Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  I got control of myself, realizing my voice was starting to stray into Brance territory. “Sorry,” I said, once I had a handle on my feelings. “But seriously, call me. I promise I will not go crazy girlfriend on you...if you call me soon. If you continue to wait, that promise is going to be null and void, and we might having a genuine domestic because I am seriously going to have to put a foot up your ass and break it off, which will be a lot better for me than for you, since I can grow my foot back and you're still going to have to extract it from your–”

  My gaze flashed to the door as a loud knock emanated from it. “Gotta go. Consider yourself saved by the bell.” I hung up without any words of affection to offset the threats I just made, and stewed in the active question of whether I was being a crappy girlfriend by threatening to rectally violate my significant other for not returning any of my calls. And making me worry. One of those was a stronger impelling force than the other, but as with so many facets of my psychology, hell if I could judge which was which.

  “Hey, Reed,” I said, throwing open the door to find my brother wearing a light (for him) scowl. He was dressed in a cheap-ish suit that he'd picked up somewhere in town here, though hell if I knew where. He'd been out of the hospital for a day or so, but his demeanor had not improved from the pleasantness of when he'd been unconscious.

  “You looked through the peephole?” he asked, frowning like I'd pricked him.

  “No, I could hear you breathing through the door in that steady, disapproving way you have.”

  “Hah.” He feigned amusement, clearly writing off my comment as a joke. It wasn't, but I didn't need to press him on it.

  “What's up?” I asked, holding the door. “Do we have a clue?”

  “No.” His annoyance returned like a flash flood. “I just thought I'd check in.”

  “Bored?” I asked, waving him in. I threw myself onto the bed, which was messy from me not allowing housekeeping in for the last three days.

  “Terminally, I think.” He picked his way around some of Lethe's mess – turns out she was a real pig, leaving clothing strewn everywhere – and dropping himself into the upholstered, vaguely pink chair with the stitched pattern on it by the window. “Do you ever remember a case where the bad guy just...took a vacation or something in the middle of it?”

  “No,” I said, “and they were blitzkrieging so hard for a while there, too.”

  “That's the part that bothers me,” Reed said. “They pressed hard. They caused two ecological catastrophes–”

  “Well, sort of,” I said. “They may have caused them, but between Scott and Augustus, they've just about got the Houston Ship Channel cleaned up already. And Augustus is chomping at the bit to head back to North Dakota and clean up that mess, too. He told me he thought he could do it in a month or less.”

  “He told me the same,” Reed said, and his frown relaxed. “And I can't say that's a bad thing, because...” He sighed.

  “We'll get paid for it...?” I asked, barely able to conceal my smile.

  “Just like we are for sitting here,” he said, looking not at all pleased for some reason. “North Dakota's still paying us, too, by the way, in spite of the anger when we left. We're triple dipping – NoDak, Texas, and the feds are all paying us right now. Overtime, too. Plus, Kat and Eilish wrapped up the California job before they headed west, and Olivia and Angel caught the New York perp.”

  “Yet still you're not satisfied, oh beancounter who is my brother. Almost like money isn't enough to make you happy. You know, in your soul of souls.”

  “It's not,” Reed said, dark clouds rolling in over his forehead. Not literally, I should say, since he can actually do that. “My worry was always for the business, which you handed me, so unceremoniously, after fleeing the scene–”

  “Hey, I could have tried to keep running it while under federal indictment, but I feel like that might have compromised our efforts to get business.”

  “–and I've tried to keep it going, really I have,” he said, undeterred by my smartassery, “but I only care about it insofar as it has to be running to allow us to do the good we do.” He took a long, deep breath. “As much as all of us might enjoy stopping bad guys, if it didn't pay the bills...well, something would have to. And that something would probably get in the way of us being available to stop bad guys.”

  “I know,” I said, barely hiding a smile, “which is why some brilliant individual set up a private agency for handling metahuman law enforcement affairs. Since basically no meta I know wants to work directly for the US government, and it's not like any individual state gets enough business to set up a genuine task force.”

  “You're not that brilliant,” Reed said, always so quick to let the air out of my balloon of joy. “For two years, business has been dismal.”

  “Because you eliminated the fresh supply of metas when you crashed that drug ring,” I said, “and thanks to Sovereign, we were an endangered species before that.” I shrugged. “But the formula's out there, now. In the dark web, in drug labs. The genie has left the bottle, and she ain't going back.”

  “Would you have stopped it?” Reed asked, looking right at me, almost accusingly.

  “I couldn't,” I said, shrugging off his nearly-accusatory look.

  “But if you could have,” he said, not backing off, “if you had magical powers–”

  “I do.”

  “–But ones that could let you snap your fingers–”

  “Oh, I see. Like that genie I was just talking about. There's a theme to this conversation. Do I get three wishes?”

  “Let's focus on the one,” he said. “If you could eliminate all the power serums out there, just...” He snapped his fingers. “...And they'd be gone. The Base serum. The Booster. The Skill Tree Unlocker. All three. Would you do it?”

  I opened my mouth to give the reflexive answer: Yes.

  But...nothing came out.

  Reed sagged in the chair, bowing his head. “I knew it,” he muttered under his breath.

  “It should be an easy 'yes,' right?” I frowned, trying to plumb the depths of my soul and figure out why I hadn't just spit out the right answer.”

  “I think I might be able to come up with reason you'd want to say 'no,' if I were forced to.”

  “I know what you're going to say. That I'm an action junkie. That I need this in order to fulfill me or something. And I'm not going to bother denying it–”

  “Good. Because we'd both know you were lying.”

  “But I don't want people to get hurt, Reed. If I could make the pain stop, I would.” I frowned. “I think.”

  He threw his head back. “Oh, come on! That one, if nothing else, ought to be easy!”

  “Well, hold on,” I said. “It should. I mean, logically, it should, but...” My mind was really whirling. “I don't know. Life's kind of a Jenga tower, I think. Yeah, you could eliminate misery, and if given the absolute power to, maybe you should. But...”

  He was staring at me, absolutely stone faced. “There's no but here, Sienna.”

  “There kinda is,” I said, cringing slightly as I spoke. “If there's no unhappiness in life...what are you left with?”

  “Happiness...?”

  “No,” I said. “I don't think so...? I mean...I'm kinda talking out my ass here, but I don't think happiness is just the absence of unhappiness. It's a positive, negative, neutral kind of spectrum, and just removing one of the poles doesn't mean you automatically shift straight to positive. In fact, you might not even fully appreciate it when you did experience it, because your perspective would be...skewed.”

  He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You've watched Inside Out too many times.”

  “Look, sorry, you're miring me in deeper thoughts,” I said. “You want me to decide to do things like it's a magical world and I can just snap my fingers and remove a vital component of human existence like misery? And expect there to be no consequences? Sorry, Reed, I can't do that. I'm not smart enough to predict the
follow-on effects of a fundamentally reality-transforming decision like that. I'm just barely smart enough to grasp that there would be consequences, and I'm slightly alarmed at your utopian thinking in believing that it'd be all hunky dory, cotton candy trees and unicorn farts and nothing bad could possibly flow from it.”

  “Because we'd have eliminated all misery,” he growled. “What part of this are you not getting?”

  “There is no magical button, okay? No genie.” I stared him down. “Not for misery. Not for the serum. Not for anything. Life is a series of trade-offs. It's the world's weirdest Rube Goldberg contraption. Everything you do has consequences. Everything you don't do has consequences. All we can do is try and maneuver in that framework and do our best.”

  “To do what?” he asked quietly.

  “Well, we can't eliminate misery,” I said, “but I have made it my life's mission to try and minimize it. For most people, anyway.”

  Reed just shook his head, a little sullenly. “You can't even answer a simple question about something like removing misery from the world in the correct way. You might be a little demented, sister of mine.”

  “You just gonna ignore my larger point there?”

  He didn't answer for a minute. When he did, it was so grudging you'd have thought it required a tractor to pull it out of him. “No.” Then he added, quietly, “But I don't have to answer it, either.”

  “Fine,” I said, shrugging. “Fine. We can just agree to d–”

  The chirp of my phone followed by a similar sound from his a few seconds later sent us both scrambling for our electronic devices. I fished mine out first and found a news alert waiting.

  ECO-TERRORIST BAND STRIKES AUTO FACTORY IN ARKANSAS

  “Dammit,” Reed said, and he had already vaulted out of the chair, heading for the door. I didn't let him get there first.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  “It's burning.”

  Those words were self-evident to anyone with a pair of eyes with which to see. Because the fire was obvious, obvious as hell, on every screen in the command center of the Texas Department of Safety. You couldn't avoid it except by shutting your eyes.

  “How far away is that?” Reed asked.

  Gabriel was staring at the screen, transfixed. “Four hundred something miles to Little Rock, I think.”

  “We're going to need to head that way,” Reed said.

  “Of course,” Gabriel said. “You've got the FBI's blessing on this one. My only concern is...” He made a cringey face.

  “That they'll double back and hit you again?” Scott said. He was bent partly over the planning table, his face and skin back to nearly its normal shade. It had come in a little paler, but a couple days in the Houston sun working to remove oil from the Ship Channel had done a lot to return it to normal. “Not a bad point.”

  “Still...this is the priority right now,” Reed said, staring at the map. “How soon can we get there?”

  “Helicopter is coming in now,” Gabriel said. “We'll get you right to the airport, then you're off to Arkansas. Figure it's an hour or so of flight time.”

  “If they're smart, they'll be long gone by the time we get there,” I said. “And as much as we might want to count 'em out, I don't think they're stupid.”

  “Other than destroying everything they profess to save,” Augustus muttered.

  “There's really no predictable pattern now, is there?” Lethe stood with her arms folded just a couple steps out of our little circle that had formed around the map table.

  “You mean how before they were hitting oil and gas, and now they've expanded to wreck an automaker?” Jamal asked.

  “Where do they go next, then?” Scott asked, furrowing his brow as he stared at the video coverage of Arkansas. “I mean, we thought they'd hit the Gulf Coast refineries–”

  “Because it fit their pattern,” Lethe said. “But they're changing the pattern.”

  “And if we don't get out in front of these people somehow, like we did with that last tip,” Reed said, jaw popping as he stared at the fire blazing on the screen, “we're never going to catch them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  The helicopter took off from the Texas DPS rooftop a few minutes later into a partially cloudy sky, sun blazing down through bright white clouds as we took off. The rattle and shaking of the helo was a little rough, hinting that crosswinds might slow our flight.

  Reed raised a hand, and the chopper stabilized. He didn't even say anything, just did it and then settled back against his seat.

  “Okay, this is the thing I don't get,” Augustus said, over the sound of the helicopter, loud enough we metas could hear him.

  “Is it going to be another rant about these people?” Jamal asked. “Because I've heard enough of those.”

  “They keep setting me off, okay?” Augustus just vented. “I have spent my last two days and three nights cleaning up their messes. There's oil every-damned-where, okay? And it didn't need to be like that.”

  “Look I don't agree with a thing they're doing, but they're raising awareness,” Reed said. “Bringing up an issue that fades to the background.”

  “Which is?” Augustus stared at my brother, hard. They were facing each other in the helicopter seats, perfectly positioned for the argument Augustus seemed primed to have.

  “Oil is the lifeblood of modern society,” Reed said calmly. “We drag it out of the earth by force, spilling it here and there, which does damage. Then we pipe it across the country or truck it, spilling more. Then we refine it, adding impurities to our atmosphere, then burn it, which adds even more and contributes to the phenomenon of climate change. And not that you don't know this, college boy, but that's a phenomenon that's going to raise the ocean levels and eventually could kill us all.”

  Augustus just rolled his eyes. “Yo, look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates, okay? Worst case scenario, by 2100, if totally unchecked and we build zero – and I mean zero – seawalls, then yeah, there's going to be some flooding in places that we don't have flooding right now. And I'm with you if you're saying that's bad. But that's the worst case, eighty years from now, assuming we do nothing. Which is a bad guess over that long a time. Humans don't leave anything alone.”

  “They see a problem, they're trying to fix it,” Reed said tightly. The chopper shook once more. “They're trying to wake people up, because most seem to be asleep about this.”

  “Try and imagine living in Minneapolis in winter on zero emissions,” Augustus said, and he was fired up, like we could hook a power line to him and run things for a year or two. “What happens when it hits zero degrees and 3.6 million people need to heat their houses, but solar ain't working! Because the clouds are so thick you can't see the sky, and the wind ain't really blowing hard enough to power a city. What then? Huh?”

  “I'll tell you what then,” Lethe said, and I caught a flash of danger in Reed's eyes as he perceived himself being ganged up on. “It's like what happens to people when they start to starve: they do anything to scrape by. They'll start chopping down trees and burning them for fuel.”

  “Or burn shit,” Augustus said. “Literal shit. Because a lot of places in the third world, they still burn fecal matter on a daily basis for warmth. And they die of the fumes, too, but nobody wants to talk about that. She's right, though – they'll burn whatever they can because human beings are attuned to their own survival that way.”

  “I'm not advocating for zero emissions,” Reed said tightly, and the chopper shook again. “I'm not defending their position. Just telling you why they think that way. I'm just in favor of scaling back.”

  “Why can't we just crank up the technology?” Scott asked. “I don't see the problem here. Wind, solar, battery capacity. That's the bridge, that's the future. We need to invest in it, and leave fossil fuels behind.”

  “Dude, you're trying to talk about driving on a bridge that ain't built yet,” Augustus said. “That's what frustrates me about these assholes. You kno
w what I hear when they talk about the world ending in ten, twelve years? I hear them saying, 'Make me your god, give me the power to fix this and I will magically solve your problem for you.' But they can't.” His jaw tightened. “They're lying. Because they want power. And control.”

  “Why can't they fix it?” Scott asked, leaning forward. “And why shouldn't they try? There are things we can. Reduce the consumption of meat. That puts a ton of carbon into the air.”

  “Consumption of meat, especially in third world countries, increases life expectancy,” Lethe said. When everyone looked at her, she sighed. “It adds nutrients that might be otherwise hard to come by in a plant-based diet somewhere other than the first world. So if you're advocating for cutting down on that, recognize that what you're actually advocating is population control, albeit maybe in some softer terms and with a little less venom than it's been suggested with in the past by places like China with the one-child policy or Germany under the Nazis.”

  “That's not what I'm advocating,” Scott said, voice rising. “I'm just saying we need to be smarter about things.”

  A buffeting wind shook the chopper, and I looked at Reed, whose face was slightly red.

  “I think metahumans could help solve these problems,” I said, trying to take this discussion off boil. “I mean think about it – Reed could power wind farms himself. And Jamal? I mean, you could just hook him right up to the power grid and you'd have zero emission electricity.”

  “Having lived with him for many years,” Augustus said, “I can assure you my brother is not zero emissions.”

  “Nice one,” Scott said, chuckling.

  “Also, I draw a lot of my electricity from the grid,” Jamal said. “Put me in a blackout area with no storm going on, and if I'm tired or tapped out? I won't zap much of anything. My personal batteries are not infinite.”

  “Still, Reed could power a wind farm,” Scott said. “That's something. My point is there are solutions we could embrace, if we tried.”