She winced back from his anger, which lashed her like a whip across the face. “I…only meant…to ease your pain…”
His face contorted with indignation. “Damn it, Sera. People are supposed to feel horrible sometimes! We ain’t supposed to be happy an’ content all the time, with everything that happens.” He shook his head. His anger faded to nothing just as quickly as it had flared up. He suddenly looked…hollow. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped like that. But…I don’t know.” He turned away from her again, facing the edge of the roof.
“I should not treat you as an unknowing child, incapable of understanding anything more complicated than ‘I need’ and ‘I want,’” she said, after a moment. “But…it is hard. Because to me, you are a child. You are so very, very young…” She sighed, her mind filled with the memory of the moment when the Infinite said I am and everything began. She and her Siblings had been born in that moment. “And I am so very, very old.” She groped for words. “John Murdock, there is one great Law that governs all that is—”
“Y’know,” he said, interrupting her. “Y’can just call me John. I feel like I’m in school when y’call me by my whole name.” He graced her with a shaky grin.
She felt…warmth. Human warmth, and felt her lips curving in a return smile. “John. You above all should appreciate this. The Law of the Universe is a simple one. All that is mortal has Free Will. Please think about that for a moment, and consider what that means to the Infinite, and to those of us that serve the Infinite.” She paused for a long breath. “The Infinite itself knows all and is all, of course. And thus, It cannot act, because that would violate Free Will. Only those who cannot know and see all, can. And the more one can see, the less one is allowed to act. I…am allowed, comparatively, only little, little things. Things that will not cause unbalance. Advice, mostly, rarely intervention.”
“Seems like since the war started, you’ve been intervening quite a bit.”
Pain, this time her own, almost made her cry out. “How many have died, John? Not just combatants. Innocents. So many, many I was not permitted to save. Or could not more often than ‘was not permitted.’ I cannot be everywhere, at all times. Most often…I have to choose, choose only one, one who is needed, will be needed. And the rest…” She was weeping again. “The sparrow falls, and I cannot keep it from falling. But that does not mean I do not see it and mourn its passing.”
He sighed. “It’s triage. While y’say you’re part of somethin’ all-powerful, you aren’t all-powerful, Sera.”
She sensed a calm in him that had not been there when he confronted her. That calm resonated in her…and oddly, gave her comfort back. She had been wrong, as she had suspected, in treating him as a child who needed solace. Perhaps merely talking had been all he needed. Or…could it be, that it was not “just talking.” Could it be that he had needed to talk with her? To listen to her? To have her explain, treat him as he deserved to be treated? To begin to get answers indeed, but not just from “any” source—but from her?
And…there was no doubt. He, in his turn, was comforting her, though he could not know it.
“Thank you, John,” she said, softly. “It is hard. It is good to…be forgiven.”
“Don’t fret.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Y’know, I was wrong to jet outta HQ so fast. There’s no doubt plenty that still needs doin’, cause of the attack.”
“Ubermensch,” she told him, answering the unspoken question in his mind.
“How bad is he?”
She considered what she should tell him, and finally settled on something he could have found for himself. “Consider the past,” she said. “When did they first appear? How did they first appear? The metas as a whole. Consider the pattern. Your answer will be there. Also…consider what he called himself. He is not the first of that name.” The futures were shifting again, and she scanned through them, each word charting a change as she spoke. “Ask Natalya. Ask her father.”
He nodded, turning to leave. “I’ll talk with you again, soon?”
Warmth—happiness—lifted her spirit again. “I would like that, John. I would like that very much.”
He smiled, and then left, closing the battered roof access door behind him.
She felt her mouth smiling again. This was nothing like the joy of the Siblings, and yet it was as intense in its own way, this happiness. And very mortal. Oh, she knew about the pains and joys of mortals, in the same way as one of them, landlocked all his life, knew about the ocean from reading, viewing, hearing recordings. But knowing about something, and experiencing it, were two very, very different things. It made her curious. It made her want to experience more. But not with just anyone.
Have I a…friend? she thought, suddenly startled by the idea.
There was no answer.
But then, she didn’t expect one. The Infinite was still keeping Its secrets about John Murdock from her. She would have to discover them herself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Total Eclipse of the Heart
Mercedes Lackey and Veronica Giguere
Watching Tesla slowly disintegrate—and I did watch it—was painful and infuriating. Painful because I could empathize with him. Infuriating because he had so many people around him who were willing to do whatever it took to make sure that the future he wouldn’t reveal would never happen. Maybe it was the CEO in him that kept it secret. Heaven knows that if he’d broken open the Ides of March, he would have found dozens, if not hundreds, of people who could have proved to him that there actually was hope.
As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
For the second time in as many weeks, the sight of the Le Parkour course on the Echo campus caused Ramona Ferrari to break down in tears. Never mind the fact that she was in the car, driving to the building that held her crummy hole of an office, or the fact that she was fully dressed in the dark frumpy suit that she wore as an Echo detective. She had simply turned the corner, blinked at the broken concrete and crumbling walls, and had thought for a moment that she had seen Bill.
And that was impossible. The last she had seen of the Mountain was from high above in Corbie’s arms, Bill’s stony figure sinking into the Atlantic. He might have been made of rock, but he needed air like most other living creatures. When satellites didn’t pick up any movement near the Marianas Trench, the report came back that the meta was dead with an explanation of suicide.
Ramona sniffled and reached for a tissue, then thought better of it and just pulled over to the side of the Echo access road. She had the right tags and decals, so security wouldn’t bother her. She just needed to sit and cry it out before she started another day at Echo.
Her eyes deep in a wad of tissues, she started at the tap on her passenger’s side window. She looked up, ready to tell whatever officious security goon who was interrupting her private breakdown to go take a hike.
But it wasn’t an officious security goon. It was that blue DCO—Bella—peering in at her with a concerned expression on her face. When she saw that Ramona was looking at her, she made a little cranking motion.
Ramona sighed and punched the button for the automatic window. “I’m fine,” she lied, even as she crumpled tissues. “Allergies. You know, that with all that mold in those buildings, it flares up. Just wanted to take care of it before I got to the office.”
“Bullshit,” the blue woman said, with a knowing look. “A little bird told me you could use a shoulder. Well, okay, not a bird. But she has wings. Come on, Detective, I worked LVFD. And I’m an empath. And I have a friend that knows these things. Crying’s better when there’s somebody else to lean on and it sure as hell won’t be the first time that I was a towel. You don’t have to talk about it. Just have a good low-down bawl.”
“I already watched Steel Magnolias for that. Twice.” Ramona slumped in her seat and stabbed at the button to unlock the doors. She let a long sigh rush out as Bella slid into the seat next to her. “This whole place, they’re slowly givin
g up on people. Sure, they’ll take in any meta flake who can spit ice or sneeze acid, but they’d rather just cycle them through than do something with them. And if someone dies on their watch? It’s not their fault, no,” she sneered, waving a tissue for emphasis. “It’s the someone’s fault, for not being strong enough or stable enough. And that right there is bullshit. They want to fix this place? They can stop being so damned self-centered and lazy and start building the place back up instead of hiding in some DOUBLE-WIDE TRAILER!”
The last few words were shouted towards the center of the Echo campus, the effort seeming to take the last bit of energy from her. Ramona reached for a foil packet on the console and popped out two pieces of gum. “Damn Tesla,” she muttered. “He’s a weasel. A little weasel with a roomful of toys who’s too scared to do anything else but hide in his little weaselly corner.” She popped the gum in her mouth and made a face, but kept chewing anyway.
“Actually…Tesla’s a CEO. Only a CEO. That’s all he’s ever been. Then all that”—Bella waved her hand at the mess that was Atlanta—“got dumped in his lap. Ain’t nothing in the management handbooks to cover the End of the World. So…he’s reacting like any CEO would, and not like the guy you’d think would be in charge of a hefty percentage of the metas of the world—paralyzed. Much as I loathe and despise the fact that he hasn’t cowboyed up and turned the reins over to someone who’ll act like a commander-in-chief and not a terrified little girl, I understand what’s going on in his head. He’s not his father, who handled the job in the war, and he’s sure as hell not his great-uncle, who probably would have reacted to the Ides with—uh…did anyone show you the Ides of March?” She handed Ramona another sealed packet of tissues.
“The Ides…no. You’re not talking Julius Caesar, I take it?” Ramona took the tissues but didn’t open them.
“Nope.” Bella took a deep breath. “Up in Chicago they had a bedridden precog named Matthew March. Now, normally the only way they got anything out of him was with a telepath. It took special psions just to deal with all the crap in his head. Day of the Invasion he got out of the bed he hadn’t left since he was a child, wrote about twenty pages of stuff in a notebook, threw it as far away from himself as he could and set himself on fire. What was in that notebook is what’s being called the ‘Ides of March.’ Reads a little like Nostradamus, but with more sense.” She took out her PDA and tapped at it. “And that is what has Tesla so spooked. I don’t think anyone is supposed to know about this but Yank, Fata Morgana who had it transcribed, and maybe that rat bastard from the Defense Department masquerading as a janitor.” She handed the PDA to Ramona. “I have clever friends who can do impossible things. And one with wings that thinks you should see this.”
Ramona’s fingers twitched as she took the PDA. She went through the text slowly, pausing every so often to zoom in on parts of the report. Her lips moved once or twice, but she read through the report in near silence. Unable to sob and analyze at the same time, she chose to analyze what the DCO had put in front of her. When she had finished reading the report, she went back to the top and tried to access the attachments. Scanned images of the handwritten pages appeared, and Ramona examined those as she dabbed at her face. If this was authentic and even half of this had come true between the time that the precog had scribbled it down and yesterday, then the very existence of such a document would be trouble for all of Echo.
“That’s a suicide note for Echo,” Ramona muttered.
“That’s what Tesla thinks.”
“It’s a suicide note now is what I mean. Maybe we couldn’t predict the first few, but having this document could have helped move people, allocate resources, do some preventative action. And instead, Tesla keeps it to himself and does the cover-up dance while more people die. Brilliant leadership.” Ramona’s sarcasm edged out her tears for the moment.
“And why do you think CCCP has been so successful in being Johnny-on-the-spot the last couple weeks?” Bella asked. “Wish there were more of them, but hey, you do what you can with what you’ve got. And when you can’t get there and someone clever can jinx the civil defense sirens to go off in time…” She shrugged. “Something else I need to point out about this thing. There is no mention of CCCP in it. But there”—she stabbed her finger at a set of terse notations—“and there, and there—those are incidents Saviour sent squads to intercept before they happened. And hey, they busted some buildings up, and a couple people got hurt, but nothing like the fiery catastrophe that the next sentence fragment describes. That friend of mine—the one with the wings—says that precogs generally can only see things surrounding stuff and people they already know about. The clever one says that looking into the future other ways works the same. March never knew the CCCP existed, much less that they were going to get dumped here. Read into that what you will, but there are some of us who are not going to curl up like an armadillo because the end of the world is predicted.”
“Us is right.” Ramona handed the PDA back and sat up a little straighter. “So, the Reds know about this to this degree, or have you just been feeding them the right bits of information? And this friend of yours, is she someone inside Echo or is she one of those post-event metas?” Her brain had started to click forward with names and associations and the spread of information among the various networks. If Pride knew, then Ramona was sure that the information stopped there. Of all of that upper tier, he walked and talked the absolute American heroic bit as much as breathing.
“Saviour knows the whole shebang. I think she’s probably passed it all on to Moji and Unter—that’s Mojiotok and Untermensch. Moji’s her fellow Commissar, Unter was Speznatz, so both of them know how to keep their lips buttoned. Maybe she passed it to her old man, Saviour the First, and Worker’s Champion, but I kinda bet not. There’s not much you can apply to Russia in these ramblings, and she’s not happy with Papa Boryets and Papa Saviour. They were holding out on her, and she doesn’t just cherish grudges, she feeds and waters them and calls them pet names. And…I actually have two reclusive friends. The clever one, and the winged one. The winged one—” Her lips twitched with the hint of a smile. “The winged one informed certain parties that they could tell Tesla she answered to a higher boss than he was. And I wouldn’t call her a meta at all, though your mileage may vary.”
“Fair enough. At least your friends are doing something with the information, rather than shoving it into a drawer and pretending like it doesn’t exist.” Ramona folded her arms across her chest and cracked her gum. “I’m hauling Pride out to the Cracker Barn and we’re going to have a moment over biscuits, I can promise you that. I can’t fault him for keeping stuff close, because that’s just the way he is, but I know he’s not a puppet. He just needs a better reason to break a few rules.”
Bella sucked on her lower lip a moment. “Okay. Anyone tell you about Project Overwatch?”
“The DNA database in case the buildings collapse again and we need to identify people by strands of hair? Between you and me, I think it’s a lousy excuse to get more information by making dumb people feel better.” Ramona snorted. “What about it?”
“That’s the cover for the allocations and the equipment we’ve been using.” She tapped something over her breast pocket. “Vic, I’m bringing in Detective Ramona Ferrari, like we talked about.”
She handed Ramona an earpiece, a button cam, and a button throat-mic, all standard Echo issue. “Tesla actually knows about this one too. What he doesn’t know, is that half the stuff is going to CCCP. Go ahead, put those on.”
Ramona obliged, fastening the mic such that her collar concealed the piece of electronics. When she had secured the earpiece, she gave Bella a “now what?” shrug.
“Good morning, Detective,” said the voice in her ear. “I’m Echo OpTwo Victoria Victrix, callsign VickieVee. You are sitting in your car, driver’s side, fifty feet south-southeast of the south corner of the Le Parkour course. Your heart rate and respiration indicate that you are distressed but under cont
rol. Your car will need an oil change in another thousand miles, and your favorite radio station is KBEZ and why anyone would listen to that is beyond me. Your GPS needs recalibration, it’s off by twenty feet. There is an Echo security guard just behind the corner of the construction trailer directly ahead of you. He will come around that corner in three…two…mark.”
True to Vickie’s count, the security guard came around the corner and frowned at the car. He approached Ramona’s side and bent down. “You lost, ma’am?”
“His name is Justin Blake, and he’s a new hire,” said the apparently all-knowing voice in her ear.
“Justin, honey. Fred up at the main guardhouse said you’d be out here. Detective Ferrari, good to meet you.” Ramona showed him her badge and offered a smile. “Just doing a debrief with one of our DCOs. How’s your first week going?”
Bella wiggled her fingers at him. The effect of hearing his own name combined with a pretty blue thing with the face of a supermodel waving at him had the desired effect. He stammered a “fine, thanks” and tipped his hat to the two of them before going back to the trailer.
“You need to pick up bread before you go home, the loaf you have is turning blue and green at one end. Also, the milk in your fridge is going bad. You should check the setting, you probably knocked it back accidentally and it’s a tad too warm in there. And the way I know all this is because I am not your standard ordinary meta. I have a cyber-packet with your hair in it attached to the Overwatch computers, and I am a techno-mage. Rara avis, me. Don’t know of too many in the world and I am the only one in Echo.”
Mage. Magic. Ramona’s eyes widened a bit, but her surprise ebbed and she shrugged her shoulders. “Okay.” There was a pause, as if she was supposed to explain her nonchalant acceptance of things. “Look, I’m not like most civilians. When you’ve got to use everyday things like bandages and cell phones because you can’t heal stuff or talk between somebody’s ears like half of your coworkers, you just sort of accept what people can do and go on, regardless of where it comes from. Makes things easier.”
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