That was mostly a bluff, but it hung in the air as Secondi and Lightning chewed it over. Predictably, Secondi was the one who responded first. “Well … if we do give up, are you going to turn us over to—”
“Shut up!” Lightning Antipasti slapped him. “We’re going to be the death of you, bitch. Just you wait and see.” He shot at me again, and the tree once more took the juice.
“Heard that one before. Just remember,” I called back as the bolt finished sizzling, “you had a chance to do this painlessly, and you chose the pain instead.”
“Oh, for f—I want to surrender!” Secondi Fireball called.
“You chickenshit!” Lightning Antipasti screeched at him.
“Are you out of your mind?” Secondi asked. “The only reason we did this was because she was supposed to be out of the picture. She’s clearly not!”
“She’s nothing!” Lightning screamed.
“I’ll remember you said that,” I muttered under my breath, and then shot into the sky while they were arguing among themselves. I used a cloud of soot for cover, twisted as I reached the top of the hotel towers, and then centered myself on my targets and started back down. “Eve?”
Ready, Eve Kappler’s steady voice said. Let us make them our bitches instead.
“My sentiments exactly,” I said and shot toward the ground.
It didn’t take me long to come back below the black clouds clogging the air above the strip. I pierced the veil in seconds and found Secondi and Lightning still bickering. Lightning shot off a stream of electricity at the palm tree where he must have thought I was still hiding, his eyes firmly fixed on Secondi.
I fired a hundred nets at him before the first one hit. They were all small, little webbings of light. They ripped him to the ground, hard enough to crack the pavement, pelting him like paintballs that exploded on impact and interlaced with bright light fibers. They sewed him to the street, and I came down to deliver the coup de grace, my knuckles to his jaw. Bones broke on both sides of that impact, but he got the worst of it, his head crashing into the pavement as the threads of my webbing pulled tight. He was bound to the road, eyes rolled back in his head, still alive but nursing a head wound that wasn’t going to be right for a day or two, even with meta-healing.
I let the webbing pull him tight and then stayed there, hovering above his downed carcass as Secondi’s eyes widened at the display. “I hope you haven’t changed your mind about that surrender thing,” I said casually, “because it’d be a real shame if I had to—”
He didn’t wait for me to respond, flame bursting out of his pores like he’d gone Dark Phoenix. It projected out like he had flamethrower valves under both arms, blossoming out in all directions; at me, at the street, at the world around us, like he had rage to throw and he wanted it to go everywhere at once. I watched it flare, like a bomb going off, and felt the heat rise around me, and I didn’t know if I had enough left in me to stop him.
11.
The heat was intense, even for me, fire bursting out of Secondi’s hands and body like a star going nova. Waves of heat washed over me like I’d thrown myself into the flaming torrent rising off a nuclear bomb blast. Sweat rolled down my forehead, my arms, and I channeled it away from the thin disguise of my hoodie and into my fingers, into my toes, melting my damned boots into slag and scorching the cuffs of my jeans.
I had a feeling that preserving my hidden disguise was going to be a full time job if I was going to try and continue fighting evil and stupidity and metas. Mostly evil and metas. It was possible to fight stupidity with pure snark, which likely wouldn’t result in my hoodie and wig getting burned off. Hopefully. You never knew with me.
My hands shook as I absorbed the fire. I didn’t know exactly how much flame I’d taken in, but it had to be, like, a quarter-star’s worth. I also didn’t know exactly how they measured flame, because, let’s face it, no one absorbed fire except me and apparently this guy.
“You should have given up when I gave you the chance,” I said, sweating and floating closer to him. He was really pouring it on, blasting at me with full heat, and I just kept channeling it away from my clothes. The zipper on my hoodie felt like I’d left it on the front seat of a car parked in a Vegas parking lot all day. I could feel it eating through my shirt and into my skin, but I didn’t dare take it off.
Secondi was screaming in fury and determination as he threw everything he had at me and I took it all in. His flame started to sputter and die, choking off out of his left hand first, then guttering out from his right as his shoulders slumped and he started to sweat. He looked about two steps away from passing out, and I took the last flare of heat into my palm, absorbing it and letting a little puff of smoke escape from between my lips, as though I were about to blow a ring out to impress Bilbo Baggins.
“How …?” Secondi croaked, and he looked pitiful. “How did you—?”
I hit him with a shoulder tackle at high speed and carried him up into the air, the staple in my hood tugging at my forehead as the wind tried to rip it loose. I carried Secondi up, his eyes as big as roulette wheels (come on—thematically, it fits, people), and I brought him down at ludicrous speed into the Bellagio fountain just down the block. They were spraying, mid-show, strains of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On tickling my ears before I slammed into the water, Secondi-first (heh heh. I kill myself. Mostly others, but occasionally myself, only in the laughing way. Not the others, though. I kill them fer realz).
The air left him in a burst of bubbles. I used his solar plexus, that spot in the center of his belly where the wind gets knocked out of you, to cushion my own landing. I could see him choking for air, sucking in great gasps of water, as I pushed him to the bottom of the fountain.
Believe it or not, I wasn’t even being vengeful as I drowned him. I shoved his face into the rocky bottom of the fountain as hard as I could, scraping his cheek off and turning the water around us red. I was about as cool and dispassionate as could be, and if he hadn’t possessed the power to turn thousands of people into scorched piles of organic matter with a single burst of anger, I probably would have left him unconscious and let the Vegas PD work out what to do with him.
Some people, though … were just too dangerous to live. At least the government seemed to think so when it came to me, so I had no moral difficulty taking the same position when it came to a man who’d just (stupidly) tried to nuke me into oblivion.
He sputtered a few times, blood churning out as he thrashed ineffectually against my claw-like grip. I was holding my breath with everything I had, and fortunately I could do that for a decent space of time (I’d practiced, since a guy who controlled water was presently hunting me to the death), and certainly longer than a guy who I’d just knocked the breath out of.
It took less than a minute for Secondi to drown, but it was a painful minute. He finally stopped moving, and I waited another thirty seconds after that to come back up, checking to make sure my hoodie was still stapled to my head before surfacing (it was, and also, still oww). Just to be safe, once he was limp, I broke his neck and pushed him away. His body got caught in a jet and hurled to the surface.
I broke the surface and took a long, sweet breath of smoky, hellish air. Secondi’s corpse bobbed like an apple, in time with Celine as the fountain jets pushed his carcass away from the center of the show.
I looked around. The Strip wasn’t burning anymore, but neither was it in peak condition. Cop car lights were blinking just outside the perimeter of the fountain, and I was expecting a hail of gunfire to greet me, but it didn’t. What greeted me was a hell of a lot worse.
Screams were coming from the side of the Bellagio closest to the carnage. Something stomped hard against the ground, and I heard something go SPLAT! with authority. I came out of the water like one of the fountain jets had caught me in the ass and launched me out, streaking toward the disturbance. I had a feeling I knew what I’d find, and as I came to the far edge of the fountains, rising above the bushes and trees t
hat lent the desert landscape the touch of the Italian greenery they were looking for when they built this resort, I caught sight of that damned asshole in armor hammering his way down the Bellagio’s driveway, smashing the cars that had gotten trapped in the chaos.
People were fleeing on foot in all directions. A few even jumped over the edge of the walkway and into the fountain. Maybe they figured it’d be safer than running back up to the hotel, given that the Cosmopolitan next door had a massive, gaping hole in it, and the taller Aria tower was still smoking down the street. It didn’t matter to me, because my job was to stop this mess before it got any worse.
A helicopter made a choppering sound overhead, the whoosh of its rotors turning out a steady cadence as I came in fast. People had cleared away from Iron Moron, and he was rearing back to kick another cab. I saw movement inside, and knew I couldn’t hesitate.
I sent a hot rush of concentrated flame at him in a tongue of fire no bigger around than a dowel rod. It caught him just below the neck and surged between the plates of his armor. He stiffened as though I’d poked him, then shuddered.
Then he screamed.
It was a horrifying sound. The fire I poured into him was hot enough to liquefy flesh and light muscle on fire. He jerked and danced like I had him on a string, but smoke poured out of the joints of his metal coverings. His legs failed him first, and he dropped, his blood boiling inside his suit and superheating his body.
The metal plates he’d adhered to his skin all released at once as his power failed, dropping to the pavement in a series of THUNKs! What lay beneath the metal encasements …
Well, it wasn’t pretty anymore, assuming it had ever been.
Iron Not-so-much-a-man-now had melted from the inside out, his skin bubbling off, blood boiling, squirting out and searing the pavement beneath him as he fell. He wasn’t even recognizable as a human being any longer, just a biomass of indeterminate origin, pretty much how I always imagined a transporter accident going in Star Trek, though I didn’t think they’d ever shown one on screen.
His scream lingered in my mind long after it cut off in reality, fading behind the sirens out on the Strip. I hovered over the field of battle, stuck in place as surely as if he’d somehow anchored me to my spot in the air.
“Wh … why did you do that?” someone called from below, and I looked down to see a woman with blood running out of her dark hair speaking up to me. She blinked at me, as if surprised I would deign to look at her. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
“So are you,” I said, pointing at her. I felt for my nose, and realized that Secondi must have headbutted me while he was thrashing about. I hadn’t even noticed, and it didn’t matter. “You should go over there to the ambulances, get it checked out. Scalp lacerations can be a sign of concussion.”
She blinked at me, as though she hadn’t understood what I’d said, and asked me, “Why are you here? With everything you have going on … there’s no way anyone would have expected you here.”
I looked at the ambulances, the cop cars, the fire engines. Some of them were destroyed, their crews probably dead. “These guys … these women … they had to know what they were riding into after the first of them got attacked. They kept coming anyway.”
She stared at me blankly. “That’s their job. You’re … wanted. Hunted. You’ve got no reason to come out here … no reason to play … hero.”
I stared at the ruin and felt a paralyzing sense of regret. The helicopter whipped overhead, and I realized it was a news copter, not a police chopper. They were probably filming me. “I had no reason not to,” I said to the lady. “I don’t care what they say about me—I know who I am.” I stared at the new chopper in defiance, looking right at the cameraman inside the door, as if daring him and anyone else watching to hate me. “Get that wound looked at,” I said to the lady, and then, with a last look at the chopper, I shot the news the bird, then shot off, straight up into the sky.
12.
Harmon
I watched the live feed from Vegas with rising irritation. It wasn’t as though I expected a bunch of half-baked hoodlums with a casino robbing scheme to kill Sienna Nealon.
But still, it would have been nice.
Air Force One rattled as the pilot banked, bringing us around gently. Final approach had to be coming up soon. I hadn’t had much time to rest, even isolated as I was from people. “Dammit,” I said under my breath. I didn’t typically talk to myself out loud, but this was undoubtedly a problem. The camera followed her as she stared back at it evenly; they’d captured almost the entire battle.
Her entire victory.
“Dammit,” I said again, clicking off the TV as she escaped into the sky. “She’s back in the game.”
13.
Scott
“We’ve got a reasonable estimation of how far she had to travel,” Reed said with muted enthusiasm. He was still wearing that furious intensity like a mask, staring at the TV screen at the front of the Gulfstream’s cabin, the live feed from the cable news net showing the devastation of one of the most famous streets in America. “Based on when the news broke on the net and the networks, and how long it took her to get there. If we match her top speed and draw a circle—”
“We get an idea of how long it took her to get there,” Augustus said, joining in with a quiet intensity. “Then, if she shows up somewhere else soon, nearby—”
“We triangulate,” Reed said. “The search field narrows, and we have a narrower search field to look for unusual events.” He leaned back in his seat, folding his arms before him. “I know Sienna. Wherever she is, she’s never totally quiet. She’s incapable of it.”
Scott stirred, thoughts slow like they’d congealed together over the course of the flight. The plane was banking, turning back to Washington. They were hardly necessary in Vegas now that the incident was settled, so Phillips had probably called them back. It wasn’t the first time he’d issued orders to the pilots without bothering to have them relayed to Scott and the others.
“She’s smarter than you think,” Friday said. Scott had been sure he was still sleeping. He wasn’t normally so small, but apparently on the flight he felt safe enough to shrink down to a surprisingly skinny size. His arms were about as big around now as a water bottle, giving him an almost frail appearance. “I bet she’s doing something to throw us off her trail.”
“She’s got an ego problem when it comes to helping with emergencies like this,” Reed said. “Give her another meta emergency in a place where she can get to it, and I bet you she comes running.”
“Oh yeah, bait the trap,” Augustus said with a vigorous nod. He was fiercely on board with this idea, that much was obvious. “No more of this waiting stuff. If she’s going to be out and playing the game, let’s outplay her.”
“If we’re going to make her come to us,” Friday said, “we better make sure we’re stacked up and ready. Because if you think it gets bad trying to kick down a door in hopes she’s not waiting on the other side, wait ‘til you see what happens when she comes flying into danger. You saw what she did to that guy in the metal suit.” He shook his masked face. “She’s got nothing holding her back anymore.”
“She didn’t scorch the Zeus, though,” Augustus said, pensive. “You think she might hold back on us?”
Friday snickered, his sunken chest heaving up and down comically. “Want to bet your life on it?”
“No,” Augustus said sharply.
“I wouldn’t, either,” Reed said with a shake of the head. “But these are the choices—lay a trap, or track her to her den. I’d rather corner her in her den.”
“You would,” Scott said quietly.
Every head swiveled to him. “You say something, boss?” Friday was probably half joking by calling him boss. He was never serious about that.
“I don’t want to go into her den, whatever it is,” Scott said, blinking away his surprise at speaking. What the hell was wrong with him? There was something lacking today, a clarity, a
focus. Maybe it was fatigue. “But I don’t know how we bait a trap and ensure she comes to it without putting civilians in harm’s way.”
“It’s a reasonable sacrifice,” Reed said coldly. “Maybe we could arrange for this lightning meta to get cut loose in the middle of transport, but not too far from here. Say … in Denver. If she shows up right away, even if things go wrong with our trap, we know she’s somewhere in Mountain Time. If it takes her a little longer, we know she’s on the West Coast.”
“Well, we’d be able to narrow it down, at least,” Augustus said. “But I’d rather flat out kill her, maybe put a sniper nearby and pop her skull off when she comes in for a landing.” He rubbed his hands together. “Save ourselves some trouble.”
“You’d need more than one sniper,” Friday said, sounding like he was coming alive, then his skinny frame shook. “Maybe a whole division.”
The phone in the bulkhead in front of Scott rang, and he picked it up. “Call from Washington, sir,” one of the pilots said, and there was a fizzing sound followed by a click.
“Hello?” Scott asked, his mouth feeling suddenly dry.
“Byerly,” Andrew Phillips’s dull voice sounded urgent. “I’ve turned you around. You’re coming back to Washington immediately.”
“Yes, sir, I figured,” Scott said, with a nod that Phillips obviously couldn’t see. It was a habit.
“You’ll be briefing the president this afternoon,” Phillips went on. “He’s cancelling other meetings so he can talk with you.”
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