Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  “He’s dying!” someone shouted on the other end of the line, briefly stirring me back to remember what was going on.

  “Someone call an ambulance,” I said, knowing it was too late for that. “This is terrible timing for a choking incident. What did he eat? A whole ribeye?”

  “He hasn’t eaten anything, sir!” that same fellow shouted on the other side of the call.

  “Well, this is ill-timed in any case. I need analysis, we’re trying to capture a fugitive. He’ll probably be fine—”

  “Sir, he’s turning purple.”

  I considered removing the block I’d put in his mind and just as quickly dismissed it. He’d earned this fate, and whatever had happened, Sienna Nealon was gone. “Deal with him, and someone get a new officer on the watch. We have a situation to deal with.”

  The answer came a moment later, deflated and chastened. “Yes, sir.”

  I sat back in my chair and listened to the general finish his last moments on this earth, the satellite view spooling backward, then forward again, that line moving around the area in question …

  What the hell was it?

  54.

  Scott

  “She’s gone,” Augustus said, shaking his head as the chopper set down behind them, whipping the already saturated air around them so that droplets of salt water tickled Scott’s face.

  “I can’t believe she bushwhacked me like that,” Reed said, looking bedraggled.

  Scott couldn’t understand exactly how Sienna had pulled off the escape, but he knew she had. She was a monster, a holy terror that couldn’t be fully explained. However she’d done it, she’d handed them a loss, less bloody this time but no less humiliating. He just counted himself lucky he hadn’t heard from Phillips or the president yet. They were probably boiling.

  He’d had her. She’d been right beneath the fury of his waves, and she’d escaped.

  How the hell had she managed that, with satellites overhead and F-22s stacked up for miles?

  “Have we got eyes on the ground?” Scott asked, heaving himself into the chopper, where J.J. was working on his laptop.

  “We’ve got eyes everywhere,” J.J. said, “from the banks of the lake all the way out to the bounds of the city. Facial recognition is running as we speak on every camera we can access. If she puts her head outside, we’ll see, and our satellites are running thermal now. I’ve got a room full of Pentagon analysts trying to back-trace where she went, but … it’s like she vanished.” He shrugged.

  “You think she has a new power?” Reed asked. His brow was creased, and he looked as furious as Scott had ever seen him, like a Cro-Magnon seeking someone to club, his ponytail sopping wet over his shoulder. Scott drew the water out without thinking.

  “Maybe,” Scott said as the helo lifted off. His team was in, and they were moving, trying to get positioned in case they caught a glimpse of her. How could she have escaped this dragnet they had on her? She’d been there, on the beach, just below the waves, ready to die. If she’d gone up, the F-22s would have caught her, if she’d run away, the satellite would have tracked her movement …

  What the hell had just happened?

  55.

  Sienna

  I woke up in a room filled with pre-dawn light, newspapers taped to the windows, faint sky giving them a backlight. My head leaned against a thin pillow, and I was covered in a threadbare sheet, which was fortunate, because the room was chilly. My hair was still slightly wet and my throat ached a little, reminding me of when I was a kid and would regularly catch colds that my mom brought home from the hospital but never experienced herself thanks to her meta powers.

  “Uhhh,” I moaned, sitting up. The room around me was white, painted wood paneling, weathered and aged. The light fixture above me was an empty socket, no hint that it had had a bulb in it for years. One of the walls was cracked, the paneling revealing splinters where someone had crashed into it and never bothered to repair it. The place stank, too, stale air around me in place of brewing coffee, which is what I really wanted.

  I heard a soft voice say something outside the door, and then a whipcrack noise, as though Indiana Jones were fighting a lion just outside my room. I gathered my wits about me, my body aching slightly from what I suspected had been a horrendous beating. I vaguely recalled what had happened—being shot down by AMRAAM missiles, nearly crushed by Scott’s powers when Harmon reasserted his mind-control over him, then nearly passing out from the constant whippings on the shores of the Great Salt Lake as Scott was poised to take me out of the world at Harmon’s command.

  Then someone had grabbed me and after that …

  Well, hell. I didn’t remember squat.

  I stood up and my back cracked. “Anyone remember what happened?” I asked quietly, staring at the door, which was, like the rest of the room, painted white and faded from the passage of years.

  I thought we were dead from waterboy until we didn’t die, Eve said, unsurprisingly droll.

  It took us a while to figure that out, Bjorn said. We just assumed the darkness of being in your head was actually hell.

  “Doubt you’d get laid in hell,” I mumbled, staring transfixed at the door. Someone was out there, and I was marshaling all my faculties so I could come out swinging if need be.

  Someone saved you, Zack said. Someone strong, someone good if they managed to get away from everything the government was throwing your way. That was a damned near inescapable trap they sprang on you. Maybe you oughta be grateful for a quarter second before you start throwing down with whoever this is?

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, still staring at the door. They weren’t coming in; maybe they didn’t know I was awake.

  “You can come out, you know,” came a voice from the other side, putting the lie to that thought. It was a man’s voice, muffled. He was speaking in a near whisper so I couldn’t tell much about him. “Just standing there leering at the door isn’t going to answer any of your questions.”

  He proffers an invitation, Wolfe said, plainly intrigued.

  “Saddle up, peeps,” I said and went for the doorknob. “Time to get answers—or at least one.” I turned the knob, which squeaked as I slowly pulled the door wide.

  “Oh, oh! Hold on!” the man said as I opened the door. “Shit!”

  The door swung wide and I stood back, bracing myself. I saw his movement, but he was a shadow, no lights obvious in that room, either. He was moving swiftly, waving his hands to the left, as though trying to signal someone I couldn’t see outside the door frame.

  I stood there, waiting in case this heralded an attack, my hands up and my feet in a loose defensive stance. I was ready for the fight if it came, rested enough after passing out to continue the battle. If the someone who had grabbed me intended to use me for ill purpose, they were about to get a snootful of pain in response to that notion.

  The shadow in the door shouted, “Wait! Wait!” still waving his hands to the side of the frame. I recognized his voice as familiar, and then I tumbled to who it was just as that whipcrack I’d heard through the door sounded again, and a cloud of dust blew out of the carpeting in the main room and swept in on me like a wave of sand, stinging my cheeks and palms as I held up my hand to block it from my eyes.

  When it cleared I was left looking at the two shadows now waiting for me in the main room. I couldn’t see them, but I didn’t need to, because I knew who they were now. The one who’d just arrived was carrying a cup of coffee—the one I’d “requested” when I’d wakened—well, I’d thought about requesting, anyway, and would have as soon as I realized who I was dealing with. That request might as well have been real, voiced out loud and in person to one of my rescuers, who was standing in front of me now, waiting, taking up my cup of coffee from my other—newly arrived—rescuer: Colin Fannon, the speedster.

  “Colin,” I said, stepping out of the room. I shouldn’t have been totally surprised to see him. Technically, I was his most recent employer, after all. I started to voice this
thought, but the other man cut me off.

  “You shouldn’t have been surprised to see me, either,” he said in that world-weary, smartass, knowing way that he had. “I go looking for trouble and hard cases, after all, and yours—right now—is about the hardest case of all. It’s been a real headache trying to find you, I’ll have you know, and since I can read the future—that’s saying something, Sienna.” He smiled, and it was filled with a kind of boyish charm that belied his—I presumed—hundreds of years of experience and life.

  “Whatever the case may be,” I said, giving him a smile right back, “it’s nice to see you, Harry Graves. Cuz heaven knows, I could use all the help I can get right now.”

  56.

  Harmon

  “That was a speedster,” I said, tracing the line with my finger on the screen. “A metahuman with the ability to run and move at extremely high speeds.” I was settled in my seat in the empty situation room, talking on the speaker to the colonel who had been assigned to take over for General Forster. So far he had not annoyed me enough to plot his death, but then, the day was young and my rage still not settled.

  “Like the Flash,” some young lieutenant said in the background.

  “Or Quicksilver,” said another.

  “Yes, like those,” I said impatiently. “He—or she—came running in and snatched up Ms. Nealon, whisking her away before our man’s attack could fall. He was too low for radar to detect him, so he skipped under the F-22s, and he struck at exactly the moment when Agent Byerly’s attack fell … it was perfectly timed. Expertly, really.” I leaned back in my chair. “Have we followed the line to its origin, yet?”

  “Working on it, sir,” came another voice on the phone. “It’s heading back to Salt Lake City, so we should have a clear view thanks to the satellite still being in geosync orbit.”

  “If this speedster outruns our satellite, I’m going to be very upset,” I announced. I didn’t make it sound ominous—or at least no more ominous than the president of the United States telling his subordinates he was going to be mad if they failed him.

  “We’re trying, sir,” this new colonel said. “This isn’t our usual sort of tactical exercise.”

  “Trace the line back to the origin,” I said. “And let’s get our team in there.”

  “How is a team going to fight a guy who can move so fast you can’t even see him?” One of the lieutenants muttered, so low I shouldn’t have been able to hear him. I did, though, of course.

  “Don’t ask, don’t ask,” his compatriot answered. “The president sounds like he’s gonna lose it on the next person who says anything.”

  It was not a bad question, and I wouldn’t have lost it on them. I needed a contingency to deal with the speedster, and I needed it quickly. The sapper that Revelen had sent over was probably the key, though he’d need to know in order to be ready for what he’d be facing. I muted myself on the military conference call and picked up another phone sitting just down the table. “Get me FBI Agent Byerly,” I said to the secretary on the other end, “he’ll be on a transport helicopter involved in the current operation in Salt Lake City.” I hung up.

  Two minutes later, the phone rang. “Byerly here.”

  “Agent Byerly,” I said. “You’re going to be facing a speedster in addition to Ms. Nealon. It’s how she escaped your dragnet. Tell your Booster to be ready to slow him down.”

  “A speedster?” Byerly seemed to be speaking to his crew. There was a pause, and then his voice came back strong and affirmative. “Yes, sir. We’ll be ready.”

  “We’re tracing them now. Get airborne and we’ll send you along the moment we have a vector on them.”

  “Understood, sir. We won’t—” I hung up before he had a chance to reassure me in a way I wouldn’t believe.

  I stared at the map as the technicians at the Pentagon continued to trace back the line of the moving speedster in slow motion through the streets of Salt Lake City. It ran back through neighborhoods, quickly, even in the slow-motion. I should have known Sienna Nealon wouldn’t be alone forever. That was the problem with her; it seemed like she never ran out of surprises.

  57.

  Sienna

  I stared at Harry Graves and Colin Fannon, my rescuers, in something just short of amazement. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?”

  Harry stared back at me, eyes twinkling in amusement. He’d been that way when I’d met him in Chicago earlier this year, too, just the sort of irascible, old-man-in-a-young-man’s-body that you occasionally got with a long-lived meta. He could be crabby in a “Get off my lawn!” kind of way. Other times, he was just hunkered down trying to find booze and … skirts, I guess? That was probably what he called them. He was handsome enough that he probably got more than a few.

  “Veronika called me,” Harry said, looking as placid as if he were sitting somewhere other than in a shithole abandoned house in Salt Lake City.

  “What?” I asked, gaze flicking to Colin, who nodded.

  “Yeah, she was worried about you,” Harry said.

  “We barely got out of the house in San Francisco when the president showed up,” Colin said. “I was on recon, and when I saw him coming … well, the girls were mostly out back, in the yard, talking and drinking some wine and whatnot … the boys were in the front of the house—”

  “Sounds like a very sexist party,” Harry commented, flashing me a grin.

  “Veronika got most of them out, but Harmon was already in by that time,” Colin said. “Phinneus didn’t take a shot at him, because … well …”

  “Because it’d be assassinating the president,” I said, nodding along. “So he sweeps in and—”

  “We didn’t know what was happening,” Colin said, his eyes searching around the bare room. “I was carrying the others out two and three at a time, getting them off-site as fast as I could. I saw Harmon do … something … to Reed, saw his whole personality change, through a window, and he turned and pointed to us. I ran off right then with Veronika and Kat. We were the last ones to get out.”

  “Who came with you?” I asked, swallowing heavily.

  “That angry Italian doctor, Perugini,” Colin said, ticking them off. “Phinneus. Veronika, Kat, Abby—she’s a fireball, too.” His eyebrows rose.

  “What about Ariadne?” I asked.

  “No,” Colin shook his head. “She was inside sleeping at the time. I assume … Harmon got her.”

  I gritted my teeth. “This whole time I’ve been thinking—”

  “That everyone betrayed you, the world was against you,” Harry said, kind of bored. “That’s why Veronika called me. She figured you might have that reaction.” He looked right at me. “And you wouldn’t have had to go through all that if you’d just picked up your phone a few days ago. Or set up your voicemail.”

  I stared back at him. “Huh?”

  “I’ve been calling you, fool,” Harry said impatiently.

  I thought back to a few days earlier, when my phone had rung with an unknown number. “Wait … what? How?”

  “Oh, well,” Harry said with relish, obviously enjoying the opportunity to tell me how hard he’d worked for me, “it goes like this—once we knew you were within a certain distance of Vegas, I started mentally dialing all the phone numbers in the area, asking for you. Do you know how long I had to sit there, dialing every Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California—all those numbers—in my head. Days.” His eyebrow crept up as he threw that one at me. “Even as fast as my mind works, it took days until I tumbled on your Utah numbers. I even had the probability come up, finally—1 in 99 you’d answer, but at least then I knew your number. Hours, I spent, working the scenarios. Boring hours, let me tell you—”

  “You have my gratitude,” I said with only a little sarcasm, and Harry nodded with self-satisfaction. “Now how do we—”

  Harry picked up a beer can and popped it open, draining its contents in mere seconds. Then he squeezed it, crushing the can between his fingers. He let it dro
p to the floor, at which point Colin zoomed down and swiped it up, looking quite put out. “Recycle,” Colin said.

  “You see a bin in here anywhere?” Harry let out a short belch. “Besides, that thing is gonna be in the FBI headquarters evidence vault until the end of time, it ain’t ending up in a landfill.”

  That took a second to sink in on me. “What?” I asked, rising alarm.

  “Oh, yeah,” Harry said, “they’re coming. Two minutes out.”

  “And you just tell me this now?” I asked, looking around at the newspaper-covered windows as though they might come crashing in any second.

  “Nothing you can do about it until they get here,” Harry shrugged. He closed one eye, thinking. “Oh, wait. Colin, two doors down—there’s a gun in the bedside table. Be a dear and get it, will you?”

  Colin scowled at him, and I got a hint of their working relationship. “I don’t like guns.”

  Harry looked at him like he was a dullard. “It’s not for you. It’s for her.” He pointed at me. “They’re deep sleepers, so … go, will you?”

  Colin looked mutinous, but dutifully shot out the door. He returned a moment later with a Glock 17 clutched between his thumb and index finger like it was a dirty diaper. He extended it to me and I took it. “Thanks,” I said.

  The sound of a helicopter in the distance permeated the building, and that burgeoning panic I felt got a little bit higher in my throat. “Shouldn’t we—”