Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

“If you’re gonna rip the flaming heart out of someone, just make sure it’s not one of ours,” I said. “You can kill Friday or the mercs … guys … whatever.”

  “Friday is the guy with the gimp mask,” Kat said helpfully.

  “Why does it always get kinky with you people?” Veronika asked.

  “You live for kinky,” I said. She just shrugged. “We’re going to have help, so watch out for them, too.”

  “You mean other than Taneshia and Jamal?” Kat got their names right, which impressed me. I guess she’d met Taneshia at least once, though.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hopefully. I tried to get a message to Zollers, so … hopefully I’ll have his help.” I took a deep breath and held it. “And … maybe some others.”

  “How long to Washington?” Colin asked, twitching again.

  “A few hours,” I said, leaning my head back in my seat. “Best to sleep, if you can.”

  “As if,” Colin said, waving for the cabin attendant. “Can I get a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t think you need that, twitchy,” Harry said.

  I tuned them out, staring down at the dusty, endless plains of South Dakota. I was riding off into trouble again, for the millionth time. I should have been used to it, but somehow …

  I blinked my eyes; sleep was coming for me, I could feel it. I guess I was used to it if I was going to be able to sleep before launching into what was probably one of the most dangerous battles I’d ever gone into. Definitely one of the ones I was least likely to win.

  “I have all the strength in the world,” I whispered to myself, so low no one could hear me, “but no power.”

  And it was true. The US government was against me. I was on the run. And the man who sat atop that structure of power … he was about to do something that would completely destroy the free will of every human on the planet. I imagined his mind spreading out across the globe like black tendrils, slipping into peoples’ ears and turning their joyful, hateful, loving, desperate expressions into the same blank mien. We would feel nothing but what he wanted us to feel, think nothing that he didn’t want us to think. There would be no more joy, no more falling in love, no more sitting around on a Saturday doing whatever the hell you wanted as the leaves fell outside. Total control.

  It was my mother’s dream for me as a child come true, but on a global scale.

  “I’m gonna stop you, Harmon,” I whispered again as I started to nod off, my eyes slipping down. I fell asleep in the sun, thinking of my enemy.

  83.

  Harmon

  I hadn’t meant to fall asleep sitting in the wreckage of the Oval Office, but I had. The chair was just too comfortable, which you might not expect for something that was bulletproof, but it was. It wasn’t like I could feel the Kevlar panels in the back, after all. Just the padding up front, in all the right places.

  The world around me took on a particularly bright sheen, as though the fading autumn sun was more potent now than it had been when I’d slipped off to sleep in my empty, exposed to the elements office. It brought to mind the idea of a nap in a winter garden and someone pouring poison into my ear, for some reason. Except I didn’t have a brother to inherit the kingdom, nor a son to lose his mind avenging me.

  “Why are you thinking of Hamlet?” A quiet voice asked, and I turned to see her standing there.

  My enemy.

  Sienna Nealon.

  Her hair was that dyed mohawk that I’d seen on the latest surveillance photos, the ones that were being distributed to every law enforcement agency in the country even now. She was looking around the bright, sunlit office, taking it all in. Motes of dust drifted across a sun beam, and I wondered why I felt so warm given my environ’s sudden exposure to the elements. I certainly hadn’t covered myself in a blanket.

  I realized what was going on after a moment of staring at her. “This a dreamwalk, then?”

  “They said you were smart,” Sienna said cautiously, eyeing me as though I might explode without warning.

  “I think you’ve seen the power of my mind now,” I said confidently.

  “They never mention you being humble, though, for some reason.”

  “Humility is not a highly prized asset in our modern world,” I said. “Have you ever seen anyone make money or get elected to high office by being reticent to talk about their achievements—even the marginal ones?”

  “You’d know more about that than I would,” she said, shoving her hands in her pockets. She eyed the hole in the wall. “I’m just gonna say it, because it’s like the elephant in the room—or maybe like the elephant just left the room—there is a massive hole in your wall.” She pointed at it, as though it might have escaped my notice. “What’s up with that? Did you try and bring your ego inside and find it didn’t fit through the doors or what?”

  I chuckled lightly. “That was your friend Friday, I’m afraid.”

  “Ugh,” she said, in the manner of a teenage girl. “He’s not my friend.”

  “I don’t think he has any friends,” I said. “It’s just a figure of speech.” I looked around. “So … are you still hiding?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and the vision around me shook slightly, as though turbulence were hitting the White House grounds. I knew it wasn’t on my end of the dream … “You’ve got a pretty evil scheme cooking, you know.”

  I paused and stared at her, and I knew. “You opened the vault.”

  “Wasn’t easy,” she said. “But … yeah. Booster serum? Expanding meta power? You and Cavanagh were experimenting on an awful lot of human beings to do all that.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it, I’m afraid.” I said.

  “You had everything to do with it,” she said quietly. “Do you know who he was experimenting on in Atlanta? Homeless people. And do you know what the guy he funded in Chicago did with his research? He damned near wiped us all out—”

  “I told you,” I said calmly, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Cavanagh was a science guy. I brainstormed with him, came up with a concept. He ran with it—”

  “He ran with it, all right,” she said, turning her head. “He ran with it in every direction, handed the idea off to—I don’t even know how many ancillary labs. Palleton, though, they might have come the closest to what you were looking for, mightn’t they?” She looked right at me.

  “And what did they come up with, exactly?” I asked. “I don’t have any connection to them, after all—”

  “Not a direct one, I’d imagine,” she said. “They came up with a parallel—I would call it lateral—powers serum.”

  “Did they?” I asked mildly. “Interesting. Something to … pull out the residual powers on the DNA chain that might not have been activated? Probably a fascinating bit of research.”

  “Probably a whole lot more dead homeless people,” she said, clearly intending it as a rebuke. “Is that your governing philosophy? Kill whoever you have to in order to make progress happen?”

  “The world is not a gentle place, Miss Nealon,” I said. “People die every day. You can’t make an omelet—”

  “I’m not getting a fucking omelet,” she said, “and you’re not breaking eggs. You’re going to break peoples’ lives.”

  “I’m going to fix peoples’ lives,” I said.

  “At the cost of what?” she asked. “For the low, low price of … what? Our free will?”

  “You really do know about the boost, then,” I murmured.

  “Omnipath,” she said. It sent a little chill down my spine that she even knew the word. How had she gotten this close? Everything I’d done had been an effort to keep her blinded, keep her away from what I was doing, either by killing her or simply holding her off until things were done. “The man who knows all, sees all, controls all.” She said it like an accusation.

  “The man who knows all should control all,” I said. “Does it not make sense that the wisest of us—the one who sees—should be in charge of fixing—saving—”

  �
��You’ve confused omnipathy with omniscience,” she said. “You may know what’s in peoples’ minds, but people are flawed—”

  “I will help make them less so.”

  “—And if you’re viewing the world through that flawed lens, then your actions are going to bend toward whatever you think is right—”

  “I’ll know what’s right. I already do.”

  She stared at me, almost forlornly. “Did you ever take Ethics 101?”

  I almost snorted. “Did you? Because as I recall, you didn’t even go to school.”

  “That must make me dumb, then,” she said. “But since you’re smart, you must know about the ‘Trolley Problem.’”

  I sighed. “Naturally.” It taxed my patience, being lectured by an idiot. “A trolley rolls along a track, with five people tied to the track ahead. An observer waits nearby, next to a switch. All they need to do to save the lives of those five people is to flip that switch, and the trolley will divert, crashing into one person and costing them their life. Five lives for one, a simple trade-off on the face of it?”

  “On the face of it,” she agreed.

  “But you’ve probably heard of the more complex permutations,” I said, ripping her little illustrative example out of her hands. “What if you had to push a corpulent human being onto the track to stop the trolley—commit murder yourself in order to save those five people? Or what if there were no guarantees that you would save any of them? Then, of course, there’s the ethical dilemma of sacrificing the one in the first place—who was not even in any peril until you flipped that switch—”

  “I like that you automatically put me in the role of the decision maker,” she said.

  “In your heart of hearts, you saw Sovereign’s point,” I said, and she flinched slightly. “With your power, come the occasional thoughts of what good you could do with them if you didn’t limit yourself to swooping down out of the sky and pushing the baby carriage out of the path of a speeding bus.” Dust drifted across the sunbeams between us. “You see a problem and you act to solve it, but all the problems you see are of the emergency variety—like Vegas. Trouble rears its ugly head and you come to save the day, ignoring the root causes of the problem. You work on the micro level, turning your small mind toward small action. You do your part, but it’s a small part,” I said a little nastily, my impatience with her attempt to draw me into an ethical debate for which she was incredibly unprepared manifesting itself in the pettiness of my reply. “The larger problems, though, you can’t touch. But I can. And I will.”

  “Better living through chemistry.”

  “Better living through consensus,” I said. “I see the problems that others don’t, that others ignore, that others—like you—won’t address because your brain doesn’t function sufficiently to even grasp them. I see them, and I will drive us toward the solution.” I spoke with passion of a sort I seldom displayed anymore, even on the campaign trail. “You think you’re the hero?”

  “I think I’m smart enough not to assume I know the answer to everything,” she said.

  “Congratulations,” I said, “that just makes you smart enough to know you’re dumb—no mean feat, in your case. You try to be the hero, but your successes are so minuscule as to almost not matter at all.” I looked at her with the disdain I felt. “Look at you—master of the physical world—flame and light nets and dragon power and flight and strength all at your command. They call you the most powerful person in the world because of your ability to move the physical. But they miss the point. The body is nothing without the will, and humanity is nothing without the will to fix what ails the body of us. You’re their hero because you’re the one who operates at their level—”

  “A low level, in your estimation.”

  “—a low level in fact,” I said angrily. She was taxing my patience. “People seek a savior because they can’t see a way to save themselves. They pour all their hopes into these vessels that they elevate, making them into the modern equivalent of gods, ignoring their deities’ feet of clay—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. They were men with ideals, ideas, but flawed and human.” I said the words with disgust. “Now they live as revered legends in the modern mind, not because they were paragons of virtue but because we desired them to be more than simple agents of worthy change. We build myths around them, make them more …” I chortled, “… beyond human.”

  “They moved the dial of change,” she said, clearly blind to both my anger and my reasoning. “Isn’t that what heroes do? More than others.”

  “That’s what they’ve done,” I said with disdain. “Until now.” I looked her over with disgust; she really was nothing impressive. “But then a new hero came, and it was you … but you showed your flaws. And people are willing to look—eager to look for flaws, so now they’ve got nothing left to believe in—a big, empty center in the middle of their lives.” I smiled, watching her for signs of a reaction. My anger was almost spent, and she’d retreated behind a still mask. “Until I come along.”

  “And take away the will that they have to hope and believe in others,” she said. “Until you take away self-determination, and democracy and all the other achievements of humanity up to n—”

  I snorted again. “Most of humanity for most of history has not had any say in their governance. Few people experience democracy even today. You know what people really care about? The illusion of control while things are being taken care of to their advantage. I will right the wrongs, and they won’t know any better. Isn’t that good enough?”

  “Until you run a trolley into them for the greater good, sure,” she said, jarring me.

  “I—what?” What she’d said hadn’t made any sense.

  “It’s the trolley problem, like I said.” She stared at me. I didn’t see any signs that what I’d told her had made an impression. Clearly she had a thick head, wasn’t listening, didn’t care— “You’ll be standing up on the bridge and see the imminent chaos, which means when it comes time to throw a switch … you’ll be the guy to do it. I bet millions die in the first year.” She said it mildly, but with confidence.

  “Millions will die this year whether I rule the world or not,” I said, shaking my head. She truly was a moron. She’s airborne, I thought very hard, sending the message to one of the minions I had out there. I knew he’d intuitively realize who I was talking about. She was his obsession, after all.

  I know, the answer came back. We almost have her.

  “But only I am willing to take the responsibility,” I went on, not missing a beat, “willing to accept death as the price for the great days yet to come. I’m willing to do what’s necessary, whether it’s push a Supreme Court Justice to let your enemies out,” I smiled at her, catching a flicker of interest at my admission that I’d screwed up her life entirely, “or cause an old boyfriend’s stolen memories to surface, giving him a reason to be angry with you—an anger which was easily enflamed, by the way. You’re isolated, cut off—and you always will be, because once people see your flaws, they can’t stop looking at them.”

  “You turned my family against me,” she said in quiet accusation.

  “Why do these people who say, ‘We’re family,’ about their friends always seem to be the ones with the most obvious mommy and daddy issues?” I wondered aloud, striking her again with my wit. She didn’t react. Again. It was infuriating. Didn’t she know these were aimed perfectly at her? Or was she too idiotic to notice?

  “Why does the guy with the glaring personality disorder, massive ego, and utter inability to handle a personal life of his own think that he’s the one who should manage the lives of the rest of us?” she asked, hitting me dead center and causing me to sputter slightly. I hadn’t expected that; I couldn’t read her mind here for some reason. Not that I wanted to.

  The Oval Office shook around me, but faintly, as though it were happening on the other end of this dream. “I think that’s your cue,” I said, nodding at her. “I do
n’t expect we’re going to meet again after this, Miss Nealon.” I called her that mostly to irritate her. “So—”

  “You’re the smart one, so I guess you’d know,” she snarked at me.

  “—so this is farewell,” I said as the world shook around us again and she looked around uncertainly. The Oval Office began to fade, and my eyes snapped open to find her gone, dust still fluttering across the fleeting beams of sunlight that made their way in through the hole. I was in my chair, comfortable despite of the autumn chill—warm because I had a feeling that halfway across the country, Sienna Nealon’s plane was coming crashing to the ground.

  84.

  Sienna

  I woke up to the sound of the plane breaking up around me. It was disturbing, I’ll admit, somewhere between waking up that first time with two unknown guys in my house and waking up underwater in the Great Salt Lake. This was, perhaps, slightly less unnerving than that once I remembered that I could fly.

  It got more unnerving again when I remembered that none of my companions could.

  “AIEEEEEEEE!” Kat shrieked, as one might expect when suddenly belted into a seat that was attached to no plane, no wings, and no engines. It was a just a chunk of the fuselage with a seat bolted to it, falling out of the afternoon sky toward the dusty plains below.

  “Crap,” Veronika said mildly, clothing rippling around her as she fell like a skydiver, no seat on her. She caught my eye. “Ummm … help?”

  I turned my head as Colin leapt from one piece of the plane to another, snatching up the pilot, co-pilot and cabin steward, grabbing them and stowing them, one under each arm and the last hanging around his neck. “Little help here?” he called to me, feet planted on a piece of the tail fin.

  I had a breath of panic, realizing I was still fastened into my own seat. Dark clouds filled the sky around us, tornadoes spinning and churning the air. I had a sudden realization about what had happened to our plane, and it wasn’t a happy thought. There was no way I could save all these people. I had only two arms, two legs and a back … where the hell were they going to hang onto me where I could save them?