Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Blah blah,” she said. “Little man wants to be a god, wants to rule over it all—I bet you were bullied as a child.”

  “That has nothing to do with—” I snapped, then composed myself as I waved for Cassidy to bring the box to me. “You’re cunning, I’ll give you that. You might have been useful once.”

  “I wouldn’t have joined you anyway,” she said, nodding her head at me—well, at Scott. “You complain about me being dumb, but you take away the brains of anyone whose lines of thought disagree with yours.”

  “Because they don’t know,” I said. “They don’t see.”

  “You’re a freaking telepath, dumbass,” she said. “If you can’t make them see with simple visuals and persuasive explanations … have you considered maybe your argument for how the world should be run is just a giant sour lemon that appeals to nobody but you?”

  “There’s no point in arguing with you,” I said, as Cassidy opened the box to reveal the hypodermic needles.

  “By your standards, there’s no point arguing with anyone,” she shot back, causing my temperature to rise. “You’re in the highest office in the land. You’re supposedly brilliant. You’re a freaking mind reader. You could try and persuade people, but you don’t care about winning them over because it’s easier to run them over and just do what you want to do. Because they’re stupid, you say. So clearly, you’re the better man, the better—their better, I guess, which means you have the right to rule.”

  “Exactly,” I murmured, taking the syringe and searching for a vein. Finding one, I plunged the needle in, pushing the plunger in all the way. “I am better. I am smarter. I know more than any of you—”

  91.

  Sienna

  “—And it’s time for me to take a page from your book and show everyone what real power is,” Harmon said through Scott’s mouth, that creepy ventriloquism echoing over the plains of South Dakota as Augustus’s quakes settled down and Reed’s tornadoes dissipated in anticipation of what was about to happen. “Not the force of strength you show, the paltry physical sort that manifests through violence, but true power. The power of the mind.”

  I felt a cold, clutching sensation of fear. I had a feeling I knew what was coming too, and the outcome was a big, fat gamble—

  “No more walls between us all,” Harmon said in a mocking tone. “No more barriers between humanity.”

  “No more privacy, no more secrets, no more thoughts of our own,” I singsonged. “No more lust, no more love, no more happiness—”

  Scott’s eyes were transfixed on me in a very annoyed, very un-Scott way. “What—no—stop that!”

  “Make me,” I said, knowing that if he’d just stuck a needle in his arm like I thought he had, I was too far from Washington to do anything about it if I was wrong about what would happen next.

  His eyes flared. “I will. In just a—” He paused, cold realization of his own hammering home. “Why am I not … the others … they collapsed and felt—” He bristled, straightening up as my suspicion turned out true, confirmed by him. “Cassidy.”

  “Turns out that the girl standing next to you, your right hand person,” I said, trying to distract him, “maybe wasn’t so keen about letting you run her head, either. She’s supposed to be pretty smart, though, so if she doesn’t buy into your bullshit about a better world being better for her—”

  92.

  Harmon

  “—I don’t hold out a lot of hope for anyone else being persuaded to your way of thinking,” she said across the distance between us as I saw red. Blood red.

  I broke out of the South Dakota vision and looked up at Cassidy, who was quivering before me. “That’s not the real solution.” I nodded at the box. “Not the solution you gave the others.”

  Cassidy stuck her chin out in defiance. “No.”

  Suddenly, the electrical burns on her palm made sense. “You’ve been hiding things from me, Cassidy,” I said, taking a step toward her as she jerked back. “You’ve been hiding things from yourself, too … shocking yourself to kill the brain cells holding your memories … what have you been up to?” I reached out and seized her mind in a way I’d never done before, desperation turning me to want to throttle the answer out of her with near-physical violence.

  I always hated physical violence. But I was starting to see the appeal now.

  “I … don’t know …” Cassidy said, and I could tell it was the truth. Cassidy was too clever by half; she’d fried the parts of her brain that had worked against me, covering her tracks so that she only dimly suspected what she’d done, the truth coming out until she’d have to shock it out of herself again. She had a mind without peer; performing micro brain surgery with a torn electrical cord was well within her capacity. She held up scorched palms, fresh wounds there to underscore what she’d done, and recently. “I … don’t know where the … solution is, either …”

  “Of course you don’t,” I whispered. “But the problem is, Cassidy … this makes you rather useless.”

  “Hey, dumbass.” Sienna Nealon’s voice broke through my blinding rage, and suddenly I felt a shock of pain as she punched Scott Byerly in the jaw, knocking me to the ground. I stared up at her, on the South Dakota plain, blinking away the surprise. “I’m over—”

  93.

  Sienna

  “—here,” I said, staring down at Scott, who had a stunned expression that didn’t quite belong to him. I wondered how long it had been since Gerry Harmon had felt a punch to the face, and knew that however long it was, it was too long. His was a face that deserved to be punched, and often.

  “Yes,” Harmon said, propelling Scott back to his feet, water churning at his fingertips. “There you are, indeed.” I hoped Cassidy was using the opportunity to run. “And here I am, apparently stuck at your level.”

  “You won’t like my level,” I said and punched Scott in the face again. I took it easy on him; I was mostly aiming to piss Harmon off so he’d forget about Cassidy. “Because I’m about to drag you down to it and beat you with experience.”

  Scott staggered, lip bleeding, and he turned back around. His voice broke through for a second. “Do—do what you have to—Sienna—”

  “That’s enough out of you,” Harmon said, reasserting control.

  “Is there anyone on planet earth who agrees with you enough to go along with what you want?” I asked, putting my dukes up. It was for show; I could throw a punch faster than Reed, Augustus and Scott combined.

  Scott blinked at me, and I knew it was Harmon showing through as the anger broke across his face. Someone sucker-punched me in the side of the head, the only sound of warning a crunch of earth, and I realized that apparently these boys of mine had gotten a speed upgrade along with their serum boost.

  A tornado swept out of the sky at me and I threw up a hand, blasting it away with a quick burst of fire, and found Scott coming at me with his fists, water covering them. He punched at me and I punched back, my fists on fire and dissipating his shield of water with each blow, steam hissing as we met each other in battle.

  A wall of rock came at me and I launched into the sky, barely evading Augustus’s attack. It looked like a fist of stone the size of a pickup truck reaching out of the plains, and another tornado swept down at me, this one with Reed clutched in its depths. I was buffeted about before righting myself, gritting my teeth as Scott soared up on jets of water to strike at me.

  “Son of—” I muttered, punching him in the belly as he went past. He tried to slap me down, but he lacked the skill if not the speed.

  “I think I’ve figured out why everyone else failed to kill you,” Augustus said, in Harmon’s voice. He shot at me on a wave of rock, and then it changed into a bullet-stream of gravel that I barely dodged. It winged past, drawing blood from my arm as I yanked it away. He was playing for keeps; that would have disintegrated me if I’d been directly in its path.

  “You just don’t quit,” Reed said, hitting me with a blast of air that caused physical pai
n, as though it had been hardened into ice. He, too, spoke in Harmon’s voice, and I reached out and cranked him with a backhand, snapping him in the jaw and sending him spinning out of the way.

  “That’s generally considered a virtue,” I said, turning to anticipate Scott’s incoming attack. It was a triple beam of water of such intensity that I had to launch two hundred more feet in the air to avoid it carving off anything more than my left hand—which hurt, by the way. Wolfe, I said, cringing at the pain.

  “Getting pummeled and rising again is not a virtue,” Harmon Augustus said, climbing on a pillar of rock to come at me, still spitting a stream of stones out of his improvised chariot. This was not going to be an easy fight. “A smarter person would figure out how to stop getting hit.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I turned and blasted Augustus in the eyes with a net of light, then rocketed at him, knocking him into unconsciousness with a right hook that set his head to wobbling. He dropped, his pillar of earth disintegrating into a storm of falling rocks as I caught him and dropped him gently—well, gently for me—on the plains below. “Let’s see if you can figure it out,” I muttered and whipped back around to come at Reed at the speed of sound.

  I caught my brother in the jaw, heard the crack, and watched his eyes roll. He went ragdoll, too, and started to fall out of the air, but I grabbed his arm and got him to the earth before I absorbed his soul. I set him down with relative ease, too, and then came in for a landing as Scott drifted back to the earth, his jets of water lowering him for his own landing.

  “‘A smarter person would figure out how to stop getting hit,’” I said mockingly.

  “I’m not the one getting hit,” he said as he cut the jets, but his eyes were burning from the insult and—I suspected—the secondhand pain I’d inflicted through his surrogates.

  “We’re not done just yet,” I said with a smile, my hair and torso blazing with fire.

  “Oh, I think we’re done,” Harmon said, and Scott rattled off a scream of pain, clenching his eyes shut.

  It took my breath away, seeing him waver like that. I had a bad feeling I knew what was coming next, and it wasn’t going to be good. “You chicken—”

  94.

  Harmon

  “—shit,” she said, and I could feel her rage across the distance between us. She had that look on her face, all red and intense, as though her fiery hair—an impressive little visual trick, I might add—might light up as a metaphor for her anger.

  “You’re a master of the physical,” I said, shrugging Scott’s shoulders for him. “The body is your domain, as I’ve said. I cede that ground to you. You could certainly pummel me in a round of fisticuffs, as you’ve proven here.” I smiled thinly. “But only a fool would fight you that way.”

  “You must be a fool, then,” she spat back at me, “because that’s what you just tried.”

  “It was an exercise in entertainment more than anything,” I said, trying to assuage my wounded pride. I’d thought I could beat her, it was true, but there was no shame in acknowledging her mastery of the physical arena. She was made for this combat, this kind of fight, and she was welcome to it. I’d never had to throw a punch in my life, and it had been foolish of me to start now, no matter how tempting it might have been. “We both know the real fight is in the mind.”

  I strode around my desk, pausing for a moment to slap the intercom switch. “I need security camera footage from the Secret Service, Ms. Krall. I need to know everywhere the girl who was just in here has been over the last day or so.” I waited for Ms. Krall to catch up, jogging her mind with a slight prod. “Have them put that together for me, will you?” I cut her off when I knew she’d gotten it. I needed to find out where Cassidy had been, where she could have hidden the serum, because she’d fled while I was distracted with Sienna Nealon, and now I was left with a woman standing in my office, staring at me. “I’ll be with you in a moment, dear,” I said to her, and she just blinked back at me.

  “I know what you’re going to do—” Sienna said, a wind blowing across the Dakota plains, sending dust into the air from where Augustus’s earthquake had ripped up the ground.

  “I doubt it,” I said lightly, speaking through Scott again. “I’m going to give you a chance to be a hero again. One last time, probably, depending on how you answer this challenge.” She grimaced, her eyes fluttering closed.

  I reached out and seized hold of Augustus Coleman’s mind, causing him to shake where he lay on the ground. Then I took hold of Reed Treston’s mind and made him convulse where he’d fallen. Finally I threaded my thoughts out and took hold of the mind of the woman standing in front of me, her reddish hair wavering as she shook, her smoky grey eyes evincing a hint of pain. “I’m looking at Ariadne Fraser,” I said mildly. “She’s a handsome-looking woman, you know. I hear you have some affection for her.”

  “You bastard,” Sienna said, and a tear streamed down her face.

  “You wanted to play the hero,” I said. “That forces me into the role of the villain. So … now I’ve got Mr. Byerly, Mr. Coleman, Mr. Treston … and Ms. Fraser. I’m in their heads. And I’m going to do to them what I did to Edward Cavanagh …

  “Unless you kill yourself right now.”

  95.

  Sienna

  “Unless you kill yourself right now.”

  Harmon’s threat rang in my ears. I closed my eyes, plains dust blowing against me, little grains singeing themselves against my flaming body and hair, sounding like a bugzapper crisping them as they blew through. “You coward,” I said, feeling a little wetness on my cheeks; he had almost everyone I cared about in his grip, and he was about to squeeze their brains into mush.

  “I’m comfortable playing the villain for you, knowing I’ll be the one to save the world in the end,” Harmon said through Scott’s lips—lips I’d kissed, lips I’d loved. I’d thought over the last few months that there was nothing left of the love I’d had for him.

  Until I realized that all this time … he’d been under the control of someone else.

  “You die, and I let them live,” Harmon said. He paused, watching me. “Come on. You’re the hero, aren’t you? Isn’t this an easy choice? It’s not as though you’ve got much to live for, is it? You’ve lost your home, you’re a fugitive from justice—I mean, you couldn’t go home even if you still had one … and it’d be hard to do that job that you love so much from jail. I mean, assuming, for some reason, I fail in my endeavor here. Which is unlikely.

  “I’ve turned the world against you, Sienna,” he went on, sounding like he was relishing my pain. “I’ve turned your own ‘family’ against you.” He said “family” with a special sort of skepticism. “Even if you miraculously escape this moment and free them … do you think their minds are going to be in working order? Your brother has killed an innocent woman and shot an infant. Your pal Augustus has abandoned his own family to chase you. And let’s not even discuss what I’ve made of this man,” Scott’s hands ran up and down him. “Of course, I had some help from you in that regard before I found this poor fellow. And Ariadne?” He chuckled, and it sounded gross and sinister. “Well … she’s going to be the most difficult of all to put back together. Because she …” His look was pure venom. “… She doesn’t even remember your name. Which is how it will be for everyone in the world soon enough.”

  “It seems so clear to you, doesn’t it?” I asked, my voice delicate as crystal. “So high … and mighty … and above us all?”

  He blinked. “Well … yes. Of course.”

  “Being controlled by you is no kind of life,” I said, looking at Augustus, shaking on the ground. “Being a puppet of yours is not living.” Reed convulsed, hard, bucking against the upturned earth.

  “Having their heads explode due to a massive aneurysm isn’t much fun, either,” Harmon said, as Scott shook and cried out in his own voice. “You have about ten seconds to decide before the damage becomes too much for their bodies to repair. I know you’re not that bright, but …
I’d hurry if I were you.”

  I closed my eyes and reached out with my thoughts. If you’re there … if you can hear me … if you’re in DC … please … stop him.

  “Remember, you’re an idiot, which means thinking it over is not in your best interest,” Harmon said. “Your brilliant mind got you into this situation; it seems unlikely to get you out or save your friends.”

  I saw a warm, familiar, enigmatic smile in the darkness of my mind, a reassuring voice that reached across the miles:

  I’m on it.

  Doctor Zollers.

  “Well, I’m going to take this silence and your stupidity as a ‘No,’” Harmon said, and I opened my eyes to see Scott shake, his face turning blood red. “Unless you want to take back your—” He froze, locking eyes with me, “—your—your … what the—”

  96.

  Harmon

  “—Hell?” I felt my connection with Augustus, Reed and Scott fade into nothingness, as though someone had slapped hard against my mind, knocking me out of theirs. I blinked, staring at the blank face of Ariadne Fraser standing before me. She was as close to a lobotomy patient as I’d ever encountered, but she could still balance a spreadsheet. Scooping Sienna Nealon out of her mind had been hard work, but it had been worth it, I thought. She was my ace card, waiting in the hole in case somehow Nealon got too close to the mark.