by Jackson Ford
I close my eyes, let out a deep breath. Get past the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, and start moving things.
First, the top of the pile. I shove the rubble to the side, focusing on the bigger pieces. I don’t bother to place them – just rip them away from the house, sending them crashing over into the yard behind, against the remains of the property wall. I’m more tired than I thought I was – each piece costs me, draining energy. A headache starts to bloom at the base of my skull, nausea gnawing at the stomach.
Annie puts a hand on my shoulder, resting it there. I get the sense she’s doing it more for herself than for me.
“Faster, come,” Africa says.
“Working on it.”
“Is she down there?” Annie asks. “Her chair, maybe?”
My eyes fly open. What a fucking numbnuts I am. I’m trying to dig out the whole house, and I don’t even know where Reggie is inside it. I’m wasting all this energy shifting big pieces, when there’s a better way.
I inhale through my nostrils, exhale. Africa says something, but Annie cuts him off. “Let her work.”
I send my PK through the house concentrating on shapes. A door handle. A fridge, I think. The office whiteboard, ripped in two. Another door, part of a wall. They’ve all been jumbled together, making it hard to figure out what’s what. A sudden, sick fear: I might pass over Reggie’s chair, mistake it for something else. She may have been knocked clear, or dragged herself under a desk, or part of her Rig. If that happens, I could burn the energy on nothing.
Right then, I get real woozy.
Under normal circumstances, I’ve got quite a bit in the tank before my PK gives out on me. These are not normal circumstances. The world starts to turn sideways – Annie has to grab me, hold me up. My tongue feels weird in my mouth; like there’s too much space in there, like it’s suddenly shrunken and can’t reach the sides. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever felt, but it’s definitely top five.
“Got it,” I murmur.
“Like hell you do. You can barely stand up.”
“No, I mean, I got it. Reggie’s chair.”
And I do. I recognise the shape now, my PK building a picture in my mind. With Annie’s help, I sit down on the ground, cross-legged – my pants are already soaked, so it’s not like I’m going to get any wetter. Then I start directing her and Africa, getting them to help clear the smaller bits of rubble while I concentrate on the bigger chunks. Turns out, a lot of the house is still there; it’s retained its shape, as if unwilling to let the quake break it apart completely.
I move the final bits of roof and plaster, shoving them to one side. Annie and Africa look almost like they’ve been swallowed by the Boutique, the top of Africa’s head just visible as they dig. They’ve got the chair now, I can feel it, and right then, I don’t want them to pull it out. What if we find Reggie under there, and she’s—
“She’s here,” Annie shouts back. “We found her!”
I let my head drop to my chest, pushing back against the headache. When I look up, Annie and Africa are halfway down the pile of rubble – and Reggie is in Africa’s arms, looking as small and fragile as a newborn bird.
Her eyes are open. Unfocused, glazed… but open.
I collapse backwards, not giving a shit about the mud, letting out a groan of relief. Part of the garage wall is still upright. Annie props Reggie against it, and immediately goes to work. She massages the dead tissue in Reggie’s legs, kneading it hard.
“Water,” Reggie whispers.
Africa fumbles in his pack, holds out a bottle, forgetting for a second that Reggie can’t pick it up. I don’t bother correcting him – I take the water with my mind, tilting the plastic bottle to Reggie’s lips. Behind us, a distant siren cuts through the hiss of the rain, coming from the north end of 7th Avenue.
Reggie sips, then starts to cough. I pull the water back too fast, spilling some down her shirt.
Her eyes flutter open. “That’s the second chair I’ve… managed to lose… in under a year. Moira’s going to kill me.”
Africa makes a noise that might be a laugh. Even I can’t help smiling, a little. We wrecked her previous chair in a police chase a few months ago, smashing it all over El Segundo Boulevard. At least this time, it wasn’t our fault.
“She had it on top of her,” Annie tells me.
“Quake knocked me over. Managed to pull it on top of me… before the walls collapsed. Used… arms.”
She has to stop between words to take ragged, hitching breaths. Imagining her flat on her back, using what little strength was left in her arms to pull the chair onto her, knowing that the roof could collapse at any second…
“Paul say the office was quake-proof,” Africa says.
Reggie expression hardens. “It… was. But this one… bad.”
“Yeah.” I wipe water off my forehead. “We’ve noticed.”
There’s a laptop clutched in her one good arm. She has it braced in the crook of her elbow, like a baby.
Before I can ask why she saved it, her eyes widen. “Where’s… Paul?”
We fill her in, telling her about the job, Schmidt’s plane, the quake. “If he got any brains inside him,” Annie says, “he’ll go find the nearest shelter, get that broken arm seen to.” Her voice is a hard wall.
“And you three?” Reggie’s gotten a little bit of strength back. “You’re OK?”
“Fine.” I point. “What’s with the laptop?”
Reggie looks down, as if seeing it for the first time. “I’ve got it set—” She coughs, a very weak sound. Annie moves onto the other leg, fingers digging deep into Reggie’s flesh. “I’ve got it set to back up to my drive every fifteen minutes. I have it in… in case I want to show you all something in the main room. It was… right next to me, on my Rig. When the shaking first started, I grabbed hold of it. Pulled it with me.”
“What did you find?” I ask.
The silence goes on a little too long.
All things considered, I’d rather just abandon this whole clusterfuck and go somewhere with a hot beach and cold beers. But of course, we all know what Reggie found – or the broad strokes, anyway. That means no beer until we save the world.
Reggie gathers herself. “The earthquake – both earthquakes – were caused by a person.”
And there it is.
Another long silence. I decide to say what everyone is thinking. “How sure are you? Like sort-of sure, or like really really—”
“I’ve got it on tape,” Reggie says quietly.
“Ah. Shit.”
She raises an eyebrow, and I backtrack. “Well, I mean, that’s good that we know, but just, you know… shit. It sucks that the earthquake isn’t just Mother Nature, cos…”
“You should stop while you’re ahead,” Annie mutters to me.
“Copy that.”
“How did you even know where to look?” Annie asks Reggie. “Or that you needed to look in the first place?”
Reggie gathers herself. She’s got a little of her breath back now. “Remember the state trooper?”
“What state trooper?”
“The one that went missing, on our side of the Arizona border. It didn’t sit right. Career officer with a family and a healthy psych record, just ditching his cruiser in the middle of nowhere? Something was off.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It took me a while to go digging, what with all the mission prep. How did that go, by the way? With Schmidt?”
“Teggan was on the plane when it flew off,” Africa tells her.
“I’m sorry, what?”
I have to restrain myself from punching Africa on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. State trooper. Video.”
“I just kept an eye on it. Figured I’d do a little detective work. His cruiser didn’t have a dash cam, but one of the last things he did before he went missing was run a plate on his computer. Vehicle registered to an Amber-Leigh Schenke, out of New Mexico.”
“Who is she?”
<
br /> “No idea. I couldn’t dig up anything on her – my guess is, it’s a fake name. Or fake registration anyway.”
“I don’t get it though. What made you so interested in this in the first place? It’s genuinely not what we normally—”
Her gaze is level, surprisingly clear. “Sometimes, you get a hunch. You follow it.”
Well, that’s some grade-A bullshit right there. Still, I’ll figure that out later. “But the local cops would know what you knew, right?” I ask her. “They’d have run the plate?”
“Correct. They’d already put out an APB. But I’m a lot faster than them, and, if I do say so myself, able to get into places they can’t. I found the car at a gas station near Cabazon.”
“That was the site of the first quake,” Annie says, more to herself than to us.
“Bingo. And we got lucky.” She winces. “Well, lucky as can get, anyway. The station wasn’t a mom-and-pop deal. That’d been the case, the footage would probably be on a videotape buried under ten tons of rubble.”
I frown. “So how did you—?”
“Big national chains stream their security footage to the cloud. Wouldn’t want rank and file employees having access to it, now, would we? Not when they might be stealing potato chips or whatnot.”
I feel like the rank and file employees would probably be banging customers in the back room rather than stealing chips, but it’s not the not the time to get hung up on details.
“Hold on.” Annie shakes her head, like she’s trying to dislodge a fly. “So they’ve seen the footage too?”
“Nope. Hadn’t got around to reviewing it – at least, if the metadata tells me true.”
“Why not?”
“Who knows? Chain of command, probably – corporate stakeholders gotta weigh in before they formally review the tape, or some such. I’ve taken the footage off their hands for now.”
I shake my head, trying to get my thoughts back on track. “So… so you’re saying we’ve got another Jake. One of my parents’ rejects who grew up to be a bad guy.”
“… Not exactly.”
And she taps the laptop, still clutched tight in her arms.
I pull a piece of roof overhead to shield us from the rain, aware that someone might be watching, and not giving a shit. With Annie’s help, Reggie gets the laptop working, pulling up a video file. It’s the gas station security camera, looking right across the concrete apron, out towards the pumps and the entrance from the highway. Dark clouds mass in the distance, the footage grainy and glitchy.
“Sorry about the job, by the way,” Reggie mumbles.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“When I didn’t realise Schmidt had left his hotel. I’d just broken through the gas company’s encryption, and I wasn’t really paying attention, so—”
“For real?” Annie says.
I find my voice. “That’s… not like you.”
“Yeah. I don’t get it. You always tell us that we need be completely focused on the jobs – you and Paul both.” Annie bites her bottom lip, stops massaging Reggie’s leg. “What gives?”
“Doesn’t matter now.” Reggie taps the laptop. “Fast forward. About halfway through this file.”
Annie works the trackpad, Reggie directing her. “More. More. No, stop – back a little. There.”
A beat-up truck cruises into view by the pumps. Before it’s even come to a stop, the door pops open, and a little kid scrambles out.
“Freeze it,” Reggie says.
Annie does so, just as the kid glances at the camera. The footage is a little blurry, but I get a good look at his face. No more than four or five, with an untidy mop of brown hair. Reggie taps the screen, her fingernail brushing the kid’s chest.
“Him?” Annie says.
I start rubbing my hands together, because it feels like the blood has just stopped flowing to my fingers. “No fucking way.”
“Watch,” Reggie says.
The tape plays again, the kid crouching on the edge of the lot. He’s joined by a blonde woman – his mom, I guess. Amber-Leigh Schenke.
The camera starts to shake. Slowly at first, then very quickly. There’s no sound, but it’s all too easy to imagine what it must be like.
I clear my throat. “What are we looking f—?”
The earth around the kid and his mom explodes upwards, cocooning them in a huge sphere of soil.
“What the fuck?” says Annie.
The camera goes dead.
“Rewind it,” I say. It’s a miracle I can speak at all. There’s no saliva left in my mouth. None.
We watch it again. Then a third time. And as much as I’d love to believe it was a trick of a light, or a special effect, it wasn’t. There’s no mistake.
“Where the kid’s standing?” Reggie says. “That’s—”
“The epicentre,” Annie mutters.
I stand, walk away. It’s either that, or I’ll break the laptop. Just put my fist through the screen.
Holy fucksticks, this is bad.
This is really, really bad.
It’s not surprising that there’s someone else like me. I exist, and Jake did, so it makes sense there’d be more. But I never, in a million years, thought it would be a kid. It couldn’t be.
When my parents were first figuring out how to give people abilities, they used women with unwanted pregnancies as test subjects. Foul, on every level. It was where Jake originated – he was a reject from their programme, a foetus that they thought they’d been unsuccessful with. His mom brought him to term, and years later, he popped up on my radar. He was bad news. He’d lost his mind somewhere along the line, and stopping him almost got me killed.
But my parents quit working with unwanted pregnancies when my mom had me, and my brother and sister. There was no reason for them to continue – not with three super-powered kids running around. But this kid has abilities, and if he’s only four or five, then—
Who gave them to him?
It’s not just that. At my best, I can lift a car off someone – and that’s when I’m pushing it. This kid can manipulate the earth, and he just flattened most of LA.
Behind me, somewhere very far away, Annie is saying my name.
What if I have to kill him? I thought I could reason with Jake, find out who he was and why he’d had me framed for murder, but it didn’t work. It was him or me. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and Jake was my age, a grown man. A kid? A four-year-old boy? I can’t. I won’t. They can’t make me.
Africa is making his way towards me. I stick a hand out, warning him back.
Oh my God. The tinnitus. That weird mental static I felt, when we went out to Sandra-May’s place in Watts. The sensation that someone had filled my head with water. What if it’s somehow connected to the kid? To his ability?
I turn back to Reggie. “Is there any way you could be wrong?”
“Come on now,” says Annie, her face pale. “You saw what’s on the tape.”
“Reggie. Is there any way?”
She shakes her head. “That’s where the quake started. It isn’t far from where the state trooper went missing. Even if we didn’t have that, you saw how he protected himself. He’s like you, Teagan.”
“He is nothing like me.” I don’t mean to snarl the words, but it happens anyway.
The first quake might have been an accident – maybe he didn’t know his own power. I definitely didn’t, when I was that little. But it looked like he made it happen – it wasn’t an accident. So why do it a second time? Unless…
Unless he wanted it to happen. Unless he meant to do it. Destroy Los Angeles.
What in the name of fuck are we dealing with here?
“We gotta get Reggie to a doctor,” Annie says, at the same time as I ask, “Does Tanner know about this?”
Annie raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah, OK, yes, we will absolutely do that,” I say. “The doctor, I mean.”
“I’m fine,” Reggie says.
“Maybe get a doc to decide that.” Annie wipes her mouth. “You were under there for a while. You’re definitely dehydrated, that’s for damn sure. Maybe concussion too, along with God knows what else.”
“Reggie,” I say. “Does Tanner know?”
“No. The second earthquake hit right after I found out. Whole building came down on my head.”
“So you’re telling me… You’re telling me that we are the only people, right now, who know that this quake was caused by an actual person? No one else knows?”
Annie squats, getting her arms under Reggie, lifting her up. Her legs are shaky, and she nearly drops her – Africa has to lumber forward to help, supporting Reggie under the shoulders.
“What happened to your teeth?” Reggie says to Africa, horrified.
“These sai sai people wanted to rob us, huh?” Africa lisps.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“We have to tell people,” I say. “If this kid does it again—”
“We’ll take you to the Speedway,” Annie tells Reggie. “There were National Guard trucks. They might have a doctor.”
“I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
“Reggie, we have to tell someone—”
“Look,” says Annie. Her voice is brittle. “We can’t do shit about the kid right now. We don’t know where he is, if he’s even still in LA, or what. We get Reggie to a doctor, we get some food inside us, we figure out a plan. Let’s go.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Amber
In the movies Amber has seen, people manage to talk to each other just fine while travelling in helicopters. They’re able to have whole conversations. They must have been different helicopters to this one. It’s a big chopper, with a huge belly, and it is loud.
The pilots up at the front have headphones with huge earcups, mic stalks jutting out. Amber doesn’t. Neither do the soldiers, or the thirty other people crammed into the back of the chopper. Each wall is lined with uncomfortable metal-framed seats, the passengers secured to them by rough, red straps. Every few feet, there’s a circular window. Amber and Matthew are on either side of one, and she finds her gaze continually drawn to it. Despite the chaos below, she can’t help but marvel at the view.