by Lee French
Liam shrugged. “In which case we’re already screwed and they already know where we’re going. Stopping now to check would only delay us further and give them more time to prepare.”
“When you know there’s a trap, charge in to take ‘em off guard. My kinda tactical approach.”
“Look,” Liam turned around, annoyance on his face loud and clear, “I gather this is all very entertaining to you, but Elena is my— She’s—” He made a frustrated noise and turned back around. “She’s very important to me.”
Taken aback, Bobby blinked a few times. “Ease back, I don’t mean nothing by it. I get it, you’re in love with the girl, it’s cool. We’re gonna rescue her.” He knew a thing or two about being willing to do whatever it took for a woman.
Liam rubbed his face and didn’t answer. Kaitlin watched Bobby, her expression thoughtful. “While you were gone, people talked about you a lot more than they normally do. No one really thinks very highly of your brains. They all figured Stephen talked you into taking off. But he didn’t, did he? It was your idea, to go ride on the fancy white horse, wearing the white hat. You were expecting to come back a big damned hero.”
Bobby sighed and looked out his window, not wanting to admit the truth in front of Liam and Paul. Not out loud, anyway. “It don’t matter.” Tony had figured the same thing out, and he hadn’t liked it then, either.
“Uh-huh.” Kaitlin crossed her arms and stopped watching him. “I could have told you it was going to be a disaster.”
“Yeah, well, I can tell you it woulda been stuck in committee for a month,” he snapped. There was no reason to get testy with her, though. She had every right to be annoyed and prod him. “Look, yeah, I know, all this is my fault, okay? I get that. Been said, don’t need a refresher.”
She snorted. “It’s not your fault, Bobby. That’s like saying it was Tarkin’s fault Alderaan got blown up. Technically true, but Palpatine was really to blame for that.”
“What?” Bobby had no idea what she was talking about. Those names meant nothing to him. Actually, that last one maybe sounded a little familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
Kaitlin rolled her eyes. “Never mind. I’m just saying that everything’s connected. You can take responsibility for your choices, but it’s not really your fault we’re all in this situation. Liam, why are you working for Privek?”
Liam slumped against his seat. “We were at the airport, going through customs. Homeland Security was giving me a hard time, they separated us. When I got it straightened out, she was just gone. Elena, I mean. She disappeared. They had no idea where she went or when, and when I got them to check the security footage, there was nothing to see. Privek showed up, said he was leading a special task force to deal with us. He said he’d help me find her if I work for him. I tried to just pay him off, but he didn’t want money, he wanted me to use my…ability for him.”
Kaitlin nodded like that matched her expectations. “See? Privek. So, he takes Elena and says these dangerous mutants or whatever stole her, and if you work for them, he’ll get ‘his people’ to find her. Classic bad guy tactic.”
Even though he didn’t quite follow the logic, Bobby shrugged. “I guess we should just be grateful they only managed to get eleven of us.”
“Why do you keep saying eleven?” Paul looked at him in the rearview mirror, genuinely confused. “There’s only ten of us on our side.”
Bobby took a long, slow blink, and stared back at Paul through the mirror. “What d’you mean there’s only ten? We checked every name on the list, and Privek got ten, plus Jasmine.” He’d read that stupid list so many times he had it partially memorized. It was in alphabetical order by their last names, though he could only recite the first names down pat. “Brian, Kevin, Raymond, Dianna, William, Chelsea, Kanik, Paul, and Maisie. Them’s all the ones what got took before we found ‘em. Jasmine got took later.”
“William is me, I go by Liam, but I don’t know any Kanik.”
“Yeah, I’m obviously Paul, and I recognize the other names, but not Kanik.”
Bobby looked at Kaitlin, who he figured had to be thinking something smarter than him. “Ain’t that a broke pickle.”
“Whatever that means,” Kaitlin said, then she shook her head. “This Kanik guy is maybe someone we should be interested in talking to.”
Liam asked, “Where did you get the list? We never saw one, Privek just had all your names somehow.”
“It were in the place we done broke outta that first time. Privek said ‘mistakes were made’. Stephen and me kinda figured he meant that they didn’t expect me to wake up like that, so they weren’t set up for us yet. Ai picked it up on the way out. Though, in fairness, Stephen also has an alternate theory that we was supposed to break out and that list was planted all over the place to make sure we got it. I just can’t figure that angle out, on account it don’t go square with everything that happened.”
“I remember him saying that,” Paul said thoughtfully.
“How in heckbiscuits d’you remember that?”
Sheepish and blushing again, Paul hunched down as much as driving would allow him to. “I was there, when you met with him. In the next office over. Privek wanted me to read your thoughts. Only, I couldn’t, because you’re too… I pick up each of your dragons as a separate little mind, and they’re all too tight and close to pick anything out. The only time I seem to be able to get anything from you, other than a highly confusing mess I can’t really read, is when all the dragons seem to be thinking the same thing. I guess that doesn’t happen much.”
“Wait, right now? I’m a bundle of dragon minds right now?”
“Yeah. It’s like you’re made of bees. There might be a central, core part, but I can’t see it.”
Here Bobby thought the dragons didn’t really exist unless he wanted them to. To find out they were really always there, just out of sight, shocked him so much it hit almost as a physical body blow. And he thought it was hard to explain his superpower before. Now, he didn’t even understand it. Was he really just a weird hive mind effect? How did this make sense, given he wasn’t made of dragons until he broke apart that first time? Or was he always this way, just with no instinct to guide him to let them loose?
“Stephen doesn’t exist to my mind,” Paul admitted, “and Kaitlin, you’re…disturbing. Your mind is running backwards and forwards at the same time with an echo in both directions, and feels like it wants to burst out of you and eat me.”
“Nice to know you can’t read me,” Kaitlin said cheerfully.
“I can, it’s just difficult and unpleasant.”
Bobby still sat there, stunned, while the conversation moved on around him. The drugs had to be out of his system by now, and he popped a dragon off his thumb. It sat on his palm, looking up at him as he looked down at it. Was it him or was he it? Was there any way to tell? Did it matter? Knowing that wouldn’t bring back those kids he killed. Knowing that wouldn’t get Sebastian out of whatever they were doing to him. Knowing that wouldn’t fix what went wrong between him and Lily.
“I’m you and you’re me,” he told the little dragon softly. It nodded and chirped. The small silver critter walked across his hand to rub its head on his thumb affectionately. “Hey,” he said, louder and to Paul. “If’n you see a place, I need to eat soon. Ain’t picky. A junkyard’d be good, too. Dragons gotta eat separate.”
“Yeah, I’m a little peckish, too,” Paul said with a nod. “I’ll keep an eye open for something.”
“That makes no sense,” Liam said. “Why do they need to eat separately?”
“I dunno. I almost done drowned on account of it once, though, so the why ain’t nearly so important to me as the fact of it. They gotta eat, but it ain’t urgent right now. Just can’t let it go too long.”
“It still makes no sense. When you eat, they should be fed, and the reverse.”
Kaitlin laughed. “Yeah, because any of this makes sense. Don’t even get me started about how what I can do jive
s with free will. You can’t possibly tell me that out of all of us, Bobby’s the only one that defies logic for you.”
The car went quiet. Bobby stared at his dragon and didn’t know what to think. Mostly, he didn’t want to think at all. Sure, he spent some time trying to figure out what his mind really was, but that had more to do with knowing his limits, not understanding how it actually worked. In truth, he didn’t want to know how it worked. On some level, he worried that the second he understood it, all of it would stop working, even though he knew that was stupid. He wasn’t Wile E. Coyote.
After a while, he decided to find out what the other side actually knew. “You guys all know where we come from?”
Liam and Paul shared a look. Liam shrugged. “We have theories. You?”
“Ayup, we got a theory. Starts with ‘half’ and ends with ‘alien’.”
Kaitlin snerked. “It’s not like Privek doesn’t already know we know things. We think the government has or had an alien locked up someplace, and spliced her DNA with human to make us, probably by harvesting her eggs and using human sperm. Presto, test tube babies. Someone is still working on how the alien got here.”
Both men reacted. Liam seemed to know how to keep himself more or less under wraps, but Paul had no such skill and Bobby could tell before he opened his mouth that he couldn’t believe what she’d said. “How did you figure all that out?”
Kaitlin snorted and said, again very slowly and with exaggerated pronunciation, “Precognition.”
Bobby laughed, hard. He hadn’t had much cause to in a while, and it felt good. “I know Privek thinks I’m stupid, that’s fine. But I ain’t. None of us is.”
“Privek did lead us to believe you aren’t,” Liam paused and spoke delicately, “precisely talented mentally.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Bobby stared out the window, trying not to take offense at that. It was what they wanted, him and Stephen, to be underestimated. It just kind of burned to know people talked about him that way. Time to change the subject again so he could stop thinking about it. “Why you on Privek’s team, Paul?”
The telepath blushed. “Agents showed up on my doorstep, saying my country needed me. I guess…I don’t know. It was stupid. My dad is a cop. He was actually proud of me for something for the first time.”
Since he looked embarrassed, Bobby just nodded. “That there’s some powerful motivation.”
Liam scowled. “If Privek took Elena specifically to manipulate me, he will regret it.”
“I’m in,” Bobby said cheerfully. “I’ll hold him down, you open up a can of whupass.”
Paul gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I just don’t understand how he fooled me. That’s not supposed to be possible.”
“I fooled you by wrapping my head in tinfoil.” Kaitlin shrugged. “At least, I assume that’s why I did it. Maybe he’s actually got some superpower or something.”
That quieted the car again. Bobby could only guess what Paul and Liam might be thinking about it. For himself, he squirmed a bit about how much he and Kaitlin had shared compared to how little they got in return from Paul and Liam. But then, he figured they didn’t have a lot of trust here and had to start someplace. Somebody had to give first, and he didn’t mind being the one to do it. Especially if it meant they’d hold up their end of the deal.
Not long after, Liam turned on the radio and found a station playing inoffensive jazz. An hour later, they’d passed Culpeper and Bobby perked up, paying attention to where they were. “Seems like a bad idea to just drive right up to the front door and park in plain sight,” he said as he noticed a familiar sign. “I suggest driving past and finding a place to park off the road what ain’t too far away.”
“Good plan,” Liam nodded.
Kaitlin shrugged. “I’ll wait in the car.”
Looking her over, Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “That ain’t ‘cause you know something bad’s gonna happen, right?”
She gave him a very fake innocent look. “Nope.” Her face dropped into a more serious cast. “You don’t need me to do this. I’ll only be in the way and don’t have anything like the skills needed to break into a place and infiltrate security and whatever else you’re going to have to do. Besides, if Paul leaves the keys, I can bring the car around for a quick getaway.”
“If anyone’s gonna be able to do the whole quick getaway thing, I expect it’s you,” Bobby nodded. “Assuming that’s okay with Paul?”
Paul gulped. “Maybe I should stay with the car, too.”
Liam gave Paul a flat look. “How are we supposed to get in without your help? Should I heal them as a distraction?”
“I just—” Paul made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.
Bobby laughed. “You don’t trust Kaitlin not to drive away and leave you both stranded with rattlers.”
“All three of us,” Liam corrected.
“Naw,” Bobby shrugged, “I ain’t that easy to leave nowhere, seeing as how I can, ya know, fly. I ain’t worried.” He pointed out the window at a wall of shrubbery. “That’s it, I swear on my Daddy’s grave.”
Kaitlin reached over and put her hand on Bobby’s arm, her eyes unfocused. Paul squeaked. The car swerved and went into the ditch on the side of the road. Bobby burst into the swarm on impact and surrounded Kaitlin to protect her as the car flipped over and rolled a few times before landing upside-down in the field across the road from the target house. His intervention kept her conscious.
As soon as it stopped moving, Bobby re-formed and yanked the back door open, then hauled her out. “You okay?” He grabbed her by the shoulders and made her look at him.
She mumbled some swearwords, then shook her head to clear it. “More or less. What the hell happened?”
“I dunno. C’mon, we gotta get ‘em out before anything blows up.” How he wished for Jayce or Stephen, because either of them could rip the doors off. Both Paul and Liam had been knocked out cold. At least this beat up old piece of crap was made more of metal than plastic. It didn’t look like either managed to get seriously hurt or would need to be wrenched out. Both still wore their seatbelts and probably had their bells rung.
“I didn’t even see that coming,” Kaitlin grumbled. She crawled to Paul’s door and yanked on it. The door groaned and refused to budge.
Bobby tried Liam’s door with the same result. “Just worry about getting them out.” He scowled at the car, then remembered he had a small army of tiny claws at his disposal. Letting off a handful, he had the dragons zoom inside and cut the belts so they both thumped onto the ceiling of the car. From there, he and Kaitlin hauled them out through the broken windows.
“Someone heard that, they had to,” Kaitlin said as she pushed one of Paul’s eyelids up and peered at his eye. “We’ve got to get them away from here before anyone shows up.”
“Are you people okay?”
“Too late,” Bobby muttered as he looked Liam over for serious injuries. They were both incredibly lucky because they must have hit that ditch at fifty miles an hour. Someone crunching through the leaves made him turn to see the owner of those feet. And stare.
“Sergeant Riker?”
The soldier stopped and stood there, staring stupidly for a full second before hurrying over to put a knee down beside Liam. “What are you guys doing here? I figured you would’ve stayed in the Sandbox.”
The last time Bobby saw Riker, he had injuries to his feet that meant he’d likely never walk right again, yet here he was with no sign of any kind of lingering debilitation at all. He even still wore in military gear: jungle BDUs. Riker looked over Liam, showing full recognition. Liam had said he healed soldiers. At the time, Bobby thought he only meant the really messed up ones in that warehouse. It hadn’t crossed his mind that guys with lesser wounds might have gotten the benefit of his ability. Especially not this one.
“I…uh…long damned story, man.”
“Yeah, same here. This guy,” he patted Liam on the chest, “fixed me up ri
ght. I got shunted to this duty as a sort of reward, I guess, and to keep me quiet. All five of us are here, doing the most boring guard duty rotation imaginable. What are you up to?”
Bobby had a choice. He could be honest, or he could lie and try to play Riker. Which wasn’t really a choice at all. “Looking to break into the facility you’re guarding to relieve your new boss of something he stole away: Liam’s girlfriend. Don’t expect we got a whole ton of time to explain, so the short version is like this. There’s a guy named Privek what’s running all this, in charge of us with these superpowers, and he’s been lying to us and using us against each other. We’re looking to expose him and get some justice. Right this minute, I need to prove all that to these two, which is why we came for his girlfriend.”
Riker frowned and nodded. “I have no way to evaluate that information, but you saved my life, and what was left of my squad, and Liam healed me up better than doctors could’ve done. There’s no one named Privek here that I know of, but if his girlfriend is here, let’s get her out.”
Relieved by his response, Bobby gave him a grim smile. “You got any ideas, Sergeant?”
The Sergeant stood up and scratched at his clean-shaven chin. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to do your dirty work for you, but I can look the other way and report this as nothing.”
“That’ll do,” Bobby nodded with a grim smile. He offered his hand to Riker, who shook it firmly. “I hope there’s a chance to have out the long version of the story.”
“Yeah, me too. Good luck.” The soldier got a lopsided grin. “I didn’t see anything. The noise must have been animals.”
With a bemused snort, Bobby tipped an imaginary hat and broke apart into dragons. As the swarm streaked away, he heard Riker say, “Still a trip to see that.” Kaitlin said something in return that he couldn’t hear. His attention shifted to the simple task of getting into the house. Like most buildings, big or small, this one had vents and he sent the swarm in through one. From there, they flew around in the ductwork and stopped where they could see in. The ground floor remained as he remembered it: furnished like a house and barely used.