"What do you think she did to him in there?" he asked Rose eventually.
They stood together on a catwalk overlooking the main hall of the underground base. Wegener sat in the makeshift commissary, drinking black coffee and talking to himself.
"Why don't you ask her?" Rose said.
"You've worked with her more often," Black said. "You don't have any idea?"
She shook her head.
"It's not torture, exactly," Rose said. "If they wanted him tortured they would have had me do it. All I know is nobody ever leaves an interview with the Lady in quite the same way."
"Speak of the devil," Black said.
The Lady walked across the atrium towards them. She appeared to be dressed in pajamas. A red, voluminous robe was intricately wrapped around her and her feet were bare. Several of Black's mercenaries and even a few of Rose's assassins watched as she drifted by. The Lady beckoned Black and Rose.
"Think she heard us?" Rose said.
"Come along, my friends," she said. "Our clients have selected the city they want to test their pet storm on."
The Lady brought them to a small room several levels below the main amphitheater. The space had been carved directly into the cave wall — as most of the rooms were — and she shut off all the electric lights, instead choosing to bathe the room with dozens of small candles. Black's cyborg eye kicked up the light compensation. He wished he hadn't.
The floor was covered in bare stone, but someone — the Lady herself, he assumed — painted strange images all around the room, including a circle of alien symbols surrounded by a ring of candles.
"Doctor Wegener's control mechanisms have failed, but his theories were sound," she said. "There was no way to know that the storm wouldn't process pain the same way a living creature would."
As she spoke, the Lady finished her preparations, scribbling an additional symbol here, lighting incense there. The room smelled like the palm reader's establishment Black visited once when he was young.
"Fortunately, they can still be useful as anchors for my own work," she said. "I can channel commands through them into the human girl's body, which the storm is now dependent upon to stay alive. A little malignant guidance is all we need."
"All due respect, ma'am, but why are you telling us this?" Agent Black said. "We're just the hired guns."
The Lady favored him with one of her heart-rending smiles. He immediately regretted speaking.
"Just assumed you'd be curious, darling," she said. "I like you both and thought you might want to share in our next maneuver."
"That's . . . generous of you, Lady," Rose said.
Under ordinary circumstances, it should have entertained him to see Rose a bit off her game, yet it only made Black more nervous to see his partner's confidence waning.
The Lady smiled again, knelt down in front of the circle of symbols and began to sing.
Slowly, the emblems positioned throughout the room started to glow. At first, Black thought it was a trick of the light, but he saw them warming in the dark, a light red, like heating metal. The place grew warmer. A trickle of sweat slipped down his forehead, becoming trapped in his eyebrow.
The Lady's voice changed, sounding less like singing, more like a conversation, a call and answer in some language Black, couldn't decipher, had never heard before.
Inside the circle, something . . . congealed. A shape. Almost human, but most definitely not human, a strange form with thin, brittle wings.
Black slowly, cautiously, took a step forward and to his left. Rose shook her head at him, her one good eye wide. The candles played with his night vision, but the Lady's face was clear and bright.
She had horns. Long, black, polished horns rising like elegant weapons from above her brow. Open flame engulfed her eyes. For a moment, Agent Black was convinced he would run — fight or flight kicked in again, but this time there was no fight to be garnered. He struggled for control and took a deep, incense-addled breath.
And then the lights went out.
Every candle extinguished simultaneously, leaving the room in complete darkness. After images of the glowing runes remained, but they faded into pale red burns in his vision.
Something crossed incredibly close to him. A warm body. He started to draw his weapon, but then light spilled in from the open door. Framed in the doorway, the Lady leaned to one side. There was an attempt at confidence in her stance, but Black sensed tiredness, too, a body weariness that told him the magic he just witnessed cost her something.
"Well then," she said, her voice upbeat, but slightly strained. "Shall we see what happens when our baby storm meets a major metropolitan area?"
Elsewhere, Valerie Snow was seeing things.
Shadow creatures. Skinny men made of smoke, with wings like burnt bone, flying around her, there one moment, gone the next. They'd reach out to her, prodding new scars, and her insides would burn, like hot metal pressing against her skin from the inside.
If it were not for the pain, she'd have thought she was hallucinating. But the pain was too much, and whenever she tried to push one of the shadow men away, another would reach out for her from the other direction. They teased and taunted. She tried to make out their mouths — smirking things — too wide and too thin to be human mouths, filled with splinters of sharp, sharp teeth.
She yelled for them to stop. And cried out to the storm for help. Valerie knew the other entity was distressed; the rain and wind around her growing more and more violent with each attack by the shadow men. Particularly vicious attacks provoked shards of lightning.
With nothing else to do, Valerie willed herself to move.
And she did. She began to fly — slowly at first, but faster the more she willed it — away from the attackers. The storm moved with her like a cape, wrapped around her, billowing out as they gained speed together. Valerie and the tempest, black and violent thunderclouds traveling across the Atlantic.
Later, she would realize the shadow men were driving her in a specific direction, but that didn't matter now. For the first time in weeks, Valerie Snow was in control of her own body, and moving by her own will. And even when chased by monsters, even when surrounded by a resentful alien sentience, to find herself moving, the wind in her hair, had her laughing like a child in a playground.
Chapter 34:
Hurricane
People forget Providence is a port city, Jane thought, standing on a half-shredded brick warehouse. Smoke mixed with rain and dense fog for miles; she passed an area where a gas main exploded, taking out half a city block with it. The storm hammered into the coast like a charging bull, faster than they'd seen it move thus far, flooding entire streets, knocking cars over with winds of unheard of proportions.
Doc and Emily landed beside her. Billy scouted on the edge of the horizon, his blue-white signature glow nearly eaten up by the density of the fog.
"How do we fight a force of nature?" Jane asked.
Doc watched the sky, hands thrust in his pockets, lips pursed in a hard, pale line.
"I'll be damned," he said. "What are those doing in there?" He sounded wistful as he spoke.
"What are what doing where?" Emily asked.
He ignored her.
"Here's what I want you to do, Emily," Doc said. "Try to push the storm away with one of your gravity fields."
"Sounds like a terrible idea," she said.
Jane thought the exact same thing.
"Just try," he said. "If you feel the least bit out of control, simply let go."
"Oh sure. Push the dragon, Emily. Poke the tiger! What if it chases after me?"
"We're already standing in the worst of it," Doc said, his blue-white hair fluttering in the wind, long coat snapping and swaying.
"Bubble of float," Jane said.
"What?" Emily and Doc said, together.
"Keep your bubble of float above the buildings, Em," she said. "So you don't float away any of the buildings."
"I still think this is a terrible idea,"
Emily said.
But she closed her eyes and held a hand out in front of her and flexed her fingers. Jane discovered that Em had updated her gloves and now a nuclear fallout symbol decorated both palms.
The storm noticed.
As if a living thing, the clouds pushed back, pounding away like an angry animal against the unseen wall Emily created. Lightning crackled and flashed, splintering the gray sky with pale light.
"Is the storm actually attacking us?" Jane asked.
"Sure looks that way," Doc said.
He knelt down on the rooftop and pulled out a hunk of plain white chalk from his coat pocket. Doc sketched symbols on the ground, circling some, connecting others. Then he drew a perfect ring large enough to hold a person.
"Don't stand inside that circle," he said.
Doc sat lotus style in front of the circle. Jane could barely hear him, but she could tell he was talking to himself, chattering under his breath. The longer he spoke, though, the louder he got. His words sounded like Latin, but dirtier, more feral. They sounded, Jane thought, like things human beings were not supposed to hear.
She watched the circle grow darker, as if filling up with shadows. The shadows moved, with limbs and long fingers and wings. Eyes stared at her with malice and hunger. Several creatures — maybe three, maybe more, it was hard to tell the way they seemed to glom together — writhed inside the circle like eels.
"Hello, gentlemen," Doc said.
The creatures reached for him, but couldn't pass through the circle he'd drawn. Jane heard their shadow nails squeal across the unseen surface.
He pulled something from his pocket and looked at Jane.
"When I throw this, I want you to set it on fire, and then I want you to close your eyes," Doc said.
She nodded.
He tossed the object — some sort of oversized capsule — in the air directly at the creatures. Jane projected a blast of fire from her fingertips. Even as she closed her eyes, she witnessed the blinding flash it created, a phosphorus explosion of hot white light. She heard the screams of the shadow creatures dying, and the sounds of Emily swearing.
Then, Jane opened her eyes.
The storm started to drift away from the city. Jane couldn't tell if it was moving because of what Doc did or if it was reacting to Emily's gravitational push, but it was clearly headed back out to sea again, gathering up its dark clouds like a shawl.
Doc touched the tiny radio receiver he wore in his ear.
"Straylight, can you hear me?"
"I'm here, boss," Billy's voice said through all of their receivers.
"Do not pursue," he said. "See what you can do to help rescue personnel, and then head back to the tower."
"Sure thing."
They watched Billy's aura arc back toward the city, disappearing between downtown buildings.
"What were those things, Doc?" Jane said.
"A complication," he said, watching the storm recede.
Chapter 35:
Activation
The expression on Rose's face was all the information Black needed. She was speaking to their employers. Her conversation took place over a phone in the windowed conference room off the main atrium of the underground headquarters. Rose's guise projected the right combination of self-righteousness and terror for the call to have been from the top.
She nodded several times, then hung up.
"They're curious," the Lady said.
Black nearly climbed out of his skin; he hadn't noticed Natasha standing next to him. The audio sensors contained within his cybernetics should have warned him that someone was approaching, but he remained convinced that she simply materialized beside him. She'd done stranger things in the past.
"Word from upstairs," Rose said, joining them on the catwalk outside the office. "They'd like us to throw a few of the rejects into the field."
"What for?" Black said. "Most of them are useless."
"Not useless," Rose said. "Uncontrollable. Doesn't mean they don't have their uses."
"Will it be up to me to implement some controls, then?" asked the Lady.
Rose shook her head.
"Not this time. They want us to cast them out to stir things up. The bosses are curious about our new opposition," she said.
The Lady nodded.
"Good. I'd like some time to look into who it was that banished my little pets yesterday," she said.
"The folks upstairs might have some information for you," Rose said. "They wouldn't be averse to a phone call."
The Lady unleashed one of her disarming smiles. Rose understood the smile wasn't meant for her; yet, she smiled back.
"I'm sure they wouldn't. But, I'll do my own research, if it's just the same," the Lady said. "I prefer to look into these things first hand. No need to tell them that, though."
"Of course," Rose said.
Agent Black scanned the atrium below them, looking for Wegener. The scientist had grown more and more withdrawn since his meeting with the Lady. Black was certain the man would never be the same.
"Which ones are we using?" he said. "I'm guessing they want expendable ones."
"Tinder and Hyde," Rose said.
"Really," Black said. "Interesting choices. I won't mind seeing the back of Hyde, but did they mention why they chose those two?"
"The right combination of inherent destructiveness, and they both failed the psych tests with flying colors," Rose said. "They're much more useful as improvised weapons than long term projects."
Black frowned. The Hyde project — or rather, the test subject himself, not the overall concept — disgusted him, but Tinder was one he had hoped would work out. He fought back the twinge of pity that wriggled in his gut.
"Where are we deploying them," he asked, instead.
"You're sure to get a kick out of this," Rose said, smirking.
Chapter 36:
Attention
What did you mean yesterday?" Jane said, interrupting Doc in the observation room, where she found him chatting with Titus. "When you said a 'complication'?"
He waived Titus off.
The werewolf settled down in front of the monitors and began a circuitous scan of the globe. The Tower's computer regularly made use of satellites planted long ago to detect anomalies and occurrences on the surface, and were able to indentify large-scale events like explosions or violent weather patterns. The computer — Neal, Jane reminded herself, forgetting that the mainframe seemed to have more personality than a lot of humans she knew — also tapped into news feeds and Internet chatter for the strange and violent, ready to alert them if anything unusual appeared. Neal would break into the Tower's loudspeakers if needed, but it — he? — sometimes seemed to work best when a human was helping him organize what was being seen. No matter how powerful the AI, a human touch always appeared to make things work smoother. Oddly, the werewolf got along better with the artificial intelligence than anyone else on the team.
"What I meant was that the constructs — the creatures you saw — were familiar to me," Doc said. "And that might mean we're dealing with a bigger threat than I originally anticipated. Have to do some digging to make sure though. I could use your help later."
"How can I help?"
"I need someone to — "
"Doc," Titus said. "You've got to see this."
Titus had launched on screen an enormous red spot that appeared on a heat-register map of the US. He zoomed in and converted it to real time video.
Fire. A massive one in California.
"Not again," Doc said.
"Worse, Doctor," Neal added. "Zooming in."
Neal took control of the monitor from Titus and brought them in quite close to the epicenter of the fire. A human shape stood there, walking slowly. Rather than engulf her, the fire appeared to emanate from her, spilling from her body like water. The girl's skin glowed like heated metal, and her hair flickered and waved like a candlewick.
"Is that what I think it is?" Jane said.
"Looks
like a pyrokinetic," Doc said. "Where did she come from?"
Neal intercut surveillance footage from an hour earlier and maximized its size to fill the screen. It showed a black helicopter, military grade, flying low over the forest canopy. The door opened, and a body was throw from the copter. Before the body hit the tree line, however, she burst into flames, the ensuing fire caused hair and clothes — green hospital scrubs, of all things — to burn to ash in a heartbeat.
"Someone just dumped her there?" Titus asked.
"Looks like," Doc said. "Jane. Find Billy."
"Right here," he said, walking into the room and already half-suited up for action. He struggled to pull the left sleeve of his costume on. Emily followed and angrily helped him force an arm into his uniform.
"Great," Doc said. "You and Jane are the only two who can fly fast enough to get there while there's still time to do some good. Billy, I assume your force field is fire proof?"
"And laser proof and heartbreakingly beautiful to look at," Billy said. "Is Jane — "
"I'm solar powered," she said, cutting him off. "Fire doesn't burn me."
"We bringing her back here?" Billy said.
"See if you're able to subdue her. I'm leaving the call up to you. Ping us if you need advice on scene."
"Got it," Jane said. She turned to Billy. "Race you to California."
"You're on."
"Crap! Doc?" Titus said.
"What've we got?" he answered.
Again, Neal took control of the screen. Minimizing the scene of burning trees in California to a quarter of the screen, the computer retrieved an image from downtown, just a few miles from the Tower.
"This happened ten minutes ago," Titus said.
The screen showed a teenage boy walk into the center of a major intersection downtown. Cars in both directions spun out to avoid crashing into him. When all traffic came to a stop, the boy opened his jacket to reveal a contraption embedded in his chest, a circular emblem dead center with wires and tubes jutting out of it and into his skin. The boy pounded the symbol on his chest once with his fist. His whole body spasmed. Muscles began to pop and grow, veins ravaged the surface of his skin. He took on a grayish tone, and when he stretched out his hands, his fingers elongated, arms grew apelike, legs hunched and thickened. Even his face changed, mouth now a wide rictus of pain, filled with huge white teeth — a parody of a human face.
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