XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good

by Brad Magnarella

  Techie had bested him.

  Dutch’s squad entered the grassy clearing and began wading toward them. Scott looked up to where Janis was standing with her chin propped on a fist, studying the house.

  “Did you notice how that contraption had a pair of pipes running through the wall?”

  “Yeah, I think it was to flush away his waste.”

  “There was a freshly cut hole just like it in Mr. Shine’s house, in that back room, except going into the floor.”

  Scott tried to think back. “You know … I did find some sections of what looked like new PVC piping in the crawlspace.”

  “I have a feeling that’s what was behind the door the night you tried to pick the lock.”

  “Mr. Shine was keeping someone captive?”

  “The energy I felt in that room, Scott. I think Mr. Shine was the captive.”

  “But I talked to him that night. We had a conversation in his living room.”

  “Remember how I told you that the aura around the person who approached you that night felt different than the one I felt around Mr. Shine at school? The whole light, dark thing? What if there’s Mr. Shine and then someone pretending to be Mr. Shine?”

  “Two different people?”

  Janis nodded.

  Scott thought back to their conversation, how the angles of Mr. Shine’s face, even of his speech, had become hard at times. Same when Scott encountered him at the oil facility in Saudi Arabia. Both times, Scott had picked up on a ruthless quality that he’d never sensed in the man before.

  “So, wait,” Scott said. “Is Mr. Shine a member of the Scale or not?”

  “Hard to say.”

  Janis’s eyelids closed. After another moment, and from far away, she said, “There’s something new in his house … in that back room.” Scott watched the skin between her slender eyebrows folding in. “Something that wasn’t there when we searched it last week.”

  “Is everyone all right?” an authoritative voice asked.

  Scott looked over to where Dutch had arrived, four armored men flanking him. The rest of the team circled the house.

  Janis’s eyes blinked open. “Scott and I are fine, but this man needs immediate medical attention. He was held hostage by a member of the Scale. We lost that person, unfortunately, but we may have a new lead.”

  Shine’s house, she said. We need to head back there.

  Scott retrieved his helmet. But before he and Janis could turn to leave, Dutch grabbed his forearm.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go anywhere.”

  “Why not?” Janis demanded.

  “New orders from Kilmer. I’m to bring you two straight home.”

  “For what?” Scott asked.

  Dutch hadn’t released Scott’s arm. The flanking men spread to either side of him and Janis.

  “Immediate evacuation.”

  21

  “This sucks!” Creed cried.

  “I don’t like it any more than you, frankly,” Director Kilmer replied from the head of the conference table. “But believe me, we would not be executing an evacuation plan if it were not in your best interest. And by that, I mean you, your teammates, and the future of the Program.”

  Janis glanced around at the other Champions—all present, save Jesse—and felt her insides tighten. The week before she had half joked to Scott about Kilmer deciding to lock them away in a bunker. Now it was happening, and at the worst possible time. She sat in stunned silence.

  “How long will we have to stay there?” Tyler asked.

  “At least until we can get a better assessment of the threat and how to neutralize it. And with all of you someplace safer, we’ll be able to allocate more resources to doing that.” He nodded to his left. “Agent Steel will direct the effort.”

  Beside Janis, Margaret sighed. “This is going to play complete havoc with my schedule. Can you at least give us a timeframe?”

  Agent Steel stared back at her with frostbitten eyes. “No.”

  Janis thought of Scott’s close call with the sadistic computer wizard an hour earlier and shook her head. Agent Steel and her team were good, but they were no match for the Scale. They wouldn’t be neutralizing anyone. Something in Kilmer’s eyes told Janis that he knew that as well.

  “Why not put our abilities to use?” she asked. “We can help.”

  “I know you can, Janis,” Kilmer replied. “However…” He drew a breath as he searched for the next words.

  “There’s a protocol,” Agent Steel interjected, “and we’re to follow it. That’s the only reason you need.”

  Kilmer smiled, even as the muscles in his temples tensed. “What Agent Steel means is that the parameters of the evacuation protocol are very specific. No one is to use his or her powers…”

  “Under any circumstances,” Steel finished for him.

  “Yes, thank you, Agent. Under any circumstances. The reason being is that it runs the risk of drawing attention to the secure location. Then what’s the point of relocating you?”

  “Isn’t that going to look funny, though?” Janis asked. “The six of us just disappearing?”

  “We’ve worked out stories for you,” Kilmer assured her.

  “What about our families?” Tyler asked.

  His worry for his mother rippled through Janis. She thought of her own mother, who had wanted no part of the Champions Program for her daughters when Kilmer proposed it ten years earlier.

  “We’ve analyzed that risk, and—”

  This time it was Kilmer who cut off Agent Steel. “We understand your concern, Tyler. At this time, we’ve determined that the threat to your families is low. Agents will continue to occupy the houses around them. The basic security features of the neighborhood will remain in place. Should the threat level rise, we have an evacuation protocol in place for them, as well.”

  Scott’s voice entered Janis’s thoughts. So they’re really doing this. Really pulling us from Oakwood.

  Yeah, looks that way.

  Though Scott’s telepathic voice resonated with disbelief, Janis hadn’t any doubt from the moment Agent Dutch had confiscated their drivers’ licenses and denied them permission to drive the station wagon back. Janis had wanted to stop by Mr. Shine’s house to check out the item she’d sensed. From a distance, she hadn’t been able to discern much, but the item’s sudden appearance suggested that someone had been inside the house since their last visit.

  Possibly Mr. Shine himself.

  We need to talk to Kilmer, Scott said. Tell him we have a new lead.

  Agreed, Janis replied, but not with the Ice Queen hovering.

  Kilmer raised his wiry brows and opened his hands out. “Any more questions? All right, you’ll be leaving tomorrow morning at oh-five hundred. Report to the Barn at quarter till. Two suitcases, max. You’ll be lifted to a site where a second helicopter will retrieve you.”

  “Can you at least tell us where this place is?” Margaret asked.

  “I’m sorry, but no,” Director Kilmer said, glancing over at Agent Steel. “Security precaution.”

  As Kilmer shrugged in apology, Janis focused into the chip that protected his thoughts. Like the last time, she was able to peek between the intervals as though they were spaces between the slats of a wooden fence. She pieced the information together until she had coordinates for both their pickup site and the bunker. The second was in a remote area of south Georgia.

  “What about Jess?” Creed asked.

  “For the time being, he’ll remain in Oakwood,” Kilmer said.

  “What? We’re leaving him behind?” Creed asked incredulously.

  “He’ll receive better treatment here,” Kilmer explained. “We plan to relocate him once he’s stable.”

  Janis spotted the falsehood a mile away, though she could hardly blame Director Kilmer. With so many unknowns around Jesse’s return, they had no choice but to consider him a security risk.

  Creed scowled and clenched his fists.

  “All right, then
,” Kilmer said, clapping his hands once. “Tomorrow morning. Oh-five hundred. You’re all dismissed.”

  Janis placed a hand on Scott’s forearm as the others rose and disappeared into the corridor. Kilmer had rotated toward Agent Steel and was speaking in a low voice, one elbow propped on the table. He must have seen them in his periphery because he rotated back.

  “Did you have another question?” he asked.

  “Scott and I were hoping to speak with you,” Janis said. She cut her gaze to Agent Steel and back. “Alone, if possible.”

  Agent Steel adjusted herself in her chair in a way that announced she had no plans of removing herself. “From now on,” she said thinly, “anything that concerns Director Kilmer concerns me as well.”

  Janis understood that the message was intended as much for Director Kilmer as for them.

  Guess we’ll have to catch him another time, Scott said.

  She already knows what we’ve been up to, Janis replied. Explains why the tension between them is thick enough to cut up and fry.

  “Fine.” She scooted forward and faced Kilmer. “Scott and I may have located something that could give us insight into the Scale’s whereabouts. It would take all of thirty minutes to retrieve. Do we have permission to leave the neighborhood for this one errand?”

  “Absolutely not,” Agent Steel said.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Janis snapped.

  Kilmer held out a hand between them. “What is this item?”

  Janis glanced over at Scott, who nodded.

  “We don’t know,” she said, “but it’s … well, it’s at Mr. Shine’s house.”

  Kilmer’s brow collapsed down. “Mr. Shine? The yardman?”

  “He’s more than a yardman,” Janis said. They had been taking pains to protect his identity, but in light of their impending evacuation there seemed little to lose. “We think he’s a member of the last Champions team. A shapeshifter. He got tied up with the Scale through some sort of coercion, possibly to do with his illness. But we think he’s trying to help us.”

  “You’ve talked to him?” Kilmer asked, his stern eyes shifting between them.

  “Well, only a few times,” Scott confessed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He asked me not to,” Scott said. “Said you wouldn’t understand.”

  Of course I don’t know if that was Mr. Shine or that other person, he thought toward Janis.

  Kilmer’s frown took on a more severe line. “Three months ago I stood right here and asked you if anyone had tried to contact you. Do you remember that? I asked if anyone had hinted at any knowledge of your powers. And you all sat around and shook your heads.”

  “But that was before—” Janis began.

  “I also told you to come to me immediately if that ever happened.” He hammered a fist against the table. “Immediately, goddammit. And now you’re telling me we’ve had an outsider in our midst for, what, the last eight years?” He shot a look at Agent Steel that said, How did that happen?

  Steel shifted back in her chair.

  “We’re pretty sure he’s a former Champion,” Janis repeated, but with far less conviction. Did she know who he was?

  “Listen to me,” Kilmer said. “There was a shifter on that team. His name was Reginald Perry, and he was the last member to be murdered by the Scale. This person you’ve been talking to is the woman I briefed you on. She also happens to be Reginald’s twin sister. She’s a member of the Scale, another shifter, we believe, and extremely—extremely—dangerous.”

  Atoms of understanding slammed together in Janis’s head. That explains it! she thought toward Scott. The duality I’ve been feeling, why the two sides are so similar. Mr. Shine is the light twin, his sister the dark. They were both in his house the night you went there.

  But what about the part where he was murdered?

  “You’re not dealing with a former Champion,” Kilmer continued. “You were never dealing with a former Champion. And whatever this thing is you sense at the house, it was most likely placed there as bait.”

  “How do you know he was murdered?” Janis asked.

  “The director at the time informed me.”

  “Did you see a body?”

  Kilmer leaned forward. “Janis, this conversation is over. I just thank God the two of you weren’t hurt. Rest assured, we’ll be reviewing the security procedures for the neighborhood before our return. Seems it wasn’t as airtight as reported. Would you agree, Agent Steel?”

  Steel, who had gone quiet, tensed her scarred lips. “Yes, sir.”

  He turned back to Janis and Scott. “You’re both dismissed. And listen, any attempt to leave the neighborhood and you’ll find yourselves in a containment cell next door to Jesse’s. I’m serious. If that’s what it takes to keep you safe until we can get you out of here, we’ll do it.”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Janis said.

  Scott listened to her shoes scrape along the cement floor of the corridor that led from the command and control center back toward their houses. The echoing sound spoke to the futility he felt in his own heart. They knew they had a future to alter, but they had been denied the chance at every turn.

  “Nothing’s changed yet,” he reassured her, but the message came out hollow-sounding. In twelve hours, they were going to be shipped out and shut in.

  Janis tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t care what Kilmer says. Reginald Perry is alive.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Shine.”

  “Oh, right. Did you pick that up in Kilmer’s thoughts?”

  Janis shook her head. “Kilmer believes he was killed. That’s what gave me pause. But there may have been a good reason for Kilmer’s director telling him that, wanting him to believe it.”

  “To protect Mr. Shine, maybe?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m with you on the Mr. Shine being alive thing. The man I knew from when I was eight on and the person I talked to in his house and at the oil facility were different. I don’t have your abilities, obviously, but that other person just didn’t feel right.”

  “Here’s what I’ve been able to reason out.” Janis stopped to face him. “Mr. Shine survived the purge, went underground, spent the next however many years looking for where the next team was going to pop up—looking for us. That explains the frequent changes of address in the dossier Wayne gave you. It also explains the man at the county recorder’s office asking after Oakwood’s housing data. Like Kilmer, he was worried about the Scale finding us.”

  “But then he got sick,” Scott said.

  “Exactly. And somehow the Scale found him. Offered him that drug in exchange for information. When he didn’t give them what they wanted, they placed him in the same awful contraption we saw at the old man’s place today. It was written in the energies I felt at Mr. Shine’s house.”

  “That’s when his sister would have stepped into his place.” Scott’s mind reeled with the understanding that he had been sitting face to face with a professional killer—one who had helped wipe out the last team. He wondered what would have happened if he had gotten the locked door open that night.

  “I guess the question now is what became of him.”

  “I hate to even suggest it,” Scott said, “but he might not have been so lucky this time. I mean, someone doesn’t just free himself from that kind of contraption, with its cuffs and head bolts, and walk away.”

  Janis’s gaze was fixed on his midsection, eyes narrowing in concentration.

  “Then why not kill him outright?” she asked after a moment.

  “Hmm, good point. You think it was another act of coercion, to get him to do something else?”

  Her gaze locked on his. “That’s the connection.”

  “Huh?”

  “Between the Scale and my premonition. When you said that, about getting him to do something else, it felt like puzzle pieces snapping into place. The Scale are man
ipulators. They operate from the shadows.”

  “So they put Mr. Shine out front,” Scott said, seeing the connection now, “get him to do their dirty work.”

  “He already has our trust.”

  “But c’mon, do you really think he’d take one of us out?”

  Janis’s lips pursed in thought. “I don’t have a clear enough read on that yet.”

  Scott considered the man’s light-filled eyes and rich, wholesome laughter. Even if he wasn’t as old and folksy as he’d pretended, even if his eyes were blue instead of brown, there had always been something powerfully good-guy about him. Scott had a hard time seeing him in any other light, even gray.

  Janis resumed walking. “I need to get my hands on whatever’s in that house.”

  “Short of taking on Steel’s security squad, I’m not sure how we’d get there.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s going to be a bit of a long shot, but…”

  “Hey, long shots are our stock and trade.”

  “C’mon, then.” Janis pulled her hair into a ponytail, affixed it with a rubber band, and broke into a jog.

  Scott followed the swishes of her red hair, past the intersection to their homes and into a long corridor he’d never been down before. When Scott realized where it led, he groaned inwardly. If her idea was what he thought it was, “long shot” was putting it mildly.

  22

  “The hell do I look like?” Creed asked. “Your errand boy?”

  Scott exhaled loudly. They had known it would be a tough sell, but Creed was taking pigheadedness to another level. Janis twisted the volume knob on his stereo down until the whine of metal music disappeared entirely. Creed dropped the electric guitar magazine he’d been flipping through, levered himself upright in bed, and aimed a finger at her.

  “Don’t touch my stuff again.”

  The menace in his voice reminded Scott of the time Creed had punched Janis in the stomach when she was nine. He stepped forward. “Hey, would you just listen to what she’s saying?”