“Wait!” Agent Steel ordered.
Janis sped past, knocking Steel’s reaching hand away with a thought. When she had enough momentum, she leaned forward and powered herself into flight. Gaining speed, she zeroed in on Mr. Shine’s position. Her psionic blast had hurt him, no doubt. But she intended to do more.
Much more.
A part of Janis—the part she had learned to integrate into her greater identity and control—licked her lips and whispered, yes, that is no more than he deserves. Make him fear you, make him feel pain.
She slowed when she reached the tall grass, hovering where a sniper rifle sat on a bipod. Its grip and cheek rest were still damp with sweat. Janis raised her eyes to where the grass had been flattened into a thin trail. He was sick. He was hurt. He wouldn’t have made it far.
She followed the trail, probing the lines of energy for his traitorous presence.
The trail ended at a small area that had been pressed down, as though someone had taken a rest.
Empty now.
Frustration pumped through Janis like hot fuel. It stoked her fury into a firestorm. With a sweeping gesture, she uprooted a wide arc of field. For more than a hundred yards, grass and earth blew skyward. She willed the debris aside and roamed the barren swath.
“Where are you?” she shouted.
But she knew where he was. She couldn’t feel him—he was blocking her from his thoughts—but he was in the only place where he could hide, where his aura would blend into the energies surrounding him.
Not for long.
Tapping into the astral lines that wound through the swath of trees, Janis pushed energy along them. Leaves shook, then entire branches. Trees swayed inside the growing gale.
Blood is good.
A series of cracking detonations sounded, and the first tree crashed to the earth.
Reginald hugged the tree that concealed him, eyes squinting against the sudden force that tore down leaves and limbs.
When the end of a heavy branch caught his left shoulder, he stifled a yell. He was nearly yanked from the tree before he could secure himself again, pain throbbing the length of his arm.
Girl doesn’t just intend on finding me, he thought through the strain. She means to destroy me.
She had almost succeeded when she had directed a bolt of energy into the rapport. It was only by shielding his mind that Reginald had spared himself. He had pawed his way back to his body and then managed to bear crawl to temporary shelter as his sight returned.
But now what?
With the rapport destroyed, he had no way of reaching Janis, of attempting to explain. He had no weapons, either. His strength was at critical. And he was in the middle of a blasted tornado.
Flying boughs whacking past, Reginald pressed his cheek to the tree.
Wasn’t supposed to have gone down like this, damn it.
“Where are you?” she repeated.
He peeked around his tree and saw Janis hovering beyond the maelstrom, an archangel of doom, her red hair like a thrashing pile of flames. She didn’t see him. Not yet. He’d gone chameleon, shifting his cells into a semblance of the slash pine he clung to. But she was coming nearer, her strength seeming to swell while his quivered and thinned. It was only a matter of—
The top half of his tree splintered off and was swept away. He watched it circle toward the dirt road where he’d parked.
There was his chance.
Reginald released what remained of the tree and allowed himself to be lifted off. He wasn’t prepared for the strength of the force. It wrenched his body around. He shifted the cells of his clothes into parachute-like material and an aerodynamic form, one that could ride the currents.
A limb raked his back as he shot through the leafy boughs of an oak. He grunted and tried to straighten.
“I feel your pain,” Janis bellowed.
He steered himself higher, away from the tree trunks, where impact would mean certain crippling or death.
“I feel your fear.”
The force cut him around at a sharp angle. He used the momentum to propel himself away from Janis, toward the road. He peeked back—a mistake. Before he could veer up, he was plunging into the boughs of another tree. Leaves and thin branches burst around him. A large limb cracked his jaw, and he was sent head over heels. His elbow hooked around a branch. He managed to clamp his other hand around the wrist and hold on.
Blood spilled from his mouth and fed the storm. But he was on the storm’s periphery now and at the farthest point from Janis.
He looked down. Thirty foot drop.
He dangled and let go, spreading his body to the uprushing ground. The fabric billowed out beneath his arms and between his legs, arresting his fall. He landed firmly but safely. Groggy, Reginald pushed himself to his feet, reshaping his clothes to conform to his body.
He peered back to where trees were collapsing into one another, Janis ascending above the wreckage.
Those eyes, he thought. Like cauldrons.
He worked his way around a tree. He’d been carried a good distance. Not only could he see the dirt road, but also the rising bank, where he’d parked the Jeep. At a shambling run, he could get there in under a minute. The trick would be getting there unnoticed.
But before he could take a step, an epileptic tremor shook him.
Not now, please, not now.
He grimaced, trying to force it back down. Several smaller tremors later, it relented, leaving shallow breaths and a thick coat of sweat. He blinked the road and bank back into focus.
“Show yourself!”
It was now or never.
He pushed with his legs until he was running. He cleared the final trees and stumbled onto the dirt road. A matter of Newtonian physics now: get to the Jeep before Janis got to him.
Something smashed into the ground to his right. He peeked around to see Scott rounding a fallen tree and steadying his helmet, preparing another blast. The next one came close enough to hit Reginald with a spray of dirt and send him staggering to the far side of the road.
Christ!
Wiping his eyes, he entered the trees. He tried to use them for cover as he paralleled the road.
But Janis had seen him, too. In his wake, trees began capsizing.
The terrain climbed, and Reginald fought to keep his limbs moving. A diamond-shaped light flashed in the center of his vision with each heart beat. He was growing fainter, more feverish.
He spied the roof of the Jeep, just beyond the top of the bank. He was nearly to the bank’s edge when a pair of lighting bolts tore into the Jeep’s fuselage. The explosion lifted the vehicle from the ground and pummeled Reginald with a wall of heat. He fell back into the trees.
As if Janis and Scott weren’t enough, got Tyler to deal with now.
But with more people, there would be more confusion. He could use that to his advantage. Concentrating, he shifted into a member of the Champions’ security team, making himself younger, fairer haired, and lighter skinned. He hardened his clothes into black armor.
Moments later, Scott came tromping up from the road.
“He grabbed my gun,” Reginald panted, “took off that way.”
Scott’s helmet turned in the direction he was pointing, then back. Reginald hadn’t had the time or materials to fashion his own helmet. Instead, he had assumed a nondescript face—an everyman—but he knew that the face was giving Scott pause now. He was trying to place him.
“What’s your name?” Scott asked.
Reginald held up a finger and pretended to speak into a wrist transceiver, requesting backup. Scott waited a beat, then set off again. Tyler followed on his heels, the front of his suit dark with blood.
Reginald waited until he could no longer see them before skirting the burning Jeep and dropping down to the dirt road. He would follow it back out to the nearest thoroughfare and shift into the guise of a farmer. He would then thumb a ride, give a story about his truck breaking down.
“Did you really think you
would get away?”
Reginald spun to find Janis hovering, feet away. A field of energy warped the morning air around her. Though Reginald maintained his agent disguise, he didn’t try to sell it to Janis as he had Scott. She could see through him. He held out his hands in a calming gesture.
“Let me explain, Janis.”
She balled her right hand into a fist. A crushing force pinned his arms and legs.
“I don’t want your pathetic explanation. You’re a murderer.”
At that point, Reginald couldn’t have explained anything. The air was being compressed from his lungs. Ribs collapsed around vital organs. His back arched, toes levitated from the ground. She meant to crush him like a toad.
The pain. Beyond anything Reginald had ever experienced.
Squinting through tears, he met her burning eyes.
In the next moment, her eyes winced to slits. Reginald collapsed to the ground, oxygen rushing into his squeezed-out lungs, blood returning to his aching limbs.
Janis had fallen, too. She writhed in the dirt ahead of him, hands clamping the sides of her head. Above a piercing, wavering sound, Reginald could just make out a man’s voice.
“Get in!” he was shouting.
26
Reginald turned his head to where a black sports car had skidded to a stop, dust billowing around it. The driver, a young man with a dark crew cut, was aiming a sonic blaster through his window. He jerked his head toward the car while keeping the blaster trained on Janis.
Reginald had never seen the man before, had no idea who he was, but he wasted no time scrambling toward him. He opened the passenger side door and threw himself inside.
The man adjusted the stick shift. “Steer,” he ordered.
Reginald seized the wheel with one hand. They shot into reverse. Reginald fought with the vehicle’s power, alternating his attention between the front and rear windshields. When a wall of dust collapsed over their view of the still-downed Janis, the man brought the blaster back in through the window, threw it behind him, and took over steering with both leather-gloved hands.
He jammed the brake and spun them one-hundred-eighty degrees around. By the time they were through the fresh wave of dust, he had already shifted twice and was accelerating toward sixty.
Feeling faint and gritty, Reginald buckled himself in. He studied the driver in his peripheral vision. Besides the crew cut and muscularity of his face, the man’s only defining features were a brown bomber jacket and a pair of aviator sunglasses. Reginald’s attention lingered on the glasses. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, but he could guess their color.
“You all right?” the man asked.
“Been better, sister, but thanks for asking.”
The angles of the man’s cheeks hardened. “I already told you, I have no family.”
“Then why help me?”
“You’re a flight risk.”
Reginald turned toward his sister, who was downshifting into a curve. The car slewed sideways before latching onto the dirt road and speeding forward again. Flight risk? How in the world could he be a flight risk without a supply of Vitrin? Something didn’t add up.
“I had a target in my sights,” he said.
“But you never took your shot.”
“Someone else shot first.”
“You can thank me later.”
“What, you didn’t think I’d carry it out?” He took the awful image of that boy’s body and the knowledge that he and Janis had been close—so close—and channeled them into a tone of indignation. “What in the hell do you think I was doing out there with a twenty-pound sniper rifle?”
From behind her guise, his sister studied him. “I’m not sure yet.”
“How did you even know I’d be there?”
“I was in attendance the day you met with the Witch. I’ve been keeping tabs on you since.”
“Under her directive?”
She didn’t answer, which was answer enough. She was acting alone.
“I’ll ask you again, sister. Why help me?”
“I’ll tell you again. I have no family.”
“That wasn’t the question.” He waited a beat. “Georgia.”
She appeared to stiffen.
“It’s our birth state but also your name. That’s why I had such a hard time coming up with it—one name, two meanings. Hard to separate out, going back so many years. We called you Gigi, but even that was hard to remember because it was so close to the name of our horse.”
Gingie. Gigi.
His sister showed no response.
“So, which is it now? Georgia or—”
“It’s Shadow,” she said with cold finality.
The car bumped from the dirt road and onto a thinly trafficked county highway. Reginald noticed that the hood’s color had changed—from black to a deep red. Some sort of mercurial technology. From above, it would look like a different car. A minute later, the helicopter that had deposited the Champions in the field sped overhead. It circled ahead of them before turning back toward the network of dirt roads. Reginald felt his shoulders relax. For the moment, anyway, he was safer in the hands of the Scale than the Champions.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Someplace secure.”
To that point, Reginald had been disguising his illness, speaking with more strength than he possessed—Shadow was dangerous enough without knowing the extent of his helplessness. But a seizure betrayed him, this one lifting him from the seat in shock-like thrusts. His muscles screamed. If he hadn’t pulled his tongue back, he would have lost it between the clamp of his teeth.
The seizure ended. Reginald wheezed and grasped his forehead, waiting for his vision to grow out again.
“The glove compartment,” Shadow said.
Reginald drew it open and found a black toiletry bag. When he pulled it onto his lap, something clinked inside. The bag contained a small brown vial and a hypodermic needle.
“Does this mean I’m back in the Scale’s confidence?” he asked, uncapping the needle and plunging it through the vial’s rubber cap.
“Consider it a loan.”
Reginald hesitated, the fluid-filled needle piercing a vein below his wrist. “From your stash?”
“You’ll pay me back.”
“All right, what the hell’s going on?”
“Do you need it or not?”
Reginald depressed the plunger, recapped the needle, and put everything back in the bag, zipping it closed.
“You never answered my question,” he said.
“What question?”
“Why are you helping me?”
“I’ve watched you, Reginald. You positioned yourself well in relation to the Champions, but always with an eye to aiding them. I’m not helping you. I’m insuring our future.”
“Then why not kill me, like you did Madelyn and our child?”
Still in her male disguise, Shadow adjusted her grip on the steering wheel. “I didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped you,” he said through his teeth.
“If we hadn’t acted as we did, they would have died anyway. You, too.”
“Oh, c’mon! You don’t believe that horseshit about being the chosen ones, saving the world—”
“It’s what the Witch sees.”
“The Witch could be telling you any goddamned thing she wants. She’s working for someone and you know it. Someone with an interest in keeping arms flowing to the U.S. and Soviets. The more, the merrier.”
Shadow fell silent again.
“Maybe you just like being a puppet.”
The muscles of her jaw hardened. “Would you have rather I left you back there?”
“I’d rather you hadn’t interfered in the first place.”
“Believe me when I say you’re very fortunate I did.”
They merged onto a busier highway, and this time it was Reginald who went quiet. He was interpreting what had just been said. Was there some sort of conf
lict between her and the Witch? A rift? And what did she mean by “you’re very fortunate I did”? Maybe the Witch had never meant to honor her Vitrin-for-a-Champion promise. Maybe she’d meant to eliminate him, instead.
Taken together, then, Shadow’s actions had nothing to do with him being a flight risk or even a brother. Reginald was beginning to suspect that she saw him as a leverage piece.
“What’s the Witch going to think?” he asked, testing the idea.
“The Witch’s vision isn’t as reliable as she likes to believe.”
Shadow spoke evenly, but the curl of disdain was there.
“You’re not taking me to her?”
“Not right away.”
Alarms went off in Reginald’s head. “I’m not going back in that contraption.”
“That’s up to you.”
Who’s the puppet now? he thought about himself. But if there was a power struggle in the works, one with him at its center, it would assure his short-term survival. He could use the time to figure out how to contact the Champions, to get his plan back on track. Shadow believed her assassination of Creed had removed that option from the playing board.
He had to pray she was wrong.
“Yeah,” he sighed, “I’ll behave.”
Her lips forked into a smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
For now.
27
Evacuation bunker
Later that day
4:45 p.m.
Agent Steel was seated and flanked by two of her top men when Janis stepped into the icy room. Steel gave the barest nod. Janis peered around, then lowered herself onto the lone chair at the near end of a long boardroom-style table. Except for the shifting of the eight armored men who had escorted her inside and were now taking positions along the back wall, the room was heavy with silence. When Janis tried to speak, the heaviness shrank her voice.
“Is this a court martial?” she asked. “Am I under arrest?”
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 15