Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Get to Florida,” Scott said. “Now.” Into the silence he said, “Drop what you’re doing and get down here.”

  That stopped Reed in his tracks. “Dude. What’s up?”

  “Phillips didn’t tell you because he didn’t want to. This couple—I had Sienna with me. She was helping me—”

  “What. The. Hell!” Reed’s voice sounded like an explosion. “Gyah, this suddenly explains so much! You called—”

  “Damned right I did,” Scott said. “But … it’s bad. Really bad. And I don’t know how much good—”

  “You should have called us from the beginning.” Reed’s voice sounded like metal scraping against metal. “What the hell were you thinking? You’re a federal agent and she’s a wanted felon. This is not just operating in the damned grey, Scott—”

  “They shot her in the head, Reed.”

  That caused a mighty silence at the other end of the line. “What are you telling me?” Reed asked quietly.

  “I’m doing everything I can,” Scott said. “But she’s dying. Her pulse is—”

  “Scott …” Reed’s voice went strangely calm. “… Are you telling me my sister is about to die?”

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “If something doesn’t change soon … yes, she’s going to die. In a matter of hours.”

  Reed’s reply came back strangled. “I’m on my way. It’ll take me a few hours to cross the country. Just … she needs to hang on until I get there. You tell her that.”

  “It may not come to that,” Scott said, checking the time on his phone. “I—”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Reed said. “I’m on my way.” And he hung up.

  Scott settled back in his chair, and listened to the slow, steady breathing. She’d been taking deeper breaths before. Longer ones. Now her breathing was getting shallow, the breaths raspy. “How long do we have?” he wondered aloud.

  No answer was forthcoming, but he knew it would be soon.

  47.

  Sienna

  “Oh, this is an interesting moment,” Harmon said, and he wasn’t wrong, not by any metric.

  I was sitting backstage in a television studio, my palms covered with sweat. Or at least, the past me was. I was watching myself through Scott’s eyes, and he was fuming inside. None of it quite came out that way, though, he kept a pretty solid lid on it until he said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  I looked up at him with defined menace. “Clearly, I was thinking … ‘Hey! You know what would be great for making me look like a hugely psychotic ass? An interview with the most famous journalist in the world, Gail Roth. Let’s go do that!’ And now here we are, mission accomplished, so I can go on with my life knowing that I’ve crashed and burned as hard as I could possibly do that. What a wonderful feeling, and I’m glad—so glad—you’re here to support me now, to bask in my reflected glory.” I finished my last, heavy dose of snark, and sank back into silence.

  Scott lasted about ten seconds. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “You already asked that,” I said. “If you’re just going to keep asking it over and over—”

  “You didn’t answer the questions like a normal person, Sienna!” he said. “Yes, you came off like a lunatic, and I’m glad you see that. But—what—were—you—thinking?”

  I raised my head with malice and menace. “I was thinking I’m tired because we were up until four last night arguing—again. And I was up at six for an interagency conference call, two back-to-back budget meetings, and a peek at what my next six weeks are going to look like, which is going to include sojourns to Brazil, Botswana, and probably Mongolia in addition to a half-dozen domestic trips. So if I didn’t answer Gail Roth’s questions like a normal human being, maybe it’s because I’m being pushed and pulled and ripped at by most of the states in the union and also the State Department on behalf of a dozen countries needing meta assistance—and every hour that I actually spend at home now seems to be half-spent bickering with you.” I stood up even though I didn’t feel like it. “Do you know how tiresome that is? Like I don’t have enough to manage with you getting on my ass about this—this—this utter, epic failure! I don’t even know how to describe this other than as the public relations version of an oil spill in the Supercutey Cute Pet Emporium, caused by a drunken pedophile of a captain.”

  “Well, at least you have some concept of what you’ve done,” he said, walking away in disgust.

  “See, now that was an apt metaphor for the Gail Roth disaster,” Harmon said. “Do you have any idea how upset the White House Press Secretary was the next day?”

  “I don’t really care,” I said, trying to tune back in to the argument before me. It was a rerun, sure, but still more interesting than new whining from Harmon.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Scott said, looking weary and disgusted himself. “I can’t even imagine what my parents are going to say.”

  “I can’t imagine giving a damn what your parents are going to say at this point,” I said hotly. “But then, they’ve never liked me anyway.”

  “They don’t … dislike you …” he said, rather feebly.

  “Bullshit,” I said, my tolerance for lies pretty much at the bottom of the tank.

  “Look,” he said, trying to catch my shoulder as I started past him, “we’ve just had a rough few months. This is normal—”

  “Whatever we are, normal is not it.”

  “Well, we’re metas,” he said, “but other than that … yeah, this is normal.”

  “You think fighting like this—all the time—is normal?” I felt seeping disgust, mostly at myself but some at him for the months and months of this. “Heaven help the poor woman you’re going to marry.”

  He looked suddenly distant, like I’d hit him in the stomach. “I thought you were the woman I was going to marry.”

  I closed my eyes, drawing a breath and clutching at my forehead, which was throbbing. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.”

  “He has no idea, does he?” Harmon asked as we watched the two of us walking toward the door. The world around us was shrouded in thick darkness, a blanket of black laid over everything else, much tighter than the borders of the dressing room and casting a shadowy tinge to even the lights overhead.

  “Well, his last relationship ended in tragic memory loss for the other party,” I said, stepping out of the moment again, “so no … he probably had no idea what a proper relationship looked like.”

  “How did you?” Harmon asked smarmily.

  “I guess I don’t,” I said, “but I don’t think my conception of it is that far off, because unless you like arguing, why the hell would you want to do it all the time? We’re not talking about two people who can get angry and hold no grudge. The sort of fights we were having stumbled right up to the edge and then leapt off. We said unforgivable things to each other, things—you know what, never mind.”

  “No, go on,” Harmon said. “I’ve heard a few of these ‘unforgivable things.’ They sounded to me like devastatingly accurate assessments of each others' flaws.”

  “That’s what made them so damned hurtful,” I said. “If they were lies, they wouldn’t have stung like hell.”

  The darkness swept in and then faded, replacing the scene of backstage at the interview with my bedroom again. The corners were dark, the bedside lamp unable to penetrate the gloom around the place. “I really am going to die, aren’t I?”

  “From a bullet, no less,” Harmon said, shaking his head almost sadly now. Annoyance I could see, but sadness? Yeesh. “Do you know what your problem is?”

  “I would almost be willing to pay you not to tell me at this point.”

  “Well, I don’t need money, so who gives a damn how much you have to offer?” He drew a steady breath. “You accused me once of being too arrogant.”

  “I … don’t remember saying that,” I said.

  “It went like this … ‘If you’re so smart … why do I keep beating you’?”

  “Oh. Well
. Yeah, I suppose I said it like that.”

  “So here’s my corollary,” Harmon said. “If you’re so damned invincible … why did you walk into that bank and get shot in the back of the head like an idiot?”

  “I was not thinking in terms of—”

  “Wrong.”

  “I didn’t believe that June and Elliot were that far gone—”

  “Ehhhhhhhhn,” he made a buzzer noise. “Wrong again. Care to take another stab at it, or do you want to see what my telepathy would tell you?”

  “I don’t have any duct tape with which to stop you at this point.”

  “You’ve been a goddess for so long in your own mind,” Harmon said, “you don’t even realize how far you’ve drifted from … here.” He nodded at the me that was staring, frozen, at Scott. “What were your dreams?”

  “What … then? Here?”

  “Before Sovereign,” Harmon said.

  I laughed. “Before Sovereign, I was a kid. Eighteen. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

  “Oh, but you did,” he said. “You want me to tell you? Because it was a very simple thing you wanted, a universal desire.”

  “Sure, why n—”

  “You wanted to be normal.” He touched me on the hand, and it didn’t burn, his smug smile replaced with one that was … almost disarming. Like the Gerry Harmon who campaigned for every vote, not the one lording it over me in one on one conversation. “You wanted to be … touchable.” He ran his fingers over my wrist, and it didn’t burn for once, the touch of another human being. “You wanted the same things everyone else did, with a few … modifications. Wolfe did a number on you, pushed you with guilt to want to protect, to defend … to make up for lives lost while you hid. But overall, outside of that … you wanted to be normal. Live, love … be fulfilled.”

  I had a vague memory of feeling exactly that way, once upon a time. “So … ?”

  “So what are your dreams now?” he asked. “Run and hide so that you can survive until another case comes along? So you can take another hit of that sweet feeling you get from solving a problem? I mean, you’re a federal fugitive and you’re still chasing your drug of choice—relevance in the metahuman criminal justice scene. You don’t have hope of a relationship, even a dysfunctional one like this,” he gestured to Scott. “You’re surviving, day to day, eating and drinking in an attempt to numb the pain while you wait for something bad to happen so you can go be a hero again.”

  “Well, what else is there?” I asked. “Family life is just as out of reach as it was then, and I’m not convinced I want … any of that—”

  “Yes, your mother issues are impressive, but let’s leave off those worries,” Harmon said.

  “I really miss Zollers right now.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Harmon said. “Your friends know you didn’t do what you’re accused of. But you’re avoiding them anyway.”

  “Because aiding a fugitive is—”

  “A crime, yes, I think we’ve established that. But … you’ve never shied away from committing crimes before. And simply calling them wouldn’t be a crime. You could even tell them to report it to the authorities, and you could still have a conversation.”

  “Well, it’s not that easy—”

  “It’s that easy,” he said. “If you didn’t want to talk to them that way, why not dreamwalk to them? No evidence of a cell phone call, and you have unlimited minutes. Beats email, talk and text messages.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say to that.

  “Do you know why you don’t want to talk to anyone?”

  “Will you stop with the rhetorical questions? I couldn’t pay you or threaten you to shut up, we’ve already established—”

  “Your arrogance is like a poison,” he said. “It’s coursing through your veins. Has been for years. I pushed you to the brink when you worked for the government, and I saw the effects starting, even at a distance. You walked into a house in England and got your foot blown off.”

  “It was a bomb—”

  “You got in a fight in Los Angeles with a mad bomber and were electrocuted.”

  “Well, there was some water involved in that, too, it’s not like I could have totally anticipated—”

  “You’re reckless,” he said, “and your power has led you to believe you’re somehow invincible. You’re tough, no doubt, but … I think we can see by this … you’re not invincible. You never were. And furthermore … you knew you never were.”

  “You’re kind of all over the place on this. Mind getting to your thesis?”

  “This is my thesis,” Harmon said. “You’ve got a death wish. You’re tired of being the guardian to this world. Tired of feeling like you’re better than everyone and cut off from everyone at the same time. It’s not going to get any better, and so you keep walking into death traps because … you don’t have anything worth really living for. It was bad before you went on the run, but now? You’re holding onto your so-called job that you don’t actually have anymore like a drowning man holds to a life preserver. And when that’s gone …” He snapped his fingers; the sound was surprisingly loud in the empty, darkened room. “Your whole life these last few years is like a cry for help. Even when you got friends back … it wasn’t enough. Even when you tried to stave things off by having boyfriends or one-night stands … none of it held the darkness at bay.” He threw his arms wide, indicating the shadows growing long around us with both hands. “Beating me didn’t fulfill you; stopping conspiracies and saving lives doesn’t do it. You owed—what, two hundred and fifty-something lives after Wolfe? You have to have saved millions by now. When will it ever be enough?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The answer is never. It will never be enough. Because in your life … it’s all you have left. And in your heart … you know it. Which is why you push your supposed invincibility to the limits. You take terrible, pointless risks, because a part of you hopes that you will die … because that will finally, finally let you off the hook.”

  I felt surprisingly sick, and I wondered if the sensation came from my real body. “Let me off the hook for what?”

  “For wanting it over. For being tired of the fight. It’s like the hammering waves of an endless ocean—and no one is coming to rescue you from your life.”

  That was a fair point, and it hit closer to home than I wanted to admit. “Yeah, but … then, what do I do? Just … drift beneath the surface?”

  “As surprising as it may sound, I’m not advocating that,” Harmon said. “I’m just saying I understand it. The feeling that things are never going to get better, that the surface will always be stormy, and that the only peace you’ll find is in the depths below.”

  “Am I a fool for holding out that faint hope that things will get better?” I asked. I didn’t really believe they would, but it was the hope I clung to at night, when I was trying to get to sleep in my empty hotel bed back in St. Thomas.

  “Yes,” he said, but with a surprising amount of chagrin. “I didn’t design this trap I’ve put you in with the idea that I’d ever be forced into sharing accommodations. Now that we’re stuck together, I find myself regretting that I boxed you in so thoroughly. The press is unlikely to admit error now, because they’ll look stupid, and their pride and ego rival yours. The government isn’t going to back off, because admitting error for them is even a more bitter pill to swallow, especially with that idiot Gondry in charge. The fact that there are still swirling accusations that you masterminded my disappearance is not going to work in your favor with my party, and the opposition is too focused on their own agenda to take up your cause—which is bound to be an unpopular one in any case, absent astounding evidence of your innocence, which I think we both agree would be met, in this apathetic environment, with an overwhelming, ‘Meh.’” He shook his head. “No. If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for you … I don’t see it. And if it’s there, it’s probably a train … or so distant as to be pointless.”

  “When
you put it that way,” I said, slouching over to the bed and thumping down, “why do I keep going on?” The peace of the depths below that I was slowly drifting toward was starting to sound strangely … inviting.

  “It’s a strange quirk of yours,” Harmon said, shuffling over and joining me, hands on his crisp pants legs, their perfect creases a great illustration of the difference between him—former president, poised, in shape, raised in privilege, brilliant mind—and me—badly fitting jeans, overweight, tired all the time, street fighter, dirty fighter—hell, all kinds of fighter. “I didn’t really understand it when we faced off, that persistence that carried you forward in spite of overwhelming losses. You watched every friend you had defect from your side, decry you in public. Anyone sane would have quit at that point, deciding they were too deeply buried to ever get out, but you just kept digging with manic fervor and soon enough you came out in China or something. Impressive turnaround, really, but … it’s only gotten you so far. And now … all this mental weight you’ve been carrying around is your anchor in the deep water.”

  I had a vision again of swimming in the ocean during a terrible storm. Lightning flashed in the dark night, illuminating the downpour of rain, the black, angry clouds overhead. The waves tossed me about, and no land was in sight.

  I was isolated.

  I was alone.

  I had nothing left to go on for, really.

  I looked at Scott and myself, about to get into it again for the last time. “Why do you think I chose the quick and easy route here?”

  Harmon stirred, looking up at the spectacle before us. I could have practically quoted every line from this fight, if I’d had to. “Tired people choose the easy way. Why would they want to make it harder on themselves?”