Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3)

by Marcus Sakey

  And now here you are again. Neither agent nor politician, but something different.

  The moment the struts touched earth, Cooper began to undo his seat belt. He wasn’t sure his message had gotten through, but if it had, they’d be waiting for him—

  “Is this it, then? For you and me?”

  Still staring out the window, Cooper said, “For now, at least.”

  “Then. Well. I never really thanked you.” The somber tone brought Cooper back to the moment, and he turned to see Ethan holding out his hand. “For saving my family. I owe you one.”

  “No problem.”

  “Actually, I get the feeling the whole world owes you.”

  The sentiment, unexpected and probably overblown, nonetheless touched something in his chest. “Thanks, Doc.” He reached out and shook Ethan’s hand. “You did good.”

  They stayed like that for a moment, hands gripping, and it filled him with that warmth he’d always gotten from fidelity and camaraderie, the same feeling that had made him proud to be a soldier all those years ago.

  Then the hatch was opening, and through it Cooper saw three figures running his way, and he was out of his seat and on the tarmac and sprinting to meet them, sweeping his son and daughter into his arms, hoisting them up to his chest and all of them laughing and crying and smiling like they’d found the last safe place on earth. He squeezed until he thought their spines might pop, Kate clinging to him, Todd saying, “Dad, Dad, Dad!” and pounding his back.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw Natalie standing there, a smile on her lips despite the fear he could read in her posture. “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Hey, you.” He set down his children and embraced his ex-wife, neither of them holding back as the kids hugged their waists and the cold gray of the afternoon swept away.

  “Mr. Cooper,” said a voice behind him.

  He turned, saw a tall woman with the airy beauty of a runway model. It took him a moment to place her; Epstein’s communications director, her name was—

  “Patricia Ariel,” she said. “I’ve got a car. Mr. Epstein is waiting for you.”

  He still had one arm around Natalie’s back, and he felt her muscles tense. Todd and Kate both stared with identical heartbroken expressions. Cooper looked at them, then back at Ariel.

  “Mr. Epstein,” he said, “is going to have to wait a little while longer.”

  “Sir, he was very clear—”

  “I think I’ve earned a day with my family. If Erik disagrees, he can send soldiers to get me.” He gave her a lazy smile. “But he better send a lot of them.”

  Natalie and the kids were still in the diplomatic quarters, a tasteful three-story apartment on a public square. It was messy in a way he’d missed, that lived-in look that accompanied children—toys and books and blankets strewn about, plates in the sink, the smell of processed food in the air.

  Todd and Kate chattered nonstop, talking over each other, telling stories and asking questions he answered as fast as he could: where had he been, was he okay, would he look at this drawing, did he see that somersault, had he met the new president, had he been back to their house, did he want to play soccer?

  Yes. Yes, he did.

  Wyoming was cold in December, the temperature in the midtwenties—negative two, the thermometer in the window read, the NCH of course having converted to the metric system—but he hardly needed a jacket to keep warm. Just standing in the quad playing with his family did the job.

  Cooper tipped the ball up with his foot, bounced it off either knee, then toe-popped it to Todd. “How you feeling, kiddo?”

  “I’m okay,” his son said. “It doesn’t hurt. I hate my hair, though.” The surgeons had shaved part of his head, and the stubbled portion stood out like a scar.

  “Neat thing about hair,” Natalie said, “it grows.”

  “Slowly.”

  “I think it’s cool,” Cooper said. “You look tough.”

  “You look like a dweeb,” Kate said, and giggled. Todd stuck his tongue out at her, then kicked the ball gently in her direction. He was a good kid, a good older brother. Cooper and Natalie shared a quick look of private pleasure, and one of those moments of psychic communication that came of years together. Look what we made.

  “What have you guys been up to? Any new friends?”

  Todd shrugged. “It’s okay. I want to go home.”

  “I still like it here,” Kate said. “But it’s different than before.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The grown-ups are all scared.”

  Intellectually, he knew that his daughter was gifted, almost certainly tier one. But that didn’t make it easier to hear his five-year-old announce that all her guardians were frightened. “Are you scared, honey?”

  “No,” Kate said. “You’ll protect us.” She spoke with the faith of a child, the simple certainty that her parents would keep the world at bay. That they would always catch her before she fell, always put themselves between her and harm. Which was good; that was what she was supposed to feel. And yet her words filled him with a mix of pride and terror more profound and powerful than anything he’d ever known.

  “Right?”

  “Of course, baby,” he said, but because she could read him, the only way to make the words meaningful was to mean them. To commit wholeheartedly to everything that came along with them. In that moment, he knew that he would burn down the whole world if that would keep his daughter not just safe, but secure in the knowledge of her safety.

  “Dad,” Todd said, his expression at once steady and yet uncertain, like someone looking down at a long drop and standing very still, “how come this is happening? All of it?”

  “I don’t know, buddy.” He paused. “I mean, we’ve talked before about how people are different, right?”

  “Yeah, but . . . Mom told us that the president and a lot of other people died. That wasn’t just because they were different, right?”

  He looked at Natalie, caught her tiny shrug, and in another burst of that psychic communication, he could almost hear her saying, Good luck with that one, Dad.

  There was the temptation to lie. But with the world in the state it was . . .

  Kate kicked the ball to him. He pinned it beneath one foot. “There’s not an easy answer to your question. Are you up to a complicated one?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cooper looked at Kate, who nodded somberly.

  “Okay. Life isn’t like the movies—you know, how the bad guys just want to be bad guys, villains. In real life, there aren’t very many villains. Mostly, people believe they’re doing the right thing. Even the ones who are doing bad things usually believe they’re heroes, that whatever terrible thing they’re doing is to prevent something worse. They’re scared.”

  “But if there aren’t real villains, what are they scared of?”

  “It’s kind of a circle. When people are scared, it’s easy for them to decide anything different is evil. To forget that everyone is basically the same, that we all love our families and want regular lives. And what makes it worse is that some people use that. They make others scared on purpose, because they know if they do, everyone will start acting stupid.”

  “But why would they want that?”

  “It’s a way to control people. A way to get what they want.”

  “What about the guy at the restaurant who tried to kill you? Is he a villain?”

  “Yes,” Cooper said. “He is. He’s broken. Most real-life villains are. Usually it’s not their fault. But that doesn’t matter. They’re broken, and they do things that can’t be forgiven. Like hurting you.”

  Todd pondered that, chewing his lip. “Do the bad guys ever win?”

  Wow. Cooper hesitated. Finally, he said, “Only if the good people let them. And there are a lot more good people.” He bent and picked up the soccer ball. “Now. My turn to ask an important question.”

  “What?”

  “You guys have been here for a couple of weeks.” He c
ocked his head. “Have you figured out where to get decent pizza yet?”

  They had.

  After Cooper whispered his final goodnights and closed the bedroom door, he found Natalie in the kitchen with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured without asking, and he took the glass, clinked it with hers, then settled into the opposite chair. For a long moment they just looked at each other. Like coming home from a long vacation and walking the rooms, opening curtains, running fingers over tabletops. Reclaiming space.

  “I was proud of you today,” she said. “The way you talked to them.”

  “Christ. Why can’t they ask where babies come from, like normal kids?”

  “They haven’t had a normal life.”

  One of the things he had always loved about Natalie was that her words and actions and feelings were more aligned than those of most anyone he knew. She didn’t have a passive-aggressive gene in her DNA. If she was pissed, she told him.

  So he understood that she was just stating a fact, not making an accusation. But still. You’re the reason for that. Your job, your crusade, your mission to save the world. If you’d just been a regular father, they would have had regular lives.

  Of course, if he’d been a regular father, Kate would be in an academy right now, her identity taken away, her strength and independence shattered, her fears cultivated. He’d seen firsthand what those places looked like, and he’d sworn his abnorm daughter would never end up in one.

  Fine, but instead an assassin put your normal son in a coma. And you’ve brought both your children to the center of a war zone. So don’t pull a muscle slapping yourself on the back.

  Natalie sipped her wine. “How long are you staying?”

  “Just tonight.”

  She sighed and reached across the table. Their hands met, fingers threading with easy habit. “It’s important?”

  “I’m going after John Smith.”

  Her fingers tightened. “It’s too much. Why does it all depend on you?”

  “I don’t know, Nat. Believe me, I wouldn’t mind a break.”

  “Are you sure you can’t take one?”

  He considered. Thought about a boy lynched in Manhattan. About soldiers burning in the desert. About the way Abe Couzen had moved this morning, the scientist’s certainty he could kill them all. About John Smith smiling into the security camera and blowing him a kiss.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

  She stared for a long moment, and he could read the struggle in her, the tension. He’d known her so long; they’d been little more than kids when they first got together, and he’d had her patterned in the most intimate ways for a decade. It had been one of the things that came between them, the fact that he knew her so well that he could often tell what she was about to say before she said it.

  Like now.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He nodded and squeezed her hand once more. Then disentangled his fingers from hers to pick up the wine glass and—

  “Take me to bed.”

  —swallowed it down the wrong pipe. He coughed, spat what was left of the wine into the glass. When he could breathe again, he said, “Pardon?”

  “Take me to bed.”

  He flashed back to a month ago, the two of them in a fort they’d made with the kids, and the kiss they’d shared. He’d realized at that moment that something had shifted in both of them. They had reawakened to the possibilities of a shared life. But the weeks since hadn’t afforded them time to explore those feelings.

  “Nat . . .” He stared at her, wanting very much to take her up on the offer. It wasn’t just solace or desire, it was a longing for Natalie personally. She was as strong and sexy a woman as he’d ever known, and though they had made love a thousand times, it had been years, and the notion of that combination of experience and novelty rode his system like a drug hit.

  But this was the mother of his children, not someone to trifle with. Not casual comfort. Besides, there was Shannon. They’d only been together a handful of times, but they’d also saved each other’s lives, brought down a president, and fought side by side to stop a war. Their relationship hadn’t been conventional, and there’d been no time to discuss whether they were exclusive, or even where they were going, but still—

  “Nick, stop.” She set down her glass and leaned in, hand on chin, other arm crossed at the elbow, her eyes bright and deep, hair falling tousled down one shoulder, smelling of red wine and cold air. “I’m not suggesting we get remarried. But you’re about to go off on your own again, chasing the most dangerous man in the world, and I hate it, but I get it, and I know you’re doing it for us. So before you do . . .” She stared at him for a moment that stretched electric.

  Then she rose and gave a husky laugh.

  “Before you do, come to the bedroom and fuck me.”

  DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE?

  The DAR does. They’ve got a list of every abnorm in these Disunited States. Ask for it, though, and they say things like, “disclosing said information is not in the interests of public safety,” because it could “jeopardize the well-being, both commercially and personally, of American citizens.”

  Igor, bring out the Debullshitization Device. Yes, good, my freaky little friend. Punch it in, let’s see the translation.

  What? Are you sure, you rancid cripple?

  Huh. Igor says that translates to, “We care more about not panty-twisting the twists than about the lives of your children.”

  Luckily, there are still a few heroes-not-zeros in our drugs-not-hugs world, and more than one of them are members of our little hacker community.

  And so, hot from the DAR systems, lifted like a goth girl’s skirt on free razor blade night, is a list of 1,073,904 abnorms—and their addresses. You’re welcome.

  You better be grateful, bitches, because this looks to be the swan song. The Governot is already huffing and puffing to blow our house down. Payback’s on you—make a little chaos for kOS, will you?

  So take it. No seriously, take it. Download it, share it, spread it around like corporate PAC money.

  Here’s the whole list.

  Here it is by state.

  By city.

  By zip code, you lazy twat.

  This act of civil disobedience brought to you by the merry pranksters and puckish rogues of Konstant kOS. All rights raped.

  CHAPTER 10

  The room was the size of a large planetarium, only instead of stars, holographic data floated in the air, charts and graphs and video and three-dimensional topographies and scrolling news tickers, a dizzying array of information glowing against subterranean darkness. To the average person—to Cooper—it made little sense. There was just too much of it, too many unrelated notions overlaid against each other.

  But to Erik Epstein, who absorbed data the way others took in a feedcast, it held all the secrets of the world. The abnorm had made his billions by finding patterns in the stock market, eventually forcing the global financial markets to shut down and reinvent themselves.

  “Yesterday,” Erik said. “Your delay was inappropriate. Time is a factor.”

  “Time is always a factor.” Cooper looked around, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Wearing a hoodie and Chuck Taylors, Erik stood in the center of the room, pale ringmaster to this digital circus. His eyes seemed more sunken than usual, as though he hadn’t slept in a week. Beside him, his brother Jakob was the picture of refined cool in a five-thousand-dollar Lucy Veronica suit. The two couldn’t have seemed less alike, Erik’s extreme geek set beside Jakob’s air of easy command, but in truth, they functioned as a team; Erik was the brains, the money, the visionary, and Jakob was the face and voice, the man who dined with presidents and tycoons. “And I don’t work for you.”

  “No,” Jakob said, “you’ve made that abundantly clear. In fact, you’ve failed to do everything we’ve asked of you.”

  “That’s not quite true. I did convince President Clay to let you secede. Of course, that was befor
e you murdered him.” It probably wasn’t a good idea to be so flip, given that he was talking to two of the most powerful men in the world. But Cooper just couldn’t make himself care. Part of it was that flippancy let him tamp down his seething fury; no matter what he’d said to Quinn, no matter that he understood their actions philosophically, they had still murdered soldiers, and that he could never forgive.

  The other part might have to do with last night. There were reasons he and Natalie had divorced, good ones, but they had nothing to do with the bedroom. A fact that had been demonstrated rather thoroughly last night, leaving Cooper with a loose-limbed jauntiness.

  They hadn’t discussed it this morning. The kids were up, and neither of them wanted to confuse Kate and Todd. But while last night had been rooted in the past, he knew now that Natalie was interested in the future. And she wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t just the sex, or even Natalie herself. They were good together. Easy. There had been a moment, as he took a break from cooking pancakes to hand her a mug of coffee, that felt as comfortable as slipping on an old pair of jeans and a favorite T-shirt. It felt like home.

  “You’re different,” a small voice said. Cooper squinted, then saw the girl huddled in a chair, her knees tucked up in front of her, a screen of purple bangs hiding her downturned face. Millicent, Erik Epstein’s near-constant companion and one of the most powerful readers Cooper had ever met. She sensed the inner fears and secret darknesses of everyone around her, had intuited Daddy’s weaknesses and Mommy’s cruelties before she could speak. A ten-year-old girl whose insight shaped billion-dollar deals and resulted in murders. As always, Cooper felt a flush of pity for her; too much, too much.

  “Hi, Millie. How are you?”

  “You’re different. Did something happen?” She lifted her head, stared at him with ancient eyes set in a little girl’s face.