I approached the open door at a hover, feet off the ground. I gave it a quick once-over, wondering what the hell I was looking at. It wasn’t a traditionally open and shut door of the sort you’d find on a house. This one was heavier, industrial strength, metal all the way through. There were scorch marks where someone had burned through, leaving black carbonization all around the uneven edges of the hole. It was like what I’d done to the roof, except this was cut through solid steel.
My brain went into a higher alert instantly. Now we had ice on the first floor and evidence of superhot fire or plasma upstairs, which meant that the meta I could hear Reed and Augustus tangling with—I could hear a series of grunts and thumps via the echoing hallway as well as my earpiece—was not the only one in the building.
Gavrikov, I said to myself, and felt the Russian’s presence at the forefront of my mind. A Shakespeare quote came to mind from long ago, when my mother had made me memorize long tracts of the Bard: “Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames each battle sees the other’s umbered face.” Fire was needed to answer fire in my experience, and that experience gave me a bad feeling about what waited ahead.
I listened over the sound of someone—Augustus, I was pretty sure—shouting, “You about to get your ass kicked!” followed by a heavy blow and a grunt of indeterminate origin. A faint gust came around the hallway and blew my hair into my eyes yet again. Damn my brother.
I hoped he was all right.
Faint voices were audible through the burned door, and I listened harder over the battle taking place behind me. This was part of my new resolution not to rush stupidly into places where angels feared to tread. I’d done that a few times in the last handful of years, only to lose more than my fair share of limbs, blood, and consciousness. It was lucky for me that people kept underestimating how much it took to kill me.
“—it’s not that simple,” an agitated female voice was saying. “I expected—”
“We all expected differently,” came a calm, soothing male reply. His voice was like the voice equivalent of butter and jam and honey. Mmm. Hungry. “Can you break through?”
“I don’t know,” the female voice came back again. She was starting to sound sullen now, as if coming down off her adrenaline high. “I’m wearing out, and I mean, it doesn’t even look like—”
“Maybe we should help Gary,” another woman’s voice broke in, sounding more worried. I tagged the frost giant battling my team Gary. Also, I figured he was old, because no one has named their kid Gary since the seventies.
“You should probably give him a hand,” Soothing Voice said. “There are at least four of them out there.” I cocked my head as I processed that detail. He knew our numbers? That was an interesting tidbit. My mental alert level ratcheted up another notch since I’d counted three voices now plus the frost giant.
That meant we were evenly matched in the numbers. I didn’t like that. Fair fights were bad for your health.
“Are they all fighting Gary?” Worried asked, her voice heavy with concern. Now I wondered if she and Gary were boffing. (She and Gary would boff rather than screw because, again, Gary was old. Follow along, okay?)
Soothing seemed to give that a moment’s thought. “No …” he said finally, concentrating deeply. “Three of them are …” I heard Kat’s screech echo down the hall around me, “… but the fourth …” There was a moment of silence from the room and then Soothing’s voice rose louder, “… is right outside the door, listening to us right now.”
“What?” Agitated went right back to her original tone of voice, and I swore I could almost hear her shit a brick. All that was missing was the clunk! of it hitting the floor. “I’m gonna—”
“Don’t,” Soothing said, soothingly, and then he raised his voice again—nicely and politely—and called out, “Come in. I guarantee you safe conduct.”
For some reason I couldn’t properly explain, I believed him, and went around the corner, ducking my way into the room to a sudden gasp from one of the women waiting in front of me. She had dark, curly hair that twisted its way down in front of eyes the size of tennis balls as she got a load of me. That was Agitated. I could tell by her position in the room and the look she wore that told me she needed a fresh change of undies for that brick she’d shat.
“Welcome,” Soothing said, and I took him in with a glance. He was immaculately dressed in a sky-blue dress shirt and khaki trousers. He was a tall fellow, African-American with a deep brown skin tone, and he wore a placid smile. Not a smirk, but a warm, genuine sort of smile. He was standing in front of something that looked like a giant vault in the center of the room. It was contained in the rectangular core of the building, hallways wrapping around it in both directions. It was huge, and it looked like whoever had burned through the door to this room had tried the same trick on the vault door and hadn’t met with a similar level of success.
“That’s Sienna Nealon,” Worried said, swallowing so hard I could almost hear the GULP!
“Fiona,” Soothing said, and I tagged her mentally, too. Fiona was Worried.
“We were supposed to be out of here before she showed up,” Worried said, and I looked her over as well. She was hanging out a couple steps behind Soothing, and was blond, straight haired, skinny and short enough that she could have ridden a Doberman as her personal steed and looked totally normal doing it. Except the Doberman would have dragged her around thinking she was a bone for him to play with.
“Running from me doesn’t typically go so well,” I said, probably with less snark than usual. I felt a little muted as I stood there, looking the three of them over.
“We have no quarrel with you,” Soothing said.
“Yeah, but the State of Oregon has one with you,” I said. “Breaking and entering? I don’t know how baked the populace is out here, but I know they still don’t take that lightly.”
“Oh, funny, a weed joke,” Agitated snapped, dark, twirly curls of hair falling over her face. Her eyes went around as something thumped hard against the back wall of the room, out of sight behind the vault. There was a big sign over the vault that said, “WARNING! BIOHAZARD!” along with about fifty of biohazard symbols. It made me wonder just what Palleton Labs was up to out here. “Gary,” she muttered, almost under her breath.
“Gary’s fine, Amber,” Soothing said, giving me a name for Agitated and her twisty black locks. He turned his attention back to me. “We’re not looking for any trouble—”
“Most people aren’t,” I said, “but those that break the law tend to find it landing on the back of their necks anyway.” I gave Worried Fiona a glance as she stood up. The carbon scoring along the front of the vault gave me the feeling that she was my Gavrikov, which left only Amber and Soothing as mystery players.
“You say that because you don’t know what’s happening here,” Soothing said, all calm and composed. He even had his hands at his sides, palms facing away from me, probably to give me a sense of being in control. I wasn’t under that illusion, but I didn’t feel as irritated as I normally did in these circumstances.
“You can feel free to explain it to me once you’re in custody,” I said. That muted feeling was still heavy in me; I was always one for talking before a fight, but I didn’t even feel like fighting. Standing there three-to-one usually would have inspired me to come up with a plan of attack, but here I was, just staring at these three instead of planning my shot order if I had to quickdraw Shadow. “I like a good story as much as the next anger-filled lady.” I stared at Fiona and Amber Agitated. “You like stories, right?”
Fiona looked gobsmacked, her skeletal frame looking like bleached bones in a spaghetti-strapped tank top that was barely held up by her thin shoulders. “Yes—no—maybe?” She looked to Soothing for guidance, like I’d thrown her off by calling her out.
“It’s a pretty straightforward question,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“And also irrelevant,” Soothing said.
“It’s sorta relevant,�
� I said, focusing in on him. Something finally broke loose in my head and I realized why I was so damned mellow. “You’re an empath, and you’re pushing the emotions of the people in this room down.”
Soothing’s eyebrows rose subtly. “Very good, Sienna. I take it you’ve dealt with an empath before, then?”
I didn’t bite the bait on that one. “I’ve dealt with all kinds of metas,” I said, taking in a long breath as I conjured to mind a strong memory. It didn’t take much. “Zack,” I whispered.
Yes? Zack Davis responded, answering me in my own head.
“No,” Soothing said, his posture changing. He brought up a hand, as though he could stop me. “Don’t—”
“I need you to tell me—how did it feel when you died?” I asked him, and the answer came a second later.
A flood of memories burst through my mind, flashes, like repeated slaps to the face, burning at my cheeks. I could see through his eyes, strong hands holding him in place like a parent pushing a squalling baby into an unwanted bath. I could see Clyde Clary holding my hands out, pressing them to his cheeks. There was a searing beneath his skin, an agony that rose as it ripped a scream out of his throat—
“Stop her!” Soothing shouted, his composure lost along with his quiet. He’d gone to full-bore panic as a rush of unfamiliar, uncontrolled emotion dumped into my mind. I wasn’t entirely sure how empaths worked, but I doubted he was prepared for the memory of someone dying being poured like boiling water over his icy grip on my feelings.
“No!” Fiona shouted, and she burst into flames from her bony wrists to her skinny shoulders. She drew back a hand and threw it, whipping a solid ball of fire at me.
I brought up a hand and caught it in my palm, snuffing it out with Gavrikov’s power. “Feed me rage, guys,” I said under my breath.
Oh, this I can do, Eve Kappler said, and I felt a sudden burst of pure anger, loathing so strong I wanted to take the bony specter of Fiona and expose her skeleton to the light of day by peeling her thin skin right off like a blanket. It took me a moment after that to realize that the desire to flay her for raising a hand against me was probably not wholly mine. Probably.
I sent three rapid pulses of fire no bigger than a softball back at Fiona and watched her scream and duck out of the way as my fireballs burst against the vault door, showering the area around it with fiery embers. “I thought I was the only Gavrikov left,” I muttered. “I thought I was special.”
“You’re special to us!” Augustus shouted in my earpiece, and I heard a grunt as somebody hit somebody else in the battle outside. “Now kick some ass and come help us with this frost giant!”
I wheeled around to deal with Agitated Amber the curly-haired, but before I could face her, she opened her mouth and screamed at me.
Now I’ve been known to let a scream or two out in battle, usually to try and intimidate my enemies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes the results are mixed. I’ve made people take a few steps back once or twice, made them stop and reconsider, especially when it’s the sort of rage-filled scream that warns them that if I get my hands on them, they’re going to lose pieces of themselves that they might miss in later life.
This scream, though—it dropped me right to my knees. I don’t mean that figuratively, either. My knee hurt as I slammed against the floor, my eyes closed involuntarily, and I felt like I’d been hit by a truck (again). My eyeballs shook in their sockets as though someone had stuck a finger in there, and the pain ran across the front of my body like I was getting one of those Swedish massages of karate chops to my belly, my legs, my boobs, and my face. My teeth vibrated in my jaw, threatening to come loose, and warm liquid seeped out of my ears and down my jawline even as I snotted my upper lip. At least, I thought it was snot at the time. A few seconds later I realized it was blood when I spit out an enormous gob of it, the metallic tang grossing me out.
The sound of Amber’s scream was gone after a second or two, but the feeling that it was vibrating my bones persisted. I lowered my head and tried to open my eyes, but my body was shaking like I was still being uncomfortably jarred, constantly. My head was swimming like I’d been dunked in the water and was now floating, lifeless, on the surface. My eyeballs felt like they were dipped in jelly and when I opened them, I could barely see.
Working on healing you, Sienna, Wolfe’s gruff voice sounded in my head.
“Work harder,” I mumbled. Amber was staring down at me, mouth open, soundless for a second as she took a breath. “Eve?”
Yes?
I threw up a hand as Amber started to speak again and blasted a net of light in a tight ball right in her kisser. It was a precision shot, aimed right for the uvula, and I was surprised I’d made it given that I was so damned dazed from what she’d done to me. The net of light hit the back of her throat and the reaction was instant. She started to gag, and her eyes went from dancing triumph to panic as the net activated her gag reflex.
I rose to my feet and fell on her like a wolf on a lamb. “I bet guys just love sleeping with you, screamer,” I said as I punched her lights out with one good shot. All the panic left her as she dropped, unconscious, to the floor of the pre-vault. “Until you melt them to jelly with that voice of yours.” I racked my brain for any memory of a meta that could do damage with sound waves. I knew about Sirens, the type that could entangle a mind with pretty words, but this was something different.
I swept my head to the side just in time to catch two fireballs from Fiona, who was back on her skinny-ass feet. I blasted back with a net of light right to the face and then leapt through the air between us, hammering her skull with one good punch. She thumped back into the vault and slid down, out of the fight.
“Odds are getting better,” I mumbled as I cracked my neck to one side. I came around and focused on Soothing, who was against the outer wall, standing there about as peacefully as he could.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said. “This isn’t you.”
“Rage and beatings are totally me,” I said, advancing on him. “They’re pretty much my calling card, actually. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I’m nothing if not merciless—”
I sensed movement behind me a second before I got creamed. I moved to evade and still caught the punch right behind the ear. It felt as though my stream of conscious thought was a slot machine that just had its lever pulled and came up with an orange, a couple cherries, and brain damage for the last wheel. Because whoever hit me, they knew what they were doing.
I managed to get my head around as I fell, and I caught a perfect still-frame of my attacker’s face. I saw it for only a second, even as my mind scrambled to figure out what had just happened. It was a brief glimpse, but enough that I worked it out, that I knew him, and I felt that old familiar feeling start in my belly, a sick sensation that had nothing to do with being cold-cocked from behind.
“Timothy … Logan …” I said from my knees, one elbow keeping me from planting my cheek against the floor.
“I’m sorry, Sienna,” he said. He looked like a giant, standing there over me, and I could see the regret in his eyes. He raised his fist nonetheless, though, ready to strike down on me again, and I didn’t even have it in me to prepare for the finishing blow.
3.
I was starting to get really used to that sick feeling of betrayal. It was a nasty sensation, rolling in your gut like something you ate that wouldn’t give up and move on to torment the next stage of your alimentary canal. I’d felt it quite a few times in my life—James Fries, Erich Winter, Scott Byerly … they’d all betrayed me in some way or another.
And now Timothy Logan. My first and only parolee from my time as warden for the Cube, the government’s metahuman incarceration program.
Hold on, Wolfe apprised me as Logan hesitated a second before striking me down. Almost got it.
My thoughts started to clear, but that feeling in my stomach wasn’t even close to leaving me. “Why?” I asked as he raised his fist.
“I had no choice,” Logan said, and he started to bring his fist down.
“There’s always a choice,” I said, and mentally I was clear enough to make other plans. Gavrikov?
Go.
I blew fire between my lips as Timothy leapt backward. His power was two-second precognition, which meant he knew what I was going to do exactly two seconds before I did it. I knew he’d leap away, but what I really needed to do was get him out of range of knocking the crap out of me right now. That was easy enough; I turned my head and spit a wave of fire in a steady line to either side, guaranteeing he’d have to go backward rather than to either side.
And go backward he did, which left me enough time to leave my knees in a leap sideways and slam my elbow into Soothing’s jaw. I wasn’t really looking at him, I just elbowed him blind, following the sound of his patient breathing, and was rewarded by a rich cracking sound as I put his damned lights out and landed deftly on my feet. My head was clear and so were my eyes. My heart, though …
Well, that little instrument—its existence much debated on the internet and probably in the minds of the inmates of the Cube—it was clear, too. But it was clear with rage—pure, bonebreaking rage. I turned my eyes on Timothy and I could see his alarm as he realized he was all alone with me, his little friends out of the picture. “Why?” I asked, dripping with malice. “I went to bat for you. I got you out.”
“Well,” he said, keeping his distance, watching me, probably waiting for his spider sense to warn him when I sprang, “it’s not exactly easy getting a job when you’ve got ‘Cube detainee’ on your record. These people came to me, they offered money—”
“And you just leapt at the chance to join the brotherhood of criminals again,” I said, seething.
“It’s not exactly like that, and I think you know it—”
“There’s only one thing I know right now,” I said, my rage crystallizing into a cool madness. “Hurlyburly.”
Timothy frowned, and I could see the wheels spinning in his head. “‘Hurlyburly’? What’s that?”
Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10) Page 2