Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)

by Crane,Robert J.

  “How do you know what it takes to make someone a productive member of society?” Reed asked. He sounded sincere, if a little wary.

  “I don’t,” I said, “but the recidivism rate seems to be near a hundred percent based on my experience—”

  “You let one guy out,” Kat said. “I’m no scientist—”

  “Obvs,” I snapped.

  “—but that’s an awfully small sample.”

  “So we should just go with the ‘lock ’em up forever’ strategy?” Augustus asked. “One strike and you’re out?”

  “These weren’t mistakes,” I said, glaring at Timothy Logan, who wisely continued to stay silent. “These were choices.”

  “Because you’ve never made a bad choice?” Reed asked quietly.

  “Plenty of them,” I said, “but I also worked my way out of them. Like purgatory, or indentured servitude.”

  “Whoa,” Augustus said, “you think the scales are balanced for killing people because you did government service?”

  “I killed killers,” I said coldly.

  “Was Rick Gerasimos a killer?” Kat asked, sounding genuinely perplexed.

  “He was the head of the preeminent meta criminal organization in the world,” I said. “Unless you believe Omega just changed direction suddenly under his leadership.” I was hot and defensive about it, for probably obvious reasons of self-justification. “So, yes, in most courts of law, if you could prove Omega was a criminal enterprise linked to murder, he could have been tried for it.”

  “You didn’t try him for it, though, you beat him to death with a chair,” Reed said. “Murder is murder, Sienna. And if we become the tribunal, the judge and jury for these people … look, our system is imperfect, you get no argument from me. But to bastardize the words of Churchill, it’s the worst system except for all the others. If we impose vengeance on people, just hammer them down, jail them forever, make no attempt to reconcile them with society … how does that make us any better, any different, than them?”

  “Because we don’t prey on the innocent,” I snapped back. “And if you can’t see that difference, you’re blind.”

  “Like justice?” Reed asked.

  “Was Palleton Labs innocent?” Timothy Logan spoke up at last, apparently casting off that vestige of good sense I thought he still had. “Do you have any idea what they were doing there?”

  “Do you?” I asked, glaring him down. “Because it sounded to me like you took a job just because you needed the money, not because you believed in some righteous cause of robbing from some biotech company to give plague vaccines to the poor or something.”

  His gaze flicked away, and I could see I’d struck him right in the guilty conscience. Part of me wanted to know if he was holding something back about the lab; that vault had remained sealed, and I hadn’t met the owners of the company before I’d left Portland. I didn’t like mysteries, as a rule, but I had no time to worry about it now. Besides, I hadn't been hired to dig on this one.

  “Innocence and guilt is a blurry line, Sienna,” Reed said. I was running right to the edge of my patience with his calm, lecturing demeanor. “It moves depending on which side of it you’re on—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I cut him right off. “Because it’s out of my hands, out of your hands.” I settled back in my seat. “Now it’s in the hands of nine unelected, unaccountable people—philosopher kings and queens, if you will. Their judgment gets to win out.” I smiled at him, but it was a nasty one, befitting the dark mood I was in.

  Silence fell for a few minutes, then stretched into an hour, then two. Reed stared out the window, his tanned face lit by the glowing sun. Augustus kept his eyes anchored on the prisoners, doing his duty. I did the same, though less diligently. Kat had put her headphones in her ears at some point and was jamming out to Meghan Trainor. I couldn’t fault her for that.

  “We’re beginning our initial descent into Minneapolis,” the pilot broke in to announce a little while later. I could see the lone steward lingering near the front of the galley, just listening to us. He’d offered us drinks when the flight started, but he’d withdrawn when the argument began. I had a feeling he was being very smart and strategic about this. I wouldn’t have wanted to walk into the line of fire or the cold freeze between the four of us at the moment, either, if I were human. “The seatbelt sign is on.”

  “I always forget to go to the bathroom until it’s too late,” Augustus said as the ding of the seatbelt warning echoed through the cabin.

  “It’s a private plane,” Reed said, stirring out of his solemn silence, “and you’re a meta. You can survive a crash landing from the bathroom, Augustus. Just go.”

  Augustus bolted for the rear head, zipping up the aisle without hesitation, his seatbelt clanking as he jetted to the lavatory. I watched the prisoners carefully, taking up his job while he was gone. Kat bopped her head to her tune.

  “It’s going to be okay, you know,” Reed said under his breath. I looked sideways at him, and found him speaking to me from beneath a hand that covered his mouth, hiding his reassurance from Kat. “Whatever the ruling, we’ll keep going. We’ll keep making a difference.”

  I blinked and then glanced at Timothy Logan, who quickly averted his eyes when he realized I was looking at him. Gutless, he couldn’t even look at me. “We’ll see,” I said, as Augustus swept up the aisle and back to his seat.

  We landed a few minutes later, and taxied for a few minutes after that. Reed had his phone out, the glare off the screen blinding me for a moment before he put it down. I could tell by the look on his face that something was wrong. “What?”

  He tried to force a smile, but failed. “They ruled.”

  Ice raced through my veins. “And?” The plane lurched to a stop, along with my stomach.

  Reed stared at me for an interminably long moment, and then the door of the plane opened. Light spilled in from outside, along with a chilly breath of autumn wind. “They overturned indefinite detention. And …”

  “And what?” Augustus threw in. He was hanging off the edge of his seat, his belt already undone.

  “It’s complicated, but … they’re not allowing new trials of existing prisoners. They’re basically letting them off for whatever with time served.” He grimaced. “I don’t fully understand it, but if a prosecutor wants to go after them … I think they’re going to have to do so for a new crime.”

  “All the all the outs in free,” I said under my breath.

  “Does this mean I can leave?” Timothy Logan said, and I heard Kat gasp.

  “Bad timing,” Kat said when she composed herself a second later. I didn’t even realize she’d been listening.

  I undid my seatbelt and stood, leering down at Timothy. I could feel the betrayal, the anger, the hatred for who and what he represented. It was eating at me, gnawing at my stomach like a bad meal. I wanted him to pay for what he’d done, but more than that, I wanted him to pay for his crime against me.

  “I …” Logan said, pale as cream. “Sienna, I didn’t … please don’t …”

  “Sienna,” Reed said softly, “he’s not worth it.”

  “You’re right,” I choked out, still anchored to my place in the cabin. I could smell fresh air beyond the door, calling to me, and I didn’t wait. I blew past the steward and shot out the door, keeping low over the Eden Prairie airport until I was clear of their airspace, and then I took to the skies, knowing that almost everything I’d done in my life up to this point was all for naught.

  6.

  “Come in.”

  I did as the voice bade, pushing carefully through the wooden door with its placard marked “Dr. Quinton Zollers,” and taking care not to loose my rage on an inanimate object, especially one belonging to a friend. More than a friend, really. Dr. Zollers had been with me from nearly the beginning, after all.

  “You knew I was coming?” I asked as I closed the door behind me. It felt like I was barely holding it all back, like I could explode at any moment. Th
at was a real danger for someone with the living bomb of a Gavrikov trapped beneath her skin, too.

  “Even if I didn’t have a close bond with you, it’d be hard for a telepath to miss that cloud of rage streaking across the Minneapolis skyline like a comet ready to put an end to some dinosaurs,” Zollers said with his typical dry humor.

  “I could think of about nine I’d like to make extinct this morning,” I fumed.

  “Five,” Zollers corrected. When I looked at him quizzically, he said, “They didn’t all rule against it, after all. The court was divided.”

  “Did you read the decision?” I asked. I hadn’t, so I was morbidly curious if anyone had added a few stinging, sniping condemnations of my actions as proxy for the government.

  “I skimmed it while I was waiting for you,” Zollers said, holding up his phone before he tossed it carefully onto the table to his right. He was always so gentle, even with meta strength. “They kept to the substance of the arguments.”

  I flopped down on the couch where I usually spent our sessions. “You knew I was worried what they’d say about me.”

  “For someone who takes a punch like a champ,” Zollers said, interlacing his fingers in front of his face and leaning back in his chair, utterly relaxed despite being stuck in a room with the most dangerous human being on the planet, “you do tend to be easily nettled by the opinions of others.”

  “Weird, isn’t it?” I stared up at the ceiling, which was all smoothed-out, fog-textured rather than the stupid nasty popcorn stuff. “I’m a walking contradiction.”

  “You’re a wounded person,” he said. “That’s different.”

  “After all this time, I’m still wounded?” I pouted. “And here I thought I was finally well-adjusted.”

  “The scars of a childhood filled with psychological and physical abuse and isolation don’t just fade away under meta healing power, Sienna.” He sounded as serious as I’d ever heard him. “You can take a punch, get shot, have your arms and legs burned and blown off … but what your mother did to you lingers.” His voice was low, but slightly rougher today than usual, and it took me a minute to realize that he was modulating his tone to avoid the register Soothing Voice had used when trying to talk me out of beating the shit out of his merry band. “You viewed her as the source of all authority, and so when other kinds of authority come to bear on you—peer groups, the media, government—you don’t tend to take it well.”

  “My mommy issues extend to my relationship with the government?” I snorted, still staring at the ceiling.

  “And father issues, too.”

  “Naturally. Because it couldn’t be simple.”

  “Criticism seldom is,” he said. “And this criticism … it’s not even a criticism. It’s the force of law—”

  “Emphasis on ‘force.’”

  He stopped to compose his thoughts then went on, now in his regular voice, like he didn’t care anymore if it tripped my trigger. “We get to decide as a society—in a somewhat roundabout way, via our elected officials and who they appoint to these positions of power—what kind of rules we want to live under. This is the exercise of that mechanism. You can’t view it as a personal repudiation. It’s settling a point of law that hasn’t been dealt with in any society in history.” I lifted my head to see him smiling. “Not since the days before the gods went underground has any system of government been forced to truly address the inequalities of force present between humans and metas. The ancient societies dealt with it in one way—the gods could do whatever the hell they wanted. We went the opposite direction at first, reacted perhaps too strongly, calling for a harsh response to the use of meta powers on humans.” He steepled his fingers in front of him. “Now we’re striking the balance and saying that metas are subject to the same laws as humans, with the same burdens of proof and the same standards applied to everyone else.”

  “Metas can do more damage in shorter order than humans,” I said, leaning back into the soft couch, feeling the effects of a night of missed sleep. “They can evade better than human criminals, leave less sign … they’re not even in the same league.”

  “We’re not gods, Sienna.”

  “We used to be,” I said, almost in a whisper. “We’re still god-like, and even though humans can kill us now, they can’t always do it fast enough.” I took a deep breath. “I ran into a Gavrikov tonight. I didn’t think there were any left, but we ran across another one. That’s two in the last year.”

  “And that worries you because a Gavrikov can—”

  “It worries me because no matter what sort of arguing anyone does about weapons in the hands of civilians, no one is carrying a nuke around,” I said. “But a Gavrikov is a nuke. An infinite, never-ending nuclear bomb that they could deploy over and over again, until every city in the world was just ash in the damned wind.” I folded my arms over myself. “Or how about one of those metas that produces deadly bio-toxins? Refine it a little, put it in a bomb, set it to the prevailing winds, and pffffft—a million people die choking to death on their own blood. I’ve even heard of metas that can produce deadly diseases … basically every type of WMD is covered in the spectrum of meta ability, and we are left without any recourse to stop these people before they do something terrible.”

  “You have the law,” he said.

  “I’m sure the law will be a sweet consolation when New York City is a smoking ruin, or LA is a permanently quarantined biohazard zone, or Washington, DC, is a disease-infested wasteland.” I pursed my lips and frowned. “I guess that last thing has sort of already happened. But my point is that a meta doesn’t have the barrier to entry that’s required of a human to pull off an honest-to-gosh WMD attack. No plutonium, no anthrax, no mustard gas. They just show up and wreak havoc.”

  “You’re worried because you’re afraid you can’t stop it.” His voice was soft, and I turned my head to look at him. “If any of those things rear their head … you’re worried you won’t be able to stop it in time.”

  “If they even want me to,” I said, sullen with self-pity. “You can say all day that this decision isn’t a repudiation of me, but who else has been putting away meta criminals? I’ve been gone from the Agency for months, and I’m still hauling in bad guys. I don’t even think Scott and Guy Friday are working, they’re just jerking off somewhere in a government office in DC—”

  “Which explains the disease-infested wasteland.”

  “Careful.” I frowned at him. “I did date one of those knuckleheads, after all.”

  “Then clearly the disease came from the other one.”

  “Probably,” I conceded with a faint smile. “Friday probably wears that mask for a reason, after all.” I went quiet for a bit, and he let me sit in silence. “Yes, I worry about what will happen. But even more than that … I wonder what the point was?” I turned my head to see him watching me, concerned as always. “Reed says we did good, that we kept some bad guys from doing bad things, or continuing to do bad things, but part of me wonders … is this it? Is this all there is? Because I don’t know that even before this ruling if I was doing one iota of real good.” I settled my head back on the couch.

  “It’s a common lament among humans and metahumans alike, you know,” Zollers said. “That feeling where you wonder if you’re doing anything worthwhile with your life. It takes flight in the form of passion in youth, worry in middle age, and regret among the old. You’re hardly the first person to feel it, but you might just be the only who can claim to have actually saved the world and still be wondering if your life counts for anything.”

  “Maybe I just wonder … if this is all there is?” The soft couch beneath my head threatened to lull me to sleep, or swallow me up in its comfortable cushions. “Kill bad guys, stop bad guys … occasionally date a guy … maybe get laid … eat some imported Terry’s Chocolate Oranges while Netflixing Sherlock … is that all there is?”

  “There’s also Luther.”

  “Smartass.”

  “Dogs don’t
wonder why they exist, Sienna,” he said. “Humans are unique in that regard, full of questions about their purpose. I can’t answer it for you, either, because everyone has to come to their own answer. It’s Philosophy 101, and anyone who says they have a universal truth for you to answer your question … well, you might want to treat them with a little skepticism.”

  “I just don’t want to waste my life working for nothing,” I said. I felt the regret part of it, like at the ripe age of twenty-four I qualified for the last stage of existential angst. “You can talk all day about how I saved the world, but that was years ago, and what I’ve done since … well, that sandcastle just got knocked over by the tide.”

  “It’s up to you whether to decide to build it again, I guess,” he said, serious once more. “People build sandcastles every day—and homes, and lives and all manner of things. And they don’t build them because they’re going to last forever. Nothing does. Some day, our sun will burn out, our planet will die, and long before even that happens everything we are and have done will have been forgotten. As long as you might live, you won’t be anything but dust by the time the earth comes to its natural end … but people build anyway. They do it for the day, because we’re here now, and because in this moment it shows that these are the things that matter to us. That are important to us. Beauty doesn’t last, and neither does life … and neither does your work.” He leaned forward, and I saw him smile. “But just because a thing doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. This quest to protect people … you don’t do it because it’ll ‘echo in eternity’— to steal a phrase from Russell Crowe in Gladiator.”

  “It’s a good thing you told me where it came from, because you had me all ready to slaughter some Germanic hordes.”