by Matt Carter
By the dates on some of the papers—invoices for off-brand sticky notes—someone was working here earlier today, and when I concentrate hard enough, I get an inkling of patches of energy nearby that probably mean not everyone’s gone home for the night.
Without knowing if Milgram is even a real name (probably not), I don’t know how I’m going to recognize which office is his … until I see it.
I know it by all the crayon drawings taped to the walls and desk. They’re all different, all signed with different names in rough block letters, but about half the artists have labeled their subjects, the way kids do.
“Mr. Milgram,” reading to a full classroom.
“Mister Millgrum,” working in a garden.
“Mr. Milgrim,” holding a jump rope while kids skip over it.
They sure do love to draw him.
“My gallery’s bigger,” I mutter to no one in particular, while I start searching the room for I’m not sure what.
I’m rummaging through his desk full of more drawings, some actual photographs of him with the children, more invoices for thoroughly boring office supplies, when my phone buzzes.
Hard as I try, I don’t quite manage to shut it off without seeing that it’s Mason.
I don’t have to answer.
I’m not going to.
I’m kidding myself again.
I accept the call and press it to my ear with my shoulder, still digging through the drawers.
“Little busy right now,” I whisper.
“That’s okay, this won’t take long.” Mason has a habit of saying this whenever it isn’t true. “I just thought you should know that I’m quitting the team.”
“Oh, jeez, okay, can I call you when I get home? Or tomorrow? Whatever happened, I’m sure it’ll look better in the morning.”
“It’s a done deal this time. Like I said, just wanted you to know.”
“Oh. Well that … that sucks.” I run out of more specific words of sympathy when my fingers fall on the thing I didn’t know I was looking for.
An invoice for “consultant services rendered” from Jeremy Collingwraith.
I know it’s not conclusive. Milgram and Card using the services of the same lawyer doesn’t prove any further connection between them; it’s not even illegal, but it fits with what we’ve put together so far. If Collingwraith’s done more for Milgram than just make some calls to him on Card’s behalf, he’s looking more and more like the person to talk to about them both.
“I’m leaving tonight,” says Mason.
“Leaving for where?” I ask automatically, shoving the invoice into the back pocket of my jeans.
There’s nothing else here, so I start back down the stairs toward the storerooms.
“I’m not sure yet,” says Mason.
The lights don’t work in the asylum’s basement, so I light up my free hand to look over the maze of shipping crates down here.
“ … I’m at the pancake house,” says Mason. “In the parking lot.”
He lets the information hang there, without having to specify which pancake house.
“The pancake house” means the one where we shared cinnamon French toast on our retroactively official first date, and the sequence of “I’m quitting the team,” “I’m leaving tonight,” and “I’m at the pancake house” means “Come to the pancake house and talk me out of it.”
I pull the lid off one of the crates and get the immediate urge to wash my hands.
I’m no connoisseur of narcotics, but I know this stuff from the PSA the Justice Juniors had to film after something like fifty kids up and down the West Coast overdosed on it.
It’s called Catch, and it’s basically synthetic heroin in fruity flavors, with some stimulants mixed in. I pry off another lid and find more of the same. There must be over a million doses in here.
“It hasn’t been the same since you left,” Mason continues, and it sounds like every word has to be pressed out of him with a vice. “I think I finally realized you were the only real reason I stayed this long. Without you there, I just don’t see a lot of point in staying.”
My heart swells up into a sore, familiar lump, and I almost tell him not to go anywhere, that I’m on my way, that I’ll be there in two seconds.
I can see my mother’s knowing smile as she waves me on my way to yet another tumultuous reconciliation, picture the paparazzi shots of the two of us alone together off duty again, the lines around the block for the next issue of the comic, and suddenly the prospect sickens me.
I do miss him, and I miss the others, and I miss the work, and the possibility of going back someday has crossed my mind about a hundred more times since I clocked back in with the PCG so I could spy on the Cards.
But maybe Dissident is right. Maybe all we were really doing, in the grand scheme of things, was saving kittens from trees.
Cute, safe, photogenic kittens.
Kicking open another crate and spilling the rainbow-colored Catch gummies all over the floor, I know that even if I exhaust my usefulness on the Guardians and get to quit permanently, I don’t want to go back.
I want to go forward.
This woman in the ski mask, destroying a Catch smuggler’s cache, I don’t even know if she has a name, but she’s who I want to be now.
“Mason,” I start, not sure how I’m going to explain all that.
Dissident’s voice blares out of the tiny speaker sewn in next to my ear.
“South wing, now!”
Protecting my phone between my chest and hand, I charge the rest of my body with enough energy to light the room up ten times over and release it all in a single blast, shattering every crate to smoldering splinters and leaving the contents a molten mess of sugar and plastic wrappings.
“You okay?” asks Mason.
“I have to go,” I say, taking off and orienting myself to the south.
“Oh.” I hear the roar of Mason’s motorcycle starting in the background. “Yeah. Me too. Goodbye, Kimberly.”
“Goodbye, Mason.”
Dissident said to come in smashing, so I take a few shortcuts through walls to let whoever she’s found hear what they’re up against if they hurt her.
Goodbye, Mason.
Did I really just say that?
Following the sounds of screams and arguing, I find Dissident standing in a large, tidy cafeteria, facing down a double-thick row of rather well-dressed men with automatic weapons, one man who appears to be made entirely out of menacingly revving chainsaws, and a few who appear to be unarmed.
Those ones worry me most.
She’s already disarmed one of the gunmen and is holding him in front of her as a shield, his throat pinned with her extendable staff, his weapon under her foot. The others appear hesitant to approach her, but they’re not backing off, either.
In one swoop, I clear away the first row of guns, pulling them from hands, bending them out of shape, deflecting the few bullets that get loose in the process.
Dissident charges into the resulting shock and confusion, dropping her human shield to the floor, beating away the guns still in hand with her batons, as certain and unfazed as if my power were an extension of her own, not a rescue she required.
“We’re close,” she tells me, fighting her way to the staircase at the cafeteria’s far end.
I move to follow her, but one of the unarmed men raises his arms toward me and his fingers shoot out like silly string, stretching and dividing across the distance until they wrap around me in the form of a hundred steely tendrils.
I send out an energy charge that seems to paralyze the tendrils for a moment, but not long enough for me to wriggle out of their grip. They grow and lengthen, pinning down my arms and reaching up toward my face.
Okay, energy’s not doing it, and I’m in a disadvantageous position for strength. Running down my checklist of options, I take off for the ceiling and start to spin, reeling in the stretcher like spaghetti on a fork, and then dive bomb the chainsaw man.
&
nbsp; The revving blade of the chainsaw man’s head digs into the fleshy strings of the stretcher, not cutting them, but sucking them into the gears of his neck like shoelaces in a bike chain.
“Ow!” the stretcher says to the chainsaw man. “Let go!”
“You let go!” the chainsaw man replies, powering down his engines and trying to pick the stretcher out of his chains with yet more chains that make up his hands.
In their struggle to extricate themselves from each other, I pull free of the stretcher’s loosening strands and fly straight into a stone statue that was a man a moment ago.
“Hold still,” he says, slowly changing from gray to green to gold. “There’s gotta be something on the periodic table that’ll slow you down.”
I dodge a swing from his stone arm, feel myself buffeted by someone’s telekinesis, and smell the sole of my shoe melting when Effigy reveals himself from among the thugs in a blaze of blue flame.
A dart hits my shoulder from somewhere behind, sticking in my hoodie, unable to pierce my skin. I shake it off and reach back to grab the nearest body to where I think it came from, and find myself dragging a small, scaly, violet woman by the wrist.
“Don’t hurt me!” she begs with open palms, her pure black eyes wide. “Please, they told me they were an exotic modeling agency!”
Bracing her against my chest, I fly backward out of one of the front windows and set her on the lawn.
“Go,” I tell her, before turning back inside.
Where did she spring out of, and how did I miss her at first?
Never mind.
I dodge the next wave of powers and bullets and rocket myself straight through the cafeteria ceiling to go find Dissident. The rest of them can wait.
I catch up with her sprinting down an upstairs hallway between cells.
“Where the hell were you?” she asks.
“Drawing their fire, apparently.”
Up here, the way is deserted. I can hear the cafeteria full of thugs following us the long way up the stairs, but they’re several seconds behind.
“Shit.” Dissident skids to a stop at the doorway of an old dayroom, and I stop beside her.
Just like in his photographs, Milgram is surrounded by children. Here and now, those children are dressed in pajamas and nightgowns, rubbing their eyes and squinting against the dayroom lights, looking recently frightened out of bed.
“You’re outgunned, Milgram,” Dissident tries anyway. “Come with us, and no one has to get hurt.”
The children huddle closer to him, and he pats the nearest girl on the head, then lifts her up onto his lap, making it doubly impossible to get a clear shot.
“It’s okay,” he tells them soothingly. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Then he looks at me, right through the eyes of my mask, as if none of what it covers matters in the least.
“We’re not the ones they want to hurt,” he says.
Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with me, with the way his words coax to the surface a million tiny, half-forgotten irritations.
Mason.
Cory’s unmet new girlfriend.
A dozen-odd fans who’ve turned mean after I brushed off their petitions for a closer relationship.
So many other people I wasn’t thinking about at all two seconds ago, and now I want to find and hurt them so much more than I want to be here.
Milgram opens his mouth again, but my mask emits a deafening, high-pitched whine, and I don’t hear a word of it.
In a few seconds, the feeling mercifully passes.
“Move away from the kids,” I back Dissident up, hovering forward, ready to swoop over the top of them and snatch Milgram up, as soon as there’s enough room to keep him from dragging one along for the ride.
Milgram looks at the girl on his lap with good-natured disappointment.
“If you wouldn’t mind, my dear?”
The girl screws up her face in concentration, and in a flash of light and a puff of smoke that smells like daffodils, Milgram and the entire roomful of children vanish.
Dissident kicks the door of one of the room’s craft supply cabinets in frustration and then makes for the window.
“Come on, then,” she says.
The thugs from downstairs are closing in down the hallway we entered through.
“I thought you wanted to ruin Milgram’s day,” I say.
“There’ll be other days to ruin worse than this one.”
“Or we can arrest a cafeteria full of his guys, today.”
“He owns the Pinnacle City police!” shouts Dissident. “Did that just go in one ear and out the other?”
“Then I’ll drop them off with the Amber City PD.”
“You think Milgram doesn’t have the reach to deal with a little change of venue?”
“Maybe he does, but at least in another city, they’ll get booked, and he’ll have to go through channels. Even if he gets every one of them back out, it’ll cost him time and money.” I hold up my phone and pull up the VillScan app. “C’mon, I’ll handle sorting and transport, just help me out a little with the giftwrapping?”
In a blaze of heat, Effigy makes it through the door first, leaving a trail of smoldering footprints behind as he lunges toward us.
With a guarded nod, Dissident pulls a pair of weights on a cable from her belt and throws them at Effigy. The cable wraps around him and he trips, igniting the carpet as he tries to duplicate himself out of its grasp.
The cable doesn’t budge.
CHAPTER 17: THE DETECTIVE
I push the cart of cleaning supplies up to the Silver Cowl’s rear loading dock. The door’s heavy and locked, but doesn’t have a guard outside, one of the rare benefits of the mid-morning hour. The rain isn’t as heavy as it has been lately, but I’m glad for it anyway.
It allows me to wrap my arms around myself theatrically, shivering in my coveralls, after I press the intercom button by the door.
“Who is it?” a female voice responds.
“Hola, I mean, Hello, my name is Diego Dominguez. I am from Axis Cleaning Management. I am to clean here?” I say, smiling up at the security camera above the door. Laying on the accent extra thick isn’t necessary, but I’ve found it helps sell the act, at least in EPC.
“Your team isn’t due until ten,” the voice says.
“I am hour early, I know this. But today, you see, my first day. I want to look good. To show I can be early and helpful, yes?”
“You have an ID?”
“Yes! I do!” I say, holding the ID up to the camera, shivering to show how cold and wet I am and to cover any imperfections in the fake ID Tragedii made me.
After a moment, the door buzzes and swings open.
It’s hard not being a little smug that this worked, but I think I hide my smile as eager gratitude well enough to the tired, middle-aged morning manager who lets me in.
Piece of cake.
Watch enough TV and you’ll come out thinking that the easiest way to sneak into a place is to have a janitor’s uniform and keep your head down. While there’s some truth to this, bein’ how most places that can afford to hire outside janitorial services are the kinds of places that don’t want to look the help in the eyes, there’s a little more to it than that. Come in wearing the wrong uniform or on the wrong day, and no matter how much people want to ignore you they’re bound to notice something’s off and start asking the wrong kind of questions.
So, while Kline and Dissident have been tearing through Milgram’s empire a piece at a time, I’ve been working the phones.
A quick call to the Silver Cowl saying a truck from their janitorial service dented my Maserati got me the name and number of Axis Cleaning Management.
A call to Axis Cleaning Management, this time as an angry supervisor from the Silver Cowl wanting to know who changed up all their cleaning schedules, got me their scheduled work times for the week.
Another call and a promise of a favor got me the backup I need in case anything
goes wrong while here.
After that, everything’s just gravy.
The manager shows me around, and I try to look suitably impressed with a place I’ve already been to more times in my life than I’d like to admit. She talks to me like a five year old, and I let her, nodding whenever she says something that sounds even vaguely important.
I’m brought upstairs with plenty of warnings about what to do should I find anything personal, incriminating, or illegal in any of the open VIP rooms (which all boil down to “give it to a manager”) before being left to my own devices. She looks tired and in need of coffee, and doesn’t want to spend any more time talking a new-hire janitor through the process.
So far, everything’s going according to plan. However, as I know all too well, there’s still plenty that can go to shit.
As soon as I’m alone upstairs, I drop the act, pull out my phone, and call up Kline.
She answers before the second ring, “You’re in?”
“Yeah.” I check over each shoulder. There’re security cameras at either end of the hall, dark and well hidden, but no doubt active. “Anything you can do about the eyes in the sky?”
“Not from outside. But the VIP rooms themselves are camera free, so get inside and you should be safe.”
Makes sense; the rich and powerful don’t pay to have people looking over their shoulders. But two words in what she just said have my attention.
“Should be?”
“Well, the club doesn’t have cameras in there, but I wouldn’t put it past Jacob to hide some for In the Cards. He loves his candid shots.”
“And covering up for his golden boy by deleting the worst of what he does in there,” I say, still searching for the right door.
“Exactly.”
Finally, I’ve got it. The VIP room with the locked door made to look like an Ace of Hearts. The keypad by its handle glows a dim green.
“Okay, I need the code,” I say.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Because you’re not going to believe it.”
“Try me.”
“11111.”
She’s right. I don’t believe it. But I type it in anyway, and the door handle clicks unlocked.