Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  My chair shot from behind me, launching sideways at Tracy. He evinced only a moment of shock and caught it midair with a slight fumble. He stared at it, the thing’s momentum killed inches from his body, because that was his power—counterbalancing my own.

  Killing everything around me, stopping every move I could make, holding me still.

  “Have a safe trip,” he said, waving my chair as he leered at me. “Try not to break anything too valuable.” He put it back on the ground and gave it a solid slide back into position under my desk. “Or they’ll start calling you ‘Olivia Wreck-it’ around here, too.”

  That name.

  I felt cold chills break across my back as I walked through the short tunnel out of the bullpen into the reception area.

  ‘Olivia Wreck-it.’

  That had been what Tracy and the others had called me back home. Back when—

  “Going out?” Casey, the receptionist, asked, barely looking up from her magazine.

  “On a mission,” I said, slowing as I passed her desk.

  “Oh, cool. Where?” She looked up from the pages of her article about—well, whatever.

  “Vegas,” I said.

  “Cool,” she said seriously. “Don’t lose.”

  I stared at her, probably blankly.

  “Money, you know?” She stared at me since I clearly wasn’t getting it. “Gambling?”

  “Right,” I said, my heartbeat subsiding. I forced a weak laugh. “Thanks.” I took a deep breath, and found I actually meant it. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” Casey asked, her thinly penciled eyebrows making a light V.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to smile but failing, and I went for the door, just eager to get out of that damned, confining hell for a short while before I’d be forced—inevitably—to face Tracy again.

  3.

  Sienna

  “Slay Queen!” someone shouted as I stepped out of Dr. Kashini’s office onto West 72nd Street. Manhattan was alive around me, cars honking from the logjam backing up toward Central Park, baking in the afternoon sun as they waited their turn to get the hell off this backed-up road onto—presumably—another backed-up road. At least that had been my experience in the month or so I’d lived in New York City.

  Since the FBI had pushed me to move to New York City.

  I ignored the call of “Slay Queen!” which was immediately taken up by a few more millennials walking down the street. It was a weird reaction, but one I was getting pretty familiar with the longer I lived here. I suppressed the eyeroll tendency, gave a vague nod in the direction of the shouts, and checked my phone for the status of my Uber. It was two streets and five minutes away.

  “Damn,” I muttered, and broke into a run, meta-speed. There were times when I really missed flying. And also times when I wished I had Spider-Man powers, or at least his web-shooters. This was one of them. The lack of uniformity to building heights meant that even if I scaled one and tried to leap rooftop to rooftop, I’d inevitably run into trouble within a block or two.

  So, I ran down the sidewalk at a hard sprint, shouting, “S’cuse me!” and “Move!” amid shout-backs of “Slay Queen!” and a real, constant effort not to smack the people who shouted that at me.

  I met my Uber at the corner of 71st and Amsterdam, and he looked surprised when I jumped into the back seat, slowing down out of my meta speed-blur just enough to avoid crashing into his Mazda or ripping his door off as I leapt in.

  “Whoa!” he said, looking up from his phone, mounted on the dash, where he’d apparently been tracking my high-speed move to intercept him as he sat at a traffic light. He was a black dude, about forty-five, fifty, and he had very slight wrinkles around his eyes, and a full series of dreadlocks. He glanced at the phone, then back at me, eyes lighting up in recognition. “Slay Queen!” he shouted with great pleasure.

  “Gurk,” I said, making the sound deep in my throat. “Let’s go.” I waved at the light, which had just turned green.

  “Yaaaaaassss, Slay Queen,” he said, and thumped the accelerator, lurching us along as a cavalcade of horns sounded behind us at his refusal to leave the starting block after 0.3 seconds of the light turning green. Man, people in New York City were in a hurry. “Where you going today?”

  I just stared at him, then lifted my phone.

  He laughed. “Sorry. Drove cab for twenty years before I switched over to this. Old habits, you know?” He had a Caribbean accent.

  I thought about my own old habit of killing people who annoyed me, and softened a little bit. “Yeah. I do.”

  “What are you doing in New York, Slay Queen?”

  I sighed, deciding to not bother addressing my nickname, and how much it irked me. “Work.” I flashed the FBI badge that hung on my belt. “I’m stationed in Midtown.”

  “That’s fantastic.” He looked at me in the mirror. “Protecting us all from the bad guys, yah?”

  “Something like that,” I said, and checked my phone. Five minutes since I’d gotten the initial text. I flipped to the map app. 22 blocks away. “You said you were a cabbie for twenty years. How long is it going to take to get there?”

  “This time of day? By car?” He thought about it a second. “Twenty minutes, at least.”

  “And on foot?”

  “Fifteen minutes running.” He grinned. “For us normal folk, anyway.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I gotta run it.” His brow furrowed. “Like you said—bad guys. Doing bad stuff.”

  “Go get ’em—SLAY QUEEN!” He shouted the last part as I jumped out the back of his car after triggering the payment button and leaving him a tip. I pocketed my phone and shot past a woman in a pantsuit who let out a scream of surprise as I broke into meta speed.

  “I really wish people wouldn’t call me that,” I said, almost under my breath, as I leapt over 70th and crossed onto Broadway, horns sounding either in surprise at my move or in annoyance at someone beneath me. I cleared the street without any trouble, nearly crashing into a couple pedestrians but veering off at the last second.

  I caught a whiff of a bakery or something as I pounded south on Broadway. A few leaves drifted down as I passed under the trees growing out of the sidewalk planters, my momentum ripping them clear of where they had dangled, nearly ready to fall, on the branches above.

  “Whoa!” a guy shouted as I blasted by, missing him by inches. He shouted some obscenity at me, and I buried the urge to turn back and bury him. I leapt the next street, and the one after, blurring past pedestrians at a flat sprint, and much faster than the logjammed traffic to my left.

  I had things to do, the day to save. Someone swore at me as I nearly knocked him over with the blast of wind that followed in my wake.

  I didn’t have time to smash some dude’s nose up into his brain pan just because he got rude with me—no matter how much I might want to.

  I leapt another intersection, feet pinwheeling, car horns blaring, and did a pinpoint landing atop the street light at the corner, then bounced off the facade of the building to my right to extend my jump before coming down thirty, forty feet ahead.

  I pulled up my phone, keeping one eye on the pedestrians, the wisest of whom were throwing themselves out of my way as I shot down the sidewalk at the speed of a heedless, fearless moped (about thirty, maybe forty miles an hour), and the dumbest of whom were, well…

  They were New Yorkers. The dumbest of them had their headphones in and were looking at their phones. Twelve of them per block nearly died as I blew past them, my approach barely registering until I’d nearly knocked them over just by virtue of passing close as I threaded between them on my way up the sidewalk.

  I hooked around, following the roundabout at Columbus Circle. I slapped a light post with my hand, causing it to ring like a bell. Part of my move was simple momentum control; the other was an attempt to get the jaded, sleeping denizens of New York to wake the hell up and realize that the SLAY QUEEN (DAMMIT) was coming their way like a storm. I shot down 8th Avenue amid a f
lurry of shouts and honking.

  Another few blocks and I could see the bank at the corner of 50th as I leapt the last intersection. NYPD cruisers were there in force, lights flashing, and the crowds surged in size as I drew closer, people gawking, pushed up against the police cordon.

  “Move, people,” I said, shoving my way through as gracefully as one could shove through a New York crowd. “Come on, come on,” I said, losing patience as nobody moved, nobody looked. I was just another New Yorker, trying to get through.

  There felt like a hum of bodies around me, so many heartbeats in close proximity, it was like my meta hearing started to pick them up as…well, a hum. I could smell them, too, this potpourri of human scents, feel them as I shoved past, being probably a little less gentle than I would have preferred.

  “Slay Queen coming through!” a young Latino guy howled, grinning at me as he picked me out of the crowd. I shot him a look, one that was laced with irritation and appreciation, probably in about equal measure since I was still unsure what the hell to do with that particular sobriquet.

  The crowd parted, though. I guess no one wanted to be slayed.

  I ignored the murmurs and took advantage of the situation, slipping through the aisle they made for me and ducking under the police tape as the NYPD officer manning the blockade nodded at me. “Lieutenant Church is in charge of the scene, ma’am.” He pointed to a lady in a waist-length coat behind him, lingering behind a police cruiser that was parked as a barricade in front of the bank.

  “Got it,” I said, and plunged on toward Lieutenant Church. She was tall, a shade under six feet, ebon-skinned, and when I came up to her, she immediately looked down on my 5’ 4” height with a raised eyebrow.

  “Ms. Nealon,” she said.

  “What’s the situation?” I asked, flashing my FBI credentials.

  “Bank heist,” she said curtly. “We’ve got eyes on two suspects, both wearing face masks. Guard pulled the silent alarm, and we set up a perimeter before they could alight.”

  “‘Alight’?” I asked, frowning.

  She ignored my questioning of her word power vocabulary and went on. “They have hostages.”

  I nodded. “Meta powers?”

  She blinked, and her gaze cooled when it steadied on me. “I’m not sure.”

  I stared at her; she stared back. “Uh huh.” I shook my head. “All right. I’ll clean this up for you.”

  “Thank you. Please be careful,” she said.

  I looked over the facade of the bank as I felt a slight tick of annoyance in the back of my head. I was new here, but I already knew that ‘I’m not sure’ was code for ‘These aren’t meta criminals, but we don’t want to send in a SWAT team when we can use a superhero to end this standoff.’ The NYPD was well aware I was in New York, and that I was perfectly willing to come running when they called, so it made sense they’d call as often as they could. “Curse me and my caring nature,” I muttered as I looked over the building and found it lacking. “Entry points?”

  “Front door, back door,” she said. “Back door is wired. Bomb squad is twenty minutes out.” I snapped a look at her and she shrugged, almost apologetically. “Traffic.”

  “New York,” I muttered. “Okay.” I looked up; it was about a four-story, five-story building, mid-century. Did they have central air and heat back then?

  Only one way to find out.

  I took off toward the corner of the building at a jog. The brick work had a rough, grey, protruding look to it.

  “Do you need any help?” Church called after me.

  “When shit starts to go down, clear your snipers to fire if they get a shot,” I said.

  “Those are not our current rules of engagement,” she said. “We are to wait for—”

  “Thanks for being useless,” I said, slipping my fingers between the bricks. Yep, there was a recess of a half-inch between bricks, the mortar buried deep in the cracks and providing me enough space to stick my fingers between them. “I’ll go solve your bank problem for you all by my lonesome, then.” I muttered the last bit as I started to climb the facade.

  The crowd started chanting as I climbed, reaching a hell of a crescendo about the time I got to the fourth floor. “Slay Queen! Slay Queen! Slay Queen!”

  “Well,” I said as I reached the roof and rolled over the edge, “I guess I could have a worse nickname.” But I was hard-pressed to think of one as I started to look for my entry point.

  4.

  Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now was playing in my head as I slid down inside a metal duct, trying to go slow and apply pressure lightly so as not to cause the steel encircling me to creak. It was tricky business, one that required excellent hearing and good reaction speed, because the moment the metal began to yield and produce noise, I had to adjust so I didn’t give away the game.

  As it turned out, this building had, indeed, been a beneficiary of the technology of central heat—and air conditioning. Thanks to that, I now I found myself on the first floor, enjoying just about the tightest squeeze of my hips since the last time I’d seen my boyfriend, Harry. Apparently, these air vents were not meant for girls with a little extra width.

  Still, I was making it. I’d reached nearly the end of the vertical shaft, and now I was peering into the lateral darkness of the first floor’s overhead vents. This was my exit, but from here it was going to get a lot more difficult. I needed to be extra quiet, and also not put too much weight on the metal below me, not only because it would creak, but because it might not support my weight. To end this long crawl by spilling out headfirst onto the bank floor would be embarrassing and potentially fatal. How much would it suck for the Slay Queen to go out that way?

  A lot. It would suck a lot.

  I crawled into the horizontal vent, elbows pressing against the sides. It was a hell of a workout keeping my body in perfect alignment. Core strength was important, and it made me realize that I would hate yoga if I ever tried it, not only because that level of muscle control came as naturally to me as breathing, but also because it would be even more boring than crawling the length of a metal tunnel without anything to look at but the darkness.

  A voice wafted up to me from somewhere ahead. “What’s going on out there, man?” I could see a thin shaft of light feeding into the vent. Ah-ha. The first air exchange on this floor.

  I crawled up to it slowly, trying to make sure that my shining face wouldn’t appear against the dark venting, giving away that I was sneaking in here.

  As I got closer, I got a fuller view of the snaking line up to the teller counter. I was almost directly overlooking the table where people endorsed their checks before joining the forever march to get some customer service. The hostages were all sat down between the line posts, velvet rope separating them from the crooks, who were malingering about. There were three that I could see, and not one of them looked calm, though they were all wearing masks. Their body language hinted at extreme levels of agitation—pacing, twitching, raised voices. Hell, the voices themselves told me a lot about their state of mind.

  “How are we gonna get out of here, Todd?” one of them asked the other, presumably the ringleader of this carnival of idiots.

  “I don’t know,” Todd said, and he sounded like he was close to fainting.

  The three I could see were all carrying AR-15-style rifles. Common as dirt these days, and tough to tell the model from this distance, though they didn’t look particularly fancy. They all shot 5.56 NATO or .223 caliber bullets, and looked like they were loaded with 30-round mags. Damn.

  Shuffling along the metal shaft, I barely dared to breathe, thinking how little fun it’d be to have them ventilate the duct while I was shimmying through it. That professional reputation that I’d worked so hard to build, all gone in an instant and a hail of gunfire.

  Plus, I’d be dead. That’d be bad.

  Ahead, I saw another vent and detoured around it as much as I could. In the distance, it looked like the ducting came to an end, this exchange feedin
g out over one final vent, this one in the bottom of the duct rather than the side like the previous two. When I reached it, I peered down into the darkened room below. Using my metahuman eyesight, I could tell there was a toilet and a sink, shadowy outlines showing through from the faint light coming in from beneath the door. Looked like it opened right out into the bank lobby where all the action was.

  Perfect.

  I fiddled with the vent until it popped loose, then slid it aside and dropped down, quiet as a mouse. I locked the door and took the opportunity to use the restroom, because it felt like an important thing to do before all hell broke loose. I could hear Todd and the rest of his moron gang talking out in the lobby as I did so; seemed the bathroom door wasn’t all that insulated.

  Even better.

  Once done, I sighed, as loud as I could.

  “What was that?” someone asked, muffled, out in the lobby.

  I flushed the toilet and flipped on the light, locking the door as I did so. Then I went about the business of washing my hands, because hygiene is super important. I did it quick, but left the water running.

  Footsteps stopped outside the door and someone hammered on it.

  “Occupado!” I said, as chipper as I could. Now that my hands were dry, I drew my brand-new government-issue Glock 17 from my hip and put it down at my side as I pretended to keep washing my hands. I let my hair fall in front of my eyes. Not so much that I couldn’t see, but enough to hide my famous face from immediate exposure.

  The door rattled against its hinges as someone tried to kick it down and failed due to their weakness.

  “Hey, man, I said the bathroom is occupied,” I shouted. “Wait your turn, hold your horses—or maybe stop holding your horses, depending on where you’re holding them, because you seem just a little too excited—”