Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  When it kicked into high gear again after the LA explosion…I’d left. I’d thought I’d found a way to take the heat off by coming to the UK.

  Now I was in Scotland, disempowered, with the entire law enforcement apparatus after me, nary a friend in sight and scarcely in contact (Reed being the exception) and somehow things had, once again, gotten ever so much worse.

  A car went by, and I thought I saw a face staring out at me. I looked, out of habit, and realized after one heart-stopping moment that it was a kid looking out a car’s back window. I sighed, the wind rushing through the trees to my right, and kept walking.

  I checked my phone. Now I was on Abbeyhill. Road? Street? The app didn’t say, and I didn’t care. I was following the blue line and trying to ignore the fact that I was having to walk under a shadowy, forbidding underpass that lasted only twenty or so feet. That there was nowhere for a threat to hide beneath it mattered little. Somehow, walking in shadow was now cause for fresh worry.

  But in fairness…almost everything was cause for fresh worry right now.

  I walked a few minutes more, through some tight spaces, below an even darker underpass that caused my little heart to pitter-patter wildly. Once more, no harm came to me, though the sound of a bus shifting right as it went by would have caused me to explode in flame if I’d still had that power. As it was, it just almost caused me to lose bladder control. Which was kind of the opposite of fire, really.

  It took me another few minutes of following Abbeyhill to reach Holyrood House and Scottish parliament. I recognized the latter from overflying it when I’d been in Edinburgh a few days earlier, and it still looked like a deconstructed and reconstructed pile of jangly, messed-up angles. I wasn’t sure who the architect was on it, but it felt like they might have taken a lot of inspiration from Pablo Picasso. And maybe some LSD, too.

  I watched the guards and police outside the parliament building with a wary eye. The last thing I needed at this point was to get my ass snared in a normal security perimeter for a high security location like this. Talk about your avoidable acts of incompetence.

  Taking the fork onto Calton Road, I got a slightly queasy feeling as I checked out the map. I hadn’t intended it this way, but my route was taking me past the Calton Heights Burial Ground, where Rose and I had enjoyed (or rather, she’d enjoyed and I’d gotten my ass kicked) our last climactic showdown before she’d done the metahuman version of spaying me.

  The mere knowledge that I was approaching this place was bad enough, but the road I was taking to get there was making it so much worse. The segment of Calton Road I was walking along was surrounded on the right by a high stone wall that looked like it was a remnant from the 1700s or earlier, a product of old Edinburgh at its finest, an archaeological masterpiece from the days of yore.

  It was also boxing me in on that side. Rows of flats were providing a similar service on my left, which was disquieting in that if Rose came thundering down on me out of the blue right now, I had nowhere to go but maybe into an apartment building in hopes of fleeing out a window or door out the back. Not the surest of escape routes, and when you’re fleeing for your life, any uncertainty save for that of capture is generally bad. Because it can lead to capture.

  The surroundings added another tremble to my heart as I walked. This was the kind of worry I didn’t really need, the knowledge that not only was I in a hostile city, but my escape options were severely limited. If the cops pulled in front of me and behind right now, I was out of luck. Block the street over through the apartment buildings and I was even more high and dry.

  None of this was good news, and it was the sort of thing that my brain liked to dwell on and imagine, doing me surprisingly few favors in the process.

  Passing a black iron gate to my right, a little break in the wall, I was treated with a view of the Burial Ground.

  My stomach dropped to my feet, lurching, as I couldn’t keep myself from stealing a glance inside.

  There was a fair amount of damage from my battle with Frankie and my subsequent ass-kicking by Rose. I didn’t dwell, just taking a mental snapshot of what I could see and moving on, but…

  It was enough. Enough to send my stomach swirling and churning.

  I could almost feel the trauma, the event, like it was inside me, welling up, almost close enough to touch. I didn’t cry out in alarm, but I did feel some small measure of nausea as I remembered lying there, staring at the black sky, head swimming, as Rose held her hands to me, my skin burning like someone had lit it afire.

  The block wall passed to my right, and I tried to stare at the individual blocks of stone as I quickened my pace. I kept it in the realm of human possibility, breaking into a light jog. I saw movement ahead, someone walking past out of a gateway from another round of flats. They caught sight of me and stared for a moment, and I realized I wasn’t staring down at my phone anymore.

  I’m just a jogger, I thought, trying to match my form to what I’d seen from people who I’d seen running in the past. I clutched my phone, kept my head down, tried not to stare at the person who was now watching me intently.

  Shit.

  I passed them as they raised their phone to their ear, and I listened intently as they made a call, waiting to see if it was going to be something bad. I was almost prepared, mentally, to assault this person—a guy, I realized dimly, still trying not to look directly at him—if he said something that sounded like he was dropping a dime on my location.

  He said something about being late for work but being on his way now, and I didn’t relax when I heard it. I had to keep jogging on, past the building, which was replaced with a short wall on my right and the hill leading up to Calton Heights. The smell of fresh dirt reached me here, where Frankie’s attacks had churned up the ground inside the cemetery. Taller buildings with a more commercial bent were springing up on my left now as I got deeper and deeper into the city proper.

  The buildings started to blend together as my mind raced, worrying about what was happening, what I was seeing. There were more people now, all along Calton Road. According to the map app, I was now only five minutes from Waverly Station, which presented another question: What the hell was I going to do when I got there?

  It wasn’t like I could just board the train, after all.

  On the other hand…I was pretty sure the ticket kiosks for these stations were unmanned. If I could keep my head down, maybe…

  No. Too dangerous. If my ticket got checked in the train—which was likely—I’d probably be recognized and caught in a hot second. Then I’d be trapped in a train with plenty of time for the staff to call the cops and whoever else.

  Plus, I didn’t exactly have a ton of money with which to buy a ticket. That was hardly an insurmountable problem, but still…

  I glanced back, and once again, my stomach dropped. There were people behind me, walking extremely quietly. It wasn’t just one or two, either; it was a whole heap, a mob, like twenty or thirty.

  Leading them was a big man with light blond hair, fair-skinned, with a leather jacket and a pair of jeans that were so ragged I doubted they’d ever seen better days. They might have just started out shit and gotten progressively worse over time until now, where they lacked even the structural integrity of a collapsing building.

  When he saw me looking, we made brief eye contact, and a spark of recognition in his eyes gave way to a predatory grin.

  Yep, he saw me.

  Yep, he knew who I was.

  Two minutes run from Waverly Station and I had a mob behind me, led by someone who was actively seeking me.

  Edinburgh, you’ve screwed me again, I thought as I broke into a run, desperately trying to reach the train station, and whatever faint hope of freedom it held, before they caught me, hoping against hope I could lose them in the crowds.

  29.

  Reed

  The plane cruised steadily at about 35,000 feet, the gentle hum you might expect in a commercial flight a little louder on the smaller aircraft. T
he engines roared outside, taking in air and forcing it out the back in great jets, slipping along at over four hundred miles an hour.

  I could the feel disturbance (not in the Force) created by the engines. I hadn’t really been able to before Harmon had overclocked my powers, but now I felt it keenly, just another added benefit of the expansion of my abilities. I glanced across the Gulfstream’s aisle at Scott, who was pensive, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. I wondered how keenly he could feel the moisture in the air—or maybe lack thereof at this altitude.

  Everybody was engaged in some kind of avoidance behavior. Distraction was the king of pursuits for those of us waiting for whatever might happen once we reached York. It wasn’t that we expected hostilities, but given what Sienna had told me…

  Well, I’d warned them all to be prepared, and it looked like most of them were taking the hint.

  Except Friday and Kat. They were sleeping. And one of them was snoring. (Kat, surprisingly.)

  “The sleep of the innocent, huh?” Chase chucked a thumb at Friday and sat down next to me in the empty seat that everyone else had left abandoned. It was like they could sense my mood, or maybe read the “F off” written all over my face.

  “You’ve known him longer than I have,” I said with a little amusement. “How innocent does Friday strike you?”

  “I never knew him as Friday until I came here,” Chase said. “What’s that all about?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said with a shrug. “I think Sienna came up with it. Guy Friday or something, because he used to follow our old boss around so close that if Phillips stopped too abruptly, Friday would have fallen in.”

  “That’s interesting,” Chase said, looking back over her shoulder at where Friday sat alone, but hopefully for different reasons than me. His head was back, his mouth was open, and he looked pretty much dead to the world.

  “As interesting as anything related to Friday can be, I guess,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something?” Chase showed her nervousness by scratching her arm. “Everyone else on this thing—” she just plunged right ahead without waiting for my answer on the previous question “—is all full of hearty conviction that they’re running into a worthy cause. Can I just ask…is there something I’m missing about Sienna and this whole Eden Prairie thing? Keeping in mind I’m the new girl, and don’t really, uh, know anyone that well yet, so I miss all the good gossip.”

  “The Eden Prairie thing wasn’t Sienna’s fault,” I said, letting my weariness seep out in the form of a story. It wasn’t a story I tended to tell very often, mainly because no one seemed to want to hear it. “The Supreme Court issued a ruling—probably influenced by President Harmon, who hated Sienna—that turned loose all those criminal metas she’d put away over the last few years—”

  “Yep,” Chase said. “I read about that. But, I mean, the official reports talked about her losing her damned mind and nuking a commercial park filled with reporters and innocent people.”

  “And killing all those criminals she’d released,” I said, “who’d turned up at our office for a spontaneous protest in the middle of the night, masquerading as a lynch mob. One of them turned the reporters into a bunch of feral animals, sent them after her. She broke their control, but she got overwhelmed by all those criminals afterward, and…they had her down, so she…went off like a bomb, I guess.”

  “Huh,” Chase said. “No wonder the LA thing went over like a lead balloon. I was kinda out of the country working when the Eden Prairie deal went down.”

  “They didn’t have the internet where you were?” I asked with a snarky smile.

  “Not at that time, no,” she said, utterly serious. “So…if Sienna dusted those crooks in self-defense, why is she still public enemy number one?”

  “Because President Harmon was a meta running a scheme to take over the world by boosting his metahuman telepathic powers so he could mind-control everyone.” She raised an eyebrow, then the other, and I felt compelled to further explain. “That…sounds really stupid when you just blurt it out that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Little farfetched, yeah,” she admitted. “Boosted powers? Telepathic president? Man…you people deal with some weird stuff.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Chase got a little gleam of mischief in her eye. “You people deal—”

  “We do, we really do,” I said, nodding along.

  “So why is everyone avoiding you like you’re a black hole?” Chase asked. “Like you’re a bomb on the plane. Or a snake on a plane.”

  “Probably because Samuel L. Jackson isn’t around to announce me as such,” I said, looking around for J.J. He’d supply the Samuel L. Jackson line if he heard Chase reference it, I was sure of that much. “Look, Chase…”

  “Oh, man. Is this the part where you shut me out because this isn’t any of my business?”

  I took a deep breath, biting down that first instinct, because…it kinda was her business. “No,” I said. “You’re riding into this storm with us, so…it’s totally your business now. The reason they’re avoiding me is probably—and I’m just guessing here—because I’m projecting a black hole, and no one wants to ask how I really feel, even though they can hear us talking.”

  “As usual, you’re amazingly self-aware,” Veronika announced from a couple rows back. “You keep it up and you’ll be self-actualizing in no time.”

  “That sounds dirty,” Friday said. In his sleep, I think.

  “We’re having to sneak into the UK,” I said, looking Chase right in the eyes. “Do you know why?”

  “They’ve got a metahuman ban,” she said. “The whole EU does.” She laughed grimly. “I’ve had to dodge it for years for work.”

  “Do you know how it happened?” I asked, smacking my lips. She shrugged. “Out of the country and away from the internet when it went down?” She didn’t react save for a subtle hardening of her attitude to tell me she wasn’t amused. “Fine, I’ll tell you—it’s because I went to Rome and got into a fight just outside the Vatican with a meta who wanted to create a nation state of his own in Italy, starting with killing the Pope and taking over the Holy See to make it his evil fortress.”

  Chase’s eyes widened subtly. “Seriously? That plan? The weirdest shit. Grandiose much?”

  “I don’t choose my own villains,” I said with a sigh. “Anyway, I stopped these guys, with help from, uh, the Goddess Diana and another Poseidon who was a priest. But it was a pretty ugly incident, and so the EU decided they’d had about enough of meta shenanigans, and just slapped a blanket ban on us. It was still pretty early days for our kind being out, and they’d lost most of their meta population in the war, so…anyway. Meta ban. It’s on me.” I thumped my chest lightly. “So anyway…when we get to York…”

  “We’re going to have to kinda…lay low, aren’t we?” she asked, getting it.

  “Like a snake on—not a plane—its belly.” I leaned back in my seat. “This rescue mission? Would have been a lot easier if not for my mess in Italy a few years back. So, you want to know why people are avoiding me? It’s because I’m a pit of worry for my sister, who I have the luxury of knowing is innocent, and who is as powerless as she’s been since the end of the war, is trapped behind enemy lines, basically, in an EU country, and might not even make it to the rendezvous. But if she does,” I said, finally drawing close to the grey crux of worry that was hanging around my neck right now, “I don’t know that we’re going to easily be able to hang out waiting for her, because the minute we pop off this plane, if anyone recognizes us—”

  “We’re in the soup,” Chase said, nodding along. “And not good soup either, like chicken and wild rice. Probably bad soup, like that thin, crappy tomato stuff that tastes like watered down ketchup.”

  “Close enough,” I said, giving her that one. And I just let her think it over, as I looked out the window and saw the coast on the horizon.

  We’re coming, Sienna, I thought, but didn’t dare say
aloud for fear someone would hear me and think—I dunno, decently of me, maybe. And for fear that maybe…in spite of all the things she’d done wrong in her life…it would be my screw-up that ultimately killed my sister’s chance to escape the UK.

  And just maybe…kill her, too.

  30.

  Sienna

  I was screwed over by Edinburgh again, and I didn’t really have a lot of options available to me that I liked.

  The mob behind me broke into a run as soon as I saw them, so, naturally, I broke into a run too, pounding down the street at meta speed, cries of angry and disgruntled people starting to bellow out from behind me. Waverly Station was right ahead, and there was no point in politely pretending I wasn’t a meta when a randomly assembled street gang of people dressed in…

  Whoa.

  While my lead pursuer might have been dressed in quite the, ah…aesthetically displeasing ensemble, what with the shredded jeans and all, his fellow members of the Kill Sienna Gang were not following his fashion example. I saw men in suits, women dressed for the office, two people looking like they were homeless, someone who might well have been on their way to a punk rock concert…

  I was about to be killed by horde of Edinburghers who probably wouldn’t have associated with each other under normal circumstances. Yay for bringing people together. I was a unifier.

  Waverly’s triangular roof stuck up straight ahead, and I tried to decide whether it’d be better to leap the wall and try to hide in the crowd or dodge this lot and circle around to the main entrance. Hopefully they hadn’t hacked my stolen phone (a very Jamal thing to do, but hopefully not a very Rose one) because if so, the damned game was up on my current destination and also my final one.

  My boots thudded against the sidewalk and I shoved past an old lady wearing a head scarf. She let out a cry of shock as I jetted past, almost knocking her over just by momentum. I looked back to see her astounded face…

  And also my tattered jeans pursuer running a hell of a lot faster than a normal human would, leaving the rest of the angry mob behind.