06 - Vengeful

by Robert J. Crane

  End them, Wolfe said. Don’t be weak.

  “I’m not trying to be weak,” I said. “If you think walking out there and attempting to respond without wiping them off the face of the earth in a first strike is weak, let me tell you something—it’s a hell of a lot more challenging than just burning them like chicken nuggets in a microwave.” What? I’m not exactly a great cook.

  Foolish, Wolfe said. Weak of will to do it this way.

  “I won’t argue with the first part,” I said as Dog wandered over to me. He looked like he needed a nighttime walk. “But if you test my will, I think you’ll find it appropriately strong.”

  He backed off as I grabbed the leash from the counter and strung it onto Dog’s neck. I led him out into the elevator and listened to the dinging quietly, waiting for Wolfe to make a counter-argument. We made it past the security checkpoint, manned by a lone guard reading a magazine, and out into the quiet fall night, breeze blowing lightly, a wash of stars hanging overhead, before he spoke again.

  You could die. He sounded … concerned. Probably for himself, but still.

  “I take that risk every day, don’t I?”

  You should just wipe them out.

  “I don’t want to b …” I took a breath of the cool night air. “I made myself inhuman in order to save humanity.” I switched to speaking in my own head, suddenly more aware of Dog looking at me funny. I already don’t know if I can come back from that, but … I don’t want to live my entire life apart from the world because I’m not like them.

  You could be Death, he said, like it was some kind of a good thing.

  “I don’t want to be Death,” I said, a little numbly. “I just want to be me.” And I stared up at the ceiling of stars above me, feeling the chill air wrap itself around me like a frigid hug, and let the silence wash over me.

  34.

  Ma

  Dawn found them on a back road outside Sumter, Minnesota, and they got ever closer as the minutes ticked by. Ma was watching the road signs, especially as they approached what had been Glencoe and saw how the road deviated in order to avoid the cratered wreck that used to be a town. It didn’t really surprise her; she’d been talking with Cassidy when they’d steered Anselmo there, and she’d made a mental note of it. It was pretty nice ground for a fight, after all, especially if you were of a mind to do some real brawling, just let it all hang out.

  And she was about ready for just that.

  They pulled in and made way for Blimpy to do his thing. “How long you need?” she asked him as they all stood there, sunrise not quite up over the lip of the crater just yet.

  “Pffft,” Blimpy said, shivering in his overalls. “Five minutes. You go do what you gotta do, we’ll be all ready when you get back.”

  “How you going to keep her off your tail?” Denise asked as Ma headed back to the van with Simmons and Junior.

  She paused to pick at a rust spot where it had eaten through the side of the car. “She ain’t going to be on us for a while. I reckon she’s going to have to track us afterward. But if she gets on us before that, I’ll call and let you know.”

  Denise raised an eyebrow at that. It made her face look longer. “You think you’ll have time?”

  “Fine, Simmons’ll do it,” Ma said, bumping Simmons as he got into the front seat. He looked nervous, like he was going to shake apart any time now. “Just relax and help them get set up.” She slammed the door behind her as she got in the van. “Trouble will be along shortly.”

  35.

  Sienna

  They filed into my destroyed quarters not too long after breakfast. I felt bad, like I should have put on a spread for them or something, or maybe at least had coffee, or something other than ketchup that was probably a few months past the expiration date.

  So they filed in silently, past the place where I’d just given up and pulled my door out of the entry space, propped it up against the far wall of the living room, figuring maintenance would get around to fixing it maybe when I wasn’t suspended any longer. I’d put in a request but hadn’t heard a peep. I didn’t even really know whether we had a maintenance department at this point. Ariadne could have cut them out of the budget for all I knew.

  Ariadne, unsurprisingly, was the first to show up. She had a silver travel coffee mug in hand, and the steamy smell of the contents made me want to zoom off and pick some up real quick. She was followed by Augustus, who looked a little worn and ragged but who greeted me with a nod and not much else. Unusual for him, since he wasn’t really the taciturn sort.

  Reed and Dr. Perugini came in a few minutes later, interrupting an awkward silence, thankfully. I still wasn’t used to seeing my brother without hair, though hints of stubble were present on the top of his skull. Dr. Zollers entered moments after that, subtle and quiet, barely saying anything but making us all aware of his presence.

  “Hey hey hey,” J.J. said as he wandered in with a laptop under his arm. It had a face like an alien on it where the computer logo should have been, which I thought was a little weird. He just invited himself to sit down at my table and open up the laptop, and I let him because—I mean, really, I was about to ask him for a favor, so …

  Scott came in last, bandaged, arm in a sling and a hobble to his step. He looked a little grey in the face and examined the crowd in my room with a jaundiced eye, like he was wondering what we were all doing there.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, nervous. I know, me nervous, but yeah, I was. This was an off-the-books kind of thing, since I was suspended and like half of them weren’t even agency personnel, but still … nervous. “And on such short notice, too.” I’d sent out an email only a few hours earlier, sometime between two and three in the morning, wondering if I’d even get a response.

  “Well, you know, there’s always a ton of meetings to attend on a Saturday,” Augustus said, sounding about as drained as he looked.

  I blinked rapidly. “It’s Saturday?”

  Scott chuckled and Ariadne shook her head. A ripple of amusement made its way through the rest of them. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Reed said, “my sister, the most powerful meta on the planet. Awareness—not so much one of those powers.”

  “It’s been a busy week,” I said, blushing, brushing hair behind my ears while I gathered my thoughts. “So, uh … sorry to call you in on a Saturday …”

  “If it’d been a Monday,” Augustus said under his breath, “I’d have been like, ‘I got class!’ and said nope.”

  “I’ve missed work for the last few days,” Scott said back to him. “My boss would be so mad if I missed another.”

  “Sorry,” Reed said, “you said boss, but I think you mean ‘Daddy.’” He grinned at Scott, who blushed.

  “What do you need, Sienna?” Ariadne asked, right back on point.

  “I need your help,” I said, back to being tentative again. “I think we all know what’s going on right now, specifically in regards to who’s been targeting me—”

  “Us,” Reed corrected. My train of thought ground to a halt. “These people unleashed Anselmo and then turned him loose on the agency and the city without a thought for the collateral damage. Same with poisoning you into a coma. Even if they didn’t mean to kill the rest of us, they’ve just missed succeeding at it several times over.” He folded his arms, and his lack of beard made his lonely, bare lip look extra stern when he pursed his lips. “They’re not just targeting you, or if they are, their aim is awful.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I got my back broke and my brother got knocked out,” Augustus said. “Plus we both got shot at. You know how many times we got shot at in the hood? None. Exactly none. Take a black man out to the farm in Nebraska, though, and it’s BOOM BOOM, you know? Shots fired.”

  “Is he all right?” I asked, now even more tentative.

  “He’s fine,” Augustus said, waving off my concern. “Looked like he was enjoying his hospital food when I left. He was talking about staying in Omaha for a while, guess he liked the town or something, y
ou know—what he saw of it from the ambulance window. I think he has another crush on a nurse, like he’s got a thing for Florence Nightingales or something—”

  I cleared my throat. “Okay. So the Clary family is targeting me, and they’re hitting a lot of innocent people in the process.”

  Dr. Perugini snorted, and when everybody looked at her, she shrugged. “I would say ‘some’ innocents. Not all of you could be defined that way.”

  “I’m an as innocent as a spring lamb,” Augustus protested.

  “They have shown an unsurprising lack of concern in their efforts,” Dr. Zollers said, stepping into the conversation. “It doesn’t seem to matter to them who they hurt so long as they get Sienna.”

  “But they also wanted to protect themselves from blowback,” Reed said, shaking his index finger as he made his point, “which is why they never blew the whistle on Sienna’s killing of M-Squad. They did everything else they could to assassinate her character except pull out the one card that would have finished the job faster than anything.”

  “Being exposed like this,” Zollers said, musing it over, “they might not hesitate to get as nasty as it takes. That may come out.” He said the last as he was looking at me, a sly warning like only Zollers could deliver.

  “I’ve got a presidential pardon locked in a bank vault that will insulate me from the legal consequences of that,” I said, trying to keep my head high. I saw Ariadne flush out of the corner of my eye and didn’t dare look at her. “As for the other ramifications of it coming out …” I paused, feeling regret wash over me. “Well, there’s nothing I can do. If it happens, it happens. I’ll deal with it later.”

  “What do you want to do, Sienna?” Ariadne asked, a little more direct than last time, as she sat her coffee mug on the counter.

  “I need help,” I said again, lying at least a little. I didn’t need help, but having help would mean I didn’t have to face this family of bandits alone, that I might not have to escalate the fight immediately to Defcon 1, where I’d be forced to kill them right off. Or maybe it’d force me to in order to protect a teammate. I was shooting in the dark, but I was sick of doing so alone. “I got into this mess because I started down a road toward revenge on my own—”

  “And now you want us to keep you company while you kill them all?” J.J. asked, and he sounded, uhm … totally onboard with that.

  “Uhh, no,” I said, a little troubled by his tone. “I was hoping you’d help me bring them to justice.”

  “You’ve dragged in a few villains so far,” Reed said, sounding a little skeptical. “All wanted or having committed some obvious crime, right?” I nodded, and he went on. “How do you think Phillips is going to react when you try and bring in the Clarys, who—so far as he knows—haven’t committed any crimes?” He looked around the room. “I mean, you and I know they have, but it looks to the lawyers out there like we have no evidentiary standards. He’s going to require something other than your say-so, suspended agent.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding. “The good news is that J.J. has a little bit on these people—”

  “I do?” J.J.’s eyes were wide, his lips formed into a perfect O of surprise. “I didn’t find anything on them—”

  “Did you keep the stuff Jamal came up with?” Augustus asked impatiently.

  “Oh, yeah,” J.J. nodded, back to his version of normal again. “Totally. All documented. I kept one of his programs, too, because it was soooo cool—”

  “Well, that’s something,” Reed said, switching focus back to me. “But this is gonna rest on Phillips’s judgment. Do you think he’s going to be eager to see the Clarys sitting in his jail when it’s your word and some computer intel that’s putting them there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. “On paper, they’re all petty lawbreakers ’til now. At least, that’s all they’ve been caught doing. I’d bet they’ve done more, because they’re pretty good at being bad—” I paused, felt a subtle vibration in my knees and wondered if my lack of sleep was finally catching up with me.

  “What?” Augustus asked.

  “I don’t kn—” I cut myself off halfway through the thought, because that subtle vibration I thought was all in my knees became not subtle, became so strong it turned over Ariadne’s coffee mug.

  “Oh, shit,” Reed said, his eyes on me, horrorstruck as he realized what was going on.

  “Earthquake!” J.J. shrieked as the lights flashed and the room shook. “Ohmig—”

  I saw in Reed’s eyes that he had vaulted straight to the same page I had. This was Minnesota, not known for seismic events. A crack appeared in my ceiling and plaster dust rained down as the intensity increased and a rumble of structural protest echoed through the building.

  “Simmons,” I whispered, as the first chunk of the ceiling came down, hitting Scott and drawing a scream as it landed right on his wounded arm. Another fell right after, like some set being destroyed on a Hollywood picture, then another, as the roof started to cave in around us, the revenge I expected from the Clarys showing up hours early—and in a form I wouldn’t have ever thought they’d have the gall to even try.

  36.

  Ma

  “That’s right,” she said soothingly to Simmons. He was sweating something fierce, even in the cool Minnesota morning. His hands were extended toward the fence just in front of them, and beyond it to the buildings that were hiding on the other side of the thick woods that shielded the agency campus from view. They’d left the car behind and walked here, only a few hundred yards from where Sienna Nealon lay her pretty little head, where she called home, where she schemed and planned and—“You just keep it up, darlin’, you’re showing ’em who’s the boss.”

  “It’s so … hard …” Simmons choked out. Ma’s mind ran to a natural double entendre on that one, given what she knew about the boy, but she dismissed that thought with just a little distaste. He was a filthy little shitbird, Eric Simmons, without an ounce of loyalty to anyone or anything but his own man parts. She pulled his beanie cap off, figuring if he was sweating he was probably getting warm, and she brushed the hair off his brow, mopping it up with the cloth. It stuck there like it’d been sculpted.

  “You’re tearing down buildings, you hear that?” Ma could hear it. There was a rumble in the distance as the earth quaked. Junior looked a little unsteady on his feet; the ground was moving around them like someone had a sheet underneath and was giving it a hard tug, maybe even attached it to a tractor and started to drive off with them still standing on top. “You’re bringing her to her knees. Her friends are in there, and the walls are coming down around them.” Another big bead of sweat coursed down the side of his face. She whispered in his ear, “Imagine how much you hate her, imagine what she and that brother of hers did to you—beat you, smacked you around like you were their own red-headed stepchild. Now you can bury ’em. You are burying them.” She mopped up his temple with the hat, the fibers rough in her hand. “Just bring it all down around their ears.”

  Simmons drew a ragged breath, his hands swaying like the wind of a hurricane had caught them. He wouldn’t last much longer, the sissy boy. She just needed to keep him at it a little more, bring down a little more hell on Sienna Nealon, take out just a few more of her allies, probably scared and alone in their little rooms in their little hideout …

  “You can’t save ’em all, girl,” she whispered, feeling a strange smile of satisfaction twist at her lips. “Maybe now you’ll know how it feels.”

  37.

  Sienna

  I saved them all and did it in one trip.

  Reed grabbed Perugini, Augustus snatched up J.J., Scott jumped over the balcony a second after Dog hopped up under his good arm, and I took hold of Ariadne and Zollers, one under each arm, and we went out the slider that Augustus helpfully created for us with his powers, shattering the window and clearing the glass as he did so. It was a well-orchestrated escape that culminated in wind, earth and water being flung around like
crazy. None of us much cared, though, as we landed soft and sprinted pell-mell for open ground, out of the shadow of the dormitory building as it came collapsing down like a house of cards hit by a fit of Reed’s temper. Dust billowed and covered the beautiful blue sky, blocking the sun for a moment as everyone stood in shock in a little cluster.

  “Oh, wow,” J.J. said, and then the parking garage went crashing down off in the distance, the top floor collapsing first and then dropping down on the next and the next until nothing but a cloud of dust bloomed out of the earth where it had stood.

  “Headquarters,” Ariadne said, slapping at my ribs, jarring me out of my stunned silence. “There could be people—”

  I dropped her and Zollers and shot forward, already in motion. I heard Zollers in my head: Guards in the prison entrance, two people on the fourth floor—

  I burst into the fourth-floor windows like a wrecking ball this time, dammit, flying straight out of the conference room where I’d made my entry and swiveling my head, trying to find the survivors. Zollers voice rang again: Phillips’s office.

  I shot toward my destination and burst through the open door, rocking against the wall as ceiling tiles started to fall around me, dust clouding the air. I found Andrew Phillips standing behind his desk, unsteady on his feet, that guy in the black tactical getup with the mask shaking in front of his desk on unsteady legs. He reacted to my entry with no surprise, watching me like I was a threat all the while.

  “Gotta go,” I said and scooped him up without protest. He was big, like, really big, and heavy, and as I picked him up under my arm I felt him tense in a way that suggested to me that he reacted way, way faster than a normal person would have. He didn’t fight me on this, though, and I lifted him over the desk and grabbed Phillips as the windows shattered all around the fourth floor, the building stressed beyond the point of being able to hold them.