Sienna slipped out from behind the counter. “I dunno, seems like you might have had it in hand even if they had.” She blinked, looking around her. “This is … I mean, wow. Nice powers, great usage, beautiful execution.” She paused. “Execution is maybe the wrong word, cuz these guys all look like they’re still breathing. Which is, uh, obviously good. For justice. And stuff.” She waved toward the door and shouted, “Clear!” to the police outside.
Jamie felt a grin break across her face. Heroing had been an adventure so far, but this … this was a new one for her. Something completely different even than the times when she’d faced down minor criminals who’d attempted to resist. This was … thrilling, really. “I see why you—” she started to say, but something caused her to break off.
The sound of metal smashing and shouts of alarm from the police outside.
“What’s—” Sienna started to say, but she was interrupted by something—the SUV outside, Jamie realized too late—exploding. She was thrown to the floor and slammed into the counter as if she’d anchored herself to it by a gravity channel.
35.
Nadine
Nadine heard the explosion through the broken window, her face still carefully turned, head down, focused on her coffee mug resting on her desk. It was several blocks away, she knew, but it was the sound of something far beyond the ordinary—a plan, on schedule, and it rang through the streets like a bell signaling the end of school, or the market closing after a triumphant day.
It sounded like glory—and it sounded like freedom.
36.
Sienna
When the SUV exploded outside, the shockwave hit me like a punch to the chest. I felt the hard compression quivering through my internal organs. Warm liquid oozed out of my ears, something thumped me in the forehead, and then I smelled metallic tang of blood as I keeled over, blood dribbling into my eyes.
Something burned just below my hairline, like someone had taken a knife and hacked into my skull with a chisel. I moaned low but couldn’t hear it, trapped in my own head, the world dark and fuzzy around me.
“That’s … probably not good,” Zack said quietly, sounding like a real person speaking in my ear instead of a faint voice inside my head.
“I’m guessing skull fracture,” Roberto Bastian said in his clipped tones. “Blood in the eyes, lack of clarity of thought.”
“She’s never had much of a brain,” Eve Kappler deadpanned.
“This is not good,” Aleksandr Gavrikov said.
“Brain injuries tend not to be,” Bjorn said in his thick Nordic accent.
Sienna, Wolfe said, and his voice faded as he continued to speak, I am healing you, but you’ve taken some sort of shrapnel to the brain. I blinked, listening to this low, gravelly voice speak. It’s going to take a minute to get your mind right again after this.
“More like … mind … less … am … I right?” I said, not really sure what I was saying.
Yes, said Eve Kappler, you are mindless sometimes.
“Thanx,” I said, putting an x on the end as I slurred my speech. An x just belonged on the end of that word, I felt. Like xylophone should have been spelled with a damned z. I tried to lift my head and failed, thumping it on the bank’s tile floor. I blinked my eyes again. They were shaded with warm, dark liquid, and grainy dust had settled in it. I could feel it getting stuck in my eyelashes as I tried to clear my vision.
I ran a hand over my face clumsily and brushed away a strip of my vision. It still hurt to have my eyes open, though. I dragged my sticky fingers down my cheekbones like I was painting my skin for war or a football game or something. I blinked over and over, trying to get that awful feeling out of my eyes so I could see, so I could see what was going on, but it wasn’t really working. All I could see was a haze over me, and faint hints of a scarred ceiling somewhere above.
I jerked as feeling returned to my toes. I hadn’t even realized I couldn’t feel them until the sensation came back and it felt like I stubbed my right big toe before that pain faded with Wolfe’s healing ability. I tried to lift my head again and succeeded, the warm blood dripping out of my ear like I’d gotten water stuck in it.
I turned over onto my belly in hopes it would let the liquid run out of my eyes, but it didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. I ran my bare forearm over them, and that made it a little better. I could see again, though I was still blinking heavily against the grit and blood, and there was a smear of red all down my wrist now.
“I’m giving at the … office today,” I muttered to myself, swiping at my eyes again with my other wrist. They were tearing up now, and my head was just throbbing like someone had clenched a vein inside. Every beat of my heart was like a drum beat, and someone was going kind of wild with the bass line.
“Olympic One,” came a voice from out of the periphery of my vision, “this is Torch. Extract in ten seconds.”
What the hell did that mean? I wondered, and then my hearing fully returned.
Something slammed into metal outside, and I looked up, trying to see through the front window of the bank, searching for some sign of where the noise was originating. I blinked in the harsh daylight. Cops were sprinting in all directions, hustling out from behind the cop cars still parked out on the street. The SUV that had blown up was still smoking, and I wondered how they’d passed the bomb inspection dog on that one.
“Five seconds to extract. Respond please, Olympic One.”
I realized at last that the talking was coming from a radio that one of the downed robbers was wearing. It was attached to his tactical vest like a SWAT or Special Forces operator, except the earpiece had fallen out of his ear during the fight with Jamie, so I was catching the broadcasts with my meta hearing. A vein in my temple throbbed as I realized that this was the escape plan, that these guys had intended to get caught in the bank all along. This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a bug in their plan.
It was a feature.
I staggered to my feet and stumbled toward the front door. Be careful, Sienna, Wolfe warned me, you are still not well.
“I’ll be fine, just keep the healing going,” I mumbled as a piece of metal the size of three of my fingers popped out of my forehead and clanked against the ground, covered in blood. I staggered out through the front door, onto the sidewalk, the sounds of metal crashing getting louder. I looked to the east, figuring maybe I’d get a hint of what was coming—like a school bus, or another SUV, anything, really, but what I saw.
It was a garbage truck.
And it was on the sidewalk.
Barreling toward me.
If I’d been at the peak of my capacity, I might have been able to do something about it, like punch the engine out through the grill, or hurl a fireball, or transform into a dragon and bite it in half.
As it was, I sat there, slow-witted as though I’d just woken up, locking eyes with the driver, whose face was hidden behind a ski mask except for his eyes, which widened at the sight of me. A moment later I heard the sound of him accelerating before the grill smashed right into me and sent me flying through the air, my limbs not even responding to commands.
37.
Nadine
The sound of the explosion made Nadine look around, though she tried to keep her expression neutral. Was that the scent of something burning on the breeze that was wafting into her office? Could be. Could very well be. The sounds of crashing cars were prevalent, too, and she turned back to her desk and put her head down again, only letting one little comment out, under her breath, in hopes the FBI microphones would lose it under the wind.
“Sweet, sweet music.”
38.
Jamie
“Snake One, this is Torch. Olympic One must be down! Sienna Nealon just came out of the bank!”
“Roger. Switch to alternate frequency three.”
“Roger that.”
Jamie opened her eyes as the words filtered through her consciousness, the pain in her head like she’d stuffed it into a metal vise
and gone wild spinning it tight. She couldn’t even see straight. As she lifted her head, she noticed an indentation in the counter where the wood had chipped from her striking it when she’d been knocked down by the blast.
She pushed up on her hands, palms covered in dust and dirt from her fall. Her thigh still felt like it was on fire from where that robber had slashed her with the knife.
Something snapped into place in her mind, and she remembered the words she’d heard as she was waking up, like a conversation that had woven its way into her dreams. “Sienna …?” she said, getting to her feet on unsteady legs. “Sienna?”
Hadn’t the voice said something about her walking out of the bank? Jamie looked to the door, which was missing, along with all the glass from the front window she could see. The little pylons with their interlaced nylon straps that formed the snaking line to the tellers had all been knocked over, though whether it happened when the robbers had secured the scene or sometime during the brawl or even perhaps during the explosion, she couldn’t recall. They were all tipped over now, though, like a massive latticework of black straps and poles, the world’s largest rope line. “And I’m not even at a club,” she muttered. Not that she’d ever been into the club scene.
Jamie made her way to the front door and out into the street. The cop cars that had been parked out front looked like they’d been smashed, one with a destroyed rear and the other spun about so that she could see the damage on the front right side. They’d been parked so that they could provide cover to the cops, but now they were positioned like a great big battering ram had run through and—
“Oh,” Jamie said and looked to her right.
Off in the distance she could see something—a garbage truck, it looked like, making a hard turn to the left. She stared at it for a second as it threatened to disappear from sight, and then she remembered that—
These are the bad guys.
Gotta stop them.
She made the channel direct to the ground beneath her feet and shot into the air, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet in a second. She launched off of one she set up on the building behind her, setting it to repulse and shooting her up like she’d been blown out of a gun barrel. She used a steady sequence of pulsing channels to keep her aloft as she flung herself after the truck, but when she turned the corner it was making another wide swing, this time onto—she glanced at the street sign—Albany Street.
The truck sped up again, slamming into a taxi with a sickening crunch and knocking it cleanly out of the way. Jamie bounced around the corner as she started to lose altitude, ping-ponging off of quick channels she set up off the ground on either side like tilted light posts.
She flew over the top of a short parking garage and latched herself onto the roof of the garbage truck, trying to drag herself along. If she could get close enough, she might be able to set up enough channels directly to the roadway beneath to slow it down, probably even stop it.
But where was Sienna? That was the question that didn’t seem to have an answer at the moment.
The garbage truck blew an intersection, smashing through an old Jeep and mangling its hood, sending pieces flying in every direction. Jamie latched hard onto the corrugated metal rear of the truck and held on. She threw up a quick channel and anchored it to the street, reversing the pull, and the truck slowed for a moment—
Then a chunk of pavement a few inches deep ripped free and started to drag behind the vehicle.
“Uh oh,” Jamie muttered. This was getting complicated.
She considered latching it to the buildings on either side, but it had to be going forty, fifty miles an hour now, ramming everything in its way. The roar of the engine was like nothing she’d heard from one of these trucks before, like it had been supercharged. It smashed the heck out of a Volvo, and came barreling up on a circular cul-de-sac that marked the end of the road.
Jamie stared, drifting above the truck, hanging on by a gravity channel as it sped up and headed toward the Battery Park City Esplanade, a stone walkway that meandered along the Hudson River. She stared at it, uncomprehending, then glanced down to see if the driver was bailing out of the truck.
He wasn’t.
Ahead was a series of stone pillars built up in a little monument that looked vaguely like the ruins of a Greek temple. The truck jumped the curb from the cul-de-sac and plunged right into the columns, making the ruined temple even more ruined as the truck raced madly toward the Hudson River.
Jamie unlatched herself just as the grill smashed into the rails, concrete and metal grinding as the garbage truck launched into the water. It hit with a splash and started to sink as she stared, hanging in the air twenty feet over the edge of the water, disbelieving.
Why would someone do … that? she wondered.
Jamie looked around to either side, waiting for the driver to come up. A quick examination of the towers on either side gave her pause; maybe she could latch the garbage truck to them and dredge it up, but more likely she’d peel the facade off the buildings—or worse—in a futile effort to drag it to the surface.
She waited only another moment before she made her choice, and dove into the river. Maybe the driver had panicked, maybe he’d just been in over his head—in more ways than one, now—but he didn’t need to die for it. She hit the water and it rushed around her, cool and smelly.
She swam down, thrashing her arms through the Hudson, eyes open and peering into the murky darkness. Her costume was going to need a hell of a laundering after this, she reflected as she tried to follow the natural trajectory of the garbage truck to the bottom. It didn’t take long.
She found it on the riverbed, among a whole mess of other discarded garbage. The truck was easy to see, daylight filtering down well enough that she could see its outline. The front door was open, and driver was gone, she realized as soon as she reached it. She looked around the truck, but there was no hint of him in the water, no sign that he’d swum off …
Jamie could feel the pressure on her lungs as she started back to the surface, hurrying up as quickly as she could for a breath of air when she glimpsed it. It made her stop, holding off the panic that came from not being able to draw breath as she stared down at the rear of the truck.
It was open, wide, as though something had come out.
As she broke the surface, Jamie’s head was spinning, and not just from the lack of oxygen. She blinked, gasping, in the overhead sun, the smell of the river rancid in her nostrils.
What had been in the back of that garbage truck? Some kind of submarine?
Who was doing this?
And where was Sienna?
39.
Sienna
“Are you all right?”
Urk.
Well.
That hurt.
As far as pain goes, getting leveled by a garbage truck riding at high speed on a sidewalk is right up there with some of the other anguish-laden experiences of my life—getting my foot blown off, getting electro-shocked to death, listening to Reed try to explain the virtues of Windows 10 as an operating system and why he’d forgiven Microsoft for all their suckitude up to that point. It was right up there with those experiences.
“Can you hear me?” a voice asked, right above me, and I opened my eyes to see a guy with dark hair and geek glasses—hell, geek everything—staring down at me with obvious concern.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not deaf.”
“Jeez!” He jumped to his feet from a kneeling position. I hadn’t even realized he was down, though as he rose it became pretty obvious, even through my half-closed eyes. “Are you … are you Sienna Nealon?”
I sat up, grunting at the residual pain. Take it easy, Wolfe said in my head. This is a lot of hurt in a very short time. “‘A lot of hurt in a very short time’? That’s gonna be the title of my biography, I swear.” I looked at the guy hovering above me, and realized I was on a white tile floor in a bathroom, with a busted wall and window opening to the street at my left. “Yes,” I s
aid, my brain finally lurching back to his question. “I’m Sienna Nealon.”
“Wow,” he said, positively burbling. “You are … like … so amazeballs. Is …” his voice changed tone from awe to confusion, “… Is that blood?”
“Usually,” I said, the answer coming out low and miserable, which was exactly how I was feeling by no coincidence. I got to my feet and stood there, hunched over in his bathroom, leaning against a towel rack. He was dressed in a worn-out cotton hoodie and jeans that looked like they might have been considered vintage during the first Roosevelt’s presidency. “What the hell happened?”
“I was in there,” he pointed behind him to what looked like a broom closet but was probably a living room, “and I heard a crash, and I came in here and, uh …” He laughed weakly, “… well, I was wondering for a second if, uh, all my dreams had come true.”
I cocked a bloody eye at him. “You dream of a woman smashing her way through your bathroom wall looking like she’s been through a street fight?”
He froze, mouth slightly open, eyes looking at the ceiling as he searched for the right answer. “Uh, well, no, uh … really I just, uhm … kinda wanted to meet you, because you’re … really kickass and cool and everything.”
I stood there, staring at him. Breathing hurt at the moment, but glaring wasn’t having any adverse effects. “I have a boyfriend,” I said.
“Oh, uhm, well, sorry,” he said, eyes turning down. “He’s … I’m sure he’s a really lucky … and … and wonderful guy.”
“He’s a poor bastard who probably doesn’t know what he’s in for, but thanks,” I said, straightening up. My entire spinal column popped as I readjusted it now that Wolfe had done his thing and healed it. The guy standing before me cringed at the sound. I cracked my knuckles and looked out the hole in the wall. “Did you happen to get the license plate for the truck that hit me?” I looked back at him after I was sure the truck was gone, and he was just shaking his head. “Oh, come on. There was a bank robbery down there. You didn’t think I dropped in from heaven?”
Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) Page 15