Hell yeah. It was time to make my big debut.
3.
Sienna
I was in the middle of doing a thousand rep set of curls with my three-hundred-pound dumbbells when Augustus came on the TV. I wanted to drop my weights and shout, “I know him!” because my human contact had been limited over the last couple months, but I was still self-aware enough to know that a person with six hundred pounds of weight in her hands shouldn’t leap to her feet in a sixth-floor studio apartment.
Because I had dignity, dammit. And a very, very thin subfloor that I didn’t want to break.
Instead I sat on the edge of my seat and kept curling my dumbbells furiously as I watched. “Dayum, boyee,” I said softly as reporters thrust microphones in Augustus’s face and asked him stupid questions like, “How do you feel right now?” and, “Was this level of violence really necessary?” Like there weren’t still-living criminals in the wreckage behind him.
Clearly, the world was suffering from a deficit of Sienna if they considered that to be a level of violence that bordered on the unacceptable.
Every new age brings with it a softening of the people, Wolfe said with a trace of regret.
“It’s called civilization, Wolfey. Most of us consider it a good thing.”
Your fragility compared to the folk of my era is appalling, Bjorn opined.
“That’s okay,” I said, grunting as I curled again, “because your savagery is still pretty appalling to many of those living nowadays.”
But not you, Eve Kappler said.
“Not entirely, no,” I said. “But then, my savagery is appalling to a lot of people who live in the modern world.”
Could you possibly stop exercising for one minute so I can pay attention to this? Gerry Harmon asked with vague disgust. Not that I’m complaining that you’ve whipped yourself into shape, but it’s really distracting to have all this grunting and straining going on while I’m trying to keep informed about the events of the day.
“Why, thank you, Gerry,” I said, not stopping. I wasn’t Crossfit-crazy, but I’d definitely upped my game since I’d come to Portland to hunker down for the summer. I was still a shut-in for the most part, but I was filling my hours with fitness, with training—as much as my apartment floor could bear.
I should have rented an actual house. Stupid explosive Portland real estate market, blocking me from ground-floor opportunities at reasonable prices.
“You know, we’re really just working hard to curb the instances of … uh, rising metahuman crime …” Augustus went on in the background.
Someone finally noticed the number of metas has gotten jacked up these last couple years, huh? Bastian asked.
“Scott knew,” I said, pumping my iron. I couldn’t stop. After this, it was going to be two thousand sit-ups while I watched the cooking channel. Which might end up costing me my gains when I made dinner. “That means the FBI knows. So it’s out there.”
“Trouble like this is on the rise,” Augustus said. “We’re just trying to do our part to make sure it’s dealt with responsibly.”
I could see Reed in the background, watching and listening. I’d caught him on a few shows lately, the face of this new agency, and while I loved my bro, it was nice to see Augustus putting his face forward.
You’re actually sick of your brother’s canned answers, aren’t you? Harmon asked.
I stopped pumping iron for a sec. “Look, he’s been on all these shows, and I’m constantly watching—”
Just give me a straight up yes or no.
“Yes,” I said, and resumed my curls. “Reed’s a great conversationalist, but dealing with the press? It’s not like conversation. More didacticism, and he repeats his talking points across every network until I’m ready to slap him in the back of the head just to see if he’ll reboot.”
Gavrikov chuckled. But at least you see him. You know he is safe.
“They’re all safe, Aleksandr,” I said. “Klementina’s probably filming another season of Beyond Human or something. She’ll pop up again soon.”
I’m sure you’re right.
In the meantime, Zack said, do you think you’ll ever take a break from this non-stop exercise? I mean, I’m not complaining, since I do get to see your new and improved ass in the mirror every morning, but—
I paused. “New and improved ass, huh?” I strained my neck trying to look. I’d been working it too, all low weight (relative to my meta strength)/high rep stuff because … well, it would have been a floor breaker to bring a set of weights into this apartment that would actually challenge me.
Your shoulders are pleasingly tighter as well, Eve said, a little too casually.
I ignored that, but flushed a little as I curled again. “No breaks, Zack. No stopping. I can’t get slack again, and besides, imagine how being all thin and taut is going to improve my disguise when I go out in public.” Plus I felt better. I was eating better (mostly). And I wasn’t letting myself get down anymore about the pressure I was under. “Dr. Zollers says I need to take positive actions, steps forward toward my goals in order to keep my sanity, and that’s what I’m going to do.” My forearms and biceps strained. “I’m not letting doubt creep up on me again. I will be prepared for trouble, because trouble will inevitably—”
Come knocking at the door? Harmon asked.
“Yes,” I said, only briefly taken aback at his helpfully finishing my sentence for me. “Trouble always comes knocking, eventually.”
No, I mean you’re going to need to answer the door now, because—
Knock knock! The sound was loud and urgent.
“Who’s that?” I muttered.
Trouble, Harmon said. You should open it and see.
I gently set down one of my dumb bells and kept hold of the other one, readying it to use as a club if Harmon was underselling it. I creaked across the rickety old floor and unlocked the door, wondering if I was making a mistake by answering it.
I threw it open at top speed and immediately backed up because a painfully thin guy came staggering in, drenched with water and blood, coughing, and flopped down only a few feet inside. He was skinny to the point of bony, sodden, hair hanging in limp ringlets over a pale face that was covered in a couple days of scraggly beard growth. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him before, but as he fell he grabbed my arm with meta strength and squeezed hard enough to get my attention. “Sienna …” he wheezed, and then I saw that he’d been lung-shot, the wound already starting to heal over. “… you have to … help me …”
“Who the hell are you?” I asked without tempering my response. It wasn’t every day that total strangers came looking for me at my safe house, soaked to the skin and nursing a sucking chest wound. I kicked the door closed because I didn’t want to chance any of my hipster neighbors overhearing this. They probably thought I was weird enough (compared to them) without adding any fuel to that fire.
“It’s me …” he said, staring up at me, his eyes rolling back in his head, hand clutching at the leg of my yoga pants (yes, I was wearing them unironically, shut up). “It’s … me …”
“You who?” I brandished the dumbell. “Explain or I’m gonna make that gunshot the least of your probl—”
“It’s me, Sienna …” he said, rasping, “… Guy Friday …” And then his body relaxed, grip letting go of my pants leg as he passed out without another word.
Well, Harmon said with undisguised amusement, you wanted to be ready for trouble … here it is.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, “how do these assholes keep finding me?”
4.
Augustus
It’s not easy to disengage from a whole raft of people that are asking you questions, especially when you were raised by a momma who smacked you in the back of the head every time she felt like you weren’t being polite. Ignoring people isn’t polite, but eventually I had to stop talking to the press because Reed had made his way off camera and started to signal to me that he needed my attention elsewhere, a ste
rn look on his face and the local police chief standing impatiently next to him.
I made my way over to them, feeling of nervousness rising in my stomach. “Did I do okay?” I asked as I approached.
Reed stared at me blankly for a second. “I’m sure you did fine. We need you to ‘unlock’ the bad guys, though.”
“Oh. Right.” I’d forgotten about that, and started toward the place where I’d left those boys all gargoyled up in a stony covering. The police chief trailed me, Reed a couple steps behind him.
“Really impressive, this takedown,” the chief said as we made our way past the wreckage of the Chevy, smoke wafting gently off its hood in the combined glare of fifty headlights. The chief’s name was Smithson, and he’d been kinda standoffish when we’d first arrived to consult with him. Seemed to be warming up now, though. “And no rock left on the road for us to clean up, either, except for the stuff still wrapped around those fellas.”
“Let me take care of that, and you’ll have nothing left to clean up,” I said, making my way over to them. They were both shouting from inside their stone encasements, voices sounding scratchy from non-stop screaming to be let out. A few cops were admiring my handiwork and chuckling to themselves. I had left those criminals on all fours, and they looked a little like stone-carved dogs.
“Really impressive,” the chief reiterated. From some people it might have sounded ironic, but the barely concealed awe in his voice made it obvious he was being genuine.
“This is what we do,” Reed said.
“Pros from Dover,” the chief said. “I get that.”
“From Minneapolis, technically,” Reed said, and nodded at me. “Go on.”
“What? I’m from Atlanta.” I pushed back a layer of the rock from the backs of the criminals, and waved a cop with a syringe in his hand forward to dose them with suppressant. He did his thing, and then I waited about sixty seconds, then broke apart the statuettes. “There you go, chief. Two meta criminals, declawed and ready for transport.”
“Oh, hallelujah,” one of the crooks said, gasping for breath like I’d suffocated him. He kissed the ground and started to get to his feet, but a couple of cops wrestled him back down and metacuffed him. He didn’t seem fussed by all the extra weight and power muscling him down; he wore a slight smile as he seemed to savor the cool mountain air. “Another few minutes in that thing and I would have told you everything I’d ever done wrong just to get out.”
“I can put you back in if you’d like,” I said, drawing his wide, fearful eyes to me as the cops dragged him to his feet.
“Dude, I will tell you whatever you want to know,” he said. “Just don’t … put me back in there.”
I shrugged, looking at the chief, who shrugged back. I could tell he was thinking the same thing—that it’d be a shame not to take advantage of this fine opportunity.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Keith Davidson,” the guy said. I looked to see if his compatriot was going to try and get him to shut up, but that guy was quiet as a mouse, and the cops were already culling him from his friend, dragging him toward a cop car to have their own conversation with him. Reed followed slowly behind, providing a watchful eye.
“Where do you live, Keith?” I asked. He spat out an address, chattering almost pleadingly. “And when did you get your powers?”
“Last week,” Keith said, suspended between two bulky officers.
I went through the timeline in my head. We’d just gotten called about these guys last week. “Did you even wait a day before you started doing these home invasions?”
He nodded eagerly, like a dog. “Well, we were high as hell for the first day, so … yeah? We both got our powers at the same time, Jacob and I. And we decided, you know, because we were both between jobs—”
“Do you two live together?” I asked, drawing a pissed-off look from the chief. I’d cut off his confession, I realized, and there were three cops standing around with recorders going.
“Yep,” Keith said. “We have for about three years now. We met after high school and y’know, got to be friends.”
“Tell me about what you did after you found out you had powers,” I said, and let him start rambling on in a full confession of his crimes while I did some thinking of my own. The chief was nodding, smile on his face, and the other cops were watching with plain satisfaction as well.
He said he’d gotten his powers last week, but looking at Keith Davidson, he had to be nearing thirty. The fact that he and his accomplice had been roommates was also suspicious. They both manifested powers the same day, were unrelated, and lived in the same house.
This situation was setting off all my alarm bells, because everything about it suggested that they were not natural-born metas.
It was a dirty little secret of our business that for a while now the number of metahumans had been increasing in an unnatural way. Metahuman powers were originally a genetic pass-down; if your parent was a meta, chances were you would be, too. Sienna had told me early on that only a small percentage of people were born with metahuman genes, and even at the height there had only been about six thousand on the entire earth. An attempted genocide had brought that number down to less than a thousand, most of whom had been concentrated in the United States.
But based on everything we were seeing lately … someone was making new metahumans in the US at a rapid pace. I wasn’t a natural born meta. Neither was my brother, Jamal, or my girlfriend, Taneshia. My old boss had invented a serum that unlocked meta powers, and he’d tested it in my house’s water, among other places, which had accounted for the sudden appearance of powers for the three of us, well past the age when a natural meta would have manifested their abilities.
Either Keith and his buddy had somehow encountered the same serum, or else they’d suddenly developed late-in-the-game powers simultaneously, without being related.
Yeah … that was pretty damned unlikely.
Keith was wrapping up his confession, and I waited for a pause in the conversation to ask my next question. “Do you have any new friends, Keith? Anyone you’ve met recently?”
“Ahh, there’s a girl, Danica,” he said, racking his brain. “I was kinda seeing her a little bit. Took her out last night.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Shore,” he said. “Her roommate went out with Jacob, too.”
“Anyone in the week before that?” I asked. “New friends? Met anyone? Had a … I dunno, a plumber … do any work at your house?”
“Yeah, our sink sprung a leak last week,” he said, frowning. “How’d you know?”
“Just a guess,” I said, suddenly feeling a whole lot of excited. Another wild coincidence? I doubted it. “You know what plumbing company they were from?”
“I dunno, our landlord called them,” Keith said, shrugging as expansively as the metacuffs and the cops hanging on him would allow. “He was Arabian, maybe? Omar, I think? Last name was, uh … Sharif?”
“Oh, the guy who fixed your sink was Omar Sharif, huh?” I quipped. “Must have been a real step down for him, coming back from the dead to fix sinks in Steelwood Springs.”
“I don’t remember his name, man,” Keith said. “Ask my landlord. The guy was quiet. Mumbled a lot. I didn’t even know if he spoke English, cuz he just sort of nodded whenever I’d ask him something.”
“If you think of anything else, have the cops here let me know,” I said.
“Hah,” Keith said, and now he was smiling. “I’ll come tell you myself. I’m going to be out in like five minutes.”
The chief rumbled with a big belly laugh. “How do you figure that? You just confessed to at least ten felonies, and we got it all on tape.”
Keith grinned. “You didn’t read me my rights.”
Every cop around him exploded into laughter, including the chief, and, with a few guffaws, me.
Keith’s grin faded. “What? You didn’t read them to me! That means you can’t use my confession.”
“Check with your lawyer about that, see what he says,” the chief said, laughter drifting off. “That’s funny. Didn’t read him his rights. Gentlemen … do this man the courtesy of reading his Miranda rights to him, will you?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” one of the cops started.
“You can’t do that now!” Keith said, suddenly alarmed.
“Oh, yeah, he can,” I said, and Keith’s jaw dropped. “As a suggestion … you really shouldn’t take legal advice from TV shows and movies. Writers aren’t lawyers.”
“Awww, man,” Keith said as they dragged him away toward a patrol car.
“What was that about?” Reed asked, sidling up to me.
“Dumb criminals, part eight hundred and seventy three,” I said. “I got a lead on something.”
Reed cocked an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“These boys manifested last week,” I said. “After a plumber did some work on their sink.”
“You’re thinking it feels like how you—”
“Yep,” I said. “And I’m also thinking … we might have our first actual lead on this case of the suddenly exploding meta criminal population. Keith here seems to remember a plumber named Omar, last name possibly Sharif—”
“His plumber was a dead Egyptian actor?”
“I dunno. I was going to check with the landlord, who supposedly called the plumber. Figured it might be worth a look.”
Reed stayed quiet for a second, and I waited with bated breath. We had other cases pending. A whole bunch of them, in fact.
But this was big. Potentially huge. It was like an apple that had been dangling in front of our faces for months, maybe even years, and now was tantalizingly close enough to grab a bite of … if only Reed would let me.
“All right,” he said, nodding once. “It’s about time we got a break in this.” He went quiet again for a second. “You want to look into it on your own?”
“You got better things to do?” I needled him lightly. He had a dozen requests for help from local and state police forces requesting help. Legitimate needs, actual requests backed by cash paid from those departments for aid in catching problem metas. These were the things that paid the bills, whereas what I wanted to look into …
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