Yes, Harmon said, it can wait a day. You won’t do anyone any favors rushing into this half asleep. You’ll need your wits about you if you’re going to understand your way through this.
“Or you could just tell me,” I said, “given that the stakes are super high now. People are throwing around nukes. It’s never been more serious.”
You need this, Harmon said. You need to see your way through this.
“You’re just lucky no one died,” I said. “How did you not see him coming?” I leaned back on the couch, laying my head against the armrest and kicking off my tennis shoes, putting my feet up on the other end.
I wasn’t paying attention, Harmon said tightly. Trust me … it won’t happen again.
“I hope it doesn’t,” I said, my eyes closing involuntarily. Holy hell, I was tired. Maybe just a quick nap …
I passed out on the couch without enough energy left to hold a single thought in my mind, drifting off into a weary, fitful sleep filled with nightmares of what could have been; of fire and thunder, the sounds of my failure.
Of a city dissolving under the endless force of a bomb.
40.
Augustus
“So we charter planes again now, huh?” I asked as the Gulfstream rolled to the end of the runway at Eden Prairie airport and left the ground with a last, gentle shudder, the wing dipping slightly from the crosswind as we said goodbye to the earth and hurtled into the sky at over four hundred miles per hour.
“I could fly you all on the winds, if you’d like,” Reed said, staring at a tablet with the data Cassidy had given us dumped on it. He looked like he was reading intently and didn’t bother looking up at my question. “But there’s a low-pressure system over the Dakotas that brought a ton of cold air with it, and I figured considering how much you whined last time you came down covered in frost, you might appreciate some insulation.”
Nevada was the destination; it hadn’t taken more than a few minutes debate to hammer out the plan, because just outside Vegas was where the factory producing the serums seemed to be located, at least based on what Cassidy had told us.
“It doesn’t bother anyone else we’re hinging our next move on something told to us by a woman who just bound and gagged me like something out of Fifty Shades?” I asked.
“She covered us in combustible sand and threatened to light us on fire,” Scott said, motioning to Reed. “Your charming bindings retracted when asked; I still smell like whatever that crap was she nearly drowned me in.” As if to illustrate his point, he gave his suit’s lapel a sniff and made a face. “Trust me, this whole thing is bothering me.”
“I’m just gonna say it, since I know we’ve all thought it at one time or another,” Jamal said. “All this increased business flooding our agency coffers and making Ms. Estevez smile as she counts the dollars rolling in? It’s all because these people from Revelen are making more metas and meta-criminals for us to deal with. I know it’s the right thing to do, but … are we cutting up our credit cards here?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Scott said dryly. “Probably because I’ve been too busy chasing after dangerous metas to think much at all.”
“Even if we clean up the supply side of the meta production,” Reed said, finally looking up from his tablet, “you have to believe we’re going to spend some time rolling up the ones that are already out there. No, I’m not worried about business dying if we clean this mess up. Also,” he said, turning his attention back to the screen, and becoming a bit arch, “it’s the right thing to do.”
“Shouldn’t that have been your first answer?” I asked.
“It came last because it’s most important,” Reed said.
“What about Sienna’s LA misadventure?” I asked. “What are we going to do about that?”
Reed’s mouth formed a tight line, parting only when he spoke. “Nothing. We need to focus on our mission. We’re not a support agency to Sienna, and we just got handed a big target. We go after them. Now. Besides, the FBI is not likely to listen to us if we stick our noses into that LA business.”
“Yeah, we’re more likely to get punched in said nose,” Scott said. “Director Phillips is not a huge fan of … uh … any of us, so far as I know. Unless he’s secretly a Jamal groupie.”
“I have no groupies,” Jamal said. “Mine is a sad, groupie-free life.”
“Mama follows you on Twitter,” I said. “She’s kinda like a groupie for you.”
“What? Mama doesn’t have a Twitter account.”
“Yes, she does,” I said. “Started one two months ago.”
Jamal’s eyes got big, and he gulped silently. “Ohhhh … oh, shit.”
“She’s not going to like that kind of language,” I said.
“Why do you think I just said it now?” Jamal asked. “She’s probably built a list of every time I’ve sworn on Twitter, waiting to smack me upside the head with it when I get home next.” He drew a deep breath. “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to miss Thanksgiving and Christmas for … uh … the next couple decades.”
“Back to the topic,” Reed said with thinly masked irritation, “Sienna’s not our problem. Hopefully when or if the FBI dumps her phone logs, once they track things back to her, Jamal’s calls and voicemails won’t implicate us in any of this. As far as I’m concerned, beyond that … we have our own work to do. There’s nothing we can do to help Sienna now, and … let’s face it.” He looked at each of us in turn, stone-faced to the point of causing me to worry, “She doesn’t want our help anyway.”
“She asks me for help all the time,” Jamal said.
Reed’s right eye fluttered slightly. “I meant in the fight. She regards you as support, and yeah, she’d ask you or J.J. for help all day when it comes to information. But when it comes to active danger …” He shook his head. “She’d go it alone all the way into death and ten miles beyond. Mark my words—when it comes to whatever she does next, Sienna’s not going to be asking us for help, and on a legal basis, we shouldn’t go out of our way to give it.”
His bit said, Reed turned his attention back to his screen and used his fingers to scroll.
“Wow,” I said quietly.
Reed looked up. “Do I even want to know what the ‘wow’ is for?”
“Was just thinking we’ve gone full circle,” I said, “back to when I first met Sienna, and you two were so on the outs you’d barely speak to her.”
His face went grey to match his stony facade. “You don’t know what you’re talking about this time, Augustus.”
“All I know is what I see,” I said.
“Like I said …” Reed stared me down, and I finally looked away because I didn’t want to have a staring contest with my boss right now, “… you don’t know what you’re talking about this time. You don’t know how I feel, and I’m not sharing, so butt out and let’s focus on doing our jobs.”
Once he’d spoken, Reed looked back to the tablet again, but this time, as I watched, his eyes didn’t seem to be skimming the page, reading. Instead they stared at a fixed spot in place, just past the tablet, and didn’t really move for a while as he got lost in thought, and none of the rest of us dared interrupt him.
41.
Greg
There weren’t really any good ways to spin this, Greg decided as he sat in the shop, trying to come up with a way to explain that his number-one source of income over the last several years had come to a very abrupt stop. It wasn’t even easy for him to explain to himself, but it was a fact that could not be ignored.
It was a mark of the moment that in spite of what he’d done, he wasn’t thinking about how he’d dropped the bomb in LA—no one had died, after all, and the property loss was trifling, comparatively.
No, Greg’s mind was on the impending loss to him. Even he could recognize, albeit dimly, that his fears were perhaps overblown. Yet his lifestyle changing, evaporating—perhaps he would have to turn to thieving in a very real way instead of simply stealing from the military
as support for what he deemed his “legitimate” profession—caused his stomach to sink, even as he was aware that his fears were small in scale indeed compared to the more “real” concerns of others the world over.
Thinking about things in that way, though, did not seem to help.
It was quite dark when he entered the house, leaving behind his workshop. He did so as quietly as he could, though he could hear the TV playing in the living room, where Morgan was surely watching some overly dramatic program. He still wasn’t entirely decided on what to tell her or how, which was a strange position for a man who prided himself on preparation.
“Hello,” he said as he passed under the hallway arch into the living room. It was furnished tastefully, white cloth couch and loveseat with a glass-top rectangular coffee table in the middle. The table’s wooden legs were an exquisite maple, the sort of thing he’d been able to easily afford before, without consideration.
Now, though, who knew? Maybe his next furniture would be made out of presswood. Ugh. And they’d live in a trailer in a school district without a Chinese language immersion program …
Greg shuddered involuntarily and looked at Morgan. Her face was ashen, a whiter shade of pale than he remembered seeing her since she’d been in labor and had begun to bleed more than she was supposed to. “What?” he asked.
She blinked as though coming out of a trance, and her head jerked slightly as she turned to look at him. “You … you did this, didn’t you?”
“Did wh …?” He didn’t even get it out before he turned to look at the TV. It wasn’t a dramatic scripted show at all.
She was watching the news.
Live from LA.
“I … no one was hurt,” Greg said.
“You dropped a nuclear bomb on East LA, Greg,” Morgan said, narrowing her eyes at him as a look of horror unfurled on her pale face.
“A very, very small one,” he said. “I estimate the yield at no more than—”
“What were you trying to do?” she asked, voice a hoarse whisper.
“My job,” he said. “I was simply trying to fulfill my current contract—”
“Your current contract is insane,” Morgan said, “if it requires you to drop a nuclear bomb on a US city!”
“It was so small it might as well have been conventional,” Greg snapped. “It didn’t knock down a single building or kill a single person. You’re buying into this idiotic hype—”
“They’re saying the area will be radioactive for—”
“I very much doubt that’s accurate, but if true, that’s the first time their so-called science reporters will have been right in quite some time. And in any case,” Greg said, taking a deep breath, “we have a bigger problem.”
Morgan’s frown relaxed instantly. Now her brow went in the opposite direction, rising toward her hairline. “A bigger problem than that you just nuked a city?”
“It was not—” Greg almost exploded but caught himself just a step short. He seethed quietly for a moment, and Morgan, wisely, let him. “I was trying to use the heat energy from the fission reaction to kill my target. I didn’t particularly need the nuclear component and certainly not the radiation. Perhaps I would have been better served using a napalm compound precisely targeted, but that’s neither here nor there.” Morgan was watching him like he was an invasive species that had wandered into the living room. “Mr. McGarry is indicating that he perhaps wishes to cancel our business arrangement—”
“So you used a nuke in LA and you lost your contract for it,” Morgan said quietly. “Wow.”
Greg stood in the archway, trying to decide what the look on Morgan’s face meant. “I don’t think you fully appreciate—”
“You’re in no position to lecture me about what I appreciate,” Morgan said coldly. “Not after what you did tonight.”
Greg’s face tightened. “I did my job—”
“Your job is murderous and evil—”
“You used to be good at it yourself—”
“—and even your murderous and evil employer thought what you did tonight was too much—”
“No, he was only upset that I could have killed Sienna Nealon. He didn’t seem particularly worried over the fate of East Los Angeles.”
“I don’t even know you anymore,” Morgan whispered. “When we worked together, you would never have considered doing this. You had that—that thing—”
“It was a bomb, Morgan. A fission explosive.”
“You told me you’d taken it as a tribute to your father,” Morgan said, rising off the couch. “You told me you took it from the government because he’d had a hand in creating it. It was supposed to be your touchstone to him—not some weapon you deployed when you got sick of trying to generate a body count in a conventional way—”
“You seem to think I’ve lost control. I haven’t—”
“Then you are even more gone than I thought you were, if you think this—this metahuman leap beyond the pale—”
“I’m doing what I have to do!” Greg said and lashed out at the archway. His fist clipped the plaster and sent a shower of white chips flying back into the hallway. “Why can’t you see that? I’m sorry I’m not gentle enough to take up the nurturing role with Eddie and his fragile little ego and insecurities the way you have!” He was shouting at the top of his voice now. “I am the man! I am charged with providing for this family, and I have one path with which to do that—”
“You are so full of it.” Morgan’s eyebrows were arched downward, eyes themselves dark like stormy skies. “You do it this way because you like the work. You’ve always liked the work. You loved it when we worked together. You even liked working with Sam, though God knows why. You only dropped him when it became obvious that he couldn’t control himself, that he liked the killing part too much. Well, I think you might have gone his way, Greg—”
“Don’t say that.”
“—and I’m amazed I’ve never seen it before,” Morgan said. “How could I not have? I’ve been thinking we were just growing apart, that I was going in a different moral direction, that you were staying the same. But you’re not. You’re getting worse. Wilder, somehow—”
“This is one isolated instance, in which I am up against the most powerful metahuman in the world—”
“—and less judicious. You’re not preparing, you’re flying off the handle. Using a nuke? Doesn’t reflect on properly preparing for the threat, Greg. It’s a reflection of a mind so desperate to win that you would throw your father’s only legacy away in order to—”
“Only legacy? I have more of them,” Greg said.
That stopped Morgan in her tracks. She paused, standing there, swaying behind the coffee table like a tree in the wind. “When did you take them?”
“I don’t know. A year ago. Maybe three,” Greg said, placing his hand on the shattered archway, feeling the cracks in the plaster where he’d lashed out and broke through it. It felt a little like rocks that had been busted open. “They were being decommissioned. It seemed a waste—”
“You didn’t even tell me.” Cold accusation.
“You didn’t like the one,” Greg said, “I can imagine how you would have felt about thirty.”
“Because normal people don’t store nuclear weapons anywhere near their children!” Morgan said, voice starting low but rising in intensity.
“Please,” Greg said, “you know as well as I do that they’re absolutely no threat to Eddie or yourself, even assuming they all went off, which is improbable to the tune of several decimal places. You’re more likely to get killed by North Koreans bombing Chicago than by my little stockpile.”
“What are you becoming?” Morgan asked.
“I am what I have always been,” Greg said. “What you used to be.”
“Then I never saw you clearly before,” Morgan said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we were once both like this. I don’t think so, but … maybe. The difference is, I don’t want to be like you. Not anymore, not ever. But you �
�� you don’t want to change, either. Not when you—when you do things like this,” she had so much anger in her voice, “not when you crush Eddie the way you have been …”
“I’m not cr …” Greg didn’t bother to finish the sentence. On a level of intellectual honesty …
… He found he couldn’t.
“Even you know it’s true,” Morgan said, but there was no satisfaction of rightness in the way she said it. “You can’t bring yourself to argue.”
“I have room to improve—” Greg said lamely.
“You’re destroying this family,” Morgan said quietly, her voice gaining strength. “You’re destroying us. I don’t even know you anymore.” Her eyes met his, and there was a hostility there that he’d never seen from her before, at least not pointed at him. “Get out.”
Her last words were low and angry coming from deep within. He stared at her, and a million responses flashed across his mind.
You’re wrong.
You used to be like me.
I’m not as bad as you say I am.
Things aren’t as bad as you’re letting on.
You’ve been watching too much news.
You’re poisoned against me.
Eddie is fine.
… You’ve become a monster.
The last one stuck on his lips, hollow in his ears, a small voice within speaking to him like a stone wedged in the valve of his heart. It hurt in a way Greg could scarcely recall feeling, and it paired well with the pit in his stomach.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he said, and looked toward the stairs. Somehow he knew—
Eddie was standing there, tears glinting on his face in the darkness. His shoulders were hunched back, fearful, as though he were waiting for Greg to strike at him.
But Greg had never hit him. Not once. The way he’d struck at the boy was deeper, somehow, less obvious. Maybe more painful; it was hard to say.
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