Dana didn’t know enough to suck it up until later, as Nessa did. Eventually Nessa would pay, she knew, but later. Not now.
She continued her search on foot.
The first person she found was one of Portland’s enhanced servants, one of the ones that Portland called her Wise Shepherds. A miracle worker. No, scratch that, a dead miracle worker. In fact, this Wise Shepherd had died in the first moments of the attack when Miami’s thugs blasted through the large windows at the back of the estate house. She, the Wise Shepherd, lay half-buried under glass shards, bricks, boards and other rubble.
What a waste of a life. Nessa still retained a bit of the floating-on-air stunned disbelief at the unprovoked attack by the flunkies of a God. Nessa didn’t think much of these so-called Gods any more. Devils, more likely. Demons. Monsters.
Evil-doers, mos def, she thought. Dey da bad guys. Not us.
Clarified things nicely, that.
“I’ve been here before,” Nessa said, to nobody in particular. “Only when Ken took out Lorenzi’s beach house rental back when we were dumb-shit kids, he didn’t do anywhere near this much damage.” Ken had done about a quarter of the damage to Portland’s estate house. When the place had started to creak and fail around them, he had telekinetically lifted the entire second story and roof of the place and slid it away from the battle, where the rubble now sat in a heap in the former front yard and ornate circular driveway of the estate.
Not much of a loss, in Nessa’s opinion. All sorts of four-wheeled gas guzzling pollution machines had died under that heap.
Nessa found Mary totally buried under some rubble. “Ken, a little lift, please?” Nessa asked. No response. She reached toward him with her mind and spoke her request into his head. Her telepathy was weak, as if she had been screaming for hours, long enough to leave her throat raw. Ken responded, a distant ‘yes’ from the bottom of a well, and the rubble over Mary shifted enough for Nessa to drag the rangy bodyguard out, minus denim jacket, much of a sweatshirt, patches of blue jeans, several knives, a couple of pistols, one boot, and a considerable amount of tattooed skin. And a lot of blood. Nessa winced when she realized how much of Mary stayed behind.
“Nessa,” Mary said, almost inaudible. “What’s wrong?”
“Rest,” Nessa said. “Don’t think about anything.” Mary had a few more minutes to live, but without some miraculous divine healing, that was all. Nessa had to block what she saw out of her mind or she would have fallen over on the spot.
Nessa’s words carried enough of her mental tricks with them to work on Mary, whose mind faded into unconsciousness. Part of Nessa wanted to go there as well, but she wouldn’t allow herself the rest. She had her own wounds to think about, as well as the fact that if she let herself go under, her control over Miami’s thugs would fade. Their divine support might have vanished, but they still had their AKs.
She had to stay conscious.
So she did.
Nessa walked slowly among the rubble, unsteady, attempting to avoid things to trip over, and searching for Portland. She next found Javier and Prep, Javier barely conscious on top of Prep’s dead body and the rubble that covered him. Prep had taken a rocket propelled grenade to the torso in the first moments of the fight, and what remained of him…well, Nessa couldn’t do anything for now, anyway. Javier’s left side was a tarry charred mess, burned from at least two separate attacks, and he had gunfire stitches across his chest. Blood and ash stained his beard and the left side of it was gone completely, burned away in the same attacks that charred his side.
“Remember your lessons! Stay conscious!” Nessa said. The fully functional Telepath hadn’t forgotten Nessa’s lesson that she learned in the incident back when she had been a kid: when you’ve been badly wounded you needed to stay conscious at all costs.
He hadn’t mastered his nerves, which would be fatal in a situation like this. Nessa knelt and put her hand on Javier’s head, reached inside him, and made him numb all over. The effort felt like she drew a knife through her guts, and warmth trickled from her nose. Blood. From an ultra-high blood-pressure spike. Bad, very bad. She would need a gallon or so of water, soon, to wash the poisons out of her body.
She ignored her physical problems and kept scanning. Javier had already closed the worst of his bullet wounds, his self-healing far stronger than Nessa’s. Fluid loss would be the killer, though. His burns were bad, and Nessa didn’t have water with her for either her or Javier. Nessa turned away when she realized he had lost one of his eyes. She started to shake again. She didn’t want to witness what had happened to her people.
But she must.
“I’m not that badly wounded.”
“How’d that happen?” She hadn’t noticed. On the other hand, she had shut down her pain nerves so long ago she had lost the memory of pain. A necessity, or when her compatriots took their wounds, her empathy would make her suffer them as well. Besides, the twins were okay. Things would be fine.
“Good,” Nessa said. “Nuke?”
Nessa looked. About five feet farther toward where Portland, Melvin and Portland’s people once huddled, the nature of the rubble changed. Beyond that point, a melt sheen covered the rubble, where it wasn’t charred and still smoldering. The partly melted rubble continued all the way beyond the house.
“Well, okay, it might have been some sort of small nuke. I remember a white-hot beam, though, not a missile.”
“No it fucking isn’t alright to die if you die on me I’m going to piss on your grave and feed you to the fucking maggots if you do anything so stupid!” Nessa stopped, unsure which part of her said that. “Sorry.”
The blast edge looked knife-edged and bent around where the Telepaths had stood and fought, the sign of Ken’s telekinetic shell. Nessa worked numbers, figuring the retreat distance from the explosion point to the hold edge to be about a hundred and twenty feet. Yes, this had been a powerful explosion. When the grenades had exploded in the back of the tour bus, Ken’s telekinetic shell held after only fifteen feet of retreat. Throw in an inverse cubed volume of the explosion versus inverse squared proportion of Ken’s telekinetic shell and the effect was linear… The explosion that took out the far end of the house hadn’t been too much larger than the explosion that took out the bus. A mini-micro-nuke? Something else entirely? Hellishly hot, though.
Nessa moved on, willing her body to move despite the shakes. She came to Giselle’s body, and found it hard to look at the mess. She had died alone, Nessa realized. Not instantly, either. Giselle had lost consciousness and her own body did her in. For a Telepath, this had to be the worst way to go. Giselle first went down because of glass shrapnel. Later, after a minor recovery, the bullet wounds got to her. Then the mini-micro-nuke’s rubble buried her, and she survived even that. She had died, though, while Nessa and Ken had been recovering from the shared mental attack.
“I should have been there for her,” Nessa said. The part of her that rejected lies noted that if she had not done the group mental attack with Ken, neither she nor Ken would likely be alive, and Giselle would have died anyway. Cold comfort, but truth rarely comforted, and was always cold, the reason people lied to themselves.
The reason why mature Telepaths were insane, by normal standards.
Nessa found Nicole half buried by rubble and unconscious. Luckily her wounds weren’t life
threatening, just bumps, contusions and flash-burns from the mini-micro-nuke or whatever. She must have already been rubble-buried when it detonated. She would keep. Nessa found Phil buried under rubble a yard away from Nicole, semi-conscious and hardly wounded at all. She couldn’t penetrate his mental shields and he didn’t respond when she spoke. She would have to get Ken to dig him out soon, though, or he might suffocate.
For now, though, he would keep as well.
Nessa wandered into the nuked part of the house. “Portland, Portland?” Nessa said, a whispered dog call, in an attempt to register any echo thoughts or lure any response from the God. Nothing. Nessa continued her shuffling until she found a mottled silver mess, roughly body sized and shaped, that had oozed down to the bottom of the rubble.
Portland. She put her hands on the God and reached out her senses. Portland’s mind still twitched, thankfully, just not functional. “Figures that a massive physical attack would cronk their godly minds, the same way a massive mental attack melts their bodies. No healing from her any time soon,” Nessa said, writing off Mary unless Lorenzi’s crew of divine dumbfucks showed up first. Melvin, Portland’s bodyguard and hopped-up mortal, had stood beside Portland when the attack hit. Nessa couldn’t find anything left of him.
She marched back. Only Alt and Celebrity remained missing. Nessa guessed she would find Celebrity out with the enemy combatants. “Alt?” Nessa said, her voice a bare croak.
Nessa caught a mild echo-thought response, a little ways back of her first amble across the rubble. She walked toward the spot and found Alt. He had fallen under the remains of a giant flatscreen, wounded and immobile, curled up into a fetal ball. She focused on his mind and found him conscious, fighting his own fears about his wounds and horrified by the battle. Alt and death, Nessa decided, really didn’t get along. His wounds looked no worse than hers. Only his mind had folded.
She felt recognition, and love. Damnation. She cut the link and went back to Ken. He opened one eye and gave her a tiny smile. “Hang in there, hun,” he said.
“You too.” She took a moment to look again at Ken’s broken leg, hit by a flying piece of rubble. The leg would need to be set, but the break didn’t threaten his life. She rummaged through his pack until she found the bag of plastic restraints she suspected he carried.
“Once a private investigator, always a private investigator,” she said in a sing-song voice, and skipped off to bind the mind controlled thugs, toe-dancing lightly through the rubble. If she bound the thugs, she could relax, at least a little. Javier was right, though. She needed to keep herself conscious.
Consciousness would take work, but what didn’t take work?
Somewhere in the distance, down near that crazy rocket Atlanta had used as a weapon, Dana still howled loud enough for Nessa to hear. A thin plume of exhaust from the rocket wafted straight up into the sky, and several hundred feet up veered off in a J shape.
Dana needed an intense session from Portland. She might be smart as a whip and strong as an ox with her borrowed willpower, but she took to fighting about as well as Alt did. That is: not.
Nessa saved the final thug, the one who had surrendered, for last.
“So, why’d you surrender?” she said, when she got to him. The big black man knelt in fear before her, trembling and near panic, no threat to Nessa at all.
“I saw Portland,” he said, in a weak and broken voice. “I knew then my God was in the wrong. I had to surrender.”
Interesting. Nessa knelt down and looked into the man’s eyes, ready to read his mind. His words held a subtle untruth in them, but she saw no hostility. “I’m not sure I believe you. I need to check your mind to see if you’re a traitor.”
“Go ahead, ma’am, I can’t stop you,” he said, his voice sounding as if he might piss himself.
Nessa peered down and saw his eyes: flat and steady, hard as ice. Nothing like the rest of his trembling body. Nessa recognized the fearless eyes, not panicked at all. Behind the man’s eyes she found exquisite mental shields. Well, they needed to be exquisite, she realized, to pull off this trick.
This was worth a giggle, as good as one of her better schemes, though Nessa didn’t react a bit. “You pass my mental inspection, Leo,” she said, using the name that matched the physical body. “The eyes are a dead giveaway, though.”
The eyes changed to match the rest of the thug’s appearance. “Thank you,” the former Miami thug said, with a lilt that spoke of the British Virgin Islands. “I guess there’s no fooling you.”
“No, there’s not,” Nessa said.
“I would like to serve you and your mission,” the man said. “It’s the morally correct thing to do.”
“Of course,” Nessa said, repressing a giggle. “After this fight, you have no other choice, now do you?”
Nessa didn’t have any choices either. To make everything work, she would have to hide this dainty morsel of information inside the locked compartments deep in her mind, where right sock held sway and protected her subconscious and all her other don’t-remember-it-too-often knowledge from intruders. Nessa stood and smiled, remembering her mother’s rule one: say nothing about what you did that was strange.
So many secrets, so little time, Nessa thought. Trah lah trah ley.
Celebrity walked toward her, unsteady but back on her feet, silvery still.
“You okay?” Nessa said. Celebrity looked a bit underweight. “Or, should I ask, how bad are you hurt?”
“Bad enough,” Celebrity said. “Let’s merge.”
Reason number one why Nessa needed to hide her just-gained information.
“Good idea,” Nessa said. Celebrity flowed up to Nessa, as Celebrity had been oozing along the ground, not walking, and vanished into Nessa’s body. “Ummmm,” Nessa said. Love. Decadence. “Feel free to heal me.”
“I’ll try,” Celebrity said. “Healing’s part of my Ideology now, but I’ve still got a ways to go.”
“I can sense your work,” Nessa said. “Feels good. It might even keep me from having too bad a breakdown once this is over.”
“Your faith in my healing is powering it,” Celebrity said, using Nessa’s own voice.
“Me? Faith? I have no faith. I’m an agnostic.”
The former Miami thug boomed laughter and sank back to the ground. Every few seconds he would sneak another peek at Nessa and laugh again.
Nessa didn’t think her comment had been that humorous.
“I can’t believe you’re still functional,” Celebrity said. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“Because I didn’t want to be dead?” Nessa said. Anything to keep the blood moving and the liver and kidneys functioning. “Can you conjure up a gallon of water for me? It might help in the not dying crap.” A tiny rain cloud appeared above Nessa; she gleefully tipped her head up and drank a tiny private gully washer, reveling in the feel of hard rain on her face. Yum. “Actually, ample practice might be a better answer.” She had walked away from worse, both physically and psychologically, though she still carried the scars and always would. Ten miles away Nessa sensed Lorenzi and his crew emerge from around a mountain, moving quickly. Lorenzi, the bastard, would try to take over. He always did. She always resisted. This time she suspected a whole passel of Gods would resist as well.
“I’ve gotta take a leak.”
“Your kidneys work quickly,” Celebrity said. “Just go. I’ll cover it up so nobody notices.”
The giggling thug didn’t help, so Nessa moved out of his sight before she let loose.
“I’ve got a secret we need to keep,” Celebrity said, after. Nessa’s eyes had the urge to flicker over to Miami’s former thug, but she controlled herself and they didn’t. She watched Lorenzi’s crew arrive, their first stop the remains of the rocket booster and the disconsolate Dana and the now protective Dr. Horton. Singularity picked Dana up and held her to him as Boise gathered up Dr. Horton, lifted off and flew Lorenzi’s crew over to her.
�
��Okay,” Nessa said. “What’s this secret?”
“I know who I’m going to give birth to,” Celebrity said. “A God. A replacement for Miami.”
Nessa took a deep breath of relief. “That’s not a secret,” Nessa said. “That’s a cause for a celebration.”
Somehow, out of all this incredible mess, they had won.
Dammit, they had won!
“Dion Cassius, the historian, records one of the most remarkable instances of his clairvoyance or second sight. He states that Apollonius, in the midst of a discourse at Ephesus, suddenly paused, and then in a different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all : “Have courage, good Stephanus ! Strike ! strike ! Kill the tyrant !” On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this “miracle” is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt upon the tyrant’s life. “– P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World
Two weeks later…
“Aren’t you a little young for a war God, miss?”
53. (John)
John’s driver, Matt, stopped the limo at a security gate the GPS didn’t know about. He talked to the woman who ambled up to the limo, one of Portland’s own, who scanned them with a God trick and waved them through.
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