Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  “Do not say her name again,” Philip said, his voice dripping with a menace he did not often employ. The fact that this tart would talk about Clarice—sweet, dear Clarice, betrayed by the damned legion of Omega, by him—

  “Or what? You’ll do a tarot card reading and tell me that the King of Cups is going to whoop my ass?”

  Philip forced himself to relax at the landing, looking up. The staircase curved at the corner of the square bank building, stretching up past the private bank. From there, he’d be able to get to the roof, to start crossing from building to building and go underground. His head was spinning with the emotion, the thrills. The fear. This was beyond his ability to track, and with the frustration came a certain element of heady freedom. “You’d need to be a lot closer for me to read your future, but I will say that the little I delved into when last I left you did not leave me hopeful that you were going to live to a ripe old age.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Philip said mockingly, trotting out his American accent. “Your future is blood and pain, trial and turmoil.” He hadn’t gone too deep, just a surface level reading of it, afraid to see it in detail. Still, he’d looked closer at her probabilities than he did with most people, and it was a frustrating muddle of a million branched possibilities. The only thing they had in common was a shocking level of violence.

  “You might know my future,” she replied, “but you don’t have a clue about my past beyond what you’ve read in someone else’s report. I’ve fought impotent weasels like you—” he felt his jaw clench at her goad, “—people who would take whole cities hostage in order to make me curl up and surrender. I’ve sacrificed myself before to save people. It’s what I do. I have no life so other people can live a normal one—and so I can put the fist and the foot to assholes who want to shape the future in their own perverted image.”

  “And here I was, betting on you not having enough self left to sacrifice,” Philip replied, scraping the truth out as he concentrated on the door ahead. It led to the roof, and try as he might he could not reach past the steel. Janus was little help, ready to curl into a fetal position at the sound of a loud noise. A door slammed and Janus wobbled as if he were going to collapse. Philip grabbed him by the lapel and shoved him onward on unsteady legs. “Even I can see there’s little enough left of you to quibble over. You may be a hero for now, but your fall is imminent. If you somehow manage to survive that death wish you’ve been carrying around, then the press will eventually latch onto your past and feed on your carcass until you do the job yourself.” He grinned. “You came close enough to giving them a body in that last interview, after all. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Too bad you’re not going to be around to see it,” she said, static-y again.

  “Oh, don’t be a fool,” Philip said. “Bluster will do you little good. I think we both know that you can’t find me unless you’re left a trail of breadcrumbs or unless I hide somewhere in plain sight. Well, newsflash—I don’t care about you now that my business is done. You were the last bit of leverage that I kept alive to break Janus with in case all else failed. All else did not fail, and now I’ve got what I wanted, so you’ll never see me again. And of course you’ll never catch me,” he said with a delirious sort of triumph, “because while you’re playing checkers, barely surviving your own desire to die one day at a time, I play chess. I’ve set everything in motion to lead to this, drawn you along with an offensive strategy that’s kept you exactly where I wanted you until I needed you elsewhere, and I’ve been holding you up this entire time. Well, it’s endgame, now, my dear, and I have no desire to play any longer. I would wish you au revoir, but I think in this case it’s better if I just—” He shoved the door open with his free hand, pushing Janus out onto the rooftop, the light rain coming down around him—

  And he saw the probability of a punch coming at him just in time to duck and roll, the rooftop gravel crunching under his shoulder as he dodged out of the way and came up to see Sienna Nealon standing before him, hovering a foot off the ground, her complexion flushed red with anger and her clothing shredded and hanging loose in the breeze.

  “Well, damn,” was all that came to Philip’s mind, and consequently, his lips, as he stood there while the rain continued to fall.

  Chapter 80

  “What’s the matter?” I asked as he stood there, staring at me with his mouth slightly open. “Magic eight ball a little cloudy? Maybe you should ask again later.”

  Janus was prone, lying on his belly between us. I’d never seen the old guy in quite such a state. He looked like he was unconscious, but I hadn’t seen any reason for him to be. I caught a glimpse of an eye, open beneath his glasses, which were askew on his face.

  I thought about waiting for Philip to monologue, but I wrote that off as stupid before the thought even bubbled up, throwing myself at him in a kick that sent him scrambling. He dodged, avoiding my attack and giving himself room to maneuver.

  “You realize you’re fighting a man who can see every move you’re going to make before you make it?” He smiled, smoothing the lapels of his suit. I shot a fist out at him and he dodged expertly, perfectly, only inches before I was going to make contact.

  “You don’t even have to be that fast when you know where it’s coming from, do you?” I launched into a series of attacks from memory, running off a martial arts form of pre-sequenced moves in my head. I’d done it thousands of times, simply modifying the direction of my attacks to keep constantly on him, not bothering to vary anything but the direction it was pointed in. It gave me the brain space to just let go, flowing into a sequence as natural to me as the motions required for swimming or walking.

  “I don’t have to be fast, no,” he said with that grin, “but I am.” He moved fluidly but with a little bit of a stutter as I pushed him left, then right, driving him backward. His lack of experience was clear, but so was the fact that he knew every single attack before I launched it. “Keep going until your arms wear out and the strength fades from your legs.” His grin widened. “This is what they call a stalemate.”

  Chapter 81

  She kept coming, admirably enough, not letting up even though it would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that her attacks were doing little to nothing. He wasn’t even breathing hard, evading her every move with greatest ease, his hands tucked neatly behind him just to infuriate her more. He wasn’t under too many illusions; she was fast, fast enough to see any counter attacks he might launch before he could finish them. She wasn’t making any bold moves, anything that would leave her exposed. He cursed his lack of practice in these arts; were he a little more experienced, it might have been possible for him to exploit her trifling weaknesses. As it was, he would simply have to wear her out.

  “I think you see the limits of your incredible speed and strength now,” he said, dodging again, this time to the left. “They’re all very impressive, but if you can’t land a hit on your target, what’s the point?”

  “I guess I just can’t play the game like you can,” she said, nearly breathless from the speed of her maneuvers. Still, she came at him, hands and fists a blur. At least she had stopped trying to kick him; those had become clumsy to look at. “I just can’t give up.”

  “It’s a matter of patience,” Philip said, the answer just slipping out as he ducked a high swing. “You watch. You learn. You analyze your opponent. You see them for who they are, underneath it all. You prepare yourself for their best attacks, and when they come at you…” he sidestepped, “… you’ve anticipated your way out of their path. Patience. Good things come to those who wait, after all.”

  “You know what else comes to those who wait?” Her breaths were coming fast. She was tiring herself out, the fool. He wondered if she would realize it before it happened, if she’d even slow down. He was watching seconds into her future, could see every move in definites, not probabilities. She was attacking with a surety that left no doubt. Her course was certain, and though he
didn’t care to admit it, it was taking all he had to avoid her furious assault. “Death. Excuse me if I don’t wait patiently for it.”

  Her blue eyes were tinged with green, and the anger had them ice cold. She grunted with every exertion, and he had to concede she was pretty enough, her pale cheeks flaring red from her efforts—or possibly her emotions. Frustration was evident in the twist of her lips.

  He started to reply as he made his last dodge, and his foot slipped, just slightly. He caught himself and looked back, the edge of the rooftop waiting for him. The next building over was a solid jump away, but he couldn’t make it without a moment to prepare—

  He narrowly dodged the next attack, only centimeters between him and her hammerblow. He escaped by instinct alone, and the follow-on attack he avoided by only a little more. This time he felt the edge before he slipped, and knew that his left foot was on the very corner of the building. A glance back left him with no doubt—

  It was a four-story plunge to the street below, and he was completely out of room to maneuver.

  Nowhere left to run.

  Chapter 82

  “Chess, not checkers,” I said to Philip, his face stricken with horror at the realization that he was trapped. All his fancy dodges and maneuvers had required space to execute, room to work.

  And he was fresh out.

  “Checkmate, asshole,” I said.

  “Wait,” he said, holding up his hands in front of him. “I have—”

  I kicked his ass off the edge of the building so hard I was able to watch his mouth open in terror as he flew out into the middle of the street—

  And got hit by a red double-decker bus going about thirty. A taste of London.

  He bounced, coming to rest behind a Volkswagen down the road.

  I just stared down at the middle of the street, where he’d left a pretty decent puddle of blood at the site of the impact. “I guess your Spider-sense failed to tingle on that one.”

  Chapter 83

  Philip felt the broken bones, every last one of them. There were too many to count, too many to feel, but he had so little time. He crawled along on his good arm, on his good leg, using the cars behind him for cover. He’d stayed conscious for the bus, fortunately, seeing it just soon enough to best plan his trajectory. He couldn’t read his own future, not exactly, but he could read the future of the bus and could see that if he turned his body just so that he’d be able to survive by taking the hit and landing under cover.

  And he had survived. It was what he was, a survivor. He scrambled, crawling as fast as he could, toward the narrow mouth of an alley. He had to move, had to rely on that bitch’s arrogance. No one could have survived the bus, after all.

  No one but a man who could see the course of the future. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man was as near to a god as could be imagined, because he could see.

  And he could see.

  The alley ahead was clear, and he was only a few feet away. He reached into his breast pocket with bloody fingers and withdrew the slip of paper with the bank account number for Liechtenstein. He had to hurry. Had to flee. She couldn’t catch him once he was underground, and he could disappear to—

  He felt strong hands seize him by the neck and turn him around. There was a face—her face—slightly rounded, the pale cheeks still red with outrage. “You’re not Sherlocking your way out of this one,” she said. “You think I’ve never dealt with a villain before?” He felt a twist, heard a crack, and suddenly he could not feel his lower body, nor anything else.

  He saw the paper slip out of his fingers before he fell to the ground. He tried to breathe, but couldn’t. He tried to speak, to warn her. He’d seen her future in the moment she grabbed hold of him, had seen it all like a flood of emotion, all the probabilities feeding down to one moment in her future the way water tends toward a low point. He tried to tell her—not out of any virtue, but out of pure shock for what it entailed—try to verbalize the words, say that it was coming, the Awakening—

  But it died on his lips as the paralysis of his broken neck set in. And as she stood, satisfied, looking into his eyes, the world faded to black and Philip Delsim’s future—all of the numerous, wondrous probabilities of it—faded with it.

  Chapter 84

  I’d returned to Mary Marshwin’s office voluntarily, not wanting to leave her in the lurch with a few bodies and a mess on her hands. I did it after returning Janus to Karthik. Janus had said only a perfunctory “Thank you” to me after I’d helped him up. I don’t think he really knew who I was.

  “Well, you’ve made a right mess of things, haven’t you?” Marshwin said after Wexford had walked in. “Left us with a body on a street, no less—”

  “A tragic suicide, if you were of a mind to explain it,” I said. I had carefully descended in a nearby alley before I’d killed Philip, so it wasn’t like anyone had seen me flying to or from the area.

  Marshwin’s arms were folded, and her face was unmistakably grave. “I suppose you think we can just clean it up that way?”

  “You can clean it up however you want,” I said, folding my own arms. “It’s your country and your mess. I was just suggesting that if you wanted to do it with a nice, neat little bow—”

  “‘A nice, neat little bow’?” Marshwin asked, working her jaw open and closed after she finished speaking. She rummaged on her desk and brought out a newspaper, throwing it down in front of me. “Do you really think that’s possible now?”

  There was a picture of me flying into the sky on the front page. “An American Metahuman in London,” was the headline. Kinda cliché, I thought. They had a blurry inset of a close-up of my face; it did look like me, enough that I wouldn’t have been able to lie and say it wasn’t.

  “You asked for help from American authorities and it was granted,” I said with a shrug, “since you have no metahuman policing apparatus of your own—yet.”

  Marshwin looked apoplectic, but her voice came out low. “Stop… offering me suggestions… on public relations. Being as you are hardly an expert on knowing your own bloody limits when it comes to giving an interview to the press.”

  Man, that Gail Roth thing was going to haunt me forever.

  “I think Ms. Nealon is offering very reasonable suggestions,” Minister Wexford said with a faint smile, “and I for one feel very relieved to know that a serial killer has been ‘taken out of play,’ I think is how you Yanks put it.”

  “It’s a black eye for the department,” Marshwin said.

  “It’s a minor public relations gaffe,” Wexford said soothingly. “With public sentiments against metas running a bit… high, the merest mention that Ms. Nealon, acting in concert with New Scotland Yard, dealt with the threat at hand should play well enough to give us the breathing room to work with this.” He straightened his lapels. “Mr. Delsim’s suicide upon the realization that he could not flee from the long reach of the Metropolitan Police force is a very acceptable outcome, I should think. I doubt after the incident at the gallery that you’ll find many in the press who’ll mourn his loss, and those who do will all be on the fringe, of course.”

  Marshwin looked like she was about to vomit. “Acceptable enough, I suppose. But the matter of Delsim’s efforts at the bank is an open sore. He managed to move quite a sum of money outside our reach. Seizing five hundred million pounds of illegal assets would have been quite a balm.”

  “What can you do in these instances?” Wexford asked, giving me a sympathetic smile. “Make your inquiries in Liechtenstein, of course, but I think we all know how that will turn out.”

  “How will it turn out?” I asked. I didn’t really know anything about Liechtenstein, having only seen it on the map.

  “They’re what Switzerland was to banking a few years ago,” Wexford said, “a black hole for most of the rest of the world. Money goes in, and if it comes out again, it’s virtually untraceable.”

  “So it was all about the money all along,” I said, shaking my head. “Philip’s r
evenge was just a cover for his robbery of Omega’s assets.”

  “It sounds as though he was at least a little angry with them,” Wexford said. “And he certainly did you a little bit of damage in the process, didn’t he?”

  “He was keeping me around as the last person to torture in front of Janus if all else failed,” I said. “Probably knew containing me would be a nightmare, so he just kept one step ahead. Arrogant bastard, but then again, if I could see the future of everyone around me, I might be a little cocky myself.” I pulled my shredded coat tight, huddling in Marshwin’s frigid office.

  “Well, he’s good and sorted now, as you say,” Marshwin said, sitting back down in her chair. “Now we’re just left with the matter of you.”

  I sighed. “I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll head home.” I stood, reaching into my pocket for my phone. When I pulled on it, it came out in three pieces. “Sonofa… I guess they’ll know I’m coming when they see me.”

  “I’ll walk you out, Ms. Nealon,” Wexford said, already heading toward the door, his silver hair as perfectly in place as ever. The man was simply unruffled by anything, apparently. “Good day, Ms. Marshwin.”

  “What the hell is good about it, exactly?” she grumped as he closed the door behind her.

  “Thanks for your help,” I murmured to Wexford as he walked me through the bullpen, a hand resting lightly on my shoulder.

  “Officially, I have no idea what you’re talking about, of course.” He said this low, under his breath, letting it dissolve in the natural chatter of the room. “Unofficially, of course, the PM is quite pleased about the outcome. Keeping Mr. Delsim in prison would be a headache of no small proportions.”

  “Glad she sees it my way,” I said, still hugging my coat tight around me.