She reveled in being strong and fast, having the many perks that came with her abilities. Still, the average person didn't think—or even know—about the drawbacks. The ten thousand calorie diet, the need to constantly practice to avoid hurting people just by shaking a hand.
The social stigma of being Next.
She looked out over the destruction before her, and Kit felt the old familiar dissatisfaction rise up. James Shane had made their attempt at a quiet capture very messy and public, which would no doubt only fuel the flames of public discontent. Seeing the property damage and knowing the potential death toll the wrong sort of Next could cause, it was hard to blame them.
Archer appeared from the milling crowd and made his way over. He was smeared with dirt, the elbow of his jacket shredded, but otherwise looked fine. Not that his appearance was any way to tell; with his healing abilities, the man could have broken every bone in his body and been okay by now.
“Glad to see you're okay,” he said, surprising Kit with a quick but genuine hug. A relieved smile crept across his face.
“Thank Graysen for that,” Kit said. “She's the one who saved me.”
Archer turned his gaze to the young trainee. Though Graysen was a full foot shorter, she met his eyes evenly, without a hint of the nervousness Kit had witnessed over the city.
“Glad to see you again, Ms. Ross,” Archer said. “Especially since you just made yourself a hero. Thank you. I mean that.” He held out a hand, which she shook firmly.
It took Kit a moment to realize that of course Archer knew her; he was the one who selected trainees out of the general applicants. It was one of the many administrative tasks Kit abhorred that Archer didn't mind taking on.
“Just doing my job, sir,” Graysen replied.
Archer's mouth twitched at the corner. “Well, not your job yet, technically. But appreciated all the same.”
“Did we get him?” Kit asked, nodding toward the circle of agents.
“Yeah,” Archer answered. “Cassidy caught him off guard and I tackled him.”
Kit's brows knitted together. “You? In combat?”
Graysen partially muffled a squeak of surprise, possibly laughter, at Kit's words. From the trainee's perspective, it probably sounded as if Kit were implying Archer couldn't handle himself. He was a large man, not a regular fixture in training classes, and carried extra weight. It was the obvious assumption to make, and probably the only one the girl could make given what she knew.
The glimmer of embarrassment on Archer's face was perfectly acted, though Kit knew it for what it was. The man had to gorge himself constantly to keep the fat on his body, which his healing ability could use as fuel.
What Kit actually meant was that by going into such a dangerous situation, Archer had risked being injured badly enough to alert everyone around him of his true nature. As far as the world knew, he was human.
They had decided, upon cementing their small conspiracy, to divide the dangers up in the most efficient way possible. Kit, being openly Next, would handle the more risky elements. She was the one who fought, who dealt with Robinson. It was her job to be obvious and implement whatever physical actions they deemed necessary to find the truth about Fairmont.
Success depended critically on Archer staying in the closet, so to speak. As an administrator and bureaucrat, his searches for information, requests for certain personnel, and all manner of other less-dazzling but important tasks were seen as just part of the job.
“Well, just glad you didn't hurt yourself,” Kit said, forcing a smile.
Archer gave an award-worthy sigh, then smiled wryly as he patted his gut. “Guess I should hit the gym if I want to start getting in fights, eh?” He looked at Graysen expectantly, and the girl did a wonderful impression of a deer in headlights.
“Stop messing with her, Archer,” Kit said. “You know she's not going to answer that.”
They called in a cleanup crew, though James Shane was on his way to the facility long before they arrived on scene.
Ray
The White Room hadn't changed since Ray last sat in it, but that was a good thing. It was, after all, a space where no one could see or hear using Next abilities and was completely shielded from technological snooping. The lack of change was good, though the small table in the middle had more chairs than before. Ray had brought them in himself.
Kit sat next to him, silently watching the prisoner. Ray himself couldn't manage the absolute calm she showed, though he wasn't feeling afraid. Nervous, yes, but no fear at all. Not because of James Shane, at any rate. The storm cloud that had been Shane's only expression since being locked to his chair wasn't why Ray felt his glands spitting adrenaline into his bloodstream.
What they were about to do, to ask, was insane. It was also their only choice.
Two more empty chairs sat on either side of Kit and Ray. If Kit knew who the fourth chair was for, she wasn't telling. It couldn't be for Deakins, though she was in on the plan, because Deakins was covering for them.
The door opened with a slight hiss, the heavy seals parting. By necessity, the room had no ventilation of any kind, no sort of connection with the world outside. The lights were LEDs powered by batteries, the atmosphere regulated by a compact unit sitting in a corner. That small piece of engineering mastery was the least of the inventions created by the brilliant people in R&D, and Ray shook his head that a device capable of heating or cooling a room with no ventilation as well as scrub carbon dioxide from the air could be considered a minor invention.
Archer sat next to Kit, and after the door was shut and locked, a vaguely familiar man sat next to Ray. He was an agent—that much was clear from his suit and badge—but no name appeared in Ray's head at the sight of him.
More surprising was Kit's reaction; she looked utterly shocked when she saw the man.
“You?” Kit asked. “You're the technopath?”
The agent looked chagrined. “Yeah, sorry about not telling you. Archer said he was keeping my identity under wraps until we had no choice but tell you.”
The voice was definitely familiar, Ray noted. Where had he heard it?
“You're Waid!” Ray said, snapping his fingers. “The analyst.”
Waid bowed his head in acknowledgment, though it was Kit who spoke.
“You've been an agent all this time?” she asked. “Why did you attack the facility's computers, then?”
He glanced at Archer, who nodded.
“Well,” Waid began, somewhat nervously, “I wasn't an agent when I did that. I was in training. Archer found me, brought me up to speed on what he suspected. We planned the attack.”
Kit stared at him in stunned silence. Ray took the brief quiet before the storm to get a read on James Shane. The prisoner seemed to have temporarily forgotten about his captivity, watching the exchange in plain bewilderment.
Ray understood what must be going through his head. Here they were in this strange room, hustled through the halls covertly. He was chained to a chair, festooned with devices to make it impossible to use his powers, and witness to apparent admissions of crime committed by the people who had captured him. He had to be thinking the worst, Ray imagined; that he wouldn't be leaving the room alive.
“Why?” Kit asked simply, once she had regained her composure.
“To minimize exposure,” Ray said, understanding at once. “By forcing this place to limit how much it could put into the computer system, Archer controlled the information his superiors could access.”
“Very good,” Archer said. “Not just that, but I was pretty sure we were being monitored directly through our network. Waid confirmed it, tracked it back to the NSA. Not just looking at our emails and data, but actually watching and listening through our computers. We had to create a credible outside threat to justify going analogue for a good long time.”
“Until Waid became an agent, you mean,” Ray said. “So he could keep an eye on the system full-time.”
Archer nodded. “We also had to
hold off until Operations was ready, to give him a reason to be in front of a computer all day.”
“Hang on,” Kit said. “We're talking about, what, a thousand work stations alone? More? Not to mention every other computer in the place. Research and Development alone has to be more than most technopaths can handle.”
Waid smiled, a glint of pride in his eyes. “My only ability is technopathy. I can sense machines, know their abilities and limitations. Enter them with my mind and control them. I can travel across internet, phone lines, even power cables. That's how I know there aren't any listening devices in here. I'm the best in the world at what I do. My actual power rating is a nine, not what it says in my file.”
Ray choked, Kit and James Shane having almost identical reactions. Individual powers at that level were uncommon bordering on rare.
“Now,” Archer said, guiding the discussion, “we're all caught up. That includes you.”
The last he said to the prisoner, who watched all of them with wary skepticism. Ray knew the feeling behind the look, as he'd been there himself. It was the overwhelming sense of defeat pushing you right to the edge of tolerance. Not long after Fairmont, that feeling had pushed Ray to attempt suicide.
Now that the man knew some of their secrets, the hard part could begin.
Convincing him to help.
Half an hour later Ray was beginning to think Shane would never talk. It occurred to him, as Archer and Kit alternated between explaining things, that during the entire drama over the previous days, he hadn't actually heard the man utter a word.
Ray sat back and observed, listening to Archer lay more of the groundwork of convincing this man to join them without making it obvious.
“We've told you that powerful people not only knew about Fairmont ahead of time, but may have planned it,” Archer said. They had explained it in broad strokes, anyway, but Shane gave them almost nothing in response. Ray thought it was reasonable to try to exploit the man's sense of right and wrong, at least on general principle, but doubted its effectiveness given recent events. Shane was a man driven by a personal need for justice—
“Why did those men attack your sister?” Ray blurted out loudly, drawing surprise from the others.
James Shane started in his seat, as if the question frightened him. The cool control cracked, then, his eyes darting between them nervously. His jaw clenched, set defiantly, and his lips drew tight.
“Ray,” Archer began, but Ray put up a hand.
“We've been sitting here talking at you and getting nothing,” Ray said. “We've been so focused on trying to catch you that we never asked that question. We didn't think about why the assault happened, only your response to it.”
It came to him, then, an intuitive leap ending in a fully-formed explanation. This man had nothing to lose by telling them on a personal level. They had him dead to rights for his attack on OSA agents if nothing else. The only explanation was that he was protecting his sister, and it obviously wasn't her dignity in light of the assault. Going after the men who crippled her had caused many people to look at her case.
He was protecting her from something.
“She's an unregistered Next, isn't she?” Ray asked.
He couldn't have elicited more of a reaction had he slapped the man. Shane's mouth dropped open in shock, which turned into bared teeth.
“What if she was?” he snarled. “Gonna bring her in for not registering? Put her in a cell like you'll do to me?”
Ray paused, understanding on instinct how important his next words might be.
Kit spoke up.
“Tell us what happened, James,” she said quietly.
Something in the prisoner broke, then, and Ray had to stop himself from reaching out to comfort the man. The defiant glare died away, the tension in his shoulders and arms drained. Personal experience had taught Ray how difficult it was to push yourself on nothing but anger, how isolation ate away at you. He thought it likely this man had spoken with no one about what had actually happened to his sister.
“She was at a party,” Shane said. “You knew that. She was drinking, having a good time. This wasn't some frat boy rager, either. Neighborhood thing. Anyway, she must have had a little too much, lost control.”
Ray cocked his head. “Did she hurt someone?”
Shane shook his head sharply. “My sister wouldn't hurt a fly. The only thing her power does is make her glow. She can light up a room, maybe a back yard if she really pushes it.”
Beside Ray, Kit's fingers tightened on the arm of her chair hard enough to make the steel creak.
“Those three assholes saw her. They were in the game room, just them and her. Robert Lile started it, so drunk he could barely talk. He told her how it was wrong she didn't wear a ring to let people know what she was. A freak, he said. Ginny didn't like that, and she let him know. Lile hit her, and the other two joined in.”
Archer swore. “She didn't tell the police what happened, because she didn't want to get in trouble.”
Shane nodded gravely. “Yeah. She was in pretty bad shape when the cops talked to her, but she was alert enough to leave out the part about her powers. She named the attackers, who categorically deny doing it, and the officers apparently grilled her pretty hard. They knew she was lying about something.”
“Cops usually do,” Archer said. “Since they didn't know about her powers...”
“They assumed she was lying about who assaulted her. Which is probably why the police didn't strain themselves keeping those pieces of shit off the streets.”
“Damn,” Waid said sympathetically, breaking his silence.
“This changes things,” Kit said. Archer nodded.
“What do you mean?” Shane said, visibly angry. “Now you have to go after her?”
“Not what I mean,” Kit said evenly. “Now that we know the truth, this falls under our jurisdiction. People forget, but the OSA protects Next, too.”
Shane shook his head. “If that's true, then you'll have to arrest her.”
“Oh, I don't know about that,” Ray said. “Since she didn't know about her power before that night, she shouldn't be in any trouble.”
James Shane opened his mouth to say something, then understanding flashed in his eyes. It was followed closely by suspicion. “Why would you do that, after everything I've done?”
Ray glanced at Kit to gauge whether she was angry for him speaking up—again—but she nodded to him with an amused smile. Go ahead, that smile said. You have the floor.
“First off,” Ray said, “you need to stop thinking of us as some mindless cogs in a big, evil government agency bent on oppressing you. We're human beings, man. So your sister can glow. You know just as well as I do there are thousands of people like her out there, low-level Next whose powers can't hurt anyone. They tend not to register, and we look the other way. We're not monsters, James. We're sympathetic for what she went through.”
Shane softened somewhat at Ray's words, a more thoughtful expression settling on his face.
“Ray's right,” Kit interjected. “We do sympathize. That being said, you're exceptionally lucky none of my people was seriously injured. The worst of it was the agent who caught fire, and he only suffered first degree burns. Damage resistance, in case you were wondering.”
Shane had the grace to look bothered by this, though Ray was unsure if it was genuine.
“Here's what I'm offering,” Kit continued. “I give you my personal guarantee that if these men are guilty, they get the maximum sentence. We have several means at our disposal to determine guilt that aren't quite ready for widespread use. If they did it, they will pay. Your sister gets a pass, and the OSA will take care of her medical care here at the facility. We've got people on staff who can help her heal faster and better than anywhere else in the world.”
Shane studied her through narrowed eyes. “What do you want from me in return?”
Kit didn't dissemble. “We want your help. In the short term, that means taking us a fe
w places we need to go that we can't otherwise manage. Long term depends on how those jaunts turn out.”
“What do you mean?” Shane asked.
Kit fixed him with an emotionless stare. “We can keep you out of reach for a few days, maybe a week, but sometime soon you're going to be reclassified as a threat to national security. What that means is your crimes will be used as a lever to force you into working for some very powerful people. They won't hesitate to use your family, too, if it comes to that.”
Archer leaned in. “We're trying to figure out which of those people are behind Fairmont and the too-fast reaction to the Next. They knew what was coming. Maybe caused it. If you help us of your own free will, we'll be declaring war on them. We wouldn't give you up without a fight.”
Shane's brow furrowed. “What if I just ran?”
Kit shook her head. “You won't. I've read up on you, James. You're not a bad guy, not really. We're going to put those men in cages for a very long time. You'll get justice.”
He looked down. “I killed a man,” he breathed.
“You did,” Kit said. “Because of that, we'll have to take certain precautions. You'd have to wear monitors and power disruptors we could activate remotely. But the law is clear on how you can be utilized while serving your sentence.” Kit paused, then shrugged. “But the truth is, that won't matter. It might bother me, what you did, but I get it. We've discussed it, and if it means saving lives and exposing a conspiracy that ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people, we think it's worth the life of a man who crippled a woman for no good reason.”
“Besides, what we're planning is illegal as shit,” Archer added. “So we're not going to ride any high horses around you.”
“Why would you trust me after what I've done to you?” Shane asked.
Kit looked at Ray meaningfully. He raised his brow in return, and she gave him a fractional nod.
“Trust might be too strong a word,” Ray said. “Like she said, we'll take precautions. It's more of a second chance. Everything we know about you says you were a great guy before all this happened. You didn't abuse your powers for personal gain or out of spite. You did it because you thought justice had failed. It was wrong, but understandable. You think this is some trick, maybe. It isn't. They're willing to give you a chance just like they did for me.”
The Next Chronicle (Book 2): Damage Page 12