Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4)

by Robert J. Crane

  We descended three floors and entered a room that was completely controlled by the Secret Service. I’d heard they took over entire hotel floors during presidential and candidate visits, but it lent the whole place an ominous aura. Most hotels have a quiet hum to them, even when unoccupied. This one had four visible suited guardians standing sentry at various points in the hall. It cast a little bit of a pall over the place with them standing there like statues. Statues whose heads turned as I came in with my escort.

  “Do I need to search you?” my escort asked.

  “I’m carrying a Sig Sauer P227 in the small of my back,” I said. “If you want it, you can have it, but it’s the least lethal weapon in my arsenal.”

  He made his displeasure obvious with both a disapproving grunt and a reddening of his fair complexion. “I’m not leaving you alone with the senator, then.”

  “Dude,” I said, “skip the interagency rivalry. If I wanted to kill him, I would have blown up the hotel and flown away before you even saw me coming. I’m here to talk, that’s all. I’ve known the senator for years, Agent …?” I waited to see if he was going to give me his name or play dick.

  “Faraday,” he said, conceding. “You understand my job here?”

  “Protect the candidate,” I said. “At all costs.”

  He paused at the entry to a door and stared right in my eyes. “Are you going to make my job more difficult in some way?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Just here to talk about items of mutual interest.”

  “You sure?” he asked. “Because I’ve heard things.”

  “Things?” I asked. “Like … rules of grammar? Laws of the universe? Rumors? That sound a tire makes as it’s deflating?”

  He gazed at me suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and sighed. “I’m trying not to be an ass and it’s really difficult. I could have made a really kick setup line there about ‘the sound your balls make as they explode from the impact of my foot’ against them. I’m just so used to pushing back against people who give me any hint of resistance on anything.”

  Agent Faraday stared at me, like he was trying to decide if I was bullshitting him. I was not. “That sounds like a personality disorder.”

  “Great, so we’ve got that in common. Can I see the senator now?”

  He made a grumbling noise and opened the door. “I’ll be right outside,” he said, loud enough that anyone in the room could hear him, too. He closed the door behind me.

  I stood in a hotel suite that was ridiculously lavish. The curtains were drawn, though, giving it a half-lit effect, with only a little of the late afternoon light making its way through the sheers, casting things in shadow. My eyes adjusted quickly and fell on a shape in the corner, sitting in a chair almost against the wall, head tilted to look out the white lace curtains.

  “Hello, Sienna,” Senator Robb Foreman said in a low, ponderous voice. “It’s been a while.”

  37.

  Augustus

  As soon as Sienna dropped me off, I was stalking down the street, my phone in hand. I wanted to have a conversation, and I didn’t want to do it in public or anywhere Sienna could hear me. I watched her fly off into the sky, and once I was sure she was far enough away, I dialed Taneshia and listened to it ring.

  And heard Alicia Keys’s “This Girl is On Fire” blare out somewhere in the crowd behind me.

  I turned as I felt my skin crawl like it wanted to shed me, chills running up and down even as the sun beat on me. I caught a glimpse of Taneshia, a flash of jet-black hair as she shoved her way through the crowd assembled outside my house. I didn’t have to wonder too hard about why she was hiding, why she wasn’t sitting on the back of the ambulance with Momma.

  I went after her. Not too fast, not too slow. I didn’t knock people over, linebacker my way through them. I pushed gently, said sorry, excused myself. People parted for me after a minute, realizing I was making my way through. I heard the words they said, the hushed gossip. It was all kind, too, not like I heard them say about Sienna. They knew me here, I was of the neighborhood, and I didn’t have months of bad press dogging me like the grim reaper to drag my name down.

  I made it out of the crowd and caught sight of Taneshia making her way determinedly to the end of the street. Shorty was hauling, too, so I hurried to catch up, breaking into a run. She scooted around the corner and I hustled after her, watching her cut across a lawn and disappear behind a brick house.

  I came around it in a hurry and almost ran right into her. She was just standing there, waiting, hands in her pockets and eyes down. One look at her and I knew she knew, that she’d realized why I was calling, why I was following. I stood there looking at her, she stood there looking down at the brown and scraggly lawn we were standing on, and finally I spoke. “Why?” I asked.

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” she said, still not looking up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  She hesitated, like she was wrestling with something. “More specific still.”

  I frowned. “How much are you keeping from me? Just tell me all of it.”

  She let out a sigh. “I can’t do that, Augustus. Some of the secrets I’m keeping aren’t mine to give away.”

  “Are you a meta?” I asked, staring her straight down.

  I saw her bottom lip quiver. “Yes,” she said.

  “You can throw lightning,” I said.

  She held up a hand, and I watched electricity flow through it. “Yes.”

  I took a step back and felt myself clutch onto the ground in my head. I didn’t know if I could throw up a shield that could protect me from lightning, and certainly not if I could do it fast enough to protect myself from her, but I wasn’t going to die blindsided, even by a girl I’d known as long as I’d known Taneshia. “Why did you kill Roscoe Marion?”

  She looked like she wanted to cry but there was not a tear in sight in her eyes. That girl was hard of heart, like she had a stone in her chest. “I didn’t.”

  “Man, don’t give me that!” I said, shaking my head. “Someone killed Roscoe with lightning, all right? And just a little bit ago, someone saved me with some lightning, too—”

  “That was me,” she said. “I knew you were going to stick your nose in this and get yourself in trouble, and I came to help you.” She put up a hand and covered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to—that guy … I didn’t intend for him to … but I did …” She pulled her hand away. “He was the first person I ever killed, I swear.”

  “Then who killed the others?” I asked, and took a step closer to her.

  “I … I can’t tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “I just … I can’t. It’s not my place to tell.”

  I stood there straight, looking right at her. “Yeah. Right. Well, maybe you can point me in the direction of whose place it would be to tell—” I watched lightning run down her skin like goosebumps and blinked. “What?” And I heard it a moment later.

  I turned my head in the direction of the commotion. Three vans were parked behind me on the street and men were spilling out of them. Men with guns. Men with masks. Men with …

  Men with powers. I saw one guy growing to fifteen feet tall, just ripping out of his clothes as he grew to giant size. Another’s skin glowed with fire as he stepped from the back of a vehicle. A third had the gleam of moisture on his hands, and others had the aura of energy building around them. I counted ten of them, the powered people, and they had at least twenty guys with guns as backup.

  And they were heading straight for us.

  38.

  Sienna

  “Yeah, it’s been years,” I said in reply to Senator Foreman’s greeting, with a not-shockingly muted amount of sarcasm. “I imagine if you had it your way, it’d be even longer.”

  He stared at me, entirely from the shadow. He took his time answering. “Let’s just say I appreciate your discretion in coming to me quietly, in private, rather than in pu
blic.”

  “I don’t imagine you’d want to be seen with me in public right now,” I said, turning to walk along the wall of the suite. There was a flowery picture hanging there, a watercolor of grass with long green shoots. “I’m probably approval rating kryptonite.”

  “You’ve been having a rough go of things lately,” he said.

  “My star is definitely not rising,” I said. “I’m a falling star. Problem with those is, they tend to burn pretty bright right before they hit the ground. If they’re big enough, they cause quite the mess. Seems I remember dinosaurs getting wiped out that way.”

  “If I was just listening to your words, I might hear a threat there,” Foreman said.

  “But you’re not just listening to my words,” I said. “You’re reading my emotions, and you know I don’t give a damn about threatening you. I’m not here to do that, and I wouldn’t do that, in any case.”

  “The Sienna I knew wouldn’t do that,” he said. “But I’m not sure I really know you anymore.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Do I seem too different to you?” I pressed fingers into my temple, pointing at my head as I stared at the flowery painting. “Up here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You know I can’t read your mind, but I can read your feelings—”

  “Same difference,” I said. “Emotions lead the mind.”

  “—and you’re … bitter,” he said, after a moment’s pause for reflection. Or maybe he was just trying to find a way to say it that wouldn’t enrage me. I don’t know. “You seem less … I don’t want to say ‘stable’, but … I don’t know that there’s a more apt word.”

  “You afraid I’m going to snap?”

  “Not really,” he said. “But if you keep going this direction I’m not sure you’re going to end up anywhere you want to go. You seem … defensive—”

  “Because I’m under attack from all sides.”

  “—isolated—”

  “Because I’m alone.”

  “—angry—because of all of the above, I know,” he said before I could.

  “You know what’s been happening to me,” I said. “I’m getting burned in effigy.”

  “Being a politician, I wouldn’t know what that’s like,” he said lightly.

  “It’s different for you,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him. “You have supporters. A lot of them, according to the last poll I saw.”

  “I do,” he said cautiously. “And it’s kind of you to bring that up. But … strangely … not the reason you came, I don’t think.”

  I bowed my head. “Why is that strange?”

  “Because most people in your position—someone under siege, attacked, alone … they might look to someone comparatively popular thinking that person could ‘save’ them somehow.”

  I snorted. “You’re not popular enough to save me. And you’re just as subject to this circus as I am. The press is coming at you with kid gloves right now. They’ll turn and bring the long knives out at any moment.”

  “Probably right after the convention, my advisors tell me,” he said. “Though my campaign manager says it’s been a pleasant change of pace that they’ve gone somewhat easy on me thus far. She’s not used to that.

  So what do you want?” he asked. “I assume you didn’t just come to me to catch up on old times.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I could use the civil conversation at this point,” I said. “But no, you’re right. I didn’t just come to chitchat.” I looked straight at him. “I’ve got a problem.”

  “Just one?” he asked. “You’re scaling back.”

  “A big one,” I said. “A big fat mystery with really powerful, connected people sitting in the middle of it that are making my life even more of a living hell than it was before.”

  “Ahhh,” he said. “So that’s where this sudden increase of heat is coming from.” I watched him lean forward in his seat, and for the first time I could see hints of his features beneath the shadows. “What did you get into in Atlanta?”

  “You know Cordell Weldon?” I asked.

  He made a grunting noise. “I know of him. We’re not exactly friends, sitting roughly across from each other on the political divide.”

  “Thought I might have heard you mention his name unpleasantly on one of the talk show rounds you made after the war,” I said. “His name came up with regard to an investigation I’m on. One of his orgs funds a homeless shelter where some residents went missing, ended up murdered, possibly experimented on for being meta. One of the workers who was looking into it turned up dead, too.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “So I had a conversation with him,” I said, “and he got a little defensive and threatening.”

  “Only a little?”

  “Maybe more than a little,” I said. “Definitely more than an innocent man would, I think. So I hunted down this other source, and he says Weldon’s dirty as a pig pen, has deals all over the place on the down low.”

  “Of course he does,” Foreman said. “But you’ll never be able to prove that.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “You can’t tell me there aren’t people that have witnessed this.”

  “Tons of them,” he said. “All in on the take or dead, most assuredly, if Weldon is halfway competent.”

  “Ugh,” I said, letting my frustration creep out. “How do you even deal with slime like that?”

  “How do I deal with scum like Weldon, or how should you?” He stood and adjusted his suit. “Because those are two different things.”

  I looked at him across the room. “How should I deal with him?”

  “If we go by your press, you should choke him to death and drop his corpse in the North Atlantic.”

  I blinked. “Are you … serious?”

  “Probably not,” he said, and he sounded grave. “How do you deal with a cockroach like Cordell Weldon? I don’t know. I’ve been dealing with people like him forever. He’s particularly good at galvanizing enough support and paying enough of the right people to keep the consequences of his corruption from raining down on him. Whatever the press says about your methods of dealing with people, sometimes I find it oddly refreshing. You just … do. And the problem is solved.” He looked straight at me. “That guy in England, for example. He could read the future, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cassandra-type. He could read possible futures or something, see the probabilities and how they ran.”

  “Guy would have been a nightmare to contain,” Foreman said, and he folded his massive arms over his chest and took a few steps forward. “People would go back and forth forever, for years, debating what to do about him. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of discussion. All the while he’d escape a dozen times, maybe get recaptured if we were lucky. Or, conversely—” He snapped his fingers. “Problem solved.”

  “Thank you for your late support on that one,” I said. “But what you’re suggesting here—”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Foreman said, holding up a hand. “You can’t kill Cordell Weldon, as much fun as it might be for me to consider how much easier life would be without him. I mean, you physically could, obviously, but if you did it, you’d be in a mess that’s probably not worth considering.”

  “What do I do about him?” I asked. “I’ve got a mystery, he’s at the core, him and Edward Cavanagh—”

  “Cavanagh?” Foreman asked.

  “They’re in it together somehow,” I said. “Up to their eyeballs.”

  “Woooooo,” Foreman said, like the air was being let out of him low and slow. “He’s a major opposition donor. Major. I feel like you’re teasing me with Christmas here, hinting that Weldon and Cavanagh are tied up in dirty dealings that you might be able to prove if you push at it.”

  I stared at him. “It did cross my mind that you might benefit from my work. I thought maybe if there was an incentive, you might be more willing to … I don’t know, give me some form of aid.”

  “I’m a little limited in wha
t I can do for you,” he said. “I’ve got a bully pulpit, but if I try and use it on your behalf right at the moment—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said. “The new head of the agency has zero loyalty to you.”

  “Quite the opposite, actually,” Foreman said. “He’s a hand-picked appointment of President Harmon and the administration, which makes him likely to react to any pressure from me by going in the opposite direction. I mean, I could dig a real nice trench and make a political issue out of what’s going on in your department right now, but I’m not sure it’ll do you any good at all. Might shine a little light in places you don’t want it to go, I think.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’ve already threatened to drag my past into the cold light of day if I continue to make a pain in the ass of myself.”

  “Hm,” he said, and his hands went to his pockets. “I think it’d be pretty self-serving of me to suggest you continue your investigation on this one. I mean, I’m not going to complain if you keep going and end up overturning these two, but you might want to give some thought to the blowback from this one. It could be … considerable.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said. “But I’m not ready to let this go.”

  “Of course not,” he said, again lightly, “because you wouldn’t be you if you quit when it was smart to.”

  “I get the sense you knew that.”

  Foreman sighed. “I’ve been around you long enough to know your mind. Not as well as Zollers, but well enough. All along, the people who tried to pull strings at the agency, the ones who I approached with the idea to put you to work running the war against Sovereign, they thought that what we had on you would make you a loyal guard dog on a chain, one that would bark on command and do their bidding without question.”

  I felt my eyes narrow at him. “But you didn’t believe that?”

  I could see him smile in the dark. “All along, I had the benefit of reading your emotional state. No, I always knew that what we had was a furious tigress on a real thin leash.” He took a few steps closer to me, revealing more of his face. “See, there’s a rage in you, just under the surface. It bubbles like a volcano, always there, seething and raw and furious, ready to erupt from whatever vent it can find. Sometimes it goes big, sometimes it goes small, but I never made the mistake they did and tried to act like it was something I could contain.”