Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  “And how’d that turn out?” Ramona already knew the answer, but Dixie Belle smiled at the question.

  “Handsome, if not a little thick in the head.” She sipped her tea and winked at Pride, who ducked his head over his mug. “He still hasn’t said what he needs, you see? Comes over, makes me tea, but he can’t be direct. Too much of a gentleman, but it’s so damn frustrating.”

  “Momma.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “Please.”

  “I’ll do worse, Benjamin.”

  “I know.” He took a breath. “We need a copy of the original Echo charter. The one at the Eastham Foundation was destroyed, but we think—”

  “They were careless. Nice folk, but careless. No planning for the future.” She tsked and stood, leaving her tea on the table. “And what makes you think I still have a copy?”

  This time, Ramona piped up. “Well, I don’t know about them, but if I don’t trust my employer, I save every scrap of paper. That way, when the time comes, I’ve got the upper hand.”

  Dixie Belle’s smile widened. “That,” she declared, “is one smart woman. I like you, Miss Ramona. You and me, we should talk more often. You listen to her, Willa Jean. Echo needs more smart heroes like that.”

  “But I’m not a . . .” Ramona stopped as Dixie Belle pulled a tattered Bible from a bookshelf. It was worn at the edges, the gold lettering on the front faded. The binding creaked as she opened the book, turned to the middle, and extracted a slender envelope. She offered it to Ramona with a wink.

  “Don’t scan it yet,” she warned. “Making a copy will just give you a blurry page. Find a magician. A good one, and one you can trust. They’ll know what to do with it.”

  Pride frowned as Ramona tucked the envelope inside her jacket. “And after that?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, but sat down at the table and sipped her tea. “After that, you’ll have to work to bring everyone together somehow. Keep in mind that ‘together’ has different meanings for you and whatever mage-worker you can find. I don’t know much about what could happen after that. Magic was never my strength.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that magic will be a problem,” Vickie remarked dryly in Ramona’s ear. “Call it a hunch.”

  Ramona placed a protective hand on the outside of the jacket. “Will they stay safe, ma’am? You’ve heard what Dominic Verdigris has done to his better business partners.” She had images of aging metahumans caught off guard by Blacksnake operatives as they traveled to doctors’ appointments and grandkids’ parties. The possibility for what she thought of as civilian casualties made her nauseous.

  Dixie Belle smiled. She reached across the table and took Ramona’s free hand in hers. “Ramona, darling, you’re going to have to trust an old woman when it comes to these sorts of things. The people you’re going to find, they’ve faced worse things than that oily little weasel on the best of their days. Dominic Verdigris doesn’t scare me, and he doesn’t scare a lot of the others.” She squeezed Ramona’s hand and waited. When Ramona finally nodded, her smile broadened. “Good. You’ll have to start this rolling. Leave the smiling and shaking to Benjamin.”

  Yankee Pride let out a long breath. “To make this happen, we’ll have to work with the CCCP. Is that going to make any of the older generation nervous?”

  At the mention of the CCCP, Dixie Belle got a devilish twinkle in her eye. “That depends upon what you would call ‘nervous.’ Is that handsome wolf still in charge of things?”

  “Momma!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Leap into the Wind

  MERCEDES LACKEY AND DENNIS LEE

  There was something odd going on with the later generations of metas, and this one in particular. We had combined powers. We had powers that improved with time and practice and honing them. And we had powers no one could categorize. None of this had ever happened with the first generation, and nothing like this had happened with the speed and chaos of this one.

  Bella was about to find out just how strange things were getting.

  * * *

  The knock at her door was expected, but Bella double-checked the little video monitor Vickie had installed for her to be sure of who it was out there. It hadn’t taken much persuasion to get the camera installed after the first time she’d looked out of the regular peephole into the muzzle of one of Vickie’s Glocks—and that had been before Verdigris had murdered Tesla. Having an extremely paranoid neighbor/patient was not such a bad thing.

  It was, as anticipated, Bulwark. But she used the intercom anyway. “Sushi’s here.”

  “You promised me spaghetti,” the big man rumbled with amusement. That was the right answer. Relieved that it was him and not Doppelgaenger, she let him in and locked the door behind him.

  “Clean?” he asked in an undertone. She nodded.

  “And Vickie’s glass thingy is running,” she added. Vickie had demonstrated how one of the most common bugs didn’t rely on having a physical bug present at all; it was tech that picked up voices from the vibration of the glass in your windows, from as far away as a mile. Vickie solved that with tiny speakers attached to each pane, playing whatever you had on your stereo directly into the glass. That pretty effectively scrambled what people were saying inside a room without raising suspicion. If anyone was listening tonight, they’d be treated to the full Ring cycle. “Oh, Vix wants to see you after this. She wants you wired with the improved Overwatch. That way we won’t have to play question and answer anymore.” She wrinkled her nose. “Some magic hoodoo about how because she tuned it with a sample of you that she got before DG infilled, if it takes, she knows it’s you for sure. She’ll tell you all about it.”

  Gairdner lowered himself down to the couch with a sigh. He was actually skirting the edge of visible emotion . . . which was close to being out of character for him. Then again, he’d just come back from the brink of death, so perhaps a few lapses in his iron control could be forgiven. “No scolding, please, Bella,” he said. “Trust me, Victrix has already delivered everything you could want, and more. In . . . I think Djinni counted three Eastern European languages. Maybe four.”

  Bella raised an eyebrow. “You must have really popped her cork. She only swears in the Slavics when she’s so mad only cussing like a dockside whore will relieve the pressure. Lie down, please.”

  Gairdner did so. The oversized microsuede couch was just barely long enough for him. She knelt down beside him and held her hands just above his torso, brows creased with concentration as she checked on how his insides were healing.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why Slavic?”

  “Because her mother only speaks English and Irish, and as a teenager she didn’t want her mouth washed out with soap for language. Her father thinks it’s hilarious, so she tells me.” Her expression eased a little, when she found nothing wrong. “Sovie did a great job. Not that I didn’t expect it, I mean, she is a medical doctor and I’m not, but it makes me feel better to be sure. Go ahead and sit up for now.”

  When he had made room, she joined him on the couch, with just enough distance between them to make it . . . nonpersonal. Like two people in a waiting room. Good thing she had an oversized couch; even when he was sitting up, Gairdner took up a lot of real estate. She reached for a mint from the bowl on the coffee table and shoved the bowl towards him. “I think it’s time to bring in Silent Knight and Shakti. Ramona’s felt them both out, and they’re definitely disaffected. Vickie’s new Overwatch rig means we won’t be running the same risks wiring people that we were before.”

  His brows creased ever so slightly. “Will the rig work within Knight’s armor and without being disrupted by his sonic power? He can’t keep running to her to replace it. And I’m not certain Shakti is . . . stable. Losing Handsome Devil like that . . .”

  “Vix assures me the answer is yes to Knight, and that’s why I am asking you about Shakti. She’s definitely skittish about seeing me or anyone else for head work. I can barely get her to come in to see Mary Ann when she g
ets injured. You know her better than I do.” It was such a relief to be able to bounce things off of Bulwark. She didn’t feel as if she had to keep second-guessing herself all the time anymore. “But wouldn’t giving her something else to think about and work towards actually do her good? I mean, yes, we have our covert goal, but in the long run, this is all about making Echo as solid as it ever was in the best days, and it’s all about making sure our people are given what they need.”

  He thought about that. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “Work has certainly proved beneficial for me.”

  Hooboy. There it was, the opportunity to talk about the Elephant in the Room. She grabbed it. “After Harmony?” she asked, and quickly snatched the imp of jealousy that scratched and clawed its way out of her id and stuffed it back inside the mental box she’d been keeping it in. “Bull . . . I haven’t had a chance to say this, but I am . . . I’m horribly sorry for your loss. I’d murder her in a New York minute if I ever see her again, but I am sorry for . . . hell, I can’t even begin to think what it feels like to be in a relationship with someone and have her turn on you like that. And if there’s anything I can do to help—”

  Like rip off your shirt and drag you off for a good therapeutic . . . DOWN, GIRL! Business face, business manners. Just get the Elephant out of the way and move on. On. Not in. He wasn’t a slab of beefcake, after all. This was just like all the other times he’d been here; this was to take advantage of his deep knowledge of Echo, his much broader experience, and his superb sense for tactics and planning. One of the smartest things she had ever heard a military man say was that a really good leader didn’t try to know or be everything; a really good leader made sure he had people around him that he could trust, people who knew their stuff and were going to be blunt and honest. And he kept those people around to advise him, and never got angry when they said something he didn’t like.

  That was Bull. Smart. He thought in terms of the long and short goals. Patient, more patient than she was. Experienced in ways she never would be. Indomitable. Never ran out on an impulse. Okay, sometimes you had to do that, when your back was to the wall and you had no plans and no choice, and that was her strength, to leap into the wind when the chips were all down and trust that something would turn up, that at the last minute she’d spot something that would pull everything out of the fire. But most of the time you needed plans, you needed strategies, and when you were running a rebellion, you needed a military turn of mind. Which she most assuredly did not have.

  He was staring at her as if she was speaking Urdu. “What?” he said.

  She found her cheeks turning hot. “Uh . . . you. Harmony. Relationship. When you were . . . out . . . I got a flash of when she kissed you, what she said. I didn’t mean to, but the telempathy is something I don’t have a lot of control over. I’m . . . really sorry your . . . uh . . . girl . . . turned out to be so toxic.” God, did that come out as clumsy as it sounds to me? Probably. Great, now I sound like an idiot.

  “There was nothing of that nature between myself and Harmony,” he said, looking slightly perplexed. “At least, not from my end. She may have been ‘playing for the cameras,’ or who knows? Perhaps in the dim recesses of her demented mind she truly has such feelings for me. Not that it matters. I grossly misjudged her.”

  Great, now I feel like an idiot, she thought, her cheeks getting hotter. And . . . great, so the “I’ve benefitted from work” thing is about Amethist, not Harmony. My competition is the dead wife. Yeah, that’ll be easier. “Well . . . that’s . . . good, I guess. If I ever see her again I can clean her clock without worrying about making you feel bad.”

  Bull looked into her eyes, and favored her with a rare smile. “No, I think I would enjoy seeing that.”

  The flush of embarrassment changed to a blush of mingled confusion and pleasure. But she played it for comedy. “And here I thought you only got off on watching me put the Djinni on his keister.”

  He nodded. “That’s good too, but you know as well as I do that of all of us, he gets the most pleasure out of it.”

  “Perv. Him, not you.” But she said it without rancor. “Uhm . . . speaking of the perv, I’ve been studying how he heals, and that gave me an idea, so I looked up a couple of other metas and studied their innards. In between, you know, running Echo Med and a rebellion.” She gave him a wry grin. “I know you’re going to keep right on trying to hold up the world, and I figured I’d see if I could improve your odds of doing so. So . . . uhm . . . I was wondering if you’d let me try tinkering with you a little. It won’t be anything drastic, but I know, provided you have the healing factor in you, that I can make you heal faster. And I think I can fix things so you don’t stand the risk of losing your spleen every time you try and hold up a building. As long as it’s only two stories. I make no promises for three or more.”

  Bulwark considered that. “Near-death experiences from being crushed by countless tons of falling concrete, steel and glass. Yes, that is indeed getting old. What are you suggesting?”

  “Red’s skin heals almost instantaneously, but the rest of him can as well, when properly amped up. I can’t deliver that, but I think I can teach your cells to speed up a bit, from what I’ve learned from him. It seems to be a pretty common metahuman ability, just not everyone gets it triggered. I think I can trigger it in you, provided you have it. For the rest . . .” she pursed her lips. “Navy Seal—he’s over in the retirement community with Dixie—his organs are conditioned to take compression and decompression like a marine mammal’s, and here’s the weird thing, my research says there’s records showing regular non-metas can do that too, so I bet I can do the same for you. The last thing is Untermensch. He’s got some extra reinforcement, like the ‘silverskin’ you find around beef primals on all his muscle groups, around each of his more fragile organs. I know I can get that to grow. It’s just a matter of convincing a few cells to differentiate. So, that’s the untested part. You game to try?” She sighed wistfully. “I’d love to do this for everyone, but . . . I mean, this is a gamble. An experiment. I’m totally confident it will work, but I can’t try it on me; that’s the thing, I’d do it on myself first but it’s not possible. You’re the best and most needful candidate, but it’s never been done before and not everybody wants to be Number One.”

  Bull thought it over, and finally nodded. “It seems we have an opportunity here. If you truly think you can speed up my natural healing, reinforce my body against harm and do so safely, I think we owe it to the others to try.”

  “Lie back down then, I need to do the whole ‘laying on of hands’ gig.” He obeyed her, and she placed her palms flat on his torso, shoving her concentration strictly into business mode. She moved her focus down to the level of the very, very small, looking for that elusive whatever it was that meant a meta could heal faster than normal. “Sovie thinks the healing factors are in the mitochondria,” she said conversationally, her eyes half-closed as she “looked” with that inner eye. “She doesn’t know why it gets triggered in some metas that have it and not others. And she doesn’t know why some metas have it and some don’t. I’ve got a theory, though. The first of the metas—they could ever only do one or two things at most. And they always triggered in pairs, almost like gladiators. The way La Faucon Blanche got triggered by Valkyria—the powers weren’t duplicates of each other, but they were matches in strength. Around the sixties, though, metas started triggering in isolation, in a vaster spread of relative strengths, and there were metas with several powers. Things have just gotten even more chaotic since then. The only one consistent thing is that for those few metas that had children, the children are always meta. So . . . it’s like whatever was at work started going into a cosmic blender, and you never knew what was going to come out. And . . .” She felt a grin coming on, as she identified what she was looking for. “Bingo. You are one of the lucky ones of the lottery. You have the healing factor. And there was much rejoicing.”

  “I’ll admit I find that surprising,�
�� Bull said. “I always thought any secondary abilities would be based in raw power, like my shield. Now, you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Healing factor, absolutely. I’ve triggered this before. I did Corbie and Knight. It’s kind of neat, it’s definitely a catalysis reaction, it spreads like a firework exploding. And here . . . we . . . go.”

  She “talked” to the cells under her palms, and felt them respond, wake up, and then—it was like a whoosh, as the trigger spread outwards, like one of those elaborate domino setups, as each cell triggered the ones next to it, and so on. Corbie had said it felt like tossing down a shot of high-powered Scotch. Knight had said it was like the buildup before he emitted a sonic pulse. She wondered what it felt like to Bull.

  “You should be feeling something,” she told him. “It shouldn’t be unpleasant . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment, tracking on the wave as it moved through his body. “To go by Corbie, on your own you’ll recover from—say—a gunshot wound in days instead of weeks. If one of us healer types is boosting you, it’ll be hours instead of days. And if it’s me and I’m hooked up to the pheresis rig, it’ll be under an hour.”

  “Excellent,” Bull said. “Though you will forgive me if I am in no hurry to test this out.”

  She took a deep breath and sat back on her heels, opening her eyes completely and flexing her fingers. “Now comes the tricky part. We see if I can make you as tough on the inside as you are on the outside.” She leaned forward again, and put her hands back on his abs. Such gorgeous abs . . .

  Focus!

  Find the spleen . . . that was the one that threatened to rupture first every time he deflected enormous weight with his power. There you are . . . Now go and explain to the thin membrane around it that she wanted some of the cells to look, not like this, but like that . . . Yes, and start to multiply, please. And form a nice, tough sheath . . . flexible, but hard to rupture . . .