In the Wind (Out of the Box Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  In the Wind

  Out of the Box, Book 2

  Robert J. Crane

  In the Wind

  Out of the Box #2

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2014 Midian Press

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Author’s Note: This book takes place roughly six months after the events of Power: The Girl in the Box, Book 10 and two years prior to those of Limitless: Out of the Box, Book 1.

  Prologue

  I remember the day my dad left for the last time.

  He ruffles my hair with his wind, this power he has to control the currents of air. It blows right through my thick, wavy locks like a good wind should. It doesn’t make me smile like it usually does, though, because I’ve got that sour look of a kid who’s five and doesn’t want his dad to leave.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” he tells me, bending down to look me in the eye. The world around us is dark because it’s like four in the morning, the tick of an old pendulum-powered clock the only thing that breaks the silence of the early morning. I can see his eyes in the dim light. We’re in my room; his face is inches from mine. I can smell that strong scent he has, sweet and musky, something I’ll forever associate with him. My hands are woven tight across my chest. He’s left before, many times, to do “important work,” in his words.

  I don’t care.

  I’m five.

  I want my dad.

  “It’s just for a few weeks,” he says, and even at my young age I can hear the strain in his voice. I know I’m not making it easy on him, and there’s a rough satisfaction in that. “Then I’ll be back. Maybe I’ll bring Sierra with me.”

  This drives me further into my shell. Sierra is my new stepmother, whom I’ve met exactly once. It was not a happy meeting. I can feel my face; there are no tears running their course down my cheeks. I say nothing, in preparation for my sullen, resentful teenage years.

  “I left you my watch.” He gestures vaguely to the cherrywood dresser behind him. I can barely see it in the dark. The only light source is from outside my room, somewhere down the hall. “I’ll be back when the little numbers on the side of the face read twenty-two, okay? Count the days for me?”

  He tries to get me to look him in the eye, but fails. I’m not a quiet kid, but I’m holding it all in right now. Like a master.

  “It’ll be okay,” he says and forces a hug. I go limp in his arms, refusing to wrap mine around him. All I can feel is that hot, blistering resentment, my emotions boiling over in ways I lack the vocabulary to express. I pretend I’m asleep, a lump in the bed that he has to hold up with all his strength. “I love you,” he says, and he gently lowers my boned-fish carcass back to the sheets, which are hot and scratchy and uncomfortable.

  He ruffles my hair with his power one last time, playfully, but I close my eyes and continue to pretend I’m asleep. It’s a fiction, and we both know it. “See you later, kiddo,” he says as he stands.

  I feel the bed move as he does, the seismic shift of my world rocking as he removes his weight from the mattress. I lie as still as I can, eyes squeezed tight. I see his silhouette blurred through my squint as he pauses at the door. “I’m proud of you, Reed,” he says, and I shut my eyes tight, blotting out the last hint of light. “You’re growing up so fast.” I know even at this age that I’m not acting like it right now, but he doesn’t push it and I don’t say a word.

  When I open my eyes again five minutes, five hours, five years later, he’s already gone. I hear faint voices in the distance, and then the shutting of a door. The silence creeps into the room, the light in the hall turns off, and I’m left alone in the dark.

  It’s the last time I see my father alive.

  1.

  The wind is a tricky thing; if it blows hard enough, it can destroy. If it blows lightly, it can help sow a field, give you sweet, cool relief on a hot day, or even move a little topsoil around. However it blows, the wind is an instrument of change, a herald and an enforcer.

  But as for how hard it blows?

  Well, that’s kind of on me.

  My name is Reed Treston, in case you didn’t know. I’m an Aeolus, which … well, it’s … kind of hard to explain. I have the power of wind at my disposal. Okay, that wasn’t so hard to explain. But it’s not like I can summon a hurricane. No, that’s a little much. I can do a gust, though, a good one, a solid one that can break down a wall. If it’s not, y’know, concrete or something. I can blow down a hut. Knock over a person. Lift them up in the air for a little while. I’m getting pretty good at that.

  Actually, it’s what I’m doing right now.

  I point my hands at the ground, let the power of the wind run through me, and a little tornado a couple inches across blows out of each hand, keeping me about six feet off the ground. Not gonna lie, I look a little like Tony Stark trying out his armor thrusters for the first time. Gentle sway, back and forth over the blue mats that cover the training room floor. Because that’s where I am, the training room. It’s the only place on campus for this sort of regimented mayhem, with its aroma of sweat and crushed dreams. Not mine, of course. That’s from all the poor bastards my sister has absolutely crushed in this place. Yeah, that’s a good idea, I tell the agents: take on the most powerful person in the friggin’ world in a martial arts contest. It’s always worth a good laugh. Except for that one time she broke that guy’s arm. He was not laughing much.

  I’m just hovering. Holding position. Because that’s what I do, like a weight lifter holding his bench press as long as he can. Maybe this builds muscles of a different sort, I dunno. Maybe it’s all a placebo, a thing that happens in my head that makes me think I’m getting stronger. I don’t care. I need to be stronger. Need to be able to hover longer.

  Because, dammit, my sister can fly.

  And I’m a windkeeper, and I friggin’ can’t. It’s not right.

  My arms ache, all up and down, like I’ve been lifting weights all day. I haven’t. This is all I’ve done, this little bit of wind-aided levitation. Sitting here, gliding above the surface of the earth for … oh, I dunno … my eyes scan over to the big clock on the wall … fifteen minutes?

  Shit.

  Fifteen freaking minutes?

  I realize a little late I’ve been holding my breath and let it out. I fall to the earth in a barely controlled descent, flaring a gust of wind just before I crash down. It slows my impact, keeping me from taking it full on like I’m a ton of bricks. I’m not; I’m in reasonably good shape. But my ankle disagrees. It makes a little noise firing off the nerves in pain, telling me I’m a fat ass, and I grunt as I regain my footing.

  “Nice dismount, Mary Lou Retton.” There’s enough sarcasm in the comment to poison a more sincere and earnest person than me. It flies over my shoulder as if fired from a slingshot, but I don’t need to turn my head to know who’s speaking.

  Sienna Nealon. Hero of the whole damned world. Queen of the Metahuman Policing and Threat
Response. Whatever—we call it the agency. Pain in my ass.

  Also my little sister. Half-sister, technically.

  I let out another one of those sighs. It’s genuine. The clock is telling me I only lasted fifteen minutes, and I was pretty sure—while I was fighting to keep my eyes off of it—that I’d been in the air for at least sixteen years, maybe more. It’s a disappointment. Not crushing, like a kick to the groin with a steel-toed boot, but it hurts the ol’ ego.

  Kind of like having your little sister as your boss. Maybe you don’t say anything about it, but it’s not really good for the self-esteem.

  “If I wanted annoying commentary,” I say, steadying myself after my awkward landing, “I’d put on a Gilbert Gottfried Blu-ray and turn on the track.”

  “Oh God,” she says, “Has Gilbert Gottfried ever done a film commentary? Have we reached that cultural nadir?”

  “The Kardashians,” I say simply, wiping the copious beads of sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. It’s a little chilly in the training room. Snow still blankets the ground outside, the gift of Minnesota to her residents. It’s a special gift, too, something the rest of the U.S. isn’t dealing with right now. They get spring; we get the hard, frigid shaft of winter.

  Note to self: do not use the phrase “Hard, frigid shaft of winter” ever again. It has unpleasant connotations around here.

  “Right,” Sienna says, acknowledging my obvious point. “Clearly, it’s all downhill from here. Gilbert Gottfried commentaries on everything.”

  I crack a smile. Working for little sis has its pluses, the big one being that she’s as snarky as I am. “Did you come here solely to mock and deride me?” I ask.

  She emerges into view in front of me, wearing a winter coat that’s kind of … fluffy. It’s cold outside, so I suppose this is forgivable, but still … fluffy. She looks soft, and if you know Sienna Nealon, “soft” is not a word that springs to mind when thinking about her. Not ever. “It’s Ariadne’s,” she says, catching my look. “I left my winter coat at my dorm and didn’t want to—never mind.”

  She looks flustered for a second, which does happen from time to time with her. I suspect she’s got a really fast-moving internal monologue, with rip currents that could just about snap your neck. I can see it sometimes on her face, that she’s holding something back. It makes me wish I could pull a Zollers because I know she’s thinking something good, but whenever I ask her about it later, she begs off. “Anyway, no. I did not come merely to mock and deride you.” She makes a face. “And we really shouldn’t use the word ‘deride you’ anymore. Too phonetically close to – well, it lands us in the neighborhood of that whole step-sibling erotica thing that seems to be proliferating nowadays.” Pretty sure my face explodes with an unpleasant expression on that one, because she looks tentative for a second. “It’s this whole thing,” she goes on, “like a genre unto itself, and it kinda makes me shudder—”

  “Okay,” I say, “back on point, please, before I get totally squicked out.” She has a tendency to digress sometimes. Maybe it’s better I don’t have the power to read her internal monologue.

  She gets serious. “Rocha picked up an NSA intercept this morning from a known bad guy in Rome.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Known bad guy?”

  “It’s a technical term,” she says. “It mentioned ‘Alpha’ in the scramble, and somehow I don’t think they’re talking about werewolves.”

  I feel myself squint at her. “What do you know about werewolves?”

  “Only what those lovely, smutty books involving—” She cuts herself off, and I can see her pale cheeks redden. “You know what? Never mind. Point is, Alpha. Rome. Not werewolves.” Her expression softens, her cheeks return to their normal, all snowy and freckled, and her voice lowers to a hush. “Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Got any context for it?” I ask. I had worked for a group called Alpha pretty much my entire adult life. They were based out of Rome, at least up until they’d gotten wiped out in the war.

  “Not much,” she says, and pulls a folded piece of paper out of her fluffy coat. She hands it over tentatively, like she’s afraid it’ll blow away in the non-existent wind. Which … I guess is kind of a hazard around me. I unfold it and start reading to find it’s … pretty much in Italian. As an email from Rome might be, I suppose. “It reads like a letter of introduction,” she says helpfully, “two guys, using codenames that translate into,” she scrunched her slightly pointed nose up in recall, “‘Wrench’ and ‘Axis,’ I think. Google was not super helpful on this.”

  “If only there was someone on campus who spoke fluent Italian,” I say, giving her the sidelong look.

  “I’m not asking Dr. Perugini,” she says, returning my look with one of her own. “She hates me. And is possibly also crazy.” Crazy hot, I think. “Anyway, it just sort of hints at past good times and suggests that they might find it profitable or fun to work together again on something that ‘Wrench,’” she makes air quotes, “is doing. Salutations, hope to hear from you soon, end of email.” She shrugs. “It’s not much.”

  I give it a moment’s thought. Sienna and I are the only ones with powers left at the agency at this point. We’ve been hanging out here since the war ended six months ago, watching our little team dissolve until it was just her and me. Winds of change, blowing right through, altering the landscape a day at a time. I’ve seen enough change by this point—for example, my entire organization getting blown away in the war—that I’m used to it. Sort of.

  She’s not. This has been hitting her hard, but she’s buttoned up enough she’ll never admit it. Even watching her boyfriend leave quietly in the night hasn’t undone my sis.

  But she’s watching me now like I’m gonna bolt. Not with suspicion, exactly; just that little hint of fear.

  Meanwhile, I’m swimming in a river of curiosity, no lie. Which makes it harder to say this. “You think you can spare me for a few days?” I ask.

  It’s barely visible, this little flinch she does. “Sure.” Like it’s no big deal. But it is. She’s not being passive aggressive or anything, so this won’t bite me in the ass later, but I can tell she’s feeling the losses.

  “I want to check it out,” I say, honestly, “maybe get to the bottom of this. Could be there’s some survivors from Alpha, kept their heads down during the war.” During the extermination of our people, I don’t say. She still feels the guilt on that one, too, even though there’s nothing she could have done differently.

  “Sure,” she says. “I wouldn’t have brought it to you if I thought it was nothing.” She laughs nervously. “Or if I couldn’t make do without you for a few days here.” But there’s a seriousness behind her eyes when the laugh fades. It says, Don’t leave. Or at least, Don’t be gone long.

  I wipe my sweaty forehead on my sleeve again, a fresh round of droplets coursing their way down. Damn, that fifteen minutes was terrible. “You sure you can make do without me?” I ask, giving her one last chance to dodge loneliness. She’s not so good at dealing. Repression, thy name is Sienna.

  “It may surprise you to know this,” she says with some bravado, “but I survived for quite a few years before you showed up at my door, bro.” She calls me bro all the time. Like it’s ironic. She’s kind of a hipster, I think, making obscure references and wearing kind of dowdy clothes. I would never tell her this, though, because I want to live. She gets serious again. “This isn’t much to go on, though. Like … little bitty pieces, scattered to the four winds. Sure you want to try and pick them up?”

  I gently blow a gust of air out of my index finger as I point it at her like a gun, and it whips her hair for just a second, stirring it—and a smile. “I have some small experience with that,” I say. And I give her a smile of my own on my way to go pack, surprisingly eager to go somewhere for the first time in months.

  2.

  To my complete and utter lack of surprise, there are no direct flights between Rome, Italy, and Minneapoli
s, Minnesota. This leaves me sitting in a Mexican cantina in the Detroit airport for about three hours on a layover. Not a big deal, really; the margaritas are fricking fantastic, the best I can recall having in recent memory, and the food is spot on, too. I hate flying, especially on long trips. Back when I had an employer with deep pockets, we did things like flying first class everywhere. Even when the agency was still secret and generated its own money—ahem—off the books (insider trading, cough cough) we could occasionally charter a jet. Which came in handy for things like prisoner transport.

  Ever since we metas—people with powers—got outed on national television by the president, the agency has had a much tighter rein around it. We can’t do squat nowadays in terms of spending money. We’re dependent on the incredibly screwed-up budgetary process, which is a real let down after being able to basically do whatever the hell we wanted without oversight. It’s not like we were grossly irresponsible or anything, but when you’re as big as me—over six feet, with the long legs to match—bitching about sitting in coach comes as naturally as the urge to find a restroom when you’ve got a full bladder.

  Oh, how I miss the days of money.

  The pay cut hurt, too. I’m getting paid like a brand-new government worker, not a single ounce of seniority. If my room and board weren’t covered, I’m pretty sure I’d be making minimum wage.

  Anyway, I’m sitting in this cantina, buying my own drinks on my government credit card, when—surprise, surprise—my sister’s interview with Gail Roth, that witch from the National News Channel comes up on a soundbite while they’re interviewing a congressman about the ‘meta problem.’ That’s what they call it when they’re being sensitive. It was not a good interview. Sienna, as hard as she tried—and there’s some doubt in my mind that she tried very hard, honestly—came off kind of … snide. Snarky. Sarcastic.