New Dominion

by C. G Harris

  “Just get out.” Nick stood and pulled me to my feet as well. He had one arm clutched to his chest, harboring several papers while he shoved me toward the door with the other. “I will clean this up.”

  “Nick, I’m sorry,” I said. “Please allow me to—”

  “Go. It’s fine. I need to get this mess in order.”

  I turned and allowed him to usher the two of us out the door. Alex hurried out in front of me and turned to face Nick, still standing inside the door.

  “Please allow me to apologize on behalf of—”

  Nick slammed the door in her face, leaving the two of us standing in the hallway all alone.

  Alex turned her head in my direction and folded her arms over her chest.

  “Well, that could have gone better.” I met Alex’s glare. “Next time, remember—no means no. You should really work on being less obnoxious.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  To Alex’s credit, she remained a model of self-control all the way out of the building. In the elevator, she smiled at the elderly woman walking her poodle and even asked about her day. She waved at the desk security and held the door for me on the way out. She had me convinced she was either happy with the way things had turned out, or she had gotten so angry that she had blacked out.

  I got my answer when she grabbed my pinkie finger and twisted it around my back until I saw it poking over my shoulder with my opposite eye as soon as we were halfway up the block.

  “’No means no? I need to work on being less obnoxious?’”

  She held her ninja pinkie vice crippler and added a surgical strike to my little toe with the heel of her stiletto pumps. What was with all this hate for the baby digits?

  I squealed out an apology that sounded more like an over excited feline. People on the street eyed me with a mix of pity and shame.

  “At least I was right when I said the meeting could have gone better.”

  Alex pulled my finger around until it threatened to jab me in the eyeball then leaned over so her face was about a millimeter from my cheek.

  “Do I seem like I am in the mood for your jokes right now?”

  “Perhaps I misread you. Are you in one of those ‘let’s have a serious chat’ moods?”

  “No. I can’t say chatting is on my mind right now either.”

  I tried to turn and relieve a little of the pressure she had on my finger, but somehow, that allowed her to gain more leverage and twist harder. We may be able to heal almost instantly while we’re Topside, but that doesn’t do anything for the pain factor. I would need about a gallon of children’s Tylenol when this chat was over.

  “Before you make your final decision concerning said mood, may I please apologize for my actions in Nick’s office? I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I may not have made the best choices.”

  Alex ground her heel in harder. “May not have?”

  “Didn’t make, definitely didn’t make the best choices,” I screeched.

  A few people offered glances of concern, but most snickered with quiet amusement at a guy getting his ass handed to him by a supermodel lookalike.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I screwed up. If you’re going to tear my pinkie off, hurry up. It’s not going to make my screw up go away.”

  I held my breath, hoping she would take me up on the offer. After a second, she let go and shoved me away. I staggered off a few steps and then turned back to face her. I expected to see a mask of rage, but her eyes refused to meet mine. They were cast to the sky in unadulterated disappointment.

  “You just had to be professional.” She held out her hands in defeat, turning to walk away. “I even carried the briefcase. All you had to do was stand there and not be a lunatic determined to ruin my life.”

  I cleared my throat. “Technically ...”

  “If you say, ‘Technically, we’re not alive,’ I swear, I will come back and rip that pinkie off your hand.”

  I decided not to finish.

  I walked along behind her, not knowing what I should say. How could I explain my actions without exposing myself? I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted nothing more than to work together, and stop being at odds all the time.

  My hand felt for the coin in my pocket as if to remind me of the consequence of revealing myself. Judas had made sure double agents couldn’t divulge their agreement to stop Topside evildoers and help out the big man upstairs. Now there was a rumor of some rogue agent showing up with enough secrets to bury us all. I needed to talk to Judas.

  The second I got back, I would march up to his office and figure things out. Maybe together we could cypher out what had happened and the best way to stop it. That did not do anything to help my position with Alex right now though. Right now, I had a very angry partner who didn’t deserve to be left out in the cold. At least not all the way.

  “Look, I know there is no excuse for the way I acted.”

  Alex kept walking, and I decided to remain a pace or two behind and avoid her disappointed gaze.

  “I let my curiosity get the best of me. I can’t help but wonder what their angle is.” That half-truth was even getting old to my ears. “Plus, Zoe has been at me nonstop about ...”

  Alex spun around so fast I almost ran into her.

  “This has nothing to do with Zoe, not this time. This is all you and that stupid do-gooder nose of yours. What would you do if Nick was developing a next level nuclear arsenal in his coat closet? Walk away and be happy your curiosity was satisfied? No. You would want to go in and stop him, but you can’t seem to get one thing through that thick skull of yours. That—is—not—what—we—do.”

  I stared down into her hazel eyes. They were almost luminous in the sunlight at this angle. She was right, of course. Worse, here I thought I had kept working both sides within the agency a secret, and Alex had all but pulled the denarius out of my pocket to flaunt it in my face. Some black ops agent I was.

  I nodded. “All I can do is apologize and try to do better. Next time I feel like someone is dealing dirty under the table, I swear I will try not to catch them.”

  Alex blinked at me then shook her head. “You’re impossible.”

  She turned and started walking again, but her face had softened enough to encourage me to keep pace with her this time.

  “What? Bad guys rock. From now on, I am all about bad breath and dirty underwear. I will eat and breathe villainy for breakfast, lunch and din—”

  “You can shut up now. Show’s over.”

  “Am I forgiven?”

  Alex eyed me over her shoulder. “At least until we find out what Nick reports back to the agency. You better hope he’s way more forgiving than I am. Or this walk in the park is going to get thorny, and you will be my shield.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll take the fall for anything that blows back. You had nothing to do with it.”

  Alex nodded. “You better believe you’re going to take the fall. I’ll be there to pick you up at the bottom though—after I shove you off the ledge, of course.”

  I laughed. “Bad guys rule.”

  Alex snorted out a laugh in return. “Bad guys rule.”

  We walked a little while side-by-side, enjoying the morning air before Alex broke the silence again.

  “So, what were you going to say about Zoe earlier? She isn’t getting herself into any trouble, is she? That girl is almost as bad as you are about poking around where she doesn’t belong.”

  I laughed at the painful accuracy of her statement. “I wish I could say that wasn’t true. She’s been nosing around the Wax Worx ever since they took over the Skin Quarries. She wants to start a three-woman crusade against the whole organization.”

  “How irritating it must be to deal with someone like that day in and day out. It is almost like she is trying to be some sort of hero at the cost of being self-destructive to everyone around her.”

  “All right, I get it. We’re on the same side, remember? We have a chant and everything now ... Bad guys rule? We can
do a secret handshake if it will help. I’m sorry you have to put up with my do-gooderness.”

  Alex smiled. “Do-gooderness?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a thing.”

  Alex huffed out a laugh. “You’re the one who brought Zoe on your little incursion the other day. What did you expect? You were a drug dealer offering a free taste. She will never let this go now that she’s seen the operation for herself. Not that she hadn’t seen it before,” she corrected. “When you’re in one of those cages, you feel helpless. Now that she has seen it from the outside, Zoe wants to do something about it, and I can’t blame her.”

  Sometimes I forgot that Zoe, Jazzy, and Meg weren’t the only ex-disposables. Alex had been one too. It was one of the most difficult admissions she had ever made to me and a connection she had with Zoe that I could never understand.

  “I know she wants to help but pulling the whole organization down on our heads seems a little crazy.”

  Alex shrugged. “How much would you sacrifice to do the right thing?”

  I sighed. “I still can’t let her commit suicide. Plus, she’s taken on Meg and Jazzy as her ... I don’t know, partners... protégés... something. We didn’t part on great terms yesterday. She wanted me to help with some half-baked rescue and ...”

  “... and you told her this is how things are. Stop trying to be a do-gooder. That’s not what we do.”

  Alex hung her head, staring at the ground.

  “Not precisely those words.” I let out another shameful sigh. “But, yes. That’s the gist of it.”

  Neither of us knew what to say after that. Why was right and wrong so hard anyway? Bad guys sucked.

  “I don’t suppose you would come by this evening to chat with her? I think Jazzy and Meg would just as soon follow Zoe into the sulfur pools as a field of daisies. If you can talk some sense into Zoe, maybe—”

  Alex cut me off with a laugh.

  “Fine, I was just asking. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. No need to—”

  “It’s not that,” she interrupted. “I think it is funny that we’ve been gone this long, and you think she’s still sitting in your little shop, pining away for you to return and give her permission to put on her Green Beret and start shooting.”

  I shook my head. “She has no weapons, no plan. She’s not stupid enough to march in there blind.”

  “Sometimes it’s about having enough crazy on board to dig up trouble.”

  I narrowed my eyes and glanced over at her. “Are we talking about Zoe, or my stunt in the office again?”

  “I’ll let you decide.”

  I groaned and redoubled my pace. Alex had done the same thing. We needed to get back and stop Zoe before she did something stupid or crazy or both. Judas would have to wait ... again. Sometimes I wished I could be in three places at once. Of course, that would mean I’d screw things up three times as fast. If this mission went south, Judas would be more than furious, but I couldn’t let Zoe down. I had to hope we weren’t too late, on both counts.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Alex hopped off the basket slung between the back wheels of my wonder tricycle, and we both hurried to the shop door. It was the middle of the day, so the place should have been open, but it was locked down like a KinderCare in the hood. My heart beat heavy with anger and worry. I wasn’t sure which was worse. My frustration that Zoe would run off and do something this stupid or the fact that she might be in trouble.

  Alex walked up behind me, giving the door a cursory shove of her own. “Where else could they be? Do they have any hang outs or places they go to blow off a little steam?”

  I didn’t need to give it a moment’s thought. There weren’t. At least no place I knew about.

  I shook my head and looked around the area as if we had missed them sitting across the street eating ice cream. “If they’re not here, they’re out into trouble. That’s a fact.”

  “Don’t worry too much yet.” Alex slung a backpack off her shoulders and set it on the ground. Neither of us had bothered to change back into our usual attire, leaving us both looking like a comic book hit squad. We stood out in The Nine like a diamond in a pile of wet manure. Incognito would not be our modus operandi this afternoon.

  Alex had thrown on a long, black overcoat with loose sleeves and a flared bottom that reached almost all the way to the black boots she had slipped back into. Definitely a good accessory to the high-class mobster motif. She held back one of the sleeves and worked the zipper on the backpack.

  “You may want this back. You know, in case we go out for a night on the town.”

  Alex uncoiled a long, cylindrical item from the top of the pack. I couldn’t help but grin. My Whip Crack. Sure, it was a horrible weapon of violence and wanton destruction, but to me, it felt like a teddy bear next to a mug of hot cocoa. Scrapyard City was in the heart of The Nine but having my Whip Crack back was like cocking the shotgun and pulling the pin on the grenade. No one would mess with me as long as I held this in my hands.

  “I can’t believe you got it back so fast.” I deactivated the safety and flipped my wrist, listening to the rasping blades whirr and hiss to life. Even Alex flinched at the sound, taking a step away.

  “Save it for the bad guys, Tiger.” Alex tried to keep her voice composed, but I could hear the tension in her voice. “It wasn’t as bad as we thought. Once my tech guy got it untangled, everything turned out to be intact. He did sharpen the blades and service the gearing for you though. He wanted to throttle the guy who had treated this weapon so bad.”

  She eyed me as if to say I should take better care of my stuff.

  I played the weapon around in my hand, feeling the ease with which everything now responded. It was deadly before, but now, it was downright merciless.

  “I’m glad to have him take care of my baby any time he is willing. This is amazing.”

  I got so lost in inspecting my rejuvenated weapon, I didn’t even see the figure rushing up behind Alex. My Whip Crack hissed as I flicked it off the side out of reflex, ready to strike around Alex’s shoulder. I may suck at close combat, but I was a surgeon when it came to a distanced strike like this.

  Alex spun into a fighting stance the moment she saw me move. Something snapped into both of her hands from beneath her coat sleeves, and then I heard a slight jingle of metal, like loose change in a pocket.

  The sight of the two of us standing there clad all in black with our hands full of Hellion weapons was enough to make our would-be assailant dive to the ground and scream.

  “Stop, wait. It’s me. It’s Jazzy. Don’t cut me up.”

  She had her hands over her head and her forehead on the ground with the rest of her body curled up like a frightened armadillo in the dirt. Her fingers were splayed in surrender, and she waved them at the wrists, not willing to hang anything else away from her body that might get removed.

  There was that little jingle again, and Alex straightened. I never saw what she had in her hands. Whatever it was, Alex was keeping that card close to her chest, even from me.

  I retracted my Whip Crack as well and hurried over to Jazzy.

  “Sorry about that. You sort of caught us by surprise.” I reached down with my free hand and helped her to her feet. “Are you okay?”

  I tried to brush her off a little bit, then realized I was brushing off a woman wearing skin-tight leather. There was no innocuous place to lay my hands.

  I cleared my throat and straightened, trying to appear less gropey. Alex looked at me and snorted. “Where are Zoe and Meg?”

  Mentioning their names reactivated Jazzy’s panic button.

  “They’re at the Skin Quarries.”

  She cast a glance in my direction in time to catch the fury I felt spark onto my face.

  “Please don’t be angry. We were trying to do the right thing.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry about that right now. Where are they?”

  Jazzy took a breath and tried to calm herself. “Meg i
s outside the compound. She got hurt pretty bad, but I managed to get her some help. She should be fine.”

  “What about Zoe?” Alex’s voice sounded almost as urgent as mine. She had helped Zoe deal with the memories of all the horrible things the Skin Quarries had done to her as a Disposable. In some ways, Alex was as attached to Zoe as me.

  Jazzy shifted her gaze to Alex and let out a sob. “They have her.”

  Rage got the best of me, and I snatched her arm, shaking her body. “They have her where?”

  Alex put a hand on my wrist. It was not a threatening gesture, but rather a calming one. Something to say my caveman tactics were not helping. I let go and took a breath.

  “Sorry, Jazzy. He’s just worried. We both are. Do you know where she is exactly?”

  Jazzy nodded. “I think so. After I took care of Meg, I went back to find Zoe.”

  “That was stupid.” My voice came out as a growled shout. “What if you had been caught? Then none of us would know what happened. You should have come straight here.”

  I cinched my grip down on the familiar weapon in my hand. I wanted to activate my Whip Crack and tear apart every ramshackle structure within a thousand yards, but I snapped the whirring weapon off to the side to vent my frustration instead. The blades shrieked to life, and the crack at the end sounded like a gunshot.

  Alex and Jazzy both jumped at the horrifying sound, then Alex caught my eye, and I shrunk a few inches. I turned my back and zipped my lip so she could be the rational one and coax out the information we needed.

  “Where is Zoe now?” she asked Jazzy.

  “She is in a separate storeroom on the second floor of the main warehouse. It’s a smaller area than the huge corrals they built downstairs. They cleared it all out for one guy.”

  All the blood dropped out of my body and into my feet. I didn’t dare turn around for fear Alex would read me like an old paperback, but I knew what Jazzy would say next.

  “The guy is some sort of agent. They put Zoe in with him, so she would have no chance of getting away.”