“I don’t like it.”
“Me neither, but she’s doing us the courtesy of knocking when she could have fucking phase-shifted into the bathroom while you were taking your morning shit.”
“First of all, I shit in the afternoons. Second, take Ludmilla with you.”
I shook my head uselessly. “You can keep an eye on me, but I’m going down alone. Nothing threatening. She’s waving a white flag, I’m not drawing a gun.”
Keller made a noise.
“Trust me.”
I could hear anger in his silence, and I knew he was sick and tired of hearing that line from me. I wasn’t so sure I trusted myself. But this was the closest thing to a break we’d had, and we needed it badly.
There was no elevator in the building, and my hip was still in rough shape from my fall down the hood of the Enforcement van. I was slow. Walking down the three flights of stairs gave me plenty of time to get deeply nervous.
I caught sight of her as soon as I exited the stairwell, and my heart leapt into my throat. Seeing her in person, instead of through the distance of the camera, made the reality of this confrontation a lot more solid. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me.
I limped across the threadbare lobby and opened the heavy door with visible effort.
“Um. Hi.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. Finally she said, “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” I stood aside and she swept by me. She smelled like bergamot and citrus. I let the door close behind her a bit too loudly.
“Do you want a coffee?” I immediately felt stupid, but the offer made her relax ever so slightly.
“That would be great, actually.”
“There’s a kitchen down the hall.” I led the way, and she walked authoritatively after me.
There were two Meat chatting in the kitchen when we walked in. One was shirtless, the other eating a bacon and tomato sandwich. Their eyes widened when they saw us.
“Can we have a moment, guys?”
“Um.” The shirtless man openly stared at Quantum. Her powerful frame and the tattoos on her lips and chin were immediately recognizable without the context of her usual costume. This was the first time I had seen her tattoos up close, and they were beautiful, elliptical loops and interlocking shapes like a scientific illustration.
She raised a perfect, threaded eyebrow. The Meat eating the sandwich unconsciously let his arm waver, and a tomato slid out from between the bread and hit the floor. Shirtless grabbed a tea towel and tried to hide his naked chest behind it.
I cleared my throat. It seemed to snap them out of their shock enough to hustle out, Shirtless still demurely trying to hide behind the tiny square of cotton towel. I sighed audibly and Quantum made a sound that might have been a tiny snicker.
“The coffee’s not as good here as it was in the old break room,” I said, more wistfully than I intended. I focused on keeping my hands from shaking while I poured us both cups from the perpetually full old diner-style coffeepot. “I’m sorry we’re so poorly appointed now.”
“Hard times.”
“For both of us, it seems.”
“Mmm.”
“How do you take it?”
“Milk and sugar, too much of both.”
“Me too.” I fixed us both mugs the way I liked it and carried them over.
She took a long swallow and made a sound of relief. I was beginning to realize she had no idea who I was and what I had done. “This is perfect.”
I let myself smile. “I never managed to be a coffee snob. The Boss”—I found it unaccountably difficult to say his name in front of her—“had bean quality and roasting preferences and a whole nitrogen-infused cold-press thing he preferred.”
“One of those.”
“I’m proud trash.”
The corners of her mouth trembled, and the banter I’d managed to keep up died. We both sat, not talking, both of us becoming more uncomfortable by the moment.
She looked around the shabby safe house kitchen, taking in every stain. I’d killed more than one roach in it already. “So this is the end of everything for you,” she finally said.
“I’d like to think I have some fight left in me.”
“I mean, you’re still here, right?” Her face told me she thought this would be easier than it was.
“What can I do for you, Quantum,” I prompted, not unkindly.
She didn’t speak at first. I waited, letting more discomfort grow in the space between us. I took no pleasure in watching her tense up, but this was a conversation I was unwilling to lead. I wanted her to play every card she could before I had to show one of my own.
“I cared for him, you know.”
I couldn’t quite hide the disgust on my face. “No, I don’t. Honestly, I don’t understand how you could stand to be around him as much as you were.”
Her face registered blank confusion, then she recoiled. “Not him. God, no. Melting Point.”
“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No, but I saw how he stuck up for you. He seemed better than most.” I wondered if she knew how much of a compliment that was.
Quantum stared at me for a long moment. A slow crawl of cold fear took hold in my stomach. I wondered if she had any inkling of our involvement in Melting Point’s death and the pressure cooking of his lover. I wondered what she would consider fair payback, and hoped my exhausted face remained inscrutable.
“I think they had him killed. The Draft.”
I felt a wave of relief. She wasn’t here to kill me in particular, which I thought would be perfectly reasonable if she’d figured out what I’d done. That meant she wasn’t here to wrench everyone in the building out of existence either. At least, not quite yet.
I drew a deep breath and let it out, hoping it registered as a sad sigh. “I am not surprised. I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
She was testing something, and I wasn’t sure what yet. So, to disarm her, I answered honestly. “Almost no one deserves what heroes dish out—even, sometimes, other heroes.”
This confirmed something for her, and she gave a tiny nod. “You hate us, right? Them. You hate heroes.”
Them. That was interesting. I took her lead. “I think they’re an objectively quantifiable source of hardship and suffering for everyone in the world.”
She blinked. This was not the monologue she was expecting.
“I can show you my charts if you’d like to see the proof,” I continued.
“I—no, that’s all right. I looked you up before I came here. I’d heard of you, and what you do.”
“That’s immensely flattering. So what can I, and my humble Excel spreadsheets of all your colleagues’ sins, do for you.” I braced myself. I expected that she was about to rattle off all of the reasons I must be at least partly responsible for what happened to Melting Point and, more crucially, to her. I was waiting for the other anvil to drop.
“I need to—I have—” She looked at the ceiling, clenched one of her fists resting on the table. Next to her hand was the coffee she was now letting grow cold. “I don’t know why they turned on me now. Everything went to shit after Accelerator. After he . . .
“Supercollider wasn’t the same; no one was the same. Maybe he didn’t want the liability of someone close to him anymore, something that could hurt him. Maybe they just wanted him to be the lone hero again, ‘wedded to the world’ and all that maudlin crap. But they definitely wanted me gone, and now I’m here.”
“It’s not the nicest kitchen, but it is home for now.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I know. It’s not where you ever expected to find yourself. But you are here.”
“I need your help.” Her voice was so sad, and so small.
This was what I had hoped for. She wasn’t here to demand. She was here to bargain, and she was desperate.
I had nothing. I had no way to prove Leviathan was alive, and even if I could, I had no way t
o get him back even once I knew where he was. At most I could have arranged for a medium-profile kidnapping or a bank robbery with the resources that I had, but there was no way, with the skeleton crew that remained, we could ever hope to lay siege to Dovecote.
But now I had Quantum, and she was willing to talk. I needed to wring every drop from this opportunity.
All of this clicked together in my brain in a microsecond. I said, “What could we possibly do for you?” It was a mighty effort to keep my voice level.
She looked back at me, searching for words again. She was achingly beautiful. Her skin glowed like she’d had a facial the day before, and her eyeliner was sharp enough to cut yourself on. “Leviathan always seemed to know things. You all work for him; they call you the Auditor, right? If anyone knows, you do. Tell me who killed Melting Point.”
I immediately started to calculate how to give her the safest answer. I was quiet a moment too long, and she took my reticence for disinterest rather than confusion.
“I don’t expect charity; we can work something out.”
I got my face under control and extended a hand across the table in a reassuring gesture. “Forgive me. Unusual bedfellows and all. Just getting used to the idea.”
That seemed to comfort her. “It’s weird for me too.”
“I bet it is.”
She leaned forward. “You can do it. Find them. I am sure you can.”
“Do you want the killer, or who ordered the hit?” The latter was a Draft crisis comms specialist named Harold who was addicted to Klonopin; he’d hired a couple of assassins (Keller once disparagingly referred to them as a “bonded pair”) called Source and Sink. I considered exactly how valuable she felt that data was.
“Either. Both. Whatever it takes to clear my name.” It sounded very expensive to me indeed.
“It’s going to be a lot harder to get than it usually is.”
“But you still can do it?”
I pretended to consider for a moment, then slowly nodded. “It might take a little while, but I can.”
She studied me carefully. Her lower lip was slightly raw, as though she had been biting it out of nervous habit. Whatever she was looking for in my face, she found it, and nodded decisively.
I saw my opening. “What is this worth to you?”
“Leviathan is alive.”
The room seemed to tilt. I gripped the table. Whatever unfathomable expression took hold of my face, Quantum looked deeply alarmed, as though she thought she might have made a mistake.
“Tell me,” I rasped. “Tell me how.”
“I—”
“I know he’s alive. I am sure of it. Tell me how you know.”
That seemed to completely shock her. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.
It took her a second to regain her composure, but she managed. “There’s—there’s a set of procedures in place, if we were ever able to capture him alive. The Leviathan Protocol.”
“What are they doing to him?”
A combination of guilt and disgust twisted her face. “They fake his death to avoid a trial and media circus, show the press a dummy body, and then hold him up to twenty-one days. They’ve always wanted to study and interrogate him for as long as they could, and that’s as long as the containment can reliably hold. Then they terminate him.”
I stood up so suddenly that my chair fell over and hit the floor uncomfortably loud. “We have time,” I said, not to her, as I paced. “We still have enough time.” I looked back at Quantum. “I knew that body wasn’t his.”
My reaction was clearly not what she was expecting, and I saw her struggle to keep up. “How could you have known?”
“I don’t know how, but I knew.” Impossible hope rose in me like a radioactive dawn. “I knew he was alive.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking to her or myself at that point.
She seemed uncertain too. “Is this . . . Do we have a deal? You know how long you have, now you get me a name.”
I had almost forgotten. It seemed like such an afterthought now. “Oh. Yes, of course.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I get a name from you,” she said. I supposed she might be threatening me, but I could not have cared less. My mind was already elsewhere, deploying our every meager resource to bring him home.
“Whatever you’d like.” I touched the comm at my ear. “Keller? We got a room free still on the third floor, right?”
“You are out of your goddamn mind—” His voice was in stereo, weirdly doubled.
“I can hear you.”
“Of course you can fucking—”
“I can hear you’re right outside the room.”
“Of course you fucking can! You think I’d let—”
“Come in here.”
There was a long moment, and then Keller barged into the kitchen. He was breathing heavily through his nostrils and had his shoulders low and square, doing his damnedest to look as intimidating as he possibly could, which was adorable, considering how easily Quantum could remove us from this plane of existence without breaking a sweat.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“I think you’re out of your goddamn mind letting her waltz in here. Think of what could have happened to you.”
“It didn’t.” I tried to call up some irritated imperiousness.
“We can’t lose you too.”
He sounded genuinely broken up and I gentled a little. “It was a good risk, Keller.”
He didn’t say anything, but the angle of his shoulders signified a subtle assent. He turned his attention to Quantum.
“You,” he said, “better be ready to prove everything you just said.”
She stood up slowly. “Are you calling me a liar.”
“I am not risking anyone or anything on your word. You want a name, we need evidence.”
She looked between the two of us. As much as I was already succumbing to hope, I knew in the cold cellar of my heart he was dead right.
“Can you corroborate this?” I asked. “Do you have a copy of a document, or know how to get one?”
“No. I can’t even access my email.” I recognized the look of near panic on her face as the same one she’d worn just before she blipped out of existence at the press conference. If we didn’t give her something plausible, and fast, we’d never see her again.
Something shuffled into place inside my head. I gestured with my cane, using it like an exclamation point. “You can talk to Doc Proton.”
“What?” This had completely blindsided her. “There is no way he’s ever seen the Protocol, it’s only—”
I held up a hand to interrupt her. “He’s known our Boss—and Supercollider—longer than anyone else. Surely he knows something that can prove Leviathan’s body wasn’t real.”
“I don’t see—”
“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
She glared at me. I was taking a gamble on the fact that she was not like most of her associates I had met and was therefore not about to do me a grave bodily injury. I saw a small, barely perceptible shift in her expression, like something was clicking into place. Maybe there was a reason she wanted to see Doc for herself, but whatever she thought, it made her suddenly acquiesce.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s stupid, but fine.”
I closed my eyes. It wasn’t very much, but it was everything.
“And you go in wired,” Keller said.
I looked over at him and nodded in agreement. “I want to hear exactly what Doc says.”
Quantum looked back and forth between us, trying to find a reason to refuse.
She nodded.
“We’ll get you a surveillance egg,” I said. I was starting to feel light-headed.
She frowned hilariously. “I hate them.”
“How’s your gag reflex?”
“Terrible.”
I let out a dry little cough of a laugh. “Keller, can you take Quantum up to the empty room? I can’t handle the stairs just yet.”
He nodded gravely, gave Quantum his best “just try it” glower, and gestured roughly for her to follow him. Without checking to see if she was trailing him, he turned on his heel and strode out. Quantum didn’t acknowledge me again. She took long, quick strides to catch up with Keller as he stalked loudly down the hallway.
I retrieved my chair from the floor and sat down before my legs gave out completely. I sat alone, just breathing, for a long moment. I couldn’t make all the pieces fit just yet; the sides of the equation weren’t yet balanced. But I knew, my brain knew, we had a way forward.
The coffeemaker was empty so I set about the business of refilling it, so there was a fresh pot for whoever wandered in next.
ONCE THE DIZZYING moment of optimism wore off, I spent the next forty-eight hours convinced I had let my death in by the front door. What I had done was an absurd gamble at best and an utter disaster at worst. I had Keller and some Meat, but up against Quantum Entanglement I was defenseless—we all were. If she turned on us or simply decided she wanted out of our deal, we had nothing again. More, I barely knew myself why I had asked her to do what I did. Somewhere in the depths of my brain, in a panic, I had run some numbers, and this was the scenario it produced. I had no idea how Doc could prove her claim; I just knew that right now I had nothing, and if they talked we might get something real, something definitive, even if all it showed me was my hope was in vain. At least I would know and be able to move forward. I told no one else what she had told us; I didn’t want anyone else to have to sit with the awful hope in case she was lying after all.
Quantum, for her part, was cordially hostile. She made it clear she was not interested in socializing or being exposed to any of us if she could absolutely avoid it; she trusted Leviathan’s henches much less far than she could throw us. She spent most of her time in her tiny, spartan room, emerging only occasionally to make a sandwich or brew some tea while glaring at anyone she encountered like she was trying to set them on fire with her mind.
Watching her when I could, a horrible realization dawned on me: if Leviathan died, if it all fell apart, everything I had done would be for nothing. I would have killed Accelerator for nothing. I would have destroyed Quantum’s life, and caused the death of her lover and his partner, and all of the other splash damage and ripple effects, for nothing. The math would fall apart, and I would be left with nothing but more lifeyears of debt than I could ever hope to pay off.
Hench Page 27