Liberty & Justice for All

by Carrie Harris

  “If you jinxed us, and the sky falls, I’m going to be very put out,” he said.

  “That sounded like witty banter to me,” she teased. She would have said more, but he glared at her, and she decided to quit while she was ahead.

  Chapter 20

  The mutants emerged from the back of the half-collapsed museum and into the nearly empty employee parking lot. A pair of cars still sat in their stalls, but both had the derelict look of abandoned and forgotten vehicles. One sported a bright yellow boot on the front tire.

  For once, their luck held. No one witnessed their exit from the building. No police officers watched them duck the caution tape that had been hastily strung around the building. No news reporters ran over to demand an interview with the survivors of the astounding collapse of the famous Grace Museum. They hurried across the lot toward the comparative safety of the park on the opposite side, only relaxing once they hit the tree line. Sabretooth leaned against a tree, taking a much-needed breather. Christopher toppled onto the soggy grass, not caring at all if it got his coat all damp. Eva flopped onto a handy bench. Graydon just stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit and waited.

  After a couple minutes, Sabretooth raised his head, sniffing. “Do I smell meat?” he asked eagerly.

  Eva took a big whiff. “Hot dogs, I think,” she said. “It looks like the snack shop next to the baseball diamonds is open.” Then she patted her pockets. “But I’ve got zero cash.”

  “I didn’t bring my wallet,” said Christopher sadly. “I don’t think I had much cash left anyway. I didn’t have much time to pack when I left college.”

  Sabretooth shook his head in exasperation. “You’re all freeloaders, and you owe me.” He dug in his pocket and came up with a battered wallet, which he offered to Eva. “I think out of the lot of us, you’re the most presentable. People tend to be scared of my pretty face; Graydon looks like he rolled in a garbage heap, and Christopher looks like he’s been sick for the last month. You mind taking orders and grabbing us some grub?”

  “Deal.”

  She snatched the wallet out of his hand before he could reconsider and took everyone’s orders. Then she hurried toward the snack shop, which was doing brisk business. The early evening games were just getting started now that the rain had finally let up for good, and parents and kids milled around the baseball complex, getting snacks and drinks before their games started.

  Eva hadn’t been around a crowd of people like this since she’d left for the school, and the noise took her aback for a moment. She nearly got leveled by a boy on a scooter who zoomed past her, almost running over her foot. Under normal circumstances, it would have annoyed her, but today, it felt nicely normal.

  The line for the snack shop stood six people deep, but it moved at a brisk pace, and she didn’t have to wait long to place her order. The boy behind the counter was incredibly cute. He looked a bit like a young Cyclops, with a strong jaw and short brown hair, and he smiled at her charmingly when she approached the counter, leaning toward her on his elbows.

  “What can I get you?” he asked. As she ordered, his eyes grew wider and wider. “Man. That’s a lot of food,” he said, frowning. “The boss usually asks teams to place their orders in advance so we don’t run out of dogs. I’ll make an exception for you just this once, but make sure you remember for next time, OK?”

  “Oh, it’s not for a team,” she said. “It’s for my… family. We’re here from Australia.”

  “You must have a big family, then,” he said. “That’ll be forty-two seventeen.”

  His fingers brushed against hers as he took the money, and he looked straight into her eyes. Had he done it on purpose? Was he flirting? She’d always been good at flirting, but now it worried her. She could just imagine Sabretooth putting this guy’s head in his mouth because he decided the guy had gotten too fresh. Or worse. She could imagine much worse if she put in a little effort. She had to make him stop flirting before something awful happened.

  “Oh yes. I have a giant family,” Eva babbled. “They’re polygamists. Most people don’t realize that we have polygamists in Australia. But we do. Polygamy is… just great. I really recommend it.”

  The guy’s eyes went wide as he began piling hot dogs onto the counter.

  “You don’t say. Are you going to want a bag for all this?” he asked, avoiding her eyes with all of his might.

  “Yes, please. That would be kind of you,” said Eva, blushing bright red.

  He handed her the bags of hot dogs and drinks and immediately looked toward the next person in line. “Next, please!” he called, ignoring her with firm deliberation.

  Her cheeks still flaming, Eva noticed an empty picnic table right at the edge of the baseball diamonds. She waved her hands over her head until she caught Christopher’s attention and ushered the group over.

  “How about this?” she asked. “Sabretooth can sit with his back to the diamonds. We don’t have to eat on the ground this way, and we’re a little less conspicuous. If we have a picnic in the grass without a blanket, that looks weird, don’t you think? Plus, it’s still pretty wet.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Graydon, sitting down.

  “I don’t care, so long as I can eat,” said Christopher, joining him.

  Sabretooth didn’t even speak. He sat down and devoured the first of six hot dogs in a single bite. Eva didn’t know how he managed to fit the whole thing in there. For a while, there was nothing but silence as they chowed down. Everyone except for Graydon, who didn’t eat a thing. Eva noticed it, but if he didn’t want to draw attention to his status, she wasn’t going to bring it up.

  Finally, the food was gone. Christopher sat back and let out a long and contented belch. Sabretooth slouched in his seat, resting his head on his palm. Graydon watched the first inning of the game opposite their table with an inscrutable expression.

  “OK,” said Eva. “What now?”

  “We need to do something about the Box,” said Christopher. He looked better now. The rings under his eyes now looked less like he was critically ill and more like he’d had a few poor nights’ worth of sleep. “It’s dangerous.”

  “How did you find out about it in the first place, Sabretooth?” asked Eva curiously.

  He hitched a shoulder. “From S.H.I.E.L.D. I got a little birdie in their offices. Maria Hill was complaining about how the Box was too dangerous to be included in the exhibit, and she was trying to get it pulled. That got me curious, so I decided to check it out.”

  That story had a lot of holes in it, if you asked Eva. If Sabretooth had simply been curious about the Box, why had he risked his life to go back for it after the Sentinels had shown up? People don’t take chances over curiosity, no matter how stubborn they are, and Sabretooth didn’t seem like the kind of guy to needlessly risk his own skin. The story also conveniently skipped over all mention of how Graydon had become involved. Apparently, they were supposed to believe that he’d conveniently shown up and gotten blasted by Sentinels, who had also conveniently shown up, and Sabretooth had felt so guilty about it that he’d risked life and limb to set things right. It didn’t add up, no matter how she sliced it, but now wasn’t the time to point that out, so she simply nodded.

  “Did she say anything about how it works?” she asked instead.

  “I wish. I would have swiped the file if I could have, but they’ve got that place locked up tighter than Fort Knox,” he said.

  Now, this sounded like the truth. Sabretooth glared at the Box, which sat atop the picnic table in one of the paper bags from the snack shack. It looked too strange to leave out in the open, and they stood out enough among the milling baseball families as it was. Sabretooth had done his best to hide his face and claws, but they’d still amassed a collection of strange glances from harried parents with wagons and kids in tow. Graydon’s stained jumpsuit, Christopher’s goggles, and Eva’s mul
ticolored hair stood out in this crowd.

  “Damn,” Christopher muttered.

  “So, is that what we’re left with?” asked Eva. “We call S.H.I.E.L.D. for help?”

  Graydon recoiled.

  “Over my dead body,” Sabretooth snarled, slamming a hand on the table.

  A toddler walking past on the nearby sidewalk burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” Eva apologized to his glaring mother. “We’re practicing lines for a play.”

  The mother took one look at Sabretooth’s furious expression, grabbed the kid’s hand, and hurried away. She looked about ready to burst into tears herself. Eva balled up one of her hot dog wrappers and threw it at the mercenary. It hit him between the eyes and fell onto the table, and he bared his teeth at her a little.

  “What was that for?” he demanded.

  “You scared the heck out of that woman!” she said.

  “Well, that’s not my fault. This is my face,” he protested.

  “Enough, guys,” interjected Christopher. “That’s enough. We’ve got to figure out what to do, and I don’t think that calling S.H.I.E.L.D. should be on the list of options. You’ve seen what they’re like, Eva. They don’t bargain.”

  Eva thought back to her first run-in with S.H.I.E.L.D. She’d been brand new to the school, so eager to prove herself. When they’d shown up to intercept the students on a mission, she’d been delighted. She’d assumed they would work together. But the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tried to arrest them instead, right there on the spot. Maria Hill said they’d have the opportunity to defend themselves later, but that didn’t do any good when the clock was ticking and someone needed saving. What happened to innocent until proven otherwise, or did that only apply to non-mutants these days? Eva wasn’t automatically guilty just because she went to some school, or because she had a mutation in her DNA!

  No, Maria’s prejudice had blinded her, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resulting hardline tactics had put Eva at odds with some of her childhood heroes who worked for them. The Avengers probably hated her now.

  “I get what you mean,” she admitted. “Agent Hill is awful. But is there somebody higher up on the food chain that we could go to?”

  But Christopher shook his head without even considering it. “I don’t think that matters,” he said. “If we call them, we lose control of the Box, and that’s dangerous. I mean, I think it’s dangerous for Graydon. I think the Box is keeping him alive.”

  Eva didn’t know where to look. She couldn’t meet Graydon’s eyes. He infuriated her, and he’d been wrong about mutants, but she’d started to hope that maybe he was beginning to realize that. To make matters worse, Sabretooth wore an expression of intense sorrow. The kind of look you only wore at someone’s funeral. He brushed a clawed hand over his eyes, shoved up from the table with sudden fury, and stalked off into the trees. Graydon watched him go without a word.

  Eva’s stomach sank. To her surprise, she felt a deep swell of sympathy for the both of them. If anyone had suggested that she would feel this way just ten minutes earlier, she would have laughed at them, but now she could have hugged them both.

  “What is he to you?” asked Christopher.

  Graydon still didn’t speak.

  “Are we sure?” Eva asked. “I mean, really sure?”

  The politician met her eyes, and for the first time, she could see how all of his swagger and bluster had been hiding a deep reservoir of fear. He gripped the edge of the table as if he worried some inexplicable magical phenomenon might come along and carry him away at any moment, and he’d be powerless to stop it.

  “I know something’s not right,” he said. “I feel…” He shook his head as if to drive away some thought he couldn’t bear. “I don’t feel right. And I can hardly remember anything from the past few years other than my nightmares.”

  “When you snuck away from us to take the Box, why did you do that?” asked Christopher.

  Graydon swallowed hard. “It almost felt like it was calling me. I had to have it. I can’t really explain why.”

  “That’s because the magic from the Box is feeding you,” Christopher explained. “I didn’t realize that’s what I was sensing at first, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “So that’s good, right?” asked Eva, hoping against hope.

  Christopher held a hand up and wiggled it back and forth. “So-so. Because we don’t have any way to control it. It’s just pouring out magic. That’s what animated the dinosaur.”

  Sabretooth finally returned, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His face was drawn and resigned. He’d gotten control of himself again, although he clearly wasn’t happy about it. Eva considered reaching out to him, even if it was only to pat him on the shoulder, but he wasn’t the sort who would welcome comfort, regardless of how badly she wanted to offer it. At this point, she had to admit that she needed some too. Every time that it seemed like the story couldn’t get more tragic, it did.

  “It brought back the tigers too,” Sabretooth added, clearly having heard every word they’d said. “So it’ll keep raising the dead. Is that what you’re saying? Is there a way to contain it, kid? Limit its effects to Graydon only?”

  Christopher considered. “Maybe? But this is above my pay grade. Somebody like Illyana might have an idea of how to do it.”

  Sabretooth’s eyes lit up. “She’s a powerful sorceress. You think she could jimmy up some spell that could limit the effects of this thing?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she and I could do it together. It feels like the artifact emits a weird blend of life essence and magical power, so it might take the both of us. There’s only so much I can do with it alone.”

  Eva contemplated the Box, which sat in its paper bag on the table. No one walking by could have realized that the plain bag contained such a powerful item. It could raise the dead. If its power continued to spread, dinosaurs could once again walk the earth, terrorizing the populace. Creatures long extinct could rise once more. It sounded like a great idea at first, but Eva had seen plenty of movies, and she read the newspapers. She knew what happened when people messed around with nature. It rarely ended well. Besides, if it ended up in the wrong hands, the bad guys could do all kinds of awful things with it. They couldn’t afford to let that happen.

  “So it sounds like we need to contact Magik?” she asked. “That’s our next step?”

  Christopher nodded. “Sounds smart to me. We can’t throw Graydon under the bus, but we can’t leave this thing unchecked either. It’s too dangerous.”

  Sabretooth gave a clawed thumbs-up. After a moment, Graydon relaxed his desperate grip on the table and reluctantly agreed too. Eva pushed away from the table and began to gather up all of their garbage, eager to get moving.

  “Excellent!” she said. “So we’ll head back to the chopper. The comms unit won’t work until we get inside, but once we’re there, Illyana should be able to get right to us in a jiffy. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why they haven’t shown up already. I bet Cyclops is throwing a hissy fit and a half right about now.”

  She finished stuffing all of the trash into one of the empty bags and then paused. Everyone else stood motionless, staring at the ground.

  “What?” she asked.

  Then she looked. The grass in a wide ring around their picnic bench had wilted and died. At the edge of the blighted area stood a tree. The half that stood inside the blight was gray and dead, while the half that stood outside bloomed riotously. It was as if two different trees – one alive and one dead – had been spliced together by some mad scientist with an inexplicable agenda.

  The Box affected plant life too.

  “Damn,” murmured Eva.

  A chill ran through her as she stared at the half-dead tree. Moments earlier, she would have said she thought the situation couldn’t have been more urgent. They’d already had plenty of
pressure on them between their need to get back to the school, the threatening presence of the cops, Christopher’s deteriorating condition, and the repeated appearance of things that wanted to eat them. But the fact that the Box also killed things made it a hundred times worse in Eva’s opinion. If it made the grass sick, would it also do the same thing to the baseball players and their parents? She pictured the city, devoid of all life from the smallest sprout to the teeming throngs on the streets to the tallest animal in the zoo, and she swallowed against a throat suddenly gone dry.

  “We need to keep this Box away from people,” she said. “That park is full of kids.”

  Christopher met her eyes and nodded in instant agreement. She didn’t have to explain the logic. He got her line of thinking without the need for further elaboration.

  “I think you’re right. We can’t take the Box through those crowds. It seems to be getting stronger, and it’s not worth the risk. But we can’t leave it unattended either, so I say we split up,” he said.

  “I’m not leaving the Box,” Graydon said promptly. “No way.”

  “So you stay with him, and Eva and I go to the chopper.” Sabretooth cracked his knuckles as if preparing for a fight. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait.” Eva held up a finger. “I think Christopher should go with you, and I should stay with Graydon and the Box.”

  Christopher arched an eyebrow. “Not sure I’m following that logic,” he said.

  “You can explain all of this Box stuff much better than I can. Cyclops is going to be ticked off, and he’ll need to be convinced. I can freeze the Box to keep it from killing anything. If that hurts Graydon, I can bubble him too. I’ve got it covered.”

  Christopher hesitated. “Could I… could I talk to you a minute?”

  “Sure thing.”

  He pulled her off to the side as Sabretooth watched. Eva was fairly sure that his enhanced senses could pick up every single word no matter how far away Christopher walked, but maybe that was just paranoia. Christopher stopped near a bush that still bloomed with bright pink flowers, although if they didn’t do something about the Box soon, it too would die.