Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I can't do much unless we have some cover,” I said, giving him a look of significance right back.

  “Whoa,” Augustus said, “we do not need a massive cloud like last time, okay?”

  Reed nodded. “I'll try and put up...a smokescreen. Maybe a few hundred feet out...perimeter...keep the cameras from catching you.” Then he shook his head wearily. “It's not going to be easy or perfect, though. If there's someone down there with a cell phone recording, they'll get footage of you.”

  “People close to the refinery are hopefully running right now,” I said, then looked at Jamal. “Is it too much to hope for that you could take a quick look at the local cell network and see who's down there?”

  “I ain't that good,” Jamal said. “I can't do it on the fly while we're riding into battle.”

  “I hate to say it,” Scott said, “but times like this I miss J.J. and Abby.”

  “You miss 'em?” Jamal asked. “How do you think I feel, picking up all their slack on the tech side since they got laid off?”

  Another detonation rent the air in front of us, slightly less harsh than the last. “Must have been half-empty,” Scott said.

  “Sienna,” Reed said, concentrating. “I'm getting sub-sonic air movement in one of the buildings below.” He pointed at the warren of piping and metallic structures snaking through the refinery proper, which was situated a few hundred yards from the tank farm that was blowing up. “Someone's flying around in there. Maybe ramming into people at high speed?”

  I nodded, and threw my hand forward. “Set down Augustus and Scott over there, keep Jamal with us.”

  Reed nodded, then closed his eyes. “Hang on, guys. This might get a little...bumpy.”

  “Bumpy?” Augustus asked. “What do you m – ahhhhhhhh!”

  He and Scott shot forward like they'd been accelerated out of a cannon, dropping precipitously toward the earth ahead.

  “Sienna...” Reed said, pulling his hand back as Scott and Augustus made landfall – a little rough, it looked like – just outside the tank farm. “Hold Jamal up under your own power, will you?”

  I sidled sideways lazily through the air, trying to make it look like the wind was carrying me. I looped an arm around his chest, which was easy because he was a thin dude, and once I had him snug, certain there was no skin touching, I said, “We're good.”

  Reed just nodded, and I felt the wind beneath us give out. My own flight powers took up our weight, my arm straining only a little to keep Jamal in my grip as Reed turned his attention elsewhere.

  And where his attention went...was immediately obvious to anyone with functioning eyes.

  Black smoke bled off the fires in the tank farm, whipping around in an unnatural semi-circle. It became like the eye of an ebony hurricane in seconds, shrouding the tank farm from view down to thirty or so feet off the ground.

  “I see people fleeing,” Jamal said, pointing at the ground. “Not seeing any cell phones looking up at us, though. They're hustling for their lives.”

  “That's smart,” I said. “But I don't give a damn. If I get caught flying, I get caught. This is getting too serious for me to worry about covering my own ass.”

  “Then why did I just have to go to the trouble of whipping up this cover?” Reed grumbled. Sweat beads were coursing down his forehead, and his hairline looked to be soaked.

  “Well, I'm not exactly looking to get caught,” I said, then turned my attention to the building he'd pointed out before. “Down there, you say?”

  Reed nodded. “You need me to come with you?”

  “Can you maintain this from down there?” I asked.

  He paused, thinking it over. “Maybe. Probably. I might be a little slower to call out what I feel him doing, though. I'm trying to keep track of too much.”

  “Just do what you can,” I said, and started to ease toward the ground below, aiming toward the edges of the building, looking for an entrance. “That's all I'm asking.”

  “That's all you're asking...for now,” Reed said, but when I looked at him, he smiled. A little pointedly, but a smile.

  It was progress.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Augustus

  The landing was not exactly what I'd come to expect from my years of flying. Sure, I was used to mostly airplane flight, with their relatively delicate, occasionally bumpy touchdowns. Reed's forced landing was like he'd forgotten about us ten or fifteen feet from the ground, maybe even just thrown us down like toys he was tired of.

  My shoulder took some of the impact, but I rolled out of it, thumping onto my back. I landed on dirt, thankfully, and tried to use it to absorb some of the landing, then do the same for Scotty, who landed about ten feet to my left.

  I might not have quite gotten to him in time to do as much, because I heard the air rush out of him, and he tried to suck in a breath right as another tank blew up.

  That set my head to ringing real good, and when I opened my eyes, the sky was black around us, smoke bleeding off the tower fires and caught up in whatever vortex Reed was crafting.

  Scott was rolling to his belly, eyes half-closed, when I made it up to a knee. He had a hand on the back of his head, and when he lifted it, there was some blood there. Looked like my soft landing attempt hadn't worked as well with him.

  “What do we do now?” he asked, still cringing, as he sat up.

  “You heard the lady,” I said, offering him a hand up, which he took. “We stop the booms.”

  Scotty nodded, eyes partially closed. “Yeah. Okay.” He was opening and closing his hands.

  “Yo, what are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting a grip on the channel water,” Scott said. “Bringing it closer for when I need it.”

  “Oh, yeah, good idea,” I said, and started to excavate the earth around me. The roads through the tank farm were all dirt and some gravel – ideal for me to work with. I grabbed a mountain here, a mountain there, readying it so I could pull it to me.

  Another tank went up, only a hundred yards or so away. There was one tank between us, and if I read the ground right–

  “Uh, Scotty?” I grabbed him by the arm, dragged him over to me, and launched us forward on a platform of dirt. “We need to move before–”

  The tank we'd been standing by lit off in a blaze of glory, sending us both hurtling through the air.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Sienna

  “Here,” I said, ripping open a door on the side of the building that Reed had indicated. It was shot through with piping that hugged the ceiling, the very walls made of the stuff, like they were running all the liquid in the world through this building. Or at least all the piping, though what the conduits contained – well, I didn't have a clue. Oil was in there somewhere, presumably.

  I'd dropped Jamal to the catwalk; we were on the second story of this building, which seemed to be the refinery proper. I was unclear on how any of this machinery worked, but the building appeared to be made of corrugated metal, which I always took to be a hasty type of construction. Whether that was true or not was open to debate, because as much as I tried to cast a wide net in terms of learning, building procedures was an area with which I had zero experience.

  “I hear something,” Jamal whispered. He moved to take the lead but I held out a hand to stop him. Furrowing his brow, he looked at me. “What?”

  “Maybe let the person who can heal from fatal wounds go in front?” I smirked.

  “Oh. Right.” He made a slight bowing gesture, putting his hand out in front of him. “Lay on, MacDuff.”

  I winced; anything Scottish tended to set my teeth on edge. “Thanks,” I managed to get out through the grinding of my molars.

  The building was a warren, seemingly endless. I listened carefully for noise and heard what Jamal had talked about. Then I froze, listening intently. Reed and Jamal both paused behind me, but the rasping of their breath covered over the subtle sound in the distance.

  Shaking my head, I crept forward, del
icately touching my boots on the catwalk to keep them from squeaking and giving away our arrival.

  A grunt in the distance gave me pause again. It sounded like someone was engaging in some form of physical labor. Lifting a piece of machinery? Trying to break open valves?

  My refinery knowledge was zero, so rather than try to conjure a clue out of the empty air I crept on, muffling my footsteps and gesturing for the boys behind me to do the same.

  We came to an intersection, light flooding out on the darkened catwalk from our right. I pointed in that direction, tilting slowly around the corner with my hand pointed like a gun, ice powers swirling at my fingertips. Sure, Texas was okay with me drilling these perps with fire, probably, but Sienna Nealon wasn't supposed to have fire powers any longer, so I really needed to keep this thing quiet if I wanted to maintain that secret.

  The corridor stretched off, dimly lit, and stopped about twenty yards ahead at a door. It wasn't ajar, and the only light was an overhead fixture shedding its luminescence on the grated metal below.

  Keeping my heavy boots quiet on the catwalk was not the easiest thing I'd ever done. A moan caused me to stop, and Jamal to almost run into me.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he whispered meta-low, his hip having found my left butt cheek with a surprising amount of force. I managed to stay upright and shoot him a dirty look, which prompted the apology.

  Reed was glaring at us both from the rear for some reason, but I ignored his crabbiness and started forward again. Whatever the noise was, it seemed to fit with the earlier pattern. Our perps were exerting themselves in there for some reason, probably not good. Probably to do with making this place more flammable.

  When I reached the door, I took up position at the left side of the frame and gestured for Jamal to get behind me and Reed to get across. They both fell into line quickly and quietly. I readied my left hand over the door handle, my right prepared with ice. In addition, I drew on the memory of Eve Kappler, and watched my eyes glow with fairy light in my reflection (in Reed's eyes).

  I stepped out in front of the door and gave it a mighty kick, tearing it off its hinges and flinging it into the room. I followed a second after it, both hands glowing faintly blue and swirling with cold powers as I charged into what appeared to be a control room, consoles lining the wall in front of me.

  Dead bodies lay across the grated floor. I counted five before I stopped to focus on the live bodies in front of me, at the console. My hands were ready with ice as I pointed at them, ready to freeze them up as I caught them both in my sights–

  And stopped short, caught utterly by surprise.

  “What the f–?” Reed started to say.

  “Ohhhh, damn,” Jamal muttered behind me.

  Because we'd found our perps. And they were certainly laboring, all right. With their pants around their ankles, shrouded partly in shadow but looking at us in surprise, wound tightly together, pressed against a console – en flagrante delicto.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Augustus

  “Thank you...for the soft landing,” Scott grunted, mouth partially full of dirt.

  I heard him and understood him because I could feel the vibrations of his words through the dirt. We were both packed in it, knocked asunder by the exploding tank. I'd caught us in an impromptu earthwork. It wasn't the softest landing in history, like if I'd had powers involving, say, marshmallows, or feathers. But it was the best I could do with what I had.

  “No problem,” I said, shoving off my dirt bed and back to my knees. I was covered in grains and sweat. “Any chance you can clean me off from this sweat and I'll dust you off, and we'll go into battle looking quasi-respectable?”

  Scotty waved a hand over me, and I felt the sticky perspiration on my skin dissolve. Removing the dirt after that was just a sweep more of my hand.

  I offered him mine, helping him up. “Let's get this guy,” he said, through a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. Looked like that wasn't coming off with a wave of his hand.

  “You got a plan?” I asked, hustling into a run. We were sprinting around an already-burning tank, the smoke being piped off, presumably by Reed, since it was joining his visual shield wall at the perimeter of the refinery property.

  “Yeah, we take this guy apart before he blows something else up,” Scott said, and he turned on the jets, sprinting around the corner.

  I followed him, because hell if I was going to get left behind by the rich, blond prettyboy white dude. We made it around the burning tank around the same time, and I was already sweating like a fiend again, because the heat coming off it was no joke. If we made it through this thing, I was going to have my work cut out for me dousing these fires in sand.

  Coming around the tank, we had circled back around to the dirt road that ran straight through the middle of the tank farm. Black scorch marks from the explosions colored the earth around each of them, and my head was still ringing from that last boom.

  But there, ahead, in the middle of the road, was a dude who was dancing, his hands glowing blue.

  “Scott, he's 'bout to throw one–” I said.

  That was all I got out before a wave of water came blowing out of the black cloud beyond. It interposed itself between the dancing guy and the tank he was throwing at, and that ball of glowing blue plasma hit the water and sizzled, a hiss of steam so loud I could hear it over the furious ringing in my ears.

  Dancing guy stopped dancing, and for a full second, he was just staring dumbly at the water wall he'd just thrown the plasma into.

  Then he turned, whipping his head around, looking for the source of his troubles and voila – there we were.

  He puffed up another ball of plasma. It was big and blue and glowing and about the size of a beach ball. Scotty and I were still coming at him, and he threw it right at us.

  I flung a hand up, ripping the earth up as Scotty broke to the right. The water wall was moving, sliding toward him as I brought an earthwork up between us and the plasma–

  The plasma ball struck my impromptu shield and made another evil hiss. The smell of ozone was strong and sudden, replacing the oily smoke smell that had dominated the area.

  “Scott, watch out!” I shouted, running up behind my earthwork. I peered out, and my fears were confirmed.

  Dancing guy was arming up, another plasma ball at the ready, this one a little bigger than the last.

  He flung it at Scott, and I heard it hit, the sizzle and the hiss of the water changing states of matter. Steam rushed in every direction, and from where I stood, I could even see it hissing out on Scott's side of the barrier.

  Then I heard something terrible.

  Scott Byerly was screaming in agony.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Sienna

  Well, this was embarrassing.

  Both our perps were right there, one on top of the other on the console, conjoined almost as I charged in, but rapidly separating now. The male was handsome, almost regal, and hurriedly pulling his pants up. Not before I saw dick, unfortunately.

  The female moved behind him, pure dark-haired punk rock, her eyes glinting with defiance and possibly a little lightning. She, too, was hurriedly getting her trousers up from below her knees and glaring. Her blouse was halfway unbuttoned and she was hanging out of her bra.

  I didn't say anything, because I couldn't seem to make my mouth work. To my knowledge, this was the first time I'd ever walked in on anyone in the act, and something about it short-circuited my brain. My cheeks burned like hot coals, and my brain was failing to supply my mouth anything to say. “Uh – uh – uh–” I stammered.

  “Sienna,” Jamal muttered in rising alarm.

  “Your – uhm,” I managed to get out, but that was about it. “Your...fly is down,” I finished lamely, as our male perp had finished buckling his belt but left the barn door wide open. Really wide open. A horse head was still just about hanging out.

  “Oh,” he said, glancing, then hurriedly yanking it up. His eyes met mine, and he smi
led with a confidence that made me slightly sick. “Thank you,” he said with utter sincerity, completely composed.

  “Ain'tcha gonna say nothing 'bout my tits?” Punk Rock Chick asked, adjusting herself back into her bra in full view of God and everybody. She had a rough accent, though I couldn't place it, geographically.

  “They're...certainly present,” I said, because that was what came to mind and I'm not good at filtering. “And very purple. Are you getting enough oxygen, or are you just that pale?”

  Punk Rock Chick glared at me. Lightning was dancing in her eyes. I felt Jamal move up to my shoulder, ready to intercede if she let loose.

  “You're under arrest,” Reed said for me. Because I'd honestly forgotten that's what we were here to do, in all the hubbub and nudity.

  “Yes!” I said, pointing my fingers. “That! That is what I meant to say, not all that...fly is down and muttering, stammering...stuff. Nobody move!” I kept a finger pointed at each of them. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?” Punk Rock asked, eyes lighting up.

  “I'm glad you asked,” I said, and I let her have it.

  My ice blast caught her squarely in the chest, and if I'd been Elsa, her heart would have been frozen instantly. Instead it spread from the center of her black, unbuttoned blouse and crawled over both cloth and skin, forming an inch-thick layer of ice around her and locking her upper arms in place.

  Lightning danced from her fingertips and grounded on the catwalk decking beneath us. From there it coruscated into machinery, making a hissing sound.

  “Hey, what the hell?” she asked as the ice blast drove her back and she hit the console. She lost her balance and fell over, parking her ass back where it had been a moment before, only this time with her pants on.

  “Shhh,” I said, and blasted her hands with ice, covering them over and joining it with the encasement of her arms. Now she was sealed together tight. The flash beneath the surface of the ice suggested she was trying to use her powers and not finding any luck.