by Jackson Ford
Reggie gestures to the couch. Her face looks even more lined than normal. “Sit down, Teagan.”
“Just tell me wh—”
Annie points to the couch. The look on her face is total poison. “Sit the fuck down.”
Movement behind me. Paul and Carlos. And they’re not just moving closer to the group. They’ve both taken up positions at my six o’clock, between me and the door.
What the hell is going on?
I move to the couch, lowering myself onto it, sure that at any second I’m going to wake up. I don’t. Carlos refuses to look at me, which is something he’s never done, ever.
“You have some explaining to do,” Paul says.
That does it. I leap off the couch, causing Carlos to take a step forward and Paul to take one back.
“Listen, cock-womble,” I growl at Paul. “I have had two hours of sleep. I just drove halfway across the damn city, and if you don’t tell me what’s going on—”
With a slap, Annie plants a piece of paper against my chest. The poisonous look is still on her face. “This, bitch.”
“Don’t you tou—”
Then I see what’s on the paper, and my throat just closes off.
The seconds that tick by feel like minutes. Eventually, I manage to force out a few words. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s from the Edmonds Building,” Reggie says quietly. “Thirtieth floor.”
The paper is a printout of a photo. It shows a man in his early thirties wearing a tight black T-shirt. The picture quality is pretty good. His earrings, tiny diamond studs, glint under bright office lights. He looks familiar.
He’s lying on his back on the carpet, his body lit by a camera flash. Eyes open, staring in horror at the ceiling. And around his throat…
It’s a piece of steel reinforcement bar—what house builders call rebar. It’s tough to see because it’s almost buried, twisted tight like it was nothing more than a length of wire. It wraps around his throat three times, dug in so deep that it’s almost decapitated him. The carpet around his body is soaked with blood.
“That’s Steven Chase,” says Annie. “Like you don’t know already.”
The room contracts, the walls inching closer.
“Got that off a police contact,” Annie continues. “After Reggie got an alert for the building on their systems.” She glowers down at me. “You wanna tell us something, Teagan?”
How the hell do you strangle someone with a piece of rebar? You’d need immense strength. Or…
The final piece slides into place.
“You can’t think I did this?”
I didn’t kill anyone. Why would I? How can they not know that? And when do they think I did it? I was with them, and then I was with Nic, and…
And in between I was driving home. Alone.
“It’s a fake,” I tell them. “It’s gotta be. You can’t do that to a piece of steel. It’d break, wouldn’t it?”
The thoughts are like water falling through my fingers. I hate how desperate I sound, hate how dry my tongue is in my mouth.
Annie grunts. “First thing we checked.”
“Steel with a low carbon content bends just fine,” Paul says quietly. “It’s ductile enough.”
“Ductile?” I look at him. “The fuck is—”
“It can bend. You can wrap it around something as long as you don’t bend it twice at the same spot. Of course, you need machines to do it, unless…”
“Unless what?” But I already know what.
This is impossible. Whoever did this was just strong, maybe super-strong. Surely someone with enough upper body strength would be able to…
But that wouldn’t curve the steel. It would bend it. The rebar would be kinked along its length. The one in the photo isn’t: it’s coiled like a spring, the curves smooth. That isn’t possible. Unless, of course, there was an even force acting on it, applying pressure from everywhere at once.
Like the kind of pressure a psychokinetic might exert.
“Teagan.” Reggie wheels her chair forward an inch. “I’d like you to tell us exactly what you did when you left the office.”
I can’t look away from the rebar. From the ruin that is the man’s throat.
“Uh-uh,” Annie says. “Don’t just shake your head. Start talking.”
“Teagan.” Carlos sounds desperate. “Please. Just tell us what happened.”
“I couldn’t do this,” I say. “There’s no way. I’m not even close to that strong…”
My phone goes off. And this time it’s a different ringtone. A very distinctive one: Britney Spears, singing about being a slave for you.
Slowly I lift the phone out of my pocket. That ringtone is assigned to exactly one person, and from the look on Reggie’s face, she knows just who it is.
Tanner.
THIRTEEN
Teagan
“Good morning, Ms. Jameson.”
Moira Tanner might have let me pick my new name, but she still calls me by my old one. As always, she sounds like she’s leaning back in her chair, feet propped up on a desk. And as always, I want to drop the phone and run like hell.
I swallow. “I didn’t do this.”
“I am aware of the situation in Los Angeles.” Her accent is soft New England, breathy and genteel. “And I find myself somewhat… conflicted… as to how I should respond.” A slight noise over the phone, a shifting of expensive fabric against chair leather. “Please explain to me how tonight’s target died.”
The lights in the room are too bright. “I was with the guys,” I say. “Then I got some food on the way home, then I was with a friend. Go look at the traffic cams on Slauson, you’ll see.”
“Ms. Jameson.”
“There’s no way I could have done this. No way. I don’t know who did, but—”
“Emily.”
Her tone changes only the tiniest bit, but it’s enough to cut me off cold.
“I did not ask for your whereabouts,” she says. “I asked for an explanation of how this man died. I dislike repeating myself.”
Which is when the most obvious part of this—whatever this whole situation is—slides into place.
I’m not alone.
“Who’s out there?” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This had to have been done by someone like me, right?” The implications are popping in my head like fireworks. I’m not alone. “But it wasn’t me, which means there’re other people out there with abilities. You said—”
“You know as well as I do that you were the only survivor of what happened in Wyoming. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. There is no one else with your ability.” The way she says the word makes it sound like it has a bad taste in her mouth. “And if there were, do you seriously think I wouldn’t know about them?”
After they brought me in, the people from the government spent months questioning me about my parents, getting more and more frustrated when I couldn’t tell them what, exactly, had been done to me. And they got nothing from my genetic samples—nothing that would help them recreate the abilities in another person.
Of course, maybe they did eventually have a breakthrough—in the past year, perhaps, while I’ve been in Los Angeles. My DNA is still on file, so who knows what they figured out? But then… if whoever did this is working for them, why is Tanner asking me what happened?
Maybe she wants me gone, sent down for a crime someone else committed. But there are much easier ways to do that than framing me for murder. She wouldn’t need to set me up. She’d just make a phone call.
And even if I’d wanted this man dead, I couldn’t have done this. Bending rebar in this way takes strength I simply don’t have. Which means whoever killed this man is much, much stronger than I am.
“I swear to you, I have no idea what’s happening here,” I say. My imagination is in overdrive: China Shop, Nic, my restaurant, my city, all of it gone, vanishing as a needle goes into my neck and a black bag goes over my head
. “Just… just give me some time, OK? Let me figure this out.”
“No.”
“I don’t—”
“I asked for an explanation, and I haven’t got one. I’m disappointed in you, Ms. Jameson. I thought you understood our arrangement.”
“Listen. Just listen to me, OK?”
“I’ve given your team orders to detain you. You’re to wait there until you’re collected.”
“What do you mean detain?”
Paul has a gun.
I feel it before I see it. I was too messed up to notice before, but I’m getting it now. A Glock, it looks like. Big and hefty and mean. He’s holding it loosely, almost casually, by his side. He doesn’t look like a balding forty-something dad any more. He looks like he’s back in the navy, standing on the deck of a cruiser, watching the enemy fighter appear on the horizon.
He’s the only one with a weapon, but both Annie and Reggie are stone-faced. Only Carlos looks uncomfortable.
“What are you doing, Paul?” I say. There’s no power in the words. None at all.
“I’ve asked Mr. Marino to secure you,” Tanner says in my ear. “I’m aware that you can probably disarm him, but that that will change how you’re treated later. Drastically.” A moment’s pause. Then: “Come in quietly, Ms. Jameson. Don’t make it hard.”
Paul moves the gun to his front, wrapping his other hand around the grip.
I bare my teeth. “Paul,” I say, “you’d better be real careful what you do next.”
His expression doesn’t change. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am,” he says. He’s talking to Tanner, even though the phone isn’t on speaker.
I am not very good at planning ahead. I may have mentioned that once or twice. It’s even worse when I’m angry, and right now my mood has gone from scared to mightily pissed off. So I reach out with my PK, right across the room, and rip the gun out of Paul’s hands.
He tries to hold on to it, is nearly jerked forward onto his face. Ironically, he’s too well trained to fire. His finger is away from the trigger, on the outside of the guard, and he doesn’t have time to get it in there before I take it away from him.
Reggie’s eyes go wide. Annie snarls, taking a step forward.
I don’t like guns. But I’m from Wyoming, so I know what to do with them. I release the clip with my mind, letting it drop to the floor. With the gun pointed away from anything important, I pull the slide back, ejecting the round and catching it with my PK. The phone is still pressed to my ear.
Nobody moves. Not even when I drop the gun behind the couch.
Carlos looks desperately worried. Paul is more furious than I’ve ever seen him, and Annie looks like she wants to tear my throat out with her teeth. Even Reggie looks dark, eyes narrowed.
And there’s something else there too. Not just anger: hatred. As if their worst suspicions have been confirmed. Reggie, less so, but Annie and Paul…
A year I’ve been on this team. A year I’ve been working with them. They’ve seen what I can do, and they’ve seen me when I’m not doing it. We don’t hang out much, but at the very least they treated me like a human being. Except that wasn’t true, was it? It was all an act. Here, right now, this is how they see me.
A freak. Something not human.
My face is flushed, heat creeping up from the base of my neck. The shame makes me even angrier. Who the fuck are these people to judge me?
“Ms. Jameson—” Tanner sounds almost satisfied “—that wasn’t wise.”
How could she know what happened? The phone isn’t even on speaker. Which means she expected it, was waiting for me to disarm Paul.
I’m breathing too loudly, like I’ve run a marathon. “Listen to me. Just for one second. If I were… If I did this, then why would I come in when Reggie called? And if I really am the only person with PK, why would I use it to kill someone?”
The words give me a little bit of strength, because what I’m saying makes sense. “If I wanted to kill someone, I’d shoot them. I’d frame someone else. I wouldn’t use my ability, then just go home and wait for you guys to find out. Right?”
Silence.
“Just let me find out what’s going on,” I say. “I didn’t do this, but I can’t prove it if I’m… if you take me in.”
“Your alibi doesn’t hold up,” Tanner says. “There was a period this morning that you were unaccounted for.”
“You haven’t even given me a chance,” I spit back. “There’ll be traffic cameras, like I said. The people at the takeout place. My friend Nic. There’s no way I could have done this.”
“Then who did, Ms. Jameson?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do see the predicament I’m in, don’t you?” Not a hint of emotion in her voice. “Come in, Ms. Jameson. If you really are innocent, we can—”
“What? Get me a lawyer? Read me my rights? When’s my court date set for? Am I gonna be allowed to plead, or am I gonna be too drugged to speak?”
“Due process will be followed.”
“Due process? Are you fucking kidding me?”
All the old fears are coming back, the days from before reaching out to grab hold of me.
“You know exactly what happens if you bring me in,” I say. “Even if it turns out I was right, your bosses will never let me back out. I know how this shit works.”
More silence. No one in the room moves.
“I have done everything you asked for,” I say to Tanner. “Everything. You didn’t give me much of a choice, but I did it anyway. I’ve been working for you for a year. I have earned a little trust.”
“Is that so.”
“Yeah. It is. You owe me this. Let me figure this shit out.”
Still nothing. For a good ten seconds.
“Put me on speaker,” Tanner says.
I do. Her voice, tinny and distorted, loses none of its menace. “You’ve got twenty-two hours.”
“Twenty-two? Not twenty-four?”
“No, Ms. Jameson.” She’s speaking very softly now, which is never a good sign. “Twenty-two hours’ time will be 5 a.m. Eastern Standard tomorrow morning. Five a.m. is when the director gets his morning coffee. And with that coffee he will either be receiving a full and complete explanation or a report that you are in custody. Those are the only two options. Do I make myself clear?”
Five a.m. Eastern. That’s 2 a.m. here. OK. I can work with that. “Yeah. Clear.”
“Mr. Marino? Ms. McCormick?”
“We’re here,” Reggie says.
“You will keep control of the situation. Understood?”
Paul’s mouth is set in a tight line. It isn’t hard to see why: the meaning behind the words is clear. If they fuck up, or let me run, then it’ll be on them.
“We understand,” says Reggie.
“Good.”
Tanner hangs up.
Annie strides to the window, her back to me. “This is bullshit.”
“I didn’t do this,” I say.
“Yeah, OK. We just got the Incredible Hulk in town. Or someone else who can just, like, magically do what you do. That’s much more believable than you going off on your own mission.”
“Annie,” Reggie says, turning to face her. “Dial it back. Right now.”
I point at the picture. My finger is shaking. “I didn’t do this,” I say again. In the back of my mind, there’s a digital clock, numbers ticking down: 21:59… 21:58.
“I’m not helping you.” Annie. Paul glances at her. “We are not helping you. Not any more.”
“Whoa.” Carlos gets between us, hands out, like he’s stopping traffic. “Enough, OK? Tranquilo.”
Annie ignores him, pointing at the phone in my hand, clicking her fingers once. “Call her back. Call her back, let me talk to her. I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m out.”
And then we’re all yelling: me, Annie, Paul, just screaming at each other. Paul looks like he wants to rush the couch, try for his Glock again.
�
��That’s enough.”
Reggie’s face contorts as she says the words, muscles corded in her neck. She doesn’t raise her voice often. It takes a lot of effort—her lungs aren’t very good. But you can still hear the military in her.
“Teagan,” she says, “I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t kill this person.”
“You hacked the cameras before, right? Why can’t you just do it again? You’ll see straight away it wasn’t me!”
“First thing I did. They’re down across the whole building. Have been from shortly after you arrived back here. Could be they rebooted after we were there tonight—it’s what I’d do. Break the whole system down. Or it could be something else entirely.”
“What about traffic cameras? I drove home. They would have spotted me all along Slauson.”
“Did you run a red light?” Paul asks.
“I’m being framed for murder, and you wanna know if I ran a red light?” I throw up my hands. “You know what, Paul? Yes. I ran every red light between here and Leimert Park. I also didn’t check my blind spot before changing lanes, and I never once used my turn signal. Happy?”
“If you didn’t run a red light, you won’t be on the cameras.”
“I… Wait. What?”
“Cams in this city only get footage if you roll into an intersection when you’re not supposed to. They don’t just run all the time. You know how much footage that would be to store? There’s no point.”
“Shit. What about the restaurant?”
“Maybe,” Reggie says. “But my guess is they won’t be open for a while. And they almost certainly won’t store their security footage on a network. So I’m going to ask you again: look me in the eye—no, Teagan. Look at me and tell me you didn’t kill this person.”
My eyes meet hers.
“I didn’t,” I say with a lot more strength in my voice than I feel. “I swear.”
Reggie holds my gaze for a moment more, then nods. “All right then.”
“You don’t seriously believe her?” Paul says. “Because I can’t tell you how many irregularities there are in her story.”
He stops as Reggie turns to face him. She looks old then. Old and tired.
“I get that you don’t like each other.” She straightens in her chair, chest rising and falling with exertion. “But you’re so quick to judge her, you’re blind to what’s in front of you.”
