“I have a strategy,” he said in a kind of roar. I took a step back, more out of concern for his safety than mine. “I find Gavrikov and I drown his ass.”
“And a fine strategy that would be,” I said, suppressing all my smartass instincts for the sake of my penance, “but may I suggest one that’s got a better chance of success?”
He drew up to his full height, arms folded in front of him and said, “I’m listening.” His posture said he was not, but I was desperate enough to try anyway.
“The thing you have to understand about Gavrikov is that he thinks Kat is a clone of his sister,” I started.
“Why the hell would he think that?”
“Because she actually is his sister,” I said, “and don’t interrupt me. He feels guilty because he thinks she died or something, back in the early 1900s, and the only thing he cares about is giving her spiritual successor a chance at freedom.” I paused, taking a breath. He looked at me with less rage, but also a look that told me he didn’t totally understand. “Because he thinks the Directorate is keeping her imprisoned here.”
He frowned. “They are.”
“Yeah, but not totally,” I said. “I mean, if she really wanted to, she could probably get out—speaking from personal experience.”
He looked at me with skepticism. “I have my doubts. Kat doesn’t strike me as much of a fighter.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, if she’s with me, he won’t go nuclear because he doesn’t want to hurt her. That gives me a chance to neutralize him without anyone having to get hurt. I can bring Kat back here, safe and sound, and keep Gavrikov down.” I stared him in the eyes. “You know I can.”
He blinked, then his eyes clouded with suspicion. “Why are you telling me this?”
I took a deep breath. “Because I don’t know how to drive. And I don’t exactly know where I’d be going. And Kat...well...” I hesitated. “I don’t think she’s going to come willingly just on my say so.”
He held his hand up to his head. “So you want my help convincing her, too?”
“I do. I really, really do.” I added a note of pleading to my voice. “Look, if we leave this up to the so-called pros, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I suspect bad. Really bad. And I mean, yeah, we could hide here, we’re probably safe from the blast radius, but...” I didn’t know what else to say.
Scott Byerly just stared at me, with those eyes, those cool blue eyes. “One question. If you answer it honestly, I’m in.”
I smacked my lips. Why did my mouth always dry out at dramatic moments? “What is it?”
He stared so hard I almost felt his gaze burn through me. “Why are you doing this?”
It felt like he’d wound up a swing with a sword and punched it straight through the middle of me. “You know why,” I said, my mouth even drier than it had been a moment earlier.
He shook his head, impassive. “I really don’t. Why?”
“Because...” I swallowed, trying to get the taste of ashes out of my mouth. I felt like I could taste them, like I had been on the main street in Glencoe after the detonation, and it reminded me of blood. Blood in my mouth, from fighting with Wolfe. “Because the last time someone super-powerful held people hostage I let the clock tick down and a lot of people died.” My hand came up, brushing the hair out of my eyes where the wind had tossed it. “I felt helpless, weak, like I couldn’t do anything. I can’t ever undo the consequences of my inaction. But this...” I tightened my hand into a fist in front of me, “putting down Gavrikov...this I can do.”
He looked left, then right, then back at me. “I’d shake hands with you, but I know what that would do to me. I’m in. Let’s go get Kat.”
Chapter 25
We took out the guards with minimal effort. We did it fast because I was afraid Old Man Winter would get wise to our idea and send M-Squad to protect Kat. Fortunately, he must have had them working on the plan to take out Gavrikov, because there was no siren, no klaxon as the last guard slipped from my grasp, unconscious. I cracked the knuckles of my right hand, the one that had been burned off just yesterday.
Scott raised an eyebrow at me. “Feeling okay?”
“Better than him.” I picked up the card key looped to the guard’s belt and ran it through the reader on Kat’s door. It slid open and she jumped up from the bed, looking a bit haggard. Her hair was tangled, as though it hadn’t been washed for a few days, and she wore a tank top and sweatpants. I started to crack wise about the way she looked but remembered a similar visit I had in this room from Zack and wisely shut my mouth. “Check out time,” I said, drawing a look of surprise from her.
“What are you doing here?” She looked to Scott. “Both of you.”
“He was coming to visit,” I chucked a thumb to indicate him. “I was coming to give you a choice. Did they explain why you’re down here?”
She nodded. “The man who blew up the science building thinks I’m his sister, and he’s after me.”
“I’m told you actually are his sister,” I said, “but the point is, he doesn’t want to hurt you. He thinks you’re being imprisoned and he wants you set free.”
She looked around her gilded cage, with its wide-screen TV and luxurious private bathroom. “Um, I am being imprisoned.”
“Perfect, let’s escape,” I said and started to turn.
“Wait!” The alarm was urgent in her voice. “I don’t want to go to him, either!”
“He’s going to blow up the city of Minneapolis if we don’t turn you loose and bring you to him. He already blew up a town west of here to prove he’d do it.” Scott delivered the news I didn’t want to.
I watched Kat as she took it in. She was always pretty; enough to make me jealous, at least. She was like the cheerleader everybody loved because she was just so sweet and perky and innocent. Even despite her somewhat unwashed appearance, she was still pretty. That annoyed me.
But I watched her face crumple as Scott’s news hit her. Her green eyes lost their glow immediately, turned hollow. Her face fell, her eyes dropped to the floor and her shoulders slumped. She took a step back, staggered, as if she had been punched in the stomach, and she dropped back to the bed. When her voice came, it was no more than a whisper. “He did that...? For me? Because...because of me?” She looked younger than eighteen years old, and as I watched the emotions played across her fine features like the ravages of age. I felt a tightness inside that I didn’t really care to explain. It was all too familiar.
“He’s going to blow up Minneapolis if we don’t get you to him.” Scott closed the distance between them and knelt down. “But it’s okay. Sienna and I will protect you from him.” He looked at me. “He doesn’t want to hurt you, Kat. Sienna can take him out; you’ve seen what she can do.” He smiled. “And you know what I can do. He’s not going to try and hurt you, but even if he did, we can protect you—we can stop him.”
“I...I don’t want to go.” Her words were choked. “I don’t want anybody to die, but I...I don’t want to go.”
“It’ll be okay,” he said. I watched her eyes; the soothing wasn’t working. “We can stop it.”
“It may not be okay.” I said the words before I could stop myself, drawing a startled look from her and a venomous one from him. “Aleksandr Gavrikov just killed thousands of people to convince us to bring you to him.” I took a deep breath, and watched the horror in her eyes. “He’s a monster in his way, but I know him—or rather, I’ve gotten to know him. You’re the only thing that matters to him. He thinks you’re caged, tortured, and he wants you free. There’s something in the past between the two of you that happened that he desperately wants to make amends for. I think he needs you to forgive him for something. It’s all he cares about.”
“Why would you tell me this?” The first hint of tears broke through onto her face, sliding down her cheeks, sparkling in the overhead light. “I don’t want to face him, he’s a monster!”
“He is. But if you don’t, a whole city of peopl
e will die.” I took two steps forward and reached out to Kat, putting my gloved hand on hers. “When Wolfe was tearing up the city, I sat back because I was afraid, because no one could fight him, no one could face him, and I didn’t think there was anyone that could stop him. I was wrong. I could stop him the entire time, but it required a sacrifice that I wasn’t willing to make. I sat by as more and more people died until I couldn’t stomach it anymore.” I saw the emotion flicker behind her eyes. “People are already dead, and it’s not your fault, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t blame you for not wanting to go. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to run and hide, because Aleksandr is broken inside, and powerful, and that is a dangerous combination.
“But I’m going to fight him,” I said. “Whether you go or not, I’m going to try and stop him. I doubt I’ll be able to do much because he’s fast, and could vaporize me from about a mile away before I even got a chance to take a shot at him. But I’ll be there.” I set my chin. “Because I know what it’s like to stand by, to hide and to have people die, to have those deaths on my conscience. And I won’t do it again.”
She stared me down, her eyes brimming, full of emotion and the flickers of guilt and fear, and I wasn’t jealous of her any more. All I felt was sorry for her, sorry that she had to experience the same hell that I had, but with even larger consequences. “But...” her voice trembled. “...you...” she looked to Scott, then back to me, “you’ll be there? I won’t have to go alone?”
I squeezed her hand in mine, felt the depth of her plea all the way through me, tingling my emotions and bringing me back to a morning in the basement of my house where I was forced to confront all my fears. Alone. “We’ll be with you every bit of the way.”
She looked ghostly, but her eyes came back to life and she stared back at me. “Okay.” Her voice gained strength. “All right.”
Byerly gestured toward the door as he swiped the card I’d handed him from the guard and it slid open. He and I led the way after giving Kat a minute to change into something more protective than a tank top. She came out wearing a black turtleneck, black leather gloves, jeans and a black wool coat that looked terribly familiar. I frowned at my “twin” and she shrugged. “They brought me here and didn’t bring any clothes. This was all that was left in the closet.” She looked down at her pants. “The jeans are kinda loose on me, though. And short.”
Instead of smacking her, I started toward the stairs, the two of them in tow. I rounded a corner and a guard stood in front of me. I chopped him with a hand to his throat, causing him to gag, then slammed him in the side of the head with a punch that put out his lights. I turned to tell them to watch out for any other guards, but I found Scott letting loose of a guard of his own and Kat pummeling another with a flurry of punches that sent the man reeling, finishing him with a reverse side kick that caused him to ricochet off a wall. When she caught my surprised gaze, she smiled. “What? Everyone always thinks I’m so delicate because my powers are healing. I’m a meta; I’ve got strength too.”
“And moves,” I said. “Where’d you learn those?”
She shook her head as we started toward the lobby doors. “I don’t know. My memory is pretty fuzzy before Arizona. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Persephone-types have limits on our powers. We can only heal—”
“Until you run out of strength, then it starts leeching your memory. So you don’t remember anything?”
“I still have skills, abilities,” she said as we brushed out of the double doors, Scott looking skittish as he trailed behind us. “I can understand other languages, I can fight some.” She frowned. “I can farm. Don’t remember how I learned that.”
“Memory loss isn’t cool,” I said, “but every time I kill someone with my power, I absorb their personality into mine.”
“Eep!” She blanched. “So does that mean that the psycho you killed...” She paled.
“Yep,” I said, pointing to my skull. “I’ve got Cujo panting in my brain. The good news is Doc Zollers seems to have found a way to keep him under wraps.” I yawned. “Unfortunately, there do seem to be some adverse effects.”
We ran to the garage, which was unlocked. Scott grabbed keys from a box that held a bunch of them, and I knocked out the guy in charge of watching them and stuffed him under the desk he sat behind. We made our way through the garage as Scott pressed the button on the key fob until he found the right car, a nice little SUV. I sat up front with him and Kat took the back seat. She looked nervous as we pulled out and headed for the front gate. Scott pushed a remote on the visor and the gate opened, fast.
We shot out and took a quick turn, zipping down the road at about sixty. “I’m not exactly an experienced driver,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure there are speed limits.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, mumbling.
The night was black, and up ahead there was a van pulled off to the side of the road. Scott slowed as we drove by and I caught a glimpse of the logo—a local telecommunications company—and saw, very briefly, the worker jump out of the way for us as Scott screamed by. “You know, saving the city isn’t going to do us a ton of good if we end up killing a hundred people on the drive there.”
He rolled his eyes, but I saw him slow the car a little. We passed through Eden Prairie as the clock on the dashboard flashed 4:30 A.M. Traffic was almost nil, a few cars as we got on the interstate. Kat was a silent hole in the backseat, and I cast frequent looks back to make sure she was still there. Scott gripped the wheel, white-knuckling it, the tension evident on his face as he steered us onto another major freeway. As he angled the vehicle onto it, I could see the lights of downtown Minneapolis in the distance.
The outline of the skyscrapers was pressed against the horizon, lighted shapes that gave form and substance to my thoughts of a city and what it should look like. A thousand windows gleamed and shone out at me, and some sort of lighted display shimmered in a rainbow of colors atop one of the buildings. They grew closer slowly as the distance between us and the city faded. We passed a few cars here and there, and soon enough the skyscrapers towered above us. “Which one is the IDS building?” I asked.
Scott craned his neck to look up and he pointed at the tallest one, made all of glass and jutting up into the sky. “That one.”
I studied it. “He picked the biggest. I bet he didn’t want a sniper shooting down at him.”
Scott cast me a glance. “Really?”
I shrugged. “If you think about it, it’s probably the only way he’s vulnerable. I’d bet most low caliber rounds would melt before they hit him. Anyone attacks him physically, he can keep them at bay long enough to explode. But it’s hard to concentrate enough to blow up when your brains got sent out the other side of your head.”
“Good point. Wonder why they didn’t do that to him in Glencoe?”
I kept my eyes on the building that dominated the skyline above us. “I think they were going to try, but they didn’t get a chance to set it up. Which reminds me, M-Squad will be here in an hour or less. Best we’re done by the time they show.”
Scott eased the car onto a side street and found a parking garage. I heard the noise of another vehicle somewhere below us as we stepped onto the street. I watched another telecommunications truck pass us and I felt a tingle of nerves. It was the cable company for the entire Twin Cities, after all. Not unusual to see a couple of their trucks out, even at this time of morning. “Let’s go,” I said as we entered the glass lobby.
All around us was a dramatic promenade with trees, restaurants and shops. I was a little surprised, but I kept my focus as Scott led us up escalators to a bank of elevators. I stood looking at him and Kat, watched him take her hand and squeeze it with encouragement. I felt a pang of jealousy that turned to sadness by the time the elevator dinged and the doors opened. I shuffled in after them and watched them hold hands. I tried to feel good for them, really I did. Kat needed comfort right now. So did Scott, surely. So did I, when it al
l came down to it. But as per usual, there was no one there to hold me.
We reached the top floor and stepped off the elevator. I saw a sign for the stairs and headed toward them, Scott and Kat trailing behind. I looked up, and sure enough, there were steps leading up to a locked door. I broke it with ease and we stepped out onto the roof, the winter air chilling me as I led them out under the open night sky.
Snow was piled in drifts around edges and corners, but it looked as though someone had shoveled the roof to keep it mostly clear of snow. A few shacks and some ducts and machinery sat atop the flat surface, but most of it was empty space. I walked across to the far side, wondering if Aleksandr was here yet.
I heard Kat and Scott’s footsteps behind me, soft and even as we padded our way across the roof. “Aleksandr,” I said. The wind carried my words away. I had not bothered to shout it.
“Here.” A small voice reached me and I saw him step out of the shadow of one of the boxy structures. He wasn’t in flames and he wore different clothes since the last time I’d seen him. “You brought her...” He said with something approaching joy, then his eyes alighted on Scott and they narrowed. “And another.”
“Precaution,” I said. “I had to break her out of the Directorate myself. I needed help.” I glanced back to Kat and then to Aleksandr. “There’s something you should know; this isn’t a clone of your sister. It’s actually her.”
His face wrinkled in confusion. “How is that possible?”
I shrugged at him. “How are you possible? She’s a meta, like us. She’s what they call a ‘Persephone-type—’”
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