Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Oh for the luva…” Scope sprang up from the table and headed for the door. “That’s always your answer for anything! Ram your thoughts in where they’re not wanted! Forget it, Bella! The answer was no before, and it’s no now! You are not going to rummage around in my business! You want to bust me down to ECHO Support levels, then fine! But there’s no way…”

  The door opened outward before she could reach it; unable to stop herself, she bounced off a wall of chest in ECHO nanoweave.

  “Session’s going well, I take it?” Bulwark rumbled.

  “Same ol’, same ol’,” Bella seethed, her hands flying up in exasperation. She stood up, flung Scope’s reports on the desk next to the examination table and marched from the room. From the hall, they heard her bellow back. “Talk to her, Bull! Make her see some sense before I pop a vein. Or pop her in the eye and throw her out on her ass!”

  * * *

  Bulwark turned towards Scope, his expression deliberately unreadable. “Overwatch: command: off,” he rumbled.

  He heard the single tone that indicated his Overwatch rig had severed its comm link for now. For just a second, he considered the possibility that this was a ruse on Victrix’s part; something to give him the feeling that she wasn’t listening or recording when, in fact, she was. But he dismissed that idea immediately. No matter his quarrel with the little mage, he knew she was scrupulously honest with her Overwatch Mark Two subjects. If she said he could turn the system off, then he could, and she would not surreptitiously eavesdrop.

  Scope slouched and glowered. If he hadn’t known better, he would have considered the possibility that she’d been possessed by the spirit of a rebellious, sullen teenager. But he did know better. So he waited, patiently, with a patience that had been tested by more stubborn subjects than Scope, until she finally broke the silence.

  “I’d be doing my goddamn job if Parker would just clear me for duty,” she grumbled, unable to meet his eyes. “That pop-up two days ago—I could have shot out the oculars and—”

  “I was the one that benched you, Paris,” Bulwark interrupted.

  Startled, her head came up, and she finally looked at him, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

  “Bella brought me the assessments, but I’m your team lead, and I benched you,” he repeated.

  “So put me back in the game, damn you!” she exploded, launching herself off the stool she had been sitting on. “If you benched me, you can just unbench me!” She stood there glaring at him the way she had glared at Bella, fists clenched at her sides, hands shaking ever so slightly.

  He looked into her eyes until she dropped her gaze to the level of his chin, and shook his head slowly. “Not an option. You’ve lost your focus, girl. You’re a hazard to yourself and everyone around you. I’m not putting you anywhere near field duty until you climb your way out of the hole you’re in.”

  He really didn’t expect her to react well to this statement, given her apparent state of mind, and he was unsurprised when she went tight-lipped and hot with anger. She didn’t say anything, however, and reluctantly, he moved to goad her further.

  “Bella was being generous when she said your scores were terrible. I’ve seen better marks from that last lot of Cub Scouts that came through on a tour.” For a moment he felt a flash of nostalgia, and regret for what, in retrospect, had been the halcyon days before the Invasion. These days, no mother in her right mind would let her child anywhere near the ECHO campus. It would be like sending them on a field trip to Chernobyl.

  He picked up the papers Bella had tossed on her desk, and made a show of leafing through them. In fact, he already knew the contents. “The only thing you’ve made your scores on is marksmanship,” he continued, allowing himself a little frown. “Good lord, girl, Victrix has better times than you on the Parkour course. You’re late to everything, you leave early, and you haven’t even got half your mind in the game when you’re there. Not only are you not pushing yourself, you are not even trying in the least. You’re phoning it in, then hanging up halfway through.”

  Bull leaned back against the examination table, his eyes fixed on Scope.

  “You never quit,” he said. “Of all the people I’ve ever trained, you were the one who pushed herself the furthest. Nothing you did, nothing your teammates did, no one, matched your standards, to the point where it got you passed over by every other training master until you came to me. They all closed the book on you. You didn’t work well with others. You drove yourself past your own limits, made too many mistakes in the field. But then, something happened. You learned to rein that all in, to work with a team, to focus your energies on tough but attainable goals. And still, you never stopped pushing yourself, and it was finally getting you somewhere. You were on track to be the best field agent I’ve ever had the pleasure to command. Scope, where did that all go?”

  He watched as a myriad of emotions played across her features. In the past, she had always tried so hard to keep her features stern, if not impassive. Bull knew it had been her attempt to emulate him. But Scope’s past painted a picture of a young girl who could never escape a father’s wish for a son, and whose ambitions and drive were only symptoms of an unrelenting need to break free of the bonds of a simple, rural existence. She hid within her a torrential sea of conflict, nothing that could be bottled up so long or so easily. Still, this disintegration went far beyond his preconceived notions. He could never have imagined she could let herself fall apart so completely. How could he have been so wrong? She was so different now, he could hardly believe she was that same raw recruit that had swaggered into his life, so full of herself and false bravado, years before.

  Finally, she rose up and faced him, and whatever conflicting feelings had raged within her before coalesced into a snarl, a savage glare and wild fury.

  “And what did all that pushing ever get me?” she shouted. “Pushing myself, pushing others…what did it get me? What did it get Bruno? Dead!” Her voice spiralled upwards. “I killed him, Bull! I made him promise me that we’d finish the job! Well he did it, he kept his promise!” She was screaming now. “He kept his promise, just like I pushed him to! He kept it! And now he’s dead!”

  Abruptly, she…deflated. Whether the outburst had been something like the lancing of a boil, or she had simply run out of energy—or both—she collapsed back to her stool, her eyes dropping back to the floor.

  Bulwark kept his face impassive, but mentally, he was trying to figure out his options. They had tried everything with Scope; first Einhorn’s sweetly angelic “there, there;” less saccharine than it used to be, and a lot more genuine. But Scope had sneered at Mary Ann and sent her away in tears. Then the ECHO Trainer Mike “Muscles” Grant—the one that Scope had, as she said, trained herself. He’d given her a dose of her own back, and she’d clocked him for it. Panacea had tried soothing, Gilead had tried “tough love,” and neither got anything more than a rude demand for meds. And now Bella had tried every trick in her extensive arsenal, and to no avail. Bulwark knew he was Scope’s only hope, because at this point, if he couldn’t get her turned around, they would have to pension her out.

  And on an Echo disability pension, she could drink herself—or drug herself—to death, very quickly.

  “Come with me,” he ordered abruptly, and giving her no choice, seized her elbow and manhandled her out the door.

  * * *

  She shook herself out of his grip once they were in the hall, but she didn’t, as he had half feared, stalk away. Her face still sullen, she matched his long strides as he led the way down to his office, by the new cells—the very special new cells—for high-powered meta-prisoners. “Top Hold,” they called it. When they reached the door, he opened it. Still staring at the ground, she slouched inside, and without invitation, dropped gracelessly into a chair.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, motioning to a wall of monitors beside his desk. There were easily two dozen small ones, surrounding one giant touch screen w
hich served as a hub. They displayed short-circuit feeds of different prison cells, each specialized to house a specific type of meta inmate. She watched one display a cell in near darkness, its huddled captive only visible by infrared sensors. After a moment, the display flipped to another cell. This one seemed lit well enough, but was completely lined with heat units, forcing the cold-based meta to shy away from the walls to the centre of the room. She watched as all the displays rotated through their set list of occupied cells, except for one. One display, top center, remained fixed on one cell. It was also brightly illuminated, and considerably larger than the others. One bare and Spartan cot in the middle of a large glass box, which was supported by reinforced metal pillars within another glass box, and so on. The refraction of light was blinding, and it was difficult to make out just how many layers the unique cell had. The figure inside, however, was immediately recognizable. She was sitting still on the cot, still, her legs crossed in lotus position, and Scope blanched as she realized who it was.

  Harmony.

  “She’s been quiet, ever since we picked her up,” Bull said. “She doesn’t seem to eat, or sleep, or need to move at all, really. But our intel on her suggests that out in the world, she never stops moving.”

  “You got that right,” Scope agreed. “Was hell for Bruno and me to keep up with her.”

  “Our intel suggests something else,” Bull continued. “It seems that Alex Tesla was by no means Harmony’s only target. We’ve been able to piece quite a bit together by seeing what plots fell apart since we took her in.”

  He stepped to the giant touch screen and keyed up the sequence of intended victims. As he described who these people were in a dispassionate tone, and not only who, but what and why they were important, while adding little details about their lives and their families, he watched Scope’s face out of the corner of his eye. She feigned indifference, but her eyes never left Harmony.

  “These are the people you and Bruno quite literally saved by apprehending Harmony,” he concluded. “These are people who are alive today because you two saw the job through to the end.”

  Scope shrugged, barely noticing the parade of mugshots and stills that flowed over the screen. “If someone wanted those people bad enough to hire the likes of Harmony, all Bruno and I did was delay the inevitable. They’ll find someone else, some other way.”

  “Perhaps,” Bull agreed. “For a few. But the majority of people on this list are very well protected. There are likely few in Harmony’s league to carry out their assassinations. I’m sure you noticed a few of them are under ECHO protection, openly or not.”

  Scope’s eyes flickered to the large screen. Bull had stopped on a grainy picture of…

  “That’s President Shreeves,” Scope murmured, sitting forward in her chair. “And behind him, the Secret Service goon, isn’t that…?”

  “Jinx, undercover Echo Op 2,” Bull nodded. “We wanted to make sure no assassin would ever get near him without…” He searched for the right phrase. “…endless pratfalls and fumbles. Sometimes it isn’t enough to merely foil a plot. You have to leave it in a puddle of embarrassment. In any case, I don’t see many besides Harmony who would get close enough to present any real threat. Here’s some more.” He skipped from one still to another. Scope recognized a few of them. Another world leader, a few titans of industry, and…

  She stood up, startled, and approached the bank of monitors. Leaning forward, she touched the screen, her fingers shaking as she traced a familiar smile.

  “Bella,” she said.

  “Sometimes we forget that the Thulians and Blacksnake aren’t our only enemies,” Bull said.

  Both Bulwark and Scope jumped as they heard laughter erupt from a speaker above them. Looking up, they watched as Harmony rose from her bed and smirked into the camera. “Why Gairdner,” she said, in a faintly sardonic tone. “I had no idea that you’d managed to put so many twos and twos together. You’re smarter than you look. But then, we always knew that, didn’t we, Paris?”

  Scope started. “The hell—” she croaked. “She can’t—”

  “Oh yes I can,” Harmony replied. “I can hear you quite well. I must say, Bull, it took all my self-control to avoid giving myself away when you and Bella were having your little trysts with the door locked.” She sucked on her lower lip, thoughtfully. “I would have pegged her for a screamer, not a moaner. Interesting.”

  Scope watched as a red tinge crept up Bull’s neck to his face. How long had it been since anyone had been able to make him blush? But he had picked up a pad and pencil from the desk, and while Harmony was speaking, he’d been writing. He turned the pad around so that Scope could read what he had written. He watched as Scope’s eyes flickered back and forth.

  Harmony’s a mystery, he’d told her. Unique kind of meta. We’ve tried everything. We can’t read her. VV thinks there’s magic at work. Enhanced hearing—that’s new.

  Scope finished reading and nodded abruptly.

  “You know, Gairdner, I think you and Bella deserve each other.” One of Harmony’s eyebrows raised slightly. “No, I’m serious. I really do. I’ve got nothing to gain or lose by being sincere about that. I hope it works out for you two.”

  Scope’s mouth twitched and she gestured for the pad and pencil. Bulwark handed them to her, and she scribbled quickly and handed it back to him.

  Better soundproof her cell block.

  “Harmony,” he said out loud, “Unless you want your cell to ramp up with another shock, you probably ought to keep the rest of your thoughts to yourself.”

  Harmony smirked again. “Do tell, Silver Wolf. I have to say I admire the stamina both of you have.”

  Bulwark’s neck looked like it was fire. That eliminated any shadow of doubt about her hearing. Bella had probably never called him that except in private. He scratched a few more words on the pad, handed it to Scope, and quietly left the room. Scope read the pad, and scowled.

  Keep her talking. Calling Bella for a powers sweep. We might get lucky and find out how she’s doing this while she’s actively listening.

  “Oh dear, was that a door?” Harmony sighed. “I didn’t chase you both away, did I?”

  “Only Bull,” Scope said. “Just you and me now, you filthy piece of—”

  “Language!” Harmony said. “Now now, Paris, you’re a member of ECHO’s elite meta force of high octane do-gooders! You have all those lofty standards and moral quandaries to live up to. Not that Bull has any problems in that department, hmmm? He always knows the right thing to do. He’s not like us.”

  “I’m nothing like you, you murderous bitch.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Harmony laughed. “Anyway, it’s good Bull left; thought he’d never leave. It was you I really wanted to talk to anyway.”

  “I’m surprised you even have enough in you to talk,” Scope said. “How long have you been in there, without food or water?”

  “I’ve been getting my daily bread in other ways,” Harmony smirked. “Truth be told, I’m pretty juiced and have been for a while. Confined to this pretty, multi-layered coffin, I haven’t had much to spend it on either.” She scowled. “Though I suspect my source might dry up soon. Didn’t think that one through, I guess.”

  “Let’s pretend I even know what you’re talking about,” Scope said. “You say you’re telling the truth. Why should I believe you?”

  “Why would I lie? Besides, isn’t it common knowledge that us supervillains do more damage with the truth? Here’s one that should make your head spin. I know you’re not right. I could sense it the moment I felt you both coming. Wasn’t sure who was walking with Bull. Imagine my surprise when I heard you speak.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re not Scope.”

  “Look, right now I’m painting a lovely mental image of having you drawn and quartered,” Scope said, looking pained. “You’re mucking it all up with this existential crap.”

  “I mean you’re not the Scope I knew,” H
armony said. “You’re all wrong, askew. That need to prove yourself, that’s gone, and that’s just the top layer. Overheard Bull and Bella talk about you, y’know… afterwards… when they stop being groiny. Sounds like you’re on that long overdue vacation we always told you to take. Don’t be so sure we’re so different, you and I. I’m feeling closer to you than ever.”

  “Okay,” Scope sighed. “I now officially want you to shut up.”

  “We’re not so different,” Harmony insisted. “We’re not, because I’ve changed too.”

  “Well, considering that you spent years lying to us, telling me that you’ve changed doesn’t mean a whole lot. I don’t know what you’ve changed from, what you’ve changed into, and that whole lying thing doesn’t make you very believable in the first place.”

  “I know,” Harmony said with a smirk that somehow seemed less smarmy than…pensive. “This whole penance thing is a bitch. Probably why I’ve never tried it before.”

  “So why should I believe you?”

  Harmony stood up and walked purposefully to the wall of her glass-lined cage. She stared intently into the camera.

  “Paris,” she said. “Do you really believe ECHO can hold me, if I don’t want to be held?”

  “No,” Scope said, after a moment. “I guess not. So you’re telling me—what, exactly?”

  Harmony crossed her arms over her chest, in a move that made her look oddly vulnerable, and yet, nothing at all like the “Harmony” Scope used to know.

  “Maybe I’m stealing a page out of the Djinni’s playbook. Remember those weeks he was in solitary here? It gives you a lot of time to think, because that’s all there is to do. I think that’s what he wanted. But being in here now, myself, I think he wanted more.”

  “More?” Scope asked, perking up at the mention of Red. “Like what?”

  “I think he wanted someone to punish him. I get that now.” She let her hands fall, and softly rubbed them together. “I still feel it, y’know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”