Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8

by Crane, Robert J.

  He didn’t bother to respond, just came at me in an attack, leading with a hard punch. I’d seen a Hercules type before, in a dream. They grew muscle mass on command, getting insanely strong. I dodged back, only narrowly avoiding his punch. He was fast, too, less out of shape than the Hercules I’d seen in my dream a few months earlier. My gloves were on, and that wasn’t going to help my cause because putting my skin against his was the fastest way to make sure he went down.

  A blast of wind shot by me, stirring the Hercules back a step but not lifting him. He smiled at Reed, whom I saw just over my shoulder. “Mass increase,” he said smugly. “Your little gusts aren’t gonna do squat to me, Windkeeper.”

  He came at me again, and this time I vaulted back over a planter, clipping a palm tree as I rolled back over the edge and back to the blue, thinly carpeted floor on the other side. He hit the sculpted concrete edge of the planter with his fist and it shattered, slinging dirt, plants and pieces of tile and stone in a shotgun blast pattern toward me. I was already low to the ground from having rolled over the planter, but I ducked down and avoided all but a little dirt that hit my right eye over the edge. It hurt, though, and I felt tears spring to my eyes. I kept my left eye squinted open and tried to open my right as well, my cheek pressed against the planter’s uneven, graveled surface and the floor.

  I sprung up to my feet in a quick move that looked like an overpowered pushup, which it was. The Hercules was still across from me, looking smug, the wreckage of the planter separating us. “Tough luck,” he said.

  It took me a second to realize what he meant. I glanced back and saw Reed on the ground, blood and shards of the planter scattered around him, his shirt soaked with red and dirt stains. Breandan was a little farther back, clutching his midsection and rolling like someone had kicked him in the gut. I saw Foreman off a little farther, apparently uninjured, but keeping his distance from the fight. He didn’t look like a man who was well versed in the martial arts, so it was probably better that way.

  The blood around Reed and on Breandan chilled me, like the air conditioner had just kicked on in my soul. I felt my pulse slow as I looked back at the Hercules, who was grinning like he was enjoying a particularly hilarious joke. “Look at you kids, playing at being big boys and girls. What are you? Twelve?” He laughed, sneering derisively. “The kid gloves are off, little girl. Now run home and wait for us. We’ll be back for you later.”

  I pulled my hands up, slowly, showing them to him. “My gloves are still on, actually.” I ripped the leather, tearing them from my hands. “Now the gloves are off.” I clenched my fists open and closed.

  He watched me, a wary caution creeping over his face. “I know what you are, and if you think you’ll even be able to lay a hand on me—”

  I threw myself at him, but I went low, rolling over the remains of the planter and throwing a sharp kick upward from the roll. It connected with his thigh and he grunted, balling up slightly. When I came out of the roll, his face was right there from his instinctive turtle maneuver and I punched it, hard, in the nose and heard the cartilage break. I followed with another and his head snapped back, sending him staggering a step. His hands came up to defend his face but it was too late; I was on to other things.

  I went low, grabbing him on the back of the neck, and swept his feet from underneath him. He tried to grab at me, but my free hand slapped his aside and he had no leverage for all his strength. His back and shoulders hit the hard floor and I stomped on his face, twice, then kicked him in the ribs with so much force that he flew in a low roll through the air and into another, smaller planter, roughly the size of a vase. It broke open, sending a cascade of dirt down his prone body.

  I jumped through the air to follow him, landing both feet on him with all my force. I hit his belly, causing him to gasp with the shock of my impact, all forced through the toes of my boots. I didn’t stop there, though, savagely assaulting his fallen body with a series of devastating kicks as he tried to get to his feet. I broke his face, shattering it with a volley of attacks that stopped only when his head slumped and he sagged to the ground, his overmuscled frame beginning to deflate. His body was limp, and I reached down and grabbed him around the neck, holding my hand there until I heard the screaming in my head, the sound of his soul starting to pull away from his body. In the moment before it left, I slammed the back of his head to the hard tile floor and let myself sag to my hands, down on all fours. I stared at the fountain, roaring just in front of me. I hadn’t even realized I’d gotten this close to it.

  “You didn’t drain him?” Foreman’s voice shook me out of my weariness, my body chastising me for not finishing the job, for not giving it a sweet, just reward for the fight.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve got enough trash in my head without inviting in more. I got his memories, though, the ones about Century.”

  “Oh?” He offered me a hand up, but I shook my head and gestured at my bare palm.

  “Yeah,” I said, getting to my feet only with great effort. I looked back toward the destroyed planter just across the courtyard. “Reed and Breandan—”

  “They’ll be fine,” Foreman said. “Looks worse than it is.” I heard a trilling from his pocket and he took out his phone, staring at the screen. “Looks like the team in Miami got a result of their own.”

  “Oh?” I asked, my legs unsteady as I made my way slowly over to Reed, who was still clutching his midsection in silence. Breandan was making no attempt at bravery, moaning and wailing softly. “Was it sheer luck that you married an empath or—”

  “No,” Foreman said. “She and I got a sense for each other immediately, were drawn to each other.” He smiled. “Been married twenty-eight years.”

  “Lucky you,” I said as I slumped down next to Reed. “Lucky us, actually, since it sounds like having her along helped out our Miami group.” I tilted my head down to look at my brother. “How are you doing?”

  “Took some slivers in the gut,” Reed said, moving his hands away from his shirt to reveal shredded cloth all around his abdomen. “They’ll get pushed out as I heal, but ... damn, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Gut wounds are never fun.” I looked over at Breandan, who had settled down a little. “What about you, Irish?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” came Breandan’s voice, a little weak. “I’m just bleeding to death over here.”

  “Come off it,” Foreman said. “You pretty much have to take the heart out of a meta to get them to bleed to death, and your heart looks fine from here.”

  Breandan moved his hands away from his abdomen and a single red spot, only about the size of a dime, darkened his silky green shirt. “You don’t think this looks serious?”

  “It looks like you accidentally peed yourself,” I said.

  “No, that was lower.”

  I chuckled and nodded to Foreman. “You have the briefcase?”

  He nodded and ran a few steps back to where we’d been sitting, retrieving a black leather case and opening it just as the TSA officers were starting to make their way over to us. I had met them all before, when we’d first arrived, and they knew to give us a wide berth. Foreman opened the case with a couple clicks but fumbled it, hand and leg cuffs spilling out onto the floor in front of me. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s fine.” I stroked Reed’s hair idly before I stood, walking over to Foreman and helping him retrieve the cuffs from the ground. Let’s get ’em bound for transport.” I looked at the fallen telepaths and the Hercules bleeding over near the planter, a host of TSA officers standing around him. I smiled at the carnage, dimly aware that I was feeling a lot happier than someone ought to feel at the scene of so much destruction. “We struck our first blow against Century today.” The happiness faded then, my smile lingering but without feeling behind it as I wondered how long it would be until they struck back.

  Chapter 19

  The flight back to campus was longer somehow and filled with the swearing of the prisoners until we
had enough and gagged them. Foreman started to raise the point of constitutional rights, but tossing out the phrase “indefinite detention” shut him up pretty fast.

  We dropped Foreman’s wife off in Nashville in a quick stopover then got back into the air for the flight to Minneapolis. We were set for a landing at Eden Prairie’s Flying Cloud airport, but it was still hours off. The prisoners had their own seats, and Scott was loud and jubilant, the minibar clouding his ability to think straight. Reed suffered in silence, his body doing the hard work of healing the injury he’d suffered. Breandan, meanwhile, didn’t shut up and moaned all the way back.

  “All I’m saying is you’re suited to this sort of thing,” he said, using illustrative hand gestures more appropriate for an Italian than an Irishman. “You’re a fighter. Me, I just sort of do my thing, stick to the shadows, keep myself out of trouble. Getting life-threatening wounds is just so far out of the—”

  “I wouldn’t worry about life-threatening wounds,” I said, not looking at him. “You still haven’t had one of those yet.”

  He was quieted for a moment, one in which I heard Scott shout from the back of the plane, near where the prisoners were trussed up, “We need a par-tay! When we get back.”

  “You all right?” Breandan asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “Would you go check on Scott? Make sure he’s not too overdone?”

  “Sure,” Breandan said, unfastening his seatbelt. “But when I come back, maybe we could discuss hazard pay for this danger you keep thrusting me into—”

  “Take it up with Ariadne,” I said, sinking into my seat, a padded one, with a sigh. I thought about pushing the seat rest back, maybe trying to nap, but I wanted to be awake in case I had to pound the stuffing out of a prisoner. I’d considered starting the interrogation right then and there, but the interior space of the plane was too small to start working them over one by one, and I really wanted to get them on an individual basis. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d even have to use my power to sift their memories in order to get what they knew.

  I sighed and stood, as I looked back at Scott, gyrating to music only he could hear, a bottle of open champagne in his hand. The prisoners were behind him, strapped to their seats, most of them looking fearful. As telepaths, I suspected they conversed to each other largely through speaking with their minds. Now that they were gagged and Foreman was shutting down their ability to communicate mentally, the six of them were frantic, eyes wide. The Hercules was still out cold, his face a mess. Blood crusted his cheeks below his eyes, and his head was tilted to the side, right-angling his neck. He would definitely have a crick in it tomorrow, and that bothered me none.

  “You did well on the Hercules,” came my mother’s voice from my right. She eased into the seat across the aisle that Breandan had just vacated. “I didn’t even get to find out what type my escort was; he came at Karthik a little too hard and I had to put him down.”

  “Yeah, well, I knew what to expect,” I said. “Thanks to Adelaide.” I thought about it. “Thanks to Zollers, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?” Her face was a little scrunched. She and I hadn’t talked much over the past few months outside of work. If she was interested in more of a relationship with me, time didn’t allow for it. We worked a lot of hours, and almost always it broke down with her leading one team, me leading another. She was good; I couldn’t deny it. It’s why I had left her in charge of the second team rather than letting Karthik lead. She had experience, and it showed.

  “I had these visions while I was in London,” I said. “Zollers gave them to me. They were of a succubus named Adelaide who worked for Omega.” I stroked the leather arm of my seat. “She was the one who killed your father.” I looked up at her and saw her surprise. “She drained him in an alley in London on the orders of the Primus.”

  My mother’s reaction wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone but me. Her emotion just cut out and she got cold. “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. Late eighties sometime, maybe early nineties by then,” I said. “I didn’t get the full story, just a quick shot of the fight.”

  “He left on a business trip,” she said slowly, “and never came back.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. “I have some passing familiarity with how that feels.” I didn’t add any judgment or spite to it, but my mother blanched almost imperceptibly nonetheless.

  “Wolfe got me,” she said. “Captured me. I was coming out of the hospital from work one day and saw him, he saw me, and I had a quarter second to run before he was on me. He beat me down, knocked me unconscious. I thought I was dead for sure. I woke up in a warehouse, hanging from the ceiling by a chain. I only barely got out, had to break my own bones to do it.” She smiled bitterly. “I crawled outside and managed to get to a convenience store. A good Samaritan picked me up. I knocked him out by draining him, took his phone and called the Directorate. I was useless, arms broken, couldn’t drive, couldn’t fight, even. I tried to move the car but couldn’t. I just passed out. When I woke up, I knew it had been too long. I was healed. When I got back to the house, you were gone.” The bitter smile faded. “I saw you on the Directorate campus. Once I knew you were safe, I headed for Gillette, Wyoming, where I had a safehouse. Dug a hole in the earth and pulled it in after me.” She leaned her head back against the headrest. “Didn’t come out until someone sent me an email from an anonymous account spilling some of the details of the Andromeda project.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, leaning toward her. “What was so important about Andromeda?” I stopped her before she answered. “Wait, you came out of hiding for an anonymous email detailing some mysterious Omega project? What the hell were you thinking?” I felt hot irritation flood me. “What about all those times you told me that ‘Motion reveals the prey; hold still and go unnoticed’?”

  She looked deeply uncomfortable. “I think the moral of the story there is that after six months of not leaving a house, even I get a little antsy. Maybe too antsy to think things through logically.”

  I just stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “What?” She frowned, and I caught a hint of irritation.

  “Come on,” I said, “Surely you can’t possibly miss the irony in that statement.” She stared at me blankly, so I leaned toward her, as though my proximity might wake her up. “You went stir crazy after being confined to a house for six months without being able to go outside ...”

  “Oh,” she said with a subtle hiss of impatience. “I get it now, yes, very funny. There’s a big difference between being locked in a house and not even being able to see the light of day because you’re underground.”

  “What?” I laughed. “Rule #3 was that I wasn’t allowed to look outside, remember?”

  “Oh, please, you looked out the back window all the time,” she dismissed me.

  I stared at her, a little shocked. “You knew about that?”

  She slanted her head, everything about her expression asking me how dumb I thought she was. “Of course I knew. You weren’t that good at putting the curtain right after trying to peek out past the armoire I covered it with.” She straightened in her seat. “But that was fine. I wanted you to have at least one open channel to quietly defy me, so I left it that way.”

  “Why?” I asked, a little befuddled.

  “Because,” she said, “expecting you to perfectly obey me in all things would be an exercise in futility. Everything I did, I did with an eye toward practicality. I had to keep you away from the world, away from the threats outside. Getting you to buy into those threats at age six was impossible. So I worked you like a dog, trained you in martial arts, fighting—”

  “I thought that was so I could defend myself,” I interjected.

  “Dual purpose,” she said. “It did that, which was obviously most important, but it also gave you an outlet for your frustrations and physicality, wore you out so you didn’t have as much energy to expend trying to find ways to escape or su
bvert me. Same with your studies. Admit it,” she said and smiled a little. “You may have been confined to the house for ten years, but you were never bored.”

  “No,” I conceded. “Not when I was in the house at large. I always had studies to work on, or something else.” I glanced down at the bulkhead in front of me. “Still wouldn’t have been the way I’d have chosen to spend my childhood, though.”

  There was a quiet from her seat for a long moment. “It wouldn’t have been the way I’d have chosen for you to spend it, either.”

  I started to say something else but a hideous, groaning screech came from behind me and I stood. Mom matched my motion and we both looked back to the rear of the plane. The Hercules who had been unconscious was most definitely not unconscious now; he was on his feet, the chair he had been resting in ripped from the floor of the plane.

  “Oh, hell,” I breathed, but I was already running down the aisle. I could hear Mother two steps behind me.

  Scott was blocking my passage and I hipchecked him out of the way. Breandan was quick enough to move on his own, just behind Scott, tripping onto Reed, who screamed in pain as the Irishman landed on his stomach. The narrow cabin forced me to slow my run so I didn’t bounce up and hit the low ceiling. I didn’t make it back in time to keep the enraged Hercules from doing something stupid.

  He was still well secured to the seat, but it was ripped free of the cabin floor, hanging off his back. I saw him stress it, trying to break the handcuffs, but the sound of the seat resisting and the metallic grind from stress in the chair itself were the only noises.

  The Hercules viewed my approach with a wild-eyed demeanor. He knew he was stuck: his hands and feet still bound, he was unable to fight me. I saw the options roll through his mind and the desperation set in, eyes darting. Finally, something clicked as he looked back toward the wall of the cabin, and I didn’t even have a chance to scream, “NO!” before he launched himself into it full force, leading with the seat.