62.
June
She heard the boots coming, but there was no point in running now. She couldn’t motivate herself to do it, even though a distant part of her mind was screaming for her to get up, to run, to grab Ell if she needed to, to keep hauling ass up the elevator shaft a double jump at a time.
But her bare legs lay against the cold, rough concrete and stayed there, unmoving, her cutoff jeans soaked in blood and Ell’s unmoving body draped across her lap. She cradled him, taking care not to let his head fall back. She held him close to her chest, the way she’d leaned against him as they drove, remembering the feel of his breathing against her.
He wouldn’t be breathing anymore now.
They were coming, and she held tight to him, waiting. Maybe they were a floor down, maybe two, but they were coming, and soon.
The thump of shoes behind her caused June to look up with surprise—
And start to scream, before a hand descended over her mouth and squelched it.
Sienna Nealon was standing there in front of her, dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders, inscrutable look on her face until her eyes dropped down to take in Ell, lying there, lifeless—
“Damn,” she said, looking him over. She touched his arm, felt for a pulse, and came up wanting only a second later.
“You scared the shit out of me,” June said, blurting it out without thinking things through. She’d shot this woman in the head, hadn’t she?
“That’s one of my lesser-known powers, being a metahuman laxative,” Sienna said, clasping her on the shoulder, but not too rough. “We need to get out of here.”
June didn’t flinch at the touch; it was a lot lighter than she would have expected. Her mind backpedaled, though. “Why?”
“Because these guys with the guns? They’re going to kill you, June,” she said.
June just stared at her. “Why do you care?”
Sienna took a visible breath, like she was trying to keep patience with a wayward child. “Because I told your grandmother I’d try to save your damned life. Now come on—”
The squeak of boots further down the floor gave way to the rattling of shots—loud, echoing in the interior of the building, like they were played over a theater speaker, booming between the steel beams and through the guts of the tower.
Sienna scooped her up and yanked her along; bullets whizzed past and out through the opening behind them where Nealon had entered. Sienna dragged her, instead, deeper into the building and behind an interior post that cracked with the shots, spitting a little spray of concrete dust over June as she was pulled behind it.
“That’s not good, either,” Sienna said, taking a knee and looking to her right.
June stared at her, wondering what she was talking about.
Then she heard them. More boots, clapping their way up stairs to their right.
They couldn’t go forward, because a team was already waiting.
They couldn’t go left, because if they stepped out, the team would shred them with fire.
They couldn’t go backward, because the wall behind them was solid concrete, a pillar probably designed to hold the building up in the event of a hurricane.
And now they couldn’t go to the right because they were seconds from being cut off by another team.
“I knew the end was coming,” June said as the footsteps from two directions drew closer … and closer …
63.
Sienna
“Dammit, Debbie Downer,” I said, trying to have sympathy for the gal because I knew what it was like to lose a boyfriend, but at the same time deal with people trying to murder you, “this is not the freaking end, okay?”
Before she could answer, I kept low and dragged her with me toward the stairs where a SWAT team was hustling their butts off to ascend in hopes of putting a shit ton of bullets into her and her now-dead beau. We were concealed by a half wall, but if the team already on our floor and advancing on us figured out we were skedaddling, that sure as hell wouldn’t stop the bullets they sent our way.
The stairs were about twenty feet away, a solid concrete set that weren’t covered over by any kind of carpet or padding yet, which meant I could hear even the muffled footsteps of the SWAT team trying desperately to advance without making noise. I hoped there were only six of them coming up, but the numbers were about to be irrelevant.
“Okay, stay here,” I said to June, letting loose of her, probably about five seconds before I would have started to drain her soul.
“What?” She was dazed, plainly, her eyes still as big as when I’d surprised the hell out of her by flying in behind her.
“Stay here, and if those guys come around the corner, do your skunk thing and disappear in a puff of toxin, okay?”
She blinked at me. “But … if you’re right there … won’t it hit you?”
I looked at her flatly. “Don’t get all concerned with my life now,” I said in a hushed whisper. “I’m not going to be right here. Back in a flash.”
Before she had a chance to question what I was going to do, I leapt over the edge of the staircase, which helpfully had no railing, and zoomed downward.
Six guys in tactical gear were waiting below, guns raised, but fortunately not quite at the right arc to catch me as I descended. They moved fast, one of them, the farthest from me, swinging his weapon around. I pointed a finger at his gun barrel and yelled, “Gavrikov!” without really thinking that one through fully.
I shot a quick burst of superheated air, aimed as precisely as I could. With my reflexes in top form, my dexterity well-tuned, and a total lack of movement from recoil, I’d become a pretty good shot with my little fire bursts.
This one, though, was expert. And maybe a little lucky.
It caught his M-16 variant right in the barrel and snuffed as it dove in the narrow breach. A puff of smoke came out a second later as he stroked the trigger.
The rifle blew apart in his hand, drawing a scream from him and panicked looks from his fellows that gave me just enough distraction time to land in their midst.
“Yeehaw!” I yelled, grabbing one guy’s MP5 and melting the barrel with a flaming hand. I yanked him hard and ran him into the next nearest of their number and both wobbled, teetering on the edge of a ten foot drop to the stairs below.
Another gun swung in line with me and I yelled, “Eve!” and blasted the guy with a glowing web of light that yanked him backward as his weapon chattered through half the magazine. He was anchored to the wall behind him, weapon secured across his chest, and I spun low, knocking the legs out from beneath the guys who’d been on the edge of falling a second before.
They both went over, flipping in midair and crashing to the stairs below. Grunts of pain told me they weren’t dead, but they were out of my way for a second. I fired a couple light nets over the edge to make sure they stayed down there while I wrapped up the last two of them.
I clapped the guy whose rifle I’d blown up across the back of the head; he was stumbling around blindly, a trickle of blood running down his forehead from a nasty superficial wound. I caught him as he stumbled from my blow, wrapping my wrist around his neck and using him as a human shield.
Two guys remained, and they were both at the top of the stairs, aiming down at me. If I hadn’t had their buddy for cover, they probably would have had me dead to rights. “It’s Nealon!” one of them shouted.
“Bjorn,” I said.
Both of them dropped their guns as I hit them with a wave of mental anguish. Their weapons snapped against the bounds of their slings as they went to grasp at their heads, suddenly under psychic assault. It didn’t surprise me the government hadn’t trained them for this sort of thing, because without Harmon, who the hell would show them what it felt like?
I took the last two out with some well-placed punches, and stitched my human shield to the stairs with a light net, coming back up just in time to see June blink in surprise at my reappearance.
“You stopped them?” she a
sked.
“Yeah, it’s kinda what I do,” I said. “Come on. This is our exit.”
“What about Ell?” She was still down on all fours, where I’d left her, but she cast a pitiable look over her shoulder, where the body of Elliot Lefavre waited in front of the empty elevator shaft.
I didn’t feel like we had time to be delicate. “Come with me or you end up like him.”
She stared at me, dully, her eyes red and puffy from that crying she’d done. I regretted my choice of words instantly, because when I’d gone through this …
Yeah, dying would have been an option to consider.
“I don’t know if I want to—” she started to say.
But she didn’t have time to finish.
Around the corner where we’d taken cover, six men came advancing, their guns coming up, drawing a bead on us from forty feet away—not quite point blank but far enough that I couldn’t take them out with a light net, a fireball or the Warmind.
And then they started to fire.
64.
Scott
It was unsurprisingly peaceful under the waves, even this close to the shore. Scott remained submerged, in the fetal position and working, from the time when Sienna had dropped him into the loving embrace of the ocean.
Because there was so much to do.
The unfinished building was just like every other high tower on the beach in one regard: it had an elevated pool deck behind it, on a platform fifteen feet above the beach. Scott sent tendrils of water crawling up through the sands, seeping slowly at first, then with greater rapidity, climbing up the sea wall and into the pool. It wasn’t finished; he could feel its rough edges, the concrete bottom waiting to be fitted with a liner.
But it worked for his purpose, which was just to hold a couple hundred thousand gallons of water until needed.
From there, while he continued to fill the pool, he sent streams creeping up the steel pillars inside the structure. Along the way, he absorbed a little water left in small puddles by a recent rain, or spilled by careless construction workers. The tendrils of water snaked through the building, feeling, listening, the sonic waves of gunshots absorbed through the water molecules and communicated back to Scott in the sea …
He moved the water toward the source of the sound, somewhere up on the fifth floor. He couldn’t see it, but he imagined it looked a little like waterfalls in reverse running up the side of the building. That thought prompted a smile, which no one could see.
The thrumming sound of the shots increased in intensity as he sent coils of water running in a flat stream around the corner. He couldn’t see, exactly, but he let the structure he’d maintained go, let it run and rush over the concrete floor like a burst pipe, and it fed sensory details back to him through the long chain, down to the pool, over the decking, through the sands to where he waited in the ocean …
Boots. Six pairs. Where the gunshots were coming from.
Reaching out, he set his powers to work, the pool emptying, the water flying out and up in a great rush—
65.
Sienna
An epic, Moses-leaves-the-Red-Sea-level flood washed through the fifth floor just as the tactical team opened up on us in earnest. Before I had a chance to yank June down into the cover of the stairwell, before she had a chance to scream, before I had much of a chance to even blink, more water than I’d ever seen on the fifth floor of a building came around the corner and wholly engulfed the SWAT guys.
Then it just stopped, reversed course like we were watching a Blu-ray someone had hit rewind on, and dragged all six of them back around the corner.
“What the hell was that?” June asked, her mouth hanging open.
“My ex,” I said, grabbing a handful of the back of her shirt and pulling her after them.
The immense water mass was rolling back out the side of the building now, the tactical guys screaming and shouting and generally freaking out about being caught up in what looked like a writhing, sentient mass of water. I dragged June over to the edge and we looked out together, down five stories to the pool deck below, where the tactical team was keeping their heads above water, barely, by the grace of Scott.
“I … did not see that coming,” June said, staring strangely down at the spectacle before us.
“Watching your enemies get washed away when you’re high in the air on a sunny day isn’t a real common thing, so don’t get used to it,” I said. I took hold of her spaghetti strap and yanked her again, this time pushing her back against the nearest concrete pillar. I watched her carefully; if she so much as twitched purple, I was going to burn her to ashes before she had a chance to poison me.
June just stood there, my hand pressing against her, back against the wall, all the will to fight gone out of her. She looked up at me, as though expecting me to kill her right there. “Go on,” she said in a hollow voice.
“I told you I wasn’t here to kill you,” I said, “but now I need something from you.” I put my fingers up, and lit them afire.
“Tell me why I should save your life.”
66.
June didn’t look like she heard the words, at first. She stared at me with dull eyes, the tears still drying on her cheeks. Her back was against the wall, my hand against her chest, pressing against the tank top, cold steel of a support beam against the back of her neck. “I don’t know that you should,” June said when she finally composed an answer. “I don’t know that I’m worth it.”
I pursed my lips, searching June’s eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“I’ve done things,” June said. “Things I shouldn’t have done. We …” She looked back over at where Ell’s body still rested, eyes pointed toward the ceiling above. “Oh, Ell,” she said. “This is all my fault. He never wanted to do any of this. Didn’t want to … shoot you. Didn’t want to rob banks. I convinced him to do it all.”
“Team Three, move up.” Andrew Phillips’s voice sounded distantly in my stolen earpiece, which, I realized, was hanging loose around my knee. I scooped it up and stuffed it back in my ear, then straightened so I could look at June. “And where’s our overwatch?”
“Why?” I asked June, trying to keep one ear on Phillips’s orders and the other listening for her response, which was bound to be muted at best. June Randall looked like she was ready to hurl herself off the top of this building.
“I just wanted to …” She closed her eyes and screwed up her face. “I grew up in—well, you know. And Grandma—we didn’t have it that good … not that that’s an excuse … but I just wanted to … I just wanted to … live. In a way I never did.” The tears started to flow, and she didn’t even bother to sweep them off her cheeks. She just let them go, crying right there in front of me, her back to the pillar, trapped—and somehow, maybe because I had felt that same desperate lack of hope—I knew her running days were done.
67.
I worked to suppress the urge to give a lecture about working for what you wanted instead of robbing banks, as I let her loose. I doubted it was the moment or that it’d be well received. I just kept my stare on her and she bowed her head again and kept talking.
“So … I don’t think I’m worth saving. Because I did terrible things. Selfish things. I got the person I loved … killed,” her voice cracked in a very genuine way and her shoulders heaved with the exertion of trying and failing to hold in emotion. “I think I’m … pretty well beyond redemption at this point.” She stared at her feet, face red and puffy. “I’m … I really am poison.”
I watched her for signs of duplicity, but all I could see was the trauma of her own choices and their consequences punching this girl in the face in that nasty way reality had. Anything I said to her at this point would be superfluous. Life had caught up with her, and now she saw all her wrongs reflected back on her, which was something that happened very, very infrequently in my line of work.
“I worry if I’m irredeemable, too,” I said, and she looked up in surprise. “If I’m beyond … hope. Poison
is maybe a little too literal in my case, but … I’ve made some pretty toxic choices in my life, ones that have … left my garden pretty salted.”
“But you’re out here still trying to catch bad guys,” she sniffled, then laughed to the point of sobbing again. “And you’re more wanted than I am! What’s that about? Are you trying to … balance the scales?”
“The good I do doesn’t ever erase the bad,” I said. “It’s not a scale. There will never be balance for the people I’ve killed who didn’t deserve it. But I don’t know if redemption is really about that. I think it’s about … making it so that whatever sins we’re living with, that we’ve spread in our lives … that they don’t poison us fatally. I’ve met a lot of really bad people in this line of work. And lots of them made similar choices to you and me, but … the difference between them and you is … they never once stopped to reflect, to say, ‘Yeah, this is my fault,’ and just cut it out moving forward. Most of them didn’t even feign remorse, they just flat out wouldn’t admit they did it. They were never going to change. They were never going to get better. They would have kept driving, June, kept going for what they wanted.”
“I don’t want to drive anymore,” she said, and I believed her completely; the fatigue in her eyes … I’d felt it myself.
She really was done running.
“You ready to face your consequences?” I asked. “Even if they mean jail time? Because I can’t promise you a happy resolution to this. You did terrible things. But … if we can get you in front of the local cops, not this federal death-strike task force, and you surrender to them, make a confession, exhibit real remorse when they try you … you might just walk out of jail someday in the far future. Maybe even while you’ve still got some life left in you.”
Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13) Page 23
