My teeth nip the edge of my tongue to stop me from blurting out the question: How the hell did Ric Weiss get superpowers?
Although I do let slip, “How’s Weiss’ ankle?”
“Healed well.” Briggs hunches his shoulders to shift his scarf higher up the bridge of his nose. “How’s your entire body? I heard it was thoroughly crushed.”
“Well, it’s in one piece again. But it still aches like I got smacked with the world’s largest flyswatter.” Not to mention my gut throbbed through the night, thanks to Dynara’s fist of steel. I had to take one of Cyril’s sedative pills from my nightstand stash to stay asleep. When I woke up again this morning, I was still nauseous and spent fifteen minutes dry heaving over my toilet before I took a shower. In hindsight, calling the god of war a conniving bitch was not the best idea I’ve ever had.
I need to get a grip on my apparently unbridled anger before I take a bullet to the head.
Gods, when did I become so unbalanced?
I’m tempted to say I need a psych—
No. Not going there.
Briggs grunts. “Sucks. But I’m glad it wasn’t worse for you. When I saw that tunnel collapse, I thought for sure you were dead. You and…Connors.” A nervous pause. Uncharacteristic for Briggs. But the subtle way he adjusts his posture to seem less imposing and more sympathetic tells me his act is due to the fact he now knows damn well how I feel about Jin. He, same as Dynara, saw me run off and risk my life to catch Anderson before Jin was lost forever. Even though I was injured. Even though I had no weapons. Briggs has seen a more human side to the arrogant boy with the powerful mind.
One I would have rather kept behind closed doors.
He picks up where he left off. “How is Connors? I heard he was being released today.”
“Yeah. I’m going to pick him up this evening. I’ll be staying with him, at his apartment, until his rehab is far enough along for him to manage by himself. A couple of weeks maybe. But his outlook is pretty good. The doctors reassured me last night that, after the full rehab course, he shouldn’t experience any lasting effects.”
“Nice of you to help him out like that.” Briggs digs his boots into the snow and casts his gaze upward, at the overcast sky still spitting fat flakes.
“Something you want to say, sir?”
The IBI Commander tenses up like someone jabbed him with a needle and hums a low, painful note. “I want to tell you the story, Adamend. Believe me. But it’d be a betrayal of my confidence to Connors to do so. So I’m going to give you the nonspecific overview version.”
“Of whatever mysterious past Jin apparently has? A past that is, some way, related to Finn?”
“Yes. That.” His gloved hand pinches the bridge of his nose through the scarf fabric. “I’ve known Connors for a long time now, Adamend, and he hasn’t always been the man he is today. When I first took him on as an agent, his personality was…a bit different. Certain events in his life had caused him to do certain things he later came to regret, and his employment at the IBI is related to those things.
“For the first several years I knew him, he was a bitter young man with a lot of pent-up fury. It took the better part of a decade before he finally loosened up and took on a rosier temperament. But those things he did back then, and the events that led to them, well…they still haunt him. He’s got a lot of emotional baggage, a lot of scars. He’s had them since the day I met him.” A weighty pause. “And then, not long after I finally saw those scars begin to fade…”
“Jericho happened,” I murmur.
“Exactly.” Briggs uses the icy top of the bench to push himself into a standing position. “Jericho broke Connors in all sorts of ways, Adamend. More than even you, with your genius brain, can infer. It dredged up parts of his past he wanted to forget, parts of himself he wanted to bury for good.”
What in the old gods’ names were you involved in, Jin?
Briggs’ shadow falls over me, dark eyes downcast. “It’s unfair of me to ask this of you, Adamend, but you’re in a unique position in Connors’ life to manage it, so…
”Look after him. His alcoholism. His emotional stability. With the Jericho anniversary and this whole business with Finn or whoever he is, I worry Connors might hit a breaking point he can’t recover from. So look after him, and if you think he’s about to walk off the kind of cliff you can’t climb back up, you do what needs to be done, all right?”
“You’re asking me to force him into—?”
“If it comes to that, yes. I expect you to drag him, forcefully, to the nearest psych facility and lock him in. Even if it makes him hate you for the rest of his life.”
“Wow, sir.” I pinch the corner of my bottom lip between two sharp teeth. “You said unfair. Not absurd.”
“There’s nothing absurd about it.” He kicks snow onto my boots. “You get Connors the help he needs, or he suffers the consequences. It’s all logical, Adamend. Your favorite kind of reasoning.”
I taste copper on my tongue and smile so tight my dry lips nearly split. “That it is.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“So you don’t have to?”
“Connors is my agent, first and foremost. If I do it, I’ll have to report it. I’m legally required to do so. And if I report it, he’ll get fired. And if he gets fired…let’s just say that part of his employment contract stipulates that termination carries more weight than normal.”
“Ah. Now I see. You’re stuck in another legal bind and need me to cut you out of it. Don’t you have any more contacts to ask for help?”
He steps back, three, four, five times, leaving wide footprints in the snow. “None like you, Adamend.”
“That a compliment or an insult?”
He shrugs his broad shoulders. “Take it as you will.” Then he turns on his heels and stalks off toward the invisible pathway, made indistinguishable from the fields of graves by the drifting white.
A second before he’s out of earshot, I call out, “Hey, Briggs. You doing anything for Thankfulness Dinner tonight?”
He halts mid-step, coat tails wrapping around his legs as another frigid gust blows by. “I was planning a quiet night, maybe with Ric and a six-pack of beer.” His snow-sprinkled eyebrows arch toward his hairline. “Unless you have a better idea?”
“Oh, I do have a little get-together planned. If you’re interested, I’ll send over the invite.”
* * *
Jin’s shiny red baby cuts through holiday traffic, taking a sharp diagonal across four lanes to the off ramp that leads to a neighborhood called Blake Circle. It makes a hard turn, close to three-sixty, and then, as if we teleport to an alien world in a split second, the roads are clear, the sidewalks, too. Not a soul in sight.
Everybody in Jin’s cozy block of townhouses and small apartment buildings has either left to go visit their family and friends or has received those same people into their homes. There’s no one left to move in that jerky, frenzied, half-panicked way people do when they travel for the holidays.
So there’s a stillness captured in the planes of white that cover the manicured lawns, the roofs of the townhouses, the barren branches of the trees. A stillness disturbed only by a single car and the two men inside it, heading home.
Jin is dozing in the seat next to me, his temple pressed against the window. There’s a quilt that I found in his closet this morning draped across his huddled form. In his light sleep, his lips form strings of indecipherable words. And even though I can’t hear whether he’s happy or sad or calm or scared, I feel a warmth in my chest at the sight of both sides of his face moving as they should. His last few rounds of nano-therapy corrected the facial paralysis.
They also restored his ability to move the right side of his body—to a degree. He can’t control them yet. That’s what the rehab is for.
So his right arm is in a sling, strapped in place to prevent him from injuring it by accident. The corresponding leg is free, but there’s a wheelchair folded up in the trunk I�
�ll be using to haul him around until his leg is trained enough to support his weight and balanced enough to keep him from running into walls. All in all, though, he’s in much better shape than he was yesterday. Physically.
Mentally…
Well, I’ll have to keep Briggs’ warning in mind, won’t I?
As the car nears Jin’s apartment complex, I shoot off one last message on my Ocom. A question. And the response arrives while the car is backing into Jin’s designated parking spot (which, I notice, hasn’t been plowed). Satisfied at the answer, I tuck my Ocom in my coat pocket and order the auto-drive AI to pop the trunk before it shuts down for the night.
Leaning across the seat, I nudge Jin’s shoulder gently with two fingers. He mutters a few sleepy words, yawns, and lifts his lids high enough to scan the cabin of the car. They land on me for a moment, and then look past me, through the window, at the familiar brick building twenty-five feet from our parking spot. “Oh,” he mutters. “Home sweet home.”
“I’m going to get the chair out of the trunk and come around to help you out.” My fingers find the rounded plastic handle on my right and pop the car door open. Cold air floods into the cabin, and Jin shivers, tugging the quilt tighter around himself. “Sorry about that,” I say. “We’ll be out of the cold in a minute.”
A half-hearted groan. “It’d be less than that if they’d just given me a power chair. Why do I have to use a manual one? Huh?”
“I had to use a manual one, back at EDPA. I didn’t see you complaining about that.”
“Well, it was fun when you were the one in the chair.”
“Guess it must be karma then. Payback for enjoying the suffering of others.”
He sticks his tongue out at me. “Asshole.”
I chuckle and slip out of the car, boots crunching through the hardened snow. A fine mist of sleet is falling. As I’m lifting the chair from the trunk, I glance over my shoulder at the Central Business Sector glowing in the distance. The ad windows and signboards are visible now, but the icy precipitation blurs them into meaningless symbols and lines of gibberish closed with exclamation points. (But then, aren’t they always?)
Once I unfold the chair on the sidewalk that, thankfully, has been cleared of the most recent snowfall, I head back to the car and open Jin’s door. It’s only a five-foot trip to the sidewalk, but since Jin has two functioning limbs, not four, it takes six minutes of stumbling and fumbling and yelling and cursing and tripping and slipping and sliding before Jin’s ass finally lands safely in the chair. Both of us have to catch our breath after the ordeal.
Finally, we hit a steady pace toward the front lobby of Jin’s apartment building. The wind is harsh, and Jin balls himself up into a knot, the quilt covering everything except his still-drooping eyes. But, I notice, he doesn’t ask me to pick up speed or make an amusing complaint about my nursing skills, which is what I’d expect from him at this point.
So I cough and ask, “Is everything all right? You’re a bit quiet.”
“Oh, I’m just mourning,” he murmurs through the quilt fabric.
Three alarms and a question—Who?—go off in my head before I realize he doesn’t mean it literally. “About what?”
“My dinner party. I bought all that food to make for dinner tonight, and now I don’t get to use it. Most of it’ll go bad before I can fix it for myself.” A slow, keening whine slips through his teeth. “I hate wasting food. And I spent so much money on it this time around. I had all these dishes planned out, too. Cool things I’ve never tried before. I was looking forward to…” He sighs. “Never mind. It’s pointless to dwell on it now, I guess.”
We reach the lobby doors, and Jin uses his good arm to wave his Ocom over the ID scanner. The scanner light blinks green, and the doors unlock, sliding open before us. With a heavy push, I force Jin’s chair over the lip of the doorframe, off the wet sidewalk and into the warm, dry lobby. The elevators are on the left, so I take a slow, wide turn and wheel him onward.
“Hey, don’t sweat it too much. I can help you cook some of your store, if you want, and we can have a little holiday dinner together.” I tap the elevator control pad with two fingers and wait for the box to arrive.
Jin cranes his neck to give me a wide-eyed stare over his shoulder, his mouth hanging open in abject horror.
“What?” I say.
“You want to cook? As in, real food? With a stove and an oven?” He carries the tone you’d expect from a president on national TV, telling the world an apocalypse-grade meteor is heading for Earth. “You’re joking, right?”
“Hey, I can do it.” The elevator arrives, and I roll his chair inside, then squeeze by him and tap the button for the third floor. “It’s all just following instructions.”
“Adem, the last time you tried to help me cook, you nearly burned down my kitchen.” He wiggles his shoulders to tug the quilt from his head. “I had to use an extinguisher, and my whole apartment smelled like smoke for two weeks.”
“It was an honest mistake, Jin.”
“You caught the spaghetti on fire.”
“It wasn’t entirely my fault.” The elevator arrives at the designated floor, and our journey reaches its last leg. “You had that music playing, and I misheard you when you said the order on how to put in the ingredients.”
“Adem, there were two ingredients, and one of them was water.”
“Fine.” I roll the chair up to Jin’s front door, in range of the greeter attached to the wall above the frame. “We’ve established I suck at cooking. But that still doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a holiday dinner.”
Jin glances up at me, one eyebrow quirked, and rubs the shaved side of his head, mimicking the nervous way he often runs his fingers through his hair. “How’s that?”
The greeter machine scans us with a red flash and says, with its robot voice, ”Welcome home, Jin. Welcome, Adem.”
And then the front door slides open.
To reveal a huge crowd of people standing behind it.
Who all shout out at once, “Happy Thankfulness Day!”
Jin goes rigid in the chair, uncomprehending, for a moment. But then, past the milling crowd in his apartment, he spots his dining room table, covered by two dozen hot, steaming dishes, meats and vegetables, cakes and drinks. Among those dishes are foods clearly identifiable as all the ingredients Jin bought for his party. And among the crowd in front of the table are people clearly identifiable as all the people Jin invited to his dinner (and the moochers he didn’t but who came anyway).
Gloria Shay and her Homicide pals. Jin’s fellow Cyber Sec buddies. A random assortment of people Jin knows from a random assortment of other IBI departments. Briggs and Weiss, who were on Jin’s couch when the door first opened, and are now standing at the front of the crowd, smiling at the injured man in the wheelchair who can’t seem to believe what’s right in front of his eyes. And, to my surprise, the entirety of EDPA’s Night Team One, Chai and Lance (whom I did invite), Murrough and Dynara (whom I did not). They’re loitering in the corner of Jin’s living room, and Lance throws me a wave and a nod as I push Jin into his apartment.
A dozen people greet us, most of them patting Jin on the shoulder, telling him how happy they are to see he’s feeling better and how they hope to see him back at work soon. Jin doesn’t respond to any of them; his jaw is unlatched, and his eyes are stuck bulging, and a choking sound emanates from his throat as we near the dining room table. A space for his wheelchair has already been made, and I put on the brakes once I situate him correctly in front of a table full of his favorite foods.
After we stop moving, the crowd begins to calm, and close to thirty pairs of eyes lock onto Jin, wait for his reaction. I move partway around the table to get a better look at his stunned face, pull out a chair, and seat myself across from him. “Jin, hey. You okay?”
My voice breaks him out of his trance, and all at once, a flood of emotion washes through him. His bottom lip wobbles. His eyes tear up. His shoulders shake. And he
says, “Adem, you did all of this? For me?”
I wink. “You sound like you expected me to throw you in the gutter or something.”
“Well, no. But…you hate parties.”
“True.” I reach across the table and grip his shoulder. “But even I make exceptions. When the occasion calls for it.”
He stifles a sob, and the widest smile I’ve seen him wear all week graces his face. “Thank you.”
“If you want to make it special, you can say you’re thankful for me. It is, after all, Thankfulness Day.”
A scoff, and he bops me on the head with the palm of his good hand. “Don’t be a dork. I’m more thankful for the food than anything else. Especially because you didn’t cook it.”
“Hey!”
The whole room laughs.
And so does Jin.
And so do I.
Well, it’s nice to know I did something right.
* * *
Three hours later, I sit in a cold metal chair in the small courtyard area outside Jin’s apartment building. Sated with more food and drink (tea, not alcohol) than my stomach can handle. Gaze lingering on the living room window of Jin’s home, where the party is still in full swing.
My EDPA “buddies” have departed though. Chai to her own house to meet up with her partner and his family for a second dinner. Lance to a bar gathering with some of his fellow coordinators. Dynara and Murrough off to whatever house they share (my gods, the thought).
But all the IBI agents are still inside, Briggs and Weiss included, making Jin feel the way he should always feel. Appreciated, at the least.
After three hours of listening to the high-pitched prattling of Gloria Shay and a gaggle of agents I was happy to leave behind when I quit the IBI, I need a break. A break to think. Or, more accurately, to stop thinking. To let my mind process all I’ve seen and experienced over the past week. Lang and Anderson and Castile. Stiegel and DuPont. Delacourt and Herrera. And, of course, Finn.
Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2) Page 30
