Power

by Robert J. Crane

“I don’t know, why don’t you tell me after you see her reaction.” I waved him off. “This needs to happen, right now.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “I was escorting you to get your clothes, remember?”

  I caught a hint of mischief in his eyes and returned his look with one of faint amusement. Very faint. “As much fun as that would be, saving lives is more important than letting you peep on me getting dressed.”

  His brows rolled up and he grinned. “You were gonna let me peep? Awesome—”

  “Go,” I said, shaking my head. I felt my cheeks redden. “You can have a show once this is over with.”

  “Aw, come on.” His face fell. “Why did you have to say that? You practically guaranteed I’m going to die now, because there’s no way fate’s going to let me collect such a sweet prize.”

  I felt myself redden more at the phrase, “sweet prize.” I started to say, “You’ll be fine,” but stopped myself. “Worry about it later,” I said instead. “Work to do, miles to go, all that. Come on, stay serious. We’re in the home stretch now.”

  He sighed, and raised a hand in surrender. “All right, all right,” he said as the elevator dinged and opened in front of me. “I’ll head over through the tunnel.” A look of childish delight came upon him in the form of a smirk. “Try to stay out of trouble without me.”

  I frowned. “You dare to jinx me? Ass.”

  He laughed and disappeared around the corner toward the stairwell to the basement. “Two can play at that game.”

  I stepped into the elevator and pushed my thumb onto the reader that would take me to the fourth floor. It scanned my print and beeped then started slowly into motion. I liked having a little fun with it, but I didn’t take much stock in the whole jinx thing, at least outside of movies.

  Still, the thought that Scott—or anyone—might die in the last act of this war was … disquieting. It made my belly rumble.

  Death is a fact of life, Little Doll. Death is a fact of war.

  War is certain in only one respect, Bjorn said with a rumble. And death is the only certainty in life.

  “Helpful advice,” I said, my tone only mildly sarcastic. If I was a walking violation of the “Thou shalt not be an asshole” commandment, the voices in my head were the fallen angels of that philosophy. “I know death is a possibility, and I’m trying to be prepared for the fact that more of it may be coming. But I can hope that it doesn’t.” I bit my lip.

  Hope has carried people through worse, Zack said. Now that was actually helpful. I smiled.

  The elevators dinged and I walked out into the darkened hallway. I headed toward my room and passed the biometrics there with a beep. I’d just downed another five Century operatives, taken them out of the game. Even though there were more coming, according to Amaterasu, it felt like I had a moment to breathe. A moment to take stock, to plan, to come up with a next move.

  And then I saw the man standing in my living room, looking at the blank walls, and I knew I’d been such an effing moron.

  “Hey,” he said, nodding to me as I came in. “This place is kind of … bland. What’s the matter, you don’t believe in paintings or posters or … I dunno, pastels?”

  I just stood frozen at the door, staring at him like the unwanted intruder he was. I should have known, in my planning, that it might come down like this. That he might just show up, not in a dream—

  “Hello, Sovereign,” I said. “I’d say it’s nice to see you, but then I’d just be lying.”

  “That’s okay,” he said with a casual wave. “I’m an uninvited guest, I know. You don’t have to welcome me with false enthusiasm or anything.”

  “Plus you’re already commenting on the décor,” I said. “But I have to tell you, if we weren’t in lockdown, the sunlight does wonders for the brightness of the place. You know how it is during wartime, though. We all have to make sacrifices.”

  He got this vaguely pained look and nodded once. “Indeed. We do.”

  I took a step into the room, eyeing him warily. Just because he hadn’t made an offensive move yet didn’t mean he wouldn’t. “So … what are you doing here? Got tired of the construction site in our dreams? Because I didn’t hear you offer decorating tips there.”

  “Rebar is hard to accessorize,” he deadpanned. “But, yeah, I was tired of meeting in dreams and getting just absolutely brutalized by your sense of righteous indignation and justice.”

  “So you came to receive them both in person?” I asked, taking another step into the room. “Because I’m not any less likely to lecture you in person. Or hit you,” I added. “In fact, that second one is likely to happen at some point, once we’re past the niceties.”

  “You don’t have to hit me,” he said, and suddenly he looked wary—and weary—himself.

  “Pretty sure I do,” I said. “What I don’t have to do is enjoy it, though I’m pretty sure I’ll do that, too.”

  “Really?” He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Who was it that said that the measure of a society is how they treat their prisoners?”

  “Probably a guy serving a long prison term and kind of pissed off about it,” I said, my eyes narrowing at him. “But you aren’t a prisoner. You’re a free-range, genocidal psychopath—”

  “Not anymore,” he said, and he turned toward me and extended his hands, wrists out. “I hereby surrender to you for the judgment due under the U.S. justice system.” He smiled, though it was faint. “You got me. I give up.”

  I stared at him for a second, regarding him warily, like he was going to spring at me and say, “Fooled ya!” before punching me right in the nose. But a few seconds passed and he didn’t, he just stood there with his hands extended like he was waiting for me to cuff him.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  Chapter 34

  “I don’t like it,” Reed said, staring over my shoulder at where Sovereign sat, in handcuffs, on a chair in the corner of my room.

  “What’s not to like?” Scott asked, keeping his head down, like not meeting Sovereign’s eyes would somehow keep him from reading Scott’s mind. “Our number one enemy just broke into our headquarters to surrender. He’s only the most powerful meta on the planet, supposedly, and we probably have no way of containing him, or breaking into his mind to figure out for sure it’s a trap—”

  “It’s a trap,” Reed and I chorused simultaneously.

  “It’s a traaaaaaaaap!” Sovereign offered mockingly from his seat by the window. I didn’t even bother stationing human guards to watch over him, because what was the point? He could kill them in two seconds flat, even cuffed and shackled as he was. He sighed longingly. “I know it gets a lot of hate among the fanboys, but I still like Return of the Jedi.”

  “Just another reason I have to despise you,” Reed said.

  “You know, I can hear your entire conversation,” Sovereign said, smiling. “You could just have it over here, make me feel welcome.”

  “People who start the wheel turning on mass genocide don’t get to sit at the dinner table with civilized people,” Reed said, turning to offer him a nasty look. “Usually, they have the good grace to kill themselves rather than surrender.”

  “I never killed anyone,” Sovereign said, and his smirk was gone, replaced by seriousness. “I don’t even know if you could call what I did aiding and abetting, since you’d be hard pressed to find evidence of me helping anyone other than Sienna—you know, with some of her Omega problems.”

  “Please,” Reed said, and turned to face him. “You’re going to tell us you didn’t have a hand in this atrocity—”

  “My hands aren’t exactly clean,” Sovereign said, his face darkening, “but neither are yours.”

  Reed looked slightly apoplectic, but he didn’t say anything. “Fine,” Scott said, and he looked like he was making more than his fair effort at keeping himself under control. His words came out slow and measured. “So you’re here to surrender to us. Why? And why now?”

  Sovereign moved his head slightly, and h
e looked a little … upset. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I said nothing. Reed, thankfully, kept his mouth shut, still. “No,” Scott said at last. “Other than the idea that it’s a trap, no, your motives are not obvious.”

  “I’ve lost whatever control of Century I might have had,” he said, and he seemed just a hint resentful, like things were boiling under the surface that he was keeping a tight lid on. “I thought I was partnering with Weissman on this, that we were going to build a better world together, but it turns out he was playing me the whole time. And now that he’s gone, his kids are running amok, trying to kill Sienna.”

  “Again,” I said quietly. “Let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time Century operatives have tried to kill me.

  His weariness returned at that moment, and Sovereign looked like an old man once more. “Yeah. Again. I thought I’d made it clear to the world that you were off limits, but apparently all along I’ve been fooling myself about who was in charge of this thing.”

  “‘Thing’? This murderous, genocidal operation, you mean,” Reed said, regaining his power of speech. “So now you’re turning yourself in because this insane, bloody Leviathan you turned loose—with the best of intentions—has decided to disobey you, and thus you’re giving up your murderous plans for a better world through the scourging fires of mass killings in order to save the life of one woman.”

  He looked at me, and I glanced away. “It’s a good woman I’m doing it for, but yes. And I was never involved in the killings. That was Weissman’s play. I believed in the vision he sold me of a better world, but I was an idiot.” I looked back up at him and he was staring into my eyes. “All flip comments aside, I was wrong. You were right. That’s why I haven’t wanted to argue with you. I may be slow coming to the right conclusion, but I get there eventually. Weissman was a monster. Whatever aid I gave him was a crime of incredible magnitude, and I have to answer for it.” He looked from me to Scott to Reed. “And I will, in whatever manner you want me to. If it’s prison, I’ll go and serve whatever sentence I’m ordered.” He straightened in his chair. “If it’s death, I’ll take the bullet in the back of the head without protest. Maybe I deserve it for whatever help I gave him, I don’t know.” His lips pulled tight together for a moment. “But if you want help taking them down, I’m willing to do that, too, before I have to pay for my crimes.” He held up his hands, the cuffs clinking as he raised them as far as the chains would allow—which was about mid-chest. “I am at your mercy.”

  “Or lack thereof, I do hope,” Reed said, wheeling away from him. “He’s too dangerous. Kill him now and get it over with.”

  “I’m still sitting right here,” Sovereign said. “And I just offered to die if you want me to.”

  “Great, so you won’t complain if we just get that out of the way right now,” Reed said.

  I frowned at him. “You’ve never been in favor of capital punishment before. We’ve argued this, remember?”

  “My position is evolving on this issue,” Reed said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t exactly stick him in a glass cell and hope it holds him as he taunts us endlessly while waiting to unfold some diabolical scheme. There’s no prison on earth that could keep him in.”

  “Oh, but there is,” Sovereign said.

  “Bullshit,” Reed said. “And all this ‘word is bond’ crap is worth as much as wet toilet paper in a tornado. There is no guard and no jail that could contain you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “there is. Your prison in Arizona could do it, if you had the right guard to keep watch.”

  “Huh,” Scott said. “How thick would the walls have to be in that place?”

  “Thick,” I replied, realizing that neither of them had tumbled to what he was suggesting yet. “But do you actually think you’ll get the guard you’re hoping for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his features carefully neutral. The corner of his mouth turned up, just slightly, to let me know that he knew I’d caught on. “What do you say? Are you willing to watch me sit in a cell for the rest of my life?” He leaned forward in the chair. “Because as your brother said, if my word isn’t good for anything, then you’re the only one who could keep me from getting away if I chose to leave.”

  Chapter 35

  “Who do you have guarding him?” Foreman asked, at the opposite head of the conference table. Li sat next to him, arm in a sling and partially immobilized.

  “No one,” I answered, and watched the expressions change around the table. Reed shot me a “Told you so” look and then he politely averted his eyes by rolling them. Everyone was present except Janus, who was still in the hospital. Kat, Scott, Zollers, Ariadne, Li, Foreman and Reed were all in a rough oval around the conference table, all in varying states of disbelief over what I’d just said. “What’s the point?” I asked. “He could kill any human or humans we set out to guard him, or mind-control them with his telepathy, or—”

  “So you’re just going to let him walk out anytime he wants?” Li asked. His jaw locked into place in a scowl that I suspected had nothing to do with any arm pain he might have been feeling.

  “I can’t watch him twenty-four-seven, even if we did have a prison that could contain him,” I said. “I’m open to other solutions.”

  “Kill him,” Reed singsonged.

  I gave him a look like … well, I don’t know what it looked like, honestly. “Your strongly held beliefs about the death penalty vanished awfully swiftly.”

  “The guy is a walking holocaust if he wants to be,” Reed said, his face dark. “We still don’t know what phase two is, but you know he’s at the core of it, which means he’s got the kind of power that could lay the world to waste. To me, this is like … nuclear disarmament. Just be done with it already and make the world a safer place.”

  I glanced at Foreman, who was studying the table. “I don’t hear anything from you on this subject, Senator.”

  “Me?” Foreman asked. “I’m not here, officially or otherwise.”

  “Plausible deniability?” Reed snarked. “Wow. I’m totally shocked, given that you’re a—”

  “This has little to do with politics,” Foreman said, and he looked a little put out. “I’m civilian oversight. I can’t give you orders even if I was officially here.” He nodded in my direction. “You’re part of the executive branch, and you have a duly appointed head of agency to answer to.”

  That provoked another moment of silence, as everyone realized I’d just been handed a live grenade with the pin pulled. “Lucky me,” I breathed. “I get to absorb the blame if it all goes horribly wrong.”

  Foreman shrugged. “That wasn’t why I brought you here, but it’s a not-unanticipated side-effect of your taking the post. Shit rolls downhill in Washington, and there’s a major septic malfunction heading this way. Rapidly, by my reckoning.”

  “What the hell?” Scott asked, and everything about the way he said it told me he was utterly disgusted. “We’ve done what you asked. Century has taken some hard knocks, one of their leaders is dead and the other just surrendered. Now you want to prepare Sienna a place under the bus if anything goes wrong?” He made a pfffffft-ing noise.

  “I knew what I was getting into when I took the deal,” I said. I was near toneless, because ever since he’d told me that word was going to get out, I knew that bad things were unavoidably washing toward me on the tide. “I’ve still got a job to do.”

  “Do you realize what’s going to happen if you fail now?” Reed asked, spinning toward me. He was sitting next to Ariadne, and she had her head down, looking at the table. I made note of that for later. “You’re gonna get run through by the press.”

  “Full well aware of it,” I said. “But we’ve still got to survive whatever else Century is coming up with. Because they’ve still got a meeting in two days, and it sounds like it’s going to be a doozy.”

  “What are the odds it’s a referendum on packing up and calling it quits?” Scott asked.

  “I woul
dn’t lay Vegas odds on it,” Zollers said, finally weighing in. “I’ve met with very few Century operatives, but they seem to fall into two camps—deathly scared and carrying out their instructions from on high, or true believers who have bought Weissman’s vision, hook, line, and … whatever.” He waved a hand. “I would suggest that the ratio of true believers to non is 3 to 1.”

  “The house always wins,” Reed said.

  “We need to find this meeting,” I said.

  “And what?” Reed asked. “Crash it? All ten of us against the … I’ve lost count. Eighty of them left now? What are we down to?”

  “Does it matter?” Kat tossed in. “Seven-to-one and one to nine are just as bad as each other when you’re up against this many metas.” She looked at me then hesitated. “Is there a chance Sovereign is sincere, that he’d be willing to help us take them down?”

  “No way,” Reed said.

  “Maybe,” Scott said. “If he thinks it’ll give him a chance to impress Sienna.” I didn’t look at him, but I felt every head at the table swivel to Scott. He shrugged. “He’s not exactly being coy about his intentions. He figures that we won’t execute him and that it’ll fall to Sienna to guard him because she’s the only one who could. He’s playing us for that. Give him a chance to impress her and maybe he’ll jump at it.”

  Now everyone looked at me, except for Zollers, who quietly cleared his throat and kept his gaze averted.

  “Could you play him?” Ariadne said quietly.

  “He’s a telepath,” I said. “Even assuming I could, he’d figure out what was going on because he’d be able to read it on one of you.”

  “Besides,” Reed said, shaking his head, “he’s too smart to fall for it. She goes in there and starts talking in a throaty, come-hither sort of way, he’s going to know she’s playing him for a sucker, big time. She’s not exactly subtle when she turns on the charm.”

  I gave him the daggers. “How would you know?”

  “It’s true, you’re kind of obvious,” Kat said, drawing my look of ire. “Because you’re nice to a guy when you like him.”