Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives

by Kieran Strange

  Sometimes, it was as if Ronnie could read his mind. “Let’s just say you earned it, you hard-working go-getter. Look at you, all brave and smiley even though you just got off a plane!”

  Cabe craned his neck a little to look down at her as they stepped through the automatic doors into the crisp December air, warm-brown eyes narrowed in annoyance at her comment. It was no huge secret around the office that flying – commercially or privately, it made no difference – made the British-American agent extremely uncomfortable. But that didn’t mean he was content to discuss it, even with his closest friends.

  Ronnie always looked and felt so comically tiny next to his own athletic, brawny frame. At six-two, he towered over the petite young woman by the better part of a foot, and he was genuinely convinced that if the Scientific Research Department ever figured out the cloning process, both she and two of her clones could easily fit into one of his T-shirts.

  “Four dollars and some change is not just a ‘treat’,” he pressed, like a dog with a bone. He knew when he was onto something, and he wasn’t letting it go. “Anything over two bucks is…”

  “Don’t think too hard.” Behind her glasses, Ronnie’s brown eyes were focused on the damp sidewalk dead-ahead, betraying her guilt. “You’ll give yourself an aneurysm.”

  “Bribery,” he finished. He tilted the cup in his hand as if suddenly concerned it may contain a bomb or anthrax or something, and his eyes slid over to regard her with suspicion. They stopped at the entrance to the parking structure, and Ronnie pulled out her company credit card so that she could fork over a ridiculously astronomical sum of money for leaving her car on airport property for fifteen minutes.

  “It’s bribery, isn’t it?” asked Cabe, not committing to his first sip just yet, despite how delicious it smelled. Ronnie ignored him, sliding the credit card into the pay machine. “I know you, Peanut. You’re buttering me up for something.”

  “You’re out of cat food,” she tossed casually over her left shoulder as she punched in the PIN and waited for the ticket. “Don’t let me forget to stop on the way home.”

  “Then don’t get distracted.”

  “Then don’t turn on the radio.” Ronnie scoffed a little. “You know me, the second Adam Levine opens his mouth, I’m gone.”

  Parking paid, thankfully out of W.A.R.D.’s business banking account and not either of their own, Cabe followed his handler’s lead across the huge concrete multi-storey lot.

  “It should be illegal to listen to pop music anywhere in the Pacific Northwest,” said Cabe in that flat, bored tone he used to indicate that he had slipped somewhere into the depths of his awfully dry sense of humor. “Do you know how many great rock bands hail from up here?”

  “Cat food, though, Cabe. Seriously, man. Don’t let me forget, or Bruce Wayne’ll be guilt-trip-staring at me all effing night.”

  “Nirvana, Soundgarden, D.O.A.…” Both hands currently occupied with his case and his coffee, the blond man punctuated each band he listed off with a nod of his head, his breath coming out in tiny little puffs of steam. “Mother Mother…”

  “Nickelback,” Ronnie replied slyly.

  He ignored her. “Alice In Chains…”

  “Isn’t she the one who sang that song about Poison?”

  Cabe turned his head to stare at her in total and absolute disbelief as the familiar mint-green Fiat 500 came into view, nestled in between two large S.U.V.s that dwarfed it. “Okay, oh my God, tell me you’re just mucking me about?”

  “Maybe I am.” Ronnie grinned at him, unlocking the car doors and popping the trunk for him. “Or maybe I’m not.”

  “You’re the worst.” Cabe lifted his carry-on one-handed and set it down in the center of the trunk, amidst a sweater, some loose tools, and empty water bottles scattered inside. He closed the trunk with a gentle slam and skirted around the small car to climb into the passenger’s side as Ronnie was starting it up.

  “Hey, Blueberry,” he casually greeted the stuffed blue alpaca plush wedged in the corner of the dash, closing his door behind him. It was icy outside, and if he knew Ronnie, she was no doubt impatient to get the heating going.

  She’d only had this little beast for half a year or so now. Her last car, her beloved Ivy, had finally bitten the dust ten months ago during a high-speed chase involving four separate parties that left most of an icy downtown Salem riddled with bullet holes. Until that night, both Cabe and Ronnie had been genuinely convinced that Ivy was indestructible. When their team retrieved and separated them both from the wreckage, Ronnie had been more worried about the state of her car than the state of her body. Cabe, on the other hand, was definitely mostly preoccupied with the fact that he could actually see some of his best friend’s bones. He was firmly of the opinion that you should never be able to see your best friend’s bones.

  On the field, he was used to it. He’d bandaged enough comrades back together in the heat of an assault with whatever they happened to have on hand. But Ronnie spent so little time in harm’s way that his protective, pseudo-big-brother instincts tended to kick in whenever she was hurt or injured, or in any sort of real danger. Which, thankfully, wasn’t a common occurrence at all, but when push came to shove, Veronica Moss was one tough little cookie.

  “All right, I let you get in the warm,” Cabe said, “now spill.” He squirmed a bit to get comfortable in the seat, reaching his hand down and behind him to adjust it. Normally, he rode shotgun frequently enough that it stayed in his preferred position, but he’d been on assignment in Pennsylvania for a week and a half now. It was expected that one of her friends or another agent would’ve mucked about with it during that time.

  “Let’s get back to the bribery thing. The whole, you sweetening me up by surprising me with my favorite expensive coffee.”

  “Which is going cold,” Ronnie pointed out bluntly, turning the wheel hard to one side as the little car descended the ramp that spiraled tightly, somewhat dizzyingly downward toward street level. Cabe snorted a short, curt laugh.

  “Well. I don’t know if I want to drink it yet.” He poked at it where it sat snugly in the cup holder between their knees. “If I drink it, I’m accepting it. And I don’t know what I’m signing up for yet. I’d rather leave all my options open lest I need to throw a bitch fit when you tell me what my assignment is.”

  “You know what I miss about you the most when you’re gone on these long trips is totally your smart mouth,” his handler shot back. Quick like a whip, as usual. Cabe grinned to himself; he actually did miss these verbal sparring sessions with her when they were states apart.

  “You can Google it,” she said. “Elliot Wright.”

  One fair eyebrow shot up, and Cabe lifted his narrow hips in the seat so that he could pluck his smart phone from his jeans back pocket. “Elliot Wright as in, like, the Elliot Wright? Because if not, I’m just gonna get a bunch of crap about that computer guy. The C.E.O. of WrightTech?”

  “I’m talking about ‘that computer guy’,” replied Ronnie, quickly checking the screen of her own cell phone while they were stopped at a red light. The plastic case was the same shade of mint-green as her car, her Filofax, her nails… having a friend who was absolutely obsessed with one specific color made some his holiday shopping at this time of year very easy. “Seriously, just Google his name. You’ll get all the answers you need.”

  “You’re spending too much time around Agent Dasilva, it’s making you all cryptic and stuff,” chuckled Cabe, punching the man’s name into the search bar of his browser. Cryptic as Ronnie was playing, she was right: in a single search, he had all of the answers to almost all of the questions currently running through his mind about what sort of ‘bad news’ she could have for him.

  His query was filled with profiles and images of the man himself – Elliot Michael Wright, only child of the late Mike Wright, an information technology entrepreneur and inventor who had founded the Fortune 500 hardware and software giant WrightTech in the late seventies. Elliot’s young,
angular face was dappled with neatly-trimmed, close-cut hair that matched his brushed-up waves in their rich chocolatey color – it was a face that was recognizable worldwide from magazine covers, television interviews, and of course the gossip column of every self-respecting (or not) tabloid and website in the world of pop culture.

  Because Elliot Wright wasn’t just the chairman and C.E.O. of the largest and most successful technology company in the world. Elliot Wright was a sex symbol of the modern celebrity universe. And, if those gossip columns were to be believed, a cocky young poster boy living the high life on his dead father’s dime, and little more.

  At first, Cabe had wondered what the hell Elliot Wright had to do with him, or Ronnie, or even W.A.R.D. for that matter. The secret department the two agents worked for answered to the United Nations first, foremost, and solely. The majority of the world were not even aware of their existence, though there were (as always) a great deal of conspiracy theories floating around. That single search attempt, however, yielded everything he needed to know.

  “He’s… he came out as an Anomaly?”

  “Yep.” Ronnie checked her rearview, pulling onto the winding highway that would weave them in and out of the moderate Seattle traffic now that rush hour was starting to end. “This morning. The Internet is fuh-reaking out.”

  “No shit.” Cabe blinked at the screen, selecting the first news story and waiting for it to load. “It’s not every day your favorite celebrity wank-bucket develops superpowers.”

  “Hey, it’s not politically correct to call them that, remember?” Ronnie scolded him with mock-seriousness. Her heart-shaped face turned to him for a few seconds, her lips twisted up smugly. “We’re supposed to call them ‘recently-developed abilities’.”

  “Well, one day, when it’s been decades since the Megaflare happened, we won’t be able to call them recently-developed abilities, and what’s the government gonna do then, huh?”

  Ronnie pursed her smirking lips a little more, but said nothing regarding it. As a general rule, Cabe knew she preferred him not to mention the Megaflare around her. He was the kind of person who dealt with his problems openly, honestly, by talking about them too much and with an overabundance of sandpaper-dry humor. Others needed a little more time, and he understood the mentality, but empathy alone didn’t keep him from slipping up on occasion.

  And besides, it hadn’t even been five years. Grief and shock could both take decades to fully fade. Post-traumatic stress could be with you for life. And every single human being who had been alive and situated within the upper two-thirds of the Northern Hemisphere on that fateful day was likely to be a prime candidate for all three of the above.

  The warning came at ten o’clock in the morning P.T. on a blistering summer’s day in early July. Scientists at N.A.S.A. had registered the brightest X-class solar flare in recorded history, bigger than the 1859 Carrington Event (which had previously held that title). The northern lights were seen as far south as Honolulu, the sky erupting in brilliant flashes of red, purple, green, and blue. Many families sat out on their lawns to watch it, while those who were afraid had their fears and concerns quelled by scientists on the television and Internet who claimed the storm could certainly interfere with communications and electricity grids – but that provided people were prepared, at least for the most part, it would be fully and entirely survivable.

  But no matter who you were, and how much you prepared, it didn’t seem to be enough.

  Fifty-two hours later, power outages plunged civilization into darkness all across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa, as ground currents induced by the huge geometric storms melted copper wiring and winders within transformers and generators. Electricity failed, communications failed. The economic toll was extreme. Airplanes glided silently through the sky after having their engines cut and G.P.S. lost by the electromagnetic pulse that accompanied the storm. No one had ever imagined the proverbial end of the world would come not with not with violence, chaos, and destruction, but with an eerie, empty silence.

  The planet fell into a state of panic as suddenly half of its population were unreachable by business partners, acquaintances, and loved ones. Governments struggled to maintain order and control over their people as, believing this to be the end, they rioted their way into madness. Martial law was put into full effect in the United States of America as suddenly normal, everyday activities became impossible without the use of satellite communication and electricity, and as cities who went without power for weeks, months, even seasons began to choke up, fall apart, and starve.

  But somehow, as humanity always had a tendency to, the world survived. They survived. Technicians and emergency workers slaved relentlessly to do whatever they could to make a dent in the damage. Citizens banded together to defend storefronts and other homes against looters and criminals taking advantage of the world’s weaknesses. For the most part, looking back, Cabe was pleasantly surprised with how the people of the planet actually reacted to such widespread insanity and unease. It was… oddly heart-warming, and while Cabe would never outwardly admit it, it was enough on occasion to bring a tear to his eye.

  The event was dubbed the Summer Solar Megaflare. An estimated two point six million lives were lost due to the combined efforts of natural disasters, power failures, and widespread violence. Even on the news, the topic was one that was always discussed very delicately; the world was still very much rebuilding, finding its feet again after everything that had been lost. It was painful to put pressure on wounds that were still so raw. Never forget.

  “You don’t have to go quiet every time you eff up and mention it,” said Ronnie, tilting her head just slightly enough that she could see him in the peripheral of her vision. “It’s not like I’m the only one who lost someone. In fact, I don’t think I know anybody who didn’t.”

  She gave him a very pointed look, which he ignored. He had already conquered his own grief for the friends he lost during the Megaflare, and he wasn’t in any mood to revisit it after spending five hours breathing recycled air on a cramped commercial plane.

  “So, Party-Boi McMoneybags developed superpowers, huh?” mused Cabe, deliberately using the same expression he had been scolded for beforehand. He lazily scrolled through the news story, taking it all in.

  Of course, it had been all lights and cameras and news crews. Elliot Wright had called a rather sudden press conference that morning to announce that he had recently joined the ranks of those who had, over the past four years, started developing strange, supernatural abilities that were only comparable to the superheroes and villains from comic books and Japanese cartoons. A photograph of the sharply-dressed, attractive young man was captioned with a quote from the conference: “I fully intend to use this gift for the betterment of humanity, to help our race develop beyond any potential for ourselves we could’ve ever imagined.”

  The Field Agent’s lips pulled into a flat, tight line. No wonder W.A.R.D. wanted to get involved with this one. And fast.

  “According to TMZ and a bunch of left-wing bloggers, his publicity team didn’t want him discussing the details of his abilities, but he pretty much went ahead and gave them the middle finger.” Ronnie signaled to get off the highway at their exit, turning in her seat to check her blind spot without making eye contact with her friend and colleague. “He basically told the world he can see the future. The government wants to drag him in for questioning. Apparently China and Russia and a bunch of other countries are losing it. Huge shit show.”

  “Aww, and you bought me front-row tickets to it,” Cabe shot back with a wry smile. “You’re such a sweetheart.”

  Ronnie rolled her eyes again as she merged onto the I-5 North, immediately slowing down to match the sluggish speed of the weekday traffic. “Hey, I wasn’t the one who decided you’d make a good operative and dragged you in for assessment. You knew what you were getting yourself into – the American government isn’t exactly kind to Anomalies.”

  “Ameri
can, French... you hear about that call center in the U.K. who laid off all twelve of its Anomaly employees last week?”

  Ronnie pulled a very genuine face. “That’s revolting.”

  “Yeah... Apparently they found out someone in Sales could kinda-sorta read minds, and it pushed them over the edge. Bad publicity move.”

  “Or a good one,” scoffed Ronnie. “It isn’t as if the anti-Anomaly movement is an unpopular one. I mean, come on... we’re talking about ordinary, everyday human beings who, for some reason, have started to develop very non-ordinary abilities and powers ever since the Megaflare. This is the stuff of comics and video games, Cabe. People out there are losing their shit.”

  “Yeah, and I mean, it’s not like I don’t get that. I do. It is totally unnerving knowing that there are people out there who can run as fast as a Formula One car, or lift an entire semi over their heads –”

  “A woman in Michigan a few months ago created a pool of water in her hand and is still awaiting trial,” Ronnie countered, a hint of bitter spice flavoring her words.

  “Not everyone’s new abilities are so... minuscule,” Cabe asked flatly, to which Ronnie fell silent and returned her attention to the heavy traffic.

  “I’m just saying that not everyone is afraid of them and agrees with all the discrimination, but it’s understandable that people are concerned,” the Field Agent continued gently. “Some of those crazy religious zealots are even calling it a ‘kiss of God’, like it’s some kind of effed-up gift from the Heavens to help them with some earthly struggle. Not all of the right-wing can be brainwashed with the same type of bullshit propaganda.”

  Ronnie groaned. “That reminds me, my mom’s doing another rally in Idaho on Saturday.”

  “Oh, man.” Cabe winced sympathetically. “Did she ask you to go with her again?”