“The guy jumped out at me, okay?” I folded my arms. “Jackie says this isn’t insurmountable—”
“Jackie’s job is infinitely harder because you keep giving the press terrible things to say about you,” Phillips said, in a low growl. “She’s got the grace to try and deal with it. I don’t know how she does. If it were me in her job, I’d be telling you something different right now, like where to go and what to do with yourself when you get there.” He drew up to his full height, which was considerable. “But I’m not going to tell you where to go, or what to do when you get there. I’m just going to tell you that right now, you can’t be here.”
My eyes fluttered as I processed that. “Wait … are you firing me?”
“You’re suspended,” Phillips said. “Two weeks, no pay.”
“Can you even do that?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a civil servant—”
“You assaulted a civilian while off duty,” he said, “hell, yes, I can suspend you for that. This isn’t watching porn at your desk. The government does have rules against hitting people who … well, who legally don’t deserve it.”
I grudgingly reached for the olive branch he offered in there. “I like how you added the word ‘legally’ in there.”
“In spite of whatever you think, Sienna,” Phillips said, and his face flashed in an otherworldly way, looking gaunt and spectral, just for a second, “I’m not your enemy. Not personally. My job coming here was to get this agency out of the spotlight and reduce the number of PR catastrophes that the White House has to answer for. It’s two months to the election and you’re not making my—or the re-election campaign’s—job any easier. It’s like you’re trying to hand the presidency to Robb Foreman.”
“I’m not,” I said, lowering my gaze to the edge of his desk, a wooden model that used to be mine. Not that I’d be terribly upset if Robb Foreman were president; he’d be a fair sight better than Gerard “Gerry” Harmon, the twat. I knew who I was voting for on the first Thursday in November, that much was certain.
Though I had my doubts, if things kept going the way they were going, that Robb Foreman would be able to keep me on even if he won.
The light flashed in the room, and I saw an old stone table in place of the wooden one for a moment before it snapped back to real. “It’s wonderful how I can achieve a fantastic apprehension rate in my job,” I said, “prevent six major metahuman incidents this year, yet still get sacrificed on the altar of politics and media.”
“Don’t play martyr on me,” Phillips said stiffly. He said everything stiffly. “Any cop in the U.S. would be getting their ass handed to them right now for hitting a journo off the clock. They’d probably be looking at a lot more than a suspension. This is not acceptable behavior in a civilized society.”
“You know he wanted to get hit, right?”
“Yeah, I’m sure his life’s ambition was fulfilled the day you broke his jaw,” Phillips said.
“Well, everyone knows his name now,” I said. “You can’t deny it got him some fame.”
“Maybe, but his fifteen minutes is going to be up soon,” Phillips said, “I only wish yours was.”
The way he said it was like a spear delivered right to the center of my chest. “I wish it was, too.”
I looked out the window behind him, and the green lawn flashed white, snow mounds piled high in drifts, like rolling hills sprung out of the flat earth. It was that way for a few seconds, then it went back to the lawn. I shook the afterimage out of my head.
“Two weeks,” Phillips said, drawing me back into our conversation.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked, dragging my ass out of the chair.
“I don’t care,” Phillips said. “Think long and hard about whether you really want to stay here, because your days at this agency are drawing to a close if you keep acting the way you’re acting.”
“The way I’m acting?” I resisted the urge to throw the chair at him. “I can barely leave the campus anymore, because the press follows me every chance they get.”
“Maybe you should fly away next time,” he said.
“I don’t run,” I said, my temper rising. I could feel the heat in my face.
Phillips’ face turned cold—very cold. His broad cheeks narrowed and thinned before my eyes, revealing a thin face that was heavily lined. The green behind him disappeared, and the desk turned to a stone table, the office décor morphing into something eerily familiar.
Erich Winter’s office.
“Maybe you simply do not belong here,” Winter said, his breath frosting in the air.
“This is the only job I’ve ever had,” I said, saying the exact words to him that I’d said to Phillips at this point in the conversation.
“Then maybe you don’t belong anywhere,” he said, and the chill in the room rose, driving the heat from my cheeks. The glass frosted over, a sheet of ice forming on its surface.
I ignored the barbed comment. “What are you going to do without me if a meta threat shows up?”
“I know this will come as a great surprise to you,” Winter said as the roof opened up and snow began to pour in, heavy white flakes covering the ground a foot in a few seconds, “but somehow we will manage without you.”
“With who? Reed?” I scoffed, but a nervous, sick feeling permeated the depths of my belly. “He’s not ready. He doesn’t have the nerve to do what needs to be done.”
“Perhaps what we need is less of your particular variety of nerve,” Winter said as the room continued to fill with snow. It was past my knees now, the chill seeping through my legs and into my bones. “Perhaps a steadier hand would serve us better.”
“You don’t know what’s out there,” I said, shaking my head. My cheeks were red from the arctic wind that was roaring through the office now. “You won’t be able to manage without me.”
“That’s your ego talking,” Winter said. “The world endured a very long time before Sienna Nealon was born. Societal collapse will hardly follow if you were to simply … disappear.” I heard the ghost of Phillips voice append, “for a while,” to the end of that statement, like a whisper somewhere beyond the howling winds.
“I don’t mean to go quietly into the night,” I said. The snows were up to my chest, crushing me. I felt trapped, afraid, but let none of it come out in my voice.
“You are nothing but a footnote in history,” Winter said, and this was all him, his voice strong. “You will die nearly unremembered, at the feet of the mob that once embraced you as its hero. How quickly they forget, how slowly they forgive, and how complete is the scouring of the bones of their victims.” He stepped through the snow like it was nothing, towered over me as the cold reached my chin and mouth and flooded in before I could make reply. “You don’t belong anywhere. As you said, you live apart from humanity, and humanity will not mourn you when you die … alone.”
With that the snows surrounding my limbs, flooding into my mouth, shot through with a hard blue frost that turned everything liquid to solid ice. I choked soundlessly, my throat constricted and filled by the frost that was going to swallow me whole.
60.
Reed
“What the hell is going on here?” Phillips asked again. His face was redder the second time around, and he completely ignored Augustus’s painkiller-induced levity, which was a shame, because if ever there was a moment that needed levity, this was it.
“Sienna is in a coma,” Isabella said, forming the explanation before I could come up with it.
“Then why is Harper picking up heat flares from the medical unit, that look like Cunningham is in here?” Phillips asked, stepping a little further into the room. I could see black-suited security men behind him, armed well past the teeth. They were armed at least to the foreheads, with rifles and submachine guns and maybe bazookas, I dunno.
“She’s under psychic attack,” Zollers said, his soothing voice carrying a little extra gusto. “She’s lashing out blindly with her powers.”
&nb
sp; “Who are you?” Phillips asked, but not in as nasty a way as he could have.
“Dr. Quinton Zollers. I’m a consultant.”
“Right,” Phillips said, nodding. “Okay. Consulting for who? Because we’re not paying you. Let’s just get that out there right now.”
“Right to the purse strings,” Ariadne said with a sigh.
“He’s consulting to try and save this place from becoming ground zero in a nuclear detonation,” I said, wading into the fray. “Because Sienna could make Cunningham’s work at the airport look like a four-year-old’s sparkler on the Fourth of July.”
“She was supposed to be out of here,” Phillips said.
“Someone had other plans,” I said.
Phillips’s eyes narrowed. “Was this coma induced?”
I swiveled my head to Isabella, who shrugged faintly. “Probably,” she said. “This sort of thing does not happen naturally in metas, and she’s got something in her blood that’s causing a reaction.”
“So she’s poisoned,” Phillips said, mulling it over. “She can’t stay here.”
That casual drop-in left me stunned, and it took me a few seconds to recover. “What? You can’t move her now!”
“Why not?” Phillips asked. “Presumably you did, unless she was hiding in the closet when I came through earlier.”
“She needs care,” I said. “She needs—”
“She needs to not blow up in the middle of civilization,” Phillips said, “and preferably not in the middle of the response unit that’s currently hunting two dangerous fugitives in the area.”
“If you move her,” Zollers said, “we won’t be able to contain her.”
Phillips’s face twitched, just a little. “Can you contain her here?”
“Maybe not,” Zollers said, and oh, how I wish he had lied. You’d think he’d be good at it, what with being a former spy and telepath and all that.
“Get her out of here,” Phillips snapped and pointed at the door. “Get her in a car and drive west, the hell away from here—”
“She’s spiking!” Zollers shouted, and the medical unit became a chaotic free-for-all in an instant.
Sienna’s skin glowed blue, hotter than I’d seen her go before. Scott was already moving, directing water from a free-flowing sink in the corner into a floating ovoid shape, just hovering it over her. The dirt that Augustus had piled on as mud earlier was spread out on the bed and floor around Sienna, and I watched as it coalesced below her, flowing like water to cover her chest and legs, completely blocking out the flames. Scott’s water dropped, seeping into the soil shell that Augustus had created. Steam began to hiss, the soil began to glow—
“This one’s bad,” Zollers said, voice back to calm, but I could barely hear him over the hiss of the steam. The temporary entombment around my sister began to glow a harsh orange, cracks appearing in steadily widening fissures around it. Scott kept pouring water over it, and soon that entire corner of the room was obscured. Isabella scrambled away again, coat flapping behind her, her silken gown showing beneath it as she stooped in her barefooted run.
“You should have told me what was happening immediately,” Phillips said over my shoulder, voice laden with fury.
“You know why I didn’t?” I shot back, not taking my eyes off the steam-filled corner where my sister was baking. “This. This right here. Here we are, in the middle of a crisis, and you want to cast her out to explode on her own—”
“Where she won’t hurt anyone, yes,” Phillips said.
“She’s going to blow up as we’re transporting her off campus, dumbass!” I shouted at him. “Unless we’re working to contain this, she’s going to go off like a bomb and we’ll all die, and then she’ll just keep going off until she’s dead and the countryside around her is completely nuked. Maybe over and over for days, who knows?” My jaw hardened, my eyes cornered him and wouldn’t let him loose. “We’re trying to stop that from happening, and you’re trying to screw it up. Stop doing that!”
“I’m trying to keep this from getting worse,” he said. “You should have moved her the second this started. Your head is so far up your own ass that you can’t see clearly. You should have someone who wasn’t emotionally involved in this crisis giving the orders, telling you what to do—”
“Maybe I’ve had enough of you telling me what to do,” I said, and felt wind flare from the tips of my fingers. “Especially when it’s clear you don’t give a fig if she lives or dies.”
“Security,” Phillips said, menacing. “We need to move Ms. Nealon out of—”
“Belay that!” I shot back.
“You will follow my orders,” Phillips said over his shoulder, not bothering to look back at the black-clad men behind him.
“You’ll get us all killed,” I shouted, not daring to look away from my death glare at Phillips.
Phillips’s eyes narrowed, and the steam drifted in front of his face, making it look like he was breathing smoke out of his nose and ears. “You—”
A flare of fire interrupted him, pulsating orange and red and nearly blinding me, but this time, it didn’t come from Sienna.
It came from the hallway outside the medical unit, and it consumed the entire security team in its angry heat. The men in black danced and writhed, fire rolling up their bodies as it covered them in its hot embrace, sending black clouds billowing up to the ceiling. The clatter of their weapons falling out of their hands was nearly drowned out by their screams, and one by one the men followed, lumps of organic matter slowly cooking, the smell of burning meat overcoming the steam.
Out of the smoke, two figures emerged. I blinked as they drifted out of the leading edge, features fuzzy but becoming clear in seconds. The one in the back I knew as Cunningham immediately; his hangdog look and slumped shoulders obvious even before he cleared the black clouds.
The other, it took me a moment to identify. When last I’d seen him, he was scarred from head to toe. Now, his skin was new, flushed with pride, or pleasure or maybe even the simple effort of holding his breath as he trod through our burning security men. Either way, there was no hiding the satisfaction on Anselmo Serafini’s newly-formed face as he stepped out of the smoke to face me. “And now we meet again, Mr. Treston,” he said, “for the last time.”
And I knew, one way or another, that he was right.
61.
Sienna
The ice was suffocating, choking, killing me slowly. It covered every limb, to the tips of my fingers and toes, and washed me with a numb burning that felt like slow fire was licking at my nerve endings. I could feel it in a way I shouldn’t have been able to if it really had been fire. It was in my nostrils and sinuses, numbing my brain and burning it, all in one. I was immobile, railing against the strength of the hard ice that secured me in place, pain lancing through me from bottom to top, and I had no recourse but to stand there and feel it, feel every bit of it.
I stood there for a minute, for an hour, for an age. I flexed my fingers ineffectually, I tried to curl up without success, I screamed and cried to the heavens for help.
Shapes and shadows moved outside my frigid prison. I saw them distorted, as if through a glass, a spider web of imperfections in the ice giving the shapes a funhouse mirror look.
I saw an eye—blue, but not the blue of Winter and bereft of the green that flecked my mother’s. I saw dark hair, a young face that was too distorted to be handsome. I heard a voice, muffled, unfamiliar. “Uhhh … did I catch you at a bad time?”
For obvious reasons, I did not answer.
I saw him move, saw him work, saw him try to free me, but to no effect. “I, uh … guess I’ll come back some other time. Sorry.”
I screamed and I screamed at him, but he didn’t hear a word of it.
I waited another age. Day and night moved steadily overhead, the sun and moon visible in my burning, painful prison.
I wanted to go home.
… but I didn’t have one.
I wanted to see my friends
.
… but I didn’t have any.
The ice hardened and set, the sun disappeared, and the moon as well. The darkness closed in on me like four iron walls had been dropped in around me.
I was alone.
Again.
Cut off from the world.
Again.
In the box.
Again.
Forever.
I am death, I said to myself. And the world would be a much happier place without me.
I closed my eyes.
The sound of a faint tapping reached my ears, a subtle vibration in the ice that sounded like someone putting their fingernail against wood, over and over again. It was slow, steady, and gradually maddening.
It grew louder, then louder still, and I opened my eyes, which had never really been shut. A faint light had appeared in the distance, glowing like a penlight in a dark room, but far away, across a moonless night at sea.
Leave me be, I said, for I am death, and you don’t want any of this.
“Nice,” a familiar voice said, reverberating through the ice. “But I’m pretty sure death talks a little more formal. Probably doesn’t say, ‘you don’t want any of this.’ I’m guessing he would have gone with, ‘You will receive naught but the taste of ash and grave from me!’ With an exclamation point, for emphasis, see.”
I tried to frown, but my face was frozen. Who are you?
“It’s me,” he said, and I knew it was a he. The light was larger now, like a headlamp in the fog at midnight.
Me who?
“You’ll see,” he said, and the tapping was now a pecking, the sound of frost being chipped away. The light was an open door to my room, his silhouette like that of a parent checking on their child in the darkness of slumber.
Whatever, I said.
“Death definitely wouldn’t say ‘whatever.’ Death is not a teenage girl.”
Tormented Page 27
