Empowered: Traitor (The Empowered Series Book 2)

by Dale Ivan Smith

  Somehow the children were hosting things that grew the unliving armor.

  I couldn’t put into words what I saw, or understand how the hell it worked. I didn’t want to.

  The vines weren’t vines. They were veins. The children’s mouths were open. I could see green fur growing on their tongues.

  I started to reach out with my power, stopped. What the hell could I do for them?

  I wanted to save them, but how? I pounded my fist against the glass. The kids didn’t react. Damn it. My wrist comm buzzed again. Had to be Simon, wondering why I wasn’t at the dock.

  I had to go. But I wasn’t leaving before I got proof this time of the horror show.

  I pulled the camera from its waterproof pouch on my belt. Took pictures through the glass. Zoomed in on the kids in the water. Tried not to throw up as I snapped photos.

  I swiped the pad by the outer door, and ran out, heart pounding. I hated myself for not staying and saving them, even if saving them meant killing them.

  I had to go. Had to tell Support about this place, about what I’d found.

  And there was that closet filled with Hero Council jumpsuits belonging to Titan. The HC was involved with this horror show, somehow.

  Just then the water exploded in the pool, and what looked like seaweed rose up, writhing like fucking snakes, like that willow thing. It came up out of the water and toward me.

  I lashed out with my power, but it was like Colombia again. My power slid off the thing. A huge green mass of ropey things writhed and pulsed, came toward me.

  I yanked my stunner out, and fired at the squirming mass. The tendrils writhed, and the thing stopped for an instant, but as I started to run, it moved again, and the whip-like extensions slithered onto the ledge, cutting me off from the exit.

  Trapped.

  I looked frantically around.

  There was a stack of liquid nitrogen canisters on a cart. I ran over to them as the plant’s snaking tentacles closed in. A hose ran from the one of the canisters to a sprayer. I lifted the sprayer, pointed it at the monster made of not seaweed, and pulled the trigger. Icy fog shot out.

  The tendrils spasmed and the thing retreated into the churning water.

  I sprinted for the exit, charging through the membrane. Clean ocean air greeted me, clean spray on my face. The sun was nearly up. The sky had lightened to blue.

  I didn’t look behind me.

  If I had brought a bomb, I would have used it back there, no matter what the hell Support would think. No matter what the consequences for an Empowered using a weapon like that. But I had no such thing.

  My arms shook with anger. My jaw was tight when I found Simon and the others waiting at the dock.

  Keisha took one look at my face. Her eyes widened, and she took a step away from me.

  Connor shrank back. Simon didn’t say a word.

  I held up my camera. “This time I have proof.”

  “Oh my god,” Keisha said.

  I nodded. We got in the boat and Simon started her up, while I mechanically untied the boat from the dock. We pulled away, heading out to sea.

  “That wasn’t all I found inside that nightmare back in the cave.”

  I put down my backpack and opened it. Pulled out the Hero Council blue jumpsuit and held it up so that the others could see the name on the breast.

  Their eyes got wide. Shock spread across their faces.

  I nodded. “Somehow the Hero Council is involved.” I knew one thing for sure. This would get the Inner Circle’s attention. There was something else. What would Zhukova and Winterfield say if I told them about this? Their sacred Hero Council, in bed with people that would create unliving freakshows and use children to spawn unliving battle armor.

  My hands gripped the railing so hard my bones ached.

  What if they already knew?

  Chapter 16

  Tacoma was a stinking dump of a city. Pulp mill stink was everywhere, like rotten eggs. I had left the others in Portland, and drove up by myself in the Dasher.

  Of course the Inner Circle would only meet with me, the cell leader. Yeah, I was treating Keisha like a mushroom and she had gotten up in my grill about it.

  I blew her off. I was in no mood to vent my rage on her for once. But what chance did I have of anyone believing me? Nada. I was an ex-con, a rogue Empowered. And no one knew I was working for the government, the same god damn government that let monsters like Ellis do whatever the hell he wanted to the world. Colombia and the Oregon coast were only the tip of the iceberg.

  Ellis was betraying humanity for his own ends, which were what? More profit? More money? How many bucks did you need to have before it was enough, or was it a game to billionaires like him?

  No different than gangers and rogue Empowered, except richer, a lot richer.

  “Meet me at the old Brown Factory,” Ashula had said.

  So there I was, parked two blocks away from a falling down mess of an abandoned building, the Puget Sound roiled by wind. It reminded me of Mutter and his damn cyclone, before I killed him.

  But that had been months ago, and in Seattle. At least the wind here broke up the stink from the pulp mills.

  Dead trees, killed for paper. Nothing I could do about that.

  I wore black jeans, brown calf-high boots, and a red sweater. I dressed like I wanted to for once. Be myself. No hoodies, and no damn jumpsuits. Black or blue, what was the difference?

  The world would be better off without Empowered. Except normals screwed things up just fine without us.

  I was in a foul mood by the time I reached the closed factory. It was a mess of broken windows, splintered glass, and brown walls covered in graffiti. A real eyesore, and no one gave a fuck because there was no money in it. The sun had gone down behind the hills to the west, and long shadows covered everything. But as I neared the front doors to the factory, the shadows grew around me. Then a shadow detached itself from the wall beside the door.

  Ashula Singh. She who had once been called Lady Night.

  “Mat, I see you can dress nicely when you choose to,” she said, in that Indian accented voice of hers, that accent that made her seem so polished.

  “Yeah, sometimes,” I said. I was in no mood for small talk. I hefted the duffle bag.

  “I come bearing gifts.”

  She nodded, and opened the right hand door. “Then follow me.”

  The place was gutted, just cracked concrete flooring and bare supporting columns below iron support beams. I had no idea what kind of factory the Brown Factory had been.

  Ashula closed the door behind me. The darkness grew around me.

  Damn them and their spook games. The Scourge was no different than Support with its secret dungeons and sensory deprivation crap suits.

  “Too dark and you won’t see what I brought for you.”

  “All in due time, Ms. Brandt,” a male voice said. It took me a second, but I recognized the voice. I’d heard it back in the day, on television news and interview shows, and on the radio.

  There had been two men with that voice.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “We appreciate the effort you have gone to, going beyond what had been requested.”

  David Drake. Or was it Daniel Drake? It was one of the twins. Hazard and Halo, stars of the Hero Council once upon a freaking time. Then Halo went bad and formed the Scourge. Or so the story went.

  When Winterfield and Alex recruited me to be an agent for Support, they told me they thought David Drake had survived, that Daniel Drake, who’d stayed on the Hero Council, had died heroically.

  But they were identical twins, and Support was going off Intel which could be crap.

  So the voice belonged to one of the two Empowered twins killed in the Mojave showdown at the Scourge’s old desert fortress, back when they had challenged the Hero Council directly and paid the price.

  Just like my old group the Renegades had earlier.

  “Which Drake are you?” I asked, finally, not able to ke
ep quiet any longer.

  “Does it matter? I was once one of the Drake twins. Now I am only one.”

  “What do I call you?” I said. “I’m not just going to say, hey you all the time.”

  Ashula laughed softly, but Drake didn’t.

  “You could call me Drake.” His voice was calm, eerie calm like, not ice cold calm or barely controlling my rage calm. Calm like he’d seen things no one else had, and it changed how he saw the world calm. Yeah, all that from his voice.

  “Okay.”

  “Or you could call me by my Empowered name.” Maybe this would tell me which twin he was, Halo or Hazard.

  “Nefarious.”

  Nefarious. Of course. That was what David Drake, the one who’d gone bad, had called himself. I wanted to laugh, but the laugh died in my throat. He sounded so sincere, so focused.

  “Nefarious to our foes,” he said.

  A shiver ran through me. I swallowed. Whatever. I wasn’t letting back-from-the-dead Drake mess with my head.

  “I have a few things you’ll want to see,” I said.

  “You have a charming way of putting things,” Ashula said. Her voice came from right beside me, a slender shadow.

  “Yes, the Emerald Biologic assignment,” Drake—Nefarious said. His voice turned dark. “You exceeded the boundaries of that assignment.”

  “I did, because we had a lead, and I didn’t want to waste it.”

  “You should have contacted Ashula. That decision wasn’t yours to make, Mat Brandt.”

  I felt like I was talking to Zhukova again. Picking everything I said apart.

  But he hadn’t been there.

  “Do you know what I found in Colombia?” My face was hot. So what if this guy was Nefarious, the big bad leader of the Inner Circle. “A fucking freak show!” I spit the words.

  Drake barely raised his voice. “You claimed you encountered modified normals, who had had some sort of artificial plant life grafted onto them for purposes unknown.”

  Purposes unknown. What a way to put it.

  “Ellis and Emerald Biologic are treating people like lab rats.” My voice rose. “I found more of the same on the Coast, yesterday!” My blood ran cold at the memory. Damn it. I couldn’t lose it, not here, not in front of them. The people in charge always acted the same, stupid, bullshit way.

  “All you care about is finding a weapon. People are being turned into things.”

  “Enough!” His shout was like a bang. When Nefarious spoke again, his voice was back to eerie calm. “What we care about is finding a way to overturn the order the so-called Hero Council has imposed on the world. Weapons are one way to do that.”

  I crossed my arms. “You can’t ignore what Ellis is doing. He’s creating nightmares, warping people and plants. Making new, alien things.”

  Silence.

  “Dial back the darkness,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Ashula said.

  “Let there be light. I have stuff to show you.”

  She hesitated.

  “Her anger is her truth,” Nefarious said. “It’s all right.” He said that with sudden tenderness it almost made me embarrassed to be there. There was something very close between the two of them.

  The darkness became deep shadow. It was night outside. Yellow streetlight reflected off broken glass on the far side of the factory. I could just make out Ashula, her face beautiful. Next to her was the shadowy figure of a tall man. His eyes glittered green in the street light. His hair was blond, fell to his shoulders. He wore black.

  “Show us what is in the bag,” he said.

  I knelt beside the duffel bag, unzipped it, pulled out the panel. I palmed a penlight, flicked it on and played the beam over the shimmering green-black surface. The panel was quiet in my mind. I don’t think it was dead, not yet.

  Nefarious knelt next to me, reached out and stroked the panel. “Living armor.”

  “Unliving,” I said. “It’s like a combination of plant life and something new, inside some sort of composite.”

  “Interesting way to put it.” He looked at me. I could make out his face now. He had been handsome once, but now was covered in thick, livid white burn scars.

  “Yes, I’ve looked better,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I blurted.

  “These scars opened my eyes,” he said. “It was the pain ritual the truth imposed on me.”

  I blinked. How could I answer that? I didn’t even try. The fire that caused that scarring must have been very hot for him not to heal from it.

  Ashula bent down, lifted the panel. “It is light.”

  “Yes.”

  “What else did you find?” Nefarious asked.

  I hefted the computer. “Information. My team pulled three drives, as well as paper files, and two more of those canisters, one loaded, one empty, and some kind of little scuttling plant thing, in a cage. Also video.”

  We’d only watched a bit of it, but it showed Ellis visiting the facility, speaking with scientists. What kind of person films this? Someone who thinks they are doing the right thing, I guess.

  I paused. How did Simon put it? “Weaponized unlife.” I was suddenly very tired. I pressed a knuckle into my thigh. Focus.

  “There is something else, isn’t there?” Ashula watched me closely.

  “Yeah. A bombshell.”

  “It must be quite a bombshell given what you’ve already shown us,” Nefarious said.

  “Yeah, you could say that.” I pulled the jumpsuit halfway out of the duffel bag, ran the penlight’s beam over it, plucked at the fabric until I found the gold HC emblem and then to the other side, to the name “Titan.”

  The air suddenly felt very still.

  Nefarious leaned closer. “Where did you find this?”

  “In a monitoring room inside the lab I told you about on the Oregon Coast.”

  “What were they monitoring?” Ashula asked.

  I took my camera out of its carrying case, turned it on, and showed them the screen. Flicked through the pictures.

  Ashula’s eyes widened, while Nefarious’s face turned ugly as he watched.

  I finished. “I did tell the truth about Colombia.”

  Tears streaked Ashula’s face. A muscle in Nefarious’s face twitched.

  “Titan’s Hero Council jumpsuit means he must have been there, right?” I asked them. “There were several of these with his name on it, in a closet in that monitoring room.”

  Ashula and Nefarious looked at each other. Something passed between them. For a moment, I felt another twinge of envy at their secret connection.

  “This changes our plans,” she said.

  Nefarious glanced down at the jumpsuit in my hands. “It does.” He stood.

  “Thank you, Mat, for taking the lead in investigating this.”

  “What happens next?”

  His voice dropped an octave. “We need to collect more information.” There was a sudden, vicious strength in those words.

  Good.

  Chapter 17

  Nefarious didn’t say how the information was going to be obtained. “Just be ready to aid us.”

  Fine. I was good with that.

  I wasn’t back home for more than two minutes when there was a knock on the door. Keisha and Connor weren’t around, so I answered. It was Alex, in full Grunge Dude mode.

  His hair hung over one eye, and the beard stubble was especially thick today.

  “Hey, uh, Mat, I need your help.”

  Perfect timing. Imagine that.

  “Yeah, I figured as much.” My roomies might be away, but the place could be bugged. God, it was like living in a fishbowl.

  I jerked my head toward the street. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Alex ambled alongside me, looking from side to side, doing his slacker slouch walk. We rounded the corner, past the rusting hulk of an ancient Ford pickup.

  “Let me guess, you want to know what’s going on with me?” I asked him.

  He straightened up at my t
one. “Hey, I am concerned.”

  “Bullshit. You just need information for your report.”

  The gray sky and the drizzling rain didn’t help my mood.

  A discarded Oregon Journal lay like a dead fish on the wet sidewalk. The cover showed Brandon Ellis at some gig in San Francisco—“The New King of BioTech?” The headline asked.

  Shit. I grabbed the moldering paper and tore it in half, ripped it again until it was just wet chunks of newsprint, then threw it on a weed-covered lawn.

  I reached out and brought the crabgrass there back to life, urged it to grow until the newspaper scraps had vanished.

  “Mat, what is wrong?” Alex looked so concerned, his face suddenly sympathetic.

  “You figure it out!” I snapped, and strode down the sidewalk, hands in my jacket pocket, shoulders hunched. “It shouldn’t be hard.”

  He ran to catch up, walked alongside me, suddenly not even trying to be the Grunge Dude.

  He put a hand on my arm. I shook it off. Shoved him. He backpedaled, half fell but managed to stand on his feet.

  “Calm down,” he said in a low voice.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. I’m right to be pissed.”

  He gave me a long look. “Let’s get back to walking,” he said.

  I suddenly felt five years old again. He started off. I shook my head, anger still twisting my insides, and then followed him.

  He led me across an intersection, and to a grass covered bank overlooking the Willamette River.

  I put my hands on my hips, raised my chin. “This supposed to make me feel good?”

  “No. You don’t want to feel good.”

  That hit me like a slap. It would be damn easy to shove him off the cliff.

  “You want to know why I’m so pissed?” I stepped close. “Do you? I’ll tell you. Because that fucker Ellis is out to turn the world into a nightmare, and you and the rest of Support won’t do a thing about it.”

  He held up a hand. “Hold on, Mat. Tell me why you think he’s trying to do that.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. You can’t tell me Support doesn’t know what this asshole is up to.” I was so angry I coughed so hard I bent over, kept coughing.