Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  He looked back to Morgan and saw that same muted, horrified look. He felt … small. In a way that, ironically, he had never felt before. He wished he was smaller still, small enough to escape their notice, and the desire to retreat, to run away from this, his greatest failure, won out—

  And Greg turned and left, halting steps carrying him back toward his workshop with uncertainty, wondering if he would ever feel welcome—or as if he even belonged—in his own home again.

  42.

  Sienna

  I woke up on the couch to the sound of the TV playing at probably level one of fifty, so muted that only a meta could have heard what was being said on it. As I slipped into a dim consciousness, I became aware that the sun was up outside, shining faintly through the thick, yellowed window shades like light through construction paper. My mouth was dry and cottony, like I was working my way through a hangover even though I hadn’t had a drop to drink last night. My shoulders were killing me, which was a thing that should not have happened with Wolfe on the job—

  Sorry, Wolfe said. Working on it.

  My shoulders unkinked, the healing power running through me and restoring vitality to my weary limbs. I felt a little of that morning weakness in my hands, though it faded quickly. Even weakened, my hands were probably still strong enough to break a few boulders. I clenched a fist with my right hand, then the left, and wondered what that crunching noise was, because it sounded like somebody else actually was breaking boulders—

  I sat up to find Friday sitting at the table in the corner of the room, munching a bowl of cereal. He ate quite daintily, like he was trying to show off his table manners. Under other circumstances, it would have seemed odd, but given I was a fugitive on the run while trying to save him from a relentless assassin, Friday’s delicate mouthfuls of cereal took a distant backseat to nearly getting nuked last night. Strange days.

  “Hey,” he said, barely turning his head to acknowledge my wakeup. “I saved you some Basic 4.”

  “Thanks,” I said, massaging my neck, not because it hurt, but because my fingers kneading the muscle felt soooo good. When no one can touch you without losing their soul, sometimes it’s easy to forget how nice human touch feels. “You know, for saving me my own cereal.” I yawned and sat up, glancing at the TV.

  Predictably, it was all still coverage of my night in LA, a very serious news reporter standing in front of the scene with a yellow radiation suit covering most of his body and a slightly nervous look on his face. “—still have no idea of the whereabouts of Sienna Nealon, though the FBI is said to be more aggressively stepping up their hunt for her.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” I said, stifling another yawn, “because I’d hate to think they were just sitting around being lazy asses given everything they’ve done to me up to this point. Hunting me with drones and satellites and F-22s and metahuman tactical teams from Eastern Europe and whatnot.”

  That was me, Harmon said. Without me, they probably won’t use the military against you. Probably.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I said, “since my current opponent has attacked me with a Comanche helicopter, an F-35B, an M2 machine gun, and a nuclear bomb so far. It’s like getting hunted by the military, but without any rules of engagement.”

  “The good news is,” Friday said, “there’s only one other RAH-66 Comanche in existence, so if you can wipe that out, you won’t have to worry about those anymore.” He said that shit with a straight face, munching on his cereal.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to contain my sarcasm and oh, so failing, “but then he can just switch down to—what’s the next step down in assault helicopters? The AH-64 Apache? And there are probably thousands of those?”

  How do you know these military vehicle designations? Harmon asked. I never paid attention to that and I was the Commander-in-Chief.

  “My mother made me study every major weapons system and all the firearms employed by every military around the world,” I said. “It was part of my social studies and self-defense curriculum.”

  “Neat-o,” Friday said, pausing with the spoon almost at his lips, milk dripping down into the bowl. “I bet that beat the hell out of my boring-ass World Studies course. And gym class.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded, looking back to the TV. The chyron at the bottom was predictable, too: SIENNA NEALON TOPS FBI MOST WANTED LIST AFTER NUCLEAR INCIDENT IN LOS ANGELES. Big letters. Small minds. “Do you think they’ve noticed that I don’t have the ability to irradiate an area?” I snorted mirthlessly, because inside I felt like I was dying. “Not that anyone cares at this point.”

  “Are you feeling sorry for yourself?” Friday was crunching cereal as he spoke, so I got a great view of him annihilating the multi-grain flakes and raisins as he chewed with his mouth open. “Because, if you ask me—”

  “I didn’t ask you,” I said. “Because I was sure your opinion would be stupid.”

  Properly chastened, he shut his mouth and chewed. “Okay,” he said, shrugged off my shot like it was nothing, and went back to watching the TV as the nervous anchor continued his report from the sight of his impending, lethal cancer—or at least that’s how he made it sound. So brave, two hundred yards from ground zero on a nuke that didn’t even bring down the building ten yards from where it went off. He probably wouldn’t even see a dip in his fertility from this, though heaven knew the gene pool would have been better off if he had. Hell, he’d take more radiation from a dental X-ray.

  “Regardless of the outcome,” Mr. Serious TV reporter was saying, white with fear but talking in his I’M A SERIOUS PERSON TELLING YOU SOMETHING SUPER SERIOUS voice, “it’s become very obvious that Sienna Nealon is a threat which simply can’t be contained.”

  “Well, no shit,” I said. “What was your first clue? That the FBI has been hunting me for six months and come up with dick to show for it?”

  “They’re going to kill you,” Friday said.

  “They’re going to try,” I said tightly. Of course he was right, which was annoying. With Scott in charge of the investigation, and after my coercive truce with Phillips, things had reached a nice little detente. I wasn’t going to go rubbing the government’s nose in the fact that they weren’t very good at tracking me or fighting me, and they weren’t going to expend their limited resources in this ridiculous manhunt anymore. Or so it seemed.

  And then along came this bullshit.

  “I think the gloves are really coming off this time,” Friday said. “Remember, I was on the team when Harmon ordered you killed. And don’t get me wrong, we came after you hard. But coming after you that way and having you come back at us—it was kinda like a street fight. Short, brutal, over faster than you might think if you’re up against Sienna Nealon.”

  “Thanks, I think?”

  “But the way they’re going to do this … it’ll be a steady series of fights like that,” Friday said, crunching. “Over and over. Wearying. They’ll just keep after you, no breaks, really, until they grind you down.” He took a sloppy spoonful and it ran dribbling down his chin, which was covered in thin whiskers. “And then, sooner or later … one of those first shots they take, the ones that come without warning … it’s gonna hit you. Maybe in the brain, make it over quick. Maybe in the spine, hobble you. Death by a thousand papercuts. But they’ll get you. They’ll make it as quick as they can. Merciful, almost, because they won’t want to chance you healing. But that’s how it’s going to go.”

  I just sat there, realizing Friday had laid out a pretty reasonable scenario for the death of Sienna Nealon. It should have sent a little cold chill down my spine, but … I’d recently looked death pretty hard in the face, and he was right about the weariness. Even after counseling with Zollers for the last couple months, and trying to take positive action to turn my life around …

  … There was only so much you could do as a wanted fugitive who was always on the run. My body was in shape, my mind was sharp, but …

  The US Government was going to hunt me and hunt m
e and hunt me now. Hunt me until I had nothing left or catch me unawares and splatter my brains in a wider dispersal than June Randall had done in that bank in Florida, really decorate a wall somewhere with them. And that’d be that. Maybe they’d hang a plaque to commemorate the spot where it happened.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath. These were grim thoughts, even for me, but I could almost feel the noose tightening around my neck. I looked back at the TV, where they’d switched to a panel discussion of how awful I was.

  “—is just emblematic of how impotent our government’s response is, in so many ways, to a critical threat to our security.” This was coming from a congresswoman from New Jersey. “Seeing the FBI’s hamfisted, Keystone Cops response to her is—well, it’s very disheartening.”

  “I find myself agreeing with the congresswoman,” a grinning pundit from DC said, dressed in a dapper suit with a purple pocket square jutting out of his left breast, all jaunty and flared. “If the FBI can’t handle this very basic function, maybe we need to look at a new agency to handle this threat. Something more specialized, a sort of ATF for metahumans.”

  “You had one of those,” I muttered under my breath. “And you decided to roll it into the FBI.”

  I decided that, actually, Harmon said. Because the person who was running it was the very definition of a loose cannon.

  “Phillips was a loose cannon?” I cracked. I knew he meant me, though technically he was wrong.

  “—but either way,” the pundit was saying, “the response is, to use the congresswoman’s phrase, impotent. It really is. Pathetic. The Gondry Administration may have inherited Harmon’s weakness in this regard, but he could choose to right the ship here.”

  “Do you think,” the anchor butted in, wearing what I assumed to be his version of a pensive look (but which I took as seriously constipated), “that perhaps President Gondry fears Sienna Nealon’s response? Based on what is alleged to have happened to his predecessor?”

  “You mean the rumors that Sienna Nealon killed President Harmon?” The pundit was still grinning while casually mentioning a presidential assassination, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because he was enjoying the thought or because he was having fun tossing that out there.

  The congresswoman looked like she’d caught some of the anchor’s constipation. “We need to be a little careful about throwing that accusation around. ‘Alleged’ is the right word—”

  “Oh, come on, Jane,” the pundit said, still grinning, “why are we tiptoeing around this? Everyone knows that Sienna Nealon had some kind of hand in President Harmon’s disappearance. She is an active threat to the safety of this country, our people and our very democracy.” I almost had to admire the casual way he pronounced me a dire threat to every damned thing while still smiling.

  “He seems pleased with himself,” Friday said.

  “Yeah, almost like he’s not actually worried about me swooping down and Harmon-ing him,” I said. I looked at the name at the bottom of the screen: Russ Bilson.

  That guy, Harmon said. Ugh.

  Ugh? I asked. Why, ugh?

  He’s a party functionary, Harmon said. I inherited him from my predecessor. He gladhanded donors during the campaign, and got hired to do some policy work in the background of the administration. I showed him the door when I took over and started setting up my own team.

  So you know this douche? I asked.

  Never met him, Harmon sniffed. Too low on the ladder. Not worth my time.

  “—but what the Congresswoman is not saying,” Russ Bilson, still grinning, said, “is that while they can’t build the case, every major government agency knows that Nealon did it. Building a case against a meta who can fly and crash through walls and kill with a touch is a lot harder than busting some punk with a gun who held up a liquor store. So they may not be prepared to call it, because the evidence is lacking, but I’m telling you—serious people in the government know she murdered President Harmon. It happened. We may never know exactly how it happened, but my sources assure me it did. No doubt in their minds.”

  “That’s stunning, if true,” the anchor said, still serious and needing to poop. “What do you suppose the motive—I mean, what do your sources say the motive was for this action?”

  “It seems pretty obvious to anyone with a brain,” Russ Bilson said, so smug I wanted to slap all the teeth out of him. “Harmon was spearheading a manhunt for Nealon. She reacted as we’ve seen her react on any number of occasions—or overreact—and she went after what she perceived to be the source of her problems. And, honestly, she might have been very savvy in doing so, because since President Gondry took the oath, I think we can all agree that the effort to hunt her down has been halfhearted at best. Certainly not the response we’d expect for a multiple murderer and suspected presidential assassin who has just now gone and perpetrated a nuclear attack on one of our foremost cities—”

  “Oh, you can stick your crooked, speculative head right up your ass,” I said, snatching up the remote and clicking the power button so hard the plastic cracked a little. I did that sometimes—or worse—when things got heated on TV shows where I was the subject.

  Friday had stopped crunching his cereal. He picked up the box and poured himself another, doused it with milk in the silence, then stuck his spoon in like he was about to dig a grave or something, leaving it sticking up slightly until it started to sag down. “This stuff really gets to you, doesn’t it? People talking crap about you on TV and the internet?”

  “Congratulations on having eyes,” I said, fuming.

  “Okay,” he said. “You know you didn’t nuke LA. You know you didn’t murder Harmon in cold blood.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “So …” He picked up the spoon, but cradled it in his hand, not bringing it closer to his mouth, like it was in a holding pattern. I could almost sense the flakes turning soggy. “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “Because now everyone thinks I did,” I said. Duh. Obvious. He didn’t seem to get it, so I added, “Because perception is reality.”

  He shoved a spoonful in his mouth and then talked around it again. Gross. “No it isn’t. Reality is reality. Just because I perceive pi is 8.9 instead of 3.14 blah blah blah, it doesn’t make it so.”

  I looked at Friday, thinking … he seemed slightly smarter right now than he usually did. He was also deflated, no hint of the usual bulk, and I wondered, not for the first time, if his brainpower suffered when he used his powers. It would make a lot of sense, actually.

  I could have pointed out to him that after his last couple of farfetched stories, he was the last person who should be lecturing me on reality, but …

  Damn. He was right. Sort of.

  He was also back to casually eating his cereal, as though he’d forgotten we were talking. “It’s because I feel like … the world is against me, I guess.” He looked up, stopping his eating again, so I took it as a sign to go on. “It’s not easy to live knowing everyone hates you.”

  “Not everyone,” he said.

  “No, not absolutely everyone,” I said. “But things like this don’t help. I mean, I’m getting the blame for this thing, and that can’t make people feel warmer and fuzzier toward me. It’s a lie, but it fits their perception of the truth, so … boom. Some people—maybe a lot of them, maybe most, I don’t know—believe it. And they hate me more.” I half laughed. “And … in my head, I guess I shouldn’t care, because you’re right—the people who know me presumably know I don’t have radioactive powers and that I wouldn’t nuke LA, but … I don’t get to see those people much anymore. My life’s in ashes—err, ruins.” Ashes felt too soon, given what had just happened yesterday.

  “Yeah, your life is pretty corked,” he said matter-of-factly. He seemed to realize that this wasn’t a statement to make me feel better, so he added, “Sorry.”

  I sat back down on the couch and stared at my tennis shoes, which I hadn’t removed before I had fallen asleep last night. They were new, o
f course, because I’d burned off the boots I was wearing in LA. “The funny thing is … I’ve had lawyers working on getting me out from under those false accusations from Eden Prairie, but … when a potential jury pool sees something like this? It doesn’t help my case. When they hear I might have assassinated the president, it drives another wedge between me and the humans who are going to decide my fate. I don’t really know where I could ever go in the world to get a fair trial, because I’m pretty sure most of the country believes what they hear about me, even though it’s mostly bullshit. But … being a public enemy means that … well, you know, that a lot of the public is my enemy. Which makes me kinda sad, because I’ve done my best to save lives. Including theirs.”

  With that little depression grenade thrown out, we both settled into silence for a little bit. “That’s a pretty bad deal,” Friday seemed to agree between slurps of cereal. “Sorry,” he said again.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. I left off the part about his damned case not helping, because it wasn’t like he had any control over Greg the magical assassin coming to kill him. Which reminded me … “So, I think I know what we need to do next.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Chase.”

  Friday frowned, milk dribbling down his chin again. “Okay. Who do we chase?”

  “No, we need to talk to Chase,” I said. He stared at me blankly. “Chase.” Still nothing. “Your girlfriend?”

  That got him. “Ohhhh, Chase. Yeah. Okay. No.” He shook his head. “We can’t do that.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a great idea.”

  I just stared at him. “She’s the last member of your team. We still have no idea why Greg is coming to kill you, and we have even less of an idea about his powers, except that he can kindasorta teleport around, and draw objects from the air by magic. If you don’t have the answers, and Jon and Theo don’t … I’m sorry, but she’s the last one left before we start talking to random strangers. Which, right now, probably not the greatest idea for me.”