Reckoning (The Variant Series, #4)

by Jena Leigh

  It was nice here, in the mist. Quiet. Empty. Calm. The very antithesis of her waking life. In the fog there was no fear or anxiety. No worries for the future. No regrets from the past. No heartache. No loss.

  Only silence.

  “… to fight it, Alex … don’t want to do this … isn’t you. Resist … Dammit, girl, wake up!”

  A man was being held against a sleek black wall by an invisible force.

  He hovered impossibly, three full feet off the ground, his head nearly at the level of the dark, glass-like ceiling above him. The man’s limbs were splayed out around him and pinned to the jet-black partition as though he were Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man come to life… or perhaps as though he were a prized insect in some enthusiast’s collection.

  The man’s dark hair was going gray at the temples. His suit, though slightly disheveled and missing a coat, looked well-tailored and expensive.

  His face was twisted into a grimace, his pale blue eyes brimming with fear.

  He was shouting at her.

  He was familiar.

  And though Alex couldn’t say why or how, she knew without a doubt that he meant something to her.

  She tilted her head to the side, squinting past her outstretched arm as she tried to see the man more clearly.

  “Grayson?” her voice asked from somewhere far away.

  “Yes!” he shouted. “It’s me, Alex! Please—release me!”

  The fog began to lift… and the pain returned full force. Alex felt her arm drop uselessly to her side and heard the dull thud of Grayson sliding to the floor.

  As the exquisite agony in her skull reached a crescendo, Alex longed to relax her knees and fall as well. The pain made her want to grip the sides of her head. To massage the back of her neck. To close her eyes and halt her breath until everything just stopped hurting and she could think clearly again.

  Instead she remained rigidly in place, her body refusing to accept any orders of movement she sent its way.

  “I said kill him, Alexandra.”

  Her arm rose again of its own volition and suddenly, she understood.

  Alex was being pushed—and she’d received an order to kill John Grayson. Her body was eager to follow through with the command.

  Her mind, on the other hand…

  No, Alex replied, funneling every ounce of intension she could drum up into that single syllable until it evolved into an order of her own making. The word echoed in her thoughts, louder and louder with each reverberation, until it eclipsed the roar of the push itself.

  Her arm dropped to her side once more. Clarity returned.

  The pain vanished.

  “Well that was disappointing,” said a woman’s voice from someone behind her.

  Alex spun around to find yet another glossy black wall, this one with a speaker mounted in it—and the familiar red, blinking light of a surveillance camera.

  She recognized the room. It was a slightly larger version of the holding cell the Agency had used to contain Aaron Gale in the days leading up to his death.

  With a rush of anger, Alex’s memories came flooding back to her.

  The EMP going off just as she entered the main room of The Corner Pocket. The brawl that ensued as four telekinetic Variants barred the exits and began slaughtering the innocent men and women that surrounded her, right there in cold blood. Being taken down as she fought to defend them, using everything at her disposal and still unable to save a single soul.

  Because if Alex was here, then they were almost certainly dead.

  And now… now they were trying to force her to kill Grayson.

  She glowered at the speaker.

  “You certainly are a stubborn one, aren’t you?” said the woman on the other end.

  Director Dana Carter’s voice was even colder than Alex remembered.

  “Lady,” Alex growled, “you have no idea.”

  Carter laughed. “Yes, well. We’ll see about that, won’t we? Make yourself comfortable, Miss Parker. You won’t be going anywhere until you learn to follow orders.”

  The staticky noise of the speaker cut out and silence descended.

  Alex fought back a sudden urge to scream in frustration. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the blinking red light, raised both hands, and gave Carter the finger. The old witch may or may not be listening anymore, but she was almost certainly watching.

  Behind her, someone chuckled.

  “Oh!” she turned back around. “Grayson! Oh, God. I am so sorry. I don’t even know what happened. One minute I was at the bar and the next… Are you okay? Did I hurt you?!”

  Grayson was on his feet now, leaning heavily against the dark wall, observing her with his arms crossed over his chest. Relief flooded his expression.

  “I’m fine, Alex,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be sporting a few new bruises, but it’s certainly preferable to the alternative.”

  “Oh, thank goodness.”

  Alex pulled Declan’s gray jacket more tightly around her, hanging her head, grateful beyond measure that she’d managed to resist the push before inflicting any real damage.

  “Hang on.” Looking down, Alex spotted a frayed, darkly stained hole in the right leg of her jeans. “There isn’t a pool cue in my thigh.”

  “Should there be?” Grayson, to his credit, seemed unfazed by the observation.

  She shrugged. “Well, since I pretty vividly remember the feeling of a broken wooden stick tearing through my leg… probably?”

  Speaking of discomfort.

  Alex searched her jeans and the stomach of her T-shirt and discovered four more, much smaller holes created by the tranq darts, exactly where she expected them to be.

  Four tranqs.

  Add that to the bottle of booze…

  Alex reached up and felt her temple just below the hairline. Moments before everything went dark, she took a full handle of Jameson directly to the forehead. Her vision was already starting to blur from the tranqs, but that green bottle’s label had been quite clear when she turned and discovered it sailing toward her face.

  There wasn’t even a bump to mark the spot of her injury.

  Alex should be experiencing all the misery of a concussion paired with the world’s lousiest hangover—minus the precursory night of fun—and puking her guts out right about now. And since she wasn’t…

  “How long has it been since I was taken?” she asked. “Days? Weeks?”

  “Weeks?” Grayson shook his head. “Try hours. And only a handful, at that.”

  “That’s not possible. Not unless—”

  “A healing ability,” Grayson concluded, gingerly lowering himself onto the prison cell’s uncomfortable looking bench. “I rather envy you that, at the moment.”

  The agents must have taken her from the bar and then exposed her to another Variant’s regenerative power. If it was at full strength, it would explain her lack of injuries—and why her body wasn’t still suffering from the aftereffects of the tranquilizer darts.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would they want to heal me?”

  Grayson closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall. “Clearly, Carter wants her new asset to be kept in good health. You’re of little use to them injured and even less use to them dead. Also, I think they were eager to wake you up for a… trial run, of sorts.”

  She crossed to the bench and sat down beside him. “Killing you, you mean. They were trying to see if they could push me?”

  He nodded.

  Realizing with a sudden rush that she still possessed her telekinetic ability, Alex focused on the bars that separated the cell from the hallway. Her strongest attempts to bend them outward were met with a fierce resistance. She could hear the soft groan of straining metal underneath the shiny black coating of the bars, but nothing budged.

  “There’s likely no point in wasting your energy,” said Grayson. “The fragile lining of black obsidian that covers our cell has almost certainly been reinforced with something far stronger underneath.�
��

  “Obsidian?” She dragged her hand along the smooth, featureless wall. “Is that what this is?”

  Another nod.

  “The superstitious believe that carrying around small pieces of the rock will help guard against the ‘evil eye’ and protect them from psychic attack,” he explained. “They aren’t exactly correct… but they aren’t entirely wrong, either. Something about the presence of black obsidian can interfere with the Variant brain’s electrical signature when present in high enough quantities. A room like this one holds more than enough obsidian to prevent the use of telepathy—and it’s completely shorted out my psychic ability.”

  He shrugged.

  “So long as we’re trapped in this cell, surrounded by it on all sides, most abilities rooted in the mind will be….” Grayson sat up straight, then fixed Alex with a piercing look. “The push shouldn’t have worked on you. Not in here. Not without…” After a moment of thought, Grayson sighed. “Of course. Well, I suppose that explains Jezza’s actions earlier.”

  “Whoa, back up,” said Alex. “What did Jezza do? And if this room is so special, then how was Carter able to push me?”

  Grayson shook his head.

  “I don’t think it was Carter. At least, not technically,” he said. “Your eyes were entirely black while you were under the influence of the push and that’s something I’d never seen before. When you resisted, was it painful?”

  Alex snorted. “Even more painful than that bottle of Jameson. And trust me, that’s really saying something.”

  He raised a distracted eyebrow. “I didn’t take you for an admirer of Irish whiskey, Miss Parker.”

  She opened her mouth to correct him, but he continued with his explanation before she could get a word out in her defense.

  “Trent came to me earlier tonight, concerned about Jezza,” he said. “Apparently, he’d seen her eyes go black in the same instant she doubled over in pain from a headache. At the time, he thought it was simply a trick of the light.”

  Grayson grew quiet for a moment.

  “And then?” Alex prompted.

  Her voice emerged as a whisper. She wasn’t sure if she was emotionally prepared to hear about what had happened next. Because if Grayson was in this cell with her, then something pretty terrible most have gone down at the safe house not long after she left for The Corner Pocket.

  “Shortly after a team of agents infiltrated the compound tonight, Jezza attacked Trent.”

  “What?! Is he okay? Did she…?”

  Grayson shook his head. “I’m sorry, Alex. I saw her take her shot and I saw Trent fall, but an agent gripped my arm and we teleported before I could see how much damage he sustained. I don’t know what happened to anyone after that.”

  Alex closed her eyes.

  “Seeing as how there were no shouts of instruction from the agents before it happened, I imagine the Agency was controlling Jezza’s actions from a distance. Probably via an implant attached to the girl’s brain stem. I’d wager they’ve now done the same to you.”

  Alex reached up and brushed her fingertips along the unblemished skin at the back of her neck, mind racing at the implications.

  “You think they were able to weaponize a Variant ability?” she asked.

  “It’s the only possibility that makes any sense. You seemed to be responding to Carter’s orders just now,” he said, pointing toward the speaker. “And that shouldn’t have been possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—on top of our being trapped in an obsidian-lined room—Dana Carter is not a pusher, Alex,” he said. “And because even the most talented of their kind can’t share their control with another. If Carter was the one giving you orders, they only could have reached you through some sort of implant.”

  Alex gazed back at him quizzically. “You seem pretty certain it’s an implant. Why?”

  With a tired sigh, Grayson stood and crossed to the barred wall of their cell. He took hold of the poles and lowered his head, rocking back slightly on his heel.

  Just when Alex thought he was going to ignore the question, Grayson finally spoke.

  “Even though he was only seventeen when I first encountered him, Samuel Masterson was far and away the most gifted scientist I’d ever met,” he said. “And when I put him in charge of the Agency’s research and development division, I had every faith that the work he accomplished… Well, I felt confident that one day his discoveries would have the potential to change the world. To make life better for our kind.”

  His laugh was bitter.

  “If only I’d known then what we know now,” he said, then shook his head. “But for all his genius, Samuel was only one man, and his ideas and his research soon outpaced his ability to keep up with his experimentation. So, after a few months, we hired a small team to assist him with his projects in the lab.”

  There were other people working with Masterson on his VX serums and experiments? Wow. Alex really did not like where this story was heading.

  “Convincing Dana Carter to leave her position at Stanford and come to work for us at the mountain was quite the coup for our burgeoning Agency at the time—especially given that her new position was essentially as Samuel’s assistant. Not as his equal. Dana took the whole thing in stride, however. Possibly because she saw the same potential in Samuel and his abilities as I once did… Or perhaps it was simply because I offered her double what she’d been making, working in academia.” He shrugged. “Samuel was often secretive about his work, and about the VX serums in particular… But there was one project that he and Dana worked on rather closely together.”

  Grayson turned around, shifting to lean against the bars.

  “Not long after the team arrested a troublesome pusher responsible for the murder-by-proxy of six women, Samuel had an idea. You see, short of putting the man to death, the only option for punishment was to place the young man in an extreme form of solitary confinement for the remainder of his life.”

  Grayson paused, seeming to need a moment to gather his thoughts before he continued. Alex spoke up.

  “Solitary confinement does sound a little cruel,” she allowed. “But then again he did kill six people. And if he could push the guards into helping him escape…”

  “Exactly,” said Grayson. “And therein lay the problem. Back then, the Agency simply didn’t have the same resources. There was plenty of funding at our disposal, but the infrastructure needed to contain the more dangerous Variant criminals we apprehended was still being put in place. The prospect of imprisoning the man in such an unusual way for such a prolonged period of time… Well, back then it was a logistical nightmare.

  “And that’s where Samuel’s idea came into play. For a time, he and Dana believed it might—theoretically—be possible to create a small piece of circuitry that could be used to regulate the man’s ability. Basically, they intended to strip him of his gift by controlling it through an implant attached to his brain stem. Complicating matters was the fact that the technology of the era simply hadn’t progressed far enough yet to create such a complex piece of circuitry on that small of a scale. Eventually, Samuel would abandon the project in favor of pursuing the development of his VX-1 serum—a different solution to the same problem. Samuel was eager to move on. Dana, on the other hand, was a bit more… reluctant to give up that line of research.”

  Having met Dana Carter, Alex could easily understand why.

  The VX-1 was created solely to strip a Variant of their ability. It eliminated the threat, sure… but it also eliminated the power. And if there was one thing that woman seemed to prize above all else, it was power. If she could develop a device that would allow a Variant’s ability to be controlled rather than eliminated, then naturally that’s the route Carter would prefer to take.

  And now, she appeared to have accomplished exactly that.

  “So you’re saying,” said Alex, “that you think Carter’s followed through with her old research over the years. But instead of making a
device to stop a Variant from using the push, she created a device to mimic the push, instead?”

  “Mind control,” he said. “With no pusher required. The device does all the work.”

  Alex stared off into the distance. “She could build an army.”

  “She already had an army, Alex,” Grayson corrected. “What she lacked was mindless obedience. With this, no Variant under her control will ever be able to oppose her.”

  “Still…” Alex trailed off, her face scrunching as she puzzled over a major flaw in Carter’s strategy.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just… If this is her grand plan to put down the resistance, I don’t think it’s a very practical one. How could she possibly hope to catch everyone who opposes her? Attaching a machine to someone’s brain stem doesn’t sound like an operation you can really do on the fly. She’d need to take us all in, one by one. How the heck would she manage that?”

  Grayson scoffed, raising a hand to his forehead and closing his eyes. “Of course. It was staring me right in the face and I didn’t even see it.”

  “What?” she asked. “What am I missing?”

  “You, Alex,” he said. “You are what’s missing. You are the key to the implementation of Carter’s plan.”

  “Me? But how?”

  “Once she’s figured out how to control you using the implant, she’s going to put on a show for the norms.”

  “A show?”

  “You, Alex Parker, are going to be sent out into the world to wreak so much havoc that the humans will finally be forced to accept that we exist. You’re going to do something so violent, so terrifying, and so impossible that it will scare the absolute hell out of them. After that, Variants will no longer be able to hide in plain sight.” He shook his head. “Carter’s going to kick off another Variant purge. One unlike anything we’ve experienced since Salem in the late 1600s. Only this time the witch hunt will be a global one. She’ll use the humans’ fear of us in order to justify her decision to round us up and implant the devices. She’ll sell it to the norms as a way to control us—and to protect them. And when they see you, suddenly reformed and entirely under Carter’s control, they’ll be all the more eager to support her plan.”