The Next Chronicle (Book 2): Damage

by Guess, Joshua

  Now it was his, and for all the appearance of the grand old lady it was, the house hid many interesting new features. The inner face of the door, for example, was covered with an experimental alloy to prevent anyone from cutting through it. The locks were state of the art biometrics, and every floor and wall was laced with micro-sensors to detect intruders. There were even several countermeasures he had never been brave enough to test, though the thick instruction manual he had been given explained them in detail.

  It was an expensive retrofit, one many might consider overkill since the old man was the only occupant. The justification was that of all the people in Cabinet-level positions, he was the one the country was least able to lose. Whether that reasoning was true was a matter for debate, though it could not be argued that Robinson had come up with solutions where others had failed in regard to the Next.

  Indeed, the ten million dollars spent upgrading his home into a fair impression of a fortress was not money wasted. That it failed was not its fault. There was no deficit of imagination or design, but the simple fact that no engineer or programmer alive was capable of defending against this particular sort of assault.

  The system did what it was supposed to do, letting Robinson in and reacting automatically to his presence. There was nothing in the familiar set of beeps and whirring noises as the locks engaged on their own to give him pause. He ascended the creaking stairs tiredly, but without fear. The long day weighed on him, and if he still had the physique of a younger man, his age showed in just how hard these long days were getting, to say nothing of the stress.

  Call it a combination of exhaustion and complacence, but Robinson thought nothing of the door to his study being open just a crack. He entered the room, lights flicking on to predetermined levels automatically, and moved toward the large desk. Two fingers of the vodka he'd acquired a taste for in Saigon would do nicely.

  At nearly the same moment his briefcase rattled onto the smooth top of the desk, the door slammed shut behind him.

  Robinson spun, instinct forcing him to reach for a sidearm he no longer carried. He stared at the form standing in front of the scarred bookcases running from floor to ceiling, only broken by the door. For a few seconds he was confused, unable to grasp how anyone else could have gotten in without tripping the alarms.

  “What the hell are you doing in my house?” Robinson asked.

  Kitra Singh gave him a death's head smile, the dark grin of a soldier about to do something reckless. “We need to have a talk, Mr. Secretary.”

  She lurched forward. Robinson tried to fight back, futile as the gesture was. In the end, he was an old man. Had he been thirty years younger, it likely wouldn't have made a difference. She was what he made her to be, after all, and men with abilities far beyond his own had proven no challenge to her.

  In less than a second she had his arms twisted behind his back.

  “We're going to take a trip,” she said.

  There was a flash of light, and they were gone.

  Kit

  She was already shoving Robinson away from her body when they arrived. The environment couldn't have been more different from the cozy, climate-controlled home they left behind seconds before. The old man tried to catch himself as he fell, one hand gouging a furrow in the sandy earth. He rolled to a stop, helped along by the stunted bushes dotting the landscape.

  Kit coldly watched him collect himself. When Robinson stood he was dirty and scuffed, suit ruined. A part of her took deep satisfaction from that alone. Here, he wasn't the quiet man of power, feared and respected as he slid through the background.

  “Please go back and retrieve our friend,” Kit said to James without taking her eyes off Robinson. She didn't want to name Waid, who was still in his hiding place in Robinson's house keeping the security system in check.

  “When do you want me back here?” James asked.

  “Take your time,” Kit said. “I'm sure we've got a lot to discuss. And I'm perfectly comfortable, so no rush.”

  Robinson watched this exchange carefully, and Kit saw the tendon in his jaw twitch. She hadn't lied, she was comfortable. But then, the cold didn't affect her much. Her Next abilities saw to that.

  The old man, however, wasn't so lucky. Kit thought she saw him suppress a shiver.

  “Where are we?” Robinson asked after James popped away.

  “I'm not sure,” Kit said. “Somewhere in South America, I think. James said he knew a nice, quiet place where the two of us wouldn't be bothered.”

  The night was clear, though the thin sliver of moon didn't shed enough light to give much of a view of the world below. “This is a mesa,” Kit said. “Pretty tall one, too.”

  Robinson set his jaw. “You planning to throw me off, Kitra?”

  Kit gave him her sweetest smile. “Depends on what you have to say.”

  He measured her quickly, a familiar experience from years of working under the man. With a sigh, he ambled toward one of the many large rocks scattered about and took a seat. “If you're going to kill me, I might as well be comfortable beforehand.”

  The dry tone made Kit hesitate. She was reminded in that moment why Robinson wielded the sort of power he did. In a world of grandstanding politicians bent on using the moment to get the upper hand, he was a pragmatist. The sort of men who ran continuous election campaigns, the next beginning at the end of the last like a gross impression of a snake eating its own tail, would not have acceded to the reality of this situation so easily. There would have been bluster and threats.

  Robinson merely sat with a tired grunt, and massaged his ribs.

  Was this the sort of man who would plan the destruction of an entire town? Only one way to find out.

  “Tell me about Fairmont,” Kit said softly as she padded toward a rock of her own.

  Understanding flashed in Robinson's eyes. “You were the ones who hit the vault,” he said, not guessing. “You used James Shane to get inside.”

  “I want to know everything,” she said. “Why you seemed to have known about it beforehand, why Ray was targeted, all of it.”

  Robinson shook his head ruefully. “The funny thing is, you would have learned most of this soon enough. The vault was on the list of things I needed you to be aware of, should something happen to me.”

  “Then you won't mind telling me now,” Kit said. “I think I've shown I'm willing to do what it takes to get answers.”

  Robinson nodded soberly. “That you have. I shouldn't be surprised, really. I know how protective you are over the people you care about. Why would this be any different?”

  He swallowed several times, trying to work some moisture into his mouth. “I suppose I should start at the beginning...”

  “A few months before the disaster at Fairmont, I began receiving messages from an anonymous source. At first they seemed like the normal crank letters. You know the kind; conspiracy theorists convinced the government has secret alien ships locked up in the desert, that sort of thing. The only reason they reached my desk at all was because of the threats they warned of. Not invasion or anything fanciful, but realistic descriptions of all-too-credible threats.”

  Robinson paused. “Understand, these letters were addressed to me personally. I was chosen as the recipient because, according to the author, I was reasonable enough to at least consider them.”

  He sighed. “The author was right. Though the content of the letters was at first heavy with what we thought to be science fiction, soon enough we learned the truth. Our anonymous writer told us about a fire before it happened. He gave us details about where and when, along with a description of the circumstances.”

  “You're not telling me he could see the future,” Kit said.

  “No,” Robinson said. “The writer had been observing a man who he claimed had the ability to create fire from his own body. We thought it was nonsense, of course, but the urgency of the message made it memorable. Imagine my surprise when the fire happened exactly as described.”

  Ah, no
w it made sense to her. “You thought your mystery man set the fire to keep his delusion alive.”

  Robinson nodded. “Something like that. I had the FBI take over the investigation, and checked it out myself. We expected to find a mentally ill man in need of help, to protect himself and others. What we actually got was precisely what was promised. By the time I arrived, the investigation was well under way. In my briefing I learned that there was a single survivor of the blaze, a man at the point of origin. He was found naked and unconscious, but without a single burn. Even his hair was untouched.”

  “You became a believer,” Kit said.

  “Not immediately,” Robinson said with a shrug. “Had I been told about the unhurt man in the fire without any context, I'd have written it off as bizarre but overall unimportant. With what I had been told, though, I was forced to admit the possibility existed that a new type of human being was appearing. The author was the first to refer to them—to you—as Next.”

  The stoic demeanor cracked, showing Kit one of the rare moments of the man beneath. The pained expression didn't touch Robinson's voice, however.

  “We studied the fire starter,” he said. “Little more than a week later, we got another letter. This time we paid attention. Our preliminary tests on the man, who was kept in an empty concrete cell, supported the things our anonymous friend was telling us. I watched him burst into flames personally, not ten feet away.”

  “What was the next incident?” Kit prodded, filled with enough genuine curiosity to make her forget to be angry, at least momentarily.

  “It was at a shopping mall,” Robinson said. “A young woman working at a sporting goods store suddenly developed immense strength and total invulnerability in the middle of her shift. Our warning was less specific this time, only telling us the location of the mall and what day it was likely to happen.”

  Kit whistled. “A Black Band?”

  Robinson nodded. “Close enough. She tried to hand change to a customer and broke the man's arm. When she jerked back at his scream, she launched herself into a wall. Her body had no time to adjust. There was none of the gradual acclimation we usually see. One minute she was average, or near to it, the next she's tearing through walls and glass windows. Our people were on site, though they didn't know what was happening until the poor girl crashed through the railing on the second floor and landed twenty feet below, totally unharmed. It took them several minutes to calm her enough to allow the agents to take her into custody.”

  The old man looked up, though whether he was stargazing or just trying to clear his head, Kit didn't know.

  “We spread the story that the girl had taken drugs, and people were willing enough to believe it. The cover-up was difficult, given the large number of witnesses, and it became my full-time job as the weeks progressed. More incidents happened, one after another. On Monday I might be in Vermont trying to think of a way to contain a man whose control over water caused him to drown his wife while they slept. On Thursday I would be in California, consoling a child who tried to run away from her bullies and moved at supersonic speeds and afterward was unable to move even a pinky without breaking the sound barrier.”

  Kit blew out a breath. “You must have suspected your writer had something to do with this, right?”

  “Of course,” Robinson said. “I wrote him personally, using instructions for a dead drop he included with every message. I wanted to know everything; how he knew about these incidents beforehand, what his role might be. The response came via email, from an encrypted account we had no way to trace. He explained that his research had him stumble across the Next years before, and that he had come up with a way to locate them. Only those whose powers had grown to a certain point, he said, which allowed him to measure the rate of increase. This allowed him to predict when those incidents would occur.”

  Kit raised an eyebrow. “If that's the case, why don't we have access to that technology now? The only scanner I've seen capable of detecting Surge energy was the size of an X-Ray machine.”

  “You're getting ahead of me,” Robinson said, a note of pride in his voice. “At the time we had no reason to doubt the claim, though we were far from trusting. When I asked how he was able to test so many people across such large distances, he said that answering would potentially identify him. By then I was in charge of a task force composed of every agency with initials, and I put a team on trying to figure out what connection the Next we found might have. We needed to bring this man in, if for nothing else to get our hands on his technology.”

  “We failed,” Robinson said. “The months wore on and no leads appeared. We dealt with bigger and worse situations, until one day I got a message that changed everything. I can see you've guessed, Kitra. It was Fairmont. He told us what would happen, the scale of it. Our anonymous author explained that there were certain Next he called Batteries, whose powers slowly magnified those of other Next around them. This particular Battery was a magnitude beyond any he had seen before. He could siphon energy from matter and convert it into Surge power. This also meant he could release it in huge waves rather than the normal slow radiation.”

  “He told us what would happen,” Robinson continued, his voice cracking. “He knew the scale of it, the destruction it would cause. He didn't know precisely when or where, but it would be in Kentucky.”

  “Go on,” Kit said. “I'm still waiting to hear your explanation for all the medical data we found about Ray.”

  “That came later,” Robinson said. “Before Fairmont, all we knew was what we were told. Due to the scope of what we knew was coming, we didn't send any agents. There was nothing we could do, not with the vague information available. We were in the task force offices when the news hit. Literally five minutes after every channel on the planet switched to reporting on the disaster, a man walked into our office.”

  Kit perked up. This was what she had been waiting for.

  “He didn't introduce himself by name, not at first,” Robinson said. “He identified himself as the man I had been corresponding with, and showed me copies of his letters as proof. Much as I wanted him in an interview room, he insisted we speak privately.”

  Now the cracks in Robinson's countenance split and shattered, revealing anger the likes of which Kit had never seen from the man.

  “He told me the truth, then; that he had been the one setting off all the Next. He had developed some kind of treatment designed to temporarily overload their powers. He said this as calmly and pleasantly as if he were discussing his kid's baseball game. I sat there, so angry it paralyzed me. I knew if I moved, I'd kill him. The death toll from Fairmont was impossible to calculate that early on, but certainly thousands had died. Given the bourbon festival, we expected potentially tens of thousands by the time the counting was done.”

  “When I asked him why he would kill so many people, there seemed to be real sadness in him,” Robinson said. “I know that sounds impossible to believe, but I've been measuring men a long, long time. This man admitted what he had done, and felt sadness at the act. That's the scariest sort of person...”

  Kit nodded. “I remember. You said it a lot during the early days of my training. People who are willing to do something they know is wrong for what they think is a greater good. I always thought there were more shades of gray than that.”

  “There are,” Robinson agreed. “We're proof of that, aren't we? What you did with the Maggard boy was necessary, after all.”

  Kit nodded. “What did he say? The man behind this, I mean.”

  “That it was an unavoidable decision,” Robinson said. “Every document he showed me is—or was—in the vault. He had reams of data in his briefcase, carefully explaining how the Next had to be pushed forward. How a Battery had to be overloaded in order to kick start powers and increase them in people who were already developing them.”

  “Why?” Kit asked, completely baffled.

  “His explanation was that doing what he did to Ray Elliot meant forcing people to learn how t
o use their powers sooner rather than later. His calculations predicted a point not far down the road where multiple Batteries would unleash their power in a short period of time, drastically increasing the level of Surge energy. Making nearly every Next just like that girl in the mall.”

  The dark logic of it was clear to her. “By doing it, he also forced those other Batteries to learn to control their powers. It probably kept them from going nuclear.”

  Robinson nodded. “Yes. I'm condensing a lot, here, but you've got the basic shape of it. We took him into custody, of course. At the time I was still trying to process what happened in Fairmont, so I didn't think of what I was doing when I reported all of this to my superiors. Had I taken the time, I would have waited. An hour later, he was gone from our custody. A day after that I was sent in to handle securing what was left of Fairmont. I learned a short time later that our mystery man had planned much further ahead than anyone knew. It was his idea to build the facility. He knew we'd need a place to put the more dangerous Next.”

  “You said you didn't learn his name until later,” Kit interjected. “I'm guessing you ran into him again?”

  Robinson nodded wearily. “I have no idea what kind of leverage he had, but rather than put the man into a cell inside some mountain and pretend he didn't exist, he was put on the payroll. The groundwork was being laid for the DSA, and while I oversaw the cleanup and construction, people way above my pay grade were considering me for secretary of the department. As such, I had to choose key personnel, but one position in the hierarchy we had in place at the time had been filled. Head of Research. I was too busy to visit the lab set up for him, but the reports I read claimed this scientist was making huge leaps in our understanding of the Next. It was several months before I finally met him, and when I did, I recognized him at once. My anonymous writer and mass murderer.”