The steam from the flash-fired pond disappeared, leaving a slick moat around the island.
I pressed my lips against Keisha’s ear, in order to be heard over the unholy shriek of the cyclone Mutter had set spinning.
“We have to get to April and take the Amplifier!”
Keisha nodded. She seemed stronger now.
“Can you help me?” I shouted over the roar of the wind.
“Damn straight,” She shouted back.
“For Gus,” I said
“For Gus!” she shouted back.
Ash trees flew up into the building, their trunks spinning like children’s toy tops.
Gunfire sparkled from the main floor but incredibly missed Mutter. Perhaps the hurricane force winds somehow deflected the bullets.
The building shuddered again. The glass walls high above us flexed. The air pressure must be enormous.
I sent my awareness into the plant life around me, to the island where April stood, sending more jets of white-hot fire blasting up into the main floor.
Around me the redwoods rumbled in pain, feeling the heat.
I reached down below the island, until I found the edges of the root, then, pushed my essence into them, urged them to grow, grow, grow.
The roots worked up, through the soil, my strength began to slip away, but still I forced the roots up until they burst from the soil around April, writhing, and entangled her in their grasp.
The flames stopped.
Keisha charged down into the moat, pulling metal fragments into a halo that orbited her, flinging dozens of metals shards at April. The other woman brought up her hand and spewed flame at Keisha as the shards struck flesh. April’s arms windmilled, flame roaring skyward as she fell, blood spurting from her neck.
Keisha rolled on the ground, blazing, and into a patch of shallow water, which exploded into steam.
I ran to her, whipping off my coat and trying to beat out the flames.
Die fire, die, I thought desperately. The flames guttered out.
Keisha’s clothes had partially melted. I started to pull them off.
“No!” she hissed. “Get the Amplifier. Stop…stop Mutter.”
Mutter. The nut-job sadist who had caused this disaster, who had threatened my family, who had killed dozens of people already, and who now could kill thousands with the cyclones he created.
I ran to the island, dropped beside April’s body. I pulled the harness from her and shrugged into it, putting on the gauntlets last.
I had no idea how this device worked.
The silver chest disk, I ran my finger around its rim. It began vibrating against my skin.
Mutter was fifty feet above me, nearly at ground level. The windows were shot through with cracks.
Clearplex glass shattered. I couldn’t imagine the amount of energy the cyclone had.
Mutter floated out of my line of sight, toward the world outside and the sky above. I had to stop him or thousands would die. I remembered the nightmare I had last night. A monster cyclone flattening everything in its path, drowning out all the screams from its victims. This was Mutter’s plan.
I pushed myself up as the wind died down. Debris crashed around me. One of the security console stations bounced off of a redwood and hit the earth nearby.
The tallest of the six redwoods loomed in front of me. My senses opened up and my awareness expanded until I was inside the tree and it was inside me. It wasn’t just a tree, it was part of a world forest, part of the green growing plant life which covered the earth.
I tasted redwood needles, ash tree bark, cattail fronds. My skin felt like moss and bark at the same time. My blood sang with every breath the world forest took.
My eyes widened. I no longer stood on two legs. Instead I soared up on a new redwood rising from the wet soil. As the tree rose we passed the ruined floors and dozens of bodies in black. The new tree reached the ground floor, grew thicker. I stepped off onto the glass strewn floor and ran outside.
Mutter hung a hundred feet above, in the midst of a cyclone of shattered glass.
In the distance lay the fallen blimp, smashed against a building. In the Sound, a hurricane-force wind battered at the UN carrier. The ship leaned against the wind, threatening to capsize in the howling storm.
The trees around me whipped in the gale. I struggled to stand. On the road below, near the sound, cars were thrown against the guardrails and into shops.
My enemy was out of reach again.
I inhaled, and as I did I felt the earth. I felt the moss between the sidewalk and the verge, the weeds that struggled to live in the cracks, the seeds bursting forth beneath the soil, down to the deep roots of the redwoods, to plants cells and more seeds, and in that one, terrible moment, everything connected to me. The world was alive, one giant living organism, and I was at the center of it.
My brain felt like it was going to explode.
My legs screamed, my thighs muscles spasmed. My head pounded, enormous pressure pressed down on my temples.
I drew another breath, and even as I could feel my body breaking under the pressure, the world seemed to freeze.
The towering strength of the redwoods, the Douglas firs, the pines were in me. The power of the trees flowed through my veins. I willed a new forest to burst forth around me. With a roar, concrete crumbled and trees rose.
My heart felt as though it would burst, but I pressed on. The tips of the new tree tops soared and surrounded Mutter. He gestured at the Sound and the water bulged up in a huge wave, capsizing the carrier.
Change.
I saw the potential for new life in the forest and altered the trees, sending the whip-like branches snapping at Mutter, slicing his flesh, pulling him toward me. I ordered the branches to clutch him and constrict.
The wind bellowed. I clung to a tree. Cars flew toward me.
Change
I grew thick oak-like trees with rubbery bark, in the blink of an eye. The cars bounced off the trees.
Mutter spun his hands faster and faster. Out in the Sound, a waterspout rose up, its twisting body spinning toward me, a watery tornado.
The spiky branches exploded away from Mutter. He shouted something at me, but I couldn’t hear it over the roar. I grew a giant tangle of blackberry vines from the cracked earth, like Jack’s beanstalks soaring up to a giant’s castle, the vines like steel, their thorns like swords, tearing at his flesh, piercing the harness.
Blue lightning flashed from the harness. Mutter’s body arched in obvious pain, his lips pulled back from his teeth. His skin browned and he screamed.
The wind bellowed and then died. Above me Mutter hung, body torn, his blood running onto the giant vines.
He was dead. I was numb. I’d killed him, but I felt nothing.
I willed the vines to lower him down to me, until his corpse hung within reach. I reached inside the collar of his jumpsuit, searched until my fingers found the chain around his neck. I drew it over his head, the jeweled medallion heavy and gleaming in my grasp.
The storm blew out into the Sound, but as I watched, it too died.
The water was filled with people swimming and clinging to rafts.
Emergency sirens sounded from all directions.
The Sequoia building behind me was a ruin.
My heart should have burst already. I didn't let go of my connection, instead, I grew trees around the Sequoia, and had them extend their branches and lower me down to the pit to find Keisha.
I would not leave without her.
Chapter 19
I found Keisha in the ruins of the bio chamber, lying against a redwood trunk. Glass shards covered her like a deadly snowfall. I raised my hand, and pushed rubber-like grass up from the soil, coiled around Keisha’s body, and turned her over to let the glass fall away.
I refused to cry.
I knelt beside her, and gently lifted her in a firefighter’s carry. The ruin of the Sequoia building yawned above me, broken cables dangling and sparking, burst pipes sprayi
ng water.
Imagine green life never before seen on this Earth, soft to the touch yet stronger than Durasteel. I summoned such life from the soil, directed it to coil around Keisha and me, and then, with impossible strength and vibrancy it lifted us skyward, becoming a beanstalk taking us to the Giant’s castle. We rose through the ruined floors and past the dead. The beanstalk leaned into the ruined lobby, releasing me. I carried Keisha outside. Let the Earth heal, I thought, and green-gold trees rose, boughs sprouting emerald flowers that released clouds of flashing silver pollen.
I shuddered. I had not willed this, not consciously.
A new grove welcomed me. Another beanstalk broke through the pavement and writhed around me, taking me and Keisha into its grasp, becoming a titanic vine which rose from the earth, and pulled us along to the south, through the ruins of warehouses and shops, beneath a freeway and up into White Center and then west to the Sound, where another titanic vine rose impossibly from the water and carried us across to the distant shore.
When we reached the far side, I laid Keisha down on green grass and looked back at Seattle, at the impossible trees I had made. It was like being in the middle of a dream that was becoming a nightmare.
As I watched, the impossible trees withdrew back into the earth, and the colossal beanstalks and world vines which had carried us away disappeared.
My heart was like an engine pushed to the redline. My muscles screamed but I forced myself to lift Keisha again and struggled up into a grove of trees at the edge of a park. The sun was low to the west, over the Olympics. I could just see the snow-capped peaks.
I laid Keisha down again, and as I did, the grass grew until it was a thick carpet of green. Keisha’s burnt skin began to grow smooth, her body fighting to heal itself from the massive damage she’d taken. I prayed she would live.
Mutter was dead. Dead.
But I had not completed my mission.
Winterfield might lock me up forever for what I was about to do, but it was the only way.
Numbly I pulled off my gauntlets and shrugged out of the harness, folding it beside me.
I ran my fingers over the amulet’s jewels, like I had seen Mutter do.
“I have something you want,” I said to the air. “I am in West Seattle.” I collapsed onto the grass beside Keisha. The world began to grow dark. “Please come and get it. I don’t know where exactly we are, but come.” Everything went black.
I woke up but everything was still black. I dug my hands into the grass, stroked the wet blades. They were real. I could barely sense them, I was exhausted from pushing myself and using the amplifier.
“Keisha?” I whispered.
“She is with you,” said an accented voice I did not recognize.
“Where are we?”
“You remain in the park.”
I looked around, but could see nothing. My hands brushed against a body which moaned.
Keisha.
I leaned over her and gently ran my fingers across her face. The skin was smooth.
“What happened?” I asked the voice.
A soft laugh came from behind me. I turned but there was only blackness, blackness deeper than the darkest night.
“Such an open question.” The accent sounded East Indian. A memory pulled at me, something familiar, I had heard the voice once.
“Lady Night,” I said. Once upon a time, when I was in the Renegades, Lady Night made a broadcast on television. The voice of the Scourge.
“I was that, once. Now I am merely Ashula.”
“You came.”
“Indeed. As I said, you remain where you lay down. It is night. I have simply strengthened the darkness, so that no prying eyes can see us.
“I’m blind.”
She laughed, again. “We are all blind, Mathilda Brandt.”
“I had to kill Mutter.” I would do it again if necessary.
“Yes, you did.” There was no anger in those words, just a statement.
“He wanted the Amplifier for himself.”
“We know.”
The blackness lessened, and I saw a shadow near me, slender, like a statue chiseled from the night itself.
“The Amplifier. I have mine.” I swallowed. “Mutter’s was destroyed.” Or had it been only damaged, even though it had killed him?
“Yes, you brought it.”
“For the Scourge to have.”
“It is an extremely dangerous device,” Ashula said.
A vision of the hurricane-racked Sound came to me, the crashed blimp, the cars blown into the water, the capsized UN aircraft carrier.
“Yeah, I know.” I wish I could tear the horrors from my memory and forget all of it. But I couldn’t. I never would be able to.
A hand touched mine. “Know this then, as well; it is deadly to the wielder. It can kill.”
“It nearly killed me.”
“Yes. What we do not know are the long term effects.”
A chill settled in my stomach.
She squeezed my hand. “We will take this gift of yours. It may be the key to unlocking a great mystery.”
“What mystery is that?” I asked.
“Why the Empowered exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
Again, soft laughter. “There is no reason you should, Mathilda Brandt.”
The darkness lightened further.
The shadow beside me became the outline of a finely featured and stunningly beautiful woman, large eyed, hair braided, dressed in a midnight black sari with black slippers.
They used to say that “Lady Night” of the Scourge wore a black mask representing the night, but Ashula’s face was bare. She lifted her delicate chin, and pressed keys into my hand. She pointed past me. “A Ford Galactic is parked twenty feet from us. Take it and return to Portland.”
I lifted the amulet.
“Keep that,” she told me. “We will want to contact you. You have proved your worth. You did not succumb to Mutter’s corruption, you fought him to save us from him, and we will remember this. Thank you.”
I looked away. How could I answer that? I did all this to save my family, and they still hung in the balance.
“What about my friend, Keisha?”
“I will take her. She needs more healing.”
“Without her help, Mutter would have killed me. Please take care of her.”
“We will. You will see her again.”
I didn’t want to leave Keisha there.
“I promise you, Mathilda Brandt,” Ashula said after a moment. “I do not break my promises. Ever.”
“Okay.” How could anyone pledge to keep all their promises? Sooner or later, promises were broken. But what choice did I have?
“Thank you again, for saving us all,” Ashula said.
“You’re welcome.” I hated lying. Saving them wasn’t why I did this. But that had been the result.
I left Keisha with Ashula. Walked through the night until gravel crunched beneath my feet, and I saw the deep purple Ford Galactic waiting in the street outside the park.
Now I had to face Winterfield.
Chapter 20
He waited for me at a diner just off the Interstate near Longview, about an hour north of Portland. The Skyline was an all-night diner, which was good because I arrived after 2AM. Winterfield sat in a booth in the rear of the restaurant, facing me, back to the wall, just like always.
He wore a denim jacket and John Deere hat. Not his standard uniform.
He looked about a century older than the last time I’d seen him, and a cigarette lay burning in the ashtray on the table.
The waitress took my order. Winterfield insisted I eat, even though I said I wasn’t hungry. Food was the last thing I wanted now, but I didn’t argue with him. I was still dead tired.
“I did it,” I said. “I did what you asked. The Scourge thanked me for killing that bastard Mutter.”
“It works for us, too.” Winterfield looked pleased. “You did well, Brandt.”
Gee, that, too. Glad to be a good tool. I picked at my pancake, took a few bites, put the fork down. Screw him. Anger welled up inside me.
“Lots of people died taking out Mutter.”
Winterfield held my gaze in his for a long moment. “Yes, they did. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
Just like that, my anger was gone. Amazing what a little empathy can do.
I told him what had happened, how I had gone along with Mutter’s plan, had decided not to try and contact Support because I had to follow through. I told him everything, right through to giving the Amplifier to Ashula. I did not mention what she had said about it being the key to unlocking “the great mystery.” It was bad enough that I had handed an incredibly dangerous device to the enemy.
If they were the enemy. I really wasn't so sure anymore.
Winterfield stared at me long enough that I finally looked down at my partially eaten stack of flapjacks, my anger gone.
“You did very well, Mat.”
Never thought I’d hear that from him. My first name, too.
Winterfield smiled. “You succeeded.”
I exhaled. “Thanks.”
“You went to great lengths to carry out your mission. Agent Sanchez and I appreciate all your efforts.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Winterfield, saying I did good.
He put a small case on the table beside my plate, patted it.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“An experimental drug to help Ruth Brandt deal with Thalik’s. Taken weekly. Three months’ worth of injections are inside the case with the hypo.”
“How do I explain it to her? She’s going to wonder how a two-bit Empowered criminal obtained an experimental pharma tailored for her disease.”
Winterfield pushed the case over to me.
“Tell her it’s from the Government, for services rendered.”
I blinked. “Wait, you want me to let her in on what I am doing for Support?”
Winterfield frowned. “Did I say that, Brandt?”
I thought for a moment. “Tell her it’s from the Government for ‘services rendered?’”
“Precisely.”
“But what if she asks more questions?”
Clearly he thought I was some new sort of idiot from his expression. “Trust me, Brandt. She won’t.”
Empowered: Agent (The Empowered Series Book 1) Page 22
