24.
Reed
I stepped off the plane in Minneapolis to find Governor Bridget Shipley waiting for me, clutching her hands, blond hair cut in an overgrown bob that reached the top of her shoulders. Governor Shipley was a pretty stately lady, and I’d met her enough times in the past to recognize the nervous tension in her as I descended the steps from the Gulfstream, my team following behind me.
“Mr. Treston,” she said, taking a few strides to greet me as I came lightly off the last step. We were standing on the tarmac at the private terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. A 737 roared in the distance as it came in for a landing, passing over the Mall of America toward the north-south runway. The governor extended her hand, and I shook it, carefully, trying to not break it with my still-newfound strength.
I’d lived as a meta my entire adult life, and I’d always been strong. But what President Harmon had done, giving me a power boost? It had boosted everything. Strength, speed, dexterity. I wasn’t exactly exploding Coke bottles with my grip by accident, but I didn’t want to lose control on the Governor of Minnesota’s hand, either. The consequences would be a lot more dire than a little Cherry Coke on my new suit.
“Rolling out the red carpet for us, Governor?” I asked, pausing to look her in the eye. I wasn’t her biggest fan; when Sienna had run into trouble, Shipley had been one of the first to pull out the long knives for her, making her life harder at a time when she didn’t need it.
In previous meetings with the governor, I had been in Sienna’s company. They’d been congenial, filled with praise and mutual admiration.
That had evaporated as soon as my sister hit hard times. I wasn’t keeping a shit list or anything, but if I had been, Governor Bridget Shipley would have been right at the top. I suspected Sienna wasn’t likely to forgive her, either, if she were to ever find her way out from under the mountain of trouble she was presently buried in.
“I’m just glad you saw fit to come back to us now, when we need you most,” Shipley said, smiling thinly. Sanctimonious, of course. A true politician, this one.
“Well, I might have been around more if I felt like I was welcome here.” I said that with the dryness of a good sherry.
“You are more than welcome here, of course.” She didn’t bat an eye. Provided this incident resolved well, and with a decent helping of assistance from her party, she’d probably be a contender to Gondry in the next primaries—assuming Gondry continued to fumble around in the dark like a monkey seeking a football to hump (and I figured that was a fair assumption).
“Well, I don’t like to travel anywhere alone,” I said, turning to watch Augustus and Jamal coming down the stairs, Taneshia behind them. Friday had the luggage, and he was just behind them. Olivia Bracket followed a step behind, with Tracy bringing up the rear.
I frowned. Where was Scott? And Greg Vansen?
“And family is important to me,” I said, offhand, trying to complete my snide insult of the governor. I wasn’t sure it hit home, because she had a wicked good poker face. Or maybe just passed on the opportunity to insult me since I was here to help her.
“You’ve built quite the team,” she said. “I remember when it was … almost just you.”
I shot her a sideways look and decided to avoid the topic of Sienna, because … well, two could play at this politeness game. “I still have elements of a second team in position on the West Coast. Protecting one of our people who’s injured.”
“I heard about that,” Shipley said, falling into line beside me as I stepped away to let the others disembark. “And the incident in New York, and with the bridge in Maryland—it’s got people on edge.” She met my eyes, still betraying nothing. If she was panicking, she was good at keeping a steel lid over it.
“Well, they have good reason to panic,” I said. “Between the Enterprise incident and the bridge, that’s a lot of dead and injured. I’m sure seeing one of the perpetrators show up here isn’t helping you keep things calm.”
“We’ve seen worse,” she said, levelly. “The string of murders back in 2012, for instance, when your sister faced off with that … animal.” She shuddered lightly under her heavy coat; I knew she meant Wolfe. “The destruction of Glencoe. The battle over Minneapolis when your sister killed Sovereign.”
Now she was leaving oblique references behind. “Funny that you should mention the common denominator there,” I said. “Because it seems like one person solved all those problems for you.”
Her expression darkened. “Really? Because it seems to most, once they know the full facts of the situation, that all those problems had one common denominator.”
“Then they should remember the old maxim about correlation not equaling causation,” I volleyed back, trying to be just as light as she was but probably failing.
“Mr. Treston—”
“I love it when someone calls me ‘Mister,’” I said. “I can always tell they’re about to say something either very respectful or very not.”
“I hope we don’t see your sister,” Governor Shipley said, maintaining that straitlaced calm. “Because given the current climate, I’m about one step away from activating the Minnesota National Guard to help deal with this crisis. And if Sienna were to show up—”
“I like how you still call her by her first name, even though you’ve totally disavowed ever knowing her.” My cheeks were burning. Bad sign. Usually a storm warning tended to follow.
“—she’s the sort of incendiary element that would necessitate that decision,” Shipley finished, leaning back slightly to straighten her back. She looked like a pillar, standing there on the tarmac, snow at the edges of the concrete where it met the grass. “I hope we can resolve this peacefully.”
“We’ll do our best,” I said, holding inside a lot of other, nastier replies that I could have fired at her. None of them were productive or useful for the task at hand, though, so what was the point? Other than the short-term emotional satisfaction of basting the woman in vengeful rhetoric about how my sister was innocent and persecuted and—
Hell. No one was going to listen to that. I didn’t bother saying it to Sienna—because she knew—but the sum total of all of her bad decisions in the past sure had come roaring back to kick her ass with a vengeance when the Eden Prairie accusations came along.
“How’s the view from the ground?” Scott Byerly asked, striding over to me from where he’d just disembarked the plane. Governor Shipley was striding off, her message apparently delivered. I’d certainly gotten it loud and clear: Deal with this— and heaven help your sister if she shows up to assist.
“My view feels like it’s currently from under a bus,” I muttered, meta-low. “Or at least that’s Sienna’s current view.” I shook my head in a thinly veiled fury. “She does all these things to help the state, to save lives, and the minute things get a little dicey—boom. She’s persona non grata, no trial, no—”
“Well, she didn’t exactly hang around for a trial,” Scott muttered under his breath. I gave him a daggered look and he shrugged. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t have, either, under the circumstances, but … no one’s told Sienna’s story, at least not anywhere someone like Shipley would have heard it. All she knows is the party line—Sienna blew up that corporate park in Eden Prairie, killed a ton of newly released prisoners that she apparently had a grudge against—”
“That had shown up at our freaking offices with ill intent, Scott. Hell, two of them damned near killed me. That’s the part I don’t get about everyone’s reaction—do they think these people were just innocent souls out for a walk, by coincidence, by our offices, when the shit went down?”
“Well, come on,” Scott said, looking around. Beyond a tall fence nearby, a road wended its way under the grey sky, light traffic passing. “You know how it was covered by the press at the time—that was when the bombs dropped about how Sienna killed M-Squad. And she already had all those other public image issues—beating the hell out of Simmons on that internet video, punching that reporter when he blindsided her—you start adding things together, maybe it doesn’t make it too hard for people to get the wrong idea, especially if they’re predisposed to believing that everyone Sienna put in the Cube was wrongfully imprisoned.”
“That’s such a load of bullshit,” I steamed, even though I shivered when a subzero breeze blew through. “You saw what some of these people did. You—”
“Preaching to the choir, man,” Scott said. “I was in charge of the FBI squad that hunted criminal metas for a while, remember? I know what happens out there, even if it’s not exactly broadcast to the world.” He shrugged. “But good luck getting people who have the seen the bad and somehow missed the good to change their minds now that they’re entrenched in their current position. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a common failing of humanity is a real failure to appreciate our own potential fallibility of judgment. You wouldn’t think so, given how many people have completely effed up their own lives, but—here we are. Personally, after evaluating how my life has not turned out the way I wanted, I might look around and think, ‘I don’t know if I have this figured out.’ But not most people.” He shook his head. “There is an awful lot of absolute certainty out there from people who have made terrible, awful choices that have brought their lives to ruin.”
I took that in, and then smiled tightly. “Thank you for that simple truth, Scott.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, returning my smile. “And don’t despair. I’m sure we’ll get this thing cracked before Sienna shows up.”
I stared over his shoulder. Blinked a couple times. “Yeah. We really will,” I said quietly, raising my voice to the point where it was audible to all. “One way or another.”
He turned. Saw what I saw. His whole body tensed, like mine.
Because the guy we were looking for? The meta who’d trashed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, who’d attacked Jamie Barton in New York, who’d attacked Veronika and Kat in California …
He was hovering over us, looking down at us all, cloaked in flames from head to toe.
And beneath the fire, a dark line appeared where his lips would be—a shadowy smile that chilled me like the wind.