27.
“I don’t think anyone is dead,” Cassidy said, “but I can’t be sure. I’m getting the MSP airport police radio transcripts in real time, and—they haven’t called for a coroner or anything. Of course, that could be coming …”
Normally, I might have wanted to kill Cassidy for delivering this kind of news in a such a chipper tone of voice, but now I was hanging onto her words like a lifeline, trying to catch anything she threw my way, any factoid, any tiny data point—whatever I could get I would take, like a hungry puppy begging for table scraps.
“Here,” Harry said, and he shifted the SUV into park. I hadn’t even realized we’d come to a complete stop, my foot on the brake pedal.
Cars whizzed by us at 70 and higher. The SUV shook in their wake every time one passed.
“Do you know for sure that no one is dead?” I asked, even though I knew she’d just answered it. My brain felt like molasses, like it was moving in slow motion, trying to come to grips with this meteor strike of information and emotion. My hands were shaking on the wheel, wrists fluttering back and forth like a rope bridge on a gusty day.
“No, and I wouldn’t even know this much if not for the fact that the entire emergency response for Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington and the surrounding areas just exploded into action,” Cassidy said, face lit by the screen’s glow. “Apparently the governor was there when it happened, and now everyone’s freaked out that this was an assassination attempt or something.”
“It was,” I whispered. But it wasn’t targeted at the governor, and we didn’t know if it had succeeded yet.
“Sienna …” Harry said.
I turned on him, slowly. “Did you see this coming?”
He shook his head. He was pale like the snows that lay draped, unevenly, over the snowy Illinois plains. “No.”
I looked him in the eye. “I believe you.”
He didn’t exactly let out a breath of relief, but I could see a slight loosening of his features. “Good.”
“Emergency services are going to be working for a while,” Cassidy said. “They’re calling in more ambulances.” She was still in tight concentration.
“That’s … that’s a good thing, right?” Eilish asked. “They don’t call in ambulances for dead people, after all.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening my door as frosty air rushed in. “What wonderful news.” I slammed it behind me and stalked around the hood of the car, heading for the limited treeline to my right. It consisted of five pines all in a row, the tallest of which was only about ten feet, and it sat just in front of a three-wire cattle fence.
I didn’t even have a proper woods to stalk off into to gather my thoughts. Illinois. The southern and western part was like Iowa lite.
I half-expected to hear a door open behind me, but I didn’t, and when I reached the fence I just jumped it. Nothing too fancy, a simple meta leap about five feet over a four-foot fence. I landed in the patchy snow on the other side and almost turned my ankle.
Color me unworried. Even if I turned my ankle, a minor injury like that would heal in about two hours, even in my vanilla condition.
“Dammit,” I let out a breath, and it frosted in front of me. I couldn’t tell if the worry I was feeling bubbling inside was driving the anger, or the anger was driving the worry harder. It didn’t really matter either way, because they were both present in sufficient quantities to choke me, and all I was doing was keeping my cool until I felt like I was far enough away from the SUV to lose it without having to worry about being watched.
But the ground was flat all the way around me, so there wasn’t much hope I wouldn’t be seen. No, there was nowhere to hide now; I was in plain sight of the road anywhere I went.
The despair and uncertainty felt like it was choking me, a little extra discomfort to compete with the chilling air that seeped in around my long sleeves and jeans. I should have dressed more warmly, knowing I was heading north, but here I was in the middle of snowy field, wearing no coat and watching my breath mist in front of me.
And lucky me, I got to wonder if my brother and my friends were dead on some cold, snowy runway in Minneapolis.
They’d come to save me in Scotland, and now I had to wonder if I’d missed my chance to repay the favor. They’d gone through all that hell, come to pull my fat out of the fire only for me to be too pathetic and drunk and unconcerned with everything to worry when they went into the fire themselves.
“I don’t think they’re dead,” Cassidy said from behind me. I turned to find her picking her way across the gaps where no snow lay, patches of black earth that were fallow for winter, hard and unyielding against her little tennis shoes. She had wrapped her arms around herself and was shivering, her tiny frame covered by a heavy coat, one more appropriate for Minneapolis weather. I wondered, idly, if she’d set up shop there again, or if she’d picked some other place to park herself after Reed destroyed her house in Richfield.
“It’d be a lot more helpful to me if I knew—and if I knew how badly they were injured,” I said, turning back to her. I paused, and said, “Wait … Harry sent you to talk to me? You?”
“I don’t know why, either,” Cassidy said, shivering. “It’s so cold out here, and it feels like I could be doing more at the computer, but …” she shrugged her small shoulders. “Yes, he sent me. Said I needed to come talk to you.” She almost missed a step but caught herself at the last second. She was not the most graceful meta I’d seen; in fact, she wasn’t that far off from being human in her dexterity. “Said I was the only one who could come talk to you.”
“I wonder why that is,” I said, turning back to look at the horizon, at where the grey sky joined the flat earth.
“Hell if I know,” she said, shivering as she slipped up next to me. “I think we both know my people skills are still …”
“As weak as your deadlift,” I said. “Weaker, probably, since you still have meta strength.”
“I never understood the point of physical strength until I ran across you,” she said, cocking her head, breath still misting the air. “Eric and I, we could … I mean, he used some variant of physical strength, obviously, but … it wasn’t like he had to get violent with people. We cracked bank vaults with his powers, and always when they were unoccupied. It was easy, it was lucrative, and we could just … live in the times between. Live on what we’d taken. Physical strength was about threats, about violence, about compulsion through force. I liked … to outthink my opponents instead.” A trace of a smile appeared on her lips. “To present them with a circumstance so ingenious that violence was an afterthought. Persuasion by manipulation of circumstance, call it. They never even needed to know my hand had been involved in … whatever it was. I could get what I needed without being so coarse.
“Then you came along,” she said, “and suddenly … all the thought in the world, all the avoidance—none of it mattered. You wouldn’t stop coming. You caught Eric, and I needed actual physical strength to overcome you. So I thought it through. I brought in people skilled at that sort of thing, people who had lived by violence. I removed most of your ability to do violence through the use of the suppressant—”
“Oh, yeah?” I remembered what she was talking about, her jailbreak at the old Agency, back when I’d worked for the government and been the warden for their prison, the Cube, which was housed under our headquarters. She’d done it, too, orchestrated a hostage situation to cover up Eric Simmons’s escape, used metahuman Russian ex-Special Forces operators to lay siege to us during a big event and depowered my brother. Then she’d had her little team hound me throughout the facility while I Die-Harded my way through them in order to keep the jailbreak contained.
And it mostly was. Only Simmons and Anselmo Serafini had escaped, and Anselmo had had to be carried out, scarred beyond recognition, thanks to me.
“—and you still wrecked everything and saved the day—mostly.” She made a face. “Violence. You were a master of it. You killed almost every one of those Russian mercs with less power than you have now.”
“I had some help,” I said quietly. “Reed. J.J. Scott … eventually.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Cassidy said. “I mean, I know Scotland was tough on you and all, but … you’re not dead. And like I said, you’re more powerful now than you were when you fought through those Russians—”
“I knew who I was then,” I said, the truth crashing in on me—several at once, actually.
My brother could die.
I’d lost my way, because not only had I lost my power and my memory, but …
This thing I’d been doing the last few years? Helping people? Fighting the bad guys?
I’d done it under the auspices of being a fugitive for the last year, which hobbled me.
But I’d also done it with incredible, near-limitless amounts of money available to me, and the power of flight to guarantee I could escape just about any situation that got too dicey. I’d turned tail and run a few times, and when I wanted to stand and fight, I had lots of power to do that as well.
Now?
I was standing in the middle of a field with the ability to punch, with a Walther PPK in my waistband, and the power to suck souls if someone held contact with my skin long enough.
It was hardly nothing, but it also wasn’t the power to fly, to throw fire in any direction, to cast webs of light that could net people up like a holy Spider-man, to throw fear and paralysis into their minds, or, failing that, heal from just about any wound they could inflict or turn into a four-story dragon and rip them apart with my teeth.
I let out a long sigh.
“Why the hell did Harry send me out here to talk to you?” Cassidy asked. “I lack the soft skills for this. I mean, can you imagine a person less interested in feelings than me?”
“You’re less interested in the feelings of others, Cassidy,” I said, “I’m pretty sure you have your own, since I’ve been on the receiving end of your ire before.”
“That’s a reasonable point,” she said, all computer-like again. “But I don’t know why Harry thinks I can help you with this—this baggage of yours.”
“Who am I to you, Cassidy?” I asked, turning around to her.
Cassidy stared at me with shrewd eyes. “You’re an occasional obstacle to be overcome and an occasionally useful person when our objectives align. You did save me from Harmon, after all.”
“Cold. Analytical. About what I’d expect of a thinking machine.”
“Thank you,” she said, completely sincere.
“That wasn’t a … never mind.” I shook my head. Why the hell did Harry send her after me? “You’re not going to have a real news update on anyone’s condition for hours, are you?”
“If they die, I’ll probably have one sooner,” she said, and then seemed to realize what she’d just said. “Which … would be bad, I guess …?”
“Yes, that’d be bad,” I said, and realized that her last, drawn-out sentence had been one of the longest ones I’d ever heard Cassidy try and construct, almost like she was struggling, even with her big, fast-moving brain, to put together an answer in an expedient fashion. She was taking more time to be as sympathetic as she could.
Unfortunately, she was still Cassidy, but … points for effort.
And that drove home an old truth I’d learned a long time ago—that there was nothing you could do if you just stood around waiting for things to happen. I could stand out here in this snowy field all damned day, but there’d be no news that’d reach me here that wouldn’t catch me in the car, no action I could take here that would help my brother or my friends …
“Let’s go, Cassidy,” I said, starting the short walk back to the car, snow crunching beneath my feet as I put one foot in front of another and started away from the fields, away from the cold, away from nature … and back to action.
Back to Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Home.