14.
Sienna
Rose’s greeting didn’t last long; the other helo started firing, and she was immersed in bullets and grenade blasts and all else. Rose disappeared under a shroud of smoke and shrapnel, and I leapt to my feet in a dead sprint, not giving a damn if I got shot now, because if I stayed to wait this out, I was probably going to end up dead or as good as.
It was time for Plan B.
I’d studied the maps of this place on that phone before I’d chucked it in the loch, of course. On it, I’d noticed a certain element of the design that I’d explored a little further when I scouted the area before I’d pulled in behind the woods and ditched John Clifford’s purloined car.
Now, sprinting for the cover of the air traffic control tower, explosions going off behind me as the US Spec Ops team tried to avenge their fallen brothers against the hellbeast that was Rose Steward (might have been a fake name, like everything else about her but her boobs—those weren’t significant enough to be fake), I was going to find out if my scouting and suspicions were going to pay off.
Personally, I was kinda rooting for the Spec Ops guys to win.
I dodged between the admin building and the tower, bouncing off one of the walls and leaving a very slight smear of blood as I did so. Must have gotten hit by some shrapnel, I reflected, but there was no time to worry about it now.
Besides, the second part of Plan B would help take care of any wounds, if in a somewhat oblique and less than satisfactory way.
An explosion signaled that the first chopper had blown up, probably. I was on the other side of the buildings now, but it came through loud and clear. Nothing those military guys had been carrying could have made a boom like that, and I doubted it was the Cessna’s aviation fuel going up, though I suspected that was coming soon, too.
“SIENNA!” Rose shouted, voice booming over the airfield. “Where did you go?”
I spotted a gully hidden just beyond the parking lot of the admin building, the midday sun sliding behind the clouds. I wasn’t going to have long. Speeding for the gully at meta speed, I hoped—hoped—hoped that the logic I’d followed in drawing up my plan B, that straightforward thinking and scouting was about to pay off in the form of an ace I was going to pull out of my sleeve unexpected.
A drainage culvert, only a few feet wide, yawned open at the bottom of the gully, and I sprinted for it, launching myself inside as Rose shouted, still a ways off, “Where are yeeeee?” all singsongy and crazy.
I hit the ground inside the culvert and didn’t wait. It was mostly dry, a hint of moisture touching my elbows and running up my body, down my chest, all the way up my thighs to my feet. I lay longways in the culvert, only an inch or two of clearance to my left, and maybe a little less on my right. If I raised my head up, I’d bump the corrugated metal above me, so I kept it down and started belly-crawling as though my life depended upon it.
Because it damned well did.
“SIENNA!” Rose cried. “Are ye in the woods?” The unmistakable sound of a blast of fire being unleashed, and another, and another, made their way, muffled, down the tunnel. I was in about a hundred yards already, speed-crawling, and judging by the tiny pinprick of light in the distance, I had about five hundred more to go. The culvert had a downward slope, being meant for drainage in this hilly country, after all.
Lucky for me, it didn’t look like this part of Scotland had experienced torrential rains in the last couple days.
“Come out, come out!” Rose’s voice was getting fainter. “You can’t hide from me, luv. And if you don’t come out, you’re just going to burn to death, and that’d be a shame. I want to have words with you.”
She wanted to have words with me, all right. Or at least one word:
Death.
I was wise to her game, though, and while fully aware that I couldn’t outpower Rose—not now, anyway, with my order of weapons burning in the Cessna and my chance of grabbing Suppressant melted to slag—I picked up my pace and started to sink into my own head as my body got into the rhythm of crawling.
My stomach bumped against rough, jagged rocks, and so did my knees, my stolen pants not doing a lot to protect them. I could feel the bruises forming, the steady aches beginning in the bones where I was thumping down hard, over and over. My elbows were complaining too, and I was covered in grime from head to toe. The light in the distance was getting brighter, though it was doing so slowly enough that I wondered if I’d get out the other end before Rose got wise to the fact I wasn’t hiding in the cluster of trees she thought I was.
I didn’t dare breathe very loud for fear that she’d hear it, magnified, from some distance. Thinking, though, that was an even greater hazard. She had to have a telepath available to her, didn’t she? She’d mentally jammed Harmon when he’d been in my head, and we hadn’t been able to read the minds of any of her thugs, either. Harmon had been pretty firm that an empath couldn’t do that the way she had.
So…if she could read my mind…why wasn’t she on me right now like a tick on a hound?
I put that thought aside, because I couldn’t suspend my escape on a premise that might have been false, the idea that she was some all-knowing force. Maybe she had a telepath, maybe she didn’t. Maybe her telepath was weak and couldn’t have read Guy Friday’s meager thoughts.
But…wouldn’t she have broken Harmon by now?
I couldn’t look back, but I kinda wanted to, not that it would have done any good. What I really wanted to do was have looked back when I had been running away from the conflagration that was Rose’s “rescue” attempt. Those Spec Ops guys had lit her up good, but she seemed to be flying around fine now. How’d she pull that off? Some kind of meta power that turned away bullets? Some ability to create a shield around herself with energy that dissolved them? I’d seen Gavrikov put up a wall of flame that melted bullets before they could harm him. Did she have something similar?
Or was she now in possession of Wolfe’s healing powers?
The light was growing brighter ahead, and my knees and elbows and chest were damned sick of being rubbed roughly against uneven ground and rocks that had washed their way down this culvert only to get lodged in the dried silt at the bottom of the pipe. I was probably only a hundred yards from the end now, and though I could hear Rose shouting faintly in the distance, I could no longer tell what she was saying. My entire world was the pipe, and only a dull hum pervaded this place, that and my labored, steady breathing as I exerted myself to GTFO of here as quickly as I could.
The air was stale, and dry, and even though I’d probably only been crawling for five minutes, it felt like I’d been in this darkness forever. My head was still spinning, and another question presented itself. Rose had turned an entire Police Scotland station against me back in Edinburgh, and she’d done it without even having to expose herself as the villain pulling the strings. How had she done that, if not telepathy?
I had another theory, of course, but it now had a big hole in it. There was a type of meta called a Siren. I’d never met one myself, but an old friend of mine—Breandan, an Irishman I’d met the first time I’d come to the UK—had a girlfriend who he claimed had that power. I had no reason to doubt him, because she’d died in the war, taken by our enemies and killed, like so many metas had been. He’d said that she could control men with the sound of her voice alone—not women, only men—that she could wrap them around her finger surer than any seductress.
If there was a male counterpart to those powers, kind of in the same way that my powers had a male counterpart, an incubus, then Rose could have absorbed those, and that was how I explained the fracas in the station in Edinburgh.
Except…
If Rose had the power to compel obedience by speech, or by using her mind (telepathy)…
Why the hell hadn’t she used it on those Spec Ops guys just now? Or me? Why bother wasting time fighting them or chasing me?
Unless she didn’t have those powers.
I was getting closer to the light now, and it had morphed from a pinprick to the size of a bowling ball. The culvert was reaching its end, and the dust I was stirring up with each scrape of my elbow against the ground was puffing up in my face. I couldn’t see any water at the end of the tunnel, just light, and I had to concentrate to keep my body in its rote habit of crawling.
Behind me, the faint sound of Rose’s fury still echoed, as I pulled myself from the hole in the ground and got to all fours. I sucked in a greedy breath of fresh air, smelled the greenery all around, and looked up at the iron grey sky above. I’d come out in a copse of trees, a little mini-forest down the hill from the airfield. Ahead of me, the dried-out drainage path went on, down to a pond.
I stood there, trying to orient myself by the sun. I didn’t dare say anything, afraid that she was listening somewhere in the distance, and that even the slightest sound would stir her to my presence.
Maybe she hadn’t tumbled to the idea that Harmon was a powerful ally that could help her immensely yet. Maybe she didn’t have any other telepaths. Maybe—
Maybe, maybe, maybe. If I was lucky, she was just being dumb, and was ignoring the mind reader in her midst.
But I couldn’t count on luck.
I didn’t bother to brush myself off, because I was just going to get dirtier in the next little while. I looked back at the culvert, the little metal tube sticking its way out of a concrete earthwork, and then set my course—due south.
Let’s go, let’s go, I said in my own head as I broke into a run. Not a hard sprint, but a metahuman jog, one that would cover some serious ground. I forgot for a moment that I would receive no answer, and I tried to bury my disappointment—my loneliness—at the lack of reply somewhere deep inside under the fatigue, under the weariness, and under most especially the gnawing, creeping sense of fear that seemed to get larger with every confrontation with Rose.