4.
Sienna
I didn’t have much time, so I tried to focus. Worry was the enemy of intelligent action, because it used brain cells that you needed in order to be on the top of your game. I slipped through the Scottish underbrush, bushes barely touching me as I went past, heading for the voices ahead and the road I’d left behind when I’d crawled this way the night before.
Moving like a metahuman meant running at speeds most people couldn’t really conceive of. It was like being an Olympic sprinter times two, my legs pumping so quickly and crazily that when I’d seen myself filmed running, it looked absurd, like someone had kicked the video into high speed. I was doing that now, leaping over a sapling here, dodging under a low branch there, assessing the threats to me and avoiding them quicker than the human eye could normally even process them.
The smell of rich, green forests was thick in the cool, morning air. The fresh air would normally have been an incentive to—I dunno, go for a run or something if you were into that. And I was certainly running this morning, but the incentive in this case was to bust the living crap out of an officer of Police Scotland before he got a chance to broadcast my location to anybody and everybody this side of—oh, I dunno, Scotland, pick a frigging city. Inverness. That one was big back in the day, wasn’t it? Macbeth took place there, didn’t it?
Up ahead I could see the vegetation clear; green branches and light brown boughs gave way to grey skies beyond. I was sprinting up the embankment below the road, and I heard a male voice start to speak, following a hiss of static as he thumbed a microphone. He must have heard me coming, though, because he hesitated before saying anything.
I burst out of the trees and hit him like a freight train. I wasn’t aiming to kill him, but I assaulted that police officer hard, keeping on after I kicked his legs out from beneath him. They flew up, leaving him as my violent sweeping kick landed, and I was moving on to the next target, figuring hesitation was my deadliest enemy in this fight. I grimaced and said, “Sorry,” as I rammed into the second officer. He’d been grabbing for a baton the moment he’d seen me, but he didn’t have a prayer. I’d only had to cover about ten feet once I left the cover of trees, and that was simply too much for human reflexes to deal with. He’d needed to draw his baton, deploy it, and then raise it and bring it down on me. He’d gotten to about halfway through deploying it when I jacked him in the jaw. The light went out of his eyes and the strength went out of his legs, and he sagged. I caught him and let him down slowly, then turned my attention back to the guy I’d cut the legs from beneath.
He was moaning, but coming back to himself, so I took a couple quick steps over to him and punched him right in the forehead. It hurt me, it hurt him, but it put his lights out and I didn’t break his skull, so I considered it a win overall. He was probably going to wake up concussed, but he’d wake up, and that was important for reasons of his health and my conscience.
I looked around. We were down in a ditch just off the roadway, probably about ten feet down the slope. I could hear a car or two coming by, but I couldn’t see them from where I was standing, and that was damned good luck, the first piece I felt like I’d had in a while. I stood there for only a second catching my breath after the run and the—uhm, assaulting a police officer—and reflected that it was already time to go back to work.
It only took me about ten seconds to load a cop over each shoulder and then carry them back into the woods. I didn’t want to go too far, so I stopped about ten feet in, where there was enough cover that they wouldn’t be immediately visible from the road, but they weren’t totally out of sight, either. I figured a helicopter with thermal gear would be coming this way once their higher ups figured out they were missing, probably go along their patrol path. Here they’d find them, if a passing motorist didn’t hear the screams first.
These were the judgments I made in seconds, and I defy you to figure out how to make better ones.
I took the clothes off the shortest one, including his boots and that stupid reflective vest. I rolled up the cuffs of his pants and put them on, then did the same to his shirt. I laced his boots up tight, and sucked it up as I pulled his belt as tight as it could go. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately, given that my waistline allowed me to wear a man’s belt), that fit fine.
“Guess I need cardio after all,” I muttered under my breath. Usually that was the sort of line that would provoke a good gout of laughter and commentary from the voices in my head, but…
I didn’t have any more voices in my head.
Shit.
I put the stupid cop hat on after cramming all my hair up underneath it in an unrestrained bun. The hat did a fine job of holding it back, fortunately, and I only hoped that it’d changed the look of me enough that people wouldn’t be shouting, “That’s Sienna Nealon!” as I passed. It was the most I could hope for at this point.
I had several problems to solve, but the most pressing was that without Aleksandr Gavrikov rustling around in my brain, I’d lost my ability to retreat effectively. Time was, I could turn on the supersonic flight powers and be in Zimbabwe by now, all worries about Scottish police in my rearview.
Without Gavrikov, though…I was a sitting duck for patrols like this. Well, maybe not exactly like this, but certainly any patrols that came armed would have a better chance of bringing me low now that I was as close to powerless as I’d been since that time I’d been gassed with a drug that suppressed metahuman abilities.
Taking short breaths to calm myself, I started back up the hillside toward the road. I’d taken the other cop’s gear and tossed it aside after cuffing them both around the tree in their undershirts and boxers. “I miss undressing a man for the fun of it,” I said aloud, again forgetting that I had no audience for my brilliant wisecracks now. Which was a shame, because the edification of a laugh track in your life almost made me understand why stupid sitcoms put them in.
Honestly, though, there were a lot of things in my life that I missed at this stage of the game, having been an international fugitive for however many months (like seven or eight, but who was counting other than the news channels?). Being able to have breakfast with friends. Sitting in my living room, watching TV without worrying someone was going to come bursting in to arrest me. Sleeping at night without having paranoid dreams about waking up in a jail cell—or not at all.
My feet crunched the dewy grass as I came up on the road next to the police car. It was another shoe-sized car, like all of them over here seemed to be. I missed pickup trucks, and SUVs, and the glorious American cars that stated plainly that if you didn’t get the hell out of the road, we would run you over and you would die, instead of suffering a tragic injury to your big toe where it scraped the bumper.
I missed home, I realized for the zillionth time as I opened the wrong door to the police car, and had to circle around to the driver’s side. Someone came by at about twenty miles an hour, and I waved to them as I turned my head away, trying to make sure they couldn’t see my face. They kept going, which I hoped meant that I’d succeeded as I slid into the driver’s side, which was, because it was the bass-ackward UK, on the wrong damned side of the car.
It started up with a choking sputter, sounding a little like I’d turned on an RC car, and I sighed again, deciding it would be best to avoid getting in any high-speed chases. I scoured the car quickly, and found no joy in the form of hidden handguns or the like. I hadn’t expected to, but I still found it unfortunate, because I’d had one last night, but it had gotten lost somewhere in my fight with Rose.
Rose.
Here was a name that stirred questions and provided no damned answers. I was so tangled that even thinking about that red-headed bitch made me want to throw every thought of feminist cooperation and empowerment back in someone’s face along with a hard damned slap, the sort that wouldn’t just rattle their head but bust it clean off.
Rose had played my friend and fan better than anyone I’d ever seen do it before. There was something about people that shone through, that hint of malice you could see when you looked in their eyes.
There had been none of that for my pale, red-headed “friend.” I’d taken her power at face value, ignored the fact that I couldn’t read her mind because the story she presented seemed oh-so-logical, and because she’d taken a bullet for me. That was a commitment to the art of deception I’d never been prepared for. People who wanted to trick me usually kept their plans simpler.
Rose, though—she’d gone for the gold. She’d stayed by my side long past a time when she had ample opportunity to kill me without resistance. She could have snuffed me in my sleep, multiple times. She had enough power she could have turned me into free-floating atoms any one of a hundred times I turned my back on her.
But she didn’t. She didn’t even give me a sour look, nor a kick in the duff, not even a cross word…until she was ready to end the charade.
Shit, that was some deep planning. It bespoke of a hostility that was almost otherworldly in origin, the kind of white-hot hate and scary levels of self-discipline that I hadn’t seen outside of…well, Mom, I guess.
And Rose was a succubus.
“Shit,” I said under my breath, lowering my head. She was Scottish-born—if her story to me could be trusted, which…I guess it couldn’t. So maybe she wasn’t Scottish at all. She’d said that her meta powers came from her drifter father, but now I had to doubt that, too. I’d thought she was young, younger than me, but now every single thing she told me about herself was thrown into doubt. Her name might not even have been Rose, for all I knew. It could have been Frito Bandito.
But probably not that. I’d given this Rose problem some thought while contemplating the underaxle of a truck last night, and the number of conclusions I’d come to was roughly zero. All I had was that she hated me enough to run the longest con of all the long cons I could remember, short of maybe Sovereign or Old Man Winter, and all in order—in her words (if they could be trusted)—to “know me.”
Why the hell would she want to know me?
Who the hell was this girl?
And, I wondered, not nearly the last of the questions I had, but the one bubbling most fiercely in my upset, rumbling, hungry stomach…What was she doing right now?