44.
Jamal
“Nice to see you fellas without orange jumpsuits and steel jewelry,” Reed said as Augustus and I exited the jail with Miranda trailing behind us. He’d been leaning against a wall, arms folded, not looking too pleased or impressed with being called out to Northern Virginia in what was getting to be the middle of the night. “It wasn’t a great look on you when I saw it on the news earlier.”
“Well, you know, the steely handcuffs don’t really offer enough pop against my skin tone,” Augustus snipped at him, adjusting his shirt like it was too tight, or had itching powder in it. Something.
I was powering up my phone, trying to give Reed a pass on his hard snark. Who could blame him for being pissed that he had to drop everything and cross the country to bring us a lawyer to bail our asses out?
Lucky for us, Miranda hadn’t had to do much. My phone buzzed as it came back to life, a text message already waiting for me from Arche.
Sorry about that.
I sent right back to her, or at least her number, avoiding the traditional message routes and delivering it direct with 1’s and 0’s of electrical energy to the point of origin. I felt a little touch from her own exploring, probing, digital fingers, and for a second it was like talking direct to her, no devices between us.
“Did you know this was going to happen?” I asked, seeing a flash of a digital avatar that looked like her.
“No,” she said, voice garbled and digitized. “If I had known how stiff the opposition was, I would have warned you. I didn’t mean to send you into the lion’s den unprepared. Those weren’t my orders.”
“Orders …?” I asked. “Care to tell me who you’re working for?”
Her avatar showed the hint of a smile. “No. You’re a smart fellow. You’ll figure it out.”
I tried not to show my disappointment. And here I’d been hoping she was helping me out of the goodness of her heart or our prior association or … other … reasons. “Well, thanks for getting us out of it.”
“They didn’t see me coming—this time,” she said. “Be careful if you go after these people again. They’re more dangerous than I thought they’d be. More prepared.”
I thought about it for a second. “You know I can’t just leave them alone.”
I caught a flash of that smile again. Arche never looked … happy, exactly, but there was a certain amusement in what I saw here. “I know. Best of luck, Jamal.”
And then she was gone, her digital footprint vanished from my phone like she’d never even been there.
“… just trying to figure out what you were thinking,” Reed was saying as I popped back into the real world.
“Phones out, everybody,” I said, and they all looked at me questioningly. “Never mind,” I said, and a little bolt of electricity lanced out from my hand, finding their phones with a tiny trickle of blue to each of their bodies. I switched off every one of their phones and did a quick search, manually deactivating every single microphone, camera and transmitter so that I’d physically have to power them up again once we were done. “Okay, Reed—take us up.”
If Reed didn’t know what I was doing, he made no display of it, instead following my request and shooting the four of us into the sky. Miranda gasped, but Augustus and I both managed to control our surprise as the ground fell away and the wind carried us a thousand, then two thousand feet straight up, and brought us together in a tight little circle.
“A little warning next time might be nice,” Miranda said, the legs of her pants flaring like bell bottoms.
“We’re well out of range of most listening devices, if you’ve switched off the ones we carry with us,” Reed said, looking straight at me. “So … what is it you didn’t want to talk about with anyone else around to hear it?”
I traded a look with Augustus, and he answered for me. “We were chasing evidence that Sienna was defending herself in Eden Prairie.”
Reed stiffened visibly. “Say what?”
“Last year,” I said, taking up the story, “when Sienna and I worked with ArcheGrey1819, that superhacker? She told us there was video proof that Sienna was innocent in the Eden Prairie explosion. That the local cameras had recorded her getting her ass beat by those prisoners, and that she blew up in self-defense.”
“Of course she did,” Reed said, still stiff. “We all know that the Eden Prairie incident was just a pretext for Harmon to sic the dogs on her.”
“Right,” I said, “but the problem with siccing the dogs on her was, after Harmon died, there was no one willing to call them off. Most people didn’t know she was innocent—but some do. And they’re hiding the evidence, maybe at Harmon’s behest, maybe for their own reasons at this point. But we got … pointed in the direction of the supposed custodians of the proof.”
“And they’re a metafamily that works in IT for a whole lot of congresscritters,” Augustus said. “Powers like Jamal and Arche to affect the digital flow of information.”
Reed’s brow furrowed. “So you’re saying that … there’s an active conspiracy to keep Sienna on the run? It’s not just Harmon’s dead hand and bureaucratic momentum keeping it going?”
“There’s probably some of that at work,” I said. “I mean, the press that was there, that was mind-controlled and attacked her, they’ll probably swear till their dying days that she’s evil and came after them, but …”
“But they were basically the only witnesses and they were under the influence of that meta with the feral whatever powers,” Reed said, working it out for himself. He took a deep breath and stared off into space for a moment before looking back at us. “How long have you been on this? Trying to prove Sienna innocent?”
I traded a look with Augustus, and he answered for us both. “Since just after we rolled up that Revelen Serum cartel. Right when Guy Friday joined us.”
“That’s a long time to be working this under the radar.” He looked at Miranda. “I trust, given your history with Sienna, you can keep this secret?”
Miranda let slip a ghost of a smile. “I’ve kept much darker secrets for Sienna than the fact she’s innocent. And she had me working on this on my own, anyway, so … to borrow one of her favorite phrases,” she looked at each of us, “‘Welcome to the party, pal.’”
“I knew she was innocent,” Reed said, pensive, “but I never dreamed there’d be a way to prove it. This is …” And he smiled. “I want this done. More than anything.” Now his eyes flashed danger, though. “But these people, this family you’re talking about? They damned near put you in the same boat as her with only a couple moves.”
I nodded. “They’re dangerous, no doubt. And now they know we’re looking. The game’s afoot fer realz.”
“We’ll need to watch our step, then,” Reed said, and he seemed to come to a decision. “But … at least now we know something, too. We have a first step.”
“The Custis family,” Augustus agreed.
“They’re protected by power,” I said. “Their own metahuman abilities—but also friends, I think. These people—they’re asses we can’t just kick, or we’ll find our own kicked back even harder.”
“That’s all right,” Augustus said, and his tone sounded different than it had when we’d started this day in Ohio, charging into trouble. “We’ve got time. We do this slow, if we have to. Tie ‘em up. Get it right. Keep a watch on ‘em—and wait for them to make a mistake, because everybody does, sooner or later. And now that they know we’re after them …”
“They’ll be moving,” Miranda said. “Before, they were probably just standing still on this, or acting behind the cloak of anonymity. Now that we know about them …”
“Yeah,” Reed said, and a smile broke over his lips. “We know who holds the cards. Now … we just have figure out how to get them.”