2.
Sienna
Panama City Beach, Florida
Waking up to bad news sucks, doubly so when it’s around noon that it happens.
I opened my eyes when I heard forced whispers through the walls. You know the kind; hushed but loud, lots of emotion behind them. The speaker can’t quite keep it bottled up so it bursts out, like an acrophobic skydiver shoved from the back of a plane.
That was what I heard when I woke in my bed in the vacation condo. White walls, white ceilings, beach décor. There was an olden wooden oar with the words “Mike’s Beach Place” painted on it in white letters. Seashells dominated the decorating scheme, printed on a strip of wallpaper border, embroidered on the towels, and glued into a box that hung on the wall.
Which made sense. I was only a block from the beach, after all.
I was staying outside Panama City, on the Florida panhandle, that little stretch less than a hundred miles from Alabama. If the rest of the state was a dangling peninsula bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other, the panhandle was the piece that kept it from breaking away and floating off to party in the Caribbean, a haven for retirees, visitors from the midwest, and vacationers from the southern US. I was staying along a strip known as 30A, a colorful locale filled with lots of screaming kids and sunburned parents.
Or it usually was. It was January now, so there wasn’t a lot of sunburning going on, and it was beach weather for no one, except maybe this Minnesotan.
I sat up in bed, a hangover announcing its presence now that I was up. Light streamed in through white blinds and the curtains that bordered them. I’d gone through a bottle of scotch last night—again—and it was plainly going to punish me this morning.
I was getting pretty used to this feeling by now.
I listened, trying to figure out what was going on with all the whispering. I couldn’t hear it all that well, because it seemed to have stopped, but I listened anyway. I thought I could hear some intrepid soul using the pool in the off-season—crazy; it was probably fifty or sixty degrees outside—but there was no sound from the main room.
Squinting my eyes to try and block out some of the pain streaming in with the light, I put my feet over the edge of the bed and stood, tentatively. The world didn’t sway around me; I guessed that meant I was sober now.
“Ugh.” I made my way to the bathroom on unsteady legs, did my business, and then headed for the door. There was no problem that anyone could have been dealing with this morning that couldn’t wait until I was done peeing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been whispering.
I slid open the pocket door and light blazed down the hallway. Turning left, I shuffled my way toward the condo’s living room to find Reed, Eilish, Augustus, and Taneshia all sitting on the couches and wicker recliners that made up the sitting area. Beyond them was a sliding glass door to the balcony, which overlooked the pool. And yep, there were a couple crazies in there this morning, splashing it up. I could almost see the blue lips from here.
“What’s going on?” I asked in the middle of a hell of a yawn. It probably came out more like, “Waaaaaaas gooooooin onnnn?” Didn’t even cover my mouth. Ladylike, I know.
Reed gave me this look he’d been sporting a lot lately. I called it the “mom combo”; it had guilt, a little worry, and a faint whiff of judgment. He didn’t say anything, though, just nodded at the TV, which hung over the mantel above the fireplace.
Yes, our condo in Florida had a fireplace. And we’d been using it, too.
Taneshia and Augustus were so cuddled up, it took me a second to steer my eyes away from their overwhelming cuteness, but eventually steer them away I did, and sure enough, on screen …
“Wow,” I said.
It wasn’t the wreck of the Hesperus, because only a few people died in that. This was the capsizing of the brand new USS Enterprise in its dry dock, and the chyrons at the bottom of the news screen told the tale: Hundreds feared dead after metahuman incident at ship christening ceremony. President Gondry scheduled to attend, missed attack by minutes.
“So Gondry’s okay?” I asked, feeling a little surge of patriotic worry, even though I didn’t know Gondry and he hadn’t gotten my vote. Honestly, who even really knows who the VP is? I’d voted against the guy at the top of his ticket. Gondry had been an afterthought until President Harmon died. Now he was the big cheese.
Still, I didn’t want him dead. And the accusatory “metahuman” tag in that chyron was a bit worrisome.
“When do you think they’ll call us in?” Augustus asked. He was already twitching, and Taneshia had a look on her face that told me she wished he’d settle down.
“I don’t know,” Reed said, still watching me with mom eyes. “But when they do, it’s going to be the three of us and Scott, I think. Just for ease of getting there.”
“Scott’s in Minnesota,” I said, trying to suppress a yawn and failing. “Along with the rest of your team. Which means if you can pull him, you can pull anybody you want.”
“Not so,” Reed said, dropping the mom eyes for just a moment. “I had to send Veronika, Kat, Angel, and Chase to Seattle last night. They had some sort of meta throwdown at Pike Place Market yesterday. Nothing major, but a lot of people got scared. And Friday, Tracy, and Jamal are in Oklahoma this morning, dealing with a runaway spiraling meta.”
I knew all of those people save for Tracy and Angel. Angel had been hired by the lady I’d trusted to start up this new agency, some meta who was in her family and apparently looking for work.
Tracy, though … Tracy was, by Reed’s own somewhat strained account, a real asshole who, by some sort of miraculous transmogrification that I’d never gotten the full story on—because Reed was being incredibly dodgy about telling it—had become a very helpful sort of guy, one who practically fell over himself kissing Reed’s ass on every occasion they were in close proximity. It might have been alarming if it hadn’t made my brother so comically uncomfortable.
He might have been able to do mom eyes with the best of them, but I could smell his guilt when Tracy was around. He’d done something he was ashamed of in relation to that guy. I was just too busy wallowing in my own shitty feelings to dig into it.
Yet.
“I might pull in Olivia Brackett for this, too,” Reed said, thinking out loud. He’d become quite the commanding commander, building up this agency I’d handed him. It was even making money now, which was a relief, because I was tapped out or cut off, most of my money taken away by Rose months ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars impounded by my Scottish nemesis, now well outside my grasp because I couldn’t get to the countries where they were quartered and take possession of them.
Alas. Being a federal fugitive is such a pain in the ass. Being a flightless federal fugitive? Even worse.
I stared at the TV. “What do you suppose did that?” I asked, pointing at the wreck of the Enterprise. The side of the ship was completely torn open. It looked like it had been gouged on the side of the quay, a tear in the metal hundreds of feet long revealing the compartments within. “Metal-controlling type? Poseidon playing splash games in the dock?”
“I don’t know,” Reed said, staring at it with full concentration again. The wheels were turning, which meant he had no time to mom-guilt his baby sister. Wheee.
“And here I thought hanging about with you lot would be boring,” Eilish said, her light Irish accent such a contrast with all our rugged American gutter mouths. “But it’s never boring in America, is it?”
“It used to be,” I said, suppressing another yawn. “Back when metas were an endangered species instead of sprouting up everywhere like genetically altered weeds.”
“Yeah, I thought we pulled that plant out by the roots,” Augustus said. He leaned forward, unintentionally displacing Taneshia and earning himself a glare he remained blissfully unaware of. “Didn’t we get Revelen’s entire distribution network in the US?”
“That we knew of, sure,” Reed said, still frowning. “But it’s a mighty big country, and there are a lot of wrongdoers out there looking to cause chaos.”
We’d talked about Revelen enough in recent days that I didn’t feel the need to go there again. When a European country takes a special interest in creating superpowered people who then go criminal and cause havoc in your country, there’s not much to discuss beyond a) stopping them here, and b) stopping them there. We were still working on the former, and thinking about the latter, because I’d had too many strong people warning me away from whatever demons lurked in the country of Revelen to go charging into that den of beasts unthinkingly.
Especially now.
“I think—” Reed started to say something but stopped, pulling up his phone and then answering it. “This is Treston, go.”
“Hi, this is your sister, Sienna,” I said, sotto voce, earning a completely horrified look from Reed. “I’m standing ten feet in front of you right now …”
“Dude,” Augustus said, almost on his feet. “He’s on with the FBI!”
“Yeah, and I doubt they can hear me, so …” I shrugged. “I thought it was funny.”
Augustus’s jaw tightened. “They have their own metahuman task force now. Complete with actual metahumans.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oops.” I hoped they didn’t hear me, because that’d turn my joke into a not-so-funny incident of them kicking down our door.
“Yeah, I’m watching,” Reed said, all his ire toward me forgotten as he focused on the conversation. “I’m in Florida right now, but I’ve got a private jet standing by about twenty minutes away. I can be there in a few hours with a team.” He listened, then nodded. “All right, make the arrangements. We’ll see you then.” And he hung up and turned to Augustus and Taneshia. “We’re up. Get packed, wheels up in half an hour. We’ll meet Scotty there, and I’ll send for Olivia.” His jaw tightened. “Maybe Greg, too, since he’s offered to be on our reserve payroll in case of emergency.”
I recognized that as a sign of nothing good. “What?” I asked, and he didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. “Reed … what is it?”
He drew a long breath, then let it out, slowly. “They have a suspect, and … he’s known to us.”
“Oh, man,” I said, putting a hand to my face. My list of rogues was pretty short these days, and one popped immediately to mind, someone who could move—well, mountains, or the earth, and definitely shake up an aircraft carrier within its berth if he were of a mind to. But I didn’t say this. Instead, I said, “Who?”
“They’ve placed Eric Simmons at the scene,” Reed said tightly, getting to his feet. “When confronted by the military police, he fled. They’ve got a helicopter over him right now, and they’re following him back to wherever he’s going.” His jaw tightened, my brother suddenly serious, no more trace of the mom combo. “They’re waiting for us to make their move.”