29.
Reed
The plane cruised steadily at about 35,000 feet, the gentle hum you might expect in a commercial flight a little louder on the smaller aircraft. The engines roared outside, taking in air and forcing it out the back in great jets, slipping along at over four hundred miles an hour.
I could the feel disturbance (not in the Force) created by the engines. I hadn’t really been able to before Harmon had overclocked my powers, but now I felt it keenly, just another added benefit of the expansion of my abilities. I glanced across the Gulfstream’s aisle at Scott, who was pensive, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. I wondered how keenly he could feel the moisture in the air—or maybe lack thereof at this altitude.
Everybody was engaged in some kind of avoidance behavior. Distraction was the king of pursuits for those of us waiting for whatever might happen once we reached York. It wasn’t that we expected hostilities, but given what Sienna had told me…
Well, I’d warned them all to be prepared, and it looked like most of them were taking the hint.
Except Friday and Kat. They were sleeping. And one of them was snoring. (Kat, surprisingly.)
“The sleep of the innocent, huh?” Chase chucked a thumb at Friday and sat down next to me in the empty seat that everyone else had left abandoned. It was like they could sense my mood, or maybe read the “F off” written all over my face.
“You’ve known him longer than I have,” I said with a little amusement. “How innocent does Friday strike you?”
“I never knew him as Friday until I came here,” Chase said. “What’s that all about?”
“Hell if I know,” I said with a shrug. “I think Sienna came up with it. Guy Friday or something, because he used to follow our old boss around so close that if Phillips stopped too abruptly, Friday would have fallen in.”
“That’s interesting,” Chase said, looking back over her shoulder at where Friday sat alone, but hopefully for different reasons than me. His head was back, his mouth was open, and he looked pretty much dead to the world.
“As interesting as anything related to Friday can be, I guess,” I said.
“Can I ask you something?” Chase showed her nervousness by scratching her arm. “Everyone else on this thing—” she just plunged right ahead without waiting for my answer on the previous question “—is all full of hearty conviction that they’re running into a worthy cause. Can I just ask…is there something I’m missing about Sienna and this whole Eden Prairie thing? Keeping in mind I’m the new girl, and don’t really, uh, know anyone that well yet, so I miss all the good gossip.”
“The Eden Prairie thing wasn’t Sienna’s fault,” I said, letting my weariness seep out in the form of a story. It wasn’t a story I tended to tell very often, mainly because no one seemed to want to hear it. “The Supreme Court issued a ruling—probably influenced by President Harmon, who hated Sienna—that turned loose all those criminal metas she’d put away over the last few years—”
“Yep,” Chase said. “I read about that. But, I mean, the official reports talked about her losing her damned mind and nuking a commercial park filled with reporters and innocent people.”
“And killing all those criminals she’d released,” I said, “who’d turned up at our office for a spontaneous protest in the middle of the night, masquerading as a lynch mob. One of them turned the reporters into a bunch of feral animals, sent them after her. She broke their control, but she got overwhelmed by all those criminals afterward, and…they had her down, so she…went off like a bomb, I guess.”
“Huh,” Chase said. “No wonder the LA thing went over like a lead balloon. I was kinda out of the country working when the Eden Prairie deal went down.”
“They didn’t have the internet where you were?” I asked with a snarky smile.
“Not at that time, no,” she said, utterly serious. “So…if Sienna dusted those crooks in self-defense, why is she still public enemy number one?”
“Because President Harmon was a meta running a scheme to take over the world by boosting his metahuman telepathic powers so he could mind-control everyone.” She raised an eyebrow, then the other, and I felt compelled to further explain. “That…sounds really stupid when you just blurt it out that way, doesn’t it?”
“Little farfetched, yeah,” she admitted. “Boosted powers? Telepathic president? Man…you people deal with some weird stuff.”
“You can say that again.”
Chase got a little gleam of mischief in her eye. “You people deal—”
“We do, we really do,” I said, nodding along.
“So why is everyone avoiding you like you’re a black hole?” Chase asked. “Like you’re a bomb on the plane. Or a snake on a plane.”
“Probably because Samuel L. Jackson isn’t around to announce me as such,” I said, looking around for J.J. He’d supply the Samuel L. Jackson line if he heard Chase reference it, I was sure of that much. “Look, Chase…”
“Oh, man. Is this the part where you shut me out because this isn’t any of my business?”
I took a deep breath, biting down that first instinct, because…it kinda was her business. “No,” I said. “You’re riding into this storm with us, so…it’s totally your business now. The reason they’re avoiding me is probably—and I’m just guessing here—because I’m projecting a black hole, and no one wants to ask how I really feel, even though they can hear us talking.”
“As usual, you’re amazingly self-aware,” Veronika announced from a couple rows back. “You keep it up and you’ll be self-actualizing in no time.”
“That sounds dirty,” Friday said. In his sleep, I think.
“We’re having to sneak into the UK,” I said, looking Chase right in the eyes. “Do you know why?”
“They’ve got a metahuman ban,” she said. “The whole EU does.” She laughed grimly. “I’ve had to dodge it for years for work.”
“Do you know how it happened?” I asked, smacking my lips. She shrugged. “Out of the country and away from the internet when it went down?” She didn’t react save for a subtle hardening of her attitude to tell me she wasn’t amused. “Fine, I’ll tell you—it’s because I went to Rome and got into a fight just outside the Vatican with a meta who wanted to create a nation state of his own in Italy, starting with killing the Pope and taking over the Holy See to make it his evil fortress.”
Chase’s eyes widened subtly. “Seriously? That plan? The weirdest shit. Grandiose much?”
“I don’t choose my own villains,” I said with a sigh. “Anyway, I stopped these guys, with help from, uh, the Goddess Diana and another Poseidon who was a priest. But it was a pretty ugly incident, and so the EU decided they’d had about enough of meta shenanigans, and just slapped a blanket ban on us. It was still pretty early days for our kind being out, and they’d lost most of their meta population in the war, so…anyway. Meta ban. It’s on me.” I thumped my chest lightly. “So anyway…when we get to York…”
“We’re going to have to kinda…lay low, aren’t we?” she asked, getting it.
“Like a snake on—not a plane—its belly.” I leaned back in my seat. “This rescue mission? Would have been a lot easier if not for my mess in Italy a few years back. So, you want to know why people are avoiding me? It’s because I’m a pit of worry for my sister, who I have the luxury of knowing is innocent, and who is as powerless as she’s been since the end of the war, is trapped behind enemy lines, basically, in an EU country, and might not even make it to the rendezvous. But if she does,” I said, finally drawing close to the grey crux of worry that was hanging around my neck right now, “I don’t know that we’re going to easily be able to hang out waiting for her, because the minute we pop off this plane, if anyone recognizes us—”
“We’re in the soup,” Chase said, nodding along. “And not good soup either, like chicken and wild rice. Probably bad soup, like that thin, crappy tomato stuff that tastes like watered down ketchup.”
“Close enough,” I said, giving her that one. And I just let her think it over, as I looked out the window and saw the coast on the horizon.
We’re coming, Sienna, I thought, but didn’t dare say aloud for fear someone would hear me and think—I dunno, decently of me, maybe. And for fear that maybe…in spite of all the things she’d done wrong in her life…it would be my screw-up that ultimately killed my sister’s chance to escape the UK.
And just maybe…kill her, too.