06 - Vengeful Read online

  Phillips gave me that dead-eyed stare. “Can we do anything about that?”

  I seethed inside, months of bitterness writhing like a fiery snake in my belly, waiting to come out with a hiss and a pop of flame. “We? Probably not? Me? Maybe, but I’m suspended.” I threw that out there, just wanting to see what he’d say.

  “Yes, you are,” he said with a light shrug, and at that moment I realized that if the end of the world was stampeding toward us right now, he’d still be citing regulation and procedure to the moment of impact. “But what are you going to do about it?”

  I wanted to burn him to death right there and leave a charred, blackened corpse behind, but I didn’t. I just looked at him with enough fury that if I had said Gavrikov’s name in my head right then, spontaneous combustion would have occurred.

  Kill him, Wolfe whispered, not for the first time in the last few weeks.

  You should totally do that, Kappler agreed.

  It would be so satisfying, Bjorn added.

  “Shut up,” I whispered, and Phillips’s eyebrows drew up in slight surprise. I stared at him, seething.

  “Sir?” his assistant’s voice came again. “Nineteen minutes to impact, and NASA is wondering if we can help.” Phillips stared at me, I stared at Phillips, and it was a game of chicken for the ages. “Sir?” his assistant’s voice came again.

  I blinked first. I summoned up Wolfe’s power as I blew out the window, contenting myself with going to supersonic speeds about six feet away from him, knowing the shockwave would probably knock him flat on his ass as I hauled my own to Chicago at top speed.

  13.

  Timing is everything, they say, and by “they,” I mean some jackass who never had to stop a meteor from destroying Chicago while they were trying to chase down the person who blew up their brother. Here in the real world, though, that was exactly what I had to do, and I did it in the manner of my generation, griping mentally about my ordeal the entire time.

  “I can’t just kill Andrew Phillips,” I said, not even close to audible as the force of air rushing past my face mushed my cheeks like the sweet and plump aunt I’d never had. Mine was a psycho, full stop, and any pinching of cheeks on her part would probably have been the kind that would break skin.

  Could, Wolfe said, saying the same shit he’d been spouting for weeks now. Should.

  It would not be difficult, Bjorn said. You have done it to others for less.

  “What?” I almost dropped out of the sky from outrage at that one. How dare the crazed Nordic psycho impugn my reputation. “No, I haven’t!”

  Rick, Zack said tentatively. He wasn’t on their side by any means and had regularly proven himself the not-devil’s advocate in these ceaseless debates that the six numb-no-skulls in my head were having constantly nowadays. The Primus of Omega.

  “That was different,” I snapped, the wind pressure on my cheeks probably resulting in it sounding like “wah wah wiffwent!” Whatever. They were in my head, they knew what I was saying. I wouldn’t even have been talking out loud, but such was the measure of the “had enough of this shit” lines in the graduated cylinder of my patience that it was simply overflowing at this point.

  Friendly fire, Roberto Bastian suggested. Sometimes a butterbars gets out of line, is going to get the squad killed—

  “Naw hewah!” I said, meaning, “Not helping!”

  Far be it from me to suggest anything that would actually benefit you, Eve Kappler said, but this man is a disaster for the agency.

  A disaster in addition to constantly stepping all over your former girlfriend, you mean to say, I said, silently this time.

  I could almost see Kappler’s cheeks flush in my head. Fine. You figured me out. But he’s far more of a pain in your ass and a credible threat to you than that Russian woman you dropped out of the sky a few months ago.

  I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. I cannot. Kill. The head. Of my agency. When did I become the voice of reason and tolerance and kindasorta nonviolence?

  Then again, compared to some of these people in my head, I was almost like Gandhi.

  It would almost certainly lead back to you, Aleksandr Gavrikov agreed. Gone are the days when she had unlimited discretion to mop up these problems—

  The hell, Gavrikov? I thought at him.

  It’s true, he said with what would have been a shrug, if he hadn’t been disembodied. The time was that the curtains were pulled, when a metahuman could conduct their life as they were meant to, free from oversight and criticism over every little thing. I could feel Bjorn and Wolfe nodding along with him. Well, not nodding, but … whatever, agreeing. We were gods. Now you are people, and subject to the laws of man.

  I am no man, I said, clearly channeling the spirit of Miranda Otto.

  You’re not exactly a Shieldmaiden of Rohan, either, though, Zack offered helpfully, getting my reference immediately. He should have; he was the one who introduced me to the Lord of the Rings movies. And Gav’s got a point. How many years exactly into their forced incarceration in my brain had my ex started calling nutball flame-warrior Aleksandr Gavrikov “Gav”? There’s watchful eyes aplenty, now. She can’t just assert her will, go after these people like she would have before—

  I didn’t know if I should feel insulted by the implication that I was some sort of hanging-on-the-edge-by-my-fingernails psychotic waiting to snap before, but it bothered me a little. It was a thread that had run through my life since the day Zack had died, a piece of my past. I’d killed people, and I’d not really been that shy about it in some cases. Part of me even questioned where the line was at this point, whether I’d moved it over time. I knew which dead bodies I felt guilty about and which ones I didn’t, though, and the ones I felt guilty about were the ones farthest back in the past, the ones where I’d responded to Wolfe’s suggestion more strongly than I should have, or maybe just let him push me slightly in the direction he wanted me to go.

  —all I’m saying is that she’s changed, Zack said

  Hunters never change, Wolfe said. Always seeking their prey.

  Revenge doesn’t exactly go out of style, Kappler added. When someone challenges you as she’s been challenged, to show weakness is to invite further challenge.

  She’s the apex predator on this planet, Bjorn said. Without fear, she’s simply the largest target—

  —trouble could come knocking any time, Bastian said, and now they’re actively interfering with her doing her duty—

  This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I took a shot of chloridamide a few days ago that nearly killed a lot of people. It had been like this since even before the suspension, a constant argument over direction. I raised my eyes to look at the horizon and they burned at the wind blasting my lids back. The human body wasn’t really meant to fly this fast without a plane around it. There were g-forces I had to account for, I had to be careful of how I positioned my neck (I’d broken it one time by accelerating too fast without Wolfe’s power at my immediate disposal—that had almost resulted in death), I had to not look straight into the wind for too long, I had to maintain a lower altitude, to keep Wolfe front and center the whole time so as to keep my circulatory system from—

  It was a lot to remember. As I looked into the sunrise and saw a trail of fire coming down at an angle from the sky, I realized that this was maybe not going to be the easiest job I’d ever done.

  “I need to think while I’m doing this,” I said, speaking aloud to make sure everyone knew I was serious. The argument quieted, blissfully, though only for now, I was sure. I pulled everyone to the front of my mind, making sure there was agreement, and then I zoomed at the chunk of falling rock that was heading down fast, passing the gleaming towers of Chicago as I went to save the city from a tsunami that they didn’t even know was coming.

  14.

  Being somewhat pressed for time, I had to come up with a strategy to stop a giant segment of flaming, falling rock on the fly. While this may sound to an idiot as simple as, I dunno, gettin
g underneath it and catching it, I was (probably) not an idiot and saw a few issues with that strategy.

  Giant hunk of rock that’s hotter than hell courtesy of the resistance of the atmosphere to its extremely fast descent hits one hundred and … uh … something … pound girl who’s either floating still or flying toward it. I didn’t know the specific velocity of the meteor and it didn’t matter for my purposes, because I could figure out how it was going to end—either in me going SPLAT or it breaking into smaller pieces and wreaking some other form of havoc as its component parts spun off course. I tried to imagine how the press would react to a Buick-sized piece of meteor I smashed hitting the John Hancock tower. “Hey, but I saved the city from a flood!” I would protest.

  SIENNA NEALON MURDERS A THOUSAND INNOCENT CHICAGOANS AND PROBABLY AT LEAST SIX DOZEN PUPPIES WHILE ENCOURAGING TEENAGE SMOKING, is how the headline would read. Buzzfeed would add me to their Which historical mass murderer are you? quiz.

  The SPLAT might be better.

  I suspected I might maybe be able to survive the impact if I ran into it. I had survived contact with a plane before, with jumping out of a plane before, with—well, hell, a lot of impacts that shouldn’t have been possible. But none of those objects had been flaming from entry into a resistant atmosphere, which brought me to problem two—how hot was this thing burning, anyway?

  Being neither a physicist nor a math-magician, these were also questions I could not answer.

  All I had was a layman’s knowledge of the problem at hand and an expert’s knowledge of all the different ways the press would try to screw me if I messed up even slightly. Now that NASA had asked for help and, presumably, Phillips had let them know I was on the case, I had successfully worked my way into a damned if you do, shagged rectally with a pointy object if you don’t position. I did not enjoy it, but this was my life of late. Couldn’t stand up for falling down, couldn’t succeed for being pushed down to failure, and couldn’t make a good impression for all these people trying to make me a pariah.

  I tried not to wonder how many of these assholes were actually in Chicago as I streaked toward the incoming meteor. I thought about the innocent people who were just going about their day on the shores of Lake Michigan, looking up into the sky as they—I dunno, walked their children and dogs and pet ferrets while discussing all the charity work they were going to do today.

  I flew over Lake Michigan lower than I probably needed to, making a wake in the water behind me. It was kind of soothing, and I decided that I should be allowed to indulge myself a little before I went to confront a flaming meteor. Meteorite? Hell if I knew. FIERY DEATH. That’s what it was.

  I swallowed and looked skyward, and once I found it, I shot into the air on an intercept course. I estimated I had about two minutes to impact, which, hey, was not a ton of time to figure out how to do something I’d never actually done before. “Invulnerable skin would have been real useful right now,” I muttered as I felt the sting of the air in my eyes and across my flesh. There was no looking down now. “Superman’s got it easy.”

  There was a reluctant chorus of agreement in my head. I could tell they all wanted to resume their fight. It was like walking into a party where nobody was speaking. You just feel the tension in the air. I shot into the sky toward the falling star, fully aware that there was no camera watching me now, not at this distance from the actual city. Time to be an unsung hero—again.

  I shot wide past the meteor, giving it enough berth that I didn’t get caught in its wash, letting it blow past as I used Gavrikov to absorb some heat as it streaked by. I’d already flipped and was chasing it by the time it got a hundred feet past me, and was doing my level best to match speed as it streaked toward the lake below. It was a hell of a lot bigger than a metro bus, closer probably in size to two Abrahms tanks welded to each other.

  I pulled heat as fast as I could, absorbing the meteor’s contrail as I caught up and flew past the leading edge of the damned thing. It was fairly oblong and I overshot it by a few feet per second and then slowed, my hands extended to “catch” it as best I could catch a multi-ton object streaking through the atmosphere. I looked down and saw nothing but water coming up fast.

  “This is what heroes do,” I muttered to myself like there was some sort of consolation in those words as I started to apply the brakes, the torsional forces working across my entire body, tensing me enough that I felt like I was about to have a full-body stroke. My palms and arms got the worst of it, if there was such a thing as the worst of it, and I was forced to unlock my elbows in order to take some of the tension off of them. I kept the meteor from crashing right into my neck and killing me, but it still thumped me good when it ended up on my shoulders.

  I had it like Atlas had the world, the weight of it slowly being taken up as I started to gradually turn gravity on again. I was taking the heat in across the entire surface of my body, burning up the third set of clothing I’d wasted today. Yeah. It was one of those kind of days. Barely dawn and I was about to end up naked again. It happens so often lately I don’t even mention it anymore, like when I got burned out of my clothes at Shafer’s house. Yeah. That fight was near naked. I’d left Shafer and Borosky on my balcony while they were still disoriented from the mind meld and put on clothes in speedy rush.

  Anyway, at least there was some upside to not having cameras around.

  I took up more of the meteor’s weight as it pushed me toward the lake below. I judged it to be less than five thousand feet below, but my perspective was kind of iffy since I was presently on the leading edge of a catastrophic event fast approaching a major U.S. city.

  I pushed against the meteor and it pushed against me with gravity and momentum on its side. It hurt a lot, not gonna lie. I pushed back even harder, and felt something near my kidney explode. Tendons blew out in my neck. One of my arms shattered, and it cascaded down into my shoulder and snapped my collarbone.

  My Wolfe powers held me together. Barely. You can always tell it’s getting bad when Wolfe starts to panic. Little Doll …

  “I got it,” I breathed, but in truth, I wasn’t sure I did. My body was trying to pull itself together, but it wasn’t exactly doing a bang-up job under the pressure.

  You might have reached your limit on this one, Sienna, Zack said.

  Let it go! Kappler advised, more emotional than I’d ever heard her. Get out while you can!

  “No,” I grunted as we slipped to within a thousand feet of Lake Michigan below. I fired a few rounds of Eve’s light nets into the meteor, doubtful they’d do any good but also fairly sure they wouldn’t do any harm. I didn’t feel any difference, but then I had a few tons resting on my neck by now, and I hadn’t even taken up the full weight of the thing just yet.

  This is suicide, Bjorn said, probably taking in my view of the lake and realizing that, yep, we were about to hit that, and still going awfully fast. Not a survival speed for a human, even absent the massive rock that was coming along for the ride.

  “At least I brought something to mark my watery grave,” I said. I looked sidelong and saw the city of Chicago off to my left, in the far distance, towers sticking up into the sky, sunrise reflected shining orange against some of the buildings. It was like a beacon against the horizon. Children. Puppies. Charity workers.

  All counting on me.

  I arrested my downward momentum, taking up the full weight of the meteor on my shoulders, and boy, did I feel it. It broke my back, both shoulders, a dozen ribs (on each side), and it was my only good fortune was that I managed to heal them all before they became much more than fractures. My muscles strained, squealed, cried—actually, that might just have been me. There were tears of pure pain running down my face as my feet touched the water and halted with it around my ankles.

  I stood there, a couple inches from walking on water with a few tons of weight on my shoulders and let my eyes dart about. I took a ragged breath, then another. The surface of Lake Michigan stretched for miles in every direction, and a
cool breeze blew over my bare skin, which hurt just about everywhere. “Well, hell,” I said, and realized that the surface of the rock that was eating into my back was as cool as if it had just been plucked off the ground, “what do I do with this now?”

  15.

  I was body conscious enough to make the flight back to Minneapolis with my skin on fire, having left the meteor on the bottom of Lake Michigan after easing it in so as to avoid any massive tidal waves. It wasn’t like I could just carry the damned thing off, after all, so I did the best I could with it. It’s not like I wanted it for a souvenir or something, a fine reminder of that time I saved Chicago. Nobody would believe me anyhow, and the press would probably report that I ripped the top off Everest or something just to show off.

  By the time I’d slipped into my fourth change of clothes for the day that was now dawning properly, the knock sounded at my door that heralded another impending discussion that I probably didn’t want to have.

  Of course, the knock hadn’t actually come at my door; it had come on the drywall just inside my door because I didn’t currently have a door. “Uh, come in,” I said, resigning myself to the likelihood that I was about to get a lecture from some quarter.

  Quinton Zollers strolled into my apartment as though he didn’t have to just navigate over my kicked-in door, as though the place didn’t still stink to high heaven like someone had used it for a latrine. Which … they sort of had. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and he looked around like he hadn’t been in here just a few hours earlier and already seen the place in its current state of disrepair. “So …”

  “That’s a lousy opener for someone who can read my mind,” I said as I put on my leather jacket. It wasn’t my favorite, because there was no way I was risking wearing something I actually liked on a day like today.