Final Empire (36 page)

“He said my time was coming,” she sighed nonchalantly. “He said that if I wasn’t with him, I was against him, and yadda yadda yadda. He did most of the talking but I could tell Valeriya was fueling him. That little pre-teen Stalin had been feeding his ego, building him up until he felt like he could conquer the globe. It’s like he was this fire and she was an endless supply of gasoline. So naturally I asked what made him so confident, and why he thought
he
could take on the world. He said his constructs were indestructible, crafted from pure energy. And now he was fearless. Until I met you I’d never encountered
anyone
without a fear of death, and right away something felt wrong…I didn’t need to get inside his head to know he was lying.”

“So what
does
he fear?”

She looked around again, first left and then right. She was savoring the juicy morsel of information as if it were a sublimely cooked piece of steak, just waiting to be sliced open. The suspense was killing me. “He fears only one thing: his power being sapped. He’s an architect, and his abilities seem unlimited, but he’s mortal. He can bleed. And
that’s
where his power lies. He knows that his blood could be his undoing.”

It made sense. Scientists had been obsessed with superhuman anatomy ever since their discovery. While defense contractors were preoccupied with their only tangible weakness – altering their brainwaves to temporarily drain their abilities – other corporations had gone to great lengths to harvest their blood and tissue, hoping to gain advancements in the ultra-lucrative field of medicine. To date the results had been lackluster, at least from the limited number of samples that had been collected. They were always looking for a sample from increasingly powerful superhumans, hoping to find the billion-dollar genome.

The race to drain a sample from Sergei Taktarov was a poorly kept secret, though that turned out be fruitless as well; the Russians had done everything in their power to obtain a sample from his corpse, but even in death they couldn’t penetrate his skin. Rumor has it that diamond-tipped drill bits were snapping off in mid-rotation trying to puncture his veins. If you got a sample from the right badass-level superhuman, it wouldn’t just be a step for mankind – it would be a leap over a soaring megatower.

It seemed like an interesting lead, but I needed more to go on. “So what you’re saying,” I asked, “is that he’s terrified of someone getting a blood sample. So what? That could just be paranoia.”

She shook her head. “His creations aren’t temporary anymore,” she stated. “He creates something and that thing is a part of
him.
He can even create organics, but those creations aren’t fully formed – they’re missing a catalyst to realize their potential. They lack the missing ingredient to becoming independent.”

Holy shit.
Brynja couldn’t ghost because he’d crippled her abilities by design; brought her back as a small part of a whole. He was limiting her to protect himself.

“I get some of Kenneth’s blood, inject her with it and then she can ghost again.
She’s
the last Omega. It’s the one power he might not be able to counter…” My mind was flooded with possibilities, but it was still a bit of a leap. And while
I
may have been stuck with the nickname, it was
Brynja
who was the real God Slayer. The only known superhuman who could become incorporeal – and that was the key to my strategy.

Weaving reached up the stem of her umbrella and unlatched the locking mechanism, pulling the canopy down with a swift snap. “Sure,” she said offhandedly. “In theory. Get a pint of Kenneth’s blood, mainline it into your girl and she’ll be back to her cheerful self, powers and all.”

“So how do I get the blood?” I asked her, stupidly blurting out the question before taking the time to think it through.

“You promised payment, and I promised I’d reveal his greatest fear.
That
was our arrangement, and I never go back on my word. But that was the extent of our arrangement, Mister Moxon.” She took a final sip of her water and dropped the empty tumbler on the tabletop with a dull clunk.

“You have power,” I said. “Maybe even more power than Livitski. Help me: join my team and I’ll double the gold. Triple it. Whatever you want.” I was coming off desperate, I’m sure, but I’d never been much of a negotiator. Plus she was a mind-reader – no use playing it cool when someone can hear the clumsy, frantic thoughts colliding in your brain.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but didn’t really sound like it. “I don’t take money for things I can’t provide. Technically, yes, I can turn someone’s fears against them, but Kenneth…he’s in class of his own now.” She extended an open palm, pressing it forward as if she were a mime pushing against an imaginary barrier. But it wasn’t imaginary. Her fingertips illuminated, radiating a white-hot energy that I could feel from across the table. The bones in her hand became visible through her flesh like an x-ray. “Even now, I can feel him,” she said, her eerie black gaze locking on mine. “His power and influence swells. I can feel the fear and respect of his followers rippling like waves, spreading exponentially…”

“So aren’t
you
afraid that you could be next? If he found you once he could find you again.”

She closed her hand and snapped off the light show with a fizzle of electricity. Then she sighed wistfully and leaned across the table, and pressed her soft, dark-painted lips into my cheek.

“I’m no hero, so I’m sitting this one out. When the dust settles, I’ll choose my side.”

She produced a twenty dollar bill from somewhere (again, I don’t know how – it was like having brunch with Houdini) dropped it on the table and placed her empty cup on top, ensuring the salty ocean breeze wouldn’t carry it away. She stood, flattened out her dress and walked away.

“What if The Living Eye wins?” I called out.

She answered without turning around. “I guess I’ll become a Scientologist.”

It took a day to complete my other stops around the world.
By the time I’d returned to Fortress 18 in the South China Sea, few of my other fortresses remained intact.

A simulcast in New Zealand reported that my remote Lees Valley research facility (Fortress 11) had been eviscerated by flames when a faulty gas line exploded. My security footage showed otherwise. A blur of fists and energy that looked vaguely like The Living Eye streaked through the steel and concrete laboratory, tearing the glimmering six-level structure to pieces. It was left pocked with entry and exit holes, six-inch bullet proof windows smashed like delicate stemware, and towering concrete walls plowed down as if by a wrecking ball.

And it didn’t end there.

My fortress in Newfoundland had been torn to pieces, and what remained was concrete strip footing attached to the cliff face overlooking the North Atlantic, with threaded galvanized rods bent out in awkward directions like dislocated fingers. The fortress itself was gone: it had been shorn from its foundation, bobbed in the waves and then capsized, sinking to the ocean floor.

My Siberian stronghold – a dome roughly the size and shape of an NFL football stadium – had been pried open as if by a giant can opener, and was ransacked in a matter of seconds.

It went on and on. Every place I could possibly be hiding was being systematically destroyed, and only Fortress 18’s cloaking device was keeping me off the radar. At least for now. For how much longer, I had no idea.

I gathered the gang in the conference room, knowing it would likely be the last time we’d gather in that spot. There was a sobering finality to it all, and I was suddenly overtaken by a stomach-twisting melancholy; sadness that I had a difficult time suppressing. But there needed to be a leader now, and I had to push my personal feelings aside. Easier said than done.

Once seated, I stood at the head of the oval conference table with a reinforced steel briefcase sitting ominously before me.

“What’s in the case?” Karin asked, plopping down into a leather seat. She was rolling back and forth on her toes, dragging the wheeled chair across the plush white carpeting like an impatient grade-schooler.

“You can’t just blurt it out like that,” Brynja scolded her. “I’m sure there’s some really cool story behind it.”

McGarrity, who was sitting next to me, reached over and tried to unlatch one of the locks. “Yeah, screw that – I wanna see inside.”

I smacked his hand and he jerked it back. He massaged it as he shrunk into his seat.

“Okay,” I began, shifting uneasily from one running shoe to the other. “So I’m going to give you all a speech. I’m notorious for sticking my feet into my mouth more than I am for my rousing addresses, but we’re short on time and this is going to have to do. Kenneth is coming. Sooner than later. It could be next week, or tomorrow, or in the next fifteen minutes. I don’t know. And when he gets here, we’re all dead. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Winston Churchill would have been proud.

I’d gotten everyone’s attention, though at what cost I don’t know. McGarrity, Peyton, Brynja, Karin and Gavin stared at me wide-eyed, and in the pregnant pause they were undoubtedly awaiting a ‘but’.

“But,” I added, “if we set up a trap right now, we can gain the upper hand. He’ll show up on our terms and our timeline. We can ambush him and lock him into my cryogenics chamber.”

“We know,” Gavin said. “Peyton told me all about the plan. ‘Keep Kenneth biologically alive’ and all that. But we still don’t have a way to get him
into
the box.”

I unlatched the case and flipped it open. Inside was vial the size of a soda can, filled with blood. Kenneth Livitiski’s blood.

Brynja stood. “Is that…”

“It’s his,” I nodded. “And now it’s yours. This is what you’ve been missing – why you’ve felt so empty and directionless. It’s the missing piece of your puzzle.”

“I’ll be able to ghost again?” she asked, though she didn’t sound wildly enthusiastic about the prospect. She’d read my mind before I could say the words.

“Yes, but…I think it’s more than that. Teach Weaving said that—”

“The Nightmare?” Peyton interrupted. “You’re consulting with the superhuman hit woman who tried to murder you back in Fortress 23?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” I explained. “She told me Kenneth’s greatest fear was his blood being harvested and exploited, but was a little fuzzy on the details. And then there was the issue of being able to actually get my hands on some of it. I didn’t take him for a charity blood drive kind of guy, so I had to go with a hunch I had.

“When I was following him using the microtracers in his blood, I could track exactly where he was all over the world. I was keeping a close eye on him. But then something strange happened: the trackers died months before they should have. When I realized it wasn’t a technical malfunction it hit me that he’d have to have had them removed, which meant a blood transfusion.”

McGarrity leaned closer, marveling at the container. “O-M-G-F. What an
idiot
.”

“Well, I’m sure when he hired Doctor Conor McGrady and instructed him to filter and dispose of the blood sample, he assumed the good doctor would do just that. But this,” I held the container higher, letting the overhead light gleam through the transparent tubing at the top, “is a thousand times more valuable than gold. There is no way someone is going to throw an Omega-level superhuman’s blood in the trash when they know it’s worth a fortune to the right buyer, or even good for a Nobel Prize or two if they worked on it themselves. Tracers or not.”

“So now what?” Peyton asked. “We just pump it into Brynja and see what happens?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, holding her hands out. “I’m not some lab test bunny. We don’t know what’s going to happen if I get that inside me. My head could fall off or my nipples could explode, or I could start crapping blue electricity for all you know.”

Peyton scrunched up her face. “Wow, that was graphic.”

“It’s a gamble,” I admitted, “but so is everything. Every time I stepped into the casino it was a risk: would someone know I was counting cards? Would I even pick up a decent hand in the first place? And would someone put a bullet in my back if I cleaned out their life savings at a game of Texas Hold ‘Em? You can’t guarantee a win, ever. Life just doesn’t work that way, and things are dangerous and scary as hell. But you can tilt the odds in your favor.”

She took the metal and glass vial from my hands and inspected it, staring at the crimson blood that was decidedly antithetical to whatever the blue liquid was that currently ran through her veins.

“And you think this is it?” she asked, not averting her eyes from the container. “You’re confident that this is your royal flush or whatever?”

I shrugged. “It kind of
has
to be. So many horrible things have happened that it’s almost a statistical impossibility that this will be a dud, too.”

She snorted. “Not exactly instilling me with confidence.”

“Look, do what you need to do,” I told her. “But if you can ghost again, you can drop a sedative inside him, the same way you dropped an acid-filled bullet into Sergei Taktarov’s skull. We drag him into the cryo-chamber and he’s a popsicle. We win.”

She stood. “Let’s do it,” she said, steeling her resolve. “We could use a win.”