I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (25 page)

It made a kind of sick sense.

What do you want me to do?

Julie arched her back and leaned away from the monitor in the operating theater. She stretched from side to side, cracking her spine. She picked up the burnt-tasting coffee Ms. Jance had brought in a Styrofoam cup. It was cold.

Julie still finished it down to the dregs.

Julie was looking at an MRI of Pax’s chest cavity, taken postmortem. His heart, liver, and stomach were clearly visible. But where his lungs should have been—two black, empty spaces on either side of his heart—were only lumps of pure, solid white.

A file beside her listed the tests they had done on the silvery material they’d taken from Pax’s lungs and other parts of his body. Acid didn’t dissolve it. Carbon didn’t bind with it. It didn’t give off a smell. It didn’t respond to electrical current or magnets. Test after test had revealed nothing: the testers could only speculate that it was an artificially designed material, like some kind of plastic. Or even a sci-fi material, a self-replicating nanomaterial.

She’d been staring at it for twenty minutes and still couldn’t make any sense of it. She closed the file.

She had her own files on Pax’s disease, stolen by DARPA off her own computer. But she already knew what those said, and none of them said anything about this.

Ms. Jance had fallen asleep in one of the chairs in the front row of the audience, her head on the desk, arms crossed in front of her.

Julie rubbed her eyes. “I’m down to the last few files, Ms. Grace. Would you mind telling me what you intend to do with… whatever is impersonating my son?”

“Classified.” Ms. Grace had been pacing back and forth behind Julie’s chair for the past hour, reeking of boozy-smelling perfume and making insufferable snorting noises as she cleared her sinuses. “But as far as I know, the plan is to take both of them alive for study.”

“Aren’t you going to arrest the girl at least? For destroying her school?”

“If we do, we’re obliged to arrest your son, too, aren’t we? For killing that preacher.”

“That thing is not my son,” Julie said. Her chest and throat ached, and her voice came out hoarse. “My son is dead and lying on that table.”

The corners of Ms. Grace’s wrinkled old mouth turned down and her lips pooched out. Her eyes looked almost sympathetic.

I don’t need your pity!
Julie blinked calmly at the woman and said, “It’s not going to be easy to capture either of them. You don’t have a department that specializes in that, do you?”

“You’re lookin’ at it: me and Ms. Jance,” Ms. Grace said. “Can’t you tell? I got superpowers up the wazoo and a secret military base in Arizona—or was that New Mexico?” The woman put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. Her fingers were covered with wrinkles and gaudy fashion rings. She had a French manicure with little plastic flowers glued to her ring fingers, and her hands smelled like cigarettes.

Julie resisted the urge to jerk away.

“I’m sorry about your son.” Ms. Grace’s fingernails tightened on Julie’s blouse, making her flinch. “So maybe you’d better help us think of something.”

“What do you even think I can do for you?”

“You tell me.”

“You want me for one of two possibilities. Either because some remnant of my son is housed within the fake body, and you want me to communicate with him, or because you think I can come up with some way to affect the material directly.”

“Let’s just say yes on the first one, and a strong maybe on the second.”

Julie rubbed the backs of her hands with her thumbs and went to work deeper into her forearms and wrists. “What if I refuse?”

Ms. Grace mercifully removed her hand entirely. “Nothin’. We’ll be watching you, that’s all. We can’t force civilians to cooperate. And we certainly wouldn’t be sabotaging your future job prospects. Forever.”

The threat in her tone matched the words. Julie was trying to formulate a response when the screen on the monitor went dark, as if it had gone to sleep in the brief time she’d glanced away from it. Julie shook the mouse in annoyance.

The screen stayed dark.

“Damn it,” Ms. Grace said. “Of all the damn times for the server to go down.”

Behind them, Ms. Jance made a small, startled sound. Julie looked. Ms. Jance was sitting up with both hands flat on the table and her face raised toward something over their heads. The whites of her eyes looked very white. Her jaw relaxed for a moment and then clenched shut, bulging at the sides.

The screens above their heads threw light across Ms. Jance’s face. A second later, the monitor in front of Julie began doing the same, flickering through different images she recognized from Pax’s files or the files from DARPA.

Julie looked from one woman to the other. “What’s going on?”

Ms. Jance pressed the button on her microphone and spoke over the loudspeaker. “Call security, please.”

Julie glanced around for the phone, but Ms. Grace already had it in hand. “Hello? Security? Mr. Pallone, why on earth are you the one picking up the phone at this hour? Where’s David?”

And, to Julie’s surprise, Ms. Grace shut up. The muscles under her wrinkled facial skin flexed as though she were chewing on her tongue. She nodded and dropped the phone back into its cradle.

“We’re evacuating as of two minutes ago. It would appear we’re being hacked by the Chinese.”

Pax expanded his hamster ball and rolled faster across the barren, moonlike landscape, jogging north toward the line of trees that marked the edge of the destruction. As he watched, a large tree collapsed, landed on a power line, and was dragged downward and out of sight. A cell phone tower with a triangular set of transceivers shook as though it were in a hurricane. Another tree went down, revealing a shack-like house with a balcony looking over the ridge; the house was surrounded by piles of trash that seemed to be eating the place.

Whatever the monsters were, they were moving in a widening circle around the island, consuming everything as they went. The balcony slumped and fell down the side of the hill. Similar destruction was happening all over the place and spreading fast.

Lana would have rushed in with fireballs and swords and attacked like she was made of flaming justice.

Pax rolled to a stop a hundred meters from the top of the ridge. A gravel road led to a flat spot shaped almost like a Tetris piece. As he watched, a short piece of copper pipe was shoved out of a hole in the ground, along with a spray of sand and crushed rock.

Pax reached into the hole and felt something thin and feathery, like a weed. He pulled it, expecting it to snap off easily. Instead it tightened across his palm like a piece of cable. He pulled harder until the thing finally came free. He stumbled backward, tripping over some loose rock.

The thin, feathery vine writhed in his hand briefly, the pale greenish fronds near the end curling and uncurling. The fronds rolled up into little balls at the end of their branches and turned a faint pink.

He flicked one of the little balls; it exploded into a suspicious dust that seemed to defy the light breeze. Some of it landed on his metallic skin and clung there.

Pax squinted, wishing he could see it better. The thought changed his vision, magnifying what he was seeing and giving him access to spectrums no human had ever seen. He saw the fleck of dust for what it truly was: a spore with tiny, featherlike tentacles trying to dig through his skin. The spores hummed with life, a little heat, some kinetics—but not a single stinking black thread of negative energy.

Which was nuts.
These things were eating an
island
. It wasn’t possible they didn’t have any negative energy…

Unless Terry had designed them that way, so the tentacles couldn’t manipulate them.

Clever bastard,
Pax thought.
Clever, evil asshole.

Pax looked closer and saw the tiny weave of the spore’s spirit like a ghostly thread hovering inside it, a kind of twin to its DNA. The spore’s spirit was smooth and healthy, running at optimum.

Pax imagined a robot arm reaching down into the spore’s spirit and giving it a good squeeze to crush and tangle it. He felt his astral form re-shape itself and do exactly that. Pax smiled. Crude and basic, but effective.

A black tentacle of negative energy reared up out of the ground and twisted itself around the spore’s damaged spirit. Its tentacles began ripping at the spore next to it.

Negative energy spread quickly through the spores on Pax’s skin.

The tainted spores, much more aggressive than the normal ones, spread quickly, infecting the feathery branches that covered the ground.

Whether or not he’d just made things worse, at least now there would be something for the tentacles—and Scarlett, if he could find her—to work with.

Pax reached out for her with his mind and hoped she would listen.

Scarlett sank deeper into her nest of negative energy threads as they continued to pump her full of dark material, replacing the body Lana had stolen. On the one hand, it was as comfortable as being in a hot tub. On the other hand, it sucked because the threads were also pouring international news feeds straight into Scarlett’s brain.

Some turds in the Middle East were throwing bombs at each other while the rest of the world egged them on. Some people were pushing to continue the stupid war on drugs, which only ended up sending money and guns to a bunch of thugs in Mexico, South America, and Southeast Asia. Incidentally, the people who were being pushy owned stock in companies that sold weapons and ran prisons. A black kid was shot for walking down the street with more attitude than the cops liked. Another riot erupted, and a bunch of hackers pointlessly took down a bunch of websites in retaliation against the cops. A train car full of dead illegal immigrants was found. Two kids with apparent superpowers were still being sought in the greater New York metropolitan area. Both were suspected of murder.

Apparently Mr. Goody Two Shoes had killed some asshole preacher at about the same time she’d blown up her school.

And even as she thought of him, a presence appeared inside her head, a little figurine with shining metallic skin, calling,
Scarlett!

What the fuck do you want, asshole?

The little figure seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

I need your help.

Well, too bad. I’m not coming.

The miniature Pax clenched its fists, started to speak, and stopped itself. When it started again the words were slow, measured, and angry.
Terry released a monster. It’s destroying all life on one of the islands in the Caribbean, and it looks ready to spread.

What?
Scarlett was shocked, not so much at the idea of a monster, but that Pax would actually hold Terry responsible. Pax had practically worshipped Terry before.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?

Scarlett remembered the invaders then. They were definitely coming for Earth, if the tentacles were right. If Terry knew about it, he might well decide to clear anything off the Earth that might help them, including all human life.

The negative energy started sending her reports from the Caribbean. There
was
something going on there—the news agencies were calling it a freak earthquake that seemed to have killed hundreds of people on the south end of St. Lucia. The way the news agencies were telling it, what really mattered was that some tourists were in danger, never mind the locals
.
Typical.

The footage was pretty impressive, though. Clouds of black smoke rolled off the island, which looked like it was collapsing.
Ahead
of the fires. Trees fell down, buildings fell in on themselves, and the roads looked like they’d been busted up with tanks and scattered every which way. A couple of small boats had fled the island but were pulled down into the waves without a trace.