Power (13 page)

I didn’t see any sign of my clothes, which meant they’d probably been cut off after my rough landing. I wondered if I’d been medically evac’d to the campus and realized it didn’t matter. I was here now, and that was all that counted. The last thing I’d needed was to wake up in some hospital in the Minneapolis suburbs where I could make a doctor scream with the display I’d just graced Perugini with. They probably wouldn’t have taken it as well as she had, especially when it ended with me disappearing from their care against medical advice.

I felt every cold step on the pads of my feet as I headed toward the door. As I went I pulled the IV out of my arm—I was getting to be a real pro at this by now—and by the time I’d reached the exit the doors whooshed open automatically. I started through and almost ran into a man who was considerably larger than I was. Which is not an accomplishment, really, but he was bigger than even most guys. Tall, dark-skinned, and with eyes that showed no amusement whatsoever. I tried to remember if he’d looked this grim when last I’d seen him, and realized that if I had been dealing with what he’d been dealing with, I’d probably be grimmer, too.

“Hello, Senator,” I said, waving my hand.

Chapter 21

I stopped, realizing that the hospital gown had wide sleeves and I had nothing on underneath. I returned my arm to my side and stood there for a moment while Senator Robb Foreman looked at me in that humorless way. “So nice of you to come visit me while I’m under the weather.”

He did not even raise an eyebrow in amusement. “When are you not under the weather, Nealon?”

“I’ve actually been injured very little lately,” I said, caught a little off guard. “Comparatively speaking.” The number of injuries I’d received needed a bell curve to make the periods of over-achievement look less dramatic. “What brings you out here from Washington?” I frowned. “Or did you come from Tennessee?”

He didn’t look like he’d smiled in weeks. “Tennessee? Oh, yes, I remember Tennessee. It’s the state where I’m supposed to be living, except I’m not because Washington, D.C., owns me lock, stock and barrel. I haven’t been home for more than a night in months.”

He looked like he’d maybe put on a couple pounds since last we’d met, but he was so physically imposing it was hard to be sure. “Seems like—”

“Any cracks about my weight are sure to go unappreciated at the moment,” he said. Damn, he was good with those empathic powers of his. I was only going to dance lightly around the edge of it, but he’d caught enough sarcasm in my emotional state to figure out the probable angle of attack and preempt me. It reminded me, once again, why formidable was always at the top of my list when I searched for adjectives to describe him. He looked at my hospital gown again. “On your way to get clothes?”

I glanced down at the blue-spotted gown and noticed more than a few bloodstains coloring it as well. “I could walk around like this, but I think it would detract from my professional credibility.”

“No, no,” he said, and I caught a hint of give in his voice. “The blood adds an element of, ‘Do what I say or else.’ It’s a reputation enhancer.”

“The things you learn in Washington,” I murmured and stepped through the door to start down the hallway. He fell in beside me. “Since this isn’t a social call—”

“I’ve been getting reports from Li and Ariadne,” he said, back to being all business. “And I’ve read yours as well, when you’ve bothered to send them. I’ve also gotten the notices on things like that Century safe house in Henderson, Nevada.” He looked sidelong at me and I ignored it. “You could say I’m feeling concerned.”

“Glad I’m not the only one,” I said as we reached the stairs to the basement and started to descend. My voice took on an echoing quality as we walked, our footsteps bouncing off the walls around us, magnified like every other noise in this confined space. “Century hasn’t exactly been pulling their punches.”

“You’ve lost personnel to both death and attrition,” he said.

“We’re better off without the ones who have left,” I said. “And as for the dead—”

“You’ve left a trail of dead bodies behind you, both in numbers of people you work with who have died in this conflict as well as ones you’ve killed—” I got the feeling he was going off a list.

“This is war,” I said, waving a hand at him. “War with a highly capable adversary that outnumbers my little army by staggering margins. If you want something casualty-free, try the ballet. When you get super-powerful people with ill intentions coming your way, you better be ready for a violent soirée.”

“Oh, well, you’ve certainly provided a violent soirée,” Foreman said, and now he was sarcastic, but not in a funny kind of way. “I speak of course of that house full of dead bodies in Nevada. Most were unarmed—”

“Bullshit,” I said. “They were metas. We’re never unarmed.” I paused. “Unless, you know, someone actually chops our arms off—”

“Hilarious,” he said in a tone that suggested he found it anything but. “We’ve got a plane crash down in a swamp south of Bloomington. What if that plane had come down a couple miles north, say in the Mall of America or some neighborhood?”

I wanted to be flippant but honestly, I felt a chill contemplating that scenario. “I didn’t crash the plane, okay? I didn’t even know I’d done enough damage to cause it to crash until it was already falling out of the sky.”

Foreman didn’t stop walking and neither did I. He did not look at me. “NTSB is still investigating, but their preliminary reports indicate shrapnel somehow entered the cockpit and injured the pilots so badly they couldn’t continue to fly the plane.” Now he looked at me. “Was that your doing?”

I blinked. “I don’t know. There was a metal door being tossed around, and a lot of heavy hitting between me and the Wolfe brothers, but … no explosions or anything like that. At least not that I can recall.”

“And you’d recall explosions?” Foreman gave me a sour look.

“Probably,” I said, and now I brought the flippant back, full force. “I’m becoming something of an expert at causing them nowadays.”

“So, about this freeway thing—” he said.

“Good grief,” I said, aping Charlie Brown. “I’m not even … what? It had to have been less than a day ago—”

“Three hours,” he said, terse.

I paused as I opened the tunnel leading from headquarters to the dormitory. Fluorescent lights flickered on ahead of us, filling the air with a hum. “Give me a few minutes to compose myself before you start in on this one, okay?”

“There is no more time for composure,” he said. He’d fallen behind me in the tunnel. He grabbed my arm and I twirled instinctively. “The Senate is pulling together an immediate committee to start overseeing metahuman affairs. They’re talking about forming an official agency—”

“That’s no good,” I said with a shake of the head. “I have zero time for Congressional oversight right now.” I held up a hand and waved toward the dormitory entrance in the distance. “I mean, I’m straight out of medical care and back to work, all right? Pretty sure that violates some OSHA regulation in and of itself.”

“This is a nation of laws,” he said gravely. “We’ve been bending them for a long time and now there’s about to be some serious blowback. I’m not the only one reading your Agency’s reports, and it’s scaring a lot of people who get regular intelligence briefings about Russia’s nuclear capacity and how many of their weapons are still pointed at us. This is going to go public in a big way.” His face went slightly slack, and he sighed. “Count on it. There are people in Congress and the White House that want to head it off.”

“God, why now?” I held a hand up to my face, rubbed my palm against my forehead. “Could they pick a worse possible time? Century is in ‘nest of hornets’ mode right now, apparently bending against Sovereign’s will and trying to kill me.”

“That’s what the freeway thing was about,” Foreman said, and it was like a light went on above him. “You’re seeing friction in the organization.” His head bobbled as he pondered it for a second. “That’s a good sign.”

“It’s not a good one for me,” I said with a low growl. “But I’ll grant you that having them fighting amongst themselves provides us with more opportunities for success than having them unified and coming after us with everything they have.”

He shuffled back a step and leaned on the concrete wall of the tunnel, shoulder first. “I know this isn’t ideal—”

“This is absolutely nightmarish,” I said.

“—but it is what it is,” Foreman said. “It’s not what I would have chosen, but with the run-up to prepare for Sovereign, we’ve had to break this secret—metahuman existence—to a lot wider group of people than it’s ever been exposed to before. We outsourced everything to the Directorate for a damned good reason, but now we’re out of options. You’re under the federal umbrella, for better or worse, and I’m telling you there are holes in it, so that you’re at least a little ready for the rush of cold water that’s coming.”

“They’re really gonna leak it, aren’t they?” I said, dim awareness washing over me.

“We think they already have,” Foreman said softly. “To at least five major press outlets. Three of them dismissed it as utter rubbish, two are investigating. One of the reporters is … dogged, shall we say.” He took in a deep breath and let it out. “We think they have a personal history with a meta-based crime, might have been a witness to something extraordinary.” He grimaced. “Word is, the president is talking to the governors as well in the next few days. He’s circulating a briefing paper on calling up the National Guard in order to cope with some unspecified internal emergency—which is really code for whatever Sovereign and Century are planning next.” He spread his arms apart. “Word will get out.”

“Son of a …” I pondered the implications of that for a minute. “Can’t he just use the Army, keep it federal?”

“It may come to that, but Sovereign and Century are operating in the United States. That makes it subject to the Posse Comitatus Act of—”

“Spare me the legal mumbo jumbo,” I said, cutting him off. “Bottom line, metahuman affairs and all this extinction business are about to become front page news.” I rubbed my jaw. “I’m going to have to answer to Congress for what we’ve done in the last few months.” I thought about that trail of bodies he’d mentioned. “Aw, shit.”

“It gets worse,” he said, and I could sense him slumping lower even though I couldn’t see him because my head was down.

“Because getting better would be completely unacceptable right now,” I muttered. “How?”

“You’re not just going to have to answer to Congress,” Foreman said. I looked up and saw a ragged weariness on his face that seemed to be all too common in every ally I had lately. “Part of what we think was leaked was a complete profile on our present response to this crisis.” His lips formed a thin line as he paused. “Including a full profile of you, naming you the head of Agency operations. So you’re not just going to have to answer to Congress when the storm comes.” He drew himself up to his full height, and suddenly I felt very small indeed. “You’re going to be a household name when this breaks, and that means you’re going to be in the full spotlight and scrutiny of every single American watching, in addition to the rest of the world.”

Chapter 22

There’s a reason the phrase “the shit hits the fan” is such a popular way to express a complete and total mess. Because really, what other image could you conjure up that encapsulates the absolute, disgusting mess you’re dealing with when feces hits a dispersal machine like that?

I didn’t really know until that moment, but it seemed likely that “Nineteen year old shut-in and murderer has fate of the world handed to her by United States Government” might actually trump “the shit hit the fan.”

Foreman had parted ways with me after leaving me with that lovely tidbit. He’d promised to stay around campus for a little longer afterward, which I might have been more enthused about had I not felt like he’d just informed me that someone had dropped a pickup truck from orbit and that it was going to land on me sometime in the next week or two. No, don’t worry about it because you can’t do anything to stop it. Go perform brain surgery, and try not to think about that inevitable doom that’s heading your way. No pressure.

I dressed in silence in my quarters. I cast aside the bloodstained hospital robe and realized I’d been in more of those than most nineteen year olds. When it came to physical wounds, I’d probably had more than most people on the planet. Not that that would matter when the press came calling for me. I kind of had a feeling about how this was all going to play out, and it reminded me of that time I’d been cuffed and perp-walked out of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport customs area.

Except with a wider circle of judgment this time. Like “everyone on Earth” wider.

Being hated isn’t so hard, Little Doll
, Wolfe said.
You get used to it after a while.

“However hated you are, I doubt you’ve had seven billion people despising you at once, Wolfe,” I said.

Perhaps not
, he said.
But everyone in the ancient world did hate me at one point.
He let out a soft growl. Wolfe and his brothers were not gentle spirits, and there was so much anger …

The old gods knew the power of vitriol
, Bjorn chimed in.
Your lessers will always resent you.
That is the curse of power, and it takes a strong person to wield it—

“It takes someone who has power to wield it,” I said, cutting him off as I buttoned my blouse. It felt vaguely silky, and I suspected it was one of the ones Kat had bought for me with a company credit card. At some point I’d had to distract her from Janus’s comatose state when he’d been down for all those months and sending her shopping had worked pretty well for a day or two. I’d had to send her back to get bigger sizes after the first trip, but once she’d figured that out, she’d done a decent job. I had stuff in my closet that I’d never even worn.

Which would probably come back to bite me in the ass if they ever held a budgetary hearing, now that I thought about it.

“Wielding power for the sake of it, just to whip it out and swing it around, is the least impressive thing,” I said then hesitated, realizing what I’d just said. “You know what I mean. This is the type of thing Century probably sits around and talks about. ‘When we’re in charge and all-powerful, bwahaha, things will be different.’” I finished buttoning my blouse. “Yeah, congrats, you’ve got power. Why not try using it responsibly? Why not try using it for actual good instead of running over everyone who disagrees with you?” I shook my head as I started to pull on my slacks. “All these maniacal egos, I swear. It’s like being a meta breeds a thirst for power that rivals any Evil Overlord stereotype.”