The Next Chronicle (Book 2): Damage (5 page)

If you wanted to get technical about it, Ray shouldn't have left the facility. The rules were clear on what agents at his level could and couldn't do, and going out on assignment without your partner was a fairly crucial one.

Fortunately, Ray wasn't alone. Archer himself rode along with the team to investigate the body Louisville Metro had called them in on. Ray wasn't needed in any real sense; he wasn't an experienced investigator. That was what the forensics team was for. The OSA wasn't in the business of solving crimes, generally speaking. They caught rogue Next.

Exceptions like this one existed for a reason, however. Sometimes the nature of a crime pointed toward Next involvement, which meant a little more leg work. Ray would have no real part in that. His job was at the same time far more simple but infinitely more complex.

“Quiet down back there, or I swear to God I'll turn this thing around!”

The half dozen trainees in the back of the van settled into complete silence, though a low murmur of conversation resumed a few seconds later. Being a babysitter wasn't Ray's idea of exciting field work, but after seeing Kovacs get hurt a few days before, boring busy work was welcome. It would only be a few days until Kovacs was back to full strength, thanks to the magic of several Next capable of helping people heal quickly. Ray was happy to take the down time.

“You guys know what to do when we get there?” Ray asked, glancing in the rear view mirror.

A mumbled chorus of assent filled the van.

“Good,” Ray said. “What's rule number one?”

“Don't go anywhere we're not told to go,” answered a young woman.

“What else?” Ray asked.

“Observe but don't interfere.”

“Take notes on procedure.”

“Don't talk to the normals, especially cops,” someone said, almost too low for Ray to catch.

His eyes shot back to the mirror. “Hey,” he said, an edge in his voice. “That's an attitude you need to drop right now. We don't keep information from the agencies we work with because we're Next and they aren't. They aren't
normals,
because that's a shitty way to look at people. Don't set yourself apart from people who don't have powers.”

“Why not?” asked a young man, one of the non-Next trainees. “I don't have powers, but it doesn't really bother me for people to point that out.”

Ray shook his head. “Setting yourself apart is one step away from putting yourself above,” he said. “It's one thing to make a technical distinction between Next and the average person, another completely to think of yourself as being separate from the rest of humankind. We're all people. That's why I wanted to do this job, to help people.”

The silence following had a different texture than the previous one. It was not the quiet of the chastised, but more thoughtful. Ray had seen it in his own training, as various instructors brought up points designed to remind the students of their many ties to the rest of the human race. Philosophers weren't wrong about power corrupting, exactly, but the unwritten caveat was that it wasn't all that hard to set people on a better path. All it took was gentle nudges here and there.

He could almost hear the gears turning in their heads, thinking of friends and family, remembering the uncountable times in their lives when having (or not having) super powers mattered not one bit. The Next among them were doubtless recalling how they, too, had once been powerless. The others were surely reminding themselves of the many good times they had with their classmates, simple enjoyment with another person, no powers needed or considered.

At least, Ray hoped so. His fear for the younger people around the world was based less on the idea of power going to their heads than it was on the public attitudes about the Next. As with any societal upheaval there were blowhards constantly declaiming about the dangers posed by Next all over the world. The internet, television, and radio were full of them, and their audiences only grew.

The other side of the spectrum was filled with those who stood up for Next as the people they were, an attitude Ray found refreshing and hopeful. Idealism was rarely a practical solution, however, and if anyone knew about the dangers Next could pose, intentional or otherwise, it was him.

Caught between were the masses, people who believed what they were told because it had been repeated—shouted—at them so many times it appeared to be gospel. They were afraid, torn between the public figures trying to sway them, and convinced at every turn that the only solutions were drastic ones.

Ray sighed as they pulled into the crime scene behind the small convoy of other vehicles. There weren't any easy answers, but if he could do even a little good by helping the trainees think for themselves, it was something.

They waited in the van for a few minutes while the techs set up the scene. Because the OSA had access to technology unavailable to the rest of the world thanks to the many super intelligent Next working for them, there were certain precautions they had to take.

A white barrier was unfolded, a square thirty feet on a side centered on the body itself. Five techs carried cases inside, where the local police couldn't see. They were lucky the area was open, the closest trees several dozen yards away. Something tickled Ray's brain as he scanned the area.

“Why here?” he muttered.

“What was that?” one of the trainees said.

Ray tilted his head toward the field where the crowd of vehicles sat. “Why here? That's something you guys should be thinking about. This is an open field next to a well-traveled county road. There are businesses within a hundred yards, homes right next to them. The body is only, what, fifty or sixty feet from the road? Seems like a bad place to bury someone, especially without cover while you're digging the hole.”

As he spoke, Archer broke off from the main group and approached the van. Ray rolled the window down.

“Leave them in the van,” Archer said, his expression troubled. “I want you in there.”

Ray nodded. He turned in his seat and searched for the young woman who had answered his first question. “What's your name?” he asked, catching her eye.

“Graysen,” she replied. “Graysen Ross.”

“You're in charge until someone relieves you, Graysen,” Ray said. He let his face fall into what his boyfriend had lovingly referred to as his 'bitch gaze' and let every one of them see it. “That means the rest of you act like agents, or at least like adults. This is a crime scene, and your behavior reflects on the OSA.”

A round of solemn nods and mumbled agreement followed, which gave him hope the van wouldn't be set on fire and flipped over when he got back. For all the training and stress these kids endured, they were still college-age, which meant mature behavior was never a safe bet.

Following Archer toward the makeshift room in the middle of the field, Ray felt a lead weight drop into his stomach. In the office, Archer's mood was anywhere between playful and an angry god, but in the field the veil dropped over him. Ray had never seen him show anything beyond mild interest in the presence of other agencies.

Through the plastic flaps serving as a door, they walked into a scene that could have easily been pulled from a science fiction movie. There were numerous pieces of equipment already working, lights blinking and spindles whirring. Archer ignored them and the techs milling about.

Ray followed right up to the hole in the ground, now a solid six feet wide and growing. An agent whose name Ray didn't know stood at one edge of the hole with his eyes closed and hands out as if he were standing in front of a fire trying to warm them.

The dirt surrounding the body shifted, slowly peeling away in layers. Curious, Ray took a deep breath and closed his own eyes, focusing on the reservoir of Surge energy inside him. Practice had made his ability to see the Surge itself much easier to attain and hold, but it did take some effort.

Ray opened his eyes to a world painted in a million shades of green.

The agent's hands glowed, though not the blaze of light Ray caught off more powerful Next. He had to be careful not to look at himself, as his own form was like looking at the noonday sun.

Streams of energy flowed from the agent to the ground, and along the way those bright ribbons changed from a hazy sea foam hue to a nearly solid forest color. The dirt fairly crackled with power as the agent shaped and compacted it, smaller tendrils gently clearing pieces from the corpse.

As he took in this spectacle, Ray's gaze gradually took in the body they had come to see. His shock was so severe that his concentration slipped, letting the Surge vision drop.

“What the fuck?” he nearly shouted.

With his normal sight, the body still looked bizarre, but only his training allowed Ray to catalog the details. The rest of his brain reeled.

The corpse was big, probably a man. There were shreds of fabric mixed in with the soil, along with a dark brown goo he wasn't eager to identify. Pieces of bone showed at random, but the most interesting—and obvious—sign that this was more than a normal death was the large branch jutting out of the skull. The skin there was gone, leaving a pale expanse of bone bare and unbroken.

Even where the branch was sticking out of it.

“What did you see?” Archer asked. Ray glanced away from the body to find the everyone in the tent watching him.

“The body is surrounded by Surge energy,” Ray said mechanically. “Not like anything I've ever seen before, though.”

One of the techs, apparently the leader of the bunch, leaned toward Ray excitedly. “How is it different?”

Ray glanced at Archer, who nodded.

“Bodies don't usually retain Surge energy for very long,” he explained. “They release it on death, and the residue dissipates with time.”

“Of course,” the lead tech said. “The decay rate is measurable.”

Ray nodded. “That's not the weirdest thing. I've seen plenty of Surge variations, mostly looking at people while they're using their abilities, but this is new. Manipulation of the Surge always looks like organic things. The body...to me it looks like it's wrapped in geometric shapes. Complicated ones, with defined lines and patterns.”

Archer groaned. “Well, that's that,” he said. Turning to another agent, he jerked his chin toward the outside. “Send the locals away,” he told the man. “Get someone to take that van full of kids back. This area is off limits to anyone I don't personally identify and allow in. Got it?”

The agent nodded and darted off.

“What's going on, Archer?” Ray asked.

The big man sighed. “Based on what the locals said, this body must have been here for a long time. Months, if not years. This field hasn't been disturbed in a long time.”

“I don't get it,” Ray said slowly. “How did they find the body if there wasn't a fresh grave?”

Archer pointed to the branch sticking out of the dead man's forehead. “That was sticking out of the ground. Some kids tried to pull it up, and when they did something...weird happened to the soil. It started to get soft, like sand, and since the body was very close to the surface, they saw part of the skull.”

Confused, Ray looked back at the body, trying to understand. He racked his brain for answers, trying to remember any mention of similar circumstances from his classes.

“I'm sorry,” Ray said after a long silence. “I'm just not getting it.”

Archer smiled grimly. “No reason you should. There are some things field agents only learn when they reach certain levels. You're getting the lesson a little early.”

The big man ran a hand through his hair and blew out a breath, as if steeling himself for what came next.

Then he explained it to Ray.

And Ray was terrified.

For the fourth or fifth time that day, Kit wondered whether she could get away with killing five of the highest ranking members of congress.

They sat across from her, the cramped size of the room no obstacle to the insatiable need for grandeur and importance. She and Robinson sat behind an ancient wooden table while her interrogators rested above her behind a semicircular desk much like a judge's bench.

The majority and minority leaders from the House and Senate sat on either side of the Speaker of the House, who almost never stopped looking at Kit with tired brown eyes.

“Were you aware at the beginning of the incident that the killer was a young boy?” asked Senator Lee, the Majority Leader.

Kit swallowed a hot retort, also not for the first time, and took a deep breath. “No, sir. As I've said before—in answer to most of your questions—that was in the report. It's all in the report.” Well,
almost
all. She left out the part about Archer being impaled by a support beam. He'd be in a world of trouble if anyone found out he was Next.

Senator Lee grunted behind his thick white mustache and darkened glasses. “You do understand, Director Singh, that we're here to make sure you're still fit for your job. If there were errors in judgment here—”

“Then Robinson would have sent me back to Helix, fired me, or filed charges against me,” Kit said heatedly, cutting him off. “As it's his call and not yours, I have to wonder why you brought me here just to ask questions you could get the answer to by reading our reports.”

Congresswoman Siegel, the minority leader, frowned at Kit and raised a gnarled finger. “Watch yourself, Director. We're not here to take any shit from you. You answer
our
questions.”

Kit wondered idly if the congresswoman would have been as...colorful in a public forum. Her guess was probably not, but the situation got no less public than this. They were deep below the Capitol building in a nearly forgotten room nestled between several storage areas. Robinson had mentioned in passing that even the janitorial staff rarely visited the area.

Kit was about to respond to Siegel when Robinson touched her arm. She bit back her response.
Again.

“My apologies, Congresswoman. I've had a rough few months, and talking about it for so long isn't the easiest thing for me.”

Senator Ditko, the minority leader, smiled approvingly, as did the Majority leader, Congressman Shuster. Neither of them spoke, however.

“I wonder why you think we asked you here,” said the figure in the center, Speaker Kirby.

Kit blinked, then glanced at Robinson. Oddly, the old man smiled and gave her an encouraging nod.

She met Kirby's eyes and held his gaze for several long seconds. “How honest do you want me to be?” she asked.

Kirby's mouth twitched at the corner, which could have been the beginning of a smile or a sign of tightly-controlled rage. “Completely,” he said.

“There are several reasons,” Kit explained. “On the surface, I think you want to measure me, see how I react. You're deliberately pushing me by being as humorless and bureaucratic as possible, asking me things you know the answer to. Rather than simply ask the real questions, you're trying to gauge my response.”

Siegel and Shuster both reacted, small tells but obvious once Kit had nailed down their body language. Siegel sat back in her chair, lacing her fingers together, while Shuster rested his chin on a fist. It was as if they had shouted out that Kit was right, even if the other three had no more reaction than a stone would.

“You said that was the surface reason,” Kirby said. “Why else are you here?”

Kit poured water from the carafe on the table into one of the crystal tumblers and took a sip. “Well, the first reason is because you want to see what kind of person I am. You want to see how I deal with stress. Below that, you want to make sure you're covered. That you aren't allowing the incident at the facility to just pass by without comment. You know what I did, and you're worried about what will happen if the truth ever comes out. You want to be able to say you sat me down and grilled me.”

She felt Robinson tense beside her, but Kit wasn't finished. The row of faces in front of her were all grim, now, wiped clean of any trace of sympathy.

Kit met each set of hard eyes with her own stony glare. “But that's just politics. I get it. The thing that really brought me here was fear. You're afraid of what I am, and I think you're scared of what I did. It chills you to your bones that I made the call to let that boy die.” She paused, letting the accusation sink in and waiting for someone to shout at her to shut up. No one did.

Instead, Speaker Kirby sighed and leaned forward. “Should we be afraid, Director Singh? Don't we have a right to fear the things you can do? That other Next can do? Are we wrong to worry about a woman who can kill a child and apparently suffer no guilt afterward?”

Other people might have been outraged, even stood up and shouted, but Kit had spent every day since the incident thinking about it. There had never been any illusions about her privacy; Kit was aware that her meetings with Dr. Otomo would pass through many hands and be seen by many eyes. For the sake of accountability, every moment of her sessions would be scrutinized.

“You're right that I don't feel guilt about it, at least not in the way you're thinking,” Kit said calmly. The five members of congress were focused on her completely, now. “Guilt implies a crime. What I did, I did to save lives. You'll note from the record that at the time, I had no way of knowing John Franklin would save my life. I thought I was going to die, too.”

She took another sip of water, though more for a pause to rein in the torrent of rising emotions than anything else. “Don't make the mistake of thinking I don't care, though. I feel bad that Thomas Maggard died, and I hate that I was responsible for it. I've been through enough to understand how to cope with doing what's necessary, even if it's completely vile. I killed him, yes, and given any other option I wouldn't have, but there weren't any. None that wouldn't have cost many more lives, at any rate.”

Letting some heat back into her voice, Kit continued. “As for Next in general, my opinion is that you have reason to be afraid, but also that you and many others have let fear override your common sense.”

“How so?” Senator Lee asked in a dangerous tone.

“By making the same mistakes people have since the dawn of civilization,” Kit said. “You lump all of us together for
what
we are, and forget to look at
who
we are. You know the statistics. One in a thousand people in the world are Next. In America, that's more than three hundred thousand people. That's an army capable of leveling every city from coast to coast in a matter of days. Yet nothing like that has happened. The majority of us live our lives like everyone else. A lot of Next even use their powers to serve their communities. Should we worry about another Fairmont? Absolutely. It would be stupid and naïve to think that some insanely powerful person out there won't cause another disaster. But it's irresponsible to treat us all like rabid dogs, in no small part because history shows exactly what happens to minorities when they've had enough of the boot on their throat.”

That
certainly made an impression. All five people behind the bench flinched, even unflappable Kirby. Their reactions varied from rage to horror, there and gone again in a blink, but for Kit that second lasted a long time

“You're on dangerous ground,” Senator Ditko said.

Kit snorted, shaking her head. “Do you really think I'm stupid enough to come in here and make threats, senator? If I had any ill intentions, I wouldn't tell you about them. Honestly, the fact that the public attitude toward Congress has never been more negative combined with the reality that no Next have decided to do anything about it should tell you just how dangerous we are. My own abilities are low on the scale compared to a Black Band, but even I could do a tremendous amount of damage to a room full of powerless people.”

The tension in the room could have stopped bullets, but Kit pushed on. In for a penny and all that.

“I'll tell you why you want me to stay where I am,” she said. “It's really simple. I can do what you can't. I can be the person in charge of catching rogue Next without alienating the entire community. I'm the one who can make the hard calls and live with them. I can enforce the law without being seen as the enemy, because I treat Next like people while still recognizing how dangerous we can be.”

Something like approval seemed to flicker across Kirby's face, but even pushing her perception of time to its limit, Kit thought she might have imagined it. “Are you done?” he asked.

Kit nodded.

“We're not in the habit of being berated,” Kirby said, an eyebrow raising slightly. “That said, you've made points everyone here has discussed at length more than once. Public sentiment is a powerful—and dangerous—force. Walking the line between being firm with Next criminals and trying not to be seen as oppressors is never easy. When Secretary Robinson told us he was appointing you, we agreed that someone with your experience would be the right fit. You weren't law enforcement, which wasn't ideal, but your practical experience dealing with Next more than made up for it.”

Kirby's voice hardened, his expression tight. “However, it's
because
of the delicate state of public opinion that we have to be sure there are no blank spots regarding Thomas Maggard's death. That includes determining whether you acted out of true necessity or because it happened to be an easy choice. I doubt you're aware, but we have had a handful of Helix agents lose their grip on reality over the last several years. The stress of the work can take its toll.”

Kit's eyebrows drew down. “I didn't know,” she said. “Anyone I know?”

Kirby waved away the question. “Not important. I mentioned it to give you context. You need to understand the sort of scrutiny you will always be under. More, now that Secretary Robinson has made you his shadow. You're being entrusted with secrets known by very, very few people.”

The threat implied in those words was clear, but Kit never got to find out what would follow.

The door of the small room opened fast enough to bang against the wall. Kit and Robinson turned in unison to find Wes Christjansen approaching. He leaned down between Kit and Robinson and spoke in a low but urgent voice.

“Archer has a possible Blue Box situation,” he said.

Robinson's eyes flashed at Kit as the gravity in the room seemed to vanish. The old man took stock, then cursed under his breath. “Wes, take Kitra to the scene directly. No, wait. One minute.”

Robinson faced the bench. “We've got a situation that can't wait,” he said to them. “Director Singh needs to be there now. What's your vote?”

Vote? Kit tried not to let her bewilderment show, but it wasn't easy.

“Mr. Secretary, this shouldn't be rushed,” Senator Lee began, but Robinson cut him off with a raised hand.

“No, sir, it shouldn't be. But as you know, Director Singh is experienced in tackling extremely difficult problems, and this is a Code One situation. She needs to be there
now
. So what is your vote?”

Speaker Kirby blanched. “Code One? Damn it. Fine, Robinson. We'll vote. All in favor?”

All five raised their hands. Whatever it was, it was unanimous.

“Sir,” Kit said to Robinson. “Why do you look so relieved?”

“Because you've just been confirmed as my backup,” Robinson said. Without pausing, he barked orders to Christjansen. “Take her to the scene and stay there. I'll be ready to leave here in an hour. Until then, you're to help her in any way she needs.”

Kit was trying to process a lot of information, but even her enhanced brain was overwhelmed. When the teleportation happened, Kit barely noticed.