Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9 (16 page)

“Okay,” Scott said, concentrating on his phone. I felt pity for him as he worked. “I think I’ve got it.”

I shuffled toward him, avoiding the bodies on the ground, and peered onto the screen, glaring out at me in the darkness of the guardroom.

“Looks like …” Scott said, “… okay, got it.” The screen flashed, and then a very small depiction of the guardroom appeared on screen. He thumbed a button to fast forward it, and we stood there watching guards flow in and out of the room, unconcerned, unharried, like they were going about their daily business. “Whoa.”

Scott paused the image, a perfect freeze frame. I stared at it as he thumbed it back a few seconds and everything changed. The tape began to play normally, and two guards were standing in the middle of the room, talking, one of them with a cup of coffee in his hand.

A few seconds passed, and suddenly they both dropped without warning or notice, with only a flash of black in the image to herald anything changing. Blood spurted from their backs and they writhed in pain as they fell, curling into the fetal position.

“Go back,” I said. “Can you freeze the video and walk it forward frame by frame?”

“I think so,” Scott said, his tongue out of his mouth in concentration. He rewound it to a point when both guards were still standing and then paused it. The images resumed but more slowly, like someone was showing us a series of still images, a stop-motion video starring the guards whose faces we couldn’t even see.

“There it is,” Zollers said calmly, as Scott stopped the forward progress of the recording.

A figure in black was standing behind one of the guards, a figure that had not been there just one frame—one second—earlier. A knife the size of my forearm was clutched in his hand, and his dark hair looked like it was hanging in tangles. Even through the grainy footage and on the small screen, I knew him. I knew him and my heart thumped in fear because of it.

I let out a slow breath, a hiss of hatred. “Weissman.”

JAMES

The first breath of autumn had come to Minneapolis even though it was not nearly fall yet. James Fries felt it in the cool wind prickling his skin, and he cursed it. It rustled in the trees as he walked along the cool street, wishing that the sun overhead would do more to heat the day but knowing that it was a pointless hope.

It even smelled like fall, he conceded. The leaves on the trees were still green, so at least there was that, but September was nearly here and that was always the beginning of the end. He despised the winters here, despised being in Minnesota in general, but somehow he hadn’t found the courage to leave. Why? He asked himself that on a daily basis. No answer was forthcoming.

He kept a steady pace as he walked along the tree-lined street, houses on both sides perched over him. He didn’t know exactly why they built them this way, ten feet above the street with stone terraced steps that you had to climb to get up there. For the basements, he supposed. He’d been living in one of the older areas of Minneapolis for the last few months. He’d switched after the last time Sienna Nealon had found him. She’d shot him, for crying out loud. Twice.

That had been just before Omega went out of business. Scary times, knowing that the storm was blowing his way. He’d heard the whispers about Century, gotten a briefing or five with everything HQ had been willing to share at the time, but it’d had been months since London had gone dark.

Now all he had were rumors.

Even after all this time, James couldn’t shake the idea that all of this—all the crap that had blown his way—had all started on the day he met Sienna Nealon. That smug, hard-edged little bitch. She was a frosty one. And damaged in all the wrong ways. Fries preferred his conquests with a little more innocence, a little more prettiness, and a lot more sweetness. That girl was as bitter as a hemlock milkshake.

He glanced over his shoulder involuntarily, and for the first time he took note of the two big guys behind him.

No, big wasn’t an adequate descriptor. They were huge. He could see the long, red hair and beard of one of them. The other looked cleanly shaven. They were moving up on him fast, and Fries started to feel just a little bit nervous.

Was this how it was happening elsewhere? He didn’t have any friends—incubi weren’t beloved in the meta world, after all—but he’d read the Omega reports about metas disappearing elsewhere in the world. There were too many stories of it happening, too much evidence that the China and India explosions hadn’t been accidents or regional disputes for him to dismiss it.

He took one look back at them, the two mountains of men, and he started to run.

The pre-fall air stung his cheeks. His breath exploded out of him. He didn’t run. He didn’t like to run. Fries didn’t need to exercise; he maintained his physique just by being young and being a meta. What was the point of exercising when you were already a god?

Heavy footfalls behind him caused him to look back. The two men were pounding up the sidewalk toward him like he was walking. They ran with fury and speed, and Fries suddenly regretted not exercising.

They caught him after a block, one of them catching him by the collar and yanking him back. A leather-gloved hand descended over his mouth and strong arms gripped him tight enough to numb his forearm.

He felt a snap and his left arm broke with a screaming pain. A moment later his right followed, and he shouted his anguish into the leather glove but it did little good, making only a muffled sound.

An arm wrapped snug around his ribs and then broke three of them through the slow application of pressure. He screamed again, near soundlessly. It was like a high-pitched whistle in his own skull.

“If I squeeze him hard enough, do you think I can pop his head off?” a gravelly voice asked. He couldn’t see, couldn’t even judge where it came from, the pain was too overwhelming.

“Probably,” came the answer from a voice just as gravelly. It almost sounded like the same person. Twins? he wondered. The gloved hand pushed in on his mouth and James felt his front teeth break loose of his gums. “Remember that guy in Switzerland that time?”

“Heh,” came a guffaw. “That was fun.”

“Still, maybe this time we should keep it neat. It is a city street in daylight, after all.”

There was a snort. “You worried about the cops? I think we can take ’em. After all … it’s been done before in this town.”

“I wouldn’t go basing my life’s ambitions on what
he’s
done.”

“No,” the reply came. James’s head was swimming, and the pain was everywhere. “No, that’s not a line I’d want to cross over, either. But still, he showed us it’s possible.”

“Let’s wrap this up.”

James felt himself spinning, a slow twirl. The hand stayed in his mouth all the while. He felt a few more teeth break free and realized that there were tears of pain on his cheeks, chilling in the air as he spun. He saw the face of the man who held him—

Oh, God, the face.

“I like to look my victims in the eyes as I kill them,” the guy in front said. Red hair. All red. Like a lion’s mane of red. No, not like a lion. Wrong animal. Like a—

There was a cracking, popping noise in James’s head. He couldn’t tell exactly where it came from. His chest? No … his neck. His throat. His head sagged, limp, held up by the hand that was closed up around his face. His jaw broke, and that one was louder and more obvious. He felt pressure on his lower face.

“That’s a new one,” the clean-shaven one said from behind the red-haired monster. “Might make him tougher to identify without dental records.”

“Who cares?” Red asked. His eyes were like black pools of darkness. Like looking into the sun during an eclipse.

“Not me,” the man behind Red said. “Hurry up and finish.”

There was a last snapping, and a flash, and Fries felt the feeling disappear from his fingers, toes, and everywhere else. Red’s eyes were the last thing he saw, and he wondered—thinking of all the women he’d killed—if they’d felt like this when he’d looked into their eyes? Looked into their eyes and—

SIENNA

I was sitting on a plane on the runway at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, letting the blower above me churn barely warm air into my face. I hated the smell of planes, that filtered, sterile air. It reminded me of the medical unit at the old Directorate, where I’d spent more than my fair share of time in a bed, recovering from some grievous wounding or another.

I was feeling squeezed, with Zollers on the aisle side and Scott on the window side, looking out. He was still sullen, and hadn’t said more than a few words since we’d left the wreckage of the prison. The local PD was on the scene along with the FBI, which was managing the fallout for us thanks to Foreman’s intervention. Better them than me.

I had an inkling that Foreman was going to take some heat over this, but it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. With the local PD on the scene, news was bound to leak unless someone spun it as a research facility or something. I didn’t know how it was going to wash out, but I was glad to be well clear of the mess.

Zollers was trying to be considerate, tucking his elbow in so I could have the armrest. Scott was not conscious enough of those of us around him to do anything of the sort, and so I had his elbow almost poking me in the ribs. “Why did I get stuck in the middle?” I mumbled, low enough that no human would have been able to hear me.

But my traveling companions were not humans. “Because you’re just too nice,” Zollers said.

I felt a frown come on. “I thought you were a mind reader, but it’s like you don’t know me at all.”

He let out a soft chuckle at that and turned back to reading his magazine. I knew we’d have to call a meeting as soon as we were back on campus; there were things that had to be dealt with, and we needed to get everyone on the same page. I hated meetings, but we needed a plan. We needed a strategy. We’d dealt Century some unexpected damage from our expedition to Vegas, and they’d struck back. I doubted that it’d be the last bit of striking back Weissman would do, so we needed to figure something out soon.

I turned to look at Scott. He’d been my faithful right hand in Vegas. He had come with me to cheer me up, and he had. I was scared but felt myself returning to forward motion again, no longer frozen and paralyzed by this sense of inevitability that I’d had after my encounter with Sovereign. We’d struck a blow against this terrible destiny that he was trying to impose on us as if by divine fiat, and it gave me confidence we could do more.

Scott, on the other hand, seemed completely demoralized. Zollers’s words about losses to my team hitting harder than losses to Century rang in my ears. I couldn’t afford to have Scott out of action right now, wandering in the desert. For more reasons than one.

“Scott,” I said gently, and he looked as if he were awakening. He turned his head to me, eyes bleary and red. I thought it was from lack of sleep, but there was no guarantee it was. Scott was sensitive; I had nearly forgotten that his breakup with Kat had put him hard on the bench only a few months earlier.

“What?” he asked.

I tried to figure out how to approach what needed to be said without driving him deeper into his shell. “I’m sorry.”

He blinked, red eyes looking at me in confusion for a second before I saw them get jaded. “Are you really sorry for what we did? Or are you sorry that I’m feeling the way I am about it?”

I paused as I thought about lying. “I’m sorry you feel the way you do about it,” I finally said, hoping the truth would set me free but doubting it all the way.

His entire face reddened. “Sienna, what we did was wrong.”

I stared back at him, trying to keep myself expressionless. “In a perfect world, maybe.”

“In a perfect world?” He nearly exploded, but controlled himself just in time, lowering his voice back to a whisper. “Sienna, we—” He paused, face twitching with emotion. “How does this make us any better than them?”

I surveyed him, watched him watching me, waiting for an answer. “I’m not worried about being better than them. I’m worried about helping you all survive them. You can live the rest of your life trying to be a superior being after the threat of them murdering you isn’t hanging over every day of it.”

“It’s just so wrong,” he said, shaking his head.

“This is war,” I said. “Every place we tread is a battlefield, and the people we are up against are not going to politely declare that they’re going to kill us before they try. They’re hiding in plain sight, they’re sneaky and they’re vile, and they will not hesitate to wipe us out however they can. We are outnumbered, outgunned, and if we fight this war the moral way—the way that would allow your conscience to sleep easily at night, every one of you will die. Maybe you’re okay with martyring yourself on the altar of whatever morality you feel you’re upholding by following the good and lawful way you’d like to conduct this fight,” I leaned closer to him, so my nose was almost touching him, “but I don’t want to look back in a hundred years as the only survivor and have my regret be that I wish I’d fought harder to save our people.”

He looked at me with dull eyes. “Are you really fighting to save our people? Or are you fighting because you’re afraid you’ll be looking back in a hundred years as the prisoner of Sovereign?”

I didn’t flinch, though I felt it inside. Hot anger bubbled in me as I heard the engines start. “I’m fighting because while you’ll all die if Sovereign wins, I’ll lose my life. Yes, I have a personal stake in this. So do you. So does every meta. If you think my lot will be better than yours if we fail, I’m more than willing to exchange places with you. You can go be Sovereign’s bride and I’ll die in your stead, how about that?” On that one he flinched.

“I spent twelve years locked away in my house,” I said. “Then I spent a year with the Directorate doing their bidding, putting off nearly everything I wanted to do and I’ve spent the last six months running my ass off trying to figure out how to save what’s left of the metahuman race.” My fingers came up and massaged my face. “We spent the last two days in Vegas identifying corpses, fighting enemies and chasing leads. I didn’t gamble a dollar and I didn’t have so much as a drop to drink. I’m tired, Scott. It feels like I’ve been in a cage my whole life, watching and hearing about everyone else living but me. I want to live, Scott. I want to live my life instead of having my life—and my job—run me, own me and break me.”