Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (17 page)

This was cold, vicious satisfaction, which was a totes different emotional creature. Totes. Different.

I raised my fist for the fourth strike and held it up, planning to do my level best to reciprocate what he’d done to my jaw when he went insubstantial and dropped right through the grass, leaving nothing but a not-so-faint outline of his body in the soil, the grass and dirt disturbed around his head where I’d just pounded him hard enough to till the earth.

“Fhiiiit,” I said, my jaw not quite back to normal. The air was starting to clear, but the sound of screaming was still present. What else could anybody do? It’s not like the bomb had gone off close enough to us to cause actual injuries, but that never stopped the human mind from interpreting it as a brush with death anyway. I mean, for crying out loud, most of us don’t deal with bombs exploding in our proximity on a daily basis.

I mean, I did, but I was special. My mother never said so, but I know it’s true, because I’m a millennial.

I sat there staring at where Captain Redbeard had disappeared into the earth for a few seconds too long, expecting him to come back and finish our fight. “Huh,” I said, and started to get to my feet. That kind of assault, those injuries I’d just inflicted on him? They would have killed a normal person. They would have put a low-level meta out of the fight, period.

Which made it very disquieting that Redbeard had gotten away, because it suggested that he was not a weaksauce meta who’d fold easily.

“Sienna!” Steven came out of the cloud, hands in front of his face, eyes squinted against the dust. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, doing a little squinting of my own, my eyes feeling the burn. “Bad guy rabbited.”

“He had a lot of babies?” Steven asked.

“He
is
a baby,” I said, trying to look around, get a clear picture of the situation. I looked back toward the lake, where Kat was still standing knee deep in water. “I don’t think he should have any. Besides, he’s dickless.”

“Ouch,” Steven said, peering at me through the dusty air. “What now?”

“Well, he’s stuck in the earth, I’d guess,” I said, “so—”

“Are you sure about that?” Steven asked, and now he was squinting at me in a way that suggested doubt rather than dust in the eyes.

“Umm, yeah,” I said. “We’re close to sea level, aren’t we, so—”

“The LA subway has a tunnel that runs under this park,” Steven said, lowering his hands.

“What?” I asked, in utter disbelief. “LA has a subway?”

“Yeah, I think a lot of the locals are clueless about that one, too, based on the rider numbers—”

“You live in earthquake city,” I said. My jaw fell, but not on account of a flesh-ripping sucker punch this time, “why would you build a subway here?”

“Uhm—”

Something grabbed hold of my ankle with furious force and tugged me downward. Suddenly it was like my feet lost all touch with the ground, and my eyes got dragged along with me. Darkness filled my sight and I drifted down, my sense of gravity all screwed up by the fact that I knew I was passing through solid ground. It felt like I’d been pulled out of an airplane, or fallen off a high step in a dream, or accidentally backed into a hole.

Before I could so much as scream “GAVRIKOV!” in utter panic, I hit metal and wood, their distinctive sounds and sensations filling both the air and the nerves in my back. Steel ran across my shoulder blades and wood slammed into my tailbone as I hit rail tracks. At least, I assumed they were rail tracks. I also assumed they were steel and wood, because my mind was filling in the blanks that the dark around me wasn’t providing any insight into.

I lit my hand as I called Wolfe to the front of my mind again.
Be wary, Sienna
, he offered oh-so-helpfully as my left hand flared into fire and revealed—

Captain Redbeard standing over me with a broken nose, blood caking his mustache and beard, crazy fury in his eyes as he leered down at me.

I thrust my hand up as he dodged, and all I caught was his beard. I grabbed with my flaming hand and he screamed like a little boy who’d gotten kicked in the crotch, dancing away from me as I lit his stupid beard on fire. I struggled to my feet in spite of the pain in my back, and I had a feeling he’d dinged my vertebrae during the fall.

Wolfe
, I groused.

Working on it.

“Now there’s no audience, stupidass,” I said, staring at him in the dark of the subway tunnel. “Which is fortunate for me, because I need another YouTube video of me obliterating you into dust like I need my jaw ripped off.”

“You do need your jaw ripped off,” he sneered, beating at the little embers of fire still left in his beard. He circled me warily, watching with thinly concealed fury. “You need to shut your stupid mouth.”

“It doesn’t surprise me you want a woman who’s stronger than you to shut her mouth,” I quipped. “This whole scheme of yours is like a giant Freudian article on airing your inadequacies. Apropos of nothing, I just read a study the other day that said that monkeys with the smallest testicles howl the loudest.”

“SHUT UP!” he screamed.

“You’re really just backing up the research here,” I said. My hands were up, in a defensive position, and I was ready to fly at him.
Gavrikov
, I said in my mind,
ready the fire. We’re gonna burn the soles of his feet off
.

Aye aye, Keptin
, Gavrikov said, reminding me that he probably spent a lot of time in seedy motels in the sixties and seventies watching whatever was on television.

I had a life before you,
he said sullenly.

Never tell me about it, Chekov
, I fired back, turning my attention back to Redbeard. “Time to dance, a-hole,” I said, watching him fade away and drop about six inches into the ground. He cringed in pain, his lower lip wavering. “What the hell?” I asked the air, not really expecting a response from him; he’d just anchored himself to the earth, after all, buried his feet in the earth, where presumably the concrete under the metro line had just merged, painfully, with his feet just below the surface of the floor.

“I don’t feel like dancing,” he said smugly, pulling something out from behind him, something he must have grabbed before pulling me down here. It turned solid for a second as he pushed a button, on the oblong, cylindrical object that he held in his hand. It would have taken a dunce, or someone completely unfamiliar with movies, not to recognize the theatrical object in his hand, but I didn’t quite get it in time to stop him from doing his thing with it.

It was a detonator. It didn’t have a glowing button or anything, but I heard the click when he pressed it.

And then I heard an explosion go off behind my head, filling the tunnel with dust.

It was only enough to stagger me, the force of the shock. My eardrums blew, true, and that hurt like a bastard. I could feel the blood running out of the canals, but I had my eyes open and locked back on my threat a moment later, just in time to watch the detonator hand go insubstantial.

“You think that’s going to stop me, turd monkey?” I shouted, unable to hear myself over the damage to my ears.
Wolfe, get on that, will you?
It wasn’t likely Redbeard would say something useful, but the sound of me screaming into the void without being able to hear it was kind of annoying.

Redbeard said something, something I couldn’t understand because I don’t read lips and his were covered by that stupid scraggly beard anyway. I could see the satisfaction in the way he’d said it, though, and it was enough to make me dart a look behind me—

Just in time to get hit by a knee-high wave of water from MacArthur Park Lake as it came rushing into the subway tunnel.

For a second, I thought I was going to be okay; I was strong, after all. I could have just flown out of the water and shot down the tunnel, escaping before it became too high or too fast for me.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten something that Redbeard had not.

Subways run on electricity. Electricity that comes to them via a third rail.

The water rushing down engulfed the subway’s third rail and carried that electricity straight to me. As it hit my legs, it didn’t feel like a normal rush of water, like the tide coming in the way I’d once felt it while on a job at Galveston Beach. No, it felt like a thousand stings—

—like pain forcing itself behind my eyeballs—

—like every muscle in my body locked up at once—

Wolfe
, I cried helplessly, but I could feel his panic. We hadn’t trained for this, this outside possibility of getting struck by lightning. I should have; it’s not like there weren’t metas out there that could shoot lightning at me, but I’d prioritized using my healing powers to acclimate my skin to gunshots, the more common danger I ran up against.

Ten thousand volts of electricity ran through me, attacking my muscles, attacking my heart, frying my nerves and my brain. The last thing I felt before I was rendered unconscious was the flood behind me carrying me away down the tunnel helplessly as I slipped into death like it was an old slipper, waiting for me at the home I would never see again.

The second explosion had caught them debating what to do—Kat still in the water, Guy Friday looking all around like a war zone was going to drop down on him at any second, and Steven Clayton frozen like he was completely clueless.

What followed, though, that was a sound that rendered all of them clueless. That or speechless, and Scott didn’t really know which it was.

The rumbling of the explosion shook the earth, harder than the one across the park, a little more oomph to it. But this time there was no physical sign, no cloud of dust, no debris in the air. People were screaming, the few that hadn’t run off by now, and Kat looked more uncertain than the rest of them.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, looking around nervously. With good reason, Scott figured.

“Where’s Sienna?” Scott asked, as though she’d coming popping out of the ground any second, dragging Redbeard’s beaten carcass behind her like she was returning from a triumphant mole hunt.

“In the ground,” Steven Clayton said unhelpfully. “Hopefully in the subway tunnel beneath the park.”

“There’s a subway tunnel?” Scott asked. “In LA?”

“Metro Rail,” Guy Friday pronounced. “It’s actually the descendant of two different railway companies that started in 1901, if you can believe it—”

“I can’t,” Scott said, focusing all his attention on Clayton. “You think Sienna’s in the subway?”

“Well, hopefully she’ll be able to catch a ride on one of those cars,” Kat said, making a face as the ground shook once more beneath her. The sound of something rushing was faintly below the screams. “Maybe meet up with us later, back at the hotel?”

“This guy could have left her in the ground,” Clayton said, looking right at Scott. “I mean, if he just wanted to be done with her—”

“He doesn’t just want to be done with her,” Scott said, speaking with a certainty he didn’t totally feel, hoping he was right. “He wants to kill her in front of an audience. He wants to humiliate, to shock, to destroy—”

“I don’t get that,” Guy Friday said. “I just kill my enemies. They’re dead, they can’t talk back anymore, it’s great.”

“You’re really creepy,” Kat pronounced like it was coming as a sudden surprise to her. “Why are you so—” She was cut off mid-sentence by the rushing turned to a roar as she snapped her read around to look.

Scott figured it out at last; the lakebed was draining behind her, the water level dropping rapidly.

“Wow, this drought is so terrible,” Kat said sagely, sounding like she was about to launch into a lecture. “When are we going to learn—”

“Oh, shit,” Steven said, and Scott couldn’t help but agree.

The lakebed beneath Kat’s feet disintegrated, and she disappeared like she’d dropped into a pit—which she had, he realized, gone in a flash of darkness before he even had time to react.

She fell into the hole in the ground without anything to cling to, the earth ripped from beneath her so quickly she didn’t even have time to scream before she plunged. Water fell with her, ringing her ankles, wetting her dress up to her buttocks. She passed through it as she fell, and it drenched her as she went down, dropping into the darkness.

Kat hit the ground without any water to break the fall, and it hurt. Not as much as it maybe would have if the water hadn’t slowed her fall, but it still hurt. She sat up slowly, rubbing her back where she’d landed, and stared into the bizarre spectacle above her.

The water hung suspended above like it was trapped behind aquarium glass. It pulsated, sloshing back and forth behind an invisible barrier as it lifted up off the tracks like it was a video being rewound, water pouring up instead of down. It was the strangest thing she could recall watching, maybe ever, as the tunnel ahead of her cleared, the water lifting off the train tracks, sucked up into the sunny sky that shone above the liquid roof that separated her from the sky above MacArthur Park.

Kat stared into the semi-darkness, a lamp on the wall her only guide. “Sienna?” she called experimentally. Her eyes were still adjusting.

“What the hell?” came a distressed, malevolent voice from somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. She heard the sound of pained grunts and something like cloth tearing hard in the distance.

Kat felt the edge of panic that ran through her. She reached out with all her senses, feeling for plant life; naturally there was none, and even that which she felt in the park above was desperately muted, rendered nearly insensate by the lack of water. The trees were suffering from the drought, and the grass was near dead, its roots too shallow to be of any help anyway.

She backed up, her dress catching on a metal rail. She didn’t even hesitate—she slipped it clean off in a second with her meta speed. She had seen enough of this guy—Redbeard, as Sienna called him—to know he wasn’t going to be content to let her stumble in the dark with her sopping dress, hoping for mercy. She’d seen his eyes. There was no mercy there.

Kat walked across the painfully rough concrete floor, deftly stepping over the rails as she made her way to the side of the tunnel, out of the light streaming in through the watery ceiling above. Drips of water fell all around her like light tears falling from the sky. Somewhere up there, Scott was holding back the flood as best he could. For now, anyway. That might change, and soon. He’d never been the strongest guy, at least not as far as she knew. Her earliest memories of him all involved tears of some sort, his moaning about a relationship between the two of them that was as alien to her as the thought at this point of living a life without kale smoothies or hot yoga.