Powerless (The Girl in the Box Book 40), page 11
She shook her head. Not arrogantly, but certainly.
“Good point,” Reed said. “Doesn't matter, though. They shouldn't have done that to you. I'll get lawyers on it–”
“I'm sure that will be affordable.”
“Good thing someone made $150,000 today,” Reed said. “Because honestly, most of what we've pulled in the last few months has just helped to pay off some of our lines of credit that were starting to get extortionate.”
“Yeah, well, it's good that now we can afford legal fees from suing the state to keep them from neutering us every time we get into a brawl with some asshole trying to kill or harm people,” I said, putting my fingers back over my eyes. Like covering them would let me go to sleep and wake up in a time when this shit wasn't happening. “They're holding the funds for a few days due to it being foreign and a large amount, but hopefully they'll release them soon, since it sounds we'll need it post-haste.”
“Let's hope,” he said. “What's your plan?”
“Right now I'm hunkering,” I said. “Waiting for the suppressant to wear off. They plugged me pretty good, though, so who knows when that'll be.”
“Damn,” he said. “All right, well, I'll try and speed things up here, but...” I heard the near-cringe in his voice. “...You have things under control there, right?”
I could feel slow pressure building in my head, adding to the already rising tide of the headache. Olivia stared at me from across the desk, shaking her head and clearly motioning me, No, you do not, tell him you do not.
“Yeah, we'll be fine,” I said, and watched her eyes widen. “You go and catch your bad guy.” I hesitated. “Is Ohio...paying for you to play?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, sounding the most satisfied he had the entire call. “We're getting paid, all right. And it'll be a good haul. But listen – if you get in trouble, you can always call in Kat. And Harry, of course.” He chuckled.
I must have reacted in some unsubtle way, because Olivia's gaze on me increased in intensity. “Of course,” I said, trying not to sound stricken. “But...just in case I need a little...extra help...do you have a gun?”
There was a long, long, looooooooooooong silence. “No,” he finally said. “I don't. And, as far as I know, neither do any of the others here. But that's...that’s just you being precautionary, right?”
I forced a smile, hoping it would shine through my voice to the other end of the line. “You know me. Always trying to be prepared for worst case scenario.”
“Right,” he said, but he sounded...just a little uncertain. “I'll call Miranda, get her started on the lawyer stuff. Then I'll try and speed things up here. You just...hunker down. That's a good plan.”
“I do come up with them every once in a while,” I said. “Catch you later, Reed.”
“Later,” he said, a bit distractedly, and then he was gone. Leaving me with Olivia...and no hope of help beyond her anytime soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Um, what are you doing?” Olivia asked, nonplussed enough that her voice ran completely wobbly and out of control compared with her usual staid, chipper, somewhat reserved manner of speaking. It hung in the office air, which was already tense with a hint of panic after Oberheuser's unannounced stopover.
“Minimizing the current threat,” I said, “so that Reed can continue to do his job.” I caught the flicker of panic in her eyes. “Look, we'll make it through. I always do. But Reed needs to focus on the job at hand, because it sounds like he's up against a bad one.”
“Can we at least call Kat?” Olivia asked. “And your boyfriend?”
I lurched forward in my seat, pulling my legs off the desk where I'd rested them. My steel toed boots felt incredibly heavy. Probably because they were still filled with moisture from the freezing incident in the bank parking lot. “Kat...left to go back to California yesterday.”
“So call her back. Tell her we're in trouble.”
I adopted what could only be described as a pained expression. “Well...that sort of dovetails with your second suggestion...”
Olivia's eyes crinkled into crow’s feet. “...What?”
“Harry sort of...broke up with me last night,” I said, in what I hoped was a meta-low tone of voice. I checked through the window to see if Traverton or Aniya were watching or eavesdropping. Neither appeared to be, but I couldn't be sure. “So he's not going to be coming to help, and Kat sounded pretty put out with me over the whole thing, so–”
“Wait, he cried to his mommy about it?” Olivia blinked.
“I don't think I'd describe it that way, but he definitely informed her, and that caused her to have a bit of an attitude toward me when we talked...”
“But your boyfriend–”
“Ex.”
“Whatever, he can read the future,” Olivia said, leaning across, both elbows on the desk. “Does that mean he's foreseen this...conflict or whatever? What you're going through right now?”
“Probably, I guess?” I shrugged, because the inner workings of Harry's mind were still a mystery to me after all this time.
“Then...you're going to come through it okay, right?”
That caused a drag on my self-certainty. Was that why Harry had left? Was the breakup a pretense to get the hell away from me before something bad happened?
No. I was a hell of a pill to handle even in the best of times, and these weren't them. “No. I don't think so.”
“Ohmigod,” Olivia said, wide-eyed and wild-eyed. “What if he did? What if he saw that there was no way to save you and–”
“Stop it!” I hissed, making a hacking off gesture as if to get her to cut that shit out, right now. “That's not why he broke up with me. I get into shit situations like this all the time, I'm sure the timing wasn't intentional. Harry had his reasons–”
“What did he say they were?” Olivia pressed harder against the edge of the desk. The poor girl was practically using the edge of the desk as a push-up bra, she was up against it so tightly. I couldn't help but notice, and hope for her sake that she quit relying on the hard wood for an underwire, because I was guessing it would really feel bad tomorrow. Or shortly.
“I'm not discussing this right now,” I said irritably. “We have other problems.” I waved a hand, so slowly – yet as fast as I could muster with human reflexes. “This stuff wears off, it's game on for me. We just have to hold out until then.” I looked around the room. “But we should probably do so...elsewhere. Since Oberheuser already came here once.
“You're right.” Olivia brightened. “I know just the place.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“When you said you had a place we could hide out, I didn't think you meant your apartment,” I said, walking down a hallway that verged on seedy. We were out beyond Eden Prairie, down highway 212, past Chaska and even Cologne. It was old, familiar territory for me, probably ten, fifteen minutes from the site that was now the Cube, but which had once been the Directorate. My origin point.
“Well, no one knows where it is,” Olivia said, chirping like a happy bird bringing me back to her cage. Or something along those lines. I tried not to display my wariness at the prospect. Until I got my powers back and waited out this stupid suppressant, I was entirely in her care, after all. “So there's that. It's an advantage.”
“It is...something,” Traverton said. He and Aniya were following us up the stairs at a much less frenetic pace than Olivia. The fact that Traverton, our resident piece of shit, was not impressed with her digs told me that my attempts at keeping my disappointment in were not badly placed. I didn't want to offend Olivia, after all, and I'd certainly lived in a few shitholes while I was on the run. This was not that much different than any of them. Hell, it was better than some.
But it was grim. With every step up the weathered staircase, a loud squeak greeted me. My boots felt like they weighed tons, the steel toes so easily moved while I had powers were now like weights on my tired legs.
A window behind me overlooked the parking lot, and Olivia's old car sat lonely in the middle of it. Aged, faded white paint covered the interior walls, and the smell of something like old animals lingered in the interior, a scent long past. It was exceedingly faint for me.
Apparently not for everyone, though. “Is that...cows?” Aniya asked, nose wrinkled.
“Yep,” Olivia said. “This was a dairy barn before it was turned into an apartment complex. Eleven units.” She turned to me with a bright smile, far brighter than was warranted in any of the situations we'd found ourselves in today. “Neat, huh?”
“That's rad,” I said, trying not to let a single drop of sarcasm bleed through.
She walked us to the end of the hall and hurriedly opened a door for us. I passed other doors, sensing that any moment, some cow left behind after the renovation might come crashing through one of them and run me over. In my depowered condition, I'd be hard pressed to stop them from tearing me to pieces in a storm of hooves and udders.
But I was probably being paranoid. Sure, a cow would gladly kill me if it could, knowing what I'd done to so many of its brethren over the years. But it couldn't know. Because it was dumb. Like Traverton.
“I gotta go again,” Traverton muttered. Or maybe he was speaking at normal volume for him, and it just didn't seem like it since my hearing had been turned way down after getting darted.
Either way, I was first to Olivia's door as she hustled inside, turning on interior lights. I could see into the darkness within, and the entry was a short hallway framed by a door on one side – coat closet, I assumed – and leading into a sitting area with...
One battered old recliner plopped in front of a TV. A white, square pillar obscured my view of the room, a load bearing column just sitting there, in the middle of the space, probably an artifact of the former barn's redesign.
“Just a second!” Olivia shouted as she bustled around.
I stepped inside tentatively, watching Aniya and Traverton out of the corner of my eye. Of the two, Traverton seemed least enthused about coming in. Aniya radiated near-indifference, taking it all in with zero care or interest in anything.
Olivia appeared from around the blind corner, around the curiously placed pillar, and plopped a weathered chair down in front of me. It was wood, with a beige, faded seat cushion and wicker back. It looked like its heyday had been in the eighties, and life had been all downhill from there for it. “Just grabbing my extra chairs!”
I stepped around the corner and felt like I'd gone back in time.
The sad sitting room with the single chair in front of the TV didn't get much better when I got the full view. A tiny kitchenette waited to my left, just past a bookshelf that was overstuffed with various volumes of sci-fi and self-improvement books. Titles like Eat that Frog! were shoved in right next to American Gods and battered Star Trek paperbacks. My eyes hung on one titled Imzadi, and I wondered if I was reading it wrong.
“One more!” Olivia said breathlessly, thumping another of the beat-up, wicker-backed chairs down in the near-empty sitting room. She was arranging them around the already existing recliner and waved me toward it. “You sit there,” she said. In the place of honor.
“You know what? I'm feeling the call of nature,” I said, dedicated to the proposition of not sitting in that recliner for all sorts of reasons, the least of which was that it felt like she was setting things up like a royal court.
“Oh, this way,” she said, urging me back the way she'd come, past the kitchenette. Beyond it were three doors. I could see a bedroom – and more of the wicker-backed chairs stacked within, in a corner, beyond a mattress and box springs set directly on the floor, no frame or other artifice to make it look in the least bit nice. Not a single photo or poster hung on any wall, anywhere in the place.
Behind me, I caught a glimpse of Aniya taking the big chair and settling in. Apparently she'd decided she was worthy of the royal treatment, which was fine by me.
“Right there.” She pointed to the left door. It opened into a long, narrow bathroom with a floor of dirty linoleum.
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile. “I might want to...relax for a minute. Put a cool compress on my forehead. Any chance you've got...?”
She almost fell over herself opening the third door. “You'll need a towel!” She grabbed a threadbare washcloth and offered it to me like a squire offering a sword. Except she didn't get on one knee. Still.
“Much appreciated,” I said, taking it from her and stepping into the bathroom.
“But I needed to go,” Traverton whined from across the empty sitting area as I closed the door.
I found the fan button next to the light and turned it on. It rattled to life above the toilet, providing the slightest cover for whatever noise I made, albeit not much for the metas in the apartment.
The mirror was spotlessly clean, and I frowned. How could the mirror be so clean when the linoleum floor was so filthy, I wondered? A closer look offered the answer: the linoleum wasn't dirty, it was old and spotted. It was actually as spotlessly clean as one could make it, and the bathroom had a zesty lemon smell undergirding everything.
Looking back in the mirror, I could see I'd enjoyed a fine trip through the ringer today. My makeup that I'd spent so much effort on was utterly ruined, as was my hair. With a sigh, I reluctantly concluded there was zero chance I was going to be able to reconstruct any of it here. Not that I wanted to. Fixing myself up once per day was quite enough, thank you very much.
“Hey, if you need anything else, check the drawers around the sink,” Oliva's voice intruded, muffled, through the door on my solitude.
“Thanks,” I said without enthusiasm.
“No problem,” and her footsteps moved off, leaving me alone once again in the elongated bathroom.
The shower and tub was at least twenty feet away from me. The bathroom was spacious, really – but weird because of the narrowness. Whoever had converted this place must have been playing a form of Tetris in designing the rooms, sliding whatever they could into the space allotted. It was a hell of a way to build a building, but it had worked. After a fashion.
I stepped closer to the mirror, my boots clunking heavily against the baseboard as I leaned in. With a sigh of weariness, I stooped and untied them, kicking them off. They were pointless now, useless with my human strength. I couldn't throw a kick with decent form with them on, or with anything approaching the speed I'd have needed to hit a meta. So off they went, soaking wet and disgusting from my ice antics.
My socks were soaked, too, so I ditched them. With a little hot water from the bathtub, I let my feet soak a few minutes as I sat on the tub. Every once in a while I heard a moan from Traverton, muffled through the door, and was suddenly thankful I didn't have my powers and couldn't hear him being a little bitch at full volume.
Once I'd dried my feet, I washed my face and did my best to restrain my mane, which was distinctly horsey at this point. Using one of Olivia's ties from the counter, I gathered it together and bound it up, looking in the mirror at my face.
My eyes were tired and a little red. I mopped at them with cool water, staring at the steely blue irises. “You know,” I whispered, “for a girl with a hundred and fifty grand in your pocket, you sure don't seem happy.”
I looked at the results of my efforts. That was as good as it was going to get with what I had. Sighing, I stared at myself in the mirror. Another fight, another beating. That was normal. I could take those.
But as I stared at my face – my now human face, since the meta had all been drugged out of me – I felt like there was a dark shadow over me in the mirror, like I was tiny and beneath something so much bigger than I was. Overwhelmed by it, I looked like nothing but a scared little girl, and tried to keep those feelings to myself as I clicked off the light and unlocked the door, trying to put my brave face back on before I stepped out to face these people who were – for some reason – relying on me.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Hey!” Olivia sprang to her feet to greet me like I'd been gone for days. I waved with my hand to try and get her to stay seated, but she either didn't notice or ignored me, hurrying over and catching me right by the kitchenette. “You want something to eat?”
“Uh...” I started to reflexively say no, but a rumble from my stomach betrayed me. “What have you got?”
“Excuse me,” Traverton said piteously, trying to get past us without doing any pushing or, really, any actual standing up for himself. Olivia moved aside easily, but I didn't move at all, and he huffed as he detoured around me and went into the bathroom. I glared at him as he went past, because he almost stepped on my bare feet.
“Oh, your shoes,” Olivia said, looking down.
“Yeah, I left them by the tub to dry,” I said. “They're kinda...soaked.”
“That's fine,” she said. “Good, even. So – food! I've got...” And she made her way all of two steps to the fridge and opened it, immediately sagging. “...uh...ketchup. That's...kind of expired.”
A woman after my own heart.
She moved frantically up to the freezer and found little more; I saw ice cube trays and a pizza, which she checked the date on and promptly tossed into the garbage can. “Ummm...” she said, clearly embarrassed. “...I don't get to the store much, I guess...long hours, you know...”
“Oh, I know,” I said, because I did. Her fridge looked like mine in DC, and before that, in New York. In fact, the only time I could remember having a fully stocked refrigerator in my adult life was during the time when I'd been early in my fugitive days, when I'd made the decision to eat healthy, and that had required more meal prep and less takeout. In New York and DC, the restaurants had offered plenty of healthy takeout options.
Out here, in this former barn, I doubted anyone delivered that would offer a salad with peanut chicken. Just a hunch.
“Don't worry about it,” I said, breaking off and heading for the sitting room. The carpeting, in spite of a gray and worn look, felt great on my bare feet. Much better than the linoleum, which, in spite of now knowing it was clean, still gave me the heebie jeebies. I considered, briefly, asking her if there were any decent delivery options – calories be damned after the day I'd had thus far – but got caught up in another, more urgent matter.
