“Don’t tell me,” I said, wishing I could land a finger on his lips, shush him … gently. “It’s better if I don’t know how the path unfolds to get me there.”

  “Everything you need to know, you’ve already learned,” he said. “At this point, it’s really more of a question of if you’ll remember.” He froze, thinking. “My window is closing. Are you absolutely sure—”

  “I’m staying,” I said. “But … thank you, Harry. For …” He’d fill in the blank.

  Harry smiled. “You should be more careful about who you mouth off to in here. Prison guards have to be feared by the inmates, especially super-powered ones. This whole place is a jungle hierarchy, and as much as you might want to be queen, your ass is going to have a difficult time cashing the checks your mouth writes in here. You need to be more strategic.” He looked away, studying the floor. “After this … I’m not going to be able to help you.”

  “Are you helping me now?”

  He nodded. “That guard, Burke? He was going to be a big problem for you.”

  “Not loving the past tense there, Harry,” I said. “What’d you do?”

  “I did what you would have done in my place.” Harry still did not meet my gaze. “I took care of him.”

  “What the—Harry, you can’t go murdering a prison guard just for being a dick to me!”

  “He wasn’t just going to be a dick to you, Sienna,” Harry said, and now he looked me in the eye. There was a lot of fire there, an anger I seldom saw from Harry Graves. “Anyway … it’s done. He’s not going to be a problem. But there are others … ones I can’t get to.” He leaned in close to my face. “Once I walk through that door … you’re going to be on your own. The inmates here … the guards … the administration … there are a lot of people gunning for you. You’re going to go through hell if you stay.”

  He pulled back to look me in the eye, and I saw a flicker of hope die. “But you’re going to do it anyway.”

  “That wasn’t a question,” I said.

  “Because … there is no question. No probability. It just … is. Your will is like stone,” he said.

  “You’re a strong man, Harry,” I said. “But … some things even you can’t move, with all your powers.”

  He laughed, weakly, and forced a smile that was equally weak. “If you weren’t the most obtuse, frustrating person I’d ever met in my life, the most immovable … I probably wouldn’t be here now.”

  I blinked. “Whuuuut?”

  “I can move anyone, Sienna,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Time and effort, that’s all it takes. The right responses, counter-responses … I can move anyone.” He looked me in the eye. “Except you. And that’s why I l—”

  “Kiss me, you fool,” I said, and he did. Long and slow, and without a timer, I thought, until he broke it off after a few seconds. “Now get out of here, before your window closes.”

  He walked over to the door and it buzzed, the keycard triggering its lock. “I hate to be cryptic guy, but … I know you won’t take straight up advice, and it’d go down like meatloaf if I just told you what to do.”

  “I hate meatloaf.”

  “Exactly.” His eyes twinkled. “Trust poison. It’ll see you through. And when the shit hits the fan … to thine own self be true.” He forced another smile. “Good luck, Sienna.”

  And then he was gone, the door closed and locked behind him with a great click of finality, and I was left alone, again, in the holding cell.

  13.

  Reed

  “So this group of metas like Jamal has the evidence that Sienna didn’t blow up Eden Prairie on purpose?” Veronika Acheron asked the question, her reddish hair glinting in the sunlight, skin flushed, eyes slightly bloodshot, probably from the rush to get assembled together for this.

  “Nah, she blew it up on purpose,” Augustus said. We were having that all-hands meeting in the middle of the bullpen in our office. “What the evidence will show is that she was being violently attacked to the edge of death by all the prisoners that our loving press had built up as a bunch of innocent victims railroaded into criminality and permanent imprisonment due to Sienna’s evilness.”

  “She didn’t technically blow up all of Eden Prairie,” Jamal stepped in to further correct. “It was one commercial park, a few tens of millions in damages. And the only fatalities were the former prisoners trying to kill her, so …”

  “There was another fatality, too,” I said, leaning into the conversation for the first time since Veronika had interrupted my briefing, “the pride and objectivity of the reporters on the scene. Their brains got hijacked by one of the inmates; he turned them into a feral, mindless mob—”

  “What’s the difference between that and their natural state?” Kat asked, under her breath. “Seriously. The mainstream press is basically the paparazzi of old now, clickbait and all.”

  “—and when Sienna broke that spell over them—”

  “Wait, there are metas that can cast spells?” Friday asked, standing up, swelling, eyes wide in his mask holes.

  “I think it was a metaphorical spell, Friday,” Eilish said, brushing some lank strawberry blond hair back over her ear.

  “They can cast metaphorical spells?” Friday straightened, swelling even more. “This sounds incredibly dangerous.”

  “Idiot,” Greg Vansen put his head in his hands, slightly shrinking, as though he wanted to disappear from the meeting.

  “—they ran, managing to escape the explosion, but probably left with the powerful illusion that she was trying to kill them,” I said. “They’re not likely to have a favorable opinion of her with that ingrained in their subconscious minds, obviously.”

  “I never have a favorable opinion of people trying to kill me,” Tracy said, shaking his head. He nodded in my direction, like my own personal amen chorus. I couldn’t really look him in the eyes. “Right on, boss.”

  “Anyway, these are the people we need to secure the evidence from,” I said. “The Custis family. They’re typically in Washington, DC, but …” I looked to Miranda.

  “I hired a local PI firm to surveil them,” Miranda said. “Within forty-eight hours of the Jamal/Augustus incident—”

  “That’s a polite way of referencing that time they tried to frame us for murder and just barely failed,” Augustus said, a little heated.

  “—they’d left DC,” Miranda said. “Our detectives lost their trail, and they’re in the wind.”

  “Reed can find anything in the wind,” Tracy said, nodding furiously.

  “Not the literal wind, Tracy,” I tried to explain to the big man with as much patience as I could muster. He was like a puppy dog that followed me around, desperate for my love and approval. My guilt for making him this way was acute, but I couldn’t deal with it right now. I needed all the help I could scrape together. “My guess? They’re either dead at the hands of whoever they work for, or they’re hiding.”

  “If alive, they’re probably somewhere with a strong wifi signal,” Jamal said. Then he blinked, thinking about it. “Actually, scratch that. All they need is an electrical plug and they can make an internet connection.”

  “That means they could be literally anywhere,” Olivia Brackett said, leaning in to our little circle around the bullpen. “They could be hiding in Outer Mongolia if all they need is an electrical source.”

  “There is a limit to that,” Jamal said. “There’s got to be an internet connection somewhere on that power network in order for them to use it.”

  “Can you flush them out, Jamal?” I asked.

  “I’ve been avoiding the hell out of poking that particular nest of bears since we got back from DC,” Jamal said, light reflecting off his glasses as he pushed them up on his nose. “There are five of them and one of me. Without ArcheGrey in my corner last time … Augustus and I would still be sitting in jail. But … my guess is they’re still watching us, so … I might be able to flush them. They’re likely to see it coming, though.”

  “They’re not going to see me coming,” Friday said, using his best Christian Bale Batman voice.

  “Everybody sees you coming,” Veronika said. “You’re literally the biggest of us. When you swell, we can see you a mile away.”

  “With Greg’s help, no one will see me coming,” Friday said. “Nobody expects the Friday inquisition!”

  “That … does not make any sense,” Jamal said.

  “It’s from Monty Python,” Friday said.

  “Yeah, but there’s never been a Friday inquisition,” Augustus said. “There was a Spanish inquisition—”

  “If you’re going to deconstruct all of Friday’s jokes, I don’t think we’re going to get anything else done,” Scott Byerly said, joining the conversation at last.

  “Hear, hear,” Greg Vansen said, head still in hand.

  “This is the thing I don’t understand,” said Jamie Barton, better known as the New York superhero Gravity, hanging on the outside of our little circle and doing nothing but frowning up until now, “Sienna keeps getting herself in trouble—”

  “She does seem to have a nose for it,” Kat said. She wasn’t staring at her cell phone for once, which surprised me. She was actually paying attention to the whole conversation.

  “—and you all keep riding like the cavalry in a western to try and save her,” Gravity said. “I mean … there was that thing in DC with the president, then Scotland, now—”

  “Because she’s always trying to save the world,” I said. “And certain elements keep trying to … stop her. She’s in this mess because of that ‘DC thing,’ as you mention it. Because Harmon decided to scratch her off his hit list by making her a criminal. Everything that’s followed, from Scotland to here? It’s all because of that one item, one choice, one massive string of consequences.”

  “I don’t think it was one choice,” Gravity said, face scrunching with skepticism, “but let’s say for the sake of argument that yeah, okay, that was the thing landed her in trouble with the law. Since then, she’s sure compounded her problems by running and fighting and raising all manner of havoc—”

  “The term is ‘raising hell,’” Friday said. “Why won’t you say it that way?”

  “I don’t like to swear,” Jamie said. “I’m a hero, it sets a bad example for kids.”

  “You’re from Staten Island,” Veronika said, sort of squinting at her. “All the kids you’re around have heard the word ‘fuck’ since before they were old enough to walk.”

  “That’s … blatantly untrue,” Gravity said, “and beside the point—”

  “Which is?” Scott asked.

  “When does this ‘call up the reserves and everybody in to the pool to save Sienna’ thing—when does it ever end?” Gravity asked. “I like Sienna, in the main. She’s done some good things. But I keep getting a summons to twist up my life and come help her once a year or more when she gets in deep doo doo—”

  “Just say ‘shit,’” Friday said. “‘Shit.’ It’s so easy.”

  “—and I’m just wondering when it stops,” Gravity said. “Is this a forever obligation? Does it come with an expiration date?”

  A silence fell over the room.

  “It’s over when she’s done saving the world,” I said, coolly as I could. “Because at that point, she’ll be done pissing people off, which means presumably they’ll stop coming after her.”

  “This beyond the normal level of people coming after you—” Gravity started, then stopped.

  “You’re thinking about that time the Queen of Wall Street damned near took everything from you, aren’t you?” Jamal asked. “And Sienna saved you.”

  Gravity just stared at him. “Poo.”

  “‘Shit,’” Friday said.

  “What about the deeper roots of … whoever this is?” Chase Blanton said, her short bob of dark hair hanging partway over her face. Sienna had pointed me in her direction because, and I quote, “Chase has the coolest power maybe ever—you’ll shit.”

  Let the record show: I did not actually shit. But she could make a lightsaber come out of her arm, and that is pretty damned cool.

  “You’re thinking if we could get past this IT family,” Jamal said, “we could make more progress going after the head rather than the hands of this org? We thought about that, but digging these bastards out? I haven’t been able to do it. The Custis clan is especially skilled at covering their tracks, at least from a tech perspective. There is no evidence of anything getting past them, at least not digitally. Phone records, surveillance camera footage of them meeting with anyone—nada. I’ve looked. They clean it all out as it happens, leaving no trace. They’d make the Boy Scouts proud.”

  “Maybe you need to do some old-fashioned detective work,” Taneshia said. For once, she and Augustus were not intertwined in some way during our meeting.

  “Would all the actual, trained detectives here please raise a hand?” Scott asked. No one raised a hand. “All right, then.”

  “That seems like a gaping hole in our staffing,” Friday said, partially shrunk again. “We should hire someone with those skills.”

  “They haven’t really been needed thus far,” I said. “I mean, the metas we run across are usually kinda … smash-smash, grab-grab. Subtle and clever in their crimes, they aren’t.”

  “And we’ve always kinda had Sienna to fall back on when things got excessively twisted,” Angel said, chiming in at last. She’d been quietest of all. I assumed she was feeling guilty, since I was feeling the burn of some of that myself. We’d both been there when Sienna got caught and had our particular parts to play in what followed.

  “Still, there has to be some way to get past this front line of IT blockers,” Chase said, brow furrowed in intense concentration. “Some way to … cajole or investigate or threaten—”

  “I can handle the threatening part,” Friday said. “I threaten like a pro.”

  “—something,” Chase said.

  “She’s right,” I said. “And now that we come to it … this is the deal. We’re all skilled, competent people—in our own ways.”

  “In what way is Friday competent?” Olivia Brackett asked, her blond hair shining in the sunlight that streamed through the office window.

  “I’m excellent at pounding the stuffing out of those who need it,” Friday said.

  “Fair enough,” Olivia said.

  “We’re going to break into teams,” I said. “Each of us divides into crews with a specific task. Chase, you’re leading the group that’s going to be looking into getting past the Custis family.”

  “I … volunteered myself for that by speaking aloud, didn’t I?” Chase asked.

  I smiled. “Exactly. You’re showing leadership. Tracy, Olivia, Taneshia—you’re with Chase. Coordinate with J.J. and Abby.” Those two were on lockdown at their house; I hadn’t wanted them to come in just in case we decided to do something stupid. Being unpowered, they could operate just as easily at a distance, and far outside harm’s way. “Figure out a way to leapfrog these people and get us a clear target for who’s responsible for Sienna’s current predicament.”

  “Uhm, these Custises contract for half of Congress,” Jamal said. “I’m not sure you’re going to love what you find past them.”

  “Admittedly,” I said, “but just because they work for powerful people doesn’t mean that those people specifically ordered this. They’re not part of a government agency, after all, which means … maybe this Sienna deal is a freelance thing that the family does in their spare time. Find the truth, either way. They’re almost certainly not doing it just for kicks. Find the man—or woman—behind the curtain.”

  “Uhm … we’ll do what we can with our limited technical expertise,” Chase said, looking at Olivia and Tracy as they eased in her direction.

  “Jamal, Augustus … I need you front and center on the Custis family,” I said. “Greg, Eilish and I are going to be rolling with you guys.”

  “Oh, boy, we get to clash with these folks again,” Jamal said. “Because it turned out so well for us last time.”

  “You’re not leaving me out in the cold, are you?” Scott asked. Kat had eased up to his shoulder, looking a little questioning. Friday, too, lurked in the background.

  “You two, Veronika, Friday, Gravity,” I said, “you’re on emergency detail. If we get a hint of Sienna in trouble …”

  “We will Kool-Aid man our way into the Cube and perform a dick-ectomy on anyone who gets in the way,” Friday said, slinging his giant arms over Kat and Scott’s shoulders. “Go Team Dick-ectomy!”

  “That is not going to be our team name,” Scott said.

  “Pull Greg if you have to,” I said. “But this is priority. Sienna’s in there alone, and the last thing we need is for her to come to real harm while we’re working at proving her innocent.” I put my hands on my hips. “We’ve all got our assignments.” I looked at them each in turn, trying to emphasize the importance of what we were doing. “Let’s get this done. For—”

  “Whoa,” Jamal said, lifting his phone and interrupting my dramatic moment. He was blinking furiously, which made me think that perhaps he’d gotten some last-minute update, digitally.

  “Don’t leave us hanging like that while you’re data processing,” Augustus said. “What happened? You just stumble across some juicy online porn?”

  “If so, share,” Friday said. “Unless it’s all dude, in which case … maybe still share. For science.”

  “Remember how I said the Custis family had been covering their tracks in real time since Augustus and I crossed paths with ’em?” Jamal brought his phone up. “Well, I just got a hit to a weird lead I had on them months ago. I couldn’t track it back at the time, but … it just popped up again, and this time I got a location.” He flicked the screen to life, and on it was a map to … somewhere. “It’s an abandoned factory in upstate New York.” He pursed his lips together. “And I think … one of them might be there right now.”

  14.

  Sienna

  I pretty much knew I was screwed the minute I entered gen pop.

 

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