Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (31 page)

I mean, we were standing with the most powerful metahuman in the world, after all. That seemed like an odds-evener to me.

“Now …” Sienna said, “… how do we get in?”

And then the answer appeared.

The loading dock door in front of us rattled as it began to rise. We all stood there, waiting to see what happened. A pair of black dress shoes appeared first, followed by giant legs, and finally by the face of a man as humorless as any I’d ever met.

“Hey, Laverne,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Come in,” Laverne said, not taking the bait on my question. It left a little tension. “You can keep any weapons you have.”

“Was planning to anyway,” Sienna said, “but thanks.”

That made me feel a moment’s relief. After all, if Cavanagh was planning to hit us hard in an ambush, he’d want us unarmed, right? Maybe this was going to be a discussion.

I hoped.

Laverne shut the door, leaving the chain pull rattling as he strode away from it. I started to follow after sharing a look with Sienna, Taneshia and Jamal, and we fell into a line. I could feel the electricity as I brushed past Taneshia. The nervousness showed on her face.

We walked through massive automatic doors into a beautiful stainless steel facility that was totally at odds with the run-down look of the building from outside. The doors whooshed closed behind us with a mechanical finality that I found uncomfortable. The place was lit up like midday and it looked sleek as hell. Even the floors were steel, and glass lab rooms were visible on either side of me.

We walked down a long row of labs and under metal catwalks. I watched above us for any sign of people. There was none. This place was quiet, like they’d sent all the help home. Which made sense, I supposed. You don’t really want to get into a throwdown with super powered folk with a bunch of potential casualties all around you. That’s just bad HR practices.

We headed toward a room at the end of the long chamber. I could see Mr. Cavanagh in there, waiting, arms crossed in front of him. He was alone and looking at a computer. It wasn’t exactly an office, though. It looked more like a storage room, with some kind of massive tanks on the wall.

The glass doors in front of him swished open as we approached, and I caught a hint of something slightly putrid in the air as he looked up to greet us with a tight smile that didn’t appear to be feigned. “Augustus,” he said, like he was greeting an old friend. “I’m so glad you came.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around. “It’s a real impressive facility you’ve got here.”

“I know,” he said, looking around. “This is the first time I’ve been here. I really regret that now. I would have liked to have been more involved in this project, but … I just couldn’t be.”

“It’s always good to keep your distance from felonious activity,” Sienna mused.

“Necessary evil, I’m afraid,” Cavanagh said. “But I’m not here to talk to you about regrets.”

“Tell me you’re here to confess,” Sienna said, “and save us all lots of time and trouble.”

Cavanagh sighed. “I’m here to explain. Now, I’m told—by the company stock price bump every time I hold a meeting like this, where I get to go into detail about what we’ve done and why—that my explanatory style has a wonder all its own.”

“Has anyone ever told you how humble you are?” Sienna asked.

Cavanagh let himself grin. “If you’d done what I’ve done, the word humble wouldn’t even be in your vocabulary.”

“A remedial reading course could fix that problem right up for you,” Sienna said. “I’m assuming you skipped that day in favor of attending the Egomania 101 lecture?”

“Please,” Cavanagh said, still smiling, still charming, “I
started
egomania at the graduate level.” He waved a hand and looked at me, seemingly seeking understanding. “She’s trying to get a trap to spring. But I’m not here to trap you. I’m here to show you the brighter tomorrow that we’ve been building. Which is what a leader—a hero—”

“A raging egomaniac,” Sienna added.

“—is supposed to promise,” Cavanagh went on, undeterred.

“A brighter tomorrow based on human experimentation?” Jamal asked, cutting into the conversation.

“All of the wonder drugs of today were tested on humans at some point,” Cavanagh said. “Every last one. The difference here is … this particular leap forward could only be tested on humans. Because no other animal on earth possessed the genetic potential that we were looking to unlock.”

I watched Sienna’s forehead and nose wrinkle. “You … tell me you didn’t.”

Cavanagh smiled at her. “We did. It took … years. Years of lab time, before we even thought about trying it out on another human being. But you know what? Once we did, it worked exactly as we thought it would. Perfectly. It doesn’t work a hundred percent of the time, but when it works …”

“You mind explaining what you’re talking about?” Taneshia asked, watching the subtle interplay between Sienna, whose face was frozen in a pained look, and Cavanagh, who looked triumphant.

“Haven’t you asked yourself why you developed your powers when you did?” Cavanagh looked at her, then Jamal, then me. “I’m guessing none of you have metahumans for parents. But the three of you, all developing powers together, with seemingly no genetic link. That’s extremely unusual.”

“Like having ten metas in your private army that you can just deploy seemingly at will,” Sienna said quietly. “There are only some six hundred left in the world—”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Cavanagh said. “Not anymore. Now, with what we’ve done here, the possibilities are unlimited.”

“Oh my Lord,” Taneshia said, and I could tell she’d gotten it.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“I did,” Cavanagh said, eyes agleam. “I really did. I discovered the secret of metahuman powers in human DNA … and now we can unlock the door and use it at will.”

“Ohhh, great,” I said, laying it on with the sarcasm. “I’ve been wanting another super-powers war. Because I got to the one out on the street just a little too late to scratch the itch I’ve been having for the last couple years.”

“You’re afraid,” Cavanagh said, prompting me to give him my best “You idiot,” look. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re a control freak. You’ve got a goddess complex. I get that. That’s me, too. I understand. You’re afraid you’ll lose the handle on the situation, that you’ll no longer be relevant.”

“I would be overjoyed to be irrelevant,” I said, more than a little annoyed at this cocky prick. “But I think, unfortunately, I’d be more relevant than ever, and that troubles me.”

“You’re missing the silver lining for the cloud,” Cavanagh said. “Think about this. Disease, injury … they’ll be gone overnight. It’ll be an awakening. Most people will go to bed and sleep peacefully, and when they wake up the next day they’ll be something different. They’ll have power over their lives in a way they never had before, but really, it’ll be the same story. Society won’t fall apart because the biggest difference will be in the small scale—that ability to heal that we’ve never had before, that ability to ward off sickness. A cure for cancer? I’ve discovered it, and it’s already in genes of every person with powers.” He pointed at Augustus. “You’re the future.”

Augustus looked at him hard. “Did you test this on me?”

Cavanagh gave him a slight nod. “I did. On you and your family. Clearly your mother didn’t—”

“Why me?” Augustus asked, looking suddenly outraged.

“Haven’t you always wanted to be somebody?” Cavanagh asked, his voice soothing. “Haven’t you always wanted to stand head and shoulders above others? To have something special to differentiate yourself from the herd? You are a special young man, Augustus. I put you in my management program because I saw it. You have the hunger to do great things—like me.”

“So you tested this—this stuff on my family?” he asked. He wasn’t taking the news well, but he was accepting it better than I would have.

“Yes,” he said, “about a year ago. We added a few parts per million of our compound to your house’s water supply under the guise of being the water company. It doesn’t have to be ingested, but that helps. A year later, your brother, your best girl—”

“Excuse me?” Taneshia asked. “I’m not his girl.”

“—and you are all metahumans,” Cavanagh said.

“But not his mother,” I said, wanting to know the answer to why almost as much as I wanted to punch Cavanagh in the face.

Cavanagh hesitated for the first time since we’d come into the room, no slick answer easily accessible. “We’re finding a percentage of people—about a quarter—that simply don’t respond to the treatment. It’s possible their genetics aren’t predisposed to accepting the unlock. Like … there’s no key for them. We call them passives.”

“Gah,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “So you want to give superpowers to seventy-five percent of the population of—what, the U.S.?”

“The world,” Cavanagh said. “This is a global community now.”

“Have you not ever picked up an
X-Men
comic?” I asked. “Because leaving twenty-five percent of the population without defense against these shiny new powers seems like a formula for disaster.”

“You can’t just put an anchor on human development because there might be some people who don’t use them responsibly,” Cavanagh said. “But then, I should have expected this regressive attitude from you; you already have powers, after all. Wouldn’t want to upset the balance.”

“Yeah, I think the world becoming unbalanced is a great idea,” I said. “Because turning a randomly selected subset of people into weapons of mass destruction makes a ton of sense. You realize that there are some metas who have the ability to explode with the force of a nuclear bomb? Try to imagine giving that power to a person who—I don’t know, has the ideology of a Hitler but lacks anything but fringe nut support for his ideas. I’ve heard of metas with chemical abilities, too. Think of the damage one of them could cause if they snapped into a psychotic rage. Whole cities could get wiped off the map. Mass destruction or even the annihilation of humanity could become the province of individuals with a grievance.”

“Whereas today we reserve that particular right for only the largest governments,” Cavanagh said. “I’m strangely uncomforted.”

“This is a terrible, terrible idea,” I said. “You can’t do something like this without at least pondering the consequences first.”

“I can,” Cavanagh said. “I absolutely can.” His face twisted. “It’s going to be my legacy, in fact. I’m an idea man, see, like Edison. I just keep churning them out—ten, a hundred, a thousand—until I find one that works.”

I sighed, and stared him down. “Well, you’ve tried to kill us, like, a hundred different ways now. Maybe for your next attempt you should change a sign so that it leads us over a cliff? Maybe that’ll be the one that works.”

Cavanagh grinned. “I think … just maybe … I found something better.”

“You have to realize I will fight you to the death to keep you from unleashing this plague on the world,” I said.

“Oh, I realized that was a possibility,” he said and looked at Taneshia, then Jamal, and finally Augustus. “Which is why we’re here, in a steel facility without any concrete or dirt or stone nearby for Augustus to play with. And why I’ve got these canisters leaking a very small amount of gas,” he waved a hand to extend to metal containers stacked in storage racks all around us, “that will explode if either of our lightning bearers or our lady of the flames cause so much as a spark.” He gestured to the area around us. “No dragon in here, either. You try, odds are good things will explode. And those light-based nets? I’m not so sure they won’t set off a boom as well—which is fine for you.” He looked at me and smiled tightly. “You might walk out of this alive. But me and the kids won’t.” He took in Augustus, Taneshia, and Jamal with the wave of a hand.

“Why don’t I just kill you now?” I asked, feeling my blood run cold.

“You could,” he said. “You absolutely could. Break my neck, I’m done. But … then you won’t know what I’ve got lined up to disperse the treatment to the whole city of Atlanta. Which, I believe, is something you’re afraid of?” He smirked and walked in a line in front of us like a visiting lecturer. “This doesn’t have to go bad. We can all still—mostly—get what we want. I want to make the world a better place. Always have.”

“Your vision of it, anyway,” I said.

“This is a great equalizer of power,” Cavanagh said. “Don’t be such a nagging parent. Look how these three have done with power.”

“Umm, one of them has been murdering people,” I said. “Kennith Coy, Joaquin Pollard and Roscoe Marion were not accidents.”

Cavanagh frowned. “Really? That’s—well, that’s …” He looked annoyed and shot an irritated look at Laverne before turning his gaze back to Jamal and Taneshia. “Thanks for screwing up my point, asshole. Who did it? No, never mind, it doesn’t matter. This is going to happen, but we can all benefit from it. Augustus,” he said, looking right at his intended target, “I know you want to be somebody. I know you want to climb the ladder of the world, go to college, get your own little slice of the American dream. You can still do that. I can help you. I mean to help everybody I can. To make it possible for more people to help themselves than ever before. We have an obligation to put an end to sickness, to disease, to pain—”

“This is going to cause more pain,” I said, looking straight at Augustus. I felt like I was in a war for his soul, and I couldn’t let it go unargued.

“You need to think like a hero,” Cavanagh said. “Heroes save the world, but she treats the world like it’s past saving. All she wants to do is hold the status quo in place because she benefits from it.”

“You know I don’t,” I said darkly, letting a little of the pain I’d been bottling up for months spill out. “If I could change the world right now into a better place, a place where there was no hurt, no sickness—I wouldn’t do it. Because I saw that vision, and it was the same vision that Sovereign offered—a scorched and barren surface.”

“People could be better,” Cavanagh said.

“Not this way,” I said. “People are getting better, generally, a little at a time. Less war, less murder—these things are happening right now, just slowly.”