Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (34 page)

“I don’t really need to be watched,” Kat said, “I need to get back to LA—”

“So that more people can die on the altar of your career?” I eyed her with an unforgiving look. “How about ‘no’?”

“I need to do press,” she protested, crossing into whining and making my ears feel like they were ready to bleed. “Disappearing right now is—”

“Wow,” Reed said, cutting her off, “you really are shallow and vapid now. I argued for you, you know.” He shook his head. “When Sienna said you were a total write-off as a human being.”

“Thanks,” Kat said, clearly meaning anything but. “But I don’t need your approval.”

“Okay, I’ll watch her,” Reed said, meeting my eyes, all trace of resistance gone.

“Knew I could count on you.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at him, “Bro.”

“Yeah, don’t do that.” Reed shook his head. “You can’t pull it off.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I went to check the caller ID. “Zollers,” I said in pleasant surprise. “You mind getting her something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” Kat said irritably, “and this is kidnapping, you know.”

“Katrina Forrest,” Reed said, once again rolling his eyes, “for your own protection and that of others, you are under arrest under the authority of the Metahuman Policing and Threat Response—”

“I know the name of the agency,” Kat snapped as Reed took her arm in hand and I answered my phone.

“Hey yo,” I said, looking out over the Austin morning. It was already kinda balmy, the sun shining and the air dry.

“Hey,” Dr. Zollers said. “How are you doing?”

“I just had Kat placed into protective custody after physically hauling her out of Los Angeles,” I said as Reed shut the sliding glass door behind him, giving me the illusion of privacy. “So … I’ve had better and worse days, really.”

“Did you enjoy that?” Zollers asked, slipping immediately into therapist mode.

“Uhmm …” I gave it some thought. “Not really. We had a lovely argument in the middle of the desert, but frankly, I could have done without it. It didn’t exactly give me closure.” I paused. “Say, you’re not just calling because I didn’t book a session this week, did you?”

“Well, as much fun as it is running a startup practice,” he said, and I could hear him smiling with just a hint of strain, “no, I’m not so desperate for a paycheck that I need to bill you for this—though it is going to come in at a special rate of eight hundred dollars per hour—”

“You know I’d pay it,” I said seriously.

“I know you would,” he said. “But I’m just concerned by what I’ve picked up in your emotional state, that’s all. Also, the news. This … this villain you’re up against …”

“He’s a doozy, isn’t he?” I stared hard at the horizon, the blue sky and fluffy white clouds. “He just … man, he hates. He’s like a world champion hater. I don’t like Kat or what she does for a living, but this dude irrationally hates her with a force that I can’t even muster for Old Man Winter at this point. Possibly for my first date the other night, though …”

“He does seem like an injustice collector,” Zollers said. “Just from what I’ve seen on TV, anyhow. His exchanges with you, documented on YouTube—”

“How is it that YouTube is like the historical archive of my life?”

“—and you’re right, he’s furious about some past issues, possibly related to his clash with Augustus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll talk to Augustus about that in a minute.”

“Don’t expect him to be much help,” Zollers said. “I took a look at the file the agency has—”

“How did you—” It only took me a second. “Never mind. Stupid question.”

“—and this Redbeard, as you’ve taken to calling him … he merits a line, and I don’t think it’s because Augustus forgot him. It’s because he only dealt with him for sixty seconds or less.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Redbeard nearly killed his girlfriend, and Augustus buried him. Now he’s back, five months later, and he’s mad about—well, everything.”

“What you should consider,” Zollers said, smooth as ever, “is what happened in the interim.”

“Well, clearly Redbeard went crazy—”

“No, I mean—what do you think happened to him next?”

I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. “He probably found a tunnel and—”

“It could be,” Zollers said, “but I looked at the geography, and I don’t think there’s much in the way of tunnels beneath Augustus’s neighborhood, which is where that clash happened.”

“Well, he had to get out of the ground somehow,” I said, frowning. “He couldn’t just—” I stopped. “Could he?”

“It’s funny you ask,” Zollers said, and I heard the sound of shuffling paper at his end. “I have a report here about a starvation-thin white man with an overgrown red beard and long hair turning up in the Indian Ocean, picked up by a passing freighter. They didn’t know what to make of him.”

“As one doesn’t, when picking up a red-haired hobo-looking fellow in the middle of the Indian Ocean.” I pondered it for a minute in the silence of the morning. “You think he drifted through the whole damned earth?”

“I suspect, yes,” Zollers said. “He’s a meta, probably pretty far up on the power scale”

“But he’d need to eat,” I said, not believing it. “To drink. To breathe.”

“When I was doing my practice at the Directorate, before you showed up,” Zollers said, starting to lecture, “Dr. Sessions ran across a meta who had been entombed for a hundred years. No air, no water, no food.”

“Uhhh … I don’t like where this is going …”

“He seemed dead,” Zollers went on, “like he was in a suspended state. We never did find out what type he was, because when Sessions and Perugini went to perform the autopsy—”

“Really, really don’t like where this is going.”

“—he sprang to life, scaring the hell out of both of them,” Zollers said. “Now, he died shortly thereafter—”

“Of shock?”

“Of a scalpel to the eye. Dr. Perugini … she’s not the sort you want to mess with.”

“I called that even before there was an imminent danger of her becoming my sis-in-law.” I hoped Reed was eavesdropping and heard that.

“Anyhow,” Zollers said, “when Sessions did the autopsy, he speculated that the man first fed off all his fat reserves, and after that, his brain entered a state of—well, oxygen deprivation and malnutrition, as well as—”

“I get the gist,” I said, definitely feeling skeeved out. “And now I know more about torturing a metahuman than I really wanted to.”

“I’m sure the Nazis performed experiments of that sort that were probably even less humane,” Zollers said. “In any case, this meta—he was mad by the time Perugini and Sessions revived him. Crazy. His brain lacked vital nutrients in addition to oxygen, and he was permanently damaged in a way that affected his cognitive function. He must have been high on the power scale as well, because we have very clearly documented cases of metahumans dying of oxygen deprivation.”

“Remind me to avoid accidentally locking myself in a coffin.”

“I thought you already slept in one during the day,” Zollers deadpanned.

“Nice.” I puckered my lips. “So Redbeard’s genuinely crazy in addition to feeling wronged by me and Kat, for undefined reasons.”

“He may not need clearly defined reasons, and that’s the point. His mind is not functioning in a logical fashion.”

“Neither is Kat’s. Hey, maybe she’s starved herself, too—”

“Sienna.”

“Well, it’s a possibility,” I said, knowing that it wasn’t. “Have you seen her bony ass?” I gave us a moment. “This guy’s not going to stop, is he?”

“He’s fixated on both of you,” Zollers said. “He’s failed a few times in trying to end at least Kat, if not both of you. But he won’t be done until he’s killed you.”

I didn’t bother to mention that he hadn’t failed that hard, since Redbeard actually had killed me once already. That was the sort of thing I generally preferred to spring on my friends in person. “Well, he’s going to have a hard time getting hold of Kat,” I said. “But me … I’m going to have to go after him.”

“Be careful when you do,” Zollers said, and I could feel the sense of worry through the phone, “because in addition to being crazy as hell, he likely wants nothing more than to see you bleed and die in front of the whole wide world … a repayment for the sins he imagines you’ve committed against him.”

I stayed outside for a few minutes after I hung up with Zollers, just staring into the sky, hoping for an answer to come streaking down and hit me in the forehead. Unfortunately, it did not, and after less than sixty seconds, a little voice piped up from inside me instead.

You were awfully hard on Klementina
, Aleksandr Gavrikov said quietly. Yes, he practically whispered in my head, which was a lot nicer than the shit that Bjorn or Wolfe usually pulled, two men who spectacularly failed at “indoor voice.”

“For f—” I let out a hiss of exasperation. “She doesn’t even like to be called Klementina anymore, Gavrikov. She doesn’t remember you, or her life before. It’s all gone. All that’s left is Kat.” I stared at a cloud shaped like a kidney. “Stupid, selfish, Kat.”

You didn’t know Klementina
, Gavrikov said.
She was not selfish. Wounded, yes. Damaged, perhaps
—

“Your sister is damaged, all right. I’d help inflict more, if I weren’t trying to self-improve.”

—
but not selfish. Never selfish.

“Times change,” I said. “People change. She’s changed, trust me.”

She has the power to heal, to give life
, Gavrikov said.

“Well, she’s dealing out more death than me, lately,” I said, tapping my foot on the thin grass. “And that takes some doing.”

She is merely trying to do what—

“What she wants,” I said, cutting him off pretty harshly. “She’s doing what she wants, not what’s right. Therefore, she is selfish.”

We all want what we want.

“Yes,” I said, losing patience, “but we don’t all start getting people killed to get it, do we? There’s the selfish thing again, see. Reasonable people are willing to maybe back it off when people start dying for what they want. You don’t even have to be a hero to do that; you just have to not be a totally self-centered asshole.”

There is still good in her.

“Yeah, well, I don’t see it,” I said, tilting my head back and looking up, “but maybe I’m the wrong person to be looking.”

“Is that self-pity I hear?” Reed’s voice came from behind me and I spun to see him standing at the sliding glass door, closing it quietly behind him.

“It’s …” I searched for an answer and did not find a good one. “Probably.”

“Why ever would you feel sorry for yourself?” Reed asked. “It’s not as though your life isn’t completely perfect, every moment a blissful treasure free of stress and worry—”

“Where’s Kat?” I asked, turning my attention back to my brother with a surge of alarm.

“Relax,” he said, “Augustus is keeping two very watchful eyes on her.”

“Probably also keeping a very drooling tongue on her as well.”

“I don’t rule that out,” Reed said, “he does seem a bit starstruck.” He took a couple steps off the patio into the yard. “You talking to the voices in your head?”

“Just the one that’s pleading for clemency for Kat,” I said, tapping my skull with my index finger a little too hard. Ouch. “What is it about brothers that blinds them to their sisters’ faults?” I smirked at him as I asked.

He gave me a wary eye. “I don’t think that’s a universal thing.”

“No?”

“Yeah, I got a really long list of yours. It’s not something I can travel with, though, because the airlines dock you if you fly with a suitcase over 50 pounds—”

I raised my hand to playfully swat at him and gave him plenty of time to cringe away. “Love does tend to blind us,” he said finally, continuing to get closer to me. “To faults, I mean. Probably why people who love themselves so much don’t realize how shitty they are.”

“I don’t love myself enough to ignore how shitty I am,” I said, uncomfortable with the sudden self-reflection. “I mean … I know why people hate me. Kat busted me over the head with it, but she didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

“What’d she say?” Reed asked, eyes full of concern.

“Ohh …” I played it back in my head. “I don’t know. Something about not being attentive to others, but I wasn’t really listening …” I flashed a grin at him. “She said … I kill people. Lots of people. And I’ve got powers. And I’m cold and mean … yadda yadda, you know all this.”

“Well,” Reed said, slipping his thumbs in his pockets like a hillbilly with a pair of overalls, “if it makes you feel better … you’re less of those things lately, in my estimation.”

“I’m trying,” I said softly. I actually was, at least to the people I cared about.

“I know you are,” he said. He put an arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. He smelled like queso and salsa, like freshly chopped onions, and I wrinkled my nose but didn’t say anything. “Change isn’t easy.”

“Scott figured it out,” I said. “The memory thing.”

“Ouch. He mad?”

“Is the Pacific Ocean filled with water?”

“I don’t know, you’ve seen it more recently than I have, and supposedly there's a drought.”

“It’s still there,” I assured him. “And … yeah. He’s not happy.”

“You didn’t expect him to take it with grace and aplomb, did you?”

“I didn’t expect to have to deal with it yet, if ever,” I said with a sigh. “I know, I know … I said I’d tell him, and I always meant to, but, you know … later.”

“You should tell him how it happened,” Reed said, every muscle tense.

“I don’t want to,” I said and buried my face in his side. “And I damned sure don’t want to do it before I find this Redbeard bastard and cathartically skin him alive.”

“You need to tell him,” Reed said. “The how is the context. If you don’t tell him the how, he’s going to be mad forever.”

“I’m not sure he’s going to get any happier after I tell him—” I sighed. “I’d rather start with something easier, like saying I’m sorry to J.J.”

“What’d you do to my homie?” he asked with a frown.

“He probably thinks I accused him of bestiality.”

“Does he think that
because
you accused him of bestiality?”