Painkiller (2 page)

“Hey,” the bartender said, slapping a round of beers down on a tray that rattled on the bar in front of me. “You need some help schlepping these back to your table?”

I looked around the bar. There was one waitress to cover about ten occupied tables, hence my need to place my own drink order. “I got it,” I said, sliding the tray off the counter and balancing it on the tips of my fingers, the cease and desist order between my fingers and the plastic tray. With metahuman dexterity and strength to help, carrying a round of beers on a tray was the easiest thing in the world. Way easier than resisting the temptation to smack people for asking stupid questions. Yeah, carrying drinks was easy compared to that. Maybe I could be a waitress.

Wait, me in customer service? That would end in tears. And flames.

I made my way back up a couple steps to the second tier of the bar. Loud music played over speakers, and a glance at all the empty tables around my little party told me that privacy was pretty much a guarantee. Not even a meta could eavesdrop on us in this place, not with the music turned up like it was and the massive gap between us and the other patrons.

I put the tray down on the table as I stepped back to my empty chair. There were five people waiting for me, chatting amiably among themselves. “I just got served by the FAA,” I said, lifting up the envelope. “Apparently they don’t want me to fly anymore.”

“Well, you are a hazard to navigation,” Augustus Coleman said, the beer in front of him still half-full. He was a youthful, energetic young black man, nodding along with my pronouncement like it made utmost sense to him. He was also underage, but no one at the bar needed to know that. “Remember that time you smashed up that plane?”

“On purpose, because it was full of fleeing Russian terrorists,” I said, glaring at him. “Remember that time I saved that other plane full of innocent civilians from crashing by flying a pilot out to them? Or the time I saved Chicago by stopping a massive meteor from crashing into Lake Michigan and unleashing a tidal wave?”

He frowned. “You did? I don’t think I heard about those.”

“I’m such an unsung hero,” I muttered, slumping back into my seat. It was not comfortable.

“I’ve heard you sing,” my brother Reed said, barely disguising his grin as he took a jab at me. His hair was back to roughly neck-length, still quite a bit shorter than he usually wore it. “It’s better this way.” He swiped the beer I’d just bought him off the tray and took a sip, hiding his grin behind the massive glass mug.

Doctor Isabella Perugini smacked him on the arm from where she sat next to him. “Be nice to your sister,” she said in a thick, Italian accent. “She is almost unemployed. It is a difficult time.”

“Uh, we’re all almost unemployed,” Ariadne Fraser said, looking glum behind a mug of her own. She, too, swiped a fresh beer off the tray, her red hair catching pink neon, her eyes slightly dulled from several previous rounds.

“You’ll get a job,” I said, waving her off. “I hear finance is a hot sector right now, and Minneapolis has a booming job market.”

“Whereas face-punching is something of a limited-growth industry,” Reed said, smirking. “The government tends to want to keep the monopoly on that, see, so if you do it without their blessing you’re operating outside the law and thus subject to being put away like the criminals that we’ve been locking up forever without a trial—”

“Oh, God, you are so sanctimonious,” Kat Forrest burbled, slurring her words. “I mean, I love you, Reed,” she said, looking right at him, clearly in the “I love you guys” phase of drunk that produced the greatest honesty, “but seriously … just … you know, dial it back, man. It’s really off-putting. I think it probably costs you a lot of friendships.”

Reed stared back at her, mouth open slightly. “Uh … okay.”

“Thank you,” Kat said sincerely, reaching across the table and patting him on the hand. Dr. Perugini watched her with both suspicion and irritation. “You’re such a good guy. If you just … like, lay off doing that one thing, I think you’ll be like … golden and stuff. People will love you. Because you’re a lovable guy.” She sniffed and looked around. “Really, you all are—” she said, starting to prove my point about how drunk she was.

“So,” I said, cutting her off before she got sappy … er, “Augustus … what are you going to do?”

“Well, my semester is paid for,” Augustus said, shrugging, “so I’m going to see it through, of course. I’m just trying to figure out if I want to transfer to DC after that and keep working for the man, you know.”

“I don’t know if you can call Andrew Phillips ‘The Man,’” I said, staring into my amber mug. “Maybe ‘The
Ass
Man’.”

“We set aside the money so your entire college career is paid for,” Ariadne said, looking at him seriously. “I suspect it’ll be okay, that it’ll survive whoever takes over my job, because it was well hidden, and it’s set up to auto-draft to your account. If I could have pulled off just transferring it all immediately, I would have, but the penalties would be stiff, heading toward criminal, if I’d gotten caught, whereas the slow trickle is easily attributable to governmental incompetence—”

“And these are the people who want a monopoly on the use of force,” Reed said, shaking his head.

“You said you would stop,” Kat moaned her eyes rolled. “And … also, another thing,” she slurred, and turned to look right at me, “Why did I follow you up here so I could work for like two months before we all quit? I left Hollywood behind, you know—”

“I thought you start filming on the new season of your show next month?” Augustus asked, frowning.

Kat either didn’t hear him or ignored him. Probably the former. “Whyyyyyy?” She put her hands in the air like she was asking the heavens.

I stared her down. “Because you were sick of soulless, materialistic wandering and wanted to serve a higher purpose than just showing your sculpted ass on television and trying to contrive ‘storylines’ to mine pointless drama out of your life for the sake of entertaining people.” I paused.

She stared at me through cloudy, drunken eyes then broke into a lazy smile. “You really think my ass is sculpted? Everyone else always calls it ‘bony,’ but I’ve been working on it and—”

“I propose a toast,” Reed said, cutting her off, raising his mug.

“—I was thinking about maybe getting ass implants, but—”

“Kat,” I said, trying to stifle her. I looked at Reed.

Reed’s eyes were glimmering, thick with the emotion of the moment. “In honor of our last week working together in glorious cause … to us, the line between the metahuman world and humanity. May whoever follows us do as much or more good as we did.”

I frowned. “Well, that’s awfully chipper.”

He gave me a cool grin. “Would you prefer they do oh-so-much worse? Chaos and destruction in the streets and all that?”

I thought about it for a second. “Honestly … yes. I want to see the agency fall apart without me so that they know how badly they screwed up by wanting me out. I want President Gerry Harmon to be calling every day for the next year apologizing and telling me he’ll move the agency back to Minnesota or do whatever I want as long as I’ll come back and do my job again. Yes, I want chaos in the streets and cataclysms in the sky and the world to fall apart without me.” I pursed my lips. “I mean, I don’t really want any of that, not really, but … on a very basic, emotional level … yes, I want that. I want to be needed, to feel like all these years I put into carrying this thing on my back weren’t a waste.”

“You’ve done a lot of good,” Kat said, a hint of regret on her face behind those flushed cheeks.

“You’ve saved the world,” Augustus said, lifting his own mug. “Ain’t nobody can take that away from you.”

“It is true,” Dr. Perugini said, nodding. “No one may ever really know it, or thank you for it, or care that you’re gone, but—”

Reed cut in over her with a fake laugh. “Honey … maybe try and help instead?”

She gave him daggers. “I am helping.”

“So what are you going to do, Sienna?” Ariadne asked me, looking forlornly over her mug. Her new one was already half empty and she wasn’t really much of a beer drinker.

I stopped with my mug halfway to my mouth. “I’m …”

“Excuse me?” came a polite voice from behind me. I turned to see a middle-aged Asian man looking down at me, a polite expression of reserve upon his face that tended toward a faint smile. “You’re Sienna Nealon, correct?”

“Oh, for crying out—” I put down my beer. “Who are you with? The EPA, right? You want me to cease and desist with setting things on fire?”

He raised an eyebrow. “My name is Jonathan Chang. I’m a lawyer with the firm of Rothman, Curtis and Chang, here in Minneapolis.”

“Oh, really?” I picked up my mug again and held it at the ready, staring at Mr. Chang with a wary eye. “Who’s suing me this time?”

His faint smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “You misunderstand my purpose.” He reached into his coat and pulled out envelope, this one white and long, a letter envelope that looked thick. “I’m not here about anyone suing you.” He placed the envelope on the table next to me as I watched him carefully. “I have a job offer for you.”

I gave Jonathan Chang, esquire, attorney at law, blah blah blah, a wary, cocked eye. “You want to hire me? Because my registration with the Minnesota bar is sadly nonexistent.”

“Who do you work for again?” Reed asked, voice cloudy with booze and suspicion. “Wolfram and Hart?”

“No,” Mr. Chang said coolly, still with that faint smile, “my firm is named Rothman, Curtis and Chang. But I’m not making the offer on our own behalf. I’ve been contracted by an employer who would like to hire you.”

“As what?” I asked, looking right at him. “A security guard? Muscle? An assassin?”

“Hardly,” Mr. Chang said, looking very slightly affronted. “We only deal with legal and aboveboard entities.”

“So says every lawyer, I’m sure,” Augustus said, looking extremely amused, “even the ones that deal with murderers and rapists.”

“We don’t work in the realm of criminal law,” Mr. Chang said.

“So you defend big, dirty corporations in lawsuits?” Reed asked, suspicion far outpacing the booze.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Chang said, “and sometimes we defend big, clean corporations against some idiot who wants to sue them because they shoved the staple remover the company manufactured into their own eye and think someone else should pay for their stupidity.”

“Eye for an eye,” Reed said. “That’d fix it.”

“Yes, and then no one would make staple removers,” Mr. Chang said, and shifted his attention away from Reed. “And while I’m sure that a world without staple removers would be a better world for all, clearly … that has little to do with why I’m here.”

“What’s the job?” I asked, frowning. I kept my face carefully neutral.

“A Non-Governmental Organization is forming,” Mr. Chang said, “backed by someone with considerable resources and focused on assisting with metahuman threats that the United States Government is unable or unwilling to address.”

“So wait,” Augustus asked, his brown furrowing, “what would she be doing?”

“In her current capacity with the government,” Mr. Chang said, utterly calm, “Ms. Nealon presently assists state and local jurisdictions because they’re unable to handle metahuman threats. After her exit for—the agency, I think you call it—the U.S. government will be tasked with replacing her, and thus assisting these state and local jurisdictions will fall to this new FBI-led task force, should the state and local governments desire the help. However, they may be finding their assistance somewhat lacking, since the only metahuman available to assist them now will be—”

“Guy Friday,” I said. “Which, I mean, he can probably handle some of the stuff we dealt with, but … he’s a blunt instrument. Like, really blunt. Like, his head is a hammer and everything else in the world is a nail—”

“As you say,” Mr. Chang nodded, “the U.S. government approach will be somewhat one-dimensional for the foreseeable future, leaving state and local jurisdictions without anyone to turn to in a time of crisis. For example, if the recent incident in Los Angeles had been left to Mr. Friday, as you call him—”

“He would have played skee-ball at Santa Monica pier while the Elysium neighborhood went kablooey,” Kat gurgled, unable to hold her head up straight. “And I would have died horribly, too.”

“Furthermore,” Mr. Chang said, “if the events of last January, the robbery at the Federal Reserve, had been left to Mr. Friday—”

“We’d be off the gold standard permanently,” Reed said. “But maybe they’d finally audit the—”

“Reed, shut it,” I said, focusing on Mr. Chang. “So what does this … Non-Governmental Organization do, then? Butt in whenever they see something like this happening?”

“It will make our resources available under the aegis of the state jurisdiction, if the local authorities want the help,” Mr. Chang said, “and most of them will, because you have a reputation—”

“For lighting tires and starting fires,” Augustus said, raising his glass to me before taking a drink.

“For raising ires and burning shires,” Kat burbled senselessly.

“I think that’s more Saruman’s territory,” Reed said, his brow furrowed in thought. “Or Sharkey, if you prefer—”

“So you want to hire me,” I said, spelling it back to Mr. Chang, “to do … basically my job right now, but without the federal government on my back?” He nodded, and I narrowed my eyes in practiced skepticism. “Who would I answer to?”

“The state authority on each job would be your employer,” Mr. Chang said, “but the NGO—the organization—would be run by you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ariadne said, frowning. “You said the money comes from somewhere. Who’s bankrolling this and why?”

“A concerned citizen of the world,” Mr. Chang said, inclining his head to look at Ariadne. He was wearing a suit under his fancy, fancy coat, and it didn’t look cheap either. “Someone worried about where things will go without Ms. Nealon at the helm.”

“Who is this concerned citizen?” Reed asked.

“Your benefactor would prefer to remain anonymous,” Mr. Chang said with a sniff.