Shades of Gray (10 page)

“Smart lass.”

He’s about to say more, maybe even kick-start the seduction process, when the ground shakes. And then it groans and gives a violent heave, sending Julie into his arms. Husband and wife exchange a panicked look, then Garth’s bolting into the main room. He doesn’t have to glance behind to see Julie gripping the kitchen doorway, her knuckles white with worry; he knows his wife far too well.

“Drop to the ground,” Garth bellows over the sound of the earthquake, “and get away from the windows! Alex, Jacob, under the table!”

The kids scamper like the Devil’s on their heels, and their parents chase after them. Julie’s calling out words that are meant to be encouraging, but her voice is too shrill. The walls are practically humming with energy, the old-fashioned 2-Ds shaking in their gilded frames. Things fall and splatter as Garth helps Mrs. Summers to the far corner of the room, the one away from the outside wall. He crouches over her as she hugs the floor, shielding her as best he can as he scans the room.

“Paul,” he shouts, “the bookcase isn’t bolted to the wall! Get closer to the door!”

Paul squawks and shuffles toward the front door. He makes it halfway before there’s a deafening
THOOM!!!
and the door implodes. Paul dives to the side just as the metal door sails past, thundering to the ground like a dying elephant.

Garth’s blood is pounding in his ears and the Brewer clan is shrieking and Mrs. Summers is praying loudly and Julie’s telling him to look Garth look and so Garth looks.

On top of the fallen door, a thin man in blue is scrambling to his feet. He’s battered worse than the door, all shaking limbs and torn fabric that’s almost fashionable. He ignores Garth and the others as he faces the naked doorway, opens his mouth, and screams.

Earsplitting noise, the sort that makes your bones rattle. Garth clamps his hands over his ears and bows down low, doing his damnedest to think. Daring a glance, he blinks away tears to see a tall man in prison grays stepping through the ruins of his doorway, a wall of light shielding him. The man calls out words Garth can’t hear, and a small, balding man slinks past him. Now the weasel-like man is throwing out his hand, and the screamer clutches his head.

Screamer, Garth realizes. The man in blue is Screamer, one of the Squadron-turned-rabids.

The noise cuts off, leaving Garth’s ears ringing like mad. Screamer is on his knees now, gibbering and crying and shaking. The weasel is standing over him, a gleeful look on his narrow face. He reminds Garth of every serial killer he’s ever seen on the vids.

“Enough,” the tall man decrees. “Just cuff him already. No need to make a show of it.”

Garth knows that voice—cultured, British, altogether commanding. He’s heard it on interview shows and on the news. He thinks of the light shield and puts two and two together.

Arclight’s busted out of Blackbird and is standing right here in his flat.

“Just one more minute,” the weasel begs. “He tastes so good.”

“Radar,” Arclight says in that movie-star voice, “do I really have to repeat myself?”

The small man licks his lips once, twice, then reaches into the pouch on his belt and removes a set of stun-cuffs. Screamer’s too busy bawling to notice that he’s been captured.

I want to throw up,
Garth thinks as he unfolds himself and stands tall. “Here now,” he says, and his voice isn’t even breaking, “you can’t go barging into people’s apartments to do your fighting.”

Arclight turns to face him. His mouth is set in a bemused smile. “Seems like we already have.”

“Fear,” Radar whispers, crooning. “So very delicious.”

Damn straight Garth is afraid. But that doesn’t stop him. “There’s kids here,” he says quietly.

Arclight frowns, then darts his gaze about the place until it settles on the Brewer children, huddled beneath the dining-room table, clutching each other with desperate limbs. Something softens in the man’s face, but when he speaks again, his voice is hard.

“Take Screamer outside,” he commands. “Protean should have the Angle well in hand, but he may need some assistance.”

Radar grins, and Garth once again thinks of evil things who live to kill all manner of creatures. Very slowly. And very painfully. The small man leads Screamer out of the apartment, humming “London Bridge.”

Arclight watches the Brewer children for a moment, then takes in first their parents, then Julie, standing breathless in the kitchen doorway. He looks at Mrs. Summers, who’s peeking out from behind Garth. Finally, his gaze lands on Garth.

“I apologize for the mess,” Arclight says. “If these were different times, I’d put you in touch with the Squadron Claims division.”

“If these were different times,” Garth says slowly, “I’d think you’d still be in Blackbird and Screamer would still be a hero.”

A grin touches Arclight’s lips. “Touché.” With that, the villain—former villain? Hell if Garth knows—spins on his heel and parades out of the apartment.

For a long moment, none of them say a thing. Then everyone talks at once. Alex and Jacob are going on about this being the best day
ever
. Heather and Paul are falling over themselves asking if the children are okay. Old Mrs. Summers insists that, in her day, even criminals respected innocent citizens’ private lives and nothing like this ever used to happen.

Garth exchanges a look with Julie. “No,” he says. “It surely didn’t. Things change.”

Julie gets his meaning. She lets out a sigh and leans against the doorway. “Some things shouldn’t change,” she says, but there’s no fire to her words.

In the kitchen, the teakettle begins to sing.

CHAPTER 11

IRIDIUM

I have absolutely no doubt that this technique could have saved Miranda’s life. I was too slow. Too slow by half. Never again. Nothing stands in the way of my work.

—Matthew Icarus, diary entry dated June 16, 1976

(the anniversary of Miranda Icarus’s death from
leukemia eight years earlier)

I
ridium didn’t hate people. Hate, Lester had taught her, was a useless emotion unless it was spined with anger or fired by ambition. Iridium didn’t hate people just for being people. She didn’t hate the doctors who’d worked on Frostbite; she didn’t hate Night, who’d brainwashed Jet into a pale skeleton of her former self.

Iridium hated Corp. Corp was the machine that minted the doctors and the Nights, the true target of righteous rage, if you had any sense. Hating one part of a machine was like shooting the messenger—unsatisfying, and ultimately useless.

And if there was a living symbol of Corp, it was Gordon.

“You don’t have a choice,” the man said. It was a sick parody of when they’d met in the control room at Blackbird. He had the same gray suit and smarmy smile. The same gun.

Pointed at her face.

Iridium curled her hands. The air around her shimmered like an aurora borealis as the Light threatened to explode into the visible spectrum, searing Gordon’s eyes from his skull, flaking skin like burned paper.

Christo, wouldn’t that be nice.

No.
Iridium couldn’t afford to call down the remnants of Corp still obviously working in New Chicago, or the full force of Corp Headquarters, on her father and the other convicts. Couldn’t afford to have Gordon and his smug grin rescind their pardons. Not yet.

“I suggest you get that thrice-damned gun out of my face before I shove it up your nose,” she said. “Or someplace less comfortable.”

Gordon flicked the barrel at the purse snatcher at Iridium’s feet, then back at her, quick as a snake. He wasn’t fast enough to be an extrahuman, but he had the quicksilver edge of a normal human who was just very, very good at what he did.

“You’re off the reservation, Calista. This is not how Corp brings in a criminal.”

The purse snatcher groaned, holding his broken nose. Iridium had eschewed her powers for shoving the sprinting thief in front of a robo-hauler. That had stopped him nicely, and it hadn’t caused a scene that would have brought cops or worse, a flock of rabids, down on the block.

“This is how
I
do it,” Iridium said. “You don’t like it, I suggest you go cry in your beer and leave me alone.”

Gordon raised a finger, wagged it. “You want to think about what comes out of that mouth, Calista.”

“Call me that again, and I’m going to
feed
you that gun.”

“Fine.” He holstered it, straightened his tie, twitched his cuffs. “But I mean it when I suggest you think, instead of using that fine brain Jehovah gave you for pithy comebacks and cussing.”

At Iridium’s feet, the purse snatcher tried to jump and run. She stomped down on his hand. He crumpled again, moaning.

“Think about what?” she managed, even though the urge to strobe Gordon was overwhelming. This must be what Jet felt every day, felt when she’d nearly killed Taser.

“This world will not burn forever,” he said. “Corp is negotiating with India to bring in their extrahumans to clean up the mess you’ve made.”

Iridium felt her eyebrows go up. Squadron: India was like Squadron: Americas in name only. India was state-sponsored and served the people. They didn’t go international. They were Switzerland, and the United and Canadian States was a war zone very much outside their jurisdiction.

“When they arrive,” Gordon said, “order will tip back into balance. Where will you be then? Will you be a criminal, running for the rest of your days with your poor, dear father? Or will you be welcomed into the Squadron with open arms, the prodigal daughter returned to the light?”

“Squadron: India won’t help you,” Iridium said reflexively. “They don’t answer to Corp.”

“And yet, their funding is nearly half Corp’s doing.” Gordon smiled, like a lizard tasting the air. “I think perhaps they will reconsider their position of international neutrality in this case. And then the question remains—where will you be?”

Iridium looked into Gordon’s soulless eyes, a gray that was nearly white. Corpse eyes. She knew with sudden, bell-like clarity that Corp couldn’t be allowed to gain a foothold in the Americas again.

Her life and Lester’s and even Jet’s depended on it. If Corp came back to power, every extrahuman who’d escaped their grasp and exposed their skeletons was as good as dead.

When Squadron: India landed on American soil, there needed to be a compelling case to lock up the men and women responsible for the rabids vaporizing the city. Men like Gordon.

And to do that, they’d need evidence, from someone who’d been a Corp insider.

“Well?” Gordon frowned at her.

Iridium pulled the purse snatcher to his feet as two patrol hovers rounded the corner, waving them in to take custody.

“I’ll be where I’m supposed to be.”

Gordon smiled again. “Good girl.”

Iridium smiled back, feeling ice crystals freeze the expression. “I try my best, sir.”

CHAPTER 12

JET

Aaron is positive that, without additional controls in place, the extrahumans have only 1–4 years before their conditioning breaks down. I think that range is too conservative.

—From the journal of Martin Moore, entry #51

S
top that,” Jet said for the third time.

Nocturne, struggling against the stun-cuffs, tried to slam her chin into Jet’s face. The purple-clad woman missed, then overbalanced and went crashing to the ground, landing sloppily in the gutter. She was probably so used to phasing through solid objects that she’d forgotten how to roll with a fall or take the brunt on her shoulder.

Jet had little sympathy. Maybe next time, Nocturne would rethink breaking into First National. Light, what
was
it with former heroes pretending to be villains? Had Nocturne really thought all she had to do was phase inside the bank vaults and that would be the end of it? As if the bank didn’t come equipped with both organic and inorganic matter sensors that automatically triggered a silent alarm when they were tripped?
Please.
Had Jet been the only one of her Academy class actually to pay attention in the Criminal Minds units?

Well, her and Iridium. And Iri, she was sure, had cheated in those units.

Jet helped the bigger woman to her feet. “Come on,” she said to Nocturne. “You know the cuffs are messing with your balance. You’re just going to get dizzy if you try to hit me.” And if she tried to phase out of them, the cuffs would neutralize her. Painfully.

Nocturne suggested something anatomically impossible.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Jet asked.

Nocturne spewed obscenities so blue that even Were would have blushed.

“Now that’s just rude.” Jet bound Nocturne with a graymatter leash, then summoned a floater to whisk them both to the Sixteenth precinct. Nocturne, not a flyer, shrieked. Loudly. And very, very long, the sound slowly fading to an echo of terror. The woman shuddered, inhaled, then let out another whoop of sheer panic, giving Screamer a run for his money.