The Indestructibles (27 page)

      "Big bubble. I could put a big bubble around Florida," she thought. Then she imagined all the cars and tourists and people in mouse costumes and Princess Ariel's kingdom floating away when she suspended their normal field of gravity so, thought better of the idea.

      "Big bubbles, little bubbles," Emily said. "Think different sizes. Lots of bubbles?"

      She waved a hand and scattered little gravitational fields like marbles in front of the storm. Again, the living clouds wrestled with the possibility of going through them but quickly realized it was impossible and weaved their way around the pockets of antigravity. Emily let those pockets disappear, and the storm, like water, filled in the empty space.

      "I need to put it in a fishbowl is what I need to do," she said.

      That same tendril snaked forward, moving more aggressively toward the coast. Irritated, Emily made a fist with her hand and snapped a medium-sized bubble around the tendril, trapping it.

      The cloud within the bubble simply disappeared. There one moment, gone in a flicker of condensation the next.

      "Well that was tricksy," she said.

      She repeated the gesture, this time wrapping her mind around a chunk of the storm still part of the main body of the clouds. A sphere-shaped emptiness appeared, like someone had taken a giant bite out of the storm. She released that sphere and did it again, twice, taking two more huge sections out of the storm. Each time she let go, the clouds filled back in, rushing to replace what had been destroyed. But so long as she maintained that bubble, nothing happened inside.

      "Well wouldn't that be funny," she said.

      In a darkened room, Doc Silence found her.

      It was the only time he could catch the Lady unawares; she had to be deep in a ritual spell so that she tuned out her environment enough to not notice him right away. And there she was, sitting cross-legged in front of a demon-trap, communing with creatures from another plane. He spied them through the trap. Scaled, winged things, angry with her for commanding them, desperate for her attention, loving her, hating her.

      This is the way of all who come in contact with the Lady. All monsters want to serve her, and then they hate her for it.

      She'd been busy for a while before he got there. Doc saw the smoking burn marks where her pets had touched the floor, smelled the sulfur of their passing, heard the strange way their echoes lingered in rooms long after they were gone.

      He caught himself hesitating. Was he frightened of her? He'd never been afraid before, even at the beginning, when she took him under her wing. He was too young and too cocky to know he should have been terrified, and too clever by far for her to trap him like she did everyone else. That was why she was willing to teach him so much. The Lady once said that a hundred years had passed since she met someone she couldn't trick.

      No, he wasn't frightened. Was he worried? They were friends, once upon a time; and they weren't truly enemies now, though they had, for years, been on opposing sides of the same fights. He knew in a way she admired his willingness to do the unselfish thing. It drove her insane, sometimes, and it frustrated her at other times, but she always enjoyed knowing that one of her students had volunteered to do the right thing instead. He could have been a world-class dark sorcerer, she told him once, and instead he was a do-gooder with a pocket full of parlor tricks. There seemed to be something stupidly noble in that.

      Perhaps Doc was just worried he would finally cross the line. To say that she played the game fairly with him over the years was an outright lie, the Lady always played the game unfairly. Yet she played it unfairly always. In this, at least, she was consistent, and there was a sort of honor in that as well. Honor among thieves. Among cheats. Among magicians and liars.

      But later he watched her conjure her last pet, the hulking red thing with skin like cracked stone and eyes full of the sort of malice you only see on the other side of the Pit, and Doc knew he really had no choice. That was no gremlin to torment the girl in the storm. That was a whip-cracking demon, a herder of souls. He wondered why she chose to use such a creature for this — like bringing a canon to a knife fight. Overkill. And, irresponsibly so.

      She dismissed the creature, all craggy muscles and calcium deposits, off to do something at her command. Doc wondered if it would confront Jane out there over the ocean. Did her invulnerability extend to things not of this world?

      He stepped from the shadows.

      "Natasha," he said.

      He saw her mouth quirk into a smile even before she turned to face him. Slowly — so as not to lose the threads she was holding to control the storm — she stood up, like a dancer, graceful and strange.

      "My Doctor Silence," she said. "I had hoped you weren't among the ones who ran away. I thought you loved this place too much to quit."

      "Someone had to stay behind," he said. "Might as well have been me."

      "What are you doing here?" she said. "Have you come to challenge me to a duel? You know you can't win."

      "I know," he said.

      "Then shouldn't you be out there with your little pawns? They're out of their league, you know."

      "Why are
you
here, Natasha?" he asked, taking a step closer. "This whole game is beneath you. The Children? They're simply businessmen in funny masks. You're so much more than any of them."

      "They offered me things I wanted," the Lady said. "They offered me things they didn't know they were giving away. Darling, this was my retirement plan."

      "Money? You're doing all this petty nonsense for cash?"

      "You know I don't trade in earthly currency," she said.

      "What were they giving you?"

      "Enough to close my account ledgers with the beyond," she said.

      Doc squinted.

      "You made a bad deal," he said.

      "Brokering with the beyond always has its risks," she said. "I would have caught up eventually. This just simplified things."

      "Who did you owe? What could possibly scare you into settling a debt early?"

      "I deal with the high rollers," she said. "But it's over now. I'm free and clear. I finish this petty nonsense, I destroy a piece of America, and I go home. You should come with me."

      "Why did you send that last demon out there," Doc said. "That was a slaver demon, wasn't it?"

      "I mean it," she said, ignoring his question. "You should come with me."

      "Why did you send a slaver demon, Natasha? I saw you."

      "You were here for that?" she said, musing. "Funny. You're sneakier than I remember, Doc."

      "Why — "

      "He's not in the bargain for the Children," the Lady said. "That was my own sidebar. He's cleaning up loose ends for me."

      Doc felt a wave of relief pour over him. He wouldn't want to fight that red monster himself, let alone allow Jane and the others to have to face him.

      He could see distraction in her eyes, though. I got lucky, didn't I, Doc thought. She's not just controlling the storm. Her mind is in three places right now. Thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts.

      "You mean it, don't you? That I should go with you."

      "Doctor, I'd enjoy spending two hundred years trying to convince you to go back to dark magic," she said. "You'd be a wonderful conversation piece in my retirement."

      He took another step closer. When he was younger, before he knew who she was, he possessed such feelings for her. Young man's love, a youthful crush, admiration and adoration all wrapped up in one confusing package. But, he'd seen her other side, he watched the fire in her eyes until his head began to spin, he witnessed her traverse the night sky on wings the color of the absence of all light.

      Doc pushed those other reflections away. He let the whispers of a young man's infatuation bring a smile to his face. Not because he wanted to go with her, but because he needed her to believe him, for just a moment longer.

      He found himself standing in front of her. She reached her arms out. Doc let her wrap them around him.

      "Come along, my little doctor of silence. Leave all this petty nonsense behind. There are worlds we've never seen."

      The knife he'd strapped to his left forearm hours before, slipped into the palm of his hand.

      "I know there are," he said.

      He kissed her, just a little kiss, like something between old friends. With his left hand he slashed upward at the empty air behind the Lady, the knife, a timeless dagger with a handle of bone from a creature who never existed in this world and a blade like a reflecting pool, sliced a thin gash into the very fabric of reality. A tear, an opening just big enough for a person to fall through.

      A person, or perhaps two.

      He pushed the Lady into the gap, and as he did he opened his eyes. Doc saw a million realities through that gap, an endless array of worlds, some new, some old. He didn't let go of her. Instead, he followed her through, one arm wrapped tightly around her waist.

      He let the knife fall from his hand. It clattered to the ground.

      Doc Silence and Lady Natasha Gray fell through reality. And reality sealed itself back up again quickly, like air rushing into a vacuum.

      All that remained was an empty room, the scattered remnants of the Lady's spells now dormant and useless, the glimmering blade a forgotten relic resting on the floor.

Chapter 59:

Control

The ninjas were proving to be problematic.

      On the other hand, the mercenaries — thugs with firearms and body armor — had become easier pickings than expected, mostly because they hadn't anticipated a werewolf who shrugged off gunshot wounds and a girl who moved without a sound and punched with a titanium-protected fist. They made up for lack of competence with sheer numbers, yes, but between Kate's moves and Titus's utter menace, they weren't presenting much of a problem.

      The bigger hurdle, until the ninjas showed up, was the complete lack of a floor plan. Finding the laboratory where they could shut down the controls on the girl in the storm posed a more substantial obstacle than previously anticipated. The rig was bizarrely large with a multi-tiered leveling system and a frustrating lack of OSHA-compliant signage.

      It was then that the guys and girls in the skin-tight body armor showed up. They looked like ninjas from an old movie and that's certainly how Kate dubbed them in her mind, though she had no idea who or what they really were, other than people in need of a good, swift kick to the solar plexus.

      Kate almost lost the plot when she encountered her first two because she mistook them for regular mercs and approached them as such, thinking a few quick spin kicks would suffice. Instead, in a shadowy rig corridor, surrounded by steel bars and exposed framework, she confronted two legitimate martial artists. Their training was similar to hers, and as they traded blows — kicks, jumps, spins, elbows, punches, blocks, kicks again — Kate worried that she finally found herself out of her league.

      Then, she remembered the tricks Sam gave her.

      Rather than throwing it, she palmed a taser disc and it stuck into the armpit of one of the ninjas. He yelped and fell down, struggling to figure out where the pain came from. The shock of his reaction caused his partner to lose her focus, and that's when Kate bashed her across the nose, knocking her silly. She finished her off with a taser zap and looked for Titus.

      Four more ninjas slowly picked him apart. It was embarrassing. They had a variety of weapons on hand: two with paired short knives, one with a staff, one with — and Kate found herself oddly jealous — a literal set of nunchaku.

      She reared back with a throwing disc but couldn't get a bead on any member of the enemy force, and didn't know what kind of effect an electric shock would have on an already enraged werewolf. As it was, he looked terrible; his eyes lost the rational element that had been developing behind the feral exterior, and his swipes at the ninja became more and more erratic. One stabbed Titus cleanly in the shoulder, but the werewolf rewarded him with a horrific blow, sending the black-clad fighter into the darkness, where he stopped moving.

      Kate thought about the other items from Sam, then pulled out the weird, squat, gun-like apparatus they'd tinkered with in the training room. She fired it above Titus's head, wondering if the clawed end of it would latch onto the metal wall behind him or clatter off. She hoped it would be able to penetrate the metal.

      It didn't.

      The clawed projectile, and the thin but strong cord attached to it, became an additional party in Titus's fight, flapping around out of control, a hindrance as much to him as it was to the other fighters. At one point, it bonked off Titus's forehead, sending the werewolf into a pained howl; then, it kicked back in the other direction and, unexpectedly, wrapped around one of the ninjas' necks. Kate took advantage of this, hit the recoil button on the device and dragged the claw, the rope, and the ninja back to her. She used the butt of the grappling device to knock the fighter unconscious, tapped another button to cut the cord off at the barrel, and then jumped in to help Titus with the last two ninjas.

      Before she got any closer, though, Titus, obviously in a rage, pinned one ninja down with a massive, clawed foot, and sent the other flying into the shadows of the exposed framework, clattering like a dropped penny. Titus ground his claw into the chest of the ninja he'd pinned. The man whimpered in the darkness.

      "Titus!" Kate said.

      The wolf turned on her. She didn't recognize anyone looking back, only yellow eyes, white teeth, red rage.

      "Titus. Enough."

      He stared her down, fangs bared, but soon relented, removing his foot from the fighter's chest. The man glanced up at Kate, grateful.    She kicked him in the head.

      "We've been all over this damned rig," she said, keeping an eye on Titus.

      He huffed, his huge shoulders rhythmically rolling in the dark. This was the most feral she'd seen him in a quite a while. It worried her. She needed him in control.

      Someone moaned in the darkness. Kate followed the noise until she found the source, one of the ninjas Titus had thrown. The man was in horrific shape, but alive, clearly nursing two broken legs.

      "Where is Wegener's lab," Kate said.

      "You don't scare me, kid," the man said.

      She took a step closer.

      "Tell me where his lab is, or you will be frightened."

      "You think I haven't seen worse than you?" his voice was strained, but hard.

      Kate put her heel on the man's shin and pressed down.

      He screamed.

      "That bone is fractured. I can break it the rest of the way if you want," Kate said. "Scared of me now?"

      "You wouldn't — "

      She pushed harder. He screamed louder.

      "Okay! Stop! . . . One flight down, it hangs off the bottom of the rig. There's nothing else there. We left him to die anyway."

      "Left him?"

      "It's too late. You can't save him," he said. "Rose killed him. Shark bait. We didn't even bother weighing the body down."

      Kate took out one of her taser discs and zapped the man with it until he began to drool. She put it back into the pouch on her belt and turned to Titus.

      "You ready, big guy?"

      He wasn't listening to her, though. Instead, Titus surveyed the iron steps that led back up to the surface platform. Someone was coming.

      She drifted into their view like a shadow. Dressed in the same tight armor as the other ninjas, her face was exposed, revealing red hair framing a hard, angry face; one good eye smiled at them, the other hid behind a black eye patch and scars. The woman who killed Wegener.

      "Look at you," she said.

      She held a knife in each hand, dangling lazily from her fingers. The blades shone incredibly bright in the darkness. "You're just a baby. I've never killed a puppy before."

      Titus watched her like a hunting dog, stock still, unblinking.

      "This is hardly going to be a challenge. Bet nobody's even showed you what silver feels like," the woman said. "It's been so long. I would have believed your people were all extinct by now. Haven't had an opportunity to hunt one of you in years."

      She edged her way closer, moving like a killer, light on her feet, trying to distract them both.

      Kate moved to join Titus on the walkway. He held an arm up, keeping her a few paces behind.

      "I bet I killed your mother," the woman said. "You're the right age. Right coloring. Then again it's so hard to tell. With so few of you left, you all kind of look alike these days."

      Titus growled, the slow, rumbling growl of a guard dog.

      "Poor lost pup," the woman continued her taunting.

      "Titus, allow me," Kate said.

      He turned her gaze back to her, all trace of humanity drained from his face. She knew, without a doubt, he'd gone completely feral.

      Then he spoke.

      "Go," he ordered.

      Kate nodded. Then turned and ran. Finish the mission, she thought. Remember what's important.

      She heard the crash of combat behind her, howls of rage and pain. But Kate rushed on. There were more lives than one at stake.