Stolen, p.1
Stolen, page 1
STOLEN
THE GIRL IN THE BOX
BOOK 56
ROBERT J. CRANE
Ostiagard Press
Stolen
The Girl in the Box, Book 56
Robert J. Crane
copyright © 2023 Ostiagard Press
1st Edition.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Teaser
Author’s Note
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Then
Let me take you back in time. Back in time to a moment a bit after I'd defeated Sovereign in a bone-crushing, slightly Donner Party-ish final battle over Minneapolis, but before those hillbilly assholes the Clarys had unleashed their plan for vengeance on me for drowning that metallic dickweed, Clyde, in a swimming pool. This is after my team had split to the four winds, but just before I met Augustus and started reuniting the crew. After that fun time the Russians seized the Agency campus in the wake of me being replaced as Agency head, after Reed and I had suffered our first real break in our relationship, but before Gerry Harmon, before Lethe, Hades, and Revelen, and before that wild Scottish ho-bag left me clueless about large, important swaths of my life.
It was the more innocent time of March of 2016, in a little town called Silver City, New Mexico, where I'd come to chase – as was usual in those days – a rogue metahuman. In this case, a guy named Stanley Croftsburg. Stan was a bad, bad boy. He'd done it all, from assault to breaking and entering, and murder, and now I was tasked with assaulting him, breaking him, preferably not entering him, and only murdering him as a last resort.
Oh, and because of my split with Reed and the total break up of my Agency team, I was doing it all by my lonesome.
“I work better alone,” I muttered, walking down the sunlit, surprisingly cold, classical American Main Street complete with an old movie theater announcing that Zootopia was playing this weekend. That thing about working alone was pure cope, just some shit I was telling myself back then to cushion the hurt about the fact that everyone had left me.
You keep telling yourself that, sweetheart, Bjorn Odinson said in my mind. Because yes, it was during that time when I still had oh-so-many voices in my head.
I walked past a line of pickup trucks, mostly new, catching the glinting of the sun in the day's bitter chill. No cops to assist, either; the Silver City PD had decided to leave this one up to me. In spite of the line of cars parked along the street, it looked almost abandoned, like everyone was hiding from this weather.
“Hey, aren't you–” Some guy asked as I passed, head down, huddled against the chill wind. He stood there, gap-toothed and gap-brained, finger extended as if to point.
“Get out of my way, dipshit,” I said, giving him a shove as I bustled past. Not too hard, but enough to clear him from my path. It wasn't so hard to see why my friends had left me.
A confidential informant of one of the detectives of Silver City had pointed me to this place. Two stories, crumbling brick, a shuttered storefront, but no obvious sign that this was a hiding place for a metahuman troublemaker, no blazing neon saying, HERE HE IS! Not that there ever was.
I shuffled up to the door, readying myself. Given it was abandoned, Silver City PD had given me carte blanche to kick down the door and get on with it. He'd downed two deputies at a traffic stop Clovis a few days back, and no one wanted more.
Glancing down the street, I saw the guy I'd shoved was standing there, phone out, filming me. I gave him an acidic glare, but he was swayed not at all, giving me a little wave, goofy grin stretched across his dumb face. It didn't look like he was even offended at the shove; he was just excited to see me in his little town.
Pausing to give him the finger – which I did with great enthusiasm – probably saved my life.
A burst of purple energy blasted open the door and then clipped me, sending me sideways into a USPS post box, my head impressing a Sienna-sized dent in the blue metal, my arm on fire.
I found myself staring at the sky, dipshit filmographer guy looking down at me a moment later with his cell phone in hand, my arm on fire – maybe literally – and a groan escaping my lips.
“Are you okay?” Dipshit asked, his phone partially obscuring his face. It occurred to me then that if I had Gavrikov light off, I could sear him black from head to toe except for the shadow of the phone, and that would be hilarious. He’d walk around the rest of his life with scars that he’d have to explain, while the perfect white outline of his phone would stand out like a mark of Cain.
You are fine, Gavrikov said. Unlike, perhaps, Klementina, who we have not checked on since–
“Oh, shut up,” I said, floating back to my feet with his power.
“Who, me?” Camera douche asked.
“Not just you,” I said, half-tempted to give him a light web to the face. Sure, maybe burning the impression of his beloved phone into his face was too much, but a bruise? That wasn’t too much of a violation of constitutional rights, was it? “Get back, moron, before you catch one of those blasts to the face, and it burns your head – and your stupid phone – to a crisp.” I looked at my arm where the blast had hit; my suit jacket was now sleeveless on that side, as was my blouse, and pink, angry new flesh had replaced what I felt sure was similar to the black scarring I’d been tempted to give this guy for his face.
Looking through the gaping hole in the wall, I could see the back door to the place swinging. Lifting off, I looked blocks and blocks for a glimpse of Stanley Croftsburg, either fleeing on foot or driving away.
But the bastard was gone, at least for now. He’d hit me good, and run.
We were definitely heading toward murder, I reflected as I completed my orbit of Silver City. And maybe there’d be some entering after all, to go along with the breaking, when I caught up with him.
Little did I know that the only thing that would be broken in my next encounter with Croftsburg would be my expectations for where my life was going from here.
CHAPTER ONE
Now
Jian Chen knew he was in trouble, along with the rest of America.
Jian was a Chinese dissident, long on the run from his own country. That was why he was here, in America, where he’d been able to somehow make a living – if not quite a life – in spite of the government of a billion-plus people desiring deeply to throw him back into a gulag half the world away.
But finding him wasn’t so easy when one could change shapes, and Jian could do exactly that. For now, in fact, he was a Cooper’s hawk, riding the winds a couple hundred feet above a wooded enclave in Middle Tennessee, watching a house below as construction workers swarmed in and out of it like ants on a mound.
He swept through the air, letting his hawk body ride the air currents, slipping between them to glide as he kept a sharp eye on the activity below. Holes in the house’s façade were numerous, where the facade still existed. Clapboard had been removed in large swaths, revealing shattered studs beneath. It looked as though the house had been in a war and it had been the loser.
It was, of course, Sienna Nealon's house.
But there was no hint of Sienna Nealon. Hardly a surprise, when she'd been declared the number one enemy of the new regime in Washington. Surely, just beyond the tree line of the woods that surrounded the place, there must be law enforcement waiting on the off chance she was foolish enough to show her face.
It was a face he'd seen relentlessly of late; everywhere, on every newscast, on wanted posters in every public space in America, and draped across the internet. Wanted: for murder, terrorism, sedition, plotting to overthrow the government–
All bullshit, of course. Well, perhaps not the last bit, given who was in charge in Washington now. Jian knew it was all lies. So did most of America. There were whispers – and more than whispers – everywhere in these United States. Everywhere he went, she was the main topic of conversation, her and the new president, Nicole Muller. Very occasionally, things were flipped, like a switch, and he would hear Nealon talked badly about and Muller spoken well of, but that was a signal he should leave whatever place he found himself in, that no good could come of him staying.
Jian caught a cold updraft and corrected, lowering his left wing and letting himself drop a few hundred feet in a steep dive. He wanted to see more closely what was going on below. Sienna Nealon was the great fugitive of the moment; who was paying to reconstruct her house?
Jian swooped lower, confident in his disguise. He looked like a real Cooper's hawk, of which there were plenty in Middle Tennessee. The March wind was brutal, bitter, and in spite of his hawk physique he felt it, like a seeping cold through his brittle bones.
He'd met Sienna almost three years ago, when she'd been on her first journey of discovery about the evils of China's government. It had been a case involving the Chinese government's abduction of dissidents and exiles for repatriation back to the homeland in order to exploit their genetic potential as metahumans. She'd put a stop to it – and several schemes since, including a sub base in the Bahamas, first strike nuclear warheads nested in low orbiting satellites–
Which had made Sienna Nealon the Chinese government's Public Enemy Number One as well, a position that Jian did not envy. He wasn't anywhere near the top of their list, yet still he looked over his shoulder every day, even here in America. And now that they'd taken the US government–
Not that everyone believed that. Oh, they knew something was wrong here in America, that Muller was an unnatural president, even in a recent field of somewhat unnatural presidencies – Gondry, Barbour. But the rumors were wild and varied enough that Jian suspected Chinese agents and internet trolls were steering the discourse. For every person he heard mention “China” in relation to the bomb going off at CIA Headquarters a month ago, two others fielded wild stories of Russian agents or alien invaders. Everyone knew something was wrong, but not everyone could agree on what it was.
Jian circled lower; a construction worker had caught his eye as the man slipped in through the front door of the house. Visible between the studs, he moved with grace and speed beyond that of a normal man; a meta. Jian was now only fifty feet off the ground and descending, trying to close to see between the gaps in the roof–
Pain tore through Jian's body as something flew up and over him; a net, he realized too late, as electricity surged through it and by extension, through him.
Jian dropped the last thirty feet and felt the crack of bones as he struck the earth, dark figures in tactical gear sweeping in around him. Another pain, this time a prick, and he felt his body begin to change. The feathers and light bone structure of the Cooper's hawk began to change, to deepen, his own skin reappearing as the feathers faded, his mouth exploding back into existence as the beak disappeared and his teeth returned, a scream wrenched from his lips by pain, such pain–
“Not one of Nealon's,” one of the black-clad men said in Mandarin, pointing a rifle at him. Their faces were masked, but their eyes were Asian – Chinese, in fact, he could tell. “But interesting, nonetheless.”
Another brought up a phone and held it in front of Jian, as if scanning him. “Jian Chen,” the man said, “wanted dissident.”
There were ten, twelve of them, Jian realized, casting his eyes about in panic. This was exactly where he had not wanted to end up, and yet here he was, in the custody of Chinese agents once more.
“Our trap finds a rat, if not Nealon,” the first man said. “Let's get him ready for transport. The general will want to see this–”
A flash turned the world red, and Jian had to look away for a moment, the brightness was so intense. When he opened them again, the afterimage of death and pain remained in his sight; where a moment ago had been some growing number of Chinese agents–
Now half or more were gone, with nothing but a black scar across the earth the width of a car where they'd been standing.
“Funny thing about looking for Death,” came a voice from above, and he looked skyward to find – yes, of course – Her. She smiled, almost benevolently, and flames leapt from her hands, catching a half dozen of the remaining agents on fire. “Is that if you look long enough...you might just find it. Or, rather...” And all the benevolence went out of her smile, “...She might find you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Sienna
It may not surprise you that when I came sweeping down on the Chinese team that was using my house as a trap for any of my old friends or allies daft enough to come looking for me there, I was not in the greatest of moods. Scourging half their number from the face of the earth with a blast of red energy power that Reed had taken to calling, “Cracking the Gates of Hell,” helped – a bit.
Covering their remainder in Gavrikov's fire? Helped a little more. A wee bit. Greg Vansen, shrunk – that's the size of how much it helped.
Seeing Jian Chen, trapped naked in a net, staring up at me in fear and awe as I fed the fire, burning those Chinese army guys? That might have helped a bit more.
“Just the man I was looking for,” I said, cutting into the net with my energy blade. It broke open, and he shrugged it off, making me look away because he was, indeed, naked as a whatever-kind-of-bird he'd been playing as to get here. “How's it hanging, Jian?” I inwardly cringed as soon as I asked, because I could see how it was hanging – it was right there.
“Where did you come from?” he asked, breathlessly. The smell of scorch was coming off him. And the others, who were actively burned, screaming, running around – but him, too. The net was electrified, I realized. Hm.
