“That’s fairly accurate,” Sophie said.

  “Which part isn’t accurate?” Sienna asked. “That you mean me no harm? Or that you don’t give a shit about me being irritated?”

  “One of those,” Sophie said. “Definitely.”

  Sienna made a low sound in her throat. “This is like having a conversation with Janus or Winter.”

  “How is old Janus this days?” Sophie asked, turning her head to look at Sienna. “Still carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders? As though he has any influence on its course.”

  “Well, last I saw him—and this was about a year ago, he’d kinda been tortured into a hot mess,” Sienna said, eyeing Sophie with suspicion.

  “That’s a shame,” Sophie said.

  “You don’t exactly sound torn up about it.”

  “He’s not a close friend,” Sophie said with a slight, one-shoulder shrug. “And he always liked to walk on the dark side. It’s hardly surprising when the darkness decides to take a bite.”

  “I don’t know if a pissed-off, wronged, thieving Cassandra-type counts as ‘the darkness,’” Sienna said, “but I guess when you live in the criminal underworld, it’s fair to expect a little blowback from the people you run with every now and again.”

  “Exactly,” Sophie said. “Lay down with dogs … and all that.”

  “Well, he got more than fleas,” Sienna said. “I don’t know if his mind will ever be right again, frankly.”

  “He’ll be fine, I’m sure. He was always a resilient fellow, and he’s been through worse.” Sophie let slip a very slight smile. “He’s the sort that always seeks to find his advantage in whatever adversity befalls him. He’ll come out of it looking for an opportunity to make an even greater asshole of himself.”

  “That’s … fairly accurate,” Sienna said.

  “Which part?” Sophie asked. “The fact that he tries to turn everything to his advantage? Or that he’ll make a bigger asshole of himself?”

  “Okay, maybe it’s totally accurate.” Sienna shifted in her seat and fanned herself. The air conditioning was not exactly covering itself in glory at the moment, and it was stifling in the car. “How do you know Janus?”

  “Old acquaintance that I’d just as soon forget,” Sophie said.

  “That … was not really an answer.”

  “It was an answer to something.”

  “But not the question I asked.”

  “I didn’t realize that I was required to answer your questions.”

  “You’re not required to do much of anything,” Sienna said. “But it’d be polite.”

  Sophie looked at her sideways, smiling. “Do you consider yourself a polite person? Someone who prides herself on manners? On following societal expectations and mores?”

  Sienna just glowered back at her. “Congrats on knowing me without having actually, ever, y’know—met me. You have a very complete picture of my personality as reported on TV.”

  “Who says we’ve never met?” Sophie asked, turning back to the road.

  “I really hate mysteries,” Sienna muttered.

  “You live for the mystery,” Sophie said. “The chase. The hunt. The fight. The sooner you accept that annoying fact about yourself, the quicker you’ll find happiness.”

  “Screw you,” Sienna said, rising up in her seat. “Who are you? ‘Dear Abby’ for metas?”

  “‘Dear Abby’ might be gentler with your feelings.”

  “To hell with my feelings,” Sienna said, putting her hands on the roof of the car. “I have questions. You have answers. Start dealing them out or—”

  “Or what?” Sophie looked at her sideways again.

  The roof made a slight straining noise, and the car lifted, just slightly off the ground. “Or I start driving,” Sienna said as the engine roared and the wheels spun, tractionless.

  Sophie took her foot off the accelerator, looking at Sienna evenly. “And where will we be going?”

  “High in the sky, slowly,” Sienna said. “And then back to the ground, rather quickly and spectacularly.”

  Sophie raised an eyebrow, but that was all. “You’re going to murder me?” She waited a beat. “All right.”

  Sienna stared back at her. “All right … what?”

  “All right, go ahead,” Sophie said, and waited, folding her hands and putting them in her lap.

  Sienna just stared at her. The car rose steadily. “You’re cool with dying?”

  Sophie let slip a little smile. “You assume the drop would kill me.”

  “It’d kill most people.”

  “I’m not ‘most people.’ I’m me.” Sophie looked out the window. The ground had frozen in place, about a hundred feet down. “If you’re going to do this, would you mind getting on with it? I have an appointment to get to, otherwise.”

  “And you’re bringing me with you?” Sienna’s eyebrow twitched.

  “Assuming you want to come. I’m not forcing you.”

  “Damn you, Sigourney Weaver,” Sienna said, and the car lurched as she started to bring it down. “Why are you intentionally trying my patience while asking me to go along with this ridiculous road trip?”

  “Because I don’t much care about your feelings, one way or the other,” Sophie said, putting her hands back on the wheel as the car touched down. “Your anger means little to me. Probably as little as the anger most people direct at you. Maybe less, since I’ve lived considerably longer than you and had plenty of time to perfect my art of … what is it you young people call it these days? ‘DGAF’?”

  “So you’re one of the old gods?” Sienna asked.

  “Well, I’m certainly old,” Sophie said, “but no one ever much worshipped me.”

  “Shut up, Wolfe,” Sienna said, and when Sophie looked at her, “he’s growling. I guess he doesn’t like you.”

  “I guess not,” Sophie said. “But he probably also knows that I don’t care what he thinks, either.”

  “He growled at that, too,” Sienna said, letting out a little exasperated sigh. “I’m just going to go on record and say this is the worst road trip ever.”

  “You’re young. You have time to have worse.”

  “That’s—” Sienna started to say, but …

  They crossed the divide right at that moment.

  The desert and sagebrush hills ahead fell away. Replacing them was endless green, fields that swept miles to every side, growing lush with plant life. A kind of primordial jungle had been cultivated in the distance, palm trees and other tropical flora sticking out of the flat earth of Texas just past a town built of brick and wood and steel, some strange confab that brought a smile to Sophie’s face at the mere sight.

  “What … the hell … is that?” Sienna asked, craning her neck and leaning forward. If Sophie had been aiming to kill her, a sudden stop would have launched her out the windshield like a javelin.

  “That … is a town,” Sophie said. The road side rippled, and a beautiful stone sign with greenery growing around it came into view.

  NEW ASGARD, TEXAS

  “… The hell?” Sienna asked, jaw slightly open. “We’re … still in Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is …” Sienna leaned back, just slightly, in her seat. “This is …”

  Sophie just waited.

  “How the hell did you hide this?” Sienna asked, turning to her at last.

  “The outer defense is a mirage,” Sophie said. “Maintained by a meta with Rakshasa powers strong enough to fool even the satellites.”

  “You have a Rakshasa?” Sienna asked, eyes narrowing. “What else do you have?”

  Sophie smiled. The town was growing closer with every passing minute, and soon they’d be there. “You’ll see.”

  19.

  Reed

  Upstate New York

  “You sure this is a good idea?” Augustus asked as we crept across an empty field, dead of night surrounding us, wrapping us up in its darkness.

  “This is where the signal originated,” Jamal said, fingers twitching. We’d left all electronics behind in what Jamal had called a “null box.” I had a suspicion it was a Faraday cage, just an electromagnetic dampening device, like a microwave. He’d collected everything just before we’d made landfall. Which was a fancy way of saying that Greg stepped out of the plane and grew us to full size less than a mile from the old factory that was our destination.

  “Is there anything nearby that’s going to give us away?” I asked. “Any electronic signatures or whatever … ?”

  “I’m not sensitive enough to detect that sort of thing without my phone,” Jamal said. He was the only one of us who had one, but it was powered down. He looked a little twitchy without it. Greg was huffing slightly behind him, Eilish trailing a few steps behind. Angel was bringing up the rear, casting furtive looks back, guarding us against attack from behind. She had a big rifle in her hands, not the sort of thing I’d usually be in favor of, but …

  I was carrying a pistol myself. The reality was that we were about to come face to face with whoever was behind Sienna’s frame job, and I wasn’t big on meeting these people unarmed. This Custis family had shown themselves willing to play deeply dirty, doing a frame of Augustus and Jamal that had nearly stuck. I figured it was better to be safe than sorry at this point.

  Hopefully we wouldn’t end up safe and sorry.

  “Greg … if things get hairy here …” I whispered into the night. We were in tall grass, slinking our way through, and the tips had wet my pants and shirt all the way up to mid-chest.

  “I’ll pull us out,” Greg Vansen said in a clipped tone. I knew he was good for it; his power set as an Atlas included shrinking and growing, and he always tended to have something cool on hand in case of emergencies. I’d seen him bring out an SR-71, a Concord, an Apache helicopter, even a Bradley Fighting Vehicle once. I suspected he had more military surplus secreted away on his person, shrunk until he needed it, and that included a full arsenal of weaponry embedded under his fingernails (or so he’d told me). Guns at his fingertips.

  “Man, I wish Friday was here to make a pulling out joke,” Augustus said, leading the way. I hadn’t tasked him to go first, but he’d taken up position at the fore, his eagerness pushing him ahead. For some reason, he seemed to take Sienna’s guilt personally.

  “Instead you gotta go and hint at it,” Jamal said.

  “Well, yeah, someone had to,” Augustus said.

  “I don’t think anyone actually had to,” Eilish said, her Irish accent lilting as she joined the conversation. All of us were speaking meta-low, so quietly no one but a metahuman in close proximity could pick us up.

  “Factory is a hundred meters ahead,” Augustus said, keeping his eyes forward. “Not detecting any footsteps on the earth around there. There’s a pad of concrete ahead, though, and I don’t have a real good read on it.”

  “How big?” Jamal asked. “Does it surround the factory?”

  “Probably,” Augustus said. “Kat would have had a better idea, if we’d brought her. She can feel plants and grass working their way up through the cracks. I’m not that sensitive on disconnected earth.”

  “Anyone see watch towers?” I asked. “Cameras?”

  “No obvious ones,” Augustus said. “Might want to send Greg ahead for recon in something small and fast.”

  “I can do that,” Greg said with a curt nod.

  “Bad idea,” Jamal said. “These people can hack anything electronic. Modern aircraft fit that definition.”

  “You think an SR-71 or Concorde has wifi?” Greg asked, lips pursed in amusement.

  “No,” Jamal said, “but I think a minor EMP of the sort I can produce if I want to make a little noise can shut you down.”

  “Then I would shrink, recover my aircraft, and switch to either running or some other vehicle,” Greg said, and patted his jacket. “My arsenal is fully protected from electromagnetic discharge.”

  Jamal shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Probably better than sending a drone,” I said, doing a shrug of my own. “No radio signals. In and out in five minutes, okay?”

  Greg nodded, and then disappeared into thin air.

  “That … is not something I’m going to get used to,” Angel said, shuffling through the grass to close up our formation, clenching her rifle more tightly.

  “You think this is more or less nerve-racking than being where Sienna is right now?” Jamal asked, brushing his hand over the wet tips of the long grass. It made a pleasant whooshing noise that normally might have soothed my nerves, but now only served to agitate me.

  “Well, she’s in jail, mostly surrounded by people we, her loyal friends, have put there,” Augustus said. “So I’m guessing she’s up to her eyeballs in trouble. As usual.” He swallowed visibly. “You think they let her keep her powers?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, squeezing my fist tightly, feeling out for the winds all around us. I could start a tempest in an instant, and I wanted to, to get rid of emotional churn spinning inside me like a tornado. “What I do know is that we need to get her out. And the only way we do that is by squeezing these clowns for all they’re wo—”

  A klaxon sounded in the distance, and lights flared on all around the factory. Augustus stood up in the semi-dark, a fence line standing out between us and the derelict structure. “Oh. Now I feel ’em. Ten guards—twenty—thirty—” He swallowed visibly in the light. “Fifty. Seventy …”

  “Madre de Dios,” Angel whispered.

  “Ninety,” Augustus said. “One hundred and twenty …”

  “What the hell are we dealing with?” Eilish asked, her face visible in the pale light shining from the countless spotlights around the factory. “To have that many guards on it—out here—in the middle of bloody nowhere?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, squeezing my hands together and summoning the wind around us in a rush that blew down the grass in all directions. “Let’s get in there … before the Custis family gets away.”

  20.

  Sienna

  The nurse had barely gotten the needle out of my arm when Gert, Clara, and Marta came at me in a mad rush. “Better skedaddle,” I told the lady in the white gown, and she heeded my advice, booking it for the exit. The guards were just watching the whole thing unfold, nobody calling out so much as a warning against Gert and her crew.

  Sigh. So it was going to be like that, I guess. Color me not surprised.

  “Any chance you want to help a sister out?” I asked June as Gert grew to hulking proportions and stepped over the table two away from mine.

  “Not really,” June said. “I’ve got a good behavior record.”

  “So glad I saved your life,” I muttered, getting to my feet to greet Gert as she charged me at impossible speed.

  Well, not impossible speed. But she was damned fast to my now-human eye. Effing suppressant.

  Fortunately, she was charging like a bull, unconcerned about my human reflexes. Her teeth were bared in a scowl, now one table away, and stepping over them like they were kid’s toy tables thanks to her size and dexterity. She lowered her head like she was just going to charge right through me, eyes lit up in anticipation of the kill.

  I tossed my nasty breakfast in her direction and dove for the next table over, hitting the surface—and a couple of gross meals—and rolling off the other side. I noticed Gert caught my tray in the face—I’d flung it up with pretty decent aim considering I’d lost my meta dexterity with all my other boosts—and she’d been so focused on charging me down she didn’t get a hand up in time to block it.

  Never lead with your chin. It tempts your foe to aim for it. I mean, unless you have an iron jaw.

  Oh, how I missed my iron jaw.

  Wet eggs seeped through my prison jumpsuit, and my knees hit the benches on the other side. Two of my fellow prisoners jumped away from the table, wanting no part of my fight. Or more accurately, as they probably saw it, my death.

  Gert, blind, hit my table with her shin and you could hear her suck in the breath. Then she let out a caterwaul, a scream worthy of a banshee, and went tumbling over the table, shouting to the heavens and clutching at her wounded leg. Blood ran through the orange cloth, but I didn’t take it as a victory, because there was no way she was going to be down for long.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” June said. I hadn’t even realized it, but she was lingering close to Gert. A little purple cloud bloomed over Gert’s face, her mouth wide to scream her agony, and the cloud disappeared like she’d just taken a big hit. She choked, eyes bugging out of her head, still clutching her shin, and a wet, gagging noise was all that came out. June stepped back from her. “I don’t want a fight. I don’t want a fight,” she said, eyeing Marta who was coming at her from the side.

  “Then you shouldn’t have done that!” Marta shouted, spines sprouting from her skin like porcupine quills. She launched a whole assload at June, who dodged behind Gert.

  “I didn’t do anything!” June shouted back, putting her hands up. I had a feeling this theater presentation was more for the guards, who maybe hadn’t seen June shoot her poison gas right in Gert’s face, than it was for Marta, who definitely had. “I don’t want to fight you, Marta!”

  As much fun as it might have been to watch Gert choke on poison or Marta keep screaming over June’s beautiful, lying denials, I had my own problems, and they were racing at me fast in the form of plate-faced Clara. Her hands were on fire, and so was the damned rest of her. She shot a burst of flame at me and I tried to dodge.

  Too slow. My shoulder caught fire, and I yelped, beating it out with a hand as I fell back, stumbling.

  Clara could smell the kill, and she leapt the last table between us, tragically not shinning herself the way Gert had. She rushed me, and all I had was a nearby table with shitty food and a couple cups of water—

 

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