That left me with one problem to deal with.

  But it was a big one.

  Bletchely was standing behind his desk with a gun.

  A real one.

  “Shit!” I shouted, lurching to a stop as the guard impacted the ground behind me. Bletchely’s gun was raised, covering the door, shaking slightly—

  I hurled my baton offhand, out of instinct more than conscious thought. It was a clumsy throw, but it frisbeed through the air—

  And clocked Bletchely in the face, just as he was turning the gun around …

  On himself.

  It fired, missing the warden and hitting the ceiling. Bletchely collapsed, blood spraying out of his nose from the baton strike. I charged the desk, but June beat me to it, leaping over and ripping the pistol out of his hand. She stretched it out to me as I came around the desk, in no hurry now that the trouble was resolved. Damn my lack of meta speed. And healing, I thought as I tested my not-quite-numb right hand. Though even with my powers, it wouldn’t have healed immediately.

  “What have we here?” I took the pistol from June, giving it a quick once-over. It was a Sig Sauer P226, pretty standard government issue pistol I’d used a thousand times before. I liked it, though this vanilla variant wasn’t quite as accurate as some of the more specialized ones with crisper, lighter trigger pulls. Still, any old port in a storm. I put the front sight against the edge of the desk and pushed down, carefully racking the slide back enough to make sure there was a round in the chamber. All I needed was to get into a fight and find out then that Bletchely had fired the only round in the gun and it’d be the end of me.

  “Was he going to shoot himself?” June asked, dragging the warden up by his collar and laying him out on the desk.

  Bletchely just sobbed, all that illusion of power he’d carried only minutes earlier, down in the Cube, dissolved away like salt in the rain. “I … I …” Tears just rolled down his cheeks.

  “What’s with the hasty, final exit plan?” I asked, staring down at him. June wasn’t even holding him any place anymore, he was just lying there, in a pose of total submission. He hadn’t even lifted his head off the desk; he lay there like he was crucified to it. I brandished the gun in front of him. “There’s no coming back from this, you know? And you have so much to live for.”

  Bletchely didn’t summon a coherent answer in the timeframe I’d mentally allotted. He just sobbed for, oh, five seconds or so, and I kinda lost patience.

  “I think we should try a poison version of waterboarding,” I said to June. That raised her eyebrows.

  “I will tell you whatever you want to know,” Bletchely said, folding immediately, as I’d suspected he would.

  “Who wants me dead?” I asked, cutting right to the nub. I hovered over him, looking him right in the eye.

  “I don’t know who’s ultimately behind it,” Bletchely said, “but my contact person’s name was Berenger.”

  “But not Tom Berenger, right?” I asked. “Because you’ve already got Sigourney Weaver working as doctor, and this would put us one contestant away from Celebrity Jeopardy. Which generally sucks.”

  “Why does Celebrity Jeopardy suck?” June asked.

  “Because most of the time celebs are tragically stupid,” I said, not taking my attention away from Bletchely. “Almost like most of them got there on looks alone.” I stared down at Bletchely. “Tell me about Berenger. Who is he? How does he fit in here?”

  “It’s a she,” he said, shaking his head. “She works for the Gondry Administration. Department of Justice somewhere. She has some real power behind her, because—she got recommended—put in charge, really—by someone way up the chain. I got a letter from the Attorney General himself telling me I reported to her now.” Bletchely was breathing hard, like he’d just run a marathon. Which he hadn’t. Getting here from the Cube was a 440 at most. “I read between the lines … had a conversation with my immediate boss … her word was law for me.” He squinted his eyes shut. “Anything she told me to do … I was to do. So I did.”

  “What did she tell you to do?” I asked, surprisingly calm considering I was peeling the onion of who was trying to kill me.

  “She wanted you to go,” Bletchely said. “Quietly. We had … discussions. Knew you’d be a problem.”

  “You called that one,” June muttered.

  “She wanted that problem gone,” he said. “Minimal fuss.”

  “What about my trial?” I asked. “Who quarterbacked that fiasco?”

  Bletchely shook his head. “That’s … Department of Justice. Not my bailiwick. I only dealt with this side of things, in the prison, unrelated to trial.”

  “Who did handle that side?” I asked, leaning over him.

  He made a limp shrug, still lying lifeless upon the top of his desk, pale as if he’d bled out on the beautiful cherrywood. Bet that cost taxpayers a small fortune. “Department of Justice. I dunno. The Attorney General? The meta court? No idea. Like I said … my purview was narrow, and I … I did what I was told.”

  “And this, to you, is a valid excuse for prisoner mistreatment?” I put a little cold fury into my voice, even though I was actually relieved to hear him say that I wasn’t just being paranoid, that indeed, they were out to get me. Yay.

  And boo.

  “I … you’re a bad person,” Bletchely said, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. “You’ve killed … so many people … I don’t need this trouble, I—”

  “You’re a good person,” I said, “who follows orders, helps facilitate show trials, and arranges the murder of powerless prisoners in your custody.”

  He opened his eyes, and somewhere in his cowardice, he found it in himself to smirk, disgustedly, at me. “Oh … you’re powerless, are you?”

  “Comparatively,” I said. He had a fair point there; I was standing over him with a gun, after all, in spite of his best efforts. “So … why try and end it now? You rolled on Berenger pretty quick. Why not just cough up the answers the minute I walked through the door?”

  He closed his eyes again, shook his head. Said nothing.

  “The hell?” June nudged his leg.

  Bletchely opened his eyes, and let out a new sob, though he was plainly trying to hold it in. “Please … just kill me.”

  I hadn’t even pointed the gun at him. I traded a look with June; she was as confused as I was. “Why?” I asked. He didn’t answer, so I leaned in. “Is it Berenger? Are you afraid of her?”

  He laughed, then broke into a sob. “No. No. Not at all. What’s she going to do? Fire me?” He laughed again, and once more it deteriorated into a full-blown ugly cry. “Please … if I tell you … will you promise to kill me? Before you go?”

  I looked at June. She was moving from curiosity to slight alarm, a pose I was with her fully on. I turned back to Bletchely. “What the hell, man?” I raised the gun to point at the ceiling. “What did you do?”

  He shook his head. “I … I’m ruined.” He sniffled. “I knew … knew you’d come for me. And that’s … bad … but …”

  This was getting worrisome.

  “But … you’re not getting out.” He laughed and cried again. It was really quite manic. And alarming. “The front entrance is sealed tight. They’ll shoot anyone who approaches … before they even get close.” He forced a smile, but failed, and it turned down. “There’s no way out.”

  “That’s … not entirely true,” I said.

  He seized my sleeve so fast that June slammed him back into the desk, thinking it was an attack on my person. Bletchely gasped, but the pain didn’t keep him down for long. “You—” He looked me in the eyes, a faint flame of hope. “You can get us out? From here?”

  “I … maybe could …” I said, staring down at him, a tingle running across the nerves of my scalp. Every alarm bell in my head was going off. First, he wanted to kill himself, then he wanted me to kill him …

  Now he wanted to escape?

  With me?

  “Oh, shit,” I said, taking a step back from Bletchely. The monitors behind him were tuned to news channels, but there had to be … there—

  “What is it?” June asked as I snatched up the remote. It wasn’t quite a standard TV remote, but it did have a SOURCE button, which I hit, and it flipped the TVs from network television, which was a series of boring reports about diplomatic tensions with Russia over some foreign military exercises in the Baltic to—

  To—

  “You dumb motherf—” I said, taking a step back from the wall of monitors. It was all there, in the schematic of the prison, the same one that showed the state of affairs in every guard control room, probably. I turned my fury on Bletchely. “Why? Why, you—you—you ginormous frigging idiot? Why would you—”

  “Because … you were going to kill me,” Bletchely said, sniffing, tears running down his face. “I knew it … you were going to get me and … do things to me and … and I couldn’t get the doors to close in the ring, so …” He closed his eyes, and the salty drops just ran down his pale cheeks, mottled with red, “… so I did the only thing I could and …” He turned his eyes toward the monitors, showing the doors to the Cube highlighted in red—

  Unlocked.

  Open.

  “—I let them loose … to stop you …” Bletchely said. His eyes were back to hopeless. “And now … they’ll be coming … for all of us …”

  36.

  I cold-cocked Warden Bletchely with my Sig, slugging him so hard that if I’d had my meta strength, his head would have dissolved into paste. As it was, I knocked his cowardly ass out right there on his desk. He went slack, almost sliding off, but his upper body weight kept him in place, leaving his legs to dangle loosely over the edge.

  June was staring at the prison schematic. “This is, uh …”

  “Bad,” I said. “The word is ‘bad.’” There was a lot of red on that map. Every door in the place was wide open.

  “You think he ordered everyone loosed while he was running from us?” June asked. She shook her head. “That’s crazy. He could have locked us in. He could have—”

  “Maybe,” I said, staring at the scary hellscape rendered in map form. One of the schematics was 3D, and it looked like he hadn’t just unlocked the ladies' prison. The men’s prison was open, too, which—considering men tended to get jail time at the ratio of ten to one, was … worrying. “He said he couldn’t lock down the corridors in the ring. Maybe he panicked.” I looked at the warden, now sleeping blissfully on his desk. “Scratch that. He was definitely panicking. I don’t know why he panicked in that stupid direction when there were clearly saner ones—”

  “People lose their minds in fear over you,” June said, shaking her head. “They see Sienna Nealon after them and they don’t even think—‘Hey, she’s human. She makes errors.’”

  “Spoken like the person who once preyed on my very humanity in order to empty my brains out the side of my head.”

  June shrugged. She didn’t look particularly repentant. “I knew you were human. Everybody else seems to miss that.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, tearing my eyes off the monitors.

  “Can we still get out of here?” June asked. “Using your planned exit?”

  “Yeah, it’s on the very bottom of the wheel,” I said, pointing at the map. We were at the 3 o’clock position, my putative escape lay at 6 o’clock. “We can get there, probably before any of the escapees even reach this part of the complex.” I took a step toward the door. “Let’s—”

  And I stopped.

  June was halfway to the door and sensed my stop. “What?” She looked back at me.

  The monitors next to the door were tuned to security camera footage. The riot I’d been aiming to start? It was in full swing in the men’s section of the cube, a rampaging meta battle going on in the square. Another monitor showed the front entrance, and the firing squad was drilling attempted escapees on their way out, shooting them down every time one of them appeared in the junction before the elevator. Flashes of gunfire turned the camera displays white with their heat. The guards were lined up in two rows, the first kneeling in front of the second, shooting straight into any prisoner that tried to make a break for it.

  I couldn’t tell from the low fidelity of the monitor, but there had to be twenty, thirty bodies already piled up there. And with the fracas going on in the men’s section …

  “We should go,” June said.

  “We should,” I said. But didn’t move.

  “Uhmmm, Sienna?” June was moving her head, weaving a little, trying to get my attention. “Exit? Immediatamente? Uh, now-o?”

  “That last one is not Spanish,” I said, staring at the monitors. At the chaos. “It’s not even Pig Latin.” I sighed.

  “What are you doing?” June asked, more quietly this time.

  “Agonizing,” I said, looking down at the pistol in my hand. “Sinking into my own head for a minute. Dwelling on consequences.”

  “You didn’t olly olly oxenfree this entire prison, okay?” June tried to catch my gaze. “You didn’t ask for this. You wanted to do your time, and—you heard it straight from the horse’s ass mouth—they wanted you dead.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I chewed on my lower lip. “Every time … I always have to hit ’em back. You hurt the innocent, you break the law … I’m the hammer of that law. The thin line between order and chaos in the meta world.” I pushed my fingers through my hair, pulling it as I hit tangles from days without a shower. I must have looked like a dirty animal. “Even when I was a criminal … I’d go out of my damned way by thousands of miles to mess up other criminals. To put things right. To cut off the toes they put over the line.”

  June looked at the monitors with great significance. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to cut off this many toes. It’s more than just a dance line.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my head, going for the door. “You’re right. I don’t have powers, and this gun only has 15 shots left. Time to vacate the premises.”

  We burst out of the office and into the hall, heading for the T intersection ahead. “We go left, circle around,” I said. “There’s an old air shaft they used during construction. I made sure they didn’t plug it, just in case I ever needed a way in during a lockdown. But it’s got a pretty thick casing of concrete around it, and it’s buried a foot or two below the ground, so—I hope you don’t mind bruising your knuckles.” I held up my useless right hand. “Because mine? Not so much of help, even if I had my powers.”

  “I can break through two rounds of concrete if it means getting the hell out of here,” June said as we hit the crossing. She veered left, and I—

  Stopped.

  Again.

  “Um?” June asked, pausing twenty feet down the loop.

  “I know,” I said, looking back around the ring. “I know.”

  “If you know,” she said, jogging over to me and taking me by the arm, “why don’t we goooooo?” She rhymed and made a stupid voice to drive the point home.

  It was right there, just a quarter of the way around the perimeter circle. A storage room, a wall, boom, an exit. I had all the necessary ingredients, and we’d be popping out in the woods above the prison while the rest of the damned world was still waking up to the fact there was an epic level riot going on in the country’s only supervillain prison.

  And I’d be back on the run.

  Again.

  “I can’t do it,” I said, and the strength went out of my legs. June tugged at my arm, but not hard, and I pulled back.

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “We can. Bust out, we’re free. Zoom, zoom.”

  “You’ve been down that road, June,” I said. “They’ll come after us … they’ll kill us this time, no questions, no nice attempts to subdue us first. They will shoot us down like dogs. Just like they did to—”

  “Ell,” June whispered. Her face fell, all that hope that had been there a moment earlier … gone with the memory of her lost love.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She let go of my hand. “I don’t want to stay here.” She pointed at the hallway behind me. There were sounds echoing down it. “I don’t want to fight … all that.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “Go to the storage room. Hardly anyone’s going to make it all the way around the horn to there. Turtle up. You can surrender when they send in the troops—and they eventually will. Play dead, even, then they’ll have no reason to shoot you. They’re not going to massacre the entire place, it’ll look way worse for them that way. And it’s already going to look bad enough as it is.”

  “Okay, so, let’s do that together,” she said, and waved me toward her.

  I took a long breath. “I … can’t.”

  Her mouth hung slightly open. “… Why not?”

  It was like a clarion call in my mind.

  “I’ve forgotten a lot after my little Scotland excursion,” I said. “I got my ass kicked … hard … by another succubus. She took some of my memories, made me forget … lots of things.” Little chills ran up and down the skin on the back of my neck. “I’ve been back in the USA for six months … running … til now.” My face settled, a cold sense of unreality falling over me as I put into words an uneasy sensation that had been plaguing me for months. “It’s like … some days I wake up and look in the mirror and … I don’t even know who I am.”

  June listened in silence, though there was a faint noise in the distance. “That sucks. But if we keep standing here—”

  “I’ve forgotten a lot,” I said, “but I remember this one thing about myself that seems to have gotten lost in the last couple years, even before Scotland …” I felt my jaw tighten. “I don’t run from the fight. And this … jailbreak, riot, whatever … is a fight that no one else ought to have to wade into.”

  “You have no powers at the moment,” June said. “None.”

  “I’ve got a gun and fifteen or so rounds,” I said, brandishing the Sig. “I’m no daisy.”

  “There are literally hundreds of prisoners back there, male and female, that would like to tear you to pieces like a chimpanzee.”

 

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