“Yeah, imagine how bad that riot would have been if the dirty hippies had really had a chance to wake up and shower—okay, maybe just wake up and arrive,” I said. “There would have been ten times their number, surely. And probably still only five cops, because the mayor hates me almost as much as Governor Shipley.”

  “I cannot imagine why,” Owens said.

  “I know, I’m so sweet, and so much fun,” I said. “Why, I’m a metahuman, shiksa Mrs. Maisel. But living in the modern day. And single. And a lot more willing to use violence as my go-to to solve problems.”

  “That explains how you ended up in our care,” Warden Bletchely said as the elevator doors closed and the box started to move. Sigh. All these years later, I still couldn’t get out of these freaking boxes.

  “What can I say? I know my strengths.”

  “You don’t have any strength right now, Ms. Nealon,” Bletchely said, really rubbing it in. He squeezed my exposed forearm with a bare hand, as if to prove he could. It was a fair point; with the suppressant drug running through my veins, even my metahuman strength had faded to whatever it would have been had I been a normal human. And my skin-to-skin draining powers? Gone. As evident by the pasty warden not going even paler as I ripped his minuscule soul from his gangly body.

  Ugh. Normal.

  “If you think I’m that powerless, why am I still chained and strapped to a table with a mask over my face?” I asked. To paraphrase that old Churchill joke, I may have been powerless, but he was witless, and this serum would eventually wear off if given a chance to run its course.

  Bletchely just forced a smile, because he couldn’t force a non-asinine answer. “So very funny,” he whispered as the elevator doors opened. Without my meta hearing, I almost missed it. “Let’s get you checked out by the doctor, just in case. Wouldn’t want allegations of mistreatment to be grounds for a mistrial.”

  “I think you may have missed the memo from the Department of Justice about how my trial’s going to be conducted if you think mistreating me now is going to have any effect,” I said. It didn’t make any impact on the warden, which … surprised me. Maybe he thought I was actually going to get a fair trial. If so, he was as cheerfully naïve as I had been up until I’d gone before the magistrate and she’d disabused me of that innocent notion.

  They rolled me through and into a small infirmary, where a woman with brown hair was standing, only faint hints of lines on her face. She was attractive in a stately kind of way, though obviously a little beyond middle age. She looked thoroughly unamused, giving me a near-indifferent once-over as I was rolled in.

  “A patient for you, doctor,” Warden Clownshoes said. “Make sure she didn’t suffer any injuries during the … disturbance in Minneapolis on her way out of court.” And he just walked off, order given.

  “Oh, good,” she said, “I was just starting to get settled … and here you are.”

  “Here to unsettle you, that’s me,” I said, keeping my eyes on her. “After all, I can’t just let you hang around rent-free, not doing anything … Sigourney Weaver.”

  5.

  “That’s not my name,” Sigourney said. Though she totally wasn’t Sigourney Weaver, I couldn’t help but call her that. At least the two times I could recall us meeting.

  “What is your name?” I asked, keeping an eye on her. She was keeping her own very dispassionate blue eyes right back on me, her lips fixed in a thin line.

  “Dr. Helen Slaughter,” she said, checking to make sure her latex gloves were on properly.

  I burst out laughing. “Helen Slaughter? Really? That’s what you’re going to go with?” I laughed again. She raised an eyebrow, very Spock-like. “Seriously. Dr. Helen Slaughter—has anyone ever actually said your name out loud? Does no one else get it?” She just kept looking at me. “Hell and Slaughter?”

  “Oh, shit,” Owens said, covering her mouth. “I didn’t even catch that.”

  A very small smile creased the doctor’s lips. “That’s a dark interpretation.”

  I just stared back at her. “You didn’t dispute its accuracy.”

  “Did I need to?” She pressed a gloved hand into my abdomen, watching my face for evidence of discomfort. “It’s not the place most people’s minds would go to immediately.”

  “That’s why I’m the one who kicks the ass of all the bad guys,” I said. “Because I’m on guard.”

  She paused, pressing my stomach lightly. Who knew what she was looking for. “Or paranoid.”

  “Been shot at twice this morning,” I said. “Nearly had a riot unleashed on me. You’re not paranoid if they’re actually out to get you.”

  “There was a disturbance?” the doctor asked, eyeing me very casually as she did … whatever the hell she was doing. She had her back turned to me now, rattling some metal equipment tray over to my bedside. Gurneyside. Whatever.

  “No, it really was a riot,” Owens mumbled.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “What do you think, Ms. Nealon? Do you have any injuries to report? Any pains? Where did these objects impact?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Nothing hurt on me, not even my pride.”

  “Well, if your pride’s okay, I’m sure the rest of you is fine,” she said, snapping the gloves off and tossing them in a nearby waste bin.

  I furrowed my brow as I looked at her. “Gee, it’s like you know me.”

  “I’ve known you for five seconds and already know it’s true,” Owens said. “We done here, doc? I need to return your patient to her holding cell.”

  “I get a cell? Of my own? Happy day,” I said. “Mom would be so proud.”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor said dryly, “every mother’s dream, the day their daughter gets sent to prison.”

  “Technically, she’s still in jail,” Owens said. “She’ll be transferred from the temporary holding facility to the permanent part of the prison—gen pop—after she gets tried and sentenced.”

  “Something to look forward to,” I said. “Lots of new people to meet, lots of new faces to punch. Entirely in self-defense, I’m sure.”

  “I’d like to remind you that you’re lacking your powers,” the doctor said, parading around by my feet, stopping there, staring at me. “And they’ll be suspended via suppressant for the length of your stay here.”

  I nodded. “Well, that sucks, but … I’m not super surprised, especially if you’re throwing me in with the other inmates. You can’t have me stealing all the souls, after all.”

  “Not every prisoner is so restrained,” she said, still staring me in the eye.

  Oh, shit. “Well, that’s a departure from how it used to be when I ran the place,” I said.

  “All part of that Supreme Court decision that originally released the prisoners,” the doctor said. “One of their findings was that creating a hermetically sealed isolation chamber for each inmate violated their rights.”

  “Yeah, putting them in Supermax before they’d proven themselves worthy was … uh … unworthy,” Owens said.

  “Wait till they get a load of how my trial’s about to be conducted,” I said. “That oughta be a bonanza of violations of rights. Also … putting a bunch of superpowered people in a prison together with me, without any powers? That doesn’t sound …”

  “Healthy?” the doctor was staring at me, and I could read the significance in her look.

  “No,” Owens said, conjuring up the exact thing I was thinking. “This doesn’t sound healthy at all for a person with no power.”

  This … was a warning.

  As soon as my trial was over I was going into a metahuman prison with my superpowers suppressed … and into a population of people who’d have enough strength to kill me with their bare hands. Not to mention plenty of motivation to do just that.

  And I’d have all the strength of a normal human.

  6.

  Houston, Texas

  Four Years Ago

  “So...where are you from?” Sienna Nealon asked her, looking straight into her eyes with those piercing blue ones. She’d seen them on TV, of course, but that was nothing compared what they looked like here, in person.

  “All over,” Sophie said. “But lately, a country called Revelen in Eastern Europe. Nice little place, just off the Baltic. Don't rack your brain searching for the name. No one's ever heard of it, really.”

  “Hm,” Sienna said, thinking it over anyway. Or maybe hearing those voices of hers? Sophie felt a little quiver at that thought. “And...so sorry...what was your name again?” Sienna asked.

  “Sophie,” the woman said. “Sophie Adams.” Sienna’s face was twisted, contorted. “You don’t approve of my name?”

  “Sorry,” Sienna said. “I’m always going to think of you as Sigourney Weaver.”

  Sophie’s eyes flashed, and a rare hint of a smile curved her lips. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “Haven’t we all,” the lawyer said. What was her name? Miranda? Cousin to the somewhat beleaguered young restaurant owner, Angel, who was happily cooking away in the kitchen, her new meta powers negating the clumsiness Sophie had noted upon her last visit.

  Sienna was nodding, sloshing the remnants of her margarita around in her glass. “I guarantee I’ve been called worse. Ever since that stupid Gail Roth interview, I swear half the country thinks I’m some sort of savage who’s going to turn into a dragon and eat them right there.”

  Sophie raised an eyebrow at that. “But you’re not, right?” Perfectly deadpan.

  Sienna stared back at her. She looked like she was wavering between annoyance and amusement. “Not if Angel gets dinner out here lickety split.”

  Miranda snickered, and Sienna joined her. Sophie kept it to a smile. “I saw your battle on TV,” Sophie said, once they’d both finished laughing. “It was impressive. And fearsome, I suppose.”

  “The one with Sovereign?” Sienna asked. She downed the rest of the margarita. “Yeah. That got a lot of play on YouTube. I guess a lot of teenage boys watched it like it was WWE match, replaying certain parts over and over. Y’know, it probably wasn’t just teenage boys. Some full-grown men might have done that, too. I guess it was kind of the equivalent of a comic book come to life.”

  “Could you imagine what a metahuman WWE would look like?” Angel came over, walking at a nice clip, balance perfect, trays on both hands. Sophie hadn’t seen her do much the day before, when she’d met Angel for the first time, but she would have guessed that trying to move at a snail’s pace with that much on one arm would have sent her tumbling before she’d acquired her newfound powers.

  “I can,” Sienna said, “and I’m shuddering, because … I mean, you look at the human growth curve, and think about … you ever seen little kids fight? It’s not very impressive. They have no real strength. But once they hit puberty, they start to get some power behind them, and suddenly it gets a little scary. Well, with a metahuman it’s like turning the dial up on that so that even a light backhand could bust your face completely open. And most of us don’t have super speedy healing.”

  “But you do,” Sophie said.

  “I do because I absorbed a … creature … that had it,” Sienna said, then frowned, staring off into space. “Shut up, Wolfe, You are too a creature. Well, I damned sure wasn’t going to give you the benefit of calling you human in mixed company.”

  “Does she … do this a lot?” Miranda asked, whispering to Angel. Sophie caught it, but she wasn’t sure if Sienna, distracted as she was talking to a voice in her head, did.

  “She’s got souls that she’s absorbed,” Angel whispered back, “they talk to her. Help her with their powers.”

  “I’d heard about that, but … seeing it …” Miranda said.

  “Sorry,” Sienna said. “I know it makes me look really crazy, but … I’m only a little crazy.”

  Angel set the food in front of them and slid into her own seat. “I like crazy. Crazy saved my life earlier tonight. Because I’m guessing those fire powers weren’t succubus standard.”

  “Nope,” Sienna said, lifting knife and fork and digging in. “I absorbed a Russian meta named Aleksandr Gavrikov when he threatened to blow up Minneapolis. He gives me the power to conjure fire, throw it in bursts, cover myself in it like a second skin. Downside—I lose my clothes when that happens. In case any of you saw those zoomed-in photos of my naked ass falling out of the sky that one time. Because those damned teenage boys on the internet? Every time I run across one, I swear they bring it up—”

  “I must have … consciously not sought that out for some reason,” Miranda said, cutting into her steak burrito.

  “The internet is a revolutionary tool for sharing knowledge and information, and increasing the bonds of communication worldwide,” Sienna said, “and teenagers mostly use it to bully each other and share naked pictures. ‘Plus ça change,’ amirite?”

  “‘Plus c’est même chose,’” Sophie said, finishing without thinking about it. Everyone at the table looked at her. “Sorry. Product of my time, I guess. I was classically educated.”

  “Does that mean you had to read The Aeneid in the original Latin?” Sienna asked. Her eyes twinkled; sarcasm.

  “I have, yes,” Sophie said. “It’s not as good as The Iliad and The Odyssey in the original Greek. Homer was much more impressive than Virgil. More inspired, less manufactured and derivative. Homer felt less … fictive.”

  “I’ve only read them in English, but that was my interpretation as well,” Sienna said, turning her attention back to her food. “Since Virgil basically aped Homer in tying together a mythology for Rome’s foundation that’d match the epic stories of the Greeks.”

  “Indeed,” Sophie said, taking a sip of her water. “Virgil did something impressive, no doubt, but I still feel the threads of derivation. And at the time, his work’s reception was colored by the need to legitimize the rule of the Caesars. It was … a product of its time, I suppose.”

  “Did you really learn all that in school?” Angel asked Sienna, fork paused over her piping hot plate. “Because we’re the same age, and I didn’t learn any of that in school.”

  Sienna looked up from her meal. “I was homeschooled, so … yeah. My mom was a stickler for the classics. I did a lot of intense reading in my formative years. Mostly because I was confined to my house and could only watch TV an hour a day.”

  “Wow,” Miranda said, “I thought you were going to say you were confined to your house because you were raised in Minnesota. I forgot the whole … captivity thing.”

  “Can I ask you about those souls of yours?” Sophie asked, cutting into what looked like it was going to become a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “Sure,” Sienna said. “What do you want to know?”

  “You hear them in your head, like voices?” Sophie asked, settling back in her seat, delicately cutting at her food. The burrito shell had gotten a little soft thanks to the meat juice within. It tasted absolutely wonderful, though.

  “Just like a crazy person, I assume,” Sienna said.

  “How many do you have?” Sophie asked.

  “Six,” Sienna said. “Wolfe, Gavrikov, Bjorn, Zack, Eve and Bastian.” Her eyes flittered again, upward. “Just be glad I remembered your names—you’re dangerously close to being called ‘Nordic A-hole,’ Bjorn, if you keep this crap up.”

  “I’m going to be really honest with you because you saved our lives earlier,” Miranda said. “That talking to yourself thing? Is not a good look for you.”

  Sienna just blinked a few times. “Is it really that bad?” She looked to Angel, whose eyes flew wide, unprepared for a response, then to Sophie. “Is it?”

  Sophie didn’t shy away from her gaze. “It’s … off-putting, I would say. Miranda’s right. Can you do it without actually speaking aloud?”

  “Yesssssss,” Sienna said. “It might take some practice.”

  “You should get on that right away,” Miranda said. “I’m only telling you this because—it’s really bad.”

  Sienna deflated slightly, shoulders drifting down. “No one’s ever had the guts to tell me that before. Thank you.” She stared off into space.

  “The souls you have,” Sophie said, trying to get back to her questions, “you mentioned … a Bastian? What does he do? Or she, I suppose.”

  “Dragon power,” Sienna said, turning her attention back to her food and digging in. “Bastian was a badass Quetlzcoatl type.”

  “Hey, finally some myth I grew up with!” Angel said, eyes lighting up “I mean, don’t get me wrong, hearing about Hades and Poseidon and all those Greek gods is cool and all, but—Quetlzcoatl? That’s like, super familiar.”

  “What about that Eve you mentioned?” Sophie asked.

  “She gives me fae powers—light nets,” Sienna said, looking up at her. “You’re awfully curious about all this.”

  Sophie put on a smile. “I saw something not that long ago … something that seemed very much up your alley. It made me curious about all this … metahuman business.”

  “What’d you see?” Sienna asked. More than a nibble. Her eyes almost shone, though she stayed still.

  Sophie took a slow breath, keeping her eyes on Sienna’s. A nibble wasn’t a bite. “I was driving through West Texas on the way to see a client in El Paso. It was the middle of the night. Out one of the side car window I saw … lightning. It forked through the sky like the most intense storm you’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s … abnormal for West Texas, I guess,” Miranda said, frowning. “But not unheard of—”

  “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” Sophie said. “All the stars were out overhead. Glowing, brightly. And after the lightning came—”

  “Thunder?” Sienna asked.

  “An explosion of soundless fire,” Sophie said. “Like what you do with your powers. Not a chemical reaction or combustion—pure flame leaping toward the heavens, then coming back down as though metal drawn by a magnet. After that—a burst of red energy.”

 

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