“Wow, that’s weird,” Angel said, “even for West Texas.”

  “Where was this?” Sienna asked, her meal apparently forgotten for the moment. She was utterly still.

  “I don’t know that I could find it on a map,” Sophie said, turning her attention back to her food. “But it made me think of your battle, because that was the only thing I’d ever seen short of a film that could come close to capturing what happened there.”

  “If you can give me a general area,” Sienna said, looking at her intently, “I’d like to fly out there and see for myself.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t think I could do that. Not from overhead. But I’m leaving tomorrow to drive out that way. If you’d like, I can keep an eye out, and if I figure out where it is, exactly, take a look, maybe send you an email about it—”

  Sienna sat forward in her chair and pushed her plate aside. “How about I just come with you and see for myself?”

  Sophie blinked. Tried to show surprise, even though this was the outcome she’d been aiming for from the start. “I suppose it wouldn’t be terrible to have company. It’s a long drive to El Paso.”

  “Road trip?” Sienna frowned with amusement. “Let’s just fly.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t like to fly.”

  Sienna’s face fell. It was not subtle. “You’re going to … drive across Texas?”

  Angel snorted. “You know it takes almost as long to drive to El Paso from Houston as it does to drive to Atlanta from here? I’d bite the bullet and take a plane.”

  “I don’t need a plane,” Sienna said, waving her off.

  “The answer, then, is double no,” Sophie said, calmly, cutting off a small bite of her burrito. “If I don’t care for flying with a professional pilot, safely ensconced in a metal tube for protection from crashing and messing up my hair—you can imagine how little I’d care for taking flight without the plane.”

  “Oh, man,” Sienna said. Her expression was obvious—she was torn between wanting to investigate this intriguing possibility and having to ride in a car across the infinite plains of Texas.

  “I can send you an email when I find it,” Sophie said, utterly casual, paying more attention to her food than what she was saying. “That’ll spare you the trip. I’m sure you can cover the ground much faster after—”

  “No,” Sienna said, and Sophie knew she had her. “I’ve got nothing going on right now, and … I want to know more about this light display of yours. It definitely sounds meta in origin.” She nodded, resolute. “Okay. I’ll go on the drive, I guess. When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Early.” Sophie concealed her smile expertly, through incredibly long practice. As though this were not the outcome she’d been angling toward all along.

  She’d have a call to make tonight to prepare things for her guest.

  7.

  Reed

  My watch read 11:55 AM, and I was still blinking a little sand out of my eyes. I’d settled my head back on my chair in my office, rage still pumping blood through my veins at a vastly accelerated rate.

  My door thumped open without a knock, and I looked up. Angel and Miranda were standing there, Miranda looking more harried by far, but Angel being about as disheveled as you might expect a recently rescued prisoner of a drug cartel to look.

  “Where the hell have you two been?” I asked, then slapped myself down mentally for asking. I knew the answer—downtown Minneapolis. My sleep-addled brain was turning slowly in spite of the adrenaline that was keeping me awake. “Never mind. Sorry.” I sat up in my chair, looked right at Miranda. “Did you see her?”

  Miranda shook her head. Several days chatting with the FBI hadn’t left her the best-groomed I’d ever seen her. “They’re not allowing me access. I’m filing a motion this afternoon, but based on the conversations I had at the jail tonight …” She shook her head. “It doesn’t look good.”

  “Break it down for me,” I said, rising to my feet.

  “She’s being tried by the metahuman court,” Miranda said as Angel and I looked on. I caught a glimpse of Scott, Augustus, Jamal and Friday all listening from just outside my open door, and I didn’t make any move to stop them. “You know how that works.”

  “Big black box,” I said tightly. “Prisoners go in one side—”

  “They don’t come out the other,” Angel said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. Apparently, she lacked a hair tie or a scrunchie of any kind. I thumped a hand on my desk lightly—for me. It rattled, and I heard a crack. “Dammit.”

  “Kinda ironic, huh?” Augustus moved up by the door. “We’ve been feeding people into that machine for years without questioning—”

  “I’ve always questioned,” I said. “Always. But I soothed my conscience by telling myself that the people we sent them were incredibly dangerous.”

  “That’s true,” Friday said. “You remember that one chick that punched a guy’s face in for answering her honestly when she asked if those pants made her ass look fat?” He looked around, eyes wide through the holes in his mask. “That guy could have been any of us!”

  “No, that could have been you,” Jamal said. “The rest of us have manners and decency.”

  “Wait,” Scott said, thinking, “did Sienna do that? Was that one of those memories that got stolen from me?”

  “I thought you got all those back?” I asked. “Never mind. No, that was not Sienna. And the point is—the metahuman justice system sucks.”

  “And we’ve been aiding and abetting it for years,” Augustus said. “Kinda self-serving for us to just notice and complain about it now.”

  “I told you, I’ve noticed for years,” I said, snapping at him. “You think I’ve been turning a blind eye to mostly secret trials, and a prison black site that people just vanish into, that the press never tours—never asks to, near as I can tell, but that’s another story. I’ve been agitating for as long as you’ve known me about any number of civil liberty violations I see everywhere. You think I haven’t paid any attention to this?”

  “I think you’ve been quiet about it,” Augustus said. “I think you’ve been keeping it in your personal discussions if it’s been torturing your soul, because I ain’t heard you say boo about it and we spend a lot of time together, Reed.”

  I tried to think back; it was definitely something I’d discussed with Isabella and Sienna at various points. Hell, I’d had a few arguments with Sienna about it just in the last few months, since she’d gotten back from Scotland, both during our time in Florida and our dreamwalks since. She’d never much engaged on the subject, though, and rather than just rant at her …

  I’d probably kept my mouth shut about it more than the old Reed, the pre-Harmon’s-mind-control and head-of-the-agency Reed, would have.

  Damn.

  “Fine, I haven’t been as much of an activist as I could have been,” I said, just trying to move past Augustus’s complaint. “If you want to call me a hypocrite for not displaying my outrage over this mockery of due process until now, when it’s hitting home—fine. I’m a hypocrite. I don’t give a damn. My sister’s going into that black box, alone, right now, without the benefit of so much as a lawyer. She’s got no advocate, she’s probably by herself and scared—”

  Scott coughed. “We still talking about Sienna? Because I doubt she’s ‘scared’ if she’s being walked into a courtroom. Not after the crap she’s been through. This is probably the least frightening of all her challenges.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right about that,” Miranda said. “I’ve heard rumors about what goes into this segregated justice system. It’s a different arena than a straight-up metahuman fight. The threats here? I haven’t seen the charges, but the death penalty could well be on the table.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “In the Cube, I assume,” Miranda said. “They moved her while I was inside the federal building arguing with—”

  “What do you mean they moved her?” I asked. “Where was she before?”

  “Cube first, then to the federal building for a court hearing with the metahuman magistrate,” Miranda said. “I was trying to get in, but—” She shrugged. “Denied. Anyway, they moved her back to the Cube and—”

  “Nearly had a riot,” Angel said. “There were gunshots and everything. News was covering it like crazy when we were on our way here.”

  “What?” I asked, my mouth having suddenly gone dry. “What do you mean, gunshots?”

  “Someone took a shot at the transport van,” Miranda said. “They almost had a riot out back when they moved her.”

  “And you wait to tell us this until now?” Scott asked, face red. He stepped back from my office door and rummaged on a desk, coming up with the remote for the TV mounted in the corner of the bullpen, clicking it on. One of them must have turned it off after growing tired of the steady drumbeat of the news media ripping Sienna to shreds in their jubilant post-arrest coverage.

  There it was, a headline that made my stomach drop like a hot potato in a sensitive hand: “Near-riot in downtown Minneapolis as protestors demand metahuman criminal Sienna Nealon be brought to justice.”

  “That’s a hell of a loaded chyron,” Jamal said. “They’re presuming her guilt already.”

  “She got caught in a quarry with a rifle that had her fingerprints on it and somewhere around two hundred dead people in her immediate vicinity that could be tied to the weapon,” Angel said. “I’m not sure claiming innocence is going to be easy.”

  “She was saving your life, Angel,” I snapped.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t defense of others that drove it,” Angel said, holding up her hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m just saying that it’s not looking good, however you want to slice it. They’ve got charges. Legit ones, that have a basis in real-life incidents.”

  “Like that time we blew up a logging camp out in Montana while trying to destroy the true evil that was Sam Bennett,” Guy Friday said. “Or when we had to dodge out of LA because Greg threw a small-scale nuke at us as we were walking out of a Mexican restaurant.” He sighed, almost wistfully. “Those were some good burritos.”

  “You should try mine,” Angel said.

  Guy Friday waved her off. “I only eat Mexican food from actual Mexicans.”

  Angel blinked her eyes in surprise. “What … do you think I am?”

  “You’re Italian,” Friday said. “Obviously.”

  “No, I’m from Texas,” Angel said, “but my grandmother is from—”

  “I’m sure I remember you being from Italy,” Friday said.

  “That’s … Isabella is from Italy,” I said. “My girlfriend.”

  “No, no,” Friday said, waving me off. “Your girlfriend is from Mexico. I could never forget a south of the border hottie like that.”

  “I thought your brain got bigger the smaller you were,” Jamal said, looking at Friday. He was not swole at the moment. “I guess there’s a maximum.”

  “Hey, everyone,” a chipper Irish voice called from across the room as Eilish dragged in, strawberry blond hair swaying somewhat limply over her shoulders, free and loose over her navy suit. “I thought we were taking a late start today, but here you all are … having a party without me. Which is sad, because I’m Irish, and can drink all of you under the table. Which … surely you knew. Probably why you didn’t invite me—”

  “Did you not get the message?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest. I had to interrupt her ramble before it got too out of control.

  “What message?” Eilish asked, putting her bag down on her desk and looking at us with her bright green eyes. “Was there an all-call?” She opened her purse, removed her cell phone. “I didn’t get a call. Nobody calls me.”

  “Uhhhh,” Augustus said as I looked at him. “I thought Jamal was calling the Irish girl.”

  Jamal frowned. “I called Kat and Veronika and Greg. Who’d you call?”

  “Taneshia,” Augustus said. “Chase. Gravity. And—”

  “And not me, apparently,” Eilish said, looking a little put out. “Nice to be such an integral part of the team that you’re forgotten immediately when everyone else is assembling madly. That’s all right. I get it. I’m still being hazed, after all these months. It’s a forever thing. You make fun of the accent, you don’t call me in times of trouble … yet every day here that’s not winter is still better than that shit time I spent in Scotland. Or London. Or—” She paused, apparently getting a load of our expressions. “What?”

  “What are you doing here, if you didn’t the call?” Augustus asked. “Like you said, it’s a late day.”

  “Still sort of on Ireland times,” she said. “I mean, there’s a limit to how late in the day I can sleep without feeling utterly shiftless, and—well, we still had the paperwork to clear from that Chicago case.” She pointed to her desk. “But seriously … it looks like a wake in here, and not even a proper Irish one with lots of whisky. What’s happened?”

  I pointed at the TV screen. “They got her.” I looked at the commentator, smirking on the screen. The name across the bottom of the screen read Russ Bilson, and he was smiling smugly as he spoke to the anchor. The TV was muted, but I could read the closed captioning text.

  It was not flattering.

  Eilish turned, looked, and her hands whipped up to cover her mouth. “Oh, shite.”

  “That’s the polite way of putting it,” Augustus said.

  “What are we going to do?” Eilish asked.

  “Apparently Reed wants to bust her out,” Jamal said.

  “Some of us are trying to talk him out of it,” Scott said.

  “She chose this, Reed,” Angel said, apparently swinging back around to that ‘talk me out of it’ thing. “You talked to her. She’s tired of running. You can’t just—”

  “Look what’s happening here!” I finally blew. “She’s been shot at once. Miranda can’t even talk to her! She’s disappearing into the guts of a system designed to digest her permanently! She could live to five thousand years old—”

  “Not the way she’s going,” Guy Friday muttered.

  “—and they may just sit on her that entire time,” I went on.

  “I’m not convinced the US is going to stand for five thousand more years,” Augustus muttered. “No democratic system has lasted longer than—”

  “She’s killed people in self-defense,” I swung around on Augustus hotly. “Every single person she’s charged with killing—I guarantee—is going to be one that died because they were trying to do immediate harm to others. They’re mercenaries, supervillains—she doesn’t kill for the fun of it, like some garden variety psychopath—”

  “Nadine Griffin,” Scott said, softly.

  “Even the government would have a hard time proving Sienna did that,” Miranda said.

  “President Harmon,” Jamal said, and I rounded on him, and he surrendered immediately. “I’m not saying she wasn’t justified, or that she even intended to, but—you know they’re going to try and pin that on her, and they’ve got cause, because come on—he was in her head up until that Scottish hoecake sucked him out.”

  “There were so many funny and arousing parts of that sentence,” Friday said, guffawing.

  “Look what’s happening to Sienna right now,” I said, striding past all of them to point up at the television. I used the wind to elevate me a step so I could better reach it. Smug Russ Bilson was still talking to the interviewer in studio, the closed caption text right below him: —Nealon has been a dangerous criminal all along, and to see her taken off the streets is nothing but a win for the Gondry administration, especially at a time when there are foreign policy concerns abroad—

  “Yeah, he’s really sweeping the crowd against her there,” Augustus said.

  “You know what’s happening here,” I said. “Every time they get on, they bang the same drum: ‘She’s a threat to your very way of life, she destroys everything, she blew up LA’—”

  “Speaking as someone who was at ground zero, that LA explosion thing was intense,” Friday said. “The heat, man. You could have roasted marshmallows just standing there. I mean, sure, they might cause your eyebrows to fall out later if you ate ’em, but you could have s’mores in record time with that nuke heat—”

  “She did not nuke LA,” I said, losing it. “She did not kill two hundred or two thousand people or murder Harmon or do any of these things—for shits and giggles!” I pointed at the screen. “She’s not a murderer! She kills to protect people from threats, and we used to understand that self-defense and the defense of others was a virtue, not some—some—self-serving bullshit vice—”

  “I think the argument is more … she goes to violence right out of the gate,” Scott said, still quiet. “That it’s her first response. That she doesn’t look for other, cleaner ways, morally speaking. She’s a hammer … meta problems are nails—”

  “Whose side are you on, Scott?” I asked, feeling the stab of betrayal.

  “Hers,” Scott said, so fast he might have used meta speed to say it. “Without reservation. I’m just saying what we’ve all thought at various points in time. That Sienna is quick on the trigger.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Friday said. “And a damned fine shot, too. Makes her uncle proud, and I’m not even a gun guy.”

  “Everything she does, we know why she does it,” Scott said, taking a step closer to me. “But the rest of the world … civilization … they’re not conditioned to deal with this level of violence. Not in the first world, anyway. It’s shocking and horrifying and not … not what we want to see in our streets.”

  “It happens in some of our streets all the time,” Augustus said dryly, “even in the so-called first world.”

  “Society isn’t what it was when metas walked the world as gods,” Scott said. “We’ve advanced. We’ve made progress. Violence is at a low ebb, worldwide, and most places in our country you don’t see heinous murders happen right on the street. Sienna walks the darker side. She deals with people, like we do, who have power beyond that of normal folks, and in most cases, a lot more willingness to use it. People with a darker side than most of us want to acknowledge exists in humans. Or metas, I guess.”

 

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