Authors: Robert J. Crane
“Who was the last person that had power like you and no connection to humanity?” Zollers asked, a little more coy than he needed to be.
I blinked a few times. “Sovereign? You think Sovereign became who he is because he—what, didn’t have any friends?”
“Sovereign was so withdrawn from humanity, so detached,” he said, “that he might as well have been a different species. He didn’t view himself as one of us, not really. Not meta or human. He was ‘a man apart’ by his own admission. He wanted to create a better world for us, like a benevolent deity smiling down on his subjects.”
“Being one of the people he wanted to create that world for,” I said, staring at the wreckage of the house, with the roof cracked in three specific segments, “I remember all too well what his benevolence felt like. But that wasn’t just from being a recluse for a while. I mean, he had other issues.”
“He had limitless power and no accountability from normal people, people he could he listen to, whose dreams he could hear, whose fears he could taste,” Zollers said, looking at me with those warm eyes. “He wanted to change the world, but the way he wanted to do it wasn’t by leading; it was by crushing all opposition. He lost touch with humanity, especially the humanity of those who he perceived as standing in his way. He wanted to kill every single guardian of the old order because he didn’t see them as people anymore.” He straightened up and brushed the dust off his shirt, making a small cloud in the air between us. “When you withdraw from humanity, you cut yourself off from your own in some way, and when you’ve got amazing power coupled with it, suddenly you’re convinced you’re the impartial observer with all the answers, and why can’t you just fix the problems? It’s in your hands, after all.”
“Sounds like a long road from there to here,” I said, looking away from him.
“Because you never take aim at a problem and go forth to solve it without worrying about the consequences to yourself?” I turned around and caught him smiling, though faintly now. “It’s always closer than you think.”
“Uh, ma’am?” A cop’s voice interrupted my opportunity to contest Zollers’s assessment, and I turned to see a young guy in full uniform with a military style haircut waiting tentatively, like he was afraid I’d turn him into a toad or something.
“Yes?” I asked, probably a little higher than my normal conversational tone. It’s like when you’re in an argument with someone and you try to pretend you’re not. I probably wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all the young cop in front of me.
“We’ve got something over here you should see,” the cop said, and I followed him around the house as Zollers came with me, looking a little mysterious. We passed a crushed-in corner of old white paneling that probably hadn’t been replaced since the turn of last century judging by the peeling paint, and moved behind the house where part of it was still kindasorta standing. In the back, the floors hadn’t taken as much damage as they had where Clyde Junior had crashed through, so the walls had just fallen in, leaving a room at the back—well, not intact, but with the roof collapsed in and the wreckage still above ground.
No one had started excavating yet, which seemed wise given the structural integrity of the place was suspect at best. I paused at the back wall, folded neatly in half where it had dropped in on the room and listened, hearing something faintly tapping somewhere inside. “What the hell?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” Zollers said, still coy.
“Great,” I said and seized hold of the back wall at the corner. I waited for the young officer and Dr. Zollers to step clear, and then I lifted into the air and ripped it up, tossing it into the middle of the wreckage pile that had once been the Clary household. I revealed what looked like a room that had partially sunk into the ground, the floor collapsing downward and threatening to spill everything into the fallen middle of the house like a black hole had formed to drag everything toward it.
I paused as the pieces I’d just thrown settled and listened again past the raised voice of the cops who were surprised by my little feat of strength. That same tapping came again from just in front of me, and I peered into the cloudy darkness of the collapsed room until I located its origin.
There was a cylindrical thing in the corner that looked kind of like a coffin or a photon torpedo from
Star Trek
, but bigger. It was bulky as hell and it took me a second to realize there was something—no, someone—inside making the noise. “Huh,” I said.
“It’s a sensory deprivation tank,” Dr. Zollers said, answering my question.
“A whut?” the officer asked.
“It’s filled with salt water and insulated against outside noise so that someone can remain inside, afloat with nothing but their thoughts,” Zollers said. “They were quite popular for a while.”
“Lemme get this straight,” the cop said, “you’re saying there’s someone in there right now. Someone locked up in there with—like a bunch of salt water.”
“Yep,” I said, smiling for the first time since this whole damned raid had begun. I grabbed the tank by its end and hauled it out of the wreckage of the Clary house as the room shifted behind it, the roof collapsing in as I removed one of its supports. Once the tank was out in the light of day, I reached for the handle and tugged on it. No dice.
I went around to the other side and ran a flaming finger down the two hinges, melting them to slag. Then I settled myself and yanked hard, tossing the metal top into the air behind me. It went flying off and dragged three flat-paneled computer monitors with it. They made a hell of a racket as they came to their landing.
“Whhhhaaaaat—” the officer said as I crept up on the tank, looking inside.
And there she was. Pale as her mug shot, eyes closed against the harsh light of day, hands up and trying to protect her face from that which was bound to assail her. She adjusted a little, enough to blink them open and see me, and I got the feeling she’d known I was the one pulling on her tank by the lack of reaction when she saw me.
“Hello, Cassidy,” I said, probably just about leering at the small, thin stick figure in the tank. “I think it’s time we had a meeting of the minds.”
It took all my restraint not to bust Cassidy’s face into a messy, bloody pulp right there in the Nebraska dirt, or to just pop her like a zit right there in the salt water solution that smelled like there might have been a little pee in it. I dragged her out of the tank screaming and flailing her pale, scrawny limbs. She was wearing something like a one-piece bathing suit, and I hauled her up as she writhed.
“Holy mercy—” the cop nearest me said.
“I’ll take it from here,” I said and caught Dr. Zollers’s eyes before twisting my grip on Cassidy even tighter and lifting her straight up into the air with me as I took off.
She screamed and screamed and screamed as I carried her higher and higher, trying to writhe out of my grasp as though she had a death wish. “You might want to simmer down,” I told her helpfully as I got her up to about five thousand feet, “because I’m not sure you can survive a fall from this height, and my grip’s not exactly infallible, knucklehead, especially after the shit your friends just pulled.”
She stopped squirming and stiffened up. She didn’t say anything, just hung there in her swimsuit onesie. I suspected she’d already run the percentages in her head and knew she wouldn’t survive impact if she broke loose. I also didn’t fancy her chances of survival if she expected me to catch her after tearing her way out of her swimsuit, because I’d have to grab her wet, slippery skin with my bare hands and get her to the ground before my powers caused me to absorb her soul.
I’d just maneuvered Ms. Super Smartypants into a no-win scenario, and she damned well knew it.
I flew her out to a freshly mowed field with nothing around for miles in any direction and swooped down, dropping her squarely in the middle of an exposed patch of tilled earth. The air was already turning cold around us, and when I dropped her I knew it was going to sting a little. I was cool with that, and she obliged me with a cry as she landed. Not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
I doubled around and came flying back for effect, looming over her as she tried to get to her feet. “How fast can you run, Cassidy?” I asked, letting my mood cloud my face darkly.
She plopped back down on her skinny ass, black dirt all over her wet legs. “Not fast enough,” she said with a sullen scowl of her own. It looked like the mug shot all over again.
“Your friends left you behind,” I said, playing a hunch. “Did your boyfriend even tell you he was going to collapse the house?” Her sullen face wavered, and I knew in that moment that Zollers had the measure of her. All the brains in the world, not enough emotional maturity to handle a rebuke from a stranger. She pulled her knees close and wrapped her arms around them, still dripping beads of water onto the dirt. “He left you, did you know that? Ran off with the entire Clary family without even a word of warning.”
She pulled her knees tighter to her chest, like she could put a wall between us. I felt a cool satisfaction roll through as my jab hit home. Her lower lip quivered as she tried to hold it together. This was the girl who’d tried to get the inmates in my prison to rise up and murder me, the person who’d been feeding my secrets, my sadnesses, my personal emotional tragedies to the press for months in order to prey on my insecurities.
“He abandoned you,” I said, easing closer to her. I was careful not to get too close, not because I feared for anything she could do to me, but because if she took a swipe at me I’d probably break her hand on general principle. “He left you behind the moment things got tough.”
“You’re lying,” she said, shaking slightly. “We didn’t even know you were coming.”
“Oh ho ho,” I laughed. “He didn’t even have to pick between you and saving his own skin; Clyde Junior shot at me for five minutes before I made it in the door.” My jaw tightened as I remembered the blood flooding out from between Scott’s fingers. “He left you behind because he didn’t want to take you with him. Ma busted the house’s supports out while Junior distracted us, and Eric waited out back until she told him to drop the place around our ears with a custom-made earthquake.” I moved to look her right in the eyes as she turned her head to avoid me. “Face it. He left you behind … because he wanted to.”
She shook her head back and forth in a tight, almost muscle-spasm driven way. Her eyes were fixed open and red, the tears already starting to stream. I blinked and looked at her, my surprise escaping before I could restrain it. “Is that … are you … crying? There’s no crying in super villainy.”
That got her to look right at me with those puffy eyes. Her lip quivered. “I’m not the villain. You are, and you don’t even realize it.”
“I’m the villain?” I pulled back my hand and put it on my chest like I was offended. “If I was the villain, Cassidy, I would have ripped the thoughts I needed out of your swelled head and left your carcass in the middle of this field for the crows to have a meal that fit their diet plan.” I lurched toward her and she cowered away.
“You’re the strong,” she said, voice oozing contempt, “I’m the weak. You prey on the weak, it’s what you do.”
“I enforce the law,” I said, feeling a little burn inside. “You and your boyfriend tried to rob the biggest bank in the country, in case you forgot, and then Simmons crashed a commuter train full of people in a vain attempt to escape the consequences of that act. He put the lives of innocent people at risk to save himself from jail. You’re Bonnie and Clyde, if you’re self-aware enough to recognize that makes you nothing more than petty, two-bit losers and not Hollywood-glamorized martyrs to the cause.”
“I know what I am,” she said, and turned her head away like she was denying me a kiss or something, “and I know who you are, and I’m not telling you anything.”
“I never needed you to,” I said, “and you know that.” I stood up and loomed over her pitiful frame as she quaked in my shadow.
“You’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you?” Her voice shook a little, but she refused to look at me.
“More than you know,” I said.
“You’re a psychopath,” she whispered. “You like to hurt people. You like to kill people.”
“I’m neither going to hurt you nor kill you, Cassidy,” I said, and grabbed her by her onesie as we both lifted off into the air. She let out a squawk of surprise as we surged back up to five thousand feet and I hit a cruising pace that was only a couple hundred miles per hour, well below what I was capable of. I didn’t want to strain her swimsuit, after all. If I splattered her all over the countryside, it wouldn’t achieve anything but fill the air with her screams for a few seconds before she came to an abrupt stop at the bottom.
“What the hell are you doing?” she cried out.
“I’m taking you to jail,” I said as the wind whipped past my face and I headed north and east, toward the darkening sky. “Where you’ll get to spend the rest of your life thinking about what you’ve done.”
“You—you were supposed to take my memories!” she shouted. “You were going to—”
“You don’t know anything,” I said, firmly convinced I was right. “I don’t need to read your mind to know that your friends betrayed you and didn’t even give you a clue about where they were going.”
Even in the looming haze, I could see her redden in fury. “I know more than you think I do.”
“Twice as much, I’m sure. Maybe even three times as much, but unfortunately for you, thrice zero is still zero.”
I flew on into the approaching night slowly, and the whole way back to Minnesota I got the satisfaction of watching Cassidy burn in silence—and I didn’t even have to use Gavrikov to do it.
Ma
The house was outside Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the state line from Omaha, but it might as well have been across the world for Ma’s purposes. They’d skirted the edge of civilization, watching the skies all the while, worrying that Sienna Nealon might coming swooping down from above at any moment. Well, Junior, Denise and Simmons had worried about it, anyway. She hadn’t so much as cast a look in concern.