“Son of a bitch,” Ray muttered as he ran at full speed toward the main office, dodging surprised workers and alarming more than a few onlookers.
He skidded to a stop at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the ground floor, reoriented himself, and took the steps two at a time. The summons had been urgent, though Deakins hadn't explained why. Being called to the office by an order to drop everything was unusual, however, and recent history had led Ray to believe that bad news was far more likely at the OSA than it was elsewhere.
Every agent was gathered in the main office, a crowd centered on Kit, who stood on a chair to be more easily seen and heard. Ray saw faces that shouldn't have been there, which made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Being called in on your day off was unusual to the extreme when you were a field agent. The stress of the job wore on you, and it was more efficient to staff more agents than it was to lose them through burnout.
Ray joined the crowd along with a few other stragglers from the employee quarters below. When the trickle of new arrivals ceased, Kit nodded to the group and cleared her throat.
“As you know, Kevin Gray was out of the country,” she began. A low murmur swept through the assembled agents at her use of the past tense. Kit raised a hand and the room fell silent.
“Though Gray was out on bail, his employer managed to work out an agreement with the court to allow him out of the country for a scheduled business trip to Canada. If you've read the file, you know this man is almost certainly being targeted by James Shane for his alleged assault on Shane's sister. What you may not know is that Gray's employer, Quinn Dynamics, is a small but critical contractor with the DSA.”
Fuck
, Ray thought. Going after someone important enough to the Department of Superhuman Affairs that he was allowed out of the country while on bail meant politics were going to come into play.
Kit gave them all time to process this, though it appeared many weren't as quick on the draw as Ray had been.
“Let me be crystal clear,” Kit said, her voice calm but forceful. “You're thinking we're about to stick our hands in a hornet's nest. You're right. But that will
not
stop us from doing our job. We will protect Kevin Gray because it's our job, and by protecting him we'll be making sure he gets his day in court.” She hesitated, then added, “And what's coming to him, if he's guilty.”
She took a deep breath. “You heard me say Gray
was
out of the country. That is no longer the case. Apparently someone at Quinn Dynamics thought to warn him about the situation with James Shane, though they didn't have any names to use. Whatever the case may be, Gray spooked and finished his trip early. His plane lands in four hours.”
A round of swearing followed this news, no small part of it from Ray.
“We were down to the wire with two more days to set this up,” someone griped loudly. “How the hell are we going to manage in four hours?”
Kit put up her hand again. “Good question. The answer isn't what you want to hear, but it's what we have. Shane will almost definitely find out about this; being able to move in and out of nearly anywhere means he has access to information that would normally be be out of reach. The advantage we have is that he may not know Gray is coming home early. Shane's file indicates he's very intelligent and his encounter with Ray and Dan shows he's both tactical and careful in his approach.”
Ray heard it in her voice, and idly wondered if anyone else had studied the small woman enough to notice it. That tone of pent-up tension, the vocal equivalent of the other shoe waiting to drop.
“We have two choices,” she continued. “Assuming James Shane is watching us, which we have to do, then he'll know something is up if we mobilize. If we don't send out teams to protect Kevin Gray on the chance it won't draw Shane's attention to the man, then we risk losing Gray without a fighting chance to keep him alive.”
“I know where this is going,” Ray muttered to himself. A tall, dark-haired woman next to him glanced his way with a curious expression. Ray shook his head.
“We're putting everything we've got into the field,” Kit said, just as Ray expected. “I'm not saying we'll use Gray as bait, but our best chance of taking out Shane is by having as many boots on the ground as possible.”
“I'm sorry,” the tall woman said, surprising Ray, “but isn't this overkill just to catch one Next?”
Kit folded her arms beneath her breasts. “I can answer that two ways. Philosophically, I don't think the time and effort involved is too much to save one life. Practically, the word from Secretary Robinson is that teleporters are about to be reclassified by Next Oversight as national security threats.”
Ray's mouth went dry, and the mood in the room instantly changed into the startled-deer caution of cornered prey. The McDonnell act weighed in at more than a thousand pages, so full of loopholes and provisos that no one knew every in and out. One section was famous—or infamous, depending on your outlook—in its treatment of Next with the threat classification. While the Constitution still technically applied to those poor souls, it was common knowledge those Next usually vanished.
They weren't just catching James Shane. They were consigning him to God only knew what kind of endless confinement, away from lawyers or any sort of help.
Or worse.
Ray shivered.
The underground garage located in the facility proper had almost nothing in common with its much smaller sibling above ground. Both held vehicles, but where the latter would be considered large by most standards, the former was cavernous.
Assembling the small army they were sending after James Shane had taken time. The facility itself was nearly a mile and a half across at its widest point, after all. Men and women from Research and Development and Fabrication and Production had been ferrying gear to the garage—the team's makeshift staging ground—almost nonstop since Kit had ended the meeting in the main office.
A fleet of custom, armored vehicles waited before Ray, several still being outfitted with special equipment. He had arrived early and managed to avoid the line for the quartermaster, who was doling out protective equipment and weapons. Ray was the only person in his field of vision not wearing a vest and carrying a small arsenal. Instead he wore only his usual pulse weapon, with an added backup and a pocketful of the newer pulse tags.
None of the field agents mulling around gave his lack of weaponry a second glance. His abilities were well-known, and they knew if he had to use his disintegration in a fight, there was a good chance he'd end up turning his gear to dust.
That was the reason he gave, and it was true enough. The deeper reasoning, known only to a handful of people, had two points. One was that the more restricted Ray's clothing was, the harder a time he had utilizing his powers. It was an odd weakness, if you wanted to call it that, but all too real. When Ray's powers were active, the sensitivity of his skin increased tremendously. Wearing even his suit felt like being squeezed. The one time he had worn a tactical vest when trying to use his powers, it had been a struggle to breathe under the assault on his senses, as if a giant were trying to crush his chest.
The other point, the one he hadn't told anyone, was that carrying pulse weapons was risky for him. That's why he had accepted no pulse grenades and carried none of the special restraints containing pulse technology. In a moment of curiosity he had once vaporized a fully-charged pulse grenade just to see what would happen to the electromagnetic energy waiting to become an EMP inside.
When the grenade flashed into a handful of metal dust, it went off. The pulse hit him hard, and he felt the energy inside him waver and nearly escape. It had been a sobering moment, the sensation distantly familiar. The only other time he had felt like that was right before Fairmont.
The room in front of him was filled with people armed to the teeth with the things, people who would be driving vehicles with even more pulse weapons integrated into them. To say Ray felt tense was an understatement on the order of calling the sun a bit of a fire.
A small group of people received their gear and made a beeline for Ray. Given his ability to throw powers out of whack, he had been relegated to a support role. He would be kept near the outside of the convoy, held in reserve until and unless his talents were needed. As a junior agent, he had just enough rank to allow him the privilege of riding herd on the trainees. Again.
He didn't recall the names of three of the people in the group, but the fourth was Graysen Ross, the girl he had spoken to the last time he had been saddled with the newbies.
“Hey, Agent Cassidy,” Graysen said as the group stopped.
“Hey, yourself,” Ray said in greeting. “You know your assignments?”
“We're backup,” one of the others said, a man in his late teens or early twenties. “Oh, and we're supposed to listen to the radio.”
Ray let his gaze linger on the young man for a moment, trying to give the sort of stern glance his own father had been so expert in. “You're absolute last line of defense backup,” Ray clarified. “You're not to leave our vehicle unless explicitly ordered to. The
only
way you even think about fighting is if you're attacked.”
Graysen's eyebrows shot up. “What if someone is attacked right outside our door?”
“You hope their training—which they have completed, unlike any of you—does its job and keeps them safe,” Ray answered flatly. He met the eyes of each of them in turn, looking for any sign of challenge. “If you have a problem with that, you're staying here. End of discussion. Any takers?”
The four trainees all shook their heads, as he expected. They had been selected by the lead instructor at the in-house academy as the most level-headed and trustworthy, a fact marred slightly by the fact the same instructor had admitted these four were the only ones out of his class he trusted to actually go into the field.
“As for the radio,” Ray said, moving on, “your job is to take one channel each. We're going to have a lot of analysts feeding us information on this trip, and you're the backups for that, too. You'll be listening and getting text files on your tablets just in case we lose communication with Operations.”
Not that it was likely for communications to fail, though in fairness Next powers had ways of surprising you with depressing regularity. Bringing them at all was a concession to the need to staff the capture of James Shane as well as possible. It really would be a worst-case scenario for the trainees to find themselves in combat, but according to the powers-that-be, such a scenario was worth the risk to bring the man in.
Ray didn't agree, but then he wasn't the one in charge.
“Load up!” came the call a few minutes later, followed by the rustle and clink of armor and guns. The sound of doors slamming on two dozen vehicles faded into the roar of engines, and they were off.
Luckily, they didn't have to travel through the heart of the city to reach Kevin Gray. The airport had been notified and ordered to keep the passengers on the plane until Kit and her team arrived. Rather than risk exposing the man in the crowded airport proper, her people would take him directly from the tarmac.
The drive was relatively short down the Watterson Expressway after winding onto the main roads from the edge of the metro area. Kit was a bundle of nerves as she rode in the passenger seat of her SUV, the feeling that someone was watching her as strong as she'd ever experienced.
Before developing powers she would have written that sensation off. Now, it was harder to do. Did you automatically assume paranoia, or did you entertain the possibility that you were picking up on something real?
The consensus was strong that James Shane would be watching the OSA since he knew they were protecting his intended victims, so it only stood to reason to believe what her senses were telling her.
Still, it bugged the hell out of her all the way to the airport, in much the same way a younger sibling felt when an older sibling shouted about not touching them while coming as close as possible to doing so. Or so Kit imagined; she had only seen that on television and in movies. Being an only child had some advantages.
Their caravan rolled through a service entrance and onto the tarmac minutes later, the vehicles spreading out around the rolling stairs leading up to the entrance of the plane. She listened over her earpiece as Archer ordered EMP generators brought online and put in ready position. Six agents, including one named Erica Bruno who could see about two seconds into her probable futures, ascended the stairs.
Thirty seconds later they exited the plane, huddled tightly around a man with a suit jacket thrown over his head and shoulders. There was no room between them, as planned, giving James Shane no ability to teleport himself directly to Kevin Gray. He would have to go through an agent. The tactic made for an awkward descent, eating up more seconds than Kit was comfortable with.
Her right hand was clenched on the door handle, the left on the butt of her pulse gun. She kept her perception of time pushed to its absolute limit, in case she had to react quickly. It made everything move at roughly the speed of tree sap rolling across a flat surface, but Kit didn't care.
Rather than scan the area as she would have done with most other threats, she kept her sights on Agent Bruno. If anything was coming, Bruno's reaction would give Kit warning.
It might even be enough.
Fortunately, the need didn't arise. Once the group reached the ground they hustled Gray into a waiting vehicle, an agent on either side of him as they squeezed into the back seat.
Next came the really dangerous part.
“We're ready,” Kit said across the radio. “Take the alternate route.”
The fleet of dark vehicles moved in near-unison, driving back to the service entrance but heading south instead of north, which was the direction they had come from. The precaution was necessary in case Shane had planned something along the route he had no doubt watched them take to get to the airport. It was especially risky for the fact that the route skirted the edge of the city, where there were more civilians, and because it would take longer.
The miles passed without incident, one after another, and the optimistic part of Kit untouched by the cynicism of the world found a small flicker of hope that they would get Kevin Gray to safety. Those dim flames grew stronger and more steady as the convoy looped around two one-way streets and turned onto the road that would take them from the city, almost all the way to the facility.
The convoy was at the fuzzy edge between urban and suburban, the last few commercial buildings about to give way to middle-class sprawl, when one of their transports slammed on its brakes. Kit had just enough time to realize it was the truck Agent Bruno rode in before a motorcycle appeared in a flash of light, rolling toward the convoy without a rider.
Two important facts were immediately obvious to Kit. The bike was strapped with several large plastic containers, the kind you put gasoline in.
Also, it was on fire.
There was no time for reaction as the motorcycle sped toward them, carried forward by its own momentum. It wobbled but held true, slamming into an SUV in a massive burst of flame. The occupants had already thrown their doors open wide, diving clear. One of them wasn't quite fast enough, horror taking root in Kit as droplets of liquid flame sprayed across the agent's coat.
Chaos erupted, doors flying open in every direction. A sea of agents moved like a colony organism, half toward the SUV holding Kevin Gray, the rest moving to assist the injured agent.
Kit should have called out over their earpieces, reining in reactions and getting the operation moving. It was the smart play, the one least likely to fail.
Instead, she joined the crowd. She rounded the front of her vehicle just in time to see one of the more bizarre sights of her career, and that was saying something.
Two agents were already on the ground clutching their heads, and it wasn't until she saw the small flash of light and a third agent fell that she understood. James Shane was somewhere nearby, watching them, and throwing baseballs as hard as he could. Kit's overclocked mind had the time to appreciate the cleverness of the move.
Shane had no need to aim. All he had to do was see his target and throw, teleporting the ball at the end of his pitch. While the man's ability allowed him to transport things across space by touching them, the fundamental physics of the object didn't change. Throw the ball at sixty miles an hour on one end, and it would appear at the other moving at the same speed.
Kit dashed forward, keying the general channel. “Don't stand still!” she barked. “He'll have a harder time hitting moving targets.”
Most of them obeyed instantly, dodging about in an effort to avoid being hit. The people helping the injured agent had a harder time of it, and sure enough one of them took a fastball to the base of her neck a few seconds later. Anger flared in Kit, and a rare burst of helplessness. She would throw herself at a Black Band without hesitation, but this was something she had no capacity to fight.
The mass of bodies surrounding Gray's SUV moved in and out of a rough circle, which to Kit's eyes almost looked like a dance. Several baseballs materialized among them—Shane must have a bucket of the things—but only one agent was hit, and that only a graze.
Then, possibly out of frustration, Shane changed his tactics. A hail of baseballs began slamming into the crowd, one after another. Agents brought their arms up to protect their faces, some stumbling. Kit, who was moving around the outside of the fleet, trying to split her attention between keeping an eye on her people and watching for Shane, realized what was about to happen a split second before it did.
“Down!” she screamed, making a running leap onto the hood of a truck and launching herself in an arc toward Gray's vehicle. She didn't bother with her radio; Archer was trying to establish order over it at any rate, and she would have just added to the confusion by cutting in.
As she sailed through the air, Shane delivered his next blow; rocks. The first and simplest of human weapons, aided only by gravity. Flashes filled the sky as hundreds of them fell upon the gathered agents, some as small as gravel and others the size of fists. Kit cursed as several of the latter slammed into her shoulders and head as she completed her jump, sliding slightly as she landed on the roof of the SUV.
Buckets fell along with the rocks, obviously having held the weapons and transported high into the air with them. Distract with the baseballs, then hit from above. The dossier had said Shane was smart, and Kit had a grim respect for his creativity. All around her agents groaned and swore, several more knocked unconscious and a great many bleeding from head wounds. Kit barely felt the places she had been hit. Her skin could stop bullets, after all.
But she could feel every one of the injuries suffered by her people, and she was
pissed
.
“What are my orders?” Ray asked over the radio. “Should I start disrupting the area?”
“No,” Kit said into her mic as she scanned the surrounding area. Small chance she would see Shane. The man could move freely in an instant. No reason for him to stay in one place for very long. “You'll just short out my powers, and it won't stop him from teleporting stuff at us. Just give me...”
In a single, flowing movement, Kit dipped her hand to the roof of the SUV and snatched a rock. She threw it in the same motion, sending an extra flash of energy into her strength and coordination. The throw was unexpected enough to catch Shane off guard, though the man managed to turn slightly from his hiding place between two bushes. Rather than stun him with a direct shot to the sternum, the stone hit him in the ribs.
He toppled, but the flash of light as he fell from view was all the warning Kit needed. She leaped backward, hard, doing her best to clear the agents below. Shane slammed down onto the SUV half a second later, cursing as he realized Kit had anticipated his attack. She hit the ground, rolling backward and grabbing a baseball.
The ball sailed through empty air. On pure instinct Kit threw herself sideways and spun. Shane's foot lashed out, barely missing her. Damn teleporters had a thing about surprising people from behind.
She fired with her pulse gun without raising it first. A hip shot was the only way not to give the man warning. Shane vanished before his kick was finished, but didn't immediately reappear. The entire fight so far had taken less than a minute, and none of the other agents had been able to keep up. Kit was running faster than normal, and unless she missed her guess, James Shane had something of an improved perception of time himself. His movements had been too coordinated and controlled for anything else.
Luckily, he only seemed to perceive time more slowly. Unlike Kit, he didn't move any faster, but was simply better able to use what he had.
Agents began to rise, others moving toward the SUV. In the respite, Kit recognized several things she had ignored during her mad dash. Several agents had fired pulse weapons, though the low whine of the guns had been distorted and slowed to her ears. It had been background noise, something her mind had filed away as unimportant, and that fact scared the hell out of her.
If Kit was one thing, it was observant. Especially in a fight. That she hadn't noticed—or at least cared about—EMP pulses possibly knocking her powers askew during this kind of danger, what else had she missed?
Ten seconds, then thirty, then a minute passed with no further incident. Shane seemed to have given it up as a bad job. The slight change in air pressure was her only warning, a lucky break that Shane appeared close enough to her to allow her to feel it.
She spun, dropping as low as she could to avoid his grasp. He began to tip, off balance from her surprise evasion. Kit was faced with only one option as the tall man began to fall toward her. She was crouched, and no matter how strong her muscles were, she couldn't avoid hitting him.
So she jumped, spearing James Shane across the hips with a shoulder tackle.
He was light enough that Kit took him completely off his feet. They sailed through the air together, her arms locked around his middle with vice-like strength. Her neck was pressed against his waist, affording a clear view of the ground approaching. There was a flash of light.
Then she was somewhere else. Somewhere cold, frigid enough to elicit a gasp from her, at which point she discovered the air was very thin.
It took her mind a moment to reorient.
She looked down, and many thousands of feet below, she saw Louisville spread out across the land. In her shock, her arms loosened. It wasn't much, but apparently just enough for Shane to vanish again, this time without her.
Kit fell.