The Empowered, page 100
“That was quick,” I said. “Damn fast, in fact.”
Keisha frowned. “I did nothing. Not yet.”
“You sure?”
She shot me a glare. “Yes, Mat, I’m sure.”
“Was there any power to the door just then?” Alex asked her.
“Not that I could sense. Maybe I missed it.”
Maybe, but I wondered.
“Might as well figure out what’s up ahead,” I said, and stepped toward the open hatchway.
“How about I go first,” Alex said behind me.
“Too late,” I whispered back over my shoulder. “My turn to take point.”
“You always take point, bitch,” Keisha groused.
That made me smile. I held up my flashlight and shone it into the darkness beyond, revealing an enormous room. Metal flashed in the light. There was a wall maybe thirty yards away, with a hatch directly opposite. Five yards to the right was another. On the left-hand wall was a big floor-to-ceiling mirror.
“Weird,” I muttered.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“I need a better look,” I said, and stepped through the hatchway.
Blinding white light flooded the room. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Keisha swore behind me.
The entrance hatch clanged shut. I whirled around. There was another clang, much closer. My fingers brushed metal.
“Just relax, Mat” a voice said over an intercom.
I blinked, trying to see in the blinding light.
“Who are you?” I demanded. I had to stall them. The room was coming into focus. The walls looked like reinforced concrete. The mirror showed me standing there in front of the now closed hatch, fists balled. That had to be a two-way mirror. I moved away from the hatch. Keisha would disintegrate it any moment now, and I didn’t want to catch any shrapnel.
I reached the middle of the room, turned to watch the hatch disintegrate.
Nothing. I waited. Still nothing.
“Keisha will not be removing the hatch,” the voice said. It was female.
It bugged me; I knew that voice.
“Who are you?” I demanded again.
“A very cautious person.”
I put my hands on my hips. “That’s what you are, not who you are.”
“You’re right, but as a cautious person, I need to make sure all my ducks are in a row.”
I shook my head. “Don’t waste your time or mine. You’ve got me six ways from Sunday. I’m in a sealed room. What did you do to Keisha and Alex?”
“Just helped them relax.”
I clenched my jaw. “You knocked them out.”
“Sedated them with quick acting aerosol spray. Don’t worry, it’s gentle stuff.”
I rocked back on my heels, gestured at the mirror. “I’m guessing you’re watching me from the two-way.”
“What matters is that you answer a few questions before we go any further.”
At least she’d planned on there being a further. Then again, if familiar-sounding-voice had meant for us to be dead, she’d have had us killed. Or her associates. I strongly suspected she wasn’t alone.
My life—a study in surprises in various underground lairs. I don’t know what I’d ever done to deserve that, but everything from Hideaway to the Support dungeon to Loris’s ancient Persian underground city to Titan’s little Canadian getaway, and now this, things always went beneath the Earth. Every. Freaking. Time.
I shrugged. Questions. Fine. Like I knew much.
“Why did you agree to come here and not follow your cohorts into the Dark-Net?”
She cut right to the heart of things.
“I’m not sure I should answer that, when I know nothing about you or who you might work for.”
“You still need to tell me,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we need to know whether we can trust you.”
We. That was important. “Who are you?” I asked.
“You already asked that question.”
“You didn’t really give me an answer,” I pointed out. “Besides, I didn’t mean just you this time—I meant your group.”
“You always were hot-headed. Rushing in before thinking.” The voice sounded smug now.
I tilted my head. I knew that voice; I did. I just couldn’t quite remember who it belonged to. Arrogant sounding and sure of itself. Which described about half the people I’d met in my life since I’d become Empowered.
“Let’s try again. What do you want?” the voice asked.
“To not die.”
“No one wants to die,” the voice replied. “What specifically do you want at this point in your life?”
The blood rushed to my face. I balled my fists. “What kind of question is that? I don’t want anyone to die. I want a place where people like me can live, that’s free, where we don’t have to be afraid of other people trying to hunt us down and murder us. For the world to stop being hit by mega-storms, earthquakes, floods, you name it.”
“You mean everything that happened since you took down the secret power suppression network code named RAMPART.”
“Yeah, that one.” I raised a hand. “Let me save you the trouble of asking. I took it down because it wasn’t suppressing powers so good anymore, just scrambling them.”
The voice was suddenly scornful. “So, you’re an expert on the Gaia force now?”
“No, but I can see, can’t I?” My knuckles whitened, and my face burned.
“Fair enough.”
My shoulders slumped. The voice agreed with me?
“You were in a tough spot. You still are.”
I braced myself for the next questions—they had to be about my mother, Zarathustra and the others. Probably about the Dark-Net, too, and what their plans were.
“Have you been getting sick in the mornings?” The voice asked.
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, so what.”
“Nothing sounds good, right? Your stomach twists and turns at the thought of food.”
I stared at the two-way. The nausea I’d been dealing with. “How do you--?”
The voice cut me off. “Medical scanning tech. The kind that doubles as implant scanning, and scanning for “other” security reasons.”
The voice sounded very familiar now.
“So, what do you think is up with me?” I asked.
Silence. I waited.
“Don’t keep me in suspense. If you have the medscan tech, you know. You have to.”
“You’re pregnant. Nearly six weeks in, according to the medscan.”
The world wobbled around me. “Pregnant? But how?”
Soft laughter that sounded so very familiar. “I’d think even you are familiar with basic biology.”
I felt my face redden. “Funny.” My heart pounded. It made sense. I’d been ignoring the obvious. My sick stomach was actually morning sickness. But a baby?
I hadn’t dared to dream of having a baby. Not since Special Corrections, when I’d been a homesick teenager who thought maybe she’d never get paroled, and would wind up being a lifer.
Now I was pregnant. But now was a terrible time. How could I bring a baby into this world? A world filled with wars, detention centers that were really concentration camps, a world where Gaia was still out of control, and disasters seemed to happen every five minutes.
A baby. I was going to have a baby. If I made it through this.
“Does he know?” The question cut through my mental loop like a monofilament knife through steel.
“No.”
More soft laughter. “They never do.”
I’d been stupid. I hadn’t thought. Hell, I hadn’t even known if I could get pregnant. Many Empowered were sterile. It was something I’d pushed deep down into my subconscious back when I’d been in Special Corrections, because that had been the last place I’d wanted to hope on a long shot.
I closed my eyes. It was a hell of a time for a teenaged dream to come true.
But terrible timing seemed to be one of my strong suits.
“So,” I told the ceiling, giving the two-way another glare. “You just get me here to tell me I’m pregnant? No other reason?”
Silence. I forced myself to take a deep breath. “Just letting me twist in the wind, is that it?” After everything that had happened, especially now, the last thing I needed was backsliding into the anger bordering on rage that had nearly gotten me killed a dozen times over. I was smarter than that now. I had to be. There was a lot riding on me being smart. Staying alive. Getting to the bottom of what was driving Gaia crazy, even with RAMPART down. Helping all those Empowered refugees still in detention centers, and the many thousands now hiding in the Dark-Net with my mother, and tens or even hundreds of thousands still on the run. All the normals caught up in this.
Like my sister, Ava. She couldn’t be dead. She just couldn’t be. And now, if I didn’t miscarry, there would be a baby. A baby.
“Just playing with me, is that it?” I muttered and shook my head.
“No, Mat, I’m not playing with you. I’m deadly serious.”
The voice came from behind me. I turned to look.
A slender Asian woman in a black jumpsuit stood there, arms at her sides, her black hair in a long braid. She wore a utility belt.
I definitely knew her.
Willow Chang.
“You!” I raised my fists, expecting Support men and women in black to come boiling out of hidden doors.
She tilted her head. “Don’t worry, Mat. I’m not here to imprison you.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m surprised you’re here at all,” I groused, but lowered my arms, and flexed my fingers. “Wasn’t Support destroyed?”
Her smile vanished. “Not entirely, despite the Coalition’s best efforts to wipe us out.” Her eyes glistened, but she held my gaze. “The Hero Council had it even worse.”
I forced myself to speak. “How many?” I asked. I didn’t used to give a flying fuck about the Hero Council. In fact, I wouldn’t have shed a tear at it being destroyed. Officially sanctioned Empowered, who called themselves a council, a council of many, formed to protect Normals from Empowered.
Things were different now. I was different now. Zarathustra said thirteen hundred were killed.
“Too many.” She swallowed, blinked, glanced at her hands, then looked back up at me. “Ninety percent at least.”
“I knew it was bad.” My voice trailed off. I didn’t know what else to say.
“You and your group have kept informed.” She wiped her eyes. “Why did you leave Liberation?” She stared at me.
“I never joined,” I said. “I just got roped into going along with it after RAMPART went down.”
She waved her arms. “That’s funny, you and your friends are wearing stolen Hero Council jumpsuits, the latest version, too. You were riding in a hacked semi that was part of a convoy that broke into a detention center, one of a sequence of coordinated breakouts around the world.”
“Is saving Empowered a terrible thing?” I demanded. “Empowered that the Coalition imprisoned in concentration camps, even if they call them something else?”
Willow looked away. “No, but how can we trust you?”
“Trust no one, not completely,” I said.
She blinked, raised her head, and looked me in the eyes. Sadness still lingered in her gaze. The Willow I remembered had been a pain in the ass. She’d trained me to work in Support; always seemed like a trickster, always smiling. She had a sly sense of humor, the kind that liked to set up someone else for a joke. She could move objects, levitate, and was nasty quick on her feet. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been looking for the Imbued group Keisha and I were with, at the old Mossville ghost town in the Columbia River gorge.
“Why are we having this conversation?” I asked.
She sighed. “Always in a hurry, aren’t you?”
“Especially when my friends are apparently unconscious, cut off from me by a sealed hatch.”
“Fair enough. You’re here because we need you, and, frankly, you need us.”
“Us?” I squinted at her. “I knew you couldn’t be alone.” A chill went up my spine.
“Always suspicious,” she said.
“Damn straight.” The faintest whisper sound of a hidden hatch unsealing off to my right. I didn’t turn, but kept my gaze on Willow. “The thing about being paranoid is, I’m never disappointed when things go south.”
“Nice to see some things haven’t changed.” The voice came from the direction of the hatch that had just unsealed. It was male, and cynical. A voice I knew at once.
Winterfield.
I whirled around. There he was, shaved head cocked, steel-blue eyes boring at me like twin lasers. His hard-edged look. Which was pretty much his standard look. Instead of the black suit he used to wear as a Support agent, he wore military camouflage. He had a big pistol holstered on his right hip, and a holstered stunner on his left.
The hidden hatch on the wall behind him was still open, and another figure from my past stepped through it. She was around Winterfield’s age, early to mid-forties. Her blond hair was in a ponytail, and she still wore a black Support jumpsuit. A black eyepatch covered her left eye.
Irene Zhukova.
“We don’t have time for banter,” Zhukova said.
“But time enough to put me through the verbal ringer,” I shot back.
She frowned. “I would have hoped you’d have matured.”
I gave her a level look. “They've declared me dead more than once, so I figure I’m entitled to a little immaturity from time to time.” I narrowed my eyes. “This conversation isn’t going any further until you’ve revived Alex and Keisha. Period.”
She crossed her arms. She wore a stunner and a big knife with a power cell attached vibro-blade.
“We need to talk to you first, before we revive them.”
“Why?” I demanded.
She didn’t answer, instead she crossed the room to the wall at the far end. Waved her wrist. A chime sounded and a section of wall split and retracted back, revealing a conference style room, much like the one she’d briefed me in regularly when I’d been in Support. There was a wall screen, and high-backed chairs around a long table. This one wasn’t mahogany, but made of ultra-tech plastic.
Took me back to when I was first captured by Support, and recovering from being shot in their Portland base, the Dungeon I’d called it.
Hidden bases. Underground facilities. Networks. Someday I hoped to live in the sunlight and not be skulking about.
Most of all, right then, I wanted Alex and Keisha, conscious, and at my side.
But, Zhukova was the original tight-ass and until she had her say, I wasn’t getting anything. I followed Zhukova, Willow and Winterfield walking alongside me.
“Always cloak-and-dagger,” I said to them.
Winterfield shrugged. “Some things never change. This is one of those.”
Especially with Zhukova.
I sat between Winterfield and Willow, facing the wall screen. Zhukova stood at one end of the table and held a little remote. Whenever I’d seen her before, she was always in charge.
I kept quiet. The faster she got through this, the faster I could see Alex and Keisha. I extended my senses into the air again, and found zero organics, nothing to create plant life from. Given how screwed up my power had been, that would have been dicey at best anyway. But, not being able to connect with plants here, made me itchy. Not even having the potential to create airborne spores, not having that little tiny dribble of my power connecting me to plant life; I felt walled off. Alone.
There was only one reason for that I could think of.
This bunker complex must be shielded from Gaia. No wonder I had seen no steel ball bearings orbiting around Willow. She always had those on standby, spinning around her.
Zhukova turned on the wall screen. A map of the world appeared, covered in green blotches, except for Russia and China, which were white-orange.
She didn’t waste any time. “This is an energy map of the world, based on data we’ve been able to get from the RAMPART backup.”
“Backup?”
She smiled thinly at me. “Did you really think, when you summarily deactivated the RAMPART system, that you’d taken everything down?”
“Yeah, I thought I had,” I said through gritted teeth. I would not let Little Miss Stone-Cold get to me, no matter how she tried to provoke me.
“If you hadn’t disappeared after the Emerald Green operation, things would be different.” Her voice was mild, as though she mentioned she didn’t like cream in her coffee.
“I’ve had my reasons.” Rescuing my sister Ella for starters. I shrugged. “Here we are.”
Annoyance flickered across Zhukova’s face. “Indeed.” The annoyance disappeared, replaced by calm. “The fact is, we’ve learned RAMPART began failing some time ago.”
A question itched at me. One I’d thought about, sometimes, at night, right before drifting off. I faced Winterfield. “Did you know RAMPART existed?”
He shook his head. Winterfield rarely gave away his thoughts, but that headshake and the look on his face told me all I needed to know: he regretted being in the dark on this one. Welcome to my world, pal. No fun being a mushroom, was it?
I looked at Zhukova.
“Did you know?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer my question.
“You knew?” My face tightened. “You knew and just let it be.”
She crossed her arms. “I suspected.”
“And you didn’t even tell Winterfield.”
“A secret is no good if you tell others.”
I blinked, mouth hanging open for a moment. “What kind of answer is that? This isn’t like keeping what you know about someone else’s love affair to yourself.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I wanted to believe you had matured, given your experience.”
I caught myself lifting my hand to slap the table top.
Zhukova had always been a master at pissing me off.
I rubbed my hands. “You knew, but were out of the loop on the details, weren’t you?”
Her lips puckered for an instant, like she’d sucked on a lemon. “This is all a diversion from what we need to discuss.”
I shook my head. “It sets up what we need to discuss.”
