The Empowered, page 26
Simon tilted his head. “I am surprised you know what that is.”
“Funny. I was in Special Corrections, remember?”
There was a fusion reactor that powered the force field at Special Corrections in San Diego. Thanks to that I spent my five years in prison with the sky all distorted. But here, in the back of beyond? “Those things are freaking expensive.”
Simon didn’t answer.
I glanced at my wrist communicator. The South Americans should be nearly done at the factory. Why hadn’t they sent a message already? They were supposed to comm us when they reached their target.
I looked at my team. “Check your wrist comms—anyone get a message from the other cell?”
Head shakes all around.
Shit.
“Perhaps this building is blocking the signal,” Simon said.
Of course. “Look for a way to haul these charging cradle things out. There’s like a million of them.”
“I’m guessing under a thousand,” Simon said.
I laughed.
He smiled out of one corner of his mouth. He didn’t smile often.
“That’s still a ton,” I said.
“I think you mean a lot.”
We needed the truck that was supposedly parked nearby. The briefing said there was a truck, but we hadn’t seen one when we arrived. We’d grab as many of the charging cradles as we could.
I pointed at Simon. “Go see if you can’t find that truck while I check for messages.” I looked at Keisha and Coldie. “Go find a cart, or a hand truck or even a big bag.”
Keisha sighed. “I always get to fetch and carry.” She headed outside.
Coldie sniffed but followed Keisha. Even princesses would need to get their hands dirty here.
Simon and me went outside. He headed down the front of the building. There was what looked like a garage maybe two hundred yards away, half-hidden by trees.
I didn’t have to order Simon; he was already jogging toward the garage.
I lifted my wrist, pressed the sync button on the comm. Waited.
No messages. What the hell? The South Americans had been cocky and sure of themselves. They still went by Empowered names down here. Their cell leader had called herself the Red Witch, probably because she was a flame warden. Go figure. She mocked Keisha because Keisha used to call herself the Steel Witch.
“Witches and steel don’t mix,” Red Witch had said. Then she’d laughed. I had to hold Keisha back from slugging her.
I wasn’t supposed to call them, because it might give away our location. But now that they were overdue to comm us? Screw that. Besides, the cameras would have seen us, even if only for a moment.
“Azul, this is Indigo.” Stupid code names.
No response.
I pressed the emergency call. “Azule, Indigo here. What’s your status?” I’d gotten a lecture from the Scourge tech Empowered back in L.A. before we took our private plane. Skyler was his name. Skyler had run me through using the call band, and how to say stuff like checking for status. At least I didn’t have to say “over.”
Received flashed on my wrist comm’s screen. That only told me a wrist comm had received my message, not that it had been read. Annoying.
Simon had opened the garage door. There was a truck inside, white, with high sides. A typical panel truck.
“Azule, please respond.”
The comm’s display flashed reply in blue.
The Red Witch sounded in pain. “Indigo, Azule here. Under attack. Evacuate at once.”
Shit. “Security?”
“Si.” She shouted something in Spanish. There was a loud crackle, like a super loud version of a stunner, and a scream.
“Are there other Empowered at your location?” My muscles tightened at the thought.
“No!” she gasped. There was a high-pitched shriek, and someone screamed. The Red Witch’s next words ran together. “We found information. This all belongs to a company called Emerald Biologic. It is part of Ellis Corporation. Make sure the Inner Circle knows. Understood?”
“Got it.”
I heard flame crackling.
“Pull out!” she shouted, and then the comm ended.
Red Witch was a flame warden—she could create and throw fire. Would take a lot to beat her by herself, and she had three other Empowereds, including a speedster.
There weren’t supposed to be any Empowereds here. No sanctioned ones for sure. But something was creaming them. I went cold. Maybe more of those killer tree-things.
Red Witch was in charge. My cell was junior to hers, so technically we had to follow her orders.
Funny thing about being Empowered, even sanctioned stuck-ups like the Hero Council: you wanted to do your own thing. That was a big reason why normals were scared of us—yeah, our powers were the main thing, but our powers made us want to do whatever we wanted to do, if that makes any sense.
So, yeah, following orders wasn’t our strong suit. But the Scourge had way more discipline than rogue gangs. The Inner Circle ran things tight.
Emerald Biologic. Ellis Corporation. I memorized those names.
The factory wasn’t far from here, like maybe two miles, so we needed to get away fast, especially if there were sanctioned Empowered there.
The panel truck roared up beside me, stopped, and Simon hopped down.
“Good timing,” I said. “We have to go, now. The South Americans are getting their asses handed to them. Red Witch ordered us to evacuate pronto.”
Simon was always cool and collected, mister professional. But he hesitated when I told him the news. “She didn’t say what was attacking them, other than it included security?”
I shook my head. “I heard a weapon. It sounded like a big-ass version of a stunner. Then a scream.”
But you didn’t scream when you were stunned, you just dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Simon glanced at the warehouse and those big, sealed doors. “Unless we can figure out how to unlock those, we will need to use the front door.”
“You’ve got two minutes.” I ran through the people door back inside the warehouse.
Keisha and Coldie had found a cart, a big metal thing with racks. Looked like you plugged the power pods into it. I didn’t know much about tech, but that seemed like a good guess.
Simon was fiddling with a display panel on a stand, his fingers dancing across the screen. He swore under his breath. That was twice in just a couple of minutes. Before this job I’d never heard Simon swear, no matter how much shit we got into, which was often. The life of rogue Empowereds was usually neck deep in crap. But Simon was always cool.
Something flashed blue on the display panel. The wall in front of him opened like an eyelid, wide enough to drive a truck through. Even though I’d pulled my power’s sense back inside me, walled off in my mind, I felt a ripple of something plant-like when the wall opened. Crap. Was the entire building made of this stuff?
The sliding doors on the outside must have been just for appearances. This place was getting crazier by the second.
Keep it together, Mat, I told myself. It would have helped if Ashula had bothered to mention that the building was living. We were gonna have words when I got back.
I turned and gestured at the others. “No time for screwing around. We gotta go, now.”
“Hey, we were just waiting for you to tell us what the fuck to do, boss.” Keisha spat the words out.
Never apologize, but I had fucked up by not giving them any details at all. “The other cell is under attack. Red Witch wants us out of here. At once.” Coldie and Keisha both looked like I’d just thrown ice water in their faces. “So we grab what we can take in five minutes,” I said.
Simon backed the truck into the warehouse.
I helped push the cart over to the nearest cradle, reached inside, and touched one of the power pods, feeling a very slight charge on the tips of my fingers. A skinny cable was attached like an umbilical cord to the pod. I picked up the pod and pulled on the cord. It wouldn’t budge.
I yanked hard on it, turning my face away in case the thing exploded.
Nothing.
“Damn that thing’s on tight,” Keisha said.
“No shit.” I held up the pod, the cable trailing beneath it and waved the pod at Simon. “I can’t pull the cable off.” Our time was running out. I still couldn’t figure how Lucalla’s cell got whacked by security. They had a speedster, a flyer, a fire warden, and, a peeper. And they were packing stunners and a jammer—there had only been one to hand out, so they got it.
None of that mattered right now, so I stopped thinking about it and focused on our little problem.
Simon ran over, took the power pod and tried pulling the cable off. He twisted it, tried again, and then did something fast with it, his hands almost a blur. Nothing.
“There must be a signal, probably chemical.” He closed his eyes. Simon was our cell’s techie, he took it personally when he missed something. “Those cables aren’t to charge the pods.” He opened his eyes, and ran a finger up the cable to the pod. “It’s a chemical lock.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I’d take his word for it.
“Okay, so how do we unlock it?”
“Could be the signal is set remotely.”
“We have to take at least some of these battery pod things,” I said.
Simon looked around, gaze scouring the room. “We should try to find where the cables join.”
The cables all ran into a big fire hydrant-like thing in the center of the room. A pipe then ran from the hub to the pill-box.
We sprinted over to the hub, but there wasn’t any control panel on it.
“Damn,” Simon said, voice low.
“What?” I asked him.
He looked at me, his face serious. “An idea just occurred to me, but you won’t like it.”
“Not when you put it like that, but tell me anyway.”
“Those things are some sort of artificial plant life, right?”
I nodded, slowly. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Then see if you can merge with what is inside the cable, and pull it back. Send the signal.”
“You’re nuts. I wasn’t able to back in the field with those crazy killer tree-things.”
“Maybe it will go easier with these not-killer battery pods.”
“Funny.”
“It’s either that or leave, unless you want to give me an hour to see if I can get into the reactor room there and find out if there’s a control computer or something.”
God, I hate it when someone is right about something that’s going to hurt like hell. Fine.
I yanked the cable out of his hand, held it tight. I closed my eyes, and pushed my sense into the cable. It felt like there was a trickle of ice inside the cable. Holding the cable was like holding something that was almost a vine. It echoed the feel of the real thing, but it wasn’t. It was so cold.
Cold.
That was it.
I pushed myself into the ice trickle. I could see the fluid now. Had to make it warm. The ice trickle must keep the thing cool enough, along with being locked.
But I couldn’t make the fluid move any faster. I could barely grasp it with my power. The living bits were scattered throughout the unliving bits, if that makes any sense. My eyes widened. Suddenly I could feel the life inside the unlife or whatever it was. There was plant stuff in there. And in the pod.
That was the key.
I put the pod back in its cradle, and ran to the “hub”, put my hands on it. Yes. Alive. It hummed in my mind like a machine, but inside that hum I felt the living bits of plant. There was more of it here. Maybe this was different than those killer trees. I didn’t know.
My teeth chattered. The hub was so freaking cold. I reached into the living particles swirling among the unliving ones and urged them to move faster, to pull from the fluid what they needed, which included C02. That was what made it so cold.
That made it move faster. Now I could push my power through the fluid to all the pods connected to the hub. But there were too many pods.
Time was running out. I could barely feel my hands. Freaking ice cold wasn’t going to stop me. I pushed my power through one set of cables to the cradle where the rest of my team was. I pulled the living bits back, felt the cables detach from the pods.
“Damn girl, you did it!” Keisha fist pumped in my direction. My hands were warm again.
“Grab the pods,” I shouted. “Plug them into the cart.” I closed my eyes and reached my power down another cable bundle to a second cradle. My nerves felt like ice, and a killer headache hammered on my skull.
I released the cables from the pods in the second cradle, and then bent over from the pain, squeezing my eyes shut. Reaching into the fluid was worse than trying to push an oak to grow a new branch. I let go. I couldn’t do another, and we were out of time.
I staggered up and half ran, half fell to the second cradle. “Come on, get these.” I waved at Keisha, who stood by the cart while Simon finished plugging in the first batch. “We could have company any minute.”
“How do you know that?” Coldie sneered at me. Definitely back to being her normal, bitchy self.
If there’d been time I would have wiped that sneer off her face with my fist.
I glanced at my wrist comm. It had been nearly ten minutes since I’d gotten the frantic order from Lucalla.
“Because Lucalla’s team was getting their asses kicked just two miles up the road ten minutes ago. If it’s the Hero Council, they could be here any second.”
My heart was racing. Come on, Simon.
He finished, and began pushing the cart toward me. Keisha got beside him and helped push. They reached me, and I began frantically handing Simon pods.
“You really are scared.” Coldie looked at me, shook her head in surprise.
“Not scared, worried.” There was a difference.
“Denial’s not just a river in Egypt,” Keisha said, trying to make me relax by cracking a dumb joke.
I took a deep breath and kept handing Simon the pods as fast as he could plug them in.
He finished. “All set.”
“We’ve got room for more,” Coldie pointed out.
“We’re leaving.”
“But the Inner Circle wanted as many as we can retrieve, right?”
“And this is what we can retrieve.” My heart pounded harder, and I took a breath to calm down. Damn it, I hated being cornered. I wasn’t dying down here, and none of the rest of my cell was either.
“Simon, get the truck started. The rest of you, help me push this thing.”
Simon sprinted to the truck, jumped in. The engine roared to life.
I pushed the cart as hard as I could. My head still felt like it was about to split open, but I was just pushing muscles now, not my power, and it felt good to sweat my muscles for a change.
We reached the back of the truck.
Keisha lowered the tail lift. I grabbed the rear door handle and yanked up. We pushed the cart on to the lift. This was taking too long, but none of us had Empowered strength. Finally we got the freaking cart into the rear of truck, and secured it to wall straps.
I scrambled out. Was that rotors I heard over the truck’s idling engine?
Shit.
“Let’s get into the cab,” I told the others. We piled into the truck’s cab, Keisha and Coldie squeezed between me and Simon. Simon started the truck off with a lurch that made us crash together.
“Seat belts,” Simon said. “That would be a good idea.”
I craned my neck to look up. No sign of a helicopter, but I still thought I heard the low droning swish of rotors nearby.
I grabbed a hand hold. “No. We have to be ready to defend this thing, and getting out will be tough enough without having to get unbuckled first.”
“Not my bloody fault then if you end up wearing that dashboard,” Simon muttered.
He was worried if he swore like that.
Keisha snickered. “Limey scared?”
“Bloody right. I’ve seen what the Hero Council can do, too.”
“We don’t know it’s the Hero Council,” I gritted through my teeth as Simon swerved onto the road.
The truck roared down the access road, which curved past ordinary looking low palm trees.
I pulled out my data pad and brought up a map. “There’s a check point up ahead. Three hundred yards.”
At least we weren’t going back through nightmare village.
The checkpoint had a railroad crossing-style gate. The gate was lowered. There was an honest-to-God guard shack, and two uniformed goons standing off to one side, pistols pointed at us. A bullet clanged off the hood; another smacked into the windshield but didn’t crack it. Bulletproof glass. The idiot guards should know what their own company trucks had, but I wasn’t going to complain.
Simon floored it and the truck roared ahead. The guards jumped into tall grass. We crashed through the gate and hurtled down the road. More gunfire behind us. Bullets smacked the back of the truck. I guessed the guards would be in deep shit if their bosses found out they were shooting at a truck carrying their precious power pod egg things, but stupid does what it does, as Ruth used to say.
Something black and sleek flew overhead. My breath caught in my throat. Crap and double crap.
That was a skimmer, the kind the Hero Council used. I’d seen a skimmer like that five years ago, when the Hero Council brought the hammer down on the Renegades and killed my friends. But this skimmer was matte black, not deep blue, and there wasn’t a gold HC logo on the fuselage. Instead, there was a green circle with a stylized emerald in the middle of the circle.
We drove underneath it, and the skimmer pivoted and followed us. The cockpit windows were polarized. The rain forest’s branches grew over the road here. I reached out to touch the trees with my power, but nothing. I leaned back against my seat. Detaching the battery pods had drained my own power. I shook my head. Dumb joke.
“Corporate security.” Simon cranked the wheel hard right and the truck hurled onto a highway. Keisha slammed into me, and I banged into the door.
I managed to crane my neck around to get a look in the side mirror. The skimmer swung into view behind us.
My heart pounded harder.
