“To hell with your luck,” Bjorn said, and spat on the ground.
“If we’re prisoners,” Zack said, trying to get them back on some kind of track, “then our first obligation is to escape.” No one argued against that, which was surprising, because all these assholes seemed to do was argue. “To get back to Sienna.”
“While I heartily agree that conditions were better in our last host mind,” Harmon said, “let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. Why would we go back to Sienna?”
“You answered your own question already,” Bastian said, frowning. “The conditions were better.”
“I think you’re missing my point—we’re prisoners either way,” Harmon said. “Why lock ourselves into a course of action like, say, trying to get back to Sienna?”
“Are there other options available?” Zack asked.
“Almost certainly,” Harmon said with a glint in his eye.
There was a moment of silence. “Care to share with the rest of us?” Bjorn asked.
“After Sienna got shot in the head,” Harmon said, coolly, almost conspiratorially, “I used my telepathic powers to transfer memories she’d stolen from Byerly back into his own mind.”
“I remember,” Zack said cautiously. “What does that have to do with—”
“What if I could transfer all of us?” Harmon asked, with a mischievous element of drama. “If we’re going to escape, why go back to the same old, same old? Why not pick a new host body? Metahumans have notororiously strong wills, and Sienna probably takes first prize in that competition, perhaps topped only by this girl.” He indicated their surroundings again, and Zack took his meaning. “Why fight that? Let’s find a nice human body, one we can dominate together.”
“Can you even do that?” Bastian asked. “Transfer all six of us—”
“Seven,” Bjorn said, and when everyone looked at him, he said, “Wolfe will be back.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Eve said. “He seems to have—how do you say? ‘Drank the Kool-Aid’?”
“It was actually Flavor-aid,” Bastian said. “At Jonestown, I mean.”
“It will be difficult,” Harmon said. “But…yes, I think I can. Transfer us into another body. But not until I get my powers back.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this before now?” Eve asked, getting a little heated. “We have been prisoners in Nealon’s head for years. And you had an escape route?”
“She was a good warden,” Harmon said, shaking his head. “It never would have worked with her watching over us. But here…” He looked around again. “We’re alone. Unsupervised.” He smiled thinly. “I say we get into some real trouble.”
The world felt like it was shuddering and shaking around Zack. His head spiked with a sudden ache contemplating this new possibility. “You cannot be serious.”
Harmon cocked his head. “Why wouldn’t I be serious?”
Zack held out a hand, trying to find a way to indicate the world beyond. “Those are people out there. Actual people. They’re not rental cars just waiting for you to drop in and take them for a drive.”
“What about coma patients?” Gavrikov asked. “We pop into a coma patient, take them over?”
“They have actual physiological damage to their brains that would essentially seal us in there as well,” Harmon said. “It has to be a healthy person.”
“What if it was a…bad one?” Eve asked, shrugging her shoulders lightly. “Say, like, this Rose? But, you know, without the superpowers? What would be wrong with taking her over and…making her a vessel for us?”
“You have got to be joking,” Zack said, clenching his eyes tightly shut. It did no good; he had no eyelids, could not shut out the stimuli of the Scottish village and the grey skies, the cool air, none of it. “We’re dead.” His head sprang up. “Our time is over.”
“We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one,” Harmon said. “I don’t think our time is necessarily over. We’re not dead. We’ve just been in purgatory, earning some links off our chains so we could have a second chance.” He held up a hand. “I think we’re closer on this than you might believe. I have no desire to take over an innocent person. But Eve brings up a good point. There are plenty of very bad people out there who have, frankly, done things that should have made them lose their freedom and their shot at life—”
“I thought you campaigned against capital punishment,” Zack said.
“—and that’s where we could come in,” Harmon said, easing back a step. “A second chance for us.”
“I don’t see how this even matters,” Bastian said.
“Because we could get our lives back.” Bjorn leaned in. “Our bodies would be different, but…” He paused. “Could I be a beautiful woman? I mean, a bad one, obviously, but with enormous—”
“I’m still not going to like you, even as a woman,” Eve said.
Bjorn smiled. “You never have liked me. That hasn’t stopped you from—”
“The point,” Harmon said, cutting that madness right off, “is that we need to be looking for an opportunity if this is something we want to do. We need to look for a way out of this…” He glanced around. “Well, ‘hell’ seems to be the right word for it—”
A subtle rush of wind around them seemed to come from all directions at once. Zack felt it bristle along his skin, causing it to tingle and making him shiver in a way he couldn’t recall really doing since before he’d died. It raised gooseflesh on skin he no longer had, and almost made his non-existent legs wobble.
And then a voice spoke, quiet, and slow—and most definitely not Rose:
“There is…no…way out.”
“The hell was that?” Bastian asked, looking around, already planning his defensive perimeter; Zack could tell because he knew the man.
Harmon was the only one who answered, face screwed up in intense thought. “I think it’s one of the other inmates.”
“The voice of experience, then,” Zack said, relaxing just an inch. It hadn’t come off as a threat. More like a warning, and it repeated once more, quiet and low, and with more fervor and feeling, as though whoever was speaking knew exactly what they were talking about.
“She will never…let any of us…go…”
14.
Sienna
Rose’s greeting didn’t last long; the other helo started firing, and she was immersed in bullets and grenade blasts and all else. Rose disappeared under a shroud of smoke and shrapnel, and I leapt to my feet in a dead sprint, not giving a damn if I got shot now, because if I stayed to wait this out, I was probably going to end up dead or as good as.
It was time for Plan B.
I’d studied the maps of this place on that phone before I’d chucked it in the loch, of course. On it, I’d noticed a certain element of the design that I’d explored a little further when I scouted the area before I’d pulled in behind the woods and ditched John Clifford’s purloined car.
Now, sprinting for the cover of the air traffic control tower, explosions going off behind me as the US Spec Ops team tried to avenge their fallen brothers against the hellbeast that was Rose Steward (might have been a fake name, like everything else about her but her boobs—those weren’t significant enough to be fake), I was going to find out if my scouting and suspicions were going to pay off.
Personally, I was kinda rooting for the Spec Ops guys to win.
I dodged between the admin building and the tower, bouncing off one of the walls and leaving a very slight smear of blood as I did so. Must have gotten hit by some shrapnel, I reflected, but there was no time to worry about it now.
Besides, the second part of Plan B would help take care of any wounds, if in a somewhat oblique and less than satisfactory way.
An explosion signaled that the first chopper had blown up, probably. I was on the other side of the buildings now, but it came through loud and clear. Nothing those military guys had been carrying could have made a boom like that, and I doubted it was the Cessna’s aviation fuel going up, though I suspected that was coming soon, too.