My stomach dropped to my feet, lurching, as I couldn’t keep myself from stealing a glance inside.
There was a fair amount of damage from my battle with Frankie and my subsequent ass-kicking by Rose. I didn’t dwell, just taking a mental snapshot of what I could see and moving on, but…
It was enough. Enough to send my stomach swirling and churning.
I could almost feel the trauma, the event, like it was inside me, welling up, almost close enough to touch. I didn’t cry out in alarm, but I did feel some small measure of nausea as I remembered lying there, staring at the black sky, head swimming, as Rose held her hands to me, my skin burning like someone had lit it afire.
The block wall passed to my right, and I tried to stare at the individual blocks of stone as I quickened my pace. I kept it in the realm of human possibility, breaking into a light jog. I saw movement ahead, someone walking past out of a gateway from another round of flats. They caught sight of me and stared for a moment, and I realized I wasn’t staring down at my phone anymore.
I’m just a jogger, I thought, trying to match my form to what I’d seen from people who I’d seen running in the past. I clutched my phone, kept my head down, tried not to stare at the person who was now watching me intently.
Shit.
I passed them as they raised their phone to their ear, and I listened intently as they made a call, waiting to see if it was going to be something bad. I was almost prepared, mentally, to assault this person—a guy, I realized dimly, still trying not to look directly at him—if he said something that sounded like he was dropping a dime on my location.
He said something about being late for work but being on his way now, and I didn’t relax when I heard it. I had to keep jogging on, past the building, which was replaced with a short wall on my right and the hill leading up to Calton Heights. The smell of fresh dirt reached me here, where Frankie’s attacks had churned up the ground inside the cemetery. Taller buildings with a more commercial bent were springing up on my left now as I got deeper and deeper into the city proper.
The buildings started to blend together as my mind raced, worrying about what was happening, what I was seeing. There were more people now, all along Calton Road. According to the map app, I was now only five minutes from Waverly Station, which presented another question: What the hell was I going to do when I got there?
It wasn’t like I could just board the train, after all.
On the other hand…I was pretty sure the ticket kiosks for these stations were unmanned. If I could keep my head down, maybe…
No. Too dangerous. If my ticket got checked in the train—which was likely—I’d probably be recognized and caught in a hot second. Then I’d be trapped in a train with plenty of time for the staff to call the cops and whoever else.
Plus, I didn’t exactly have a ton of money with which to buy a ticket. That was hardly an insurmountable problem, but still…
I glanced back, and once again, my stomach dropped. There were people behind me, walking extremely quietly. It wasn’t just one or two, either; it was a whole heap, a mob, like twenty or thirty.
Leading them was a big man with light blond hair, fair-skinned, with a leather jacket and a pair of jeans that were so ragged I doubted they’d ever seen better days. They might have just started out shit and gotten progressively worse over time until now, where they lacked even the structural integrity of a collapsing building.
When he saw me looking, we made brief eye contact, and a spark of recognition in his eyes gave way to a predatory grin.
Yep, he saw me.
Yep, he knew who I was.
Two minutes run from Waverly Station and I had a mob behind me, led by someone who was actively seeking me.
Edinburgh, you’ve screwed me again, I thought as I broke into a run, desperately trying to reach the train station, and whatever faint hope of freedom it held, before they caught me, hoping against hope I could lose them in the crowds.
29.
Reed
The plane cruised steadily at about 35,000 feet, the gentle hum you might expect in a commercial flight a little louder on the smaller aircraft. The engines roared outside, taking in air and forcing it out the back in great jets, slipping along at over four hundred miles an hour.
I could the feel disturbance (not in the Force) created by the engines. I hadn’t really been able to before Harmon had overclocked my powers, but now I felt it keenly, just another added benefit of the expansion of my abilities. I glanced across the Gulfstream’s aisle at Scott, who was pensive, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. I wondered how keenly he could feel the moisture in the air—or maybe lack thereof at this altitude.
Everybody was engaged in some kind of avoidance behavior. Distraction was the king of pursuits for those of us waiting for whatever might happen once we reached York. It wasn’t that we expected hostilities, but given what Sienna had told me…
Well, I’d warned them all to be prepared, and it looked like most of them were taking the hint.
Except Friday and Kat. They were sleeping. And one of them was snoring. (Kat, surprisingly.)
“The sleep of the innocent, huh?” Chase chucked a thumb at Friday and sat down next to me in the empty seat that everyone else had left abandoned. It was like they could sense my mood, or maybe read the “F off” written all over my face.
“You’ve known him longer than I have,” I said with a little amusement. “How innocent does Friday strike you?”
“I never knew him as Friday until I came here,” Chase said. “What’s that all about?”
“Hell if I know,” I said with a shrug. “I think Sienna came up with it. Guy Friday or something, because he used to follow our old boss around so close that if Phillips stopped too abruptly, Friday would have fallen in.”
“That’s interesting,” Chase said, looking back over her shoulder at where Friday sat alone, but hopefully for different reasons than me. His head was back, his mouth was open, and he looked pretty much dead to the world.
“As interesting as anything related to Friday can be, I guess,” I said.
“Can I ask you something?” Chase showed her nervousness by scratching her arm. “Everyone else on this thing—” she just plunged right ahead without waiting for my answer on the previous question “—is all full of hearty conviction that they’re running into a worthy cause. Can I just ask…is there something I’m missing about Sienna and this whole Eden Prairie thing? Keeping in mind I’m the new girl, and don’t really, uh, know anyone that well yet, so I miss all the good gossip.”
“The Eden Prairie thing wasn’t Sienna’s fault,” I said, letting my weariness seep out in the form of a story. It wasn’t a story I tended to tell very often, mainly because no one seemed to want to hear it. “The Supreme Court issued a ruling—probably influenced by President Harmon, who hated Sienna—that turned loose all those criminal metas she’d put away over the last few years—”
“Yep,” Chase said. “I read about that. But, I mean, the official reports talked about her losing her damned mind and nuking a commercial park filled with reporters and innocent people.”
“And killing all those criminals she’d released,” I said, “who’d turned up at our office for a spontaneous protest in the middle of the night, masquerading as a lynch mob. One of them turned the reporters into a bunch of feral animals, sent them after her. She broke their control, but she got overwhelmed by all those criminals afterward, and…they had her down, so she…went off like a bomb, I guess.”
“Huh,” Chase said. “No wonder the LA thing went over like a lead balloon. I was kinda out of the country working when the Eden Prairie deal went down.”
“They didn’t have the internet where you were?” I asked with a snarky smile.