Tempest

Twenty-three

Assistance Plan




By the time our backup from Manhattan arrived, our entire group of exhausted rescuers had retreated to the command post at Hollywood Park for power naps and a simple meal of sandwiches and chips. Hollywood Park had once been famous for horse racing, but was shut down and abandoned more than thirty years ago when animal racing was made illegal. It had a large open parking lot, as well as an overgrown racetrack. All the old buildings had collapsed during the quake, so the post was set up in the lot. We were only two blocks from the Centinela Hospital Medical Center, which was providing us with the bulk of our medical supplies and personnel.

Major Lee was in charge of the Hollywood Park ICP. He looked like he’d fallen out of a classic Hollywood war movie, with slate-gray hair, hard lines around his eyes, and a voice that could challenge cannon fire. He treated our group of Metas, in our uniforms and strangely colored skin, with the same respect he showed to every other volunteer working at the ICP.

“I knew some of your parents,” he’d said when we were first introduced. While it was a familiar refrain from authority figures over the age of forty, this time it stung. This time, versions of our parents had most likely caused all of the destruction in the first place.

Around 9:00 p.m., our help arrived via two helicopters landing on the old racetrack. Fourteen prisoners in gray jumpsuits, accompanied by four armed prison guards. Among the volunteers I spotted several familiar faces from the Warren, including one that made my heart sink—Alexia Lowe, Muriel’s mother.

Major Lee introduced himself to the Metas, then turned over their care to Teresa, who seemed to have found a second wind (or third or fourth), with the arrival of help. It might have been nighttime, but there were still people to find, fires to put out, and lives to save. She divided everyone up into five smaller squads, with herself, Double Trouble, Marco, Renee, and me each in charge of one.

My squad consisted of Aaron, Alexia, and a neon-yellow-haired man named Sebastian Rojas, whose imperviousness to pain and ability to spit acid would come in handy around immovable metal.

Before we headed out into the field, though, I pulled Alexia aside for a private chat. “Why did you volunteer?” I asked.

She gave me the kind of patient look mothers excel at. “I can manipulate metal, Ethan. I can be useful here.”

“What about Muriel?”

“Muriel’s with her father. I explained why I was leaving. She needs to know that we can still help people. That being Meta is a good thing.”

I wanted to tell her to go back, and not to risk getting herself killed when she had a daughter waiting for her. Only, I couldn’t do that. First of all, she wouldn’t listen to me. But mostly, I had no right. As Rangers, our parents faced death daily on their quest to do what they believed was right. Maybe Alexia had been a Bane once, a lifetime ago, but this was her time to be a hero to her daughter. She deserved that chance.

She got it, too, in spades. We followed a National Guard squad to an apartment complex in Culver City that was being threatened by a massive fire a quarter mile away. The fire had engulfed multiple city blocks, and city firefighters were doing all they could to contain the blaze while the surrounding neighborhoods were evacuated. Not even Dahlia could pull the heart of that fire out. The black smoke drifted on a westward wind, right in our direction, and I did my best to redirect it so we could work without choking.

We evacuated forty-seven people who were trapped in their apartments—and we found three times as many dead bodies. Alexia and Sebastian worked with an intense precision that reminded me so much of the Rangers who’d been my childhood heroes. They hadn’t been in a situation remotely close to this in over fifteen years, and yet they moved, talked, and reacted as if this was just another training exercise.

Our squad kept moving throughout the night, trying to keep ahead of the fire that didn’t want to die. What we really needed was someone who could manipulate an ocean of water and drop it down on the growing blaze—too bad the only one we knew was the freaking enemy. And if Tricia Rice had been willing to help, she’d have done so by now. From all the news reports we’d been briefed on by Dr. Kinsey, no one mentioned active Metas other than us—which well and truly sucked. Not even the Greens were coming out to play tonight.

Maybe in the morning.

Morning seemed like forever away, even when the first streaks of navy and purple lit the eastern sky. Rest was a foreign concept, untranslatable to a mind and body far past the point of utter exhaustion. There wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t ache. At some point, after we’d successfully cleared another residential street from the path of the fire, everything went white, then fuzzy black.

I woke up later, flat on my back on a thin cot, sweating like crazy in the sweltering summer heat. My whole body felt like a grain sack—heavy and bendy, without any real shape or mobility. I blinked at the white canvas tent above me, searching for some kind of energy within myself. Some strength to sit up. Maybe call for help. I tested my powers and found them easily—good. The moving air helped me feel less sweat-soaked and gross.

“Welcome back,” Teresa said from somewhere on my left.

I listed my head to the side. She was sitting on the next cot, elbows on her knees, shoulders slumped in the very picture of exhaustion. But she was smiling. “How long?” I asked.

“About six hours. You passed out right before I gave the order for everyone to take a break.”

“Lucky me.”

“Lucky you that Aaron caught you before you face-planted on the road, or you’d have another purple mark for your collection.”

“Told you I wanted to be more like you.”

“Leadership-wise, you’re doing a great job. Just leave the skin colors to me, okay?”

Wait a second, had she just complimented me on my leadership skills? I squinted at her through eyes that desperately wanted to close again. “How’re the rest of our people?”

“By some miracle, so far so good. Our New York volunteers are doing amazing work out there. No injuries, either.”

“I bet Humankind is thrilled.”

Her expression shuttered. She tried to hide something, but I’d seen it. I swung my legs over the side of the cot and sat up. Blood rushed to my head. I steadied my hands on both sides of the cot until the swirling in my brain stopped and I could focus. “What have they done?” I asked.

“They went on TV again, another distorted image and voice.” She clenched and relaxed her hands several times. “They got wind of the USGS’s suspicions about the earthquake being man-made, and now they’ve blamed Metas for it. They’re calling it a stunt—that we’re trying to gain sympathy by reinventing ourselves as heroes saving the day.”

I expected rage to show up at any moment, but all I felt was nausea. The clones had caused the deaths of thousands of people, untold millions in property damage, and now Metas were stuck in the middle. And the more people who believed the shit that Humankind was spewing, the worse it would get for us.

“And we fell for it,” I said softly.

“We couldn’t not help all those citizens who needed us,” Teresa said.

“Yeah, and we just gave Humankind more ammunition to use against us.”

“We can’t stop what people say about us in the press, I know that. But to think that people would believe we’d do something so awful . . .”

“F*ck them, then. Most people are smarter than that.”

“You’re right.” She let out a weary sigh. “I just can’t seem to see any further than the next rescue.”

“So don’t.” Off her startled look, I continued. “Focus on the rescue and evac missions, Teresa. You said once that Rangers could do more than just react to a Bane threat. We’re doing that right now. This isn’t something we can fix, but we can sure as hell do everything in our awesome collection of powers to help make it better.”

She considered me a moment. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like what you’ll be doing while I’m out with the rescue teams?” She knew me way too well.

“The clones have my brother,” I said. “And even though I have no actual emotion for the man, they have my father, too. I want to keep helping here, but . . .”

“You need to find your family.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to ask Aaron to go with you?”

I blinked several times, a little thrown by the question. She watched me calmly, a knowing light in her eyes and the hint of a smile tweaking the corners of her mouth. I looked down at my feet, feeling oddly cornered, even though she’d asked a perfectly innocent question. Only, it wasn’t innocent to me, because there was nothing innocent about my feelings for Aaron.

“Hey, pal.” She reached out and squeezed my knee. “We all love you. Period.”

I covered her hand with mine. The band of worry that had been squeezing my heart for the last eight months loosened. In time, it would go away completely. “Thank you.”

“Trance? Tempest?” An excruciatingly tall, skinny Meta named Lacey Wilson had ducked beneath the canopy near the end of the row of cots. Her enormous, leathery dragon-like wings were tucked close to her back, and her eyes glowed with orange fire, which made several of the resting volunteers cringe away. She ignored them in favor of us.

“What is it?” Teresa asked.

Lacey smiled, showing off sharp, pointed teeth. “We have some new volunteers.”

With a little bit of effort, I lurched to my aching feet and followed Teresa out into the afternoon sunshine. Lacey led us to another tent where Aaron, Renee, and Alexia were gathered around a trio of teenagers. The teens—two guys and a girl—didn’t seem nervous or afraid of us. One of the boys, whose hair was hidden beneath a black ski cap, looked downright excited to be there. All three of them went a little goggle-eyed when Teresa showed up.

“These are our volunteers?” Teresa asked Lacey, who nodded.

“I’m Mike,” the boy in the ski cap said. “This is Ben and Shawna. We wanna help.”

“And why is that?”

Mike puffed out his chest. “Because we’re Metas too, and we’re not afraid to say it anymore.”

She smiled. “What can you do, Mike?”

He turned around and nodded at Ben, who sighed, then closed his eyes. Mike walked up to Ben . . . and right through him. It was one of the most bizarre things I’d seen in a long time. Mike walked through a nearby table covered with water bottles, then came back to us.

“That’s handy,” Renee said.

“Sometimes is,” Mike replied.

“Not bad,” Teresa said. “What about the rest of you?”

• • •

Someone had been smart enough to set up a couple of mobile showers for the volunteers, so I made good use and washed off twenty-four-plus hours of smoke, dirt, grit, and a little dried blood. My bruises had bruises, and I’d acquired a limp at some point, which just added to my overall aesthetic. Putting my dirty clothes back on didn’t help, either, but it was that or running around in donated pink hospital scrubs, and that just wasn’t happening in this lifetime.

Before I could make the acquaintance of the food tent, I ran into Aaron—almost literally, coming around the corner from the row of portable johns set up downwind of the showers. He smiled, which made me grin right back at him. Working side by side last night had been amazing. Teresa was right about one thing—I wanted him by my side for whatever came next.

“Thought you’d be interested to know,” he said, “that Mayor Ainsworth has officially canceled today’s HQ demolition until further notice.”

I snorted laughter through my nose so hard it actually made my eyes water. “Ow. I can’t believe she made an official statement about that.” I glanced at the sky, as though I could see HQ from here. “I’d forgotten that was today.”

“I think so did the rest of the world.”

“Half her work’s done anyway. The Housing Unit will fall over if someone so much as looks at it funny. The Base is the only building still solid.”

“Thanks to the Merry Band of Misfit Clones.”

“Yeah.” Clones who hadn’t been seen since yesterday morning—after disappearing so quickly and completely.

They’d made a carefully orchestrated effort to protect the Base yesterday, to keep it upright during the powerful quake by shielding it in a cocoon of ice. Why? They could have faced us down in the parking lot and saved themselves the effort.

“Ethan?”

“Huh?”

Aaron frowned. “What were you thinking just now? You looked . . . I don’t know, confused?”

“I am, a little.”

“About what?”

“The Base.”

“What about it?”

I glanced around us. Even though activity continued everywhere at a frantic pace, no one was paying us any real attention. I described the rooftop fight in more detail, including the ice case around the walls and the clones’ grand disappearing act at the end. “If Andrew was with them, shielding them, they didn’t even have to leave the roof until we were distracted.” By Gage, for example.

“Do you think they’re still at the Base?”

“I don’t know, maybe. But what if they are, Aaron? What if they’re sitting in the Base, watching us run around saving people, and laughing about how perfectly their plan to ruin us worked? I mean, half the country seems to think we caused the earthquake as a publicity stunt. Why would the clones leave in the middle of the show?”

Aaron looked horrified, but definitely on board with my theory. “Are you going to tell Trance?”

“No.”

He looked startled. “No?”

“No, she needs to focus on the rescue and evacuation efforts. I don’t want to divide her attention right now.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Collapse. Sleep. Kiss you.

“I need to go back to HQ,” I said. “And to somehow get close enough to the Base to see if I’m right.”

“You got a plan in mind for accomplishing that?”

“Not a single one. You?”

He started to speak, then closed his mouth. He rocked back on his heels as his gaze went distant, thoughtful. An enormous, bird-shaped shadow flew over us, and we looked up. Lacey was coming in for a landing with what looked like a sackful of supplies in her arms. Aaron watched her disappear into one of the tents, then looked at me again. He didn’t have to tell me—I saw it in Scott’s brown eyes. He had an idea.

• • •

Aaron didn’t explain his plan until I put all four of us down a block away from HQ, behind a pile of rubble that had once been the front of an office complex. The plan was a good one, and Alexia confirmed that she could do her part with no problem. Our second volunteer seemed less confident, but he was a kid, which was why Denny got exactly one job to do. He was our snatch-and-run guy.

The plan was simple: make sure the McTaggerts were in the building, cause a distraction, get them out—specifically, get Andrew out. He was an innocent kid, which made him our number one priority.

We left Denny behind with a com. The front gate was still open after yesterday’s dust-up, so all he had to do was wait for my signal to do his thing. Aaron, Alexia, and I crept around the rubble to the wall behind the Housing Unit. The angle hid us from sight of the Base, and a quick lift of wind got the three of us up and over. We stayed close to the walls, despite the fact that the building looked like it would fall down at any moment. At a corner, just out of sight, we stopped.

Alexia closed her eyes. As a metal manipulator, she could sense different types of metals around her—even if she couldn’t manipulate all of them, she knew if they were around. Every person who’d been imprisoned on Manhattan, herself included, had been fitted with a tracking collar. After our powers came back, one of the prisoners deactivated the tracking mechanism, but the collars were not removed. The collars and their locks were made out of a special alloy blend she’d never felt before, but she was confident of being able to identify it. Andrew had never worn a collar, but Freddy did. If he was inside the Base, she’d know.

Her eyebrows furrowed, and then she blinked at me. “It’s odd, but I’ve picked up on two collars,” she said.

“Two?” Unless one of our volunteers had somehow slipped their squad and defected to the Base, that didn’t make any sense.

“I’m positive there are two. Near the top, possibly the fourth floor, pretty close to the wall nearest our position.”

I recalled the layout of the Base as best I could. The fourth floor had several smaller training rooms and an equipment storage closet. Andrew and Freddy could be in any of those rooms. “Okay, thank you.”

Aaron pulled a handheld tranquilizer gun out of the waist of his jeans—one of the other things we’d collected at Hill House. Dr. Kinsey was developing a tranquilizer that would help us capture dangerous Metas, rather than have to seriously injure or kill them. The gun itself was the size of a standard Glock and preloaded with four blue-tipped darts. Our hope was to take the clones alive—or at least put them down before they killed us.

“Ready to make a distraction?” Aaron asked.

“Yep,” I said.

“Be careful.”

“You, too.”

Oh, f*ck it. It felt odd to kiss him with Scott’s face on, but his lips felt the same. He tasted the same. When we pulled back, he winked.

“I’ll be careful, too,” Alexia deadpanned.

Ah, sarcasm. I knew there was a reason I liked her.

I stirred the air on the other side of the wall, till broken bricks and upturned earth became a cyclone of dirty, impenetrable wind. Lifted it up and over the wall to create a dangerous fog that hovered at the second floor of the Base and covered the ground between here and there.

Aaron didn’t use the hybrid part of his hybrid-Changeling powers very often. At high speeds, his skin hardened and he could smash right through solid objects—the opposite side of the Base still had a hole he’d made months ago. He ran at the building, picking up speed as he went, graceful as any pro athlete. Right through the swampy grass left over from yesterday’s water spill.

The sound he made when he ran through the wall was indescribable—not quite a bang, but more than a pop. A small cloud of dust burped out of the hole. Alexia ran after him. The moment she disappeared inside the impromptu door, I lifted my dirt-fog cloud until it covered every window on this side of the building. Careful to keep it there, I divided my attention just enough to fly across the open space to the Base roof. I held the dirt-fog a moment longer, then collected it all into a massive, whirling ball of air and debris. I moved it to the opposite side of the Base and sent it crashing through a second-floor window.

Two distractions for the price of one.

I pressed my ear to the stairwell door. No footsteps. The door opened without too much effort. No alarms that I could hear. I descended as silently as possible on the metal steps. On the fourth-floor landing, the building vibrated. Far below me, metal groaned and squealed—probably Alexia doing her thing. I slipped out of the stairwell and onto the fourth floor. Checked the Wet Room—meant for water and ice elementals—and found it empty. The Metal Shop, where telemagnetics like Alexia would have once practiced their powers, was also a bust. On a whim, though, I grabbed a dusty iron pipe the length of a baseball bat off a rack of similar objects.

Just in case.

The next door was a storage room—locked. Another rumble from downstairs vibrated up through my feet. Curious and hopeful, I lined up my iron bat with the doorknob and swung down with all my strength. The knob broke off. I shoved the door open. Rows of metal storage shelves were empty of everything except dust, which gave me a clear view of the room.

And its redheaded occupant. Near the back of the spacious storage room was my target. Andrew leapt to his feet when he saw me, his green eyes going wide. We met halfway, and I lifted him up in a bear hug.

“You’re here,” Andrew said breathlessly. “Daddy said you’d rescue us. He really did.”

I hugged him tighter, my heart thudding with a relief that turned to fear when I realized he was wearing a tracking collar. It was newer than the collars I’d seen on the Manhattan residents, but definitely the same design. How the hell had the clones gotten hold of one of those?

“Where’s your dad?” I asked.

“Back there.” Andrew pointed at the corner he’d been hiding in. I put him down and followed him.

McTaggert was on his back, unconscious, breathing so shallowly that for a moment, I thought he was dead. His collar had something attached to it, and as I knelt down to examine the device, anger curled in my guts. A needle was jammed into his neck, and the needle was attached to some kind of small pump filled with amber liquid. The anti-Rangers had drugged him.

“He won’t wake up,” Andrew said.

“The bad guys are keeping him asleep.” I touched the attachment. It didn’t zap me. It also wasn’t part of the original collar. Getting Andrew out was priority one, but I couldn’t just leave his father here, drugged out of his mind. Hoping I didn’t cause any permanent damage, I got a good grip on the needle attachment and yanked.

For modern technology, the damn thing broke off really easily. The short needle came out, dripping amber liquid and little dots of blood on the floor. I put it up on a shelf, out of the way.

Andrew hovered next to my arm, his small body shivering. “Will he wake up now?” he whispered.

“I hope so.”

“Well, isn’t this the very picture of a modern Meta family?” asked a familiar female voice.

Crap.