“Sienna …” Harry said.
I turned on him, slowly. “Did you see this coming?”
He shook his head. He was pale like the snows that lay draped, unevenly, over the snowy Illinois plains. “No.”
I looked him in the eye. “I believe you.”
He didn’t exactly let out a breath of relief, but I could see a slight loosening of his features. “Good.”
“Emergency services are going to be working for a while,” Cassidy said. “They’re calling in more ambulances.” She was still in tight concentration.
“That’s … that’s a good thing, right?” Eilish asked. “They don’t call in ambulances for dead people, after all.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening my door as frosty air rushed in. “What wonderful news.” I slammed it behind me and stalked around the hood of the car, heading for the limited treeline to my right. It consisted of five pines all in a row, the tallest of which was only about ten feet, and it sat just in front of a three-wire cattle fence.
I didn’t even have a proper woods to stalk off into to gather my thoughts. Illinois. The southern and western part was like Iowa lite.
I half-expected to hear a door open behind me, but I didn’t, and when I reached the fence I just jumped it. Nothing too fancy, a simple meta leap about five feet over a four-foot fence. I landed in the patchy snow on the other side and almost turned my ankle.
Color me unworried. Even if I turned my ankle, a minor injury like that would heal in about two hours, even in my vanilla condition.
“Dammit,” I let out a breath, and it frosted in front of me. I couldn’t tell if the worry I was feeling bubbling inside was driving the anger, or the anger was driving the worry harder. It didn’t really matter either way, because they were both present in sufficient quantities to choke me, and all I was doing was keeping my cool until I felt like I was far enough away from the SUV to lose it without having to worry about being watched.
But the ground was flat all the way around me, so there wasn’t much hope I wouldn’t be seen. No, there was nowhere to hide now; I was in plain sight of the road anywhere I went.
The despair and uncertainty felt like it was choking me, a little extra discomfort to compete with the chilling air that seeped in around my long sleeves and jeans. I should have dressed more warmly, knowing I was heading north, but here I was in the middle of snowy field, wearing no coat and watching my breath mist in front of me.
And lucky me, I got to wonder if my brother and my friends were dead on some cold, snowy runway in Minneapolis.
They’d come to save me in Scotland, and now I had to wonder if I’d missed my chance to repay the favor. They’d gone through all that hell, come to pull my fat out of the fire only for me to be too pathetic and drunk and unconcerned with everything to worry when they went into the fire themselves.
“I don’t think they’re dead,” Cassidy said from behind me. I turned to find her picking her way across the gaps where no snow lay, patches of black earth that were fallow for winter, hard and unyielding against her little tennis shoes. She had wrapped her arms around herself and was shivering, her tiny frame covered by a heavy coat, one more appropriate for Minneapolis weather. I wondered, idly, if she’d set up shop there again, or if she’d picked some other place to park herself after Reed destroyed her house in Richfield.
“It’d be a lot more helpful to me if I knew—and if I knew how badly they were injured,” I said, turning back to her. I paused, and said, “Wait … Harry sent you to talk to me? You?”
“I don’t know why, either,” Cassidy said, shivering. “It’s so cold out here, and it feels like I could be doing more at the computer, but …” she shrugged her small shoulders. “Yes, he sent me. Said I needed to come talk to you.” She almost missed a step but caught herself at the last second. She was not the most graceful meta I’d seen; in fact, she wasn’t that far off from being human in her dexterity. “Said I was the only one who could come talk to you.”
“I wonder why that is,” I said, turning back to look at the horizon, at where the grey sky joined the flat earth.
“Hell if I know,” she said, shivering as she slipped up next to me. “I think we both know my people skills are still …”
“As weak as your deadlift,” I said. “Weaker, probably, since you still have meta strength.”
“I never understood the point of physical strength until I ran across you,” she said, cocking her head, breath still misting the air. “Eric and I, we could … I mean, he used some variant of physical strength, obviously, but … it wasn’t like he had to get violent with people. We cracked bank vaults with his powers, and always when they were unoccupied. It was easy, it was lucrative, and we could just … live in the times between. Live on what we’d taken. Physical strength was about threats, about violence, about compulsion through force. I liked … to outthink my opponents instead.” A trace of a smile appeared on her lips. “To present them with a circumstance so ingenious that violence was an afterthought. Persuasion by manipulation of circumstance, call it. They never even needed to know my hand had been involved in … whatever it was. I could get what I needed without being so coarse.
“Then you came along,” she said, “and suddenly … all the thought in the world, all the avoidance—none of it mattered. You wouldn’t stop coming. You caught Eric, and I needed actual physical strength to overcome you. So I thought it through. I brought in people skilled at that sort of thing, people who had lived by violence. I removed most of your ability to do violence through the use of the suppressant—”
“Oh, yeah?” I remembered what she was talking about, her jailbreak at the old Agency, back when I’d worked for the government and been the warden for their prison, the Cube, which was housed under our headquarters. She’d done it, too, orchestrated a hostage situation to cover up Eric Simmons’s escape, used metahuman Russian ex-Special Forces operators to lay siege to us during a big event and depowered my brother. Then she’d had her little team hound me throughout the facility while I Die-Harded my way through them in order to keep the jailbreak contained.
And it mostly was. Only Simmons and Anselmo Serafini had escaped, and Anselmo had had to be carried out, scarred beyond recognition, thanks to me.
“—and you still wrecked everything and saved the day—mostly.” She made a face. “Violence. You were a master of it. You killed almost every one of those Russian mercs with less power than you have now.”
“I had some help,” I said quietly. “Reed. J.J. Scott … eventually.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Cassidy said. “I mean, I know Scotland was tough on you and all, but … you’re not dead. And like I said, you’re more powerful now than you were when you fought through those Russians—”
“I knew who I was then,” I said, the truth crashing in on me—several at once, actually.