“Lovely,” Eilish said, “well … feels like we should be getting along, now.” She clapped Quincy on the shoulder. “You stay here, darling. Wait for the cops. Go ahead and forget I was ever here, or that she was—actually, just forget everything that happened since you took this mission. It was all a distant dream; you don’t have any idea at all how this happened, how you ended up here. It’s a big mystery. All right?” And she smiled at him.
“All right,” he said.
“Go ahead and sit down right here and wait for the police,” she said, and he did just that as I started past him.
“They’re not going to stop until they catch you,” he said, calling after me as I went by. “They know you killed Harmon. They want this settled.” He turned his head. “My orders said dead or alive, but I just wanted to beat you. You’re a fellow warrior to me; I’ve seen what you’ve done over the years and it’s beautiful work. But these are soft people, the ones who sent me, people who don’t understand fighting, don’t understand war. You’re a murderer to them. They won’t be as merciful next time.”
I looked down at him. “Thank you, Warren.”
He looked right back, and beneath Eilish’s control, I almost felt like he was saluting me … and warning me. “Ma’am.”
I walked on by, and Harry fell into step behind me, Eilish a few behind us. “Did Cassidy erase the surveillance footage here?”
“Yep,” Harry said. “And without any affirmative witnesses—”
“This won’t be provable as a metahuman incident,” I said, smiling that Harry got what I was driving at immediately. That’d be an insurance payout for Deltan Data Systems, and it meant my conscience could rest easy about all the property damage I’d done here. Hell, with one of their people caught at the scene, maybe the government would get involved and throw in some hush money.
The van was waiting in the parking lot, and Harry slid open the door for me as I stepped up, cringing at a couple of my lesser-realized pains that adrenaline had wallpapered over during the fight. Cassidy was waiting inside, face in a tight moue, watching me.
“You got him?” she asked. “I couldn’t see on the feed. Which is erased now, by the way.”
“I got him,” I said, and she slumped back in her seat as I slid in next to her and fastened my seatbelt. Eilish and Harry loaded up in the front, and then we were on our way, before the first siren even reached my ears.
42.
We pulled up in front of the wrecked house in Richfield, Minnesota, the street deathly quiet and a light snow starting to fall around us. Cassidy had already gathered her things, and I was left staring out at the destroyed house as I opened the door on the silent street and let the frigid air rush in, chilling me. “Are you sure about this?” I asked, nodding at the house. My brother had wrecked it while dragooning Cassidy into his service to rescue me from Scotland; it didn’t look like she’d done much to repair it yet.
Cassidy frowned at me. “I own the one next door, too.” She shrugged. “I liked the neighborhood, and it felt right to expand, so …”
“Oh,” I said, glancing at the wrecked house again. “I just … thought you were sleeping in the ruins of the basement or something.”
“I need an active power supply for the sensory tank,” she said, shaking her head as she crossed over in front of my chair and I squeezed my legs to the side to let her pass. “And the computers. And—well, everything, really.” She stepped out onto the curb. “Though I think I’ve missed the sensory deprivation tank the most these last few days.” She glanced at each of us, then lowered her face. “Good times, people. Let’s never do this again.” Then she looked at me. “Except us. We have a future date.”
“Way to make it weird, Cassidy,” I said, then added, “So … we’re not square, huh?”
She hesitated, yellow light from a nearby streetlamp casting her pale face in shadow. Snowflakes came down around her, giving her a case of artificial, frosty dandruff around the shoulders. “No. But …” She looked me right in the eye. “This … thank you.” Then she glanced away. “Your friends … they’re all in stable condition. Some are waking up now, others will be within hours.” Now she looked right at me. “They’ll all be fine, every one.”
“I know,” I said, feeling my breath catch in my lungs, and not just from the rush of col. “But … thank you, anyway, Cassidy. And … I’m sorry about Simmons.”
“I know you are,” she said, looking down again. “Which … is strange, because were I in your shoes … I wouldn’t feel the same.” She shook her head, like she was trying to rid herself of troubling thoughts. “Let me know when you go to Revelen,” she said, looking me straight in the eye once more. “And we’ll call it square.”
“I like how you’re the only one that believes that I’ll be able to square things if I go to Revelen,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Because everyone else is all like, ‘You’re going to die if you go to Revelen.’”
She blinked a couple times. “Who told you that?”
“The voices in my head before they died,” I said, “Stepane—the Predator—that’s where he came from. Where he got his powers. Their serum.”
She took this in, processing. “That affects the calculus in my equation.”
“Unfavorably, I assume.”
She nodded, just slightly, as she stepped up onto the driveway, which had been plowed, despite the house being wrecked. “Yes, unfavorably.” And then she started to walk away.
“Do I even want to know the odds?” I asked, wondering how she could even render such an equation without any freaking idea of what we’d be facing in Revelen.
“No,” she called back, not turning around. She picked her way around the snowy lawn, walking down the cleared sidewalk, bag on her back comically large for her thin frame.
“Maybe we should go right now?” I asked as Harry eased the van forward.
“No,” Cassidy and Harry chorused as one. I looked back at him, he shook his head.
“Bad odds,” Cassidy said and gave me a little wave.
“Very bad odds,” Harry agreed. “The worst, in fact.”
I frowned, and slid the van’s back door shut as we passed Cassidy, now making her way up her driveway. Any other time, even when I had her locked up in prison, I would have dreaded seeing her again.
This time … and for some reason, related to this growing fear and awareness that the nation of Revelen was a growing menace I was going to have to deal with at some point … this time … I almost looked forward to seeing her again.
Almost.
I mean … I wasn’t totally crazy.
43.
“Oh … it’s you,” Reed said, sounding a little dazed, like he was suffering from cotton-brain, that medicated feeling where your head feels like it’s stuffed with … well, cotton. He was blinking at me furiously against the darkened backdrop of our dreamwalk, and smacking his lips together like the cotton feeling had spread to his mouth.
“You sound surprised,” I said, slipping out of the darkness toward him.
“I guess I am,” he said, peering around, that dazed look in his eyes. “I didn’t really expect to see you again for a while after our last talk.” He frowned. “Wait … what happened after our last talk?”