Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (21 page)

“Do you hear anything?” the man asked.

“Sounds of the city,” Sienna replied tautly. “Nothing that would hint at—oh, man.” She pointed west to the river.

Barely visible at this distance, Jamie could see something racing off the end of the esplanade. The splash was immense, commensurate with what she’d seen earlier about ten blocks south. The garbage truck disappeared in a second or two, sinking below the surface before she could even say—

“Let’s go,” Nealon said, and she was off, jetting toward the river at high speed.

“I can’t go that fa—” Jamie started to say, and then realized that really, if Sienna could do it …

Jamie threw a gravity channel up and attached it right to Sienna. She figured it would work, she could just hang on, like she had to the garbage truck during the chase earlier.

Jamie felt a hard yank as the channel started to do its thing, ripping her along at high speed, jerking her neck back as Sienna’s momentum tore her forward at high speed. That lasted about a second, and then, suddenly, there was a lurching feeling followed by weightlessness.

“AHHHHHH!”

Jamie fell a good ten feet, the screaming sound coming from somewhere ahead of her until the fall ceased as quickly as it had begun, and she found herself suspended in mid-air, staring up at the white clouds in the sky, hints of grey on the horizon suggesting rain might be in the future.

“What the hell was that?” Nealon shouted somewhere ahead, and Jamie righted herself to find Sienna staring at her, outraged, the man in the suit still on her back but looking a little rattled. He was gripping her right across the—

“Ohhh, my,” Jamie muttered. “Sorry. Sorry. I was—I anchored myself to you, figured I’d just ride along—uh, you know, your passenger is, uhm—” Jamie pointed at her chest, looking away all the while.

“What?” Sienna asked, then looked down. “Scott!”

“Huh?” the guy asked, like a true Cro-Magnon. “Oh, sorry. We were falling, I panicked.”

“Well, we’re past panic now and heading toward groping pretty fast, so—”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll move.”

“And you,” Sienna said, looking a little irritable, “maybe warn me next time you’re going to hitch your wagon to my star? I thought it was bad when he was trying to pull my pants down. I don’t know exactly how you did it, but you latched right onto my—uhm, not good place to be latched to—wait, are you all touching me inappropriately?”

“You know, it’s not exactly my first time at your rodeo,” Scott deadpanned.

“Not cool, man, I’m giving you a lift here,” Sienna said, then turned her attention to Jamie. “Can you anchor on my waist, maybe? And now that I know it’s coming, I think I can counterbalance with flight and, uh, just, you know, watch the—sensitive areas.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jamie said, still flushed.

“Garbage truck in the water, people,” Scott said, rolling a hand in a ‘speed up’ motion. “If we’re all done discussing inappropriate touching? In the middle of the crime scheme? With the, you know, fate of—something—hanging in the balance?”

“Yeah,” Sienna said, nodding. “J—uh, are you ready?” she asked, looking right at Jamie.

“Ready,” Jamie said, her anchor secure. She maintained it at perfect equalization, a tether that would move her neither closer nor further away from Sienna.

“Then let’s go get the bad guys,” Sienna said, and shot off toward the Hudson.

I was starting to feel a little like I’d been groped by everyone in New York as we flew toward the dying ripples of the sinking garbage truck in the Hudson River. The sun was beating down pretty hard, my stomach was rumbling like crazy, and I now had one monkey and one sincere, powerful, badass mom-turned-superhero weighing me down on my flight. I couldn’t decide what I’d done to earn a now-evil ex hunting me, but plainly I’d done something very wrong, since he was now riding my back in a way he hadn’t since—

Uh. Never mind. Again.

Oh, wait. I remember what I’d done to deserve it. I stole all his memories of our relationship and then somehow he found out about it. Whoops.

“It’s been down there for at least two minutes already!” Jamie shouted from where she hung beneath me. I could feel the pull of her weight, but Gavrikov’s flight power essentially negated gravity, so really the only problem was just the pressure on my spine where her gravity tether—or whatever—was latched on. “They’ve probably deployed the sub!”

“If they’re in the water, I can stop them,” Scott said with a kind of confidence that I didn’t remember seeing from him when last we’d crossed paths. It was, however, reminiscent of the Scott I’d known when we’d first met, and he’d been a brash, kind of rude kid who’d had the inside track at the Directorate and I was a smartass loner.

Good times.

“You sure about that, ace?” I prickled back at him. “Even a mini-sub has got to weigh a couple tons.”

“I’ve got this,” he said, reaffirming his current implacable badassness for me. No one understood trying to impress an ex like I did, but he was going over and above, in my opinion.

“Well, it’s not going to do us much good if you just pull them out of the water, is it?” Jamie asked, her voice a little faded by the wind. She must have realized we were waiting for a fuller explanation. “Unless you think they’ll just talk to the police when we bring them in?”

I looked down at her, her white and black leotard a nice contrast with the grey and brown city rooftops below. “I got kind of an ex-foreign-military-hardass-merc vibe from the ones I saw carted out of the bank. Having experienced these guys in the past on many, many—many, many—”

“We get it, you kill a lot of guns for hire,” Scott said.

“—many, many occasions, most of the higher level ones that could pull an op like this are unlikely to talk. They’ll lawyer up and it’ll be like trying to coax blood out of a seashell.”

“Nice simile,” Scott said dryly. “And … point taken.”

“Nice to see you can still be reasonable,” I said, and I could sense the mood behind me darken.

“I can follow their progress under the water,” Scott said tightly, a moment later, and I realized that whatever he’d wanted to say he’d buried. “See where they lead us, if you think that’s a smarter play?”

“Well, it can’t be any dumber than ripping their mini-sub out of the depths and shaking it like a can of pop,” I said as we crossed over the wreckage of the promenade below, where the garbage truck had left a wake of destruction as it had headed into the river. People were standing at the end of the smashed railing where it had plunged through, pointing and talking.

“This is where I get off,” Scott said.

“Honestly, with all that grabbing and rubbing you were doing, I figured maybe you already had,” I groused.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” He dropped from my back and caught himself on twin pillars of water, like he was shooting jets to hold himself aloft about ten feet above the Hudson. He swayed a little as he caught his balance, then stood there, concentrating, lowering down to a few inches off the water, before he started to slide over the surface like he was surfing without a board or any discernible waves.

“That’s … kind of cool,” Jamie said, sounding mildly impressed. I could feel the shift in weight now that he was gone, my world a little pleasantly lighter.

“He has his moments,” I said grudgingly. However willing I might have been to admit I’d screwed Scott over, I still didn’t appreciate the looming threat he currently represented to me. “Let’s go.”

I followed along after Scott as he jetted over the surface of the water, Gravity Gal hanging from me like she was on an invisible swing. He took a clear path, like he was an arrow shot straight, heading south. Jersey passed by on my right and Manhattan’s skyscrapers were to my left as we followed him following the sub. We were really moving, and I had to wonder what kind of sub they had, because it was probably going forty miles an hour or more as it headed past the tip of lower Manhattan. I could see Ellis Island up ahead, and past that, the Statue of Liberty.

We kept going, the sun hot. My back was aching, and I had Wolfe doing some healing every few minutes just to take the load off. “Any chance you can walk yourself for a bit now that we’re slowed down?” I asked her.

“Not really,” she replied apologetically. “I can’t establish an anchor on the water. I need a fixed point, or at least something that can bear my weight.”

“How about the river bed?”

“Too far down.” She shook her head. “I need to be able to see the point I’m attaching the gravity channel to.” She paused. “I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?”

“Well, I’ve never tried attaching a channel to something I couldn’t see,” she said, a little defensively.

I frowned down at her. “Wait, how long have you had these powers?”

“A few months,” she said, and that caused me to frown deeper. She must have sensed my surprise because she asked, “What?”

“Metas manifest in their teenage years,” I said, “and no offense, but … you are not a teen.”

“Uh, no, obviously,” she said. “Why does that matter?”

“Because it means your powers weren’t a natural, genetically passed-on phenomenon.” I felt my jaw grow tight as I contemplated that little detail.

She had turned herself so that she was on her back, swaying in mid-air, looking up at me. “Wait … you’re saying … I’m not a … a natural-born meta?” I nodded, and she got it. “Then … how did I get my powers?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I have no idea,” she said, and sounded earnest enough that I believed her. “I just woke up one day and I could … well, you know. All this, plus strength and—”

“Yeah. You got them artificially,” I said tightly. “There’s a serum that does it.” I shook my head. “I thought it was a secret, that it was all … out of circulation.” I felt that headache returning as I recalled the destructive power unleashed the last time some wise guy—by the name of Edward Cavanagh—thought to create a meta army. “I guess we were wrong.”

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge loomed ahead, wide and sweeping, stretching from Staten Island over to Brooklyn. I followed Scott under the enormous span, about a hundred yards behind him. I heard Jamie make a shocked sound, followed by a pained sigh. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and it was plainly not nothing. “I just … had a busy day ahead of me before all … all this.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty much a job, this hero business,” I said, like I was old hand. Which I was. “You know, if you wanted to, you could probably go full time like ol’ Captain Frost did—”

“Pass.”

I chuckled under my breath, a few flecks of spray left behind by Scott’s water trail catching me on the forehead. It felt good. “What, you don’t think a hero should be directly responsible to their fans?”

“I think a hero probably ought to do the right thing,” Jamie said with obvious distaste. “Full stop. And the idea of being beholden to … whoever he’s beholden to … doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Yeah, I’m not super clear exactly how all that works,” I said. “Crowdsourcing or funding or something? The gist I got was that people pay him to be a hero. Tip him when he saves a squirrel or something, I dunno.”

“I guess I was under the old-fashioned assumption that being a hero was a public service,” Jamie said drily.

“I probably shouldn’t talk, since I’m on the payroll of an organization that basically makes me a law enforcement officer for hire, huh?”

“That’s a little different,” Jamie said, sounding like she was backpedaling. “I think, anyway. I assume if you got a call for help that didn’t involve—”

“Yeah, I help the local departments in Minneapolis and St. Paul out where I can,” I said. “And people, individually, where I can. Some pro bono type work, though that gets a little dicier now, since a lot of states are not necessarily on board with me helping them.”

“Run into that problem a lot?”

“Ohio gave me some static when I offered to help them with a meta criminal last month,” I said. “He was an armed robber that was getting bolder, using his powers to—”

“I heard about that,” Jamie said with a cringe. “How many did he—”

“Twelve officers,” I said, suddenly a little scratchy in the throat. “Before they brought him down with a police sniper. This job … I think sometimes people either underestimate or overestimate what a meta can do, though when they go over, at least it’s the safer path.”

“Are we heading toward that boat? Out there past Breezy Point?” Jamie asked as Scott started a lazy turn to the left, a massive container ship the only thing nearby.

“Ship,” I corrected her. I frowned in the distance, but I couldn’t see a designation on the hull. “And yeah, I think that might be it.”

It was only a few hundred yards away, probably about a mile out to sea past the bridge. Our approach had slowed, presumably because Scott had sensed the submarine reducing speed in the water. I’d never really thought about his ability to feel things under the water, but then he’d always been a font of creativity in the ways he’d used his powers.

“Scott,” I said, drawing closer to him so as to avoid shouting over the open waters, “you might want to—”

Before I could tell him to back off, I heard shouts over the side of the vessel ahead. Sentries appeared from behind the containers on the deck like ants swarming out of a hill, and I immediately broke skyward, figuring that I’d split any fire they sent our way. I saw the submarine break the surface just ahead, cozying up to the side of the ship as Scott zoomed toward it to attack.

The gunfire peppered the water below as half a dozen rifles opened up over the side. I caught a glimpse of the bow of the ship and a faded name—
Tirragusk
, Canta Morgana. I recognized the name of the country at least; Canta Morgana was a country in Eastern Europe, and when last I checked, the haven of more than a few soldiers of fortune.

“You want me to drop you on the deck?” I asked Jamie as I accelerated up. I planned to drop down myself, engage these clowns one on one. I was mourning the loss of the Sig Sauer P226, but I must have left it in the bank after the explosion.

“I’ll follow you down,” Jamie said, and she swung like a chain above me as I started my plunge from five hundred feet up. I could see Scott with a wall of water in front of him like a shield as he rose to the side of the ship. He swept five gunmen off their feet and then doused the top of the mini-sub with a hard spray as it opened up. Jamie was just behind me, and I felt her tether release from my waist as she got a new anchor on the boat. I figured I’d be joining Scott in the fight in less than two seconds, and Jamie probably a few seconds after—