Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (22 page)

A sudden, compressive detonation caused the
Tirragusk
to explode beneath me, and the shockwave hit me like a god slapping a fly out of the air. I didn’t even have time to see the ship disintegrate before I was knocked unconscious in the air, that weightless sensation of falling trailing me into the darkness of my dreams.

Jamie was lagging far behind Sienna when the ship blew up; she’d braced herself against the deck and was on a slow descent, already sending out channels to drive the guns of the guards at the sides of the ship to the deck. She wanted a soft landing, and all the troubles to be wrapped up by the time she got there.

Well
, she thought as her channel to the ship disintegrated when the
Tirragusk
exploded into a geyser of fire,
one out of two ain’t bad …

The world bucked around her as Jamie was suddenly left with nothing to steady herself against. The shockwave hit and knocked her head over heels, flipping through the air, the rippling surface of the Atlantic Ocean replaced by the clouded sky as she turned end over end. She caught a glimpse of Sienna as she dropped, insensate, the woman’s t-shirt fluttering in the air as she dropped out of the sky.

Jamie anchored herself to Sienna and turned the power up to full; this was a terrible idea, but it might buy a few seconds, if they were lucky. Sienna’s unconscious form shot right at her, and Jamie loosened the channel’s power once Sienna had achieved full momentum upward. She let the channel extend like a rubber band as she twisted on her fall and Sienna sprang up, like a bungie cord had caught her.

Jamie twisted as she fell, passing Sienna by mere inches, and thrust her hand out as she turned, her eyes on the Verrazano Bridge for only a second—but long enough to establish a channel between it and Sienna.

Jamie activated the channel, turning it on low, and Sienna stopped in midair with a very slight jerk. The channel started to reel her, very slowly, back toward the bridge, arresting her momentum downward, as though she had a winch holding her in place vertically, the strength of the channel holding her aloft.

“Whew,” Jamie said, her own momentum halted by her tether to Sienna. She hung off the woman like a stray piece of string, dangling over the ocean below as the
Tirragusk
continued to break up, the hull shattered in the middle, any hint of the mini-sub they’d been chasing gone in the wreckage—

“Uh oh,” Jamie said.

Where was the agent—Scott—who they’d been following?

Jamie cut herself loose from Sienna, leaving the slow channel in place to reel her back to the safety of the bridge. The wind hit Jamie in the face as she dove the last hundred feet, sending out eight channels in an attempt to break her fall into the harbor.

It didn’t work. She still belly-flopped, and it hurt, especially along that last, stubborn bit of stomach fat that had dogged her for the last decade and a half since she’d had Kyra.

The water flooded her ears, soaked her costume again—it had just been starting to dry, too—and Jamie opened her eyes to see flames glowing from the wreckage of the ship, lighting up the water beneath the surface like an angry dragon had been loosed below the surface.

Jamie blinked her bleary eyes against the effect of the salty water. It threatened to flood up her nose, held at bay by the air she had kept in her lungs even through the belly flop. She hadn’t dived like that since the time she’d gone to a public pool as a kid, and made an utter fool of herself with a similar maneuver from the top of the high dive.

She cut through the water with powerful strokes. Ahead, she could see the twisted wreckage of the mini-sub sinking through the darkness below the
Tirragusk
, the big ship’s keel broken right in the middle and starting to list as the fore and aft of the ship began their descent toward the bottom.

Jamie looked for dots, spots, little shadows between her and the flame. He had to be in here somewhere. Probably unconscious, like Sienna, but here somewhere, surely …

Yes! She saw a shadowy figure drifting down, slower than the mini-sub. She thrashed her legs and propelled herself forward, feeling like a shark cutting through the water. Grateful she had decided not to add a cape to her costume, Jamie pushed against the natural drag as she swam toward the cracking underbelly of the
Tirragusk
as it sank bit by bit.

She drew closer and closer to the dark figure, her lungs starting to feel the strain like she had while diving for the garbage truck earlier. Did all heroing experiences take a turn into the water eventually, she wondered? Because swimming really wasn’t Jamie’s forte. She’d been a fairly weak swimmer before gaining her powers, though her metahuman strength made it easier.

The closer she drew to the figure she was chasing, the more sharply defined he became. His head was down, and he was lazily drifting toward the darkness at the bottom of the ocean. His legs were up in the air, lifeless, and she swam hard toward him, grasping him around the chest, dragging his upper body toward her—

Jamie screamed in shock, the sound muted by the water, bubbles issuing forth explosively out of her mouth. She could see the face of the man she’d grasped in the light of the burning ship, and while half his was missing, half was not, and she could tell that this wasn’t Scott—at least not the one she was looking for.

She pushed off the corpse, letting it continue in its downward path as she felt the hard push against her lungs from the pressure of the water. She looked up and realized she was thirty feet down beneath the surface, no shore in sight, and the broken-up husk of the ship was almost directly overhead now. She looked down and saw nothing but shadows, no visible seabed, though she knew it was surely somewhere below.

A rumble filtered through her water-laden ears, and she looked up to see another explosion, this one finally rending the
Tirragusk
irreparably in two. The stern end broke off, sinking ahead of her, and the bow rushed through the water at her, no longer held up by the last tenuous connection between the two pieces. Jamie saw the metal hull slipping inexorably toward her, a shadow that blotted out all light of the surface, and as it sank closer her she raised her hands, trying, frantically, to anchor it to something and push it away, but there was nothing—

When I stirred awake, it was to a gentle sea breeze rustling my hair. Bright sunlight was shining through my closed eyelids, and once again, I could feel blood dripping out of my ears like warm bath water. When I opened my eyes I could see the red stains on my dark t-shirt glistening in the light, alerting me that my eardrums had probably ruptured. Again.

“Ungh,” I said, my neck kinked as I looked around. I was floating lightly over an expansive sea, Long Island and Brooklyn stretching off a couple miles to my left, the wreckage of the
Tirragusk
breaking up a few hundred yards in front of me, split cleanly in two like a giant hand had chopped it right down the middle. I could see fires burning inside the hull, flaming out across multiple decks even as it continued to sink below the waves bit by bit, and a memory of what had happened before I took a nap came flashing back to me along with a rush of fear.

Scott had been thirty feet off the bow when the
Tirragusk
went up, shielding himself from gunfire. Did that mean he was …?

My stomach dropped, and I felt a shock of adrenaline blast through me as my flight powers kicked in. “Thanks, Gavrikov—and Wolfe,” I said as the urgency filtered through me. I started forward—

And something jerked me back hard, snapping my neck like I’d just gotten rear-ended by a trucker.

“What the hell?” I muttered, turning my head and looking for whatever had stopped me. There was nothing behind me, so I started to fly toward the
Tirragusk
again, but that same sense of something anchoring me to—

I got it a second later as I realized I was being slowly, slowly pulled back toward the Verrazano Bridge, probably at the pace of a slow walk. Jamie must have used her gravity powers to anchor me to the superstructure, because now I was having a hell of a time moving even an inch to the left or right. I tried to pull at my t-shirt, hoping maybe she’d connected me there, but no dice; she’d clearly attached somewhere deeper. Which made sense, because a t-shirt wouldn’t have a hope in hell of holding my weight. Sadly. And much pointed out. (Thanks, internet assholes.)

As I debated trying to figure out if she’d anchored me to a point in my back and internal organs that I might be able to survive the loss of for a few seconds, the
Tirragusk
exploded yet again, and the two pieces of the ship that had been barely clinging to each other divorced entirely, dipping below the waves one final time as the area around the ship—presumably where Jamie and Scott were—became a graveyard for the vessel, hundreds of tons of steel making their way to the bottom of the bay.

And I was powerless to stop it.

The ship was falling toward her, gathering speed as it came down. She threw out her hands in reaction, throwing channels and setting them to repulse. This wasn’t the sort of maneuver that would do any good, but she was out of air, out of ideas, and panic was starting to set in, taking from her clarity of thought. She activated the channels in an instant and pushed—

She was dragged down by their force, propelled toward the bottom of the harbor by the weight of the ship bearing down on the channels and through them, her. The murky darkness waiting for her below rose to embrace her. Jamie fell, her ears filled with unbearable pressure as she went down, the light above disappearing as she swirled into the depths, the pieces of the broken ship falling after her.

She looked around frantically as she fell, hoping to see the bottom. If she could just find the bottom, she could set up a channel and launch herself to the surface. Why had she even come down here to begin with?

Oh. Right. That government agent. That one. Right over there …

She blinked her bleary eyes against the burning of the water in them, felt it swamping her sinuses, painfully, pressing up into her nose as the pressure increased. She shook her head, her vision becoming dimmer either because she was falling further into the depths or because she was out of oxygen, her need to take a breath now painfully desperate.

She reached out with a hand and snagged the agent with a channel, pulling him toward her even as she continued on her downward path, driven ahead of the falling of the ship’s pieces. She dragged the agent, Scott, to her like a fisherman reeling in a line, and he bumped against her side, his body limp and lifeless.

Worry about him when we get to the surface
, she thought, darkness closing in, vision getting hazy. Her movements were sluggish, and not just because of the resistance of the water. Her arm felt like it didn’t want to obey her, it wanted to flail pointlessly in the water. Liquid dripped down her throat and choked her, and full panic set in, drowning reflex active and preventing any rational thought.

Helplessly she flung her arms in the water. The light above was gone, the silty bottom below not yet in sight, and Jamie was drowning, she knew, and her body was reacting, preventing rational thought, and trying to get her to the surface, flailing against the drag of the pieces of the
Tirragusk
, unable to stop the channels as they propelled her closer and closer to death.

Nadine took care not to even get into the shower spray this time, because she anticipated a long call with Abner. She held herself to the side of the spray and then immediately punched the keypad to activate the door, slipping into the darkness and fumbling for the phone, dialing before she’d even really settled in her seat.

“Hello?” Abner asked when he picked up the phone.

“Abner,” she said, as close to exultant as she got without a one hundred percent return in a day. “I saw the news. Did we—”

“It’s almost entirely done,” Abner said. “The bank job distracted them and allowed us to hit FBI headquarters by using the stolen SWAT van as a Trojan horse. I also used a different contractor to hit the US Attorney’s office. Whatever evidence they had on you is safely destroyed, save for the digital backups, and, uh,” he chuckled, “those will be gone soon enough. I’ve got a man on them now.”

“Sounds like a tall order,” Nadine said, breathing a rush of relief into the cool darkness. “I hope your man can handle it.”

“He’s quite good,” Abner said, matching her with a coolness of his own. “Professional hacker. His handle is ArcheGrey1819. He’s a legend in the digital underworld. They won’t realize it until later, but the job should be done within the hour.”

“So I’m about to be a free woman?” Nadine mused.

“They’ll be watching you for quite some time,” Abner said, the voice of caution. “But in essence, they won’t have a thing on you. They’ll have to at least allow you to resume your ordinary activities.”

“How much is this going to cost me?” Nadine asked. She didn’t care, so long as she was able to get back to work, but she was curious.

“Not as much as you might think. ArcheGrey—or whatever his actual name is, because I don’t bloody know—he didn’t want money. He wanted something else.”

“Curious.”

“I suppose when you’re as good as he is, you can make money appear in your account like turning little bits of ones and zeroes into water. Anyhow, he’s going to be a happy camper because I’ve got him what he wanted and you’re happy because it only cost you—well, we’ll talk about it later. You’ll get a lulz out of it, as Grey says.”

“I look forward to it,” Nadine said, shifting in her chair. The plasticy seventies-era material was sticking to her naked ass. “When will we be able to meet? I want to discuss prevention of future occurrences of this.”

“Try not breaking the law,” Abner said with amusement. “Failing that … this will be more difficult next time. We’ve left signs that this was a terrorist action rather than evidence disposal, and hopefully it’ll be enough to cover what we did. The mercenaries we hired are almost all dead as well.”