Trance (29 page)

“No, no, no,” over and over until my words became sobs, and the pleas became bitter tears.

We stayed until late afternoon, waiting for the fire department to seize control of the blaze and give William back to us. I wouldn’t leave without him. I sat for hours in the back of an ambulance, long after they dressed the few burns on my back and stomach. Long after they tended to Gage’s shoulder and Dahlia’s scrapes. Sat and waited and didn’t speak.

Gage left and returned once. He offered a nod that told me he’d placed the call. Renee and the others knew, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t been the one to tell her. I couldn’t do anything except sit and stare and mourn.

Dahlia remained by my side, a shell-shocked shadow. Had I inadvertently sensed something when I picked her out of the paparazzi crowd? I didn’t know. At the moment, I didn’t care. She tried to offer a few more teary apologies. I ignored her into silence. She was a mystery I hadn’t the faculties to ponder. We didn’t discuss her fire absorption, or if she could be out there helping the firemen rein in the inferno. She couldn’t control it. I couldn’t ask her to try. Not like this.

Police corralled a slew of reporters behind wooden barricades. The throng was more frenzied than they’d been at the building collapse. I could imagine the headlines: “Heroes Torch Studio After Welcome Back Interview.”

Lanthrop wandered by once, wondering if I would be pleased to know that he had a copy of the interview. My response was to flip him off. He left us alone after that.

A little after four in the afternoon, a fire lieutenant came
over to the ambulance and spoke with Gage. From their body language, I knew what was happening. They had found William.

It was time to take him home.

I spent the short ride back avoiding eye contact with the sheet-covered form at our feet. I hadn’t let the EMTs put William into one of their black bags. He startled easily and didn’t like enclosed spaces.

Five people hovered on the Base’s roof below, waiting for the copter to land. Marco stood behind Renee, one hand on her shoulder. She had her own arms wrapped around her torso several times, as if trying to find comfort in the embrace. They watched us approach, solemn and unmoving.

Dr. Seward and Agent Grayson huddled to one side, along with an orderly who appeared to be in charge of a gurney. The sight of it squeezed my chest.

The copter landed and the green safety light blinked on. McNally turned the lock and pushed the door open. A rush of air from the rotating blades erupted into the cabin, caught the edge of the sheet, and blew an unsecured corner. Gage snagged it and tucked it back under—too late to prevent a glimpse of William’s severed leg. Chopped through meat and bone just below the knee by one swing of an ax, and secured only by two inches of muscle and skin.

Renee screamed, arms going back to normal length like a retracting coil. McNally climbed out and steered her away, words lost to the roar of the slowing motor. Gage and
I waited inside while Dr. Seward and the orderly pulled out the backboard and secured their burden to the gurney. Marco appeared in the door, his glowing eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. He gazed past us, to the passenger trying to disappear into the vinyl bench seat.

“Why did you bring the reporter?” Marco asked.

“Because she’s one of us,” Gage replied.

Marco furrowed his eyebrows. “Us?”

“I absorb fire,” Dahlia said.

Gage grunted. “She’s safer here, so we brought her along.”

Marco looked at me, and I nodded my agreement. He offered his good hand to Dahlia. She smiled, took it, and climbed out. Gage followed, and then turned around to wait for me. I stared at the floor with zero desire to leave. He waited silently for a while, then followed the others inside.

The pilot locked down the copter controls, making no move to evict me. The others were gone, probably waiting for me to appear and decide what to do next, and all I could do was hide in a stationary helicopter. Hiding was not something I did often, but the idea of facing my friends—the people whose lives I was responsible for—terrified me on a basic level. I had failed; someone died. Again.

I always lost.

Specter found us at the studio, but how? Fewer than fifteen people knew about the location. Most of them found out an hour before we started. Specter knew to look for us at the HQ, not at a tiny public broadcasting studio in West Hollywood. Outside the team, only Seward, McNally and Grayson knew about the interview, and they were all on our side.

Maybe.

McNally and Grayson had lied to us about how we lost our powers. They had known about Fairview and the Warden. They were certainly both smart enough to commit arson and get away with it. Hadn’t Seward said Specter was likely to strike at us off-site? But why would any of them help Specter kill us? Why not simply shoot us all and be done with it?

Chad the cameraman had been the perfect target for Specter. The boy was tired, overworked, with a weak mind sensitive to suggestion, stuck in that perfect place between sleep and awake, where Specter liked to strike. Only someone possessed could start a fire with the intent to hurt so many. Only Specter-possessed could a sleepy-eyed teenager take an ax and chop through someone’s leg, slice through muscle, splinter bone, spurt blood.

My stomach twisted. I lurched out of the copter, scurried across the landing pad, and vomited into the gravel. Bitter acid scorched my throat and tongue, and I continued to retch long after my stomach had emptied. Angry tears spilled down my cheeks, somehow finding expendable moisture in my exhausted, dehydrated body. I spat a wad of phlegm and wiped my mouth, my entire body trembling.

Cool wind pushed a lock of sooty hair into my eyes, shading me from the setting sun. It dipped low on the horizon, its bottom edge just touching the Pacific Ocean. Beams of gold and red sparkled against the winter sky and slivers of visible water, setting the entire world on fire.

“Stay the course,” I said, frustrated with the meaningless words. I glared at the sunset. My strength gave out, and I sat
down hard. The odor of charred wood was ever-present, grafted to my skin. Seeped into my uniform. I knew I should change, but I preferred the grit. In the past I had gone weeks without clean clothes. I’d soaked shirts and bras in hot water and glycerin soap in lieu of proper laundering. It had seemed more important to spend my money on food and heat than detergent.

Had living here softened me so much? Provided a false sense of security by the notion of a job I couldn’t get fired from?

Not true. I could get fired. I could very easily fire myself for incompetence, only I knew I’d never leave this place. The Corps was all I had. I’d sooner die than disappoint them—if I hadn’t already.

Footsteps swished across the landing pad. I ignored the pilot. I was out of his copter. He couldn’t make me leave the roof. The steps stopped behind me.

“Any symptoms?” Dr. Seward asked.

I tilted my head. He looked so sincere, thin mouth puckered into a little ball, that I swallowed a sarcastic retort. “No. Nothing that isn’t the direct result of smoke inhalation and long bouts of crying.”

“I can give you something for the headache.”

“How about the heartache, Doc? Got anything for that?”

He looked up, toward the sunset. Red light reflected in his eyes and off the rims of his glasses. “Time heals all wounds, right? Except for the ones we keep ripping open anew.” He crouched, hands dangling between his knees. “I am so sorry about William.”

“Me too.”

“Your father used to come up here to watch the sun set. Not as often that final year, but for a long time before. Your mother was deathly afraid of heights.”

I hadn’t known that about her. “I’m not afraid of heights, just of everything else.” Had I really just admitted that to Dr. Seward? I had all the insecurities of twenty people my age, and no one to talk to about them. I had to be brave for the team, brave for my friends. I couldn’t afford to be weak, hence my hiding on the roof instead of facing them with my grief. Facing their grief.

“What are you afraid of, Trance?”

“Losing it all.” I flicked a stone and it skittered across the cement. “My whole life, everything I value has been taken away from me. Friends, jobs, money. Freedom. My mom and dad, my powers, my memories. William. Control over any aspect of my life, all taken away. And I can’t stop it.”

“Few of us ever maintain the control over our lives we would like to have, but we do what we are called to do, Trance. When your powers returned and Rita McNally called me, I left behind a wife, two grown daughters, and a life in San Diego to come here.”

“I didn’t know that.” I was dumbfounded, having never considered his personal life. Hell, it took hard thought to recall his first name. What did that say about me?

“My wife, Annabelle, is furious at me right now. Fifteen years ago, after we secured you children new lives, I handed in my notice and walked. It was supposed to be my retirement from twenty years of service.”

“Why’d you come back? Why didn’t you stay with your family?”

He smiled, a warm gesture that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “My mother worked for MHC and the Corps, as did my grandfather. It’s always been a part of my life, and I’ve sacrificed a lot for it.”

“Has it been worth it?”

“Most of the time, in moments like this. People forget that Rangers are human beings with feelings and fears and love and pain. It hurt your predecessors to think the people they were fighting for no longer gave a damn.”

“But you give a damn.”

“Yes. You have a gift, Trance, to make people listen and follow. You can rebuild the Rangers and repair the indignities of the past.”

“Be the leader my father was?”

Dr. Seward shook his head and put his hand on my arm. “No, be the leader only you can be. Don’t compare yourself with the past, because it’s gone. Blaze your own path.”

Stay the course.

I wanted—no, needed—to do right by my friends. Stopping was only part of my course, bite-size and easy enough to work with; a chunk of the larger picture of rebuilding the Corps and, just maybe, reuniting the Metas without the dividing lines of the past.

The golden sun melted deeper into the ocean. I squinted into the glare, watching red and deepening purple spread across the sky. The sun would rise and set every day. The world would continue, lives would be lived, babies born,
as inevitable as breathing. Those things lay outside of my control.

Everything else lay within me. The desire to change, to do right by my fellow Metas, and to stop the century-old rivalry between Rangers and Banes. To destroy whatever misunderstandings and supposed differences had put us on opposing sides of a battle that no one could ever hope to win. Maybe I would fail and that was okay. Failure and success were out of my hands; the power to try was not.

Grief had to wait a while longer. I had work to do.

“Did the pilot go inside?” I asked.

“I think so. Why?”

“Can you find him and tell him we’re leaving in half an hour?” I stood up and dusted off the seat of my pants. “I’m going to Manhattan. There’s someone I need to talk to.”

T
wenty minutes after the ATF’s private jet took off from the Burbank airfield, my Vox beeped. I ignored it as long as I could stand it, and then accepted the signal.

Across the cabin, Agent McNally cleared her throat. She’d secured permission to use the jet and made arrangements to get us from the airport in Newark to Manhattan Island Prison. I’d asked her to come along in case I needed her clout to get access to Psystorm. His powers put him among our most dangerous enemies, and access to him was likely restricted. McNally had argued against not telling the others, and against not taking anyone else along for backup. I listened to her advice and then promptly ignored it.

I held up my Vox. “Cipher, Trance here. I’m almost over Nevada, why? Where are you?”

“I’m not in Nevada, I’m flying over it. Or rather, I’m in a jet that’s flying over it.”

He didn’t seem to appreciate my attempts at levity,
because venom coated his next words.

“Taking the next step in ending this. You were right. Psystorm is our best chance at stopping Specter.”

“Stupid, irresponsible, and foolhardy, yeah, I got the list.” I cut my eyes at McNally. “You know what’s more foolish? Taking every able-bodied Ranger I have left to an island full of people who hate us. One wrong move, and it would be Ethan and Dahlia against the world. Do you want that?”

Silence.

“Gage?”

“I know.”

“No, but I like hearing it.”

“I promise.”

His cold tone left no room for negotiation.

“You’ll be kept informed, Gage, now go get some sleep. Out.”