Empowered, p.11
Empowered, page 11
Thomas. That was Winterfield’s first name? He’d always just been Winterfield. Nothing else.
Alex nodded. He didn’t flinch at the sight of Simon’s ruined face.
Simon continued, suddenly sounding like he was reading a report. “Considered AWOL by Support.” He looked at me. “Mathilda Brandt. Along with her sister Ella, now Empowered, Alexander Sanchez, and Keisha McMillian, leading a group of rogue Empowered and others possessing lesser abilities. You escaped a sweep of a criminal base called Sanctuary, located in Great Persia.
“How do you know all this?” I demanded.
“Bugs in the system, Mathilda. The Scourge infiltrated into the computer networks employed by the Hero Council and Support.”
“They did? What about the Black-Light system.”
“Never heard of it,” Simon snapped.
“I hadn’t either. It’s part of the monitoring system for the Reclamation Zones, the Dark-Net and the Necklace.”
“Listen to yourself.” Simon coughed. “You sound like a Support agent. His face tightened. “But you were, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “Yes. Because I had to.” My hands were slick with sweat, and I kept rubbing them on my jeans.
He tapped his fingers together. “I wanted to kill you for the longest time.” The tapping stopped. “I could kill you and the others right now. Pump nerve gas into your cell. The nullifier would prevent Steel Witch from using her metal powers, and you from creating plants from the air.” He scowled. “I should do that. Save me worry.” Cold rage filled his voice.
“I can’t do that,” I said, lying. I don’t know why I lied right then. Maybe because I was just trying to get him to calm down.
“Don’t lie to me,” Simon snapped. “I’ve seen your profile.”
My stomach twisted. “My profile?”
“Support keeps detailed profiles on all Empowered. Not just their history and background, and superpower, but their potentiality. Yours is quite detailed.”
I shivered. “Once a mushroom, always a mushroom,” I muttered. Fed shit and kept in the dark. I didn’t know anything.
The corners of Simon’s mouth twitched up into a humorless smile. “An apt way of looking at it.”
I swallowed. I suddenly realized that hadn’t been an expression I’d used with the Scourge, not with him at any rate. It was with Alex. Maybe Keisha. I couldn’t recall, not with Mister-Back-From-the-Dead-Bearing-A-Grudge-With-A-Kill-Switch-At-His-Fingertips grilling me.
“Your plant control is far more potent than even their projections.” He jerked his head at the computers behind him. “I’ve run models based on the incidents of your power use that I know about, and there’s a sharp upward curve in both the magnitude of your power and its adaptability. In short, your power continues to grow and broaden in its abilities.”
“Why tell me this now? Why not just kill us?”
“I said I could kill you, not that I would.” The cold rage was gone.
He looked at Alex. “You’re the X Factor. I should kill you. A Support agent who claims to be a former one is dangerous.”
“I’m not with them anymore,” Alex said quietly.
Simon made a little tsk-tsk sound. “But are they still with you?” He turned and shambled slowly over to a wheeled computer chair and sat. He waved a hand. “You’ll have to excuse me, I tire easily.”
He didn’t move with any of the easy grace he used to. Simon’s power had been incredible reflexes and agility. Now it looked like an enormous effort just to make himself cross a room.
He nodded at me. “I know what you’re thinking, Mathilda. I still have my power, but it’s all it can do to keep me alive and mobile at all.” He coughed, a deep, strangled cough that threatened to barf up his lungs. When he finished, he looked up at Alex again, now standing beside me.
“Mathilda’s no fool,” Simon observed. “She may be ignorant because knowledge has been kept from her, but she’s no fool. She was smart enough to not only stay alive but to infiltrate the Scourge to the level of the inner circle. That’s not easy.”
“Aren’t you pissed at me for deceiving you?” I asked.
Simon laughed quietly, which ended in another coughing fit. “I have to remind myself that you mean angry, not drunk, when you say pissed. No, I’m not angry with you. I did exhaust the liquor stores here, toasting your memory along with the others, but no, I’m not angry.”
“Why not?”
Keisha made a shushing noise behind me.
Simon smiled at that. “It’s a fair point.” He got serious. “We were both double-crossed. You doubly so. Your Support masters hung you out to dry, and Nefarious and Ashula used our cell.” He spat. “They threw us away.”
“Damn straight,” Keisha rumbled behind me, her voice low. “They fucked us over and hung us out to dry.”
Simon nodded. “You always cut straight to the point, Keisha, even faster than Mathilda.”
He glanced at Harris. “I recall you, too. Jango Harris.”
Harris shifted, face pinched, like he’d just tasted something royally sour. “Just Harris.”
“Very well Just-Harris. I recall you from our mutual days in the Scourge. You were in tight with the inner circle, back when Rodney and Felicia were running things.”
I had no idea who they’d been; obviously this was before my time.
Harris shrank back from Simon’s words.
Simon shrugged. “I see events have changed you as well.” He coughed. “They have us all.” He stared off into space, lost in thought.
I waited a long moment, still rubbing my sweat-slick hands against my jeans. This man was a far cry from the confident, easy going, professional man I’d known in the Scourge. But he was still observant and whip-smart.
“What do you want, Simon?”
He blinked at my question.
“I’d want what everyone wants, to survive. But I’m living on borrowed time.” He leaned forward. “To make a difference.”
His words sent a jolt through me.
“So, do I,” I said.
“I know. That’s why I haven’t killed you.”
“What about the rest of us? Are we pickled herring or whatever it is you Brits eat?” Keisha said sourly.
Simon chuckled. “You mean kipper, and I never had any use for the stuff. Plus, I’m English.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Simon sighed. “Americans.” He leaned back. “No, but this is all beside the point.” He paused. We waited for him to continue. It wasn’t happening.
“Which is, what exactly?” I prompted at last.
He smiled. “I want to know what you want.”
12
We crowded around a little table in what passed for a dining room in this underground rat trap, insta-meals in front of us. Simon had let us out and led us here, to eat and recharge, as he put it, before answering his question. He wanted to give us time to think hard about our answer.
He sat in what Ruth would have called a comfy chair, a padded recliner in a corner. He’d inserted an IV in his arm while the rest of us ate.
I pushed back my box, wiped my mouth. Turkey and rice, a classic. Still tasted like crap.
“You asked what we want,” I said. “Well, I can tell you what I wanted.”
Simon nodded.
“We belong to a community of Empowered and Imbued. You know what Imbued are?”
Another nod.
“I wanted to save that community and rescue my mother.” I told him the visions I’d had.
“Tricky things, visions,” he replied when I was finished. “Hard to tell when they’re real and when they’re just wishful thinking, or even delusions.”
“This was real.”
“You certainly believe that,” he said. “Fair enough. Continue.”
“Keeping our community alive has become impossible. We’ve been using the Dark-Net, but it’s become chaotic and unpredictable. I haven’t heard from my sister Ella. We were gone for a year inside the damn Dark-Net.”
The others looked as monumentally unhappy as I felt at this thought.
“Sucks,” Keisha mumbled. Alex and Harris finished their insta-meals.
I took a deep breath. “Alex has intel about the Dark-Net, and the Necklace.”
Simon pulled himself forward, looked intently at Alex. “You do?”
“Yes. Just need to reassemble it.”
“Multiple ciphers, encodings, and disassembled data as well, I gather.”
Alex cocked his head. “How did you know?”
“I’m familiar with Support security,” he smiled thinly. He grew serious again. “This from an enclosed intranet?”
“You really are familiar with them, aren’t you?” I said. “Anyway, we have info. We need to finish reassembling it.”
“And then what?” Simon asked.
“Do whatever it takes to save the Dark-Net, stabilize it, whatever, so we can continue using it.”
“The problem is, that’s short-term survival training.”
“We’ll come up with a better plan when we aren’t drowning,” Keisha snapped.
“You must think ahead, otherwise you’ll never get ahead.”
“Now you sound like a corporate slogan,” I groused.
He laughed. “Fair play to you, Mathilda.” He got serious again. “But if you succeed in stabilizing the Dark-Net, what about the larger problem of the world itself?”
“I can only focus on fixing one problem at a time.”
He sighed. “The world is dying. How can fixing the Dark-Net solve that?”
I shuddered at his words. The world, dying? “That seems a bit of a freaking exaggeration.”
“There’s the old Mathilda. I know you’ve been out of the loop for a year—longer, really.”
“We were never really in the loop,” Keisha said.
“Guess it’s high time we were.” I stood. “Can you help us with the—” I glanced at Alex. “What did you call it?”
“Data reassembly,” Alex replied.
“Data reassembly,” I repeated. “Please?”
Simon grinned at me. “Mathilda Brandt asking politely? How can I refuse?”
Reassembling the intel from the Black-light system proved to be a true royal pain in the ass. The computing work was a real bitch for Alex and Simon. Harris offered to help, like a dozen times, finally managing to annoy Alex and Simon both. Alex said how about helping Simon with a health boost.
“I can do that” Harris said. His voice was eager. He ran his fingers over Simon.
Simon sighed.
“Don’t you feel better?” Harris asked.
“A little. But you can’t fix me. I’m nearly dead,” Simon said.
“If you would lie down, rest, and let me really try, I might.”
“I’m going to die soon,” Simon muttered. “No one can do anything about that.”
“We’re all dead in the long run.” I pointed out. “What does it hurt to try?”
“But some of us sooner than others,” Simon replied. “I need to get back to work.”
They kept working. I made them stop for another meal break after four hours, and almost had to force march Simon to the med bay when he nearly passed out.
Harris came with us, looking like a lost puppy, eager to please.
Simon stretched out in the med bed. Harris injected him with a special super-drug-super-vitamin concoction.
He ran his fingers all over Simon’s body, sweat dripping from his face and arms, until he looked like he was going to collapse from exhaustion. Simon groaned, eyes squeezed shut, pain plain on his face. His face was still a scarred ruin. His skin a reddened horror, and his eyebrows and eyelashes still missing.
I hauled Harris away and sat him down in a metal chair. “Sit. Stay. You’ve done enough, pal.”
I pushed back the fear inside me. Fear for Simon.
Simon took a slow breath, coughed and coughed some more. “Water,” he croaked.
I brought him water. He drank. “Thanks,” he said.
He sat up. “I appreciate the effort, Just-Harris,” he said. “But I’ve performed medical scans on myself. I’ve known which way the wind blows for me, for a long time.”
“I’m sorry.” Harris cringed in his corner. “I’m so sorry.”
“My DNA is damaged,” Simon said to me. “Can’t be fixed. Not even by an Empowered healing miracle cure. I’m dying, far sooner than later.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Life’s a bitch and then you die, isn’t that how the expression goes?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’d better make mine count.”
We rejoined Alex, who continued to slave away over the computers.
I spent the next hour lost in my thoughts, wondering and worrying about Ella and the others, and Ruth and Ava. What was Winterfield up to? Zhukova? I thought briefly about the turmoil wracking the world, and the revelations that Titan was more than he seemed. But that didn’t rank very high at all against the fate of family and friends.
“Got it!” Alex stretched his arms. “Haven’t worked this hard on crunching data in ages.”
Simon rolled back from his computer console. “That was onerous computing,” he said.
“But we did it,” Alex said. He looked over at me. “We’ve finally got the intel from Kerch assembled.”
I jumped to my feet and slapped my palms together. “Yes! Show me.”
He pressed a button and one of Simon’s wall monitors flashed to life. A map of the world appeared. “This is the Necklace.” Gray dots spotted the globe.
“Okay, fine.” I said.
“Have a little faith, Brandt,” he said.
“Was it my tone, Sanchez?”
“Nah, your face is a dead giveaway.”
I laughed. “Okay, so show me the money.”
He ran his hand over a computer pad and a series of lines circled the world, like spirals. He did it again, and lines running sideways to the first appeared.
Simon coughed. “These are the links between the various parts of the so-called Necklace.”
The Pacific and Atlantic oceans were sprinkled with gray dots. I whistled. “There are places in the sea. What’s up with that?”
“Islands,” Simon replied. “And undersea mountain tops.”
“And these are all ancient places?”
They both nodded.
“What about the Dark-Net?”
Alex typed on his console’s keyboard. “This took some work—it’s a 3D model.”
“All over my head.”
He winked at me. “Well, the visual will help.” Tunnels appeared inside the model of the Earth. “I present the Dark-Net.”
I walked up to the monitor. The tunnels twisted and turned inside the Earth, disappearing and reappearing.
My head started to ache looking at it. I turned away. “What’s with the killer headache?” I asked, rubbing my temples. The headache faded away.
Simon nodded. “It was headache inducing because your brain was trying to make sense of a fifth dimensional model rendered in three dimensions. The visual was just to illustrate.”
“When did you become such a tech?” I asked Simon.
He smiled thinly. “I’ve done a lot of tech in my time. You underutilized my talents in the Scourge.”
“I didn’t know about half your talents,” I said. “Clueless as usual.”
“I preferred to keep some things close to the vest. Safer that way.” His eyes shone with excitement. He looked more energized right then than at any time since he’d revealed himself here. “We have a good model now of the Necklace and the Dark-Net, and how they inter-relate.” He glanced at Alex.
Alex nodded. “But there’s something else, a third factor.”
A shiver ran down my spine. My visions. Something pressing down on the world, on the necklace. “I’ve seen that in my visions.” I explained.
They looked at each other. Amazing how fast they’d bonded, in just a few hours. I guess both of them being knowledge freaks helped.
“Alex mentioned your visions while we were running the numbers,” Simon explained.
“So, what does it mean?” I asked.
“We’re not sure. Just that something else is interacting with the Dark-Net and the Necklace,” Alex said.
“Both are connected somehow to our powers, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” Simon sipped from a bottle of water. He put the bottle down. He moved slower again. This must have taken a hell of a lot out of him.
“You need a snack?”
He shook his head. “It’s my condition. In any event, the source of our powers is intertwined somehow with the Dark-Net and the Necklace. The Dark-Net is a shunt of sorts, while the Necklace is a regulator.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t think I do, either,” he admitted. “But that’s what we believe.”
“So, what do we do with this?” I fidgeted.
“You want to find your mother?” Simon smiled.
“Yeah.”
“It’s understandable. You say your vision was of a green island, and an ancient barrow-like site—could you tell us again?”
I did.
“Sounds like Ireland,” Alex said.
Simon agreed. “It’s one of the ancient mounds. As it happens, we found exactly such a site in Ireland, north of Dublin. Maybe twenty-five kilometers from Newgrange, a famous site. This one is more worn-down ruins, beneath a hill. But the reconstructed data from the site correlates with your visions.”
“I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but how the hell does it do that?” I unkinked my neck. My muscles were stiff, and all this standing around and talking wasn’t helping one bit.
“The Irish site is a nexus, one of the places where the Dark-Net and Necklace come together,” Alex said.
“The perfect place for a control center,” Simon added.
I opened my mouth to ask why, but Alex answered before I could ask the question.
“The information we extracted details how the Dark-Net was created to work alongside the Necklace.”
“What do they do?” I asked. We kept talking around the obvious question.
