Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (13 page)

He shook his head. “A ways south, but not really close, no. McDonald’s?”

“Dammit.” I like Croissanwiches better than biscuits. “Okay. Augustus, meet me at—where is it?”

“Just—there’s only one,” Calderon said. “MLK—”

“I know where McDonald’s is,” Augustus said. “I’ll see you there in a few.” He hung up like someone from TV, not even saying goodbye.

“Be careful out there,” Calderon said a little stiffly, like he didn’t want to be caught acting unprofessional in front of his co-workers. I could fully sympathize with that feeling.

“Why?” I asked. “Because someone tried to kill me yesterday?”

His face twitched, and I could tell he was trying to mask feelings. It was cute. “Yes. That’s usually a cause for concern in my world.”

“Really? Because in mine it makes it just another day,” I said, turning my back on him and striding out of the room. He didn’t have a monopoly on playing it cool.

I decided to run to McDonald’s, and it turned out to be a good idea because it not only let me figure out how fast I could run (really fast!) but it also caused people to shout and honk their horns at me as I blew past. It wasn’t, like, Flash fast, but it was pretty fast. Fast enough that people noticed. Fast enough that if I watched later on YouTube (lots of people recorded me, I saw them), I was pretty sure it was going to look cool.

I was also hoping to beat Sienna there, because it’s in my nature to try and impress the new mentor/boss—wait, I’m not getting paid for this—uhh … do you still call them a boss in an internship? I’d never had one.

Anyway, I made it to McDonald’s to find her already there, in the booth next to the door, bag in front of her, look of utter disappointment painted across her face. I’m sure my own look asked the question, because she answered without me having to say anything. “It’s after ten-thirty,” she said as she trashed her bag and led me outside. “Lunch. Blegh. I was not in the mood for a burger.”

“Early bird gets the worm and all that,” I said. She did look a little bleary eyed. Also, although her clothes were different, I could tell by her hair that she probably hadn’t showered. “You all right? You look like you might have swallowed the worm last night.” I paused, and felt a mild surge of panic. “Like from a tequila bottle! Not from – oh, hell.”

She gave me an inscrutable look for a moment before she reached into her back pocket and pulled out some folded papers. “I’m just peachy and not just because I’m in Georgia.” She looked up at me with a slight twitch upward at the corner of her mouth. “Get it?”

“Georgia peaches, yeah,” I said.

“You're not the only one that can make with the mildly amusing.” Her momentary levity vanished. “Let’s get to work, shall we? Kennith Coy used to live about … six blocks from here, I think?” Her feet lifted off the ground.

“Uhh,” I said, “you know I can’t fly, right?”

She dropped back to the sidewalk like someone had let her loose. “Dammit,” she said. “Sorry. I’m used to going places with my brother, and he’s finally figured out how to fly a little now.”

I looked around, and saw some bushes sticking out of the planted gap between the sidewalk and the parking lot asphalt. “I could … maybe ride the dirt across the sky like they do in the movies?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Can you really do that?”

I shrugged. “Maybe? You want me to try?”

She seemed to think hard about it for a few seconds. “If you haven’t practiced,” she finally said, “probably not. The last thing we need right now is you falling out of the sky and going splat in the middle of the street. Because the way things are going for me lately in the press, I’d probably take the blame for that.”

“‘Sienna Nealon kills black sidekick,’” I said.

She blinked a couple times. “Yeah, that’s pretty much how it would read, except they’d probably also scathe me for having an unpaid intern.”

“Damn,” I said. “I’ll practice later, see if it works.”

“Be careful, okay? For both our sakes.” She started to walk down the street then paused. “Wait, which way do we go?”

“You don’t even know where you’re going?”

“I can usually …” she let out a sound of low exasperation. “I just fly around until I find the right street signs, or I use my GPS and just …” She pulled out her phone and shook her head. “Never mind. Give me a minute.”

I plucked the paper gently out of her hands while she looked at me in mild surprise. I’d clearly caught her off guard, because I’d seen her move and I don’t think I was fast enough to catch her if she wanted to avoid being caught. I stared at the paper with the name Kennith Coy at the top. “That’s like three blocks this way,” I said, pointing.

“Lead on,” she said and fell into step beside me.

I hurried but didn’t run, figuring it was better to not get into a race with her. I also assumed she’d let me know if she wanted to go faster. She didn’t really say anything for a little while, kinda had her head in the clouds—metaphorically speaking. I needed to make that clear because she was the only person I’d ever met that it could have been literally true about as well.

“What’s my, uh …” I broke the silence, feeling a little swell of confidence that shriveled as she looked at me with those bluish-green eyes. “What’s my role here?”

She sort of blinked for a moment. “Very basic. Help me out. Help keep me alive.”

“Sounds simple enough,” I said.

“Trust me, it’s not,” she said. “People try very hard to kill me. Constantly.”

“Personality like yours, I’m not finding it hard to believe that,” I said, trying to put a little humor into it. I thought I might have missed the mark and backed it up a little. “You know that was a joke, right? That didn’t cross the line, did it?” She looked at me evenly. “We’re supposed to banter, I thought. That’s how they do it in the movies.”

“Banter’s fine,” she said after a pause that felt like forever. “Banter all you want. It doesn’t bother me; most of the time I enjoy it. Besides, even if you pushed a joke a little too far, it still wouldn’tbe the least shitty thing said about me this hour, so take some comfort in that.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s not my imagination, right? People have kind of … turned on you?”

“It’s not your imagination,” she said darkly. “They love you one day and then hate you the next. What was that old Stalin quote? ‘Gratitude is a disease of dogs’? The press is definitely on board with that philosophy, except maybe they think he was understating it.”

“Which I don’t get,” I said, “because, like … you saved the world.”

“Not according to
Time
,” she said. “Or
Newsweek
. I mean, yes, at first, they thought so. But I’ve seen a few lovely pieces lately that call into question every word I’ve ever spoken. I kind of suspect that at this point if I said the sky was blue, they’d just report it as suddenly green and then issue a correction on page 48 in a little itty bitty text box six months from now.”

“Wow,” I said. “I guess I just … I don’t know. It all seemed a little over the top. I was watching the news a couple weeks ago and …”

She lowered her head, her lips turned faintly like a little ghost of a smile was there—the joy was long dead, all that was left was the form. “You’re talking about the sudden burst of spontaneous think pieces where they accused me of being the villain while Sovereign was actually a misunderstood reformer, aiming to change the world for the better?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That wasn’t …” I didn’t want to be insulting, but at the same time I had a question. “None of that was true, was it?”

She shrugged and kept walking. “He wanted to change the world, all right. By wiping us all out, eliminating all armies and putting everyone under his boot heel. So, yes, you could call him a reformer, if you were a big supporter of Germany in 1938.” She smirked. “Which
Time
magazine was, apparently.”

“Ouch,” I said. “So why’d they report it that way?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve got a PR flack named Jackie who says that she’s never seen anything quite like this. Like the entire press corps’ mood has just turned on me. She’s tried repeatedly to turn it around using every trick she has, and … she’s smart, I’ll give her that, but …” she shrugged again, “… no difference. They’re gonna keep coming at me.” Her jaw tightened. “And now that they’ve got a new favorite—”

“You talking about Katrina Forrest?” That wasn’t exactly a tough leap to make.

She seemed to speed up just slightly, pushing me to quicken my pace. “Was it that obvious?” she asked.

“Not a whole lot of big-name metahumans out there,” I said. “You, your brother, Katrina, your ex … though you don’t hear much about him anymore.”

“Scott?” She shook her head. “He wanted out. He’s in the family business now, out of the public eye as much as possible.”

“So there’s really not a whole lot of examples to point to,” I said. “Once you get through that list, then you start getting into some of the nearly-nameless, like that guy whose ass you beat down in Manhattan—”

“Eric Simmons,” she said, not looking all too happy.

“Those Russians you killed when they tried to take over your headquarters, the Italian guy from the Vatican thing—”

“Anselmo.” Her voice was hard.

“You got like three-four heroes,” I said, “and a list of villains, most of whom are dead. Doesn’t give a lot of examples to point to when you’re looking for heroes. I mean,
I’m
now on the list of high-profile metas, and I’ve been in this game for like … ten minutes.”

She cocked that eyebrow at me. “Yeah, I’d watch out for that if I were you. Just based on personal experience.”

“You think Katrina would say the same?” I asked. Not quite banter, but it was a little pointed, I’ll admit.

“No,” she admitted as we turned a corner. We were walking pretty fast now, but not so fast we were outpacing cars or anything. “She seems like she has the world by the damned tail.”

“Well, if it’s like you describe,” and I was having a hard time believing it was that bad—call me an optimist at heart— “then she’ll probably catch the other side of that sword before too long.”

“Shut up, Gavrikov,” Sienna muttered under her breath, so low even I could barely hear her. “We’ll see,” she said, back to normal volume. “Kat has a tendency to skirt through things mostly unharmed. She’s a little like Teflon in that regard. None of the bad stuff sticks to her.”

“What about the good?” I asked.

“Seems like she’s getting a fair dose of that, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Who’s she dating nowadays? One of the Hemsworth brothers or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

We fell into a silence that I could tell, just by looking at Sienna, was sullen as hell. “She lies about her age, you know,” she said after a moment’s pause. “She’s not really that young.”

“Whaaaat?” I asked. “Girl looks like … twenty, tops. With that body? Or are you saying there’s some Photoshop going on there?”

“There’s always Photoshop going on there,” she said. “But no, I mean she’s older than she says she is. We metas … a lot of us don’t age like others.”

“So … you’re saying I could be like sixty and still look young enough to date eighteen-year-olds?” I felt my eyebrows rise. “Because that would be—”

“Don’t creep,” she said and then hesitated. “But, yes, you could do that. Possibly even at a hundred and sixty, you could do that.”

“Oh, damn!” I actually covered my mouth with my hands. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Man, this just keeps getting better.”

She got sour fast. “Yes, it’s such a wonderful fringe benefit, constantly being able to sleep with young women under false pretenses while avoiding the discussion about your recent sesquicentennial and the embarrassing collapse of your birthday cake under the weight of all the candles. Don’t be a perv, Augustus.”

“Hey,” I said, “you know, I just look at older women and I think … I’m not ready yet. I’m just glad to know that I have the option—”

“Ugh, ewww, ugh,” she said, putting her hands over her ears. “Just … ewww. You’re Janus in training.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot all about him,” I said. “That dude was kind of famous for a minute, too, and then he went and disappeared. What was up with that?”

She pursed her lips. “He and Kat broke up, and he went back to England.”

I felt my brow furrow, my whole face shrivel up in disgust. “That old dude hit it with Katrina Forrest? Ohhhhh, that ain’t right!”

A glimmer of amusement ran through her eyes. “Just think—someday that could be you.”

“Ohhhh, yuck. I take it all back.” I held my head in my hands. “Damn, that just ruins my whole image of her.”

“Because she slept with an older man?” Sienna scoffed. “Get over it. You could end up sleeping with a thousand-year-old meta woman without even realizing it, you know.”

“She’d have to have a pretty damned hot—”

“Oh, just stop it,” she said. “Are we close?” She nodded to the paper in my hand.

“Ahead on the left,” I said, nodding at the house numbers. “Odds on this side of the street, so …”

“Okay,” she said. “Watch out for vans filled with gunmen.”

“That’s a conspicuous choice,” I said. “You’d think they’d just convoy in, like, two or three sedans, try and blend in a little or something.”

“Strangely enough, I wasn’t expecting a van full of mercenaries when I crossed the street,” she said, “so really, they did okay on maintaining the element of surprise, I think. The residents didn’t seem to think anything was out of the ordinary either, except, you know, me crossing the street in front of them.”

“Well, you kinda are a little white girl in a not-so-pearly neighborhood,” I said, sizing her up. She really was short. Not as tiny as Taneshia, but thicker, too. I had to look down to talk to her face. “They probably thought you were up to no good if they didn’t know you.”

“I’m always up to no good,” she said and led me up the driveway of a house that had really been let go. It had shingles hanging off, plywood in the front window. I’d seen foreclosures around that had this problem. Kids would come and party in the houses, fire off paintball rounds or just tag the hell out of the interior with spray paint.