Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (25 page)

“Thank you.”

“Now or after breakfast?”

“We’ll talk to the others after breakfast, but if I don’t see Dr. Seward now, I probably won’t go.”

“Why not?”

“Because whenever we talk about my powers, I feel like a specimen under a microscope.”

Gage squeezed my thigh. “He’s trying to help, Teresa. He really does care.”

“I know he does, which is why I’ll endure his litany of questions and personal poking.” I grinned. “You want to come? You helped cure me, after all.”

“Pass.”

“Chicken.”

“I prefer the term
wuss
.”

We laughed. One more kiss, and I hopped out of bed. Time to make medical history with Dr. Seward: “Blindness Cured by Hot Monkey Sex.” The title alone would make that paper a bestseller.

I ran into Dr. Seward around the corner from the ICU. Really. We collided with enough force to send me flailing backward
onto my ass. I hit the floor with a thud. A sharp jolt sailed up my spine and made my stomach seize. The stack of X rays in his hands went flying and scattered across the linoleum with a sound like splashing water.

“You do sneak about, don’t you?” Dr. Seward said. He bent over me and hovered directly in my line of sight. “Are you all right? Can you stand?”

“I’ve had worse spills. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not a full night in thirty years.”

“Must be hell on your REM patterns.”

He offered his good hand—the other was wrapped up in an Ace bandage, something I hadn’t been clued in to last night during my blind spell—and hauled me to my feet. He had a firm grip for someone his age, which I could only guess at, somewhere between fifty and sixty. Seemed impolite to ask. I helped him gather up his X rays.

“What are you doing running around like that, Trance? I—” He stopped and seemed to really see me. “Is your vision back? What happened?”

“Actually, that’s what I was coming to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

I picked up a film that looked like someone’s elbow and handed it over. He shuffled them around, trying to create some semblance of order and hide his curious glances. I felt them, and I heard a hundred unasked questions. The scientist in him was showing remarkable restraint.

“Can we talk about this in private, instead of the hall?”

“Certainly.”

He stood, still organizing his X rays, and walked in the
direction I had been heading before our collision, his temporary office. He’d installed himself in one of the labs. It had counter-height tables instead of a desk, and storage boxes were scattered over most of them. He offered me the room’s only seat—a backless swivel stool. I declined and perched on the edge of a lab table.

“Did you have another episode this morning?” he asked as he placed his stack of X rays on top of a box. “An expulsion of power?”

“Not exactly. Well, maybe in a way, yes, but …” God, this was embarrassing. “Hell, Gage and I had sex.”

If it was truly possible for a man’s eyes to bug out of his head, that’s what Dr. Seward’s did. He stared at me like a frightened animal, caught between fight or flight. I didn’t blink, sure that I would blush to the roots of my hair if I reacted to his shock, and I couldn’t help a small amount of pride in shutting him up like that.

“Did you, ah, come here for a gynecological exam, because that’s not really—?”

“No!” Laughter bubbled up, and I waved my hands in the air. “No, that’s not—no offense, Doc, but you wouldn’t have been my first choice, even if it’s why I was here. I’m here because we figured it out, or at least, we figured out one way of doing it.”

“Doing what?” He asked the question as if dreading the answer.

“Cleaning my filter.”

He blanched and went a little green.

“Hey, you came up with the air filter analogy. Fact is, I was
completely blind six hours ago, and I can see perfectly this morning. No color fade, no vision loss, just normal. I thought you’d be interested.”

“I—” It came out high-pitched, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I am interested, Trance, just surprised. I didn’t expect this particular conversation.”

“Neither did I, trust me. But I was thinking about what you said, about how my body uses what it needs and stores the rest. Maybe I just need to burn up that excess energy. If I redirect it into some sort of strenuous physical exertion, I can avoid those nova eruptions and potentially killing myself. I’d really prefer to not die, if it can be avoided.”

“It’s a good theory, Trance. One we can’t test right away. However, you may be correct, and I highly doubt your recovery has anything to do with the presence of seminal fluids.” His deadpan delivery made me laugh. “Change in vision seems to be your primary symptom, and we know that prolonged use of your powers causes it to occur.”

I bobbed my head, proud of being able to follow along. Prouder, in fact, that he had validated my theory. It was still a far cry from finding and stopping Specter, but I’d found a way to work around my powers, and it wasn’t a small thing. Maybe, just maybe, I could do this.

I latched onto my sprouting confidence, a little excited, and said, “So we just have to wait to test it again. I don’t know, maybe an hour on a treadmill could even help prevent the purple vision completely. It may not always be feasible to work in a quickie.”

“Sexual attraction is a powerful thing.” He smiled warmly,
almost fatherly. “Don’t discount its ability to heal, rather than hinder.”

“You sound like a self-help guru.”

He shook his head. “I’m just a man who’s seen too much. I honestly never thought I’d see the day when someone told me sex healed blindness.”

“You just aren’t having the right kind of sex, Doc.” Ew, okay, not going there. That time I did blush. As a teen, I’d missed out on the awkward parental sex talk but I bet it would’ve felt something like this.

“My wife and I do just fine.”

Wife? That was news. And I really didn’t need to start conjuring up any mental images of their sex life. “Anyway,” I said, “since I’ve got you, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Anything, as long as it has nothing to do with sex.”

“It doesn’t. I was curious about the HQ.” He nodded, and I took it as my cue to continue. “Why was it maintained all these years? No one knew why we lost our powers, so no one could have predicted they would come back.”

He sank deeper into his chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together into a steeple. “Hope, I suppose. As far as I’m aware, the ATF had no reason to think you would ever be repowered. It’s one of the reasons MHC was disbanded and their agents reassigned. Some folks in the Department of Justice wanted to bulldoze this entire complex, to tear out that particular page of history and file it, but they objected vigorously and won.”

“Who’s they?”

“Rita McNally, Alexander Grayson, and a handful wealthy
supporters within the government. They raised quite the stink and the budget committee relented, allowing ATF to fund a considerably slashed budget for upkeep and maintenance. We’d hoped the Rangers would return to full strength one day, but none of us hoped to see it again in our lifetimes.”

“Agent Grayson? He fought for us?”

“He did.”

I didn’t like the idea of owing Grayson anything, especially the existence of our home base. He was a jackass who desperately needed advice in buying suits, but it looked like he was also one of our champions. “Does this mean I should thank him next time I see him?”

“I wouldn’t. The man’s head is big enough as it is.”

“Good point.”

Dr. Seward exhibited an admirable amount of spunk not seen during our previous engagements. He reminded me of an eccentric relative who makes fun of everyone after too many belts of whiskey.

“Trance, may I ask you a serious question?”

As if our conversation so far hadn’t been serious? “Sure.”

He seemed to struggle a moment, then said, “Do you think your relationship with Cipher will hinder your ability to function as this team’s leader?”

I hadn’t expected that to be his question, even though I’d asked it of myself quite a few times on the walk over—and not just about Gage. My other team members, too. As I grew closer to them, my ability to sacrifice their lives in the way I’d sacrificed Janel was slipping away.

“I can’t honestly say it won’t affect me,” I replied. “I know
it will, and I want to believe I’ll still be able to make the tough calls.”

“You can only believe it until you’re faced with it, and then you’ll know for certain. I hope you’re right.”

So did I. “Thanks, Doc.”

“Where are you headed now?”

“I’m going to call a meeting.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the whole team, plus you and the agents. Everyone at the same time.”

His thick eyebrows furrowed as he failed to hide his curiosity. “Some sort of announcement?”

“Something like that.”

I left before he could ask me to elaborate. I had to meet Gage in the conference room and see what he’d dug up. Until I verified my suspicions, I’d keep my accusations to myself.

To Dr. Morgan’s great consternation, we held the meeting in Ethan’s room. Gage felt as strongly as I did about doing this in front of everyone, which crammed eight adults into a small ICU cubicle. Grayson and McNally seemed twitchy, and for good reason, according to our research. I bit back my flaring temper and focused on Gage while everyone settled in. More silver had crept into his light brown hair, collecting above his temples and in his eyebrows—more than had been there yesterday. It gave him an air of physical maturity that better matched the sum of his experiences.

“What’s this all about, Trance?” McNally asked.

“The truth about our powers,” I said.

She blinked. Grayson tensed. Ha!

“What do you mean, Catalepsia?” Marco asked.

I started with my first vision in the rest stop bathroom and continued into the most recent nightmare. McNally listened with more intensity than anyone else in our audience. She stood by the wall, hands folded over her stomach, eyes drilling holes into me. I couldn’t decide if she was finding fault in my words, or planning her rebuttal. Ethan listened through a haze of pain medication, with an occasional tap from Renee to keep him focused. William and Seward seemed equally curious, while Marco sat in a chair with a wholly blank expression. Grayson continued to fidget, not as good at body language control as McNally.

I ended with the dream-woman’s accusing stare. “She knew the fire wasn’t an accident. They were murdered.”

Everyone, with the notable exception of the pair of federal agents, was stuck between confused and mystified.

“You’re having visions?” Seward asked, perplexed.

“Apparently so, yes.”

“Have you ever had them before?”

“Never. Not even when I was a kid.”

“Utterly fascinating,” McNally said.

“Fascinating, huh?” I said. “So MHC had no knowledge of these two people who burned to death in a fire last Thursday at one fifteen in the morning? Two people who, for the last fifteen years, have been living in Fairview Center, a chronic care facility in Santa Barbara? A facility that also happens to receive a healthy, monthly government stipend?”

Grayson’s skin went the color of paste. He looked petrified, while McNally hadn’t lost her cool or her posture. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t even look at each other. I thought back to my earlier conversation with Seward. These were supposedly people who’d fought for us? Bull. Shit.

“T, what’s going on?” Renee asked.

I ignored her. Gage handed me printouts of newspaper articles and financial reports. I waved them at the agents. “You want to see the hard copies so you know I’m not bluffing?” A lump of emotion—anger, confusion, betrayal, and fear all rolled up into something impossible to swallow—clogged my throat. “Were you ever going to tell us the truth?”

Grayson’s head snapped toward McNally. She held my gaze a moment longer, then met his. Her resignation collided with his trepidation, and a silent argument was held. When she once again met my accusing stare, her steely eyes were rimmed with … regret?

“Does knowing the truth change those years we stole from you?” she asked.

The tension level in the room quadrupled as my fellow Metas clued in to the enormity of our conversation. Tears stung my eyes as the last hope I’d had of being wrong about this shattered. “You took our powers away,” I said.

“Not directly, but we were responsible for hiding the truth from the world,” she replied with a hitch in her voice. “You have to understand, Trance, what was happening back then. The country was falling apart around us. People were terrified of Metas, and the Rangers were losing the War. Dying one after another in horrible ways. The fighting had
localized to the Northeastern states. The president’s advisors were urging him to consider extreme measures, including blanket bombings of New York and New Jersey, and when some of us at the MHC heard that—” She swallowed. “It would have been genocide. The casualties were unthinkable.”

“Bombing two states,” Seward said. He seemed on the verge of vomiting.

McNally nodded. “Yes.”

“Who were those people?” I asked. “The man and woman who died?”

“Your investigative reporting didn’t give you their names?” Grayson asked. His first contribution to the conversation and it was sarcasm. Nice.

I lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Your people weren’t a hundred percent incompetent. We couldn’t find any records, other than John and Jane Doe. Very original.”

“Because they don’t exist,” McNally said.

“On paper?”

“Technically, at all. No identification, no fingerprints. They were both Metas of a power level we’d never seen before. Their minds had been joined together by a machine designed by scientists who’d spent years studying them. Together they created what was called an energy sink. They were able to collect MetaHuman abilities and store them away.”

“Where the hell do you find people who can do something like that?” William asked, his deep voice barely above a low growl. “Who studied them?”

McNally took a few breaths, gearing up for some sort of
confession. Her façade of cool collectedness was cracking, and a tiny part of me wished I hadn’t done this so publicly. The majority of me enjoyed her discomfort. “About a week before that day in Central Park,” she said, “a man came to the MHC office in Burbank. He gave us the name O’Bannen and claimed to work for a specialized research and development firm based in Virginia. They had a branch in Los Angeles, and he told us about a project he’d been developing for his firm involving a pair of Metas whose extreme psychic abilities ran toward the telekinetic end of the spectrum. He’d helped them develop a machine they called a Warden—a way to harness their abilities and remove them from other Metas. O’Bannen offered them as a solution to the War.”