Rivals (16 page)

“He said
normally noses don’t do that. He said that when somebody gets their nose
flattened like that, normally the doctors have to break it again to put it back
in the right shape.”

“Okay, stop,”
Lucy told him.

He was angry
enough, though, to enjoy grossing her out. “I could feel it moving inside my
head all night. Rebuilding itself.”

“Stop! I know
I said I would always be there for you, and yes, I guess that’s true, but if
you tell me one more nasty detail I will totally walk out the door, and I know
for a fact that you don’t want that, so be quiet, okay, cease and desist, be
still, for me?”

He frowned and
sat down next to her on his bed. “Sorry,” he told her. “I’m just fed up. I
did everything I could and the newspaper acts like I dropped the ball. ‘Cops
curious’. I mean, seriously? One of them did ask me if maybe I let her go,
but then Weathers threatened to have him demoted on the spot and he backed
down. Everyone who was there saw me go chasing after her at top speed. If I
had caught her, if I hadn’t had to catch that car—”

“Would you
have beaten her up?” Lucy asked.

“I—I
don’t know,” he admitted. “I probably would have tried to talk to her again.
And she would have run away again.” He thought back to the moment when Maggie
had hit him. “Except, there was this one moment, when I was convinced that
suddenly everything made sense. That my whole purpose, the point of my entire
existence, was to get in a serious fistfight with Maggie. How messed up is
that? My dad would have been ashamed. But if she had stuck around, I think I
would have hit her back. She’s my sister, Luce. Why did I feel that way?”

“Let me ask
you something,” Lucy said, running one hand up and down his back. “Before you
got your powers—you and she fought a lot, right?”

“Well… we
called each other a lot of names. And one time, when we were pretty young, I
was building this tower out of Legos, like, this enormous thing that I spent
days on, and she knocked it over like she was Godzilla.”

Lucy laughed.
“But you never, even once, wanted to hit her?”

Brent stared
down at his feet. He could see where this was going. “Yeah. I guess I did.
Maybe about a hundred times a day, some days. But I would never have actually
done it. Mom always said I should never, ever hit a girl.”

“Which is good
advice. Except maybe if the girl is throwing cars at you. Don’t punish
yourself for being human, Brent. I know you think you’re supposed to be some
paragon of virtue now because of what happened to your dad, but don’t be so
hard on yourself! And don’t let total strangers tell you what you’re worth.
You’re always going to be my hero. You always have been, even before all
this.”

He leaned over
and gave her a big hug.

For a while
they just hung out, the way they had been doing for years. Lucy tried to help
him with some of his algebra homework but mostly he just wanted to chill,
listen to some music (not too loud) and surf the web. It was actually really
nice, the kind of thing he hadn’t had the chance to do for ages, and when Lucy
said she had to get home he was sad to see her go. At the front door he waved
at her dad, who had come to pick her up in his Jeep. Lucy’s dad was a really
nice guy who had the loudest laugh Brent had ever heard and who always wore a
cowboy hat, indoors and out. Brent liked him a lot. When they’d gone, Brent
turned around to head back to his room—and found Grandma standing right
behind him, watching him intently.

“We should
talk,” she said. She lifted her cast and gestured for him to follow her to the
kitchen. She sat down with a grunt and let her broken arm rest on the table.

“Do you need
anything before bedtime?” he asked.

“I need,” she
said, and stared at him through her huge glasses, “some peace of mind.”

“I’m not sure
I can help you there,” he told her.

“Maybe,” she
went on, “you think I was too hard on your sister. Look at me, boy. You
answer me now, and be honest.”

Brent nodded.
He didn’t like to say it, but—“Yes. I think you really pushed her. I
don’t blame you for her running away. That was her choice. But you made her
life pretty miserable.”

Grandma nodded
agreeably, as if she could see his point and was giving it ample consideration.
Then she said, totally surprising him, “I love that girl.”

He could do
nothing but sit there and wait for her to explain. What she’d said sounded
frankly impossible.

“Don’t be so
surprised. She’s all I have left of my daughter. Oh, don’t pout like that. I
know I have you as well, but you take after your father. Maggie has your
mother’s eyes and her hair—that beautiful hair. I used to brush out your
mother’s hair for her, when she was little. And then, until she was five years
old, I brushed Maggie’s, as well. Did you know that? No. You didn’t.”

“But you hit
Maggie! A lot!”

“I hit your
mother, too, when she needed it. Because it was the only way to keep her on
the straight and narrow.” Grandma waved her good hand in the air. “I suppose
things are different now. But in my day, we had a saying: ‘spare the rod and
spoil the child’. It was how you taught your children discipline and respect.”

Brent thought
there had to be better ways. He thought that society must have come pretty far
since then. “They don’t say that anymore,” he told her.

She looked
unconvinced.

The security
guards were checking IDs at the front door of the hospital, so Maggie went
around to the back and jumped up to the second floor and crawled in through an
open window. Then she had to wait near the nurse’s station until no one was
around, which felt like it took hours. Once she had access to a computer it
was easy enough to look up what room Fred Wallace was in. She’d gotten his
name from the news broadcast she’d seen in her hotel room. He was the cop who
had shot her in front of the bank while Brent distracted her. He was the cop
she’d then picked up and thrown, hard enough to fracture half the bones in his
body.

He was a
twelve-year veteran of the police force. He had a wife and two kids. She had
swatted him away from her like a pesky fly. It was true, he had shot her. In
the face. But she had shrugged off the pain of that in a second. His pain was
going to last a whole lot longer.

No one noticed
when Maggie slipped past a nurse’s station on the fifth floor and worked her
way down a semi-darkened hallway. It was late and the hospital felt all but
deserted. Visiting hours were long over but in some of the rooms she passed
people were still sitting next to quiet beds, holding pale, battered hands or
reading magazines or just staring into space. Machines kept beeping softly to
themselves and the soda machine at the end of the hallway rumbled and buzzed
for no one.

She found the
room she wanted. The door was open and she could see Wallace lying in the bed.
There were bandages wrapped around most of his head and on both of his hands.
He was asleep. Maybe that was for the best. Maggie slipped into the room and
stood at the foot of his bed.

It was amazing
how fragile human bodies could be. The ones without superpowers, anyway. She
hadn’t thought about what she was doing. As usual, she had just
reacted—to her anger, to the darkness inside of her. When he shot her,
she’d figured that made it alright to strike back. No, even that was giving
her too much credit. She hadn’t figured anything. Everything had looked red,
and she had just lashed out like a wounded animal.

She didn’t
think she should wake him. He probably needed his rest, and, anyway, what was
she going to say to him? I’m sorry I nearly killed you? The newscast had said
he was in serious but stable condition. That meant he wasn’t going to die.
But what if he had? It could have happened easily enough. If he’d hit his
head instead of his back, if she’d thrown him slightly differently… there were
so many ways.

All she could
do, she decided, was leave the money and go. She slipped off her backpack and
looked for a place to set it down. She was giving him half the money she’d
stolen from the bank. It might cover his medical expenses, though she doubted
it. She’d started to count it earlier and realized that there just wasn’t that
much of it. After paying for her ridiculously expensive hotel room and a cheap
car, she might not even half enough left to pay for gas and food on her trip
out of town. It didn’t matter, though. She would give Wallace and his family
as much as she could spare.

She was about
to put the backpack on a chair by the bed when she heard a toilet flush. All
the hair on her arms stood up and she slowly turned around to see someone
coming out of the room’s private bathroom. A middle-aged woman with short,
frizzy hair. Her face was red and worn as if she’d been crying for a long
time. It must be Wallace’s wife, Maggie decided.

“I don’t want
you here,” she said, her voice firm. Not, what are you doing here? Not, did
you come to finish the job? That was what Maggie had expected.

“I only came
to say I’m sorry. And to try to help,” Maggie told her.

“Don’t. Don’t
try. You can only make things worse. I know about you. I went back and read
all the things they said in the newspaper. You hurt people, and then your
brother comes in and saves the day. Except he doesn’t save anything. He just
cleans up. He’s like your janitor.”

Maggie looked
down at her shoes. “I have some money, here, I thought it could help pay for
the hospital room, and—”

The woman
grabbed the backpack out of Maggie’s hands. She rummaged around in the twenty
dollar bills crammed inside. “Where’d you get this?” she asked, holding up a handful
of twenties.

“From the
bank.”

“It’s stolen?
Do you even understand what you’re doing? He’s a
cop
. I’m a cop’s wife. I can’t take this. It would be
my duty to turn it in.” She threw the bills at Maggie and they fluttered
across the floor. “Here. I don’t want it,” she said, and handed the backpack
to Maggie. “Stupid little twit. Bringing stolen money here.”

“I was only
trying to say I’m sorry!” Maggie protested.

“Help? Do you
even know what you did? It’ll be months before he walks again. Fred will
probably never be able to go back to active duty—they’ll have to give him
a desk job. He’s going to hate that.”

Tears were
crowding in the corners of Maggie’s eyes. “Please. Let me help, somehow.
Just tell me what you want. Because I don’t know what else to do.”

The woman
grabbed Maggie’s face in her hand and stared into her eyes. “Just go away.
Just go somewhere and
die
.”

Maggie fled
the room, then. At the nurse’s station someone shouted for her to stop, but
she ignored them and kept running. Eventually she was outside again and still
running and she didn’t stop for a long time.

Weathers was
waiting for Brent the next morning when he was on his usual patrol, heading
towards school and another day of failing algebra. When Brent first saw the
FBI man he kept walking, but Weathers just followed after him.

“Leave me
alone,” Brent said. He knew it wouldn’t work, but what else was he going to
do? Hit the guy?

It was
tempting.

“I’m not here
to ask you for anything today,” Weathers told him.

“Are you here
to apologize for using me?”

Weathers
chuckled. “No. That was just part of my job. It’s also part of my job to
provide you with information you may find useful.”

Brent scowled.
“Did you find my sister again? You want me to go trick her into getting run
over by a tank?”

Weathers
grabbed his shoulder. Brent spun around, as angry as he’d ever been in his
life. The fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. Both of them looked
at it. Eventually Brent managed to relax his hand, to let it fall loose at his
side.

Weathers
seemed intent on pretending he hadn’t seen it. That he had no idea what Brent
had been thinking. “Yesterday wasn’t a complete fiasco. We actually managed
to gather a lot of useful data.”

“What? You
were—huh?”

“I wanted to
know how powerful the two of you were, so I had some of our techies rig up some
video equipment in the helicopter you saw. We got excellent footage of the two
of you fighting and my analysts spent all night going over it.”

“So now you
are watching us, just like Maggie said.”

Weathers
shrugged. “Studying you, you could say. As long as your sister is at large my
job is to know everything I can about her. Especially about her limitations
and weaknesses. It turns out the two of you have similar, but not identical
powers. She’s about ten per cent stronger than you are—but you’re
faster, by the same margin.”

Brent frowned.
“We’ve got different powers? Why?”

“Who knows? I
still don’t have a good answer as to why teenagers can survive the green fire
in the alien spaceship but adults are killed instantly. Maybe it’s because you
two have slightly different DNA, or maybe it was because she’s a little bit
older than you. Honestly, I have no clue. My analysts were very surprised by
the results. They assumed that it would be the other way round. Normally, men
tend to have stronger muscles while women beat us at endurance and quickness.
But your sister is the tough one in the family. This is the kind of thing you
should know, Brent, for next time.”

“If I ever go
up against her again—”

“
When
you do,” Weathers told him. “It’s inevitable you’ll
clash again. The police gave it their best effort but she got away from them
easily. You could have caught her—if you weren’t distracted. You’re the
only real threat to her right now. Which means she’s going to want to
neutralize you.”