Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (9 page)

“Yes,” Cooper said. “He is. He’s broken. Most real-life villains are. Usually it’s not their fault. But that doesn’t matter. They’re broken, and they do things that can’t be forgiven. Like hurting you.”

Todd pondered that, chewing his lip. “Do the bad guys ever win?”

Wow.
Cooper hesitated. Finally, he said, “Only if the good people let them. And there are a lot more good people.” He bent and picked up the soccer ball. “Now. My turn to ask an important question.”

“What?”

“You guys have been here for a couple of weeks.” He cocked his head. “Have you figured out where to get decent pizza yet?”

They had.

After Cooper whispered his final goodnights and closed the bedroom door, he found Natalie in the kitchen with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured without asking, and he took the glass, clinked it with hers, then settled into the opposite chair. For a long moment they just looked at each other. Like coming home from a long vacation and walking the rooms, opening curtains, running fingers over tabletops. Reclaiming space.

“I was proud of you today,” she said. “The way you talked to them.”

“Christ. Why can’t they ask where babies come from, like normal kids?”

“They haven’t had a normal life.”

One of the things he had always loved about Natalie was that her words and actions and feelings were more aligned than those of most anyone he knew. She didn’t have a passive-aggressive gene in her DNA. If she was pissed, she told him.

So he understood that she was just stating a fact, not making an accusation.
But still. You’re the reason for that. Your job, your crusade, your mission to save the world. If you’d just been a regular father, they would have had regular lives.

Of course, if he’d been a regular father, Kate would be in an academy right now, her identity taken away, her strength and independence shattered, her fears cultivated. He’d seen firsthand what those places looked like, and he’d sworn his abnorm daughter would never end up in one.

Fine, but instead an assassin put your normal son in a coma. And you’ve brought both your children to the center of a war zone. So don’t pull a muscle slapping yourself on the back.

Natalie sipped her wine. “How long are you staying?”

“Just tonight.”

She sighed and reached across the table. Their hands met, fingers threading with easy habit. “It’s important?”

“I’m going after John Smith.”

Her fingers tightened. “It’s too much. Why does it all depend on you?”

“I don’t know, Nat. Believe me, I wouldn’t mind a break.”

“Are you sure you can’t take one?”

He considered. Thought about a boy lynched in Manhattan. About soldiers burning in the desert. About the way Abe Couzen had moved this morning, the scientist’s certainty he could kill them all. About John Smith smiling into the security camera and blowing him a kiss.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

She stared for a long moment, and he could read the struggle in her, the tension. He’d known her so long; they’d been little more than kids when they first got together, and he’d had her patterned in the most intimate ways for a decade. It had been one of the things that came between them, the fact that he knew her so well that he could often tell what she was about to say before she said it.

Like now.

“Okay,” she said.

He nodded and squeezed her hand once more. Then disentangled his fingers from hers to pick up the wine glass and—

“Take me to bed.”

—swallowed it down the wrong pipe. He coughed, spat what was left of the wine into the glass. When he could breathe again, he said, “Pardon?”

“Take me to bed.”

He flashed back to a month ago, the two of them in a fort they’d made with the kids, and the kiss they’d shared. He’d realized at that moment that something had shifted in both of them. They had reawakened to the possibilities of a shared life. But the weeks since hadn’t afforded them time to explore those feelings.

“Nat . . .” He stared at her, wanting very much to take her up on the offer. It wasn’t just solace or desire, it was a longing for Natalie personally. She was as strong and sexy a woman as he’d ever known, and though they had made love a thousand times, it had been years, and the notion of that combination of experience and novelty rode his system like a drug hit.

But this was the mother of his children, not someone to trifle with. Not casual comfort. Besides, there was Shannon. They’d only been together a handful of times, but they’d also saved each other’s lives, brought down a president, and fought side by side to stop a war. Their relationship hadn’t been conventional, and there’d been no time to discuss whether they were exclusive, or even where they were going, but still—

“Nick, stop.” She set down her glass and leaned in, hand on chin, other arm crossed at the elbow, her eyes bright and deep, hair falling tousled down one shoulder, smelling of red wine and cold air. “I’m not suggesting we get remarried. But you’re about to go off on your own again, chasing the most dangerous man in the world, and I hate it, but I get it, and I know you’re doing it for us. So before you do . . .” She stared at him for a moment that stretched electric.

Then she rose and gave a husky laugh.

“Before you do, come to the bedroom and fuck me.”

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE?

The DAR does. They’ve got a list of every abnorm in these Disunited States. Ask for it, though, and they say things like, “disclosing said information is not in the interests of public safety,” because it could “jeopardize the well-being, both commercially and personally, of American citizens.”

Igor, bring out the Debullshitization Device. Yes, good, my freaky little friend. Punch it in, let’s see the translation.

What? Are you sure, you rancid cripple?

Huh. Igor says that translates to, “We care more about not panty-twisting the twists than about the lives of your children.”

Luckily, there are still a few heroes-not-zeros in our drugs-not-hugs world, and more than one of them are members of our little hacker community.

And so, hot from the DAR systems, lifted like a goth girl’s skirt on free razor blade night, is a list of 1,073,904 abnorms—and their addresses. You’re welcome.

You better be grateful, bitches, because this looks to be the swan song. The Governot is already huffing and puffing to blow our house down. Payback’s on you—make a little chaos for kOS, will you?

So take it. No seriously, take it. Download it, share it, spread it around like corporate PAC money.

Here’s
the whole list
.

Here it is by
state
.

By
city
.

By
zip code
, you lazy twat.

This act of civil disobedience brought to you by the merry pranksters and puckish rogues of Konstant kOS. All rights raped.

CHAPTER 10

The room was the size of a large planetarium, only instead of stars, holographic data floated in the air, charts and graphs and video and three-dimensional topographies and scrolling news tickers, a dizzying array of information glowing against subterranean darkness. To the average person—to Cooper—it made little sense. There was just too much of it, too many unrelated notions overlaid against each other.

But to Erik Epstein, who absorbed data the way others took in a feedcast, it held all the secrets of the world. The abnorm had made his billions by finding patterns in the stock market, eventually forcing the global financial markets to shut down and reinvent themselves.

“Yesterday,” Erik said. “Your delay was inappropriate. Time is a factor.”

“Time is always a factor.” Cooper looked around, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Wearing a hoodie and Chuck Taylors, Erik stood in the center of the room, pale ringmaster to this digital circus. His eyes seemed more sunken that usual, as though he hadn’t slept in a week. Beside him, his brother Jakob was the picture of refined cool in a five-thousand-dollar Lucy Veronica suit. The two couldn’t have seemed less alike, Erik’s extreme geek set beside Jakob’s air of easy command, but in truth, they functioned as a team; Erik was the brains, the money, the visionary, and Jakob was the face and voice, the man who dined with presidents and tycoons. “And I don’t work for you.”

“No,” Jakob said, “you’ve made that abundantly clear. In fact, you’ve failed to do everything we’ve asked of you.”

“That’s not quite true. I did convince President Clay to let you secede. Of course, that was before you murdered him.” It probably wasn’t a good idea to be so flip, given that he was talking to two of the most powerful men in the world. But Cooper just couldn’t make himself care. Part of it was that flippancy let him tamp down his seething fury; no matter what he’d said to Quinn, no matter that he understood their actions philosophically, they had still murdered soldiers, and that he could never forgive.

The other part might have to do with last night.
There were reasons he and Natalie had divorced, good ones, but they had nothing to do with the bedroom. A fact that had been demonstrated rather thoroughly last night, leaving Cooper with a loose-limbed jauntiness.

They hadn’t discussed it this morning. The kids were up, and neither of them wanted to confuse Kate and Todd. But while last night had been rooted in the past, he knew now that Natalie was interested in the future. And she wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t just the sex, or even Natalie herself. They were good together. Easy. There had been a moment, as he took a break from cooking pancakes to hand her a mug of coffee, that felt as comfortable as slipping on an old pair of jeans and a favorite T-shirt. It felt like home.

“You’re different,” a small voice said. Cooper squinted, then saw the girl huddled in a chair, her knees tucked up in front of her, a screen of purple bangs hiding her downturned face. Millicent, Erik Epstein’s near-constant companion and one of the most powerful readers Cooper had ever met. She sensed the inner fears and secret darknesses of everyone around her, had intuited Daddy’s weaknesses and Mommy’s cruelties before she could speak. A ten-year-old girl whose insight shaped billion-dollar deals and resulted in murders. As always, Cooper felt a flush of pity for her; too much, too much.

“Hi, Millie. How are you?”

“You’re different. Did something happen?” She lifted her head, stared at him with ancient eyes set in a little girl’s face.

Natalie astride you, her thighs clamped around your hips, her head thrown back . . .

“Oh,” she said. “Sex. But I thought you and Shannon were doing it.”

For the first time in a decade, Cooper found himself blushing. To cover it, he turned to the Epsteins. “You’ve taken care of Ethan Park?”

“Yes,” Jakob said. “We’ve given him a facility that exceeds anything he’s known, along with a staff, all brilliant. With his knowledge of Dr. Couzen’s process, rediscovering the gene therapy to create gifts is just a matter of time.”

“Which you don’t have.”

“Uncertain,” Erik said. “The data is unclear. Disparate factors, personality matrices under exceeding stress, unexplored variables. Predictions are below threshold of utility.”

“Yeah?” Cooper pointed at a video feed hanging between graphs, a high-angle perspective on the rocky ground outside New Canaan’s southern border. The camp was a hive of activity, twenty thousand people preparing for war. “They seem pretty certain.”

“Unimportant.”

“An army is about to breach your border, and you say it’s unimportant?”

“No. The term
army
, no. Militia. Statistically far less effective.”

“Yeah,” Cooper said. “But this is the part you’ve never gotten, Erik. Data only goes so far. Not all emotions can be quantified. You murdered thousands of people, did it on national tri-d. You want a prediction?” He put his hands in his pockets. “I predict they’re coming for you.”

“You sound almost happy about it,” Jakob said.

You’re goddamn right, you slick shit. That was my country you attacked, my soldiers you killed, my president you murdered—

He took a moment and a breath. “I’m just tired of everybody making things worse.”

“Cooper,” Erik said, his voice hesitant. “I . . . I didn’t want to do it. They made me.” The billionaire looked around the room as if seeking support, someone to tell him it was okay. “It wasn’t easy. Isn’t. I’m—I hear them, the explosions, and I see them dying. I didn’t want to hurt them, but they wanted to hurt us. Were going to. I had to. They made me.”

The dark circles under his eyes, the extreme twitchiness, the shoulders slumped farther than usual. He’s suffering.
The realization brought no compassion. “I understand why you did what you did.” Cooper kept his voice level and cold. “But the people you killed were not monsters. They were public servants. Leaders. Soldiers. If you’re looking for sympathy, I’m the wrong guy.”

Epstein’s mouth fell open like he’d been slapped. He stared for a moment, then turned away, pawing at his eyes with the back of his hand. Behind him the data whirled and spun, sharp holograms floating in nothing. Jakob looked at him disdainfully, then went to his brother, put a hand on his shoulder.

His back still to Cooper, Erik said, “The militia is not a factor. No sophisticated weaponry, no air support. Not a factor.”

“You’re underestimating emotion again. Especially hatred.”

“And you,” Jakob snapped, “are underestimating us. Again. The Holdfast is a long way from defenseless.”

“Even so—”

“Others tried to hurt us. They died. If these people try, they will too.” Erik turned to face him. “They will burn in the desert.”

Burn in the desert? That phrasing can’t be accidental.
Cooper said, “It’s true, then. The rumor about your little defensive perimeter. The Great Wall of Tesla.”

“If by ‘little defensive perimeter,’” Jakob replied, “you mean a redundant network of ten thousand microwave emplacements generating targeted radiation that can reduce flesh to ash and bones to powder, then, yeah. It’s true.”

“I don’t want that,” Erik said. “I like people.”

Cooper wanted to hurt him again. Wanted to lash out and make the man feel what he had done, make him suffer for it. He checked himself. Despite Erik’s actions, the sincerity in his voice was hard to question.
He’s never made an aggressive move, only defensive. Brutal ones, certainly, but they were to protect his people.

Besides. Like it or not, you’re going to need his help.

“John Smith,” Millie said. She was staring at him again, her eyes aglow with reflected data.

Cooper sighed. “Yeah. As bad as things are right now, he’s about to make them worse.” He told them about tracking Abe Couzen, about the fight on the street and the chase through the train station, the way Abe’s gifts had manifested, and he walked them through his kidnapping. “Now, it’s possible that Smith just wants to keep the serum from us.”

“No,” Erik said. “That would be the maneuver of a journeyman. Smith is a grandmaster. Every move functioning to highest efficiency on multiple levels.”

“I agree.”

“Which is why I asked you to kill him three months ago.”

My God. Three months. Is that all it’s been?
Cooper flashed back to that conversation, when he’d first met the real Erik Epstein. The man telling him stories of ancient history, the early terrorists in first-century Judea who killed Romans and collaborators. How that had provoked a reaction that punished not just the killers but all the Jews. Comparing them to John Smith. Saying that if he were allowed to live, the US military would attack the NCH within three years.

Only, because you spared Smith—hell, you exonerated him—it happened in three months, instead.

You did what you thought was right, what your father taught you. And the world is suffering for it.

In a very real way, this is your fault.

“Yes,” Millie said.

He fought the urge to glare, to snap at them, to say that he’d done the best he could. Forced it down, and his temper with it, until he could speak in steady, level tones.

“We’ve been over my mistakes. And yours. For now, we have to put that aside and focus on ending this. Because John Smith certainly is.”

For a moment, the brothers just stared at each other. Finally, Erik turned to him. “What do you propose?”

“First we’ve got to find Smith. I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

“No.”

“You did before.”

“That was before.”

Right. Well, so much for the easy way.

“Then I need to talk to someone who does.” Cooper took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I need to sit down with the man who killed me.”