Chimera

Twenty-two Raised Stakes

Staying behind while your loved ones go off to catch a crazy person as slippery as Uncle is never an easy thing to do. I knew why I wasn’t going, but that didn’t make it hurt any less to see the puddle-jumper take off from the landing pad.

Derek stood next to me, also watching, probably as confused as the majority of the folks who lived on the island. He knew something big was going down, hence Teresa leading the mission. And I respected him a bucket load for not asking questions I couldn’t answer.

Gage watched from my left, arms crossed over his chest, jaw clenched so tight I thought his teeth would break. He was second-in-command and it made sense for him to stay behind and hold down the fort here. Teresa had taken Marco along, so he could do any required sniffing around. Still, Gage was taking this personally. I knew him well enough to see it etched in the lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and I swear the gray streaks in his hair had gotten wider.

“I’ll be in the conference room,” Gage said. He walked away with a furious stiffness that he didn’t bother hiding.

“I know you can’t tell me what’s going on,” Derek said when we were alone on the stone pad, “but if I can do anything . . . ?”

“I’ll let you know,” I said. “I wish there was.”

“But right now it’s a matter of hurry up and wait?”

“Basically.”

“Does this have anything to do with Landon?”

I hesitated, unsure how much I’d be giving away by answering at all. “Tangentially, yes.”

“Uncle?”

“Can’t say.”

“All right.”

“How is Landon doing with all this?”

Derek exhaled hard. “He isn’t taking it well, which is to be expected. He and Bethany were raised like siblings. For better or worse, she was his sister, and he doesn’t know life without her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. Teresa and I discussed this briefly, but we both agree it’s best if Landon is the one to make the call.”

“The call?”

“About turning off her life support, if the second opinion supports Dr. Kinsey’s diagnosis.”

“Right.” My stomach turned at the idea of pulling the plug on an eighteen-year-old. It just wasn’t right, damn it. “I’m going to go check on the kids, okay?”

“Want some company?” Off my look, he added, “Landon’s sleeping.”

I smiled. “Sure, I’d like that.”

We found the Junior Meta Squad in one of the empty rooms along the main first-floor corridor. It had been set up with cots, tables, and chairs, and a stack of games. Tate and Barry were hunched over a chessboard and barely glanced up when we walked in. Nicolas was lounging on a bunk reading from a tablet. Sasha paced back and forth in front of the windows, her sparkly eyes flashing in the sunlight with each pass.

They all looked so young and scared.

“What’s a Chimera?” Nicolas asked. He put the tablet down on his chest to see us better.

The question wasn’t directed at me, so I deferred it to Derek. “It’s a creature from Greek mythology,” he replied. “A monster made of a lion, goat, and snake. Seeing it was often a bad omen. It can also mean an illusion, or a trick of the mind’s eye.”

“Why did you pick it as your code name?”

Derek came farther into the room and sat on a folding chair near Nicolas’s bunk. Everyone in the room had stopped to listen. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with his audience, and I have to admit to being curious about the answer, too.

“I chose Chimera for two reasons,” Derek said. “The first was my powers of alchemical transmutation.” Tate made a face, so he explained, “I can change strong metals into weaker ones, and vice versa. Solid steel that rips apart like tin. It’s an illusion of sorts.”

“What’s the other reason?” Tate asked.

“That one is more personal. Growing up I felt a bit like the Greek monster, made up of various parts. I was raised by an uncle who didn’t particularly like me. My mother died when I was a baby, and no one knew who my father was.”

“So you’re kind of like us? No real parents.”

He smiled sadly at Tate. “Yes, I suppose I am. I wish I’d had people like Teresa and Renee and the others around to help me out when I was your age. My life would have been very different these last twenty years.”

And we’d have maybe never met. My heart ached at the thought, and I was suddenly very, very glad to have Derek Thatcher in my life.

Tate returned to his game while Nicolas studied Derek intently for probably close to a full minute. Then he sat up and stretched his feathery wings. “You play chess?” he asked.

“I do,” Derek replied.

“We have a second set.”

They set up the board at another table. I wandered over to Sasha, who still vibrated with tension and pent-up energy. “Teresa will take care of Rick,” I whispered.

“I hope so,” Sasha said fiercely. “For her sake.”

A piercing wail interrupted Derek’s move to get himself out of a check. The siren was a general emergency alert, and it sent a bolt of sick worry through me.

“Keep them here,” I said to Sasha as Derek and I made tracks for the door.

The corridor was already filling up with people heading toward the conference room. I pushed ahead and ran straight into Denny. His sister Kate was behind him. I shook my head at both of them—I had no idea what was going on. Less than three hours had passed since our group left, which meant they should be arriving at Richmond at any moment.

Gage was already in the conference room, hunched over the computers. Both screens showed news coverage of a large brick building with sections on fire. I stared at it, a little relieved it was just a widespread fire and something we could help with if state officials asked—until I saw the location on the bottom corner of one screen.

Richmond, VA.

“What happened?” I asked, closing in on Gage. My heart wanted to hammer right out of my chest, and I wasn’t even sure I was standing upright.

“Teresa called to tell me they’d arrived,” he replied, face white and eyes wide. “Then I heard the explosion and we got cut off. No one’s answering their coms.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything.”

We had seven people out there who had maybe just walked into a trap, but we didn’t know that we’d lost anyone. We’d simply lost communication with them. The raging fires on the screens made my skin prickle with phantom pain. I’d lost so much to fire already. No one else.

And all of the rumbling voices in the room were giving me a headache.

“Everyone, shut up!” I stood on the desk chair to get people’s attention, and silence fell over the crowded conference room like someone flipped a switch. Nice. “Some kind of explosion has affected a research facility in Virginia. We have seven people down there and we’ve lost communication. This is an R&D firm, which means we don’t know fuck-all about the shit they’re cooking up or what’s burning.”

The sea of familiar faces watching me, waiting patiently for orders, washed an unusual sense of calm over me. Thirty years ran between some of us here, but we were all united by one thing. We were Metas and our family was in danger.

On one of the screens, the closed captioning showed mention of dangerous chemicals and hundreds of people trapped and needing to be evacuated. The other showed an aerial map and how close the facility was to a residential community on the north and another medical complex on the east.

“Richmond police are getting our help whether they want it or not,” I said.

Sounds of agreement rippled through the gathered Metas.

I looked down at Gage, who was working hard to keep himself together. “How do you want to do this, boss?” I asked.

He glanced up at me, and in a blink, his fear shifted into cold determination. I jumped off the chair and let him climb up. The fierce way he looked over everyone sent chills down my spine. “Everyone with an active designation, I want you suited up and by the landing pad in five minutes. Greens are staying here to protect HQ and our wounded.” When he turned his attention to me, I didn’t have to wait for him to ask. I just nodded. “Renee will be in charge here.”

Preparing twenty-odd people to cross the harbor on two puddle-jumpers required a little planning and several trips, and even with Nicolas pitching in to fly two at a time, the entire production took fifteen minutes we didn’t have. Gage, Aaron, and Derek were the last to go across, and I didn’t resent them for leaving. I had a job to do here, and that included coordinating communication between us and the authorities.

Virginia State Police had already called and officially asked for assistance in stopping the spreading fires. The disaster, they said, could cause long-term harm to the area if the blaze wasn’t controlled before it hit certain areas of Stratfield. And through it all, we’d had no word from Teresa or anyone else with her.

I headed inside. I was officially in charge of the island and its handful of occupants. I’d asked Sasha to keep her friends in their room for now, and she’d agreed. One less thing to worry about. Jessica Lam went with the teams in case medical assistance was needed, leaving Kinsey to oversee the infirmary and its patients. They’d apparently had a pretty epic argument about who would go; I don’t even want to know how she won that coin toss.

Only two other island residents still had Green designations, and they were just too new to take out into the field. The twenty-somethings had come to us only a week ago, and I’d ordered them to stay in their rooms until further notice. They hadn’t argued. This was their first major emergency, and they trusted us to know what we were doing.

I just hoped we did know what we were doing.

I stopped by to check on Sasha and the kids. They were tense but fine, still playing chess to pass the time. Their need to help was written all over their faces. I totally sympathized with that feeling of helplessness in the face of imminent disaster.

My next stop on the way to the conference room was the infirmary to visit Double Trouble.

Noah was dozing in one of the private rooms, and I did a double-take at his appearance. It had been two days since I’d last seen him, and he’d gotten so much worse. His skin was a sickly yellow color, like old dried paste. The dark smudges under his eyes had deepened and widened like a pair of fight-worthy shiners. His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, and when he opened his eyes, they lacked any real color. Not Dahlia’s baby blues and not Noah’s vivid emerald green. They were as worn and washed out as the rest of him.

“I’m sorry I let this slip to Ethan,” I said.

He lifted one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Probably good you did. They said good-bye, her and Ethan. I think Dal’s ready to go.”

Tears stung my eyes at the helpless fatigue in his voice. “I hate that we can’t fix this.”

“Me, too. So what’s the emergency? Dad won’t say.”

I gave him the basics of our identifying Uncle/Switch/Nancy Bennett, as well as the fire our people were going to fight. Disappointment sank him deeper into the pillows.

“Wish we were there,” he said. “Our powers can do so much together.”

“I know, but we have a lot of people on the ground fighting.” We all had family out there, people we loved. “I’ll keep you posted, okay?”

I headed back to the conference room to monitor the news. Gage sent a message that they were twenty minutes out from the fire’s location. I passed along the little information I’d collected from various news sources—not much for him to use when they got there. Moments later, the bottom corner of one news helicopter’s screen flashed with purple light. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

The reporter zoomed in on the area. A building in the south quadrant of the property, its perimeter in flames, had a small patch of exposed lawn near the fence between it and another medical center. Seconds after the flash, a familiar purple-haired figure appeared with several other people.

I admit it. I whooped out loud.

Before I could tell Gage that I’d seen Teresa, I was distracted by our perimeter alarm beeping at me. Because of the size of the island, we couldn’t keep visual guards at all times. Marco had rigged something similar to the sensors we’d had at Hill House, only these were modified to react to very specific things crossing. We couldn’t have an alarm every time a seagull got curious. We did, however, get one whenever an inanimate object larger than a coffee cup made it on to the island.

The security camera facing the observation tower blinked to life. One of the puddle-jumpers was heading toward the landing pad, which was both alarming and not. The puddle-jumpers had two fail-safes—a security code required to open the doors and to fly the thing, and a switch hidden near the com that sent a signal to our perimeter sensors authorizing entry.

Whoever was flying the puddle-jumper hadn’t activated the switch, which meant they were either too panicked to remember, or they didn’t know about it.

I checked the designation, then opened the com. “HQ to Jumper Two, identify yourself.”

Nothing. I repeated, but still nothing.

The puddle-jumper dropped down to land. I ran with only one thought in my head: Identify the intruders. I didn’t have my Coltson, and I didn’t have backup. All I had with me was a niggling sense of something very big about to happen. The jumper engine was still on when I got there, the blades just slowing down. Both doors were shut, the interior completely empty.

Had it been flown over telekinetically? It was possible. The copter that crashed into Central Park had been operated by a telekinetic. But why land it? Why not send it crashing into the building? I didn’t know enough about explosives to guess what might be rigged or not, so I backed off. Back right inside and into the conference room.

I brought up our security system with the hope of using it to scan the puddle-jumper for threats. The security program blinked open with a grid of the entire island. The feature allowed us to track the number of Metas on the grounds by identifying each person’s individual power signature. The technology that made it work was way beyond me, so I simply trusted it. Dr. Kinsey was the only white dot on-screen, because he was the only non-Meta here. Everyone else showed up as a blue dot.

Seventeen blue dots. Five of those dots had a yellow ring around them, indicating they were unidentified powers.

Eleven of us had stayed behind.

Six unknowns were on our island.