Robert Crane - Untouched

“Why would you tell me this?” The first hint of tears broke through onto her face, sliding down her cheeks, sparkling in the overhead light. “I don’t want to face him, he’s a monster!”

“He is. But if you don’t, a whole city of people will die.” I took two steps forward and reached out to Kat, putting my gloved hand on hers. “When Wolfe was tearing up the city, I sat back because I was afraid, because no one could fight him, no one could face him, and I didn’t think there was anyone that could stop him. I was wrong. I could stop him the entire time, but it required a sacrifice that I wasn’t willing to make. I sat by as more and more people died until I couldn’t stomach it anymore.” I saw the emotion flicker behind her eyes. “People are already dead, and it’s not your fault, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t blame you for not wanting to go. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to run and hide, because Aleksandr is broken inside, and powerful, and that is a dangerous combination.

“But I’m going to fight him,” I said. “Whether you go or not, I’m going to try and stop him. I doubt I’ll be able to do much because he’s fast, and could vaporize me from about a mile away before I even got a chance to take a shot at him. But I’ll be there.” I set my chin. “Because I know what it’s like to stand by, to hide and to have people die, to have those deaths on my conscience. And I won’t do it again.”

She stared me down, her eyes brimming, full of emotion and the flickers of guilt and fear, and I wasn’t jealous of her any more. All I felt was sorry for her, sorry that she had to experience the same hell that I had, but with even larger consequences. “But…” her voice trembled. “…you…” she looked to Scott, then back to me, “you’ll be there? I won’t have to go alone?”

I squeezed her hand in mine, felt the depth of her plea all the way through me, tingling my emotions and bringing me back to a morning in the basement of my house where I was forced to confront all my fears. Alone. “We’ll be with you every bit of the way.”

She looked ghostly, but her eyes came back to life and she stared back at me. “Okay.” Her voice gained strength. “All right.”

Byerly gestured toward the door as he swiped the card I’d handed him from the guard and it slid open. He and I led the way after giving Kat a minute to change into something more protective than a tank top. She came out wearing a black turtleneck, black leather gloves, jeans and a black wool coat that looked terribly familiar. I frowned at my “twin” and she shrugged. “They brought me here and didn’t bring any clothes. This was all that was left in the closet.” She looked down at her pants. “The jeans are kinda loose on me, though. And short.”

Instead of smacking her, I started toward the stairs, the two of them in tow. I rounded a corner and a guard stood in front of me. I chopped him with a hand to his throat, causing him to gag, then slammed him in the side of the head with a punch that put out his lights. I turned to tell them to watch out for any other guards, but I found Scott letting loose of a guard of his own and Kat pummeling another with a flurry of punches that sent the man reeling, finishing him with a reverse side kick that caused him to ricochet off a wall. When she caught my surprised gaze, she smiled. “What? Everyone always thinks I’m so delicate because my powers are healing. I’m a meta; I’ve got strength too.”

“And moves,” I said. “Where’d you learn those?”

She shook her head as we started toward the lobby doors. “I don’t know. My memory is pretty fuzzy before Arizona. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Persephone-types have limits on our powers. We can only heal—”

“Until you run out of strength, then it starts leeching your memory. So you don’t remember anything?”

“I still have skills, abilities,” she said as we brushed out of the double doors, Scott looking skittish as he trailed behind us. “I can understand other languages, I can fight some.” She frowned. “I can farm. Don’t remember how I learned that.”

“Memory loss isn’t cool,” I said, “but every time I kill someone with my power, I absorb their personality into mine.”

“Eep!” She blanched. “So does that mean that the psycho you killed…” She paled.

“Yep,” I said, pointing to my skull. “I’ve got Cujo panting in my brain. The good news is Doc Zollers seems to have found a way to keep him under wraps.” I yawned. “Unfortunately, there do seem to be some adverse effects.”

We ran to the garage, which was unlocked. Scott grabbed keys from a box that held a bunch of them, and I knocked out the guy in charge of watching them and stuffed him under the desk he sat behind. We made our way through the garage as Scott pressed the button on the key fob until he found the right car, a nice little SUV. I sat up front with him and Kat took the back seat. She looked nervous as we pulled out and headed for the front gate. Scott pushed a remote on the visor and the gate opened, fast.

We shot out and took a quick turn, zipping down the road at about sixty. “I’m not exactly an experienced driver,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure there are speed limits.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, mumbling.

The night was black, and up ahead there was a van pulled off to the side of the road. Scott slowed as we drove by and I caught a glimpse of the logo—a local telecommunications company—and saw, very briefly, the worker jump out of the way for us as Scott screamed by. “You know, saving the city isn’t going to do us a ton of good if we end up killing a hundred people on the drive there.”

He rolled his eyes, but I saw him slow the car a little. We passed through Eden Prairie as the clock on the dashboard flashed 4:30 A.M. Traffic was almost nil, a few cars as we got on the interstate. Kat was a silent hole in the backseat, and I cast frequent looks back to make sure she was still there. Scott gripped the wheel, white-knuckling it, the tension evident on his face as he steered us onto another major freeway. As he angled the vehicle onto it, I could see the lights of downtown Minneapolis in the distance.

The outline of the skyscrapers was pressed against the horizon, lighted shapes that gave form and substance to my thoughts of a city and what it should look like. A thousand windows gleamed and shone out at me, and some sort of lighted display shimmered in a rainbow of colors atop one of the buildings. They grew closer slowly as the distance between us and the city faded. We passed a few cars here and there, and soon enough the skyscrapers towered above us. “Which one is the IDS building?” I asked.

Scott craned his neck to look up and he pointed at the tallest one, made all of glass and jutting up into the sky. “That one.”

I studied it. “He picked the biggest. I bet he didn’t want a sniper shooting down at him.”

Scott cast me a glance. “Really?”

I shrugged. “If you think about it, it’s probably the only way he’s vulnerable. I’d bet most low caliber rounds would melt before they hit him. Anyone attacks him physically, he can keep them at bay long enough to explode. But it’s hard to concentrate enough to blow up when your brains got sent out the other side of your head.”

“Good point. Wonder why they didn’t do that to him in Glencoe?”

I kept my eyes on the building that dominated the skyline above us. “I think they were going to try, but they didn’t get a chance to set it up. Which reminds me, M-Squad will be here in an hour or less. Best we’re done by the time they show.”

Scott eased the car onto a side street and found a parking garage. I heard the noise of another vehicle somewhere below us as we stepped onto the street. I watched another telecommunications truck pass us and I felt a tingle of nerves. It was the cable company for the entire Twin Cities, after all. Not unusual to see a couple of their trucks out, even at this time of morning. “Let’s go,” I said as we entered the glass lobby.