Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

We hit another bump in the road, the truck’s huge tyres carrying us over it. Reggie snorts awake suddenly, blinking next to me. She licks cracked lips, her unfocused gaze darting around the truck’s interior.

“Here.” I pull out the one bottle I still have on me, half-full of water. Reggie tilts her head back, accepting the drink. Annie looks up, concerned, then flashes me a quick smile of thanks.

“Got any more?” the businessman next to me says.

“Nope. Sorry, dude.”

He lapses into sullen silence.

“I never said,” Reggie tells me, when she’s drunk her fill. “Good job on Schmidt. That was quick thinking.”

“Paul didn’t think so.” Man, I hope he’s OK. Just because we don’t see eye-to-eye on stuff doesn’t mean I want him hurt. And Annie… she’s doing a good job of not showing it, but she’s clearly worried about him. She’s even more tense than normal, which is saying something.

“Paul doesn’t know everything.” She coughs. “I’m truly sorry, by the way. I should have been paying more attention to… to what Schmidt was doing. I should have spotted how he left his hotel.”

I’m about to tell her that it isn’t important – however she messed up, we’ve got bigger things to worry about. But before I can, she says, “I knew this would happen.”

“You… knew a kid with earthquake abilities would show up?”

“I knew someone with abilities would, eventually. We were caught unprepared last time, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again.” A deep, trembling breath. “I wanted to show Moira. Prove to her that we were ready for anything.”

Tanner. She won’t know about the kid, that’s for sure. Will she be looking for us? Trying to get us out? I doubt it. She’s always been practical – chances are, she’ll let the National Guard do their thing.

“You don’t have shit to prove to Tanner,” I tell Reggie. “And you can’t plan for everything. Besides, that’s not what China Shop is for. We go out, we do jobs, we take down bad guys. Right?”

“I suppose.”

The defeat in her voice rattles me, more than I want to admit. “Reggie, it’s gonna be OK. This quake wasn’t our fault – there’s no way we could have known. If anything, Tanner’s the one who should have known about it. We’ll get to the stadium, we’ll figure out what to do about the earthquake kid, then we can worry about El Jefe . She’s not gonna get mad at us for this. How could she?”

“She won’t.” That same listless tone. Is it shock? Has to be. Annie will know what to do about it. I look around, trying to find some more water, half-sure that dehydration is part of the problem.

Reggie says, “She’ll keep China Shop around in one form or another. No doubt about that. It’ll just look… different than before.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

File that with Stay calm and Your ass looks fine in that dress under Things that never result in the intended effect, ever .

I’m saved from having to answer when the truck lurches, tilting upwards as it climbs over some obstacle. The back of the vehicle is open, and it looks as if it’s stopped raining. I don’t have the first clue where we are. Koreatown? Crenshaw? Hell, maybe even Leimert Park – if it is, I could hop off here, go see if anything’s left of my house. It’s probably pulverised, but at least I’d know for sure…

“I think Moira’s going to fire me,” Reggie says quietly.

I blink. “Excuse me?”

“That’s why I was digging into the first quake. That missing trooper. I wanted to find… something, I don’t know. I was distracted during the job, but I just…”

“Hold on. No no no. Tanner isn’t going to fire you . She can’t.”

Another sigh. “Sometimes, I forget how young you are.”

“OK, number one, fuck you, and number two… she can’t fire you. You run China Shop. You’re the whole reason we exist!”

“Technically, you’re the reason we exist.”

“You know exactly what I mean. And anyway, what the hell have you done to justify firing? Our jobs are going fine! Is it because of Carlos? Listen, that was as much her fault as anyone’s. I even told her after—”

“Would you keep it down?” grumbles the man next to me.

“Zip it, cupcake. Reggie: you’re wrong. Sorry, you just are.”

“Moira and I go back twenty years now. I know exactly how she thinks. She doesn’t just want good performance – she wants the right people in the right positions. Even more so now, after what happened with Carlos.”

“So she was asking you to come to Washington to can you?”

“I suppose she thought she owed it to me to do it face-to-face.”

“But you can’t know for sure!”

“I have a pretty good idea. Just things she’s said, the way she’s phrased certain emails. I can read between the lines.”

The idea of Reggie not being with China Shop is so dumb I can’t even begin to see how it would work. “You’re literally the best hacker in this country—”

The ghost of a smile. “You know that isn’t true.”

“The hell it is. Who the fuck is she going to get to replace you? I don’t think the guy who invented the internet is available.”

A thought occurs – and not a comfortable one. “Reggie, this isn’t because of – I mean, there’s no way Tanner would use your disability…”

It still feels wrong to use the word, but Reggie herself once told us that if we referred to her as differently abled one more time, she’d hack our social security files and give us that phrase as our new middle names.

In response to my question, she shakes her head. “I don’t believe so. It’s more about management style. I get the feeling she wants China Shop to be a little more… tightly run. I pushed for Africa to join our team, and I wanted to make sure she didn’t regret that.”

She pauses, as if choosing her words carefully. “I wanted to sell her on our creativity. That I would see things a more rigid manager wouldn’t be able to. Show her we could act on our instincts, instead of just following orders.” She scoffs. “God, listen to me. I’ve gone corporate.”

“Wait a second – is this because of me? Because of that whole thing with Jake?”

“Honey, not everything is about you.” But she doesn’t meet my eyes.

“You tell me one thing I could have done differently in that situation. Well, OK, I probably shouldn’t have thrown Annie and me out a skyscraper. And yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have revealed my ability in front of Nic, but it worked out OK, didn’t it? He’s on board, he signed all the NDAs, no harm done. Right? And if—”

“You’ve been getting stronger,” Reggie murmurs.

“Well… yeah. We knew that. Adrenaline spikes my PK. So what?”

“You think I haven’t noticed how much more you can lift nowadays? The control you have? The range? You’re getting more powerful, and it’s starting to make people very nervous.”

“People. You mean like Tanner?”

“I’ve kept it from her as much as I can, but she has her ways. There have been… I guess you could call them rumblings in her department.”

“Reggie, if you don’t start talking sense—”

“There are people who work with Tanner who would prefer you back in Waco.”

I let out a long, slow breath. Waco. The off-the-books Texas facility where these fuckers kept me for years after Wyoming. A grey hell, with endless tests and doctors and the threat of being casually murdered because someone in power thought I was too dangerous.

“Tanner wouldn’t let them,” I say, voice as steady as I can make it. “That’s the deal, right? I work for her, she keeps me in play. And we’ve been doing exactly what she wants. Haven’t we?”