John Ridley - What Fire Cannot Burn

Raddatz nodded to the affirmative. "But we've got no motive for the attacks."

"One superhuman wants to kill another. How much more reason do you need?"

"On the job, how many times did you come on really random violence? Guy robs a liquor store, he wants money. Guy jacks a car because he wants wheels. A girl gets killed because she jilted her man. I don't care what kind of powers metanormals have, you've got to look at the crime same as any other. Besides… " Raddatz looked to Hayden. "If one of their own went off, they would know."

They would know. Raddatz was acknowledging what the establishment feared: Metanormals weren't just hidden among the normals. They had a network, an underground. As far as the establishment cared, that was one step removed from having a resistance. Forming an army.

And Raddatz was actually trusting Eddi with this information.

If he was trusting her. If he wasn't handing her misinformation. Disinformation. But, really, wasn't the trust Eddi's to use or discard? She could keep on with Raddatz, hear him out, back his play. Or she could keep a metaphorical hand on her gun ready for betrayal.

"Okay, so this isn't random… " What was the phrase Eddi was looking for? "Freak-on-freak crime.'

"No," from Hayden. "Whoever it is, or they are, they've… they've made targets of us."

"The last guy to get killed, Anson Hall, he'd been stalked. We got out the word among the metas: Mind your back for anybody who's watching you, clocking you. That's how," Raddatz said, "we knew to stake the house where the last murder attempt was."

"Melinda thought-"

Eddi asked: "That was the intended vie?"

Hayden hesitated. He used her name in front of Eddi by accident. He'd just outed to an unknown quantity a fellow freak.

"It's all right." Raddatz vouched for Eddi. Went out further on the limb.

Hayden said: "Melinda Franklin. She has the ability to alter thermal degrees in a microclimate."

"A weather girl," Eddi slanged.

"She thought she was being watched. She got a message to some other metanormals, to me. I told Tucker."

Hayden was so insubstantial. He was in his mien, he was physically. Going from the gut, Eddi'd always figured a guy who was superstrong would have muscles the size of small bull calves. But if you could lift almost anything and everything that was set before you-from engine blocks to locomotives-how could you ever develop musculature? Couldn't. No more than pumping five-ounce weights would land Eddi on the cover of a fitness mag. Metagenetics had their own, odd rules. And admittedly, for Eddi, even in this short amount of time seeing them from the inside out held a certain fascination.

A semitrailer coming down the off-ramp took Eddi's attention. She looked to Hayden's wife. Hayden's wife had been watching Eddi stare at her husband. She didn't care for the way Eddi was staring, studying her man as if he were a control animal at a university lab. Hayden's wife made her feelings plain in expression alone.

Eddi to Raddatz: "Why are you involved? Besides your guilt or near-death experience or whatever. Freaks've got-"

"Do you like 'chink'?" That from Hayden's wife. "You call us freaks, do you like to be called a chink?"

"Chinks are from China." Eddi calm enough to be commenting on a recipe for soup. Directions to the mall. "My family tree goes back to Japan. So they' ve got all the power this side of God. Why don't they just take care of the problem themselves?"

"That's what the people up top want."

"They don't fight back they get killed. They fight back they get blamed for using their abilities and end up hunted." Eddi, flippant: "Kinda sucks to be a metanorm al"

Hayden, not sarcastic, serious: "Yeah. Kind

of."

The boy, with his mother, just sat and listened. Grown people standing around talking about the thousandth variation on hunting season on the unique, and he just listened. The thing was, even if both his parents were metanormals, it wasn't a sure bet he'd have an active gene. Wouldn't know at the earliest until puberty. For most that's when the gene went active. And how would that be for this kid? Early teen years, getting zits and pubic hair and maybe the ability to rip sequoias from their roots or see through brick walls or have control over the metals of the earth… What do you do then? You try to live "normal," or do you take your abilities and pay back the normals for what they did to your kind? It occurred to Eddi that maybe this moment was merely a polite introduction to the boy. Their severe meeting was years and circumstance away. And what would the circumstance be? Violent, hopeful? Would it end in death or inspiration? Eddi was getting with the idea the future was beginning right then. And right then Eddi got, or was at least starting to feel, the weight of Raddatz's words: It is time to end fear.

Okay, so what did Eddi have? Eddi had nothing. Raddatz had little to give her beyond what was known. What was obvious. Freaks were being killed. Tashjian had given her that much coming in. All Raddatz had added was a long-winded assertion freaks were the vies in the situation. Backed it up with nothing more than the word of a freak itself. Eddi didn't take it. She didn't disbelieve Raddatz, but she wasn't going on trust anymore. She was also going to jettison the gut instinct that almost caused her to commit murder. She would start acting like a cop. A cop alone, for sure, but a cop.

And where'd that put her? Nowhere. The freaks were no help. No matter the underground they had going, they didn't know-at least the way Hayden told things-who might be responsible for the killings. And Raddatz really only knew-again, according to story-what the freaks were feeding him. Raddatz had been hiding intel, been chasing tips, but had been able to do little investigating. And what amounted to his investigating unit, the rest of the cadre, they were zero help where they were.

And yet, ironically, the only help Eddi had was coming from beyond the grave, Soledad. Her journal. Whether Tashjian was lying to her or not, using her or not, she'd come into the situation to collect intel-go back over Raddatz's work, be it honest or otherwise, vivisect it and hand the pieces to another. Like with everything else in her life, Soledad'd come at the chore with frigid dispassion. Sentimentality is fine when you're reflecting on things. But in Soledad's world attaining a point of reflection would have been impossible being sentimental. In the end, for Soledad, sentimentality wasn't possible anyway.

So here was Eddi hoping what Soledad left behind would give her the perspective Soledad never had.

Accurately, succinctly, on the pages of her journal were summaries of Soledad's conversations with Anson's wife, with Officer Hayes-a notation about him trying to hit her up.

There was her retracing of Anson's steps, his running from his attacker. The burns to his clothes, as well as the possibility the attacker had thrown Anson into a wall, actually tried to beat him with a motorcycle.

That was troubling. A freak displaying multiple abilities. The thing that had taken out Raddatz's old element, the berserker, had increased strength and speed, but it was just the meta version of a druggie on PGR A mutie that had actual separate, distinct abilities… It signaled the next step in evolution. It harbingered the end of normal humankind.

And wouldn't that be… ironic, poetic? As the freaks were a threat to normals, the superfreaks were now ready to wipe out the freaks.

But that was just theory. The very first one Eddi arrived at. Really, all that made it substantive was motive. It at least gave meaning to the murders.

Back in the day, in the age of heroes-Age of Heroes-those kinds of murders were easy to explain and so very public. One-Eyed Jack trying to prove he's a badass by taking out the Egyptian. Death Nell trying to pay back Red Dawn for what'd happened to the Burningman.