Michael Grant - Villain

“Next up, Dekka Talent. She’s very powerful, reasonably bright, and more experienced at actual physical combat than any of the others, and probably more than any soldier currently serving in uniform, frankly. In the media they’re calling her everything from Catstein to Catzilla to Lesbokitty.”

DiMarco nodded, and her upper lip disappeared behind her lower lip, a clenched-jaw expression that often preceded an angry eruption.

No eruption this time. Not yet.

“Fifth place is Aristotle Adamo, aka Armo.”

“I made that boy!” DiMarco snapped. “I gave him power beyond anything he could imagine, and offered him . . .” She waved a hand to encompass the world of pleasure she’d tried to use to control the uncontrollable brat. This one DiMarco took personally. Dekka had been Peaks’s special project, Armo had been hers, and it was not a happy reality that the two had apparently teamed up.

“Six is Hugo Rojas, aka Cruz. She’s a trans female or gender-fluid male—we aren’t sure yet—a follower, not a leader. She seems to have the power to alter her appearance at will. She can appear as any person, old, young, big, small, any race, any gender.”

“Huh.” DiMarco grunted and turned on a sour smile. “I’m sure he, she, or it enjoys that.”

Atwell quashed his instinctive disgust at her sneering bigotry. “Seven is Francis Specter. She’s just fourteen, mother and father both members of a meth-dealing biker gang known to have been one of the gangs drawn to the Perdido Beach cave. No idea whether she consumed some rock or was down there in the hole long enough to be affected less directly.”

“What do we have on her powers?”

Atwell blew out a sigh. “Damned little, I’m afraid. She seems to be able to pass through solid objects, or allow solid objects to pass through her. We just located a seven-second snippet off a traffic camera in Glenrio, New Mexico. May I?” He indicated the remote control on DiMarco’s desk. He clicked the button to open a sliding panel that revealed a large TV monitor. A few more clicks, and they had choppy, grainy black-and-white video of a girl with jet-black hair crossing a busy highway. A car came into view, swerved madly to avoid her, and was followed by a Costco tractor trailer that slammed into her at sixty-four miles an hour.

And passed right through her: the entire length of the tractor trailer. Francis Specter had walked on out of camera range as if nothing had happened.

DiMarco had him replay it twice. “Fascinating. My first thought was that she alters her density, or the density of solid objects, but we’d see an increase in apparent size then. The lab’s current working theory is that she moves into an unseen dimension and essentially moves around the object through a fifth dimension of space-time.”

“The truck driver says all he saw was like a blurred rainbow.”

“A what?”

“He says that in the split second he saw her, she looked like a walking, blurry rainbow.”

“Why don’t we see it on the video?”

Atwell said, “Well, one, the driver could be hallucinating, or two, she’s got her back to the camera and the effect is only on her skin.”

DiMarco drummed her fingers and looked at the freeze-frame blur. “Criminal parents. If she’s bending space, it will be impossible to lock up or restrain her in any way. Pity. She’s a KOS.”

KOS. Kill on sight.

“Glenrio is hard on the New Mexico–Texas border,” Atwell said. “New Mexico authorities will not cooperate, but the gang frequently crosses into Texas, and we have people in the Texas Rangers who can . . . can do what needs to be done.”

Atwell, as a student of military history, understood that he was being given an illegal order, an order that violated the law and the Constitution. And his oath as an officer. It made him queasy. Just not queasy enough to refuse.

“KOS! And I’m not concerned with blowback. We have assets of our own, we don’t need to lean on the police,” DiMarco said. “Eighth place?”

“The Perdido Beach survivor Drake Merwin, aka Whip Hand, known to millions from the Ellison book and the movie. He’s teamed up with Peaks, which is bad enough, but worse, ordinary people think he’s Alex Pettyfer, the actor who played him in the movie. In reality he is worse than could be shown in a PG-13 movie, much worse—a psychopath and a sadist. A murderer, rapist, torturer, an all-around nasty piece of work.”

“KOS?” DiMarco frowned. “No, I think not—we want him. I assume you’ve read-in on him? The whip arm thing is not the power that interests me; he is apparently indestructible. You could run him through a blender and pour the bloody goo in the ocean, and a few days or weeks later he would be back. No, no KOS on Drake Whip Hand—he may yet be useful.”

Atwell made a note, concealing his disapproval. Atwell understood the need for drastic measures, but working with vicious animals like Drake Merwin was not why he had enlisted.

“Number nine is Malik Tenerife. A college freshman at Northwestern, high IQ, devoted, we think, to Shade Darby. We have only very preliminary information about him. He was badly burned by Peaks in the battle at the port. Doctors gave him a zero chance of surviving, but somehow he walked out of the hospital, seemingly healthy. He had an unusual effect. I just this minute got some video . . .”

DiMarco rapped her knuckles on her desk, an impatient signal to get on with it.

This time the video was from a professional news camera, showing a middle-aged nurse with a tear-streaked face.

“ It was horrible, horrible, I felt as if I was on fire. The pain . . . I could look down and see that I wasn’t hurt, but the pain, the agony . . . It was unbearable. I honestly thought that if it didn’t stop very soon, I would kill myself .”

“Huh,” DiMarco said thoughtfully. “We want Mr Tenerife if we can get him. Let’s see just how devoted he is to the girl who dragged him into all this.”

“Finally, number ten is still Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare.”

DiMarco gave him a hard look. “Young Justin is in custody and working for us now.” She stabbed a finger in the direction of the cavern outside her window. “He’s caged and tagged, and enlisted as a private in the US Army. And not even that sword of his can cut through a foot of reinforced concrete and six inches of electrified Vanadium steel.”

Atwell licked his lips nervously. “Ma’am, I think we should remember that both Dekka and Armo were formerly held here, and both escaped.”

“They escaped Tom Peaks, not me!” she said, adding grit to the last two words. “Anyway, if we’re going to start counting our own kept monsters, hell, we’ve got worse than Knightmare locked up down here.”

Yes , Atwell thought grimly, and may God forgive us all . The Ranch had been doing crash research in numerous avenues: they had tried to weaponize and control the rock by feeding it various strands of animal DNA. Sometimes—Armo—it had worked. Other times it was as if the rock was mocking them, using entirely different DNA—a passing mosquito, say—to create unsustainable monstrosities. One had morphed into a human-mite hybrid, a brainless slug unable to move its bulk on eight tiny, distorted human legs.

The Ranch had also pioneered cyborgs—human-machine blends: robots with human brains, weapons systems with a human head attached, or sometimes just a brain.

Silence descended as DiMarco templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips, a sign she was thinking. For a solid five minutes Atwell sat looking into space, trying to convince himself this was all right, trying to believe that years from now he would still be able to look his daughters in the eye and justify what he was doing. General DiMarco made that harder with what she said next.