Page 29 of Playing with Fire

A phoenix feather or two would come in really handy torching gorgon bile. Of course, the feather would likely torch the entire building in the process, but not even napalm could reach the same temperatures as a phoenix. If the CDC brought in the full bird, 120 Wall Street would be reduced to a big pile of ash within twenty minutes.

I wondered how I’d compare to a phoenix if I let loose and went on a rampage. The thought tempted me, although the presence of the two cops ensured I only considered it for a moment. Still, who didn’t like the idea of going full-out pyromaniac for once in a lifetime?

Instead of indulging, I sighed and gave both cops a sour look. “May-be step back more feet. To be safe.”

Janet obeyed, dragging her pair of extinguishers with her. The cadet did not. Why was I not surprised? When I got out of the building, I’d give Chief Quinn a piece of my mind for allowing the NYPD to even have such a useless cadet in training. What were they doing at the academy? Twiddling their thumbs and scheming ways to add chaos to an already chaotic—and dangerous—job?

“Meter set to fif-teen feet, Janet?” I asked around a mouthful of lanyards. A girl could hope, right? The meter was set to mass detection; that much I could tell from the screen icons. Maybe my luck would hold for once in my life.

“Yes, ma’am. The CDC recommended the settings. I just did what I was told and confirmed everything with them.”

“Good job. Purr-fect.” Fifteen feet would give me enough of a range to avoid general contamination and get a good feel for how much the bile had spread in the office. If the initial spatter radius was out twenty-feet, I expected some of the gorgon bile to have gotten on shoes or other materials and been spread around. The worst I’d seen was when one man had stepped into a puddle of it and tracked it thirty feet before it’d gotten through his socks and petrified him.

Maybe I’d get lucky and no one had gone on a long hike with bile all over their feet. I doubted it, but at least I’d know before I stepped in any trace residue.

I squeezed my way through the door and made it two steps before the meter shrieked an angry chorus of warnings, too shrill and piercing to indicate a simple gorgon bile contamination. Lowering my head, I set both devices down on the tiles, unsheathed a claw, and hooked the edge of the meter to flip it over so I could get a look at the back-lit display.

The screen flashed red, indicating a critical contamination. I tapped the diagnostic button and waited for the result. While I expected gorgon bile, and likely the concentrated, A+ grade stuff no one ever wanted to deal with since it stuck to everything and took several rounds of neutralizer—or intense heat—to get rid of, I got something even worse.

Gorgon dust.

Why did I always end up with the gorgon dust cases? Why couldn’t it be bile? The meter confirmed the strongest source was at the fringe of its current detection range, but as I initiated a more thorough scan, it picked up a trace source within three feet of me.

Crap.

“Back!” I twisted around and blew a gout of flame at the hallway to drive home my point.

Janet hightailed it to the elevators while Cadet Winfield stood around and gaped at me. How had I gotten the idiot cadet without real training? Why me?

Maybe if he didn’t move or breathe, none of the dust would reach him. I returned to my work and glared at the meter, and hoping for a misreading, I tapped away at the device’s thick rubber buttons, grateful the CDC had rejected the idea of touch screens, which did not play well with hazmat suits or unicorn claws. I did a full reset of the device, a procedure that cost me three minutes, and I reset all the settings before running the test one more time.

Nothing had changed. I still had multiple sources of gorgon dust nearby, and by the rulebooks, standing within three to five feet of a trace source classified as contaminated. I lifted my head and eyed the receptionist’s desk, which wasn’t close enough to be the nearest source of dust. The gray and brown granite floor tiles gleamed under the office’s lights, doing an excellent job of masking the presence of dust.

I snorted and smoke trailed from my nose.

“What are you doing?” Cadet Winfield demanded.

“Do you want to die?”

“You—”

The crack of metal against a hard surface startled me into turning my head towards the hallway. Janet had her billy club out and smacked it against the wall. “That is enough, Cadet Winfield. If you interfere with her work, I will follow protocol to the letter. That involves my gun and your kneecap, followed by a pair of handcuffs and your immediate suspension from the academy. At the scene of a contamination, the certified CDC specialists are the law, and she’s working for the public’s safety. You are, at most, an observer and assistant.”

Maybe I’d let Perky ride in a cruiser and give Janet a lift wherever she wanted to go. I liked when the cops backed me, even if she was twisting the regulations just a tiny bit. Then again, she wasn’t, not really—she just didn’t know I had a gorgon dust disaster on my hands, er, hooves.

The cop and cadet engaged in a stare off, and I left them to their silent battle while I went to work getting a better feel for the situation. A glass wall separated me from the purported contaminated room, and dark brown fluid streaked the window. If the meter wasn’t shrilling its dire warnings over gorgon dust, I would have believed it to be bile. An initial reading of gorgon dust plus a reset reading and full scan showing the same result, without any evidence of bile in the area, meant the liquid was likely the dust.

What was the brown gunk? It looked like bile. It looked like every other gorgon bile sample I’d ever seen, so much so if I’d been going in with visuals only, I might have begun clean up without bothering to do a secondary scan. Then again, I always ran the meter just in case there was something else with the bile.

Why me? Why again? Had someone mixed the dust in with a fluid designed to mimic bile? Was the bile-like substance some prank gone disastrously wrong and the dust was from something else? No matter how it had happened, I was stuck. At my range to the contamination, I couldn’t leave. By the book, I was contaminated. If the dust was in the fluid, when it dried, the entire building would also be contaminated.

Hundreds upon hundreds of people—maybe even thousands—worked in the building. Anxiety prickled its way through me. With such a heavily ventilated building and no way of knowing if the dust had gotten into the air ducts, I couldn’t afford to request help, either.

I had no choice. “Cadet.”

“What?”

“Walk backwards. Slow-lee. Don’t dee-sturb air. Go ell-ee-vay-tur. Leave, to ground floor. Dee-mand meter. Call for glass coffins. You will need. You not con-tam-eenated, you would be stone, but you may carry res-ee-due.”