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“Both of them not only acquired powers, but somehow they’ve kept them. Kept them four years after the PBA came down.”
“Looks like,” Dekka said, clipped, tense, waiting.
“They, unlike you, Dekka, were physically altered. They were physically changed. Only Drake, Taylor, and Charles Merriman—Orc—were altered physically. Orc died, and we’ve seen no sign of him. But something about that difference, the physical change, means Drake and Taylor still have their powers outside the PBA.”
“You need to find him, then dig a deep hole and throw him in. Throw a nuke in after him. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“Actually, we do. That video was taken quite by accident from a military drone on a training run in the Joshua Tree National Park. Out in the desert. And when we ran a search we turned up eighteen instances of rape, mutilation, and murder in the area over the last four years. It’s all being blamed on illegals coming up from the border, of course, the convenient scapegoats, but it was him. People coming across the border don’t carry bullwhips. They don’t spend hours flaying victims alive, then leaving them to burn in the hot sun.”
Dekka felt her stomach turn, felt her heart pounding, felt . . . fear. Fear like she had not felt in years. “You have to warn Astrid. He hated—hates—her.”
“Ms. Ellison is watched twenty-four hours a day. We have armed personnel—”
“You don’t know what he is,” Dekka said, her voice rising. “You don’t know. You do not know!”
“Please, sit down,” Peaks urged.
Dekka sat and swallowed her beer in a single, long gulp.
“Here’s the thing, Dekka. It’s been kept very secret, but pieces of the same space body that created the PBA, the same mutagenic asteroid, are arriving on Earth. The first three pieces, ASO-Two, -Three, and -Four, have already come down. Now, we are doing all we can to retrieve all of that . . . object . . . but it is entirely possible that some will escape, may even fall into the worst possible hands. We could have more Drakes. We could have a lot of Drakes. Dekka, we are looking at the possibility of a world inhabited by dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with extraordinary powers.”
“Wha
t the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Dekka demanded. “I’m a cashier, you’re the government!”
Peaks looked at her, patient, waiting for her to calm down. Dekka saw that he was waiting for her to calm down, and really wished she could calm down, but every hair on her body was tingling, her palms were sweating, and she was nowhere close to calm.
Drake!
But Dekka knew how to look calm.
She licked her lips, exhaled a long, slow breath through her barely open mouth, and said, “You need to just tell me.”
“All right.” Peaks leaned back, satisfied that she was listening. “You are an extraordinary person, Dekka Talent. Slightly above-average IQ, a little hot-tempered, loyal. Brave?” He made a little admiring snort. “Your record is quite clear on that. But the thing that we like best about you is that you are, for lack of a better, more scientific word, strong. Mentally strong. Emotionally strong.” He smiled and shook his head in sincere appreciation. “Some combination of DNA and life experience . . . you are really quite extraordinary.”
“Thanks. But you told me all that and it’s flattering and all, but let’s cut the bullshit, okay? What do you want?”
“Well, it’s like this. We have some of the rock—what we’re calling the ASO, the Anomalous Space Object. You have direct experience of possessing and using the power the ASO can convey. You are therefore very unlikely to suddenly turn into a . . . a Drake. So we want to test it on you.”
“Test what?”
“We want to expose you to the rock. We want to see if these fragments are still capable of causing mutation. We want to see, Dekka, whether you can once again acquire powers.”
“Can’t be done, not outside the FAYZ, that’s what everyone said.”
“Yes, well, we suspect that everyone is wrong. I have another bit of tape to show you. Did you happen to see anything about the plane accident at LaGuardia?”
“Yeah, the one that broke up on landing?”
“The video I have isn’t very good; the person shooting it on their phone was terrified.” He tapped his laptop and up came yet another video. It was narrow, with the phone held vertically. At first she could make nothing out, just what looked like airplane seats and wildly gyrating lights and arms and heads. The soundtrack was screams, cries, shouts, loud prayers: terrified humans begging for mercy.
Then the picture steadied for just a few seconds and Dekka saw a monster, a coral-tinged, huge, hulking creature with what looked like a long blade where the right hand should be and something like a lobster’s claw for the left hand.
The picture slipped, more wild gesticulations, more screams, and the sound of metal screeching and jet engines suddenly louder.
The video stopped.
Dekka waited.
