Chapter 2 —No Service
Gleason caught her arm just before her knees hit the floor. The Chief was faster than he looked for a big man, but even through his gloved hands his touch sent heat pouring into her and right down to her core. Heat the inhibitor couldn’t reach, and Lord, she wanted a man right here and now. A low moan escaped her. The inhibitor was good enough to dull the edge of afterburn, but not enough to stop the effect of direct contact; and oh, God, she wanted contact. Full frontal, missionary, doggy style, whatever.
Xavier, where are you?
She reached for Gleason and he shoved her hand away.
“Damn it, Drake. Get a hold of yourself.”
He shoved her back against the desk and she stood there trying to slow her breathing and her racing heart. Gleason was about the furthest thing from her type, but this afterburn was as bad as any she’d had. She fought the lust down, swallowed back bile, and pushed herself upright. The air was a mélange, fragrant with the rich scents of the agents: cut grass, sage, cherry, wet dog, and mornings. Too much, too many. Her knees went weak again.
She fought the nausea and looked back at Gleason. Nodded. “I’m fine, Chief. Really.”
“Good.” He gave a perfunctory nod.“Dean. On the desk.” He nodded in the direction of the clean shaven agent who, in Vallon’s sensitive state, positively reeked of jasmine. “You. Come with me.”
He motioned her to follow but, thank God, didn’t touch her. She followed, stretching to keep up with his long, lurching stride. Gleason glanced back at her. “And I am not your Chief. Not any longer.”
His voice was like rough sandpaper over her skin. She swallowed. Nodded.
“That’s better. What the hell’s going on, Drake? You’re pale as a ghost.” He held the door from the map room open for her.
“I wish I knew, Sir.” Sir. It felt so strange in her mouth. Almost like perfume, and that wasn’t right, but then neither was the sensation that her brain stood on the edge of a cliff and her Dayton boot-clad feet were about a thousand miles beneath her. The long hall that they stepped into seemed to undulate around her and she staggered against the wall. She closed her eyes a moment until the movement stopped.
When she opened them again, Gleason was looking at her, his hoary eyebrows bristling close together. If she didn’t know him better, she’d almost think he was concerned.
“Better?” he asked.
She went to nod, but thought better of it. “I can manage.” She pushed herself away from the wall and started down the hall again. “We going to Landon?”
“Yes.”
She set her sights on a doorway halfway down the hall that bisected the long, low bunker that was the AGS headquarters, but when she reached it, Gleason motioned her away and led her down to the far end of the building, where in the past there had been a small office with bunk beds for itinerant agents and a cleaner’s alcove. He stopped her at the alcove, and the overpowering scent of new paint and old ammonia came from the small, brightly lit room. A computer and battered desk now took most of the space, but couldn’t disguise the drain in the cracked tile floor.
“Landon?” She blinked. It didn’t make sense. It just wasn’t real, because Landon Snow was a creature of dimly lit rooms with strange concoctions brewing on Bunsen burners that emitted even stranger smells. He was a creature of shelves full of old tomes and walls plastered with ancient line drawings of mandalas, hermaphrodites, and snakes swallowing their own tails. He did not sit blinking under harsh fluorescent lights, his white lab coat replaced with a suit that made his diminutive frame look even more like a child playing dressed up.
But it was him. His faint almond and baby-fresh scent warred with the ammonia. Thinning white hair exposed pink scalp, and his pale pink-blue eyes were watery behind thick spectacles that he usually never wore. He swung around from his computer screen, his chair squeaking, and neatly touched a button so the screen went dark as he smiled up at her.
“Vallon! What a pleasant surprise. Come in. Come in.”
He motioned to a scarred wooden chair in front of the desk and she collapsed into it. But a surprise? They’d spoken only last week and she’d said she’d come see him. She’d planned to, after her shift was over. Of course he hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t in his lab anymore. That was the surprise.
“Landon, what happened?”
He looked so little and misplaced, like an insect in a bottle.
He glanced up at Gleason and something seemed to pass between them as the room tilted precariously around her. She closed her eyes and grabbed the chair arms, and the chair squeaked again; and suddenly a second mint-scented bottle was thrust against her hand.
“What the hell happened to you?” Landon asked.
“She was on the desk and punched the alarm. I need to know what happened and I need a report for Amundson.”
Said as if they were two different things. She closed her eyes and drank the inhibitor down, even though two hits of the stuff were going to leave her in a bad way when they wore off. She needed to be able to think, and without the inhibitor that seemed beyond her at the moment. The inhibitor might not allow her to prevaricate her way out of a bad situation, but it would give her a chance to report. The cool of the liquid left her shivering, but it was better than the debilitating afterburn fever.
When she opened her eyes, she found the two men looking at her. “I’m okay. That helped. A little. Thanks.”
Both of them seemed to relax. Landon’s smile showed small precise teeth through his pale lips. He might be an odd-looking little man, but he had always been there for her and had stepped in as her guardian when her father went missing all those years ago.
“You’re sure, Pigeon? Because at this moment you’re paler than I’ve ever seen you, and that is going some.” He looked over his glasses at her as if to say she could come clean with him, given what they’d been through together.
She scrubbed her face. The trouble was, Landon wasn’t her father and he wasn’t Xavier, either. He could never fill the hole her father left and he could never do for her what Xavier could. The sweet, low throb between her legs became pain everywhere else. “I feel like I’ve been scraped off a windshield. God, what was that thing?”
Gleason made a chopping motion and nodded at Landon.
“You certain? It’ll get picked up,” Landon said.
Gleason nodded again and Landon pulled open a drawer and touched something inside. A vibration seemed to fill the air between them and hum in her bones.
“That should do it,” Landon said. His lips curved at the question on her face. “A little something so we can talk without Amundson’s goons listening in. Things have changed since you went off work, Pigeon. Not the least of which is the Chief’s and my new circumstances.” He motioned around him.
And she hadn’t known. Hadn’t a clue as she convalesced at home, even though she’d known Landon was now living in a condo in Seattle, when all her life he’d lived in an apartment on the AGS grounds. According to Landon when he’d visited her during the summer, his suite and another that had been reserved for returning agents had both been taken over by Amundson’s newly contracted-out IT section and a security detail—a bunch of big, burly guys—both from some company named Loadstone.
Gleason checked out the hall and then returned. “I feel like a damned kid trying to hide something from his parents.” His grim gaze slipped to Vallon. “Report, agent.” He started pacing behind her, though the size of Landon’s office allowed only two strides.
She closed her eyes and tried to get her thoughts straight, but regardless of the inhibitor, it was all a bit of a muddle. Images bled into each other and came apart like milk curdling in coffee.
“It all happened so fast. I was checking something out on the map.” No need to tell them it was something across the border and that Canadian Gifted were going to be hellishly depleted keeping that pipeline and harbor in place for a while. “I’d just pulled back when I felt something.”
/> She reported how she had used L.A. and New York to triangulate and how the quake that wasn’t a quake had hit. “It was a huge wave of Change, so big I couldn’t stand against it. But when it was all over, I don’t think it had changed anything. I mean, how weird is that?”
She looked up at them, rubbing her temples. The sweats had started. Small beads formed on her forehead and the backs of her hands.
Gleason and Landon looked at each other as if they could read each other’s minds and… “Would you mind letting me in on whatever has you two so concerned?”
“Where was the quake centered, Drake?”
“The epicenter?” She stopped. She had triangulated, but she hadn’t really had time to notice in the frantic attempt to stop the Change. She closed her eyes and thought back to the map pit and the connection to the L.A. and New York substations. An image of the continental United States formed in her mind. If she ran her internal transit line straight from here towards the point of origin and took the information from New York and L.A. and did the same… She did the math, and the results left the hollow place inside looming large.
“Oh, crap.”If she’d looked pale before, she must look like the dead now, because this was bad. Very bad—and a bout of shakes ran through her. “New Madrid.”
The name hung in the air and Gleason sat down hard on Landon’s desk. “New Madrid? Christ.”
The three of them looked at each other, each clearly reflecting on what was known. New Madrid had been the epicenter of the largest series of quakes in American history. In 1812, quakes and aftershocks ranging right up to 8.2 on the Richter Scale had been generated by the geological formations in the Mississippi Valley. The quake had sent church bells ringing as far away as Boston and New York. It would have caused untold loss of life, except that in 1812 there were just a few settlers and log cabins and Indians in the area. Survivors had told stories of the earth rolling like water and then exploding in mud and sand geysers. Entire plateaus had risen or fallen. Lakes had formed or been drained, and for a time the direction of the Mississippi River had changed.
“Fuck. New Madrid.” Gleason resumed pacing, then stopped. “You’re sure it was Change?”
Landon rolled his eyes. “This is Vallon, Gregor. If anyone would know Change, she would.”
Gleason went back to his quick one-two pace-and-turn so that Vallon had to turn away or get dizzy watching. “Are you thinking that someone’s trying to break the New Madrid fault loose again?”
“Could be,” Landon said. “But where was New Madrid station?”
Gleason swung around. “Of course. “ He turned to Vallon. “Where were they? They must have sent warning? Have tried to stop this thing?”
“New Madrid station.” As a substation, it didn’t have the same staffing levels as New York or L.A. and certainly didn’t have the high-tech maps that those stations shared with Seattle headquarters, but the substation agents should have been helping. They at least should have sent warning. She closed her eyes trying to remember, but there was nothing. The sense of the L.A. desk agent with her scent of chalky mint, the seaweed scent of the New York agent, but beyond that, nothing.
She shook her head. “They weren’t there.”
She -reached- out for them, doing something she shouldn’t be able to do unless she was on the desk with the map in front of her, and ranged east across the plains to the curved oxbows of the Mississippi Valley and New Madrid substation, set there to monitor the myriad fractures of the earth’s crust that were the New Madrid fault zone. But instead of the warm presence of a desk agent, there was—
—cold and a sense of screaming.
She jerked back and shuddered, and the hollow place pulsed larger inside her. She felt like crying—and not just for the agents of New Madrid station. She was just so alone, and the hollowness wasn’t something she could push away anymore.
“They’re not there.” It came out in a whisper.
“Nonsense.” Gleason said. “There are three agents assigned to New Madrid. They have to be there.”
She shook her head and wished she hadn’t, because her brain had started to feel like it sloshed in her skull. “They’re not. But if you like, I’ll check.”
She reached for the phone, but Landon had it before her. He dialed as if he had every station’s number memorized, and she could hear the dial tone turn into the distant trill of a ring tone. When a voice answered, for a moment she thought she was wrong. Then Landon set the phone down so they could all listen to the tiny, mechanical voice as it repeated its message.
“The number you have reached is not in service. Please check your number and try again. The number you have reached is not in service.”
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