THE METAHUMAN TRANSFIGURATION
Description: The gang gets superpowers. It's not as cool as some of them always thought. Alternate Season 9 premiere.
Notes: This chapter turned out to be a little longer than most and not to have nearly as much action as some others, but I'm hoping the emotional intensity will make up for that. For those interested in my imaginary head-casting, I will note that I imagine the character of Breanna Locke to be played by Viola Davis, which is unsurprising given how much Ms. Locke is inspired by the character of Annaliese Keating on the show How To Get Away With Murder. I will also note (with an enclosed apology for actual Pasadena residents) the degree to which my imaginary Pasadena is varying geographically from reality, and those of a more technical bent may be able to spot my BS-ing through what might be in a state-of-the-art tech lab. And, as always, I would like to very much thank everybody who has posted encouraging reviews, and I hope you will continue to find this crazy tale engaging.
Disclaimer: The author does not own THE BIG BANG THEORY or any of the characters.
- 8 -
LATHAM HALL, 1645 ORLANDO ROAD, PASADENA, CA
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2015, 7:44 P.M.
Mrs. Latham's house was the most spectacularly lavish place Raj had ever entered in his life. He was no stranger to luxury—even after their divorce both his parents were extremely wealthy—but it had been quite a while since he'd been home, and in India there were things that even wealth like his parents' couldn't buy. Space, for one. The "back lawn" of the property was long enough for a full-scale cricket pitch—nearly twenty-five yards—with room to spare, and ended in a courtyard containing a small but placidly clear swimming pool. Inside, the corridors were painted a warm burnt-gold hue, floored either with polished oak or beige carpet so thick and soft Raj thought he might be able to go to sleep right upon it. He suspected some of the paintings on the walls were originals that had once been in the Louvre. Mrs. Latham led the group past doorways showing off palatial bedrooms, some of which looked bigger than his entire apartment, and dining chambers large enough to seat all of CalTech's board of directors. From time to time they passed formally uniformed staff, all of whom either ignored them or nodded deferentially before going on their way. To the Raj of three days ago, this place might have felt like a homecoming.
But the Raj who now, for the first time in his life, finally knew how to read the people around him, who could feel the emotional dynamics of a room the same way others felt air currents or warmth, had to swallow back a subtle but undeniable queasiness with every room he looked at. After a moment, it came to him: there was no joy anywhere in this house. Everything that might come close had something just that little bit off about it, like the first streaks of infection in a superficially ruddy glow of health: a tint of vindictive malice in the triumph, of gross satiety in all the pleasures, of jealousy, bitterness, suspicion and fear beneath all the apparent bonhomie. This house could only ever be a home to people who didn't really know what a home truly was.
And Mrs. Latham . . . somehow, Mrs. Latham was the worst, not only for what she gave off but for what she didn't. Walking behind her, Raj slowly realized that the low-grade fizz of emotional overspill which everyone, even Sheldon, gave off to his new senses was barely perceptible at all from her, as if she had become so used to concealing what she felt that she herself might not know. But even more disturbing were the only hints of anything he could detect—an iron presence that brooked no disagreement or denial, and the faintest black sting of sadistic glee he remembered only too well from their one prior meeting. For all her undeniable charm, Mrs. Latham was a woman, Raj slowly realized beyond any capacity to forget, who enjoyed humiliating others—and that was an impulse Raj knew well, having spent, like his best friends, much of his life being on the receiving end of it. Pace by pace, Raj grew more and more certain that coming here had been a mistake.
He was, nonetheless, almost convinced to rethink his opinion when Mrs. Latham led them into the library. Raj loved libraries—he'd spent many delightful hours in them throughout his life—and this was like nothing he'd ever seen in a private residence before: a loft-height, twelve-sided room with a rolling wooden ladder that could run around the entire chamber, lined with mahogany shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling packed every inch with books, and lit by a massive chandelier dangling from the ceiling's apex. His fingers itched to climb that ladder and roll it around, letting his hand trail over the books' spines. In the centre of the room stretched two long reading tables, ringed in chairs; at the head of one table sat a short, stocky black woman in a burgundy power suit, her dark eyes flickering between her laptop and a spread out folder to her right. At their entrance, she looked up, then stood. "Mrs. Latham," she said in a rich contralto. "Are these our clients?"
"Our potential clients, Ms. Locke," said Mrs. Latham, taking a seat. She gestured to the other chairs, and one by one the group sat. Raj took the chair farthest away from the burgundy-clad woman. For all the richness of her tone, she radiated a hard chill that made Raj think of diamonds and ice, with a sting like biting on tinfoil; he thought if he sat any closer he might physically shiver. Lucy sat beside him, holding his arm. She hadn't been far from his side since they'd found her at Leonard's and Sheldon's place, and he realized only now how accustomed he'd become to the sparkle of anxiety and fear she gave off—the aura felt almost as cold as Locke's, but was somehow far more pleasant and bracing. More alive. Locke felt like a computer AI which had somehow gotten into a human body and was only waiting for its orders to go full Terminator on the puny humans. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, he found himself thinking. Until we are dead.
"Allow me to make the introductions," Mrs. Latham continued. "Dr. Leonard Hofstadter; Dr. Sheldon Cooper . . . ." One by one she named them all, finishing with, "And Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Cooper, widow of George, mother of Sheldon, of Everholt, Texas." Mary shifted slightly in her chair, her surprise and alarm like a gust of windblown gravel across his face. Not that Raj could blame her. Someone had been doing their research very fast. "Leonard, this is Breanna Locke, my personal attorney. I think she'll have some useful insights into your situation."
Leonard cleared his throat. "Listen, Mrs. Latham—"
"Oh, Leonard, please." Mrs. Latham tilted her head and smiled warmly at him. Raj thought of crocodiles closing on prey. "I did ask that you call me Laura, didn't I? It seems silly to be so formal if we're going to be working together."
Leonard exchanged a glance with Penny; the currents that flashed between them were too complex for Raj to read completely, though it seemed to end with an unhappy certainty from Leonard and a grudging acceptance from Penny. He looked back to Mrs. Latham and nodded. "Laura," he said, not warmly but firmly. "Given how much you seem to know about us already, I'm pretty sure you must know none of us are in a financial position to retain Ms. Locke's level of legal representation . . . ."
"That's not exactly true, Doctor," Locke interrupted smoothly. Raj only barely managed not to cringe as she turned her diamond-edged focus on him; Lucy looked at him in alarm. "Dr. Koothrappali's family is more than capable of meeting our usual fees. Are they not?"
Raj cleared his throat. "My parents are divorced, Ms. Locke," he said, a little hoarsely but evenly enough. "That's limited their resources somewhat. And neither of them would just automatically commit to incurring legal fees on my behalf, not without a compelling explanation."
Locke nodded wryly. "Which you've never been terribly good at giving, Dr. Koothrappali, have you? Well, fortunately for you all, that's not the offer on the table here." She glanced to Mrs. Latham. Raj wondered if he should be insulted, dismayed, or frightened. Lucy squeezed his arm consolingly.
"I'm prepared to contract Ms. Locke and her team to work on your behalf, Leonard," said Mrs. Latham, "effectively pro bono as far as you all are concerned. Based solely on what I've seen, and what I can guess, I think you have a very good case."
Leonard frowned. "We do?"
Locke nodded again. "Oh yes. The FBI had no grounds to deem you threats to national security and therefore no grounds to hold you in that hospital; in the light of that fact, their attempts to recover you, even down to drafting that squad of riot cops in Texas, all constitute wrongful arrest and imprisonment. I've no doubt they managed to scare up a warrant by pulling some strings, but I'll be very surprised if I can't take that apart in an evidentiary hearing—the fact that they insisted those cops go in only with Tasers and nightsticks is a pretty clear indicator they weren't being straight with someone—and once the warrant is revoked, all your actions in Mrs. Cooper's house fall under legitimate defense of the home against trespassers. Though it helps a lot that Ms. Carmichaels and Dr. Fowler," she added with a glance at Penny and Amy, "didn't actually kill any of the cops they beat up—even if you did put a few of them in hospital. And the stunt saving that FBI copter didn't hurt either."
Penny stiffened. "Excuse me, that wasn't a flipping stunt," she said indignantly. "That was not letting a bunch of people die just because they were doing what they thought was their job."
"Good," said Locke. "Remember that righteousness; we might need you to show it again on the stand, although I doubt it'll come to that. Now, all that said—" Locke closed her laptop and leant forward, looking around at all of them. "A lot of our flexibility comes from the fact that there are simply no laws on the books to deal with people with your kinds of capabilities. That is not going to last. The more we can get out ahead of that initiative, the more control we can take. So I'm going to schedule a major press conference in a week or two where you, Drs. Hofstadter and Cooper, will make a public statement explaining exactly what happened on August 25, and why there was no possible way you could have been expected to be responsible for what happened in the Boer Laboratory building. We'll also have a public statement from the rest of you acknowledging your abilities, describing them, and basically convincing the public that nobody has anything to fear from you."
"So, no secret identity, ever, is what you're saying," said Howard, looking more than a little put out.
"Secret identities are things for comic books, Mr. Wolowitz," said Locke brusquely. "We're going to be dealing in the real world. You know, the place where adults live."
"Hey," said Bernadette, glaring at Locke. "That's my husband you're talking to. Show some respect! You know what I can do with a flu bug, some E. coli and a petri dish?"
Locke arched an eyebrow. "You know, Dr. Rostenkowski, threatening your legal counsel isn't usually a productive tactic."
"Oh, bite me, shoulderpads," Bernadette snapped. "We haven't even agreed to this deal, yet, and it's pretty clear you guys want something out of this too or we wouldn't be here. So let's cut the condescending crap and get down to brass tacks. What do you want?"
Leonard cleared his throat. "That's, ah, blunter than I would have put it, but it's a good question. What's our end of this arrangement, if it's not money?"
"Information," said Sheldon abruptly. He had folded his arms and was sizing up both Locke and Mrs. Latham with the skeptical look he tended to reserve for President Siebert's rare invitations to university social functions. "You want us to figure out some answers for you, and make sure you have exclusive access to them. And then maybe hire us as some kind of superhero mercenary team. Well, I have to tell you, ladies, I've already got a job I'm perfectly happy with."
"Do you?" said Mrs. Latham, sounding honestly quizzical. "Not that CalTech wouldn't be happy to keep you on, Sheldon, I'm sure, but, well . . . haven't you already written your Grand Unification equation? As I understand it, that means you've basically completed the structure of theoretical physics. Everything after this is just going to be filling in corners. Doesn't sound like much of a satisfying career left there—at least, not for a brain of your quality." The faintest sour tang in Mrs. Latham's aura betrayed the sarcasm in her last words, but nothing else did.
Sheldon opened his mouth and stopped. Raj felt the confusion wash over him like an avalanche, slowly followed by something black and freezing that was, he realized, pure, bone-deep horror and dismay. It was more intense than anything Raj would have believed Sheldon capable of, and his own stomach sank with its force. He had to close his eyes and swallow. Amy, who knew Sheldon well enough to read him even without Raj's powers, looked at Sheldon in sudden worry and took his hand; that Sheldon didn't immediately pull away was the final proof of how badly he'd been shaken. Mary put her hand on his shoulder.
"Let's come back to the future careers thing," said Leonard hastily, clearly aware that something about the remark had hit Sheldon hard, if not why. "If what you want is information, well, I think that's something we all of us desperately want to figure out too. But Mrs. La—er, Laura—first of all, we'd need all kinds of equipment to run the kind of tests we'd need—basically a full working high-energy physics lab, and a medical and probably biochemical lab as well. And secondly—" he paused for a deep breath, then went on firmly "—the information we could get out of those tests is something to which the entire world has a right, and based on the news reports we've seen, it's something they either need ASAP or are going to. We couldn't promise you permanently exclusive rights to the data, not and call ourselves real scientists." Leonard looked around at everybody else, his eyebrows raised. "Right?"
"Well, hang on a minute, Leonard," said Bernadette, her tone suddenly markedly different. "There's nothing wrong with taking out a few proprietary covering patents in advance. Zangen doesn't release all my work to the public—we have a right to recoup something on our investment, don't we? After all, we've all of us got the rest of our lives to think about . . . ." She gave a bright, artificially perky smile. Howard stared at her, his eyebrows almost up in his hairline.
"My thinking exactly, dear," said Mrs. Latham approvingly. At the remark, Bernadette's smile suddenly faded, and she shifted her weight uncomfortably. Her eyes stayed fixed on Leonard, though, who was staring at her as if he'd never seen her before. Raj frowned. What the hell was this?
He hadn't consciously intended anything, but simply thinking the question appeared to trigger something in his new senses. As if someone had turned a dial, suddenly the room seemed to dim around him, and the sensations coming off Bernadette blazed up invisibly in his sight, like neutrinos shooting through matter. To Raj's shock, there was far more sincere eagerness in that aura than he'd expected—behind her earnest façade there tingled the confident ambition of someone comfortable with making deals, and the hunger for opportunity of someone always thinking about where the advantage might lie. Raj had known for a while that Bernadette had a streak of ruthless competitiveness to her, but he had never suspected it ran this deep or this strong.
On the other hand, he found himself thinking, that might be exactly what we need right now.
He cleared his throat, sensing the surprise from everyone as people turned to look at him, and felt slightly irritated. Did everybody really think of him as such a milquetoast? Then he decided not to think about that. "Bernadette may have a point," he said, putting his fingertips together. "Much as I applaud the purity of the scientific ideal, Leonard, think of it this way: We are not just operating as scientists here. We are also going to be our own test subjects. Do you really want information about our DNA—yours, mine, Sheldon's, Amy's or Penny's—going out to the public?" He saw Leonard's stubbornness flicker at the name Penny, and leant forward. "Or to pick someone who can't speak for themselves at all at this point: What about Howard's and Bernadette's child? Do we have the right to waive an entire family's medical confidentiality?"
"No, of course not!" Leonard sat back, scowling. "I was never talking about releasing private medical information, just data that could help people who needed it. Like how to test for the presence of an oneirion field in a subject brain." He directed a rather fierce look at Bernadette, who blinked, clearly taken aback by it. "Call me crazy, but making a profit on that isn't my first priority."
"Well, that's as may be, Leonard," said Mrs. Latham. "But I'm a businesswoman, and I have responsibilities to my board and my employees; I can't not consider the profit angle. Besides, for insurance purposes I have to monitor resource usage, so you're going to have to report your results to us first anyway. Suppose we simply phrased it as, oh, say, a grace period? A non-disclosure agreement requiring six months' wait between reporting to me and publishing to the field."
"With part ownership shares in any technological or methodological innovations developed as a result of that research," added Bernadette hastily. That ambition—Raj wasn't quite sure he could call it greed, although it was verging disquietingly close to that—flared up in her aura again. "Including right of patent franchise control." She looked back at Leonard. "Listen, Leonard, I understand you don't like this idea, but I've worked in R&D for years now, and let me tell you, the best way to make sure something you're making isn't used for the wrong purpose is to stake a legal claim to it. Right or wrong, though, that means that when somebody does want to use it, they've got to pay you to use it. We don't have to be factory owners gouging Victorian urchins, here. We just have to be part of the power structure, and that means we have to do what's needed to maintain that structure. There's no way around it."
Leonard glared at her, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. "Somebody's going to make money off this, so it might as well be us? Is that what you're saying?"
Bernadette held his gaze. "I'm saying we can share control at least partly on our terms with someone willing and able to protect us, or we can turn it over to the same people who wouldn't have cared if they Tasered Sheldon's mother into a heart attack. Sometimes there is no snow-white choice, Leonard."
And something stirred behind Bernadette's crackling ambition—something deeper, something colder and more desperate: fear, doubt, wariness. Suddenly Raj knew what Bernadette was doing, and his mouth tightened. As carefully as he could, he reached out to Leonard with the lightest possible touch, trying to will to him a message stripped to nothing but an impulse, a delicate brush of sensation that would convey without compelling. Trust her, he willed. Trust her, Leonard.
Leonard's head snapped around, his eyes locking to Raj's, widening in surprise. Immediately Raj dropped the transmission, but didn't look away. There was silence for a moment.
Abruptly Leonard slumped. "All right," he muttered. "Bernadette, you seem to know what you're talking about with this stuff; I think we can trust you—" his eyes flickered back to Raj's for half an instant "—to work something out with Ms. Locke, here. Would you be up for that?" Then he straightened and turned back to Mrs. Latham. "But we're going to include an option for quick disclosure, if something comes up that'll save lives."
"Of course, dear." Mrs. Latham smiled affably. "And as for your first request, I think we can help you with that, and more quickly than you might expect. Let me just take a moment here." She took a phone from her jacket, made a call and put it to her ear. "Yes, hello, Kieran," she said. "We're going to need some rooms made up for our guests, at least five, I should think—" She looked at Leonard. "I'm assuming you and your fiancée will share a room, like the Wolowitzes here, and that Mrs. Cooper will need her own chamber; is anybody else going to be sharing?"
Raj raised his hand. "Uh, I think Miss Armbruster and I will take separate rooms, thank you." Beside him, Lucy nodded; the emotional surge coming off her was too tangled to read completely, but at least part of it was relief. Raj decided he could live with that. His life was too complicated to risk making it worse right now.
Amy cleared her throat. "Dr. Cooper and I will also need separate—"
"One room," interrupted Sheldon, without looking up. "For us both." He met her shocked gaze and shrugged, looking exhausted. "If I'm not going to be able to sleep in my own bed anyway, this is more efficient. And in the context of the general air of paranoia and mistrust here, probably safer. Do you disagree?"
Amy gaped at him. After a moment, she managed to close her mouth. "I, uh . . . yes. Yes, I agree." If Lucy's emotions had been a tangle, Amy's felt like a superstring crushed to neutron-star density; Raj winced and walled off his mind as best he could.
"Six rooms, Kieran," said Mrs. Latham into her phone, apparently not at all bothered by Sheldon's words. "Yes. Thank you." She put the phone away and stood up. "Now, if you'll follow me? Gentlemen, if you're anything like my husband was—and I think you are—you'll appreciate this." She went to one of the bookshelves, hesitated, then moved over one. "Certainly more than I ever did. Added a ridiculous cost to the construction, and I can never remember where they are or which ones you have to pull . . . ah, yes. Here." She tipped one book forward on its spine, then another, then a third. Something clicked. Mrs. Latham nodded in satisfaction and pulled lightly on the shelf, which slid forward out of the wall on four greased extension rails affixed to its corners. Behind, a gap in the wall showed a metal-lined cubicle gleaming under harsh fluorescent light.
"You're kidding," said Penny in disbelief. "You actually have a secret flipping elevator in your library? Holy crap on a cracker, you really are a superv—" She caught herself at the last second under the twin glares of Leonard and Bernadette. "—vvvery, super, person to know! I mean, seriously. That's awesome."
Mrs. Latham shrugged. "Eh," she said. "Like I said, it was my husband's idea. Brilliant man, but more than a little loopy." She whirled her finger around her temple in the classic screw-loose gesture. "Still, I kept things in working order; that was cheaper than ripping everything out, and I thought it might come in handy one day. I was right—if hardly for the reasons anyone could have guessed. We should all fit, if we're willing to get cosy . . . ." She stepped over the ground level rail and into the elevator, then beckoned.
Raj exchanged glances with Lucy, who didn't look much happier than he felt. But she nodded to him, as if to say, Your call. Raj couldn't decide if he felt good to be so trusted or annoyed to be put on the spot. He decided not to waste time with either and stood. As they went to the bookshelf and ducked past it into the elevator, Lucy took his hand.
8:01 P.M.
The fit was actually not that bad; the elevator was easily twice the size of a normal car, more like a storage or hospital elevator. Oddly, it occurred to Penny that it was still closer than she would ever want to have been stuck next to Howard Wolowitz, once upon a time. Things changed. Boy, did they. Now Howard only had eyes for Bernadette, and if the look was more worried than amorous, they were still pressed closely together as if terrified of being pulled apart. Moved despite herself, Penny reached down and took Leonard's hand; he started, glanced at her, then gave a tiny smile. She returned it.
A minute or so passed in uncomfortable silence; five or six floors' worth of distance, Penny guessed. When the elevator finally stopped, Mrs. Latham flashed a blank white plastic card at a black scan panel on the wall, and the doors rolled open. Leonard, Raj, Sheldon and Howard all gasped together, sounding like kids who had just walked into Disneyland for the first time, and moved slowly out into the room beyond in a visible daze.
Penny frowned as she followed them out of the elevator. The room was a stark cavern of concrete walls and floor, filled from wall to wall with tables on which all she could see was machines and dust; cables ran along the floor, mostly beneath the tables but sometimes across the passages between. The air smelled of metal, oil, dust, and the faint acrid tang of ozone and other gases—a lot like Leonard's own lab, in fact. Fluorescent lights glared from overhead. "What is all this?"
"Oh, my God, will you look at this?" said Howard, practically drooling. He ran his hand over a huge boxlike device. "This is a multi-layer, multi-channel 3D fabricator with laser and electro-sintering! You could build an entire car from scratch with this baby!"
"Holy crap, Howard, check this out." Farther down, Leonard swung a tarp off a large rectangular shape, revealing something that looked like a transparent fishtank with the front missing. "If this is what I think this is—yes!" He tapped frantically at a keyboard next to the tank, and suddenly light came alive within the space it enclosed: glowing lines of multicoloured radiance, red, green, blue and gold, twined together and became a three-dimensional transparent outline of something that looked like a car engine, though insanely more complex. Penny gasped. Leonard put his hands to his face, looking startlingly like Macauley Culkin in the old Home Alone posters. "Full 3D CADCAM design with holodisplay!" He reached inside the tank, and as if the light sketches were solid objects, they shifted back and forth under the movements of his hand. "With gesture tracking! Oh my God, and it's got dust on it!"
"A CADCAM gesture-display holotank?" Raj rushed past Penny, and almost physically staggered at the sight. "Holy Krishna, do you know what the backlog is to get just a half-day's worth of time on the university's tank? Close to three months!" He abruptly scowled. "Though it'd be a hell of a lot less time if Kripke didn't keep commandeering it to build his fighting robots."
Sheldon had gone over to a shelving unit full of cabling and components Penny didn't recognize, though some of them looked vaguely like the boxes and devices the guys often incorporated into their computer setups. He sorted through them like a kid unable to decide which candy he wanted first. "Oh, Leonard," he said, practically cooing. "Look at all this! I could build my very own private Wi-Fi network! Enough to cover our entire neighbourhood!"
"And yet you continued to take every opportunity to kick me off your apartment's WiFi for eight years," remarked Penny.
Sheldon drew himself up primly. "That's different. You weren't invited."
"Would you invite anybody to this network of yours?" Penny arched an eyebrow.
"No."
"Then what's the point of building it?"
"To deny people access," said Sheldon, as if that should have been obvious. He squinted past Leonard, Howard and Raj, who were still fussing over the holotank, and suddenly gasped. "Amy, if you go to the corner over there, you'll see a lovely little toy that I think we'll both find very entertaining."
"Hmph," said Amy in an undertone to Penny and Bernadette. "The last time he said something like that I was hoping he'd visited that dirty store you told me about. Turned out he'd bought me a starter train kit." She navigated her way around the devices and equipment packing the floor, turned right past the holotank, and then she too gasped with almost exactly the same note of surprise. "Good God!"
"Oh my God, it is from the dirty store," said Penny.
Bernadette snorted. "Hundred bucks says you're wrong."
"Yeah, no." Penny hurried past the guys, dodged round something that looked like an industrial mining drill, saw the machine that Amy was running her hands over like an equestrian soothing a stallion, and drew in a gasp of her own. "Holy crap, that's an MRI machine, isn't it? Does that work?"
"Oh, everything in here works," said Mrs. Latham, standing by the elevator door. "My husband was a bit of a tinkerer, and he liked to get the tech geniuses he hired to be able to come in and show him exactly what they were doing. Unfortunately, that sort of thing bores the living crap out of me, so after he died I basically just kept the equipment up to date and forgot about it." She waved vaguely around the room. "I haven't the foggiest what else is down here, but I suspect you boys will have far more fun doing your own inventory, hm? Just let me know if you need something and can't find it."
"And not just the boys," said Penny, as Bernadette hurried past her to glom onto a series of machines set up along a tabletop next to Amy's MRI scanner. She walked back to the elevator, glad to see that Lucy and Mary had decided to stick near the door as well; it was nice to know she wasn't the only person thoroughly at sea with all of this. She nodded at the keycard in Mrs. Latham's hand. "If the guys are gonna be using this place, they'll probably all need their own cards, right?"
"Ah, good thought, dear. I'll have to have some made up." Mrs. Latham watched the others gushing over their machines with what looked creepily like maternal fondness. "It's fun watching smart people geek out, isn't it? They're so unselfconscious about it. Like kids comparing Hallowe'en candy."
Mary shook her head. "I don't know, ma'am; I've seen some plenty vicious fights start exactly that way, too. Smart don't wipe out greedy." She cleared her throat. "Listen, Mrs. Latham—"
"Please, Mary, feel free to call me Laura."
"No, I don't think so." It was said so calmly that Penny could actually see Mrs. Latham take a second to register the refusal. "Mrs. Latham, I'm gonna tell you something while Shelley's busy, 'cause he's just stubborn enough to take it amiss if he sees his old mother tryin' to protect him. You must already know I love my son. What you may not know is that I love the rest of these people, too; love 'em like they were my own family." She smiled warmly at Penny, who had to gulp down a sudden lump in her throat. "Now if you want to help them out of the Christian goodness of your heart, fine and dandy; more power to ya. But if you plan to use them for your own ends and I get wind of it, well, I believe in leaving vengeance to the Lord, but I also believe that the Lord helps those who help themselves. And I plan to help myself in that event." Her unblinking gaze did not flinch from Mrs. Latham's for a second. "I trust I make myself understood."
Penny had to gulp again, but this time from something else entirely. Lucy looked like she wanted to disappear through the floor again. Mrs. Latham looked back at Mary with a calm, assessing expression Penny decided she really didn't like. "I don't find threats amusing, dear," Mrs. Latham said at last. "I trust I make myself understood."
"Perfectly." Mary glanced back into the elevator. "You know, I don't think there's much more I can contribute here. Would you mind if I took this back upstairs? I could really use a lie-down. It's been a long day, and I've already been—what's the word, Penny? Tased?—Tased once." She stepped back into the elevator. "Lucy? Feel like comin' with me?"
"Uh, yeah, actually, I do." Lucy followed her in, then looked pleadingly at Penny. "Penny? Can you tell Raj where I've gone?"
"No problem, sweetie." To her own surprise, it was no effort to say the word. She still wasn't sure if she liked Lucy all that much, but Penny had to admit they had been through enough together that it was hard not to sympathize. "Get some rest. We've all had a day."
"Thanks." Shyly, Lucy smiled. Surprising herself again, Penny returned it. The elevator doors began to roll closed. Then, a second before the doors met in the middle, Mary's hand slapped against one of them and stopped them; they rolled back open again and Mary leaned out.
"One more thing," she said, and pointed at Mrs. Latham. "Don't call me 'dear', and don't call me 'Mary'. Ever. Clear?"
Mrs. Latham lifted her eyebrows. Then she shrugged. "Clear."
She and Penny watched in silence as the elevator closed. When the whir of the motors had died away, Mrs. Latham put her finger to her chin, tapping it thoughtfully. "I'm conflicted," she said at length. "The bluntness is refreshing. The ingratitude isn't. You'd almost think I hadn't just committed to keeping her son out of the hands of the government, wouldn't you?" Oddly, she sounded almost jovial.
Penny wasn't sure why she asked the next question, but it was the first thing that came to mind. "Do you have any children, Mrs. Latham?"
The older woman hesitated. "None that are a part of my life," she said eventually. "And that's all I intend to say about it, so I advise not pressing me further." She gave Penny a direct look. For all that Penny had, in the past few hours, shrugged off the impact of bullets, Taser darts and a helicopter rotor at full speed, that look still ran chills down her arms. Mrs. Latham pressed the button beside the elevator doors. "Tell your friends they can come up whenever they're done, there's no hurry. I'll tell Kieran to leave directions to your rooms in the library. There are intercoms for service if you want a late snack, or need anything during the night. Sleep well, dear."
Penny had to admit, if only to herself, she had started finding the "dear" almost as offputting as Mrs. Cooper seemed to. But that look—and the reminder of how fragile their situation really was—had temporarily quelled any urge to mouth off. "Thank you," she said quietly, and nodded. "You too."
It seemed to mollify Mrs. Latham; she smiled as the elevator doors opened again. "Oh, I always sleep well, dear. Don't you know? The benefits of a clear conscience." She stepped inside and gave a small, elegant wave goodbye. The doors closed.
11:48 P.M.
Hours had gone by in the lab before Raj, unable to keep himself from yawning, had checked the time on a wall clock and shocked himself with how late it was. Penny had long since gone back upstairs. When he went round the lab to collect the others, Leonard and Amy had both yielded only reluctantly, despite both being obviously as tired as he was. Sheldon had actually fallen asleep on the table in front of a pixelboard which he had covered in equations, his head pillowed on his forearms. Howard wouldn't come at all; he had been locked into what seemed almost a trance at the holotank, flipping his way through designs and components as if conducting a symphony, the tank's light painting his face in flickering schematics of green and gold and red. Bernadette had been equally stubborn, though she had had a much better reason. "I can ignore fatigue at will now, Raj," she explained, and indeed, she looked as bright-eyed and perky as she ever had. "If I can heal a broken skull, I can clear a few fatigue poisons out of my system."
"Indefinitely?" said Raj.
That had, at least, set her back. "Um . . . I don't know."
"Then it might be a good idea to find out under more controlled circumstances." Raj waggled his finger at her, then indicated her stomach. "And remember, it's not just your health you're looking after. A single all-nighter probably isn't going to do you any harm, but don't you get into this habit, okay?"
Bernadette scowled at him. "Who are you, my mother?"
Raj lowered his voice to a murmur, though from the glazed look in Howard's eyes he rather suspected he could have shouted and Howard wouldn't have heard. "I'm the person who helped you pull the wool over Mrs. Latham's eyes, Bernadette. If she thinks at least a couple of us are inclined to be on her side, she may not put quite so much effort into . . . securing us. Right?"
Bernadette sighed. "God, I hate keeping secrets from Howie. But you know them, Raj; they're all lousy liars. They'd never be able to fool her. And Leonard's so stupidly noble he'd have wound up getting us all thrown out." She gave him a considering look. "I'm actually kind of surprised you pulled off the act, to be honest."
"Thanks," said Raj sourly. "I guess it helps to be able to read your audience. Besides, you had a point. We just have to remember that Leonard had one too." He sighed. "I'll see you both tomorrow morning, I hope."
He and Leonard had helped Amy put Sheldon to bed, Leonard leaving as soon as Sheldon was down with clearly one thing only—or one person, rather—on his mind. The room given to Sheldon and Amy had a massive king-sized bed with a curtain frame, which Amy had slid open and closed with a tired but goofy grin. "He'll love this, when he wakes up," she predicted. "Like having your own tree fort in bed." She looked down at Sheldon, who'd fallen back deeply asleep. "This isn't exactly how I pictured our first time sharing a bed, but I suppose I should take what I can get. It's all progress."
Raj nodded. "Amy, can I give you some advice?" he said after a moment.
Amy arched an eyebrow at him. "Lack of permission has never stopped you doing that before, Rajesh."
Raj flushed. "Well, yes, but this is . . . rather personal. It's about Sheldon." He took her sudden alert look as consent, and went on. "Sheldon's happiest when he's comfortable, but he only manages to change successfully when he's knocked out of his comfort zone. What you need to do is watch for the moments he's off-balance, and take advantage of them—but you have to make sure he never thinks of you as the thing that pushed him off balance, or he'll only resist you all the more. The thing you want has to be the thing that's more familiar to him than anything else. Do you follow me?"
Amy nodded slowly. "I think I do. Thank you, Rajesh." Then her mouth twisted in a wry look. "The implication seems to be that the only way he'll ever propose is if we're in a war zone, though."
Raj shrugged. "Well—the way our lives seem to be going, that may happen sooner than we think." He'd meant it to be a wisecrack, but couldn't really laugh at it. Neither could Amy.
His own room was considerably smaller, the bed only a queen-size, but Raj was too tired to care; he was even too tired to care about missing the pajamas he usually slept in, though it helped there that the sheets were as soft and silken as anything he owned. Strange to be so exhausted, he mused, when he had, after all, been in a coma for two days and only woken up this afternoon. But he, too, had been Tased, he defended himself. And the day had been tremendously busy.
He was drifting off when the soft knock came at his door, and for a moment he just wanted to whine. Then the cold, nervous fizziness he sensed through the door told him who it had to be. Acutely aware that he was wearing only his underwear, he gulped, pulled the covers around himself and raised his voice. "Come in."
The door cracked open; Lucy peered hesitantly around it into the room. When she saw he was alone, she came in. Unlike him, she was still dressed in the clothes Penny had lent her. "Hi," she managed after a long, awkward pause in which she stared at everything in the room except him.
Raj nodded. "Hi," he said, and waited. It felt distinctly strange. Before, when in a situation like this, he had always been so intensely afraid of saying the wrong thing that the fear itself had almost always tripped him into it. Now he could tell, as easily as a person with closed eyes could find the sun, the difference between the silence of looking for your own words and the silence of waiting for someone else's; for Lucy, this was definitely the former. The tangle turned over and over in her mind, like boiling spaghetti. Raj waited without any impatience.
"I saw Emily at the hospital," she burst out in a rush. Lines of fear cracked through her aura like glass shattering in frost. Raj stiffened. What was wrong? "I wanted to see if she was all right. She was in a coma when I found her. I told her I was sorry, and—" Lucy's eyes found Raj's at last. "I told her I wouldn't see you any more. I kinda felt I owed her that, for trying to save us like she did."
Raj let out a slow breath, weighing that thought in his mind. "You said, earlier, you'd seen her and, uh, she'd been angry," he temporized, deliberately leaving out the rest of what she'd said. "I thought that meant she was better. Why didn't you say anything before?"
"I didn't want to talk about this in front of everybody," said Lucy. "It was your business. Ours. Not theirs." She came over and sat down on the bed, but it was more the slump of someone too tired to stand any longer than any coquettish flirtation. "And then when I told her goodbye . . . she woke up. And told me goodbye. And—" She swallowed. "I really do think she meant to kill me, Raj. I wasn't exaggerating that part. I only got away by ghosting out through the floor."
Raj felt cold. "I . . . I'm sure that's not the case, Lucy. Emily has a bit of a dark streak and I know she's mad at us both, but she would never—"
"Raj, I think she killed those people at the hospital too." Lucy turned to face him. "I found an office, and went online to look up some newscasts. I read about the attack. I escaped just before the time they said everything started happening; I heard it start happening, so I know when and where. Maybe she didn't start out planning to, but . . . ." She swallowed again. "She was changed too, Raj. Just like you and me. But I think she's become something a lot scarier than you or me, or any of your friends. And believe me, Raj, I know from scary."
After a moment, Raj nodded. "I do believe you," he said, and he did; there was no hint of a lie in Lucy's face or mind. "I very much hope you're wrong, but . . . thank you for telling me, anyway. And as far as uncomfortable admissions go, I . . . I was not entirely honest with you, when I invited you." He let his gaze drop to his bedcovers. "The truth was that I haven't been happy with Emily for some time, and I missed you, and I wanted to see you. But I was too much of a coward to break it off with her first, and too much of a weakling to tell you the truth. If I had just done one or the other, you would never have been there that day and you would never have been a part of this. I am . . . sorrier than words can say."
"Wow," Lucy said, blinking. "Well. Uh, I kinda wish you hadn't told me that."
Raj shrugged. "I can't blame you."
"No, no—not like that. It's just that, well, if you're going to be honest with me, I think I kinda have to be honest with you . . . ." It was Lucy's turn to look away again, this time at the wall. "Remember when we had that coffee, after Penny chewed me out for breaking up with you through an e-mail? I told you I was seeing someone? Well, the truth is, I, uh, I kind of . . . lied . . . when I said that."
To his own disgust, Raj immediately felt a current of hope spring up in his breast. He squashed it down, wanting to swear. This was no time for that sort of thing. "In what way?"
"In the pretty much complete and total way," Lucy said, and sighed. "I was never seeing anyone. I just couldn't bring myself to go through my old cycle with you again. I was too scared."
Raj nodded slowly. "Well," he admitted, "I understand scared. I spent most of my life being unable to talk to women unless I numbed my fear with alcohol. That I broke through that block at all, Lucy, is mostly due to you. So there's another thing I owe you."
"Really?" Lucy smiled. "I never knew that. Good to know something good came out of our whole big hot mess." Then the smile faded, and she looked down at her knotted hands. Raj watched her aura change, sliding from her tangled terror and confusion into a spinning ball of growing resolve. "Your, uh, your abilities," she said. "You can read what people are feeling? And project it?"
"It appears so, yes."
"Can you tell me something?" Lucy shifted around, moving closer to him, her dark eyes wide. "Can you use your power to make someone stop feeling something?"
Raj blinked. "Well . . . yes, actually, although I only ever did that once, and it was just as a backup to reassuring someone normally. Why?"
Lucy drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "Because I decided something, back in that hospital, when I was trying to find my way out. I decided—" she gulped "—I decided that I was sick and tired of being scared. Of living my life like this." Then she looked up at him, and he couldn't look away from those huge, depthless eyes. "And I just want to know . . . just once . . . what it's like not to be scared."
Without further warning she leaned over and kissed him. Her aura exploded in a tingling, freezing burst of fear; Raj almost drowned in it before he realized what she wanted, and reached out. It was like wrestling an octopus made of liquid nitrogen. For a few moments he struggled futilely with her fear before he changed his mind. Instead, he reached down through it, and as his hands came up to slide into her hair, he found the core of that terror and wrapped it gently in warmth, as if cupping a baby bird in his hands. Delicately as a chef pouring honey into batter, he let his own excitement fuse with hers.
The turmoil and torrent of fear eased, slowed, grew warm. Under his hands, he felt Lucy suddenly relax, felt her mouth loosen and grow mobile against his. She broke apart from him, staring into his eyes, her mouth open now with astonishment. Then she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him in for another kiss, much fiercer now, hungrier; the fear flashed over, like plutonium achieving critical mass, and became a desire so raw it was frightening in itself. "Oh my God," she mumbled into his mouth, between kisses, "this is what this is supposed to feel like?! Why do normal people—waste time—doing anything else?!"
"If you think—this is good," Raj mumbled back, "you absolutely—won't believe—what comes next . . . ." But then his mind leapfrogged from image to memory to conscience, and he realized what he was doing. With a massive exertion of willpower, he made himself pull back, deliberately severing the connection with Lucy's mind.
Lucy stared at him, bewildered, her chest heaving, her hands still clenched on his shoulders. "What's wrong?" she gasped. "Why did you stop?"
Raj took a few deep breaths of his own. "Because right now," he said finally, "you're not thinking clearly. Your mind's under a foreign influence—no different from getting roofied. If anything happens between us, it should happen without my needing to . . . to make it happen." Carefully, he took her hands off his shoulders, then held them firmly. "And much as I would very much like something to happen . . . I don't think it can. Not right now. It would make things too difficult, and I have . . . things I have to sort out first." He didn't say, With Emily, but the words hung between them in the air, clear as a bell.
Lucy's brows drew down. But after a moment, one side of her mouth turned up. "When the hell did you get so wise?" she said, her breathing slowing. Raj saw the desire damping down, collapsing into something calmer than he'd ever felt from her, with a streak of wry amusement. "I thought you were almost as damaged as I am."
Raj shrugged. "I've had a lot of time to think about this stuff. And . . . you'd be amazed how easy it is to look wise when you get inside information." He tapped his temple, then smiled. "But you're welcome to stay, just to sleep." With a mock-lasciviously arched eyebrow, he added, "That is, if I can trust a sly minx like you not to take advantage of me in my defenseless state."
Lucy smiled hesitantly. "I don't know. It's been a really long time since I was this close to a nearly-naked man. I might just lose control of myself, you know?" She giggled, and Raj chuckled. Without saying anything further she slid over, curling in next to him, her head on his shoulder and one hand on his chest. "Wow," she said. "You're . . . surprisingly warm."
"Well, the effects of that experiment weren't entirely one-way, you know."
"I guess not."
They lay together in comfortable silence. To his own surprise, Raj felt himself actually getting sleepy again, and had almost drifted off before Lucy whispered, "Raj?"
"Hmmm?"
"Thank you for saying you were sorry for getting me into this. But . . . just to let you know . . . I'm not." She kissed his cheek.
Raj smiled.
350 SHOPPERS LANE, PASADENA, CA
11:58 P.M.
In the window of the convenience store, Kurt peered out at the darkness of the night beyond, then glanced impatiently back at Sweeney as she searched behind the cash counter. The clerk, a tubby Asian guy in his forties, stood swaying beside her, staring straight ahead, a stupid, blissful grin on his face. He'd gone down so easy Kurt half-wondered if Sweeney had even needed her mojo. Unfortunately, she couldn't whammy video cameras, which was why they had to wait until she found the recorder and stopped it. Kurt cracked his knuckles and looked out at the night again. He'd locked the door and turned off the OPEN sign, but anybody who came by and saw people in here was like as not to bang on the door and ask to be let in anyway, and that was not a good way to go unremarked.
"Got it!" Sweeney ducked down, then emerged again with a black videocassette in her hand. She nodded at the ATM, which they'd seen in the store window and which, she'd told him, belonged to one of the cheaper service unions, therefore unlikely to contain any of the newer anti-theft measures like dye-bombs or chemical foams. "Okay, hit it."
Kurt grinned. He liked this part. He turned to the ATM and drew back a fist, but before he could let fly Sweeney suddenly raised her hand. "No, wait. Let's see if there's anything else we can get, first. Once you rip that thing open there'll be a silent alarm going out. We'll need to be gone in two minutes, and we better not miss anything."
Kurt thought that over, then nodded. "Makes sense. Okay, let's scrounge." He had never much liked taking orders from anybody and enjoyed it even less when it was a woman, but he had to admit that this Sweeney chick was smart—which made sense, if she'd been a doctor before . . . well, before—and he wasn't averse to going with the flow when it made sense. Half the stuff she suggested he knew he would probably never have thought of on his own.
It had started back in that garage, when the first thing she'd told him to do was grab a spare paramedic's jacket from the ambulance to wear over the hospital johnny. After leaving Page on the floor to sleep off whatever Sweeney had done to her, Sweeney had dashed upstairs to retrieve some key belongings from her apartment, including a spare set of pants for him and her emergency cash stash; he, in the meantime, had stolen a car—he'd worked in an auto mechanic's shop, before a run-in with the law over an assault charge had cost him that job, and knew how to hotwire a car and how to spot an older model, with none of the modern security safeguards like LoJacks or remote engine deactivation. Sweeney had given him some very specific instructions, then climbed into the trunk ("to rest," she'd said tersely) and pulled it closed. Making sure to keep at or just above the speed limit, Kurt drove over to the parking lots around Shoppers Lane, found a space and waited.
Once night had fallen, he'd let Sweeney out of the trunk, and they'd started their run. Sweeney had insisted on hitting an electronics store first, where she'd grabbed about twenty prepaid burner phones and then whammied the clerk into forgetting them. They'd paused to get some food at a burger place, though Kurt suspected he knew what had happened when Sweeney had abruptly excused herself a quarter of the way through her meal, practically run to the bathroom, then returned looking pale and sick and refused to finish the rest of it. She'd only regained her normal look after making another bathroom visit, this time following one of the counter clerks very closely; that clerk hadn't reappeared by the time they left. After that, they'd hit a clothing store and picked up a few new outfits, then—of all things—a camping store, where Sweeney had gotten a two-man tent and a sleeping bag big enough for her to enfold her completely. This convenience store was one of their last stops, and Kurt had to admit, he was itching to hit the road. He'd been considering leaving Pasadena for a while. Sometimes, reality just gave you exactly the kick you needed.
At last, he'd filled several plastic bags with useful stuff, including a couple of cartons of cigarettes—he didn't smoke much himself, but they were a handy impromptu currency in the circles he guessed they were going to be moving in for a while. He checked with Sweeney that she'd gotten what she needed, then went to the ATM. She surprised him when she joined him. "Something I want to try," was all she said. They positioned themselves on opposite sides of the unit, then counted down.
Kurt's punch drove all the way through the metal casing and into the interior. Sweeney's dented it, but didn't break through; she hissed in pain and drew back her fist, shaking it. The bloody scrapes across the knuckles vanished as Kurt watched. He filed that carefully away. She wasn't quite as strong as he now was, it appeared, but that punch looked like it would hit hard enough to hurt regardless—and when she changed tactics and began ripping at the outer panels until the screws holding the machine together snapped, he noted another example of her brains. Within two minutes they had the guts of the machine open, and Kurt was scooping out stacks of twenties and stuffing them in a carrying case they'd lifted from the ambulance. Sweeney had been right: no dye bombs exploded in their face.
A loud ringing split the air. Kurt whirled, half ready to punch something out, before realizing it was just the store phone, and slumped. "Shit." He looked at Sweeney, who was staring at the phone oddly, and poked her sharply in the arm. "Come on, we better go."
"Don't touch me," she told him, without force. "Okay, right. Let's go." They left the store open, the phone still ringing, the clerk smiling foolishly at empty air. Kurt actually felt kind of sorry for the guy. He doubted they'd blame him, but it still looked bad to have this kind of shit happen on your watch.
In the car, Kurt followed the signs leading to the 210, heading east. Sweeney went through the burner phones, activating them one by one and dividing them up. "We'll need to be careful with these," she told him. "Any time you even think someone's ID'd you through a person you've used one of these to contact, switch to a new phone. We should be able to—"
The phone rang in her hand. She dropped it in shock. Kurt frowned. "Telemarketer?"
"At this hour?" Sweeney picked it up and silenced it by turning it off, then popped the battery out for good measure. "There. The next time they try, they'll get no answer and—"
The rest of the phones all went off at once. In the close quarters of the car, the noise was earsplitting. Kurt yelled in shock and almost rolled the car, swerving to the curb and coming to a screeching stop at the last minute. "Turn 'em off!" he yelled at Sweeney. "Come on, you stupid bitch, turn 'em—aw, fuck this!" He grabbed one, opened it and yelled at whoever was on the other end, "Goddammit, you asshole, stop fucking calling us!"
Suddenly, the ringing ceased, as abruptly as it had started. Kurt's breath heaved, and he stared at Sweeney, who looked as poleaxed as he felt. When the voice suddenly spoke on the phone, he almost dropped it. "I beg your pardon for the interruption, sir," it said; it was male, mellifluous and even. "Are you in the company of Dr. Emily Sweeney?"
"Who wants to know?" Kurt demanded.
"I represent a group with whom I think Dr. Sweeney will find her interests now align. We may have opportunities for you, as well. But it is imperative I speak to Dr. Sweeney now. We have gone through a great deal of effort to find her. We do not want that effort to go to waste—although we will dispose of you both, if you make that necessary. Please. Let me speak to Dr. Sweeney."
It was the sheer absent-mindedness of the threat which rattled Kurt, as if the voice really had just only thought of it in passing. Kurt's fist clenched. But he had nothing to hit. After a few deep, harsh breaths, he handed the phone to Emily. "It's for you," he said.
Eyes wide, Sweeney took it and listened. There was a long period of silence. At last, she only nodded and said, "I understand. Thank you." She closed the phone and sat for a moment.
"Well?" said Kurt.
"New directions," said Emily at last. "Get on the 110 and head into downtown L.A. We're going to meet someone there. They say they can help us."
"Help us do what?"
"Survive," said Emily. "Because—apparently—they've been doing it themselves. And for much longer than anybody thought."