Puppets on strings/
All dance and sing/
And flap their wings/
Trumpets play sick lullabies/
Jonathan needed to take a walk. He needed to get out into the air, away from these people he'd made enemies of simply by saying the first thing that came to his mind. He slipped out of the door with the silence and pantheric perfection of a person who did a lot of sneaking. He broke loose of his own quiet and vented his feelings once he was out of the apartment, jumping down the rust-eaten stairs two and three at a time with satisfying loud clangs. He walked away from the complex and toward the lights of the Strip, automatically drawn to them, moth-to-flame. He wanted to take the city in his hands and drain it dry of its bright neon life, suck it of all its electricity until there was light coming out of his eyes in beams and out of the top of his head. He wondered if he could; he wondered how much he could hold until he simply broke apart, cells and volts and nothingness. Part of him wanted to try it.
The rest of him, more firmly grounded in reality, pulled out his cell phone to make a call. Not family—he hadn't lied when Nathan asked where his family was. He didn't know them and never had, so for all practical purposes, he didn't have a family. This call was to someone else, and definitely not someone they'd want him contacting.
The phone rang only once before she picked up, always quick to the draw. "Yeah?" she answered, voice impatient, slicing across the airwaves between them.
"Hi, Jessica," he said.
"Hi, Jon," she replied, voice immediately changing to a delighted purr. She actually liked him, so far as the emotion went with her—she'd been known to smile at him and even tousle his hair affectionately. He knew, however, that her happiness had less to do with him and more with the fact that he was about to make her job a whole lot easier. "What have you got for me?"
"Linderman said to check in with you as soon as she'd settled," Jonathan told her, walking slower along the dusk-soaked alley, examining the sprawling graffiti brick-by-brick. "Well, she's settled, and I think you're going to be just thrilled when I tell you where. In fact, you are going to be so impressed with me that you're going to want to buy me a Coke."
"So tell me," she said.
"Promise first," he insisted, holding the bombshell over her head. "Promise you'll buy me a Coke."
"I'll tell you what," she said, dangerous-slow. "I'll buy you a Coke and I'll beat you to death with it. How does that sound?"
"Not so good. I'm getting a feeling that there are some latent violent tendencies locked up in that pretty blond head of yours."
"Jonathan," she growled, as in, you've got three seconds to tell me what I want to know, or else you're of no use to me and you're as good as dead.
"Fine, fine," he relented, giving in to her as always when she became one hundred percent Jessica, ruthless and not to be messed with. "Katie and I met up with some other specials, and I mean a lot of them. Hana Gitelman, Claire Bennet, Nathan Petrelli, Peter Petrelli, and one non-special that I'm sure Mr. Linderman would like to get his hands on—Mr. Bennet."
"Jonathan, you've just made my day," she said, and he could hear her getting up, ready to hunt them to the ground. "Where are you?"
"Just south of the business district. Here, I'll send you the coordinates with my phone."
"Practically there already. You know, I may buy you that Coke after all."
"Stop it," he deadpanned, kicking an empty beer bottle down the alley, watching it skitter off the walls and break into razored amber shards, "you're making me blush."
"So how do we want to do this? You want to help bring them in?"
"Only passively, please. I still need to be in with them if you screw up, you know."
"I don't screw up," she snapped
"Whatever you say," he grinned, pleased at having successfully annoyed someone as elemental and emotionless at Jessica. "How about this: I'll go stand out on the balcony with a giant target sign painted on my forehead, and you can climb up and grab me. Some of them don't like me very much—"
"I can't imagine why."
"—but they are the good guys, after all," he continued, ignoring her comment. "If you hold a gun to my head and yell a lot, they'll do what you want."
"Sounds like a plan," she said. "I'll be there in ten minutes, tops."
"Just don't get carried away, all right? I'll play hostage without your help, so don't be pushing me around."
"I'm not making any promises," she said breezily, and hung up the phone.
---
"You're all coming with me. Now."
"Stop it, Katie, you're going to get him killed," Peter hissed, tightening his grip on her arm. "We can figure this out." He felt her muscles spasming under his hand, shaking with the effort of not tackling Jessica on the spot.
"Can you stop time again?" she whispered furiously. "If you can, do it now, Peter."
"I don't know," he admitted, dragging her back as she started to move forward again. "It's too unpredictable, I can't risk it."
"What about shielding?"
"I tried already, I can't get the shield between the gun and his neck, she's got it pressed too tight. Do you think she'd notice if I went invisible?"
"Not if someone distracts her," Katie said grimly, and without moving, without any warning whatsoever, she shut off the lights, throwing them into seamless darkness. She heard scuffling from the front of the room, and the sound of a blow.
"I told you to quit messing with the lights!" Jessica said furiously.
"Ow!" Jonathan complained, apparently not losing his obnoxiousness even in life-threatening situations. "Hey, ow, I didn't do anything!"
Whoops, Katie thought guiltily, and switched the electricity back on. Peter was gone, and she quickly stepped back, moving to fill the space where he'd been. Suddenly, Jonathan jerked sideways out of Jessica's grip, pulled violently away by unseen hands. As Jessica swung the gun around to him, Peter came visible again, throwing a blue-spark shield around both of them just in time to deflect the line of bullets that Jessica sent at him and Jonathan. Everyone else dropped at once, used to the sound of gunfire and reacting with the instincts of long practice, forming a makeshift barricade of worn leather couches.
"Katie!" Peter yelled, shoving Jonathan to his hands and knees. "Katie, hold the shield, I'm losing it!"
In her mind, Katie complied immediately, reaching out and shoring up his flickering protections with heroic strength. Her body was a different story—her ears began roaring like she held seashells over them, blocking out Peter's calls for help and overrunning them. Her vision tunneled to nothing, hazing out the situation and the responsibility to act, and she stared at her hands, dizzy and wondering why she was just standing there, doing nothing.
"Katie!" he yelled again, barely managing to block out Jessica's latest barrage of perfectly-aimed fire. "Come on, help me out here!"
She heard his voice like a tinny, two-bit echo, filtered through the molasses lockdown of her senses. She fell to her knees, collapsing like a deck of cards under the pressure she could never take and couldn't stand after being so alone for eight years, with nothing but white walls and needles and her own spun-sugar fragile self. "I CAN'T," she screamed back to him, forcing her voice through the gummy panic wrapping her like spiderweb. "I CAN'T!"
He had no time to worry about her—his shield gave, fizzling into nothing and letting Jessica's bullets through to hit him in the leg and stomach, driving him to the floor with a cry of pain.
"Peter!" Claire screamed, about to go after him, coming out from behind the couch and ready to run into a rain of deadly projectiles that perhaps even she could not survive. Jonathan grabbed her wrist and jerked her back behind the furniture, nearly dislocating her shoulder, wrapping an arm around her waist to stop her. That crazy bitch, he thought furiously, watching Jessica throw her empty clip aside and reload. She's going to kill them all!
"Get off!" Claire spat, struggling to get free of him. "Get off, don't touch me!"
"Do you want to get yourself killed, you stupid girl?" He hung grimly onto her, wincing as her fingernails cut half-moons into his arm. "He can take care of himself!"
Peter had already crawled behind their barricade, bullets falling to the hardwood as his body healed them out. Jessica went after him, blazing down at him from her six feet of blond menace, and was abruptly met by return fire—Hana had managed to get to her emergency handgun, strapped under the coffee table and ready for just such an event. As the bullets came for her, she twisted her body sickeningly, bonelessly, like a cat, wrenching out of the line of fire. She got herself out of the way with near-perfect success—one bullet bit into her shoulder, and she dropped the gun with a wildcat scream-snarl.
Jonathan saw her face change, breaking down to soft eyes and horrified hands coming up to her mouth, trauma-forced into her alter ego. Oh great, he thought. Well, that's it, then. There was only one problem with Jessica—she herself was invaluable, cold as frostbite and as efficiently emotionless as a robot. Unfortunately, she was bound to her other personality, a weak, vacillating woman named Niki that Jonathan very often wanted to slap. Whatever Jessica did, she couldn't quite get rid of Niki, and there was the rub—she often popped up at the most inconvenient of times.
"Oh God," Niki said, looking as if she wanted to cry. "God, what have I done?"
Jonathan watched Hana's glittering hard, military eyes and her gun come over the top of the couch, and faced a swift decision whether to release Claire and try to save Niki, or to keep his cover and let her die. The choice was made for him before he could move—Nathan hit Hana from the side, grabbing her wrist and sending her shot wild.
"Don't!" he protested. "Can't you see it isn't her anymore?"
Jonathan had only a moment to be impressed at the man's powers of observation before Niki ended the scene, dashing out the door before she could be shot at again, splattering the floor with blood from her shoulder. Jonathan let Claire pry his arm away (reluctantly—she was very pretty, and he wasn't above copping an opportunistic feel—he was seventeen, after all) and she immediately whirled and slapped him with enough force to leave a red mark spreading across his cheek.
"Don't you ever touch me without my permission again," she told him, blistering with female fury.
"All right," he agreed. "When do you think that will be?"
She glared at him and fled to Peter, who was fine but shaken with the aftereffects of wounds that should have rendered him quite dead. He let her go—he himself was worried about Katie, who was still kneeling on the floor, looking like she was going to go into the fetal position any second, never strong under pressure, so much worse, nerves thinner since her captivity.
"Okay, then," Nathan said. "I estimate we've got about half an hour before the police show up, what do we plan to do?"
"I think our decision has been made for us," Mr. Bennet told him, surveying the damage with the practiced eye of one who has seen a lot of damage. "Linderman knows where we are, and every second we're in his city, we're likely to be caught. The dangers of Las Vegas now significantly outweigh the benefits."
"So we're leaving?" Hana asked, thrusting the gun through one of her belt loops.
"We're leaving."
---
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey, hope you guys didn't have trouble getting this chapter! Some people couldn't see it earlier, so just tell me if there are issues. Sorry about that, don't know what happened, and thanks again for reading and reviewing!