Chimera

A tiny flash of guilt cooled my stomach as she brushed past me. That had been happening more often lately—not so much me snapping at Dahlia, but feeling guilty about it afterward. Being stuck to Noah like that couldn’t be fun for her (God knows it blew for the rest of us), but I never used to care what she thought of me. Or anyone else, for that matter, except for Teresa, Gage, Marco, and Ethan.

Something occurred to me and I turned around. “Hey, Dahlia? Are you going to the debriefing?”

She paused while reaching for a bagel, and when she looked over her shoulder, her face was stormy. “No.”

“Okay.”

Halfway to the War Room, the significance of her exclusion hit me. Dahlia had been with us since January, and she’d been part of most of our biggest operations, up to and including the move to the East Coast. But she hadn’t been part of last night’s stakeouts, and she wasn’t invited to the meeting today. Why?

Who cares?

I made it to the War Room with a few minutes to spare. Both a conference room and a communications center, the War Room has a long, U-shaped conference table lined with chairs, two large monitors set up on the wall opposite the windows, and a workstation below them. A shoulder-high wall splits the conference room from the communications side, where the majority of Marco’s computer magic happens.

Marco Mendoza was at the conference terminal when I entered. He glanced up and nodded, then returned to his work. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Marco smile. Or willingly join in a casual conversation. More and more, he reminded me of the nearly feral kid who spent more time as a panther than as a human, just so he didn’t have to make friends. Ever since he was absorbed by another hybrid-Changeling for a day, and then pulled apart by our ally Simon Hewitt, a powerful telepath . . . Marco had changed.

I grabbed a seat and ate my bagel while the others filed inside. Teresa and Gage McAllister, together for a change, but with a noticeable distance between them. Alexia and Ethan came in together, in the middle of a chat about Alexia’s daughter Muriel. His left wrist was wrapped tightly in a bandage, the fingers less swollen than when I last saw him. The only face I wasn’t used to seeing in these meetings was Sebastian Rojas, another pardoned Bane. He could spit acid and was super-strong, and he had actual pre-War military training that Teresa seemed to find useful, so she kept inviting him to these things and asking his opinion.

The sour look Gage gave Sebastian did not go unnoticed by me.

Except for Marco and Sebastian, no members of the other stakeout teams were here. Alexia, Ethan, and I took turns narrating what had happened last night, focusing on how Jack and Jill (which, to my surprise and delight, everyone started using in lieu of Target One and Target Two) used their powers.

“It probably sounds odd,” Ethan said, “but Jill? She really reminded me of Mayhem, you know? The way her powers worked and how she looked when she fought.”

“Crazy?” I asked.

“Pissed and scared.”

I hadn’t seen the scared in either of those kids earlier this morning. They worked like seasoned thieves, never panicking or taking an extra, unnecessary step.

“It sounds as if they’ve had training,” Teresa said. “The big question is, from who?”

“I doubt they picked up those skills at community college,” I said.

“No, but someone must have been training them for this since before our powers returned. Learning how to be a competent thief is one thing, but doing it with the added stress of adapting to new Meta powers?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“No, but it’s unlikely.”

“So was someone training future Metas on purpose,” Sebastian said, “or is this a coincidence?”

“I don’t like coincidences.”

“They do happen.”

“I’d buy one of them being Meta as a coincidence,” Gage said with a little snap in his voice, “but not both.”

“Agreed,” Teresa said.

Marco muttered something in Spanish. “I think I have something,” he said more clearly.

He tapped his keyboard. One of the monitors came to life with the photo Ethan had taken on his phone. Jack’s face was pretty clear, angled mostly at the camera, while Jill gave us only profile. Their features were easy to make out, though, and a collage of lines and dots appeared. “I used facial recognition software to pinpoint certain features and find possible matches in the government’s identification database.”

Marco code for: I broke into the federal licensing system and we’re matching them up like yearbook photos.

“And you have a match?” Teresa asked.

“It is not perfect, and it makes no sense.”

“What do you mean?”

Another image appeared next to the first. This was an official prison identification photo taken the day all of the depowered Banes were rounded up, weeks before the prison walls and defenses were finished and the inhabitants set free to roam. He was fifteen years younger, but I recognized the face.

“No way,” Ethan said.

“Derek Thatcher?” Teresa said.

Thatcher was one of the loudest protesters when it came to our government and its policies regarding Metas. He firmly believed that one day the government would declare all Metas dangerous and criminal, lock all of us up in Manhattan, and make us subject to the whims of the regular humans who feared and hated us. It was the only time I’d ever actually agreed with a Bane.

“There are a lot of reasons why that’s not possible,” Ethan said, “starting with the fact that Derek is twenty years older than the kid we fought this morning.”

“Not to mention he’s in jail,” I said softly.

Ethan shot me a glare, and I shrugged. It was true.

“I have to admit, there’s a strong resemblance,” Teresa said. “And we’ve fought clones before.”

“Of Rangers, not Banes. Thatcher was never a Ranger.”

“Does Thatcher have any children?” Gage asked.

All eyeballs in the room bounced between Ethan, Sebastian, and Alexia—the three people who’d spent the most time with the man. Ethan and Alexia looked as perplexed as I felt. “None that he ever mentioned to me,” Alexia said.

Sebastian was silent, though, which earned him a lot of unwanted attention. He looked at Teresa’s curious, expectant face, and he sighed. “This may or may not be relevant,” he said. “A few months after the start of our incarceration, Thatcher had a rough patch emotionally. We weren’t friends, at the time I didn’t really care what he was dealing with, but I overheard some others talking about him.”

“Saying what?” Teresa asked.

“That he had a wife and kid on the outside, and that they’d been killed in a fire.”

Her eyes widened. “A son?”

“I only heard kid, but they mentioned he or she was three.”

Marco was back on his computer, searching away.

“The age fits,” Ethan said. “And in a way, the powers do, too. Jack is telekinetic, and Derek’s chemical transmutation powers work on a similar level of telekinesis.”

“So someone tells Thatcher that his wife and kid are dead, but instead the kid is alive and . . . what? Taken to Sherwood Forest and trained to rob people?” I asked.

“It’s a theory.”

“I have information,” Marco said. Both photos shifted to a single screen. The second showed a news article with photos and the headline “Tragic Fire Claims Lives of Two.” “Jennifer and Landon Cunningham, ages twenty- nine and three.”

I looked at the date. Three months after the end of the War. I was still in the psych ward then, oblivious to everything except my own pain. The article also had photos of the pair. The little boy possessed the exact same eyes as Thatcher. Jack, too.

“One moment,” Marco said. He did something on the computer that pulled Landon’s childhood photo away,