lot faster…” She saw him start to rise, his shoulders lifting. “Well, thanks for looking at those maps. That will help.” His face scrunched up stiffly, the stiff iron skin over his eyes furrowing. “So where’s this Tanzania place?”
Jerusha sighed. “Tanzania is…” she began. Stopped. He won’t last five minutes out there on his own. She realized that somewhere in the midst of this, she’d made the decision. What’s here for you? You’ve nothing. No friends, just Committee work. And when Michelle dies, now you’ll get the blame for that, not the Committee. You have a chance to save a life…
“Oh, hell,” she said. “I’ll show you on a map on the way over.”
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle reaches a hand out in front of her face. Five fingers. That’s good. She pulls her legs up to her chest, reaches down, feels her feet. “That’s better,” she says. Even though she’s in the pit again, she’s happy about her feet and hands being back.
The spider pops down in front of her, points up to the edge of the pit. “Yeah, leopards, I know. I’m really the wrong person to try and scare with kitties.”
The spider grabs Michelle’s hair. Its body lengthens and grows and the four middle legs shrink into its torso. The mandibles slide back into its head and the eight eyes move toward each other until there are only two.
Sitting on Michelle’s lap is a little girl, maybe eight or nine. She wears a threadbare dress. The pattern is faded, and in the dim light of the pit it’s a mottled grey. The girl places her hand over Michelle’s mouth, then leans forward and whispers in her ear.
Michelle whispers back, “I can’t understand you.”
The girl pulls away from her, and a tear slides down her cheek. Michelle reaches up and wipes it away. “I’m sorry,” she says.
The girl puts her hands on either side of Michelle’s temples. The girl shuts her eyes and suddenly Michelle is slammed by a barrage of images.
Trees limbs whip her face as she runs. Vines grab at her legs, but she can’t stop. She can hear her own harsh breathing. Are they closer now? Close enough that they can reach out and… a claw rips open her back.
She shrieks. Warm blood wells up and burns. She trips and begins to fall.
Wait a minute, Michelle thinks. Claws don’t do anything to me. She reaches up and gently pulls the girl’s hands away.
The girl gazes at Michelle with such longing and pain it makes her want to cry. Michelle reaches out and touches her own hands to the girl’s temples, imagines pointing at herself, whispers, “Michelle.”
An image blossoms in Michelle’s mind. It’s the girl in her lap, but now she’s wearing a pale blue checkered dress. Her hair is plaited with a pretty pink headband. The girl points to herself and says, “Adesina.”
United Nations
Manhattan, New York
The United Nations perched at the edge of Manhattan like the guest at a party who really needs to leave now, but has just one more very important thing to say.
Bugsy showed his ID to the guards at the front who all knew him anyway, and took the brushed steel elevator up to the seventh floor. In the brief time that the Committee had existed, they had commandeered much more space than Bugsy would have expected the international bureaucracy to permit. Having a lot of superhuman powers probably helped with that.
Lohengrin’s office was on the western side, its windows facing out toward the skyscraper mosh pit of uptown. The hallways were filled with people in thousand-dollar suits looking harried. He nodded at the people who nodded to him and ignored the ones that didn’t.
It was getting harder and harder to keep track of who exactly was with the Committee. It seemed like every time he turned around, it was Let me introduce Glassteel. He can shatter anything made from hard metal. Or Noppera-bo here can mimic anyone’s appearance. Then Bugsy would shake hands (with Noppera-bo it had been particularly creepy since she’d taken on his face as soon as their fingers touched), exchange some pleasantries, and scurry off to someplace he could add their names into his database. Even so, he forgot the newbies more often than he remembered them.
Lohengrin, at least, was familiar. The long, blond hair actually looked really good with a dark grey power suit. Maybe a little tired around the eyes, but that went with the suit, too.
Bugsy closed the office door behind him and plopped down on the couch while the Teutonic God finished his phone call. “No,” he said. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution on a day-to-day basis. You’ll have to call the World Court. At the Hague.” He put down the handset with a sigh.
“Highwayman’s lawyers still giving you shit?” Bugsy asked.
“Captain Flint today,” Lohengrin said. CAHptain flEHnt. No one could do round vowel sounds like the Germans. Except maybe the Austrians. And the Dutch. “There was a time, my friend, that I believed this would be fulfilling work. There are weeks I spend fighting and fighting and fighting and at the end, I think I might just as well have stayed at home.”
It had been a long time since they’d gotten drunk and burned Peregrine’s house down. There weren’t many people Bugsy had actually known that long. Not that were still alive, anyway.
“Brokering world peace keeping you busy,” he said, his tone making it an offer of sympathy.
“Water rights. Human rights abuses. The slave trade. I come in every morning, and I find something new and terrible. And every afternoon, I find why we can do nothing direct. Nothing final. I am becoming tired,” Lohengrin said, then sighed. “What do you know about the Sudd?”
“Their second album sucked.”
Someone in the next office ran their shredder for a second. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Lohengrin said.
“Yeah, not really. No.”
Lohengrin nodded like he’d just won a bet with himself and leaned forward over his desk. “The Muslim government of the Sudan has taken steps to join their nation to the Caliphate.”
“Ah,” Bugsy said. “That’s a bad thing.”
“No,” Lohengrin said. “That’s the background.”
“That’s not the problem?”
“No.”
“Ok-ay.”
“The People’s Paradise of Africa,” Lohengrin said, “under the leadership of Dr. Kitengi Nshombo, has accused Khartoum of enacting a policy of genocide against the black tribal population of the south and west Sudan.”
“Got it. Genocide. Problem.”
“No,” Lohengrin said.
“Genocide not a problem?”
“Genocide isn’t happening. It is an excuse. The PPA has manufactured evidence and generated propaganda to make a case for the invasion of the Sudan. Its forces are making incursions across the border, and the Caliphate has mobilized to defend Sudanese national territory. Yesterday there was a battle in the Sudd. A terrible battle.”
“And that’s the problem, right?”
“Yes,” Lohengrin said. “In the bigger picture, that is the problem. But it gets worse. The PPA forces are being led by Tom Weathers. The Radical.”
Bugsy sat up straighter. “Hold it,” he said. “Same guy who tried to set off Little Fat Boy and nuke New Orleans last year?”
“Same guy, ja.”
“I don’t like him much, you know. He tried to kill me. I mean, I don’t like the Caliphate much either. They tried to kill me too.”
“Tom Weathers tried to kill many hundreds of thousands of people,” Lohengrin said.
“Yeah. And I was one of them.”
“The PPA has been a destabilizing influence for years. Now they have begun to use aces to further their own political agenda.”
