Chimera

Twenty-one Freeroll Hand

The smell of tomato soup and coffee roused me from a dead sleep, and I rolled over in an attempt to figure out why. The fact that I was alone in bed hit me fast, and I sat up. The lamp was back on, even though the curtain was still drawn. The tray of food was on top of my dresser.

Derek sat at the foot of the bed, dressed again, watching me with a kind smile. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I rubbed at my eyes. “How long did I sleep?”

“A few hours. It’s almost four.”

“Damn.”

I rolled out of bed, stretching as I went. I catalogued my lingering aches and pains as I got dressed. I wasn’t much of a bask-in-the-afterglow type, and I wasn’t about to risk Derek getting a better look at my birthday suit and realizing he didn’t like what he saw. Afternoon sunlight glared at me when I opened the curtain and then the window to let in fresh air.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Famished.” And I was, for a change. The soup had cooled to gulping temperature and I wasn’t shy about my appetite. The only thing I was shy about was Derek himself. I didn’t know what to think of him anymore, or of us. If there even was an us. Could there be an us?

“Any news?” I asked after I settled on the bed next to him with a mug of lukewarm coffee.

“Not that I’ve been told,” he replied. “But it’s been made clear that I’m need-to-know.”

I couldn’t argue with him there.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Good. Rested. No nightmares, thank God.”

He tilted his head. “Do you have nightmares often?”

“I guess. Hard not to in this line of work.”

“I can understand that. For years after the War ended, I had nightmares about my wife and son’s deaths. And about some of the battles I fought in. Lately I’ve been dreaming about last month’s copter crash in Central Park.”

That very deliberate crash had killed several Meta prisoners, and had nearly killed both Ethan and Aaron. I’d forgotten that Derek was there; he could have easily died, too, and the notion seized my heart with icy fear. Irrational fear, considering he was fine, alive, and sitting right next to me.

“I don’t always remember the actual nightmares,” I said. “Just the terror of them when I wake up. Knowing I was helpless or hurt or both.”

“You don’t like feeling helpless.”

“Does anyone?”

He didn’t answer, just watched me with liquid eyes, so I told him. I told him everything, from my childhood to my torture and eventual rescue by the Rangers. Delphi’s psychic shields that helped me at first and then nearly destroyed me when I lost my powers. My fantastic foster parents, accepting myself, embracing my blue. I even told him about William and my irrational dislike of Dahlia. He listened, nodding along without comment, his emotions plain on his face and in his lovely gray eyes.

He just listened. I finally got it all out with tears streaming down my cheeks, and he held me for a while.

“This can’t last, can it?” I asked after I’d calmed and mentally regrouped.

“What’s that?”

“You and me.”

He didn’t answer right away, and I was too nervous to look at his face. “Would you want it to last if it could?” he finally asked.

Yes. “Maybe.”

He kissed the top of my head. “I can’t promise anything to you, Renee, because I don’t have anything to promise. Only that I will do my damnedest to not become one more person who hurts you.”

“Ditto.” It was all I could think to say.

Someone knocked hard, a familiar cadence. I heaved a sigh, then heaved my bones off the bed to unlock the door. Teresa stormed inside, her entire body tensed for a fight. She barely batted an eyelash at Derek’s presence as she shut the door and put her hands on her hips.

Crapsticks, she’s pissed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Teresa blinked, clearly thrown by my opening volley. “I—For what?”

“Slipping up with Ethan. I was mad, and I wasn’t thinking.”

Some of her anger physically evaporated, leaving her looking less tense and more . . . tired. “Dr. Kinsey and I wanted to break the news differently, but Ethan and Aaron know now, and there’s no changing it. Mostly they’re pissed at us for keeping them in the dark.”

“It wasn’t my place to tell them, but I’m not sorry they know.”

“Truthfully, neither am I. They can discuss what to do as a family.”

“You mean decide which one of them dies? Noah or Dahlia?”

Teresa flinched. “Something like that.” She looked so young right then. Hell, she was young. She’d be twenty-six next month, and yet the weight of the world sat heavily on her shoulders. The burden was more than one woman should ever have to bear alone.

“How’s Bethany?” Derek asked.

“No change,” she said, this time to both of us. “Dr. Kinsey doesn’t expect there to be, but he’s having her results reviewed by several specialists.” She swallowed hard, then rubbed her eyes. “Maddie’s doing well, and the other kids are resting. They’ve all given us composites of what Uncle looks like and Marco combined them in the system, so we now know who we’re looking for.”

“That’s huge!” A small flare of hope lit up inside of me.

“It’s a good breakthrough. We needed that. Marco was convinced he’d seen the face somewhere before, so he’s playing with the de-aging program and running different pictures through the facial recognition software. With any luck . . .”

“We’ll get a hit.”

“I hope so.”

I squeezed her shoulders and smiled. “We will, T. We’ll find the motherfucker who stole those kids, and he’ll answer for what he’s done.” I meant that with all my heart. Meant it as much for Derek as I meant it for Bethany, Landon, Sasha, Maddie, Tate, Nicolas, Rick, and Barry. For Louis and Summer, most of all.

“I should go check on Landon,” Derek said.

He tried to slip past us, and I couldn’t let him walk out like a dirty secret. I tugged him to a stop, then planted a quick kiss on his lips. It was as much a thank-you as a silent declaration to our audience of one. He smiled, winked, then left.

Teresa glanced around the bedroom, giving my messy bed a long look, before raising an eyebrow at me. “You and Thatcher, huh?” The question was calm, almost amused, with no judgment clinging to the words.

“He doesn’t see my scars,” I said.

She accepted the explanation without comment. “Your battle in Philadelphia is making national news. No one has connected us to it. It’s being called Meta-on-Meta violence.”

I snorted. “So clever.”

Her phone rang. “Yeah, Marco.” Pause. “Get everyone together. Five minutes.”

“Does he have a hit on Uncle?” I asked before she could put her phone away.

“Not yet. Rita McNally wants an immediate conference call with all the Alpha leaders. She has some information for us.”

Information from Agent McNally was always taken seriously. She’d been our ally since we were kids, and she’d stuck by us since our reactivation in January, no matter what the government threw our way. The only Alpha leader who didn’t attend the emergency conference call was Aaron, who wasn’t budging from the infirmary for the time being. Ethan was there, though, glaring at the table in lieu of anyone in particular.

Marco activated the nearest screen as soon as we were settled, and McNally’s perfectly coifed face appeared. She seemed extra-stressed and a little pale. She wasn’t handing down good news today.

“Thank you, everyone, for assembling so quickly,” she said. “Marco, I’ve sent a file over to your terminal, which you should be receiving as we speak. It’s the only image I was able to find from security footage at our former ATF offices in Burbank.”

“Security footage of what?” Teresa asked.

“The man who came to us sixteen years ago and gave us the Warden. The man we only ever knew as O’Bannen.”

The world slowed down a moment. The Warden was a man-made device, powered by two telepathic Metas, that had removed our powers fifteen years ago during the final days of the Meta War. Until January, no one outside of a select few knew of the Warden’s existence. McNally and her late partner, Alexander Grayson, had admitted their part in maintaining the Warden over the years. She told us a man named O’Bannen had given it to them, claiming he worked for the Virginia branch of Weatherfield Research and Development. Later, no R&D company would claim the man, and they’d been unable to track him down for further questioning. He’d disappeared entirely.

“I was under the impression no images of the man existed,” Teresa said.

“As was I,” McNally replied. “Until I dug into the right system.” Her way of saying she’d done something she shouldn’t have, which meant she had a good reason for wanting to get a picture of this O’Bannen character.

It connected in my brain an instant before the second screen lit up with side-by-side images. One was the composite drawing of Uncle. The second was an enhanced security photo of O’Bannen. The similarities were too numerous to be coincidental.

“When Marco sent me your composite, I remembered O’Bannen,” McNally said. “I believe the man you call Uncle is the same person.”

The conference room felt silent while we all digested that tidbit. The news was both shocking and perfectly reasonable, like the corner piece of a puzzle we’d forgotten we were missing. Following up on O’Bannen and the people who created the Warden had fallen by the wayside, trampled over by so many other dire issues and crises. Now it was staring us in the face and laughing at us.

“How certain are you?” Gage asked.

“As certain as I can be with a sketch,” she replied.

“It makes sense,” Teresa said, her voice hollow and cold. “You told us O’Bannen claimed to work for Weatherfield’s sister company in Virginia. Maybe he lied about his name, but he didn’t lie about his employer.”

“So the people who stole all our powers,” I said, “are the same people who stole and brainwashed Meta kids, and the same people who cloned our family members?”

“In theory, yes,” McNally said.

“And you are certain there is no other existing information on O’Bannen?” Marco asked.

“Not that I’m aware of, but if I find anything, I’ll pass it along.”

“You’ve been a huge help, Rita, thank you,” Teresa said.

“You know I wish I could do more. Be careful.”

She ended the call. Marco left the two images frozen on-screen.

Sebastian leaned forward, staring up at the screen. “Is it me, or is this man eerily familiar?” he asked.

“I thought so, as well,” Marco replied. “The computer is searching for likenesses.”

Okay, the fact that two people in our little group thought he’d seen Uncle before was scaring me a little bit.

“O’Bannen is a good lead,” Gage said. “Marco, bring up the map of locations the kids gave us earlier.”

A map of the East Coast took over the screen where McNally’s face had been moments ago. Four black dots in four states were clustered within five hundred miles of each other. The only group we couldn’t place belonged to the late Louis and Summer, but I’d bet they were within that same radius.

“Where’s the sister office?” Gage asked.

A red star appeared in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia, to be exact, outside of Washington, D.C. It definitely seemed to be the center of the cluster of dots.

“Stratfield Research and Development,” Marco said. “Their security is tighter than Weatherfield. Even if they grant us access, we will learn nothing of value.”

“You’re right,” Teresa said. She stood up, shoulders back, spine straight. “We can’t visit the locations where the kids were raised because they could be traps, and we can’t visit Stratfield for the same reason.”

“So what do we do?” I asked, perplexed by all of the information we couldn’t do anything with. “Call them up and tell them we know Uncle’s secret identity?”

“No, we keep that to ourselves. Aaron’s an Alpha leader, so he can be told, but no one else outside of this room can know about Uncle. Not until we’ve confirmed it.” She gave both me and Ethan hard stares. “No one.”

Sebastian stood and walked to the other side of the conference table to stand behind Marco’s chair. He said something, and then the drawing of Uncle reappeared. “Marco, run this composite of Uncle through the database of Ranger images,” he said.

Marco looked up sharply, then his fingers flew across the keyboard as he acquiesced. I glanced at Teresa, who seemed as perplexed by the request as I was.

“What are you thinking, Sebastian?” Teresa asked.

“The vaguest memory from when I was a boy,” he replied. “I keep connecting that face to a Ranger uniform.”

Six months ago, several of us would have shot him down with shouts of that being impossible, that no Ranger could be involved in this. Now we knew too much about the less-than-pristine history of our forefathers. No one was dumb enough to dismiss this out of hand. Didn’t make the idea hurt any less, though.

“Dios,” Marco said. “Sebastian is correct.”

The screen displayed an obituary notice with two photographs. One photo was of a younger, almost identical version of our composite. The other was of a woman with a striking resemblance to the man in every way, right down to the nose and chin. The headline read “Switch Found Dead in Apparent Homicide,” and was dated thirty-one years ago last month.

I skimmed the obituary notice, unfamiliar with this particular Ranger. C. J. “Switch” Kemper had been a Ranger less than two years before she was found dead of unnatural causes, her body nearly unrecognizable. Her power, apparently, was the ability to alter her appearance from female to male at will—a very unusual and controversial power. She was helping to investigate the disappearances of four other non-Ranger Metas at the time of her death, and had no family to speak of.

“So this means what?” I asked. “Switch faked her death thirty years ago and her male alter ego went to work for Stratfield R&D?”

“Looks that way,” Gage said. He seemed utterly horrified by the thought.

“Why?”

“I’ll be sure to ask when we catch her.”

“Marco.” Teresa’s voice was strangled, almost hoarse, and every set of eyes in the room landed on her. She walked toward him with slow, almost pained steps, her face pale and wan. “Take the female photo and age it thirty years, please. Make her hair white.”

We waited in horrified silence while Marco did as asked. He posted a familiar face on-screen next to the younger version—a face I’d never seen in person, only over a video conference call once.

“Damn it, I hate being right sometimes,” Teresa said. “Someone get Dr. Kinsey in here right the hell now.”

The female Switch had aged perfectly into Dr. Nancy Bennett.

Ethan left like his ass was on fire. Teresa moved away from the group, shoulders heaving, probably trying to calm the fuck down. I didn’t know what to say to anyone, so I just sat there like an idiot, trying to get all of this to make sense. Reconciling the fact that we’d been duped into handing over the body of Patricia Swift, as well as private, vital information about Noah and Dahlia, to our goddamned enemy, and we’d done it all with a smile. Trusting Bennett had been a big decision on Teresa’s part, and she’d done it because of need and because of Kinsey’s recommendation.

She’d mentally beat herself into a bloody pulp for this one.

Ethan must have filled him in on the half-run over, because Kinsey’s face was pasty white when the pair returned. He took one look at the photos on-screen and gasped.

“How well did you really know her?” Teresa asked, whirling on him like a purple devil. She was beyond furious, beyond fear. She was pure ice in voice and face, her eyes blazing.

Kinsey turned slowly, his motions mechanical, as though afraid to spook her and incite violence. “We were colleagues,” he said, voice steadier than his body language. “Everything I told you was true as I knew it, I promise you.”

“Tell me again.”

“Nancy was already an employee at Stratfield when I was recruited to Weatherfield. We were introduced via our project supervisors, as we both worked in the field of genetics. Her specialty, I was told, was cloning. We spoke over the phone several times a month for my first two years, and less frequently after. We stayed in contact, even after she left Stratfield for another company.”

“When did she leave Stratfield?”

“About fifteen years ago.”

“When the War ended?”

He blinked hard. “Yes.”

“In the last fifteen years, how many phone calls did you have with her?”

Kinsey frowned as the pieces starting coming together. “We corresponded every few months, but we never spoke. Not until this year. My God.”

“What about her personal life?”

“Never married, as far as I knew. She never mentioned any family members to me. I trusted her, Teresa, implicitly, or I never would have suggested we send her the clone’s body, and I absolutely never would have sent her that information on Noah.”

Probably the only reason Kinsey hadn’t suffered a fist in the eye yet was because she knew he loved Noah too much to ever deliberately put his son in danger. Bennett/Switch had duped him with style.

“Now the question is,” Teresa said, “what’s she really been doing with that information? Because I will bet the title to this island that she isn’t doing what she promised she’d do for us.”

Like clone another Changeling in order to save Dahlia’s life—which no one said out loud, me included, because not everyone in the room was in the know on Double Trouble’s issues.

As his own shock wore off, anger took its place and Kinsey flushed bright red. He stared at the photos of Switch and Bennett. “How did I never see it?” he asked no one in particular.

“If you didn’t keep abreast of Ranger news back then, there’s no way you could have seen it,” Ethan said. “And none of us were even born when Switch was supposedly killed.”

“When I was still very new at Weatherfield, I heard rumors.” Kinsey rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Rumors that Metas were being kidnapped and their DNA used as part of the projects. I promise you, I never participated in or witnessed such a thing, but the rumors did exist.”

“And you’re just mentioning this now?”

His expression suggested he thought he had mentioned the rumors before, but it was news to me. It didn’t surprise me, though. Weatherfield had created the Recombinants. Their sister company had created the clones. Everything about this was incestuous.

“So was Switch a willing participant in those experiments?” Gage asked.

“Like you said,” Teresa replied. “We’ll ask her when we catch her.”

He nodded, and something passed between them. An unspoken promise, a silent declaration of love. That he’d follow her orders to the ends of the earth, because he trusted her. Whatever it was, it was beautiful.

“Dr. Kinsey,” Teresa said. “I need you to give Bennett a call. Tell her Noah and Dahlia are getting worse, ask what her progress is.”

“I can do that, but why?” Kinsey asked.

“If she answers you, she’s in Richmond. And if she’s in Richmond, we’re going to go get her.”

He blinked, then nodded. “All right.”

“Gage? Go with him, please.”

Teresa was taking no chances and was sending the Human Lie Detector along for the phone call. Gage had read Kinsey several times in the last few months, and always correctly. He couldn’t do the same for Bennett, not over a wireless call, but he could observe from a distance.

After the pair left, we waited for Teresa to tell us what was next. We didn’t have to wait long.

“I’m leading this extraction,” she said. “I want Ethan, Marco, Lacey, Sebastian, Alexia, and Rick.”

“Rick?” I repeated. “Firework Boy, Rick?”

“His powers are as strong as mine, and he wasn’t badly injured last night. If Switch decides to use her other half, he can identify Uncle’s face for us.”

“He isn’t trained.”

“He’s coming with us. I want a small but powerful group on this, Renee. If we can capture Uncle, this is a huge win for us. It’s one step closer to identifying the Overseer and finding those clones.”

Finding the clones was our biggest headache at the moment, and Hinder’s throat had a pending date with my hand, so I stopped arguing with her. Being left behind didn’t hurt, because I understood her reasoning. I had nothing to add to her group. I’d be more of a hindrance than a help. No biggie.

“I’ll get Alexia and Rick down here,” Sebastian said as he headed for the door. “I take it you want to go right away?”

“Yes,” Teresa replied.

He left with a terse nod.

I didn’t like that Ethan was going with his fractured wrist, but he didn’t require a healthy arm to use his powers. And he needed to be doing something besides sitting around worrying about Double Trouble. Their problems would still be here when the team returned with Switch bundled up in chains.

Rick, though, was impulsive and emotional. And Sasha wasn’t going to like one of her people being roped into this little mission against Uncle. Or maybe she’d cheer him on—I didn’t really know her well enough to guess if she’d high-five him or lose her shit. And the one person I wanted to confide all of this to wasn’t in the loop, and I was forbidden to tell him. Derek wouldn’t like it, but he’d live with it.

Sebastian returned with Alexia and Rick at the same time as Gage and Dr. Kinsey.

“She’s at the lab,” Kinsey said. “She reports nothing new in her findings.”

“Shocking,” Ethan drawled.

“Who’s at what lab?” Rick asked. He glanced around the room, some of his bravado missing in the face of so many older, more experienced Metas. “What’s up?”

“We may have discovered the location and identity of the man you call Uncle,” Teresa said. “You want to help catch him?”