Metcalf flinched away, then said: "All we've got is just this much to go on: We had a civilian come in off the street. He claimed he'd seen an invulnerable and gave us the location. Turns out he was being puppeted. We know that now."
"And you didn't bother to consider that before you sent four cops to kill themselves?"
The finger-pointing was starting. The brass, Soledad thought, had a hard-on for pointing fingers as long as the fingers got pointed away from themselves.
Lies and deceit and conspiracy.
Bo—good cop, team cop—stepped in, came to Metcalf's defense."Well, now, there wasn't much precedent for this. In all my years I never heard of a freak baiting MTacs; setting them up for the slaughter."
Tannehill had a question."Why lure them out at all? If it was a telepath, it could've walked in and had the whole division putting bullets into each other."
An unsettling thought.
Rysher offered: "The stinking coward's too scared to face down more than a couple of cops."
"Telepath can jump from mind to mind so fast, it could take out an entire station before they knew what hit them." Bo laid out the facts as he saw them."Could be it was just targeting MTacs. Maybe it didn't want anyone else to get hurt."
"Since when," Rysher scoffed,"do muties care about who gets killed?"
Not since San Francisco, Soledad thought as she wrote.
"Gets worse," Metcalf said.
Rysher: "You mean the message?"
Soledad stopped writing. In the rumors she'd caught she hadn't heard about any—
"Message?" Tannehill asked.
"Before Fiero," Metcalf started,"shot himself he said—he was made to say by the telepath—'The revolution is coming. The truth will set them free. '"
"Revelation."
Everyone looked to Soledad.
She said again: "Revelation, not revolution."
Tannehilclass="underline" "How do you know?"
"I know because it's the same thing a freak said to me."
Bo, for Tannehill's benefit: "On her first call Officer O'Roark came in close contact with a metanormal."
"How close?" Tannehill wanted to know.
Soledad hitched down her collar, let Tannehill get a good look at her neck scars.
She said: "When a pyro's got you by the throat trying to burn the life out of you, you remember what it tells you. What it told me is the revelation is coming."
"What," asked Rysher,"is a revelation?"
"A revelation is a disclosure or something disclosed by or as if by divine or preternatural means." Soledad, snide, looking to Rysher: "It's when you find out the truth about things."
That was lost on Rysher."I know what a revelation is. What does it mean? In this context, what does it mean?"
No one had an answer.
Metcalf did his best guessing."A code word of some kind. Has to be."
Tannehilclass="underline" "For?"
Bo: "Must have some kind of significance. The telepath wanted Fiero to tell us."
"Does it matter? For Christ's sake, we got freaks passing around coded messages—"
"But if it was some kind of a code, I don't think they woul—"
"O'Roark, just take notes," Rysher directed.
Metcalf weighed in anxious."Whatever the meaning, coded information is being exchanged among these things, and far as I care that amounts to subversive activity. We need to gear up."
Tannehilclass="underline" "Let's think about this."
"We need to gear up now!"
Bo pressed a palm to his forehead, slid it up and over his hair, slicking it back with his own sweat, his hand trembling through the move.
"Is that what you want, David? Every paper, every TV station screaming about a terror network of freaks?"
"That's what it is: freaks teaming up with each other."
"We'd have panic in the streets."
Metcalf ignored that, sputtered on: "We… we need to mobilize the military."
"The law doesn't allow the military to—"
"The law?" Metcalf cut Bo off."They changed the laws after May Day, they can change them now. Let's have a talk with the White House, tell them what the hell's going on out here and see what happens. What you don't do is let words on paper keep us from doing the job."
Rysher didn't agree."A president hasn't put federal troops on the streets since when? Since the fifties? Since Little Rock? No sitting politician is going to fess up to a freak crisis. This is our problem. It's ours to solve."
"And ours to take credit for when it gets solved?" Tannehill asked/said very pointedly.
Soledad noticed, on the wall, the picture of her and Rysher. Gone.
"… I'm not even thinking about that. My primary concern, as always—"
Tannehill waved off the rhetoric."My primary concern is what if we can't solve the problem? Telepaths have a way of putting together a body count."
"We can handle it."
Again, all eyes to Soledad.
"We know the territory, we know what we're up against. There's no group better trained for this." The words stomped out of her mouth full of confidence."Whatever the muties throw at us, MTac can handle." Soledad said what she said with pride and presumption. She said what she said without regard to the fact that whatever MTac did next it would be without her services.
Tannehill did some considering. A lot in a very little amount of time."All right. For now we keep it local. Bring in this freak and do it fast. MTac or the army; I don't care who gets to wear the medals, I just want these monsters off my streets."
Tannehill stood. He walked out of the office. He patted Soledad on the shoulder as he passed.
Little gesture as it was, it made Soledad feel good. Feel proud. It made her feel like not quite the whole world was against her.
The feeling went away when Rysher said: "Go type all that up, O'Roark."
Julie was always the most nervous just when she was closing up her bodega. She knew, from three previous incidents, when she was closing up was most likely when someone—an addict or a banger or just somebody who'd gotten hold of twenty dollars' worth of gun—was liable to push their way into the store swinging their piece, demanding some of what little she'd been able to earn over the day. They wouldn't have to demand hard. She'd hand it to them. They could have it. It was just money. More than just money, really. It was food on the table, medicine, it was the difference between paying the electric bill and sitting nights in the dark. But even at that it was still, really, end of day, just money. So they could have it. Jorge wasn't so easy. He hadn't risked his life, the life of his family, to cross the border, take whatever crappy, demeaning work he could scrape up standing on street corners soaking in all the sneers and looks and pejoratives that got thrown his way daily, saved his pay and bought a bodega where he'd still be earning just enough to barely, barely get by only to pass it off to whatever punk wanted to get his by shoving a gun in someone's face. So when guys with guns came around, Jorge didn't give up the dough. Jorge got shot. Got shot four times one night. Lived. Lived, but didn't learn. Guys with guns came around again, and again Jorge didn't give up the green. He got shot. Once. In the head. He died. For all his bravery Julie was now alone with the store, with their son and daughter and with all kinds of bills for all kinds of things. She did not remember Jorge fondly. When she thought of him, which was every night when she closed up shop fearful of the guys with guns, she cursed his name.
Vaughn sensed all that sitting in his loft six or seven hundred feet away. The city was at ease, Aubrey was sleeping—a sleep Vaughn had put him in. The night was still. It was effortless for Vaughn to read Julie's story, her emotions. He could even see the night she watched Jorge take a fatal bullet through his occipital lobe. That clear it remained to her, and was to him.
He said, in his mind: It's pointless. It really is pointless.
Quiet.