"No!"
"You're no good until the doctors give your leg a clean bill anyway. Beyond that—"
"I… sir, I don't… I didn't do anything that I deserve to be—"
"You yanked open the furnace door. Made it hot for all of us."
"I did my job."
Rysher gave a long study to Soledad. For the first time his expression revealed his feelings. He looked like he pitied the girl.
Rysher said: "You really don't see it, do you?"
"I didn't empty my clip into a kid with a shank. I chalk a righteous shooting, shot one of them, and I get sat down?"
"Your piece wasn't certified. Nobody told you to carry that thing. Technically… nothing technical about it. Your piece is illegal. No matter what kind of work it did, it's illegal and you used it anyway. You did things the way you saw fit."
"As a last resort. Better that than let cops die."
"Just trying to save lives?"
"Yes, sir. I was just trying to—"
"Freaks used to save lives, O'Roark. Freaks used to do what they wanted no matter what the law said. Do you see?"
She saw.
Soledad just then saw the total picture. Clarity of vision had come late to her. Really it was just denial falling away, some truth getting through.
Rysher: "After May Day, after the freaks wiped out San Francisco, the president issued an Executive Order. Muties are enemies of the state."
"I know."
"MTac platoons were formed with one job: enforce the letter of the law. Protect normal humans."
A little anger. At herself."You're telling me what I know!"
"You know, yes, but do you understand? Do you understand why things are the way they are? There's order, and there is chaos. The freaks are chaos. MTac is order. When we fall apart, there is nothing left."
And Rysher just lets that hang.
And Rysher said, said to Bo: "Take her, get her set up."
Bo took Soledad by the arm. Minding her limp and her cane, started to guide her from the office.
She moved like she was sleepwalking.
"O'Roark."
Soledad turned back to Rysher.
"I know you were just trying to do right. I have to be… I'm going to be straight with you."
"Yes, sir."
"The situation is problematic."
"Yes, sir."
"It's problematic, but don't worry. Not too much. We've got some good boys in this department. We'll try to fix things for you."
Bo got Soledad a desk—a standard-issue municipal desk among a field of desks in Parker Center—and the duty-bug pencil pushing that went with it, the boring core of police procedure.
Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards.
No matter she'd just been reassigned, forms and requisitions and
66s and want cards waited for Soledad when she arrived at her new position. They were waiting for her like from day one, whatever else Soledad had planned for herself, they were what she would eventually be coming around to. They slothed on her desk, a drowning pool of the mundane. Looking at them, at a distance, she felt their wasting. This is what trying to make a difference had bought. Wasn't supposed to be this way. The way it was supposed to be…
"Bo… I meant what I told the lou. I only took the gun along as a last resort. I'm tired of seeing people get killed, cops get killed. I just wanted to do something about it."
Honest with the facts: "Well, you sure pissed your chance away."
Bo started off, left Soledad to the rug she'd been swept under. He stopped, turned back. Trying to paint a decent picture of the situation: "It'll work out." Not much conviction there. Bo headed off.
Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards. Been a long time since Soledad had been near the basics of cop work.
Soledad looked around, looked at everybody else working a desk: Too young to have climbed off of one. Too old to do anything else. A couple who were too much trouble to be let out onto the streets. It was a funky little zoo of cops too-something to do anything but what they were doing: shuffling papers.
Welcome, Soledad.
Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards.
She roboted her way through them for what seemed like all day.
A glance at her watch. It was only midmorning.
A couple of hours since she'd taken a tumble from MTac to working a desk. She sucked a breath. A couple of hours, just a couple and things had changed that much, that bad, that quick?
A couple of…
And from a desk where was there to go? Down? Out?
Jesus had she screwed things. Jesus.
Screwed, yeah, but they could be fixed. Rysher said he could fix them. Soledad would do everything she could to help. She promised herself this: She did not survive an encounter with a pyro just to get taken out by some technicality. Her and her gun had put down a flamethrower. Her and her gun had saved a whole element… except for Reese, her and her gun had. So to hell with the rules and regulations and dotted i's and crossed t's and…
And Rysher was right.
And Bo was right.
She'd fucked up. No other way, no gentle way to put it. Soledad had fucked up. She hadn't tried to skirt regs. Not on purpose. Not really. She'd only tried to fulfill a simple mandate given to herself years ago: get rid of every single metanormal freak of nature that existed.
But judgment on her actions wasn't about saving a few lives. It was about law and order, and the bold words tattooed across Reese's shoulder.
First call, and Soledad had come out no better than the mutie they'd gone after. She was no better than the things that she hated.
There was another before she came, but him I barely remember, or remember what happened to. He might've been killed fighting the Void. I can't recall.
But her… I remember the Princess. See her in action once, you'd never forget her. She could kick ass, yeah, but they all could. She could kick ass and she was beautiful. And graceful. The way she would sail above the city. Not fly, sail. It was the same difference in motion between a motor-boat and a tall ship.
She made me proud, Nubian Princess.
How many times I'd heard that, Nubian Princess, from guys who just wanted to get with me, who just wanted to break off some of what I had. Enough times that the words didn't mean anything anymore. Not until I saw her. Strength and grace and beauty embodied.
For a while, just after she first appeared, they started showing up one after the other. Quadrupleman, the Texan, Tavor, Blue Knight, Red Dawn and the rest of the Color Guard… It was getting so you needed a score-card. Incredible abilities. Unbelievable powers. Were they always among us and just then decided to show their faces? Was this some kind of sudden, incredible leap in human evolution? Aliens? Heavenly agents? Questions got asked, but there was no one to answer them. All any of us normal people knew was that we were on a schedule. Every month or so we could expect new hero, new costume, new power. Most were guys (white guys), most were brutish, most didn't get my attention beyond a" Oh, isn't that interesting. It's the hero dujour."
Most. But not the Princess.
Tough, proud, and as costumes go she actually had fashion sense. To me
she was a symbol and an inspiration, and I wanted nothing more in the world than to be like her.
And she let me down. Just like the rest of them let all of us down. Worse than that. The baseball player everyone loves who turns out to be an afternoon boozer lets you down. Same with the corporate CEO who shovels employees' 401 (k) money into his beach house in Maui. What the so-called heroes, what the freaks did: They deceived us, lied to us.
They killed us. Our spirit and then our bodies.
Be like Nubian Princess? I want nothing to do with her except to throw flowers on her grave.
La Brea and Sunset. The busiest intersection in a city full of nothing but cars and traffic.
Head to her steering wheel. Had to be this intersection?