“Oh, well, you’ve certainly provided a violent soirée,” Foreman said, and now he was sarcastic, but not in a funny kind of way. “I speak of course of that house full of dead bodies in Nevada. Most were unarmed—”
“Bullshit,” I said. “They were metas. We’re never unarmed.” I paused. “Unless, you know, someone actually chops our arms off—”
“Hilarious,” he said in a tone that suggested he found it anything but. “We’ve got a plane crash down in a swamp south of Bloomington. What if that plane had come down a couple miles north, say in the Mall of America or some neighborhood?”
I wanted to be flippant but honestly, I felt a chill contemplating that scenario. “I didn’t crash the plane, okay? I didn’t even know I’d done enough damage to cause it to crash until it was already falling out of the sky.”
Foreman didn’t stop walking and neither did I. He did not look at me. “NTSB is still investigating, but their preliminary reports indicate shrapnel somehow entered the cockpit and injured the pilots so badly they couldn’t continue to fly the plane.” Now he looked at me. “Was that your doing?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. There was a metal door being tossed around, and a lot of heavy hitting between me and the Wolfe brothers, but … no explosions or anything like that. At least not that I can recall.”
“And you’d recall explosions?” Foreman gave me a sour look.
“Probably,” I said, and now I brought the flippant back, full force. “I’m becoming something of an expert at causing them nowadays.”
“So, about this freeway thing—” he said.
“Good grief,” I said, aping Charlie Brown. “I’m not even … what? It had to have been less than a day ago—”
“Three hours,” he said, terse.
I paused as I opened the tunnel leading from headquarters to the dormitory. Fluorescent lights flickered on ahead of us, filling the air with a hum. “Give me a few minutes to compose myself before you start in on this one, okay?”
“There is no more time for composure,” he said. He’d fallen behind me in the tunnel. He grabbed my arm and I twirled instinctively. “The Senate is pulling together an immediate committee to start overseeing metahuman affairs. They’re talking about forming an official agency—”
“That’s no good,” I said with a shake of the head. “I have zero time for Congressional oversight right now.” I held up a hand and waved toward the dormitory entrance in the distance. “I mean, I’m straight out of medical care and back to work, all right? Pretty sure that violates some OSHA regulation in and of itself.”
“This is a nation of laws,” he said gravely. “We’ve been bending them for a long time and now there’s about to be some serious blowback. I’m not the only one reading your Agency’s reports, and it’s scaring a lot of people who get regular intelligence briefings about Russia’s nuclear capacity and how many of their weapons are still pointed at us. This is going to go public in a big way.” His face went slightly slack, and he sighed. “Count on it. There are people in Congress and the White House that want to head it off.”
“God, why now?” I held a hand up to my face, rubbed my palm against my forehead. “Could they pick a worse possible time? Century is in ‘nest of hornets’ mode right now, apparently bending against Sovereign’s will and trying to kill me.”
“That’s what the freeway thing was about,” Foreman said, and it was like a light went on above him. “You’re seeing friction in the organization.” His head bobbled as he pondered it for a second. “That’s a good sign.”
“It’s not a good one for me,” I said with a low growl. “But I’ll grant you that having them fighting amongst themselves provides us with more opportunities for success than having them unified and coming after us with everything they have.”
He shuffled back a step and leaned on the concrete wall of the tunnel, shoulder first. “I know this isn’t ideal—”
“This is absolutely nightmarish,” I said.
“—but it is what it is,” Foreman said. “It’s not what I would have chosen, but with the run-up to prepare for Sovereign, we’ve had to break this secret—metahuman existence—to a lot wider group of people than it’s ever been exposed to before. We outsourced everything to the Directorate for a damned good reason, but now we’re out of options. You’re under the federal umbrella, for better or worse, and I’m telling you there are holes in it, so that you’re at least a little ready for the rush of cold water that’s coming.”