Sunset Volume 2: High Noon

Sol LAHQ. Terre Department.

Darwin finished up his session notes at around 12:40, managing to leave just enough of his lunch break to run down to the atrium for a kale bowl, if he could score one, before his student at one o’clock. It was a decent enough achievement for his typical schedule and he had a tiny bounce in his step as he headed down the hall. It felt like a long day already and he was excited for it to be over in a few hours. His big evening plans? His comfiest hoodie, leftover zucchini noodles from the night before (no cooking!), and a movie. He loved his students, every single one, but sometimes there was nothing he wanted more than a nice, quiet night in which his biggest responsibility was making sure he didn’t burn the microwave popcorn and set off the smoke alarm for his whole block of quarters.

There was a huddled group of counselors in the hall by the elevator and Darwin prepared himself to give an awkward no-time-to-chat wave. He would be glad to skip whatever the office gossip of the day was.

He was about to pass by when he realized that Ollie was at the center, his face red and splotchy. The two coworkers hovering around him looked dismayed.

Darwin froze. “What’s wrong?” he stammered, looking from one to the next, searching for who would answer. From the way his mouth was open and his chest was rising and falling, he didn’t think it would be Ollie.

Carol nodded at Ollie. “One of his foster teams went Icarus.”

Darwin’s heart sank like lead. “What?” He took a few delicate steps closer to them, as though if he weren’t careful, he would step on something breakable.

That was the what-if thought that kept each and every guidance counselor up at night, and it was the crux of most of their nightmares. That they’d missed something, some indicator, some coded call for help, and now the children they were responsible for were in danger or worse.

Ollie swallowed with an uncomfortable smacking sound. “The student is missing. Assumed taken with them. I had no idea that—”

Darwin gaped, waiting on pins and needles for Ollie to struggle with a sniffle before he could get enough air to go on.

“The whole team,” the intern told him when Ollie wasn’t able to go on. “Just gone.” She looked terrified.

Darwin shook his head vehemently and gathered his words. His own mind was racing, running down if there was anything he could reasonably do (no, he was far from Neptune as it gets) while getting tangled up in what he would possibly do if he’d gotten news like this. He loved all his students, as draining as they could be sometimes, but the idea of one simply disappearing overnight was never on his radar.

“It’s not your fault,” he told Ollie with as much force as he could imbue. “You couldn’t have known something like this would happen.”

Those were the words they’d all want to hear in this situation and the words not a single one of them would believe and he knew it.

“It’s literally my job,” Ollie retorted then retreated behind his hands. “Everything looked normal.”

“I’m sure you did everything you possibly could,” Darwin told him in as calm a voice as he could muster.

“We can only do what we can do,” Carol agreed. She was older and Darwin hoped her voice of experience would help. “And you said one of them is a telepath, so who knows if your perceptions got interfered with.”

Telepath. A thought made Darwin’s stomach twist. He leaned slightly to try to catch Ollie’s eyes.

“Which team is it?”

When Ollie gave him a sad, silent look he already knew the answer before Carol chimed in with, “One of the Venus Twenty-Five.”

Darwin was worried he might be sick immediately on the hallway floor. He’d vouched for them. He was the reason they’d been considered, despite all the red flags. It was his fault.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” someone said.

Ollie shook himself off, avoiding looking at Darwin. “I have to go. Investigation needs to talk to me.”

“Okay, well we’re here,” Carol told him, voice full of pity. She opened her mouth to say something to Darwin, but he turned on his heel to go back to his office.

“I’m sorry,” he called back.

Inside the safety of his office, Darwin stared blindly at his computer and tried to decide if he could call out of the rest of his day. And do what, though? Sit at home and wonder if Neptune would come for him too, to make him justify what he’d done?

He looked at the clock. Only minutes left of his lunch break. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he opened the file on his next student.

---

Natal, Brazil.

When Alex woke up, his hands were cuffed behind his back, his shoulder screaming, and his ankles were tied together. The first agent he had shot was walking toward him, shucking off his shirt and black Kevlar vest with sharp jerking motions.

“You all right?” a voice called.

The agent tucked the vest under one arm. A raised red welt was spreading across his flank and there was a lump where he’d banged his head. “Fine,” he grunted. “Impact knocked me out. Get him in the car.” Alex blinked and shook his head to orient himself. He was being handed into the backseat of the SUV next to the woman with the bloody arm. They wrestled him into the vehicle thrashing and squirming, but it was going to take a whole fucking lot more than that to get him to sit quiet. Alex rammed a shoulder into the gut of the guy behind him and kicked out with his legs.

“You want me to hit him?” she asked.

“Just fucking try it,” Alex snarled, aiming a wild, two-foot kick at her face.

“Do it,” the agent said. The agent behind him gave him one last shove and let go of him completely. Off balance and tumbling, Alex twisted to press himself against the door and break his fall. The woman caught at him, grabbing him around the midsection. Small blue winks of electric sparks snapped with static and gathered down the length of her arms toward him. A white pain lit up every fork and branch of his nervous system, contracting his muscles and wrenching his body rigid as a board. Alex thought he was yelling but his jaw was locked shut and his throat an immobile wrenching tube. When it was over, Alex collapsed, unmoving. He was placed into the backseat and he felt the car begin to move.

“We should call this in,” the healer said.

“We will,” the driver responded. From his decisive tone, Alex guessed he was the team lead. “But let’s show LAHQ we can bag the whole team first without them butting in. Is he awake?”

“I think so?” The woman who’d shocked him was leaning over.

“We want the telepath to be able to track him.”

Alex let out a slurred stream of obscenities.

“Yeah, we’re good.”

The car jolted and careened with a loud crack. Wrung out, Alex rolled, fetching up against the door. People were shouting. The car was swerving in a cloud of dust. Out the window, Alex could see the doctor’s car slammed up against their bumper. The engine was roaring and Alyosha was behind the wheel. With the memory of Alyosha spinning to the ground, Alex reached deep for his last strength and heaved himself up, trying to work the door handle with his numb fingers. The SUV swerved evasively down the narrow, house-lined road. An agent was leaning out an open window firing at the car. Alyosha veered sharply and was sluggish to recover. Alex gave up with his hands, sliding down, limp onto the floor space in front of the seat and began to work the latch with his teeth until he heard the rising whine of an engine working hard and he curled his head away from the door.

The impact sent them into a skid, back end sliding out to one side and clipping the side of a house. There was the slam of a second metal-bending crunch that made Alex wince, but it hadn’t been their car that made the sound. Then all Alex could hear was the clattering of glass and shouted curses. The sound of Alyosha’s car fell away. They kept driving. He was alone.

---

It felt like a blip. Reeve had been in the middle of uploading files when he felt it. It wasn’t much, just a brief thirty second interruption. His mouth went dry. At this range, his telepathy only had enough of a hook that he could sense his connection to the minds of Alyosha and Alex as two small, bright points. And then there was one bright one and one dim one. Then it was back. Since telepaths read thoughts and memories, they had no footing in the realm of the subconscious. When a person fell asleep or unconscious or they died—they were untouchable, unable to be accurately sensed or tracked. There were two bright points, and then there was one.

All at once, Reeve stood up, grabbed his phone, and yelled Hannah’s name. He was calling Alex when she came in the room at a jog, Gareth behind her, looking disoriented. No answer, but with Alex, there was a chance he’d blow Reeve off. He might have talked Jonathan into making a stop at the beach after all and fallen asleep on the sand. He called Shvedov, who he knew would take his call in the middle of an earthquake.

Reeve was halfway to the door by the fourth ring.

“Reeve!” Hannah barked, bringing him back to a world with words and the faces in front of him. She was staring at him, bewildered, from the hallway.

“Something happened,” he managed to spit out, his mouth fumbling. “Grab Jon’s med bag.”

Gareth’s brow furrowed, looking at his phone. “They’re not picking up?”

Reeve pocketed his phone and slung on his holster. “And I lost track of Alex for a minute. He slipped off my grid.”

“Could that be a lot of things?” Gareth asked. Reeve shifted his weight back and forth, unable to stand still.

“Yes,” he snapped, “and one of them is very fucking bad, so move!” Gareth and Hannah threw on clothes without another word, exchanging glances, and then they were out the door. Reeve blew past the elevators, heading for the stairwell.

“We’re on the eleventh floor!” Gareth called, slowing to a stop. Reeve’s nose twitched; the idea of standing still inside an elevator made his temples throb harder.

“Stairs won’t be faster.” Hannah said gently and hit the down button with the side of her fist. He swallowed and waited for the elevator doors to open. Inside, he thought he could feel the car rocking to the bounce of his legs as he pumped his heel nervously. He fished two small bottles out of his pocket. Glancing at the labels, he pocketed the caffeine and took a dextroamphetamine pill. No one made a comment, but he could feel their unease and some surprise at how seriously Reeve was taking this lapse in contact.

As they got out at the garage level, Reeve walked out onto the pavement, reaching and finding the mind of the closest driver he came across. He twisted her thoughts, heedless of her confusion. She drove past her assigned parking spot and came to a stop just in front of Reeve. She stepped out of the car, slack-faced and empty, leaving it running and got onto the elevator behind them. Reeve, Gareth, and Hannah climbed into the car. Reeve pealed out.

The closer Reeve drove toward the airstrip, the more it became clear that the two points in his mind were too far away from each other. Each was periodically dimming and Reeve raced down the street, passing anyone possible. His thoughts took on the clean, streamlined feel of the uppers kicking in. Like his skull was made of chrome on the inside. The others in the car were tense and quiet with a fair amount of fear, some of it toward him.

His phone rang.

Reeve nearly slammed into oncoming traffic reaching to answer it. Alyosha’s number flashed on the screen.

“Where are you?” Reeve shouted, unable to control the volume of his voice.

“Reeve—” Alyosha’s voice was forced and low. The call stayed open but silent and he put his foot down, sparing a quick thought to pity any law enforcement that might try to pull him over.

“What is it?” Gareth yelled behind him.

“’Lyosha.” His voice was clipped, focusing. “He sounds bad.” Panic rose, cold and razor-edged, in the minds around Reeve, but it was distant and impersonal. Isolated and compartmentalized like so many facts, like the images of long black bags that he pushed out of his mind.

The whirring cloud of the thoughts of the people in the other cars on the road, those in the hotels, and in restaurants on the strip became both louder and clearer, but easier to filter out and ignore at the same time.

Once out of the city, Reeve’s stretching telepathy could sense a peculiar buzz of activity ahead of them to the left. It made his heart beat triple-time. Tearing down the dusty roadway, they could see that there were people outside their homes, standing on the street. They were clustered in small groups, talking. Hannah made a wordless sound beside him, pointing. Ahead of them was Jonathan’s car, the nose crumpled, crashed into the side of a house.

Reeve skidded to a stop, swerving in the dust. They were out of the car in a stumble of limbs. The crowd that had gathered around the crash murmured to each other and watched them, side-eyed. Some protested in Portuguese, but saw Gareth hold up the med bag. There were shouts of, “Medico!” and Gareth repeated it back to them nodding as the crowd let them through. There were too many people. As he ran to the car, Reeve gathered their thoughts, their memories, and set a hook in each one of their heads.

There was a bloody form on the floor of the backseat, shoved too far under the passenger seat by the impact of hitting the house to be identifiable through the spidered and misshapen backseat window. Reeve felt his lungs tie themselves in knots trying to catch a decent breath while he reached.

He could feel Alex’s mind moving away from them—it wasn’t him. Jonathan. Reeve forced himself to keep looking. Shvedov was sprawled out face down across the front seat under a glittering cover of broken glass. There was blood on the steering wheel and on the seat. One arm was reaching, gone limp, to the passenger-side floor, inches from his dropped phone.

---

Emotions, Hannah had learned as a child, were held not just in some metaphorical heart, but in the body. In the gut or the jaw, butterflies in your stomach or cold, tingling fingertips. She stretched the tendrils of her empathy to search the car. A dead body might be silent, but an unconscious one sometimes still held the hum of emotions. Nightmares, for instance, felt like a sharp, piercing vibration—a sensation, unfortunately, which was not dissimilar to the fright that shocked through the crowd and flooded Reeve and Gareth beside her. She tried to discern between them and the bodies in the car. It was impossible to tell.

Hannah looked at Reeve, watching. Beside her, Gareth was doing the same. If they were at all conscious, Reeve would know before either one of them could crawl through a twisted window frame to get a hand on a pulse, whether or not they had made it in time.

Reeve nodded to them and started to work at the door, trying to force the dented metal to budge. Hannah let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and moved to climb up through the small opening of the backseat window, carefully widening it by chunks with the heel of her palm. Gareth grabbed her shoulder.

“Glass.”

She shook him off and scrambled through, keeping her mouth shut tight on the scratches to her legs and arms, the stretching pain in her side. Alex was not in the backseat. Jonathan’s body was contorted, though not enough to no longer seem human and allow for some disconnection. With a steady tug, she pulled him mostly out from under the seat and checked for a pulse, but given how still his eyes were despite the angle of his limbs, she already knew.

Alex wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere. The shaking in her lungs spread throughout her body, not sure if she was glad he wasn’t in this wreck, or if his something-else could possibly be worse. Hannah swallowed her heart, focusing on the task in front of her. That had always been her training growing up. Mission first, unit later—though this may have been the first time she’d ever used it.

She crawled into the front and got her arms around Alyosha’s shoulders, supporting his head. His skin was cold in the heat and the blood on the seat was thick and dark. She could hear the clattering of more glass as Reeve cleared out the remains of the driver’s side window. Lifting Alyosha up, she saw his eyes were dull but open and following her as she set him upright. His face was red and swollen. There was blood oozing from some unseen cut on his scalp. He hadn't been belted in, and Hannah felt her whole body give in to the shaking as she flinched, hearing the sound of their own crash in her head.

She forced her eyes open and focused on Alyosha. He had ripped off part of his shirt, balled it up, and pressed it against a wound on his shoulder, and it was stuck to him with drying blood. Reeve’s arms came around Alyosha’s waist and, together, they fed him through the window and onto the dirt. She followed, bare knees smeared red and black.

“Careful of his neck,” Gareth said. He knelt down to open up the medical bag, but then hesitated, his hands freezing. He raised his voice, “Alyosha, can you move your legs?”

Alyosha muttered in Russian, eyes fluttering. Hannah knew what shock looked like.

“What’d he say?” she asked.

Reeve ran the back of his hand across his face. “I don’t know.”

Carefully, Hannah peered under the wadded up cloth. The shot was high up on his shoulder, but wide, probably avoiding bone.

Alyosha groaned, pulling away from her, and raised his knees up. She let out another held breath. Not being paralyzed was at least something. Behind them, Reeve popped the trunk and Hannah watched from the ground, not wanting to look, but he shook his head at her. Alex wasn’t there.

“Does he need a hospital?” Reeve asked her. His voice was flat and she honestly didn’t know what he would do if she said yes.

Her hands hovered in midair over Alyosha’s shoulder. “I don't know. I don’t think so, not for the bullet. Just somewhere clean.”

The murmuring of the crowd was getting louder and Hannah kept thinking that there was no way someone hadn’t called the police.

“All these people,” she started.

“I know.” His voice was hollow, automatic. He stood up. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Like she was waking up from a dream, the dozens of voices around them went suddenly silent. The locals were stock still, their mouths opium-slack. Looking around in something like shock, Hannah stood up and turned to study Reeve. He wasn’t breathing. She watched him close his eyes and swallow. All at once, each person in the crowd turned and walked away. They walked into houses or farther down the road toward other homes. Hannah had never seen him use his telepathy to this scale. There had to have been at least two dozen people, zonked out, probably memory-wiped, and walking at a stoner’s pace to their homes. What kind of accuracy could he have with that many minds? She couldn’t imagine it—it would be like playing twenty games of chess at once.

“Reeve!” Gareth’s voice snapped them both out of it. Reeve took a sudden, but quiet, gulp of air. He scanned the emptying street and looked at Gareth. Whatever was exchanged silently between them, neither seemed to come away from it better than before.

Once they’d gotten Alyosha into his plane—the closest and cleanest place—they started in on him. Reeve paced, watching them. Gareth gingerly felt the surface of Alyosha’s skull for obvious damage while Hannah tried to wash out the bullet wound, but Alyosha hissed and began to blindly struggle. Reeve dropped to his knees and put a hand on his chest with enough pressure to keep him from sitting up and softly shushed him until Alyosha quieted and went still.

“What did you do?” Hannah yelled. Gareth checked for a pulse, but she could see Alyosha's eyes were open and blinking, slowly shifting randomly back and forth, scanning the ceiling of the plane.

Reeve leaned back, wiping blood off on his pants. “He thinks he's somewhere else. He can’t feel anything you're doing.” His eyes had welled up, but he had shut his face hard against that.

With nothing to say, Hannah went back to work, swallowing. The bullet had gone straight through and didn’t seem to have nicked any major vessels. She finished washing it and applied a clotting agent from the med bag. Alyosha's arm was relaxed and pliant as she worked. His face was calm and every now and then there was the smallest hint of his normally large grin. It made Hannah feel sick.

“What’s he looking at?” Gareth asked quietly.

“The stars.”

Gareth tucked a blanket around Alyosha’s neck, careful to cradle his head, without any outward sign that he had heard Reeve.

Hannah sighed. “Nothing else we can do here. We can't really know how bad it is without some kind of scan. It could be really bad or he could only be concussed and sore as hell. And if it is bad…”

Gareth finished for her, softer than Hannah had heard his voice since Beatty, “Then it’s not going to matter if we’re here or not.”

Reeve paced.

“Alex?” Hannah asked, just the one word but it made Reeve stop short.

“They took him alive. I read Shvedov’s memories.” He started walking again. “He was cuffed, not in a black bag. I know what the car they were driving looks like. Alyosha managed to damage it. They’ll want me to track them down.”

Hannah hadn’t realized until just then that she had still, in her mind, been thinking of this as some local crime problem. Tourists getting jumped. Some unfortunate, but unrelated, conflict. But Reeve was saying Neptune was here and that they were here for them. They had already gotten to them.

Gareth’s entire body flexed and tensed. “What do we do?”

“We track them down.”

***