I said. “She was looking, she must have found something…” Had she caught Willow Grace setting the bomb? Disabling the security system? Leaving the house? Had Fifer decided to take Tabitha as she’d taken Arthur, to find out how much she knew and who she had told?
Please let her have been taken. We’d never heard Tabitha’s voice on the phone call.
We hadn’t given up the investigation like we’d told Willow Grace we would. And Arthur had overheard more than she’d known, the exact plan Fifer had been trying to prevent us from finding out. Not only that, but we had Teplova’s files now, and we hadn’t stopped digging into them.
I remembered then my guesses about how Teplova’s clients could be used. How they might be molded into an army.
And Fifer—she wouldn’t even have to do any molding, I realized. The hard-coded powers worked on anyone from regular folk to people like Simon; they’d definitely work on one another. Whatever politicians and other powerful people had been Teplova’s clients, they were primed into a ready-made force of impossible people, and Fifer not only knew who they were but could make them follow her just by smiling at them.
Fifer hadn’t only killed Dr. Teplova to protect herself after getting her new features. She’d committed the murder to take over.
Had she known about the power Teplova had bestowed on Willow Grace’s flesh and bones before forcing the doctor to make the same copy on her own? She must have. Any position or press credentials had been a side benefit to worming her way onto the top of Teplova’s pyramid, all with a face that couldn’t be refused.
And we, the people with a partial client list, who wouldn’t stop looking under all the virtual rocks—we would have been the only people who knew enough to stop her. The only people who had a chance of recognizing her army for what it was.
She had stolen prestige and a frightening ability with explosives. Add who knew how many brainwashed superpowered minions who wielded their own power … if she thought the country needed to be taken down a peg, she could drop us into anarchy as easily as pushing a button, playing the sides of both terrorist and authority to her own predetermined tune. It wasn’t a perfectly coordinated plan, but it didn’t need to be—any sloppiness could be papered over by raw power.
Until we got in her way.
Apparently, as soon as that seemed at all likely, she’d aborted subtlety and decided to put the kibosh on all of us before we discovered the truth. D.J. wasn’t kidding about what kind of person she was. If she’d decided the same about Tabitha …
But Tabitha had been researching on her own, and very well might have found something solid revealing Fifer’s true goals. Fifer had to be worried about that, had to want to interrogate her.
Had to have kept her alive. I wouldn’t allow myself to entertain alternatives.
“Glad you got all that mumbly-jiggero figured out,” D.J. broke into my stunned thoughts. “Good luck being on her hit list. It was nice knowing you.”
Checker spun back to the screen. “You have to help us. You’re here in LA, right? You’ve been tracking her, you know her—you have to help us. You have to!”
“What?” D.J. said. “No, I don’t! Don’t get me wrong, I will heartily agree to blowing shit up for money, or if I’m mad, or if it’s fun enough, but going up against Fifer? No, thank you. I’d rather relax by the surf and build more orgasmic little toys.”
“Then you should help us!” Checker argued. “What do you think is going to happen if this Fifer person gets her way? It’s going to be chaos! Where do you think you’ll get your advanced devices then?”
“Oh, the old evil versus oblivion argument,” D.J. said. “Oldie but a goodie. ‘Come on, D.J., you live in the world too!’ But you should remember, Charles, I’m really fucking lazy.” He leaned back and studied his nails. “Besides, she probably won’t be able to do it. She’s a fucking slob. Somebody’ll catch her. Too bad it won’t be in time for the little kitten you’re trying to save.”
D.J. didn’t know she had access to a whole supernatural army of power. People who could grab her coup for her and then run her empire with the hand of a vise, one the people never even noticed as the faces on their television sets soothed and controlled them.
But we had one last shot,