Shades of Gray - By Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge Page 0,26
doorway. “Some things shouldn’t change,” she says, but there’s no fire to her words.
In the kitchen, the teakettle begins to sing.
CHAPTER 11
IRIDIUM
I have absolutely no doubt that this technique could have saved Miranda’s life. I was too slow. Too slow by half. Never again. Nothing stands in the way of my work.
—Matthew Icarus, diary entry dated June 16, 1976
(the anniversary of Miranda Icarus’s death from
leukemia eight years earlier)
Iridium didn’t hate people. Hate, Lester had taught her, was a useless emotion unless it was spined with anger or fired by ambition. Iridium didn’t hate people just for being people. She didn’t hate the doctors who’d worked on Frostbite; she didn’t hate Night, who’d brainwashed Jet into a pale skeleton of her former self.
Iridium hated Corp. Corp was the machine that minted the doctors and the Nights, the true target of righteous rage, if you had any sense. Hating one part of a machine was like shooting the messenger—unsatisfying, and ultimately useless.
And if there was a living symbol of Corp, it was Gordon.
“You don’t have a choice,” the man said. It was a sick parody of when they’d met in the control room at Blackbird. He had the same gray suit and smarmy smile. The same gun.
Pointed at her face.
Iridium curled her hands. The air around her shimmered like an aurora borealis as the Light threatened to explode into the visible spectrum, searing Gordon’s eyes from his skull, flaking skin like burned paper.
Christo, wouldn’t that be nice.
No. Iridium couldn’t afford to call down the remnants of Corp still obviously working in New Chicago, or the full force of Corp Headquarters, on her father and the other convicts. Couldn’t afford to have Gordon and his smug grin rescind their pardons. Not yet.
“I suggest you get that thrice-damned gun out of my face before I shove it up your nose,” she said. “Or someplace less comfortable.”
Gordon flicked the barrel at the purse snatcher at Iridium’s feet, then back at her, quick as a snake. He wasn’t fast enough to be an extrahuman, but he had the quicksilver edge of a normal human who was just very, very good at what he did.
“You’re off the reservation, Calista. This is not how Corp brings in a criminal.”
The purse snatcher groaned, holding his broken nose. Iridium had eschewed her powers for shoving the sprinting thief in front of a robo-hauler. That had stopped him nicely, and it hadn’t caused a scene that would have brought cops or worse, a flock of rabids, down on the block.
“This is how I do it,” Iridium said. “You don’t like it, I suggest you go cry in your beer and leave me alone.”
Gordon raised a finger, wagged it. “You want to think about what comes out of that mouth, Calista.”
“Call me that again, and I’m going to feed you that gun.”
“Fine.” He holstered it, straightened his tie, twitched his cuffs. “But I mean it when I suggest you think, instead of using that fine brain Jehovah gave you for pithy comebacks and cussing.”
At Iridium’s feet, the purse snatcher tried to jump and run. She stomped down on his hand. He crumpled again, moaning.
“Think about what?” she managed, even though the urge to strobe Gordon was overwhelming. This must be what Jet felt every day, felt when she’d nearly killed Taser.
“This world will not burn forever,” he said. “Corp is negotiating with India to bring in their extrahumans to clean up the mess you’ve made.”
Iridium felt her eyebrows go up. Squadron: India was like Squadron: Americas in name only. India was state-sponsored and served the people. They didn’t go international. They were Switzerland, and the United and Canadian States was a war zone very much outside their jurisdiction.
“When they arrive,” Gordon said, “order will tip back into balance. Where will you be then? Will you be a criminal, running for the rest of your days with your poor, dear father? Or will you be welcomed into the Squadron with open arms, the prodigal daughter returned to the light?”
“Squadron: India won’t help you,” Iridium said reflexively. “They don’t answer to Corp.”
“And yet, their funding is nearly half Corp’s doing.” Gordon smiled, like a lizard tasting the air. “I think perhaps they will reconsider their position of international neutrality in this case. And then the question remains—where will you be?”
Iridium looked into Gordon’s soulless eyes, a gray that was nearly white. Corpse eyes. She knew with sudden, bell-like clarity that Corp couldn’t be allowed to gain a foothold in the Americas again.