Afterburn by Karen L. Abrahamson
Chapter 1 —The Dragonfly Desk
The dragonfly desk hung in the ozone-scented air of the main American Geological Survey map room, its elongated, movable stanchion joining the bulbous desk to the floor like the seat in a carnival Octopus ride. Unlike the Octopus ride, there was no carnival atmosphere, no lights, no families, no laughter—only silence that hummed in Vallon Drake’s ears. The desk’s motor, however, hummed up through the metal seat that she sat in, and directly into her spine as if the damned chair vibrated her bones apart at the cellular level. As if she were falling apart when she had just put herself back together enough to come back to work.
She’d thought she’d be coming home to family.
Instead it was like entering an enemy camp.
And that was enough of that kind of thinking. Even if being on the desk was the most thankless, difficult job at American Geological Survey headquarters. The desk only emphasized the empty, hollow feeling that seemed to grow like a cancer in her chest. She toggled the controls and the desk swooped low, out over the infernal map pit in the center of the room. Heated metal tinged the air and she pulled her cardigan a little tighter around her neck, because apparently she’d forgotten just how cool it could get up close to the ceiling, with the incessant air conditioning blowing down past the fluorescent lights. It might be August outside, but in here she needed a parka. Or a turtleneck, at least. Darned engineers who’d designed the map hadn’t thought about the people who had to work with it. Instead, they used the air conditioning to manage the map’s heat buildup that could quickly turn the room into a sauna.
The map room was an empty, cavernous affair, now that the AGS agents’ peripheral desks had been relocated into a separate room in the AGS building. The floor around the map pit seemed perilously empty and the high ceiling seemed to echo with the lost voices of AGS agents.
Or their ghosts. With all the deaths, there had to be ghosts floating around. Of course, if she were a ghost, hanging around the AGS map room was about the last thing she’d do. Unless she’d decided to come back and terrorize the AGS’s new management.
Actually, that might be fun, given that they already saw her as a problem child, even after she’d almost died saving their asses during her last little adventure.
The map lay below her, a blue-green-brown marvel of modern technology. Its surface was a fine membrane of cells that had the tensile strength to hold up a person and the delicacy to form whatever landscape the desk might happen to be looking at. It also was sensitive enough to the living landscape that the desk agent could see imminent Change as it simmered beneath the surface. Right now it held a Pacific-Northwest-from-space kind of view that included Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and half of British Columbia, too.
She sat back in her chair. Strange. Usually the desk kept its observations south of the forty ninth parallel. Her fingers flicked to the computer keys to bring the map back to American coordinates, but a flicker on the Canadian part of the map stopped her. Something was happening along the coastline of British Columbia. The map features trembled as they always did when under the influence of significant Change. She stopped. It wasn’t really her business, but darn it, Change shouldn’t be happening anywhere, and this massive a Change couldn’t just be an accident that came out of someone’s dreams.
In fact, it would take more Gift than most AGS agents possessed. That size of change, and maybe it could be….
A low, warm flush ran through her body. Xavier? Was it him? Was he here? The records of Xavier de Varga said he had often entered the U.S. from Canada. Could it be the mysterious stranger who had terrified her at first, but who had proved to be her more-than-friend had actually returned? Damn man hadn’t shown his face since the Murdoch thing was over, and she’d been left hanging the last four months, waiting.
Well, I see you, Mister. And I’m coming for you.
She stabbed the coordinates and the map readjusted, the fine membrane shivering in a series of small waves that stilled into a view of a long Canadian fiord and a harbor—or the harbor it was becoming. She -reached- and her awareness slipped over the intervening landscape, and the ozone-and-ether stink of Change soured her nose. The map landscape shimmered as if the nanites that worked in the map couldn’t decide whether to be the trees that still stood there, or the metal tanks and pipelines that flickered into existence along the waterfront. The essence of the trees flowed out of the pine and spruce and became the metal pipes that cut back through trees that wisped away like smoke, and around the town eastward, the landscape reshaped. The Change had a metallic under taste of copper, not the scent of incense she knew as Xavier.
So it wasn’t him.
She almost pulled back, disappointed, but something about the place was familiar. It had been in the news. The town had to be Kitimat, and the pipeline that crawled across the shifting landscape had to be the Northern Gateway project that planned to have oil supertankers ply the western Canadian coastline on their way to China. The Canadian government must have gotten tired of all the protests and decided to simply put the pipeline and harbor in place. There’d been talk of doing something similar in the Midwest with the Keystone XL pipeline, but Gleason had refused, citing the AGS mandate and the secret U.S. legislation to maintain the landscape. But once the Canadian changes were in place long enough, the population would simply accept that they had always been there and the change would be fixed. Until then, though, there were going to be some pretty tired Canadian Gifted holding this change in place.
She sat back, shaking her head. The Gift wasn’t meant to be used like that; otherwise, there’d be no solid world to hold onto. The AGS’s total mandate was to hold America secure against just such attempts to Change the landscape to one party’s advantage. Heck, if terrorists ever got hold of the Gift, they could wreak havoc without an agency like the AGS to intervene.
She touched the computer console to bring the view back to Washington and Oregon. The new map wavered in the eastern sector as if it couldn’t quite find its form. Odd.
She -reached- into the map to steady it, but something interfered, like different wavelengths clashing.
That made no sense. The map was a closed environment except for its sensory connections to the landscape.
She -reached- further, her hands flying over the computer console. There were no plans for large Gifted activities in Washington that she’d been briefed on. A whiff of ozone and lightning tanged the air, and that shouldn’t be there, either. Something was happening. Her finger hovered above the radio call-button that would send an alert to all field agents.
Which was where she should be, instead of cooped up in this damned desk.
Where was the change? Nothing in Seattle, though small ripples ran through the map like water over ice. Nothing in Yakima or Wenatchee. She touched a button and the map expanded her viewpoint. Not the neck of Idaho, either, or Montana, though the ripples in the landscape were worse there. They became more intense the farther east she went, and the map shimmied dizzyingly below her.
What the hell was going on?
Vallon yanked her gaze back from the map and felt the earth’s slight tremor like a deeper shiver up her spine. Whatever it was, it was hellishly big to be outside Washington and Oregon and still so clearly felt. Change on a large scale and—
The room jerked. Jerked again and then settled into a steady shudder that set Vallon’s teeth rattling. Not huge, probably most people wouldn’t even feel it, but here on the desk and above the map, the vibrations cut through her concentration.
Quake, and a big one. Where?
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she broadened her search. Yellowstone wasn’t coming alive, thank God. The San Andreas hadn’t unzipped—the California Station would have been all over that. She -reached- out through the earth, past where the Yellowstone doomsday volcano still slumbered.
[Where?] She sent to the desk agents in L.A. and New York, the two main stations to Seattle’s headquarters. Instant awareness flooded into
[There.] Halston and Yamamoto fed her readings and she triangulated through the growing vibrations.
She followed the station lines toward their point of intersection, seeking, reaching. What was the source? What was happening?
Suddenly, the landscape churned around her. The map became a seething mass of tormented earth, of landscape rising and falling in waves, of earth exploding upwards. Steam and geysers blew up houses and cities. The force threw her back in her chair. An attack. It had to be.
Her hand slammed down on the large red emergency button on the left of the desk and she -reached- for the earth, for the tormented soil, for the houses, the towns, the cities that were wisping away. She would not let it happen. This was American soil, and she and the AGS were here to make sure shit like this didn’t happen.
She grabbed for the change but it was impossible to grasp. Too large, too powerful, and from too many directions at once. That didn’t make sense—
[Hold the cities and towns. Form a barrier.] She screamed at the L.A. and New York desk agents and felt them add their strength to the fight, but something dark rose out of the east. She stopped, trying to comprehend what she saw. A wave of Change. It grew as it neared.
Large, so large her brain could not comprehend it. It made her want to cover her head and run. Instead she reached out for it, would break it apart.
It slammed into her like a tsunami into a sandcastle. Seared cinnamon and burned almond and pomegranate assaulted her nose, and suddenly she was drowned in caustic Change. She floundered for purchase, fought for her feet, but the Change lifted her up and tossed her.
She slammed into her body and into the back of the desk’s chair. The desk wavered above the map and the air stank of ozone so thick it hurt to breathe as she hauled herself forward and over her console. The entire map vibrated with shock waves. Her head filled with agent voices demanding to know what was going on.
“Shut up. Just shut up. I’m working on it.”
No blasted Change was going to stop Vallon Drake from what needed to be done. She -reached- back into the earth and sped eastward again, prepared to do battle.
The Coastal Range and the Rockies wisped away one moment and thrust up taller the next. Denver fell and grew larger than it had ever been. She sped across the great plains, now an inland ocean, now not, the stink of ozone so powerful she could barely breathe. There! There another wave crashed outwards toward her and she drew on the earth’s rose-scented ley lines to feed into the landscape and hold it against Change. The new wave came on, eating away the landscape, wiping away everything, and leaving disaster in its wake. She held where she was as the wave grew. As it devoured everything and seemed to reach to the heavens as it met her. But she was not allowing it to go any further. The western landscape would hold with her. It would. She linked with the ley lines that ran like veins through the earth, but here, in the plains, they ran deep so that they pulsed like a lost lover’s remembered heartbeat. Much harder to feed her strength from something so difficult to access.
The wave crashed down like a mountain. Power and Change crisped her innards. A churning sea drowned her in overpowering fermented pomegranate, almond, and cinnamon. Who? Who would do such a thing? The power ripped her loose from the ley lines. She tumbled across the landscape. The Change seared like acid and then—was gone—disappeared as if it had never been except for a faint whiff of almonds.
Vallon gasped and slumped back into her body, the reek of cinnamon and almonds filling a huge burned-out place inside her. The map undulated as if some leviathan moved under the surface. But the ripples ceased and the map returned to normal. The room was normal, but so cold she might never be warm again, and the stink of ozone and ether were so thick her stomach churned. She fought to steady her breath and the hollow, empty feeling.
“What the hell was that, Drake?”
“What’s going on?”
“The whole flipping city winked out for a moment.”
“Vallon?”
“Vallon?”
“Vallon?”
Voices clamored in her headset.
“Just be quiet a moment. I’m trying to think,” she muttered and tried to slow her heart’s thunderous racing. What had just happened? So hard to think with the fluorescent light stabbing her eyes, and she wanted to stuff her hands in her ears to stop the noise. She yanked the headset off her head and dropped it on the seat beside her, her body throbbing with all the sensitivities that came with afterburn.
“Drake! Drake, get the damned desk down here, right now!”
The deep voice thundered into her poor injured brain. Chief Gleason never did have much sympathy for agents, even when they were suffering from afterburn. Correction, Deputy Chief, since the new management stepped in, though it didn’t seem to have affected his attitude.
“Drake? Do you hear me?”
She stirred in the desk and managed a nod, though movement sent fierce red bolts of pain right into her brain. She slid her hand across the curved console because she didn’t think she could lift it, touched the down button, then sagged back in her chair and kept her eyes shut against the vertigo that came as the desk swooped across the map and settled against its floor mooring. She didn’t move. It felt like her innards might just fall out of her eyes, or what was left of her could just disappear into the chasm of emptiness inside her. Shadows shifted around her—probably agents who had responded to her hitting the emergency button, but she couldn’t be sure.
A hand fell on her arm and she almost cried out at the surge of heat and awareness that came from the Gifted touch.
“Damn it all to hell, Drake! Warn a man when you’ve got afterburn. Gloves! I need gloves here.” And then someone had her by the shoulders and half-lifted her out of the desk console and stood her on unsteady feet. “Here. Drink this.”
A cold, mint-scented bottle was thrust into her hand. She stood there wavering, trying to understand how this had happened when she hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t had a chance.
“Would you drink the inhibitor before you fall down?” The growl of Gleason’s voice cut through her questions. She brought the bottle to her mouth and let the cool, cool liquid pour down her throat. It would help for a short time. Hopefully give her enough time to give her report before she collapsed.
Cool poured into the raging heat in her limbs. It filled her up like water, slowly working towards her head. She staggered back a step as the cold completed washing over her and opened her eyes just a slit.
Wrinkled blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie that hung too loose on a bony frame in front of her. Not like the usually neat and tidy Gleason at all. She followed the tie upwards to its neat oxford knot, and then higher, past the wrinkled neck to the cadaverous face that peered down at her through intense dark eyes over a roman nose that seemed to inhabit most of his face. His bald head reflected the fluorescent lights and his body radiated the scent of squeaky clean. Of course, all that intensity meant she probably wasn’t going to be able to find a corner, curl up, and either die or sleep.
“Report, Drake.”
Oh, yeah. So much for concern for her. That was Gleason.
“Something happened, Sir. Change. Eastward. I had to triangulate using L.A. and New York.” She felt everyone around her still. “That’s not the worst of it, Sir. It was huge. Massive.”
“We felt it.”
Of course they would have. Anyone with the Gift would. She paused to gather her thoughts, but the clack of crisp footfalls on the map room’s tile floors made her want to curl up with her hands over her head. Her sensitivity to light and sound had never been this bad before. What the heck was wrong with her?
“Gleason. What is going on here? Report.”
Her heart sank. Just what she didn’t need. It was bad enough having to deal w
“Well?” Amundson demanded.
She felt his gaze on her and how he stiffened when he recognized her. Yup, there was no love lost between her and the new Chief, ever since she’d eluded him during the Murdoch affair.
“It seems our Agent Drake had to deal with an earthquake. As you can tell, it has hit her quite hard.”
What the…? No simple earthquake would do this to her. Not to her. What was Gleason thinking?
She opened her eyes in time to see Gleason’s bony six-foot-four frame step between her and Wolf Amundson and then ease the new AGS Chief away.
Gleason lowered his head down to Amundson’s slightly shorter blonde one. “This is her first day back to work. If I’d known she was still so weak, I would not have allowed her to return; and I certainly wouldn’t have put her on the desk.”
“You would not have allowed it?”
Gleason seemed to freeze. There was a hole in the murmurs of the agents in the room, and then Gleason inhaled and looked at the other man. “I know you wanted all agents back to work, but I am still in charge of administrative matters such as illness leaves.”
It was like watching two tectonic plates grind against each other, or the posturing of sumo wrestlers. For a moment Vallon’s mind played with placing sumo wrestling attire on the two men. She stifled a giggle—damned inhibitor actually did exactly the opposite and loosened the bonds she placed on her tongue.
“For now,” Amundson allowed. “I want a full report on my desk before the day’s out.” His solid frame almost vibrated with the need to knock down his adversary. His pale blue gaze locked on Vallon and she had to look away from the hate. “Immediately. Before she goes home.”
“Of course.” Gleason nodded, his bald head looking almost too big for his shoulders. He stood there, hunch shouldered, until Amundson stalked to the lone office that gave onto the map room and closed the door behind him.
The door clicked shut and Vallon’s knees gave way.