I smiled and shut the door.
Chapter 13
I snuck up on Webster without him even realizing it. He was studying something on his computer, staring at it like it contained the very secrets of life. He had on earphones and was bent over as if he were listening to the very secrets of the universe.
Or he could have been watching porn on the internet. He was certainly hunched over enough for it.
The bullpen had cleared out; the few windows provided a sweeping view of the darkness falling outside. The smell of coffee that had been so strong earlier in the day had faded along with the volume of noise in the room. I saw other people coming in now, maybe the night shift, and heads were down as people worked on computers or paperwork. I approached Webster.
When I got close enough to see his computer, I knew why he had the headphones in. He was on YouTube, watching an interview from NNC, the National News Channel. It was a couple years old, but I recognized it immediately.
Since I was the one being interviewed.
I could remember almost every word like it had happened yesterday. I watched the interviewer, Gail Roth, asking a question, and even without reading her lips, I knew what she was saying. That moment was etched in my mind, along with the slightly burnt smell of the hot lights in the studio, the scent of the makeup they’d spackled on my face that made me feel like a geisha, and the sense that the air conditioning in the room was in a perpetual and losing battle with the heat coming off the lighting rigs.
“Why you?” Gail Roth asked me. I watched her lips flap in time with the question, and I could hear her words in my head. She had blondish-brown hair and enough of the look of youth still about her that she wasn’t going to be kicked off the national newscasts for the crime of aging just yet.
“Why not me?” I asked as the camera shifted angles to catch my reaction. I had gently taken Gail’s question and lobbed it back at her. Reed had taught me how to do it, said it was a sales technique called a porcupine. I hadn’t asked him how he’d known that.
“You’re… nineteen years old?” Gail asked, and waited for my nod. “You’ve just saved millions of people from a tyrant who supposedly had enough power to take over the world—”
“Yes, he did,” I said, interrupting her to confirm that little fact for her. Sovereign definitely had the power to take over the world. I’d seen what would have happened if he’d gotten his way. Enough power was not his problem.
Gail paused, eyes searching me as she made a face to play for the camera. “You have to understand, for the viewers at home… we’re taking a lot of this on faith. Everyone’s seen the footage from the battle over Minneapolis, which was—incredible. Scarcely believable. The sort of thing you’d see in a Hollywood summer tentpole, not the evening news. You turned into an enormous, flaming dragon—”
“I’d just like to point out,” I said, interrupting her again, “that the camera adds ten pounds, and there were an awful lot of cameras pointing at me that day. Like… all of them, I think.”
“You turned into a giant dragon,” Gail Roth said, not breaking away. Her gaze was annoyingly penetrating. And not in any kind of good way. “You burst into flames. And you killed a man—”
“A very bad one, but yes,” I said, nodding. “Again, just for the record, I did try very hard to get him to surrender first.”
She settled into her chair, shifting to the right. “What were you talking about with him up there? While you were fighting?”
“Geopolitics,” I said with a straight face. “State-of-the-world-type stuff.”
She blinked once, and that was all the reaction she gave that the answer might not be what she expected. “How so?”
“Well, Sovereign was of the opinion that people are in need of… stewardship,” I said. “That they should be made to fear in order to keep them between the lines. That he could build a
Chapter 13
I snuck up on Webster without him even realizing it. He was studying something on his computer, staring at it like it contained the very secrets of life. He had on earphones and was bent over as if he were listening to the very secrets of the universe.
Or he could have been watching porn on the internet. He was certainly hunched over enough for it.
The bullpen had cleared out; the few windows provided a sweeping view of the darkness falling outside. The smell of coffee that had been so strong earlier in the day had faded along with the volume of noise in the room. I saw other people coming in now, maybe the night shift, and heads were down as people worked on computers or paperwork. I approached Webster.
When I got close enough to see his computer, I knew why he had the headphones in. He was on YouTube, watching an interview from NNC, the National News Channel. It was a couple years old, but I recognized it immediately.
Since I was the one being interviewed.
I could remember almost every word like it had happened yesterday. I watched the interviewer, Gail Roth, asking a question, and even without reading her lips, I knew what she was saying. That moment was etched in my mind, along with the slightly burnt smell of the hot lights in the studio, the scent of the makeup they’d spackled on my face that made me feel like a geisha, and the sense that the air conditioning in the room was in a perpetual and losing battle with the heat coming off the lighting rigs.
“Why you?” Gail Roth asked me. I watched her lips flap in time with the question, and I could hear her words in my head. She had blondish-brown hair and enough of the look of youth still about her that she wasn’t going to be kicked off the national newscasts for the crime of aging just yet.
“Why not me?” I asked as the camera shifted angles to catch my reaction. I had gently taken Gail’s question and lobbed it back at her. Reed had taught me how to do it, said it was a sales technique called a porcupine. I hadn’t asked him how he’d known that.
“You’re… nineteen years old?” Gail asked, and waited for my nod. “You’ve just saved millions of people from a tyrant who supposedly had enough power to take over the world—”
“Yes, he did,” I said, interrupting her to confirm that little fact for her. Sovereign definitely had the power to take over the world. I’d seen what would have happened if he’d gotten his way. Enough power was not his problem.
Gail paused, eyes searching me as she made a face to play for the camera. “You have to understand, for the viewers at home… we’re taking a lot of this on faith. Everyone’s seen the footage from the battle over Minneapolis, which was—incredible. Scarcely believable. The sort of thing you’d see in a Hollywood summer tentpole, not the evening news. You turned into an enormous, flaming dragon—”
“I’d just like to point out,” I said, interrupting her again, “that the camera adds ten pounds, and there were an awful lot of cameras pointing at me that day. Like… all of them, I think.”
“You turned into a giant dragon,” Gail Roth said, not breaking away. Her gaze was annoyingly penetrating. And not in any kind of good way. “You burst into flames. And you killed a man—”
“A very bad one, but yes,” I said, nodding. “Again, just for the record, I did try very hard to get him to surrender first.”
She settled into her chair, shifting to the right. “What were you talking about with him up there? While you were fighting?”
“Geopolitics,” I said with a straight face. “State-of-the-world-type stuff.”
She blinked once, and that was all the reaction she gave that the answer might not be what she expected. “How so?”
“Well, Sovereign was of the opinion that people are in need of… stewardship,” I said. “That they should be made to fear in order to keep them between the lines. That he could build a
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