Read Online Ruthless by Robert J. Crane - Free Book Online Page A

the parallel was not lost on me.
    Reed sat back, looking hideously uncomfortable. “It’s just not right. It’s like those Russians they dug out of that Siberian prison a few months ago.” He stared at me. “You know what I’m talking about?”
    “It would have been hard to miss,” I said. They’d been on pretty much every news broadcast, and I’d gotten email forwards from what seemed like everyone in the government from the White House on down. It was turning into a real human interest story, the tale of four metas locked up by the Soviet Union for mysterious and unremembered crimes, left to rot for thirty years and through multiple regime changes. I had enough requests for comment from reporters that printing them all out would have deforested ten planet Earths.
    “Justice systems that take place in the darkness are not typically—” he began.
    “Oh, enough already,” I snapped at him. “God save me from hapless idealists. What would you prefer we do with him?” I tilted my head to indicate Simmons. “Let him go?”
    “No,” Reed said, looking like he was about to deliver a punchline of his own, “that’s the kind of thinking that causes the death of Uncle Ben.” He paused and looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, not the rice guy.”
    “I got it.”
    “I’m not saying these people aren’t guilty as hell,” Reed said gently, “and I’m not saying they don’t deserve what we’re giving them right now and worse.”
    “Then what are you saying?” I asked, feeling the plane shift directions again. The shawarma was not settling well. Or was it the conversation?
    “We have a justice system for a reason,” he said. “With penalties civil and criminal—”
    “That these guys wouldn’t fit into at all,” I said. I laughed, but there was zero joy in it. “Try and imagine sticking them in—I dunno, the Stillwater prison. Human guards, meta prisoners. Give them their hour of exercise or whatever every day, under the supervision of normal people, and see how long it takes for Simmons or—” A particularly malicious thought occurred to me, “or your boy Anselmo,” I watched him blanch almost imperceptibly, “to break out.” I folded my arms in front of me. “The guards don’t even carry guns in human prisons, Reed. They’d be completely defenseless against what these guys could unleash. It’d be like taking a prison population and giving them all guns and telling the guards they had to go in with nothing.”
    “I don’t have a solution, okay?” Reed said, and it was not a question. “I’m just suggesting that we’re making trade-offs that should be examined. In this case, we’re putting people in a black box without—”
    “I know what we’re doing,” I said, in a tone that suggested I was so far done with this conversation that I didn’t even want to look back at it.
    “Do you?” he asked. “Do you really?”
    I tilted my head to look at him. “Unless you’ve got a better idea?”
    He looked like he was going to argue more, but his voice fell. “The guy who got those Russians out? He was part of an organization called ‘Limited People.’”
    I wanted to roll my eyes, but didn’t. “Great name for a human group.”
    Reed held his silence for a second. “It’s from a quote. ‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’” This time I did roll my eyes. “You don’t think it’s true?” he asked.
    “I think it’s a really great piece of fortune-cookie wisdom from someone who’s never had to deal with running a prison for people who fall outside the realms of ordinary law and power,” I said with a slight growl. “I mean, really, has there ever been a system devised to take into account these extraordinary circumstances?” I shot him a look of fire, feeling like I was burning as I looked at him. “Has there ever been this great a threat to basic security?”
    “There’s always a threat, Sienna,” he