The police lights were flashing all around us, and Calderon was making the rounds with a sour look on his face. He hadn't talked to me yet, but I presumed that was going to be a marvelous conversation, one which would lead anyone watching to the conclusion we hated each other rather than that we had really quite enjoyed each other's company less than twelve hours ago. Things moved quickly for me, I guess. Always in the wrong direction, but quickly.

I shuffled toward Augustus. I didn't mind complete silence when I was alone, but it sorta drove me nuts when I was standing in the middle of a crowd. And it was getting crowded, to the point where I could actually feel the souls of the people moving around me, like they were all within arm's reach and I could just reach out and grab them one by one.

Which was not a power I had, thankfully, but it did make me want to just start grabbing people and drinking them dry of their souls. Never a good sign.

"How are you holding up?" I asked him, almost as much to distract myself as to be nice. I was still a little tentative after our previous conversation, after all. Gun shy, I think you could call it. I doubted he wanted much from me at the moment.

"I just killed those guys," he said, shaking his head.

"First time's always rough," I said, standing over him and watching the scene. Calderon didn't even look at me.

"Oh, you remember that, do you?" He was appropriately snotty for the situation, I thought, so I didn't hold it against him.

"Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, yeah," I said.

He looked up at me. "What about you?" he asked, a little grudgingly. He genuinely was a nice guy, and he didn't even have to pretend.

"I've had better days," I said.

"Oh, yeah? Still stinging from our argument?"

I eyed him. "It was not my favorite conversation ever, but I've had two I'd class as worse since then."

He looked up at me and frowned. "What happened?" He nodded his head toward Calderon. "You and the brother over there have a tiff?"

I sighed. "It wasn't a tiff, okay? It had nothing to do with us sleeping together." I snorted. "Hell, if I could have told Cordell Weldon I slept with Calderon, maybe he wouldn't have accused me of being a racist." Nah. He still would have.

"Wait, whut?" Augustus's eyebrows rocketed skyward. "What'd you do to Mr. Weldon?"

"I didn't do anything to him-"

"That man is a community leader," Augustus said, about half a step from bawling.

"That man is piece of human excrement," I said. "He tried to shake me down."

"What?"

"He implied," I said, choosing my words carefully, "that if I didn't get some agency money and time and cooperation to flow in the direction of his organization, he was going to aid the press in vilifying me even further by saying I was a racist. I can't imagine what the next accusation to come my way will be. What's left? Bestiality?"

"Cordell Weldon did not threaten to paint you as a racist," Augustus snapped.

"I think he did," I said. "And he got really defensive when I even brought up the fact that Flora Romero's shelter was one that his organizations run, and that at least two of our skeletons were regulars at."

Augustus just blinked. "I can't imagine why he would be upset at that implication."

"He didn't get upset," I said, "he got irate and defensive, like I'd just tried to shake him down. And then he proceeded to call the mayor, who called the chief of police, who then crapped from his higher perch upon Calderon, and et voila, here we are."

"You are the cause of most of your own damned problems," Augustus said. "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to approach things with some subtlety?"

"Not really," I said. "But I fail to see what was subtle about Weldon suggesting to me that the 'race image problems' I haven't actually had yet could just be vanished away with some money pushed in his direction."

"Maybe you should hire more black people," Augustus snapped. "Just a solution off the top of my head."

I felt my eye twitch. "You want a job?"

"With you? Hell, no."

"Well, if you run into any more African-American metahumans, send them my way," I said. "Personally, I haven't had much luck locking down all three of those categories since the war, but then I've also seen a fairly big outflux of my white employees too."

"Maybe it's your managerial style," he said. "Did you learn it from Sun-Tzu's The Art of War?"

"Sun-Tzu actually had some pretty good advice in there, and no-no, I did not."

"I see you two are picking up where he and these clowns left off," Calderon said, stepping up to us right in the middle of our little quibble.

"We haven't started ripping up the streets and throwing fire at each other yet," I said, "so count your blessings."

"Have you had a phone call from your headquarters yet?" Calderon asked me, looking daggers in my direction.

I fished it out of my pocket. Twelve missed calls. "Probably a few," I said.

"Don't you think you should answer them?"

"I feel like I need a vacation," I said, smiling sweetly. "Minnesota is so cold, you know."

"It's June."

"Yeah," I said, "it's like ... 75 degrees there right now. Frigid."

"You aren't going to find anything else here but problems," Calderon said. "Your investigation? Has turned up nothing except a lot of corpses I can't get answers on. I would have been better off if you hadn't showed up. This whole thing is radioactive now."

"Good news," I said. "Radioactive doesn't bother me. Advanced healing takes care of it, see. Let me handle it all."

Calderon made a grunt of frustration and stalked off. "You really do bring out the worst in people, don't you?" Augustus asked as we watched him storm away.

"You should see me and my boss," I said.

"I don't think I want to," he said. "I live a nice, drama-free life. Or I did, until-"

"I showed up?" I suggested, heading that one off before he could get it out.

"Until I developed these powers," he said. "Without them, I'd be at work right now." He paused, and I caught a hint of uncertainty about something from him.

"What?" I asked.

He hesitated, like he was trying to decide. "I talked to Roscoe Marion's widow."

"And?"

"I used to work with him," he said, "on the line at Cavanagh Tech-the factory."

I waited. "Uh huh ..."

"She said he was still working at Cavanagh," Augustus said, "but he'd gotten promoted. Trouble is, he didn't get promoted the traditional way, to, like, line lead or super. She said he got promoted to work in an off-site lab working with biological research."

I shrugged. "Still not seeing it."

"Cavanagh Tech doesn't do bioresearch. They're a mechanical and software tech company." He raised his hands in an expansive shrug. "It's not listed on the website, and Edward Cavanagh himself said to me this morning that they weren't in the biotech arena."

It was my turn to frown. "You called him and asked him this?"

"No," he said. "He came over to my line and offered me help, gave me time off, complimented me and-I don't remember how it came up, but he said something like, 'I wish we were in the biotech business so we could'-partner on something, maybe. I don't know."

I felt a rising tide of surprise. "That's really interesting, because apparently the Atlanta press is speculating I want to meet Edward Cavanagh and beat his ass at the moment-"

"Is there anyone whose ass you don't want to beat?" he asked in exasperation.

"Yours, until just now," I quipped. "But listen-the reason why they think I want to beat his ass is because apparently Cavanagh Tech developed that chemical weapon that suppresses meta powers."

"That thing they used at your headquarters?" he said. "That thing the Russians stole?"

"Exactly," I said. "So tell me how your mechanical engineering company developed a bioweapon if they don't work in that realm? Because I doubt it was a printer toner experiment gone wrong."

Augustus held a hand up over his mouth, face locked in serious thought. "Damn," he said quietly.

"Damn, indeed," I said and noticed for the first time a thin puff of black smoke in the distance, to the west. It was a little pillar, stretching up into the hot midday sky. The sun was beating down on me, making me sweat, and that black smoke just seemed ... out of place somehow. I took a sniff and it came home for me at once-something was on fire.

"Hey," I called out to the nearest cop, "what's up with the fire?" I pointed to the column of smoke in the distance.

"House fire south of 278," he said nodding his head. "Four alarm."

Augustus's head came up at that, and he launched off the curb like his ass was spring-loaded. "Where is it? Exactly?"

The cop just shrugged. "Not sure. Somewhere near Pelham, I think."

I saw Augustus's pleading eyes turn toward me, and he whispered only one word, one that told me immediately what he was thinking: "Momma."

I scooped him up with one arm and launched us both into the air, centering on that column of black smoke and racing toward it, hoping that what we found wouldn't make things even worse for him than they already were.

Augustus The wind rushed past my face, and I didn't even care that I was being carried along by a girl that was, like, five foot nothing. I could see the billowing smoke ahead as we shot across the sky, and the closer we got, the surer I was, until we finally came down for a gentle landing on the street in front of my house.

The place was engulfed, fire raging out of every window, black smoke clouding the air and making its way up in thick, continuous bursts. I started toward the front door, which was practically gushing flame, and felt a strong hand on my shoulder that threw me backward in something less than a courteous manner.

"Hold on," Sienna said, and she rose into the air as I watched, biting back a stream of curses and a desire to shove her in reprisal. She floated toward the fire and her hands came out. "Gavrikov," she whispered, so low it was barely audible over the howl of sirens and cries of the crowd.

The fire crackled and burned, a wave of heat coming off my home like I'd stepped too close to an open oven. Sienna hovered there for a moment, and then I saw what she was doing as her powers started to work.

The fire was sucked toward her like she'd grabbed all the oxygen in the area and fed it along a pre-assigned path. It shot toward her hands, blazingly fast, curling like fiery tornadoes as it made its way toward her, swirling into her palms and dissipating into smoke as it made contact with her flesh. Her hands burned like they were aflame as she drew it all in, every bit of it, and I watched a tongue of flame the size of a concrete pillar fork off from the rest and head toward her face. She breathed it in like a reverse dragon, drawing it to her and out of my home. It came from every window, from the roof, and she pulled every bit of it into her body as she hovered there.

Within sixty seconds, every bit of the fire that had raged in my home was gone, and all that was left was the billowing black clouds, which still came, but lighter now, deprived of their heat source.

The crowd was quiet, the roar of the flames was gone, and as Sienna fell to a knee on the lawn, I heard a different buzz start. It sounded like amazement at first, surprise, and it was and startled. It was a chorus of voices talking with each other, over each other, around each other, in a way I hadn't been able to distinguish before I got my powers.

"That's her-"

"-she put it out-"

"-you see what she did to that dude in New York?"

"-wouldn't want to cross her-"

"-she's a bad, bad bitch-"

"Why doesn't she do that more often? Seems like she could help a lot more people putting out fires than-"

"-read about her in that magazine, how she-"

"-but she sure doesn't look like Katrina Forrest, amirite?"

"Are you okay?" I asked, taking a couple steps toward her.

"I oughta be asking you that," she said, and then she coughed, a long, hacking cough that belched out black smoke from her mouth.

"I'm not the one who just inhaled a whole house full of carcinogens," I said.

"I did not," she said, trying to get back to her feet.

"You realize that the fire was burning like-the cleaning fluid under the sink, the insulation in the walls, the treatment on the wood they built the house with? So ... yeah, you kinda did."

She coughed again. "Should have just used the hands, I guess. Felt like breathing in the fire would dispel it faster." She looked at me. Her eyes were bloodshot. "What about your mom?"

"I'm over here," came Momma's voice from behind me. I spun and she was there, a blanket around her even though it was ninety degrees outside. "I'm fine."

I felt a quick rush of relief that was replaced by panic. "Where's Jamal?"

"Wasn't home," she said, shaking her head. "I checked his room before I got out."

"Where is he?" I asked, taking a few steps closer.

"I don't know," she said. "But he's not here."