The Law of Averages

Chapter 88

Dan stared at the small flip phone that Anastasia had left on his coffee table. It was the only remnant of her passing, having established both his cooperation and her granddaughter’s continued safety. And having taken all of the vigilante gear stored beneath his house. Dan had wanted to protest this point, but could produce no better reason than, “I want it.”

He wasn’t a scientist. It wasn’t like he could reproduce any of the special qualities that the outfits might have. And even if he could, what the hell would he do with it? Better to not have the temptation to act like an idiot. Giving up the equipment without argument may have won him a few points in Anastasia’s book, though it was impossible to know for certain. She seemed to delight in being unreadable. Her moods swung as wildly as Abby’s, but there was something deeper behind it. Something controlled. Something beyond dangerous.

So Dan planned on cooperating with Abby’s overbearing, psychotic, murderous grandmother, but that didn’t mean he was willing to roll over and obey her every whim. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the best position to deny her. Putting aside the moral quandary of ignoring the Matilda situation—A quandary that Abby continued to insist did not exist—and telling the old woman to fuck off, he still needed a way to keep her from butting into his life. Or, failing that, Dan at least needed a stronger shield against trouble than Abby’s fondness for him.

The disbelief that Anastasia had displayed towards his circumstances was a comfort, at least. Dan had always harbored a not particularly subtle worry that someone would just… figure him out. That some random cop on the street would take a single look at him and think, “That guy ain’t from around here! He must be from a parallel universe!”

Texas was not overly fond of illegal immigrants. The method of arrival was not necessarily relevant.

With Anastasia’s instant dismissal of his story, some of that worry was eased. Granted, Dan couldn’t even begin to judge how sincere the crafty old woman was being with him. It was entirely possible she had begun working on a method to cripple his teleportation the instant that she’d returned to her mansion. It was possible that, even now, she was planning on capturing him and dissecting him the instant Abby’s attention was directed elsewhere.

Fear, slick and cold and oily, slithered through his veins at the thought. He couldn’t stop the shivers.

Dan needed a backup plan. He needed another person in his corner.

He needed Marcus.

Dan’s feet touched down on a metal corridor, a short walk from his quarters. He preferred this spot as his landing pad. It was out of the way, with little chance of running into an experiment gone awry, and beautiful. To his left, a massive window looked down upon Neptune. The stars beyond the planet twinkled like gemstones, leaving starbursts in Dan’s eyes as he glanced away. He loved this view; he could stare at it, enraptured, for hours, but there were things that needed doing. Marcus had to be brought into the loop. He deserved an update at the very least.

The station was quiet as a grave, as was its wont. On some days, the sound of angry cursing might propagate through the cold hallways, but silence was and has always been the predominant sound. But there was something different about it this time, Dan noticed with creeping disquiet. Something off that he couldn’t quite identify.

The station had a melody of its own, sung through the soft hum of electric lights and the soft hiss of flowing air. The current quiet was so all-encompassing that it was almost supernatural. Dan breathed out in a quiet gasp, his mind finally processing what his eyes were telling him. The lights, he realized, were dim. In the distance, he could see one flicker, then die.

That had never happened before. It was something new. And new events occurring on an nearly empty space station at the edges of the solar system were rarely good. He moved onward with cautious haste, towards the main laboratory. He haphazardly stripped off his outer jacket, only now registering the heat. There were drops of water condensing on the corners of the vast window into space. Dan couldn’t hear the air conditioning. There was no air flow.

He came before a sliding door. A simple entrance leading from one section of the station into the next. It was motion sensitive, like everything aboard the station. Dan expected it to hiss at him like a pissed off cat, then move out of his way, in the same manner that it had a hundred other times before.

It remained silent. Still.

With a frown, he tentatively pressed the back of his hand against it, almost flinching away at the warm temperature of the steel. What was beyond was anybody’s guess. The door wasn’t vacuum-locked. Marcus had expatiated his various complaints about the design of the station with gusto, the one time Dan had thought to ask. It should be safe to teleport beyond it. Should. He wasn’t really willing to bet his welfare on a should. Time to run a quick experiment. He’d never actually tested his power in a vacuum.

Dan moved to the window, and pressed his palm against the glass. It was cool to the touch, and getting colder. His veil peeled itself free from his skin, piercing through the glass and into space. It was like hitting a solid wall. A vast nothing. His veil flailed against it, aimlessly searching for a way to extend itself. Water, crashing against stone. Perhaps it too, in time, could weather away the resistance. Either way, Dan now knew what a vacuum felt like to his power.

He pressed another hand against the uncooperative door. His veil dove into it, past it, slowing to a crawl but advancing. Dan willed himself to the other side. He found the corridor beyond him to be dimly lit, washed out by the dull red of emergency lighting. An old warning echoed through Dan’s mind, something that Marcus had told him while he was adjusting to his situation. A restriction on his movements.

“Never teleport past this point,” Marcus had said, while marking out a specific door. It had been an unremarkable location by all appearances, another steel door in a long series of steel doors. This one, however, had been different. It led to the section of the station where the reactor was housed. The station was nuclear powered. And the power was currently failing.

Dan’s cautious stride became more of an urgent jog. If there was something wrong with the reactor— well, there was nothing Dan could do about that. He would’ve hoped that there would be more noise if something critical had gone wrong. An alarm, at the least, seemed like a sensible precaution. The eerie silence weighed his thoughts in a different direction.

The door to Marcus’ lab was as immobile as the rest. Dan didn’t bother slowing down this time, taking only enough time to establish that there was atmosphere on the other side before teleporting. He found himself in a sprawling empty room. The piles of scrap metal, the flat tables, even the spare power generators that had been nestled in the corner of the room, all gone. The window into the Gap was missing, with only a scorched black circle near the center of the room left to mark its passing.

“Fuck,” Dan summarized.

He turned on his heel, vanishing into t-space.

==

“Gone?” Abby asked incredulously.

“Gone,” Dan grimly confirmed. “Went and done a runner. No note. No warning. He just… up and left.”

Abby frowned. “Did grandma cause this somehow?”

“Who knows?” Dan replied with a shrug. He leaned backwards, sinking into the cushions of his living room couch. Abby sat beside him, tucked into his side, gnawing worriedly at her lip.

“The timing certainly matches,” Dan mused aloud, rubbing his brow tiredly. “The emergency power should only keep the lights on for a day or two. After that, it’s down to basic life support.” Meaning further trips to the station would be incredibly inconvenient, if not outright dangerous. Dan couldn’t be sure how long the power would really last. “He took damn near everything, too. Even his old newspapers.” And his test subjects, and all the food. Merrill’s little lab buddies were long gone.

Abby stiffened beside him. “You think— is he maybe coming here? To Earth?”

“I don’t know,” Dan admitted, shaking his head. “There’s nothing here for him, though. At least, that’s the feeling I always got. The man carried a lot of regrets, but not much he could do with them. Not a lot of unfinished business around here. Pretty much everyone he knows is dead by now.”

“Only grandma is left,” Abby murmured to herself.

Dan gave another sigh, briefly indulging in a moment of self-pity. He was a little disappointed by how unaffected he felt. Marcus had been a major figure in his life, despite their short acquaintance. The man had taught him how to be better. He was, in every sense, a beloved mentor. He was also a bitter old asshole, with a shady past and inscrutable motives. Dan trusted him more than Anastasia, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot.

“So plan A is out,” Dan announced, clapping his hands together. The sharp noised cleared away the cobwebs in his mind. His goal still remained. He needed some kind of ace in the hole against Anastasia. Something he could pull out in case of her trying to blackmail him. His origins, his lack of an identity, hung over him like the sword of Damocles. Anastasia Summers was no Matilda Fairbanks. If she wanted to draw attention to Dan, that attention would stick. She had the money and the influence for something that simple. Should the blade fall, he needed a plan. Simply leaving was always an option, but he refused to uproot the life he had built in a fit of pique. He had worked too hard for that. He had hoped Marcus could help him come up with a plan, but that was clearly not going to happen.

Which left plan B. What the hell was plan B?

Abby sucked in a slow breath, and let it out with a shaky rattle. “I can call my brother, ask him to get you a more solid background. He’s got… people. Jason basically only has as much power as grandma gives him, but if he gets involved I doubt she’ll act against you. She wouldn’t risk it getting out. It might embarrass the company. He’d help me, if I owe him a favor.”

That favor would likely manifest as something deeply unpleasant for Abby. A public appearance, most likely. She hadn’t made many of those. Her face was a relative unknown, despite being essentially a billionaire heiress to a Fortune 500 company. Jason Summers had come off as a man who was overworked, in over his head, and a little callous. Dan wouldn’t put it past the man to use his little sister as a PR tool, whether he needed the good press or not.

“No,” Dan decided. “Don’t do that.”

It was, more than anything, a matter of pride. He didn’t want to put Abby in an awkward position regarding Anastasia. Not for him. He wouldn’t force Abby into a situation where she had to betray the trust of her grandmother. The old woman, crazy as she was, had practically raised Dan’s girlfriend. This was, he realized with some amusement, essentially like dealing with a cranky mother-in-law. Maybe it was better to treat it like that. To assume that, rather than outright hating him, the old woman simply thought Dan unsuitable for her golden child.

She didn’t suspect him of anything nefarious anymore, that much was obvious. Dan would currently be splattered across his living room if that wasn’t the case. There was simply no chance that vicious, overprotective, helicopter-grandma Anastasia Summers would ever leave her precious granddaughter alone with someone who would intentionally bring the girl harm. It was a revelation that brought no small amount of relief to him.

What then, was this nonsense about Matilda? Why did she want him, of all people, interfering in this mess? A test? That couldn’t be right. The hatred with which she spoke of the People was entirely real. She wouldn’t leave it to bumbling, stumbling Daniel Newman to root out an old enemy. There had to be something else at play.

Didn’t there?

He didn’t have enough information. It was frustrating, trying to pick apart motives that he couldn’t begin to even decipher. An exercise in futility. Dan breathed in deep and slow, keeping a steady rhythm.

Focus. A new plan. How could he do this?

His impulsive agreement to Anastasia’s demands seemed insane, now. He could barely comprehend what had been going through his mind. It had felt as if the responsibility of the entire situation was solely on his shoulders. The knowledge of what could happen had weighed on him, like an invisible weight wrapped around his heart. It had been on him to act, him alone, and that pressure had made him agree to something profoundly stup—

Oh.

Ohhh.

That bitch.

Was a coerced agreement really an agreement? Dan doubted Anastasia would see things his way. The woman seemed to favor aggressive negotiations. It clarified some things for him, though. He had agreed to keep seeing Matilda, to cooperate with her, until such time that she was forced to bring him to her shady backer. And he had agreed to not inform any member of the APD about Matilda’s situation. That was all. There was a lot of unspoken stuff hidden in the agreement, but in light of this new revelation, Dan had elected to ignore that.

Dan blinked, then grinned. He found Abby’s eyes, and laughed.

“Let’s hang out with some friends, tonight,” he said, reaching down to squeeze her hand. “You call Freya, I’ll call Graham.”

The thing about blackmail, is you only get to use it once. Would Anastasia really give up her best leverage on him for this? Dan doubted it. He wouldn’t tell his friends everything, he didn’t know them well enough or long enough for that, but he could lay out some suspicions about Matilda. Talk it over, get an opinion from people close to law enforcement. It would be enough to guide him forward.

Worst case scenario, Anastasia returns in a huff. Hell, Connor had wanted to meet the old lady anyway. Maybe some honest groveling would soften her up.