It didn’t take Cal long enough to realize what was going on. “What the hell just happened here?” Cal asked, sitting a little more upright. He seemed older and grayer, maybe around fifty years old now — maybe he was using whatever Yushchenko had left to trade age for healing.
“Yushchenko… turned on us. Just get as much… as you can,” Frank said, seemingly struggling with the transfer.
“You all right, Frank?” Maggie asked, a bit more loudly than she should have.
“Trying to… get it all,” Frank said. “There’s a lot.”
Cal gingerly got to his feet. He looked like a hale, strong middle-aged man — she wondered if he had looked like that back when he was working at the Firestone plant. “What now?”
Maggie tossed the rifle down toward him, which he caught. “Check on Ellis. See what you can do. It’s bad.”
Cal immediately rushed over to Ellis’s side and looked under the bloody coat across his stomach. He stretched a hand over that area and closed his eyes for a few seconds. “Gonna take a lot just to make sure he don’t die,” Cal said. Maggie could practically see the concern radiating off him — genuine concern about a man who always seemed to feel nothing but contempt for Cal.
Frank finally straightened up a bit, grabbing something from Yushchenko’s pocket before standing up. “Can you just get him stable for a minute or two?” he asked.
“Maybe. Gonna take something out of me, though, for sure. Why?”
“Just do it. Maggie, hold fire.”
“What do you mean, ‘hold fire’?” she demanded, her shock receding, replaced with thoughts of revenge.
Frank looked up at her. “Don’t fire the fucking rifle, and stand down on your Enhancement, too.”
She put the rifle down, reluctantly, and reached out toward his feelings. “You have a plan. You’re scared. But also… I don’t know what.”
“It’s called hopeful,” Frank said with a slight grin. “Try it sometime. Cal, go ahead and stabilize Ellis, but make sure you can still run a bit if we need to do that.”
As Cal placed a hand on Ellis once more and began praying, Frank lifted his head and shouted in Russian. “My sdayemsya! Prikhodite, brat’ya i sestry!”
A minute later, they were surrounded by soldiers with guns — and four others, two of whom Cal had already met. One was the once-teenage Variant who could disappear and reappear; he seemed to be stable at a healthy sixty or so — about where Cal was now, given that he had managed to keep that damn fool Ellis from dying. The boy-turned-old-man fixed Cal with a righteous glare of anger.
Then there was the little Superman-girl. Whatever anger she had about her brother seemed spent for now, and she eyed the MAJESTIC-12 agents with a kind of detached curiosity. Cal figured it was the kind of look she had when she looked at ants under a magnifying glass — right before the glass caught the sunlight and fried them.
Third one was a bulky fellow, kind of Asian-looking, almost Eskimo, really. He had a bandage tied around his arm and a gun in his hand. Cal couldn’t really say much more about him than that, other than that he kind of looked like a big statue — emotionless. He wore a dark suit that seemed to stretch across his body like a canvas on a frame.
And finally, there was a middle-aged, severe-looking woman, blond-haired and dressed in a jumpsuit — kind of like the coveralls Cal had had to wear in some of his factory jobs, but this lady’s was formfitting to the point of being almost indecent. Cal had to admit she wore it well, but admonished himself for the thought. Then again, his list of prayers was growing real long, and his time to pray was running short.
Ellis groaned slightly, and Cal knelt down beside him again. “Doing what I can, Mr. Longstreet. I think Frank’s gonna try to get me some livestock or something, and I’ll fix you up, all right?”
Ellis’s eyelids fluttered open. “Why am I still laid up?” he muttered, brow furrowed.
“Ain’t got the gas in the tank to get you where you need to go yet,” Cal replied. “You just rest there, and I promise we’ll get you taken care of.”
Ellis seemed like he wanted to say a little bit more, but fact was, he didn’t have the strength, and he fell unconscious again within a few seconds. Cal sighed and looked over to Frank. Whatever he had planned, it had better work.
“This does not look like surrender,” the woman said in English. “Your weapons are not on the ground.”
“She is Maria Ivanovna Savrova. Her ability is to track a single individual once she has touched him. Do not let her touch you!” Yushchenko said in Frank’s head. “She tracked me, forcing you to be constantly on the run, in a position where you could not gain intelligence from me easily.”
Frank nodded at Savrova. “We are brothers and sisters, are we not, Maria?” Frank replied in perfect Russian. “We are all Empowered.”
Savrova and the kid traded a look. “How do you know her name?” the girl demanded.
“The same way I know yours, Ekaterina Giorgievna Illyanova,” said Frank as he switched to English for the benefit of Maggie and Cal. “I know all your names, and why you’re all here, and your plans for us. That’s why you had Yushchenko here pretend to defect, teasing us with information about your Bekhterev program.”
Mikhail Tsakhia, the Mongolian man — he was the negative-zone generator, but through Yushchenko, Frank knew he had to be completely healthy to pull it off — cocked his gun. “You already know too much, American. Why let you live?”
Honestly, I was really hoping you wouldn’t ask that. “Because your numbers are too small. There’s a lot of people in the Soviet Union. There’s a lot of people in America, too. Not enough of us to do what needs to be done in either place — unless we concentrate our numbers more effectively. We are, after all, brothers and sisters, right?”
Now all four of the Russian Variants started looking at each other incredulously. “We were told you were all working for your government,” Savrova said. “We approached you and yet heard nothing since.”
“And we were told you were all working for your government,” Frank bluffed. “And at the time, we were being watched. Couldn’t really respond. But here we are. Variants — that’s what we call ourselves. You call yourselves Empowered. I admit, I kinda like that more. So, what do we do now? Especially since we switched to English so these Czech boys don’t understand us?”
Frank stood through the subsequent awkward whispering between the Russians, hoping Maggie was keeping a bead on his emotions. If this was gonna go south, he wanted her on the ball and ready to unleash the worst sort of fear on these guys.
“Frank.”
He turned to see Cal kneeling next to Ellis and looking a whole lot older — almost as old as they day they had first met. “He’s slipping. I’m too low to help out. Gonna need something real soon.”
Frank nodded and turned toward Savrova. “Before anything else happens, I need to borrow a few of your men here,” Frank said in English. “Our man here can heal our wounded, but he needs life force to do it with.”
Savrova cocked her head at this request. “And how many do you need?”
“We can spread it out over most of them here so that they don’t suffer any long-term effects. And if we can get enough, we can make Boris Giorgievich young again, too.”
“If we help you? What then?” Savrova asked.
Frank cringed inside. “We’re not going to play it that way,” he replied. “Or do I need to start talking here and now and ruin your day?”