Contingency Zeta
Anacostia, MD
“Exoskeleton!” Danny Hearn gasped out in the nick of time as he sailed ass-backwards through the air. The audibles were at this point force of habit; Hal hadn’t been in his head for the better part of a year by this point, but Danny found he had a little more confidence in his ability to manifest animal attributes promptly when he called his shots. This confidence was mildly reinforced as he slammed tailbone-first into a garbage truck and the black insectoid carapace his metahuman powers formed absorbed most of the impact. He shook his head to clear the stars and looked back over to see what the hell had blindsided him like that.
It was Number Four. Was it Number Four? They all looked the same. Phil would be able to tell him if he weren’t so busy. Whichever of the alien foot soldiers this one was, he was evidently a shithead and rather pissed at Danny. The seven-foot orange-skinned humanoid detached a nasty-looking energy pistol of some sort from a mounting point on the matte forest-green metal or plastic or whatever of his/its armor as he/it/the fuck it was strode toward the winded Aussie. To the left, Brianna Fin… Finn… Montag now, which was a relief – Brianna swooped down on her white-feathered wings and opened her mouth just as Danny covered his ears, emitting a shattering sonic cry that knocked Probably Number Four to the pavement. Four got up slowly and looked a little unsteady. Danny had just started to get a plan together when Ben Phillips grabbed Four by an ankle, whipped the alien around over his head like a team-logo towel at a football game, and flung the green-armored interloper into the brick wall behind and above Danny’s head, the sharpened spines on Four’s armor whistling as they spiraled past.
Living up to his sobriquet, Brute Force charged over to follow up, but Four’s lack of movement and the spreading pool of pale translucent orange beneath the crumpled armor indicated no additional action was required. He extended a massive, clumsy-looking hand and helped the former leader of Vanguard to his feet as the current leader of Vanguard issued a status report. <Three down, nine plus the ringleader to go,> a voice rang in the heads of the gaggle of metas. <Danny’s okay, Leslie is catching her breath, Griss is reloading. Bri, keep their eyes in the skies, but stay safe up there. Danny, once you’re moving I need you and Ben to assist Fisher and the Secret Service guys at the Douglass Bridge. We can’t let them across the river. Dirk, once you find a new perch, see if you can whittle them down a bit more. Keep the tempo up, guys!> He was almost back on top of his game even after what he and Leslie had been through, which underscored how much this trip to Washington meant for Phil Smith.
For nearly a decade, unspoken American policy toward metahumans and posthumans had been depressingly reminiscent of unspoken American policy toward – well, any number of people groups – with researchers looking for ‘vaccines’ to suppress the metagene’s activation, behavior-modification specialists teaching metas how to keep their powers from manifesting, and healthcare policies reluctant to countenance the medical costs for those with genomes convoluted beyond anything studied anywhere by anyone. The US and EU hadn’t reached the point less developed nations had – in large swaths of Central America and South Asia, governments were ‘placing’ the children of metahuman parents into state-run boarding schools for their ‘rehabilitation’ – but the attitude of both norm culture and norm governments toward metas was typically not very enlightened anywhere. The Eastern Hemisphere had the small, landlocked hi-tech utopia that was Mandelovia, and the Western Hemisphere had the tiny Caribbean island nation of La Perdita, but otherwise there were few sanctuaries where those with mutations and superhuman abilities weren’t treated like second-class citizens.
But all that was starting to change, thanks to the unlikeliest of pro-metahuman activists. Former FBI agent Steve Fisher had for years been a vociferous proponent for the registration of all metahumans and posthumans, and had at one point spun the Bureau’s metahuman-affairs division off into his own personal meta-hunting army. But just over a year ago, he had crossed paths with none other than Phil Smith and wound up becoming pivotal to the telepath’s adventure to discover his lost past. It turned out that Smith and Fisher were in fact old Army buddies – from the Second World War. Both had been experimented on by the most diabolically brilliant Nazi geneticist the world had never heard of, but while Fisher returned to America with augmented strength and speed and became the NATO superspy KINGFISHER, Smith fell into Soviet hands and was subjected to innumerable additional experiments. Unable to duplicate or weaponize Smith’s telepathic or telekinetic abilities, the Russians developed a way to program new identities into his mind, overwriting his own identity and memories in order to use him as their Cold War superspy SIGMA.
After half a century, eight identities, hundreds of missions, and the unexpected collapse of the government that had created him, SIGMA was unceremoniously dumped in the American Midwest with no memories and no possessions beyond the clothes he wore and an Ohio driver’s license bearing the name Phil Smith. He quickly discovered the nature of his phenomenal abilities, but when SIGMA and KINGFISHER crossed paths again, it was a turning point in the lives of both men. While Smith attacked life with a new mission – no longer to learn who he was by digging in the past but to decide who he was by working to improve the lot of the world’s metas - Fisher was inspired to stop running from his own metahuman identity and use the resources he’d accumulated in decades of government work to try and better the lives and opportunities of metahumans in America. It was because of Fisher’s pro-meta political-action committee Real Humanity that Phil had been given the opportunity to brief the President on the plight of altered human beings throughout the world, and the annual “Metahuman Threat Assessment Briefing” had finally been replaced by a report that recast metas as yet another misunderstood and mistreated people group rather than a mysterious race of scary people with dangerous abilities. And that report was the reason Vanguard International had accompanied Smith to Washington.
Grissom Montag saw the faint flicker of an alien targeting beam on his white T-shirt and dodged to the side an instant before a searing bolt of charged particles flashed down the beam at him. The convection in the wake of the blast scorched the thin fabric covering his shoulder and bored a perfectly circular half-inch hole in the door of the car he’d been leaning against. “Bloody ‘ell!” The British mercenary held out his three-fingered right hand, and a chrome-plated revolver with a customized trigger guard teleported into existence in his grip. He let off two or three shots in the direction of the alien who’d shot at him, but if they’d found their mark the rounds didn’t seem to stagger the armored adversary. <Cover your ears!> flashed into his mind like a mental lightning bolt. Montag hurriedly obeyed, dropping to the pavement and clamping both hands over his ears as Brianna flitted by overhead and unleashed another sonic onslaught. Grissom popped back up and emptied the cylinder of his right revolver, and the alien soldier dropped with a splash of orange. He looked up and smiled as his wife waved at him, then flapped her wings and took off after another opponent.
A block away, Vanguard’s other married couple – the Harrisons were on an indefinite leave of absence – was fighting side-by-side against two particularly determined aliens flanking the apparent leader of this attack. Leslie Kline Smith slapped the charging handle of an MP5K-PDW and unleashed a five-round burst, but her shots were mostly turned aside by the alien armor. As she dropped back into cover, she felt the heat from a particle bolt sizzling past overhead. “Motherfucker!,” she hissed.
Phil’s head whipped around. “Are you hit?!” The dark-haired, white-suited telepath rattled off a half-second burst of nine or ten shots from his own MP5 before dropping down next to her.
Her light-brown eyes flashed the fires of hell. “Did that sonofabitch burn my hair?”
His ice-blue eyes squinted asymmetrically in utter confusion. “What?”
“YOU HEARD WHAT I SAID!”
Phil looked her over. “No, Leslie,” he reassured her flatly. “Your hair is perfectly intact.”
The former bounty hunter popped to her feet and emptied the rest of a magazine. “Better luck next time, bitch!” Most of this string found weak points in the armor, and the extraterrestrial lackey collapsed to the ground a few yards away from the leader. He was only a little taller than the others, but his armor was much bulkier and looked to be some sort of powered exoskeleton. A police officer stood his ground as the behemoth approached, firing shot after shot ineffectually. With one metal gauntlet, the alien commander slapped the Beretta out of the officer’s grip, breaking the man’s radius and ulna almost as an afterthought. The cop’s agonized shout was abbreviated by the other gauntlet wrapping around his upper torso. The commander casually crushed the life out of the hapless human before turning to face the car behind which the Smiths were hiding. “I am still willing to accept your surrender, Mister Smith!” he bellowed in fairly practiced English. Maybe he had some sort of universal translator or something. “My fight is not with you!”
“Can’t do that!” Phil called from behind the vehicle. “We both know the President’s across that river. Your English is pretty good, though!” His eyes shot wide open as he sensed danger coming. “Look out!” he shouted, grabbing Leslie and pulling them out from behind the car an instant before an uprooted fire hydrant was hurled clean through the vehicle, bisecting the space they’d just occupied. Smith checked his wife’s condition and dusted himself off. “Fine,” he growled. His submachine gun was within reach, but he didn’t bother. “I can throw things, too.” He glanced at the severed fireplug, which twitched briefly before shooting back in the opposite direction. There was a brief whipcrack as it shot past the speed of sound, slamming into the alien commander with tremendous force and launching him (probably a him) a hundred feet into the stone façade of an office building. Masonry collapsed around the leader, obscuring him with a shower of dust. Phil heaved a sigh of momentary relief before reaching down to help Leslie to her feet.
“You okay?” he asked. She just nodded in response as they looked away from each other uneasily. There hadn’t been much to say for the past month or so.
”There’s never an easy way to say this, Mrs. Smith,” the physician began somberly. “Honestly, there hasn’t been enough time for doctors like me to learn the peculiarities of metahuman ontogeny or fetal development yet. This is the absolute worst part of my job, but… the ultrasound didn’t lie.”
“Do you want… to try again?” Phil asked. Another memory, another tear-filled conversation.
“Although,” the infuriatingly well-meaning obstetrician said encouragingly, “there are a number of norm and meta adoption firms including those your Foundation sponsors. I’m certain you would make excellent parents to any-”
Leslie’s moment of reflection was cut short by a chilling burst of electronically amplified laughter. As both Smiths turned to face the dust cloud, the commander emerged from the wreckage with a noticeable dent and a few crushed plates in his armor but no other visible damage after surviving the kinetic equivalent of a bunker-buster. The couple looked back at each other, and Phil broke the silence.
“Shit.”
A quarter mile away, Steve Fisher and the dozen or so Secret Service agents with him were hunkered down behind a row of unmarked black government SUVs barring the Douglass Bridge across the Anacostia River. Looking out past Nationals Park, Fisher intermittently scanned the skies, straining to hear the rotors of the inbound Marine choppers, but there were as yet no signs of reinforcements as they held the line at the last crossing between POTUS and the alien raiding party. So far there were no indications that any other extraterrestrial intruders were in the area, but even if these were the only aliens to deal with, they were currently more than enough trouble for the lightly-armed agents. The bog-standard 5.56mm NATO rounds their M4 carbines fired were ideal for hostage situations or firefights in crowded areas where precise force against a soft target was all that was needed, but their small-arms fire was accomplishing precisely fuck-all in the face of opponents with futuristic armor and energy weapons. But they’d have to make do for a while yet. The President had just returned from a special joint session featuring Smith’s report, but FLOTUS and the two youngest children had literally been caught napping, and POTUS wouldn’t evacuate without them. Until Marine One was wheels-up and in a threat-free sky, Fisher and the men and women with him had no choice but to stay put.
The soldier they’d informally numbered Seven strode across the intersection toward them. He fired several shots from his weapon, which punched into the truck at the right of the barricade and ignited the gas tank. A wave of searing heat rippled about twenty yards, and Fisher tried to block out the screams of two men and a woman burning alive. “This is LEAD BLOCKER,” he barked into his earpiece. “We’re engaged, with casualties. What’s the status on QUARTERBACK?” The response came, and it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Fuck!” Fisher called out orders to close the gaps in coverage – at least the heat coming off the destroyed SUV would dissuade the intruders from trying to come around the right side – and looked over to see where Seven had gone.
Seven was about three steps to his right.
Fisher whirled around, hoping against hope to bring his weapon to bear on the target in time – just as a gorilla fist punched through the alien’s helmet, which emitted a grisly splash of pale orange a few feet in all directions. The gorilla arm attached to the fist reversed itself as Danny Hearn shoved the dying extraterrestrial the rest of the way down. Fisher reeled in his pulse and unconsciously reached out to shake Hearn’s hand before realizing where that hand had just been. “Damn, am I glad to see you guys,” the former agent wheezed as Hearn and the Vanguard member who insisted on calling himself Brute Force took a moment to catch their breath after the jog.
“Where’s your reinforcements?” Hearn asked as the other agents kept Six pinned down across the intersection with suppressive fire.
“Still mobilizing,” Fisher explained. “They were expecting trouble from literally any other direction and were clustered around the White House and the Capitol. Now they’re having trouble getting here because of the civilian traffic evacuating the District.”
“Don’t they have fuckin’ helicopters?” Danny demanded.
Fisher rolled his eyes. “Do you know how long the wartime emergency preflight checklist is for a UH-60?” He turned and rattled off a burst of fire, then bent down and wrenched a shoebox-sized masonry block free from a planter before hurling it one-handed in Six’s direction. Like most people, Danny had just about forgotten there was anything unusual about Fisher thanks to the man’s lifelong obsession with concealing his differences. “I keep getting the run-around from the Marines, but I was told the President would be wheels-up within ten minutes. That was about eight minutes ago.”
“Where are they gonna take him?” Hearn inquired. “Andrews is behind us, and you can see Reagan Airport from here! Unless that chopper can block these fuckin’ laser beams, it’s a sitting duck!”
“I don’t know!” Fisher admitted angrily. “Nobody knows what the hell is going on!” He chipped away at Six’s armor with another burst of fire before dropping down to reload. “We have no fucking idea what these things are or where the hell they came from or if there are any more of them out there! Half these buildings are still full of civilians! They caught us with our fucking pants around our fucking ankles and we’ve had less time to fight them off than it takes to listen to two Meat Loaf ballads! Fuck!” He jumped as an energy blast punched all the way through the truck mere inches from his head.
<We’re way behind the curve,> Phil’s voice sounded in Danny’s head. <It’s taking all we’ve got to stop the foot soldiers, and I’ve barely scratched their leader. If the military doesn’t get here soon with more firepower, we’ll be out of options.>
Another blast slammed into the ground between Danny and Steve, the concussive force knocking both men back onto their asses, unhurt but very definitely aware of a new threat. Nine was atop a fire escape across the street and shooting down on them from a pretty good angle. The alien lined up another shot just as the crack of a powerful rifle’s muzzle signature rang out across the block. There was a faint puff of something on one side of Nine’s head, then a gout of orange and white and yellow gore on the other side, as the armored enemy deflated like a punctured balloon.
<Nice shot, Bell,> Phil remarked at the same instant Danny breathed those words. <That’s half of them down. Still no luck with the leader over here.> The telepath still hadn’t picked up his MP5, preferring to hurl bricks, street signs, and shards of plate glass with his mind as Leslie kept shooting and the Montags joined them on the ground. Bri had taken a shot through one wing, and though it wasn’t a severe or life-threatening injury, the pain and the damage to connective tissues and muscle fibers kept her from taking flight for the present.
Danny’s eyebrows went up as Six suddenly turned and retreated, backing from cover to cover across the intersection. “It looks like they’ve stopped pushing on the bridge,” Fisher called to the air.
<I know,> came the reply. <Looks like we finally have their undivided attention.>
Fisher’s earpiece crackled. “They’re in the air!” he shouted. “We’ve got reinforcements inbound, ETA…” He heard additional traffic and his excitement died down. “ETA four minutes.”
“Four fucking minutes?” Grissom swore into Vanguard’s earpieces on a different frequency.
“Four fucking minutes?” Danny echoed beside Fisher.
“Congested airspace,” Fisher growled.
“You must realize this is a lost cause,” the alien commander boomed through his armor’s speakers, now slightly tinny and fuzzy after taking damage. “I’m impressed your military has managed to mount a response at all in this span of time, but I can open another portal in less than two minutes.” He blasted a city bus in half and threw the bigger half at the quartet of Vanguardians, which Phil barely caught. “We will easily overwhelm you and your reinforcements before they even have time to land.”
“We need ‘elp,” Grissom breathed as he surveyed the extent of his wife’s injuries. Brianna was plucking damaged feathers from around the wound and doing her best not to cry.
“Sons of bitches,” Leslie growled. Ever since cutting ties with her family, Bri was the closest thing she had to a sister. Her anger smoldering, Leslie jumped up and emptied an entire magazine into Three, who twitched and jerked crazily before dropping. In response, the commander fired an energy blast at the pickup truck she and Phil crouched behind. The truck buckled under the impact, scraping backward along the asphalt and pinning Leslie’s ankle beneath it. There was an audible snap. “Fucking shit!” she shrieked as she slammed backward to the pavement. Phil instantly lifted the truck and threw it forward before telekinetically lifting his wife and hovering her a few feet over behind a solid concrete planter. Tears streamed down Leslie’s paling face as she tried not to scream. Grissom scooped Brianna up and charged over; the couple dropped down to attend to Vanguard’s honorary den mother. The alien commander nonchalantly strode off in the other direction, and a strange glow began to surround him as his armor began powering up to open a portal to wherever he had come from.
“What happened?” Danny called in their earpieces, having heard Leslie’s outburst.
<Leslie’s hurt,> Phil responded in Danny’s head as Dirk Bell silently slipped up to where Danny, Ben, and Steve were huddled on the far side of the intersection. <Leslie’s hurt, Bri’s hurt, Griss is pinned down. The leader is gonna open some kinda door to bring in his own reinforcements before our reinforcements get here. We need an ace in the hole.>
Danny looked doubtful as he keyed his earpiece. “Do… d’you have one in mind?”
<Me.>
Phil stepped out from behind cover and began crossing the plaza toward the alien commander, who was now surrounded by his five remaining troops as he continued preparations for his dimensional portal. Leslie tried to stand to follow him, but her shattered ankle wouldn’t allow it and she dropped back down with a scream. “Where are you going?” she called after him. No response.
Danny racked his brain. Ace in the hole… His eyes widened as his hand flew to his ear. “For fuck’s sake, Smith,” he shouted loudly enough to render the earpiece superfluous, “don’t you DARE! Quantos told me all about Contingency Zeta!”
“Shite,” Grissom breathed as the two women looked at him.
Phil had covered about a third of the distance, walking at a measured pace. The aliens were firing at will, but their blasts were turned back by Phil’s passive psionic defenses, lighting up the invisible bubble with blue flickers of Cherenkov radiation as they were absorbed. The leader issued a command, and one of the foot soldiers charged the psionic. With a flick of the wrist, Smith telekinetically flung the attacker across the square, through a steel-framed electronic billboard, and into a light column at the foot of the bridge. The foot-thick steel tube bent under the impact as the alien ragdolled into the Anacostia.
“What’s… Contingency Zeta?” Leslie demanded, looking over at Grissom.
“…Something the Russians built in,” the merc replied cryptically as he watched his best friend traverse the open space. “A failsafe.”
Leslie’s mind raced. “Failsafe…” She gasped. “No!” Ignoring the crippling pain, she willed herself to her feet. “Phil!” she half-shouted, half-screamed. Her ankle had been driven from her mind. “Come back!”
Halfway there, Phil’s feet faltered a moment. They wouldn’t be able to see from there, but the tracks of tears lined his own face as he resumed his approach.
“C’mon, mate,” Grissom urged in his ear as he restrained Leslie, “we can figger’ somethin’ else out, I’m sure!”
Leslie was utterly hysterical and had almost fought free of Grissom’s grasp. “PHIL!” she cried across the plaza, “I’m sorry about the baby!!”
<Sorry? For what?> Phil didn’t stop or turn as he crushed another of the foot soldiers beneath an armored bank truck. <I know it wasn’t your fault, baby. I know.>
Adrenaline or no, Leslie’s ankle finally failed her. Grissom caught her as she sobbed and shrieked and gasped for breath. “Let’s try again,” she managed weakly. “The doctors said there’s still time.”
Phil stopped. The glow around the alien commander was by now quite intense, and over a minute had passed.
<If I don’t do this,> he answered, <there won’t still be time. For anyone.>
He waved his hand from ten yards away, and the three remaining aliens were flung aside like leaves in the wind. He stood facing the alien commander, who looked back with a mixture of puzzlement and growing alarm at Phil’s refusal to attack.
Phil strode closer but still didn’t attack. Preoccupied with completing the portal procedure, the commander just looked back.
The two were five feet apart. No attack. No counterattack.
The commander was distracted enough that he didn’t see the massive prefabricated wastewater terminal levitate from a construction site down the block and slam down over the two men. The capped ten-by-ten-foot rebarred-concrete cylinder had to have weighed a good five tons. No sight or sound of Phil or of the alien commander came to the onlookers.
Leslie sobbed incoherently as Brianna held her and wept silently. Grissom held his breath and Danny balled his hands into fists. Fisher and Bell looked away grimly as Ben looked from face to face, confused.
“What exactly are you trying to do?” the alien commander demanded as he swiped in Phil’s direction with a power-gauntleted fist. In the pitch black of the cylinder, Phil calmly dodged his strikes – the alien armor apparently didn’t come with thermal imaging, which he found pretty surprising. “This structure won’t block our portal, and it won’t contain me very long at all.”
Phil wiped at his eyes. “Contingency Zeta in effect,” he said to no one in particular. “Execute.”
<<Executing,>> a metallic voice rang in his head an instant before he was enveloped in a sensation of searing heat. “Ffffffuck!” Phil breathed as he tried to block out the burning. Uses telekinesis to disrupt the strong nuclear force, he recalled from Doctor Quantos’s explanation. Displaces my entire atomic superstructure. E=mc².
He just hadn’t expected it to burn like a motherfucker.
The commander staggered back and bumped into the concrete wall of the cylinder. “…What… are you trying to…?” It registered. “No!” The energy Phil was emitting was by now bright enough to illuminate the inside of the cylinder. He hammered on the wall with as much force as his powered exoskeleton could manage. “You can’t!” One of his soldiers had somehow crawled back to his location and was blasting away at the concrete from outside. He almost managed to put a crack in the concrete before a .308 round from Dirk Bell’s rifle neatly transected his brain.
Phil thought his consciousness would be overtaken by the inferno inside him, but surprisingly a barrage of thought and memory flew through his mind. His friends. Missions. Lost love. Vanguard. Names and faces foreign to him. He suddenly realized that all his memories were surging through his brain. Even those he’d lost.
Overwhelmed by the torrent, Phil reached out to one thought, one image. He conjured up Leslie’s face and clung to her memory as he felt the terminus of this process approaching.
<I love you.>
The steel-reinforced cylinder jumped a few inches into the air before slamming back down, and a faint blue flash of Cherenkov radiation filtered through the concrete. Everyone’s earpieces flared with static as unshielded electrical systems within a hundred yards shorted out from the electromagnetic pulse of the event. Just over a mile away, threat-warning systems in the Pentagon lit up like Christmas trees after radiation detectors were tripped.
There was a long silence.
Fisher’s earpiece crackled again, breaking the silence. “Stand by,” he replied to the unheard inquiry, laboring to keep his voice calm. “Will advise on threat condition.”
Ben Phillips made the first move. “Phil!” the massive man called as he sprinted across the square with the others following behind. “Buddy?” He ran to the cylinder.
“Don’t!” Danny ordered, taking command, as the group converged near ground zero. He looked over at Grissom. “Radiation?”
A device a little bigger than the average smartphone materialized in Montag’s hand. The Brit studied it intently. “Nothing that’ll ‘urt us,” he managed, his own voice somewhat uncertain.
Phillips grabbed an untrimmed piece of rebar that jutted out of the wastewater terminal and was surprised to find it still warm to the touch. Grunting, he strained at the weight of the cylinder. Danny manifested gorilla arms again to assist him, and the two metahumans slowly lifted the cylinder off the ground as the others braced themselves for what they might see.
Nothing. Well, almost nothing. The ground beneath the cylinder was covered in a quarter inch of fine grey ash that the breeze quickly began stirring as Danny and Ben set the cylinder down on its side. Brianna looked into the terminal and gasped.
A shadow had been burned into the concrete.
Phil Smith’s shadow.
Grissom covered the silently-weeping Leslie’s eyes as he held her, realizing after a moment that his own eyes were no longer dry. Danny bit his lip, Fisher sighed heavily, and even Dirk Bell slowly removed his omnipresent fedora as his impassive eyes took in the scene. Leslie dropped to her knees, grasping at the ash with her fingers as sobs escaped her lips again.
Fisher keyed his earpiece. “Threat neutralized,” he announced evenly. “Repeat: all threats neutralized. Situation stable. Multiple friendly casualties… one down.”
Even as they took in the moment there in the plaza by the discarded sewer section, the heavy thumping of helicopters above jolted them back to reality. Men’s voices began barking orders overhead as Marine riflemen in body armor descended on ziplines. The ash stirred and scattered in the rotor wash. Brianna, her wounded wing still folded awkwardly, produced an emptied paper coffee cup from a pile of belongings left on the sidewalk by a fleeing civilian. She knelt down beside Leslie and began slowly and reverently to gather the ash into the cup. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she breathed as the others took a few steps back. Fisher went to address the Marines as Bri continued her ritual next to Leslie Smith.
“I love you too,” Leslie whispered to the ground as the grey ash sifted through her fingers. “I love you too.”
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