Page 14 of From the Noblest Motives
When she returned, she'd shed her document case, her keys, and her shoes but was still in the elegant A-line dress she'd worn for work. She climbed onto the stool next to Damien, pulled the cake to her, and cut herself a two-inch slice.
"Bad day, Doc?" Blaze watched in obvious fascination as she dug into her enormous slice.
"There are no good days anymore." The lines around her mouth had deepened, dark shadows under her eyes not quite hidden by her makeup. "There are days when I can put out fires and days when I can't. Today, I could not."
"I'm sorry." Damien put one foot on the floor, ready to slide off his seat. "Should we…?"
She waved her fork in negation. "Absolutely not. Tell me what you found while I consume my daily recommended amount of chocolate."
"That's the problem." Damien leaned both elbows on the counter, staring at the patterns in the granite. "We found nothing."
"Something tells me this isn't just about unsuccessful tracking." She put her fork down, got herself a glass of milk from the fridge, and resumed her seat. "From the beginning, gentlemen."
Damien waited, thinking Blaze would want to tell it, but the sparker just kept working on his cake. Not that there was much to tell, but Damien started from where they'd picked up the trails at the coordinates provided by their anonymous source and ended with them vanishing, cut off as if they'd fallen out of reality.
Dr. Parma gave every appearance of concentrating on her cake and milk, but he knew she'd heard every word and several things he hadn't said. "Did you have vid running?"
"Couple, yeah," Blaze chimed in. "Dash vid's always running. My personal one when we stopped at the end point. Don't know what good it'll do, Doc. It was pissing down so hard I could barely see shit."
"Noted. We'll take a look in a moment." She picked up the last crumbs with the back of her fork and pushed the plate away. "I assume you've heard about Shudder."
Damien nodded, the miserable knot back in his gut. "We watched the arrest on the news."
"It's gotta be a setup." Red climbed Blaze's throat, and his fists clenched on the counter. "No way Shuds would've done it. He wouldn't. And the timing's just too perfect."
"I agree with you." Dr. Parma leaned her head on her fist. "The state's case was shaky, at best. That Shudder would have done such a thing and stayed to be conveniently apprehended is absurd, not that it seems at all in character for him to carry out an assassination."
"This is the new legislation, isn't it?" Damien hadn't paid attention. He never had, and now… Shudder's activism began to look much more immediate and practical. "The way they rushed everything."
"Yes. It all ties together, but I'm more than certain I don't have all the pieces." Dr. Parma pointed to one of the cabinets. "I have those apple chips you like."
Damien retrieved the bag—he knew exactly where they would be—and set them in the middle of the counter instead of hoarding them on his lap as he would have liked. He could be civilized.
"So the bastards had the plan all set," Blaze growled. "Wait till the Horace Act passed, lure Shuds to the city, kill the minister, and frame him."
"Yes. Then rush him through the newly legal process for violent variant offenders and lock him away before anyone could interfere or question." Dr. Parma rubbed both hands over her eyes. "Those are the visible pieces. Why they specifically wanted to do this now? I don't know."
"All right. Great. Grand fucking conspiracies." Blaze tapped the counter with one finger. "We go to the prison and we get Shudder's part of the story. We get him good representation, not that soggy piece of moldy bread the court gave him. We—"
Dr. Parma put a hand on his wrist, cutting him off. "Oh, Blaze. You don't know, do you?"
Blaze squinted at her. "Know what?"
"He was sentenced to sixty years in San Judas Tadeo," Dr. Parma told him softly. "No visitation. The inmates can't receive phone calls. You could try to send him a letter, I believe. A paper letter. But I'm certain they'd read all his mail."
Blaze drew in a shuddering breath, his eyes squeezed shut, and Damien reached over to take his free hand in a hard grip.
"He could just escape, couldn't he?" Damien had a sinking feeling he knew the answer. "Make a hole in the floor with an earthquake and tunnel out?"
"It's a variant-specific prison, dear. They use specific materials and take drastic precautions to block talents. I'm sorry."
Trembling telegraphed up Blaze's arm, and Damien couldn't stand it any longer. He spun around the end of the counter and careened into Blaze, wrapping him in a fierce embrace and pulling his head down to Damien's shoulder. The shaking grew worse as Blaze clung to him, nearly knocking Damien off balance. Only a single sob escaped the otherwise terrible, silent tremors.
"There has to be a way to get him representation." Damien pleaded with Dr. Parma over Blaze's head. "The Horace Act can't have taken that away, too? How did it even become law? I thought it was a dead piece of legislation."
"I do wish you'd leave your hermitage more often." Dr. Parma took their dishes to the sink as she went on. "It had been tabled for quite some time. Recently, though, new anti-variant campaigns have cropped up. The most damaging has been the one spearheaded by Senator Lawson and his cronies. They've dug up a study by a largely discredited scientist who claimed that variant children were twenty times more likely to develop sociopathic tendencies and experience violent psychotic breaks. Never mind that variant mental health issues do need to be addressed in a substantive, compassionate way. No. They weaponized data cherry picked from various sources and held up this one, scurrilous study as proof. They used specific criminals for their campaign films—ones who had committed violent crimes—specifically one particularly brutal serial killer who happened to be a variant—even though the percentage of variant violent offenders is lower than the general population. When variants go bad, their campaign claimed, they are a menace to society and should be treated like the dangerous animals they are. For the safety of the community."
"They made people afraid," Damien whispered. Nonvariant people had always feared them to a greater or lesser degree, but the whole point of the Guild was to demonstrate how variants could help society. The Guild had cast them as superheroes. "They turned us back into monsters."
