Absolute Power. Michael Carroll

to stroke Mina’s blonde hair, which had now grown to shoulder-length.

      “I wonder if she’s dreaming?” Danny said, examining the plastic bag of liquid connected via a tube to Mina’s arm. “She probably is. I just hope they’re not nightmares.”

      “She is dreaming,” Max Dalton said, appearing behind them. “At least, according to the EEG readings. And she’s not really in a coma. She’s just asleep. She moves from time to time, just like everyone does when they’re asleep.”

      He doesn’t look well, Danny thought. Max’s hair was now completely grey and his once-handsome face was haggard and drawn.

      Renata asked, “So the wake-up message didn’t work?”

      “Obviously not,” Max said. For weeks, Max and his team had been scouring through thousands of hours of Sakkara’s audio logs, searching for recordings of Yvonne’s voice, and singling out the snippets of her voice where she appeared to be using her mind-control. The idea was that they would compile pieces of Yvonne’s orders into a “wake up” sentence for Mina. “It looks like Yvonne’s hypnotics can only work when they’re issued live. That definitely indicates that it’s more telepathic than vocal.”

      “So what are you going to do now?”

      “We’ve taken X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultra-sound images…There’s nothing there. Short of performing exploratory brain surgery, there’s nothing else we can do. Not directly. This is where you come in, Danny.”

      Danny looked down at Mina. “So what can I do?”

      “You can tell us everything about how you regained your powers.”

      “I don’t think I ever really lost them. I think it was the shock of what happened to my arm. I just sort of shut down.” To himself, Danny added, That, and my vision of the future.

      “But the powers came back. If we can figure out how, then maybe we can trigger the same thing for Mina. You said that your powers returned when Renata was trapped in the computer room, after Dioxin’s men shot her, right? Sure there was nothing else before that?”

      Danny shook his head. “No.”

      “Façade said that during Dioxin’s attack you insisted on coming back here instead of going to the safe-house. Why?”

      “I just didn’t want to be left behind. I thought I might be able to help.”

      “And why did you think that?”

      “Just a feeling,” Danny said, shrugging.

      Max absently fingered the scar on his neck. “That’s how it started for your father. He used to get ‘feelings’ about things, or he’d know something he couldn’t possibly have known. And then the visions started to come.”

      “Don’t ever talk about my father, Dalton. He’s dead because of you.”

      “I know, but…” He stopped. “Look, we’ve already had two cases of superhumans effectively losing their powers and then regaining them, and that’s you two.” To Renata, he said, “Your recovery can be tied directly to the power-surge from Victor Cross’s machine—”

      Renata interrupted him. “You mean, your machine.”

      “Right. But that’s not something we can replicate here. Even if we were to build another one, the power-surge was an unrepeatable accident.”

      He’s never even apologised for kidnapping me and Colin, Danny thought. He glanced at the stump of his right arm.

      From the far side of the room, Warren called, “Renata? You’re next.”

      They looked up to see Butler pulling on his T-shirt as he left the room.

      As Renata walked over to Warren, Max said to Danny, “You’re still blaming me for what happened, aren’t you?”

      “Who else should I blame? You funded and ran the whole operation. Because of you I’m going to spend the rest of my life with only one arm.”

      “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Max said. He led Danny to his computer station, and called up a program. On screen, a three-dimensional model of a mechanical arm rotated slowly. “I’ve been making some modifications to Razor’s design.”

      Danny shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”

      Max didn’t seem to hear him. He tapped at the screen with the end of a pencil. “I was going to remove the third and fourth fingers to reduce the complexity, but there’s been a few breakthroughs recently in reading and interpreting nerve impulses. We’ve built a whole array of sensors into the chest harness, and the software is clever enough to be able to differentiate between the nerve signals.”

      Despite his misgivings about the mechanical arm, Danny couldn’t help being impressed with the amount of time and money the government was spending on the project.

      “So all you’ll have to do is put it on, and within a few seconds you’ll be able to use it like it was a real arm. There won’t be any feedback, but when we really get a handle on the micro-miniaturisation we should be able to build-in thermal and touch sensors.” Max stuck his pencil between his teeth and typed a command into the keyboard.

      The screen changed to show a wire-frame figure of a man wearing the arm and the chest-harness. “It’s still just as heavy as it was, but it’s much stronger and the harness distributes the weight pretty evenly, so you’ll get used to it. I’ve redesigned it so that you’ll be able to put it on without needing someone else’s help. And our tests show that when you switch into hyper-speed mode, the arm will too, so it should be able to keep up with you.”

      Without saying a word, Danny turned and walked over to the window, and stared out.

      Why can’t they just get the hint that I don’t want a mechanical arm? Maybe I should tell them…

      But Danny knew that telling them wasn’t an option. Max and Impervia had known Quantum, and they’d seen how his visions had turned him into a broken man.

      Danny didn’t want them to know that he had inherited not only his father’s speed, but also his ability to sense the future.

      It didn’t work well, and he couldn’t control it, but there were times – like back on Isla del Tonatiuh – when Danny somehow just knew that something bad was going to happen.

      And once, shortly before he’d lost his right arm, Danny had seen a vision of himself with a mechanical right arm.

      If Quantum’s prophecy was accurate, and I’m going to be responsible for starting a huge war in which billions of people will die, then…Then there’s nothing on Earth that’s going to make me take that mechanical arm. If I don’t take the arm, then the future I saw can’t ever happen.

      His thoughts were interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. He looked around to see Renata standing beside him.

      “You OK?”

      Danny nodded. “Yeah. Just…thinking.”

      Behind them, the door hissed open and two female guards entered, one of them pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. The woman glanced around, spotted Warren and instantly looked away.

      One of the guards put the wheelchair away while her colleague helped the old woman into bed.

      “Another interrogation session,” Renata whispered.

      Danny said, “I don’t care if Ragnarök was her son. How can they treat an eighty-year-old woman like that?”

      “I suppose they think Mrs Duval knows something that can help them track down Yvonne.”

      “What could she know? They’ve never even met each other!”

      Renata shrugged.

      Warren walked over,