A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Rob Boffard

  Excerpt from August Kitko and the Mechas from Space copyright © 2022 by Alex White

  Excerpt from Shards of Earth copyright © 2021 by Adrian Czajkowski

  Cover images © Shutterstock

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  First Edition: May 2022

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950258

  ISBNs: 9780316702805 (trade paperback), 9780316702799 (ebook)

  E3-20220331-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  One: Teagan

  Two: Teagan

  Three: Teagan

  Four: Teagan

  Five: Teagan

  Six: Teagan

  Seven: Teagan

  Eight: Teagan

  Nine: Teagan

  Ten: Annie

  Eleven: Teagan

  Twelve: Annie

  Thirteen: Teagan

  Fourteen: Teagan

  Fifteen: Annie

  Sixteen: Teagan

  Seventeen: Teagan

  Eighteen: Teagan

  Nineteen: Annie

  Twenty: Teagan

  Twenty-One: Teagan

  Twenty-Two: Teagan

  Twenty-Three: Annie

  Twenty-Four: Teagan

  Twenty-Five: Annie

  Twenty-Six: Teagan

  Twenty-Seven: Teagan

  Twenty-Eight: Annie

  Twenty-Nine: Teagan

  Thirty: Teagan

  Thirty-One: Annie

  Thirty-Two: Teagan

  Thirty-Three: Annie

  Thirty-Four: Teagan

  Thirty-Five: Annie

  Thirty-Six: Teagan

  Thirty-Seven: Annie

  Thirty-Eight: Teagan

  Thirty-Nine: Annie

  Forty: Annie

  Forty-One: Teagan

  Forty-Two: Teagan

  Forty-Three: Annie

  Forty-Four: Teagan

  Forty-Five: Teagan

  Forty-Six: Teagan

  Forty-Seven: Teagan

  Forty-Eight: Teagan

  Forty-Nine: Teagan

  Fifty: Teagan

  Fifty-One: Teagan

  Fifty-Two: Annie

  Fifty-Three: Teagan

  Fifty-Four: Annie

  Fifty-Five: Teagan

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of August Kitko and the Mechas from Space

  A Preview of Shards of Earth

  Also by Jackson Ford

  Praise for Jackson Ford and The Frost Files

  Dedicated to The Alchemist, Hollywood, and roast chicken

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  ONE

  Teagan

  I should have learned kung-fu.

  I’m a secret agent working for the US government. I should be able to knock someone out, right?

  Because the thing is, people underestimate me. I’m short, not super-fit and I look like I couldn’t punch my way out of a wet paper takeout bag. How great would it be to knock someone on their ass with a wild Shaolin axe kick, or whatever they call it? Plus, it would be a tremendous backup for when my psychokinesis (read: my ability to move shit with my mind) goes on the fritz.

  Hell, I probably could have gotten Tanner – the terrifying intelligence operative who happens to be my boss – to pay for it.

  It definitely would have been useful at this particular moment. Do you know where I fucking am? I am stumbling around in the woods beneath Griffith Observatory, just north of Hollywood. It’s muddy, it’s cold, it’s 5 a.m. and dark as hell. I just survived an enormous car crash, and I have no idea where I’m going. I also happen to be coming down from a crystal meth high, which is a story I really don’t have time to get into right now. Oh, and men with guns and helicopters are chasing me.

  I can’t actually use my psychokinesis – PK, as I call it – on them, because I’ve used a ton of it tonight already, and I can only use so much before it has to recharge. I have no choice but to run, because if I fight back, I’ll get destroyed.

  And to make matters worse, my underwear has chosen this moment to ride up right into the crack of my ass.

  Angry shouts split the darkness behind me. I’m not in deep forest or anything. It’s a regular California scrubland, with lengths of open ground interrupted by boulders and hillocks and sparse groves of birch and eucalyptus. There was a huge storm in Los Angeles last night, so the ground isn’t hardpack any more. It’s mud – not deep, but sticky, caking my sneakers and pants.

  Uphill. That’s all I have to do right now. Just keep heading uphill. Uphill is the opposite direction from the road, from the scene of the crash. I have no idea whether it will help me actually lose the people chasing me or not, but it’s the closest thing to a goal I’ve got.

  Torchlight flickers on my right, and I actually flinch away from it. That turns out to not be a good idea, because I’m still moving forward, and promptly lose my balance. With a yelp, I throw my hands out in front of me, grabbing hold of a nearby tree trunk. I spin around, going to one knee in the mud.

  “Piece of fuck,” I snarl, forcing myself upright. This would be a lot easier if I didn’t have a bum knee. I actually hurt it before the crash, and it’s currently wrapped in miles of strapping, tight underneath my jeans. It’s functional – just – but it hurts like hell. My head feels as if it’s trailing three feet behind my body, like it’s filled with helium and attached to a string.

  Rotor blades roar. A heavy duty searchlight beam splits the trees, sweeping past no more than six feet away. The blowback from the chopper gusts through the branches, loose leaves flying into my face. I wait, dead-still, until the searchlight moves away from me, then keep going.

  The next patch of ground is so steep that I have to use my hands to clamber up it. My lungs burn with the effort, white-hot acid spreading through my torso, searing a wicked stitch in my side. I come over the top of the rise, descending into a small gully. As I do, I get a glimpse of the Observatory through the trees. A blinding-white domed palace on the hill, lit from below by spotlights. If I can just get there, I can…

  Do what, exactly? How is getting to the Observatory going to help me? If I w
ant to stay hidden, then it’s not a great idea to run towards the bright white object at the top of the hill. Problem is, I don’t have another solution. I don’t have a single clue about where else to go, so I aim myself in the direction of the Observatory, and run like hell.

  The stitch eats into my side. Branches whip at my face, scratching at my skin. I’m breathing too fast, and somehow, still not getting enough air into my lungs. The deeper I go, the thicker the mud gets. It goes from foot-deep to ankle-deep, cold and liquid, flooding my shoes. I’m shivering with shock, and a healthy dose of exhaustion. But I have to keep moving. I don’t have any other choice. I cannot let myself get taken.

  No sooner does the thought occur than my foot plunges into a shin-deep hole. I go down, and I go down hard.

  I land on my side in the mud, left arm bent awkwardly underneath me, the impact sending up a horrible bark of pain. I cry out, eyes squeezed shut, agonised, frustrated tears leaking out. There’s mud everywhere now, on my face, up my nose, in my ears. I roll onto my stomach, a single thought blaring like a fire alarm in my mind. Get up get up get up.

  I don’t get the chance. There are thundering footsteps, and then a knee in my back. White torchlight blinds me. A hand on my head, forcing me into the mud. The panic and anger are like rabid dogs, snarling and foaming. I have to stop him from taking me. I can’t let that happen.

  It’s not hard for me to drain the tank on my PK. After everything that’s happened to me tonight, it’s not surprising that I’m out of juice. I try to grab as many objects as I can: my captor’s weapon, his torch, the zippers on his jacket. All I get back is the barest flicker of dead-static feeling in my brain. It’s worse than normal; usually, I can still feel objects around me, but now I can’t even do that. I am beyond exhausted, and my PK just isn’t listening to me any more.

  “Got her!” my captor yells. “She’s down!”

  The pressure comes off the back of my head. He clamps his hands around my wrists, wrenching them behind me so hard that he almost dislocates both of my shoulders. The cuffs go on with a self-satisfied click, biting deep into my skin.

  The man on top of me spits, huffs an exhausted breath. “You have the right—” He breaks off, coughs, tries again. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

  The LAPD helicopter swoops low overhead, the sound of the rotor blades all but obliterating his voice. Not that it matters. Rights or not, I am truly and properly fucked.

  And you know what the worst part of all this is?

  None of it would have happened if my brother and sister hadn’t come back from the dead.

  TWO

  Teagan

  OK, look: if this story is going to make any sense, I need to explain a few things.

  I promise I’ll be quick. And just so it’s worth your while, at the end I’ll tell you about a trick to cook the world’s best roast chicken. Ready? Here we go.

  My parents were brilliant geneticists, and they wanted to create the ultimate soldier. The government wouldn’t let them, so they set up shop on a massive ranch in Wyoming. Turns out, it’s really hard to put a bunch of superpowers in one person, so they put them in three. Their own children. I got psychokinesis, my sister got the ability to see things in the infrared spectrum and my brother never needed to sleep.

  That last one was a mistake, because he ended up going completely, homicidally insane. When I was sixteen, he burned down our house, and killed everyone in our family but me. Then the government discovered what I could do, and locked me up in a scientific facility for four years. When their studies on me hit a dead end, they told me that I had a choice: I could either work for them in LA, or they would cut me open and put my brain in a jar.

  I like my brain where it is, thanks, so I went for the first option. Ended up working with a Los Angeles black-bag crew called China Shop. Our jobs involve taking down regular human bad guys, but over the past few months, we’ve had more than one person with abilities mess with us. We didn’t know much about where they were coming from, and fighting them took its toll. The latest little episode put my friend Annie in hospital, in a coma, after she got struck by lightning.

  Got all that? Good. Next time you have a chicken, spatchcock it. Cut the spine out with some heavy scissors, and press it flat. Cooks in half the time, is basically impossible to dry out, and you get the world’s crispiest, tastiest skin. You’re welcome.

  Now: let’s go back to around forty-five minutes before the LAPD pushes me down into the mud and reads me my rights. I’m in Annie’s room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital when my dead brother walks through the door.

  I don’t recognise him at first. We’ve tangled multiple times over the past day, but he’s been running around with a bandana over his nose and mouth. No bandana now, and even as I grab a bunch of surgical instruments from a nearby tray and bring them into the air between us, my brain is starting to put it together.

  When I realise who it is, all I can do is gape.

  And that’s before my dead sister moves out from behind him.

  I take a step back, my legs bumping into the chair behind me, sitting down hard. The instruments clatter to the floor.

  Outside in the hall, the hospital PA system bleeps, a call for the doctor soaked in static.

  “It’s good to see you, Emily,” my sister Chloe says. “We need to talk.”

  Emily.

  It’s been a long time since I used that name. A long time since I went by anything but Teagan. Hearing it makes a cold sweat spring out on my palms.

  Seven years since I saw either of them. Seven years since Adam, my brother, broke Chloe’s leg and left her to crawl across the floor while he set our home on fire. Seven years they’ve been alive, and I had no idea.

  There’s no way. I don’t believe it.

  But I’m already noticing the details. It starts with the eyes. The Chloe in front of me is older, the willowy teenage figure I remember turned wiry and hard, but she has the same eyes. Deep blue, cold as the Pacific. Seared into my memory. Her hair, which used to blow free around her head, is tied back in a ponytail. The same blonde colour I remember. Faded acne scars pit her skin. She wears a dark green puffer vest over a sleeveless tank and jeans, polished black boots on her feet.

  And Adam…

  He was always big. Huge shoulders, barrel chest, straining at his thick black sweater. He’s grown his hair out, a straggly grey-black mane around his head to go with his tangled beard. But like Chloe, his eyes haven’t changed. They couldn’t belong to anyone else. If Chloe’s eyes are the cold, blue surface of the ocean, Adam’s are the water a thousand feet down. Blank and empty, filled with monsters you can’t see. They are eyes that have never known a second of sleep. That have spent twenty-six years awake, that have been driven somewhere beyond madness.

  I open my mouth. Close it again. To my left, Annie lies silent, cocooned in tubes and beeping machines.

  She’s here because of Adam and Chloe. Because one of their projects escaped: a little kid who could control electricity. Annie got in the way. My friend is in a coma, only barely holding on… because of them.

  Chloe has the good grace to look slightly uncomfortable. She takes a hesitant step towards me. “I know it’s been a while—”

  I let out a sound that is somewhere between a moan and a sob. My feet skitter on the shiny hospital floor, pushing the chair back, bumping it against the wall.

  “Emily—” Chloe says.

  “Don’t call me that.” My voice barely makes it out of my throat.

  “Please just listen…”

  “Stay the fuck away from me!”

  Chloe puts her hands up. Her palms are grimy, damp from the rain. I have a sudden urge to tell her to go clean herself up. Doesn’t she know she’s in a hospital?

  “Emily,” Chloe says again. She speaks slowly and carefully. Politely, even. “You’re in danger. You need to come with us. Right now.”

  “I’m not g
oing anywhere with you.”

  “There’s a lot I have to tell you. I should never have let it go on this long. Please, please, just come with me. I’ll explain everything.”

  “Stay back!” Cold sweat slicks my skin. My tongue feels like it’s twice its normal size.

  A strange expression crosses Chloe’s face then. Frustration, mixed with the slightest touch of sadness. “I’m sorry about this next part. But we just don’t have time.”

  The icy sweat makes me shiver. Except: the shiver is way too powerful. I’m not just cold: I’m freezing, as if my internal organs have frozen solid, blocks of ice around my lungs and heart and stomach.

  What the hell?

  The shiver is so violent that I almost collapse. I hug myself, my teeth chattering. Chloe tilts her head, and the cold surges. My entire body goes numb. I slip forward off the chair, then collapse forward onto my knees. I roll drunkenly onto my side, my body jackhammering.

  And somehow, through the impossible, terrifying cold, I understand.

  Our abilities have evolved over the years. Adam can make people dream. I can lift much heavier objects and organic matter, which I never used to be able to move. It’s a lot harder, but I can do it. Chloe was always able to see infrared light, which meant she could detect body heat. Apparently, she’s learned to manipulate that heat as well. Raise and lower internal temperatures.

  If you hadn’t figured it out already, Chloe and Adam are bad news. They’ve been creating more genetically modified kids, like the one that put Annie in a hospital bed. They’ve killed people, a lot of people – maybe not directly, but through letting those kids loose in the world.

  Whatever they want from me, it can’t be good.

  I hunch into myself, desperate to control the shivering. I can barely move, let alone focus enough to use my PK. The cold is like a living thing, clawing at the inside of my ribcage. Eyes squeezed shut, throat a parched wasteland. I keep thinking that alarms will start to ring, that security guards will come thundering down the corridor. But outside the room, the hospital is silent.

  Soft footsteps. Chloe crouches over me, breathing hard. When she speaks, her voice is a little ragged, like she’s just run a wind sprint. “Once we’re safe, I’ll tell you everything, I promise. Just hold on for me.”