Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) Read Online Free

back into the moment, “looks like he been touched by God or something. Yo, Edward Cavanagh is a man. He’s your boss. Get your head out of your ass.”
    “You sound a little jealous, Lawton,” I said, turning to him with a smile. That was the problem with a man like Lawton Evers, see—he’s not a bad guy, he’s just determined to find the cloud around every silver lining, especially the ones that aren’t directed at him.
    “I ain’t jealous,” Lawton said, making a face that said he was lying, obvious as hell. “I ain’t no kiss ass. I don’t got to impress anybody.”
    “Well, you kind of need to impress your boss to keep working,” Eduardo said.
    “Shut up,” Lawton said, blowing it off.
    For a man who didn’t know shit, Lawton Evers sure did talk a lot of it. But that was just him, and I was used to it by now. I shook it off, and watched Laverne Dobbins make his way after the crowd with the rest of them, trailing behind, and I gave him a nod like I knew him or something. Very subtly, he nodded back at me before he disappeared. I thought that was cool.
    I looked down at the factory floor and let out a breath, then blinked. Something was a little strange about what I saw …
    Dust blows through the factory all the time. Not a ton of it, but it gets in. Wind brings it in through the loading docks, and big, heavy fans that keep the floor cool move it around subtly throughout the day.
    All that dust that usually spread out around the factory floor was in a neat little berm around my feet, a little line of dirt circled around me in a rough ovoid like it had been drawn in by magnetism.
    I blinked, staring at the phenomenon, like it was some kind of strange coincidence. I moved my hand toward it and the dirt moved with me .
    “Ah!” I jumped in the air a little as I stepped back, and it followed. I caught the looks of Lawton and the others as they stared at me, waving my hand in the air and jumping like a fool, and I smiled. You got to smile at a moment like that. “I just shook hands with Edward Cavanagh and Cordell Weldon!” I said, weakly triumphant. I was lucky it had happened just then, because any other day, I wouldn’t have had anything else to cover my shock with.
    “Yeah, yeah, we saw,” Lawton said, like he couldn’t even muster up the energy to rain on my parade. He went back to his work.
    As for me, I just stood there until I was sure no one was watching. Then, very slowly, I lifted my hand and concentrated, and watched the dirt follow every single movement I made. Like I had … power … over it.
    Power.
    Metahuman power.
    Whew-eee.
    Like I said, I always knew I was gonna be somebody … special.

3.
    Sienna
     
    I left Minneapolis without anything other than my gym clothes, my wallet, phone, badge, and the Sig Sauer I had tucked into my waistband under my workout jacket. Okay, so I actually had enough to be getting along with. Frankly, the gun and the badge were enough for me. Western Union could always wire money from my accounts in Liechtenstein; I’d done it before in a pinch.
    Still, flying off the campus in a rush was not my best planning ever, but by the time I realized that I was at least halfway to Atlanta and didn’t want to humiliate myself by turning around or chancing a conversation with Ariadne. I also didn’t really want to tell anyone else where I was going. Then my boss might have expected me to report in regularly or something.
    I landed somewhere in north Georgia and bought some different clothes at a factory outlet mall. I tossed my gym clothes into a dumpster like Jack Reacher and took flight again, a little more slowly this time. The skies had been clear for the last few hundred miles, but I didn’t want to mess up my suit before I met with Detective Calderon.
    This part could have been tricky if I hadn’t known exactly where Calderon’s office was. Fortunately, I had Reed’s file, and imprinted on the windblown pages was the department’s address. Okay, it was