Omega (11 page)

“
You
had a good thing going with the dreams,” I said, and my voice rose higher than I intended it to before I lowered it. “Personally, I’d still like to be able to touch my boyfriend, to feel him against me, really against me, without having to dream it.”

He nodded and I saw a little retreat from him. “Okay. I’ll talk to Sessions.”

“Try and muster some enthusiasm about it or let’s not even bother.”

“No, really,” he said. “I just felt...intimate with you already. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s talk about it later.” I started toward Dr. Perugini.

“Oh, good,” Dr. Perugini said, looking up at us, her olive skin flushed as I arrived at Kat’s bedside, a snarl posed on her lips. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your personal conversation with my tedious medical report about the people who were injured on your mission.” She smiled, her every word a dagger. “Scott will be fine. Katrina appears to be fine, physically. They’ll both awaken in the next few hours, I expect. Katrina did some preliminary healing at the scene, yes?”

“Yes,” I answered, looking down at Kat’s face, which was drawn, almost as platinum as her hair.

“That saved us from serious problems, especially with Scott,” Perugini said, a clipboard positioned in front of her. “I can tell from the damage that his injuries were much more severe, that they have been healed considerably. Without that, he would likely have died.”

“He saved my life,” I said, looking back to where Scott lay on the bed. “Saved me from getting hit, pushed me down and blocked me with his body.” I shook my head. “That was a complete cluster—”

“And you were in charge?” Perugini eyed me accusingly.

“In charge, yes,” I said. “In control of the situation—sadly, not.”

“And whose fault is that?” she asked with more than a little accusation.

“What happened?” I heard a faint, groggy voice. I looked down to see Kat staring up at us, her curled blond hair lank and hanging loose around her face. Her eyes were open but only barely, the green of her irises peeking out at us from behind heavy lids. “Sienna?” She said my name as if trying to drag it out of herself.

“I’m here,” I said, and started to reach for her hand, but hesitated when I remembered how dirty my glove was. I only froze for a second and then I took hold of her hand and picked it up. “You’re gonna be fine, Kat. We’re back at the Directorate. What do you remember?”

“Directorate?” Kat asked, blinking at me. “What happened?”

“We were on a mission,” I said. “In Des Moines. We were supposed to keep an eye on an Omega safe house, and things went wrong. You saved us, Kat—you healed Scott and the others, kept them from dying.”

“Scott?” She scrunched her eyes at me. “I saved him?”

“You did,” I said. “He’s going to be just fine.”

“Oh.” She seemed to nod, but her eyes were distant, far away, glazed over. They came sharply back into focus, and found mine, and she squinted as she concentrated, trying to speak again. “Who is Scott?”

9.

Interlude

Des Moines, Iowa

Red and blue lights flashed in the Iowa night, casting their colors over the street. The streetlamps were out, and he was left to wonder if they had functioned in the first place. The house in front of him was blocked off by a line of police cars and officers, all of them out of their vehicles—
and buzzing around like little bees
, he thought. The news vans were out as well, and they were worse than bees—they were like flies that gathered around manure in a pasture, always gravitating toward the largest pile.

Residents were out, the damp street showing the reflected red and blue, the same refracting off the faces of the men, women and children who were on the scene with him, the crowd that had gathered in their heavy coats, trying to put anything between them and the cold autumn night. The wind picked up but didn’t blow the leaves the way it had in Minnesota only a few days earlier; here, everything was damp, weighed down by the wetness of a rain that must have passed in the morning but failed to dry under the cold grey sky. The smell of it was still in the air.

He pulled his own coat tight against the chill, not quite to the point of having to stamp his feet to keep warm, but only because of the crowd gathered around. He watched one of the news anchors, a pretty blond woman, delivering her palaver to the camera, after which she pulled some poor resident of the neighborhood over to answer her questions. “What did you see?” the reporter asked the woman.

“It was like there was a bulldozer coming through here or something, like I think maybe the gas line exploded?” The woman shook her head at the reporter. “I saw a car hit another car at one point, and there were people moving around, and lots of dust because the house came down...it was crazy. I think some of them were fighting.”

“The police are calling this a building collapse,” the reporter said, turning to face the camera, “that came in the wake of a gang battle. At least one vehicle fled the scene shortly after the collapse, and vandalism by the rival gang is strongly suspected as the motive for this bizarre activity. Whatever the case, this Des Moines neighborhood is still reeling from the destruction.” She stopped and seemed to relax. “That was good, right?” The producer next to her nodded. “Perfect.”

“Fools,” the old man whispered under his breath, but it was lost to the wind. He backed through the crowd, then turned from the scene of the chaos, and began a slow stride back down the street to where he had parked his car. His grey hair was cropped short, and he bore not even a limp from his seemingly advanced age.
Eat, sleep, drink, and know nothing about your world. Deny all you see, and don’t bother to try to explain it outside the framework of your silly beliefs,
he thought
.
His car was ahead, the old Cadillac he had picked up at a used car lot only a few days earlier—steel gray, this one, perfectly suited to his needs. He’d driven it down in the morning, when he’d heard the report that the safe house had gone offline. The drive was terrible, as all drives were, but it was necessary.
As I knew it would be when I originated Operation Stanchion
.

He felt for the key in his pocket, felt the loose jangle of the change, and suddenly he knew he was not alone. There were presences all around him, familiar in their intent. The police were just around the corner—
but far enough away that it won’t matter
. He felt himself tense slightly, and smiled.
What a fine opportunity
, he thought. He let his fingers go slack around the keys and turned, leaning his back against the car. “Hello,” he said, his voice sounding normal to himself, but probably drawing the same confusion from the youths that surrounded him as his accent seemed to with everyone else that he encountered on his trip. “It’s a fine night for a walk, isn’t it?”

“I was just thinking that,” said the young man in front of him who wore a chain from his nose to his ear. His head was shaven clean, his skin a pale sort of cream, along with the two boys who flanked him on either side. “I was thinking that if you gave me your car keys and your wallet, you could just keep walking.” Tattoos on their necks caught the old man’s interest and he cocked his head at an angle to look closer.

“You are bold,” the old man said, keeping his hands folded one over the other in front of him, “with the police in force just around the corner.”

“They’ll never get here in time.” There was almost a sneer in the young man’s face. “Even if they heard you.” Behind the bravado, the sneer, the old man could sense the faintest hesitation.
A broken nose, then
.

The young fellow at the front turned to say something to his comrades. The old man smiled, and was already moving as the head began to swivel back at the sight of motion. The impact sent the young tough to the ground, hands slapping the pavement, catching him. His mouth was open, a thick stream of blood already coating his upper lip, dribbling down his face as he looked up at his attacker. “As you said,” the old man repeated, “they’ll never get here in time.”

The two youths that were still standing began to move, but they were too slow; the older man’s methodical motions were gone now, replaced with a fluid grace as he spun into a low kick that swept the legs of the thug on the right, sending his head cracking against the asphalt and followed that with a punch that fractured the skull of the one on the left. The older man returned to his position, leaning against the car, taking a deep breath of the night air, feeling the vigor return to his joints in a way that the walk hadn’t been able to restore.

“Let me tell you something,” the old man said to the young leader, the only one of the three
still conscious, “because I like to aid people in their transitions. Your life, short and pitiful as it is, will be even shorter and more pitiful should you keep walking the route you are. It’s a path fraught with peril, not to be trod lightly upon, and even less so by one as mortal as you.” The old man looked down, and saw a quivering lip, the young man watching him frozen, as though the cold had claimed him. “If I were you—which I am not, and never would wish to be—I would go a different way, because a short life is much less preferable to a long one, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Y-yes.” The reply was mumbled and stuttered, some rare combination of nerves and pain.

“Good, I’m glad we sorted that out.” The old man leaned down. “I look at you and I see someone who could still live long, at least for your people, should you cease this pointless, circuitous route of jail and robberies and beatings and eventually murder. That would be a shame, even for one with as little potential as you.” The old man stood, and felt for his keys again, his hand sliding against the fleece of his old coat, the skin feeling thin as paper against the wind. “Good luck in your transition, should you choose to make it. I can show you the door, but you must walk through it yourself.”

With that, the older man unlocked the car and eased in, shutting the door behind him. He looked out the window, saw the little cloud of fog gather on the glass from his breath, and saw the face beyond it, a scared young man, his nose broken, humiliated by a man who looked at least four times his age.
An easy mark
. The old man smiled.
Not so easy. Not such a mark. Never have been
. He started the car, fumbling the key slightly in the ignition, and reached into the old, faux leather armrest. He pulled out a new cell phone, a disposable one that he’d bought in a chain store only a few days earlier, then pulled a small 3 x 5 index card out along with it, and dialed a number.
This time, I remember
.

The female voice answered at the other end of the line, peppy for it being so early in the morning there. “This is Portal, extension 4736, please.” He waited a moment before the connection was made, and the voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy. “Bjorn has been taken. Stanchion moves to phase two.” He paused, waiting for a response. “No, I was supposed to get extension 4763...well, just forget what I said, will you? Connect me to the operator.”

He sighed as he heard the familiar ring again, of the call being connected. “Let’s try this again,” he said as the female voice picked up. “Message for extension 4763...Stanchion proceeds to phase two. Will advise. Janus out.”

He pressed the end key and replayed his words again. “Dammit! I meant Portal. Portal out.” He shook his head, teeth clenched. “Shit.”

10.

Sienna

“Her memory seems to be...selectively gone,” I told Old Man Winter and Ariadne, standing in his office before the massive stone desk. The smell of the plaster and dust that coated me was still there, now evident to my nose because of the thoughts my brain was fixed on, of what had happened in Iowa, of how we had failed. Of how I had failed. “You told me once before that when she heals someone too much, she loses memory...”

“Yes,” Old Man Winter said in his rumbling tone. He stirred against the black background of the windows behind him; the lights that lit the Directorate campus were dimmed at this time of night, and stars were visible on the horizon behind him, a thousand points of light over the trees in the distance. “So far as I know, her memories, once gone...remain gone forever. This has, of course, happened to her before, which is why she remembers her name as Katrina Forrest rather than Klementina Gavrikov
a.”

“I get that,” I said, and ran a hand over my forehead, stirring a small cloud in front of my face. “But there must be something that we can do. He’s her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even remember who he is. We had her look at him and it was a blank stare, nothing, no recognition, as if they’d never met before in their lives. But she remembers me,” I shook my head, “hell, she even remembers Reed. It’s like her memory about him just...vanished.”

Old Man Winter templed his hands
in front of his face. “For a Persephone-type, the first memories to go are those most crucial—the core memories, if you will. The best of times, the most intimate of companions, these are bundled together in some sort of way that makes them closest to the edge. What remains, even after a fully draining event, is ancillary things, the trivial and unimportant. The rest is just fragments.”

“There must be...” I sighed. “There has to be something we can do.”

“She’ll receive our full attention,” Ariadne said from her place next to Old Man Winter. “We’ll have Perugini and Sessions working every angle they can to try and restore her memory, but this is...not something we’ve ever dealt with before, nor is it something where there’s an overabundance of information waiting out there to steer us in the right direction. It’s doubtful we’ll be able to do anything for her, because as with everything else, our experimentation with meta abilities tends to leave us with more questions than answers, more knowledge of the results than what causes them.”

“She saved him, his life,” I said, quiet. “She must have known she was close to the edge of losing memories, because she’d already healed me, Reed, Clary—she knew, and I think she did it anyway, and she ended up passing out on him.” I felt my jaw tighten before I loosened it to speak. “She saved his life, and she can’t even remember his name because of it.”

“Perhaps we should discuss this another time,” Ariadne said gently, looking to Old Man Winter. “This has obviously been an emotional day—”

“I’m fine,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m the only one who is, but I’m fine.”

“Clary appears uninjured,” Ariadne said. “Perhaps you can explain what happened—”

“It all went to hell,” I said. “This meta, he greeted us at the door, blasted through the wall with his strength and sent Clary into a parked car—”

“Why were you at the front door?” Ariadne said, and for once the ice extended from her words, not Old Man Winter’s. “Your mission was reconnaissance first—”