Omega (12 page)

I didn’t answer, and tried to look past them, out the dark window, but the lights inside the office reflected me, only me, me and them.

“Did you go to the door?” Old Man Winter asked, “Or were you following Clary while trying to dissuade him from knocking?”

I felt a moment of tension. “It’s my responsibility either way.”

Old Man Winter did not back off. “And how did it happen? Did Clary disobey your orders and leave the van or did you tell him to do so?”

I felt my innards twist. To admit that Clary had disobeyed me felt like admitting I was a weak leader, unready to be doing what I was doing. But the alternative was lying. “I’m responsible either way—”

“The truth,” Old Man Winter said, “if you please.”

“Clary left the van against orders,” I said. “He did not listen to my repeated requests to return to it, and knocked on the door before getting himself taken out of the fight by the Omega meta.” I straightened up, bringing myself to attention. “I apologize for the failure of my leadership—”

“You have no need to apologize for having a teammate who disregarded your orders,” Old Man Winter said, impassive. “But the Omega meta—I have seen the footage of him in holding. I am familiar with him, his name is Bjorn. He is deadly. You did not draw your weapon?”

I pulled the pistol from beneath my tattered coat. “It was damaged.”

Old Man Winter stared deeply into my eyes. “You have a backup weapon, yes?”

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Did you attempt to use either of them, at any point, during the mission?” Old Man Winter’s icy gaze was on me now, a winter’s storm of a glare that was absent any malice, but intense in its power.

“No,” I admitted. “I...don’t know what happened. Perhaps I was trying too hard to subdue the meta so we could find out about this ‘Operation Stanchion’ he mentioned.”

“‘Operation Stanchion’?” Ariadne leaned over the desk. “He just...spilled that out?”

“Something about calling it off if he was able to capture me,” I said, hoping that maybe the information would cause Old Man Winter to take his gaze away from me. The thought was making me uncomfortable, the idea that I hadn’t used my weapon...perhaps if I had, things would have been different, the others might not have been hurt. I felt the sting inside and shoved it down, ignoring that heartsinking feeling.

Ariadne and Old Man Winter exchanged a look, a much more obvious gesture from him than most. “We will...discuss it...when we interrogate him tomorrow,” he said, breaking away from Ariadne to look back at me.

It took a moment for it to register with me. “I’m sorry...did you say ‘we’? You mean me and Parks, right?”

There was a moment’s pause as the air shifted in the office, and I would have sworn the air conditioning had switched on if I hadn’t known better. “Things have come to a point where I can no longer allow them to proceed as they have been,” Old Man Winter said, drawing himself up in the chair, but making very little expression. “I will be handling the interrogation of Bjorn myself.

“And you will assist me.”

11.

I left Old Man Winter’s office in awe. The entire time I had been at the Directorate, I hadn’t really seen Old Man Winter do much of anything. Once, he threatened Wolfe and scared him away from me through sheer, intimidating reputation—or so he professed, since he claimed that he lacked the power to actually stop Wolfe. Other than that, he had been nothing but a mystery, an enigma, a quiet voice that delivered the occasional surprise, revelation or something else.

I certainly didn’t think of him as an interrogator.

I returned to the medical unit but was run off by Dr. Perugini, who shooed me away the same way an old lady might shoo birds out of her yard with a broom. I didn’t want to fight, even though it was my teammates and my brother under her care. It’s not like I could do anything for them, and I was tired anyway, so I went back to my room.

I lay down on my bed after taking my injection of chloridamide. I felt the pinch of the needle as it left my arm, and I put a little piece of cotton over the hole, letting it rest for the minute or so it would take to stop the bleeding. I looked around my room: bare walls, plain carpet. I’d been in Kat’s suite before—the one she barely used because she was so busy sleeping with Scott most nights—and it was totally different. I lay back on the bed and pictured it from the time I’d been in there with her while I waited for her to change.

There were posters on her walls. Justin Bieber. One Direction. I snorted at the memory, and hadn’t bothered to avoid laughing at the time. She just smiled in that infuriating, uber-confident way she had—not really like a cheerleader at all, just more comfortable in her own skin. She said she liked them. Her decor was like something out of bad set design for a fourteen-year old’s room. She didn’t even have a TV. Her wardrobe was super cute, at least everything she wasn’t wearing when she was working. Great taste in fashion. Mine was abysmal compared to hers. She had like...a thousand pairs of shoes. I had ten. I’m still a girl, after all.

I thought about her room, and how empty mine had felt compared to hers, and I wondered if she’d be staying in there for the foreseeable future.

I lay my head on the pillow and stared at the whirls of texture on the knockdown ceilings in the sparse light of the single bulb of my nightlight. I thought about Kat, about what she remembered of her life before the Directorate, and I realized that I hadn’t really asked her about it. All she had told me was that she couldn’t remember anything before the scientists at the facility in the Andes. I wondered how she’d gotten there, if she’d loved someone like Scott before in her century-plus of life, and if she’d love someone like that again and end up forgetting it.

I thought about Zack for a few minutes, then consciously made the effort to put him out of my mind before I fell asleep. Nothing could be worse for him right now than me coming to him in his dreams, and I needed that worry like I needed another mission with Clary at my side.

I woke to the screeching of my alarm, fading into consciousness with sunrise still somewhere over the horizon. I yawned and wondered why I had bothered awakening before seven. Then I remembered—food, get dressed, interrogation—all of which were important things.

My morning routine was half-speed, for some reason. I didn’t ache as if I had been in a fight, but I definitely knew I’d been in one, because a few little pains remained. I remembered the times before my powers manifested, when my mother and I would spar in the basement. I was left with bruises that took a week to heal, with pains that stayed with me for days. Yesterday I’d been thrown into a concrete retaining wall and had a house dropped on me. My back hurt a little, like I’d slept on it at the wrong angle. I kneaded at the knots in my shoulders with my hands; even with the weak muscle control I sometimes felt in the mornings it was more than enough to cause me pain. If I squeezed full strength, I had the ability to break the skin and draw blood. Well, that was as hard as I had ever squeezed myself, at any rate.

The cafeteria was already filled with activity when I got there, from the crowds of people going about the start of their daily routine. I thought about texting Zack to see if he would be in for breakfast, but I didn’t want to be a clingy girlfriend, especially after last night. I suppose it was a compliment that he enjoyed our nighttime activities so much, but it worried me, and the pleasure was all his. To me it still felt fake, like trying to touch a shadow. I wanted to feel the real thing.

I waited in line, lost in thought. The crowd and conversation went on around me, hundreds of voices rising and falling in a chorus that reminded me of white noise as I tuned it out. The smell of eggs and bacon were prominent, as were the onions for the Denver-style eggs. All the cafeteria workers were dressed in brown aprons, their hairnets making them into a line of mushrooms blooming against the white, sunlit walls.

My fingers, still covered by gloves, ran along the glass window between me and the food, as though I could somehow impart the tactile sense of taste along with the touch, something small to calm my raging stomach, which was reminding me I had skipped both lunch and dinner yesterday. It had a bad habit of holding me accountable for missed meals (which happened increasingly often due to work lately) with a bad case of the rumblies. I could almost taste the food as I slid my tray down the three steel rails that ran the length of the counter.

“Excuse me,” I heard from my left. I turned and saw that teenaged boy who had been staring at me only a couple days earlier, the one that had been in the cafeteria line. He had hair that seemed to droop around his head in a bowl, falling to just above his neck. It was a careless sort of haircut, and his brown eyes were hidden behind a thick pair of glasses. “Can you pass me an apple?” he asked, pointing just past me to where the apples and oranges waited in bowls at the end of the line, in an area reserved for self-service foods like crackers and condiments, cereal and such.

I thought briefly about why he was bothering to ask me when in two seconds I would be clear of it and he could get whatever he wanted, but I put it out of my mind in the name of civility. “Sure,” I said, and tossed him an apple. He caught it, cradling it against his red t-shirt like it was some treasure. He looked familiar, I thought as I gave him a moment’s more look before turning away and finding a table of my own. And not just from the cafeteria line yesterday, but from somewhere else. He didn’t look much different in age than me, but...I shrugged. Not my worry.

I scarfed my eggs and ham without much delay, sitting by myself. It was a little unusual; I’d fallen into a pattern of eating my meals with Reed, Kat and Scott, or at least Zack. Failing that, sometimes I would eat on the run or skip a meal. I looked around the cafeteria and found myself unsettled at being alone. Which was strange for a girl who used to eat almost all her meals by herself, with only Mother occasionally around for company.

I finished and walked back to headquarters, ignoring the fall chill in the air. I hit the lobby of HQ and the heaters kicked in the moment I walked through the doors, spreading slowly over my skin as the cool air faded. I felt the heavy dryness of it in my sinuses as the soles of my shoes clipped along on the tile floor keeping pace with all the other civilian employees of the Directorate who were making their way in to go about their daily jobs. Suits and ties abounded, women wore darker-toned dress pants and jackets, and almost everyone was already wearing full-length winter coats.

I veered behind the sweeping double staircase on either side of the lobby and made my way to the emergency stairwell at the back of the building, the one that also led down. The concrete walls around me established a pattern that ran all the way to the emergency floodlights at each landing. The sounds of the people milling about the lobby on their way to their serious, professional day disappeared as I heard the heavy metal door to the stairwell shut behind me, an echo bouncing around in the four-story room like a thunderclap after lightning.

I pushed through the door at the basement entrance and found myself in a long, narrow hallway. The walls were beige, a kind of wallpaper on them made up of tiny lines that intersected like fine wire mesh, a texture so small that I wondered if the non-metahuman eye could even perceive it. Black doors lined the walls, and I realized for the first time I had no idea how many of them were actually cells, and if any of them were occupied besides the two filled with our Omega friends. Just outside the staircase entrance were the more luxurious cells, the ones that were almost like standard living quarters but more secured; the further one got from the stairs, the more they became like a square without any sort of differentiation; an arrangement designed to keep the prisoners contained within off-balance, and Spartan enough to give them almost nothing to work with in planning any sort of escape.

Old Man Winter stood in the middle of the hallway like an imposing pillar holding up the whole building. He wore a winter coat like so many of the other men, but I blinked in surprise—it had to be close to eighty degrees in the hallway. He always tended toward heavy clothing, but I wondered if perhaps it was to hold the cold in, toward him, rather than keeping the warmth in as
it was for most people. I watched him as I walked, and he seemed to take no notice of me until I was within a few feet, at which point he swiveled on a heel and looked down at me. Almost seven feet tall, that was no challenge for him, since I was not even five and a half feet tall myself.

“You are early,” he observed, arms folded over his coat.

“It doesn’t pay to be late when you’re working with the boss,” I said. “Are we going to be interrogating James Fries as well, while we’re here?”

“Pointless, I think,” he said, his rumbling voice given resonance by the acoustics of the hall. “Fries is a messenger boy, a strong meta, but not one of the privileged of Omega. Bjorn, on the other hand, was the son Odin, before he passed.”

“Odin’s son?” My face scrunched up and I pondered the oversized man who had wrecked my whole team in Des Moines. “He looks nothing like Chris Hemsworth.”

Old Man Winter ignored me. “He will, I think, be a better choice to speak with. More...knowledgeable, having been brought to America specifically for whatever this Operation Stanchion is.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, feeling a flash of confusion coupled with the fear that I had failed to read something that had been prepared. Unprepared was not a good feeling, especially in front of the boss.

“This morning, J.J. ran a...tracking program, I believe he called it...searching through U.S. customs for certain patterns. One emerged, detailing passport irregularities.” Old Man Winter peered down at me, cold blue eyes seeming to glow in the fluorescent light of the hall. “After comparing them to photographic records, he found Bjorn.” Old Man Winter let out a deep breath, fogging the air in front of him, something that reminded me of the smell of a December wind. “Unless Omega is planning something else, that means that Bjorn is here for Stanchion.”

I thought about that for a moment. Stanchion had something to do with me, plainly, because Bjorn had inferred as much when I was fighting him. If Omega was sending in more operatives to capture me, this was nothing new. They’d been sending them at me for almost a year, to the point it was now almost comical in result. Or it would have been, except for what happened to Kat. Their last two operatives had ended up decapitated (and I didn’t even feel bad about it, because they showed no human characteristics at all), the one before that was locked up in a cell even now, the one before that had been thrown off a building by the one predating him (by Wolfe, who was locked in my head).