“You’re welcome.” Her eyes clouded over and she looked troubled, as though she were trying to find a way to say what was on her mind. “Spit it out,” I said with an air of impatience.
“I was thinking about the rooftop.” She fumbled with her hands, gripping the rail of the bed. “When you faced that maniac in your basement, you were the only one there.”
“Yeah, and?”
“So...I mean, you faced someone as bad or worse than...” she tried to say it but it didn’t come out as anything but a pronoun. “...Him. But you faced Wolfe alone, all by yourself. And on the rooftop, you didn’t have to be there. You had no reason to stay, you don’t know anybody in Minneapolis. Scott has family in the area and Gavrikov would have chased me around the planet...but you didn’t have any reason to be there.”
“I told you before.” I crossed my gloveless hands in my lap. “I had my reasons.”
“Well...thank you.” She smiled at me, and I still felt bad for her.
She started to shuffle back to Scott’s bedside but I called out to her. “Wait!” She turned, almost expectant. “Do you know if there were anymore of those turtlenecks and jeans in the closet down in the room you were being held captive in?” I fingered my shirt, which was once again tattered around the arms and shoulders and my jeans were wet and caked with dirt and blood from the rooftop battle. “I think the rest of my clothes got lost in the fire.”
“Yeah, there were a few of them,” she said. “Coats and gloves, too.”
“Oh, good.” I looked back down at my bare hands.
She walked back to Scott’s bedside and I looked around the room once. Zollers and Perugini were consulting in the corner, Zack and Kat were talking to Scott. I presumed M-Squad was with Ariadne and Old Man Winter. I tried to decide if I wanted to talk to them today or tomorrow and realized I didn’t really care which, so long as I got some fresh clothes.
I left the medical unit without saying anything to anyone. I didn’t sneak out; I didn’t have to. Everyone was occupied and no one saw me leave except Zollers, who caught me with a sly smile that told me I’d see him later. That was fine, so long as it wasn’t now.
I went to the staircase and found my way to the basement. The confinement room that they’d kept Kat in was unlocked now, no key card necessary. I walked in and went to the closet, finding exactly what she had promised inside. I grabbed a change of clothes, along with some undergarments that also fit me and went into the bathroom.
I took maybe the longest shower ever known to man, taking care to keep my wounded arm out of the spray but drowning every other inch of my skin in hot water. I scrubbed off the dried blood, the caked-on grit from the roof, and afterward I combed all the tangles out of my hair. I stared at myself in the mirror. I was the same girl I had seen a thousand times before, in the mirror of my own bathroom, back home, before all this happened.
Except I wasn’t. The blue-green eyes were different. Not weary, but aged. I’d aged even in the weeks since I left home.
I heard a noise outside and dressed quickly. I didn’t slide my gloves on until after I opened the door to find Zack waiting. I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding and rolled my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
He looked at me innocently. “Came to check on you. Kat told me you were coming for clothes but I didn’t realize you were going to shower too.” He nodded at my wet hair. “I can wait if you want to dry off first.”
I shook my head. “No big deal. I’m fine. I might sleep down here; it’s as good as anywhere else and I don’t know if I have it in me to walk all the way back to the dormitory building tonight. Besides, I’m sure Ariadne and Old Man Winter will be looking for me tomorrow morning.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” He said it with more assurance than I would have expected.
“I’m not worried.” I blinked my eyes, as though I could just shed the tiredness out of them with that little effort. “Worst comes to worst, I move along on my own.” I felt a strength in those words that wouldn’t have been possible a week earlier. “I’m okay with that, really. Maybe for the first time.”
“I don’t think they’re going to ask you to leave,” he said. “But why the change? Not that you showed much sign you were feeling all dependent before, but what triggered the shift?”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been so busy feeling sorry for myself for all that’s happened, for all the tough breaks—literal, in some cases,” I held up my wrist, the brace still snug around it. “I’ve been jonesing so hard to be normal, whatever that is, that all I could think about was myself, about how I’d have to live a life where I had walls up all the time, where I couldn’t really connect with anybody.” I held up my hands as I slipped the gloves on. “Where I’d live untouched by people or emotion or life.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s up to you whether you connect with people or not. And I hate to break it to you, but your own little world is not the center of the universe.”
I cocked my head at him and shot him a “duh” look. “Thanks, Galileo. You’re a little late to the party on that one. And not fashionably so, like...party’s over, GTFO. I figured it out, thanks.”
“How?” He took a step closer to me, reminding me for some reason of Gavrikov as he took the first steps toward Kat.
“It was Aleksandr,” I said, thinking about it. “He lived over a hundred years with his flames up all the time, by choice, ever since...whatever happened with his sister. He chose to live that way, isolated, alone. I think...” I felt the loneliness creep over me, the walls start to rise, and pushed them away, “...I would give anything to be able to take the barriers down and just live. And I can do that for most of them.” I held up my hands, uselessly, showing him the gloves once more, the things that separated me from everyone. “All but one, anyway. It’s not normal, but it’s all I can do—”
He interrupted me by taking two strides to close the distance between us and before I could say anything his arms wrapped around my back, enveloping me, and he pressed his lips to mine. My eyes closed; the touch was magnificent, warm and sweet, and he pulled away just as I felt the first stirrings of my power start to work. I took a breath and opened my eyes, and his were staring back at me, brown and big and with his smile reflected in them. He had a really nice smile.
He didn’t say anything else, just pulled away, leaving me speechless, standing there with my wet hair, and walked to the door. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and the door shut before I could answer.
Chapter 29
I sat across from Old Man Winter, playing the staring game. Oddly, my eyes didn’t seem to burn this time, so I just kept going.
Ariadne was there, of course. “We’ve already gotten M-Squad’s report and spoken with Scott and Kat, so we have a general idea of how everything went, for the most part. Zack said that Henderschott showed up?” She flipped through the file in her hands as if looking for confirmation.
“Yeah. He had the campus under surveillance and picked us up as we left. He must have followed us all the way to the IDS tower, because I saw the cable truck he was driving pass us as we went into the lobby. Didn’t really put it together until he hit me, but that’s the only way it could have happened unless someone tipped him off we were going to be there.”
Ariadne closed the file. “Makes sense. Would you like to explain your actions?”
I was still locked on Old Man Winter’s ice blue eyes. “Which ones?”
Ariadne coughed. “Taking two untrained metas and yourself into combat with not one, but two, extremely deadly foes, stealing a Directorate car, assaulting our guards, interfering in our efforts to contain the situation—”
“Your containment strategy sucked,” I said, still not breaking my gaze away. Ariadne’s jaw dropped and she took a step back. Old Man Winter didn’t look away from my gaze. “It would have resulted in about a million deaths; the crosswinds on top of the tower made a clean shot against Gavrikov near impossible without a stable platform to shoot from. Hell, I’m amazed Parks even hit him.”
“And your plan was better?” she said with an air of snottiness. “Byerly almost got burned to death, Forrest was cornered—”
“But I saved her,” I said.
“—Zack jumped from a helicopter, injuring himself, and Clary ended up going through the roof—”
“That was his own fault, you can’t blame me for Clary being stupid.”
“And then there’s you.” She came around and sat on the edge of the desk, just to the side of my staring contest with Old Man Winter. “You disobeyed our explicit commands and substituted your own judgment for ours.”
“You’re right,” I said, firm. “Based on my experience with Gavrikov, I handled the situation as I thought best. None of the rest of you knew him personally or knew what to expect from him. Don’t put me in a position where I have to watch countless people die. Let me take the responsibility a thousand times before you hand it off to someone else who will screw it up. I won’t stand by and take dumb orders. I did what I thought—what I
knew
was right. And if you expect anything less from me as an agent or a retriever or a whatever you wanted me to do, you need to find someone else for the job.”
There was a freezing effect in the room, as though all particle motion had halted, and Ariadne spoke first. “I’m sorry, what?”
I still didn’t look away from Old Man Winter. “The job offer you extended. If it’s off the table in the wake of this incident, I understand. But I figured you ought to know that if it was still open, that I’m not some brainless shell that you get to use just for my powers.”
Ariadne shifted from where she was sitting on the desk. “I...don’t think we would ever expect anything less than your full opinion at any time. And...” She looked to Old Man Winter, who finally broke his gaze away from me to look to her. I mentally declared victory and pumped my fist. They pretended not to notice. She turned back after a look was shared between them. “The offer is still on the table.”
“Then you have a trainee,” I said. “And I have a signing bonus, I believe.” I looked at her. “Do I get paid with checks or cash? Because I don’t have a bank account. Yet.”
“I’ll...have someone cut you a check,” she said, standing. “I’m sure we can find someone to take you into town to make banking arrangements.”
“I’d like to go to the mall.” I stood. “I need some clothes.” I pulled on the shoulder of the black turtleneck, the thousandth I’d worn since arriving at the Directorate. “Nothing personal, but I’m kind of sick of wearing black all the time. Who does that?”
She nodded. “Anything else?”
I thought for a moment and remembered something. “One last thing. Henderschott, before he died—”
“Ah, yes.” Ariadne opened the file. “Rather spectacular, that. A 57-storey plunge to the street?” She looked away from the photograph I could see in the folder. “Not a pleasant way to go, especially when strapped into a tin can as he was.”
“He said something before he died, about his employer.” The silence in the room became oppressive in an instant. Old Man Winter seemed to perk up and Ariadne had a wide-eyed look on her face. “He said they’d keep coming after me. I asked him who, and he gave me their name—Omega.” I looked at the two of them as they exchanged a look. “That mean anything to you?”
“No,” Ariadne said after appearing to consider it for a moment. “So we have a name for this new threat—”
Old Man Winter cut her off. “No. Not a new threat at all. Not Omega.” His blue eyes glowed, shining in the dimness of the tinted office. “An old one, rather. A very, very old one.” The office was warm enough, and I was already wearing my coat. But the way he said it, the timbre of his voice, the delivery—gave me a very real shudder that was absolutely unrelated to the cold.
Chapter 30
It was a Monday, I think. I let the nice agent (he didn’t sneer or get pissy at all with me, a rarity for people from the Directorate in my experience) drive me to the bank. They were very pleasant and understanding, having had a long relationship with the Directorate, and so I opened an account and the money was in it within just a few minutes. Which was fortunate, because I didn’t have a driver’s license. Somehow, Ariadne had gotten copies of my Social Security Card and Birth Certificate, which made things easier.
I left the bank with a temporary checkbook and a debit card, walking across the parking lot back to the car where the agent was waiting for me, the heat from the exhaust causing the tale pipe to steam in the cold. And it was cold, cold but beautiful, the sunlight streaming down from above, shining off all the ice and snow. I looked up, just to make sure the sun was still there. It was, seated in the middle of the blue sky. I smiled and got in the car.
The drive to Eden Prairie Center only took a few minutes. I entered through the same entrance by the food court that I had fairly destroyed last time I was there. There was still a hole in the wall where I’d thrown Henderschott through, though they had workmen patching the damage. I passed by without paying too much attention, trying to appear innocent.
I stopped at a lot of different stores, and I bought a few things. I had decided before I walked in that I was going to try and spend less than five hundred dollars, because even though I had ten thousand, I didn’t ever want to be stuck in a situation where I needed money and didn’t have it. I tried to find the bargain tables, checked the prices on everything before I bought it, and did the math in my head. It all worked out well and I found some very nice things (all of which were long sleeved and didn’t show much in the way of flesh, because every inch of it I exposed was an inch that could kill someone) but that took my wardrobe beyond the dullness of Ariadne’s. Not that it would take much.
I walked out of the store I was in, having stocked up on some professional-looking outfits and started to make my way back to the car. By my estimate, I was a couple hundred under my limit and quite content with that until I passed the store I’d gone by with Zack only a week earlier. The dress was still in the window, the red one that I had seen on the woman I had thought was my mom. I hesitated outside, staring. It was impractical. It wasn’t for me. But I went inside, and they had it in my size.