“He’s a sweet talker, that one,” I said to Dr. Perugini, who snorted again, this time in amusement. “Why is that bizarre?”
“I’ve analyzed hundreds of meta-humans,” he went on, “and most fall into common types – a half-dozen or so groupings depending on the special powers they exhibit. Some tend more toward incredible physical attributes, some have energy projection capabilities or—”
“Perhaps speak to the girl in English,” Dr. Perugini interrupted.
“No need for that,” he corrected her. “I gave her an intelligence test as well; I could be having this discussion in Latin and she’d pick up the essential points. The simple fact is—”
“I defy classification,” I interrupted, my words calm, coming out over the foul, acidic taste in my mouth from my recent bout of vomiting. “Even among the bizarre, I’m bizarre.”
A phone rang across the medical unit and Dr. Perugini gave Dr. Sessions a thinly lidded glare before striding away to answer it. He kept his distance, as though he were uncomfortable stepping any closer. Instead he stared at me in a way that, had any other man done it right now, would likely have set me to vomiting again. I stared back at him. “What?”
“Your physical strength is high above a normal meta’s, so you should be manifesting soon, if you haven’t already. No unique abilities to report yet?” I felt zero compunction about lying, but was relieved that Dr. Perugini had stepped away; I suspected she would see through my untruth; Dr. Sessions didn’t have a prayer.
“No. Nothing unusual.”
He turned back to his clipboard. “Well, that’s fine…it’s normal that you wouldn’t be experiencing anything yet. But as time goes by, additional abilities will materialize.” He looked down at the blood pooled at his feet. “And I’ll, uh…” He pulled a small test tube out of his coat pocket and stooped down, scraping it across the tile floor, forcing a small amount into the vial before putting a rubber stopper on it. Dr. Perugini rounded the corner just in time to see him and threw up her hands in silent exasperation.
He stood up, failing to notice her behind him. “I’ll get this analyzed and maybe it’ll give us some ideas of what you are.” He turned and started when he saw Dr. Perugini, then shuffled around her as she glared at him.
“He has the bedside manner of a goat,” she said with a hint of a European accent. “But not the common sense nor tact. That—” she pointed to the phone behind her—“was Ariadne. She and Old Man Winter are coming down to see you now that you’re awake.”
“Did they already know I was awake when they called?” I asked. I could believe Dr. Sessions would wander over and not know that I was unconscious; I’d be shocked if Ariadne and Old Man Winter weren’t spying on me.
She stared back at me, her dark eyes cool and unflinching. “Yes.” She turned away, grabbing a clipboard off a nearby shelf. “You’re going to need to start eating again soon. I don’t want to strain your digestive tract until I’m sure it’s fully healed, so I’ll be giving you another ultrasound in a couple hours to confirm you mend as fast as I suspect you do. After that, dinner will be served.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. The brush with Wolfe made me wonder if I’d ever be able to eat again without heaving.
“That’s okay,” she replied without looking up from her clipboard. “I’m not feeding you yet.”
The medical unit was a long room, probably as long as my house but narrower, with curtains separating individual beds and a private room at the far end with an oversized door for rolling gurneys in. Every surface was the same flat metal that I’d seen in the room I’d woken up in when I’d first arrived at the Directorate, broken up by glass windows that looked out into a hallway that matched the distinct look of the headquarters building.
The sharp odor of disinfectants wrinkled my nose as I took it in for the first time, almost giving me another reason to gag. I could hear the low beeps of monitoring equipment in the background and the faint hum of all the machinery. I counted the number of occupied beds I could see from where I lay. Less than a half dozen. “How do you handle so many at one time?” I asked.
“I don’t,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I had to triage, and Old Man Winter demanded I treat you first.”
“But I can survive more than any of them.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, not looking up from her clipboard. “And once I had established your wounds were not of the life-threatening variety, I moved on to the next critical patient.”
“How many of them died?” The words were like ashes in my mouth. Bitter.
A moment of silence passed between us. “Five.”
I did not respond to her statement, and she didn’t speak either. The doors on the far side of the medical unit opened to admit Ariadne, who looked drawn, her severe suit wrinkled as though she had slept in it. Old Man Winter followed a pace behind her, his age less obvious today, I thought – or was that because I knew he wasn’t what he appeared?
“Hello,” Ariadne said. I didn’t bother to glare. She took this as an invitation to move closer, and hovered over my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been kicked, punched, gutted, slapped and stomped on,” I said without much feeling. “So basically like you look all the time.” I couldn’t stop myself. Ouch.
Her jaw dropped only a little, and she recovered quickly. I think she was getting used to my barbs. Good. Old Man Winter stood a few feet behind her, watching me, but did not speak.
Ariadne looked chastened, but began again. “We’ve been keeping updated on your progress through Dr. Perugini. She’s most impressed with your healing abilities, which rate very high on the meta-human scale.”
“That’s coming in handy more often than I would have hoped,” I replied. “I take it Wolfe breaking into your dormitory building came as a surprise for you, too?”
Ariadne folded her arms and shook her head. “We shouldn’t have taken Kurt’s report that all our agents at your house were dead at face value; we should have verified to make sure nothing was left behind that could be traced back to us. But at the time we viewed sending a recovery team for the bodies as too great a risk for fear that Wolfe would somehow track them back to us.”
I pictured the oversized Wolfe driving a car, following a convoy of agents, then had an idle thought wondering what kind of vehicle he would drive. The image of him crammed behind the wheel of a Volkswagon bug popped into my head and in spite of all the emotional turmoil I had to stifle the urge to laugh, which was overtaken by the feeling of sickness again when I thought of him.
“Are you okay?” Ariadne looked at me with a concern that I would have found touching if I trusted her in the slightest. As it was, she spurred my instinct to aim at her if I felt the urge to vomit again.
“I’ll be fine.” I waved her off. “You didn’t come down here to talk to me about my abilities, did you?”
“No,” Ariadne replied after a moment’s pause. “We came to talk to you about security. Yours.”
I felt hollow, a complete lack of emotion. “What about it? Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no.” Ariadne shook her head with emphasis. “Now that Wolfe has found our location, though, it changes things. We want to keep you away from the outbuildings and here in the headquarters, where we have the greatest chance to be able to protect you from him.”
I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t even surprised. But I did feel a clutch of fear at the thought of not being able to see the sky, cloudy though it was, or feel the frigid winter air on my cheeks. Funny, since I’d only just felt it over the last few days, that I was already addicted and unwanting to give it up. “So you don’t want me to leave the building…at all? Is that right?”
Ariadne shared an uncertain look with Old Man Winter, who nodded. “Just for the time being,” she said, returning her gaze to me. “Until we can resolve this Wolfe situation.”
I laughed, that scornful noise I make when I’m not really finding something funny but I w
ant to show my disdain for what’s been said. “He’s wiped out everything you’ve sent after him, including your security here on your campus. What, exactly, is going to resolve this ‘Wolfe situation’?”
“M-Squad will be returning from special assignment down in the Andes Mountains as soon as we can get in contact with them. Once they return,” Ariadne continued, “we have full confidence they’ll be able to take Wolfe out of play. Or,” she said with another backward look at Old Man Winter, “at least contain him.”
“Contain him?” I scoffed again. “The people I’ve talked to—”
“Meaning Zack,” Ariadne interrupted.
I ignored her and continued. “—seem to think that he’s one of the strongest metas on the planet. Is that accurate?”
Ariadne exchanged an uncomfortable look with Old Man Winter. And by uncomfortable, I mean on her end. He looked placid as ever. “He is one of the strongest, yes,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be stopped.”
“That’s funny,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Because Dr. Sessions told me I was a super strong meta, and I can’t make much of a dent in him, unless you count when I stuck a pen in his ear.”
“A clever strategy, by the way,” Ariadne added.
“A desperate one that bought me all of thirty seconds before he reaffirmed his desire to rape and kill me,” I raged back at her.
“It bought you enough time to allow us to intervene,” she said in a voice that was overly complimentary.
“Allowed him to intervene, you mean.” I pointed at Old Man Winter. “Wolfe called you Jotun – a Nordic frost giant.” He nodded at me with a ponderous, slow dip of his head but did not speak. “You’ve faced Wolfe before?” He nodded again. “But you both survived. And Wolfe has been alive for thousands of years?”
Old Man Winter nodded again and broke his silence once more. “He has. A cannier foe there is not; he has survived living on the razor’s edge all these years and always among people that are the world’s most dangerous. What does it say about him to be able to live millenia in such conditions?”
My heart sank. “That he’s dangerous. Worse than anything you can throw at him.”
Old Man Winter nodded, once more fixated on my eyes. “In order to protect you, we must keep you in this building. Do you understand?”
Unbidden, a memory of the door of the box closing came to me, and I felt a momentary urge to fight, to argue, to struggle out of my bed and scream at him in defiance. Then the pain in my stomach surged as I moved, and another, hotter emotion came over me, a disgust and humiliation at the thought of Wolfe manhandling me in my room in the dormitory, of his hands all over me, his finger inside my guts, ripping me up…and I almost gagged. “Yes,” I said simply, swirling emotions batted to the side.
“Good,” Ariadne said with undisguised relief. “I was worried that you might be headstrong and try to resist good sense.”
I felt weak, drained. “Glad I could allay your misperceptions.” I laid my head on the pillow behind me, not bothering to look at Ariadne or Old Man Winter any longer.
She hesitated. “There will be agents surrounding the medical unit. They’re on constant watch, especially after what happened to the agents at your house and the way Wolfe was able to breach security in the dorm. If you need anything – food, books, entertainment – just ask.” She smiled, as if she could sense that although I wasn’t shooting any venom her way it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.
She and Old Man Winter left, but only after he gave me another long, hard stare. After they left, Dr. Perugini took a moment to record my vitals, fluffed my pillow with a matronly cluck, and then, with an admonishment to call out if I needed anything, walked to her office and shut the door.
The curtains were up between me and the rest of the patients, and from where I was sitting I could see the backs of agents through the windows, stationed outside the doors of the medical unit, and I heard a healthy cough from behind one of the curtains, telling me there were more behind the partitions. Yet still, I felt alone. Again.
I thought back to what Ariadne had said about expecting a different reaction from me at the thought of being in lockdown. I wondered for just a moment what I must look like to them, how my actions must appear; then I dismissed it and realized I only cared a little. I still didn’t trust them. They would protect me now, but for reasons that were their own; reasons that were still unclear to me, but almost certainly involved using me and my powers, whatever they were, for their own ends.
I looked across the unit and found the wall there to be made of reflective metal that allowed me to see a distorted picture of my face. Bruises dotted my cheeks and wrapped around both eyes. There was crusted blood under my nose, and it looked misshapen. My eyes were haunted, the look of someone who had the spirit battered out of them.
The overhead lights went out, dimming the room, and my reflection was shrouded in shadow. It was nighttime; I knew it even though there were no windows.
I heard a door close heavily at the far end of the ward, and it brought me back again to the sound of the box when Mother would slam it shut. “Keep your fingers out of the way,” she’d snarl just before she closed it. Then the little clicks followed as she worked the pin in place to lock it. She always shut the little viewing slit last, usually after saying something reassuring or taunting through it, and the light would go out from the world and I’d be alone in the dark, all by myself.
Confinement or Wolfe. I knew which I feared more.
Seventeen
I don’t know when I fell asleep but I know that when I did my head was still swirling with thoughts about Wolfe and the fight, if you could call it that. I drifted into a darkness that had little to do with my physical surroundings. I felt myself swallowed in that surreal, faded world that had been present both times I had talked to Reed in my dreams. But this time, somehow, it was different.
The world around me swirled in a sort of rough clarity; as it came into view I recognized the surroundings. Little lights hanging above, soft blue mats on the ground below, and blurred concrete at the edges of my vision gave rise to the realization that I was in my basement. I looked into the corner and sure enough, there it was – the box – peeking out of the darkness, its flat edges visible in the low light of my dream.
“Little doll…” The growling voice sent an involuntary twitch through my body, stiffening my spine and causing me to raise my guard. It did not a whit of good. Wolfe sprung at me from out of the darkness by the box, bounding at me, leaping from all fours. I was paralyzed, unable to move as he crossed the divide between us. I blanched away from the impending hit, throwing all the training Mother had given me right out of the nearest window.
Wolfe sailed toward me, then passed through me as though I were as insubstantial as the air we were breathing. He came to rest without touching the wall, pivoted and came back at me, passing through once more. An angry, perplexed expression darkened his already vicious features, and he bore the look of a man denied his fondest wish. He drew once more to his full height and looked at me with suspicion, keeping his distance and watching me, eyes wary and calculating.
“A dream walker…this is not real…” His voice was low and gravelly, and even though he couldn’t touch or hurt me, his words sent a very real chill of fear through my guts in the same place where his finger had ripped into my abdomen.
“What’s a dream walker? Is that what this is? What I am?” I put aside my fear, desperate for answers.
He ignored me. “You caught the Wolfe while he’s sleeping. Very tricky. You’re hiding, sneaking around behind the Directorate’s walls, counting on the Jotun to protect you from Wolfe?” His feral smile returned. “Why don’t you come out and play? It could be so fun.”
“Gee, I wonder why I don’t want to face a psychopathic lunatic like you,” I snapped at him. Hot anger boiled in me. “You’re unhinged.”
“Come out and play, little doll.” The smile was worse, a nasty, stomach
-turning reminder of what he’d tried to do with me; to me. “The Wolfe just wants to play.”
“Are you stupid? Or are you deaf from where I stabbed you in the ear?” He flinched. I saw it and it gave me a moment of hope. “I’m not coming out. I’m going to stay here, because I have zero desire to be your plaything and die a horrible death after you do God knows what to me.”
“You won’t die, little doll,” his voice rasped. “That wasn’t a nice way to play, stabbing Wolfe in the ear. It makes him think about you every time the pain flares. But Wolfe won’t kill you, oh no, not yet. Not until they say so, because they want the little doll oh-so-bad.”
“Who are they…and what do they want me for?” I looked down at him, on all fours, as though he were ready to spring at me again.
“Ah, ah, ah.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you if you come out and play.”
“I’m not leaving this place,” I told him. “Not a chance.”
He sighed, a deep, throaty sound. “Wolfe knew you’d say that. But you don’t understand…see, Wolfe has to have the little doll. Not just for his…masters…but for himself.” His eyes looked at me suggestively, leering in a way that would have induced more nausea if I hadn’t been transfixed with fear at his words. “So now Wolfe has to be persuasive. Now Wolfe has to convince the little doll to come out of her dollhouse.”
My voice cracked. “What…what are you going to do?”
“If Wolfe didn’t know better, he would guess that you don’t care about people, since you let all those little toy agents get slaughtered at your house.” He ran his tongue over his incisors. “But Wolfe thinks maybe you just wanted to play so bad that you didn’t think about what would happen to them. But what if Wolfe started playing with others? Would you like that? Would it make you happy or sad to know that other people were getting played with…because of you?” The last bit crossed the realm from suggestive to disgusting as he stood upright and ran a hand down his own chest, raking himself with his claws.
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