The Girl in the Box 02 - Untouched

by Robert J. Crane

  Ariadne paused, and I watched her face twitch as she struggled to maintain her composure. When she began again, her words came out strained. “Afterward he went behind the convenience store to the low-rent housing complex where he found Karina Hartsfield smoking a cigarette outside her patio door.” She moved to the last photograph. “He killed her and stole her car, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter alone in the apartment.” She pointed to the child in the photograph with Karina Hartsfield. “Odds are good that if he’d known she was there, he would have killed her too.”

  “Seven people dead.” She reached back into the sheaf of photos and pulled out a half-dozen more, scattering them in front of me and causing me to hold my hand in front of my mouth as I heard a small gasp escape. They were photos of bodies, burned around the torso, the hands, the legs, burned so their insides showed and I nearly gagged from seeing them. “See, Darrell Seidell is what we’d call a fire jotnar—a fire giant, from the same Norse myths as,” she looked to Old Man Winter, “well, you know. Not nearly as potent as our friend Mr. Gavrikov, but up close, he’s the breath of hell brought to earth. Without anyone to stop him, he was free to keep driving west, leaving burned corpses and sundered families in his wake.”

  She pulled newspaper clippings out of the stack. “Want to read his press reports?” They were emblazoned with headlines, “Killer Burns Family to Death One by One, then Kills Police Officer” and “Arson Killer Claims Two in Iowa.”

  “What...” I felt myself speak in a hoarse whisper. “What happened to him?”

  “That part isn’t in the clippings.” She reached into the file and pulled out another page, handing it to me.

  It was a report, signed by Roberto Bastian, the head of M-Squad. I skimmed it then looked up to Ariadne. “Your people caught up with him halfway to Des Moines.”

  “They wrecked his car, beat him to a bloody pulp,” she said with a haunted look, “and dragged him back here where we slapped him in restraints and sent him to Arizona to spend the rest of his life in a deep, dark hole in the middle of the desert.” Her eyes found mine, and I looked away first. “This is why we’re here. To protect people from this sort of monster.” She picked up another file from a stack to her left, slapping it onto the table in front of me, followed by another, and another. They weren’t loud, but the sound of the paper hitting the rock of the desk made me flinch each time. Finally she grabbed the rest of the pile and let them fall in front of me with a thud.

  I stared at it, then pulled a file from the middle of the stack, opened it, and thumbed through. It was a series of reports from an incident in Birmingham, Alabama, that was handled by their Atlanta campus. A murder committed by a kid who was no older than me. Then another, and another. They caught him on his sixth victim. They were all committed in the course of robberies; three in the same incident. Every last one of them had been beaten to death.

  The next file was from Chicago and detailed a rapist working the South Side that was putting every victim in the hospital and a few in the morgue by what the victims described as “one horrific punch.” And only one. Impossibly strong, the report concluded. The rest of the file laid out the evidence against the creep: the witness statements, the agent investigation. The final report was signed by Zack Davis.

  I flipped through about fifty of them, not reading every detail but taking them all in. Every crime was like something you’d see in a movie or maybe a police blotter. Some of them were a decade old or more; some were very, very recent. They were from all over the country, and each one had a trail of evidence cataloged, indicating why the agent or meta investigating believed the person they caught was the guilty party. And almost all of them were slam-dunk obvious.

  I closed the last file, a robbery/murder, and put it on the stack with the rest. I swallowed hard, wishing somehow I could scrub all that I had just read out of my brain, along with all the things Wolfe did to me and the things he’d shown me in flashes through his memories earlier. I felt a desire to run far, far away to a place where people didn’t do things to other people like I saw in those files and in Wolfe’s memories...and in my own. Too bad there wasn’t a place far enough I could run to find that. “Why did you show me this?”

  “Because this is the ‘solved’ stack.” She reached behind Old Man Winter’s desk and pulled out another stack, almost as big as the first and lay it in front of me. The solved stack’s folders where manila; these were red. “These are unsolved, crimes where meta involvement was suspected but the perpetrator couldn’t be located because they didn’t make a big enough noise and we only have so many agents and resources.” She raised an eyebrow at me and opened the first folder. “Take this one, for instance...thirty-eight-year-old man dies in an attempted robbery. A witness said that the perpetrator seemed to have extra arms growing out of his sides that restrained the victim while the robber beat him to death.”

  “That’s...horrible.” I was suddenly hyperaware of Old Man Winter looking at me. I felt like he was sifting me, trying to filter through to my core, and I suddenly didn’t care for what he might find there. The anger made me bite back at Ariadne, hard. “I’m sorry he died, but I don’t see how anything I do is going to matter. I have my own problems, and I’m only—”

  “A little girl?” There was no accusation in her words, but they slapped me just the same. “A teenager with more strength than twenty men and a power that could keep any physical assailant at bay.”

  “This isn’t my problem.” I wanted to be firm. I needed to find Mom.

  “So it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t involve you?” That time there was accusation, and it stung. I wondered if my verbal lashings hit her half so hard as hers hit me.

  I reddened. “I’m a teenager; I’m pretty sure it’s a biological imperative to think that way.”

  “I guess you’re pretty normal, then,” Ariadne said, staring me down.

  “But you can be better.” Old Man Winter said it from behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to look close at me. I didn’t cower from his stare, but I felt a bit of withering. Wolfe was nowhere to be heard, not that I felt like I could count on him for moral support. “You are not some schoolgirl whose blissful ignorance of the harsh realities of the world cloud her eyes with starry dreams of happy endings. Are you?”

  “I’d like a happy ending,” I said. “But I don’t ignore the fact that the world can be cold and brutal and that there are people out there who exist solely to hurt others.”

  “Then you know that someone has to protect ordinary people.” Ariadne leaned forward again and her red hair flared against the dull background of Old Man Winter’s office. “They can’t protect themselves against what waits for them out there. They have no defense because they don’t know what they have to defend against. Metahumans move too fast, hit too hard, for an unprepared person to fend them off. Only someone who’s well prepared—and armed, actually—stands a chance against them, and then only if they don’t get taken by surprise.”

  “Same old story,” I said, swallowing hard again. “Why are you telling me this? What do you want me to do?”

  “Even when you find your mother,” Old Man Winter spoke, his quiet voice devastating for some reason, “at some point you will have to decide what to do with your own life, how you wish to spend it. You are nearly a woman grown, and you need to find—”

  “A job?” I licked my lips.

  “A path. A career. Maybe even...a purpose,” Ariadne said. “Something you can do that you can believe in, that will challenge you, that won’t leave you hating your life and questioning why you’re even doing what you’re doing.” She laughed, a low, quiet laugh that had no real mirth behind it. “Unless you’d like to get to age forty and wake up to wonder where your life went.”

  “Forty is a long ways off for me.” I looked at my boots. Most eighteen-year-old girls wear shoes; I’m in boots. Most girls my age wear dresses sometimes, go to school, look forward to prom and graduation. I’m stuck in outfits that
cover me head to toe, I’ve been home every day, week, and year for over a decade, and all I have to look forward to is finding my missing mother so...what? I can go back to living like that?

  “It’ll be here before you know it.” Ariadne snapped her fingers in front of her face. “It goes fast. And the question you’ll be left with is if you just got by or if you actually made a difference.” She slid the stack of files away from me. “We don’t expect you to make a decision right now.” She pulled out a lone piece of paper and placed it in front of me. “Working for us as a meta will have its rewards—more money per year than most eighteen-year-olds make, along with other benefits—”

  “I’m not super concerned with a 401(k) right now.” I glanced at the sheet. Money meant almost nothing to me, largely because I’d never had any opportunity to use it. I truly didn’t know the value of a dollar, nor what it bought. “What do you want me to do? What would happen if I said yes?”

  “You would enter training with M-Squad and agent trainers, learn how agents operate, field procedure, all that. After some basics, you’d be assigned a more experienced partner and learn how to be a ‘retriever’—someone who tracks down rogue or awakening metas and brings them back to the Directorate either through peaceful means, or, if necessary—”

  “Cracking skulls?” I glanced at the compensation sheet and wondered if $100,000 per year was a lot or a little for a girl just starting out.

  “You never seemed like you had a problem with physical violence before.” Ariadne was unrelenting. “Like, say, when you battered Zack and Kurt, or when you went looking for a fight with Wolfe—”

  “I don’t.” I looked up from the sheet to her. “I don’t have a problem breaking the teeth out of anyone who does the things that you’ve showed me in the files.” I felt my jaw clench as a little surge of pleasure from Wolfe ran through me at the thought of inflicting pain on others. “But I don’t know that I want to be a retriever for a living, always chasing down some fugitive meta who might kill me if I screw up. And I don’t know that I could...” I struggled with the words. “I mean, killing Wolfe was an accident. I don’t know if I could...do that...to someone else. “

  “It rarely comes to that, “ she said. “And retriever’s not necessarily the end of the line. You could move up, join M-Squad, move to another branch, work into one of our training positions to teach and guide the metas here at the Minneapolis branch—”

  “Because that’s the place for me, guiding the next generation.”

  “—or you could move into administration.” She shrugged. “There are a lot of places you could go. We’re a big operation. You could see the world, help us expand overseas if you wanted. You’d have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing some good.”

  “I hear you say it,” I picked up the compensation sheet between my thumb and forefinger, “but how do I really know it’s true?”

  “Trust is a two-way street,“ she said, standing. “It won’t happen overnight, but if you’re out chasing these people down and you see what they do, you’ll eventually come to realize that we’re the good guys. We don’t expect a decision right now.”

  “You have a great deal to think about,” Old Man Winter said. “You stand at the edge of the rest of your life. The decisions you make now affect everything from here on. Gone are the times when simple and inconsequential matters governed your life. It is now the time for you to choose who you want to be, what you want to stand for, and what you want your life to reflect.” He walked around the desk, buttoning his suit coat as he walked to the door and opened it for me. “So few people get to truly steer their course the way you have the chance to now. And the question before you is—will you strive to be normal and live an ordinary life? Or will you do what no one else can do—and be more?”

  Chapter 13

  I carried the compensation sheet with me, crumpled in my fist, when I left the meeting. I had read through it, though I confess I was in a haze as I left them. One item stuck out, though—a $10,000 bonus to be paid when I signed on for the training program. I still didn’t have a great concept of how much that would buy me, nor what I would do with it. The sheet indicated I could continue to stay on the campus free of charge with all meals provided.

  The meeting had taken longer than I expected and I’d skipped breakfast. I had a lot on my mind—after all, the question of how Gavrikov got out of his box was a pretty good one, and I hoped my theory was wrong. We hadn’t discussed Full Metal Jackass in much detail; not that there was much to discuss. Why did I doubt he was the sort to just give up and go home after one encounter that went awry?

  Probably because he dressed himself like a submarine and paraded himself into town in hopes of capturing me. You doesn’t dress like that unless you’re a hopelessly delusional loser who will continue to swing for the fences long past the time you should have returned to the dugout.

  I entered the cafeteria at half past eleven. It was crowded already. I made my way through the line, again ignoring the animosity of the workers as I gathered my food. I was picking my way over to the far wall, prepared to eat by myself (again) when I caught sight of Zack, sitting with his back to me. I took one step toward him and halted. He was at a table for four and it was filled. Kurt Hannegan sat next to him and Scott Byerly and Kat Forrest sat opposite.

  I began to slink back toward the window when Kat waved at me, her big eyes and a wide smile visible even from across the cafeteria. An inward feeling of desperation enveloped me as she tried to wave me over. I sighed and closed my eyes, and when I opened them, Zack was also gesturing for me to join them. He got up and pulled another chair over. With greatest reluctance, I made my way across the room and endured the enthusiastic greetings of Kat and Zack and the muted one from Scott. Hannegan ignored me, I ignored him, and we were both the happier for it.

  “Scott has something he wants to tell you,” Zack said as I sat down. I could feel my motions reduced to a severe stiffness, as though all my joints were locked together and it was only through acts of absolute will I could bend them to seat myself. I looked at Scott, who was at my left, and had his head bowed.

  “I wanted to apologize,” the young man said, his face angled toward the table. Kat and Zack watched him while Hannegan continued to shovel a burrito into his face. “I didn’t really know you when I wrote that note and it was wrong and inappropriate.” He managed to look up and I got the impression that he was rather like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t. “I’m sorry.”

  “All right,” Zack said. “Now we can put all that unpleasantness behind us.” He looked at me, the satisfaction disappearing from his face. “Right?”

  I thought about arguing, but what was the point? Byerly couldn’t have hated me any more than I had hated myself when he’d written it. “Sure,” I said. “Bygones and forgetting and all that.” I picked up the burrito from my plate. The smell of beans, rice and chicken wafted up to me, tempered with the tang of the salsa and guacamole.

  “What did you talk with Old Man Winter and Ariadne about?” Zack asked just as I was taking my first bite.

  I finished chewing before I answered. “How did you know about that?”

  “I went to see Ariadne this morning and the secretary told me she was in a meeting with the two of you and couldn’t be disturbed.” He took a sip of the water sitting in front of him.

  “History of metas, remember?” The burrito was slippery in my gloves and Byerly was giving me a funny look as the salsa dribbled down the leather and onto my sleeve. I dropped the burrito and wiped at it with a napkin.

  “Uh huh.” He chewed as he answered, kind of skeptical. Hannegan still hadn’t looked at me and Kat hadn’t taken her eyes off me yet. I wanted to knock her chair over with her still in it. Or maybe Wolfe did. No, it was probably me. “You guys talk about anything else?”

  I remembered the compensation sheet, tucked away in my coat pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “A couple things.”

  “They offered you a job, d
idn’t they?” This came from Hannegan, who had stopped eating and was frozen with a taco halfway to his mouth.

  “Yeah.” I felt myself flush. “So?”

  “Doing what?” Scott Byerly did a flush of his own, his ruddy complexion suddenly redder.

  “As an agent?” Zack was looking at me in wonderment. “A retriever?” He looked down at my side and my eyes followed him a moment later. His hand was already in motion and he snatched the compensation sheet from where it was dangling out of my pocket. I didn’t try to stop him, and he stared at it, eyes narrowed as he focused, Hannegan leaning over his shoulder. “Wait, this isn’t an organizational chart...this is...this is...whoa.” Zack’s jaw dropped and he looked at Hannegan in near-astonishment. “I don’t get paid that much. Do you?”

  “Hell, no,” Kurt said, scowling. “And I’m near the top of the pay scale!”

  “But at the bottom of their estimation, apparently,” I said and ripped the paper out of Zack’s hands.

  There was an eerie quiet around the table that lasted almost five seconds before Scott Byerly spoke. “Can I see that?”

  I let out a small noise of exasperation and thrust it at him. “Sure. Why not?”

  Kat Forrest looked over his shoulder as he looked down the page. “Wow,” she said. “They must think you’re really powerful to offer you so much.”

  “I’d offer you more to leave,” Hannegan said under his breath.

  “This is...” Byerly blinked a few times in rapid succession and then handed the page back to me. “A very nice offer. I wish I’d gotten one.” I saw his jaw tighten as he said it.

  “The day will come, my friend,” Zack said. “Probably soon, in fact—” A low buzzing filled the air and he reached down, pulling out his cell phone and studying the screen. He looked to Kurt. “Ariadne wants to see us.”

  Kurt paused in eating, his mouth full. “Now?” Flecks of half-chewed food rained onto the table and I looked away.