“Maybe focus on defense?” Ariadne said acidly. She caught my pitying glare in reply. “Just a suggestion.”
I started thinking about it, but nothing was occurring to me. “We need to know more about Sovereign.”
My mother shrugged. “Good luck with that. I met him once, and it was pretty short, as far as meetings go. Other than a sense of overpowering terror, I can’t give you much of a feeling of the man.”
“I’d say you got that across,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck as I fidgeted idly. “You got anything else?”
“He hovers like an avenging angel,” my mother said, “speaks in a voice of infinite authority, and if you defy him, the response is swift and unpleasant.” She kept her reply level, but I could hear the slightest quiver beneath it. “When it comes to terror, what else is there?”
I sighed. “I’m exhausted. Any further thinking is going to have to wait until tomorrow.” I cast a look over to the bed in the corner, where Janus lay, not as shriveled as I would have expected from a man who had been in a coma for six months but still just a shell of what he had been only months earlier. “If only he could do my sleeping for me, I’d be all set.” I winced a little inside, looking at Janus’s face, which had grown pale from the months he’d been confined to the medical unit. What had been a swarthy, pleasant look on him, a healthy man—a little weathered at times, but still vital—had been reduced to deadness, quiet, the silence of a vegetable and nothing more. “I need to sleep,” I repeated.
“Go on, then,” my mother said, “we’ll see you in the morning.”
“Or possibly afternoon,” I said and started toward the door. I barely noticed that Ariadne and my mother remained behind. I wondered if I should worry about what they were discussing and decided it ultimately didn’t matter.
I dragged myself across the campus toward the dormitory. Off in the distance, a new building was being constructed, nominally at my behest. It was a research and development lab, to be populated with the best and the brightest minds that we could muster. Right now it was just steel girders sticking out of a hole in the ground. I hadn’t paid it much attention other than to sign off on the basic layout. As far as I was concerned, by the time it bore fruit—assuming we lived that long—my tenure at the new Agency would probably be just about over and Century would be toast. Every heavy step I took was lightened by the though of that prospect. It was all that was keeping me going right now.
That was a long day, Zack said as I let him out of the box in my mind.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
I’m glad Scott was there to save you.
“Me, too,” I said, letting the heaviness of my feet trudging across the soft, grassy lawn keep my brain from tumbling into unconsciousness.
You didn’t just let me out to ask about your day.
“No,” I agreed. “I wanted some company while I walked. Needed to think.”
You’re not in much shape for thinking.
“This is true.”
But you’re still mulling over Sovereign? Dreading him?
“Always.”
Maybe you should take a break for a little bit. Come back fresh.
I almost smiled, but it was bittersweet. “Head for an island, sandy beaches?”
It would be nice.
“It would be ...” I thought about it, “... irresponsible.”
You’re nineteen. You’re allowed some irresponsibility.
My smile faded. “Not now. Not with the stakes like this.”
What was that line from that movie? “If we can’t save the earth, you can be damned well sure we’ll avenge it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think Sovereign’s going to respond to that threat any better than Loki did.” I sighed as I reached the heavy doors of the dormitory, which had emergency shutters secured in a large, rectangular casing over every window in the place. It increased the weight of the door as I opened it, and in my exhausted state, I actually felt it. “If I could even find him to threaten him.” I placed my hands over my face as I walked into the lobby area at the front of the dorms. Two security guards stared at me impassively, and I slid my key card through the little reader at the stall that buzzed and opened a gate for me to enter. It wouldn’t keep out a meta, but much like the shutters, it wasn’t designed to. It was only meant to stall for time.
You think he’d give up this plan if it meant he was going to die along with it if he failed?
I laughed, and the security guards looked at me funny. “Sorry,” I said. “I just had a thought.” They looked at me as though I was crazy. “A funny thought. A joke, more like. Yeah.” I doubt he thinks he’s going to fail, I thought to Zack, so I didn’t appear like I was talking to myself, since he’s currently winning.
So he’s overconfident.
I almost laughed again as I pushed the button for the elevator. I don’t think he’s overconfident since, again, he’s winning, and winning big. He’s wiped out something like five-sixths of our population, so ... he probably thinks he’s got this in the bag. The elevator dinged and I stepped in, forcing a weak smile at the security guards, who were still watching me. I placed my hand on the biometric reader for the elevator and it scanned my hand. More security measures. The idea that Sovereign would come here and try and wipe out our metas was not exactly laughable. I certainly wasn’t laughing about it. It gave me nightmares.
Everyone has a weakness.
“The man is a ghost,” I said as the elevator doors closed. “I have one person who’s seen him in the last twenty years, otherwise he’s all hearsay and superstition.” I rubbed my eyes as the elevator dinged, heralding our arrival at the top floor. “He’d be a better candidate for the meta bogeyman than I am, given how little he shows up and how scared shitless some really powerful people have been of him.”
So he’s earned his legend.
“That’s the rumor,” I said. “But what’s he really left behind for us?” I walked to my door, just down the hall, and let my thumbprint get scanned even as I used my badge to unlock it. It was a tandem lock; the hope was that it would at least warn me if something was seriously awry—like someone forcing their way into my quarters to ambush me. Both functioned as they were supposed to, and I heard a beep and a click as the door unlocked and I opened it. “A trail of frightened people.”
A lot of dead metas.
“Well, yes, maybe,” I said, peeling off my jacket and letting it fall to the floor. “But most of that was Weissman, acting on Sovereign’s behalf. He told me that Sovereign wasn’t involved in the day-to-day.” I let my bare fingers caress my skin, and it felt good. I barely ever got touched skin to skin, and the times that I had usually resulted in something that I could only describe as orgasmic—when my powers worked to their full extent and I ripped someone’s soul screaming from their body. Even without that, though, I liked the tactile sensation. It felt good. “What’s he really doing? What’s he up to?”
You’d probably have to know more about him as a man to know that. What his goals are, his objectives, what he wants—
“He doesn’t want anything, supposedly.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and peeled off my shirt. It stuck to me in several places. I tried to decide whether I should shower again before going to bed since I’d sweated on the drive, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Too tired. “But that’s anecdotal, too.” I shimmied out of my jeans, sliding them off and feeling the cool sheets against the back of my thighs. “What do we actually know about him? Definitely know, firsthand.”
That he destroyed the Agency. That’s about it.
“Right,” I said. “Mom’s the only person we have on hand who’s ever met him, ever faced him, ever looked him in the eye and seen who he is and what he’s all about.” I had a pad of paper next to my bed to make notes on, and I scrawled in big letters: Debrief Mom—RE: Sovereign. Part of me wanted to add AGAIN to it, because I’d sat down with her when we’d started and gone over it, but she had little to say
about it. She couldn’t remember their exact conversation, she claimed, just that she’d had a sense of being overmatched and afraid he might come after her for some unknown reason. Maybe she had forgotten something. Either way, we were at a dead end and needed to go over what we knew for certain and work outward from there into speculative territory. Something, anything to start working on a plan.
I tossed my bra, sick of it biting into my skin for the day. I lay down, pulling the sheets up. The sheets felt good, so good, like a lover’s touch. Which was something I doubted I’d be feeling again anytime soon, given the special intervention it had taken the last time that had happened. I sighed. “I miss you.”
I know.
That said, I lay back and stared at the blank, knockdown-textured ceiling above me. Sovereign rolled about in my head, the thought of him, the idea of him, the mystery, the legend. I ran through it all again, and then again, trying to think of everything we knew about him, everything that had come from every living source ...
I drifted off sometime shortly thereafter but scrawled something on the pad in an utter stupor before I went out. It seemed important at the time, and even more so when I woke up ten hours later and read it again, my scrawled handwriting a nearly impossible mess in the morning that light streamed in from the giant window behind me.
Not all of the metas who have encountered Sovereign are still alive. But not all of them are dead and gone, either.
Chapter 24
“Wolfe, Bjorn and Gavrikov have all had encounters with Sovereign,” I said, looking at the people arrayed around the conference room in front of me. Everybody of import was there—Breandan, Reed, Scott (still looking a little rough, but present), Karthik, my mother, Ariadne, Li, Kat. Everybody but Foreman. “Wolfe in the 1400s in England, Bjorn in the 1600s in Norway, and Gavrikov here in America sometime in the 1940s or early fifties.”
“They don’t know the specifics, like a date?” Li asked, leaning on his arm and surveying me coolly.
“They aren’t really the ‘Dear Diary’ types,” I said, standing at the front of the room, pacing a little here and there to work off my nervous energy. “So, no, they didn’t make a record of the moments they ran into him, but their memories are clear, and with a little persuasion—” I’d had to let them all out of their cages for a while, which was starting to drive me mad again, because I had gotten quite used to not having unexpected voices in my head as I went about my daily business, “they were pretty forthcoming, even going so far as to show me the memories in question.”
“You can’t just go in there and pick them out, like you do with people you’re draining in real time?” Breandan asked, peering at me with heavy curiosity, his tongue pushing out the skin just below his lower lip on the right hand side.
“I could scan through their entire lives,” I said, “but without specifics that would take a while, as Gavrikov is over a hundred years old and is the youngest of the three. Otherwise, no, I can’t just hop to a specific memory when they’re in my head.”
“You actually can,” my mother said, a little clipped. “But it takes practice. I’ll give you some pointers when we have time.”
“So that’d be in another few years, after we’re dead, then?” Breandan asked with a small, unamused smile.
“No need to be so down, Irish,” Reed said with a smirk. “We’re doing pretty well so far at swinging down the fastballs Century’s been tossing our way.”
“And I, for one, certainly hope that lasts,” Breandan said. “Because I rather like my petty, thieving life, even though I’m no longer a petty thief.”
“Now that we know about these encounters,” my mother said, leaning forward against the black glass conference table top, “what do they tell us?”
“A couple of things,” I said, frowning. In truth, there really wasn’t a ton I could use from the memories. Wolfe had gotten his ass handed to him by Sovereign, and in near-record time. I could feel myself cringe because every strike, every broken bone was mine to relive as I went through the memory, and all of them hurt. “Sovereign dished an epic ass-whooping on Wolfe. That tells us he’s mega-tough. He did the same thing to Bjorn, except even quicker. Physical combat with this guy is not something I’m looking forward to.” I looked across the table, and saw a sea of unnerved people, so I tried to bring it back to better topics. “He’s also got at least some of the powers of Gavrikov—flame skin, flight—”
Ariadne interrupted me. “According to our research, Gavrikov was already something of a hybrid. His father was rumored to be capable of flight, but not—”
“His dad couldn’t cast fire, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said. I’d seen that memory a long while back, and the roots of it were a deeply disturbing journey into how Aleksandr had discovered his power. It was at least a nine on my heebie-jeebie scale, and that was maybe being charitable. His childhood made mine look like a trip to Disney by comparison. I cast a look at Kat, who sat, placid, totally unaware of her part in it. That made her the lucky one, I supposed.
“Right, well,” Ariadne said, a little nonplussed, “is this going to be a meta genetics discussion? Because I’m not sure any of us are really qualified for that.”
Li’s phone chirped, drawing every eye in the room toward him and bringing the momentum of the discussion to a halt. He plucked it out of the front pocket of his suit and took a look. “Excuse me,” he said, and stepped out of the conference room without further explanation.
As the door closed, Scott leaned his elbows onto the table. “What’s the next move?”
“Continue waiting for actionable intelligence to roll in,” I said after a moment’s pause.
“Sit back and wait for them to come for us?” Breandan asked, more than a little skeptical. “I don’t care for this plan.”
“Neither do I,” I said with a sigh. “We’ve hit them hard, made them stagger, in all probability, but we have no idea where to go next. We’ve got no leads, no line on the specifics of their goals, and thus we’re sitting here on our ass until we have some idea of what to do. It’s hard to be in a fight when you have no target.”
“We have a target,” Scott said. “Sovereign.”
“Yes. I suppose we do.” I almost rolled my eyes but didn’t. “But he’s not in view. Good luck hitting something you can’t see.”
“He’s like game, and we can’t seem to flush him out,” Reed said.
“He’s like something we can’t flush away,” Breandan muttered.
“And the Irishman goes for the trusty poop joke,” Scott said with a grin. “Figures.”
“Go with what you know, I always say.” Breandan shot Scott a returned grin of his own.
“That’s interesting, because from where I’m sitting it looks like we don’t know shit,” Reed said, bringing the discussion back down. I waited, and started to clear my throat to voice something when the door swung open and Li reentered, his cheeks flushed. “What?” I asked.
He got as far as the table before slamming the phone against the hard surface, shattering it and causing Breandan, Kat and Ariadne to start in surprise. “That was Foreman. We have a new directive.” I kept my mouth firmly shut, waiting for the rest. “Katheryn Hildegarde and her team just killed four FBI agents in Portland.” Li put his knuckles down against the smooth surface of the black table, and I heard them crack as he did it. “You’re to get your ass on a plane, track her down, and bring her in, however you have to do it.”
Chapter 25
“I object to this mission,” I said into the stark, slightly crackling silence of the phone.
“Noted,” Senator Foreman said on the other end. Because of my enhanced hearing, I could detect all the imperfections that came from the digitalization of the voice that was carried to me now from Washington, D.C. “But you have your marching orders.”
“This is taking our eye off the ball,” I said as I walked down the cement stairs to the first floor of HQ. “It’s a distraction, something that’s not in accor
d with our greater focus—”
“It’s something that’s vital to the continued existence of your main mission,” Foreman said, and I could hear the tension in his voice.
I listened to the echo of my shoes as I took each step. “I disagree. Whatever Hildegarde is doing is bad, I’ll grant you that, but—”
“If you don’t handle Hildegarde, there won’t be anything left of your organization in a month,” Foreman said abruptly, surprising me. He wasn’t the type to interrupt, preferring to wait until someone had spent their argument so he could counterattack and win. “I have used every ounce of political capital I had to set this up. Every ounce. When the committee looked over the reports, their temptation was to let it all ride, to wait and see. To go with rote instinct and prepare the military to counter any threats from Sovereign and Century. I told them no, that we needed a response force. They countered that not only would it be expensive but that it would take too much time to vet and set up. I told them I’d take care of it, keep it off the books, make sure the revenue didn’t come out of the budget and contain any negative publicity.
“Then they pulled out Sovereign’s threat, about what he’d do if we got into the meta policing business again.” He paused. “I told them it was going to happen anyway, and if they wanted to look like they were caught flatfooted worrying about other things when it did, they could deal with the inevitable outrage from John Q. Public when people find out that they knew and did nothing. But now we have a problem. Hildegarde is killing our agents, and she’s killing civilians.”
“Li told me,” I said. “Four agents is a genuine tragedy, it really is—”
“And two civilians,” Foreman said, cutting me off again. “One of them a teenager. It’s not playing well on the evening news in Oregon.”
I paused, waiting. “I’m not indifferent to their plight, having seen a few innocent bystanders die that shouldn’t have—”
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