Family

by Robert J. Crane

  When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out and started toward Ariadne’s office, flanked by the three of them. Her office was against outside windows. The windows that looked from the cubicle farm into her office had the blinds closed and when we reached the heavy wood door, Bastian stepped in front of me and knocked. He looked down at me from his six foot-plus height, and I caught a hesitancy that verged on remorse. He didn’t say anything, though, and after a moment a voice called from inside for us to enter, and he opened the door.

  Ariadne was standing behind her desk, her dull gray suit marked contrast to the orange cast of the world outside the window behind her. It was early evening now; the sun was sinking lower in the sky and on the other side of the building to boot, so most of the grounds were shadowed, the lawn dark in the shade of headquarters. Ariadne looked at me in surprise, blinked a few times, her gaze swinging from me to Clary, who was still clutching my wrists, and thunderclouds moved in over her brows. “Clary…what the hell are you doing?”

  “Ma’am,” Bastian said. “We caught up with her talking with her mother in the woods.”

  “Her mother?” Ariadne asked. “Her mother was the intruder?” She looked at me in sharp disbelief.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bastian said. “Eve and Parks went after her, but she managed to get to a car and escape.”

  Ariadne stood in the middle of the office, her red hair a perfect match for the light on the trees in the background. “Clary, Bastian, Parks…out.”

  Clary tensed and I felt his grip tighten on my wrists. “But—”

  “Out, Clary. Wait in the hall.” She said it quietly but firmly. I heard Parks and Bastian move to comply. Clary was rooted in place, though, as if his brain couldn’t quite process what he was been asked to do. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “She could be dangerous, you know,” Clary said behind me, and I could hear the defensive heat in his voice. “What if she kills you and makes her escape out the window?”

  “Then you’ll have a really fun time smearing her all over the campus,” Ariadne said, as though indifferent to the prospect.

  Clary seemed to ponder this for a minute before I felt his hands release my wrists. “Oh. Huh. Yeah, that’d be fun.” His heavy footfalls cut a path out the door behind me.

  “You want me to leave, too?” I heard a voice behind me and turned my head to see Reed in the corner, leaning against the wall, looking pretty dapper for a guy who’d been out of it when last I’d seen him. He was wearing a black suit and his dark hair was up in a ponytail, a splash of color from his collared dress shirt, which was pink. It actually looked good on him.

  “You can stay,” Ariadne said, remaining standing. I realized, not for the first time, that Ariadne was taller than me. She never really felt that way, though, for some reason. She stared at me, and I stared back, and neither of us said anything.

  “Well, gosh,” Reed said, “with this being such a great, not-at-all-awkward moment, that’s an awfully enticing offer, but why don’t I just go ahead and mingle with metal head and the M-Rejects while you two hash out whatever dramatic tension you’ve got.” He slipped behind me and opened the door, shutting it behind him.

  I stood there, bedraggled, haggard, a torrent of emotions still buried. I didn’t want any of them bleeding out now, or in the presence of any other person, come to it. “Sit down,” Ariadne said, gesturing to the chairs in front of her desk.

  “I don’t think I’ll be doing your upholstery any favors,” I said, massaging my wrists where Clary had twisted and clamped on them. They ached, but they were the least of my problems. I tasted blood in my mouth and a pain on my tongue told me I’d bitten it when I hit the ground, though I hadn’t noticed at the time. I was sticky from old sweat and my jaw hurt, along with the rest of my body, a half-dozen aches reminding me that Eve hadn’t been gentle with her application of the net. I guess I hadn’t earned much goodwill with her, though, if I thought about it.

  “Sit,” she said, and this time it was quiet, no order, just a gentle invitation, absolutely at odds with what I thought I’d get from her.

  I sat, lowering myself into the faux black leather. I felt it hit my back awkwardly, as though it was forcing me into better posture than I wanted to adopt at the moment, making me sit upright when I wanted to slouch and play wounded, wanted to keep out of eye contact so she couldn’t delve into me and see how hurt I was by everything that had occurred.

  “What happened?” she asked me, taking her own seat and causing her chair to squeak at the wheels as she slid it to move closer to the desk.

  I pursed my lips. “I got done with my meeting with Mormont and went to the woods for a few minutes to just…” I paused, trying to find a way to cover what I really wanted to say, which was to be alone and cry where I hoped no one would see or hear me. “…try and gather my thoughts. My mom said she saw me walking across the campus.”

  “What did she say to you?” Ariadne’s eyes were rimmed with concern, and I couldn’t tell in my present state whether it was real or not. My bullshit detector was broken, along with the rest of my emotions.

  “She asked me where Andromeda was. I told her.” I thought again of Andromeda, who had saved my life, and how I couldn’t do the same for her. I wished I had taken the bullet and not her. “I asked her about Kat and she evaded.” I felt a shudder as I thought about how Mom had treated me when she wanted to restrain me. “She ripped me a new one about being lax in my habits. Same old story.” There was a gap of silence after that, and I didn’t want to break it, so I stayed as stoic as I could, even as I turned over the insults my mom had hit me with in the few minutes I had talked with her.

  “Michael Mormont gave me his recommendations of what we should do with you while he continues his investigation,” Ariadne said, breaking the silence. She had her fingers palm down on the desk, and stretched out in front of her on the black surface.

  “Draw and quarter me?” I suggested. “A public flaying? Whipped naked through the campus at noontime?”

  “He recommends we take you into custody,” she said softly, and I didn’t react. I didn’t know if I had it in me to even try to run, assuming I had anywhere to go other than my house, where they would surely catch me in less than an hour. “But I want you to know,” she said, catching my attention even as I felt my body slacken, as though I could slide out of the chair like the emotional jelly that I was by this point, “that the Director and I have discussed it, and we’ve discarded his recommendation. We don’t believe you’re the traitor.”

  I felt a slight warmth, amazement, and felt a choked sensation in my throat. “But…what about all the things that have gone wrong…James…and I mean…what I did…”

  “Mistakes,” she said, soft again, “not malicious.” She pursed her lips. “But we trusted the three of you to get the job done when we sent you on assignment, one that ended up evolving into something of vital importance at a time when we’re under more pressure than ever before, and we find you’ve been drinking on the job and…taking random men back to your hotel room who turn out to be spies for our enemy.” She said it softly, like everything else, and it wounded me even worse. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I coughed, fake. I needed to clear my throat. “I don’t have anything that doesn’t sound in my head like an excuse.”

  “I’m disappointed,” Ariadne said. “I guess I’d come to expect more out of you than this.”

  “You didn’t even want me to go on this assignment,” I said quietly. “Remember? You were still holding a grudge from when I took Eve out of the air with a rock.”

  “I wasn’t holding a grudge,” she said. “Scott is immature and acts like it. Kat’s a sweetheart, and she’ll go along with whatever he says because they’re attached at the…” She blushed. “…because they’re attached. But you,” she said, and leaned forward, fingers interlaced, “you always marched to your own tune. Since the day you got here, you’ve consistently been one of the stro
ngest metas not only in power, but in personality, weathering adversity I couldn’t imagine.” I could see by the look on her face she was telling the truth. “You never let it weigh you down, and you never followed anyone’s orders if you didn’t want to do something. You’d let the whole Directorate hate you before you caved on doing something you didn’t believe was right. Remember Gavrikov?” She stared at me. “So I sent that girl out on an assignment, and when she didn’t show up, I guess it surprised me.”

  “I can do better,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you can,” she said sadly. “And I hope you get a chance to prove it. I know you hate me, but the Director and I have invested a lot of faith in you. I just hope it pays dividends at some point.” She looked down. “But right now it’s not looking too good.”

  I started to respond, I did. I wanted to say something about how bad I’d screwed up, about how much my judgment had been off, and how I really didn’t hate her. But I waited a moment too long and there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Ariadne said, and the door opened to show a small, geeky guy with glasses and kind of a bowl-shaped haircut that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Beatles. He was wearing hipster glasses, which I hate. Unkempt, a ragged overshirt with holes in it covering a t-shirt underneath with the name of some band on it I doubted anyone had heard of.

  “J.J,” she said with a nod. “Progress?”

  “Big time,” he said with a smile, and stepped into the office.

  “Just a second,” she said, and looked out the door behind him. “Reed, you can come back in now.”

  Reed appeared at the door, sliding into the room unmussed and without a word. He resumed his place in the corner and I watched a cell phone slip into his pocket from one of his hands. He really did look good in the suit, but his persona was off somehow; I realized after a moment his expression was guarded, more closed than I’d ever seen before from him.

  J.J., as Ariadne had called him, sat in the seat next to me, a tablet computer in his hands. Tufts of cat hair streaked his dark blue skinny jeans. “So, the basics of what they did here were a deeper encryption than just relying on the normal OS security protocols—”

  “J.J.,” Ariadne said, “I don’t care about that. What did you find on the computer?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Is this about the laptop I recovered from the Omega safehouse?”

  “Right,” the hipster geek said with a nod. “I’ve made sure it was clear of spyware, tied it into the network, and backed the contents of the hard drive up onto our servers so you can access it from your computer.” He waved to the laptop on the work hutch behind her. “But here’s the gist: a list of U.S. Assets for Omega – though they don’t quite call themselves that on their internal docs,” he said. “It’s kinda vague, but I got some analysts sifting through it now. Looks like street addresses for safehouses, facilities, the works. Some names of employees.”

  “Anything in the immediate area?” She looked at him and his gaze popped up from the tablet computer.

  “A guy here in Minneapolis,” J.J. replied. “James Fries? Looks like they’re paying for him to live the high life; he’s got a condo in downtown.”

  “And I would love to visit and throw him out of a window to show my gratitude,” I said.

  “And wouldn’t defenestration be a simplistic approach?” Ariadne said with a raised eyebrow. “One incubus dead on the Omega side isn’t going to win us this war. I’ll put surveillance on him, see if he leads us anywhere interesting.”

  “And then, after you’ve done that, I can…?” I mimicked throwing something over my head. I didn’t mean it, not really – I don’t think.

  “We’ve got bigger concerns than revenge,” Ariadne said, but her look was muted sympathy. “We’ve got a final tally of over a hundred and eighty dead nationwide – that’s agents, retrievers, metas and all else.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” J.J. said with a shrug. I didn’t like him.

  “That’s about three-quarters of our agent assets,” Ariadne said. “And every one of them had people they left behind – mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, kids in some cases…”

  “Oh,” J.J. said in muted surprise. “Well, when you put it like that it sounds bad.”

  “Could be worse,” Reed grunted from the corner, drawing my attention back to him. A pall hung over him, a blackness of mood I couldn’t quite place, it was so at odds with the flippant guy I’d known since he offered me a ride after knowing him for ten seconds.

  “How?” Ariadne asked, slight amusement causing the corners of her mouth to curl in a faint smile.

  “You could be a meta in India,” he said without pause. “Their government has been running a training facility like what you’ve got here, where they’ve been sheltering metas – about four hundred of them. They’ve even been taking them in from other neighboring countries with offers of good money and a high standard of living.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” J.J. said with a shrug. “Working for the government would have some benefits, I’m sure. Like maybe some past indiscretions could be evaporated without having to do a hack job—”

  “They’re all dead as of this morning,” Reed said darkly. “Every last one of them.”

  “What?” Ariadne’s eyebrows arched up and she sat back in her chair, stunned.

  Reed seemed to seethe with pent up energy in the corner, every word coming out as though he were about to explode. “They’re dead. The whole compound was destroyed.”

  J.J. seemed to maintain a detached, ironic tone. “Did their government wipe them out? Because that’s not cool.”

  “No,” Reed said, staring at J.J. in disbelief. “That would not be ‘cool’,” he said, mocking the techie. “But indicators do not point to the Indian government.”

  “Omega?” I asked, and traded a look with Ariadne.

  “Don’t know,” Reed said, “but it doesn’t sound like their game. I don’t know if you knew this, but about six months ago in China—”

  “Right.” Ariadne seemed to awaken, leaning forward. “That Chinese government facility that was destroyed.”

  “Taking three hundred plus metas along with it,” Reed agreed. “This hasn’t been a good year for the meta population. We’re down by nearly eight hundred in the last few months, and there were only about three thousand of us to begin with.”

  “Why would you put all your metas in one place?” J.J. mused aloud. “I mean, it just seems like an invitation to get them wiped out.”

  “No one thought we were in any danger of extermination until now,” Reed said with a little acrimony. “Our reports out of China were vague; there was even a hint it could have been the Chinese government behind the whole thing.” He blinked and turned his head toward the wall. “Doesn’t look like it now, though. Looks pretty much like an outside job.”

  “So someone’s wiping out metas?” Ariadne asked, sitting back again. “I mean, if China was an isolated incident, you might be able to write it off as an isolated occurrence, but…” She looked at Reed. “How did you get this information?”

  “I just talked with my superiors in Italy,” Reed said. “They were…hesitant to give me much over an open communication source like a cell phone, but…anyway, I got the basics and gave them an update.” He shook his head. “The good guys seem to be in a spiral here. Feels like we’re fighting blind. I sense they know something about the troubles you’re experiencing, but I’ll need to call from the secure line at my apartment to get the full updates.”

  Ariadne stared at Reed. “Why don’t you go do that?”

  Reed smiled. “Because my apartment is in Milwaukee.”

  “Damn,” I said. “How the hell do you keep up with your HQ when you’re on the road?”

  “Well,” he began, “we had cell phones that we thought were unbreakable – until about six months ago, when we caught an Omega spy in Florence who had a copy of our encryption protocol on him.”

  “They’re star
ting to seem rather adept at this sort of penetration,” Ariadne said. “They’ve compromised us as well; Andromeda claims we have a traitor in our midst.”

  Reed nodded. “Doesn’t surprise me. Omega is very slick, and they’ve got more than a few teeps on their side to deploy for these purposes.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, confused. “What’s a teep?”

  “TP,” Ariadne said, drumming her fingernails on the desk. “Telepath. Mind readers. How many do they have?”

  “No idea,” Reed said with a shrug. “No names, no certainty; just whispers, rumors that they use them for spying.”

  “Oh wow,” J.J. said. “So we’ve got people walking around reading our minds?” He twitched. “Ah…can I have some time off until we get this resolved? I mean…I’ve got information that they really shouldn’t have, after all. I could work from home.”

  I looked at him seriously. “Is it about your unhealthy relationship with your cat?”

  His eyes widened and his jaw dropped open, making him look even more ridiculous than his glasses and haircut already did. “How did you know about my cat?” He blinked. “Are you the mind reader?” He whimpered. “It was only the once, I swear.”

  I let out an exhalation. “You’re covered in cat hair…” I looked at him in pity. “…and ew. Ew. A thousand times, ewww.”

  Ariadne stared at J.J. as he wilted in his chair, then turned back to Reed. “Why don’t you let us fly you to Milwaukee? We could use your organization’s assistance and whatever information they have, if they’re willing to provide it.”

  Reed considered her offer for about a second. “I’ll take you up on that. Flight time is a hell of a lot better than a six-hour drive each way. I’m sure they’ll be willing to render some help because I’ve been told to cooperate with you; it’s just a question of how much. I mean, it’s pretty obvious we’ve got some common enemies here.”