“I believe that is an outdated term,” the voice came from the other end of the phone.
“So is the concept of gods who rule the world,” the man who was codenamed Portal replied. “But that doesn’t make it any less accurate.”
“True enough. True enough. Take care, my friend. Take care of yourself-and our prize.”
“Oh, I will.” He let the smile tug at the corners of his lips, feeling the odd, drawn feeling from them as they began to chap from the wind. “I will ensure that Sienna Nealon will be ours.”
“Good enough,” the voice came again. “Until we meet again. Alastor out.”
The old man heard the click through the speaker of the phone, and kept it up to his ear for a moment longer. “So long, old friend. I’ll be home before you know it—with our prize.”
“Let me do an internet search for chili cheese fries,” a metallic, tinny voice blared from the speaker of his phone.
“What?” He held it up in front of him, staring blankly at the screen, which was lit up with a series of text bubbles. “No, I don’t want you to do an internet search. And where did you come up with chili cheese fries?”
“Searching for a chili cheese fries app.”
“What?” He stared at the screen, felt the confusion rise with embarrassment as a couple of teenagers brushed past him. He glanced up and saw one of them, a boy, looking at him, laughing. “Oh, shut up,” he said, fumbling to push a button on the touchscreen with his fingers encased in a glove.
“Movie shopper—opening movie ticket app—”
He fumbled and pressed the power button, watching as the screen went dark. “Damnable thing.”
“Let me do an internet search for a song to sing—”
He grumbled with irritation and pressed the button again, as the screen went black once more and the voice of the computer went quiet. His eyes came up again, back to Fries’ building. “Stanchion. Oh, yes, Directorate, you will see. And Sienna Nealon, you’ll be with us soon…whether you want to or not.”
There was a moment’s pause, then a muffled voice came from within his hand. “Let me do an internet search for bookstore oh yes director tools see you soon the new be us in—”
With a grunt of rage, he pitched the phone against the wall and watched it shatter into a cloud of plastic dust. He felt some of the debris sprinkle across his face, then shook his head at the momentary loss of temper and looked around. No one was paying attention to him. He sighed. “Now I’ll have to buy another one. And doubtless it will work just as well as this one…” His eyes went back to the roof of Fries’ building and the place that the helicopter’s flight path had taken it only moments before. “No matter. Soon she’ll be with us.” He felt the smile return to his lips, revealing his teeth, exposing them to the cold .
“Soon.”
2.
Sienna Nealon
The helicopter ride was smooth, surprisingly so for such a blustery day. It was my first autumn out in the world, out of my house, and I liked it better than summer and winter so far, but not as much as spring. The city of Minneapolis was fading behind us, the tall buildings and the skyline still a scene of mystery and excitement for me, even though I had been there more times than I could count now.
James Fries sat across from me, unspeaking. Of course, he had duct tape across his mouth and a black hood over his head, but I suspect even if he hadn’t been so afflicted, he would have been smart enough to keep his mouth shut around me. It had been only about three months since he’d seduced me, using the fact that he was the only person I’d ever met whom I could safely touch to parlay himself into a romantic situation. It was not a shining moment in my memory. It left me with a few simmering resentments and a mess of regrets. Staring at him now, face hidden behind the hood, I liked to imagine that he might have felt a regret or two as well. You know, behind the duct tape.
The helicopter began its descent over the Directorate campus, the headquarters building with its white concrete and glass design visible below. The ground was covered with red and yellow leaves, drawing a slight smile and overriding my sense of cold satisfaction. Zack was diagonal from me, and I caught his gaze once, at least. Around me, everyone was all smiles. Except Kurt Hannegan. He just looked stiff.
The campus was glorious, a miasma of autumn leaf colors standing out against the still—green grass that they lay upon. A few leaves still clung to their host trees stubbornly, apparently unaware that their eviction was imminent. That was okay by me, though, because I loved the colors, loved how they contrasted with the dull brown bark of their progenitors. I wasn’t looking forward to the last of them leaving, because I knew winter was coming. I shivered; it was my least favorite time of the year.
The smell of gun oil in the cabin was strong, and I felt the weight of the chopper shifting as the wheels touched down. I reached across and grabbed James by the arm as Scott released his restraints. I tugged him to his feet as Reed opened the door for me and I pulled Fries out. He almost made a misstep but caught himself, and I pulled him along blindly toward the red-haired woman standing at the edge of the landing pad.
“Hello, Ariadne,” I said with a smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean where you come back from a mission and I’m here waiting for you? You know how I worry.”
“Hah. Yes, Mother.”
She feigned a wounded look. “Coming from you, that hurts.”
I pushed James around, front and center, and pulled his hood off. He seemed to flinch at the light. “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” I said.
“Good.” She gave him a cold glare. “Nice to see you again, James. You probably didn’t realize this, but we’ve been watching you for a while.” I started to remove the duct tape over his mouth but she shook her head. “Leave it. I’m not interested in anything he has to say at this point.”
“Okay. Say goodbye, James.” I raised my gun and put the barrel to his temple. He struggled against my grip on his arm, but I had him held tight. I saw his eyes widen in surprise. So did Ariadne’s a moment later when I brought the butt of my gun around and clubbed him in the side of the head, dropping him to the tarmac, unconscious, as the chopper’s engine cut out and I heard the rotors begin to spin down behind me.
“I hope you didn’t do any lasting damage,” she said, looking to where Fries had crumpled at her feet. She stepped back, her high-heeled shoes clicking against the pavement, barely audible under the last noises of the rotors dying down. “He’s here to be interrogated, after all.”
“Hard to do brain damage when he didn’t have a brain to damage,” Reed said from next to me.
“Oh, he has a brain.” I looked at my half-brother with a cocked eyebrow. “A horrific and sleazy one, but it’s there. Cunning doesn’t begin to describe this one.”
“Yeah, well, let’s get this cunning, sleazy bastard into lockdown,” Scott said, Kat at his side. “Because some of us have plans for tonight.”
“Carry him down,” I said, giving the nod to Scott.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smartass salute, and reached down to pick up Fries’s legs. “Reed, old boy,” he said, affecting a British accent, “would you mind being a decent chap and help me carry him? There’s a good lad…”
“What’s with the British accent?” Reed asked, grabbing Fries by the arm and lifting him onto Scott’s shoulder.
“Trying to make you feel at home,” Scott said with a wide grin. “You know, because you haven’t been home to talk to your bosses in a while.”
“They’re in Rome, not England.”
“Oh, right,” Scott said with a twinkle in his eyes, “then it must be cos’ I want’d to sound a bit sophisticated, innit?” he said, changing his voice into a horrible Cockney accent. With a laugh, he sauntered off toward headquarters with Fries on his shoulder, Kat and Hannegan trailing behind him.
“Easy catch,” I said, turning back to Ariadne as they left, leaving me with her, Zack and Re
ed.
Ariadne raised an eyebrow. “We were watching through the headset camera Reed was wearing.”
I shrugged, and felt a slight trace of burn on my cheeks, not from the wind. “And?”
Ariadne kept her cool, I had to give her that . “The Director has…concerns.”
“Concerns? Other than the fact that the frigid cold weather isn’t getting here fast enough to suit him, what concerns does he have?”
There was a pause, then a flicker in her eyes. “Why don’t we talk about it with him? We need to do a quick debrief with you as team lead, anyway.” She looked from Zack to Reed. “Good work, gentlemen.”
“It was a good takedown,” Reed said. “We got him alive, and that’s how it was supposed to be.” I realized he was preemptively defending me, as though he was expecting me to get reamed for some reason.
“No doubt,” Ariadne said with a tight expression meant to cut off any further discussion. “Gentlemen, we’ll have a full after-action review with the two of you tomorrow morning. We’ll email you a time and place.”
Zack seemed to recede slightly. “We’ll see you later, right? An hour?”
I managed a weak smile. “As soon as I’m free, I’ll be along.”
“Okay,” he said, and took a quick step toward me, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “See you then.”
Reed gave me a wave using only his fingers to waggle up and down. He followed Zack, and I watched the two of them make their way toward the dormitory. Ariadne was already on the move, high heels clicking as she walked the path toward headquarters. I followed a few steps behind, waiting for her to say something as we passed into the lobby and headed toward the elevators. She didn’t speak again until we were in one of them and she had pressed the up button.
“How do you think you did?” She turned to look at me, but her arms were crossed in front of her. The doors shut behind us, quieting the buzz of activity in the lobby.
“I think we held to the mission parameters to bring him in, and that I got the job done.” I watched her turn her head back to the front of the elevator car as it dinged and the doors opened. “Did I not get the job done right?”
“Sort of,” Ariadne said, stepping out without waiting for me; she knew I’d follow. She walked stiffly, her tone terse but not unkind.
I followed in silence through the bustling cubicle farm that was ringed by offices on the top floor of HQ. Headquarters was only four stories high, but somehow the view it offered of the campus was still commanding. I walked into Old Man Winter’s office a few steps behind Ariadne, and she took her usual position at his shoulder, like a parakeet. He remained behind his rough stone desk, the bright background of the autumn-tinged woods behind him through the window.
I stood at near-attention, my arms behind me in a military posture I’d picked up from Roberto Bastian, the leader of M-Squad. Old Man Winter was tall, commandingly so, almost seven feet in height, and that was evident even though he was seated. His skin was wrinkled and marked him as older than seventy. In reality, I knew he was at least a couple thousand years past that. He looked up as I entered, and his eyes began to bore into me.
“We watched the takedown,” Ariadne said, drawing my attention to her. “We have our own opinions on how we think you did, and we want to discuss them with you.”
Old Man Winter surprised me by speaking. “Fries broke loose of your ambush. He was a danger, he was mobile, he was clearly going for a weapon.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking he was done, “and I recovered from that as best I could—”
“You should have shot him,” Old Man Winter said, stunning me. “You should have killed him rather than risk your own life. Fries is dangerous. You know he kills regularly, indiscriminately—for fun. You were in peril.”
“Yes,” I said, “but overall the situation was in control. My team was seconds away outside the door, Reed was waiting in the kitchen—”
“You put yourself at risk,” Old Man Winter said, and I caught the edge to his voice, the first time I’d ever heard it. “Fries should have been put down like the pitiful rabid dog that he is at the first hint that he was going for a weapon. You are too valuable to put yourself at risk when it can be avoided.”
I blinked. “The order I got was to apprehend him because we’d gone as far as we could by having him followed and tracked. I got the sense that he was valuable, that the intelligence he carried was worth us picking him up now—”
“Not the point,” Old Man Winter cut me off, and his tone was flat, but blunt. “His life is nothing compared to yours. When you were entrusted with your team, it was understood that you would protect them. I expect you to protect yourself as well, and value yourself more than some Omega sop whose value is limited, at best. If you cannot do that, we need to re-evaluate your role and place you somewhere less…” His eyebrows arched, displaying the most emotion I’d ever seen him show, “…dangerous.”
“No, sir,” I said, and swallowed heavily. “I won’t put myself in a position like that again.”
“Do not be afraid to kill,” he said, “not to save your team, not to save yourself. And certainly not for so low a form of life as James Fries.”
“Yes, sir.” I felt a slight contraction in my throat at their concern, a burning that I had failed them in some way.
Ariadne’s eyes were soft, and she wore an almost sympathetic smile of understanding. “We just want you to understand your worth to the organization—and to us. Killing in your own defense is always preferable to placing your life at risk, and we want you to know that you’ll always have our backing in that type of situation.” She leaned forward. “No matter what. If your life is at risk, you are our priority. Not a stranger, not a random person, and certainly not an Omega operative. Pull the trigger next time, and we’ll sort it out later.”
“Understood,” I said, and felt a slight tug in the back of my mind. “Is there anything else I can improve on?”
Old Man Winter said nothing, and Ariadne answered. “Nothing beyond the major concern we already voiced. We’re going to let Fries stew for a night and then start the interrogation tomorrow.” She smiled. “Should soften him up before we start asking questions.”
“What do you think he’ll say?” I looked at both of them, waiting for reaction, but found none.
Ariadne seemed to stare, cocking her head to look out the window. “I’m not sure, exactly. He’ll probably be a tough one to crack. Hopefully he’ll give us some pulse on what Omega’s up to since they’ve gone quiet for the last few months after their assault on our agents.”
“Assault is putting it mildly,” I said. “They drew out and killed ninety percent of our human agents. They engaged M-Squad in a battle in Kansas that the news called an apocalyptic firestorm coupled with tornadoes.”
Old Man Winter snorted. “The press is very easily led, in most cases. Especially when telepaths become involved.”
I felt my jaw tense at the mention of the term telepath. I’d had my own encounter with a telepath only a few months earlier, and the memory was still with me. “Fries,” I said, trying to bring the discussion back to center. “How do you want to handle this?”
“If you’re up for it,” Ariadne said, “I’d like you in there with Parks when he conducts the interrogation. You can play bad cop to his good cop. Just try not to go over the top with your performance.”
“Fries is slick,” I said. “He may see this coming.”
“If it gets ugly,” she said, “excuse yourself from the room. We’ll figure out where to take it from there.”
“All right,” I said. “How far are we going to take this?”
I saw Ariadne’s gaze flit to Old Man Winter, and his stone-faced response. He waited before answering, as though he were milking the moment of all the august pause he could put into it. “As far as it needs to go,” he said. “Omega has you as their target, and they have intended to lay their hands upon you since day one. I will not let them have you.” He let out a slow breat
h that fogged the air with frigid mist in front of his blue lips. “And I mean to know why they want you.”
3.
I walked back across the campus after my meeting with Ariadne and Old Man Winter, his words echoing in my ears. Why did Omega want me? I wondered, too, and had since they’d first sent Wolfe after me almost a year ago. The leaves blew around my ankles as an eddy of wind formed, causing them to drift up in a whirlwind around me. I blinked and took my hands out of my pockets as two of them, maple leaves, ran across my face and tickled my nose. I saw Reed, his fingers extended to the glass from the lobby, a smile on his face. When he saw he’d caught my attention, he dropped his hand and the wind around me faded, the leaves drifting away.
He held the door for me as I walked up, my hands again snugged in the pockets of my coat. “Heya, brother,” I said in as casual a tone as I could as I walked past.
“Heya, sis,” he said, and let the door swing shut after I passed then opened the next for me. “How was your meeting? Or should I call it an ass-chewing?”
“Hardly.” I walked into the lobby of the dormitory. It was a wide area, oblong and directed down two hallways to the left and right, the two respective wings of the dormitory. Directly in front of us was the entrance to the cafeteria. People were already lined up out the door for dinner; it was close to time. I was hungry, but I wouldn’t be eating there tonight. “They just wanted to be sure I didn’t hesitate to kill next time rather than let myself go into danger.”
“I was wondering about that myself,” Reed said, and I stopped, feeling my brow crumple as I gave him a look. The aromas of food came from within the cafeteria—meatloaf, I thought with a cringe. I could hear the chatter, some hushed whispers of a few newer metas talking about me in quiet undertones from near where the line formed for the cafeteria.
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