Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  I held the little stick in my hand, the little white wand that would tell me the course of the next few months and years of my life. I stared at it, the simple, unassuming thing, as white as the tile that covered the entire bathroom. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  I sat on the toilet, the seat down and putting pressure on the base of my thighs. I took a long breath, in and out, and watched the stick like it was going to sprout arms and slap me if I looked away for even a moment. I was having a hard time breathing. Each breath I took was coming in gasps.

  Worried, Little Doll?

  “Damned right I’m worried,” I said, almost hyperventilating.

  This is hardly the end of the world, Wolfe said with a Cheshire smile that I could see in my head. Ironic bastard.

  It’ll be okay, Zack whispered. Whatever happens, I’m with you.

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  What is it? Zack asked.

  This kid is being born into a tactically unsound situation, Bastian intoned.

  “He’s being born as a member of an endangered species,” I spat.

  Bjorn was oddly quiet as he spoke into my mind. You are running Omega now. You sit in a seat once held by Zeus himself.

  I looked down at the porcelain seat I was resting on. “I’m on the toilet. I kind of doubt Zeus held this particular seat.”

  Fear is for lesser people, Bjorn went on.

  “Easy enough to say when you’re dead.”

  It’s gonna be okay, Zack said again. I’m with you. The others … you’ve got a good team. If anyone can beat back Weissman and these Century clowns, it’s you.

  “I couldn’t even stop Winter, Zack,” I said. “I couldn’t fight him off, and these guys scare the shit out of him.”

  You didn’t know Winter was your enemy, Zack said. You know Century is. You know they’re coming.

  “I don’t even know why I’m fighting them,” I said, waving the pregnancy test around like it could speed up the results.

  Because they stand for everything you don’t.

  I felt my mouth go dry, and I looked down at the white testing strip again. As it began to take shape, there was a cacophony in my skull, everyone speaking at once.

  —We can kill anyone, Wolfe said, I can show you how—

  —the Primus of Omega must never be afraid, Bjorn said.

  —all comes down to tactics and strategy, Bastian threw in. Absolutely a winnable war—

  —Klementina—

  I’m with you, Zack whispered.

  —whatever. Kill some more people, see if I care, Eve Kappler said.

  The pain in my head was overwhelming, surging so hard I almost passed out. I fell to my knees, and nausea ran through me. “EVERYBODY JUST SHUT UP!” I screamed, never wanting anything more in my life. I took control of my breathing the way Mother had taught me, slowly in through the nose, slowly out through the mouth, and the voices stopped. I eased a shaking hand up on the edge of the sink and pulled myself up, continuing my breathing exercise as the nausea began to fade. My other hand clung tightly to the pregnancy test, and I didn’t look at it, afraid of what I’d find.

  I looked in the mirror, my pale complexion even more washed out than usual. I stared at myself on unsteady feet, my dark hair tangled in a ponytail that was hanging over my shoulder. I wore a tank top that was a little damp with sweat. Something Dr. Zollers had told me ages ago, back when I first met him, bubbled into my mind:

  “… if you don’t know who you are, it’s kind of tough to know what you want …”

  I stared at the face in the mirror. I hadn’t looked at myself in a long time, maybe weeks, other than just to give myself a once-over to make sure I was presentable before I walked out the door to go somewhere. The face I saw staring back at me looked older than the one I remembered, and there were lines under my eyes, dark circles. My freckled skin was still a little mottled around my right hand where I’d lost it only a few days ago in a fight with Old Man Winter.

  I took another breath and let it hiss out, with less force this time. “I thought I wanted to kill Erich Winter.”

  The words echoed in the bathroom, and I saw a face over my shoulder in the reflection, a dark one with black eyes and a razor-toothed smile. Little Doll does want to kill Winter.

  Another face appeared in the mirror behind me, this one handsome, his sandy blond hair as wavy as I recalled it. No, you don’t.

  “The angel and devil on my shoulders, is that it?” I looked at my face in the mirror, balanced between the other two.

  Opening the ice man’s veins could be so sweet, Little Doll.

  Hunting him is a pointless game that wastes your time at a moment when people NEED your help.

  The others started to chime in, too:

  —Klementina—

  —tactical advantage—

  —leader—

  —whatever—

  “Enough,” I said, calmly but with feeling, and the wave of nausea that had started to build at the cacophony of their voices subsided before it had even truly begun. “Silence.” I said it as a command, and it was finally obeyed. I saw the faces in the mirror, mine, Wolfe’s, Zack’s, and all the others, quietly watching me. I surveyed them, saw the judgment, saw them watching with their own ideas about what I should do, how I should do it, where I should go, what should happen next—

  I took a long breath, and I ignored all the rest of them, now nearly quiet compared to the deafening chorus they had been only moments earlier. They weren’t silent, but I didn’t hear them because there was something else pushing them to the back of my mind. A certainty that hadn’t been there before.

  “I know who I am.” I held my fingers up to touch the mirror, right in the middle, to the reflection of the face in the center of them all. “I know who I am, and I know what I want.”

  With that, there was silence, and when I looked back at the others who had been standing behind me in the mirror only a moment earlier, they were all gone. I stared at the girl in the mirror, and I realized she didn’t really seem all that familiar to me. Probably because she wasn’t a girl anymore.

  I clutched the pregnancy test tightly in my hand as I left.

  Chapter 35

  “I need a status report,” I said as I closed the office doors behind me and stepped out into the main bullpen of Omega. The whole place smelled of dust, and I resisted the temptation to sneeze as I looked up to see little particles floating through the air that had been disturbed by the moving of cubicles. The floor that had once been filled with the cubes was now just dirty brown carpet with stains where the cubes had rested. I could almost taste the dust, the air was so thick with it. My eyes locked on Reed and I gestured to the air as I coughed. “And … can you …?”

  “Sure.” He raised a hand and I felt a subtle gust blow through, opening the door of one of the offices off the main room. A wall of solid dust followed it, along with a few unsecured papers, before the door slammed shut behind it, leaving us with clear air.

  “You’re a handy one to have when there’s a high pollen count, I’d wager,” Breandan said, his arms folded, leaning against the wall.

  “He’s also useful when you’re lying on a beach in the hottest part of summer and the wind has died down,” I said absently. “Where are we with everything?” I looked from Reed to Breandan to Karthik and then to Kat, who stood at one side of the room next to a gurney with Janus lying on it. “How is he?” I was surprised at how gently I asked it.

  “Not good,” Kat said, running her fingers through the bobbing curls of her hair as she answered me. To her credit, she didn’t fail to look me in the eye, and I didn’t see any of the fear I might have assumed would be there after I’d battered her so recently. “I managed to bring him back—or more accurately, to save him in the seconds before his body gave up and let him die. The problem is,” her fingers left her own hair and went to Janus’s, fingering him along the back of his neck, “Weissman severed his brain stem. Even though I was
able to heal the majority of the damage, that’s not the sort of trauma you just get over immediately.” Her fingers came back to herself, to rest on the green, low cut blouse she was wearing. “I don’t know what sort of problems will come from that, and I have no idea when he’ll wake up. Or …” she let her voice trail off, very tiny and far away, “… if he’ll even be himself when he wakes up.”

  “Dammit,” I whispered. “When things start to hit the fan, you’re moving him out of here, right?”

  Kat nodded. “I’ll move him into one of the offices right now, but I’ll be back. I’m not letting Century kill me without a fight.”

  I shot a look to Karthik. “What about you? Are we ready?”

  “We have guns,” he said, gesturing to a few souls who were clustered between us and the elevators in the room. The blinds were down on all the windows that could be seen outside the offices, and it left us in a space that was lit solely by fluorescent light. “We have a few people who are trained with them, and a few others who can fight with meta abilities.” He nodded to the cluster of people behind him and I counted, quickly. “Seven,” he said, interrupting my count. “That makes us twelve when you account for the five of us.” He gave a quick sweep of the hand to encompass those of us standing in a rough semi-circle for the conversation. “We’re protecting another sixteen.”

  “I thought there were more,” I said, eyeing the offices that had the shades drawn, where I knew the others had to be hunkered down, hiding, out of the way.

  “A few decided to take their chances on their own,” Karthik said. “I’m only surprised it wasn’t more.”

  “So now we just wait?” Breandan asked, turning to look between Karthik and I.

  “Unless you have any plans that will allow us to launch an offensive against an enemy that we have no current ability to track,” I said.

  “Not really,” Breandan said glumly. “I hope they come soon. The anticipation is just killing me.” He paused. “Oh, wait, it’s them that’s going to be killing me. The anticipation is just annoying the piss out of me.”

  “Save some of that piss for when they get here,” Reed said seriously. “After all, you wouldn’t want to get in a fight to the death without wetting your pants first.”

  There was a laugh that rippled through the few metas behind Karthik, and I took a moment to look at them. They were a nearly equal split, four women and three men. Two of them looked terribly young, younger than me. One of them looked to be older than Hera had been. The other four seemed grouped in their twenties and thirties. “See,” I said, “we can laugh. It’s not the end of the world, right?” That quieted them. “Sorry. But I find if I’m not trying to laugh death in the face, I’m thinking way too hard about what I’m up against, and that’s almost never a good thing. Cracking jokes helps defuse the tension for me, and I don’t do my best work when I’m so stressed that I can’t think straight.” I looked at each of them in turn. “Also, the people I’m fighting are usually assholes, so it’s kind of nice to emasculate them while you’re pounding the hell out of them.”

  There was another laugh that was cut off when the fluorescent lights went off with a loud pop, the hum of electricity fading with them. I drew a quick breath. “Show time. Reed, rip the blinds off the windows.”

  I couldn’t see him in the dark but I knew he had complied with my request when I felt a tornado gust rip around the edges of the room, tearing the blinds off the few external windows that weren’t protected by offices. I saw some of the others come up on their own as the metas hiding within them began to lift them to let some of London’s city lights shine in on us. It cast the whole room in a dim glow, the reflected lights giving us little to see by.

  “All right,” I said, “I want everyone behind me. I’ve heard Hades himself had a hell of a range, and we don’t know how far this guy has to be from a person to put the hurting on them—” I glanced back behind me but heard nothing save for a grunt that was repeated from several different sources at once. I wheeled around and saw Reed on his knees next to Karthik, Breandan on his back next to Kat. The others had collapsed as well, holding their chests as though something were being torn out of them forcibly.

  “The answer is close,” came a voice from behind me, near the elevator. “Your great-grandfather might have been able to draw souls from miles away, but his powers were diluted by mating with Persephone.” A man stepped out of the shadows, with black hair slicked back in something that almost looked like a pompadour. He had a huge belly that hung out in front of him out from under his T-shirt. He wasn’t tall, he was squat, and he walked with a little bit of a limp. “Hey.”

  “Um, hi,” I said, a little distracted. The others were falling behind me.

  “I’m Raymond,” he said, his eyes still in shadow from the low light. “Or at least that’s what I call myself now.” I caught a whiff of a cologne. It smelled cheap.

  “Raymond,” I said calmly, “are you gonna release my friends from your death hold or—”

  “You don’t need to threaten me,” Raymond said. He put his hand down for a minute and I heard the breath of life return to the people behind me. “We’re related, you know? Hades was my dad. We can talk for a minute.”

  “You don’t look like the son of a god,” I said patronizingly.

  “I worked in a factory in Toledo until about nine months ago,” he admitted. He was cool, placid even. “Weissman came along and told me what they were planning. Asked for my help.” A smile broke out across Raymond’s fat face as he recounted the story. “It’d been a long time since anyone wanted anything to do with me. You know what I mean, right?”

  I felt a little sizzle in the back of my head. “Not really.”

  “Come on,” Raymond said, almost abashed. “I know how metas treat your kind. Our kind. I gave up on getting a favorable reaction to my abilities years and years ago and just started hiding it. I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone like you.” He took a step closer to me, and I could see the light fall across his gut. “You can’t control it, can you?”

  “No,” I said, watching the light play over him. “But you can? I’d think that someone would have tried to make you an offer like Weissman’s years ago.”

  Raymond shrugged. “They did. I’ve worked for governments before, sometimes, when I needed the money. I always needed time after a job, though, to get used to the voices, to … get them integrated in, you know? To get them to listen, and shut up when they’re told. It’s easy to get lost in the more forceful ones.” He wore a faint smile. “Hell, I remember it was a while before I learned how to keep them from walking all over me. Talking all over me.”

  Kill him.

  “Quiet, Wolfe,” I said, and he was. “I know what you mean.”

  “I know you do,” Raymond said, so softly, his voice just desperately quiet, like he was the gentlest soul on earth. He took another step toward me, into the light. He really was a big man, and for all the threat his power carried he looked like a teddy bear, with beetle-like eyes that stared out at me in the dark. I could almost see the thirst for approval dripping from him, and I wondered how long it had been since he had really connected with another human being before Weissman had approached him. I would have guessed decades. “No one else knows how it works but us. It’s close, what you go through and what I go through. Very close. The difference is just scale.”

  “I can’t imagine having as many voices in my head as you do.”

  “You get used to it,” he said. “It’s worse with the metas. They’re different than humans; their wills are stronger. They fight back harder. Dad knew some tricks with his power, could do things I can’t.” His face fell. “Some things you don’t really see much of anymore. He didn’t want to share, you see. Not that he didn’t care, he just wanted to protect himself.

  “I met your mother once,” Raymond said, and he extended a hand again, just for a moment, and I heard a half dozen screams behind me. “Sorry.” I could hear the genuine apology in his vo
ice. “I didn’t want your friends interrupting our talk, and they were starting to get their wind back.”

  “You knew my mom?” I asked, apparently unconcerned with the pain of my colleagues—and friends. I was torn, this tantalizing bit of my family’s history just hanging in front of me.

  “Just met her the once,” he said. “Long time ago, when she was just a little girl. Her mom was one of my sisters.”

  I blinked. “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a nod, “we grew up together.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “But …” My eyes widened at that. “When was that?”

  He thought about it for a minute. “Oh … um … 1970s some time? Seventy-one, maybe seventy-two. I don’t remember exactly. Your aunt was still a baby at the time.”

  “But if you were both children of Hades,” I said, “and he died—”

  “He died before the Year Zero,” Raymond said then paused. “We’re kind of old, I guess, if that’s what you were getting at.”

  I swallowed. “I didn’t know my grandmother lived that long.” I watched the beetle eyes. “Is she …?”

  “Died in 1989. I found her last resting place in a cemetery in Michigan.”

  “Huh,” I said, marveling just the least little bit at what I’d heard, at connections to a family I hadn’t known anything about. I watched him, and he watched me. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “No, we don’t,” he agreed. “You should be with us. You belong with us. What Sovereign is doing—it’s something that should have been done a long time ago.”

  I shook my head. “Raymond … this isn’t right.”

  “Isn’t right?” A lifetime of scorn was obvious in his demeanor. “What they’ve done to our family isn’t right. Keeping incubi and succubi under their boots, suppressed—”

  “Ummm, hello?” I said, as sarcastically as possible. “Suppression? You’re in the process of wiping out the whole damned species of meta-humans! Do you not possess any metrics to gauge how much irony you’re spewing right now?”

  “We’re destroying the old order,” Raymond said, “to bring about a new one, a better one, for humans and metas. Omega and all their little satellites like Alpha and the Directorate, they’re just standing in the way of a better world. This one is so locked into structures of power that hand it over to people like … well, you know.”