Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  Weissman was gone.

  Chapter 36

  “Maybe you could have killed him sooner?” Breandan suggested.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”

  “I actually thought you were going to let him get away unchallenged,” Reed said. “I thought a little bit of the old Sienna was peeking out there for a minute.” His voice held just a hint of melancholy.

  “Sorry,” I said softly, “but no. Every instinct I had told me it was a bad idea, because that bastard is too damned hard to kill.” I felt a bleak disappointment in myself. “I should have tried to take the shot sooner.”

  Reed gave a disappointed nod. “You really aren’t the same.”

  I shook my head. “I’m really not. But I meant what I said. I’ve got a job to do, a purpose to fulfill, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if you can trust Weissman, exactly, but I think there’s some truth to what he said. I don’t think they’re going to pull all their resources out of the Americas until they’re done over there. Which means London is probably the safest city in the world for metas right now, at least in the near term.”

  “What would you suggest?” Karthik asked me, in near disbelief. “Bunker down and hope the storm passes?”

  “Kind of,” I said, and started toward the doors of the Primus’s office. I could sense them all following, and I heard the soft steps of their shoes on the carpet. I threw open the doors with both hands in a very dramatic fashion and flipped the lights as I came in. I walked to the bookshelf and looked for Dickens’s Hard Times. When I found it, I pulled on it, and it slid out only with effort.

  “This is hardly the time to read the classics,” Reed said.

  “Is there ever a good time for that, really?” Breandan added.

  The wall slid open, revealing a hidden passage. I felt a rush of air as it opened, and lights began to flicker on along the sides of the hallway. “There’s always time for a classic tale,” I said as I entered the passage.

  “Who are you?” Breandan asked, almost mocking. “A James Bond villain?”

  “No, but I think the Primus of Omega kind of was.” I let my feet carry me down the concrete hallway to a staircase at the end. I glanced back to see Kat, Breandan, Karthik and Reed following behind me.

  “Well,” Karthik said with a little smile, “you kind of are the Primus of Omega, now.”

  We descended the concrete stairs into the moldy air. It was thick, and once we’d passed the first landing, there wasn’t much circulating, as though the whole area was cut off from the main air conditioning system. It retained the look of an unfinished space, the walls probably dating back to the original construction of the building.

  I went down, down, down. I counted six stories, even though the building was only four plus a parking garage. I figured we were down in the depths now, below the garage, and I wondered what we’d find as the stairs came to an end under a lamp that buzzed and hummed, flickering on and off.

  “Wait,” Reed said, cautioning me. “This could be something dangerous.”

  “Could be,” I agreed, then grabbed the door handle and flung it open.

  “And she doesn’t even give a thought or care to that notion,” Breandan said, peering into the darkened door ahead of me. “Very posh.”

  I walked through without waiting for caution to overwhelm me, and lights began to come on throughout the cavernous room in front of me. It was furnished with height-of-the-1700s furniture, like a private apartment from the American Revolution. A gold-plated throne lay in the far corner, shimmering in the light, along with other treasures that I saw cause Breandan to just about drool on the floor.

  Spread in the warehouse-sized space between us and the treasure trove were living quarters, complete with a kitchenette, floor to ceiling cabinets with some doors that led into another room, and even a set of six cots in the corner opposite the treasure. Along the wall to our left was a lab area, filled with scientific-looking equipment. In the middle of it all was an empty space where something had been, something big, and I wondered about it even as my eyes slid over six rows of filing cabinets that lay just feet away from us.

  Karthik made a noise behind me. “The Primus’s emergency apartments,” he said, looking over the space. “I must confess, I thought they were a rumor only.”

  “Where did he live the rest of the time?” I asked.

  “He had quite a few palatial estates,” Karthik said, looking over the dim, dank space before us. “Nothing like this, of course. Places that were presentable, that allowed him to mingle with society. This space … this is …”

  “It’s like a little slice of heaven come to earth,” Breandan said, his eyes still fixed on the gold in the corner.

  “It’s like the last refuge of a man who knew things were going to get really bad,” Reed said.

  “And who loved to … what? Experiment on people?” Kat waved a hand at the equipment along the wall. “You need your own personal science lab in your post-apocalyptic apartment?”

  “Maybe,” I said, turning my attention toward the filing cabinets. “Let’s see what we have here.” I made my way over to them, brown metal with silver trim on the handles and doors. They looked like they were from the seventies—the 1970s, in this case, rather than the 1770s like the rest of the furniture. I came to a drawer marked with a large red S in the filing label. I pulled it open, and it was empty, all the way to the back.

  I frowned, then shook my head, and walked over to the drawer marked N and slid it open. Nothing.

  “Looks like the Primus cleaned things out at some point,” Reed said, looking over my shoulder. “Maybe he joined the twenty-first century and went digital?”

  “I guess so,” I said, feeling a tug of disappointment.

  “You don’t mind if I clean him out, do you?” Breandan said, pointing toward the gold and baubles in the corner. “I mean, they are just sitting there, and he and his whole bloody family are dead, after all—”

  “Go,” I said, “but be careful.”

  “I am the soul of caution,” he said, already running with meta speed across the room.

  “If he doesn’t trip all over himself laying hands on that gold, it’ll only be because of his meta dexterity,” Reed muttered.

  “Heard that!”

  “Help me look through these filing cabinets,” I said, pulling out the next drawer, the one marked M. It, too, was empty.

  Reed and Karthik each took a side, and we started to work our way through. Karthik made a noise at the first drawer he opened, and I paused to look at him.

  “Found one,” he said, pulling out a thick file.

  “What does it say?” I asked, standing up and leaving the drawer for L open behind me.

  “Quite a bit, I’d guess, based on the thickness,” he said with the trace of a smirk. “Here.” He offered it to me and I took it, turning it over to look at the top leaf. It was marked with a carefully typed label, in a font that made me think it had been done by a real typewriter or a very early printer, and it bore one word to indicate what it contained.

  Agency.

  I stared at it for only a second before I opened it, scanning the first page, which was a letter detailing commencement of surveillance activities centered on the old Agency, the place where my mom had worked. The file was an inch thick, filled with neatly typed reports and the occasional glossy photograph attached with a paperclip. My eyes skimmed over the text but one of the glossies caught my attention immediately: a photo of a young woman with dark hair, pale skin, and freckles. Her expression was alight with a smile, and she was caught in a tender moment, with a man on her arm. He was taller than she was, handsome, rugged, and yet looked a hell of a lot like the man standing only feet to my right.

  “Mom and Dad,” I whispered, and I felt the tug of emotions as I glanced at Reed, who nodded. I flipped the photo over and read the caption.

  Subjects S. Nealon and J. Traeger, October 1992.

  “Well before you came along,” Reed sa
id to my right.

  “Yeah,” I said absently. The file was thick and whispered of secrets that I hungered to dive into.

  “You look a lot like her,” Karthik said. “Is she still …?” He let his words trail off.

  “As far as I know,” I said and tried to keep the regret out of it.

  It took us a few more minutes to search the rest of the cabinets, but they were empty. Not another scrap of paper was in them, nothing. Kat rejoined us after looking over the laboratory area, her face locked into a look of puzzlement. “Kind of weird,” she said.

  I waited for a minute to see if anyone else would bite before I did. “What?” I asked finally.

  “Just equipment I’ve never seen before.” She gestured to the room around us. “The furniture is hundreds of years old, the treasure is probably from thousands of years of collecting,” she nodded at Breandan as he rejoined us, sporting three solid gold necklaces and with his pants weighed down from heavy pockets, “the filing cabinets are from the seventies, but this equipment is … I dunno. Nineties, I think.

  “The former Primus was a real Renaissance man,” I said. “And I mean that in the sense that he should have stayed there. Look at this place. It’s like a mausoleum, a crypt dedicated to a man who didn’t know where the hell he belonged. For all we know, that equipment was there so he could preserve his own life, extend it. I see a man with so much ego that he couldn’t see past his own nose, couldn’t see the point of leaving any kind of legacy for those he was leaving behind.” I looked up at the concrete ceiling. “I mean, look at the kid he left. Some punk that got dragged in from Los Angeles based on name recognition alone by the ministers, just hoping he wouldn’t make waves, I guess. Did he even seem like the kind of guy who knew his father?”

  I let that thought sink in with them even as it crept up on me, and I thumbed the folder in my hands open to the photograph again.

  Chapter 37

  “So you’re really going to go back to Minneapolis, huh?” Reed’s voice was calm, smooth, talking to me almost as if we were both rational people. I could see in his face that he didn’t think it was okay, though.

  We were back upstairs in the office, just the two of us now, me sitting on the desk of the Primus and him on the couch against the wall by the door. “I’m really going back to Minneapolis,” I said.

  “Have you thought this through?” he asked, trying to gauge my reaction. “I mean, this … all this, I know it wasn’t what you came to London for.”

  I let out a faint chuckle at the irony of what he said. “I came to London for a three-month tour of duty with Omega so they’d help me track down Old Man Winter so I could kill him.”

  “Really?” Reed looked at me, perplexed. “So none of this thought of higher duty was around then, this faint idea that you should help other people?”

  “The ghost of it, yeah,” I said. “I drove through the parking lot of Southdale Mall just before I hunted down Fries. Saw the place where Wolfe killed all those people while he was trying to smoke me out. It had been rattling in my head for a while, those people who died, the two hundred and fifty-four, but I didn’t know what to do with it.” I rested my palm on my chest, over my heart. “I didn’t know what good I could do with Omega, especially since they were the ones who sent Wolfe after me to begin with.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, until Reed spoke. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  I let him wait for a beat. “No,” I said, my voice hoarse. “No, I’m not.” I let a grim smile cross my face. “But it’s okay. It’s not like that would have been all I have left of him. He’s still in here, after all,” I said, tapping my head. “Besides, right now I feel like I’m the mother of the whole damned meta race,” I said. “Like it’s my job to protect them, because no one else will.”

  “But not to lock them in a box, right?” Reed said with a smirk.

  “I think I’d like to avoid that particular parenting pitfall,” I said ruefully. “Though I do hope you and the rest stay in the underground apartments for a few days.” Breandan had found an emergency pantry with enough food to last for years. “Or at least until we figure out where you’re going.”

  “The informal poll we took suggests everyone wants to follow you,” Reed said, looking somewhat puckish. “Something about seeing someone beat down all your enemies, I guess. Puts the inspiration in you.”

  “They’re all pretty much British citizens, right?” I asked.

  “Right,” he said. “They’ll need a few days to get passports. Karthik says Omega has some connections he’s familiar with, so we should be able to get them issued soon. Hopefully, we can all head to Minneapolis in the next few days.”

  I thought about it after he said it. “I guess Minneapolis is as good a place as any to make a stand.”

  He shrugged. “Beats the underground bunker, if I had to pick. Though I’m a little unclear on why you chose it.”

  “It’s home,” I said. “We’ll have to find a way to start gathering metas to us without drawing Century down on our heads.”

  “That could be tough,” Reed said, “considering you pretty much called out this Sovereign guy and slapped the hell out of his bestie. If Weissman isn’t full of crap, it sounds like you’re coming up on Sovereign’s list.”

  “I’ll deal with it—and him—when the time comes,” I said with a wellspring of confidence that originated … hell if I knew where. Somewhere inside. “It’s not like there’s anything I can do to prepare.” Reed stared at me with smoky eyes, and I knew there was something he was holding back. “Come on. Out with it,” I said.

  I saw his tongue move within his closed mouth, as if he were licking the inside of his lips, causing them to bulge. “What if I told you … I know where Old Man Winter is going to be in three days?”

  I felt the slow tension run through my body. “Where?”

  “Rome,” he said. “He was supposed to meet with Hera. Obviously, she’s not going to make it, but I know the time, the place … everything. She was holding it back as a bargaining chip.” He gave me that same rueful smile. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you everything.”

  I thought about it for almost a minute, weighing everything, before I answered. “No,” I said. “No. Winter’s in the past. I don’t have time to deal with him now. There are people who need my help.”

  He smiled as he looked in my eyes. “There she is. Or just a little bit of her, at least.”

  “Really? You think so?” I ran my fingernails gently over my face and stared over my shoulder at my own reflection in the lit window behind me. The basics were all still there but different. Somehow I looked more like … my mom. “I guess I just don’t see it anymore.”

  Chapter 38

  “Thank you,” I told Breandan as the whole of Heathrow terminal buzzed around us. Karthik had driven the five of us to the airport; they’d insisted on sending me off in style, and I didn’t argue persuasively enough to convince them. Besides, Reed had argued it was smart for my safety, and I hadn’t minded. It was nice not to be alone for once.

  Breandan’s face wore a look of measured surprise, one eye opened wider than the other as we stood just inside the ticketing area. “You thanking me? Whatever for?”

  “For reminding me that not every stranger you meet is out to destroy you,” I said, tugging on his hand with my left. “For letting me believe again that people are mostly good and that they need help to keep the bad away from them.”

  “It’s funny that a thief whose face you bloodied the day you met him would be the one to teach you that,” he said with a wry smile.

  “I’m appreciating the irony,” I said as I clutched my ticket within my right hand. “And thank you, too,” I said to Karthik, “you and Janus, for showing me that not everyone from Omega is as horrible as I believed.”

  He gave me a pained wince. “Based on the experiences you had, I’m rather surprised you didn’t kill us all or leave us to our just desserts.”

  “They wouldn�
�t have been just,” I said quietly, the crowd melting around me. I could sense them, the pulse of them, as they flowed around us. They were all on Century’s list too, eventually. “It would have been vengeful.” I looked to Kat. “And on that note … I don’t hate you anymore.” I did struggle a little to get the words out, though.

  Her careful concern, her bare skepticism, dissolved and she leapt forward and enfolded me in a tight hug before I had a chance to do much more than stiffen in surprise. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear it, Sienna! You know, I never forgot you, never, and I always remembered—”

  “I didn’t say I liked you,” I said, shrugging off her embrace. “I just said I didn’t hate you anymore.” I watched her face fall and I felt a pang of guilt. “Give it time, Kat,” I said, and she perked just a little. “It’s … still a lot to take in.”

  “I followed you back then,” she said, serious, her age showing once more. “If you’d been in charge of the Directorate, I would have still been following you. I only left for Omega because I knew that Winter wasn’t prepared, wasn’t even thinking in the right direction.”

  “You could have shared that with the rest of us,” I said, and I knew the traces of sadness on her face were evident on my own.

  I stepped back from them, my new inner circle, I supposed, and took my first step toward the security checkpoint off in the distance. “I’ll see you all in a few days. Just hurry, okay?”

  “We will,” Reed said and stepped forward to wrap his arms around me. His embrace I didn’t try and shrug off. I might even have leaned into it a little. “Just watch your back until we get there to do it for you, okay?”

  “Will do,” I said, blinking the little droplets of water out of the corner of my eyes.

  “You’re not gonna start the party without us, are you?” Breandan asked with a grin.

  “I’m not in control of the party,” I said, giving him a smile of my own, this one heartfelt, for once. “But when it starts, I sure could use a little luck.” I gave them all a smile and a nod and got a few in return, before I turned my back and walked through the surging crowd, heading for the plane that would carry me home. “And a little help from my friends,” I whispered.