Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 (3 page)

He regarded me carefully in the mirror and shrugged, his faint outline showing me a face I hadn’t seen in reality in something close to a year, since the day I’d absorbed his soul with my own hands, taking it into my body, my mind.
There is not much to say.

I stared back at him and tried to release the tension in my jaw, which was set tight.
True enough. Not about this, anyway. It’s time to wait, I guess.
I took another breath in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Want to talk about something else?

He nodded then looked around the room.
Maybe we could talk about Klementina?

I slammed the door on him, prompting a howl that faded quickly. It took me a few moments to get my annoyance under control after that, some more breathing exercises. In that time, I realized that I was at least fortunate in one minor way. If I’d had Gavrikov’s sister’s flat, skinny ass, I reflected as I shifted in my chair for the thousandth time, my backside would be even more sore than it already was.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror and wondered how long I would have to wait. The mirror seemed so big and I so small now, with the others gone from it. Still, I sat there, watching my empty expression, my dull, disinterested eyes, staring at the girl sitting in the middle of the holding cell, all alone.

The sound of the lock shifting open caught my attention about an hour and a half later. My eyes diverted to it from my reflection, which I had been wordlessly focused on for the intervening time. The room’s air was warm and stuffy enough that I was beginning to notice how ripe I was from the flight; how toxic my breath had gotten from not having a chance to brush my teeth in twelve hours at least. I was tempted to blow a big breath right in Li’s face if it was him coming in.

It wasn’t. Another man stood in the door, a taller one, powerfully built, African-American with greying hair at the temples and just a little scattered throughout the rest of his short-cropped cut. He wore a suit, which, unlike Li’s, wasn’t cheap, and his tie was a little crooked. The door shut behind him and he waved at me where I sat on the chair, hands cuffed in my lap. “Don’t get up,” he said with a hint of a southern accent. I stared back at him and started to say something but he cut me off. “Or uppity, for that matter, at least not until I’ve had a chance to introduce myself.”

I gave him the cool glare, trying to pretend I was uninterested. Facing five murder raps and the threat of no trial, I was actually very interested in what he had to say, which was counterintuitive. After all, Agent Li had essentially painted a hopeless picture for me. Not necessarily the smartest move, putting someone like me into desperation mode. My questions got the better of me, though, even as I started to formulate a plan that involved using my guest as a human shield to help facilitate my escape. “Go on,” I said without emotion.

“I’m Robb Foreman,” he said, taking a step toward my chair. If he was concerned about me being a threat, he hid it well. “Does my name sound familiar to you?”

I shrugged. “Are you the junior senator from Tennessee?” I didn’t follow politics closely, but I knew the names of some of the notables, and he was definitely one of them. His name kept getting mentioned as a contender for the next presidential election.

“The very one,” Foreman said, nodding his head. “I’ve come a long way to speak to you, Ms. Nealon.”

“Question,” I said, stopping him before he could get going. “What’s to stop me from taking you hostage and using you as a human shield to walk out the front door?”

He grinned with a certain warmth. “You could always try it and find out, though I don’t think you’ll find the consequences agreeable or to your liking.” I didn’t love the sound of that, but I didn’t say anything to it. After a moment, he went on. “Like I said, I’ve come a long way to see you.”

“You could have ‘seen’ me from the other side of the glass,” I said, nodding my head at the one-way mirror. “According to your Agent Li, this will be a common view of me pretty soon. He seemed to indicate I was heading toward—what do they call it nowadays? Oh, right—indefinite detention.”

Foreman gave me a slow nod, his lips pursed. “That is a possibility. Murdering Parks, Clary, Kappler and Bastian?” He let a low whistle. “Cold-blooded. Premeditated. You can’t even argue crime of passion on those because you planned it all out.”

“Maybe I could argue self-defense,” I said, keeping myself from showing emotion.

He gave me a slight shake of the head. “Never hold up in court, not with the evidence of the poison still in Parks’s system or the elaborate means you used in that construction site to take out Clary.” His face twisted, and I could see the discomfort exuding off him. “These are not the acts of a person who could argue self-defense.”

“You didn’t say Zack’s name.” I said it quietly, so quietly it was almost inaudible.

“No, I didn’t,” Foreman said, not taking his eyes off me. Mine came up and caught his, though, and I saw him smile in acknowledgment. No one could have heard me to be able to respond to it. No one human, anyway. “Yeah, I’m a meta,” Foreman said, still smiling, but it was a tight one. “My wife is meta. My daughters are metas.”

I stared back at him and something dawned on me. “That’s why you’re not scared to be in here alone with me.”

He shrugged. “You’re strong, but you’re handcuffed, and you’ve got all your flesh except for your head covered. Under those conditions, I feel pretty comfortable that I could win a fight with you.”

I held my hands up and clinked them as I pulled them to maximum extension. “What about without the cuffs?”

Foreman’s eyebrow rose slowly. “I wouldn’t care to chance it.” He waved me off. “I’m not here to talk to you about a brawl for it all.”

“Then what are you here to talk to me about?” I looked away again. “Here to give me the rundown of my crimes, like the Ghost of Christmas Past? Because I know what I’ve done, since I was there—”

His eyes danced and he cut me off. “I’m not here to talk about your past. I’m here to talk about your future.”

I let my tongue roam over my back teeth as I bided my time, trying to wait for him to go on. He didn’t, and my patience ran out, quickly. “According to Li, my future is the inside of a cell. And not five minutes ago, you made mention of that fact as well—”

“It’s one possible future,” Foreman agreed and took a step to his left, leaning against the edge of the one-way mirror. “It’s hardly set in stone, though. There are ... other possibilities.” His hands came to rest in the pockets of his jacket.

“Oh?” I kept my eyes on him then let them flicker to the mirrored glass, wondering if Li was behind them. “And what are those? The other possibilities?”

One of his hands came out of his pocket, something clenched within his fingers. He tossed it lightly, and it skittered across the table to come to rest in front of me. I didn’t take my eyes off of him to look, though, I kept right on him, watching him watch me. He smiled, just a little at the corner of his mouth, a faint tug of the muscles, and he nodded his head at what he’d tossed at me.

My curiosity got the better of me and I broke away from his gaze to look. There was an open leather case resting on the table, a simple bifold that resembled a wallet. There was identification inside, something terribly familiar, something I’d used before. My picture rested inside, along with the letters FBI emblazoned across it. I sighed, and looked back up. “If you’re going to charge me with impersonating an FBI agent, you’re kind of wasting your time, aren’t you? I mean, five murders—or four, or whatever—I think they’ll probably keep me in jail for a long enough time, don’t you? Assuming you even used the court system.” I muttered the last bit.

“Maybe, maybe not, given your longevity.” He ignored my last comment. “But you don’t think I really came all the way here from Washington to discuss the fact that you have a fake FBI ID, do you? I mean, people commit those kinds of crimes all the time, they don’t get a senator coming to them to talk while they’re in stir.”

“So what do you want?” I asked again, and all the fatigue of my trip, the tension from having been arrested and put into custody when I’d felt above the law, all of it came rushing down on me and I snapped at him. “What do you want from me in order to keep my future from being the one where I spend the rest of my life—which may end up damned short depending on how current events turn out—in a jail cell?”

“Look at the ID again,” Foreman said gently.

I rolled my eyes. At a U.S. Senator. “I’ve seen it before. I’ve been carrying it for almost a year now—”

He cleared his throat. “No, you haven’t.” I glanced down. “You’ve been carrying one that says ‘Sienna Clarke’ on it. This one says—”

“Sienna Nealon,” I breathed, reading my name off.

I looked up at Foreman, and he was smiling warily at me. “We seem to have something of a crisis on our hands here,” Foreman said, and his smile disappeared. “Something about the extinction of all metakind? Well ... the U.S. government just lost its unofficial metahuman policing apparatus a couple weeks ago ...”

I blinked in surprise. “The Directorate?”

Foreman nodded, put a hand against the wall, and proceeded to lean heavily on it. “So ... how’d you like to avoid prison time by serving your country and helping us out of this mess?”

I stared at him, not quite sure what to say. He stared back then spoke. “What are you thinking right now?”

“That old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ comes to mind.”

“Have we fooled you before?” Foreman asked, folding his arms in front of him as he leaned next to the window.

“Not you, specifically,” I said, “but one of your employees, apparently, since you just admitted the Directorate was your metahuman policing unit.”

“Unofficially,” Foreman said with a smile. “It generated its own revenue, had no ownership ties that could bind it to the government, and didn’t share a single employee with us.”

I puckered my lips and moved them to the side, contemplating. “But you gave them sanction?”

He bobbed his head. “We gave Erich Winter the latitude to do what needed to be done in that department. We provided him with full access to our databases, allowed him to use our agencies to create covers for his operatives, opened the door for him to do insider trading with government intel so he could keep the Directorate funded, and gave him a free hand to do what we couldn’t after the Agency was destroyed. Imagine our surprise when he went rogue on us.” Foreman gave me an unsubtle look. “I suppose you know a little of what that feels like.”

I felt a subtle pressure of my teeth grinding together. Except it wasn’t subtle at all. “Yes. I know what it feels like to be betrayed by Erich Winter.”

“Like I said, we’re in a bind.” Foreman pushed off the wall and drew up to his full height. “See, we’ve read the tea leaves—also known as the screaming of every single intelligence agency with any intelligence at all, planetwide—and we know the basics of what’s happening in the meta world right now. But knowing what’s coming without having the means to stop it is pretty damned useless.”

“You want me to join you so I can be the means?” The weight of the handcuffs seemed to have vanished.

He nodded his head by inclining it sideways. “It’d be awfully tough for me to fight Century all by my lonesome.”

“Give it a go,” I said. “It could be fun.”

Foreman grinned. “I don’t think so.” The smile vanished. “I’m not fond of the idea of giving a murderer an out, but I like it a lot better than the idea of walking into a fight with an organization composed of a hundred of the world’s mightiest without at least one top-scaler on our own side. Especially when that top-scaler seems to be one that Century has taken a keen interest in for some reason. No, I like to hedge my bets, gamble as safely as possible.”

I let it get quiet for a minute while I thought about what he was saying. “If I jump through your hoops and join your little version of Directorate, Part Deux ... once this is over, I get to walk free?”

Foreman looked suddenly wary. “You’ll be given a pardon for any laws you may have broken while in the Directorate’s employ and afterward, specifically with regard to the murders of M-Squad and Zack Davis because in a legalistic sense you did kill him, even if you didn’t do it in a moral sense. You’ll also be given a lot of free rein in the performance of your duties, meaning if you accidentally were to cause a civilian death in the course of fighting off this Century plot, or if you were to kill every single one of the members of that organization, you wouldn’t be charged with those crimes—though you will be subject to oversight.”

He paused, and I couldn’t help but see the appeal of what he was offering. Still, I said nothing. He spoke again. “Let’s think about this for a minute and assume somehow you broke out of custody sometime in the near future. You’d be on the run, the full weight of the United States law enforcement apparatus hunting you down. Let me tell you something: it ain’t that easy to hide within our borders anymore when everyone’s looking for you, not for long. You could try running to another country, but there aren’t that many without extradition treaties that’d harbor you. Plus, you’d still have Century after you. If you want to fight them,” he took a step toward me, looking down, arms still folded, “your best chance is with us.”

I looked up at him and the staring contest recommenced. He was right, of course. Even if I broke out, the FBI would have a task force sniffing after me within hours. Air travel would become a virtual impossibility, which meant I’d be down to stealing cars and driving cross country like ... I paused, and thought of Mom, who had done something similar not that long ago. I put the thought out of my mind and focused back on Foreman. “If I do this, I walk free at the end?”

“If you help us stop Century from carrying out their plot, you will get your pardon, you have my word,” Foreman said.

I wasn’t much for trusting the word of a stranger at this point, but what choice did I have? I was bound hand and foot by metal cuffs, unable to move or walk effectively. Hell, I could just barely shake his hand if he were to offer it to me right now, and this was how it was going to be from now on. I looked from side to side, weighing my other options, which were laughable. My other option—and there was only one—was to say no. “What happens if I say no?”