Omega (3 page)

“Easy catch,” I said, turning back to Ariadne as they left, leaving me with her, Zack and Reed.

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 breath 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.

“Oh?” I let my head swivel; in a normal situation I’d have been looking for a threat. In this case, I was withering a nearby teenage boy with a glare for staring at me. He had brown hair and glasses, and he didn’t look away from me, didn’t turn red, didn’t break eye contact. Annoying. “Why’s that?”

“Because,” Reed said, lowering his head from the top of his lanky frame as though he were trying to bring it into view for me because I was much shorter than him, “Fries had a bead on you. He would have killed you, no hesitation. But you? You didn’t fire, even though you could have.”

“I was told to get him alive, so I got him alive,” I said with only a little hostility. Defensive much?

“And if they’d told you to bring him dead?” Reed’s right eyebrow was higher than the other. He held eye contact with me just a second too long for my taste. When I didn’t answer, he spoke again. “Why are you trying to scare off the newbs with your frightening glare?”

“I don’t like the way they look at me,” I said, turning back to the teenager who I’d caught staring. “Like I’m some kind of freak.”

“Umm, no,” he said. “They’re not looking at you like you’re some kind of freak.”

I frowned at him. “What are you talking about? They stare, they whisper—it’s a full-blown epidemic of gossip, just like it has been since the beginning—”

“Wrong,” Reed said with a little more energy and a slight smile. “Some of that, yeah. But they’re staring at you because they’re teenage boys, and because you’re—”

“What?” I let my voice rise and drew looks. “You’re way off.”

“Not so. You may be my sister—”

“Half-sister,” I corrected.

“—but yeah, I still know. And they’re not looking because they’re gossiping.”

“Awkward,” I said with raised eyebrows. “But thanks for that.”

He shrugged, but wore a smile. “I’m here to help.” His face shifted a little, expression almost pensive. “I never asked you this, but you really didn’t know I was your...?”

I let my face scrunch up to show my incredulity. “How would I have known that? Do you think my mother gave me a lesson in family history?”

“Just curious.” His eyes went back to the teenaged boys in line behind me, and I followed his gaze. All but the one with glasses averted their eyes before we caught them looking. The one with glasses, he didn’t seem to care, staring back at me, absolutely cool. “So you didn’t ever feel like...” Reed let his words trail off.

“Like what?” I tore my eyes away from the teenager in line and looked back to Reed. “Like you were an awkward teenage boy?”

“Hah! No.” He nodded toward the kid again. “You know...like he is towards you, but...towards me? Because you didn’t know?”

A slow dawning came over me. “What? You mean like...” my voice turned hushed, “romantic? Ugh. Awkward much? No. No, never.” I watched his olive skin darken and his brow furrowed. “I mean, nothing personal, you’re a good guy, but—”

“Yeah.” He held up a hand in a dismissive wave. “Friend zone. I got it.”

“You’re my brother, for crying out loud!” I kept my exclamation to a low whisper, but I still drew some swiveled heads.

“Yeah, but you didn’t know that,” he said, and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. After a minute he grinned, and I shook my head, a smile of my own on my face. “Just needling you. You know, you should probably smile more often, Ms. Squad Leader. Maybe be more approachable. You might end up expanding your circle of friends.”

“I’m good for now, I think. See you in a little bit?”

“I’ll be there,” he promised, and gave me a wave as he turned and walked out of the dormitory.

I watched him go, then turned and caught that teenager and his friends looking at me again. I shook my head and walked to the elevator bank just down the hall and pressed the button, causing a loud ding to sound immediately as one of the elevators opened for me. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the third floor, and waited for the doors to close as I pondered Reed’s words. I had imagined myself to be rumored about in unkind ways, just as I had been a few months ago. It had always been that way for as long as I’d been at the Directorate, since I stood by and let Ariadne and Old Man Winter protect me while Wolfe was slaughtering his way through innocent people to get me to surrender to him.

The thought of people talking badly about me was nothing new, and easily enough dealt with; I had friends to help me cope, after all. The thought of people talking about me in more pleasant terms—for some reason, that bothered me. I had seen people steer away from me in the halls, and I preferred the idea of being feared to the idea of being lusted after. It creeped me out and brought back associations with Wolfe in unfavorable ways.

I felt a stir in the back of my head as the doors dinged open, and I realized it had been almost twenty-four hours since my last dose of chloridamide, the medication that kept my demons in check. Wolfe and Gavrikov were with me, always, and I could feel them through the medication sometimes, moving in the back of my head, like faint voices in an empty room. The chloridamide made it possible to (mostly) ignore them, to shut them away where I didn’t have to deal with them on a constant basis. A couple months ago I had gone a day with a diminished dose to see if I could control them naturally; the increased chatter from the two of them was exhausting. They fought over the most inane things, bickering enough that after three hours I had no desire to listen anymore and took a shot of chloridamide just to shut them up.