“I was just thinking that,” said the young man in front of him who wore a chain from his nose to his ear. His head was shaven clean, his skin a pale sort of cream, along with the two boys who flanked him on either side. “I was thinking that if you gave me your car keys and your wallet, you could just keep walking.” Tattoos on their necks caught the old man’s interest and he cocked his head at an angle to look closer.
“You are bold,” the old man said, keeping his hands folded one over the other in front of him, “with the police in force just around the corner.”
“They’ll never get here in time.” There was almost a sneer in the young man’s face. “Even if they heard you.” Behind the bravado, the sneer, the old man could sense the faintest hesitation. A broken nose, then.
The young fellow at the front turned to say something to his comrades. The old man smiled, and was already moving as the head began to swivel back at the sight of motion. The impact sent the young tough to the ground, hands slapping the pavement, catching him. His mouth was open, a thick stream of blood already coating his upper lip, dribbling down his face as he looked up at his attacker. “As you said,” the old man repeated, “they’ll never get here in time.”
The two youths that were still standing began to move, but they were too slow; the older man’s methodical motions were gone now, replaced with a fluid grace as he spun into a low kick that swept the legs of the thug on the right, sending his head cracking against the asphalt and followed that with a punch that fractured the skull of the one on the left. The older man returned to his position, leaning against the car, taking a deep breath of the night air, feeling the vigor return to his joints in a way that the walk hadn’t been able to restore.
“Let me tell you something,” the old man said to the young leader, the only one of the three still conscious, “because I like to aid people in their transitions. Your life, short and pitiful as it is, will be even shorter and more pitiful should you keep walking the route you are. It’s a path fraught with peril, not to be trod lightly upon, and even less so by one as mortal as you.” The old man looked down, and saw a quivering lip, the young man watching him frozen, as though the cold had claimed him. “If I were you—which I am not, and never would wish to be—I would go a different way, because a short life is much less preferable to a long one, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Y-yes.” The reply was mumbled and stuttered, some rare combination of nerves and pain.
“Good, I’m glad we sorted that out.” The old man leaned down. “I look at you and I see someone who could still live long, at least for your people, should you cease this pointless, circuitous route of jail and robberies and beatings and eventually murder. That would be a shame, even for one with as little potential as you.” The old man stood, and felt for his keys again, his hand sliding against the fleece of his old coat, the skin feeling thin as paper against the wind. “Good luck in your transition, should you choose to make it. I can show you the door, but you must walk through it yourself.”
With that, the older man unlocked the car and eased in, shutting the door behind him. He looked out the window, saw the little cloud of fog gather on the glass from his breath, and saw the face beyond it, a scared young man, his nose broken, humiliated by a man who looked at least four times his age. An easy mark. The old man smiled. Not so easy. Not such a mark. Never have been. He started the car, fumbling the key slightly in the ignition, and reached into the old, faux leather armrest. He pulled out a new cell phone, a disposable one that he’d bought in a chain store only a few days earlier, then pulled a small 3 x 5 index card out along with it, and dialed a number. This time, I remember.
The female voice answered at the other end of the line, peppy for it being so early in the morning there. “This is Portal, extension 4736, please.” He waited a moment before the connection was made, and the voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy. “Bjorn has been taken. Stanchion moves to phase two.” He paused, waiting for a response. “No, I was supposed to get extension 4763...well, just forget what I said, will you? Connect me to the operator.”
He sighed as he heard the familiar ring again, of the call being connected. “Let’s try this again,” he said as the female voice picked up. “Message for extension 4763...Stanchion proceeds to phase two. Will advise. Janus out.”
He pressed the end key and replayed his words again. “Dammit! I meant Portal. Portal out.” He shook his head, teeth clenched. “Shit.”
10.
Sienna
“Her memory seems to be...selectively gone,” I told Old Man Winter and Ariadne, standing in his office before the massive stone desk. The smell of the plaster and dust that coated me was still there, now evident to my nose because of the thoughts my brain was fixed on, of what had happened in Iowa, of how we had failed. Of how I had failed. “You told me once before that when she heals someone too much, she loses memory...”
“Yes,” Old Man Winter said in his rumbling tone. He stirred against the black background of the windows behind him; the lights that lit the Directorate campus were dimmed at this time of night, and stars were visible on the horizon behind him, a thousand points of light over the trees in the distance. “So far as I know, her memories, once gone...remain gone forever. This has, of course, happened to her before, which is why she remembers her name as Katrina Forrest rather than Klementina Gavrikov a.”
“I get that,” I said, and ran a hand over my forehead, stirring a small cloud in front of my face. “But there must be something that we can do. He’s her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even remember who he is. We had her look at him and it was a blank stare, nothing, no recognition, as if they’d never met before in their lives. But she remembers me,” I shook my head, “hell, she even remembers Reed. It’s like her memory about him just...vanished.”
Old Man Winter templed his hands in front of his face. “For a Persephone-type, the first memories to go are those most crucial—the core memories, if you will. The best of times, the most intimate of companions, these are bundled together in some sort of way that makes them closest to the edge. What remains, even after a fully draining event, is ancillary things, the trivial and unimportant. The rest is just fragments.”
“There must be...” I sighed. “There has to be something we can do.”
“She’ll receive our full attention,” Ariadne said from her place next to Old Man Winter. “We’ll have Perugini and Sessions working every angle they can to try and restore her memory, but this is...not something we’ve ever dealt with before, nor is it something where there’s an overabundance of information waiting out there to steer us in the right direction. It’s doubtful we’ll be able to do anything for her, because as with everything else, our experimentation with meta abilities tends to leave us with more questions than answers, more knowledge of the results than what causes them.”
“She saved him, his life,” I said, quiet. “She must have known she was close to the edge of losing memories, because she’d already healed me, Reed, Clary—she knew, and I think she did it anyway, and she ended up passing out on him.” I felt my jaw tighten before I loosened it to speak. “She saved his life, and she can’t even remember his name because of it.”
“Perhaps we should discuss this another time,” Ariadne said gently, looking to Old Man Winter. “This has obviously been an emotional day—”
“I’m fine,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m the only one who is, but I’m fine.”
“Clary appears uninjured,” Ariadne said. “Perhaps you can explain what happened—”
“It all went to hell,” I said. “This meta, he greeted us at the door, blasted through the wall with his strength and sent Clary into a parked car—”
“Why were you at the front door?” Ariadne said, and for once the ice extended from her words, not Old Man Winter’s. “Your mission was reconnaissance first—”
&n
bsp; I didn’t answer, and tried to look past them, out the dark window, but the lights inside the office reflected me, only me, me and them.
“Did you go to the door?” Old Man Winter asked, “Or were you following Clary while trying to dissuade him from knocking?”
I felt a moment of tension. “It’s my responsibility either way.”
Old Man Winter did not back off. “And how did it happen? Did Clary disobey your orders and leave the van or did you tell him to do so?”
I felt my innards twist. To admit that Clary had disobeyed me felt like admitting I was a weak leader, unready to be doing what I was doing. But the alternative was lying. “I’m responsible either way—”
“The truth,” Old Man Winter said, “if you please.”
“Clary left the van against orders,” I said. “He did not listen to my repeated requests to return to it, and knocked on the door before getting himself taken out of the fight by the Omega meta.” I straightened up, bringing myself to attention. “I apologize for the failure of my leadership—”
“You have no need to apologize for having a teammate who disregarded your orders,” Old Man Winter said, impassive. “But the Omega meta—I have seen the footage of him in holding. I am familiar with him, his name is Bjorn. He is deadly. You did not draw your weapon?”
I pulled the pistol from beneath my tattered coat. “It was damaged.”
Old Man Winter stared deeply into my eyes. “You have a backup weapon, yes?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Did you attempt to use either of them, at any point, during the mission?” Old Man Winter’s icy gaze was on me now, a winter’s storm of a glare that was absent any malice, but intense in its power.
“No,” I admitted. “I...don’t know what happened. Perhaps I was trying too hard to subdue the meta so we could find out about this ‘Operation Stanchion’ he mentioned.”
“‘Operation Stanchion’?” Ariadne leaned over the desk. “He just...spilled that out?”
“Something about calling it off if he was able to capture me,” I said, hoping that maybe the information would cause Old Man Winter to take his gaze away from me. The thought was making me uncomfortable, the idea that I hadn’t used my weapon...perhaps if I had, things would have been different, the others might not have been hurt. I felt the sting inside and shoved it down, ignoring that heartsinking feeling.
Ariadne and Old Man Winter exchanged a look, a much more obvious gesture from him than most. “We will...discuss it...when we interrogate him tomorrow,” he said, breaking away from Ariadne to look back at me.
It took a moment for it to register with me. “I’m sorry...did you say ‘we’? You mean me and Parks, right?”
There was a moment’s pause as the air shifted in the office, and I would have sworn the air conditioning had switched on if I hadn’t known better. “Things have come to a point where I can no longer allow them to proceed as they have been,” Old Man Winter said, drawing himself up in the chair, but making very little expression. “I will be handling the interrogation of Bjorn myself.
“And you will assist me.”
11.
I left Old Man Winter’s office in awe. The entire time I had been at the Directorate, I hadn’t really seen Old Man Winter do much of anything. Once, he threatened Wolfe and scared him away from me through sheer, intimidating reputation—or so he professed, since he claimed that he lacked the power to actually stop Wolfe. Other than that, he had been nothing but a mystery, an enigma, a quiet voice that delivered the occasional surprise, revelation or something else.
I certainly didn’t think of him as an interrogator.
I returned to the medical unit but was run off by Dr. Perugini, who shooed me away the same way an old lady might shoo birds out of her yard with a broom. I didn’t want to fight, even though it was my teammates and my brother under her care. It’s not like I could do anything for them, and I was tired anyway, so I went back to my room.
I lay down on my bed after taking my injection of chloridamide. I felt the pinch of the needle as it left my arm, and I put a little piece of cotton over the hole, letting it rest for the minute or so it would take to stop the bleeding. I looked around my room: bare walls, plain carpet. I’d been in Kat’s suite before—the one she barely used because she was so busy sleeping with Scott most nights—and it was totally different. I lay back on the bed and pictured it from the time I’d been in there with her while I waited for her to change.
There were posters on her walls. Justin Bieber. One Direction. I snorted at the memory, and hadn’t bothered to avoid laughing at the time. She just smiled in that infuriating, uber-confident way she had—not really like a cheerleader at all, just more comfortable in her own skin. She said she liked them. Her decor was like something out of bad set design for a fourteen-year old’s room. She didn’t even have a TV. Her wardrobe was super cute, at least everything she wasn’t wearing when she was working. Great taste in fashion. Mine was abysmal compared to hers. She had like...a thousand pairs of shoes. I had ten. I’m still a girl, after all.
I thought about her room, and how empty mine had felt compared to hers, and I wondered if she’d be staying in there for the foreseeable future.
I lay my head on the pillow and stared at the whirls of texture on the knockdown ceilings in the sparse light of the single bulb of my nightlight. I thought about Kat, about what she remembered of her life before the Directorate, and I realized that I hadn’t really asked her about it. All she had told me was that she couldn’t remember anything before the scientists at the facility in the Andes. I wondered how she’d gotten there, if she’d loved someone like Scott before in her century-plus of life, and if she’d love someone like that again and end up forgetting it.
I thought about Zack for a few minutes, then consciously made the effort to put him out of my mind before I fell asleep. Nothing could be worse for him right now than me coming to him in his dreams, and I needed that worry like I needed another mission with Clary at my side.
I woke to the screeching of my alarm, fading into consciousness with sunrise still somewhere over the horizon. I yawned and wondered why I had bothered awakening before seven. Then I remembered—food, get dressed, interrogation—all of which were important things.
My morning routine was half-speed, for some reason. I didn’t ache as if I had been in a fight, but I definitely knew I’d been in one, because a few little pains remained. I remembered the times before my powers manifested, when my mother and I would spar in the basement. I was left with bruises that took a week to heal, with pains that stayed with me for days. Yesterday I’d been thrown into a concrete retaining wall and had a house dropped on me. My back hurt a little, like I’d slept on it at the wrong angle. I kneaded at the knots in my shoulders with my hands; even with the weak muscle control I sometimes felt in the mornings it was more than enough to cause me pain. If I squeezed full strength, I had the ability to break the skin and draw blood. Well, that was as hard as I had ever squeezed myself, at any rate.
The cafeteria was already filled with activity when I got there, from the crowds of people going about the start of their daily routine. I thought about texting Zack to see if he would be in for breakfast, but I didn’t want to be a clingy girlfriend, especially after last night. I suppose it was a compliment that he enjoyed our nighttime activities so much, but it worried me, and the pleasure was all his. To me it still felt fake, like trying to touch a shadow. I wanted to feel the real thing.
I waited in line, lost in thought. The crowd and conversation went on around me, hundreds of voices rising and falling in a chorus that reminded me of white noise as I tuned it out. The smell of eggs and bacon were prominent, as were the onions for the Denver-style eggs. All the cafeteria workers were dressed in brown aprons, their hairnets making them into a line of mushrooms blooming against the white, sunlit
walls.
My fingers, still covered by gloves, ran along the glass window between me and the food, as though I could somehow impart the tactile sense of taste along with the touch, something small to calm my raging stomach, which was reminding me I had skipped both lunch and dinner yesterday. It had a bad habit of holding me accountable for missed meals (which happened increasingly often due to work lately) with a bad case of the rumblies. I could almost taste the food as I slid my tray down the three steel rails that ran the length of the counter.
“Excuse me,” I heard from my left. I turned and saw that teenaged boy who had been staring at me only a couple days earlier, the one that had been in the cafeteria line. He had hair that seemed to droop around his head in a bowl, falling to just above his neck. It was a careless sort of haircut, and his brown eyes were hidden behind a thick pair of glasses. “Can you pass me an apple?” he asked, pointing just past me to where the apples and oranges waited in bowls at the end of the line, in an area reserved for self-service foods like crackers and condiments, cereal and such.
I thought briefly about why he was bothering to ask me when in two seconds I would be clear of it and he could get whatever he wanted, but I put it out of my mind in the name of civility. “Sure,” I said, and tossed him an apple. He caught it, cradling it against his red t-shirt like it was some treasure. He looked familiar, I thought as I gave him a moment’s more look before turning away and finding a table of my own. And not just from the cafeteria line yesterday, but from somewhere else. He didn’t look much different in age than me, but...I shrugged. Not my worry.
Omega: The Girl in the Box, Book 5 Page 10