The Girl in the Box Series, Books 1-3: Alone, Untouched and Soulless

by Robert J. Crane

  Chapter 12

  I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. I’d left Scott Byerly and his stupid question behind with my cryptic answer, not even bothering to gauge his reaction. Well, maybe just a little. His face scrunched up as I was turning from him. I can’t say that was satisfying, but it was better than stopping to explain the literal truth I had told him.

  I am death. My touch brings it. Where Kat Forrest was a tanned, lovely, blond-haired princess of life, I was a dark-haired, pale-skinned angel of death. Her green eyes represented life; my bluer ones represented winter and the end of that life.

  Worse than the nasty comparisons that witnessing Kat’s power had spawned in me were the questions. What was I doing outside when the building had exploded? Why couldn’t I remember it? Why was the flaming lunatic so thankful to me?

  When I returned to my dorm room, I had to take another shower. The fall and the fire had done a number on me. No one had asked, probably because they hadn’t seen, but my leather gloves had burned to my skin on the back of my hands. I ripped them off, the leather shredding and pulling the flesh in patches. I let them bleed out in the shower, the diluted red standing out against the cream-colored tiles that surrounded the drain. I watched the little stream of maroon as it came in streaks, circling the inevitable.

  My hands still itched by the time I was done, along with a few places on my chest and legs where the same thing had happened. Good thing the Directorate seemed to have their finances in order, I reflected as I tossed my previously new outfit in the garbage. I was going to cost them a lot of money if I kept ruining clothes at the pace I was going.

  The bruise on my cheek from earlier was gone, I saw as I looked in the mirror. One plus was that since I had awoken in the field, Wolfe hadn’t made a peep. I wondered if he was sleeping. Or maybe the explosion scared him into a kennel in my mind.

  I returned to my room and stared out the window for the rest of the night. I had a very, very nasty suspicion about how things had unfolded the night before, based partially on my dreams and partially on the fact that Wolfe had very much wanted to get Gavrikov out of his cage. He should have been overjoyed, swinging from the metaphorical rafters in my head at the fact that it happened, but he was dead quiet instead.

  Not good.

  The sun rose without me seeing it, once more hidden behind the clouds. I was disgusted enough that if I could have somehow wished myself to Tahiti and left this awful city behind, I would have. Actually, that might not have entirely been because of the sun.

  A note was slid under my door shortly after sunrise, suggesting I attend a meeting with Ariadne and Old Man Winter in his office at 9 A.M. I shrugged when I saw it, trying to play cool in case there were cameras watching, but inwardly I trembled. Did he know? Could he know? What had I done?

  I skipped breakfast. My stomach was tied in knots anyway; why bother to give it something else to bitch about? I walked to the HQ building when it got close to time. The air was crisp—actually, I’m romanticizing, it was still brutally cold, just like every day since I left my house. Tahiti was sounding better and better. There was still a smell of burning in the air and when I passed in sight of the science building, my suspicions were confirmed—it was still smoking. The smell it gave off was acrid and awful and stuck in my nose, tormenting me even once I was inside Headquarters.

  I knocked somewhat tepidly on Old Man Winter’s door. I was early, and a sizable part of me (all of me, if we’re being honest) hoped he wasn’t around. It opened to reveal Ariadne, her usual smile forced across her face. “You’ll have to forgive us,” she said as she ushered me to a seat, “It’s been a busy night and we haven’t had much time to prepare for this meeting.”

  “‘Busy’?” I looked out the window behind Old Man Winter, who was sitting placidly behind his desk as always. His eyes had yet to remove themselves from me since I walked in, but I was used to it. It wasn’t like he was undressing me mentally—at least I didn’t think he was—it was more like he was always assessing, testing me, my willpower. I could swear he read the lies in how I moved, my reluctance to even be here. I worried that if he stared long enough, he’d be able to root out that I was carrying my own worst enemy inside my head, and that wasn’t figurative speaking. “I’d hate to see what you’d be talking about if you started pulling out the really descriptive adjectives—you know, like calamitous, explosive, apocalyptic—”

  “Yes, well.” She cut me off, her politeness for once infused with iron. “It’s not as though this is the usual for us.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said in what sounded to me a very Midwestern way. “Last week, near-invincible psychos, this week, men who explode into flames and girls who touch the dead and bring them back to life.”

  “Even for us,” she said, “that’s not normal.”

  “When you’re dealing with people who have powers like ours, what is?” I said it airily, but the word stuck in my head. Normal. What was normal? Everything I wasn’t, at this point. “Is this about the history lesson I asked for?”

  “Yes.” Ariadne seated herself next to me. “It’s also a briefing on the state of meta affairs in the modern age.”

  “Ooh, a briefing,” I said. “I feel like I should be wearing a colorless pantsuit.” I blinked at Ariadne, dressed once more in monochromatic businesswear. “Like that.” I blanched inside and Wolfe howled with laughter, the first sound he’d made since last night. The sad part was I couldn’t blame that one on him; there was something built into my relationship with Ariadne that made me want to insult her more than anything.

  Her face was drawn, her eyes lowered. I wondered, far in the back of my mind where I hoped Wolfe couldn’t see it, if my constant slings and arrows at her were actually hurting her feelings. If so, she should get thicker skin, Wolfe said, shattering my illusory idea of having private thoughts. I rolled my eyes, possibly insulting Ariadne further. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t rolling them at her, but at the asshole brainclinger.

  Old Man Winter stood, drawing my attention from Ariadne. He pulled himself up to his full height, towering over the two of us, and walked to the window, looking out on the campus. He seemed to focus on the remains of the science building in the distance. I waited for him to say something, and after a minute of silence I spoke. “How can you manage to keep this place secret after an explosion like that?” I looked from him to Ariadne. “It’s not like that was quiet; it had to be audible for miles around.”

  “There is nobody around for miles,” Ariadne said. “But you’re right, it was heard in the next town over. Fortunately, the local law enforcement are in our back pocket, which means it won’t be investigated, and it seems the media is still too focused on Wolfe’s reign of terror to give this any thought.”

  “Got your own little cover up going on,” I said with grudging admiration. “I suppose you guys have it all figured out, keeping things secret and hidden from the normal world.”

  “It has not always been so,” Old Man Winter spoke finally, his low timbre crackling with a surprising amount of energy. “But the modern history of metahumans has been one of hiding our existence from the rest of the world, of letting ourselves fade into myth and legend and cloaking our activities so that humanity does not become suspicious of those of us who have abilities beyond theirs.”

  “You were around when metas walked tall and proud,” I said. I couldn’t see his reaction, not even in his reflection, but I suspected it was insubstantial. “Why the change?”

  “Why, indeed?” His hand reached out and touched the window. “Metahumans did not just walk among humans in the days you speak of, they ruled mankind. We were gods among men. A thousand humans with spears and swords could not defeat a single strong metahuman. Entire armies tried and were wiped out in battles so bloody that they became the stuff of legend—and we became the bane of human existence and the single greatest obstacle to the freedom of men.

  “Imagine a meta possessed of the will to become a co
nqueror, someone with the strength of a man like Wolfe, but more cunning and less psychotic.” I heard a grumble in my head from Wolfe at Old Man Winter’s assessment of him. “That was the story of a hundred dictators who threw their will onto the huddled masses of humankind, over and over again through the millennia, from the Greek gods of old to later, more subtle attempts of men like Rasputin to assert their influence over world powers.”

  “Why were the later ones less obvious?” I asked him out of genuine curiosity.

  “Your experience in fighting metahumans is colored by your encounter with Wolfe.” He was calm, dead calm. “Most metas are not immune to bullets. Technology has been the greatest equalizer for mankind. Whereas a superpowered metahuman might defeat an entire army in the old days, now he must contend with rifles and machine guns, bombs and explosives. Against the might of a modern army, with training, discipline, and handheld weapons with more ability to kill than entire armies of the ancient world, all but the most powerful among us would fall. Take yourself for example.” He turned to me, those ice blue eyes seeming to glow against the backdrop of the gloomy sky.

  “In the days of old, one with your power and strength, the ability to kill with a touch, to move faster than any human foe, with power enough to kill in a single blow and drain them with agonizing pain should they touch you—you would have been a goddess. Because of your speed, your dexterity, your strength, with a sword in your hand, you could have killed a thousand men and watched the rest flee in fear. Even the arrows of archers would have to have been lucky indeed to bring you down.

  “But now, a man with a single gun could end your life with a well-placed shot.” His finger traced a line ending at his forehead. “Certainly, you are more resilient than a human, and a wound to anything but your head would not kill you, but if one knows what they are facing...well,” his voice trailed off for a moment, “it’s not as though bullets and bombs are a commodity that mankind is soon to run out of.”

  “So metas have spent a good portion of history trying to conquer people.” I shrugged. “Not a huge surprise. I’ve studied history. Why should we be any different than the rest of mankind?”

  “Because we can be better,” he said with a low intonation. “The story of mankind is one fraught with struggle, true enough. But it is also the tale of a people reaching for more, desiring more than to be static, immovable, and mired in the mistakes of the past. If we are to be nothing more than a warlike people, forever locked in a struggle for dominance, then the metahumans are of no more purpose than any other weapon or person of power in the modern age.

  “The need for secrecy has become a paramount concern, especially as governments possess more and more means to control metahumans.” His eyes were dull, almost sad. “We dare not challenge them openly, and thus far America has been content to let us rest in the shadows so long as we are not an open threat. I have worked with those in charge of the country’s response to metahuman incidents. They have little to no desire to round up a small minority of people for internment or worse so long as we keep a low profile. Other governments...” His words drifted off, along with his gaze, “...are not so reticent.”

  Ariadne leaned forward. “Approximately three hundred and fifty metahumans were killed at a Chinese government facility less than a week ago.”

  “That’s...” I let my mind run with the numbers I knew and came back with an answer. “That’s over ten percent of the metahuman population, based on the number you gave me.””

  “It is.” She sat back and drew a deep breath. “We don’t know what happened; reports are somewhat sketchy. The facility was supposed to be a training center for the People’s Liberation Army’s metahuman development program. Either they destroyed it after deciding that it wasn’t worth the risk or someone else did it for them. Either way, the meta population took a steep dive last week.”

  “Ten percent?” My words were almost a croak, no more than a whisper. “I believe the literal term for that is ‘decimated’.” I had never met even one of the people killed, but somehow I felt a connection to them because somehow we were the same.

  “True enough.” Ariadne’s hands landed in her lap. “These are the sort of things that happen every once in a while. We live in a world where metahumans keep their powers secret—unless they’re—”

  “Troublemakers? Ne’er-do-wells?” My hands found the padded armrests of my chair, felt the cool metal where the leather padding ended and squeezed it, more out of a desire to feel some pressure than anything else. “Like Wolfe.” I felt him stir in umbrage within me and ignored him.

  “Similar.” It was Ariadne who answered, again. “Usually a meta doesn’t openly declare, committing crimes, harming people, unless they’ve decided to start shirking societal conventions and live by their own rules. At that point they’ve become a threat, both to human society and the collective metahuman secret.” She shrugged. “After all, it’s not as though we have something that can make a person forget when they see something crazy—”

  “Like some beast rips through a dozen cops in a mall parking lot?” I saw a brief reflection of Wolfe’s grin, like a Cheshire cat, in the window as I turned from Ariadne to Old Man Winter.

  “That’s not one we can explain our way out of,” she said. “We had to leave it to the media and the government to spin it.” She smiled. “Did you hear what they finally landed on?” I shook my head. “A biker on PCP and cocaine that was wearing multiple Kevlar vests under his clothes.”

  “I suppose he was rather scruffy looking.” I ignored the shout of outrage that echoed through my head alone.

  “But it’s at those points that someone has to get involved, for the good of society. Once someone crosses that line, if there’s no one there to stop them, they spin out of control, as though the taste of power over people and freedom from consequence is a narcotic that takes them over.”

  “That’s where the Directorate comes in,” I finished for her. “But what about the other groups? They don’t do the same?”

  Ariadne looked uncomfortable very suddenly. “Keep in mind our primary mission is policing the metahuman population, not spying on other groups that have metahuman interests—”

  “Which is a fancy way of saying what?” I looked at her evenly. “That you don’t pay attention to them? Don’t know who they are?”

  “We don’t,” she said. “We’re aware that there are other factions out there, but none of them have strong roots in the U.S. yet, and we’ve been more focused on small scale threats and awakenings than some dread conspiracy—”

  “You don’t have a clue about any of them, do you?” I shook my head in near disbelief.

  “Not so,” Old Man Winter said from the window. “The boy you have had dealings with—his name is Reed Treston, and he works with an outfit based in Rome. They appear to be a group concerned about government interventions against metahumans but most of their operations are in Europe.”

  “What about Wolfe?” I sat up in interest, and I could feel him rattling around inside, almost as though he were holding his breath to find out what they knew about his employer.

  “We know less,” Ariadne shared a look with Old Man Winter. “Almost nothing, actually. They’re a group possessed of incredibly strong metas, like Wolfe.”

  “And this new guy,” I told her. She looked at me quizzically. “You know, the guy with the metallic complexion? He’s with Wolfe’s outfit.”

  She looked to Old Man Winter, then back to me with a furrowed brow. “How do you know that?”

  “Well if he’s not with the same group Reed is, then it stands to reason he’s with Wolfe’s group, unless there’s another power out there that wants a piece of me?”

  “There are several others,” Old Man Winter said in his low rumble. “None of which we know much about.”

  “How is it you guys can be so well informed that you found me but you have no idea who your enemies are?” I sighed more out of disbelief than despair. “You don’t want to
know anything about your competition?”

  “There’s been a proliferation of metahuman groups in the last few years,” Ariadne said, twisting a lock of her hair around her finger. “It’s something we’ve recently begun to pivot to address, but it takes time to put an intelligence network in place and develop useable intel. We are working on it. But that’s not why we asked you here.” She took a deep breath. “Did this answer your questions about the larger history of metahumans and the role they play in society?”

  I hesitated. “Yes,” I said after a moment. “It’s far from complete, but I get the gist. I’m still wondering about a few things—like the Agency, what my mom did for them and how they were destroyed,” I said when she looked at me with a curious expression, “but that’s not something I expect to know the answer to right now, today.”

  “It’s something we could cover soon, perhaps in our next conversation.” Ariadne’s hands left her lap and went to a folder on the desk, sliding it across in front of me. “But all that is ancillary, unrelated to the real mission—which is why we wanted to talk to you.”

  “I see.” I felt a nervous tension run through me. Did they suspect my involvement in the destruction of the science building? I felt an involuntary shudder inside and couldn’t dispense with the idea that somewhere inside me. Wolfe was suddenly very cagey.

  She opened the folder and pulled out four photographs, arranging them neatly in front of me. One was a picture of a family of four, another of a police officer, the next of a young woman not much older than me, and the last of a mother and young daughter. “This is why we’re here. Last year a metahuman named Darrell Seidell went on a crime spree. He was nineteen and already had three felonies to his name before his power manifested.”

  She pointed to the family of four, all blond, with two girls. “He staged a daylight break-in at this couple’s home—Rick and Susan Ormann of Champaign, Illinois. Rick was a lawyer, Susan worked for a local bank. They had a nice house, so nice, in fact, that Darrell chose it out of dozens of others to break into. He went there to steal from them—maybe a TV, some jewelry—and he ended up killing both of them, then their kids.” She moved her finger to the picture of the police officer. But not before Melanie, the Ormann’s eight year old daughter, called 911 and this man, Officer Lance Nealey, responded.”

  She picked up the picture of the cop, and I couldn’t look away. He was young too, probably in his twenties, around Zack’s age. He had cocoa skin, big brown eyes, a warm smile, and his head was shaved. He was the perfect picture of a cop, the kind of image that was everything my skewed perspective thought a cop should be. He just...looked like a nice guy, there to help. “Seidell killed him and stole his cruiser, escaping the scene. That night he stopped at a convenience store outside Ottumwa, Iowa and ran across this girl, the clerk, Jeannie Sabourin.” She handed me the picture of the young woman and I took it, even though I really didn’t want to and forced myself to look into the girl’s face.

  “She was a high school senior who worked at the store at night to help make ends meet for her family.” Ariadne shook her head, a kind of muted rage present on her face that made her pause. When she went on, her voice cracked. “She had been through one robbery already and knew to give him whatever he wanted. She went with him into the back where he assaulted her and once he was done, he killed her.”

  Ariadne paused, and I watched her face twitch as she struggled to maintain her composure. When she began again, her words came out strained. “Afterward he went behind the convenience store to the low-rent housing complex where he found Karina Hartsfield smoking a cigarette outside her patio door.” She moved to the last photograph. “He killed her and stole her car, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter alone in the apartment.” She pointed to the child in the photograph with Karina Hartsfield. “Odds are good that if he’d known she was there, he would have killed her too.”

  “Seven people dead.” She reached back into the sheaf of photos and pulled out a half-dozen more, scattering them in front of me and causing me to hold my hand in front of my mouth as I heard a small gasp escape. They were photos of bodies, burned around the torso, the hands, the legs, burned so their insides showed and I nearly gagged from seeing them. “See, Darrell Seidell is what we’d call a fire jotnar—a fire giant, from the same Norse myths as,” she looked to Old Man Winter, “well, you know. Not nearly as potent as our friend Mr. Gavrikov, but up close, he’s the breath of hell brought to earth. Without anyone to stop him, he was free to keep driving west, leaving burned corpses and sundered families in his wake.”

  She pulled newspaper clippings out of the stack. “Want to read his press reports?” They were emblazoned with headlines, “Killer Burns Family to Death One by One, then Kills Police Officer” and “Arson Killer Claims Two in Iowa.”

  “What...” I felt myself speak in a hoarse whisper. “What happened to him?”

  “That part isn’t in the clippings.” She reached into the file and pulled out another page, handing it to me.

  It was a report, signed by Roberto Bastian, the head of M-Squad. I skimmed it then looked up to Ariadne. “Your people caught up with him halfway to Des Moines.”

  “They wrecked his car, beat him to a bloody pulp,” she said with a haunted look, “and dragged him back here where we slapped him in restraints and sent him to Arizona to spend the rest of his life in a deep, dark hole in the middle of the desert.” Her eyes found mine, and I looked away first. “This is why we’re here. To protect people from this sort of monster.” She picked up another file from a stack to her left, slapping it onto the table in front of me, followed by another, and another. They weren’t loud, but the sound of the paper hitting the rock of the desk made me flinch each time. Finally she grabbed the rest of the pile and let them fall in front of me with a thud.

  I stared at it, then pulled a file from the middle of the stack, opened it, and thumbed through. It was a series of reports from an incident in Birmingham, Alabama, that was handled by their Atlanta campus. A murder committed by a kid who was no older than me. Then another, and another. They caught him on his sixth victim. They were all committed in the course of robberies; three in the same incident. Every last one of them had been beaten to death.

  The next file was from Chicago and detailed a rapist working the South Side that was putting every victim in the hospital and a few in the morgue by what the victims described as “one horrific punch.” And only one. Impossibly strong, the report concluded. The rest of the file laid out the evidence against the creep: the witness statements, the agent investigation. The final report was signed by Zack Davis.

  I flipped through about fifty of them, not reading every detail but taking them all in. Every crime was like something you’d see in a movie or maybe a police blotter. Some of them were a decade old or more; some were very, very recent. They were from all over the country, and each one had a trail of evidence cataloged, indicating why the agent or meta investigating believed the person they caught was the guilty party. And almost all of them were slam-dunk obvious.

  I closed the last file, a robbery/murder, and put it on the stack with the rest. I swallowed hard, wishing somehow I could scrub all that I had just read out of my brain, along with all the things Wolfe did to me and the things he’d shown me in flashes through his memories earlier. I felt a desire to run far, far away to a place where people didn’t do things to other people like I saw in those files and in Wolfe’s memories...and in my own. Too bad there wasn’t a place far enough I could run to find that. “Why did you show me this?”

  “Because this is the ‘solved’ stack.” She reached behind Old Man Winter’s desk and pulled out another stack, almost as big as the first and lay it in front of me. The solved stack’s folders where manila; these were red. “These are unsolved, crimes where meta involvement was suspected but the perpetrator couldn’t be located because they didn’t make a big enough noise and we only have so many agents and resources.” She raised an eyebrow at me
and opened the first folder. “Take this one, for instance...thirty-eight-year-old man dies in an attempted robbery. A witness said that the perpetrator seemed to have extra arms growing out of his sides that restrained the victim while the robber beat him to death.”

  “That’s...horrible.” I was suddenly hyperaware of Old Man Winter looking at me. I felt like he was sifting me, trying to filter through to my core, and I suddenly didn’t care for what he might find there. The anger made me bite back at Ariadne, hard. “I’m sorry he died, but I don’t see how anything I do is going to matter. I have my own problems, and I’m only—”

  “A little girl?” There was no accusation in her words, but they slapped me just the same. “A teenager with more strength than twenty men and a power that could keep any physical assailant at bay.”

  “This isn’t my problem.” I wanted to be firm. I needed to find Mom.

  “So it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t involve you?” That time there was accusation, and it stung. I wondered if my verbal lashings hit her half so hard as hers hit me.

  I reddened. “I’m a teenager; I’m pretty sure it’s a biological imperative to think that way.”

  “I guess you’re pretty normal, then,” Ariadne said, staring me down.

  “But you can be better.” Old Man Winter said it from behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to look close at me. I didn’t cower from his stare, but I felt a bit of withering. Wolfe was nowhere to be heard, not that I felt like I could count on him for moral support. “You are not some schoolgirl whose blissful ignorance of the harsh realities of the world cloud her eyes with starry dreams of happy endings. Are you?”

  “I’d like a happy ending,” I said. “But I don’t ignore the fact that the world can be cold and brutal and that there are people out there who exist solely to hurt others.”

  “Then you know that someone has to protect ordinary people.” Ariadne leaned forward again and her red hair flared against the dull background of Old Man Winter’s office. “They can’t protect themselves against what waits for them out there. They have no defense because they don’t know what they have to defend against. Metahumans move too fast, hit too hard, for an unprepared person to fend them off. Only someone who’s well prepared—and armed, actually—stands a chance against them, and then only if they don’t get taken by surprise.”

  “Same old story,” I said, swallowing hard again. “Why are you telling me this? What do you want me to do?”

  “Even when you find your mother,” Old Man Winter spoke, his quiet voice devastating for some reason, “at some point you will have to decide what to do with your own life, how you wish to spend it. You are nearly a woman grown, and you need to find—”

  “A job?” I licked my lips.

  “A path. A career. Maybe even...a purpose,” Ariadne said. “Something you can do that you can believe in, that will challenge you, that won’t leave you hating your life and questioning why you’re even doing what you’re doing.” She laughed, a low, quiet laugh that had no real mirth behind it. “Unless you’d like to get to age forty and wake up to wonder where your life went.”

  “Forty is a long ways off for me.” I looked at my boots. Most eighteen-year-old girls wear shoes; I’m in boots. Most girls my age wear dresses sometimes, go to school, look forward to prom and graduation. I’m stuck in outfits that cover me head to toe, I’ve been home every day, week, and year for over a decade, and all I have to look forward to is finding my missing mother so...what? I can go back to living like that?

  “It’ll be here before you know it.” Ariadne snapped her fingers in front of her face. “It goes fast. And the question you’ll be left with is if you just got by or if you actually made a difference.” She slid the stack of files away from me. “We don’t expect you to make a decision right now.” She pulled out a lone piece of paper and placed it in front of me. “Working for us as a meta will have its rewards—more money per year than most eighteen-year-olds make, along with other benefits—”

  “I’m not super concerned with a 401(k) right now.” I glanced at the sheet. Money meant almost nothing to me, largely because I’d never had any opportunity to use it. I truly didn’t know the value of a dollar, nor what it bought. “What do you want me to do? What would happen if I said yes?”

  “You would enter training with M-Squad and agent trainers, learn how agents operate, field procedure, all that. After some basics, you’d be assigned a more experienced partner and learn how to be a ‘retriever’—someone who tracks down rogue or awakening metas and brings them back to the Directorate either through peaceful means, or, if necessary—”

  “Cracking skulls?” I glanced at the compensation sheet and wondered if $100,000 per year was a lot or a little for a girl just starting out.

  “You never seemed like you had a problem with physical violence before.” Ariadne was unrelenting. “Like, say, when you battered Zack and Kurt, or when you went looking for a fight with Wolfe—”

  “I don’t.” I looked up from the sheet to her. “I don’t have a problem breaking the teeth out of anyone who does the things that you’ve showed me in the files.” I felt my jaw clench as a little surge of pleasure from Wolfe ran through me at the thought of inflicting pain on others. “But I don’t know that I want to be a retriever for a living, always chasing down some fugitive meta who might kill me if I screw up. And I don’t know that I could...” I struggled with the words. “I mean, killing Wolfe was an accident. I don’t know if I could...do that...to someone else. “

  “It rarely comes to that, “ she said. “And retriever’s not necessarily the end of the line. You could move up, join M-Squad, move to another branch, work into one of our training positions to teach and guide the metas here at the Minneapolis branch—”

  “Because that’s the place for me, guiding the next generation.”

  “—or you could move into administration.” She shrugged. “There are a lot of places you could go. We’re a big operation. You could see the world, help us expand overseas if you wanted. You’d have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing some good.”

  “I hear you say it,” I picked up the compensation sheet between my thumb and forefinger, “but how do I really know it’s true?”

  “Trust is a two-way street,“ she said, standing. “It won’t happen overnight, but if you’re out chasing these people down and you see what they do, you’ll eventually come to realize that we’re the good guys. We don’t expect a decision right now.”

  “You have a great deal to think about,” Old Man Winter said. “You stand at the edge of the rest of your life. The decisions you make now affect everything from here on. Gone are the times when simple and inconsequential matters governed your life. It is now the time for you to choose who you want to be, what you want to stand for, and what you want your life to reflect.” He walked around the desk, buttoning his suit coat as he walked to the door and opened it for me. “So few people get to truly steer their course the way you have the chance to now. And the question before you is—will you strive to be normal and live an ordinary life? Or will you do what no one else can do—and be more?”