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

by Robert J. Crane

  Chapter 24

  We stood arrayed around Old Man Winter’s office, Zack glaring at Kurt, Ariadne leaning against the wall looking faint, the four members of M-Squad situated behind me and Kappler. Ostensibly because we were women, we were the ones that got the chairs. I didn’t care; I was tired. Old Man Winter sat behind the desk, his usual inscrutable self.

  “Why’s the girl in here for this?” Clary’s words came out in a kind of low whine. “She ain’t an agent or one of us.”

  “She’s here because she’s got more experience dealing with the hostile than any one of us,” Bastian said in a clipped tone. “He spared her life from the explosion, after all.”

  “He did more than that,” Kappler said in a heavy, Germanic accent. “He picked her up and carried her clear.” Her eyes were narrow by nature, now they were slitted, her thin face looking like nothing so much as a snake. “I think a good question would be ‘Why’?”

  “He perceives me as the only one who will reliably deliver his message.” I was so tired, I didn’t care if they thought I was in league with Gavrikov. I guess technically I had let him loose.

  “I figured it was because he was sweet on you.” Clary said it with a suggestiveness that made me assign him once more to the category of “idiot” in my head. Thank God Wolfe was quiet.

  “He’s gonna do it,” I said. “You don’t get Kat to the top of the IDS Center, he’s going to send you another message and this one will be a hundred square blocks of flattened buildings and an inferno at the middle of it.”

  “He won’t do it,” Ariadne said, quiet.

  An uneasy silence settled over the room, broken by me. “Um, yes he will. He’s already done it once tonight just to prove his point. If you’ve already killed several thousand to make a point, why not a few hundred thousand to actually get what you want? Just because you hope he doesn’t, don’t think that bears any resemblance to what will actually happen.”

  “He will do it,” Old Man Winter said, quieting the whispers I heard from M-Squad. “Let there be no doubt. But equally certain is the fact that we cannot turn Kat over to him. She is an innocent and he is...unstable to say the least.”

  “Sir, we’ll do as you order,” Bastian said, “but the girl compared to a several hundred thousand lives...”

  “You will eliminate him,” Winter said.

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted again. “But you guys had a chance to go a few rounds with him down in South America, as I recall, and it’s all well and good that you captured him, but it seems like the nuclear option wasn’t on the table for him back then, for whatever reason. Now it is.” I turned around to find Bastian staring at me, along with Parks, while Kappler glared and Clary looked on with a kind of cluelessness. “If you couldn’t take him down then, when he wasn’t up to using his full power, how are you going to do it now?”

  Bastian turned to Parks, the wizened guy with his long, gray hair and goatee that looked like it was almost white. “This time,” he said in a gruff voice, “we get to kill him instead of playing the capture game, ma’am.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, “you get to try and kill the walking nuclear bomb. That won’t piss him off at all.”

  “We’ll kill him, ma’am.” Bastian’s voice was filled with conviction. Too bad it didn’t convince me. “With the kid gloves off, my team can take him down.”

  “Glorious.” I’m pretty sure the wearying effect of the drug I’d been taking leeched any chance of me pulling off false sincerity, so I didn’t bother. “Couldn’t you maybe...I don’t know, lay the situation out for Kat and see what she thinks? She might consider it an acceptable risk to jump through his hoops for a bit to keep him from blasting the city into rubble.”

  Old Man Winter’s reply was like a crack of thunder. “Placing her into that situation is unacceptably risky.”

  “For her? Or for the city of Minneapolis?” I leaned forward, tossing all caution aside. “You’re playing a hell of a game here. You’re placing the survival of an entire city on the idea that these guys—no offense,” I waved vaguely at Kappler, who was still glaring at me, and the rest, sitting behind me, “can kill him before he can go critical. That’s a pretty big risk considering he dropped me off in the countryside, flew back to the detonation site and I bet he wasn’t there for more than ten seconds before he went off. That means if they err even slightly, a lot of people die.” I saw no change in any of the faces around me, except maybe Ariadne, who had grown slightly paler. “More than I let die, that’s for sure.”

  Old Man Winter’s cold gaze burned over my head to Bastian. “You have your orders.”

  I bit my lip and wrenched myself to my feet. “I sense my presence is no longer needed here. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find a quiet place to hide until the atomic apocalypse is over.” I didn’t exactly storm out, but I did break the door behind me. Because of my super-strength, not because I was in a snit. Well...maybe a little bit of both.

  I seethed in the hallway and all the way down to the lobby, which was quiet save for a few guards standing around. Different than agents, they wore tactical vests and held submachine guns slung across their chests. A few of them had stood guard outside my door back when they held me in the basement room where Kat was currently residing. I wondered where they recruited all these yahoos. They should have given them all red shirts.

  I started toward the front doors, intent on leaving, on running far, far away, wanting to go someplace where I’d never again have to be put in a position where all I could do was sit back and watch a massacre take place. I slammed into the glass doors at the front of Headquarters, sending them rattling open on their hinges. I would have been far more satisfied if they had broken, but apparently they were designed to be abused by metas, because they started to pull shut on their own.

  I stood outside, sucking in the cold air. It all came down to power—it always did. With Wolfe, I didn’t think I had the power to face him, to beat him. It turned out I did, but I didn’t know that at the time. Now, with Gavrikov...I was really unsure. It wouldn’t take him much to vaporize me if he got pissed, that was certain after what I saw him do in Glencoe.

  But what if Kat was with me? I thought about it a little harder. He wanted to save her, to keep her safe, more than anything. If I took her to the rendezvous point, I could get close to him, maybe stop him. I stared at my hands. It didn’t have to be for good, just long enough to get him contained again. I cringed. In another one of those boxes. Surely I could keep him out of sorts until the Directorate could find a way to crate him up again. I didn’t like that option, but I liked it better than the thought of him waltzing away with Kat, who didn’t even know him, or letting M-Squad and that assclown Clary take a crack at him, or worse, letting him level Minneapolis.

  To save the city, to make amends for what I had let happen with Wolfe, I was going to have to consign Aleksandr Gavrikov to a fate I was all too familiar with—confinement in a coffin-like containment chamber. A box of his very own.

  I cursed the irony of the whole situation, of how it had all played out. I turned back to Headquarters, studying it and wondering how I was going to make this work, when I heard the scuff of a shoe behind me and turned, ready to strike—

  Scott Byerly stood there, hands in front of him. “Whoa, I’m just here to visit Kat,” he said, circling around me toward the Headquarters building.

  What was it he had said about writing me that note? “Hey,” I said. “You have family in Minneapolis?”

  He stopped, turned back to me. “Yeah, my whole family is from around here. Why?”

  I steeled myself for what I was about to have to do. “Just thought you might want to know—the guy that blew up the science lab?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Gavrikov, wasn’t it? Russian guy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He just nuked Glencoe, you know, that town west of here.”

  Scott’s face paled, his dark complexion going white. “I heard about that earlier
. I didn’t know it was him.”

  “Yeah, well...” I tried not to belabor the point, but I wanted to draw him in a little, “...I was there when it happened. He did it as a warning to us—to show us what would happen to Minneapolis if we didn’t bring Kat to him by tomorrow morning at six.”

  “Excuse me?” The reaction was immediate. His jaw clenched, he took a step toward me, his fist balled up. “He threatened the city?”

  “Said he’d nuke it to the ground,” I said. “Bye-bye, City of Lakes.”

  He turned without saying anything else, started to stalk off. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To stop him,” he tossed back.

  I ran after him. “Wait. You can’t just attack the guy, he’d turn you into the stuff you find in the bottom of a microwave.”

  Byerly stopped, but the fury was still evident on his face. “What, then?”

  “Well,” I said, “M-Squad and the boys have a kill order—”

  “Not good enough,” he said and started to walk again. I reached out and grabbed his arm, keeping my grip firm enough to catch his attention but not enough to spin him around. He did that on his own, looking like he was ready to explode on me, his face red, his eyebrows locked into forty-five degree angles, and his mouth in a thin, downturned line.

  “Whoa!” I held my hands out in a gesture of peace. “I’m with you on this one. I think M-Squad is gonna foul it, big time. I mean, if you heard about how things went for them in South America, or you’ve had five minutes to consider that Clary is the linchpin of their strategy, you recognize that giving them this shot means that you’re basically comfortable with turning Minneapolis into a burning wasteland. Which I am not,” I said, trying to reassure him and dislodge his angry face. “But you can’t just charge after him without a strategy.”

  “I have a strategy,” he said in a kind of roar. I took a step back, more out of concern for his safety than mine. “I find Gavrikov and I drown his ass.”

  “And a fine strategy that would be,” I said, suppressing all my smartass instincts for the sake of my penance, “but may I suggest one that’s got a better chance of success?”

  He drew up to his full height, arms folded in front of him and said, “I’m listening.” His posture said he was not, but I was desperate enough to try anyway.

  “The thing you have to understand about Gavrikov is that he thinks Kat is a clone of his sister,” I started.

  “Why the hell would he think that?”

  “Because she actually is his sister,” I said, “and don’t interrupt me. He feels guilty because he thinks she died or something, back in the early 1900s, and the only thing he cares about is giving her spiritual successor a chance at freedom.” I paused, taking a breath. He looked at me with less rage, but also a look that told me he didn’t totally understand. “Because he thinks the Directorate is keeping her imprisoned here.”

  He frowned. “They are.”

  “Yeah, but not totally,” I said. “I mean, if she really wanted to, she could probably get out—speaking from personal experience.”

  He looked at me with skepticism. “I have my doubts. Kat doesn’t strike me as much of a fighter.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, if she’s with me, he won’t go nuclear because he doesn’t want to hurt her. That gives me a chance to neutralize him without anyone having to get hurt. I can bring Kat back here, safe and sound, and keep Gavrikov down.” I stared him in the eyes. “You know I can.”

  He blinked, then his eyes clouded with suspicion. “Why are you telling me this?”

  I took a deep breath. “Because I don’t know how to drive. And I don’t exactly know where I’d be going. And Kat...well...” I hesitated. “I don’t think she’s going to come willingly just on my say so.”

  He held his hand up to his head. “So you want my help convincing her, too?”

  “I do. I really, really do.” I added a note of pleading to my voice. “Look, if we leave this up to the so-called pros, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I suspect bad. Really bad. And I mean, yeah, we could hide here, we’re probably safe from the blast radius, but...” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Scott Byerly just stared at me, with those eyes, those cool blue eyes. “One question. If you answer it honestly, I’m in.”

  I smacked my lips. Why did my mouth always dry out at dramatic moments? “What is it?”

  He stared so hard I almost felt his gaze burn through me. “Why are you doing this?”

  It felt like he’d wound up a swing with a sword and punched it straight through the middle of me. “You know why,” I said, my mouth even drier than it had been a moment earlier.

  He shook his head, impassive. “I really don’t. Why?”

  “Because...” I swallowed, trying to get the taste of ashes out of my mouth. I felt like I could taste them, like I had been on the main street in Glencoe after the detonation, and it reminded me of blood. Blood in my mouth, from fighting with Wolfe. “Because the last time someone super-powerful held people hostage I let the clock tick down and a lot of people died.” My hand came up, brushing the hair out of my eyes where the wind had tossed it. “I felt helpless, weak, like I couldn’t do anything. I can’t ever undo the consequences of my inaction. But this...” I tightened my hand into a fist in front of me, “putting down Gavrikov...this I can do.”

  He looked left, then right, then back at me. “I’d shake hands with you, but I know what that would do to me. I’m in. Let’s go get Kat.”