“I’ll take you to England,” he whispered, the clouds above brewing, ready to bring forth the harbinger of the storm he’d just outrun. “To Alpha. Maybe Hera can find your living relatives.” He let a weary sigh, and cradled her with his other arm. “If not, I’ll take care of you myself.” He felt her warm against him, even through the layers of wet clothing. “I won’t let any harm come to you ... Adelaide.”
Chapter 30
Sienna Nealon
Now
“So the question is, did they wait to strike until we were more vulnerable or did they happen to catch us at a convenient moment?” My mother’s voice echoed over the speaker of the phone. I held it in my hand, pushed against my ear, my head back against the chair.
“I read the minds of a few of the surviving mercenaries,” I said, replying slowly, as if I were prying the words out of my own mouth. “They didn’t seem to know we’d be at half capacity. Their task wasn’t even to kill the metas they did, they were supposed to secure them and barter for the telepaths.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line as my mother took a deep breath. Morning was shining in from outside the windows, the sun gazing down on what should have been a perfect day. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even have noticed. Now I not only noticed but was painfully aware of the disparity between the weather as it was and what it should have been—dark clouds, gloom, rain, torrential downpours. Between the security detail and the metas I’d said I would protect, we’d lost enough people last night that it could only be classified as a catastrophe.
“So they were there solely to take back—”
“The telepaths we captured in Florida, yes,” I said dully, staring out onto the green, sunlit campus grounds. When I looked over at the dormitory building in the distance, it showed little outward sign of the assault that had done so much damage only hours earlier. I felt a burning in my chest, like bile waiting to be thrown up, as though I could expunge all the feelings I was denying in that way. “Apparently, Century thinks we’re still holding them alive.”
I could hear her thinking at the other end of the phone, and I was virtually certain I knew what she was going to say. “I know you don’t want to hear this—”
“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t.”
“—but this is a silver lining.”
“It’s a lot of dead people that I brought over here from London saying I’d protect.” The words tasted disgusting in my mouth, like meatloaf.
“But this tells us that Century is not omniscient.”
“I already knew that.” I didn’t need the bodies that were stacked up in the morgue downstairs to drive that point home.
“But,” my mother went on, heedless of my clear desire not to have this conversation, “this means that they’ll think we still have the telepaths.”
“I said I understood it.” My voice was just tired. I hadn’t slept at all that night, just sat in a chair in the corner of the medical unit and stared at Perugini’s back while she sighed and did the post-mortem work she had to do. Surprisingly, she didn’t pick at me once. She probably knew it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good.
“Then they’ll—”
“Be coming back at us again, yes,” I said. “I told you I got it. You graded my papers for years, you know I’m not stupid.”
She sounded tired, too. “I just want to make sure you don’t miss the important implications here. This is potentially vital to our efforts.”
“It is,” I agreed. “And I promise I’ll be all over it ... when I’m capable of thinking again. When I’m capable of drawing a breath without remembering that once again I’ve failed people that I’ve made promises to, that I’ve gotten people killed again—”
“This was not your fault,” she said. “This is war—”
“This is my fault,” I said. “They would have been safe if they’d stayed in London.”
My mother let out a bitter laugh that crackled through the phone. “Sweetheart, this is war. Real war. Waged by the baddest, meanest meta on the planet with a hundred of the strongest, most capable people following in his wake. Thinking that anywhere is safe is folly.” Her voice hardened, and I felt compelled to listen on rather than interrupt her. “You’ve seen what men do when they mean to wage war—because war is will against collective will, and the will of Sovereign and Century is to wipe us all out. You can’t go beating yourself up because you stood your soldiers all in a line against theirs and said you wouldn’t let them do it unchecked because it was inevitable that they were going to challenge you on it at some point. It was inevitable that he’d eventually send someone to knock you down, to pitch you back on your heels, and hit you hard enough to put you out of the fight. That’s how they do it, men like that. Like Winter.” Her voice hardened. “You did what you could for them. Mourn. Get it out of your system. Because what you can do for the dead is exactly nothing. But what you can do for those still standing with you is lead. And you need to get back to that as soon as possible.”
I swallowed heavily, listening to her words. I knew she was right, even though I didn’t want to hear it. “Okay. What about you?”
“We’re fine,” she said. “I’ll tell Reed and Karthik once I’m off the phone with you. I’m sure they won’t take it too well, so I’ll try to break it gently.” I didn’t feel any actual amusement at the thought of my mother trying to break anything gently to anyone, ever, but there was definitely a ghost of it in there somewhere. “We have a line on an Omega safehouse, so we’ll be checking it out in a couple hours once everyone’s all woken up.” She sniffed. “Pacific time is a little bit of an adjustment for the team, apparently.”
“Just be safe,” I said.
“Can do,” she replied. “And Sienna ...” She hesitated. “Don’t beat yourself up. You did everything you could for those people, and you still have a mission to get on with.”
I bit my lip as I heard the click of the line going dead and lay my head back into the softness of the seat, staring out the window of my office into the bright sunshine of a day that should have been storms and darkness.
Chapter 31
I sniffed as Ariadne and Scott stared at me from across the desk. I’d cried some, no lie, but that was past now. I’d addressed the troops as best I could, but they were morose and scared. I tried to motivate them, tell them how we weren’t finished yet, how Sovereign had taken his shot at us and failed to do anything more than bruise our spirit, but I didn’t think they bought it entirely. I didn’t blame them, not with our dead friends as visible evidence to the contrary. I didn’t buy it, either.
“We need options,” I said, staring at Ariadne and Scott, both sitting quietly across the desk from me. “We have a dispatch point for the mercenaries, at least—”
“I had Li call surveillance on it,” Ariadne said, looking up, her red hair catching the sunlight filtering through my window.
“You did what?” I leaned forward, incredulous.
“There’s no one there,” she said. “I had them watch from a distance, and after eight hours of observation, they were ordered in. Nothing there, it’s just an empty warehouse on Chicago’s south side. They used it for staging, but cleared it out either before or after the mercenaries left for here.”
“Any idea where they came from?” Scott asked. “Other than Chicago.”
“All over,” Ariadne said. “I’ll forward you the dossier, but we’ve got IDs on most of the dead and the handful of survivors. They’re mostly foreign nationals, the types that go where the money takes them. They were filtered into the U.S. in a few waves, met up in Chicago, and got sent out on this mission.” She pursed her lips. “It was supposed to be the first of many.”
“Looks like Century plans to keep up their tradition of using human mercs to supplement their ethnic cleansing efforts,” I said, looking down at my bare desk. The light grain of the wood running across the near-white surface caught my attention.
“Why stop running a play that�
�s working?” Scott asked. “These guys managed to handle the small-scale dirty work, freeing up their metas to hit the cloisters.”
“Which is even more important now that they’ve lost their big gun.” I thought again of Raymond, the man who had been my great uncle, and of how I’d watched him die in London. It was uncharitable to think of it this way, but his death had bought us months of time. Time which I felt like I was wasting, one grain through the hourglass at a time. I sighed, pissed off and more than a little desperate.
“So what now?” Scott asked. “We’ve got no more leads than we did before they attacked. We’re back to square one and minus a few really good people.”
I thought about that. We had lost good people, decent people, and had gotten a handful of pawns in return. The only thing I’d learned from the mercenaries was the address of that warehouse in Chicago, and that Weissman—that turd—had given the orders, right before he’d caught a flight back to an undisclosed location. Presumably wherever he was setting up the next phase of the extermination. I’d also caught one other thing—each and every one of the mercs had been shown a photo of me and was told not to kill me, on pain of his own death. Of course, they couldn’t have known it was me fighting through a cloud of tear gas and jumping through the air to distract them, but that was almost irrelevant.
Something bothered me, though, something about my conversation with mother. “Actually, we do know a little more.” I chewed my lower lip. “They either don’t have us under enough surveillance or penetrated enough to know that the telepaths are dead. Hell, it’s why they sent these guys.”
Scott looked at me in askance. “You can’t think that this was a serious attempt to get back the telepaths.”
“It was a decent operational concept,” I said. “Hardly foolproof, or a sign they were tossing everything they had at us, but it was a workable plan. It could have been carried off, forcing us to negotiate with them for the release of the telepaths.” I felt slightly warm, and I knew it was more than the beam of light that was shining in across my seat. “They think we have something that they want. That they need.”
Scott looked at Ariadne. “And this is good news ... how? Unless you want to bring the wrath of Century down on us even quicker than it would otherwise come landing on our heads?” His face went serious. “Because if that’s your plan, uhm ... let me know so I can vacate the premises immediately, please.”
“That’s my plan,” I said, nodding as I thought it through.
“Okay,” Scott said. “I was sort of kidding about the running thing, but I have to admit I’m a little uneasy now that your confessed desire is to bring them down on us—”
“Think about it,” I said. “Those telepaths make their job so much easier. Without them, it’s going to take twice as long to do what they mean to do. They’re going to divert other forces here so long as they think the telepaths are alive. It’s a game of resources, and they started with the most expendable thing they had, the same way you don’t expose the queen to danger in a chess game if you can accomplish something with a pawn. We beat that, and now it’s going to take more of their attention to get the job done, so they’ll send more because the alternative is adding months or years to their schedule of extermination.” I folded my arms and leaned back in my chair. “They’ll be coming again, no doubt about it.”
Ariadne looked from me to Scott then back. “I still fail to see the good news. They’ve proven that they’ll come at you in treacherous ways—taking hostages—in order to get the telepaths back. Wouldn’t we be better off delaying our confrontation with them until we’ve worn them down a little better? Make the odds less overwhelming?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Because right now we’re the lightning rod, drawing the strikes away from other things they could be concentrating on. This is good, because every day we can delay them is another day we buy time to counter them.”
Scott cocked his head sideways. “The problem you’re obviously missing is that if you’re a lightning rod, you’re pretty much asking to be struck by lightning.”
I looked across at the two of them and smiled, just smiled, because in spite of all the other crap that had happened, I knew what to do now. I knew exactly what the next move was, how to play it, and how to slap Century hard enough to bloody its nose. “Yep. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 32
It took a few days to make the preparations, days of quiet around the campus where we were still mourning. The funerals took place at a ceremony in an Eden Prairie cemetery a couple days after the attack. I stood there in my black dress on a warm day and thought of all the people we’d lost since I’d had the audacity to walk out my own front door one frozen day in January only a year and a half ago.
Two hundred and fifty-four people died in the first few days, starting with two guys in a parking lot who had dared to stand up on my behalf and interfere with Wolfe’s attempts to kidnap me for Omega. There were agents in that number, random families from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, police officers. Wolfe wasn’t in the number, but he was in my thoughts, even though I’d locked him away again for now.
Aleksandr Gavrikov was dead because of me. I didn’t blame myself for it, but a few thousand people in Glencoe, Minnesota, had been vaporized because of him, because of the message he’d been trying to get to us.
Andromeda. I’d watched her die before my eyes, powerless to help her. She’d fallen to her knees in front of me, a bullet wound spreading red across her shirt like paint spilled onto a blank canvas. She’d been abandoned, forgotten, held captive by Omega for reasons that none of us knew, and to this day I was the only one who seemed to care that she had died. Unfortunately, I had yet to get a chance to pay back those responsible for her death.
Dr. Ronald Sessions. Dr. Quinton Zollers on the run. Kat had lost her memories of Scott, her lover, because of me, because of a mission I led. Zack dead. Joshua Harding. He’d died trying to save the lives of the metas that I’d sent away and abandoned to make their way on their own while I hid in the box for days, trying to keep out of sight of my sins.
And M-Squad. Some of them had been my friends, and I’d killed them, every one.
Hera. The Ministers of Omega. Rick. I had his blood on my hands.
I glanced over at Ariadne during the ceremony and she met my eyes with a dull look. Part of me wanted to ask her if she was thinking about Eve right now, but that was the part that wished she would just lash out at me, once and for all, get it over with. I could see the flashes of repressed anger in her eyes, but she was too much of a pro to come at me with it. She had a job to do, she had to work with me, and she did it.
I still wished she’d give me the hell I so richly deserved for it, though.
We hadn’t waited for the team to come back from Portland to do this, and part of me wished we had. I’d never had a funeral for Zack, didn’t see what became of his body, though I’d checked after I got back from London and got ensconced in my current job. I’d found out it had been returned to his family, who’d had a cremation and a funeral a few days after I’d left for England.
Some girlfriend I was. I left his family behind to do the cleanup while I took his soul and jetted off to Europe.
The pastor intoned some words about flesh being transitory, and the list of my failures ran through my head again, without allowing me to settle in on any of them. I should have been in utter misery, but I wasn’t, not really. I was detached about the whole thing, pondering it, trying to figure out where I fit in. I’d lived through so much, had so many people die for me, that there had to be a reason for it. Only a moment separated me and Andromeda—the time it took for a rifle bolt to slide the next round into the chamber—from being dead right there with her in the forest in Western Wisconsin. Only luck had kept me from dying in an explosion like Dr. Sessions, luck or the watchful eye of Janus making sure his prize wasn’t killed in the destruction he’d wrought.
I thought of Janus, lying near de
ad in the medical unit as I tossed the first shovel full of dirt onto the casket in Breandan’s grave. Breandan’s family was all presumed dead in Ireland, his love had gone before him by the better part of a year, killed by Century, and I was the only family of any sort he had left. I thrust the shovel back into the mound of upturned earth, my symbolic part of the funeral over with. I looked across the thinned herd of English metas, knowing that no one had left in the wake of the attack. That was a little bit of a surprise, but not too much. Where else would they go? Back to London?
The sun was hot on the back of my head as I played it through my mind again. The funeral was starting to disperse, people wandering back to cars. I stood over the grave of the Irishman who’d let me believe I could trust people again and I agonized over the fact that I’d failed him. I wanted to say I was sorry, whisper my heartache away over his loss, but the words would be worth no more than the warm breath I issued them upon. I had failed him. That was done and over with.
The hard part was yet to come.
“You’re thinking about all of them too, aren’t you?” I heard the soft sound of Scott’s voice at my shoulder. I could feel his presence behind me, staring at the grave in solemn stillness. “The ones we’ve watched slip away before us.”
“It’s been a deadly year,” I said. “I was thinking about the body count since I left my house.” I didn’t turn. “You remember. Your aunt and uncle were in there.”
“I don’t blame you for that, you know,” he said quickly. A little too quickly.
“Sure you don’t,” I said, voice flat. “What about Kat?”
“Like I said before, that was all Clary, and you settled his hash, so ...”
I glanced back at him. “You don’t really think Clary deserved to die over that, do you?”
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