Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9

by Crane, Robert J.

  Weissman screamed with a fury and pain that made what I’d done to him sound like the work of an amateur gently pinging him on the knee with a reflex hammer. This agony was full and deep, and it sounded like his soul was being shredded as he cried out in such utter anguish that the world shattered around me from the strength of his screams.

  I awoke in the dark, in my bed, the faint light of the campus shining in beyond my window. I lay there, frozen, tucked beneath the sheets in a cold sweat, another avenue closed off. I sat there until I got my breathing under control, gasps of fear coming one after another.

  It took hours. And I never got back to sleep.

  Chapter 36

  I bumped into Kat the next morning while I was shouldering my way into the ladies’ room nearest my office. I was in a hurry, had a full staff meeting in five minutes. I heard her making a kind of thumping noise while I was in the stall, but I ignored it. When I emerged, she was standing there in front of the mirrors, sucking in her cheeks.

  “Why the hell are you making fish faces in the mirror?” I asked her.

  “What?” She turned toward me. Now she was making a duck face, her full, pouty lips flattened at me.

  “Bang. Bang,” I said, making a gun with my thumb and forefinger.

  “What was that for?” Her expression turned to a full-on frown.

  “You were making a duck face,” I said.

  “Fish face, duck face? I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She got a pouty look that somehow fell between the two and looked back in the mirror. “Do I look old to you, Sienna?”

  “You look eighteen,” I said. “Just like you always have.” I didn’t mention that she acted twelve, because it didn’t seem like the right time for it.

  “It’s just … Janus. He’s so different since he woke up,” she said, staring at herself in the mirror. “So … preoccupied.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about being exterminated,” I suggested, a little lightly.

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “Things just feel so different. I was worrying that maybe I was starting to look my age.”

  I wondered how she had survived so long, being as thoroughly non-serious a person as she was. Then again, I wasn’t exactly super-serious all the time myself. “Don’t be ridiculous. Most girls who have hit a centennial would be lucky to have skin like yours. Because you don’t have any wrinkles. At all. And honestly, the way you grin all the time like a—” I stopped myself before saying moron, “—very happy person, that’s a good thing. You look fine.”

  “Thank you, Sienna,” she turned to me, and I realized I’d just offered encouragement to her. I felt a little dirty, like I’d just crawled around on the floor of a girl’s locker room at high school. “That’s very sweet of you to say.”

  I gagged on the responses I came up with, trying to remember that she probably considered sweetness a virtue or something. “Meeting?” I asked, smiling faintly through the wave of nausea.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” she said and led the way to the conference room. She bubbled the whole way there, and I nodded in time with her comments, saying, “Sure,” at the appropriate intervals.

  Once we were all situated in the conference room, the air heavy with the smell of all the coffee cups lining the table, I started off with an explanation of what had happened with Weissman in the dreamwalk. When I was finished, I waited for someone to respond.

  “So you were just going to badger the hell out of him in his dreams for the rest of his life?” Reed asked.

  “It seemed like a good way to get under his skin,” I replied.

  “But dangerous,” my mother said. “I had no idea we were vulnerable in a dreamwalk like that.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good thing Dr. Zollers was looking out for me,” I said, and glanced his way.

  Zollers, for his part, seemed immobile. “It was a fortunate bit of timing on my part. Next time, perhaps warn me if you’re planning something of that sort? I could have intervened sooner if I’d known what was going on. As it was, I had to sense your emotional distress from a few floors away. Interrupted a perfectly good dream about a beach on Tahiti.”

  “What’s the next move?” Scott asked somewhat listlessly from his place down the table. He was leaned back in his chair, clad entirely in his navy pullover and blue jeans. He looked good, but tired.

  “I believe I have an answer for that,” Janus said, and I could see the twinkle in his eye.

  “J.J. found something down your money trail?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” Janus said. “Safe houses all over the United States. There is an advance buyer who is picking up rental locations in the cities where they next plan to stage. Several of the landlords photocopied the driver’s license of this person.” He took a page out of the folder sitting in front of him and slid it to me. “I asked J.J. how to use the projector to put it on the wall, but … I am afraid it is a bit beyond my capabilities, so he offered me a Xerox instead.”

  I looked at the face on the paper. It was a young guy, probably in his twenties, smiling in the license photo. “Doesn’t look familiar.”

  “I had Agent Li run him through your FBI’s database,” Janus said.

  “No priors,” Li said, almost bored, “no record. He’s squeaky clean.”

  “False identity?” Reed asked.

  “Probably not,” Li said. “I think he’s legit. Metas don’t tend to have many run-ins with the law. You all run too fast to get cornered by law enforcement.” He shot a daggered look at me on that one.

  “So we’ve got a buyer,” I said. “We have some safe houses … how many?”

  “About six at present,” Janus said. “San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Brooklyn, Atlanta and Tulsa.”

  “Whoa. Which one of these things is not like the others?” Reed asked.

  “Why Tulsa?” my mother asked. “That is … odd.”

  “You think it could be their headquarters or something?” I asked.

  “Unlikely,” Janus said, glancing up. “The Tulsa rental is a storage unit. A small space, something on the order of a five-foot by five-foot space in a warehouse.”

  I made the frowniest of frowny faces. “What the hell? What would they be keeping in a storage unit in Tulsa?”

  “I don’t know, but I kind of want to find out,” Reed said. “What’s the likelihood it’s something dangerous in a space that small?”

  I swept my eyes from my mother to Janus, the two most experienced people at the table. “What would you think it would be?”

  “Could be a conventional weapon of some sort,” my mother said. “Biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological. Doesn’t seem like it’d be a meta—at least not a live one—in that small of a space. Unless they’re a prisoner of some sort.”

  “FBI could handle conventional weapons,” I said.

  “We ought to be your first choice for handling those types of threats,” Li said stiffly, “since I doubt any of you know how to deal with weapons of mass destruction.”

  “Fine,” I said diplomatically. “Why don’t you have your people crack open that storage unit? Warn them to be careful, give them the heads up that it could be anything—after all, we have no idea what Century is planning for the human race after they get done with us. This could be their phase two.” I lapsed into a silence after that, staring at the table.

  “What?” Ariadne asked, breaking the silence. She was a little brusque about it.

  “Well, now we’ve got a direction,” I said. “But I’m not sure how much it helps us.”

  “We have enemies to destroy, do we not?” Janus asked. “I spoke before about executing lightning raids, and now we have targets. Imagine we could hit these five safe houses and eliminate some thirty or forty Century operatives in the process. We would have them down to less than half strength. If you can’t call that a victory, I don’t know what you could.”

  “But they’re going to get tougher, aren’t they?” I stared evenly at Janus. “You know some of what they ha
ve available, don’t you? How easy will it be for us to continue to roll through a Century safe house and not take casualties?”

  Janus paused. “I think you would have to expect some casualties from an operation of this kind. There is simply no way around it. Not going against the people you will be facing. I believe they have recruited very powerful metas and you will begin to run across some of them as time goes on. However, they are not invincible.”

  I blinked. “Wolfe was nearly invincible.”

  “Nearly,” Janus said, “but, as you proved, not. Even the most powerful metas have weaknesses. They can all be beaten.”

  “Maybe,” I said, stroking my chin. “In most cases, we don’t know what we’ll be facing. In one case, at least, we do. Weissman.” I stared around the table. “And I don’t know how to beat him.”

  “Have your telepath grind his brain’s gears so he can’t zoom around,” Scott said, shrugging from where he slumped in his chair, “then shoot him in the face. You’re good at that.” He paused. “I’m not trying to be snotty, I actually mean it. You’re a good shot.”

  “That would be a lot easier if he didn’t have a telepath of his own to block me,” Zollers said.

  “I thought you said you were the strongest.” I froze, watching the doctor.

  “I am,” Zollers said calmly, “but this Claire—she’s no slouch. I can beat her, but she’ll keep me busy for a few minutes, and that’s all the time Weissman needs if I understand his powers correctly.”

  “You beat him before,” my mother said. “How did you do it in London?”

  “Overwhelmed him with the numbers,” I said. “It was five on one, and I had Breandan’s luck on my side along with Karthik’s illusions to distract him.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t fling him through the air or anything,” Reed said sourly.

  “Plus Reed,” I said. “But those other two helped a lot.”

  “We’ll need to choose a battlefield that’s to our advantage,” my mother said, all business.

  “There’s no battlefield to our advantage, not against Weissman,” I said. How do you beat a man who could control the very flow of time itself? “If only we had someone else on our side that could do what he—” A knock at the door interrupted me. “Who is it?”

  Kurt popped his acne-scarred face in the door. I could tell by his expression that whatever he had to say, it was not good. “We have a security breach.”

  “What?” I was on my feet in an instant. “What happened?”

  “Security cameras caught footage of a man appearing and disappearing on the monitors just now,” he said, opening the door the rest of the way.

  “Weissman,” I said, and looked around the room, as though I could feel him hiding.

  Kurt’s face took on a pained expression. “Based on the description you gave us … I don’t think it’s that guy. This one … he’s … uh … Asian in origin.”

  I frowned. “Weissman’s not Asian.”

  “Bang-up observational skills there,” Reed said from behind me. “He’s a white guy. A white guy with long, greasy black hair.”

  “Right, well, this gentleman had short hair, and he was Asian,” Kurt said. I could feel the discomfort radiating off of him, as though he were uncomfortable so much as describing the racial characteristics of the intruder in front of Li. I could tell because he wouldn’t even look at Li as he was speaking.

  “Where was the intruder last sighted?” I asked, brushing past Kurt to look over the cubicle farm.

  “Just outside your office,” Kurt said.

  I took off at a run, and heard voices of protest behind me in the conference room. I didn’t care; if this guy could appear and disappear at will, it didn’t matter if I faced him alone. I was overmatched no matter what. The cubicles blurred past as I ran around the perimeter of the open floor until I reached my office door. It was open just a crack and I pushed it, the hinges squeaking.

  I stared inside, and the first thing I noticed was the one thing that had most definitely not been there when last I’d been here.

  “What the hell, Sienna?” Scott came to a halt behind me, Reed and my mother only steps behind him. “Are you crazy?”

  “No,” I said and edged toward my desk one slow step at a time.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Reed said from the doorway, looking around.

  “I think he’s gone,” I said, and took the last step to my desk.

  “What makes you say that?” Scott asked.

  “Because he left something behind,” I said, staring down at the object on my desk.

  “Well, don’t—” my mother started to say, but it was too late.

  I picked up the white envelope laid against the base of the bonsai tree’s pot. The bonsai was just sitting there in the middle of my desk, perfectly aligned. Someone had spent time positioning it. They had left the envelope leaning in front, and it had my name written across it.

  “That could have anything in it,” my mother said, sounding like a cross between a mother and paranoid FBI agent. I slid my finger under the seal of the envelope and opened it. “Anthrax, anyone?”

  “Does that fall into the category of diseases and infections we're immune to?” Reed asked as I slid the note from the envelope and read it once. Then again. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” he said after a minute, “what’s it say?”

  I blinked and read it quietly one more time. “It says, ‘To Sienna Nealon: I am in your debt. I will be at the Japanese Garden at Como Park Conservatory tonight at nine p.m. Won’t you speak with me?’”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound like a trap at all,” Reed said. “You’re not going, of course.”

  “I am going,” I said. I could feel the tautness in my chest. The timing was … fanciful. But then, if it was him, time was his plaything, so it would make sense that he’d know his help was needed, and now. “I have to.”

  “Wow, I was pretty sure my sane sister walked in here, but now she’s gone and there’s a crazy person in her place,” Reed said. “Why would you even consider taking a mystery invitation from someone that’s made it appear in your office?” He took a couple steps toward me to look over my shoulder. “Does it even say who it’s from?”

  “Yeah, it’s signed,” I said. I stared at the elegant, flowing handwriting that was exquisite in its detail. Just like the perfectly aligned plant on my desk. “It’s signed, ‘Shin’ichi Akiyama.’”

  “Random person asks you to meet in a darkened garden at night, you leap at the invitation,” Reed said. “I know you had an unconventional upbringing,” he grinned at my mom, who stood staring into the office quietly, eyes fixed on the bonsai, “but I would think that you’d have learned a good, healthy fear of strangers—”

  “He’s not a stranger.” I looked up from the invitation, staring at each of them in turn. “Not really. Shin’ichi Akiyama … is the only man Weissman has ever feared.”

  Chapter 37

  Night had fallen, and I was sitting in a van outside the Como Park Conservatory. It was a massive glass structure that extended a hundred feet into the air in a dome shape, with greenhouse-shaped protrusions jutting out from the center dome like spokes from a hub. White metal struts separated each pane of glass. It was lit from the outside, and the beautiful setting made me wonder what it was like in the daytime.

  “The Japanese garden is outside,” my mother said, a little quietly. She had been sedate all day, ever since the security breach. I had expected a more vocal debate from her, the way I’d gotten it from pretty much everyone else, but she’d been virtually silent about the whole thing.

  “Does anyone else think this is capital-C crazy?” Reed asked from the driver’s seat. Scott was sitting next to him, and nodded along without saying anything. “Okay, I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t had a psychotic break with reality.”

  Dr. Zollers was sitting in the seat just behind me and had said almost as little as my mother had. “Are you sure you want to do this?” To his credit, he didn’
t try to discourage me. At least, I thought it was to his credit. If he was walking me into a trap, I might not find it nearly so creditable.

  “I’m sure,” I said, unfastening my seat belt. “Just wait here.”

  “Um, no,” Reed said, “we’re going in with you.”

  “Akiyama invited me,” I said. “To bring others feels … rude, somehow.”

  “Really?” Reed asked. “Because to me it feels insane to do otherwise. You’re talking about walking into an uncontrolled setting while we’re at war, and you’re going to do so while keeping your backup a few hundred feet away.” His eyes grew dark. “This is the sort of thing I’d expect from someone who’s too stupid to live, not from you, my normally tactically smart sister.”

  I felt my stomach rumble and knew he was right; yet for some reason, I knew I had to do this. There was something about the invitation from Akiyama, as crazy as it sounded, that told me I needed to accept. I’d looked at the security footage, and there was something … familiar about him. He’d looked straight at the camera, and his face … I’d trusted him instantly for some reason I couldn’t define. Something inside told me that I needed to be here, right now. This was an opportunity that we desperately needed. If Akiyama would help us, and we could kill Weissman …

  … the war would be over. Not even Sovereign could stand against Akiyama’s power. Not after we had removed all of Century’s support mechanism from beneath him.

  “Why did the invitation say he was in your debt?” Scott asked. He’d been nitpicking this point for hours.

  I still didn’t have an answer for him. “I have no idea.” I glanced at my cell phone, letting the faceplate light the van in the dark. The only other light was being shed from the streetlights around us.

  “Does that not bother you?” Reed said. “I don’t see how you can be so calm when everything about this stinks—”

  “I don’t know!” I said, sighing. “I don’t know, okay? Every minute we’re in this fight with Century, I question myself. Did I make the right moves the day they raided our dorm and killed all those people? Was I a fool to turn down Erich Winter’s offer of help before he died? Did I screw up majorly by not just accepting my fate and killing Bjorn when Winter told me to?” I lowered my voice. “Am I a fool for not going to Sovereign now and telling him I’ll marry him and do whatever he wants if he’ll call off this extermination?”