Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 (22 page)

The Little Doll is special. Wolfe knew this from Omega, from the others, but they didn’t tell Wolfe how special you were, that you were one of the offspring of the master. Of Death.

“They kept you in the dark? Big surprise.” I laughed ruefully. “That’s all anybody does, isn’t it? Layers of secrets on top of secrets, burying one after another.” I felt a little stab. “It’s what Omega did to Adelaide, too. What Old Man Winter did to me. Sovereign and Weissman are doing it to at least some of their people, maybe all of them, who knows.” I sighed in the dark and felt the pressure of my body resting against the couch. “Too many secrets. I’ve lost count of all the ones I’m supposed to be finding answers to.”

Beware the secrets of scary people,
Gavrikov said.
They will consume you, wrap you up within them, and carry you away.

“I think I’ve already been carried away, Aleksandr.” I felt a little mournful as I said it. I longed for the simplicity of my house. No, that wasn’t true. What I really longed for was the nine months or so that I’d been part of the Directorate, when things were simple and I had a boyfriend who loved me, friends who watched my back. I thought about Scott and Kat, and how I hadn’t really spoken to them outside of a meeting, or about anything other than work in the six months since we’d started this endeavor. Hell, even Breandan and Karthik were nothing more than work colleagues at this point, at a distance. The conversation I’d had earlier with my mother was one of the deepest ones we’d ever had, and one of the first outside of a meeting or a discussion of straight business of the agency. “I’ve been carried along by this river of secrets since day one, with only a little bitty break somewhere in the middle.” I blinked. “I wonder if I’ll look back on this in five years and still think of my time at the Directorate as the best days of my life.” I didn’t say it, but I wondered if I’d even be around to look back on it in five years. The odds were not great.

There was a beep from the phone on my desk announcing the intercom. I rolled off the couch and walked over to hit the accept button, and I heard loud, crackling noises through the phone. “What?” I said, feeling a sense of unease.

A loud klaxon sounded throughout the building, a howling sound, and I saw a red emergency light begin to flash outside my office, casting the cubicles of the bullpen in a deep red light. “Ms. Nealon, this is dormitory security, we are under fire—” The voice was cut off by the staccato sound of gunshots in the background. “—overwhelming numbers—” The phone hissed and squealed from the feedback noise and the howl of what was coming through it. The sound of gunshots was steady now, and I could tell that a pitched firefight was going on. “They are in the building—”

“Activate the shutters!” I shouted, but the sound cut out. I waited there for an awful moment, then turned and looked out my office window. Light from muzzle flare flashed across the way at the dormitory. Black shapes were entering the building now, swarming in, too many to count, flooding out of vans parked right up on the curb. It was an army of men, and their purpose was clear.

We were being invaded.

I took the elevator even though I shouldn’t have, stopping at the first floor and shouting at the security detail to lock down the building. I saw the shutters begin to clink into place even as the doors closed again and I descended to the basement. We had built directly on top of the old Headquarters and the previous dormitory because for all their faults, the space was already excavated. A little too excavated, after the explosions, but that was easier to fix than digging a new hole in the ground in winter, so we just let the construction guys clear the mess and start building. There was an additional advantage to this, though, one that I didn’t readily advertise.

I hit the armory first, throwing on a Kevlar assault vest, the kind used by our security teams when they needed to clear a difficult target. I hadn’t had to deploy the security teams yet, which was just as well. They might have to come into play in a few minutes, but I didn’t care for that idea much. I grabbed a walkie talkie off the rack and set it to the emergency channel. “Get the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team on the line, get them out here.”

“Understood,” I heard a clipped, familiar voice on the other end of the radio. “I’ve already contacted them.”

“Li?” I asked. “I sent my mother along with Karthik and Reed to Portland to get on that manhunt for Hildegarde. I need you to see if you can locate any of our other metas. I need Scott and Breandan.” I cursed. “But they’re probably in the dorms.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Li said.

“Sienna,” Ariadne’s voice broke in. “What are you going to do?”

“Ever seen the movie
Die Hard
?” I asked, snugging a submachine gun strap tight across my shoulders.

“Oh, dear God,” Ariadne said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “As soon as the FBI HRT gets here, let them know the situation and have them start setting up. I didn’t see the shutters deployed a minute ago, but if the Century force has gained access to security, it’s more than probable that they’ll be locking the building down to repel our efforts to retake it.” I burst out the door of the armory and kept talking as I ran down the hallway of HQ toward the far side of the building.

“At which point you’ll be locked inside with them,” Ariadne said.

“I run this place,” I said, “good luck locking me in anywhere. I can override any door I want opened. No, if they trigger the shutters—and they should, to keep us from dusting them with snipers—then they’ll be the ones locked in. Security will be the only place they’ll be able to raise and lower the shutters.”

“But that keeps our people trapped,” Ariadne said, “and we have an awful lot of young metas over there.”

“No argument here,” I said as I hit the edge of the building and reached a locked room. I ran a card key over the door and it beeped, sliding open to admit me. “Hopefully they’re not dug in, because I need to deal with the Century force on my own.”

There was a pause before Ariadne spoke again. “You’re not a one-woman army, Sienna.”

“Oh, yes, I am.” I took a breath as I entered the tunnel that led from HQ to the dormitory’s basement. The overhead fluorescent lights clicked on in a long sequential pattern that left me staring at a dank, acrid-smelling hallway. The tunnel was left over from the original Directorate, designed to be used when periods of snowfall made transiting from building to building uncomfortable. I hadn’t used them since shortly after I came to the Directorate because they tended to lock them down in the summertime, but they had survived the destruction of the Directorate with only a nasty, smoky smell to show for it. I ran down the hall, feet pounding against the concrete as I headed straight for my target. “Coordinate a response, Ariadne. Keep them contained, because if they’re with Century—and I can’t imagine they’re not—then their objective is to wipe us all out, so we’re effectively already dead. Make sure they don’t survive the attempt.”

Ariadne’s reply came back eight octaves higher than usual, coated in frustration. “That’s insane—”

“Do it,” I said. “That’s the position of the head of Ops, okay? Do not negotiate, do not bargain, kill them all as soon as you can, because I guarantee you that they’ll be trying to do that to our people.”

“Why not just blow up the building then, and save ourselves the trouble?” Ariadne asked with measured sarcasm.

“Why, that’s a lovely idea,” I said. “I might just have to do that.”

There was a pause. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m joking.” I took a breath as I came to the end of the hallway. “Probably.”

“You cannot be serious—”

“I’m entering the dormitory and switching to silent,” I said, placing a small headset on my ear and clicking the volume lower. “Do what I’ve asked. I’ll contact you if I need anything, otherwise maintain radio silence.”

“But—”

“Radio silence begins now,” I said, cutting her off as I ran my key card over the scanner next to the door. It beeped and I placed my hand over the biometric scanner. It read my palm quickly, probably noting that my lifeline was getting shorter by the moment, and the door hissed open into the dormitory basement. The good news was that it wouldn’t open for anyone but me, and only while I was alive. The bad news was that whoever Century had sent, I doubt they knew or cared about that little detail.

I crept into the basement, my senses hyper alert and listening for any sound. There was plenty of it; scuffling of feet, gunfire from above, shouting. Either the extermination of my people was well underway or there was still a fight going on. The shouting led me to believe it was the latter, which meant I had a chance to tip the balance. Most of the metas who were here in the dorms weren’t much in the way of fighters and were low on the power scale. That meant that while they were stronger and faster than a human, they didn’t stand half the chance I did of being able to outmaneuver someone pointing a gun at me or being able to completely overwhelm a group of armed mercenaries with my superior speed and reflexes.

I pondered the fact that the force assaulting us was carrying guns. I’d run across some of that kind before, armed mercenaries whom Century had employed to take out smaller groups of metas a few at a time. I suspected that meant that we weren’t facing much in the way of metas this round, just men with guns. I kept my hand firmly on my submachine gun. Men with guns I could handle, so long as I was armed. Hell, I could handle metas, too, but this might actually be easier if I did it right.

I got to the nearest staircase and ascended. I knew where I was, and it was in a back hallway of the dormitory building. I opened the door to the corridor and didn’t hear any noise nearby. I dodged out with my weapon covering the corners, sweeping for enemies. I didn’t look in any direction that I wasn’t already pointing the gun, and I started to move forward, toward the main lobby. This had been the way to my room, and a line of windows to my left was shuttered closed, steel grey metal blocking any light from coming in from outside. The lamps flickered above, on emergency lighting, and red emergency lights flashed from boxes mounted every twenty or thirty feet at the sides of the hallway. In the distance I could see the entrance to the lobby and could hear gunfire coming in bursts.

I slipped along the wall, trying to make myself invisible, melting into the shadows where possible. I could see men advancing across the mouth of the hallway ahead, firing their weapons as they headed not toward the cafeteria but toward the long hallway opposite mine, the one where most of the metas we had on campus were staying. We’d kept almost everyone on one side of the building because it was easier to keep things regulated. I had worried at the time that it might make them more vulnerable, but I thought cloistering them together might also be more defensible. It appeared I had been right on both counts.

And of course the beauteous thing about it was that my enemies had left their backs totally exposed to a flanking attack by yours truly.

I stuck to the shadows, moving slowly, quietly, though the gunfire was deafening, echoing down the hall. The smell of discharged gunpowder hung thick and heavy in the air as I eased along through the red light, the faint clouds of smoke from so much weapons discharge casting a thin haze into the air. I kept on, trying to remain as quiet as possible even though I could probably have driven a truck down the hallway, honked the horn, and run right into their midst without them noticing until the treads were upon them.

I came to the mouth of the hallway, where it met the opening, and saw what I was up against. There were twenty or thirty of them, all spread throughout the lobby. They were totally focused on the hall, and gunfire was coming steadily from that direction, which made me wonder who on my team had guns and was resisting their advance. Whoever it was, they were doing a pretty good job of stymieing the mercs, holding them back from charging. They were all wearing Kevlar vests and tactical helmets, which had the potential to stop a bullet, though it was hardly a foregone conclusion. Shooting them would still hurt them, and although they were cushioned, I knew I could break bones through their padding and armor. For maximum effect, though, I really needed to get those helmets off.

The good news was that I had a plan to do just that.

I slipped on a gas mask as I stood in the shadows, unobserved by everyone. It was a newer model with a wider lens for me to see out of, one that dipped back further so it didn’t obstruct my field of vision like a lot of the old bug-eyed models did. I thumbed a canister of tear gas off the belt I had grabbed from the armory and then another, pulling the pins loose with my index finger before I heaved them toward the middle of the lobby.

That drew attention immediately, causing three mercs to look back at me. I met their gaze with quick bursts from my submachine gun, which roared in the hall and lit the walls with muzzle flash. I ran forward and slid feet-first like a baseball player behind a makeshift barricade that the mercs had set up from a table they’d dragged out of the security room. I fired blind over it twice, letting the rounds rip with the best aim I could from my hidden position. I heard bullets come back at me, tearing into the surface of the table and ripping through, showering me with splinters. I tried not to pay attention to how close they were getting, but it’s tough to ignore it when bullets are tearing through your cover.

I heard the sound of the tear gas canisters burst, and I smiled. I counted to five then rolled right, coming out and surprising a guy who had been creeping toward me trying to flank me. I pegged him in the head, landing a few rounds in his neck before I kept rolling right, coming up in a squatting position after my next roll. I shot to my feet and fired left, hitting another guy who was emerging from the growing fog as he looked up, shocked to see someone coming at him.

I could see flashes in the tear gas, could hear the sound of gunfire and coughing in the midst of it, my finely tuned meta senses combining with adrenaline to keep me on point. I dodged left as I felt bullets whipping to my right and I grabbed at another dark figure emerging from the mist as he came within arm’s length of me. I threw him without letting him get close, just whirled and tossed him by the front of his vest before he could whip his gun around or react to me in any way. I heard him land after a twenty-foot flight, and it didn’t sound like one he’d walk away from. I was already moving on, though.