Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 (28 page)

“No, it’s fine,” I said, a little deflated. “Of course I don’t really want to talk about it, but I probably should. I don’t like to dreamwalk because it always reminds me of the person who I most often did it with.” I paused, and felt a cauldron full of regret burn inside me. Dream me or real me? Maybe they were the same person. Or maybe I just had heartburn. “It reminds me of what Zack and I used to do in dreams.” The burn was more pronounced when I gave it voice, but it felt better after a moment. “So now I only use it when I have to.”

“Ahh,” he said, like it was a true revelation. “And since that’s the only way you have to contact me ...”

“Yeah.” I folded my arms tighter. “That’s why I haven’t contacted you.”

“But you’ve used it to contact others?” He peered at me. I wanted to look away, but didn’t.

“Once,” I hissed regretfully.

“Who was that with?” he asked, watching me with the most peculiar expression. I couldn’t tell quite what he was thinking.

“Scott,” I admitted after a moment’s pause. “When I needed a ride home from the airport.”

He gave me something bordering on a smirk. “I’m the most knowledgeable person about Century that you know, and you wouldn’t contact me via the only method you have because of the feelings it generates, but you would use it to save yourself cab fare.” It was definitely a smirk now.

I felt a sizzle of impatience and embarrassment. “When you say it like that, I feel stupid.”

“I wouldn’t feel stupid,” he said casually. “I would perhaps suggest that there may be more complexity to your feelings about this particular power, though.” He let one eyebrow creep higher, and I could see nothing but amusement. “Perhaps something to do with the predominant purpose of use coloring how you view using it now—”

“Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Doc,” I said, and I used my control over the dreamwalk to dispel the feverish blushing sensation I felt under my collar and up my cheekbones. I stared at him, trying to overcome the emotion. “Fine, well, we’re talking now. What can you tell me about him?”

“Hmmm,” he said, pondering. “Sovereign? He’s very strong. He knows this. His reputation is well earned, something he’s spent time building, cultivating.”

“So he’s prideful about it,” I said. “Got a little bit of an ego.”

“Perhaps,” Zollers said, a little too coyly for my taste. “But it really doesn’t matter because you won’t be able to beat him.”

I narrowed my eyes as I looked at him, my first sliver of suspicion poking at me. “I heard he can change his face.”

“Could be,” Zollers said, a little more brusquely now. “I only met him for a few minutes, and that wasn’t an ability he demonstrated to me.” He seemed to get a little thoughtful. “Still, I suppose it’s possible. Never heard of a meta who could do that, but it’s not as though we know every type of meta in the world, do we?” He smiled thinly. “After all, Sovereign is still a mystery.”

It felt just the littlest bit like he was fishing, and I leaned forward. “You said Century had scared the hell out of you when last we met. You told me they wanted me dead, that this storm that was coming would consume me.”

He nodded slowly. “I told you they wanted to kill you back then because it was true. A man named Weissman was my contact with Century, and he quietly made his position plain—he wanted you dead.”

“Why?” I asked, still leaning forward.

“I wasn’t in a position to ask,” he said.

“They changed their minds since,” I said, settling back in the chair. “Weissman said the order came down from Sovereign himself.”

“Did it?” Zollers gave me a slow nod then a smile. “I suppose that’s a good thing for you, then.”

“Or a bad thing for him,” I said, watching him through the haze of the dreamwalk. He wasn’t being evasive, but his eyes were clouded.

“I think you may be harboring some ill-considered notions here,” Zollers said, leaning forward himself. “If you think you can take Sovereign ... you’re wrong. He will destroy you if you try. His power is unlike anything—”

“I thought you said that Weissman was your sole contact with Century?” I asked in a muted tone.

“He was,” Zollers said, and I could see a hint of hesitation in him. “Before—”

“Before you ran from them because they were going to kill you?” I asked, feeling myself smile a little, like a dog who’s caught the scent of fresh meat. “Which, by the way, they seem to be doing a pretty mediocre job of.” I watched him react only a little to my goad. “You ran into him after that?”

“I did,” Zollers said, and I could see him start to hesitate, could sense the emotional friction from him. “He’s ... fearsome—”

“And he let you live,” I said with a twisted smile. “Just let you walk away after you betrayed his organization and left their target—me—alive in spite of their strict orders?” I felt my lips curl up at the corners. “You know what I think? Once a liar, twice a liar—”

“I get the rough sense of what you’re thinking here—”

“That telepathy is real handy,” I snarled, and I was on him in an instant, had him by his faux shirt. “Let me show you the other side of what I can do in a dreamwalk.” I touched a finger to his forehead before he could speak, and I heard a scream rip from his throat in agony, pure anguish and pain that was the absolute opposite of what I’d done with Zack. “Too bad you couldn’t read my mind to know THAT was coming.”

He writhed on the floor and looked up at me with a pained expression. “You have no idea what trouble you’re in.”

“I know that you killed my friends,” I said, looking down at him in silent fury. “Read my mind, Sovereign. Know what I’m thinking—that I’m going to find you and kill you, whatever it takes. You and your one hundred closest pals are going to die by my hand, one at a time or all in bunches. Because that reputation you’ve got of being the biggest badass on the planet?” I started to reach for him and he disappeared, gone from the dreamwalk in a cold second, nothing left behind but a faint wisp of his essence, a surreal haze marking the place where he’d left. “I’m going to take it for my own by killing you.”

“That was mighty bravadocious of you,” Scott said to me from across the conference table. It was morning, the sun glimmering in from behind him, and I was looking at him across fingers templed in front of my mouth. Ariadne’s coffee was the dominant smell in the room. It carried a hint of hazelnut. It was honestly making me reconsider my personal ban on coffee, it smelled so good.

“I had the upper hand,” I said. “It was my dreamwalk.”

Scott’s eyes got a little dodgy. “Um ... when you touched me the time you dreamwalked to me, it didn’t cause me any pain at all. It was, uh ...” his face got red, “... quite the opposite.”

“It’s something I figured out a while back,” I said, covering my own embarrassment by looking away and catching my mother’s half smile. I’m sure that made me flush harder. “With Zack, unfortunately for him. It’s controlled by mood, and if you dreamwalk while angry ...” I let my voice trail off.

“I made a man go into a coma one time by doing that to him,” my mother added.

“Which was it?” Reed asked, a little sarcastic. “Pain or pleasure?”

She smiled thinly at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Please stop the world of ugh,” I said, ready to throw a flag down between the two of them. “And don’t ever talk like that to each other in my presence again. Ever. There are way too many naughty stepmother ebooks out there for me to feel at all comfortable with that exchange.” She just rolled her eyes.

“If I might interject,” Karthik said a little hesitantly, “you just told the man who has been called the most powerful meta in the world to step off, essentially. Was that the wisest move?”

“I made him angry,” I said. “I aimed to provoke him.”

“Which brings us back to Karthik’s question,” Reed said sourly.

“It worked,” I said, trying to reassure them. “I needed him focused on one thing and one thing only—being pissed off at me, afraid of me, even. I needed to get him seeing red.” I looked down the quiet table, saw Scott looking at the black glass surface. Li hadn’t spoken throughout the entire meeting, and he was sitting next to Ariadne looking somewhat dead of disposition.

“I suppose if that’s what you were aiming for, then well played,” Reed said acidly. “Can I just say that I’m not thrilled by your plan?”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to be thrilled by it.”

“I also have grave reservations,” Karthik said.

“If this was a democracy, I’d be all ears,” I said. “We could set up a voting booth and everything, hand out little stickers once we were done. But as it is, if you don’t want to follow through with it, leave. Please.” I tried not to be brutally blunt but probably fell shy by miles. “This is going to require total buy-in from all of you. It’s a risk, I know—”

“And you’re sure that Quinton Zollers is Sovereign?” Ariadne asked, her hands folded uneasily in front of her. There was a faint twitch at her eye that I wondered about.

“It certainly fits the timeline,” I said. “Century was dead set on killing me the day that they murdered Andromeda, but then after that they decided not to? I think it was Zollers. He decided to spare me. It was his judgment call, nobody else’s, that kept me alive. He told Weissman to let me live, for whatever reason.”

“What is that reason?” Reed asked, humoring me more than anything. He was just as sarcastic as I was, dammit.

“I think he liked me,” I said. “That he felt sorry for me.”

“Well, I’d say you’ve done a fine job of wiping that slate clean,” Reed said. “His mercy is probably good and over by now. That means next time he’ll kill you. You’re walking into a fight with the most powerful meta in the world after you’ve provoked the hell out of him; his restraint is bound to have left town.”

“It was always going to come down to this sooner or later,” I said. “The kid gloves had to come off; we were eventually going to get serious and mix it up with him. Better now than later.”

“Yeah, that way you can get that pesky dying thing crossed off your To Do list ASAP and leave the rest of us to clean up the mess,” Reed said, and stood, buttoning his suit coat. “This is ridiculous. You want to fight him, fine. I signed on to draw a line against him and Century, and death was always understood to be a risk, maybe even a big one. But what you’re doing now is just pure, patterned suicide.” He took out his agency ID and tossed it on the table. “I didn’t sign on to watch you kill yourself.” Without another word, he left, walking out the door.

I took a close look around the table, watching for any other signs of anyone following him. “Anybody?” I asked, finally. “Anybody?” I waited another second. “Bueller?” No one laughed. “Never mind. We’ve got work to do. I did just work over the face of the supposedly most powerful meta on the planet, after all.” I stood without any other preamble. “You know what to do.” I turned and walked out of the room myself, afraid to stay and hear what they might be saying about me after I was gone.

I walked into the medical unit without any sort of fanfare. It was quiet in there, the steady beep of Janus’s monitoring equipment set to the lowest audio level. It was still loud and obvious for a meta, and I waited for a minute to see if Perugini would come lunging out at me, shrieking about some perceived evil I’d done or had had committed on my behalf. She didn’t appear, so I made my way slowly over to Janus, who lay on his back, a breathing tube sticking out of his mouth.

I took a slow breath, a long inhale through the nose and a long exhale out my mouth, the cool air carrying its own air-conditioned smell, a filtered, sterile aroma. I looked at him. He was so frail. He didn’t look like the man who had confronted me in the basement of this very building, standing so confidently even as I had a gun pointed at him. I could have easily killed him that day, but he’d faced me down because he knew in his heart that I wouldn’t shoot him. I wondered how much of that was because he could feel and control my emotions and how much of it was motivated by the simple conviction that I wasn’t the sort of person who would do that. A part of me wanted to cry because only minutes afterward I had become that sort of person, and things hadn’t been the same since.

“What would you do?” I asked the empty room, the figure in the bed. All the larger than life personality, all the exuberance had fled, and now he was just a shell. Something that Century made him. “What would you do if you were in my position? Maybe we wouldn’t be here if you were in my position.” I stared down at him. “You knew the secret, after all, the key to whatever the hell Century is trying to keep us from knowing.” I brushed the stringy silver hairs off his forehead where they were out of place. The Janus I knew was impeccably kempt at all times. This man with his hair askew, his glasses missing ... he wasn’t Janus. “You would have led us right through the middle of it. And I would have followed you. All the way to the end.” I sighed again. “You or Hera. Because you both—even though I didn’t know her for that long—actually projected the image that you cared. About me. About metas.” I bowed my head. “But then again, I got taken in by someone else who said the same things once before.”

I drifted toward a brown, plastileather-covered chair that was by the bedside. It had a slight impression in it, a circular pucker where Kat’s bony butt probably sat in it day in and day out. I lowered myself into it, making a much larger imprint and frowning as I did so. “Were you different?” I leaned back and found the chair distinctly uncomfortable. It didn’t make me move, though. “I thought you were. I still think you are.” I felt myself begin to chew my lip. “What is it about me that causes me to seek out these father figures to replace a man I never even knew? Winter, Zollers, you ...” I looked at him, hoping to see some sign, some movement, but all I saw was the motion of his chest moving up and down with the steady pulsing of the ventilator pumping air into his lungs.

“I mean, what did he really leave me?” I asked. “I didn’t even know his name until I was eighteen. Jon. Jonathan. Traeger.” I smiled almost morbidly. “I guess I could be Sienna Traeger if I wanted. Would she be a different person?” I felt the smile disappear. It wasn’t real, anyway. “No, he didn’t leave me anything. At least Winter gave me something.” I clenched my hand on the arm of the chair. “He gave me pain. Motivation to go past the moral line I’d drawn against killing. That could end up being important.” I looked at the stainless steel surface of the wall by the door and remembered one exactly like it in the old medical unit of the Directorate. “I’ve been past that line more times than I can count now. I live past that line, killing whenever I feel like there’s a need.” I sniffed and sat up straighter in my seat. “I killed half a dozen men in the last week alone. Watched even more than that die.” I stared straight into the distance, at the metal wall, and wondered if I’d see Wolfe’s face in it this time.