Power (7 page)

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, not meeting his eyes. “It’s something else entirely.”

I felt his eyes on me. “What aren’t you telling us?”

I chewed my lower lip. “Things. You’re a mind reader. Why not just take a look?”

“I could do that,” he said, stopping a step away from me, “but …” He squatted down, bringing his eyes level with mine. I avoided his gaze no longer, looking into his deep, mocha-colored eyes. “… I really don’t care to invade your privacy if you don’t want to share it.”

“I’m sure it’ll come out at some point,” I said, and felt a tightness in my throat. “But not yet.”

“All right,” he said soothingly. As always. “Do you want to talk about your mom?”

I felt my throat tighten further. “I don’t know what else to say. She never even saw it coming.”

“Oh, she did,” Zollers said with a nod, drawing my attention back to him. “She knew it was coming. My mind was with her, blocking Claire’s ability to read her as she hitchhiked on the back bumper of Weissman’s car with you. She was at peace, knowing that her end was coming. Most people don’t have the level of serenity—”

“Oh, bullshit,” I said, feeling impatience bubble out of me. “My mother was many things, but serene was not one of them.”

“In this case, she was as close as one could get,” Zollers said quietly. “Don’t get me wrong, there was rage and anger and fear—for you, I might add—but she was as peaceful at the end as I have ever felt her. You were right, Akiyama was there. He allowed her to get the drop on Weissman, and the words they exchanged gave her a sense of peace before the end came.” He shook his head. “Having been present for my share of deaths, I can tell you that it’s more than most get.”

I pushed my lips together hard and let them stay that way for a moment before speaking again. “We said a lot to each other just before she died. But … it doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It would never be enough,” he said quietly. “She has power over you and always will. Parents are like that. You’ll always want her approval.” His eyes glistened faintly. “Her love.”

“She said she was sorry.” I felt the lump in my throat. “For what she’d done. For how she’d failed. Like she knew ahead of time she was going to die.”

“The life expectancy of people engaged in this particular endeavor is not very high,” Zollers said, and he stood. I could hear his joints popping as he did so. “This is war, after all.”

“And my mother is one of its casualties.” Adelaide’s voice came back to me again, soft and warning.
Remember
. “And not the last, either, if Sovereign has anything to say about it.”

Zollers’s eyes narrowed, just slightly, as if he caught my deeper meaning. It made me wonder if it was something he was reading from my thoughts or something from his own experience with Sovereign that made him react that way. “No. No, it won’t be.” He paused and took a breath. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

I pulled my eyes from Zollers and rested them on the photograph of the Omega stasis chamber, still sitting face up on the table, the glare of the overhead lights blotting out a portion of the picture. Just like my sense of Sovereign’s plans, it looked utterly incomplete this way, unfinished, so much of it out of view. But I could still see a lot of it.

I took a breath, pulled my gaze from the photograph, looked Dr. Zollers in the eyes, and told him what I needed from him.

Chapter 10

I found Janus on the roof, which was the last place I would have looked. There was a helipad up there but it wasn’t in regular use. We used the one on the grounds out of habit, I supposed. Those old habits, they’re a real bitch to get rid of.

Suspicion was an old habit for me, though, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

“Janus,” I said quietly as I stepped out into the gentle breeze blowing across the rooftop. It was an overcast day, late summer, and not nearly as hot as it could have been. Part of me had trouble keeping track of the days. Why did it matter, after all? When the world is roaring to an end around you, who cares whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday? It’s not like I had any days off, after all.

“Sienna,” he said, loud enough to be heard. “Dr. Zollers told you where to find me?”

“He pointed me in the direction of the giant black hole in his mind’s coverage of the campus, yes,” I said. Janus was standing a couple feet from the edge of the roof, staring off. We hadn’t exactly followed safety regulations and installed railings or anything yet. There was nothing but a gaping, open space in front of him leading to the south lawn, and he stared across it as though he had a better view than a four-story building could provide. “You got pretty defensive in there.”

“Yes,” Janus said simply. He did not turn to look at me as I sidled up next to him.

“And then you run up here to … what? Think about your problems?” I stared out onto the lawn. I could still see each individual blade of grass from up here. That was meta eyesight for you.

“Think about how to handle my problem,” Janus said, not stirring. The wind came through and rustled his tweed jacket. I wondered if Kat had packed that for him when she brought him over from England.

“I prefer head-on, personally,” I said.

He rolled his head toward me, just enough to give me a sidelong look. “Yes, without doubt, that is how you handle things. I am uncertain that it will yield positive results in this instance, though.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” I said.

“Oh, but it could,” Janus said, staring back at the grounds. “It could very much hurt.”

We stood there in silence, side by side, and I tried not to further invade the privacy of his thoughts by looking at him. “I don’t believe that whatever you’re hiding about what Omega did to Adelaide to reduce her powers will change the course of our war.”

“Then you are the only one,” he said tightly. “The benefit of being an empath is that you can feel the emotions of others. Their suspicion would be obvious even to the unskilled of my kind, let alone someone who has been dealing with this for several thousand years. They regard me as a liar. And perhaps they are right to.” He laughed without mirth. “After all, before I was attacked by Weissman and—sidelined, I think you would call it—I had promised you the truth about everything.”

“You told me the biggest truth,” I said.

“But perhaps not all of it,” he said, lowering his head. “Not every truth I know. Certainly, there are several thousand years of them to sort through, but I know things—little details, here and there—that might be of some use in our current circumstances.”

“We’ve been busy—” I said, starting to make excuses for him.

“There is no need,” he said, waving his hand in the air in an abrupt cutting motion. “The problem with being me—with being who I am, with sitting in the seats of power the way I have for most of my life is that you learn to control information. And being an empath has made me even more careful with what I learn.” He looked at me, and I saw a sadness in his eyes. “Controlling the flow of secrets, carefully spinning the truths I allowed out, making certain that they reached the correct ears—this has been part of my duty with Omega.”

“When we met,” I started, slowly, “I confronted you with your reputation for being two-faced. You told me that there were multiple variations of the truth.”

“A lie I tell myself to soften the truth, I think,” he said, and his shoulders slumped. “There are always multiple perspectives. What one person holds to be truth, another would dispute until the day they die. People are contrary, argumentative. In order to make someone ‘see the light’ and accept a truth, sometimes it must be presented in a different way. When someone believes something so strongly that it is almost conviction for them, depriving them of that falsehood and replacing it with the truth is not something done by simply shouting that truth at them. They will reject it out of hand. They will deny it at every juncture. They need to be smoothed. The way needs to be prepared. You must approach it … with a ready supply of half-truths to gradually move them to the position where their mind is open to the truth. The real truth.”

I blinked. “Uhm … okay, you lost me.”

He looked at me then sighed. “I am a liar who has spent most of his life in service of liars and thieves and murderers. I have lied to myself to justify my actions, and now I find myself in a most curious position, one I have not been in before, even when I was exiled from the good graces of the Primus and forced into retirement. I am no longer in the service of a liar and a murderer. Realizing that I am in a position where the truth is more than just a tool or a weapon is …” He sighed again. “… It is difficult to adjust to.”

I went through what he’d said then replayed the words again. “In essence, you’re saying that after a lifetime of hiding the truth from the evil people you worked for, you’re stumbling at telling the whole truth now, when you’re working for …” I bobbed my head a little, trying to find a way to soften the words and finding none, “… the good guys?”

“That’s … about it,” he said, and nodded slowly. “You are not a monster, Sienna. I have told you this before, and I believe that to my very bones.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think? I’m not sure what it has to do with the matters at hand, but—”

“It has nothing to do with the matters at hand,” he said, “and everything to do with the reason I stormed out of the meeting just now.” He looked at me, focused his eyes on mine, and I could see the weary lines of age around his eyes, crow’s feet that had settled in the skin, making him look old, painfully old. “There is a way for you to be able to control your powers, of course. To make it so that your touch is innocuous to others, as harmless as the touch of anyone else.”

I felt my spine stiffen involuntarily. “Okay.” I felt myself quiver a little on the inside at the prospect of being able to live a normal life.

“But the price,” Janus said, shaking his head. “It is …” He shook his head again.

“Look,” I said, “this is, uhm … I mean, this is something that can maybe wait until after the war is over. I clearly don’t
need
to touch people right now, since I’ve lived this long without—”

“It doesn’t matter when you find out,” Janus said, and another shake of his head followed the dry, scratchy pronouncement. “Let me explain the theory behind this.”

I leaned in closer, afraid to miss a word of it now that he was explaining to me how I could potentially touch—hug—caress—kiss—and—and—everything—with another person.

“You know, of course, that your power comes from the marriage of Hades and Persephone, from the hybridization of her ability to heal with touch and his to steal souls from a distance.” I saw him waiting for an acknowledgment and nodded. “Then you must understand that your power is truly the polar opposite of a Persephone. Their touch heals, yours kills.”

“I have noticed that,” I said, listening warily. I remembered telling Scott after meeting Kat for the first time that I was her opposite—she was life, I was death.

“Then you must realize that the only way to put the stopper in your deadly touch,” Janus said, drawing out every word, “is to absorb a power that would be its equal and opposite. Something that would keep it from being able to act through your touch, something that would block its use.”

I froze and remembered the touch of Adelaide’s—Andromeda’s—hand on mine as she had steered me out of the Omega facility where I’d found her. It had felt as though she was taking away my pain, gradually healing the wounds from the beatings I’d suffered before meeting her. “No,” I said and shook my head.

“Yes,” Janus said, nodding. There were bags under his eyes, I realized, the weight of his knowledge pulling on him. In that moment, his motives became clear to me and I knew why he’d rushed from the conference room earlier. I wasn’t a monster, he said. Yet the thought of what I could do, right this minute, in order to have that power, in order to be able to live a normal life and touch like a normal person flashed through my mind—

I pictured myself kissing Scott, and realized … I wanted to. As aggravated as I’d been at him for all the ups and downs lately … I wanted to. I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss him, long and deep, feel his fingers on my face and … elsewhere.

With a shock like a cold bucket of water dousing me, I cut off that thought. I could see the look on Janus’s face and it did most of the work for me. He knew. He’d seen it in my eyes, in the way I’d reacted. “I am not a monster,” I said, repeating it aloud almost as much for his benefit as mine.

“I should hope not,” Janus said, and he looked tired beyond belief, as though he were ready to lapse into another coma, right there in front of me. “Which is why I told you.”

I swallowed, hard, and broke away from his gaze. It was natural to think about it, wasn’t it? It didn’t make me evil for considering it, did it? For thinking that only a few stories below, there was an easy answer to my desire to live a normal life?

And all I’d have to do … was kill Kat by draining her dry.

Chapter 11

Playing a dangerous game, Little Doll
, Wolfe whispered in my head.
And playing it close, out of sight of your friends
.

“Dangerous is all I know,” I muttered as I opened the door into the bullpen on the fourth floor. There was a buzz of activity, and I could tell by the smell of melted cheese that someone had ordered pizza. I realized I was hungry, famished actually, having not really eaten since yesterday. I steered toward the smell and found an empty cubicle filled with a half dozen boxes of pizza. There were a lot of missing pieces and I could tell that they’d been hit hard in a first wave. A couple of empty boxes had already been bent in half and stuffed into a big black garbage bag that was sitting next to the table. A few two-liter containers of pop were spread out at the end of the table with paper plates and cups, and—oddly enough—plastic cutlery.

“Sienna,” J.J. said, nodding to me as I drifted into the cubicle. He was munching on a slice of pepperoni and sausage, chewing and moving his head in rhythm.

“J.J.,” I said, making my way over to the pizzas. I hovered over the Hawaiian one, and the fragrant scent of pineapple caught me like a fishhook. I grabbed a plate. “What’s the word?” I asked him, more conversationally than anything.