“Your physical strength is high above a normal meta’s, so you should be manifesting soon, if you haven’t already. No unique abilities to report yet?” I felt zero compunction about lying, but was relieved that Dr. Perugini had stepped away; I suspected she would see through my untruth; Dr. Sessions didn’t have a prayer.
“No. Nothing unusual.”
He turned back to his clipboard. “Well, that’s fine…it’s normal that you wouldn’t be experiencing anything yet. But as time goes by, additional abilities will materialize.” He looked down at the blood pooled at his feet. “And I’ll, uh…” He pulled a small test tube out of his coat pocket and stooped down, scraping it across the tile floor, forcing a small amount into the vial before putting a rubber stopper on it. Dr. Perugini rounded the corner just in time to see him and threw up her hands in silent exasperation.
He stood up, failing to notice her behind him. “I’ll get this analyzed and maybe it’ll give us some ideas of what you are.” He turned and started when he saw Dr. Perugini, then shuffled around her as she glared at him.
“He has the bedside manner of a goat,” she said with a hint of a European accent. “But not the common sense nor tact. That—” she pointed to the phone behind her—“was Ariadne. She and Old Man Winter are coming down to see you now that you’re awake.”
“Did they already know I was awake when they called?” I asked. I could believe Dr. Sessions would wander over and not know that I was unconscious; I’d be shocked if Ariadne and Old Man Winter weren’t spying on me.
She stared back at me, her dark eyes cool and unflinching. “Yes.” She turned away, grabbing a clipboard off a nearby shelf. “You’re going to need to start eating again soon. I don’t want to strain your digestive tract until I’m sure it’s fully healed, so I’ll be giving you another ultrasound in a couple hours to confirm you mend as fast as I suspect you do. After that, dinner will be served.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. The brush with Wolfe made me wonder if I’d ever be able to eat again without heaving.
“That’s okay,” she replied without looking up from her clipboard. “I’m not feeding you yet.”
The medical unit was a long room, probably as long as my house but narrower, with curtains separating individual beds and a private room at the far end with an oversized door for rolling gurneys in. Every surface was the same flat metal that I’d seen in the room I’d woken up in when I’d first arrived at the Directorate, broken up by glass windows that looked out into a hallway that matched the distinct look of the headquarters building.
The sharp odor of disinfectants wrinkled my nose as I took it in for the first time, almost giving me another reason to gag. I could hear the low beeps of monitoring equipment in the background and the faint hum of all the machinery. I counted the number of occupied beds I could see from where I lay. Less than a half dozen. “How do you handle so many at one time?” I asked.
“I don’t,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I had to triage, and Old Man Winter demanded I treat you first.”
“But I can survive more than any of them.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, not looking up from her clipboard. “And once I had established your wounds were not of the life-threatening variety, I moved on to the next critical patient.”
“How many of them died?” The words were like ashes in my mouth. Bitter.
A moment of silence passed between us. “Five.”
I did not respond to her statement, and she didn’t speak either. The doors on the far side of the medical unit opened to admit Ariadne, who looked drawn, her severe suit wrinkled as though she had slept in it. Old Man Winter followed a pace behind her, his age less obvious today, I thought – or was that because I knew he wasn’t what he appeared?
“Hello,” Ariadne said. I didn’t bother to glare. She took this as an invitation to move closer, and hovered over my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been kicked, punched, gutted, slapped and stomped on,” I said without much feeling. “So basically like you look all the time.” I couldn’t stop myself. Ouch.
Her jaw dropped only a little, and she recovered quickly. I think she was getting used to my barbs. Good. Old Man Winter stood a few feet behind her, watching me, but did not speak.
Ariadne looked chastened, but began again. “We’ve been keeping updated on your progress through Dr. Perugini. She’s most impressed with your healing abilities, which rate very high on the meta-human scale.”
“That’s coming in handy more often than I would have hoped,” I replied. “I take it Wolfe breaking into your dormitory building came as a surprise for you, too?”
Ariadne folded her arms and shook her head. “We shouldn’t have taken Kurt’s report that all our agents at your house were dead at face value; we should have verified to make sure nothing was left behind that could be traced back to us. But at the time we viewed sending a recovery team for the bodies as too great a risk for fear that Wolfe would somehow track them back to us.”
I pictured the oversized Wolfe driving a car, following a convoy of agents, then had an idle thought wondering what kind of vehicle he would drive. The image of him crammed behind the wheel of a Volkswagon bug popped into my head and in spite of all the emotional turmoil I had to stifle the urge to laugh, which was overtaken by the feeling of sickness again when I thought of him.
“Are you okay?” Ariadne looked at me with a concern that I would have found touching if I trusted her in the slightest. As it was, she spurred my instinct to aim at her if I felt the urge to vomit again.
“I’ll be fine.” I waved her off. “You didn’t come down here to talk to me about my abilities, did you?”
“No,” Ariadne replied after a moment’s pause. “We came to talk to you about security. Yours.”
I felt hollow, a complete lack of emotion. “What about it? Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no.” Ariadne shook her head with emphasis. “Now that Wolfe has found our location, though, it changes things. We want to keep you away from the outbuildings and here in the headquarters, where we have the greatest chance to be able to protect you from him.”
I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t even surprised. But I did feel a clutch of fear at the thought of not being able to see the sky, cloudy though it was, or feel the frigid winter air on my cheeks. Funny, since I’d only just felt it over the last few days, that I was already addicted and unwanting to give it up. “So you don’t want me to leave the building…at all? Is that right?”
Ariadne shared an uncertain look with Old Man Winter, who nodded. “Just for the time being,” she said, returning her gaze to me. “Until we can resolve this Wolfe situation.”
I laughed, that scornful noise I make when I’m not really finding something funny but I want to show my disdain for what’s been said. “He’s wiped out everything you’ve sent after him, including your security here on your campus. What, exactly, is going to resolve this ‘Wolfe situation’?”
“M-Squad will be returning from special assignment down in the Andes Mountains as soon as we can get in contact with them. Once they return,” Ariadne continued, “we have full confidence they’ll be able to take Wolfe out of play. Or,” she said with another backward look at Old Man Winter, “at least contain him.”
“Contain him?” I scoffed again. “The people I’ve talked to—”
“Meaning Zack,” Ariadne interrupted.
I ignored her and continued. “—seem to think that he’s one of the strongest metas on the planet. Is that accurate?”
Ariadne exchanged an uncomfortable look with Old Man Winter. And by uncomfortable, I mean on her end. He looked placid as ever. “He is one of the strongest, yes,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be stopped.”
“That’s funny,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Because Dr. Sessions told me I was a super strong meta, and I can’t make much of a dent in him, unless you count when I stuck a pen in his ear.”