“Perhaps we should discuss this another time,” Ariadne said gently, looking to Old Man Winter. “This has obviously been an emotional day—”
“I’m fine,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m the only one who is, but I’m fine.”
“Clary appears uninjured,” Ariadne said. “Perhaps you can explain what happened—”
“It all went to hell,” I said. “This meta, he greeted us at the door, blasted through the wall with his strength and sent Clary into a parked car—”
“Why were you at the front door?” Ariadne said, and for once the ice extended from her words, not Old Man Winter’s. “Your mission was reconnaissance first—”
I didn’t answer, and tried to look past them, out the dark window, but the lights inside the office reflected me, only me, me and them.
“Did you go to the door?” Old Man Winter asked, “Or were you following Clary while trying to dissuade him from knocking?”
I felt a moment of tension. “It’s my responsibility either way.”
Old Man Winter did not back off. “And how did it happen? Did Clary disobey your orders and leave the van or did you tell him to do so?”
I felt my innards twist. To admit that Clary had disobeyed me felt like admitting I was a weak leader, unready to be doing what I was doing. But the alternative was lying. “I’m responsible either way—”
“The truth,” Old Man Winter said, “if you please.”
“Clary left the van against orders,” I said. “He did not listen to my repeated requests to return to it, and knocked on the door before getting himself taken out of the fight by the Omega meta.” I straightened up, bringing myself to attention. “I apologize for the failure of my leadership—”
“You have no need to apologize for having a teammate who disregarded your orders,” Old Man Winter said, impassive. “But the Omega meta—I have seen the footage of him in holding. I am familiar with him, his name is Bjorn. He is deadly. You did not draw your weapon?”
I pulled the pistol from beneath my tattered coat. “It was damaged.”
Old Man Winter stared deeply into my eyes. “You have a backup weapon, yes?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Did you attempt to use either of them, at any point, during the mission?” Old Man Winter’s icy gaze was on me now, a winter’s storm of a glare that was absent any malice, but intense in its power.
“No,” I admitted. “I…don’t know what happened. Perhaps I was trying too hard to subdue the meta so we could find out about this ‘Operation Stanchion’ he mentioned.”
“‘Operation Stanchion’?” Ariadne leaned over the desk. “He just…spilled that out?”
“Something about calling it off if he was able to capture me,” I said, hoping that maybe the information would cause Old Man Winter to take his gaze away from me. The thought was making me uncomfortable, the idea that I hadn’t used my weapon…perhaps if I had, things would have been different, the others might not have been hurt. I felt the sting inside and shoved it down, ignoring that heartsinking feeling.
Ariadne and Old Man Winter exchanged a look, a much more obvious gesture from him than most. “We will…discuss it…when we interrogate him tomorrow,” he said, breaking away from Ariadne to look back at me.
It took a moment for it to register with me. “I’m sorry…did you say ‘we’? You mean me and Parks, right?”
There was a moment’s pause as the air shifted in the office, and I would have sworn the air conditioning had switched on if I hadn’t known better. “Things have come to a point where I can no longer allow them to proceed as they have been,” Old Man Winter said, drawing himself up in the chair, but making very little expression. “I will be handling the interrogation of Bjorn myself.
“And you will assist me.”
11.
I left Old Man Winter’s office in awe. The entire time I had been at the Directorate, I hadn’t really seen Old Man Winter do much of anything. Once, he threatened Wolfe and scared him away from me through sheer, intimidating reputation—or so he professed, since he claimed that he lacked the power to actually stop Wolfe. Other than that, he had been nothing but a mystery, an enigma, a quiet voice that delivered the occasional surprise, revelation or something else.
I certainly didn’t think of him as an interrogator.
I returned to the medical unit but was run off by Dr. Perugini, who shooed me away the same way an old lady might shoo birds out of her yard with a broom. I didn’t want to fight, even though it was my teammates and my brother under her care. It’s not like I could do anything for them, and I was tired anyway, so I went back to my room.
I lay down on my bed after taking my injection of chloridamide. I felt the pinch of the needle as it left my arm, and I put a little piece of cotton over the hole, letting it rest for the minute or so it would take to stop the bleeding. I looked around my room: bare walls, plain carpet. I’d been in Kat’s suite before—the one she barely used because she was so busy sleeping with Scott most nights—and it was totally different. I lay back on the bed and pictured it from the time I’d been in there with her while I waited for her to change.
There were posters on her walls. Justin Bieber. One Direction. I snorted at the memory, and hadn’t bothered to avoid laughing at the time. She just smiled in that infuriating, uber-confident way she had—not really like a cheerleader at all, just more comfortable in her own skin. She said she liked them. Her decor was like something out of bad set design for a fourteen-year old’s room. She didn’t even have a TV. Her wardrobe was super cute, at least everything she wasn’t wearing when she was working. Great taste in fashion. Mine was abysmal compared to hers. She had like…a thousand pairs of shoes. I had ten. I’m still a girl, after all.
I thought about her room, and how empty mine had felt compared to hers, and I wondered if she’d be staying in there for the foreseeable future.
I lay my head on the pillow and stared at the whirls of texture on the knockdown ceilings in the sparse light of the single bulb of my nightlight. I thought about Kat, about what she remembered of her life before the Directorate, and I realized that I hadn’t really asked her about it. All she had told me was that she couldn’t remember anything before the scientists at the facility in the Andes. I wondered how she’d gotten there, if she’d loved someone like Scott before in her century-plus of life, and if she’d love someone like that again and end up forgetting it.
I thought about Zack for a few minutes, then consciously made the effort to put him out of my mind before I fell asleep. Nothing could be worse for him right now than me coming to him in his dreams, and I needed that worry like I needed another mission with Clary at my side.
I woke to the screeching of my alarm, fading into consciousness with sunrise still somewhere over the horizon. I yawned and wondered why I had bothered awakening before seven. Then I remembered—food, get dressed, interrogation—all of which were important things.
My morning routine was half-speed, for some reason. I didn’t ache as if I had been in a fight, but I definitely knew I’d been in one, because a few little pains remained. I remembered the times before my powers manifested, when my mother and I would spar in the basement. I was left with bruises that took a week to heal, with pains that stayed with me for days. Yesterday I’d been thrown into a concrete retaining wall and had a house dropped on me. My back hurt a little, like I’d slept on it at the wrong angle. I kneaded at the knots in my shoulders with my hands; even with the weak muscle control I sometimes felt in the mornings it was more than enough to cause me pain. If I squeezed full strength, I had the ability to break the skin and draw blood. Well, that was as hard as I had ever squeezed myself, at any rate.