The cafeteria was already filled with activity when I got there, from the crowds of people going about the start of their daily routine. I thought about texting Zack to see if he would be in for breakfast, but I didn’t want to be a clingy girlfriend, especially after last night. I suppose it was a compliment that he enjoyed our nighttime activities so much, but it worried me, and the pleasure was all his. To me it still felt fake, like trying to touch a shadow. I wanted to feel the real thing.
I waited in line, lost in thought. The crowd and conversation went on around me, hundreds of voices rising and falling in a chorus that reminded me of white noise as I tuned it out. The smell of eggs and bacon were prominent, as were the onions for the Denver-style eggs. All the cafeteria workers were dressed in brown aprons, their hairnets making them into a line of mushrooms blooming against the white, sunlit walls.
My fingers, still covered by gloves, ran along the glass window between me and the food, as though I could somehow impart the tactile sense of taste along with the touch, something small to calm my raging stomach, which was reminding me I had skipped both lunch and dinner yesterday. It had a bad habit of holding me accountable for missed meals (which happened increasingly often due to work lately) with a bad case of the rumblies. I could almost taste the food as I slid my tray down the three steel rails that ran the length of the counter.
“Excuse me,” I heard from my left. I turned and saw that teenaged boy who had been staring at me only a couple days earlier, the one that had been in the cafeteria line. He had hair that seemed to droop around his head in a bowl, falling to just above his neck. It was a careless sort of haircut, and his brown eyes were hidden behind a thick pair of glasses. “Can you pass me an apple?” he asked, pointing just past me to where the apples and oranges waited in bowls at the end of the line, in an area reserved for self-service foods like crackers and condiments, cereal and such.
I thought briefly about why he was bothering to ask me when in two seconds I would be clear of it and he could get whatever he wanted, but I put it out of my mind in the name of civility. “Sure,” I said, and tossed him an apple. He caught it, cradling it against his red t-shirt like it was some treasure. He looked familiar, I thought as I gave him a moment’s more look before turning away and finding a table of my own. And not just from the cafeteria line yesterday, but from somewhere else. He didn’t look much different in age than me, but…I shrugged. Not my worry.
I scarfed my eggs and ham without much delay, sitting by myself. It was a little unusual; I’d fallen into a pattern of eating my meals with Reed, Kat and Scott, or at least Zack. Failing that, sometimes I would eat on the run or skip a meal. I looked around the cafeteria and found myself unsettled at being alone. Which was strange for a girl who used to eat almost all her meals by herself, with only Mother occasionally around for company.
I finished and walked back to headquarters, ignoring the fall chill in the air. I hit the lobby of HQ and the heaters kicked in the moment I walked through the doors, spreading slowly over my skin as the cool air faded. I felt the heavy dryness of it in my sinuses as the soles of my shoes clipped along on the tile floor keeping pace with all the other civilian employees of the Directorate who were making their way in to go about their daily jobs. Suits and ties abounded, women wore darker-toned dress pants and jackets, and almost everyone was already wearing full-length winter coats.
I veered behind the sweeping double staircase on either side of the lobby and made my way to the emergency stairwell at the back of the building, the one that also led down. The concrete walls around me established a pattern that ran all the way to the emergency floodlights at each landing. The sounds of the people milling about the lobby on their way to their serious, professional day disappeared as I heard the heavy metal door to the stairwell shut behind me, an echo bouncing around in the four-story room like a thunderclap after lightning.
I pushed through the door at the basement entrance and found myself in a long, narrow hallway. The walls were beige, a kind of wallpaper on them made up of tiny lines that intersected like fine wire mesh, a texture so small that I wondered if the non-metahuman eye could even perceive it. Black doors lined the walls, and I realized for the first time I had no idea how many of them were actually cells, and if any of them were occupied besides the two filled with our Omega friends. Just outside the staircase entrance were the more luxurious cells, the ones that were almost like standard living quarters but more secured; the further one got from the stairs, the more they became like a square without any sort of differentiation; an arrangement designed to keep the prisoners contained within off-balance, and Spartan enough to give them almost nothing to work with in planning any sort of escape.
Old Man Winter stood in the middle of the hallway like an imposing pillar holding up the whole building. He wore a winter coat like so many of the other men, but I blinked in surprise—it had to be close to eighty degrees in the hallway. He always tended toward heavy clothing, but I wondered if perhaps it was to hold the cold in, toward him, rather than keeping the warmth in as it was for most people. I watched him as I walked, and he seemed to take no notice of me until I was within a few feet, at which point he swiveled on a heel and looked down at me. Almost seven feet tall, that was no challenge for him, since I was not even five and a half feet tall myself.
“You are early,” he observed, arms folded over his coat.
“It doesn’t pay to be late when you’re working with the boss,” I said. “Are we going to be interrogating James Fries as well, while we’re here?”
“Pointless, I think,” he said, his rumbling voice given resonance by the acoustics of the hall. “Fries is a messenger boy, a strong meta, but not one of the privileged of Omega. Bjorn, on the other hand, was the son Odin, before he passed.”
“Odin’s son?” My face scrunched up and I pondered the oversized man who had wrecked my whole team in Des Moines. “He looks nothing like Chris Hemsworth.”
Old Man Winter ignored me. “He will, I think, be a better choice to speak with. More…knowledgeable, having been brought to America specifically for whatever this Operation Stanchion is.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, feeling a flash of confusion coupled with the fear that I had failed to read something that had been prepared. Unprepared was not a good feeling, especially in front of the boss.
“This morning, J.J. ran a…tracking program, I believe he called it…searching through U.S. customs for certain patterns. One emerged, detailing passport irregularities.” Old Man Winter peered down at me, cold blue eyes seeming to glow in the fluorescent light of the hall. “After comparing them to photographic records, he found Bjorn.” Old Man Winter let out a deep breath, fogging the air in front of him, something that reminded me of the smell of a December wind. “Unless Omega is planning something else, that means that Bjorn is here for Stanchion.”
I thought about that for a moment. Stanchion had something to do with me, plainly, because Bjorn had inferred as much when I was fighting him. If Omega was sending in more operatives to capture me, this was nothing new. They’d been sending them at me for almost a year, to the point it was now almost comical in result. Or it would have been, except for what happened to Kat. Their last two operatives had ended up decapitated (and I didn’t even feel bad about it, because they showed no human characteristics at all), the one before that was locked up in a cell even now, the one before that had been thrown off a building by the one predating him (by Wolfe, who was locked in my head).
“You seem unworried,” Old Man Winter said, jarring me back to the here and now.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to keep getting charged up about this. If I did, I’d spend all my time worrying. Whatever comes, I can deal with it.”