“So, yeah,” J.J. said as Parks left next, “go get ‘em, guys.” He looked at me and his cheeks burned crimson. “And girls.” He turned and caught an icy glare from Eve (which was probably just her normal expression). “And women.” He nodded his head, bobbing it like a jack-in-the-box. “Yeah.”
I filed past J.J. Clary didn’t even try to rush ahead of me like he normally did, for which I…didn’t care, for once. Reed trailed behind me, then spoke as we walked through the cubicle rows. “Good play, you think?”
“Going on the offensive against an Omega agent?” I asked. “Yeah. Leaving the campus stripped of its best guardians? Not so much.”
“Scott and Kat are still here,” Reed said.
“One’s got a hole in her memory the size of the loop on the rollercoaster at Valley Fair and the other is broken into more pieces than that porcelain angel of Ariadne’s that Eve stuck under Clary’s ass at the Halloween party as a joke.” I shook my head. “We just need to hurry, that’s all.”
“You think they’re coming here?” Reed said, and for once he was hard to read.
“I think they’re coming for Old Man Winter,” I said. “Take him out, you think the Directorate keeps rolling along?”
“Ariadne can keep it going,” Reed said. “Why are you worried about this now? He’s been around for a good long while, a few millennia. You think he can’t take care of himself?”
“No,” I said quietly. “I know he can’t. He’s worried about it, thinks he’s at the top of Omega’s target list. He’s pushing me to step up because…it’s like he can feel the axe descending, like he can feel its shadow on the back of his neck. I’ve never seen him like he is now, and I’ve known him for almost a year now.”
“That’s not a very long time to know somebody.” Reed kept impassive, casual. “That’s about how long you’ve known me, after all, and I’m way more of an open book than Winter.”
“We’ve had long conversations because we’re related,” I said, shooting him a half-assed sneer. “Because I wanted to know about our father, and what he was like, and all the things I missed with him being, you know—dead for my entire life. I’ve worked with Old Man Winter, though, and you get kind of a bead on him after a while. There’s emotion under the surface, and for the first time, I’m seeing worry. He knows bad things are coming, even though he doesn’t know exactly what all they are. There are things going on in the meta world that too many people have been warning us about, things we need to take seriously.”
“I wonder about that sometimes,” Reed said as we walked across the lobby, Parks and Bastian in front of us and Kappler and Clary about twenty paces behind. “Your mom told you something big was coming, and then Zollers said basically the same thing.
Now, it’s true Zollers was a psychic—”
“Telepath,” I corrected gently.
“Right, a mind reader,” Reed said, “so maybe he just fed back to you what your mom said just to mess with you?”
I felt a certain clenching pain in my jaw at the memory of my last conversation with Dr. Zollers. He hadn’t just told me that a storm was coming to the world of metas; he’d specifically warned me that no one was looking out for me, which seemed blatantly untrue. If he’d lied about one…“Maybe. Let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t mind being a telepath myself and being able to dig into Zollers mind to see what was real and what wasn’t, because,” I blanched as the breath of the cold outside air hit me in the face while Reed held the door open for me and I transitioned to the outside, “he deceived me for six months when he was playing my psychiatrist, so it’s kinda hard to tell if he might have slipped a truth in there somewhere.”
Reed nodded, and didn’t say anything else. We reached the garage and loaded into one of the smaller white utility vans in silence, almost exactly like the one we’d taken down to Iowa.
“No visible powers in the hotel,” Bastian said. “The last thing we need is attention on this run. No guns unless the situation gets dire.” Bastian’s inflection became slightly accented. “If you hear gunfire, you are weapons-free at that point, but keep the bullets contained. No civilian casualties, verdad ?”
“Righto,” I heard Clary say quietly, buried under the verbal affirmations of everyone else on the team.
The ride to Bloomington went quickly; the traffic was minimal at this time of day, and the freeways were clear as we cruised past tall glass buildings and retail spaces. We took an exit a mile from the Mall of America and got off on a frontage road that cut into a parking lot surrounded by small shrubbery and next to a vacant lot. The van doors swung wide and we deployed out the back, probably not looking terribly inconspicuous as we filed toward the hotel entrance. The building was tall, at least fifteen stories, boxy, square with cream-peach coloring that looked vaguely like stucco. The windows separated out every few feet with ornate shutters that added to the effect of making it look like a throwback, or something that might fit better in Italy than in Bloomington, Minnesota.
The lobby doors swung wide, and Clary held one open for me without meeting my eyes. I tried to ignore this, but good manners got the better of me. “Thank you,” I said as I passed, and he nodded without looking up.
Eve and Bastian led the way, Parks and Clary trailing behind. There was an open staircase in the corner of the building, and the setup was exactly as J.J. had mentioned. An enormous courtyard lay in the middle of the hotel, the front lobby on one side, kiosks for coffee and muffins and such were scattered around the center of the building. Fifteen floors above us, an enormous skylight ran the length and breadth of the roof, shining daylight down on us through translucent glass that, just for a flash, reminded me of how mother had painted the basement windows in our house.
“Break formation,” Bastian said so quietly that no one but a meta would have been able to hear him. “Sienna and Reed, take the far stairwell, Clary and Parks, keep overwatch down here after you tell management what’s about to go down. Parks, you do the talking. Clary,” Bastian’s voice got tight, “don’t say a word while he’s talking to them.”
“And as for exit?” Eve said under her breath.
“We have an escape route,” Bastian said, slowing his pace for just a tick. “Hold up our FBI IDs and walk her out the front.”
“This is not gonna be subtle,” Parks said in a gravelly whisper.
“More subtle than having Eve fly her out a window,” Bastian replied. “Let’s go.”
Reed and I split from them, Clary and Parks making their way to the front desk while Eve and Bastian made for the nearest staircase. I cut across the courtyard, making my way toward open-air stairs built into the far corner.
“Couldn’t he have assigned us the elevator?” Reed asked.
“Precautionary,” I said. “What if today is the day the elevator breaks down while we’re in it? Control is the name of the game, and you want to retain all the control over the situation you can at a moment like this, even if it’s avoiding an astronomically small risk like elevator failure.”
“What about spraining an ankle taking eleven flights of stairs?” Reed asked with a smile. “What’s the risk on that?”
“You know, that’s probably not a bad point, if you were a clutz. We’re metas. We make Olympic gymnasts look clumsy by comparison.”
We took a couple rounds of stairs without speaking. Reed broke the silence. “How come I’ve never seen Bastian use his power?”
“You see him use his meta strength,” I said, trying to outpace my brother but not make it look like I was.