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  “Yeah, I think so too.” Scott’s shoulders slumped again, and the next bullet he tried to put into the magazine went easier. “Where do you think she took her? Your mom, I mean—”

  “I don’t know. I mean, we’re talking about a woman who locked me in a box one day and disappeared, not to return for six months.” I felt a tightness in my chest, a burning near my eyes, and I hated myself for it. “She’s not exactly predictable, you know? I mean, I kinda thought she was dead until she showed up and kicked my Aunt Charlie’s ass.”

  “You thought she was dead?” He turned away again. “And that didn’t bother you?” His head tilted sideways to look at me.

  I felt irritation rising, but was detached enough to realize it had little to do with Scott. “See above, re: locking me in a box and disappearing without warning or a trace. Not exactly behavior designed to build a warm and fluffy relationship with your offspring. She left me, Scott. To die, or to manifest and break out; either way, she left me to be picked off by Wolfe, and lucky for me the Directorate came along or who knows what Omega would be doing to me right now—”

  “Huh.” He picked up another silhouette target and hung it, his fingers exercising more care with the clips that held it in place than they had with loading the bullets. “If she just…left you to Wolfe and you’re her daughter, what do you think she’s doing to Kat right now?” He held the switch and the motor buzzed, sending the hangar zipping downrange, the target fluttering along with it. “Kat doesn’t have anybody else,” he said, and his eyes came up, and I caught the hint of violence within, the stir beneath the surface, threatening to boil out. “No one else to care if she were to disappear. Or die.”

  He turned, pointing the gun downrange, and I slapped my muffs back on as he began to fire. I heard every shot, each one a declaration of intent, the target a silent, black and white stand-in for my mother, each blast of primer and powder a small explosion of his rage blooming forth from the barrel of the gun. I turned my face away, as though I couldn’t handle the spectacle of him shooting at the target that was my mother by proxy.

  I could hear the click after the last of the bullets was spent, and I looked up at the target, still whole, not a single perforation in the silhouette. He stood there, unblinking, a sort of disbelief visible behind the clear plastic of his protective eyewear. He stared, his mouth slightly open for a moment before I saw the physical reaction break down his cold resolve. “Son of a…” he said, and I had to stifle the deep desire to laugh. “Dammit,” he said, the timbre of his voice rising, and he threw the gun downrange where it clipped the bottom of the target, ripping it on the corner with the force of the throw. The gun continued, his meta strength carrying it all the way to the wall.

  His hand came up again, and he extended a single finger. The air rippled around him, and a blast of water came out, focused, small, the size of a roll of pennies, and shot downrange. It impacted in the center of the target’s blank-white face, ripping a hole through the middle of it as though one of his bullets had hit the target. The splash of the water against the concrete wall in the distance was audible. His other hand came up and a broader blast of water followed, one that tore the target from the hangar and left it a sopping mess on the floor.

  Scott turned back to me, his face twisted, breathing heavy, as though he had exerted everything. Without saying anything else, he walked to the stairs and left. I looked back to the range, where a thin trail of water stretched from the counter to the where the destroyed target lay and threaded off into the distance behind it.

  Chapter 8

  I left the range shortly thereafter, leaving Parks with nothing but a friendly nod and a wave. I crossed the hall to the training room, an open space with a wall holding every imaginable kind of weapon, from the eskrima sticks that had brought me so much joy over the years, to sickles, scythes, bo staffs, and a full range of swords. There were a half-dozen excellent katanas, and I chose one that I had practiced with before, and began a kata – a series of regimented martial arts moves rendered in sequence – that utilized the sword.

  I was graceful, I was elegant, I was lethal. I watched myself in the long wall of mirrors opposite the door and the glass windows that allowed people walking down the hallway to look in and see what I was doing. I suppose I would have cared if the building got more traffic. M-Squad would pop in and out infrequently, maybe once a week, doing their own thing, but most of the time they stuck to their own floor in the dorms, which was on the other side of the campus. Except Parks. He was here constantly. A way of life.

  Otherwise, it was Scott, Kat and myself. Sometimes agents or other Directorate employees would come to the gun range to practice their firearms skills. I think the agents had to do a certain amount of practice per week as a part of their jobs, because I always tended to see them on the range on Monday morning. After that, it was pretty quiet.

  Though after the last week, and the slaughter of so many of those agents by Omega, I guessed it was going to be quiet around here for a while, until they restaffed. If they restaffed.

  I went through a kata I had done about a million and a half times before. Mom taught me dozens of them, in the basement, and most of them were interchangeable in terms of the weapon you could use – or no weapon at all. The katana was light and well-balanced enough for me to use it one-handed. I still struck with my other hand as a fist, practicing as if to pretend my primary hand, the one without the sword, were striking to stun, to distract, and then the blade followed up. You didn’t use a blade unless you were ready to kill. Although you could wound with one, it was uncertain, and better not to take a chance with anything you didn’t want dead. Mom taught me that. A blade raised in anger is for killing, nothing else.

  I moved gracefully through the kata to the end and stopped, the blade poised. I stood there, sword at full extension, holding my position, and looked to the mirror to check my technique, which was flawless. It should be. I’d practiced it twenty times a week since I was twelve, with and without weapons. Even now, outside of my mother’s influence, I found it to be the habit I couldn’t break, the remnant of the past that kept coming back, even though she had disappeared. It stayed with me, and after Scott, Kat and Parks had all called it a day, I kept coming back here, to this place, and practicing, as though it were something that was so ingrained that it was in my core and couldn’t be shed, like a second skin hiding beneath my first.

  “Very nice,” came the voice from the door. I hadn’t heard it open, which was unusual, but then the man standing there with his arms folded was the disarming sort anyway, the type that I wouldn’t have felt threatened by even if I’d seen him coming. He’d earned enough of my trust that I wouldn’t have jumped like a scared cat; anyone else catching me in the middle of a form unexpectedly might have (would have) gotten a much different reaction.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” I said, and wiped my forehead, my long sleeve catching the sweat that had begun to bead there. The practice room was actually quite comfortable, but my practice was exerting – every strike, block and attack was practiced at full tilt, nothing held back, but with all discipline and control. When I strung several katas together in sequence it became very good exercise, if I didn’t take a break in between. I looked at the clock hanging over the door and realized I had been practicing for over an hour. “And it’s not that easy to sneak up on me, so my congratulations.”

  “I don’t think I can claim much credit for that,” Dr. Zollers said, the irony bleeding through into his words. “The building could have been burning down around you and I doubt you would have noticed.”

  “Those are the things I tend to perceive,” I said, finding my way back to the far wall and replacing the katana on the pegs that waited for it. The curved blade fitted perfectly into the scabbard and I hung it back where it belonged after wiping the sweat off the handle. “You know, black smoke billowing around the ceiling, heat spiking to uncomfortable levels, flames all around.” I turned to find him unmoved, still s
tanding by the door, relaxed. “Unthreatening psychiatrists in sweater vests don’t tend to set off my smoke detectors.”

  “Ah,” he said with a subtle nod. “Next time I’ll set the room ablaze to get your attention. Or would that be too subtle?”

  “There’s not too much subtlety to burning down a room, no,” I said, and wiped my face again. I craved water now that I had stopped moving. The dryness in my mouth caused my lips to smack together as though they were chapped. The cool air of the AC had also started to chill me now that I was done, the sheen of sweat around my skin getting cold as the air conditioner fought against the hot summer temperatures outside. “There’s probably an easier way to get my attention if you’re after it.”

  “Something like saying, ‘Come to my office the minute you get out of the medical unit’? Something gentle, but that communicates the urgency of the situation – which is that you, young lady, are required by your employers to go through post-stress debriefing to talk through your recent mission.” He shook his head, almost like a tic, and went on. “Something that conveys that there’s worry about the fact that you got pummeled, shot, beaten, lost a teammate, watched a girl die, and had an Omega lackey pull a fast one on you.” His features tightened. “Maybe I really should have lit the room on fire, because that stuff all sounds kind of dire and in need of being discussed.”

  “It will be discussed,” I said, biting my lower lip. “You heard Ariadne. It’ll be discussed, sifted, pulled apart, probed – you get the picture,” I said, restraining emotion again. “I’ll be talking about it with their investigator.”

  “Sure,” he said, halting a few steps away from me. If it had been anyone else, I might have flinched internally at their approach. I wouldn’t show weakness by doing it physically, but it’d be there in my reaction. “You’ll discuss the cold, dry details of the whole thing, over and over,” he said, “poring over all the insignificancies you’ve probably forgotten, all the questions asked that need to be answered – all that,” he said. “But you know what you won’t talk about? How you feel.”

  “Feelings?” I asked with the hint of a smile. “I think you might be talking to the wrong girl. After all, I know they have some uncharitable names for me out there,” I said, waving my hand in the direction of the outside, Directorate world. “Most don’t think I have any of those.”

  “Who?” he asked, serious. “Who do you think talks about you that way?”

  “The agents,” I said. “The ones still alive, anyways. The metas, the ones who aren’t in training. The rank and file. The administrators at HQ.” I shrugged. “Eve Kappler. Everybody, just about.”

  “You think so?” He didn’t deny it. “Got a persecution complex?”

  “No,” I said. “Just good hearing. I’m sure it’ll be worse now.”

  Zollers frowned. “Why now?”

  “Because it was my mom,” I said, wearing a plastered, Cheshire cat-like smile. “Kat was like…the popular cheerleader on campus. Everybody liked her. My mother kidnapped her, and the rumor mill will go wild with speculation that I was involved, or that somehow it’s my fault—”

  “You may be leaping a bit far, there,” he said. “The news that Kat’s been taken by your mother hasn’t even spread yet. And the people that do know – Ariadne, Director Winter, Scott – none of them believe that you’re involved in any way.”

  “Oh?” I asked, still wearing that stupid smile. “How do you know for sure?”

  He gave me a look, something between deep thought and rolling his eyes. “I just know. I’m supposed to not only know the people of the Directorate through little chat sessions like we’re having here,” he flicked his finger to point at me, then him, “but to get a pulse for the morale of the whole organization. So I’ve got the pulse, and here’s where it is: those who know Kat’s gone are worried about her. They don’t think you were involved in your mom’s plans in any way. Hasn’t crossed their minds.”

  “And the rumors?” I asked, blood still cold. “Because when they find out the ‘who’ of it, they’re going to make assumptions.” I smiled again, but it was still fake. “And that’ll be fun. It’s been months since I’ve been truly hated around here.”

  “You may be overthinking it,” he said with a steely calm that I didn’t quite believe.

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “So, you want to talk feelings? Can we do it some other time, or does it have to be now?”

  “We don’t have to do it all now,” he said, and I thought maybe I’d get off the hook easy. “But I have a few questions for you. Doesn’t make sense to walk all the way back to my office, though, so we can do it here, if you’d like.”

  “Sure,” I said with excessive pep. “Let’s get it done.”

  “Your aunt?” He stared at me with those shrewd eyes, and I wondered if Scott had told him, or if he’d found out secondhand through Ariadne. “Charlie, I believe her name was? She betrayed you?”

  I licked my chapped lips and smiled, a little manic at the thought, probably a defense against the real emotion underneath. “Yep, she did. Big surprise, huh?”

  “I’m guessing it was for you,” Zollers said, and there was warmth in it. “Am I wrong?”

  “Nope,” I said, keeping it succinct and overly zesty. “You’re not wrong. It was a big honking surprise. She saved my life from James – the Omega operative – and then she turned on me in about three shakes, when I started to put together some things.”

  “Some things?” he asked. “You mean about who she really was?”

  I nodded and unbound my hair from the tight ponytail I had it in, stuck the hair tie in my mouth and bit down on it while I redid my ponytail. “That’s right. About how she was a crazy psycho who would drain men for the fun of it, for the rush, or to get money or information. Sounded like she must have killed quite a few people. Just like James, actually,” I said with a little thought, and that allowed me to skirt the edge of a really big emotion that burned inside – betrayal.

  “Tell me about James,” he said. “What happened?”

  “He tried to kill me,” I said, with a great, exaggerated shrug of my shoulders. “Not much else to tell.”

  “Before that,” he said, not letting it go, but doing so gently. “You broke up with Zack?”

  “That a matter of public record?” I turned away.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I got the gist of it from him when I talked to him in the medical unit. What happened?”

  “What always happens,” I said, walking back to the wall of weapons and admiring my distorted reflection in the blade of a curved sickle. “Things fall apart.”

  “What a classical answer,” he said, and I caught snark. “But when that happens, it’s because the center cannot hold, right?”

  “You an English major or a psychiatrist?” I flashed him a sharp smile, like the reaper I had just turned away from.

  “Maybe I’m both,” he said. “Don’t change the subject. You broke up with him. Why?”

  “Because it was going nowhere.” I took a deep breath, tried to use it to give myself a chance to think for a second. “Because there is no next level of relationship for Zack and me,” I said. “And that matters.”

  “To whom?” he asked, polite. His hands were tucked behind him, his weight on one leg, totally casual.

  “To the guy who stocks the vending machines around the campus,” I said with snark of my own. “Do I really have to answer obvious questions?”

  “You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to,” he said without expression. “But you should maybe try, because I don’t think the answer is as obvious as you think.”

  “It matters to me,” I said coolly. “It matters to Zack.”

  “How much does it matter to you?”

  “A lot,” I said. “I’m not a nun, okay? I’m not super excited about spending my life close to a man and never being able to sleep with him. It…is desperately unsatisfying.”

  “So you pushed him away?” Rele
ntless. Driving.

  “Sure,” I said, and went back to inspecting a pair of sais hung next to the sickle. I saw him in the reflection this time, not me.

  “Because if you can’t be wholly satisfied, why be with someone?”

  “Because maybe I’d keep him from being happy with someone else,” I answered, and ran my finger down the blade. It was deceptive, and I cut myself, a little line in the flesh of my index finger that filled with blood, pooling at the end of the cut, turning into a droplet. I turned to look at him again. “Because maybe I’m sick of this false closeness, this feeling of everything-but-intimacy.”

  “Is sex your definition of giving your all?” There was genuine curiosity in his returned gaze.

  I looked back to the blood on my finger, as it traced a line to my palm and began to gather there. “No.”

  “You were going to have sex with James, weren’t you?” He held his distance, about twenty feet between us, and I stared at the blood gathering in my palm. “Would you have considered that giving him your all?”

  “No,” I said. “I would have considered it…” I felt a sting. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have considered it. Expedient, maybe.”

  “It would be expedient to sleep with a man you didn’t really know, just because you could?”

  I didn’t hear any judgment from him, but there was worlds of it in my head. “Right after I broke up with my boyfriend, you mean?” I didn’t whirl at him; I kept composed. “Not even twenty-four hours later? What you must think of me.”

  “I don’t think anything bad of you,” he said, soothing.

  “How can you not?” I asked, and laughed just a little, but again, manic. I felt the first stutter of emotion I’d been holding back since before I’d seen Andromeda bleeding, the red circle radiating out on her chest. “I am death. I get people killed, Doc. I couldn’t stand that I couldn’t be close to my boyfriend, so I pushed him away, broke up with him, then I went to a bar that very night, got drunk, and would have slept with a man who worked for the enemy, because I could.” I said it with gusto, almost relishing the buildup of torturous emotion, like I was enjoying thrusting a knife into my own midsection and savoring the twist. “If Kat hadn’t stopped me, I would have. And after that, my aunt betrayed me, my mother left me – again! And I got another person killed.” I pictured Andromeda’s youthful face, her wet and tangled hair, as she’d looked when I held her, as she died. She wasn’t any older than I was. I broke into a laugh that turned into a half-sob. “How can you not think awful things of me? My own mother…” I felt my face twist. “She didn’t take me with her.”