He was cool when he answered, slick, and it came out easy. “Does she look like a fool?”
I bit back the obvious, stupid, fashion-oriented reply and also the one where I told him what he looked like. “You’re not gonna ask me if I’m a traitor point blank and get it out of the way?” I felt my lip quiver and I hated myself almost as much as I hated him.
“If you’re really spying on the Directorate,” he said with the same smirk, “you’d just lie.”
“Do I look like I’m in a fit state to lie right now?” I let the doubt slip into it, and my words came out hushed, bursting with all the emotion I was trying to cram down, the burning in my eyes and my throat.
“You look like someone in far, far over her head, Ms. Nealon,” he answered. “I don’t know if that makes you someone who would betray your employer or not.” He didn’t smile now. “But I will tell you this: you are being watched. Every hour of every day. If you are, in fact, working with Omega, or with your mother, I will find out. It’s what I do.” He believed every word he said. He leaned over again, grasping the chair in front of him, and the smile came back. “And I’m very, very good at what I do.”
Chapter 10
The silence was pervasive as I left headquarters. I had been in the room with Mormont for longer than I thought; the sun, which had been overhead when I left the training facility, was now dipping lower in the sky. In Minnesota, in the middle of summer, it would not set until near nine o’clock tonight, but the shadows were growing long, though it was still hot.
My feet carried me out the front door and I realized not for the first time that I was covered in sweat; some dried, more fresh than should have been possible in an air-conditioned space like I had been in. My legs seemed to work only mechanically, each step sending mild shocks through my body as I slouched my way out the door. I was a mess, I knew it.
A hot breath of wind blew past that felt as though it had been warmed over the heat element of an oven. Even still, it was not enough to drag me out of my fearful, lethargic shuffle. I looked left and right, feeling more like a broken person than I could ever have wanted to admit to.
I didn’t go back toward the dormitory, which surprised me. My feet carried me, taking a concrete path that went in the other direction, toward the woods that ringed the campus. I left the path as I neared the trees, not wanting to go back to my little room, with the little bed and little space provided by the people who now suspected me of betraying them. I felt a flash of anger – a HOW DARE THEY sort of indignation that fizzled a moment later. Of course they thought I was betraying them. My mother kidnapped one of their agents. I came within a few inches of sleeping with a man who works with an organization killing their people – our people. I’d think I was a traitor, too.
My steps carried me into the woods, past the start of the treeline. The sun cast shadows of the tree trunks in angled parallel lines on the pine needle-covered floor of the woods. Small green shrubs sprouted every few feet, but unpaved paths were cut through the woods for the Directorate staff to walk if they so desired, worn down by the tread of countless feet. Some of the meta kids, the teenagers who sheltered here, would sneak out on these trails for something they weren’t allowed to do in the dorms. I wondered why I’d never been warned against it, and realized that they’d always treated me with kid gloves compared to the other metas, even the kids. Was that just because I was so powerful they were desperate to keep me, or was there something else in play?
I went on, into the woods, deeper as the space around the path grew more unkempt and less trod. Trampled brown-orange pine needles were everywhere, the dull gray dirt and sands beneath it holding me up to keep me from falling through the earth – which is how I felt. Like I would collapse and be swallowed up by the earth, and that the sky would fall down upon me and drive me through it. I’d failed, completely, in everything. I had been ridiculously irresponsible on the mission, had compromised us to Omega. Even if I hadn’t gotten our agents killed in the field I had almost certainly been responsible for James allowing Omega to be positioned to kill Andromeda after her escape.
Andromeda. I felt my knees give out when I thought of her. There was something so different about her, and not just because she had been imprisoned in some bizarre containment cylinder that wasn’t unlike the box I was intimately familiar with. There was something in her manner, so different, so alien, that reminded me of someone that didn’t have a lot of social experiences. I could relate. Her powers may have made her different; her odd ability to read others would have made them nervous. She might have been an outcast. Like me.
My gloved hand was on the ground, holding me up as I lay there on my knees. I could feel the emotions racking my body, threatening to escape with violent force, and I tried to suppress them. I wanted to be strong, but I felt my limit, and it was miles back. I had screwed everything up. I imagined Zack’s face, the only man I knew who had ever really cared about me, and remembered the look I’d seen on him in the medical unit – the hurt, the betrayal. Zollers had nailed it: I was the center, whether I wanted to be or not, and I had failed to hold, and everything was falling apart around me. The Directorate had entrusted me with a great responsibility and I had screwed it up completely.
I dragged myself to a nearby tree and put my back against it. I felt weak, barely holding back the raging tide of emotion that was threatening to wreck me. There were other things weighing on my mind, obviously – I didn’t need Zollers to tell me that I had deep, unresolved mommy issues. I blinked my eyes tightly, squinted them shut. I leaned my head against the rough bark, felt the knots and grooves of it bite into the back of my skull. Part of me wanted to push back harder, like I did with everything else except my interrogation, apparently. “Why?” I whispered.
“Why what?” came a sharp voice that caused my eyes to shoot open in surprise. I blinked, twice, to be sure I was seeing what I thought I saw, and not some stress-based delusion. My mother stood before me, her hair back in a ponytail like my own, her face frozen in utter disdain. She stood only feet from me, no gloves, but a business suit and makeup giving her a drastically different look than when I had last seen her. “You’re sitting out here, exposed, with your eyes closed.” She looked at me with a narrowed gaze of her own. “You’re oblivious to the world around you – you didn’t even hear me approach you from behind. If I’d been an enemy, you’d be dead.” She maintained her distance.
“What…” I looked around, as though hoping someone else was seeing what I saw. “Are you…really here?”
She rolled her eyes so hard her entire head bobbed as she looked up and over, as though she were following the path of an imaginary fly ball going over her. “Please tell me it’s the drugs they have you on that are making you this dumb. I never trained you to be this undisciplined, this STUPID about your personal safety.” She squinted at me. “Where’s Andromeda?”
I blinked at her, again. “Wh…Andromeda? You’re…not here for me?”
This time she bowed her head in deep annoyance. “I realize I can’t punish you the way I used to, but could you at least…do me the courtesy…of answering my question.” She strained at the last, the final part of her sentence coming out in a low, growling bark.
“She’s dead,” I said, whispering again. “They killed her. Omega killed her.”
“What?” My mother’s staid expression, perpetually ready to display annoyance as her sole emotion, broke and her eyes widened in shock. “They couldn’t have killed her – they wouldn’t have—”
“They did,” I said, soft, the emotion drying me out, taking away my sarcasm. “One of their soldiers shot her, and would have shot me if not for—”