“So it was Mormont all along,” Ariadne said, facing the window and staring out. Old Man Winter watched me, his fingers interlaced in front of his face, blocking his mouth. He had returned during the night. “The best way to spy is to be in charge of catching them, I suppose.” Ariadne turned from the window and crossed to the desk to stand behind Old Man Winter.
“It was,” I said. “Pretty clever, if you’re into devious schemes. He plants evidence in my room, sics the vamps on us, gets Andromeda killed—” I frowned at the last, as something wasn’t sitting well with me on that one, but I dismissed it.
“He wasn’t too kind to you,” Ariadne reflected. “Are you sorry to see him dead?”
I felt a flash of regret as I imagined him bleeding, lying on the floor of the practice room. “A little relieved I didn’t have to do it myself, I guess.”
Old Man Winter raised an eyebrow at that, but Ariadne nodded. “You’ll need to go to Dr. Zollers at some point over the next few days—”
“For a de-stressing, yeah,” I said with a casual shake of my shoulders. “I know. I’ll schedule it. I’m okay, though, really.”
Ariadne’s eyes shuffled downward. “We haven’t talked about the fact that you spent some time in a cell at our behest recently.”
“Yeah.” I felt myself tense. “Pretty sure that’s some sort of OSHA violation.”
“Agreed,” Ariadne said, and raised her head. “But we’d like to…try to make it up to you.”
I smirked. “Why? Are you afraid I’d sue you? It’s not my style, and the court case would be thrown out on the grounds that people with metahuman abilities are a totally ludicrous concept to any sane, normal person.”
“All the same,” she said, “we’re making a large deposit into your bank account with your next check as a minor effort at restitution. And you have our apologies.” She waited, as if holding her breath to see what I’d say.
I stared at her, then Old Man Winter. “Is that all?”
I caught a flash of surprise from her, a slight recoil. He, on the other hand, did not react visibly save for his hand, which went to a file laying on his desk, which he slid, very slowly, toward me, as though offering it. I reached out without breaking eye contact and slid it in front of me. I opened the folder and found a piece of paper, typed, the print set like a transcript. As my eyes slid down the page I leaned forward, taking in every detail, starting with the date at the top of the page. I furrowed my brow – it was the date I first came to the Directorate.
[Operator]: Carringer Institute, Minneapolis campus.
[unidentified female]: I need to – dammit [unintelligible] – I need to speak with Erich Winter.
[Operator]: I’m sorry, we don’t have anyone listed by that name—
[unidentified female]: Listen to me, I know he’s there, that you’re a cover for the Directorate. Get me Erich Winter. Tell him it’s an emergency, that if I don’t speak with him, a metahuman girl will die.
[Operator]: [pause] One moment, please.
[Winter]: Who am I speaking with?
[unidentified female]: You know who I am, Jotun. You’ve been looking for me for eighteen years.
[Winter]: [pause] Sierra.
[Sierra]: Looks like you’re still on top of your game, even a hundred-plus years after Peshtigo.
[Winter]: Why are you calling?
[Sierra]: My daughter. I have a daughter. She’s seventeen and Wolfe is after her. He’s closing in on her as we speak.
[Winter]: Why do you call me, then?
[Sierra]: Because I can’t stop him, dammit. Because I can’t get her away. [pause] But you can.
[Winter]: And she is—
[Sierra]: A meta, yes. She’s at 832 Hamilton Ave. in Minneapolis. She’s…locked in. She can’t get out. If he finds her first…
[Winter]: You expect me to throw my men into danger to save her?
[Sierra]: She’ll die if you don’t.
[Winter]: [pause] I will send agents immediately. If you are lying—
[Sierra]: I’m not.
[Winter]: We still have unfinished business, you and I.
[Sierra]: Not today, Winter. I’m not even in Minnesota anymore. You might want to hurry; you haven’t got much time.
[call ends]
I looked up, caught his frozen eyes again, boring into me. “She called you herself. That’s how you knew to send Kurt and Zack to get me.”
He nodded almost impercetibly. “She and I…have a somewhat tangled history after the Agency. To send you my way, her need must have been dire.”
I stiffened. “Or she just didn’t care at all. If you were…enemies, as it were, she put me into your open arms and never so much as checked to see if I was okay.”
“I don’t believe that is so,” he said, motionless.
“Yeah, well,” I shook my shoulders lightly, “you didn’t live with her as long as I did.” I blinked. “She mentioned something. Something coming, a crisis for metas. She called it a storm.”
Old Man Winter cocked his head and leaned forward for the first time since I had known him. “Interesting. Did she share any details of this…storm…with you?”
“Nothing specific,” I said with a shake of the head. “Just told me it would realign the world of metas, leave us in wreckage.”
He settled back into his chair, and Ariadne stared over his shoulder at me, intrigued. “That’s not foreboding at all,” she said with a frown.
“Sorry. All I’ve got.”
“All right,” Ariadne said. “Well…thank you for being so understanding…about everything. Is there…um…anything else you’d like to ask us, or…talk about?” She said it with such concern, I thought she was going to wilt in front of me.
“Nope,” I said lightly. “I think it’s time for me to get some breakfast, anyway.” I stood and looked at the two of them, and then at Ariadne, who actually was wearing a red blouse. “You look nice,” I told her. “You should wear color more often.”
She blinked at me. “Uhm. Thanks?”
“You’re welcome,” I said with a smile I felt through the totality of me and walked out, making my way through the rows of cubicles between me and the elevator. I passed the outline of a familiar head and paused in the middle of one of the rows, turning my head sideways to look at the back of a black muss of hair. “J.J.?” I asked, tilting to look at the cubicle dweller hunched over a computer.
He twisted at the waist to turn, his black glasses slipping down his nose as he looked up at me. “Oh. You. How’s it going?”
“Good,” I said, taking a step into his cubicle. “Did you have as much fun in confinement as I did?”
He blinked, a little dumbstruck. “Um. No. I was bored, man. I thought I was gonna lose it staring at those square walls.” He smiled. “Thanks for getting me out.”
I waved him off. “Wasn’t me. Mormont confessed in front of Zollers and everything; all we did was repeat his story for Ariadne and she was all forgive-y and stuff. Did she try and buy you off with money?”
He pushed his glasses up back to the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. When I saw how much it was I almost asked her to lock me up again…but I was afraid I’d never get the damned squares on the walls out of my head.” He straightened. “Do you know how many one foot by one foot squares there were in that place? S—”
“Six hundred,” I said, bored. “Yeah.” I caught sight of something on the monitor behind him. “Whatcha watching?”
He blushed. “Oh. Uh. That. Well, it’s—”
I stepped closer and saw security camera footage of the practice room. I tried to visualize where the camera would have been positioned in order to capture the scene from that angle, and realized I’d never seen any cameras in that room, nor in the Directorate in general. I stared. Mormont was front and center, one hand on the taser, leads still running to my mother, his other holding a gun pointed at me. Visible in the bottom left corner was me, kneeling next to Mom, and Doc Zollers was in the top right, almost ready to fire on Mormont.