21.
The day goes slow, agonizingly so , Janus thought, even with the unexpected pleasure of company . “This is how it always was before the big moves, the big operations,” he said. “Time slows to a ticking of the second hand, when you want it to speed up. Waiting is interminable, acting is preferable, but patience is all there is at this point. This waiting will be the death of me. Thousands of years of life, and I’ll die waiting.” The old man’s smile crested on his face, then receded. “I suppose that’s what we all do, though, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” came the soft voice of the female who had slept in his bed last night. “I haven’t died yet.”
“I’ve seen enough of it, you know?” He let the words tick out, spill out. “Seen it from humans, seen it from our kind. No one really faces death any differently. No one is ready when it comes, not really. You can go in your sleep, I suppose, and it won’t distress you like the other kind does—in your face, obvious, looming. But if you’re awake?” He held up his hands. “I’ve never seen anyone go gracefully awake. Not if they know it’s coming, anyway.” He turned his head to look at her, the blond curls, her smooth curves and unblemished skin. “How did your brother take it, when he went?”
A shrug. Tanned skin hiding up to the waist under the blanket. “Gracefully. I don’t know if he knew what he was in for, at least not at first. Maybe at the end, though.”
“He wanted it to be over, didn’t he?” Janus stared out the gap in the curtains. “I spoke to him, you know, before he went to the Andes. He was a man slipping, obsessed, trying to get hold of whatever was left for him, focused on one thing and that only.” He looked back at her again. He’d seen a million like her in his life, perhaps more, yet had never lost his appetite for them. Blonds. Brunettes. Redheads. Yes, please. The younger the better, though at a century, this one is older than my usual taste…and yet delicious nonetheless .
“I’m not all that worried about him now.” She shook loose the sheets that gently entangled her, exposing herself to him totally, as she made her way across the dim, cheap, thin carpeting of the motel, away from the comforter and bedspread. “I wasn’t then, either.”
“That is because you could not remember him before.” Janus felt in his pocket for the cigarettes he hadn’t carried in over forty years, the things he had quit. “You watched him die and you had no memory of who he was.”
“Still don’t,” the voice came, empty. “I mean, I see it, now, like I see so many other things-like a movie on a screen, but there’s no texture, no emotion, no caring.” She shrugged her bared shoulders and made a mischievous smile. “I doubt he knew that you had been keeping me as your woman while you were trying to bring back my memory.”
Janus shrugged, and felt her hand run across his shoulder, felt the touch of youth and energy in it. “I doubt he would have cared, so long as he got you back. But, oddly, I didn’t hear you complain. In fact, I believe it was you who initiated…”
“It was,” she said, and kissed him. What a bawdy old man am I , Janus thought. Anyone who saw the two of us in here would know instantly what to think, a thousand judgmental thoughts—and every one would be right. Old man, young girl . A laugh sounded in his head.
“Careful,” he said, and tugged away from her, feeling her touch against the cloth of his suit.
“Still worried about me?” she asked, with a twinkle in her eye that warmed his…well, not his heart, that was for certain.
“Not you,” he said. “I believe you, I see the truth and heart of you. Still skeptical, though, if you’ll forgive me. Erich Winter is no fool, and although it delights me to see you, dear girl, and overjoys me to have you in my bed once more, I must ask…do you know why you are here?”
“Because you found me,” she said, and he saw the coyness. “Because I remember now.”
“Oh?” He seated himself in the chair by the window, an old, red one with gold tones in the threads, worn by time and age and people sitting in it. “What do you remember?”
“I remember why,” she said, kneeling down and resting her chin on his knee. “Why Omega. Why I was with you. Why I lost my memory. For a good cause , of course,” she added.
“Of course.” He took a deep breath and reached for the water in the little plastic opaque cup he’d left on the end table by the bed. “I always wondered if the next time you lost your memory, the serum we gave you would work. It was always experimental, you know, but supposed to keep everything there, a layer under the surface, so that when the life drained out of you from overuse of your powers—your good heart, you never could keep from using too much of yourself—it’d be like shuffling your personality to the bottom of the deck. And now, back to the top again.” He took a sip of water, felt it roll around on his tongue, cleanse his palate. “Back to yourself.”
“I know who I am now,” she said.
“Of course you do, my dear,” he said, “but you were never in doubt, given the time to come back to us. It’s her we need to talk about now.” A slight sigh came from the slender girl, and he felt the press of more weight upon his leg. “Now, now, don’t be jealous. I’m only here to help her in her…transition. As I helped you, once.” He looked down into her green eyes. “Come now, Klementina, this is such an unexpected and fortuitous thing, having you call us as you did, having you escape the Directorate as you did now, at this time. Surely, if it is as you say, and you remember why you worked with us in the past, things have not changed for you…have they?”
She lay her head sideways upon his knee and sighed again. “No. I haven’t forgotten. And I understand she’s important, but—”
“No buts,” Janus said. “She is important. You need not understand all of it, but know that she is just as important as the last one. This whole operation, the entirety of Stanchion, it was for her.” He held up a hand to forestall argument when he saw the lips purse, the cheeks redden, the whole face turn pouty. “Listen. Stanchion was first priority, but don’t think that it was my only concern. I would have done right by you. We would have accomplished our mission,” he checked his watch, “which we still will, and thank you, my dear, for making this interminable wait so much more bearable by coming back to me. But we would have done it all—put the Directorate out of the picture, placed Sienna Nealon just where we wanted her, and we would have extracted you at the same time, brought you back to yourself, dispensed with that ridiculous identity you’ve taken on, this—Katrina Forrest that you had become—”
“Kat,” she said, her naked body pressed against the leg of his pants, almost wrapped around it like a coiled snake, the green in her eyes flashing with the light of the motel sign. “They called me Kat.”
22.
I lay in my bed, alone, as the shadows crept across the floor again. It was quiet. I wouldn’t say too quiet, because I knew it was nearing nightfall and the admin staff had been absent all day, but it was definitely not the Directorate I was used to. Any of the meta kids who had tenable home situations had been shuffled back to their parents or relatives. Most of them lived in small towns, dedicated meta communities anyway, so the cloisters would be better protection for them than the campus at this point. It was a calculated risk, but it didn’t seem likely that Omega would be interested in tracking down meta kids when the Directorate was their primary enemy. Only the orphans remained here on campus with the rest of us.
A pall had settled over the place; it was starting to look abandoned, the falling leaves taking over the campus in volume and numbers that hadn’t been a problem back when we had a grounds crew. The whole place seemed empty without most of the people, even though I didn’t associate with almost any of them. It was worse knowing Reed and Scott were gone. I thought about visiting Kat and dismissed the idea as patronizing, as though I were trying to force some sort of empathy out that I didn’t really feel.