He raised an eyebrow at me, then looked at the fallen form of Hannegan, lying prostrate in the glass partition between the doors that led out of the dormitory. “He’s kind of a big guy.”
“What, you haven’t manifested yet?” I said, drawing an ire-filled look. “I just saved your life, remember?”
I caught subtlety from him, and saw that confidence again. “Maybe someday I’ll repay the favor,” he said as he made for Hannegan, stepping gingerly out of the broken glass hole that Hannegan’s body had made when Bjorn had thrown it out the window. We fled, Harding and I following the last of the kids out of the dormitory and reaching a safe distance of about a hundred yards away as the building burst into a ball of fire. The force of the explosion threw me off my feet, sending Bjorn to the ground and me ass over teakettle into a bed of leaves.
I looked up at the orange glow all around me, saw the chill of my breath fog the air, felt the pains in my body—shoulder, back, ribs. I could smell the acrid smoke of all the destruction wrought, could almost taste the stench in the air, the oily, chemical flame smell from the campus burning—my home. I tilted my head in time to watch the headquarters go up in a blast of flame and force, the biggest explosion of the night. I felt a quiver in the ground, and I wondered where Zack was, where Old Man Winter and Ariadne were—where M-Squad was.
“You okay?” Harding spoke from above me, still holding Kurt on his shoulders, hands anchored to Hannegan’s back and pants leg.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, forcing myself to sit up and clutching my shoulder to me. “You take Hannegan and the others and get to the woods. Get off campus. Do what I told Hannegan to do and find a way out of here.”
He stared back at me through the glasses, and he looked unbowed, cool. More than I felt, that was for sure. “Come with me.”
“Can’t do that,” I said, and I stood, feeling like a zombie coming back to life. I saw the others that were with us, the kids, saw them all recovering from the force of the explosion; it looked like almost every one of them had been knocked off their feet as well. “There’s only a few of you; get to safety. Get a headcount, move together, and I’ll be along in a little bit, once I finish searching for survivors.”
He watched me carefully. “Looking for your boyfriend?”
I sighed. “Among others.” I couldn’t see much motion through the smoke and shadows that now filled the once-peaceful, tree=lined campus. “Get ‘em out of here, Joshua. Keep them safe.”
He shrugged, no mean feat with Hannegan on his shoulders. “I’ll get ‘em out of here. But I’m going my own way once they’re clear. I’ve got things to do.”
I shook my head, in no mood to argue. “Fine. Whatever. Thanks for your help.”
“So long, Sienna,” he said, carrying Kurt on his shoulders and waving to the others as I watched them fall in behind him in a sort of procession, the flickering flames of our campus lighting their passage through the smoke and destruction—their passage through hell. “I’ll see you again.”
“Why do I not doubt that?” I asked as the last of them disappeared into the smoke being blown from the dormitory fire. I heard a moan from Bjorn and I stomped on his face out of pure pique. The moaning stopped, and I stood there for a long moment, staring at the dormitory—and the wreckage of my life.
26.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned, my hands raised defensively, then I relaxed. “Geez. Give a girl a heart attack.”
“Are you all right?” Bastian was at the lead, Clary and Parks a few steps behind him. I caught the glint of light off Eve Kappler’s wings as she descended to land nearby. At the rear of the procession, Zack was walking in front of Old Man Winter and Ariadne, who was holding her side, her gray suit darkened by blood coming from her nose and beneath her ribs.
“I’m fine,” I said, holding my shoulder. “I sent the kids out of here so I could go look for you all.”
“You left them undefended?” Parks said, pushing past Bastian to stand only a foot from me.
“They’ll be fine,” I said, “Omega wasn’t here for them. Nor for any of us, really. Not to kill, anyway.”
Bastian looked me over while Parks spoke. “Oh, yeah. And you look like hell because they weren’t here to kill anyone.”
“They weren’t,” I said, letting my eyes fall off Zack and back to the fire. The relief coursed through me that he was safe, and I watched the dormitory burn.
“You let them escape,” Old Man Winter said in the low rumble, speaking over the crackle of the flames.
“I stopped Bjorn here,” I said and gave Bjorn a gentle kick to the trapezoid. I squinted and looked to him. “How did you know I let them go?”
“I saw,” Ariadne said, clutching her side. “On the security monitor.”
“Thanks. I didn’t need any help or anything,” I said acerbically.
“You wouldn’t have gotten any from us,” Ariadne said, her voice straining. “ I was watching. The rest of them were fending off about thirty metas that didn’t act at all like they weren’t here to kill. Pretty damned far from it, I would say.”
Old Man Winter walked to where Bjorn lay and lifted him up by the head and neck, Bjorn’s unconscious bulk hanging limp in his hands. “Janus deceived you. He likely sent Bjorn back to retrieve you.”
“Maybe,” I said, and the smoke made my eyes burn as I turned back to them. “I don’t think so, though. They’re worried about something else, something worse.”
“They are right to worry,” Old Man Winter said, shaking Bjorn like a puppet in his grasp. “Do you know what this storm is that is coming? Do you know how it will affect us, our people?”
“Since you haven’t told us anything about it, no.” I folded my arms. “Only what Janus said. It’s tied to the exterminations.”
“You have no idea because you are not ready,” he said, countenance darkening, “because you would not know the enemy if you saw it, this destruction that creeps toward us, wiping out metas continent by continent. If it presented itself to your very face, to you, and you recognized it for what it was, you would still fail to stop it because you are unwilling to do what is necessary—to kill when you confront evil.”
I felt myself redden in the heat of the fire. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, feeling myself fade, as though I could slip into the darkness and away from the ire of Old Man Winter, who was losing his chill rapidly and more obviously than even the time I’d seen him face Wolfe. “Maybe this isn’t for me, the fight, the battle; I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t want to be responsible—”
“Unfortunately,” Old Man Winter said, tugging on Bjorn, letting him hang in front of me, “that is not an option. I know what waits at the head of the organization—they are called Century , by the way, since you want to know what I know—and I know that you, and you alone, are the only one that stands a chance—a hope in hell—of stopping them.”
“How do you even know that?” I asked, feeling ruthless, cynical, angry. “You didn’t know who I was a year ago! You didn’t know I existed! You couldn’t even figure out what Omega is up to! How do you presume to tell me what some black box organization that sounds like a movie production company is up to a world away?”
“Because I know who heads them,” he said, and there was a rattle in his voice, “and I have feared him since he crippled me over a hundred years ago. He is without a doubt the most powerful meta on the face of the earth, and with one hundred followers—some of the strongest metas on the planet—he has assembled an army that is wiping us out, piecemeal. They burned through the compounds in India and China because they were the easiest, but even now they have split, divided their forces and run rampant through Asia and Africa, slaughtering whole cloisters of metas. Next will be Europe, and finally…” His eyes turned grim. “You are the only one who can stop him—and by extension, them. You must be willing to do what it takes—to kill him, because you, yourself, will be the only one with a chance.”