Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9 (15 page)

… and was scared stiff of Century. Scared enough to kill himself rather than face their wrath.

“I see you’re coming to logical conclusions,” Zollers said.

“Get out of my head.” There was a quiet despair in the way I said it; even I could hear it.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Zollers said, still holding his distance. “It’s not something I can just turn off. The more forceful your thoughts, the more they jump out at me. And your thoughts, especially lately, are like shouts during a quiet night.”

“Why?” I asked. He looked … troubled. Which I would have been, were I him.

He sighed again. “Because I’m entirely too fond of you.” He shrugged, throwing his arms wide as if he couldn’t explain it away. “I’ve counseled more people in the course of my duties than … well, there were a lot. Why do you stick with me? Why do I keep finding myself prodding your mind even after we parted ways? If I said I don’t know, I’d be lying.”

He took a step closer to me. Arms reach. I bristled, unseen, but I knew he knew it. “You’re the only one who’s going to fight, Sienna. You and that senator on your side, you’re the only ones who would stand up and look Sovereign head-on and spit in his face.” His expression wavered. “For a long while after the last time we met, I feared I was going to die. For a while, I was given a reprieve by Sovereign himself. Then Weissman came after me and forced me to do his will.” He waved north, back the way we came. “After that, I knew I was going to die again. So, if I’m going to die—and it is almost certainly assured, regardless of whether you win or lose …” He smiled. “Then I might as well go out quickly, and fighting for something that matters, in the company of the only people who are actually going to fight.”

The prison site was a disaster area. Sand kicked up in the night wind and swirled to and fro, without any discernible pattern. I stood by the car and watched it go, a little tornado of dust caught in the headlights of the car. It was better than looking at the alternative.

The prison was a hole in the ground. I mean, I’d heard it was a hole in the ground from anyone who had ever described it to me, but that was semi-exaggeration. Built into the hollowed-out core of an old missile silo, the Directorate prison had originally had a building over it.

That was gone now. It looked like it had been corrugated metal at one point, like a warehouse. Pieces of it still remained, and the swirls of sand were playing over them. It might have been beautiful if it wasn’t another sign of the inevitable calamity heading our way.

“They didn’t really leave much, did they?” Scott asked. We were all standing by the car, ignoring the heat. I had a flashlight in one hand, my shotgun on a strap around my neck.

“Sure they did,” Zollers said dryly. “They left a lot of wreckage.”

“Helpful.”

“Well, I know you don’t just keep me around for my looks,” Zollers said. “Figure my observational skills are a nice icing on the cake.”

“Stow it, you two,” I said, steeling myself. I didn’t really want to descend into the earth. I could see the hole, and was hoping that the stairs that led down the silo were still intact. I had my doubts.

“Someone’s touchy,” Scott said, with a lot more grump than usual. I glanced at him and noticed he didn’t have his shotgun.

“You gonna go down there unarmed?” I asked.

“Yep,” Scott said.

I stared hard at him for a minute. “Okay.” I didn’t waste another minute, just started toward the waiting hole.

“Well, I’d like a gun if he’s not going to carry one,” Zollers said, a rising note of concern. “But I suspect you want me to prove myself a little more before you arm me,” he finished, taking the words right out of my mouth.

I approached the dark, shadowy hole in the ground. There was concrete around the edges of it, but it was already covered in a layer of desert sand. I went toward it, and took a look back to make sure they were still following me. Every step I took left footprints in the sand that had accumulated. Zollers was a few steps back; Scott was immediately behind me.

I was trying to decide how much I wanted to lay into Scott. I sensed he was fragile, and this probably wasn’t the moment. Still, if he was so emotionally tipsy he didn’t want to carry a gun into a situation where we had a definite danger … “What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “Did you leave your common sense back in Nevada?”

“It’s pronounced Ne-vad-uh,” Zollers said. He shrugged. “You said Nev-AH-duh.” I shot him a glare. So helpful.

“No, but I left a lot of bodies back there,” Scott returned. “A lot of blood on the wall, a lot of brains. I’m not an assassin, Sienna. I’m not a killer.”

“I am,” I said, but it was a whisper. “If that’s what it takes.”

I was focused ahead now, shining a light into the pit in front of me. It was about fifteen or twenty feet in diameter, and my flashlight beam bounced down the shaft. I had my pistol out; I couldn’t use my light and my shotgun at the same time. If only I’d had a Picatinny rail with a mountable light …

I wondered how many other nineteen-year old girls had
that
thought running through their mind. Probably very few. Hopefully fewer still if it involved sticking their head into a lion’s mouth like I was about to do. I felt the quiver of fear and buried it. I hoped that me doing this—fighting this war, battling with my own fear—would keep a thousand, a million, a hundred million others from having to.

I shook my head and rested my first foot on the first metal step of the staircase that led into the shaft. It squeaked but felt firm, so I took the next. My light bounced, but everywhere I pointed it, the pistol swung with it. I braced my gun hand with the flashlight hand, crossing my forearms.

Every step brought a squeak of the staircase. I led the way, not bothering to check if Zollers and Scott were still behind me. They could have both chickened out and said they wanted to stay in the car and I’d still have had to do this. It wasn’t like I could just give up, after all.

This was my baggage, and I’d picked it up long before I got back to Minneapolis.

We descended a whole floor before things widened out. There was a solid metal door ahead. It was partially open, and I crept around, keeping my gun pointed in front of me. The flashlight beam played off the walls and illuminated something against the back of the cell. It took my eyes and brain a minute to decode what I was seeing.

It was a body.

I thought I recognized the guy. I shined the light on his face and kept it there. I’d seen him in a file, something I’d gotten toward the beginning of my tenure in the new Agency. We’d considered trying to recruit some of the hard cases we had imprisoned here, adding them to the team to help fight Century and Sovereign. I’d pored over files in an effort to find some people worth saving.

I’d given up fairly quickly.

When Omega had hit the prison, the surface building had been blow up in one big damned hurry, doing more than a little damage to the upper levels of the prison, which—at the time—had hosted the less dangerous, less nasty/scary/vicious/murderous offenders. They were the ones who might actually have gotten out someday. Maybe.

Those floors had been destroyed in the explosion. Something about the pressure of the downward force of the bomb. I couldn’t pretend to fully understand the physics of it, but it was a chaotic sort of mess, as I understood it. The only survivors had been the guys—and one woman—in the depths of the prison.

There were five of them. Five of the nastiest, most horrific criminals I could imagine. They would have fit right in at ADX Florence, the U.S. Government’s Supermax prison in Colorado. They’d done things that were insanely disgusting, disturbing—premeditated attacks on people that were so violent and horrific that even I found them repellent.

Which took some doing, since I had the crown prince of all serial killers in my head and had perpetrated more than a few acts of violence in my day. Some of them more necessary than others.

The face of the man against the wall—he was one of those chosen few. Edgar something-or-other? Whatever. I approached his corpse slowly, just to be sure. I put a hand on his neck, pistol cocked all the while. I could deliver a bullet to his skull faster than he’d be able to grab at me.

I held my position there for a minute. There was no pulse, and his flesh was cold.

“There’s no one alive here,” Zollers said coolly.

“You don’t know that,” I said, pulling my hand back from Edgar Dead-gar’s neck. “There could be an empath screening them.”

“No,” Zollers said with a shake of his head. “I can get a reading from a dead body for a little bit after the death.”

“How does that work?” Scott asked.

“It’s sort of like how you can see when you push your eyelids almost closed,” Zollers said. “I can’t read their mind anymore; there’s just too much brain damage. But I get a vague sense that there were thoughts there once, as the neural activity fades. It’s a radar ping, that’s all. Enough to tell me there was someone there, once upon a time.”

He took a breath in through his nose and then snorted. The stale prison air was dank and carried all the charming scents that followed a newly-dead body. Not the sort of things you would usually get a whiff of in a rose garden, that’s for sure. Unless they had just laid down fertilizer.

“All right,” I said. “We should head down. There’s a guard post three levels in—”

“Why was this guy up top?” Scott asked. His eyes were squinted, like he was thinking. “Weren't the most dangerous criminals housed in the bottom of this place?”

“Yeah,” I said, and my voice was taut. “When we rebuilt it after Omega’s attack, I had them change it.”

“Why?” Scott asked.

I sighed and hoped he wasn’t going to get sensitive on me. “Because we knew Century was coming, and I suspected they’d use a bomb to force entry. I figured if they did, I wanted the worst of the worst to get pulped so that our jailers wouldn’t have to worry about them escaping.”

He just stared at me. “That’s cold.”

I shrugged. “I’m cold. I’m running a war, not a tea party, okay? I have to worry about what happens if murderous lunatics with insane powers escape into the outside world. Feelings and empathy don’t get a lot of attention when I’m juggling concerns like that.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No buts,” I said. “It didn’t matter anyway.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he held his tongue. “Why didn’t it matter?”

I glanced to my right. “Because Century didn’t kill this guy with an explosion.”

Scott frowned. “What? They blew up the building up top, and—”

I shook my head and stopped him. I decided a visual would be more instructive, so I reached over and pushed Edgar’s corpse over. He sagged, twisted, and fell stiffly face-down on the ground. Blood stained the wall and his back, where a gaping wound revealed broken ribs and a heart that had been ripped asunder.

Scott gagged. I stepped past him while he did and continued down. He caught up with me about the time I reached the guard station, Zollers trailing behind him. I suspected the doctor’s “soft skills” when it came to being nice and dealing with people were more useful in comforting him than anything I could say. “How did you know?” Scott asked as he caught up with me. I could feel him at my shoulder, like he was breathing down my neck. Not in a good way.

“Century didn’t blow up the building up top from the outside,” I said. “They did it from the inside, as they left. And not with an explosive, either, but with something else. Maybe a windkeeper like Reed. The door to Ed’s cell was opened from a guard station, not blown open. In short, this was another extermination, not an Omega-style retaliation with a bomb.”

I could hear the gears turning in his head. “And you know all that just from looking?”

I didn’t know quite what to say to that. “It seemed obvious to me from what I saw.”

Whatever else he was going to say, he didn’t, because we’d reached the guard station. The door here was opened, too. It didn’t look forced at all; none of them had.

I pushed it on its hinges and it squeaked, alerting anyone left in the silo to our position. I cringed, but ultimately, I supposed it didn’t matter. Assuming Zollers was right. Which I didn’t assume, ever. I’d been caught flatfooted too many times to not keep my gun out.

I ran my light across the walls. There were dead guards everywhere; it had been an extermination all right, just the same as if someone had run across a den of rats. They were all dead, all over, and it hadn’t even been a contest. I stepped over three corpses to make my way to a bank of monitors. None of them were operable, but I knew that the security apparatus was in here somewhere.

“Must have lost the backup power, too,” Scott said. His voice still had an edge to it. “I think I can access the security system footage on my phone if you give me a few minutes.”

I looked at the bodies strewn across the floor, figures shrouded in the dark. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

I stood there in the silence, back against the wall while Scott searched the console for a data card. I watched him all the while, dimly recalling something J.J. had said about how on-site data dumps onto local storage. Where once they might have used a CD, now they used the little HD cards everybody put in their cameras and cell phones. Zollers found a whole box full of them in a nearby closet while we waited.

When Scott finally found it, he made a big show of plugging it into his phone. I couldn’t really fault him for it; I suspected I knew how he felt. It was a heady feeling, killing the way we had at that safe house. Ones I’d done like that still haunted me. Parks’s face showed up a lot in my nightmares. The bloody bubbles that had rushed up when I’d killed Clyde Clary. Eve Kappler’s face as I drained her had been particularly accusing. Rick, the head of Omega, that had been … it had been …

I ran the back of my wrist over the bone at the center of my eyebrows, pushing it there like I could use it to relieve a headache. I didn’t really have a headache, but thinking about all the people I’d killed made me want to forget it all.

The ones after Rick … those I barely felt. Was it because they’d all happened in the course of defending myself or others? Or had I just calloused my soul to the point I didn’t notice anymore? Scott had no such callousing.