Tormented (33 page)

“You should stab it right into her heart,” Augustus said dryly, “like they do in the movies.”

“I will have to,” Isabella agreed, moving to the drug cabinet next to her office. “Exactly like that.”

“Well, damn,” Augustus said, the wind right out of his sails. “I was just joking. You know, trying to lighten the mood.”

“We’re standing next to a human nuclear bomb that’s on runaway reaction,” Scott said, “if this mood gets any lighter, we may all float away as individual atoms.”

“What if it just makes her condition worse?” Zollers asked. “What if it just causes her mind to race even faster, panic even harder?”

“Kaboom,” Scott said. “Anyone remember Glencoe? Fair thee well, see you people in the upper atmo as our component parts.”

“You’re awfully calm about that,” Augustus said, eyebrow cocked.

“Isn’t death part of your job?” Scott asked.

“Uh, living is part of my job, too,” Augustus said. “Kinda hard to do it if I’m dead.”

“This is bad,” Ariadne said. “Maybe we should push the panic button.”

“Hey, I’m way ahead of you on that,” Augustus said. “So glad the doctor hooked me up to a painkiller drip now. I think I pressed it like twelve times.”

“It’s a wonder you’re still conscious,” Isabella said, working her way back to Sienna’s bedside. The rails were melted, the sheets scorched where they weren’t damp with water. “How is she?”

“She’s in a trough,” Zollers said. “Gavrikov and the others are becalmed, but these delusions of hers are getting progressively worse.” He frowned. “It’s taking all my concentration just to keep track of what’s going on, and I’m not even getting the full picture, just the emotional view. It’s like watching a movie through a piece of paper.”

“What do we do?” I asked, swiveling to look at Ariadne, the closest thing to an authority figure we had here.

She looked stricken. “You’re more in charge of these kinds of things than I am.”

I started to open my mouth, then realized I had no idea what to say. I was in charge? In charge of a rapidly spiraling disaster of doom in which my sister was descending into nightmares that might cause her to burn everyone around her to cinders?

Oh, my.

“You wanted to show everyone how different things would be when you were in charge,” Augustus said, picking that perfect moment to chip my self-confidence into the corner pocket. “Here’s your chance! Try not to get us killed.”

“I think we should try the adrenaline,” I said, nodding at Isabella, who had the syringe in her hand, filled to the brimming. She nodded at me once and headed toward Sienna. “Ariadne, you should get out of here.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said, setting her jaw. “She needs us all.”

“Yeah, but she kinda needs water and mud and psychic intervention more than conversation, you know?” Augustus said. When every eye fell on him, he seemed to retreat a little. “I’m just putting it out there. Might be safer elsewhere is all.”

“If it ends like Glencoe,” I said darkly, “there might not be anywhere close by that you could consider safe. In fact, you might just rate this as a catastrophe on the scale of—”

Before I could finish the doors slid open and a voice that usually sounded oh-so-calm broke into a shout that was almost like thunder out of the heavens. “
WHAT
…
THE
…
HELL
… is going on in here?”

“Director,” Ariadne said, all the blood drained from her face. She was almost as white as Sienna.

Standing in the doorway, his face red for an entirely different reason, was Andrew Phillips.

“Let me finish that for you, Reed,” Augustus said, “a catastrophe on the scale of …
THIS
.
This
right here. Because I think we can all agree that this shit just got sooooooo much worse.”

“Maybe you don’t belong here.”

Andrew Phillips's voice rang out over his office, over the view of the green and verdant campus, but it sounded like death to me, like fall leaves should have been fluttering out of the trees, like icy snows should have dumped from grey skies, like life should have paused, fled, and left me in a dark and empty place.

“Excuse me?” As far as witty responses went, it wasn’t my best.

“You hit a paparazz—” He paused, mid-turn. He’d been pacing in front of his window, gesticulating with his arms in a way that I hadn’t really seen him do before. Maybe he was worked up for once, but his voice remained cool. “Is it paparazzo or -i?”

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. The point is, the news is everywhere. Another hit for us in the favorables. The pictures have been screen-grabbed and turned into memes—again.” He sighed and looked faintly disgusted. “Congrats on your internet superstardom. You’re heading toward more hits than Grumpy Cat.”

“The guy jumped out at me, okay?” I folded my arms. “Jackie says this isn’t insurmountable—”

“Jackie’s job is infinitely harder because you keep giving the press terrible things to say about you,” Phillips said, in a low growl. “She’s got the grace to try and deal with it. I don’t know how she does. If it were me in her job, I’d be telling you something different right now, like where to go and what to do with yourself when you get there.” He drew up to his full height, which was considerable. “But I’m not going to tell you where to go, or what to do when you get there. I’m just going to tell you that right now, you can’t be here.”

My eyes fluttered as I processed that. “Wait … are you firing me?”

“You’re suspended,” Phillips said. “Two weeks, no pay.”

“Can you even do that?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a civil servant—”

“You assaulted a civilian while off duty,” he said, “hell, yes, I can suspend you for that. This isn’t watching porn at your desk. The government does have rules against hitting people who … well, who legally don’t deserve it.”

I grudgingly reached for the olive branch he offered in there. “I like how you added the word ‘legally’ in there.”

“In spite of whatever you think, Sienna,” Phillips said, and his face flashed in an otherworldly way, looking gaunt and spectral, just for a second, “I’m not your enemy. Not personally. My job coming here was to get this agency out of the spotlight and reduce the number of PR catastrophes that the White House has to answer for. It’s two months to the election and you’re not making my—or the re-election campaign’s—job any easier. It’s like you’re trying to hand the presidency to Robb Foreman.”

“I’m not,” I said, lowering my gaze to the edge of his desk, a wooden model that used to be mine. Not that I’d be terribly upset if Robb Foreman were president; he’d be a fair sight better than Gerard “Gerry” Harmon, the twat. I knew who I was voting for on the first Thursday in November, that much was certain.

Though I had my doubts, if things kept going the way they were going, that Robb Foreman would be able to keep me on even if he won.

The light flashed in the room, and I saw an old stone table in place of the wooden one for a moment before it snapped back to real. “It’s wonderful how I can achieve a fantastic apprehension rate in my job,” I said, “prevent six major metahuman incidents this year, yet still get sacrificed on the altar of politics and media.”

“Don’t play martyr on me,” Phillips said stiffly. He said everything stiffly. “Any cop in the U.S. would be getting their ass handed to them right now for hitting a journo off the clock. They’d probably be looking at a lot more than a suspension. This is not acceptable behavior in a civilized society.”

“You know he wanted to get hit, right?”

“Yeah, I’m sure his life’s ambition was fulfilled the day you broke his jaw,” Phillips said.

“Well, everyone knows his name now,” I said. “You can’t deny it got him some fame.”

“Maybe, but his fifteen minutes is going to be up soon,” Phillips said, “I only wish yours was.”

The way he said it was like a spear delivered right to the center of my chest. “I wish it was, too.”

I looked out the window behind him, and the green lawn flashed white, snow mounds piled high in drifts, like rolling hills sprung out of the flat earth. It was that way for a few seconds, then it went back to the lawn. I shook the afterimage out of my head.

“Two weeks,” Phillips said, drawing me back into our conversation.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked, dragging my ass out of the chair.

“I don’t care,” Phillips said. “Think long and hard about whether you really want to stay here, because your days at this agency are drawing to a close if you keep acting the way you’re acting.”

“The way I’m acting?” I resisted the urge to throw the chair at him. “I can barely leave the campus anymore, because the press follows me every chance they get.”

“Maybe you should fly away next time,” he said.

“I don’t run,” I said, my temper rising. I could feel the heat in my face.

Phillips’ face turned cold—very cold. His broad cheeks narrowed and thinned before my eyes, revealing a thin face that was heavily lined. The green behind him disappeared, and the desk turned to a stone table, the office décor morphing into something eerily familiar.

Erich Winter’s office.

“Maybe you simply do not belong here,” Winter said, his breath frosting in the air.

“This is the only job I’ve ever had,” I said, saying the exact words to him that I’d said to Phillips at this point in the conversation.

“Then maybe you don’t belong anywhere,” he said, and the chill in the room rose, driving the heat from my cheeks. The glass frosted over, a sheet of ice forming on its surface.

I ignored the barbed comment. “What are you going to do without me if a meta threat shows up?”

“I know this will come as a great surprise to you,” Winter said as the roof opened up and snow began to pour in, heavy white flakes covering the ground a foot in a few seconds, “but somehow we will manage without you.”

“With who? Reed?” I scoffed, but a nervous, sick feeling permeated the depths of my belly. “He’s not ready. He doesn’t have the nerve to do what needs to be done.”

“Perhaps what we need is less of your particular variety of nerve,” Winter said as the room continued to fill with snow. It was past my knees now, the chill seeping through my legs and into my bones. “Perhaps a steadier hand would serve us better.”

“You don’t know what’s out there,” I said, shaking my head. My cheeks were red from the arctic wind that was roaring through the office now. “You won’t be able to manage without me.”

“That’s your ego talking,” Winter said. “The world endured a very long time before Sienna Nealon was born. Societal collapse will hardly follow if you were to simply … disappear.” I heard the ghost of Phillips voice append, “for a while,” to the end of that statement, like a whisper somewhere beyond the howling winds.

“I don’t mean to go quietly into the night,” I said. The snows were up to my chest, crushing me. I felt trapped, afraid, but let none of it come out in my voice.

“You are nothing but a footnote in history,” Winter said, and this was all him, his voice strong. “You will die nearly unremembered, at the feet of the mob that once embraced you as its hero. How quickly they forget, how slowly they forgive, and how complete is the scouring of the bones of their victims.” He stepped through the snow like it was nothing, towered over me as the cold reached my chin and mouth and flooded in before I could make reply. “You don’t belong anywhere. As you said, you live apart from humanity, and humanity will not mourn you when you die … alone.”

With that the snows surrounding my limbs, flooding into my mouth, shot through with a hard blue frost that turned everything liquid to solid ice. I choked soundlessly, my throat constricted and filled by the frost that was going to swallow me whole.

“What the hell is going on here?” Phillips asked again. His face was redder the second time around, and he completely ignored Augustus’s painkiller-induced levity, which was a shame, because if ever there was a moment that needed levity, this was it.

“Sienna is in a coma,” Isabella said, forming the explanation before I could come up with it.

“Then why is Harper picking up heat flares from the medical unit, that look like Cunningham is in here?” Phillips asked, stepping a little further into the room. I could see black-suited security men behind him, armed well past the teeth. They were armed at least to the foreheads, with rifles and submachine guns and maybe bazookas, I dunno.

“She’s under psychic attack,” Zollers said, his soothing voice carrying a little extra gusto. “She’s lashing out blindly with her powers.”

“Who are you?” Phillips asked, but not in as nasty a way as he could have.

“Dr. Quinton Zollers. I’m a consultant.”

“Right,” Phillips said, nodding. “Okay. Consulting for who? Because we’re not paying you. Let’s just get that out there right now.”

“Right to the purse strings,” Ariadne said with a sigh.

“He’s consulting to try and save this place from becoming ground zero in a nuclear detonation,” I said, wading into the fray. “Because Sienna could make Cunningham’s work at the airport look like a four-year-old’s sparkler on the Fourth of July.”

“She was supposed to be out of here,” Phillips said.

“Someone had other plans,” I said.

Phillips’s eyes narrowed. “Was this coma induced?”

I swiveled my head to Isabella, who shrugged faintly. “Probably,” she said. “This sort of thing does not happen naturally in metas, and she’s got something in her blood that’s causing a reaction.”

“So she’s poisoned,” Phillips said, mulling it over. “She can’t stay here.”

That casual drop-in left me stunned, and it took me a few seconds to recover. “What? You can’t move her now!”

“Why not?” Phillips asked. “Presumably you did, unless she was hiding in the closet when I came through earlier.”

“She needs care,” I said. “She needs—”

“She needs to not blow up in the middle of civilization,” Phillips said, “and preferably not in the middle of the response unit that’s currently hunting two dangerous fugitives in the area.”

“If you move her,” Zollers said, “we won’t be able to contain her.”