Family (13 page)

I opened the door to my room, which, as usual, was unlocked. I had grown used to the small print of S. Nealon on the door’s name plate, as though anyone who didn’t know couldn’t just look at the directory in the main hall entry to the dorm building. I didn’t have anything worth stealing, just the Directorate-issued stuff that everyone else had in their rooms, so I usually didn’t bother locking the door. Part of the reasoning for that was because I really sucked at keeping track of things like keys, so I didn’t want to have to carry a key with me all the time just so I could lose it every day.

I came in and shut the door behind me, letting the back of my head thud against it. My day had consisted of waking up in the medical unit, telling my bosses (and inadvertently my ex-boyfriend) that I’d nearly slept with the enemy, getting to see one of my colleagues vent his righteous rage against my mother, getting interrogated by my psychiatrist (sad that I need one of those) then an actual interrogator (sadder that I’d need one of those); then I capped everything off by getting insulted by my mother, restrained by my co-workers, perp-walked in front of everyone I know, and then lectured by a woman who acts more like my mother than the real one. Best. Day. Ever.

Oh, and Kat was still missing. Joy. I bet she had a better day than me. I frowned and thought of the box. Maybe not.

I flipped the light after standing there for a minute in the dark, and I took my first uneasy steps toward the bed. I stopped, and cocked my head, curious, at a small object lying on the bedspread. I took a few steps forward and bent over to take a closer peek.

It was a watch. A gold band with links gave way to a clasp, and the face was kind of pearlescent, with a rainbow sheen that refracted in the light as I picked it up. The numbers on the face were roman numerals. At the three o’clock position was a number for the day, and the second hand was ticking along, counting out each moment as I stared at it. There was a shred of paper threaded beneath the band, and I looked to my desk; it was from the pad there, torn out, and something had been written on it. I pulled it out and opened it at the fold, blinking as the words registered in my mind, sticking there, sending my head into an even worse spin than it had already been in.

Your father would want you to have this.

Chapter 11

I lay down on my bed after that, staring at the watch for hours. It had no identifying markings on it, nothing that would have told me anything about its owner save for the note. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, but in fairness it was a total scrawl, like it had been written in block print by a hand in one hell of a hurry. Which made sense, because whoever it was had been in my room uninvited, and thus subject to trouble from Directorate security if caught. So, probably my mother.

I placed the watch on my wrist and stared at it. It was huge compared to my slender arm and there was probably an inch of space in the diameter of the band. I let it spin loosely, playing with it, wondering if it was really his, and who he was. I read the note over and over. It said my father
would
want me to have it. Did that mean he was dead? Or somewhere he couldn’t be reached? I blinked, and I felt the stir of emotions that had dogged me all day.

Did he think about me? Had he ever even seen me? Did he care?

I let the tears slip down my cheeks, but I muffled the sobs as best I could with my pillow. They were soft, quiet as I could make them, afraid that the thin walls were working against me in this regard. I felt the cool lines that each tear made, from the blurriness around my eyes down the sides of my face and temples to the bed where I lay. After a few minutes I moved my head and realized that the bedspread was soaked on either side of my cheeks.

I fell asleep for a little while, feeling sorry for myself, and I only knew that because I awoke with a start to knocking on my door. I sat up, breathing heavy, dazed, having come out of a deep, dreamless sleep. I sprang to my feet and went to the door, opening it in a rush. It was night, black outside the windows, and I knew that knocks on the door at this hour, whatever it was, could be nothing good.

Zack stood outside my door, grim, dark circles under his eyes, his suit completely askew. He looked mussed, way worse than usual, and I’d seen him after just waking up. This was not like him at all. “Ariadne needs us now,” he said, all business, and started to turn away.

“What?” I asked, still trying to fully awaken.

“Reed’s helicopter went down near Prescott, Wisconsin,” Zack said, turning back.

“Oh,” I breathed, a pain in my midsection like someone had kicked me in the gut. “That jackass just had to tempt fate.”

I followed Zack, who was already walking back toward the entrance. We met Scott and Kurt coming from the opposite hallway, the dorms on the other side of the building. Scott looked a little dazed, and his curly hair was flattened on one side from what I assumed was him sleeping on it. Kurt had a slight limp, and still bore bandages on his face from the car wreck.

“You look like hell,” Scott said to me as we met up in the lobby, all four of us striding purposefully out of the front doors and onto the warm night air that blanketed the campus.

“You should talk, Flock of Seagulls,” I replied with a little zing that sent him reaching for his hair and finding it plastered in place.

“You’re both too young to even know what Flock of Seagulls is,” Kurt said with a shake of his head. “Were you even alive in the 80s?”

“Wait, were they an 80s band?” I asked. “I just thought he looked like that guy in Pulp Fiction.”

There was already a Black Hawk helicopter waiting for us on the landing pad outside headquarters. The rotors started to spin the moment we got into sight, and Ariadne was there, along with a couple other agents. The noise from the rotors was far too loud for conversation, but I saw them loading things into the side doors, and I suspected that we wouldn’t be going unarmed.

Ariadne nodded to me as I ducked (I was so short I probably could have walked full upright without worrying about being decapitated, but when a helicopter rotor is swinging overhead, you don’t think about these things logically) and climbed up into the chopper. I adjusted the five-point harness restraints and pulled a headset from under my seat. I put it on to muffle the rotor noise as I watched the agents that had been waiting with Ariadne shut the doors. The minute they were closed I felt the pilot throttle up and we were airborne, lifting into the sky and in motion, heading east.

“The helicopter went down about twenty minutes or so from here.” I could hear Zack talk through the speakers in the headset. “We got a call from the pilot that said they were attacked.”

“Where’s M-Squad?” I asked, the first question popping into my mind.

“Parks was on the chopper,” Zack replied. “Clary and Bastian were sent out on a quick mission to North Dakota to provide escort for a couple of our agents near Fargo, trying to get them home safely after they got bushwhacked by Omega. And Eve is remaining at the Directorate to keep an eye on things in case Omega is trying to draw us out.”

“Faulty logic,” Scott said, shaking his head. The plastered hair still didn’t move, even with his vehement action. “If they’re trying to draw us out, we should bring everything we’ve got and hit them hard.”

“I think he means that Eve’s going to provide defense for the campus in case they’re trying to draw us out to hit it,” I said, and a look of, “Oh, yeah,” went across Scott’s face.

“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Zack said with a tight smile. “After all, there are more metas at our campus than anywhere else in North America.”

“Wait, what?” Scott looked up in surprise. “I thought the Directorate had six campuses in the U.S.”

“They do,” Kurt responded, sounding like he was educating this snot-nosed punk, “but ours is the training center. All the young metas we’re harboring, M-Squad, you kids – there are almost a hundred on the campus. You oughta know that. The other campuses act as feeders and locations for mostly human agents and retrievers to work out of. Once they identify a prospect, they get sent here. Unless they’re a threat,” he said. “Then it’s off to—”

“Arizona,” I finished for him. “How many metas are there in North America?”

“More than you’d think,” Kurt answered, looking at me across the darkened compartment. “We estimate no less than five hundred.”

“Is that…a lot?” Scott asked.

“Considering there were probably only five hundred or so in India and China, yes,” Kurt said with calm uncaring.

“Why is that?” Scott asked as my mind hummed along, wondering what we were about to walk into.

“If you’ve got abilities that unbalance the scales of life,” Zack said, “wouldn’t you use your advantage to put you in the most prosperous place you could? Metas come to America and western Europe in higher numbers from everywhere else in the world. Plus, with longer lifespans, they have a higher likelihood of making it here eventually.”

One of the two agents who had stood with Ariadne was rummaging in a duffel bag. He came out with an HK MP5 submachine gun and handed it to me with a smile. I nodded at him in thanks, and realized it was Jackson, the guy we’d found when my mother kidnapped Kat. He was dark haired, and had a tactical vest over a white dress shirt. He handed me a tactical vest of my own and I unstrapped myself to put it on while he gave the same to Scott, then Kurt and Zack. I checked my submachine gun to make sure a round was chambered and then made sure the safety was on. I kept it pointed down and right, toward the door, the way Parks had drilled it into my head.

“What are we looking at here?” I asked.

“Chopper went down near Prescott after a tightband mayday that went direct to us,” Zack said. “It was thin on specifics, but it could have been a conventional weapon attack or a meta,” he finished, brusque.

“So we have no idea what we’re dealing with,” I said. I slid a palm along the stock of my weapon, taking a deep breath and smelling the gun oil and the other confined scents of the helicopter; Scott’s cologne was overpowering as always, as though he had an Abercrombie and Fitch store hidden under his clothes. Zack had toned his down since we had started dating months ago, for which I was still thankful. Kurt, as always, could have stood to go the opposite direction, but I suspected that they had gotten him released from the Medical unit solely for this action. The Directorate’s cupboard of resources for a rescue was near-empty if they were sending two newly recovered agents and a suspected traitor on this mission.

The helicopter flew smoothly through the night, the tension inside giving way to an uneasy silence. I looked over at Zack, caught him looking back at me over Jackson, who had taken the seat to my left, and we broke eye contact. Well, I broke eye contact. I wasn’t sure what I could say to him other than that I was sorry, and that seemed inadequate given what I had done.

We crossed a river as I looked out the window and saw the half-moon reflected on the water, broken up by the waves running across the surface. We began to descend and I caught sight of cliffs rising out of the water below, hilly terrain on the opposite bank that looked nothing like the smooth fields and woods that surrounded the Directorate. Trees stood out on the edge of the embankments, rough shapes in the dark, shadowed boughs reaching up for us as the pilot took us down a little at a time.

We continued about five minutes past the river to a site where flames were visible in a clearing below us. The helicopter circled, bringing us around for another look before the pilot began a steep descent toward the clearing.

“How many helicopters does the Directorate have, anyway?” Scott asked as we approached the ground, crosswinds causing the whole chopper to buck. I felt the press of my restraints and the chop the closer we got to the ground. Jackson got up and stepped past me, clinging to handles mounted on the ceiling as he slid open the door. I felt one of the wheels touch the ground and Jackson was out, on the ground, sweeping ahead with his weapon. Kurt followed, next out of the chopper while Scott, Zack and the other agent went out the other door.

I unfastened my restraints, realizing I was behind, and stepped off the side of the chopper, nearly wiping out; it was higher off the ground than I thought it would be. I recovered and landed as nimbly as I could given the circumstances, and was on my feet a second later. Helicopter wreckage surrounded us, and trees were visible in all directions, rising up on the sloped ground. We stood in a hilly clearing, underbrush and smaller trees dotting the rocky landscape. The chopper’s landing lights were active but not a lot of help for distance vision. A couple small fires remained on the outline of Reed’s crashed chopper, but they were dying down.

The area was calm save for the rushing wind around us. My gun was up, the safety off, and I minded my footing as I followed along behind Kurt and Jackson as we wended our way toward the front of the helicopter. A spotlight turned on, giving us a better view of the crash site, casting illumination over the wreckage of the downed helo and forcing me to squint my eyes while they adjusted to the brightness of the spotlight.

The chopper was the older Huey model, smaller than the Black Hawk we had arrived in. The tail was snapped off, the broken remainder a segment only a couple feet long that was sticking into the air at a forty-five degree angle from the fuselage. The nose was buried, caught in rocks; from where I stood I could look through the door on one side and out the other onto the ground behind it. No bodies were visible in the passenger compartment, the light playing off the dull gray paint job.

“What the hell happened here?” I heard Scott say in my earpiece. I snugged the butt of the gun against my shoulder, felt it push, like the touch of an old friend. It was comforting in the dark. I felt a chill unrelated to temperature; something about being in the woods after midnight, holding a gun, made me tense. I was waiting for something to happen, and I didn’t know what. Also, my last experience in the woods hadn’t gone so well, and that was in the middle of the day. Night was worse.