Sixteen
When I woke up, things were hazy and a small woman was hovering over me in a lab coat. She flashed me a quick smile as I blinked at her. “Don’t try and sit up yet,” she said, brushing a lock of black hair out of her eyes as she leaned over me. I obeyed her, mostly because I didn’t feel as if I could move. I looked down to see my clothes replaced with a hospital gown.
The memory of Wolfe’s attack cut through the haze and I felt nausea set in below the pain in my stomach. I started to gag as I recalled every sickening detail of what he tried to do to me and I began to retch. Searing pain raced through my abdomen.
“Whoa!” The woman grasped me under my shoulders, helping me turn. I threw up over the edge of the table, unable to control my reaction. A disgusting feeling of being violated seeped into me and I retched again. I wanted to shower, to scrub my skin until it bled. I grimaced from the pain in my stomach that was made worse by my heaving. “You need to settle down. That maniac nearly pulled out your intestines and that’ll slow anyone down, even a fast-healing meta like yourself.”
I coughed. “Who are you?”
She wrapped a stethoscope around her neck before answering. “Dr. Isabella Perugini. I’m the resident M.D. here in the medical unit.”
I blanched as she turned and injected a needle in an IV that ran to my arm. “Where’s Dr. Sessions?”
She snorted. “The lab rat is where he belongs – playing with test tubes and beakers.”
The haze of pain began to lift. It was still there; I just didn’t notice it as much. “So he doesn’t treat patients?”
“No.” She turned back to me, a clipboard in her hands. “I’ve treated you both times you’ve come through my doors. Want some medical advice?”
“Will it stop the pain?”
“Not immediately, but it could prevent it in the future.” She turned serious. “Stop facing off with this Wolfe character, will you? I’m sick of having blood all over my floor.”
“Send some of it to your pal Dr. Sessions; he’s jonesing for it.”
“First of all, it’s not all yours,” she said with a nod to a half dozen figures on beds down a line from me. The agents that tried to rescue me from Wolfe. “Second, if he wants it, Ron’s welcome to come over here with a mop; I suspect the janitorial department is getting quite sick of cleaning up these sorts of messes.”
“Did someone say my name?” I looked as far as I could toward the doorway and saw Dr. Sessions silhouetted in the frame.
“Yeah,” I said in a ragged whisper. “I was just telling Dr. Perugini that she should save you some of my excess blood since it’s everywhere.”
“Yes,” he said with excitement, “that would be marvelous.”
“Ron,” Dr. Perugini said in acknowledgment, with a tone that indicated some impatience. “Why are you darkening my door?”
“I came to give Ms. Nealon her test results.” His face twitched and he pushed the glasses back up into position on his nose. “Quite interesting.”
“Of course it escapes your notice she’s near dead,” Perugini muttered under her breath, sparking a quizzical look from Sessions. She opened her arms wide. “By all means, deliver your test results.”
“So what am I?” I said without preamble.
“No idea,” he replied as he crossed the floor and halted at my bedside. “You defy immediate classification.” A smile of delight colored his pasty features. “Truly bizarre.”
“He’s a sweet talker, that one,” I said to Dr. Perugini, who snorted again, this time in amusement. “Why is that bizarre?”
“I’ve analyzed hundreds of meta-humans,” he went on, “and most fall into common types – a half-dozen or so groupings depending on the special powers they exhibit. Some tend more toward incredible physical attributes, some have energy projection capabilities or—”
“Perhaps speak to the girl in English,” Dr. Perugini interrupted.
“No need for that,” he corrected her. “I gave her an intelligence test as well; I could be having this discussion in Latin and she’d pick up the essential points. The simple fact is—”
“I defy classification,” I interrupted, my words calm, coming out over the foul, acidic taste in my mouth from my recent bout of vomiting. “Even among the bizarre, I’m bizarre.”
A phone rang across the medical unit and Dr. Perugini gave Dr. Sessions a thinly lidded glare before striding away to answer it. He kept his distance, as though he were uncomfortable stepping any closer. Instead he stared at me in a way that, had any other man done it right now, would likely have set me to vomiting again. I stared back at him. “What?”
“Your physical strength is high above a normal meta’s, so you should be manifesting soon, if you haven’t already. No unique abilities to report yet?” I felt zero compunction about lying, but was relieved that Dr. Perugini had stepped away; I suspected she would see through my untruth; Dr. Sessions didn’t have a prayer.
“No. Nothing unusual.”
He turned back to his clipboard. “Well, that’s fine…it’s normal that you wouldn’t be experiencing anything yet. But as time goes by, additional abilities will materialize.” He looked down at the blood pooled at his feet. “And I’ll, uh…” He pulled a small test tube out of his coat pocket and stooped down, scraping it across the tile floor, forcing a small amount into the vial before putting a rubber stopper on it. Dr. Perugini rounded the corner just in time to see him and threw up her hands in silent exasperation.
He stood up, failing to notice her behind him. “I’ll get this analyzed and maybe it’ll give us some ideas of what you are.” He turned and started when he saw Dr. Perugini, then shuffled around her as she glared at him.
“He has the bedside manner of a goat,” she said with a hint of a European accent. “But not the common sense nor tact. That—” she pointed to the phone behind her—“was Ariadne. She and Old Man Winter are coming down to see you now that you’re awake.”
“Did they already know I was awake when they called?” I asked. I could believe Dr. Sessions would wander over and not know that I was unconscious; I’d be shocked if Ariadne and Old Man Winter weren’t spying on me.
She stared back at me, her dark eyes cool and unflinching. “Yes.” She turned away, grabbing a clipboard off a nearby shelf. “You’re going to need to start eating again soon. I don’t want to strain your digestive tract until I’m sure it’s fully healed, so I’ll be giving you another ultrasound in a couple hours to confirm you mend as fast as I suspect you do. After that, dinner will be served.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. The brush with Wolfe made me wonder if I’d ever be able to eat again without heaving.
“That’s okay,” she replied without looking up from her clipboard. “I’m not feeding you yet.”
The medical unit was a long room, probably as long as my house but narrower, with curtains separating individual beds and a private room at the far end with an oversized door for rolling gurneys in. Every surface was the same flat metal that I’d seen in the room I’d woken up in when I’d first arrived at the Directorate, broken up by glass windows that looked out into a hallway that matched the distinct look of the headquarters building.
The sharp odor of disinfectants wrinkled my nose as I took it in for the first time, almost giving me another reason to gag. I could hear the low beeps of monitoring equipment in the background and the faint hum of all the machinery. I counted the number of occupied beds I could see from where I lay. Less than a half dozen. “How do you handle so many at one time?” I asked.
“I don’t,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I had to triage, and Old Man Winter demanded I treat you first.”
“But I can survive more than any of them.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, not looking up from her clipboard. “And once I had established your wounds were not of the life-threatening variety, I moved on to the next critical patient.”
“How many of them died?” The words
were like ashes in my mouth. Bitter.
A moment of silence passed between us. “Five.”
I did not respond to her statement, and she didn’t speak either. The doors on the far side of the medical unit opened to admit Ariadne, who looked drawn, her severe suit wrinkled as though she had slept in it. Old Man Winter followed a pace behind her, his age less obvious today, I thought – or was that because I knew he wasn’t what he appeared?
“Hello,” Ariadne said. I didn’t bother to glare. She took this as an invitation to move closer, and hovered over my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been kicked, punched, gutted, slapped and stomped on,” I said without much feeling. “So basically like you look all the time.” I couldn’t stop myself. Ouch.
Her jaw dropped only a little, and she recovered quickly. I think she was getting used to my barbs. Good. Old Man Winter stood a few feet behind her, watching me, but did not speak.
Ariadne looked chastened, but began again. “We’ve been keeping updated on your progress through Dr. Perugini. She’s most impressed with your healing abilities, which rate very high on the meta-human scale.”
“That’s coming in handy more often than I would have hoped,” I replied. “I take it Wolfe breaking into your dormitory building came as a surprise for you, too?”
Ariadne folded her arms and shook her head. “We shouldn’t have taken Kurt’s report that all our agents at your house were dead at face value; we should have verified to make sure nothing was left behind that could be traced back to us. But at the time we viewed sending a recovery team for the bodies as too great a risk for fear that Wolfe would somehow track them back to us.”
I pictured the oversized Wolfe driving a car, following a convoy of agents, then had an idle thought wondering what kind of vehicle he would drive. The image of him crammed behind the wheel of a Volkswagon bug popped into my head and in spite of all the emotional turmoil I had to stifle the urge to laugh, which was overtaken by the feeling of sickness again when I thought of him.
“Are you okay?” Ariadne looked at me with a concern that I would have found touching if I trusted her in the slightest. As it was, she spurred my instinct to aim at her if I felt the urge to vomit again.
“I’ll be fine.” I waved her off. “You didn’t come down here to talk to me about my abilities, did you?”
“No,” Ariadne replied after a moment’s pause. “We came to talk to you about security. Yours.”
I felt hollow, a complete lack of emotion. “What about it? Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no.” Ariadne shook her head with emphasis. “Now that Wolfe has found our location, though, it changes things. We want to keep you away from the outbuildings and here in the headquarters, where we have the greatest chance to be able to protect you from him.”
I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t even surprised. But I did feel a clutch of fear at the thought of not being able to see the sky, cloudy though it was, or feel the frigid winter air on my cheeks. Funny, since I’d only just felt it over the last few days, that I was already addicted and unwanting to give it up. “So you don’t want me to leave the building…at all? Is that right?”
Ariadne shared an uncertain look with Old Man Winter, who nodded. “Just for the time being,” she said, returning her gaze to me. “Until we can resolve this Wolfe situation.”
I laughed, that scornful noise I make when I’m not really finding something funny but I want to show my disdain for what’s been said. “He’s wiped out everything you’ve sent after him, including your security here on your campus. What, exactly, is going to resolve this ‘Wolfe situation’?”
“M-Squad will be returning from special assignment down in the Andes Mountains as soon as we can get in contact with them. Once they return,” Ariadne continued, “we have full confidence they’ll be able to take Wolfe out of play. Or,” she said with another backward look at Old Man Winter, “at least contain him.”
“Contain him?” I scoffed again. “The people I’ve talked to—”
“Meaning Zack,” Ariadne interrupted.
I ignored her and continued. “—seem to think that he’s one of the strongest metas on the planet. Is that accurate?”
Ariadne exchanged an uncomfortable look with Old Man Winter. And by uncomfortable, I mean on her end. He looked placid as ever. “He is one of the strongest, yes,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be stopped.”
“That’s funny,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Because Dr. Sessions told me I was a super strong meta, and I can’t make much of a dent in him, unless you count when I stuck a pen in his ear.”
“A clever strategy, by the way,” Ariadne added.
“A desperate one that bought me all of thirty seconds before he reaffirmed his desire to rape and kill me,” I raged back at her.
“It bought you enough time to allow us to intervene,” she said in a voice that was overly complimentary.
“Allowed him to intervene, you mean.” I pointed at Old Man Winter. “Wolfe called you Jotun – a Nordic frost giant.” He nodded at me with a ponderous, slow dip of his head but did not speak. “You’ve faced Wolfe before?” He nodded again. “But you both survived. And Wolfe has been alive for thousands of years?”
Old Man Winter nodded again and broke his silence once more. “He has. A cannier foe there is not; he has survived living on the razor’s edge all these years and always among people that are the world’s most dangerous. What does it say about him to be able to live millenia in such conditions?”
My heart sank. “That he’s dangerous. Worse than anything you can throw at him.”
Old Man Winter nodded, once more fixated on my eyes. “In order to protect you, we must keep you in this building. Do you understand?”
Unbidden, a memory of the door of the box closing came to me, and I felt a momentary urge to fight, to argue, to struggle out of my bed and scream at him in defiance. Then the pain in my stomach surged as I moved, and another, hotter emotion came over me, a disgust and humiliation at the thought of Wolfe manhandling me in my room in the dormitory, of his hands all over me, his finger inside my guts, ripping me up…and I almost gagged. “Yes,” I said simply, swirling emotions batted to the side.
“Good,” Ariadne said with undisguised relief. “I was worried that you might be headstrong and try to resist good sense.”
I felt weak, drained. “Glad I could allay your misperceptions.” I laid my head on the pillow behind me, not bothering to look at Ariadne or Old Man Winter any longer.
She hesitated. “There will be agents surrounding the medical unit. They’re on constant watch, especially after what happened to the agents at your house and the way Wolfe was able to breach security in the dorm. If you need anything – food, books, entertainment – just ask.” She smiled, as if she could sense that although I wasn’t shooting any venom her way it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.
She and Old Man Winter left, but only after he gave me another long, hard stare. After they left, Dr. Perugini took a moment to record my vitals, fluffed my pillow with a matronly cluck, and then, with an admonishment to call out if I needed anything, walked to her office and shut the door.
The curtains were up between me and the rest of the patients, and from where I was sitting I could see the backs of agents through the windows, stationed outside the doors of the medical unit, and I heard a healthy cough from behind one of the curtains, telling me there were more behind the partitions. Yet still, I felt alone. Again.
I thought back to what Ariadne had said about expecting a different reaction from me at the thought of being in lockdown. I wondered for just a moment what I must look like to them, how my actions must appear; then I dismissed it and realized I only cared a little. I still didn’t trust them. They would protect me now, but for reasons that were their own; reasons that were still unclear to me, but almost certainly involved using me and my powers, whatever they were, for their own ends.
; I looked across the unit and found the wall there to be made of reflective metal that allowed me to see a distorted picture of my face. Bruises dotted my cheeks and wrapped around both eyes. There was crusted blood under my nose, and it looked misshapen. My eyes were haunted, the look of someone who had the spirit battered out of them.
The overhead lights went out, dimming the room, and my reflection was shrouded in shadow. It was nighttime; I knew it even though there were no windows.
I heard a door close heavily at the far end of the ward, and it brought me back again to the sound of the box when Mother would slam it shut. “Keep your fingers out of the way,” she’d snarl just before she closed it. Then the little clicks followed as she worked the pin in place to lock it. She always shut the little viewing slit last, usually after saying something reassuring or taunting through it, and the light would go out from the world and I’d be alone in the dark, all by myself.
Confinement or Wolfe. I knew which I feared more.