Ariadne sat back in her chair, her brow furrowed as she stared at Old Man Winter in sickly disbelief. “I thought we were going to protect her. That’s why we’re here, to protect metas, to keep the entire species out of danger by policing them—”
“We have many purposes,” Old Man Winter said darkly, “and protecting one at the expense of more is doing us no service.” He began to turn but Ariadne made a noise that caused him to stop and survey her with his cold blue eyes. “What?”
“You knew the girl … Sienna … you knew her mother, didn’t you?” The pen was no longer resting in Ariadne’s mouth. Now it was clenched in her hand.
“I did.” He watched coldly. “What of it?”
Ariadne swallowed visibly, and I could see her taking care with her words. “Her mother was the one who betrayed the Agency and caused it to be destroyed? While you were there?”
Winter’s eyes narrowed. “It seems likely that she gave us over to … “ There was a flash of frost in his eyes. “To destruction.”
“What destroyed the Agency?” Ariadne asked. “You never talk about it.” She let out a small laugh, which was no louder than a sigh. “You never talk about anything, but especially not that.”
Winter’s cold eyes faded as though looking far off. “It was not a simple ‘what’ that destroyed the Agency. It was a ‘who.’”
Ariadne blinked, almost flinching. “You mean one of the old-world meta organizations?”
“No,” Old Man Winter said. “A person. One man.”
Ariadne’s face furrowed, lines stitching the slight wrinkles that barely showed around her face. “One meta, I presume?” Old Man Winter nodded. “How is that even possible? I thought the Agency had a hundred metas at their disposal for all manner of tasks—”
“We did,” Winter said. “We did indeed. And one meta … was all it took to undo it all, to turn a facility twice the size of this one into utter wreckage and kill every metahuman in the entire place save for two.”
“You and … Sierra, I think her name was?” Ariadne waited for Old Man Winter to nod. “But how did you escape?”
Old Man Winter’s head slumped, subtly. Anyone who didn’t know him that saw it would think nothing of it; that it was a slight nod, a nearly insubstantial incline of his jaw. But to those of us who knew him … even after the surprise he’d given me recently, I knew somehow … that this was his feeling of defeat. “Because,” Old Man Winter said, “he let me live.” The blue eyes came up, glowing again, with a cold fury. “And he told me so. There was no need for him to prove his dominance over me, to assert his superiority.” Winter leaned back against the door frame as though hurt, and his fingers went to his torso, massaging the material of his dress shirt as though he could rub at an old wound beneath.
“I don’t understand,” Ariadne said, looking at him with undisguised curiosity. “If he killed the rest, why would he let you live?”
“Because,” Old Man Winter said, now holding his shoulder as though it pained him, “he had already broken me … before.” Without allowing for further explanation, he turned, leaving Ariadne in her office, and returned to his own. The slow, quiet sound of the door closing in the next office was almost as loud as an explosion as Ariadne stayed there, alone, pondering the complete incongruity of what he had said.
I watched too, insubtantial, and thought about what he had said, and waited to wake up.
14.
I blinked back to awake, the orange light of sunset barely edging through the curtains. I had slept the whole day away. I hadn’t gotten home until nearly six in the morning, after dodging out of the apartment building through a back exit on the first floor. The sheets didn’t smell of sweat this time, but the pall of my night’s activity still hung in the air, and I checked the nightstand next to me. Two pistols still lay upon it, within easy reach if I needed them. I sighed a deep sigh.
Having seen Ariadne’s memory in my dream was enough to get me wondering about the Agency. It had been a mystery to me, what happened to it, especially since my mother hadn’t told me all that much. I tried to sift through what I knew, but it was so minimal it wasn’t really worth hashing it over. The only concrete thing I knew was that my father had died there. “Any of you know about the Agency and how it was destroyed?” I asked the empty house.