“What do you want me to do?” I yelled at him. “I mean, seriously? I’m one person. I’m eighteen years old, Reed! Until two weeks ago, I was just a follower, riding along on the coattails of other people who were smarter and more organized than I was, okay? I have one thing in me, and that’s that I know how to fight. That’s all I have to bring to the table. So when I tell you that making our stand here is the smartest move because otherwise we’re going to lose the cloister in Scotland as well as get everyone in this place killed, you can take that as the word of an eighteen-year-old girl who’s both scared and more than a little pissed that she’s having to play janitor and protector to the remains of a group of people who have hounded her since day effing one, okay? This is a mess, all right, and it’s not mine, but somehow I seem to be the one that gets to mop it up. And I get to do it all less than two weeks after my first love was killed and while I’m trying to figure out if I’m pregnant with his baby!”
Reed staggered back like he’d been slapped. “You’re …” His face narrowed in horror and his voice went to a hushed whisper. “You’re pregnant? HOW?”
“The whole family needs remedial education in that, I suppose,” Breandan said to no one in particular.
“Dr. Sessions made a … suit …” I said. “For Zack. Before he …” I shut up, watching both Karthik and Breandan find immense interest in their shoelaces and the London skyline, respectively. “Anyway … I don’t want to be in charge of saving the world of metas, because we’re probably gonna fail.” I rubbed my hand over my face. “So, seriously. Who wants to be in charge? I’d vote for any of you.”
“Yeah, no,” Breandan said, “my vote’s for you.” He looked around sheepishly. “You know, if I get a vote. Not really sure what the Parliamentary procedures are here, being someone who rather drifted in and all.”
I brushed aside my hand and focused on Karthik. “This is your party, Karthik. Your house, your rules.”
Karthik shook his head. “I’m afraid that while I am a fairly good tactical leader of a squad, I lack the long-range vision and experience to run even the fragments that remain of Omega. I defer to your experience.”
“My experience?” I asked with amusement. “My experience is running a baby squad of metas for three months after I finished training.”
“You’re the most powerful of us,” Reed said in a strangled voice. I looked at him, and he looked back, giving me a shrug. “Probably the most experienced team leader, too, given that Karthik just deferred to you.”
“You were just bashing the hell out of my decision to make this our defense point a minute ago,” I said, trying to see if there was something behind his eyes that he was hiding, some sarcasm I wasn’t detecting.
“I was bashing the lack of emotion behind it,” he said calmly. “I didn’t question the logic of it, I just hate that you’ve had to come to a point where you see it as a game of probabilities instead of a battle for the lives of people.”
I felt my mouth dry out. “There are numbers behind the people.” I lowered my voice. “Two hundred and fifty-four.”
Breandan cocked his head. “Sorry, what?”
“It’s the number of people who died when Sienna first faced off against Wolfe,” Reed said, never taking his eyes off me. “I honestly kinda figured you’d forgotten.”
I shook my head slowly. “Never.”
Reed gave me a slow nod of understanding. “All right, then. What’s the play?”
“Umm …” I thought for a second. “We need everything we can get. Can you bluff those mercs at your safehouse into coming over here to help us establish a perimeter?”
“If you’re okay with throwing away their lives,” Reed said.
I sighed. “Is there anything … anything at all that you’ve got at your safehouse that could help us here?”
“Some guns,” he said with a shrug. “Half of them were the ones you had with you when we rescued you.”
“We could certainly use those,” Karthik said. “We’ve had to ship out quite a few these last months, trying to arm human agents to shore up weaknesses in our roster.”
Reed gave him a nod. “I’ll get them over here and take inventory over what we’ve got, see if there’s anything else that would help. I doubt I can get the mercs over here—I don’t even feel good about trying, going into this fight—but I’ll ask. See what I can do.”