“I’d rather have been through none of it and be able to sit at the back of the room with Zack, unnoticed,” I said. “I don’t want to be the kind of person that it’s going to take to win this fight.” I felt a lump in my throat. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who kills so casually and never feels anything bad about it … a monster. I never wanted to be a murderer, Reed, never wanted to be some thoughtless killer who could do what Charlie did and just drain a man, or be like Fries and casually kill because I wanted to, because it sated some thirst in me.” I wiped my eyes. “I thought I was different. I thought I could just be me.”
“That was never gonna be part of the deal,” Reed said, leaning some pressure onto the hand on my shoulder. “You’ve always been destined for this. Your powers decided it, your mother prepared you for it, and every step you’ve taken has made you harder, made you the kind of person that everyone looks at and says, ‘I think she’s tougher than me. I’m following her.’ He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt the warmth of an embrace, something I couldn’t recall feeling since the day Zack had died. “I think by the time this is all over, you might be the only person who’s still sorry that you did go through the fire you have. Because the rest of us … as unfair as it is … are counting on this new girl to save us from the hell that’s coming to kill us all.”
Chapter 32
Reed left shortly thereafter, and I lay down on the couch while waiting for Breandan to return. Thoughts were blurring through my head, a thousand of them, a million of them. For the first few minutes I could hear the sound of cubicles being moved outside the doors of the office. After a few minutes I tuned them out, though, focusing instead on my own thoughts, on the smell of the smoke from the previous occupant of this office, the lingering sweet aroma of it. It settled in the back of my nose with the acid that my stomach was churning, begging me to eat something. I thought about opening the door, saying something to Karthik or someone else, but I couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to look them in the face. I wondered if any of the others, the ones Karthik was speaking for, thought I was a bad choice. I laughed at that out loud in the quiet dark of the office as the day drew to an end outside. If anyone wanted to stage a coup, they were welcome to the responsibility that I’d picked up purely by accident. I didn’t want it.
My mind turned over the other responsibility I’d been considering, too. The idea that I could end up being a mother was downright bone chilling. I was eighteen, technically I was unemployed (doing volunteer work, I supposed), a single mother (unless you counted the voice in my head as the father, which sadly, for sharing responsibility, I really didn’t—sorry, Zack). I knew nothing about kids, having never been around them. I tried to remember my own childhood, but everything I could see of it was all after we’d shut ourselves in the house, after mom had basically rolled up the carpet and closed up shop, locking me away from the world.
And if I failed to stop Century, it bothered me to admit, I’d just about have to do the same.
I ran a hand over my belly. It felt just as flat as it had a week earlier, two weeks earlier, a month earlier. There was no sign of anything amiss. If I was pregnant, it was soon into the goings, maybe a couple weeks along. That was still a big ‘if.’ The idea of what I’d have to do to protect a child made me nauseous. In a world run by Century, where a telepath could be hanging around a city at any time, waiting to find a meta to sic a team on, isolating yourself and hiding was just about the only recourse, unless you wanted to take on a hundred metas all by yourself.
That line of thought alarmed me. Just by contemplating these things, these fears, considering how I’d handle things, didn’t that make me as bad as my mother? If my back was against the wall, would I do the same things she did under the pretense of keeping my daughter or son ‘safe’?
Would I lock my child away to protect her from certain death if we were found? I swallowed heavily and wondered if that was what Mother had been thinking when she did all the things to me that she did. Once upon a time, only a couple weeks earlier, I had believed that I was the sort of person who wouldn’t cross lines, who believed that there were certain things that were just wrong, that I wouldn’t do in the name of winning, of beating my enemies. There was a time when I couldn’t even bring myself to kill.
Now I wondered if there was anything I wouldn’t do to stop Century from killing every meta on the face of the planet.