Enemies(95)

I looked in the mirror, my pale complexion even more washed out than usual. I stared at myself on unsteady feet, my dark hair tangled in a ponytail that was hanging over my shoulder. I wore a tank top that was a little damp with sweat. Something Dr. Zollers had told me ages ago, back when I first met him, bubbled into my mind:

“… if you don’t know who you are, it’s kind of tough to know what you want …”

I stared at the face in the mirror. I hadn’t looked at myself in a long time, maybe weeks, other than just to give myself a once-over to make sure I was presentable before I walked out the door to go somewhere. The face I saw staring back at me looked older than the one I remembered, and there were lines under my eyes, dark circles. My freckled skin was still a little mottled around my right hand where I’d lost it only a few days ago in a fight with Old Man Winter.

I took another breath and let it hiss out, with less force this time. “I thought I wanted to kill Erich Winter.”

The words echoed in the bathroom, and I saw a face over my shoulder in the reflection, a dark one with black eyes and a razor-toothed smile. Little Doll does want to kill Winter.

Another face appeared in the mirror behind me, this one handsome, his sandy blond hair as wavy as I recalled it. No, you don’t.

“The angel and devil on my shoulders, is that it?” I looked at my face in the mirror, balanced between the other two.

Opening the ice man’s veins could be so sweet, Little Doll.

Hunting him is a pointless game that wastes your time at a moment when people NEED your help.

The others started to chime in, too:

—Klementina—

—tactical advantage—

—leader—

—whatever—

“Enough,” I said, calmly but with feeling, and the wave of nausea that had started to build at the cacophony of their voices subsided before it had even truly begun. “Silence.” I said it as a command, and it was finally obeyed. I saw the faces in the mirror, mine, Wolfe’s, Zack’s, and all the others, quietly watching me. I surveyed them, saw the judgment, saw them watching with their own ideas about what I should do, how I should do it, where I should go, what should happen next—

I took a long breath, and I ignored all the rest of them, now nearly quiet compared to the deafening chorus they had been only moments earlier. They weren’t silent, but I didn’t hear them because there was something else pushing them to the back of my mind. A certainty that hadn’t been there before.

“I know who I am.” I held my fingers up to touch the mirror, right in the middle, to the reflection of the face in the center of them all. “I know who I am, and I know what I want.”

With that, there was silence, and when I looked back at the others who had been standing behind me in the mirror only a moment earlier, they were all gone. I stared at the girl in the mirror, and I realized she didn’t really seem all that familiar to me. Probably because she wasn’t a girl anymore.

I clutched the pregnancy test tightly in my hand as I left.





Chapter 35




“I need a status report,” I said as I closed the office doors behind me and stepped out into the main bullpen of Omega. The whole place smelled of dust, and I resisted the temptation to sneeze as I looked up to see little particles floating through the air that had been disturbed by the moving of cubicles. The floor that had once been filled with the cubes was now just dirty brown carpet with stains where the cubes had rested. I could almost taste the dust, the air was so thick with it. My eyes locked on Reed and I gestured to the air as I coughed. “And … can you …?”

“Sure.” He raised a hand and I felt a subtle gust blow through, opening the door of one of the offices off the main room. A wall of solid dust followed it, along with a few unsecured papers, before the door slammed shut behind it, leaving us with clear air.

“You’re a handy one to have when there’s a high pollen count, I’d wager,” Breandan said, his arms folded, leaning against the wall.

“He’s also useful when you’re lying on a beach in the hottest part of summer and the wind has died down,” I said absently. “Where are we with everything?” I looked from Reed to Breandan to Karthik and then to Kat, who stood at one side of the room next to a gurney with Janus lying on it. “How is he?” I was surprised at how gently I asked it.

“Not good,” Kat said, running her fingers through the bobbing curls of her hair as she answered me. To her credit, she didn’t fail to look me in the eye, and I didn’t see any of the fear I might have assumed would be there after I’d battered her so recently. “I managed to bring him back—or more accurately, to save him in the seconds before his body gave up and let him die. The problem is,” her fingers left her own hair and went to Janus’s, fingering him along the back of his neck, “Weissman severed his brain stem. Even though I was able to heal the majority of the damage, that’s not the sort of trauma you just get over immediately.” Her fingers came back to herself, to rest on the green, low cut blouse she was wearing. “I don’t know what sort of problems will come from that, and I have no idea when he’ll wake up. Or …” she let her voice trail off, very tiny and far away, “… if he’ll even be himself when he wakes up.”