“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” I said, cutting her off. “I didn’t have anything to do with you being imprisoned.” I looked back at Foreman, who was standing at the door, still holding it open, unconcerned about Ariadne taking flight. “What’s this about?”
Foreman raised an eyebrow at me. “We’re effectively picking up the pieces of the Directorate. We need an administrator who can run things—with appropriate legislative oversight, of course.” He smiled disingenuously.
I looked back at Ariadne and avoided saying something untoward. “She’s certainly capable of that.”
“Oh, really?” Ariadne said and stood up from the edge of the cot. Her pants were smudged, and she had an odor about her that told me it had indeed been a few days since she’d had human contact. There was a toilet and a sink in the corner of the room and that was about it. The room was set up for longer-term stays than the interrogation room I’d been in. “I guess that’s high praise coming from you.” Her eyes darted from me to Foreman. “Senator.”
“Miss Fraser,” Foreman replied deferentially.
“What are you doing here?” Ariadne said, looking pointedly at me, “if you’re not responsible for this?”
“That’s a funny answer,” Scott said under his breath. Foreman made a slight noise that sounded like a cross between a cough and a laugh.
“Apparently, I’m here to recruit you because the senator thinks you’ll listen to me,” I said, and felt a sudden sense of discomfort.
Ariadne stared at me, and I caught a flicker of her distaste for me. “I guess he doesn’t know us very well, then.”
“I guess not.”
There was a moment of silence as we all tried to adjust to the atmosphere in the room, and Ariadne looked past me to Foreman, now pensive. “Recruit me for what? To run a new Directorate?”
“Yes,” Foreman said. “Under the direct supervision of the U.S. government.”
Ariadne played it cool. “Because last time it worked out so well.”
Foreman shrugged. “The guy who destroyed the Agency seems hell bent on wiping out the whole meta race, so why refrain from pissing him off now? Seems like his ire is already directed at us as it is.”
I thought about speaking up, about telling them that it wasn’t really Sovereign running the extinction program, but Weissman—that oily, nasty bastard who was Sovereign’s number two in charge of Century. Something stopped me, though, as if I would be speaking out of turn, so I kept it to myself.
“Yeah, well,” Ariadne said and sat back down on her cot, the edge of a threadbare blanket crumpling as she moved it to sit, “I’ve already worked for a metahuman policing outfit once. I think I’d like to take my career in some different directions.”
Scott and I exchanged a look, then I cast my gaze to Senator Foreman. He appeared to give it a moment’s thought. “Fair enough. How about making license plates for the State of Minnesota?”
I’d seen Ariadne cowed before; she was made of relatively stern stuff but she was still human. The threat of jail time took any starch out of her as quickly as anything I’d ever seen. She opened her mouth then closed it quickly, as though she were stammering without any sound coming out. “I ...” she said finally, “I ... don’t think that’s quite the career opportunity I had in mind.”
Foreman shrugged. “You’ve had involvement in running an organization that hasn’t paid taxes for its entire existence and has run an insider trading outfit based on stealing government secrets.” He didn’t smile at her, even though he knew he had her. “I used to be a U.S. Attorney, did you know that? By my reckoning that makes for racketeering charges, tax evasion, fraud, espionage, insider trading ... need I go on?”
Ariadne looked faint and shifted her gaze to me. “And you? You’re part of this?”
I felt a swell of pity for her. “For me, the charges were murder times four, but yeah. I’m motivated to work for the senator to make those go bye bye, same as you.”
She shifted her gaze weakly back to Foreman. “That’s some powerful coercive influence you’re wielding, sir.”
Foreman stared back at her, impassive. “I’m a politician. Coercion is part of the job, though I usually don’t have to apply it quite so bluntly.”
Ariadne stood again quietly and stared down at the bare concrete floor, as though trying to make up her mind. “What do you want me to do?” she asked finally, her voice reflective of how broken she truly was.