Legacy(15)

My mother gave me a look out of the corner of her eye. “Did he offer you this same charming deal?”

Foreman leaned back and folded his arms. “I didn’t have to. She’s not as much of a flight risk as you are and doesn’t have connections everywhere in the country that would allow her to go underground for months or years.”

She wavered just a little. I saw it in the shape of her mouth as she came close to chewing her bottom lip, a dead giveaway that she was experiencing a moment of doubt. I saw it on those precious few occasions when she had started to punish me, to put me in the box, but I managed to talk her out of it. They were few indeed. “Did they offer you the same deal?” she asked me.

I looked to Foreman, who nodded at me as if to give me the go-ahead to talk about it. I cleared my throat. “I dunno. What crimes did they threaten to charge you with?”

A brief look of surprise crossed her face. “Crimes? I got thrown in here without any idea of who I was even dealing with, though I guessed government after I saw the place. Too big to be a private concern. So ... what ‘crimes’ did he get you on?”

“I bet the surprise is going to be good on this one,” Foreman murmured quietly.

“Murder,” I’d had to admit to being accused of murder on three separate occasions in the last half hour, and as I watched my mother’s face deteriorate into shock, I realized that she was the only one of the three of us who even seemed surprised by it.

“Who did you kill?” she asked when she found her voice again. “Erich Winter?”

I looked to Foreman before I spoke. “We’ve got you dead to rights,” he said, as if he sensed my hesitation. “Fingerprints, physical evidence, traffic camera photos. It’d be a slam dunk to convict you, so you might as well tell her, because you’ve already incriminated yourself enough for me.”

I tried to be cool. “No, I didn’t kill Erich Winter. That would fall under attempted murder, though. I was accused,” I said, putting the emphasis on the word, “of killing the four members of M-Squad.” I smiled sarcastically at Foreman, and he nodded his head at me.

“Did you now?” Mother didn’t seem impressed. “M-Squad was that group of metas who were Erich Winter’s personal lapdogs, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“Uh huh,” she said, and I could see the wheels turning. She looked up at Foreman. “Your terms are acceptable. I give you my word that I won’t run, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Sovereign is the most dangerous son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life and if he’s plotting something involving wiping out our species ... he’ll probably succeed unless you have someone with some brains and skill to stop him.”

“Well, we have your daughter,” Foreman said.

“I said brains and skill, Senator,” my mother said, “not a girl who follows her genitals in whatever direction they lead like a bitch in heat.”

“Oh, screw you,” I said and turned to Foreman. “Can we just leave her in here?”

“She’s a valuable resource, having seen your enemy face to face,” Foreman said. He wagged a finger at my mother. “You’ll be answering to your daughter as she’s running the operations side of our new agency.”

“What?” Her shock was palpable. “Who have you got running the finance department? An infant with a sliding abacus in their crib?”

“I considered an aging radiologist I know for that job,” I said. “But I’m not sure she could hack it, since I overtook her level of learning in math when I turned thirteen.”

My mother seethed a little then tried to put on a polite face. “Fine. I will ... deal with you placing my daughter in a superior position in order to secure my freedom. That doesn’t seem to be totally unreasonable. You have to suffer to get what you want, after all.”

I bit back an angry reply that was ringing in my head, something about suffering and not getting what I wanted for years and years. It was pointless, though, bickering with her. The tables had turned in title, if not in fact, and somehow I was now in charge of her. That boggled the mind. “That’s very mature of you,” I said, without even bothering to throw some emphasis on the word mature. She caught it anyway and gave me a narrowing of her eyes in response.

“All right,” Foreman said, and gestured toward the open door. “Now we’ve got a basic working group, so we can start hammering out everything we know and everything we need to start doing.”

I walked out of the cell first, warily, keeping one eye on my mother as I edged out the door. She caught me looking and nodded subtly. I knew what she was thinking; she was pleased as punch that she’d suckered me on the way in the door. It was her way of reminding me to always be vigilant. Tempted as I was to repay the favor by bludgeoning her with something heavy the first time she turned her back, I promised myself I would resist the temptation. Probably.