“We need to set up fast,” Foreman said. I walked on the left side of the hallway; my mother was an arm’s length away at my right, and the two of us only had eyes for each other, watching as though each of us was a heartbeat away from striking the other. “Our latest intel suggests that Weissman—Century’s leading man, second in command next to Sovereign—is in Rio de Janeiro. He’s got a net of telepaths working the streets, tracking down the metas.” He stopped just outside the door that he’d sent Ariadne and Scott through earlier, and indicated for me to run my ID badge across a metal strip nearby, which I did. The door buzzed and opened, and we walked through a guardroom where we were greeted by two men with AR-15s pointed at us. “Sentinel,” Foreman announced, and the men lowered their weapons. He glanced back at us. “Prearranged code word. If I hadn’t given it within five seconds of walking through the door, they would have opened fire.”
“Clever,” Mother said, unimpressed. “We used to do something similar at the Agency.”
We walked on, and I suppressed my desire to make another joke about her age, something about being on the cutting edge back in the 1890s. I tried to remind myself I was a better person, and I caught a vague whiff of disagreement from the souls I’d thrown in their own little boxes in my mind. It may have been me arguing with myself, for all I knew.
We passed the door behind the guards and found ourselves in a more open space. Foreman led us down a carpeted hall and knocked on the door of a room labeled “Conference 4.” He entered without bothering to wait for a response.
It was tense inside, with three people spaced around a long, rectangular conference table. I took one look at Ariadne, seated near one end of the table, Scott, across from her, and Agent Li, sitting in the middle, and wondered what the hell had happened in this room to make my mother and I walking in together actually lower the tension level. I started to voice that thought, but Senator Foreman took a seat at the end of the table and waved for us to do the same. I made my way over to Scott and sat down, across from Agent Li and just a couple seats from where Foreman had sat. My mother made her way to the opposite end from Foreman and took it, staring down the long table at him with Ariadne directly to her right.
“Let’s get this discussion under way,” Foreman said, surveying all of us. “Welcome to the first advisory council meeting of the Metahuman Policing and—”
“Whatever,” my mother said, interrupting. “Let’s just call this what it is to spare us an unwieldy acronym—Agency 2.0.”
Foreman appeared ready to argue for just a beat, then he seemed to pause. “Fair enough. For the sake of expediency.” He looked around the table. “To start with, let me state that Ariadne Fraser will handle the administrative side of this new venture—which is strictly off the books, in spite of sharing intelligence developed by the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security and other departments. She will be reporting to Congress and the Executive Branch. Sienna Nealon will be our head of operations, and Agent Li will be your liaison and oversight for the foreseeable future.” Foreman looked from Li to us. “He’ll be here to make certain you stay within the boundaries and guidelines wherever possible, since he has experience with FBI procedures already.”
“Lovely,” my mother opined from the end of the table. “It’s always nice to have a professional on the team. Maybe it’ll help make up for the amateur in charge of operations.”
“You know what?” I asked. “I bet I’ve bagged more wildfire metas in the last year than you have.”
“I think we can agree you’ve probably bagged more men in the last year than I have,” she said acidly.
“If we’re talking body bags, I bet it’s neck and neck,” I shot back. “Though I probably haven’t smacked around nearly as many unsuspecting convenience store clerks, if we’re keeping count of those—”
“No mother/daughter cat fights on company time, ladies,” Foreman said, unamused.
“I could host one later, if you want,” Scott said, drawing a glare from Foreman. “Sorry.”
“So tell me about this ‘Century.’” My mother looked attentively down the table, waiting expectantly.
Foreman looked at me, and it took me a minute to realize this was my department. “Uhm,” I said, and listened to my mother cough quietly. “Let me start with the basics. By the accounts I’ve heard, there are one hundred of them—one hundred of the strongest metas on the planet. Their immediate goal is to wipe out the competition, at which point we’ve speculated there’s some unknown ‘Phase Two’ that relates to subjugating humanity.” I cleared my throat. “As for what we know specifically about them, it’s very little. Sovereign is at their head, though I haven’t run across anyone able to give me a description of him—”