“He looks to be in his early forties, olive skin, dark, curly hair,” my mother said pointedly. She looked over at me and I could see Li across the table, scribbling furiously on a notepad. “Talks in a deep voice, with a thousand years of accumulated confidence that says, ‘Don’t mess with me because I never lose a fight.’” She folded her hands on the table. “He’s powerful. More powerful than any meta I’ve ever come across. He can do things I’ve never seen, and since I hunted wildfire metas for several years and accumulated the best record in the Agency for capturing them,” she looked at me pointedly, “that says something.”
“I can get some sketch artists working on his face,” Li said, looking up at Foreman.
“Don’t waste too much of your time,” I said. “One of Sovereign’s powers is to change his appearance.”
There was a moment’s quiet. “How do you know that?” Foreman asked.
I tried to remember; I thought I had heard it in a flashback involving Adelaide, a mysterious Omega operative who’d apparently killed my Grandfather, but it was vague, fuzzy. I couldn’t be sure, so I lied for the sake of convenience. “It was in a record I retrieved from Omega.”
“Speaking of Omega,” my mother said, “I don’t care for them, but they could be useful in a threat situation like this. It sounds like we have a common enemy.”
Foreman looked at me. “We might as well ask the Primus of Omega what she thinks.” There was an uneasy silence as I realized that he and I might have been the only ones at the table that knew what he was hinting at.
My mother’s sigh was loud enough to fill the room. “Yes, that was my suggestion, to parlay with Omega’s Primus, though—and I admit my information could be out of date—when last I heard, it was a man named Gerasimos and had been for several hundred years.”
“There’s a new one now,” Foreman said dryly.
“Oh?” My mother’s impatience was her undoing here; she was walking right into the rake that Foreman set out for her. “How soon can you make contact? They have a lot more resources to draw on than you might expect.”
“I’d say we can make contact very quickly.” Foreman angled his head toward me. “What do you say? Are the resources of Omega at our disposal?”
“Such as they are,” I said. “The remaining operatives in England will need visas—”
“Oh, dear God,” my mother said. “YOU?” She swore under her breath, but we all heard it. “How did you become the Primus of Omega?”
I inclined my head slightly. “There weren’t many people left—”
“There would have to be nobody left,” she grumbled.
“Well, it’s pretty damned close to that,” I said back, not keeping the heat out of my reply. She wasn’t wrong, but it was still annoying.
“Give me their names and I’ll make sure we don’t run into any problems,” Foreman said. “We’re cooperating with the UK government on this, so I suspect I might even be able to expedite things on their end as well.”
“That’d be good,” I said. “There are a few of them whose help I’d like, especially for field operations.”
Foreman nodded. “So ... what’s your first order of business?”
I froze and felt my mouth go dry. There was hot air blowing directly on me from the duct above, the smell of the furnace-heated air heavy in the room. I looked around the table from Foreman’s earnest mien to Li’s slightly hostile stare to Ariadne, who wasn’t even looking at me. My mother was staring coldly, and I came back to the empty hardwood space in front of me. “Um, well—”
“Our fearless leader,” my mother sighed.
Something snapped in my head and I felt rage flood me, a kind of cold anger that fueled my thoughts and made them race faster. “First priority is identifying the metas presently in the U.S.”
Foreman nodded. “Then what?”
My mind raced back to the preliminary thinking I’d done while I was on the flight back from London, hashing over ideas with Reed and the others before I’d left. “Two parts to that—one is to start bringing whoever we can under our protective aegis—”
“Brilliant,” my mother said, “round them all up strategically in one location. I’m just now realizing that’s what happened in China and India. It wasn’t an accident of fate at all, not some random hostilities or regional conflict.” She wore a look of calculated ill ease—which is to say she was pissed and trying not to show it. “That was the opening salvos in this campaign to wipe out metahumans. They clustered them together and made them the low-hanging fruit of the equation. Now the first part of your plan is to re-enact it?”