My mother smiled. “With the Agency, we started to track the basic disposition of metas by type. Pure telepaths are rare. If Century got their hands on ten, it’d be probably half of the current supply worldwide. More now, I suppose.”
Scott leaned forward. “Is it possible they could be tracking metas through other means?”
“Cloisters,” I said. “They’re a good starting point, since they’re essentially communities where almost everyone is a meta. I don’t know how well a telepath can sift a brain, but my impression would seem to suggest that they can go through it like—”
“Like you or I would with our touch,” my mother said. “They just don’t have the touch requirement, and can do it without anyone but a very well-trained person knowing that they’ve done it.”
“So a telepath could sit at the edge of a cloister,” Scott said, talking it out, “and just dig through the inhabitants one by one, pulling out their memories of every meta they’ve ever had contact with?”
My mother nodded slowly. “Yep. Depending on the strength of the telepath, they could be as close as a few hundred feet away or as far as hundreds of miles.”
I chewed my lip. “Or more. Some can do more.” Everyone looked at me. “I’m pretty sure Zollers touched my mind from a lot farther away, unless he followed me to England.”
“Maybe he was in England?” Scott asked.
“He touched my mind only a few days earlier when I was still here in Minneapolis,” I said. “So unless he traveled in the intervening time, I think we can safely assume that the range might be longer in certain circumstances.”
I looked around and saw my mother contemplating that, deep in thought. “Maybe because he’d touched your mind before? That could have had something to do with it, helped him find you, the lone grain of sand in the middle of a beach.”
I played her statement back in my mind again, searching for the sarcasm, the barb. I didn’t hear it. “Maybe.”
“So, for agenda,” Foreman said, and I looked over to find him writing on a small, pocket-sized notepad, “so far, I’ve got inventorying the metas presently in the U.S., gathering intelligence, and setting up counterintelligence in preparation for Century’s first moves ... what else?”
“We should track down the remains of Omega here in the U.S.,” I said. “They had a presence here, complete with operatives and facilities. They may have lost their European operations, but I suspect they’ve still got some people in place here.” I looked at Foreman. “Karthik—one of my people in the UK—could help with that.”
“Expediting visas,” Foreman said, writing on his notepad. He looked up. “What else?”
“We had a lot of kids in school at the Directorate,” Ariadne said at last, drawing everyone’s attention to her. She sat, red hair limp and lifeless around her pale face. “Someone should check on them to be sure they’re all right.”
I felt a surge of concern, like I’d forgotten something. “Joshua Harding,” I said quietly.
“Who?” Scott said, looking over at me.
“This kid,” I said. “He helped me evacuate the dorms on the night the Directorate was destroyed. He promised me he’d help get the kids to the nearest cloister.” I looked to Ariadne. “That’s definitely something we need to look in on.”
“The nearest cloister is up on the North Shore of Lake Superior,” Scott said, frowning.
“Should be easy enough to take a look at,” Foreman said, looking up from his pad. “Anything else?”
I shook my head, my mind completely blank. I honestly didn’t know what else I could think of that we’d need to deal with right now. Nothing pressing, anyway.
“Money,” Ariadne said quietly, pulling everyone’s attention back to her. “We’ll need a payroll if you want me to pull the old Directorate back together.”
“Ah, yes,” Foreman said, and I could see the chagrin on his face. “For that, I’ll need you to put together the old trading unit again so you can make it self-sustaining because we don’t have any budgetary help from Washington. At all.”
That just sort of lay there like a bomb had gone off in the middle of the table until my mother finally broke the silence. “Let me clarify this, just so I can be certain I have it all straight.” She put her hand up and started ticking off points on her gloved fingers one by one. “We’re forming a new agency to replace the Directorate. We’re reporting directly to the government, but they’re not paying us. Our job is to stop the extinction of our entire subspecies of the human race from a threat we know almost nothing about save for that it’s headed by probably the most dangerous man in the world—”