“You don’t expect some sort of Omega power struggle between the two of you?” Foreman asked, fingers stroking his chin.
I glanced at Karthik. “Omega is dead. She’s welcome to whatever’s left, absent the people who have chosen to side with us. We’ve visited a few safehouses in the last few months, and everyone has pretty much flown the coop, except for that one Siren-type we ran into down in Chicago.” That hadn’t been pretty. Breandan, Scott, Karthik and Reed had almost been wiped out before I had ended her allure by breaking her jaw. Now she was stuffed in a cell in Arizona and fed three times per day by female guards.
“You might not want to assume she’s fighting the same fight as you,” Foreman said.
“I don’t,” I replied. “But she’s going to be forced to by Sovereign, eventually. All of us are. It’d be nice to have some more fighters on our side.”
“All right,” Foreman said warily. “Next moves?”
“We need to keep watch on the border,” I said, cutting off Li, who was about to start talking before I halted him. “We need to comb the records of who’s crossing and flag as many people as we can. As soon as we figure out where the next target is, I’ll move a team into position to start doing some hammering back.”
Foreman gave me one quick nod. “And here on the home front?”
I looked around the conference room. It was expansive, with glass windows overlooking a grassy campus that was deeply familiar, for obvious reasons. I’d spent most of the time I’d been outside my house here on these grounds. We had three buildings now, the construction companies doing wonders with what we were paying them. We now had a dorm, a headquarters building, and a training center with a gym, and they were working on a parking garage. They were also reinforced against easy demolition such as Omega had managed. “Not much we can do,” I said. “We’ll protect the people we’ve got as best we can, but—”
“But the minute you’ve got a line on something more interesting than sitting around here, you’ll be off chasing it and leaving everyone unprotected,” Li said, drawing a few shocked looks and a deathly silence.
I turned to look at him. “Playing defensive given what’s at stake seems like a really good formula for losing everything.”
Li smiled, but his face was haughty and smug. “Trite fortune cookie wisdom is not a sound strategy for fighting this war.”
“Given it’s my people at the sharp end of the blade, I think I know what’s at stake here,” I said. “Fortune cookie wisdom or not, it’s true. Standing here and waiting for the entirety of Century’s one hundred metas to descend upon us using their “overwhelming force” strategy is a pretty sure way to die messily.”
“She’s got a point,” Foreman said, looking over at Li. “I don’t care how good these people are, everything we’ve got on Century says that they’re top of the food chain for meta powers. Sienna could assemble a team of veritable badasses from what we’ve got in the files, but they’re going to be outnumbered.”
I put my hands over my face and buried them for a minute. This had been a constant topic of discussion over the last few months, hashing and rehashing how we’d fight Century. So far the answer was the same as how I’d go about eating an elephant: One small bite at a time. “We need a line on them. We can’t turn the tables until we know which table they’re sitting at, and right now we’re not even in the same restaurant.”
“Looks like this Katheryn Hildegarde got a pretty good line on them,” Breandan said. “Maybe you should ask her how she did it?”
I pulled my hands away from my face and looked up. My mother caught my gaze and I knew I was wearing the same expression she was.
Foreman caught the look and I could see the caution plant itself all over his dark features. “I know that look. That’s the look my wife and daughters share when they’re about to tell me something they know I won’t like.”
“What if we could approach Hildegarde?” I asked. “Now we’ve got two motives—find out if she’s on the same side, and failing that, find out how she got a piece of those Century operatives.”
“She probably just waited for them,” Karthik said, the voice of reason. “They’re coming for all of us metas, sooner or later. She probably laid a trap where they wouldn’t suspect and blindsided them.”
“So how do we find the telepaths?” I asked. “How do we ambush people who can read minds?”