“What do you want to do about him?” My mother spoke first, breaking a brief silence that had felt like years.
“Nothing,” I said after a pause. “We let him be; we have other things to worry about.”
I saw a flash of red on Ariadne’s cheeks. “Really?”
I felt a searing embarrassment inside at the thought of what Ariadne had to be thinking: If only you’d come to that conclusion before you killed my girlfriend. I didn’t flinch from her unspoken rebuke, but only because I tried to make my face into stone, unmoving. “We have bigger problems. Saving our race from extinction is more important to me than settling any grudge I might have with him.”
“He might know something important about Sovereign,” my mother said.
“He’s on the wanted list,” Ariadne said. “Foreman’s pissed at him for failing to live up to his agreement to run the Directorate as it was supposed to be run to keep metas in line.”
“He probably does know something,” I agreed, “and he’s certainly done his share of wrong, but tracking him down and catching him is going to take a lot of resources, none of which we have available to spend at present.” It sounded logical in my head when I said it. In truth, I could picture myself pressing my fingers against his throat while the frigid life drained out of his blue eyes. I would have savored every moment of his agony, even now, months after he had wronged me so. “I can’t justify it. If he was as imminent a threat as Sovereign and Century, I’d be all over it.” I clenched my arms tighter to my chest. “For now, we let him be. His day will come.” I paused, and took a breath. “We need a plan, though. We’ve gone on the offensive, we’ve stung Century, but we need to draw some of them in, start to break them a piece at a time. We need to build some momentum.”
“I thought you were happy about the splattered telepaths,” Ariadne said, her arms folded across her.
“It’s a stall, not a win,” I said. “There are a hundred of them at fighting weight and eight of us. I’d like to start drawing down their numbers and doing so quickly—and preferably, quietly. That way they don’t know what’s happening until we’re down to the very last of them.”
“They’re still wrapping up in Latin America and Canada, right?” My mother asked, fingers kneading her chin. “If they’re still mopping up elsewhere, most of their operators probably aren’t even in the country yet.”
“They’re finishing up, probably only getting stragglers now,” Ariadne said. “According to Agent Li, anyway.” She looked sideways at me. “You should probably brief him, by the way, on how this all turned out. He doesn’t enjoy being left out in the cold on things like this.”
“I’ll think about it,” I mumbled. Li was not one of my very favorite people and I avoided him as much as possible. I could tell he felt just about the same, but his duties didn’t allow us to avoid each other as much as both of us would have liked.
“We’ve always got other things we could be dealing with,” my mother said.
“More important than the twilight of our species?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Why can’t you be like a normal girl and be worried about boys and dances or something?”
I smiled at her sadly. “Because that’s not what you made me.” I looked to Ariadne. “She has a point, though. We’ve got no real line on what to do next with Century, which means we’re reduced to waiting for something to happen. We need something else to focus on until we can go on offense again.”
“Maybe focus on defense?” Ariadne said acidly. She caught my pitying glare in reply. “Just a suggestion.”
I started thinking about it, but nothing was occurring to me. “We need to know more about Sovereign.”
My mother shrugged. “Good luck with that. I met him once, and it was pretty short, as far as meetings go. Other than a sense of overpowering terror, I can’t give you much of a feeling of the man.”
“I’d say you got that across,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck as I fidgeted idly. “You got anything else?”
“He hovers like an avenging angel,” my mother said, “speaks in a voice of infinite authority, and if you defy him, the response is swift and unpleasant.” She kept her reply level, but I could hear the slightest quiver beneath it. “When it comes to terror, what else is there?”
I sighed. “I’m exhausted. Any further thinking is going to have to wait until tomorrow.” I cast a look over to the bed in the corner, where Janus lay, not as shriveled as I would have expected from a man who had been in a coma for six months but still just a shell of what he had been only months earlier. “If only he could do my sleeping for me, I’d be all set.” I winced a little inside, looking at Janus’s face, which had grown pale from the months he’d been confined to the medical unit. What had been a swarthy, pleasant look on him, a healthy man—a little weathered at times, but still vital—had been reduced to deadness, quiet, the silence of a vegetable and nothing more. “I need to sleep,” I repeated.