A lot of dead metas.
“Well, yes, maybe,” I said, peeling off my jacket and letting it fall to the floor. “But most of that was Weissman, acting on Sovereign’s behalf. He told me that Sovereign wasn’t involved in the day-to-day.” I let my bare fingers caress my skin, and it felt good. I barely ever got touched skin to skin, and the times that I had usually resulted in something that I could only describe as orgasmic—when my powers worked to their full extent and I ripped someone’s soul screaming from their body. Even without that, though, I liked the tactile sensation. It felt good. “What’s he really doing? What’s he up to?”
You’d probably have to know more about him as a man to know that. What his goals are, his objectives, what he wants—
“He doesn’t want anything, supposedly.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and peeled off my shirt. It stuck to me in several places. I tried to decide whether I should shower again before going to bed since I’d sweated on the drive, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Too tired. “But that’s anecdotal, too.” I shimmied out of my jeans, sliding them off and feeling the cool sheets against the back of my thighs. “What do we actually know about him? Definitely know, firsthand.”
That he destroyed the Agency. That’s about it.
“Right,” I said. “Mom’s the only person we have on hand who’s ever met him, ever faced him, ever looked him in the eye and seen who he is and what he’s all about.” I had a pad of paper next to my bed to make notes on, and I scrawled in big letters: Debrief Mom—RE: Sovereign. Part of me wanted to add AGAIN to it, because I’d sat down with her when we’d started and gone over it, but she had little to say about it. She couldn’t remember their exact conversation, she claimed, just that she’d had a sense of being overmatched and afraid he might come after her for some unknown reason. Maybe she had forgotten something. Either way, we were at a dead end and needed to go over what we knew for certain and work outward from there into speculative territory. Something, anything to start working on a plan.
I tossed my bra, sick of it biting into my skin for the day. I lay down, pulling the sheets up. The sheets felt good, so good, like a lover’s touch. Which was something I doubted I’d be feeling again anytime soon, given the special intervention it had taken the last time that had happened. I sighed. “I miss you.”
I know.
That said, I lay back and stared at the blank, knockdown-textured ceiling above me. Sovereign rolled about in my head, the thought of him, the idea of him, the mystery, the legend. I ran through it all again, and then again, trying to think of everything we knew about him, everything that had come from every living source ...
I drifted off sometime shortly thereafter but scrawled something on the pad in an utter stupor before I went out. It seemed important at the time, and even more so when I woke up ten hours later and read it again, my scrawled handwriting a nearly impossible mess in the morning that light streamed in from the giant window behind me.
Not all of the metas who have encountered Sovereign are still alive. But not all of them are dead and gone, either.
Chapter 24
“Wolfe, Bjorn and Gavrikov have all had encounters with Sovereign,” I said, looking at the people arrayed around the conference room in front of me. Everybody of import was there—Breandan, Reed, Scott (still looking a little rough, but present), Karthik, my mother, Ariadne, Li, Kat. Everybody but Foreman. “Wolfe in the 1400s in England, Bjorn in the 1600s in Norway, and Gavrikov here in America sometime in the 1940s or early fifties.”
“They don’t know the specifics, like a date?” Li asked, leaning on his arm and surveying me coolly.
“They aren’t really the ‘Dear Diary’ types,” I said, standing at the front of the room, pacing a little here and there to work off my nervous energy. “So, no, they didn’t make a record of the moments they ran into him, but their memories are clear, and with a little persuasion—” I’d had to let them all out of their cages for a while, which was starting to drive me mad again, because I had gotten quite used to not having unexpected voices in my head as I went about my daily business, “they were pretty forthcoming, even going so far as to show me the memories in question.”
“You can’t just go in there and pick them out, like you do with people you’re draining in real time?” Breandan asked, peering at me with heavy curiosity, his tongue pushing out the skin just below his lower lip on the right hand side.