“I don’t want to hide from him!” I said, my fury boiling over. “I want to go straight at him, to feel my fingers around his neck as I sap the life from him! If I knew where he was right now, I would go to him, find him, and do my level best to kill him just so we could get this over with, one way or another.” My anger spent, I felt the seething on my lips die down. “I’m tired. I want to be done with this.”
Little Doll should not be so cavalier with her life—
“What life?” I said with a laugh. “What life do I have? I’m in the service of my government now, in the service of my people, and that’s all I’ve got going. Forgive me for trying to figure out the shortest way possible to end this crisis. I just want it to be over so that maybe I can take a breath, maybe feel like I’ve paid some of my debt to society. I’d even be glad to be hunting troublesome metas again if it meant I didn’t have the extinction of my entire species hanging over my head. So again, Wolfe, what life? The one where I wake up in the morning, think about this all day long, and go to bed wondering if this will be the night that it starts here in the U.S.? Where I wonder when the axe will begin to fall, and if I’ll even be able to stop it when it does? So I can wake up to another day and wonder if this is my last one alive, if they’ll be coming for me now or at the end of it all, after I’ve seen the body counts rack up? Another day to wonder if I’ll get to watch every one of my friends die because Sovereign wants me alive and all of them dead?” I sighed. “And I don’t even know why he wants me alive.”
The Little Doll is special. Wolfe knew this from Omega, from the others, but they didn’t tell Wolfe how special you were, that you were one of the offspring of the master. Of Death.
“They kept you in the dark? Big surprise.” I laughed ruefully. “That’s all anybody does, isn’t it? Layers of secrets on top of secrets, burying one after another.” I felt a little stab. “It’s what Omega did to Adelaide, too. What Old Man Winter did to me. Sovereign and Weissman are doing it to at least some of their people, maybe all of them, who knows.” I sighed in the dark and felt the pressure of my body resting against the couch. “Too many secrets. I’ve lost count of all the ones I’m supposed to be finding answers to.”
Beware the secrets of scary people, Gavrikov said. They will consume you, wrap you up within them, and carry you away.
“I think I’ve already been carried away, Aleksandr.” I felt a little mournful as I said it. I longed for the simplicity of my house. No, that wasn’t true. What I really longed for was the nine months or so that I’d been part of the Directorate, when things were simple and I had a boyfriend who loved me, friends who watched my back. I thought about Scott and Kat, and how I hadn’t really spoken to them outside of a meeting, or about anything other than work in the six months since we’d started this endeavor. Hell, even Breandan and Karthik were nothing more than work colleagues at this point, at a distance. The conversation I’d had earlier with my mother was one of the deepest ones we’d ever had, and one of the first outside of a meeting or a discussion of straight business of the agency. “I’ve been carried along by this river of secrets since day one, with only a little bitty break somewhere in the middle.” I blinked. “I wonder if I’ll look back on this in five years and still think of my time at the Directorate as the best days of my life.” I didn’t say it, but I wondered if I’d even be around to look back on it in five years. The odds were not great.
There was a beep from the phone on my desk announcing the intercom. I rolled off the couch and walked over to hit the accept button, and I heard loud, crackling noises through the phone. “What?” I said, feeling a sense of unease.
A loud klaxon sounded throughout the building, a howling sound, and I saw a red emergency light begin to flash outside my office, casting the cubicles of the bullpen in a deep red light. “Ms. Nealon, this is dormitory security, we are under fire—” The voice was cut off by the staccato sound of gunshots in the background. “—overwhelming numbers—” The phone hissed and squealed from the feedback noise and the howl of what was coming through it. The sound of gunshots was steady now, and I could tell that a pitched firefight was going on. “They are in the building—”
“Activate the shutters!” I shouted, but the sound cut out. I waited there for an awful moment, then turned and looked out my office window. Light from muzzle flare flashed across the way at the dormitory. Black shapes were entering the building now, swarming in, too many to count, flooding out of vans parked right up on the curb. It was an army of men, and their purpose was clear.