I stared back at him and something dawned on me. “That’s why you’re not scared to be in here alone with me.”
He shrugged. “You’re strong, but you’re handcuffed, and you’ve got all your flesh except for your head covered. Under those conditions, I feel pretty comfortable that I could win a fight with you.”
I held my hands up and clinked them as I pulled them to maximum extension. “What about without the cuffs?”
Foreman’s eyebrow rose slowly. “I wouldn’t care to chance it.” He waved me off. “I’m not here to talk to you about a brawl for it all.”
“Then what are you here to talk to me about?” I looked away again. “Here to give me the rundown of my crimes, like the Ghost of Christmas Past? Because I know what I’ve done, since I was there—”
His eyes danced and he cut me off. “I’m not here to talk about your past. I’m here to talk about your future.”
I let my tongue roam over my back teeth as I bided my time, trying to wait for him to go on. He didn’t, and my patience ran out, quickly. “According to Li, my future is the inside of a cell. And not five minutes ago, you made mention of that fact as well—”
“It’s one possible future,” Foreman agreed and took a step to his left, leaning against the edge of the one-way mirror. “It’s hardly set in stone, though. There are ... other possibilities.” His hands came to rest in the pockets of his jacket.
“Oh?” I kept my eyes on him then let them flicker to the mirrored glass, wondering if Li was behind them. “And what are those? The other possibilities?”
One of his hands came out of his pocket, something clenched within his fingers. He tossed it lightly, and it skittered across the table to come to rest in front of me. I didn’t take my eyes off of him to look, though, I kept right on him, watching him watch me. He smiled, just a little at the corner of his mouth, a faint tug of the muscles, and he nodded his head at what he’d tossed at me.
My curiosity got the better of me and I broke away from his gaze to look. There was an open leather case resting on the table, a simple bifold that resembled a wallet. There was identification inside, something terribly familiar, something I’d used before. My picture rested inside, along with the letters FBI emblazoned across it. I sighed, and looked back up. “If you’re going to charge me with impersonating an FBI agent, you’re kind of wasting your time, aren’t you? I mean, five murders—or four, or whatever—I think they’ll probably keep me in jail for a long enough time, don’t you? Assuming you even used the court system.” I muttered the last bit.
“Maybe, maybe not, given your longevity.” He ignored my last comment. “But you don’t think I really came all the way here from Washington to discuss the fact that you have a fake FBI ID, do you? I mean, people commit those kinds of crimes all the time, they don’t get a senator coming to them to talk while they’re in stir.”
“So what do you want?” I asked again, and all the fatigue of my trip, the tension from having been arrested and put into custody when I’d felt above the law, all of it came rushing down on me and I snapped at him. “What do you want from me in order to keep my future from being the one where I spend the rest of my life—which may end up damned short depending on how current events turn out—in a jail cell?”
“Look at the ID again,” Foreman said gently.
I rolled my eyes. At a U.S. Senator. “I’ve seen it before. I’ve been carrying it for almost a year now—”
He cleared his throat. “No, you haven’t.” I glanced down. “You’ve been carrying one that says ‘Sienna Clarke’ on it. This one says—”
“Sienna Nealon,” I breathed, reading my name off.
I looked up at Foreman, and he was smiling warily at me. “We seem to have something of a crisis on our hands here,” Foreman said, and his smile disappeared. “Something about the extinction of all metakind? Well ... the U.S. government just lost its unofficial metahuman policing apparatus a couple weeks ago ...”
I blinked in surprise. “The Directorate?”
Foreman nodded, put a hand against the wall, and proceeded to lean heavily on it. “So ... how’d you like to avoid prison time by serving your country and helping us out of this mess?”
Chapter 4
I stared at him, not quite sure what to say. He stared back then spoke. “What are you thinking right now?”
“That old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ comes to mind.”