It happened so fast he barely knew it. He found himself hanging on vertically, the girl’s blanket bunched tightly in his fist, and he watched as Elizabeth dropped away into the water beneath him, screaming as she fell into the frothy, roiling surface of the lake. He cried out, shouting into the storm, and felt the conning tower of the Fitzgerald pitch forward, tilting over with the strength of the waves. He jerked the blanket upward, snugging the child into his arms and letting the sodden, wet mess of it fall away as he clutched her tight to him. As another wave came at them, he realized that if he didn’t leave now, he would surely be carried down with the wreckage of the Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth, down to the bottom of the lake.
He started the wind with his free hand, a tornado that carried them up, him and the little girl, whose cries were lost in the screaming of the gale. They broke the clouds after a few minutes of turbulent upthrust, and he held her, cold, wet and sobbing against his chest as he flew them into the night, toward a shore that was somewhere in the distance.
They reached land less than an hour later, but by then Jon’s arm had grown numb and weary from carrying the girl crooked in it, his skin cold from the frigid storm. As his feet set down gently upon the shores of Lake Superior, Jon Traeger looked down at the girl, now sleeping in his arms, and let out a sigh.
“I’ll take you to England,” he whispered, the clouds above brewing, ready to bring forth the harbinger of the storm he’d just outrun. “To Alpha. Maybe Hera can find your living relatives.” He let a weary sigh, and cradled her with his other arm. “If not, I’ll take care of you myself.” He felt her warm against him, even through the layers of wet clothing. “I won’t let any harm come to you ... Adelaide.”
Chapter 30
Sienna Nealon
Now
“So the question is, did they wait to strike until we were more vulnerable or did they happen to catch us at a convenient moment?” My mother’s voice echoed over the speaker of the phone. I held it in my hand, pushed against my ear, my head back against the chair.
“I read the minds of a few of the surviving mercenaries,” I said, replying slowly, as if I were prying the words out of my own mouth. “They didn’t seem to know we’d be at half capacity. Their task wasn’t even to kill the metas they did, they were supposed to secure them and barter for the telepaths.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line as my mother took a deep breath. Morning was shining in from outside the windows, the sun gazing down on what should have been a perfect day. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even have noticed. Now I not only noticed but was painfully aware of the disparity between the weather as it was and what it should have been—dark clouds, gloom, rain, torrential downpours. Between the security detail and the metas I’d said I would protect, we’d lost enough people last night that it could only be classified as a catastrophe.
“So they were there solely to take back—”
“The telepaths we captured in Florida, yes,” I said dully, staring out onto the green, sunlit campus grounds. When I looked over at the dormitory building in the distance, it showed little outward sign of the assault that had done so much damage only hours earlier. I felt a burning in my chest, like bile waiting to be thrown up, as though I could expunge all the feelings I was denying in that way. “Apparently, Century thinks we’re still holding them alive.”
I could hear her thinking at the other end of the phone, and I was virtually certain I knew what she was going to say. “I know you don’t want to hear this—”
“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t.”
“—but this is a silver lining.”
“It’s a lot of dead people that I brought over here from London saying I’d protect.” The words tasted disgusting in my mouth, like meatloaf.
“But this tells us that Century is not omniscient.”
“I already knew that.” I didn’t need the bodies that were stacked up in the morgue downstairs to drive that point home.
“But,” my mother went on, heedless of my clear desire not to have this conversation, “this means that they’ll think we still have the telepaths.”
“I said I understood it.” My voice was just tired. I hadn’t slept at all that night, just sat in a chair in the corner of the medical unit and stared at Perugini’s back while she sighed and did the post-mortem work she had to do. Surprisingly, she didn’t pick at me once. She probably knew it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good.
“Then they’ll—”