I looked across at the two of them and smiled, just smiled, because in spite of all the other crap that had happened, I knew what to do now. I knew exactly what the next move was, how to play it, and how to slap Century hard enough to bloody its nose. “Yep. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 32
It took a few days to make the preparations, days of quiet around the campus where we were still mourning. The funerals took place at a ceremony in an Eden Prairie cemetery a couple days after the attack. I stood there in my black dress on a warm day and thought of all the people we’d lost since I’d had the audacity to walk out my own front door one frozen day in January only a year and a half ago.
Two hundred and fifty-four people died in the first few days, starting with two guys in a parking lot who had dared to stand up on my behalf and interfere with Wolfe’s attempts to kidnap me for Omega. There were agents in that number, random families from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, police officers. Wolfe wasn’t in the number, but he was in my thoughts, even though I’d locked him away again for now.
Aleksandr Gavrikov was dead because of me. I didn’t blame myself for it, but a few thousand people in Glencoe, Minnesota, had been vaporized because of him, because of the message he’d been trying to get to us.
Andromeda. I’d watched her die before my eyes, powerless to help her. She’d fallen to her knees in front of me, a bullet wound spreading red across her shirt like paint spilled onto a blank canvas. She’d been abandoned, forgotten, held captive by Omega for reasons that none of us knew, and to this day I was the only one who seemed to care that she had died. Unfortunately, I had yet to get a chance to pay back those responsible for her death.
Dr. Ronald Sessions. Dr. Quinton Zollers on the run. Kat had lost her memories of Scott, her lover, because of me, because of a mission I led. Zack dead. Joshua Harding. He’d died trying to save the lives of the metas that I’d sent away and abandoned to make their way on their own while I hid in the box for days, trying to keep out of sight of my sins.
And M-Squad. Some of them had been my friends, and I’d killed them, every one.
Hera. The Ministers of Omega. Rick. I had his blood on my hands.
I glanced over at Ariadne during the ceremony and she met my eyes with a dull look. Part of me wanted to ask her if she was thinking about Eve right now, but that was the part that wished she would just lash out at me, once and for all, get it over with. I could see the flashes of repressed anger in her eyes, but she was too much of a pro to come at me with it. She had a job to do, she had to work with me, and she did it.
I still wished she’d give me the hell I so richly deserved for it, though.
We hadn’t waited for the team to come back from Portland to do this, and part of me wished we had. I’d never had a funeral for Zack, didn’t see what became of his body, though I’d checked after I got back from London and got ensconced in my current job. I’d found out it had been returned to his family, who’d had a cremation and a funeral a few days after I’d left for England.
Some girlfriend I was. I left his family behind to do the cleanup while I took his soul and jetted off to Europe.
The pastor intoned some words about flesh being transitory, and the list of my failures ran through my head again, without allowing me to settle in on any of them. I should have been in utter misery, but I wasn’t, not really. I was detached about the whole thing, pondering it, trying to figure out where I fit in. I’d lived through so much, had so many people die for me, that there had to be a reason for it. Only a moment separated me and Andromeda—the time it took for a rifle bolt to slide the next round into the chamber—from being dead right there with her in the forest in Western Wisconsin. Only luck had kept me from dying in an explosion like Dr. Sessions, luck or the watchful eye of Janus making sure his prize wasn’t killed in the destruction he’d wrought.
I thought of Janus, lying near dead in the medical unit as I tossed the first shovel full of dirt onto the casket in Breandan’s grave. Breandan’s family was all presumed dead in Ireland, his love had gone before him by the better part of a year, killed by Century, and I was the only family of any sort he had left. I thrust the shovel back into the mound of upturned earth, my symbolic part of the funeral over with. I looked across the thinned herd of English metas, knowing that no one had left in the wake of the attack. That was a little bit of a surprise, but not too much. Where else would they go? Back to London?
The sun was hot on the back of my head as I played it through my mind again. The funeral was starting to disperse, people wandering back to cars. I stood over the grave of the Irishman who’d let me believe I could trust people again and I agonized over the fact that I’d failed him. I wanted to say I was sorry, whisper my heartache away over his loss, but the words would be worth no more than the warm breath I issued them upon. I had failed him. That was done and over with.