Omega(106)

                “I stopped Bjorn here,” I said and gave Bjorn a gentle kick to the trapezoid. I squinted and looked to him. “How did you know I let them go?”

                “I saw,” Ariadne said, clutching her side. “On the security monitor.”



                             “Thanks. I didn’t need any help or anything,” I said acerbically.

                “You wouldn’t have gotten any from us,” Ariadne said, her voice straining. “I was watching. The rest of them were fending off about thirty metas that didn’t act at all like they weren’t here to kill. Pretty damned far from it, I would say.”

                Old Man Winter walked to where Bjorn lay and lifted him up by the head and neck, Bjorn’s unconscious bulk hanging limp in his hands. “Janus deceived you. He likely sent Bjorn back to retrieve you.”

                “Maybe,” I said, and the smoke made my eyes burn as I turned back to them. “I don’t think so, though. They’re worried about something else, something worse.”

                “They are right to worry,” Old Man Winter said, shaking Bjorn like a puppet in his grasp. “Do you know what this storm is that is coming? Do you know how it will affect us, our people?”

                “Since you haven’t told us anything about it, no.” I folded my arms. “Only what Janus said. It’s tied to the exterminations.”

                “You have no idea because you are not ready,” he said, countenance darkening, “because you would not know the enemy if you saw it, this destruction that creeps toward us, wiping out metas continent by continent. If it presented itself to your very face, to you, and you recognized it for what it was, you would still fail to stop it because you are unwilling to do what is necessary—to kill when you confront evil.”

                I felt myself redden in the heat of the fire. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, feeling myself fade, as though I could slip into the darkness and away from the ire of Old Man Winter, who was losing his chill rapidly and more obviously than even the time I’d seen him face Wolfe. “Maybe this isn’t for me, the fight, the battle; I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t want to be responsible—”

                “Unfortunately,” Old Man Winter said, tugging on Bjorn, letting him hang in front of me, “that is not an option. I know what waits at the head of the organization—they are called Century, by the way, since you want to know what I know—and I know that you, and you alone, are the only one that stands a chance—a hope in hell—of stopping them.”



                             “How do you even know that?” I asked, feeling ruthless, cynical, angry. “You didn’t know who I was a year ago! You didn’t know I existed! You couldn’t even figure out what Omega is up to! How do you presume to tell me what some black box organization that sounds like a movie production company is up to a world away?”

                “Because I know who heads them,” he said, and there was a rattle in his voice, “and I have feared him since he crippled me over a hundred years ago. He is without a doubt the most powerful meta on the face of the earth, and with one hundred followers—some of the strongest metas on the planet—he has assembled an army that is wiping us out, piecemeal. They burned through the compounds in India and China because they were the easiest, but even now they have split, divided their forces and run rampant through Asia and Africa, slaughtering whole cloisters of metas. Next will be Europe, and finally...” His eyes turned grim. “You are the only one who can stop him—and by extension, them. You must be willing to do what it takes—to kill him, because you, yourself, will be the only one with a chance.”