Omega(110)

                             And then he was still, the brown eyes dull, empty; the soul gone from them.

                I felt the nausea double, triple, mix with something else, a kind of reckless joy and rush of euphoria that was a hundred times more powerful than what the chloridamide did to me when it hit the vein, and a kind of weak drowsiness settled over me, the emotion blown, and now I wanted more than ever to throw myself into the fire.

                “Let her go,” Old Man Winter said, and Clary dropped me to the ground, where I lay huddled, my head overwhelmed, too many thoughts and minds, even behind the wall of chloridamide that remained. “You will remember this day, and look back, and know that I was right.”

                “I will look back on this day, and remember...” I said, “...and I will kill you...the next time I see you...” I looked up at him with all the hatred, all the venom, everything I felt down to the last inch of my soul.

                Old Man Winter was above me, Bastian and Parks flanking him, and Clary sidling into line behind them. The old man’s face was indecipherable; there wasn’t any expression. It was like it was when I’d first met him, as though I’d never known him at all.

                With that, he turned, and strode off through the carnage, the grass and leaves of the dead summer crunching underfoot. Bastian followed first, then Clary, and finally Parks, though he waited a moment. I didn’t look at them, not at any of them. I didn’t want to dignify them with so much as a glance. I clutched my shoulder tight to me, rubbed my arms, which I could not even feel, and lay on my back, looking up to the sky. I didn’t want to look at the body; I knew they had laid me next to him. I reached out for a hand and found it, his bare skin on mine, but his was cold, and lifeless...and mine was not, no matter how much I wished it were. I curled my face against his chest, and it wasn’t moving now, not like last night or this morning, and I knew I could sleep here next to him, undisturbed by his breath because now there was none.



                             I stared into the black sky overhead, the smoke and darkness lit only by the fires of the burning Directorate, and I felt a touch of something on my forehead. Another followed, and another, and I opened my eyes. Snowflakes fell in little flurries, wending their way toward the earth, falling down around me, around the chaos of the destroyed campus, the destruction of my life, the end of my world, and I lay there, Zack’s cold hand in mine, as they fell.





27.



                Interlude

                Chanhassen, Minnesota



                The Cadillac’s wheel was tight against his hands; the ache was in them, from the weather, he told himself, the first flakes of snow hitting the windshield, illuminated by the headlights as he drove down the darkened highway.

                “I can’t believe you left Bjorn behind,” Fries said from the backseat. “How could you do that?”

                “He disobeyed my order,” Janus said, and gave a reassuring smile to Klementina in the passenger seat, “and he paid the price for it.”

                “You let him remain a prisoner of Old Man Winter—” Fries said.

                “Hardly,” Janus said. “He’s quite dead, now.”

                “Dead?” Fries said into the silence. Madigan, for her part, did not question, did not say a word. She knew. He had worked with her many times before, and she understood the way of things. “You let them kill him?”

                “I did not let them do anything,” Janus said. “But I believe Erich Winter has hit his breaking point. You see, Winter is afraid, and Bjorn will suffer the rather unfortunate consequences of that. It’s all part of the plan, you see. All expected.”