“I’m good for now, I think. See you in a little bit?”
“I’ll be there,” he promised, and gave me a wave as he turned and walked out of the dormitory.
I watched him go, then turned and caught that teenager and his friends looking at me again. I shook my head and walked to the elevator bank just down the hall and pressed the button, causing a loud ding to sound immediately as one of the elevators opened for me. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the third floor, and waited for the doors to close as I pondered Reed’s words. I had imagined myself to be rumored about in unkind ways, just as I had been a few months ago. It had always been that way for as long as I’d been at the Directorate, since I stood by and let Ariadne and Old Man Winter protect me while Wolfe was slaughtering his way through innocent people to get me to surrender to him.
The thought of people talking badly about me was nothing new, and easily enough dealt with; I had friends to help me cope, after all. The thought of people talking about me in more pleasant terms—for some reason, that bothered me. I had seen people steer away from me in the halls, and I preferred the idea of being feared to the idea of being lusted after. It creeped me out and brought back associations with Wolfe in unfavorable ways.
I felt a stir in the back of my head as the doors dinged open, and I realized it had been almost twenty-four hours since my last dose of chloridamide, the medication that kept my demons in check. Wolfe and Gavrikov were with me, always, and I could feel them through the medication sometimes, moving in the back of my head, like faint voices in an empty room. The chloridamide made it possible to (mostly) ignore them, to shut them away where I didn’t have to deal with them on a constant basis. A couple months ago I had gone a day with a diminished dose to see if I could control them naturally; the increased chatter from the two of them was exhausting. They fought over the most inane things, bickering enough that after three hours I had no desire to listen anymore and took a shot of chloridamide just to shut them up.
I stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor, and walked down an open hall. To my left was a series of windows that looked down on the cubed structure of the cafeteria and to my right were doors, spaced every hundred feet or so down the hallway. The paint was fresh white, and the pungent smell of the primer and lacquer was still in the air. I took a deep breath of it, trying to ignore the fact that the chemical was probably not healthy for me. It made the place smell new, fancy, as if it had been built just for us—which it sort of had. I walked past four doors before I came to one marked with a gold plate that saidss “S. Nealon” on it. I heard the scanner next to the door beep as it reacted to the proximity of the key card I had in my pocket, and I reached for the handle and opened the door.
I had lived on the first floor of the dorms for most of the time I had been at the Directorate, but a few months ago, when I left training, Ariadne handed me a key card and pointed me to the third floor. I’d never explored up here, and I found to my surprise that this was where M-Squad lived. It required a key card on your person to even access the floor, and there were only the eight of us up here—the four members of M-Squad, Kat, Scott, Reed and myself. There was a fourth floor, of course, and I knew Ariadne and Old Man Winter both had quarters up there. I’d seen it only once myself, though.
My suite was light, open and spacious—lots of sunlight pouring down from the three paneled windows that opened into the living room, which was two steps down from the entryway where I came in. There was a kitchenette to my left and a subtle dividing half-wall that ran between the kitchenette and the living room. A set of French doors opened onto a balcony just beyond my living room, and the ceilings were high enough that even as a meta, I’d have had to put some effort into jumping to touch them.
The sun had finally come out from behind the clouds and was lighting the room beautifully; it wasn’t long until sundown, however, and I had a few things to accomplish before then. I went to the fridge, a new, beautiful stainless-steel model, and opened it. A few party trays were sitting on the shelves, with twelve-packs of cola. Along with my new quarters, I had access to a pool of assistants who could run my errands for me, paid for by the Directorate. I had sent one of the gophers to a local catering company to pick up some hors d’oeuvres earlier—finger sandwiches, miniature pastries, and a few other things for what I had planned for this evening. I pulled the trays out and set them on the table in the dining area.