“We do that pretty well ourselves,” Eve said with a wicked smile.
“And that’s fine—if she starts it,” Ariadne said, turning to look at Eve. I couldn’t see her face, but her tone shifted. “The last thing we need is a civilian casualty for some poor British nanny who picked the wrong time and place to get her passport done before she took her dream vacation to see the Mall of America.”
“Wrong season to visit,” Eve said, “Christmas shoppers and all that vileness. Horrible idea.”
“We will take all precautions not to harm her in any way,” Bastian said, ending any debate. “Eve will be at the fore; her nets are second to none for non-lethal containment. Sienna and Reed will follow up, being effective in-fighters, and Clary and Parks will keep overwatch.” He looked around at each of us until he saw the nod. “With your permission, ma’am?” He looked to Ariadne, who gave him the subtle nod of approval, and with that he opened the door and walked out first.
“So, yeah,” J.J. said as Parks left next, “go get ‘em, guys.” He looked at me and his cheeks burned crimson. “And girls.” He turned and caught an icy glare from Eve (which was probably just her normal expression). “And women.” He nodded his head, bobbing it like a jack-in-the-box. “Yeah.”
I filed past J.J. Clary didn’t even try to rush ahead of me like he normally did, for which I...didn’t care, for once. Reed trailed behind me, then spoke as we walked through the cubicle rows. “Good play, you think?”
“Going on the offensive against an Omega agent?” I asked. “Yeah. Leaving the campus stripped of its best guardians? Not so much.”
“Scott and Kat are still here,” Reed said.
“One’s got a hole in her memory the size of the loop on the rollercoaster at Valley Fair and the other is broken into more pieces than that porcelain angel of Ariadne’s that Eve stuck under Clary’s ass at the Halloween party as a joke.” I shook my head. “We just need to hurry, that’s all.”
“You think they’re coming here?” Reed said, and for once he was hard to read.
“I think they’re coming for Old Man Winter,” I said. “Take him out, you think the Directorate keeps rolling along?”
“Ariadne can keep it going,” Reed said. “Why are you worried about this now? He’s been around for a good long while, a few millennia. You think he can’t take care of himself?”
“No,” I said quietly. “I know he can’t. He’s worried about it, thinks he’s at the top of Omega’s target list. He’s pushing me to step up because...it’s like he can feel the axe descending, like he can feel its shadow on the back of his neck. I’ve never seen him like he is now, and I’ve known him for almost a year now.”
“That’s not a very long time to know somebody.” Reed kept impassive, casual. “That’s about how long you’ve known me, after all, and I’m way more of an open book than Winter.”
“We’ve had long conversations because we’re related,” I said, shooting him a half-assed sneer. “Because I wanted to know about our father, and what he was like, and all the things I missed with him being, you know—dead for my entire life. I’ve worked with Old Man Winter, though, and you get kind of a bead on him after a while. There’s emotion under the surface, and for the first time, I’m seeing worry. He knows bad things are coming, even though he doesn’t know exactly what all they are. There are things going on in the meta world that too many people have been warning us about, things we need to take seriously.”