“Not the biggest fan of these aggressive tactics myself, sir,” Bastian said. “We let ‘em stew, we break ‘em traditionally, without laying a finger on them. Not one of them is tough enough to take the isolation forever.”
“We do not have forever,” Old Man Winter said. “We may not even have a day. Omega is coming, make no mistake. They have marked us as a threat, they desire to eliminate us, and they are operating on a timetable so aggressive we are left with few options.” He ran a cold, surveying set of eyes over us, not flinching away from looking anyone in the eyes. I blinked away from his first, though. “This is certain: the damage could be greater than anyone of us can calculate.”
“Should we evacuate the campus, sir?” Bastian said, cutting through the air that had suddenly gotten thick in the room. “Get the younger metas out of here, maybe give the admin staff some time off and keep a skeleton crew here for the next couple weeks while we wait for the anvil to drop?”
“Who knows how long it could be?” Ariadne said. “I mean, the Director says soon,” she favored him with a submissive nod, “but they’ve known where we are—where Sienna is—for quite some time. They could have moved against us at any point. It could be tomorrow, it could be the day after, it could be six months from now. Just because they’re putting their people into the country doesn’t mean it’s happening now. For all we know, we just took out their entire strike force.”
“You didn’t,” came Reed’s voice from behind Old Man Winter. He shouldered his way into the room. “It’s coming, soon. Like...next week or sooner.” He looked around at each of us, his long, dark hair disheveled from the wind outside. “My bosses say they’re just ratcheting it down right now, dragging the last few pieces into place.”
There was a stark silence, one that I finally broke. “Oh, good. Because I hate a long wait before I die.”
Reed shook his head. “They don’t want you dead. Anything but is the word. They want you alive, just like always.”
I let a little scratchiness enter my voice, probably from the fatigue and the fact my head was whirling. “Do your bosses know why Omega is so keen on having me alive that they’d start a war with the Directorate?” I caught a flash from Old Man Winter’s eyes as I asked, something that was both subtle and yet obvious; no one else reacted to my question but to turn to Reed to listen for his answer.
“If they do, they’re not sharing,” he said, “but they barely tell me a fraction of what they know over open lines. I only got this much out of them before they dropped a hammer of their own on me.”
I felt a chill unrelated to the Director’s presence. “What?”
“I’m to return to Rome immediately,” he said, and I could hear nothing but the sour notes as he said it. “Immediate recall. They have me booked on a flight that leaves in three hours.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, a sick pit in my stomach churning the acids within. “We’re looking down the barrel of imminent attack here.”
“I know,” he said, “and I told them to sit on the pointy end of an umbrella and open it. I’m staying.”
“No,” Old Man Winter said, “you should go. And you should take Sienna with you.”
“Director,” Ariadne said, silencing the voices that started to speak around her, “are we certain that sending Sienna to Italy is going to be safer than keeping her here?”