“Because you wouldn’t have unleashed those maniacs, those twits, those sidewinders?” I asked.
“Certainly not,” he said with an assured shake of the head. “Because you...you are too important to chance to such...creatures, shall we say.”
“But you did send Bjorn,” I ticked them off in my head, “and Madigan.”
“Of course I did,” he said. “Naturally.”
“Um...they failed just as miserably as the ones you didn’t send.”
“Not at all,” Janus said with a smile, and there was a beep from the phone in my pocket. “Do you need to get that?”
“It’s a...” I frowned and kept one hand covering him with the gun while I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket and thumbed the text message feature. I had three messages and a missed call from Zack. I clicked the messages first, my eyes darting from the phone to Janus. “I have messages.”
“I understand,” he said. “I’ll wait. Personally, I hate those smart phones. Don’t get along with them.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be open to change?”
He sighed, deeply. “There is a difference between helping others with change and embracing it for oneself. Technology may be my bane, but no matter. Read your messages, and then we shall talk.”
I flipped through the first, the newest, from Ariadne, to me and all of M-Squad:
Assemble at dormitory. Protect the students at all costs.
“We’re not going to attack the dormitory...yet,” Janus said, catching my eye as I jerked my head up. “I’m an empath, of sorts. I can’t read your mind, exactly, but I get the gist of your emotions, and I know where everyone is. They’re safe, for now.”
“For now?” I asked, and felt the gnawing sense of fear start to eat away at my confidence.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and I thought he might be trying to sound reassuring, “they’ll be given plenty of opportunity to get out before we destroy the building. If they choose to stay, well, that’s on them, not me, but...they’ll be warned. You can even tell them yourself, if you’d like, once we’re done talking.”
“You don’t think I’ll be going with you?” I looked at his face over the sights of my gun, wondering if I was doing myself any favors by not pulling the trigger.
“No, of course not,” he said with a shake of his head, as though it were the most obvious of truths. “Getting you to come with me today was never the purpose of Operation Stanchion.”
“That’s not what Bjorn said.”
“Bjorn is a young bull, charging into everything.” Janus bent his head low, as though miming the action of a bull, scuffing his shoe against the tile floor. “He was an excellent distraction for you.”
“And Madigan?” I asked, nodding to the room where I had last seen her, up to her ankles in a wading pool. “Was she a distraction, too?”
Janus chortled. “Well, let us put it this way...it would seem that you and your fellows have a taste for herring—in red, at least.”