Untouched

Chapter 6

“Do you want to grab some breakfast with me?” Zack’s words shocked me enough that I think my head spun. The ride back to the Directorate had been long and filled with Kurt’s surliness. I didn’t even bother to defend myself as he loosed a profanity-laden tirade about Reed colluding with me that lasted until we were well out into the farmland. I felt fortunate Zack was driving because with the fat man wailing and gnashing his teeth as he was, I had no faith he could have driven the car without putting us into a snowy ditch.

I blinked at Zack, amazed that he would offer after what had just happened, and I wondered if my head was twitching like Dr. Sessions did, brain trying to understand the question that was posed. “You want me to go like this?” I gestured to my coat, which was shredded from the collar to halfway down the back and hung open, the zipper ripped from the seam. My shirt and jeans were soaked and filthy, my hair was still wet from the snow in the parking lot and I could feel the grains of dirt in it. I couldn’t see my cheek but the throbbing in it told me that I had a bruise of no small scale where I had been punched.

“You look fine and the cafeteria’s bound to be open by now.” He smiled at me and I felt my better judgment slipping away. “I’m starving. The last leg of the flight feels like the longest trip I’ve ever taken. Facing off with your friends in the warehouse didn’t help matters at all.” His voice hit a sour note and I couldn’t tell if it was because of Reed or the armored ass.

“Friends? I don’t know if you saw, but that armored tool damned near took my head off.” I snorted, more from annoyance than anything, and it faded fast. “All right,” I said, taken aback by his…I don’t know, boyish charm. I felt my stomach roll over and knew that either I was hungry or Wolfe was reacting to my mooning over Zack. Forgotten was the fact that I avoided the cafeteria and the people who visited it, those people who hated me so. I watched Kurt limp off toward the medical unit for a once-over by Dr. Perugini.

The cafeteria was showing the first signs of life when we entered, with workers behind the glass counter adding food to the display and a few people already sitting at tables. The cafeteria was huge, a massive structure with glass windows for walls that stretched a hundred feet into the air on two sides, giving it an open feeling. I looked at the edges of the room and realized for the first time that the panes along the perimeter were doors that could be opened to what I presumed was a patio outside; with the snow covering the ground it was impossible to tell, but it seemed like there was an eating area out there.

The framework of the whole thing was metal struts that held the glass in place. I wondered idly if one could climb it, then wondered why I’d ever need to. I decided that I could, probably with ease, because the segments were no more than four- or five-foot square. On the opposite side of the room I shifted my attention to the cafeteria workers. When they saw me enter the line with Zack, several of them scowled. After we had collected our food, I let Zack lead me to a table by the windows, in the corner.

Others were here, a half dozen people scattered throughout the cafeteria. One caught my eye; a young man who I’d had words with in the past, here in this room. He’d been the only one in this place with enough guts to confront me after the first incident where I’d gotten agents killed. Everyone else had just gossiped behind my back. He had a rounded nose and his dark hair was curly and cut short. He hadn’t caught sight of me yet, and was focused on the doll he was sitting across from.

When I thought of her as a doll, I shuddered. Damn Wolfe. She was tanned, with blond hair that fell below her shoulders, and green eyes that seemed very alight. Her smile was wide and genuine, and left me with the feeling that she had too many teeth, or they were too big for her mouth, or something. I wasn’t jealous of her good looks, really. Well, not much anyway.

“Scott,” Zack called out, stirring the young man out of his conversation. He turned and saw Zack and broke into a wide grin as he stood. Zack put his tray down and they did one of those manly greetings where they gripped hands and bumped shoulders.

The man he called Scott shook his head, his smile still wide. “When did you get back?” I wondered how well they knew each other.

“Just now.” He nodded to me. “Have you met Sienna Nealon yet?”

Scott’s features tensed and he looked me over. “Briefly.”

I felt a flash of annoyance as I remembered what I probably looked like. “Have we met?” I kept a straight face. “I don’t recall.”

“My God,” the girl next to Scott breathed. “What happened to you?”

“I got into a fight with a guy who thought he was the Black Knight,” I quipped. “It turns out he didn’t get so much as a flesh wound, but maybe next time things will be different.”

“Sienna, this is Scott Byerly,” Zack said. “He might be in training with the agents soon.” Zack nodded back at me. “You better watch out, Sienna’s pretty powerful. If she decided to go into training I think she’d give you a run for your money.”

“Is that so?” Scott’s reply was cool, far cooler than I would have given him credit for. He seemed like a hothead based on our first meeting. “I heard she might have some power, but there was a rumor she didn’t have the…” He paused, as if searching for the right word, “…motivation to use it.”

Courage, he means . Wolfe was so helpful. I was seeing red, and he was encouraging me to wrap this guy’s head around the nearest table edge. I had to restrain myself to keep from showing Scotty Byerly exactly how motivated I was to use my power by throwing his limp and battered body through the nearest window. I wondered if I punted him how far he’d fly before landing headfirst in the snow like a lawn dart.

“Oh, she’s motivated,” Zack said before I could answer. “She killed that maniac Wolfe, you know.”

“I heard about that!” Scott’s companion bubbled with the enthusiasm he was lacking. “It’s all everyone talks about since I got here, how this crazy meta killed dozens of agents and how she,” she nodded at me, oh-so-helpfully, “went into a basement with him and was the only one to come out alive.” Her eyes were as glowing as they had been when talking to him.

“This is Kat Forrest,” Scott looked pained as he introduced her to us. “She just got here from our Arizona campus a few days ago.”

Arizona Campus? I made a mental note to ask Zack about it later. Kat seemed to vibrate as she stuck out her hand for me to shake. I did, feeling the pressure of her grasp through the leather of my glove. “So glad to meet you,” she squealed, and I could tell she meant it. “I don’t know that I could have done what you did, facing off with that monster.”

I pulled away as soon as I could, not wanting to find out if I could drain her soul through my gloves. “Thanks,” I said, with as much sincerity as I possessed. “I’m surprised that everyone’s talking about me in pleasant terms. It was my understanding that I wasn’t very popular around here.”

“Well, you’re certainly popular to talk about,” Kat said, almost gushing, “but I would have to say that the overall tone hasn’t been terribly flattering.” She looked a little chagrined, as though it was her sad duty to inform me that people hated me. “But it’s difficult being the new kid in town, I know.”

“Oh, you’ve had people say nasty things behind your back and send you a letter telling you that they hope you get raped to death, literally?” I kept my tone light and wore a smile, even as her face fell. Dark clouds gathered around Zack’s eyes, and even Scott looked taken aback.

“Who did that?” Zack’s voice was a low, strained murmur.

“I don’t know. Does it matter?” I said.

“Yes. I want to know who it was,” Zack said. I looked back at him, and his face was dark, as though he was in shadow.

“It wasn’t the sort of work that the author would want to be associated with,” I said.

“I wrote it,” Scott said. “And it didn’t say anything about anyone hoping you got raped to death. It said we all hated you for hiding while people were dying and we’re rooting for him to turn you inside out.”

I saw the punch coming, and I suspected that if Scott Byerly had any power as a meta, he did too. Zack took a long windup and swing that connected with Scott’s jaw. The meta fell back, landing on his rump, his hand cupping his jaw lightly. “You done?” he asked, unconcerned.

“Maybe.” Zack’s hand quivered at his side.

“I didn’t have to tell you.” Scott sat on the floor, not bothering to get up.

“Which raises an interesting question,” I said. “If you’re so proud of what you did, why admit to it now when you left it unsigned before?”

“I’m not proud of it,” he said with a shake of his head. “My aunt and uncle lived in Minnetonka. They got killed by that maniac while he was trying to root you out. And like I told you the last time we talked, I knew a lot of those agents that died for you.”

“Which time?” I asked, voice laced with bitter irony.

He looked up at me, and I could see the loathing, the intensity with which he looked at me. “Both times.”

“I was there.” Zack’s reply came out in staccato bursts, his whole face twitching with rage. “Sienna saved my life. I wouldn’t have come out of that basement if she hadn’t carried me out. I’d have been another body for Wolfe to torture.”

It would have been so fun , Wolfe said in my head.

“Yeah, and?” Scott vaulted to his feet with the speed and agility of a meta. “There were a lot of other guys that didn’t get carried out. Guys that we’ve known for a long time. Then she finally goes after him and miraculously kills him?” He smirked and I resisted the urge to give him a punch that I could guarantee he wouldn’t see and would feel. “Why didn’t she kill him sooner?” He threw his hands out. “Hell, HOW did she kill him? That’s what I want to know—and nobody’s saying a word about that.”

“You want to see how I killed him?” There was enough menace in my voice that Byerly actually took a step back. “No? Then mind your own business.” I wondered how much of his willingness to back down was based on the fact that I looked like I’d already been through at least one fight this morning.

I steered past him, guiding my tray toward the table in the corner that we’d been heading to before our detour. I sat down, my back to all of them, and started to attack my food with more violence than was necessary. It wasn’t as if the eggs were going to stage an uprising and attack me, but I speared them on the end of my fork with enough vitriol to be certain.

Zack’s tray hit the table in front of me a minute or so later. I’d heard him make a modicum of peace with Scott, enough that it sounded like they’d be on speaking terms but not enough that they’d be greeting each other like they did when we entered the cafeteria. He sat across from me and ripped into a strip of bacon with displaced anger. I didn’t find it funny enough at the time to overcome my irritation with (still) being the most hated person on the campus.

“Amateur bullshit,” Zack pronounced after throwing his bacon strip back on his plate.

“Excuse me?” I was halfway through a mouthful of eggs.

“When we take on the job of being an agent, it’s understood that we’re going up against metas. Most of them aren’t that powerful. Some of them are.” He stared at me, his eyes smoldering. “Policing metas is a dangerous business; especially since we have no powers and no way to know if we’re up against an innocent person who’s never done a violent thing in his life or the next psycho criminal who’ll be glad to gut you and serve you for dinner.” His eyes darted left and right. “It’s a hazard of the business. Scott’s got no right to take you to task for those guys dying.”

“Maybe,” I said, noncommittal. “You didn’t have to deck him for it.”

Zack licked his lips. “He didn’t even feel it, did he?”

“Only a little,” I said. “Why’d you do it?”

“Frustration.” He let out a muted exhalation combined with an exasperated sigh. “I wanted to knock the crap out of Reed, too.”

“Good job showing some restraint. If Reed really is a meta, he would have pummeled you, unlike your friend.” My hand left my fork behind and I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “What happened in South America?”

“I went to find M-Squad.” He put his hands on the table. “I found them.”

“And a flaming metahuman in a casket.” I stared him down and he tried to play it off but failed. “What happened? You got sent to retrieve them, but they were gone a long time; longer than Old Man Winter thought they’d be gone.”

He concentrated, as though he were bringing up details of a story. “They were sent to our facility in the Andes Mountains.”

“How many facilities does the Directorate have?” I crinkled my nose, trying to make it seem like an innocent question.

“Six in North America, two in South America, two in Europe, four in Asia, one in Australia, two in Africa.” His eyes darted back and forth, looking up the whole time, as though he were trying to recall. “I think that’s it. Anyway, they got sent down to the Andes facility—”

“For what?”

“Because the facility went dark. Completely offline, radio blackout, silence, dead air, all that. And we hadn’t even had the facility that long—”

“What?” I frowned. “Was it new?”

“No, we took it over from someone else. Are you going to stop interrupting me so I can finish my story?”

“Sorry.”

“So anyway, it went offline, and Old Man Winter had a suspicion he knew why, so he sent M-Squad down there with that coffin contraption after telling them about Gavrikov.”

“I thought you said they went offline?”

“They did. Somehow he knew it was Gavrikov.”

“How—”

“I don’t know,” Zack said, exasperated. “Because it’s Old Man Winter, and he knows all kinds of things he shouldn’t theoretically know. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” I nodded, and he went on. “Gavrikov was there for some reason. He had come to the facility with something in mind. He killed the entire staff—about fifty people, in case you were wondering—and set up shop. Well, M-Squad started playing feint-and-parry, trying to get him boxed in so they could force a confrontation, but he wouldn’t engage them directly.”

He took a breath, and I jumped in. “Before, you said Gavrikov had energy projection capability…”

“Yeah, he flies and can throw fire. I heard from M-Squad he can even explode.”

“Reed mentioned that Gavrikov was responsible for the Tunguska explosion in 1908.”

I watched as Zack’s jaw dropped open. “You told him about us capturing Gavrikov?”

I shook my head. “He already knew.”

Zack’s mouth became a hard line, his eyes looked down at the table, and I could tell he was suppressing a kind of deep internal fury. It was the wrong moment for it, but I actually thought it was damned cute. Outwardly, I gave no sign. I hope. “How did he know?” he asked, restraining whatever anger he was feeling.

“I didn’t ask.”

“If ever you get a chance again,” Zack said, measuring his words, “do ask. This is something that only a dozen people in the world knew as of this morning.”

“Sure. Though I think you’re naïve if you believe he’d tell me. So did he explode for you guys? Wipe out a few square miles of real estate in the Andes?”

Zack was distracted, but he went on. “Not quite, but I guess Clary had him pinned in a building at one point and he blew up, left nothing but a crater. It took Clary a while to climb out of that one. Anyway, Gavrikov has a shield of fire around his skin, so tranq darts can’t make it through—”

“So how did they get him?” I was getting impatient. I blame Wolfe. He didn’t have much to do with this one, actually, but I blame him anyway.

“It was pretty ingenious, I thought,” Zack said with a smile. “He wasn’t willing to leave the facility. He’d just fly to a different building whenever they came for him, throw some fire if they got close, do anything to keep them at bay while he jetted off—”

“He doesn’t sound so dangerous,” I said. “Except for the fifty people he killed, I suppose.” I felt sheepish. He sounds like fun , Wolfe thought. You should let him out. I ignored him.

“Anyway,” Zack went on, “they managed to set a trap for him when I got there. They used me as bait.”

“What?!”

“Well, I went in and tried to reason with him, pinning him in place while the hammer fell. See, I was a new face—he’d seen them for weeks on end while they went back and forth. They tried to talk to him at first, too, I guess. Didn’t work out. Anyway, once he figured out I was human, he shot at me like a missile— I mean, he was gonna kill me, but Clary was positioned perfectly, took the hit for me, got a hold of Gavrikov and managed to knock him unconscious.”

I was going over what he had told me, but it didn’t quite make sense. “How did Clary put a hand on Gavrikov if he had his fire shield up?”

Zack’s smile was smug. “Clary can change his skin. In this case, he shifted into some kind of metal. It was actually dumb luck; Clary moves a lot slower than Gavrikov, and if he had been even an inch to either side, he wouldn’t have been able to grab him and club him out.” He leaned back in his chair. “After that, we stuffed him in the containment unit and carted him back here.”

“Bravo,” I said in a hushed voice, thinking of the containment unit. It was tiny, a coffin by any other name, a horrible, claustrophobic nightmare. I tried to think of Gavrikov’s victims rather than about the means of his confinement. I forced a weak smile. “I’m sure the world is better off with one less monster wandering around.”

“I think so,” Zack said, eating another piece of bacon. The smell of my plate had stopped being appealing, so I watched him in silence as he ate, trying to think of something else to talk about. “You know,” he said, “you still have quite a list to work through.”

“List?” I stared at him, blankly.

“You know,” he said. “Of things you haven’t done—go to the movies, a mall, an amusement park…”

“Oh.” I had forgotten that we had talked about that when last we saw each other. Nothing like having a mass murderer rattling around in your head to put some of the irrelevant things in perspective.

“You do still want to do those things, right?” He looked at me, all earnestness, and I couldn’t flinch away from those eyes, those deep brown eyes, rimmed with concern. I got a sudden, uncomfortable feeling, like I was being put on the spot.

“Yeah,” I said, and felt like my answer was burdened with a reluctance that seemed like metal scraping across stone. Slow and painful.

“How about this,” he went on, “why don’t we go out tonight—get dinner and see a movie. You can cross it off your list.”

He smiled, and I felt my stomach twist. Did he just ask me out? Did I just get asked out for the first time? I blinked, almost in disbelief. Was it that he was spying for Ariadne and Old Man Winter that prompted this or had what he told Scott been true? Maybe he felt like he owed his life to me.

I mentally slapped myself. It wasn’t like that, it couldn’t be. After all, even if things went well and the date ended with a kiss, it wouldn’t just be my first date—it’d be his last, and the next time I saw him would be at his funeral.

“Just friends,” he added, as though that would make me feel better. It didn’t. It made me feel a hell of a lot worse.

“Sure,” I said with another weak smile. Wolfe was cackling again, that bastard. “Thanks for offering to…be my guide.”

“It’ll be fun.” His phone rang and he answered, pulling it out of his pocket. “Yeah…I’m with her now, we’re getting some breakfast. Sure, we’ll see you in five.” He finished his call and looked at me. “You’re done, right?”

“What?” I didn’t understand what he was asking until I looked down and saw my half-full plate. I hadn’t taken a bite in several minutes. “Oh, yeah, I’m done.”

“That was Ariadne. She wants us at Headquarters to talk about the warehouse.”

“Okay.” I stood, taking my tray with me to the nearest garbage can and dumping it in. I felt uneven; my head hurt a little, my heart hurt a lot, and I was once again suffering under the realization that my life had been so upended from what I was familiar with that I didn’t know what I wanted.

I mean, even if he wanted me, I couldn’t touch him, right?