building a few hundred yards away. “No need to walk through the snow if we don’t have to,” she said. I had wondered why she wasn’t wearing a coat. She wore instead another colorless business suit, not the same as the one she’d had on when I met her but not different enough for me to care.
We emerged from the tunnel into the basement of the headquarters building and climbed a staircase to the fourth floor. I looked out the window as we walked down the corridor. The sky was still covered in clouds. I sighed. I had yet to see the sun.
We paused before a set of heavy wooden double doors. Ariadne knocked so softly I wondered if it was even possible to hear it inside. There was no answer but a moment later a click came from the handle and the door swung open to admit us. Ariadne gestured for me to go first but I shook my head and pointed for her to enter. She shrugged and did. I followed her a moment later.
The office was big, with a heavy stone desk standing in the middle of the room. It looked like a slab of flat rock that someone had propped up on two supporting blocks and used as a table, and it stretched about six feet across. There was no sign of paper on it anywhere, just a tablet computer. A lone painting of a winter landscape hung from the wall on the left hand side and two chairs were set before the desk for audiences.
Old Man Winter had opened the door, but by the time I was inside he’d already returned to his chair and sat down. He was tall, probably at least six foot five. His hair was close cropped on the sides and deep furrows were carved in the lines of his brow. His face was long, his eyes were sunken; bags hung beneath them, giving him a look of a man well over sixty and possibly over seventy. He was not thin but neither was he fat – he had a look of muscle and power that belied his years.
And his eyes were an icy, icy blue, and fixed with a stare that sent a deep chill through me.
“This is Sienna,” Ariadne said to him, as though I could be anyone else. The only sign that he heard her was a slow, short nod, during which he never broke eye contact with me. I stared back, unwilling to be the first to look away. This was a game, I thought.
Ariadne said nothing and neither did he. He didn’t blink, didn’t look away, until finally my eyes were burning and I had to close them. He did not smile when I looked at him again, but I caught the thinnest suggestion of upward movement on his lips.
“Sienna is still considering whether or not to go through with the testing,” Ariadne informed him. He sat stock still in his chair behind the desk and continued to stare me down. I like to think a lesser person would be intimidated by his constant eye contact. I was annoyed. “She has questions for you.”
His gray eyebrows rose as if he were asking a question of his own. He waved his hand at me in a vague gesture that I took as a sign to proceed with my inquiries.
I stared back at him, trying my utmost not to blink. “Do you know what happened to my mother?”
He shook his head slowly, breaking eye contact for the first time since I entered the room. “No.” His voice carried an obvious Germanic accent, even in the brief response. He raised his hand toward me once more, indicating to ask my next question.
I tried my hardest not to glare, but I probably failed. “Who would know?”
This time the eyebrow rose only a hint and he glanced toward Ariadne, who answered for him. “We have a variety of different sources of gathering information, including sending some of our agents to question people under the guise of being police officers investigating her disappearance. I have a report that you can read, but here’s the gist: your mother has been working as an MRI technician at Hennepin County Medical Center for the last fourteen years under an assumed name—”
“So she’s really not Sierra Nealon?” I asked without surprise.
Ariadne’s fake smile held more patience than irony. “She is. She’s been working under the name Brittany Eccleston. She has friends and co-workers, a pretty well