fast as I suspect you do. After that, dinner will be served.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. The brush with Wolfe made me wonder if I’d ever be able to eat again without heaving.
“That’s okay,” she replied without looking up from her clipboard. “I’m not feeding you yet.”
The medical unit was a long room, probably as long as my house but narrower, with curtains separating individual beds and a private room at the far end with an oversized door for rolling gurneys in. Every surface was the same flat metal that I’d seen in the room I’d woken up in when I’d first arrived at the Directorate, broken up by glass windows that looked out into a hallway that matched the distinct look of the headquarters building.
The sharp odor of disinfectants wrinkled my nose as I took it in for the first time, almost giving me another reason to gag. I could hear the low beeps of monitoring equipment in the background and the faint hum of all the machinery. I counted the number of occupied beds I could see from where I lay. Less than a half dozen. “How do you handle so many at one time?” I asked.
“I don’t,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I had to triage, and Old Man Winter demanded I treat you first.”
“But I can survive more than any of them.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, not looking up from her clipboard. “And once I had established your wounds were not of the life-threatening variety, I moved on to the next critical patient.”
“How many of them died?” The words were like ashes in my mouth. Bitter.
A moment of silence passed between us. “Five.”
I did not respond to her statement, and she didn’t speak either. The doors on the far side of the medical unit opened to admit Ariadne, who looked drawn, her severe suit wrinkled as though she had slept in it. Old Man Winter followed a pace behind her, his age less obvious today, I thought – or was that because I knew he wasn’t what he appeared?
“Hello,” Ariadne said. I didn’t bother to glare. She took this as an invitation to move closer, and hovered over my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been kicked, punched, gutted, slapped and stomped on,” I said without much feeling. “So basically like you look all the time.” I couldn’t stop myself. Ouch.
Her jaw dropped only a little, and she recovered quickly. I think she was getting used to my barbs. Good. Old Man Winter stood a few feet behind her, watching me, but did not speak.
Ariadne looked chastened, but began again. “We’ve been keeping updated on your progress through Dr. Perugini. She’s most impressed with your healing abilities, which rate very high on the meta-human scale.”
“That’s coming in handy more often than I would have hoped,” I replied. “I take it Wolfe breaking into your dormitory building came as a surprise for you, too?”
Ariadne folded her arms and shook her head. “We shouldn’t have taken Kurt’s report that all our agents at your house were dead at face value; we should have verified to make sure nothing was left behind that could be traced back to us. But at the time we viewed sending a recovery team for the bodies as too great a risk for fear that Wolfe would somehow track them back to us.”
I pictured the oversized Wolfe driving a car, following a convoy of agents, then had an idle thought wondering what kind of vehicle he would drive. The image of him crammed behind the wheel of a Volkswagon bug popped into my head and in spite of all the emotional turmoil I had to stifle the urge to laugh, which was overtaken by the feeling of sickness again when I thought of him.
“Are you okay?” Ariadne looked at me with a concern that I would have found touching if I trusted her in the slightest. As it was, she spurred my instinct to aim at her if I felt the urge to vomit again.
“I’ll be fine.” I waved her off. “You didn’t come down here to talk to me about my abilities, did you?”
“No,” Ariadne replied after a moment’s pause. “We came to talk to you about security. Yours.”
I felt hollow, a complete lack of emotion. “What about it? Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no.” Ariadne shook her head with emphasis. “Now that Wolfe has found our location, though, it changes things. We want to keep you