Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,37

were open but only barely, the green of her irises peeking out at us from behind heavy lids. “Sienna?” She said my name as if trying to drag it out of herself.

“I’m here,” I said, and started to reach for her hand, but hesitated when I remembered how dirty my glove was. I only froze for a second and then I took hold of her hand and picked it up. “You’re gonna be fine, Kat. We’re back at the Directorate. What do you remember?”

“Directorate?” Kat asked, blinking at me. “What happened?”

“We were on a mission,” I said. “In Des Moines. We were supposed to keep an eye on an Omega safe house, and things went wrong. You saved us, Kat—you healed Scott and the others, kept them from dying.”

“Scott?” She scrunched her eyes at me. “I saved him?”

“You did,” I said. “He’s going to be just fine.”

“Oh.” She seemed to nod, but her eyes were distant, far away, glazed over. They came sharply back into focus, and found mine, and she squinted as she concentrated, trying to speak again. “Who is Scott?”

9.

Interlude

Des Moines, Iowa

Red and blue lights flashed in the Iowa night, casting their colors over the street. The streetlamps were out, and he was left to wonder if they had functioned in the first place. The house in front of him was blocked off by a line of police cars and officers, all of them out of their vehicles—and buzzing around like little bees, he thought. The news vans were out as well, and they were worse than bees—they were like flies that gathered around manure in a pasture, always gravitating toward the largest pile.

Residents were out, the damp street showing the reflected red and blue, the same refracting off the faces of the men, women and children who were on the scene with him, the crowd that had gathered in their heavy coats, trying to put anything between them and the cold autumn night. The wind picked up but didn’t blow the leaves the way it had in Minnesota only a few days earlier; here, everything was damp, weighed down by the wetness of a rain that must have passed in the morning but failed to dry under the cold grey sky. The smell of it was still in the air.

He pulled his own coat tight against the chill, not quite to the point of having to stamp his feet to keep warm, but only because of the crowd gathered around. He watched one of the news anchors, a pretty blond woman, delivering her palaver to the camera, after which she pulled some poor resident of the neighborhood over to answer her questions. “What did you see?” the reporter asked the woman.

“It was like there was a bulldozer coming through here or something, like I think maybe the gas line exploded?” The woman shook her head at the reporter. “I saw a car hit another car at one point, and there were people moving around, and lots of dust because the house came down...it was crazy. I think some of them were fighting.”

“The police are calling this a building collapse,” the reporter said, turning to face the camera, “that came in the wake of a gang battle. At least one vehicle fled the scene shortly after the collapse, and vandalism by the rival gang is strongly suspected as the motive for this bizarre activity. Whatever the case, this Des Moines neighborhood is still reeling from the destruction.” She stopped and seemed to relax. “That was good, right?” The producer next to her nodded. “Perfect.”

“Fools,” the old man whispered under his breath, but it was lost to the wind. He backed through the crowd, then turned from the scene of the chaos, and began a slow stride back down the street to where he had parked his car. His grey hair was cropped short, and he bore not even a limp from his seemingly advanced age. Eat, sleep, drink, and know nothing about your world. Deny all you see, and don’t bother to try to explain it outside the framework of your silly beliefs, he thought. His car was ahead, the old Cadillac he had picked up at a used car lot only a few days earlier—steel gray, this one, perfectly suited to his needs. He’d driven it down in the morning, when he’d heard the report that the safe house had gone offline. The drive was terrible, as all drives were, but it was necessary. As I knew