Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,44
at me, steadily. “What are you willing to do?”
“What am I willing to do...to what?”
“To find out the truth about Operation Stanchion and what it means for you.” Old Man Winter was unflinching. “To discover Omega’s aims. These are all questions which could be of great use to us if we were to find answers.”
“I’m willing to question Bjorn as long as necessary to get some answers,” I said.
Old Man Winter reached out to the door, finally looking away from me. He placed his hand in his pocket and withdrew a key card that looked no bigger than a scrap of paper in his massive palm, and ran it over the reader in front of the door. The glowing red light on the reader turned green with a subtle beep. “Follow,” he said and opened the door to the cell.
The room was small, ten by ten by ten, like the rest. The squares that made it up seemed to blur together for me, and I put aside my thoughts about all else to focus on Bjorn. He didn’t look quite as he had yesterday when I’d been fighting him. His short brown hair was still powdered with the dust of our battle. He had blood on his face and chest that had gone uncleaned, though his wounds were gone. His shirt was missing, along with boots and any other sort of clothing save for his pants, which were a dirty corduroy and speckled with all the evidence of our fight. He was shackled to a chair that was metal, bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and he was still cuffed about the wrists and ankles.
“Bjorn,” Old Man Winter said in some form of greeting. “It has not been nearly long enough.”
“So it is you, Jotun,” Bjorn said, his brow arced in a forty-five degree slant on either eyebrow. “I had heard you were the head of the Directorate, giving shelter to this one. Do not expect me to remember the old times fondly and cooperate with you.”
“I do not expect you to remember anything fondly,” Old Man Winter replied, his breath still frosting the air. “But you will cooperate with me, or your memories will go from less-than-fond to a much darker place.”
Bjorn’s back straightened at this, his shoulders squared, even with his arms trapped behind his back. “You will get nothing out of me, Jotun. Do your worst.”
Old Man Winter stopped in the middle of the room, towering over the seated Bjorn, who was not exactly a small guy. “Do you remember that time in...what did they call it, the Huns who lived there? I find myself forgetting the names the Germanic tribes gave to the old places. I have heard that in old age, humans default to their childhood remembrances. I find the opposite is true for me, that I cannot remember the names of the places from my youth, though I can recall the sight of them in vivid detail. For example, I recall that maiden that you bedded, that local girl from a tribe, how you called her a virgin sacrifice, and how when her brothers came after you in the morning, you caved their heads in with your fists as the girl cried behind you and begged you to stop. Do you remember what happened after that?”
Bjorn showed little reaction, only the slightest of a smile. “I remember her voice, but not her name. Is that strange? I don’t remember any of their names.”
“That does not surprise me at all,” Old Man Winter said, surprisingly gregarious, even as I was trying to keep down my breakfast in the midst of these discussions. “I wanted to kill you for that, did you know?” He bent at the waist, as Bjorn’s head jerked in surprise. “My respect for your father kept me from it, though. You lived as a god, and all you wanted was there for the polite taking; there was never a need for the sort of violence and thuggery that you and your kind visited upon the humans. But for you it was never about receiving the gifts of those who worshipped us for our power; it was about taking that which they did not wish to give freely.” Old Man Winter rumbled with every word, and the temperature seemed to drop in the room. “Strength over kindness, as it were. Force over grace. Did you thrill to the thoughts of what you did there?” Old Man Winter leaned in