Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,67

so far, with some skill, some luck—but it just feels like...they’re in the shadows. They’re unknown. We’re in the dark, waiting for something bad to happen. You ever have that? Where you’re waiting for something you think is gonna be bad, and it comes and it wasn’t as bad as what you anticipated?”

“Sure,” Zack said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. The fact that you’re beating their best, taking down every meta they throw at you...doesn’t that give you some confidence that with everything we’ve got at our disposal, that we can take whatever they push at us and cram it right back down their throat?”

“Maybe. I just know that what they’ve thrown at us so far hasn’t exactly gone down painlessly.” I pointed to the wall, on the other side of which lay Scott’s quarters. “Look at what happened to Kat. She’s never gonna remember a thousand things about her relationship with Scott. And that’s pretty mild as far as consequences go, but it’s devastated him. What if they kill someone? What if their attack is focused, and determined, and draws a bead on one person and just...takes them out?” I bit my lip. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That this time they’re not coming to capture me at all, that they’re coming to kill Old Man Winter so that they hit the Directorate in a place where it never recovers.”

Zack slid off the arm of the couch to sit next to me. “It’s sweet that you’re more worried about the Director than yourself in all this.”

“I worry about you, too, lunkhead,” I said, and put my head on his shoulder, letting my hair flow down his chest. “Humans are just disposable foot soldiers to Omega.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Zack said, and I could hear the tightness in his voice. “A lot of my buddies died when they decided to wipe out our agent ranks, you know.”

“I know.” I let my hand run along the front of his sweater, coming to rest on his collar. I wasn’t wearing my gloves, because I hadn’t bothered to replace the ones Eve had sullied with one of the numerous spare sets in my closet yet. I avoided his skin, instead rubbing the soft threads between my thumb and forefinger. “You should get out of here for a few days. Maybe take a vacation.”

I felt his head turn more than saw it. I didn’t want to read his reaction, but I heard it in his voice. “You know I’m not leaving you.”

I felt the weight of my head against his shoulder, and I wondered if it felt like the weight of the world to him. “Yeah. I know.”

He took his hand and ran it across my cheek and I realized for the first time he was wearing a glove, a very soft, almost skin-like glove. I glanced down, expecting to see fabric but saw a flesh-toned color in its stead. “You like it?”

I ran my hand across his, felt the ripple of my nerves, my flesh, as we touched for longer than we ever had before. “Did you...?”

“Picked it up this afternoon,” he said with a ready smile. “Doc Sessions made it more flesh-colored, said he thought that’d be less...I dunno, odd or something.” He pulled his sleeve up and I saw his arm, covered with the material of the suit. I ran a hand up his to his bicep and gave it a squeeze, as though I were touching him, really touching him. “You like?”

“I like.” I let my fingers stay on his arm, then ran them further up his sleeve to his shoulder. “And it goes...?”

“Pretty much everywhere,” he said, pulling down his turtleneck to reveal the top edge of the suit around his neck. “Hands, feet, toes, and uh...” he hesitated, “everywhere in between. It stretches, too,” he said, suddenly looking uncomfortable, “so, you know...it uh...it works uhm...well. And whatnot.”

My hands found their way down to the bottom of his sweater, and I lifted the bottom edge of it, sliding my hands along his waist, working the material of the suit between my fingers, feeling it give and stretch as I kneaded it. “And you can feel everything through it? It’s not...”

“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding. “I can feel everything. It’s thin, really thin, and it’s almost like touching, no barrier in the way.” I leaned in and nuzzled his neck, kissing the area covered by the thin sheen of the suit, and I heard him take a sharp inhalation. “Yep. I