Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,79

powers—your good heart, you never could keep from using too much of yourself—it’d be like shuffling your personality to the bottom of the deck. And now, back to the top again.” He took a sip of water, felt it roll around on his tongue, cleanse his palate. “Back to yourself.”

“I know who I am now,” she said.

“Of course you do, my dear,” he said, “but you were never in doubt, given the time to come back to us. It’s her we need to talk about now.” A slight sigh came from the slender girl, and he felt the press of more weight upon his leg. “Now, now, don’t be jealous. I’m only here to help her in her...transition. As I helped you, once.” He looked down into her green eyes. “Come now, Klementina, this is such an unexpected and fortuitous thing, having you call us as you did, having you escape the Directorate as you did now, at this time. Surely, if it is as you say, and you remember why you worked with us in the past, things have not changed for you...have they?”

She lay her head sideways upon his knee and sighed again. “No. I haven’t forgotten. And I understand she’s important, but—”

“No buts,” Janus said. “She is important. You need not understand all of it, but know that she is just as important as the last one. This whole operation, the entirety of Stanchion, it was for her.” He held up a hand to forestall argument when he saw the lips purse, the cheeks redden, the whole face turn pouty. “Listen. Stanchion was first priority, but don’t think that it was my only concern. I would have done right by you. We would have accomplished our mission,” he checked his watch, “which we still will, and thank you, my dear, for making this interminable wait so much more bearable by coming back to me. But we would have done it all—put the Directorate out of the picture, placed Sienna Nealon just where we wanted her, and we would have extracted you at the same time, brought you back to yourself, dispensed with that ridiculous identity you’ve taken on, this—Katrina Forrest that you had become—”

“Kat,” she said, her naked body pressed against the leg of his pants, almost wrapped around it like a coiled snake, the green in her eyes flashing with the light of the motel sign. “They called me Kat.”

22.

Sienna

I lay in my bed, alone, as the shadows crept across the floor again. It was quiet. I wouldn’t say too quiet, because I knew it was nearing nightfall and the admin staff had been absent all day, but it was definitely not the Directorate I was used to. Any of the meta kids who had tenable home situations had been shuffled back to their parents or relatives. Most of them lived in small towns, dedicated meta communities anyway, so the cloisters would be better protection for them than the campus at this point. It was a calculated risk, but it didn’t seem likely that Omega would be interested in tracking down meta kids when the Directorate was their primary enemy. Only the orphans remained here on campus with the rest of us.

A pall had settled over the place; it was starting to look abandoned, the falling leaves taking over the campus in volume and numbers that hadn’t been a problem back when we had a grounds crew. The whole place seemed empty without most of the people, even though I didn’t associate with almost any of them. It was worse knowing Reed and Scott were gone. I thought about visiting Kat and dismissed the idea as patronizing, as though I were trying to force some sort of empathy out that I didn’t really feel.

I waited for sleep to come claim me, wondered if it would. I hadn’t heard from Bastian or Parks all day, which I took as a good sign; they were supposed to call if the world started to end around us. Personally, I suspected that would be something I wouldn’t need a lot of heads-up about. When Omega came, I kinda thought I’d know the hour and minute it started to happen. It wasn’t going to be subtle. Not this time.

My phone lit up and I pulled it off the nightstand at the first beep. The screen lit up when I thumbed the power button, and I swiped my finger across the message icon to bring up a text message. It was from