was content to give your Directorate a slap on the wrist by wiping your agents out until you did that. Once Andromeda went loose,” he said with a quiet shake of his head, “it was...how do you say it? All bets were off.”
“What is it about that girl?” I asked. “What is it about her that has you so...has everybody so...edgy?”
“Andromeda was the future,” Janus said. “That project was our hope, our weapon, our chance to defeat an enemy monstrous in their application of force. I know you’ve heard it said that there is a storm coming, that you’ve heard others tell you of the threat to us, to all of us, and I am here to tell you that it’s only partially true. Humans are safe; they have little to fear from what comes. For now, at least. The Directorate is not our enemy, you see, they were but a buzzing fly. And you know what you do to a fly, yes?”
“Please say catch them with honey,” I said. “Because I’m getting tired of this manure.”
“This is more like vinegar,” he said. “The truth always is. I laid the trail for you myself, so you could see I went to Shenzen after the murder of the Chinese metas. They were wiped out, to the last. The government soldiers guarding them were all killed, or rendered so useless of mind and body as to be unwhole human beings for the rest of their lives. India was no different, and even now, across Africa, and the rest of Asia, it continues, the extermination, the destruction of our race—on a smaller scale, one at a time, because there are no cloisters there.” He looked grim now, deadly serious, “and it will spread, and grow, across all the continents, until the last of us are dead and in our graves. They who perpetrate this? They...are our enemy. Your Directorate is nothing more than a fly that I have had to take a month out of my schedule to swat. After tomorrow, I won’t think of your Directorate again. I will only think of you, and I will be waiting for the day when you join us, as surely you must.”
I laughed, at his face, from fifteen feet away. “You think I’ll join you? You’re talking about destroying my home, threatening my friends with death if we don’t disband, and you think I’ll...what? Come find you in six months asking if I can join your special club?”
He gave me a noncommittal shrug. “I’d be surprised if it’s more than a month. But then, I know things that you don’t.”
“I.Will. Never. Join. You.” I let each word come out with emphasis, and I re-centered my pistol on him, cocking it. “But I’m going to put you in a cell now, then I’m going to get to work checking out how many metas you actually brought with you—”
“Check your phone,” he said, with that little bit of a smile, and I forgot I was still holding it. “No tricks, I’m not compelling you to do anything, just suggesting that there might be information that you don’t yet have.” He smiled enigmatically.
I pulled the phone up after a moment of wrestling with my mind over whether I should. I thumbed the messages and the next came up, this one from J.J.:
Over fifty, REPEAT, over fifty enemy metas presently in continental United States based on analysis of passport batches.
I looked up and saw that smile, and I didn’t know whether to scream or put a bullet in him. “The case for letting you live while I’ve got fifty other metas to deal with is not one based on logic.” I faltered. “How did you know about the message?”
“Mmm,” Janus said, cringing, “now, you see, this is where the truth is really going to hurt.” He held up a hand and slowly put it in his pocket, bringing it out with a cell phone identical to mine.
“Looks like a Directorate phone,” I said. “What, did you hack it? Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head in amusement. “I’m nowhere near clever enough to manage that. No, it was given to me by one of your own.” He flipped it over, and the sight of the pink otter box case gave me a shudder. “Come out,” he called, “she knows it’s you, now.”
The door to his left slid open, the one to the room we had all stood in while watching Clary and Old Man Winter interrogate