Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,35

from earlier was gone, I saw as I looked in the mirror. One plus was that since I had awoken in the field, Wolfe hadn’t made a peep. I wondered if he was sleeping. Or maybe the explosion scared him into a kennel in my mind.

I returned to my room and stared out the window for the rest of the night. I had a very, very nasty suspicion about how things had unfolded the night before, based partially on my dreams and partially on the fact that Wolfe had very much wanted to get Gavrikov out of his cage. He should have been overjoyed, swinging from the metaphorical rafters in my head at the fact that it happened, but he was dead quiet instead.

Not good.

The sun rose without me seeing it, once more hidden behind the clouds. I was disgusted enough that if I could have somehow wished myself to Tahiti and left this awful city behind, I would have. Actually, that might not have entirely been because of the sun.

A note was slid under my door shortly after sunrise, suggesting I attend a meeting with Ariadne and Old Man Winter in his office at 9 A.M. I shrugged when I saw it, trying to play cool in case there were cameras watching, but inwardly I trembled. Did he know? Could he know? What had I done?

I skipped breakfast. My stomach was tied in knots anyway; why bother to give it something else to bitch about? I walked to the HQ building when it got close to time. The air was crisp—actually, I’m romanticizing, it was still brutally cold, just like every day since I left my house. Tahiti was sounding better and better. There was still a smell of burning in the air and when I passed in sight of the science building, my suspicions were confirmed—it was still smoking. The smell it gave off was acrid and awful and stuck in my nose, tormenting me even once I was inside Headquarters.

I knocked somewhat tepidly on Old Man Winter’s door. I was early, and a sizable part of me (all of me, if we’re being honest) hoped he wasn’t around. It opened to reveal Ariadne, her usual smile forced across her face. “You’ll have to forgive us,” she said as she ushered me to a seat, “It’s been a busy night and we haven’t had much time to prepare for this meeting.”

“‘Busy’?” I looked out the window behind Old Man Winter, who was sitting placidly behind his desk as always. His eyes had yet to remove themselves from me since I walked in, but I was used to it. It wasn’t like he was undressing me mentally—at least I didn’t think he was—it was more like he was always assessing, testing me, my willpower. I could swear he read the lies in how I moved, my reluctance to even be here. I worried that if he stared long enough, he’d be able to root out that I was carrying my own worst enemy inside my head, and that wasn’t figurative speaking. “I’d hate to see what you’d be talking about if you started pulling out the really descriptive adjectives—you know, like calamitous, explosive, apocalyptic—”

“Yes, well.” She cut me off, her politeness for once infused with iron. “It’s not as though this is the usual for us.”

“Sure, sure,” I said in what sounded to me a very Midwestern way. “Last week, near-invincible psychos, this week, men who explode into flames and girls who touch the dead and bring them back to life.”

“Even for us,” she said, “that’s not normal.”

“When you’re dealing with people who have powers like ours, what is?” I said it airily, but the word stuck in my head. Normal. What was normal? Everything I wasn’t, at this point. “Is this about the history lesson I asked for?”

“Yes.” Ariadne seated herself next to me. “It’s also a briefing on the state of meta affairs in the modern age.”

“Ooh, a briefing,” I said. “I feel like I should be wearing a colorless pantsuit.” I blinked at Ariadne, dressed once more in monochromatic businesswear. “Like that.” I blanched inside and Wolfe howled with laughter, the first sound he’d made since last night. The sad part was I couldn’t blame that one on him; there was something built into my relationship with Ariadne that made me want to insult her more than anything.

Her face was drawn, her eyes lowered. I wondered, far in the back of my mind where I hoped