Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,41

them off. Only someone who’s well prepared—and armed, actually—stands a chance against them, and then only if they don’t get taken by surprise.”

“Same old story,” I said, swallowing hard again. “Why are you telling me this? What do you want me to do?”

“Even when you find your mother,” Old Man Winter spoke, his quiet voice devastating for some reason, “at some point you will have to decide what to do with your own life, how you wish to spend it. You are nearly a woman grown, and you need to find—”

“A job?” I licked my lips.

“A path. A career. Maybe even...a purpose,” Ariadne said. “Something you can do that you can believe in, that will challenge you, that won’t leave you hating your life and questioning why you’re even doing what you’re doing.” She laughed, a low, quiet laugh that had no real mirth behind it. “Unless you’d like to get to age forty and wake up to wonder where your life went.”

“Forty is a long ways off for me.” I looked at my boots. Most eighteen-year-old girls wear shoes; I’m in boots. Most girls my age wear dresses sometimes, go to school, look forward to prom and graduation. I’m stuck in outfits that cover me head to toe, I’ve been home every day, week, and year for over a decade, and all I have to look forward to is finding my missing mother so...what? I can go back to living like that?

“It’ll be here before you know it.” Ariadne snapped her fingers in front of her face. “It goes fast. And the question you’ll be left with is if you just got by or if you actually made a difference.” She slid the stack of files away from me. “We don’t expect you to make a decision right now.” She pulled out a lone piece of paper and placed it in front of me. “Working for us as a meta will have its rewards—more money per year than most eighteen-year-olds make, along with other benefits—”

“I’m not super concerned with a 401(k) right now.” I glanced at the sheet. Money meant almost nothing to me, largely because I’d never had any opportunity to use it. I truly didn’t know the value of a dollar, nor what it bought. “What do you want me to do? What would happen if I said yes?”

“You would enter training with M-Squad and agent trainers, learn how agents operate, field procedure, all that. After some basics, you’d be assigned a more experienced partner and learn how to be a ‘retriever’—someone who tracks down rogue or awakening metas and brings them back to the Directorate either through peaceful means, or, if necessary—”

“Cracking skulls?” I glanced at the compensation sheet and wondered if $100,000 per year was a lot or a little for a girl just starting out.

“You never seemed like you had a problem with physical violence before.” Ariadne was unrelenting. “Like, say, when you battered Zack and Kurt, or when you went looking for a fight with Wolfe—”

“I don’t.” I looked up from the sheet to her. “I don’t have a problem breaking the teeth out of anyone who does the things that you’ve showed me in the files.” I felt my jaw clench as a little surge of pleasure from Wolfe ran through me at the thought of inflicting pain on others. “But I don’t know that I want to be a retriever for a living, always chasing down some fugitive meta who might kill me if I screw up. And I don’t know that I could...” I struggled with the words. “I mean, killing Wolfe was an accident. I don’t know if I could...do that...to someone else. “

“It rarely comes to that, “ she said. “And retriever’s not necessarily the end of the line. You could move up, join M-Squad, move to another branch, work into one of our training positions to teach and guide the metas here at the Minneapolis branch—”

“Because that’s the place for me, guiding the next generation.”

“—or you could move into administration.” She shrugged. “There are a lot of places you could go. We’re a big operation. You could see the world, help us expand overseas if you wanted. You’d have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing some good.”

“I hear you say it,” I picked up the compensation sheet between my thumb and forefinger, “but how do I really know it’s true?”

“Trust is a two-way street,“ she said, standing. “It won’t happen overnight, but if you’re out chasing these