Robert Crane - Omega

But I didn’t know that it was totally wrong, either. Not when we were dealing with the same people who sent Wolfe, the man who tried his best to rape and torture me. It sounded as though Bjorn was cut from the same cloth.

I cut across the campus on the way back to the dormitory; heading to the training room was my first instinct, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I needed quiet. Operation Stanchion bothered me. Who named their little plans in such a grandiose and evil way? A stanchion was just a pillar, after all, a post, and what did that have to do with me? Or did it refer to Old Man Winter, the pillar of the Directorate?

The leaves were packed to the ground, and a frost had come with morning, turning everything a silvery, shimmering white when the sun hit it. The blades of grass crunched under my boots in a way that was almost alien to me, so different from their sweet give in summer. The frost was in the air, too, crowding into my sinuses and nose, freezing the little hairs inside. It was bitter—too bitter by far for October.

The entry to the dormitory was quiet; the younger students were in their classes. It wasn’t close to lunchtime with the bustle of all the administrative employees coming to the cafeteria in droves. I wondered how much they knew about what we did here. There were hundreds of employees, after all, and most of them lived off-campus. I doubted most of them even worked with the metas, which left me curious. There was a divide between the admin and school business, I knew that, and I supposed a person could even work in the administration building without ever knowing that the kids at the school had anything different about them; it wasn’t as if any of them had scales, or had snakes growing out of their shoulders, or anything like that. The most bizarre thing on campus was Clary, and that had more to do with his personality than his power, except when he shifted his skin.

On the other hand, seeing Eve Kappler flying past a window might be a hint that something was not quite what it seemed on campus.

I inserted my key card in the elevator and rode up to the third floor. When I arrived, I stepped off and walked down the white hall, noticing a few potted trees that hadn’t been there before. Decoration to brighten up the dull landscape with winter coming, I supposed.

I paused as I reached my door. The one next to mine, the one that belonged to Kat, was open, the card reader’s bar an angry red, and a buzzing noise coming from it, the quiet sound of low-voltage electricity arcing. I walked toward it tentatively, the thought that I might be walking into trouble only a faint idea in my mind. I lay my hand on the door, which was half open, and I could see the light flooding in from the windows. It was a sunny day and the room was lit like mine, bright and pleasant. I took a quiet step inside, then another. The living room and kitchen were silent, nothing moving as I came around the wall and got a full look.

Kat’s furniture was roughly the same as mine and in the same layout. All her appliances were Directorate standard, though again, she had taken some effort to spruce up the walls with the posters I didn’t care for. I heard a faint scratching from the bedroom, and I walked through the middle of the apartment on my way to the bedroom door, which was drawn at a forty-five degree angle.

With a touch I sent it open, the oiled hinges allowing it to move without making a sound. The bed was against the far wall, and someone was sitting on it, a man in jeans and a black t-shirt that went perfectly with his darker, more tanned complexion—something I had always thought bizarrely out of place in Minnesota, especially going into winter. “Scott,” I said quietly, and he looked up, his blond curls bobbing, his eyes only slightly puffy. I would honestly have expected more emotion, but it was possible he had been here for a long while.

“Sienna,” he said, and his voice was scratchy, like a needle run over a record. He cleared his throat and tried again. “How are you?”

“How am I?” I looked at him with incredulity. “I’m fine. I’m a little worried about you, though.”

“Dr. Perugini said I’m okay.” He held something in his hand, and I realized after a moment it was a CD, and he lay it on the bed, the clear plastic case catching the light.

“I kinda doubt she examined you in the way I’m talking about,” I said. “I realize you’re fine, physically—”

“Well, we don’t have a psychiatrist anymore to make sure I’m gonna be all right mentally, so…” He shrugged fatalistically. “I guess I’m just gonna have to limp on in my own way, kinda like every other teenager who just lost a girlfriend.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” I edged a little closer to him. “Kind of a healthy way, too, I suspect.”

“Well, I’m all about my health here,” he said, waving vaguely to his body, which I admit, was well sculpted. In spite of being unserious about almost everything, working out and eating right was something Scott did almost to distraction. And it showed. Not that I noticed, of course, but because others had told me. And I saw him with a shirt off, once, at the beach. Maybe more than once. And not always at the beach. Anyway.

“I don’t think too many people have had their girlfriend completely forget them,” I said. “That might be new territory. Something you could stake your claim to.”

“Why does that matter?” he asked with a shrug. “Lots of people wish they could forget their breakups.”

“But Kat wasn’t breaking up with you,” I said. “She sacrificed her memory of you to save your life.”

“Yeah, I get that,” he said, and I saw a flush hit his cheeks. “She’s brave and self-sacrificing, and now she can’t remember me, or any of our little inside jokes, or that we slept together every night, or anything…at all…from the last nine months. I might as well not have existed in her life.”

I swallowed heavily. “I’m sorry, Scott.”

“Why are you sorry?” he asked, and his eyes were narrowed in genuine confusion. “You didn’t make her lose her memory.”

“It was my mission.” I sat down on the bed, leaving a few feet of distance between us. “I was in charge. It’s my fault that—”

“Listen to me,” Scott said, and all the brittle was gone from his voice. His eyes were lidded, puffy, but they burned with inner fire. “I want you to hear this, and maybe it’ll make me feel better, too. What happened at the safe house wasn’t your fault. You took a beating to keep us from dying, and without you, we’d all have croaked, I’m sure, after tangling with that big bastard. What happened in Iowa was Clary’s fault, because he’s an idiot. And we knew he was an idiot, that there was nothing but rocks in his damned skull. We would have been better off without him.” The last part was spat out like a curse. “No one on that mission could have controlled Clary. No one.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying—”

“But you’re gonna blame yourself anyway?” He looked away, and his hands came behind him so he could lean back, legs still draped over the edge of the bed. “Might as well. Plenty of that going around.”

“It wasn’t your fault either, Scott.”

“Nope,” he said, staring into the window on the far edge of the room, to the blue sky beyond the tinting that made looking out bearable. “Doesn’t stop me from blaming myself, though.” He shifted position a little. “Would you mind leaving me be? I kinda just want to be alone right now.”

“Sure,” I said with a perfunctory nod. “If you want to talk, later, I’ll—”

“ If I want to talk, no offense but I’ll look for a more sympathetic ear,” he said, looking at me almost pityingly. “You’re a lot of things, Sienna—leader, badass, friend—but camp counselor you’re not.”