Robert Crane - Omega

“It would kill most of us,” Parks corrected him.

“Well, it’d make a hell of a scene for the news, too, y’know.” He nodded at me and Reed. “They’re still talking about the gangland house crashing down in Iowa.”

“That’s because it’s the most exciting thing to happen in Iowa in six decades,” Parks said.

“I want caution,” Ariadne said, cutting across all other talk in the room. “Bastian has lead on this, Sienna and Reed, you’ll be answering to him. I want everyone working together, no lone ranger BS—got it, Clary?” She waited until Clary picked his head up, gave her a silent nod, and then she continued. “Whoever this Eleanor Madigan is, I think we can expect she’s trouble if she’s truly with Omega.”

“You’re going to send all of us?” I asked, throwing looks around the room in return for the ones I got. Questioning orders like this wasn’t done. Eve gave me the nastiest look of all. “That leaves nothing to defend the campus with.”

“We still have agents,” Ariadne said. “We need a unified front. After Des Moines, I want us to be prepared for anything you might encounter, and I doubt they’re going to hit us here in the hour or two you’re gone.”

“You call it being prepared for anything,” I said, “but this is Omega we’re dealing with and I call it putting all your Faberge eggs in one basket. And then throwing that basket off the top of the IDS Tower.” I paused, and wondered where that thought had come from before realizing it had been a subconscious suggestion I hadn’t even noticed. “Which I am told is fatal.”

Ariadne opened her mouth to respond, eyes looking up as she tried to come up with something. “I can’t really do anything with your eggs metaphor, so let’s put it this way—we’re dealing with an A-rated threat, so I’m sending in my A-Team.”

“Or your M-Squad?” I asked with amusement. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it fast and quiet and get back here. With whatever Omega is planning, this is not a fortuitous time to be absent from the campus for long.”

“Agreed,” Ariadne said. “Kid gloves for the pickup on this one. Take care with her.”

“You asking us to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s a civilian?” Bastian asked, his expression almost unreadable.

“Yes,” Ariadne said. “Take her peacefully, if possible.”

“Omega doesn’t do ‘peacefully,’” Reed spoke up. “They do bloody, violent and destructive, and that’s about it.”

“We do that pretty well ourselves,” Eve said with a wicked smile.

“And that’s fine—if she starts it,” Ariadne said, turning to look at Eve. I couldn’t see her face, but her tone shifted. “The last thing we need is a civilian casualty for some poor British nanny who picked the wrong time and place to get her passport done before she took her dream vacation to see the Mall of America.”

“Wrong season to visit,” Eve said, “Christmas shoppers and all that vileness. Horrible idea.”

“We will take all precautions not to harm her in any way,” Bastian said, ending any debate. “Eve will be at the fore; her nets are second to none for non-lethal containment. Sienna and Reed will follow up, being effective in-fighters, and Clary and Parks will keep overwatch.” He looked around at each of us until he saw the nod. “With your permission, ma’am?” He looked to Ariadne, who gave him the subtle nod of approval, and with that he opened the door and walked out first.

“So, yeah,” J.J. said as Parks left next, “go get ‘em, guys.” He looked at me and his cheeks burned crimson. “And girls.” He turned and caught an icy glare from Eve (which was probably just her normal expression). “And women.” He nodded his head, bobbing it like a jack-in-the-box. “Yeah.”

I filed past J.J. Clary didn’t even try to rush ahead of me like he normally did, for which I…didn’t care, for once. Reed trailed behind me, then spoke as we walked through the cubicle rows. “Good play, you think?”

“Going on the offensive against an Omega agent?” I asked. “Yeah. Leaving the campus stripped of its best guardians? Not so much.”

“Scott and Kat are still here,” Reed said.

“One’s got a hole in her memory the size of the loop on the rollercoaster at Valley Fair and the other is broken into more pieces than that porcelain angel of Ariadne’s that Eve stuck under Clary’s ass at the Halloween party as a joke.” I shook my head. “We just need to hurry, that’s all.”

“You think they’re coming here?” Reed said, and for once he was hard to read.

“I think they’re coming for Old Man Winter,” I said. “Take him out, you think the Directorate keeps rolling along?”

“Ariadne can keep it going,” Reed said. “Why are you worried about this now? He’s been around for a good long while, a few millennia. You think he can’t take care of himself?”

“No,” I said quietly. “I know he can’t. He’s worried about it, thinks he’s at the top of Omega’s target list. He’s pushing me to step up because…it’s like he can feel the axe descending, like he can feel its shadow on the back of his neck. I’ve never seen him like he is now, and I’ve known him for almost a year now.”

“That’s not a very long time to know somebody.” Reed kept impassive, casual. “That’s about how long you’ve known me, after all, and I’m way more of an open book than Winter.”

“We’ve had long conversations because we’re related,” I said, shooting him a half-assed sneer. “Because I wanted to know about our father, and what he was like, and all the things I missed with him being, you know—dead for my entire life. I’ve worked with Old Man Winter, though, and you get kind of a bead on him after a while. There’s emotion under the surface, and for the first time, I’m seeing worry. He knows bad things are coming, even though he doesn’t know exactly what all they are. There are things going on in the meta world that too many people have been warning us about, things we need to take seriously.”

“I wonder about that sometimes,” Reed said as we walked across the lobby, Parks and Bastian in front of us and Kappler and Clary about twenty paces behind. “Your mom told you something big was coming, and then Zollers said basically the same thing.

Now, it’s true Zollers was a psychic—”

“Telepath,” I corrected gently.

“Right, a mind reader,” Reed said, “so maybe he just fed back to you what your mom said just to mess with you?”

I felt a certain clenching pain in my jaw at the memory of my last conversation with Dr. Zollers. He hadn’t just told me that a storm was coming to the world of metas; he’d specifically warned me that no one was looking out for me, which seemed blatantly untrue. If he’d lied about one…“Maybe. Let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t mind being a telepath myself and being able to dig into Zollers mind to see what was real and what wasn’t, because,” I blanched as the breath of the cold outside air hit me in the face while Reed held the door open for me and I transitioned to the outside, “he deceived me for six months when he was playing my psychiatrist, so it’s kinda hard to tell if he might have slipped a truth in there somewhere.”

Reed nodded, and didn’t say anything else. We reached the garage and loaded into one of the smaller white utility vans in silence, almost exactly like the one we’d taken down to Iowa.

“No visible powers in the hotel,” Bastian said. “The last thing we need is attention on this run. No guns unless the situation gets dire.” Bastian’s inflection became slightly accented. “If you hear gunfire, you are weapons-free at that point, but keep the bullets contained. No civilian casualties, verdad ?”