Robert Crane - Omega

“Oh my,” Fries said, his head turning as though he were woozy. “I shouldn’t be surprised you’re a man-hater, really.”

Eve knelt down and got astride him, balancing on one knee, cracking her knuckles. “It isn’t that I hate men. I work with some very decent ones.” She pulled back her fingers, exposing her leather-covered palm, and then reformed her fist and smashed Fries in the side of the head with it, rattling his head against the floor again. “Bastian, Parks, even Old Man Winter. Decent sorts. Clary…has some rough edges.” She hit him again, and I watched him spit out blood. “You, on the other hand, I find no redeeming value in.” She pulled back her fist into a palmhand and ran it into his nose, causing it to break. Blood dripped down the sides of his face and, I presume, into the back of his throat, because he started to gag.

“You,” she said, rolling him over and placing her weight on his back, “are the worst sort. I know of you, James Fries, and I know what you do to women. How many bodies have you left in dumpsters in the last year? In your lifetime?” She took his face and rammed it into the cold, black floor tiles. “I’ve been begging Ariadne for months to let me have a shot at you—just one shot, as a personal chance to thank you for how you treat women. It sets me—how do you say?—on edge?”

Fries took a moment to answer, his eyes rolling in and out of focus. He smiled, a terrible, bloody smile. “Yeah. On edge. And I’ve left some bodies by the wayside, it’s true. In alleys, in dumpsters. Tons of them.” She snapped him hard in the nose and he gagged, making a glottal-stop noise as he spit blood out. “You gonna beat me to death for them? You didn’t even know them.”

“I bet,” Eve said, wearing the thinnest, most lethal smile, “if I told you that I would kill you if you didn’t correctly write down the names of the last five girls you slept with, you’d not only die, you wouldn’t remember a single one of them.”

Fries smiled again, and I could see the bloody lines tracing between his teeth. “You got me there. I don’t even remember one of them. Sandy, maybe? Cindy? Ah, who cares.”

Eve nodded slightly, her face tight, then she unloaded another three punches on his face in rapid succession. “You’re going to choke on your own blood,” she said, turning his head to the side to let him gag it out onto the floor, a slow, steady red spill of liquid rolling its way across the black tile, an ocean of death washing toward me.

I watched, paralyzed, not sure what to say, not sure if I should stop her. My head spun, I felt a pounding sense of guilt, even though it was Fries—the worm—and a murderer of women, and nearly of me. Part of me raged internally and called myself too stupid to live for any remorse I might feel; the other part tried to play up my guilt for not stopping Eve, just as I hadn’t stopped Old Man Winter.

“If I tell you something, will you stop beating the hell outta me?” Fries said, causing my head to snap up. His teeth were broken now, and Eve had another fist cocked and ready to unload on him.

“Trying to save your own life now?” Eve asked, and hit him again, snapping his head back. “I think your pleading may be falling on the deafest ears you could have found in the Directorate, Fries.” She hit him again, and I saw his eyes unfocus, one of them starting to swell shut, the purpling on his cheek obvious and growing.

“Wait,” I said, only just louder than a whisper, but enough for Eve to hear me and halt before her next punch. “What do you think you could say that would convince Eve to stop?” I asked, and Fries turned his head, letting his neck hang slack, looking at me out of his one good eye.

“I’ll tell you…” His words came out slurred, his lip split open and bleeding down his neck, “who’s running…Operation Stanchion.”

“You’ll tell us who’s running it,” I said, taking the two steps to carry me to Fries’ side, and kneeling to get closer to him, “and what it’s all about, what’s happening.”

“Don’t know…what’s happening,” Fries said, his head lolling. “Don’t even know the objective…they…thought I was a high risk for Directorate capture so they didn’t…tell me.” His pupil was dilated, he was concussed, and he sounded like he was drunk.

“Give me a name,” Eve said, readying her fist. “Give me a name, or so help me, my next punch will sever your serial killing head and end your little perverted reign of impotence forever.”

Fries’ once-handsome face was twisted, an eye already swollen shut. The strong smell of iron filled the air, and he seemed to have no strength in his neck. Eve had him suspended by the front of his shirt, which she had torn while pounding him into hamburger. He was missing at least eight teeth by my count, and his lips were split in three places, his face swelling so rapidly it looked like he had fallen into a bees’ nest. “Okay,” he said, now barely audible. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. I just saw him the other day…Janus. It’s Janus. Janus is running Operation Stanchion.”

“Who the hell is Janice?” Bastian asked as Eve and I re-entered the observation room to find him waiting with Ariadne and Parks.

“Janus,” I said, drawing every eye in the room to me. “Roman god of doorways and transitions. Had two faces, supposedly. Not really sure how that would translate in non-mythological terms.”

“He is a liar,” Old Man Winter said, squeezing into the room behind us, Clary following him, “so the colloquialism fits for him being two-faced.”

“Did no one else manage to return any further information?” Eve asked, slipping off my gloves and handing them casually back to me. They were slick with blood, and I held them at a distance from my body, as though I were too good for them.

“No one got quite as…persuasive,” Ariadne said, “as you did. At least not for as long, or as close to the…uh…edge.”

“No one else came as close to beating their subject to death is what she means,” Parks said with more than a little acrimony.

“My only regret was that I didn’t finish,” Eve said. “He’s slime. He rapes women and kills them with his power, and finishes with their corpses. I bet he couldn’t even get it up if a woman wasn’t screaming in pain for him. I have never encountered a more loathsome creature in my life, and I wish I could beat him to death over and over.”

“This is to the damned edge of the line, Director,” Parks said in a low growl that reminded me of the wolf within him. “We don’t do this sort of thing, sir. Beating people in interrogations? Freezing someone’s arm and breaking it off?” He drew himself up. “We’re better than that.”

“Not the biggest fan of these aggressive tactics myself, sir,” Bastian said. “We let ‘em stew, we break ‘em traditionally, without laying a finger on them. Not one of them is tough enough to take the isolation forever.”

“We do not have forever,” Old Man Winter said. “We may not even have a day. Omega is coming, make no mistake. They have marked us as a threat, they desire to eliminate us, and they are operating on a timetable so aggressive we are left with few options.” He ran a cold, surveying set of eyes over us, not flinching away from looking anyone in the eyes. I blinked away from his first, though. “This is certain: the damage could be greater than anyone of us can calculate.”

“Should we evacuate the campus, sir?” Bastian said, cutting through the air that had suddenly gotten thick in the room. “Get the younger metas out of here, maybe give the admin staff some time off and keep a skeleton crew here for the next couple weeks while we wait for the anvil to drop?”