Robert Crane - Alone

Her jaw dropped only a little, and she recovered quickly. I think she was getting used to my barbs. Good. Old Man Winter stood a few feet behind her, watching me, but did not speak.

Ariadne looked chastened, but began again. “We’ve been keeping updated on your progress through Dr. Perugini. She’s most impressed with your healing abilities, which rate very high on the meta-human scale.”

“That’s coming in handy more often than I would have hoped,” I replied. “I take it Wolfe breaking into your dormitory building came as a surprise for you, too?”

Ariadne folded her arms and shook her head. “We shouldn’t have taken Kurt’s report that all our agents at your house were dead at face value; we should have verified to make sure nothing was left behind that could be traced back to us. But at the time we viewed sending a recovery team for the bodies as too great a risk for fear that Wolfe would somehow track them back to us.”

I pictured the oversized Wolfe driving a car, following a convoy of agents, then had an idle thought wondering what kind of vehicle he would drive. The image of him crammed behind the wheel of a Volkswagon bug popped into my head and in spite of all the emotional turmoil I had to stifle the urge to laugh, which was overtaken by the feeling of sickness again when I thought of him.

“Are you okay?” Ariadne looked at me with a concern that I would have found touching if I trusted her in the slightest. As it was, she spurred my instinct to aim at her if I felt the urge to vomit again.

“I’ll be fine.” I waved her off. “You didn’t come down here to talk to me about my abilities, did you?”

“No,” Ariadne replied after a moment’s pause. “We came to talk to you about security. Yours.”

I felt hollow, a complete lack of emotion. “What about it? Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no.” Ariadne shook her head with emphasis. “Now that Wolfe has found our location, though, it changes things. We want to keep you away from the outbuildings and here in the headquarters, where we have the greatest chance to be able to protect you from him.”

I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t even surprised. But I did feel a clutch of fear at the thought of not being able to see the sky, cloudy though it was, or feel the frigid winter air on my cheeks. Funny, since I’d only just felt it over the last few days, that I was already addicted and unwanting to give it up. “So you don’t want me to leave the building…at all? Is that right?”

Ariadne shared an uncertain look with Old Man Winter, who nodded. “Just for the time being,” she said, returning her gaze to me. “Until we can resolve this Wolfe situation.”

I laughed, that scornful noise I make when I’m not really finding something funny but I want to show my disdain for what’s been said. “He’s wiped out everything you’ve sent after him, including your security here on your campus. What, exactly, is going to resolve this ‘Wolfe situation’?”

“M-Squad will be returning from special assignment down in the Andes Mountains as soon as we can get in contact with them. Once they return,” Ariadne continued, “we have full confidence they’ll be able to take Wolfe out of play. Or,” she said with another backward look at Old Man Winter, “at least contain him.”

“Contain him?” I scoffed again. “The people I’ve talked to—”

“Meaning Zack,” Ariadne interrupted.

I ignored her and continued. “—seem to think that he’s one of the strongest metas on the planet. Is that accurate?”

Ariadne exchanged an uncomfortable look with Old Man Winter. And by uncomfortable, I mean on her end. He looked placid as ever. “He is one of the strongest, yes,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be stopped.”

“That’s funny,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Because Dr. Sessions told me I was a super strong meta, and I can’t make much of a dent in him, unless you count when I stuck a pen in his ear.”

“A clever strategy, by the way,” Ariadne added.

“A desperate one that bought me all of thirty seconds before he reaffirmed his desire to rape and kill me,” I raged back at her.

“It bought you enough time to allow us to intervene,” she said in a voice that was overly complimentary.

“Allowed him to intervene, you mean.” I pointed at Old Man Winter. “Wolfe called you Jotun – a Nordic frost giant.” He nodded at me with a ponderous, slow dip of his head but did not speak. “You’ve faced Wolfe before?” He nodded again. “But you both survived. And Wolfe has been alive for thousands of years?”

Old Man Winter nodded again and broke his silence once more. “He has. A cannier foe there is not; he has survived living on the razor’s edge all these years and always among people that are the world’s most dangerous. What does it say about him to be able to live millenia in such conditions?”

My heart sank. “That he’s dangerous. Worse than anything you can throw at him.”

Old Man Winter nodded, once more fixated on my eyes. “In order to protect you, we must keep you in this building. Do you understand?”

Unbidden, a memory of the door of the box closing came to me, and I felt a momentary urge to fight, to argue, to struggle out of my bed and scream at him in defiance. Then the pain in my stomach surged as I moved, and another, hotter emotion came over me, a disgust and humiliation at the thought of Wolfe manhandling me in my room in the dormitory, of his hands all over me, his finger inside my guts, ripping me up…and I almost gagged. “Yes,” I said simply, swirling emotions batted to the side.

“Good,” Ariadne said with undisguised relief. “I was worried that you might be headstrong and try to resist good sense.”

I felt weak, drained. “Glad I could allay your misperceptions.” I laid my head on the pillow behind me, not bothering to look at Ariadne or Old Man Winter any longer.

She hesitated. “There will be agents surrounding the medical unit. They’re on constant watch, especially after what happened to the agents at your house and the way Wolfe was able to breach security in the dorm. If you need anything – food, books, entertainment – just ask.” She smiled, as if she could sense that although I wasn’t shooting any venom her way it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.

She and Old Man Winter left, but only after he gave me another long, hard stare. After they left, Dr. Perugini took a moment to record my vitals, fluffed my pillow with a matronly cluck, and then, with an admonishment to call out if I needed anything, walked to her office and shut the door.

The curtains were up between me and the rest of the patients, and from where I was sitting I could see the backs of agents through the windows, stationed outside the doors of the medical unit, and I heard a healthy cough from behind one of the curtains, telling me there were more behind the partitions. Yet still, I felt alone. Again.

I thought back to what Ariadne had said about expecting a different reaction from me at the thought of being in lockdown. I wondered for just a moment what I must look like to them, how my actions must appear; then I dismissed it and realized I only cared a little. I still didn’t trust them. They would protect me now, but for reasons that were their own; reasons that were still unclear to me, but almost certainly involved using me and my powers, whatever they were, for their own ends.

I looked across the unit and found the wall there to be made of reflective metal that allowed me to see a distorted picture of my face. Bruises dotted my cheeks and wrapped around both eyes. There was crusted blood under my nose, and it looked misshapen. My eyes were haunted, the look of someone who had the spirit battered out of them.