Omega The Girl in the Box

4.



I walked into Ariadne’s office at the crack of nine the next morning to find her already behind her desk, a file in her hands, her reading glasses on. She wore them infrequently, only when she was actually reading, and as soon as I appeared at the door she hurried to put them back in her desk drawer, laying the file down in front of her.

“Why do you do that?” I asked as I flopped down in the chair across from her.

“Do what?” she asked, almost looking innocent.

“Put away your glasses when someone comes into the room?” I nodded at the drawer to her side where she had stowed them. “Everyone knows you wear glasses when you read.”

“I...” She paused, as though thinking about it. “I don’t know, actually. Just one of those things I’ve never given any thought to. Vanity, I suppose.”

“But you don’t wear make-up and you don’t worry about how you dress...?”

I watched her face sag a little, before she formed a tight smile. “What can I do for you, Sienna?”

“I’m here for the interrogation. I thought I was gonna play bad cop, worse cop, with Fries this morning.”

“Not ‘til eleven,” she said, picking up the file and opening her desk drawer again. She slid her glasses on and looked at me over the half-lenses. “I do have something you can do until then, though.”

“Oh?” I perked up. “I hope it involves beating someone up. Because I like to play to my strengths, you know. Also, physics. I’m good at math.”

“Not physics, nor beating people up. You’re behind on your quarterly physical exams,” she said, running a finger over the file as she read along with it. “You need to see Dr. Sessions.”

“I’ll get around to that one of these days,” I said.

“You’ll go today, right now, if you want to continue to be cleared for duty.” She looked up and found me with her gaze, more severe than usual. “This isn’t negotiable, and it isn’t just for you; we expand our knowledge base about metas from these exams, so help us out, will you?”

“O-kaaay,” I said, dragging out the last syllable. “But only because you asked me nicely.”

“Thank you,” she said as I made my way to the door. “And Sienna?” She looked up at me as I turned around at the door. “Try not to kill Fries. Now that he’s here, we want him alive.”

“You sure? Because you told me if I felt in peril, I could kill, so it might be that he gets a little smart-mouthed with me and I feel threatened—”

“No.”

“What if I didn’t kill him, maybe just took a spleen or something?”

“No.”

“But it’d grow back!”

She shook her head. “Take it easy on him. It’s an interrogation. You’re there to extract information, not his gallbladder.”

“The gallbladder would be easier. Maybe less messy, too.”

“Parks is an expert interrogator,” she said. “Follow his lead. You’re only there as a counterpoint, watch him work. This isn’t a one-time interrogation so don’t be surprised if you don’t get much in the way of results. We have him now, there’s no reason to get impatient when he’s not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

I made my way across the campus. I was successful at suppressing the thought in the back of my mind about Zack’s eyes turning into my own during our dream rendezvous last night. After all, it was just a dream. I toyed with the idea of bringing it up to Dr. Sessions, but he knew so little about succubi I doubted it would be of any use to me, though he was certain to fawn over it like he did any other piece of irrelevant but interesting data.

The cool air was comfortable against my skin; I preferred the chill of autumn now that it was here, because I didn’t look so out of place walking the campus in long sleeves, long pants, gloves and a coat as I did in the summertime. Talk about stares, especially when I went to the mall. Just as well, the skin on my legs and arms was beyond pale; I might as well have been a vampire. Well, not exactly like one. At least not the ones I’d seen.

A pile of leaves had blown into the small entry alcove to the rebuilt science building. It was different than it had been before Aleksandr Gavrikov had blown it up; the old building was brick, a 1970s facade and an interior not much more updated. Now it was all new and modern concrete, a more rounded profile instead of the square, blocky facility it had been before. I wondered how much of the Directorate had been destroyed and rebuilt since I had arrived. The proportion was not in my favor, whatever it was.

I knocked at the door to Dr. Sessions’ office. The doctor looked up from his desk at my arrival, his bald head shining by the light of a lamp that was lit on his desk. He looked at me through his overlarge glasses, taking a moment to readjust them. “Oh, Sienna. Good.” He blinked a few times, and then stood up, hitting his knee on the underside of his desk. I watched him cringe. “Ouch. If you’ll come with me.” He gestured toward the hall as he limped his way past me.

I followed him past the new drywall panels, and the glass windows that looked into the various labs. There were a few men and women in white coats working within them, messing around with who-knows-what as I walked by. We stopped at a room with a wooden door and he opened it for me. I shrugged and walked in. “Gown on the back of the door,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Doc, is this really necessary?” I looked at him with constrained irritation. “Dr. Perugini has told you I’m healthy after conducting a physical, I feel fine—”

“Research, Sienna,” he said with a suppressed smile that tightened the lines around his eyes. “We understand so very little about how metahuman abilities work, frankly, so it’s important to take every opportunity to further our understanding. I promise I’ll make it as quick as possible.”

“Fine,” I said with a sigh, and he closed the door. I took off my clothes in silence as I put on the gown, felt the cold touch of the tile floor on my feet, the nip of the air as I removed my shirt and jeans. The heat exchange above me was faintly letting out some warm air, which helped. I sat on the examination table, a padded monstrosity that sat in the corner. The faint smell of alcohol from the disinfectant station above the sink permeated the room, and the soft groan of the table felt like it could be audible three buildings away. “I’m ready!” I called out, hoping Dr. Sessions was still standing outside the door and hadn’t wandered back to his office and forgotten about me.

The door creaked open and he stepped inside, wearing a buttoned-up lab coat. “This won’t take long,” he said, as he closed the door behind him. A blue latex glove rested on the handle as he closed it, catching my attention.

“That won’t protect you,” I said, pointing to the glove. “Keep that in mind.”

“I’m well aware of the spectrum of your powers,” he said as he circled around behind me. I kept a wary eye on him as he walked to the sink and started pulling things out of the cabinets above the counter. “I am, after all, the one who did the experiments to test those powers.”

Shortly after I had arrived, Sessions and a few of his lab assistants (I never caught their names) took turns touching my exposed skin. It never lasted more than a few seconds, but they determined the threshold at which most people begin to experience effects from my touch (three seconds) and how long it takes the average human to pass out (about six seconds). For obvious reasons, we never definitively answered how long it would take me to kill a person. I was pretty sure it was something like twenty seconds. I’d never seen them pass out from it, though. I’d just seen them scream all the way to the end.

“I’ll need to draw some blood,” Sessions said. “I’d also like to get saliva samples—”

“You want me to spit in a petri dish?” I looked at him with a combination of loathing and skepticism. “Are you a real doctor or did you get your degree in the Caribbean?”

“Harvard Medical School,” he said with aplomb. “Highest Honors.”

“Your mother must be so proud.”

“Oh, she is,” he said, as though what he were saying were of no more import than giving me a weather update. “Very proud indeed.”

“I wonder what that’s like,” I said, muttering under my breath.

“Shall we begin?” He lifted his head up and smiled brightly, causing me to stir. I felt his touch as he pushed up my sleeve, and I watched him as he started to draw blood. His blue latex glove was on my bicep, and I resisted the urge to flex hard and knock it away just to show off. My muscles didn’t look all that big. Actually, they were roughly the size of any of the other non-meta women at the Directorate. I had the strength where it counted, though—performance.

After a moment, a thought broke through and I reached to swipe at his hand. “Doc, the glove won’t protect you for more than—” I stopped, and looked up at him, his face broken wide into a grin. He squeezed my arm for emphasis, and I realized he’d been holding onto me for well over ten seconds, and he was still sitting there, unaffected. “How?”

“New material,” he said, and kept his hand on me. “I won’t bore you with the technical details, but it’s the same approximate thickness of a latex glove, but slightly more flesh-suitable, shall we say?” I felt his hand resting on me, and he was right. The glove wasn’t rubbery, it didn’t tear at my arm hairs as he ran it down to my forearm. It felt smooth, soft, almost like skin but not quite. He gave me a squeeze and brought the needle out with his other hand. “Might as well get this done while we’re at it, but my plan is to keep a hand on you throughout the exam to test how long this material holds up.” He gave a little shrug. “If it works, we could look at getting you some gloves made from it.”

I stared at his fingers, draped in the blue material, snugged tight to his skin. “How about more than that?”

“More than what?” He blinked and readjusted his glasses. “More than gloves?”

“Yeah,” I said, as I licked my lips. “What about...like...a bodysuit?”

His eyes seemed to stare off into space and his face scrunched up in thought. “Why would you need one of those? Your hands are the weapons, keep them contained and you should be fine—”

“Because,” I said, cutting him off, “maybe I don’t want to always be a weapon.”

“Then wear gloves,” he said, clearly not getting it. “It’s simple, puts the safety on, if you were to continue the weapon analogy—you stick with long sleeves, long pants, shoes, and as long as you don’t touch anyone with your face, you should be fine.”

“You’ve never known the touch of a woman, have you Doc?”

He stared at me, inscrutable, for another few seconds and then the intense look of study dissolved. “Oh! Oh, for intimacy! You want a bodysuit so you can...” He blinked again, and his look of revelation cascaded into discomfort as his voice lowered in pitch and his face fell. “Oh. Yes, I mean...it is theoretically possible to make an entire body encasement of the material, and it’s not that difficult for us to synthesize here in the lab.” He gave my arm another squeeze and gently stuck another needle in my arm. “That is certainly something we could look into for you.”

I stared straight ahead, considering the possibilities. “How...resistant is the material to breakage?”

He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “It’s tougher than latex, can take more pounds per square inch of pressure before suffering a rupture. For something of that nature, it would need to be measured and specially fitted in order to give the level of...ah...protection...you’d require for uh...such activity.”

“So it is possible?” I tried to look him in the eyes, but he didn’t bother to look up from drawing his fifth vial of blood. “You can do that? Make a suit for me?”

“Yes. Although,” he said, placing the last vial into the little row in the container he had for them and withdrawing the needle from my arm, “I might suggest that for your purposes, it would be easier for your paramour to be the one to be fitted for the suit.” He flushed. “Assuming that your...ah...partner...would be male rather than female.”

“Fair assumption in this case.” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Zack Davis. You know him?”

“An agent, I believe?” Sessions seemed to give this some thought. “I’m certain I’ve met him, but I can’t place a face offhand. Regardless, if you intend to engage in...activities of the sort you’d indicated, it would be easier on a purely mechanical level for the male to wear the suit.”

“Sure,” I said with a vague sense that I was agreeing to something, but not really caring what it was. “Whatever you say.”

“If you wish for...Mr. Davis to have a suit of this material, send him over to me at his earliest convenience. Taking measurements is simple enough, and it’ll take a few days to fabricate. It’s hardly a panacea that will solve all your ills, but we could probably synthesize another every few weeks if need be.”

“That would be marvelous,” I said with a hunger. I felt a buzz in my stomach, a nervous energy that stemmed from excitement coupled with nerves. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said, and genuinely meant it.

“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, once again blank. “Except draw your blood, I suppose, though I don’t know why you’d be thanking me for that.”

“I’m thanking you for telling me about this,” I said, trying to stay calm. Sessions was a dolt, complete and utter, clueless about basic human need or desire. “It’s a chance for me to live a normal life.”

“Oh, I see,” he said, but I could tell by his voice he didn’t. “Well, that’s good. Now, if you can just open your mouth,” he brandished a swab, “I need to get a sample of cheek cells...”

I sighed, and opened my mouth. The swab was long, white and had cotton on the end. It was not pleasant, not fun, but it didn’t matter because my head was already elsewhere. This suit was something that could change my life, could make me able to touch my boyfriend, to feel him against me without two layers of clothing to separate us. We could sleep in the same bed, could stop fooling around in our dreams...and start doing it in the real world.

And I wouldn’t have to worry about his eyes turning colors anymore.