*
Zoe and Mateo got to their feet, left the briefing room, and disappeared into the same hallway that Ian had stormed down. I wondered if they were going to check on the Viking or leave him alone. I would leave him alone, given how angry he’d been. And heartsick too, over Amanda’s death. I felt sorry for him. Angry and heartsick were emotions that I knew all too well, especially how hard they were to get rid of.
Takeda nodded at Aunt Rachel and me, then murmured an excuse to Linus and left the room as well. Linus sighed, turned off the monitors, and ran his hand through his hair, lost in his own thoughts. After a moment, he jerked his head toward another hallway.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”
Aunt Rachel and I got up from the table and followed him.
We walked down a long hallway with several glass windows set into the stone walls. I peered through the glass, staring into all the rooms we passed. An armory filled with metal lockers, wooden benches, and rows of weapons hanging on the walls. A training area populated by plastic practice dummies. A computer room bristling with laptops, wires, and servers. A library with shelves of books. A kitchen with stainless-steel appliances.
Aunt Rachel noticed the kitchen too, and she eyed the pots, pans, and other equipment with professional interest. Once a chef, always a chef.
“We call this entire level the Bunker,” Linus said as we walked along. “It contains everything you would need to survive a war with the Reapers or anyone else. Weapons, artifacts, communication equipment, food. Very few people in the Protectorate know of its existence, which is why Takeda and his team decided to use it as their base of operations. They’re going to protect all the items down here, as well as increase security in the regular library upstairs so that the Reapers can’t steal any more artifacts. At least, while they’re in Colorado.”
“What do you mean, while they’re here? Where are they going?” I asked.
“Once the scepter is recovered and Lance, Sisyphus, and the other Reapers are taken into custody, the team will move on to a new mission,” Linus said. “They’ll most likely head back to the New York academy, since that’s where they all came from.”
We reached the end of the hallway, which opened up into a small square room that reminded me of a coat closet, given the gray Protectorate cloaks hanging on hooks on the walls. I eyed the cloaks, and a sharp knife of longing sliced through my heart. I wondered what it would be like to wear one of those and be seen as one of the good guys for a change, instead of the daughter of dead Reaper assassins.
Aunt Rachel stared at the cloaks too, as if she were thinking the same thing.
Linus walked over to the far side of the room, where an elevator was embedded in the wall. The three of us stepped into the open car, and the door shut behind us. Linus pressed his thumb on a slot in the metal panel, and a green light shot out, scanning his print. Something chirped, and that panel slid back, revealing another one with floor numbers on it, like in a regular elevator. This area was marked Level B, and Linus hit the button for Level 2.
“Biometric keypad,” he explained. “The elevator only works for people Mateo programs into our security system.”
The elevator floated up and stopped a few seconds later, but the door didn’t open right away. Instead, that first panel slid back out, covering up the one with the floor numbers, and a monitor appeared on it, showing a familiar view of a balcony ringed with statues.
“That’s the second floor of the library,” Aunt Rachel said.
“Yes,” Linus replied. “Mateo has set up several scanners to make sure that no one is on this level of the library to see us coming and going. The elevator won’t open until the scanners tell it the coast is clear.”
A few seconds later, a light on the top of the panel flashed green, and the door swung outward. We stepped out of the elevator car and back onto the second floor. Behind us, a bookcase creaked shut, hiding the elevator from sight.
“A secret entrance,” I said. “Cool.”
I would have said more about how awesome I thought it was, and the Bunker too, but it wasn’t the right time.
Not when a girl was dead.
Linus gave me a faint smile, then moved over to the balcony railing and stared down at the first floor.
We were only a few feet away from Sigyn’s statue and the spot where I had battled the chimera. To my surprise, someone had already cleaned up the broken remains of the display case that Babs had been sitting in. I wondered if it had been one of the Protectorate members or Sigyn masquerading as Raven again.
I would put my money on Sigyn. The regular librarians didn’t come up to the second floor all that often, so I was betting that no one had even realized she had put the sword on display in the first place, much less disposed of the broken case afterward. For some reason, it seemed the goddess didn’t want anyone to know that I had Babs. Maybe she thought that a secret mission like battling the Reapers required a secret weapon.
“I see you have a new sword,” Aunt Rachel said in a low voice that only I could hear. “A talking sword.”
My hand dropped to Babs’s hilt. Of course Aunt Rachel would notice that I was wearing a sword. She knew me better than anyone, and she had the same Spartan skills and instincts that I had when it came to weapons.
“Her name is Babs. She was sitting in a display case up here. The chimera destroyed the case, and I needed a weapon to kill it, so I grabbed her.”
Aunt Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Is that all that happened?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t ready to tell her about seeing Sigyn in the Eir Ruins, especially since I was still trying to make sense of everything the goddess had said to me.
“More or less. But I’d like to keep her, if that’s okay with you.”
Aunt Rachel studied Babs again. “I’m okay with it. You should have a weapon of your own, at least until this business with the Reapers is resolved. Besides, she looks like a fine sword.”
I flashed her a grateful smile. “I think she’s a fine sword too.”
Aunt Rachel smiled back at me, and then the two of us walked over to where Linus was standing by the balcony.
Down below, several men and women wearing gray cloaks were picking up pieces of broken chairs and righting overturned tables from the fight with the chimeras. One man sporting black coveralls was down on his hands and knees, with a bucket of water beside him, vigorously scrubbing a brush over a large red stain on the floor. He was trying to get blood off the stone—Amanda’s blood.