“Hey, it’s okay. I know someone who can help you feel better,” Jamie said, nearly choking on the lie before he let his thoughts drift.Katie?
I can read your mind, you know,she replied, sounding tired.Yes, I can turn off her mind, but it’s againstthelaw.
I honestly don’t give a fuck about the law right now. If we’re going to lose everyone down here, the least we can do is make it less painful for someofthem.
I can’t turn off everyone’s mind. The agents who come in for cleanup will know that Splice didn’t kill them first and that’s an inquiry we don’t need right now.She sighed into his mind, the sound like static between his ears.I can do it for all the children when their symptomsworsen.
They’d miss the chance of knowing if any changed into a metahuman, if any of them could be saved. That acknowledgment settled wordlessly between them, and as much as Jamie wanted to ignore the slim possibility, he knew hecouldn’t.
For the children,Jamieechoed.
Tell the mother toholdher.
Jamie cleared his throat and stood up, still holding onto the child’s hand. “Come on, let’s go back toyourmom.”
He returned the little girl to her mother, gently guiding them both over to the wall, getting other people there to make room for them. The woman sat down, cradling her daughter in her arms, teeth clenched as she quietlycried.
“Mommy, why are you crying?” the girlasked.
She smoothed a hand over her daughter’s hair, pressing the little girl’s head against her shoulder. “Something in my eye, sweetie. It’s okay. Can you close your eyesforme?”
“But I’m not tired,Mommy!”
“Just…close your eyes, baby.” She pressed her trembling lips to the top of her daughter’s head. “It’s okay, Mommy’sgotyou.”
Jamie kept his hand on the little girl’s wrist, monitoring her pulse. He felt when it started to slow as Katie did something she’d previously only done in the heat of battle with the backing of commandallowingit.
She turned off the littlegirl’smind.
The pulse beneath Jamie’s fingers abruptly stopped, the sound of her last breath rattling through her small lungs. The girl’s little body went limp in her mother’s arms. The woman keened out a wordless cry that devolved into harsh sobs as she clutched her dead but no-longer-suffering daughter to herchest.
Jamie let go of the little girl and reached out to touch the woman, but paused with his hand halfway to her shoulder. The woman was too deep in her grief to want comfort, and there was no comfort to be had in a situation like this. Clenching his hand into a fist, Jamie blinked back the wetness in his eyes before getting tohisfeet.
Long night ahead,Katie said quietly intohismind.
Long night,he agreed, feeling hollowed outandold.
The MDF field teams didn’t leave the Park Street Station until just before dawn on Friday morning, after the last person succumbed toSplice.
There were nosurvivors.
Jamie went through decontamination in a fog, exhausted and numb from the ordeal they had gone through. The emotional toll of watching people die, trapped behind hard containment lines in a quarantine zone, never got any easier to bear. Everyone was silent as medical personnel wearing PPPS gear helped steer them through theprocess.
Everyone was given new field uniforms to walk out of the decontamination tents in full view of the media’s hovering drone cameras that were relegated to the police line in the distance. Reporters were barred from Boston Common and the surrounding streets, but apparently technology was cleared to operate. Jamie didn’t look at the drone cameras recording their retreat into the X-17 Hermes combat jet that had landed on the dry winter grass in the southeastern corner of the park to takethemhome.
No one talked on the flight back to base, the grim silence that had shrouded them in the subway following Alpha Team home. Jamie had kept the director and deputy director apprised of the situation throughout the night, but there was no escaping debrief after everything that hadhappened.
They exited the combat jet on tired feet, slogging their way to the ready room where they racked their weapons. They didn’t bother getting out of their uniforms, since they’d already showered and cleaned up in the field rather thanonbase.
The other field teams and agents who’d been present in Boston had all returned to D.C. within the last few hours. Debrief was an inescapable task they couldn’t ignore, but Jamie managed to put it off for a few minutes longer once they arrived at the conference room onLevel36.
“I need to call my family,”Jamiesaid.
Nazari tilted his head in the general direction of an empty office somewhere on the command level. “Takeyourtime.”
Jamie would have done so anyway, with or without permission. He hadn’t spoken with his family since dragging them out of the SUV on the street in Boston and sending them up to the roof of the apartment building for an evac. He needed to get in touch with them, not the least because of the media shitstorm brewing around the tragedy the Boston campaign rally haddevolvedinto.
He found a workroom no one was using, and a terminal that Ceres unlocked for him, logging him in under his code. Sitting down in what felt like the first time in forever, Jamie tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Taking a deep breath, he held it in his lungs, slowly counting down from the sixty-second mark as he tried to clear his head enough to tackle one more problem. One moremission.
