Page 69 of Fire
He could keep walking, following their plan. Jake had already stopped at the first room they’d targeted to distribute C-4 blocks. Tobias could go on to the central hub, lay the charges, wipe the on-site servers, and assume that the Director would go down in the flames. But he couldn’t, really. Tobias took a deep breath, then put his hand on the doorknob and pushed it open.
Tobias had known that the Director’s office was insulated for sound—there were too many private meeting rooms for visiting functionaries in the same hallway, and not all of those visitors would have wanted to know what went on in the Director’s interrogation room—but he’d never quite realized how much until he stepped from the hallway into the cool, still office. Behind him pounded the alarm klaxons, chaos, and screams from what he and Jake had begun, but here, where Jonah Dixon waited quietly at his desk, there was only silence.
The Director looked up. He had, by all evidence, been doing paperwork. Tobias knew he hadn’t been oblivious to the invasion, he couldn’t have been, but the sight still sent shivers down his spine.
“89UI6703.” The Director’s tone was somewhere between greeting, identification, and criticism. “Shut the door.”
Tobias heard the latch click before he realized he had obeyed.
The Director’s voice was the same. Smooth and cold and implacable. “In this life, even with all I’ve been able to achieve, I always wondered if a freak would be the death of me. But I thought I’d trained you better, 89UI6703. Lock it.”
Tobias’s hands didn’t seem like they belonged to him, jerking toward the lock on the door before he stopped himself, just barely. He touched the lock but did not turn it. He was shaking like a marionette hung from a drunk’s hands.I should never have come without Jake.
Breathing desperately, Tobias turned to face this man who had made him.
The Director’s eyes were somber, almost angry, but a bitter curve to his mouth qualified as a smile. “Of course, you could kill me now. That would prove once and for all that you are exactly the monster I tried to beat out of you. What a disappointment.”
Tobias flinched in spite of everything he wanted to do, wanted to say, and dropped his eyes instinctively, no longer able to even look the Director in the face. It took everything in him to stay where he was, keep his grip on his gun, and watch the Director’s body language for any movement to a weapon. He tried not to listen. He couldn’t let Jonah Dixon finish destroying him now.
“More of a disappointment because even among freaks, you are particularly useless.” Jonah Dixon picked up a slim file and frowned down at the page, as though there wasn’t an armed intruder in his office. “They always suspected you were more. You were special. What shit.”
Jake didn’t even try the door when he arrived—he just kicked it in. Tobias forced his eyes up as relief burned through him, and he caught the smile dropping from the Director’s face. If any fear was in him, he buried it beneath ice-cold focus. All he let through was a flash of irritation, as though Jake had arrived early to an appointment and the Director didn’t like the disruption to his schedule.
On another man it could have been harmless, but more than once Tobias had had the skin whipped off his back for disrupting this man’s schedule. There was nothing farther from harmless, not even the wendigos. The Director’s eyes flickered to Jake’s masked face, his gun, and then back to Tobias. Tobias had to drop his eyes again. Even then, he could see the Director lean back in his chair, one long hand visible in Tobias’s line of vision.
“Hands where I can fucking see them,” Jake snarled.
Director Jonah Dixon slowly raised his hands and laid them on the desk, palms facing each other, rather than up or down, on the polished wood. “Cousin Jake, I presume.”
Jake’s gun never wavered from its lead on the Director’s head, but with his left hand he peeled his mask up to his forehead. His face showed fury colder than Tobias had ever seen. “You can presume that I’ll splatter your brains against that wall before you call me cousin again.”
Jake’s eyes were tracking the Director’s hands and body, watching for any signals of violence, but Tobias’s attention was immediately caught when the Director glanced toward him and smiled with the corner of his mouth. The Director flicked two fingers. Kneel.
Tobias felt his knees bend without his conscious control and had to fight a lifetime of training to straighten them again. He shifted the gun between his hands and brought it forward. He couldn’t quite point it at the source of his nightmares, but he knew if he couldn’t get his head in the game, neither he nor Jake would survive.
“Tobias, what did he just do?” Jake’s voice was angry, and Tobias thought distantly that neither of them were in a place where they had a hope in hell of besting the Director. “Toby!”
“Nothing,” Tobias said, soft, hollow. “I don’t kn-know, Jake, n-nothing, I don’t know w-why.”
“I know why.” The Director’s voice was soft, calm, and every time he spoke, Tobias couldn’t stop himself from flinching away, as though the calm words were hot irons laid against his skin. “But then again, I should. I put a lot of work into that freak beside you, Jake. I know what makes him tick better than he does. Damn well better than you do. Would you like to know what I’ve done with him?” He moved his hand slightly on the table, and Tobias raised his gun.
“D-d-don’t m-move.” Tobias’s voice shook, like the bad old days when he hadn’t even been able to look Jake in the eye, and he knew Jake was looking at him, but he couldn’t stay silent. Not when the threat was almost thick enough to choke them in the room. “Don’t move. Leave your hands where Jake—where we can see them.”
“Why?” The Director looked at him, and Tobias couldn’t meet his eyes. He watched the Director’s body, his hands, ready for any sign of movement (or his next order). “To make it easier to shoot me, unarmed, when you’ve done whatevermonstrousthings you plan? What was your plan in bringing him here? That’s a stupid thing to do, and after he’s dead you’ll wish I had that much mercy in me for a dog like you.”
“Don’t threaten him,” Tobias whispered. He wasn’t convinced either man heard it, at least not over Jake’s snarled, “Shut up!”
That anger made Tobias wince, but brought him some focus as well, because ultimately that was why they were here. Not because Tobias hated the hunters that had fucked him up, or because he wanted revenge, but because Jake couldn’t hold it together knowing that this smooth-voiced man was still alive—the one who had cut Tobias into so many little pieces and then sutured him together in the shape he wanted. The Director had formed Tobias into the only shape that he had thought Tobias deserved, the shape of a freak as tortured as Frankenstein’s monster but carved out of a little boy who had never been a freak in the first place.
Jake had told him that for years, long before they learned about the Wrights. Now Tobias might lose fucking everything because he had let these two men who had defined his life be in the same room.
Jake had given the Director an order, but Tobias could have told him that it wouldn’t work. The Director didn’t need to listen to anyone.
“You never thanked me, you know,” the Director said to Jake.
“Last thing I’m going to do is thank a son of a bitch like you,” Jake spat. “I should drag you into the fucking yard and let the monsters rip you apart for what you did to Toby.”
The Director let a slight look of surprise cross his face, the shadow of amusement. “But that’s exactly what you should thank me for, Jake. Poor as he is, I’ve always considered Tobias to be my best work. Perfect for a hunter of your talents and appetites, at least. In six years, I’ve never duplicated the results that I achieved with him. Wouldn’t you call him a perfect little submissive tool, perfect for every use?”
