“That’s how Max usually talks,” I reminded her.
She rolled her eyes. “I know, right? But this is different. He puts up a much tougher front if he’s reluctant to do the job.”
Her assurances made me feel a little better. As much as Max and Nathan bickered, neither of them truly wanted the other dead. Maybe once we were away from the eyes and ears of the Movement, Max would change his mind.
“So,” Anne said brightly, grasping the toes of her boots and leaning forward. “What did you think of the place?”
“I thought it was…nice,” I offered lamely. “Not at all what I was expecting.”
“I know, right? Most people think it’s going to be stone walls and torchlight and guys with long beards, in scary robes. I mean, we have the guys with long beards, but they only wear their robes during a ritual.” She said this with a shrug, as if it was completely normal to deal with occult forces in the workplace. “Aside from them, there’s really nothing that weird here.”
“Well, except the Oracle,” I began casually. “But I guess I won’t be seeing her anytime soon. What’s she like?”
“She’s like…” Anne pursed her lips as she thought. “She’s like a magic eight ball, only she can kill you.”
I straightened a little at that. “Like, she can answer your questions?” The “like” popped from my mouth naturally. I could see how Anne had easily adopted modern teenspeak.
“Like, with her mouth? No. But she talks through telepathy all the time.” Anne shrugged again. “But she doesn’t usually say anything that makes sense. Why, did you have a question?”
I wasn’t sure if I should admit it or not. The notion of “personal boundaries” seemed to have escaped this eternal teenager, and while she was nice, I didn’t feel like examining my deepest fears with her. I settled on a diplomatic, “Yes.”
“That’s cool. I’ve asked her all sorts of questions, but she’s never answered. I mean, one time she did give me a freaky vision of my spine snapping in, like, four places, but she never actually did it so I’m not worried.” After considering a moment, Anne looked up from her bracelets. “And the general wouldn’t clear you to see her?”
“I got the distinct impression the general doesn’t care much for the Oracle’s knowledge.” I picked at the arm of the chair, though there weren’t any loose threads or pilled fabric to prompt me to do so.
Anne sighed. “A lot of people here are that way. But you know, any information you could get would probably be helpful, considering your situation. Right?”
“Well, it’s not like it matters now. From the way Max made it sound, you need special permission to see her.” I sighed loudly in frustration.
There was a long pause. I’d expected an immediate response from Anne, and when I didn’t hear one, I looked up. She dangled a key card on a black cord from her fingers, smiling. “Or friends with security clearance.”
I hesitated. “You mean, you?”
“Uh-huh. I have clearance to every place in this building. Due to my excellent years of service. And the fact I have to sometimes escort guests around the building.” Her naughty grin reached the corners of her eyes now. “So, you wanna?”
I had the uncomfortable feeling I’d gotten in high school when someone would offer me a joint or ask me to skip school. I was pretty good at resisting peer pressure, but she was persuasive, and the situation was certainly different. “Won’t you get into trouble?”
She made a plosive sound of denial, as if the answer was obvious. “Only if we get caught. Besides, it’s not like they’re gonna get rid of me.”
She made a compelling argument. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been if our meeting with the general hadn’t been so disastrous.
Anne seemed to take the reason for my hesitation as fear. “She hasn’t hurt anyone lately. They changed her diet. She was getting too much male blood and the testosterone made her crabby. Now she’s pretty mellow.”
I felt a fleeting moment of sanity, and seized it. “Max told me to stay here.”
“So?” Anne got to her feet and went behind the desk, where she grabbed a pad of sticky notes. “We’ll leave him a message. Besides, he’s in the armory. He’ll be there awhile.”
“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”
“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me. “It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”
I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”
“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”
The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”
“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”
A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.
“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.
“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.
“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”
She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”
“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”
“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”
We ventured farther into the building than she’d taken us on our previous tour. This area, I noticed, had fewer safe rooms and more security labels. We reached a large set of double doors with a thick, black-and-yellow-striped line around them. Huge red warning signs, printed in several different languages, plastered the doors. In addition to a key card reader, I noticed there was a palm scan device and a keypad on the wall.
“This is the most secure section of headquarters,” Anne explained. “Only high level administrators and security have access. Oh, and the scientists who monitor the Oracle.”
“Scientists?” I chewed my lip nervously as I watched her key in the codes. The English language sticker on the door warned an improper access sequence would result in a security breach alert, and I didn’t remember where I’d seen the last safe room.
“Yeah. She’s got a whole team of doctors and chemists and pharmacists keeping her medicated and fed well and under control.” The same computerized voice from