Atomic Rebooted

49. Testimony

MIRA

Heretic's office was tiny, a rather cramped little space with just two chairs in front of her desk. Most of the walls were taken by the shelves of bins of files—copies, I realized, of stuff from City Hall or the college. Didn't matter which, I supposed. There were very little personal touches to the dilapidated room. Only a coffee-maker that had clearly been customized and a picture on her desk showed that a person was here.

Most of the light did not come from the burned-out panels above, but rather through the sunlit blinds and tiny window behind Heretic's head. I pushed past to the window, Henry following on my heels as Heretic swung over her desk to close the door.

"Oh my God," I whispered.

There were Sentinels all over the lawn—more than when we had come in.

Henry cursed and helped me shut the blinds.

"You're attracting all kinds of attention, aren't you Mira?" Heretic looked rather impressed. She shut the door and used her powers to move a filing cabinet in front of it. I could now better admire her control, how with just a flick of her wrist it hovered right into place.

I'd have to learn a thing or two from her on how to control my own power.

"That's a little extreme, isn't it?" Henry asked.

"Not when it comes to Atomic Energy." Her face darkened. "They won't deny me this day. Not after all they've taken from me. Now we might as well sit down."

Henry gestured for me to go first. We took the seats across from Heretic's desk and she started putting away files.

"So you're finally ready to know the truth about Ophelia?" Despite the hard, angular expression on her face, there was something soft about her voice.

"I was always afraid to ask." Henry averted his eyes for a moment. Then he met Heretic's steely green gaze. "We saw the crime report—and the knife."

Triumph flashed across her face. "I take it that you, Mira, knew the symbol?"

"Of course I would." I found myself gripping the sides of the chair for stability. "Atomic Energy had something to do with her death, didn't they? And the fire?"

"Oh, no, the fire was mine, they can't claim responsibility for that." She tilted her head back cackling for a moment. Then she ran her hand over the photograph on her desk and sobered. "But you don't know the whole story there. The three of us, the City Archivists—we agreed on that."

Henry and I exchanged a look.

"What do you mean, you agreed?" Henry asked.

"We planned it, Ophelia and Erik were supposed to get the files that we wanted to survive out, while I played the villain." Something in her demeanor shifted. Her sorrow transformed to rage, as quick as the blink of an eye. "I didn't know that they were onto us, that they were going to try and stop us. I was supposed to be the one who got killed. She died to buy me time—and for that, I killed him."

She laughed humorlessly. "At least Ophelia died for a mission that succeeded. So many of the people I knew in the Titan War didn't."

"The Titan War?" I recalled the Sentinel case files. "But you didn't appear in public until after—"

"Heretic wasn't my first identity." She closed a file and got up to put it in one of the bins on the built-in shelves. "I was Argent first. A hero. God, that was so long ago."

"I don't understand—why would you burn down City Hall and the Archives, why did Atomic Energy come to kill you?" I asked.

How deep does the rabbit hole go?