NINETEEN

Of course there was a hidden room.

If you knew where to look, there was a skull with a gold-plated front tooth. Deep in its left eye socket was a switch to activate a concealed door. Flip the switch, and a section of bones swung open.

The Agents had found it while they were cleaning the mansion. The basement had required a great deal of attention to make it useable, as the drug kingpin who had last owned the mansion had remodeled it to look like the ossuary under Paris. Plastic bones tended to collect dust and debris. Someone had been getting the dead bugs out of the skulls, and was socket-deep with a vacuum when she thought the wall was leaping out to attack her.

They were sure the DEA had missed the hidden room during the original raid: the two thousand kilos of cocaine attested to that. There was a fuzzy black mold over much of it, a sign that the kingpin had gotten cheap or lazy, and had cut the cocaine with something that could rot. The ones who had discovered the room donned protective suits and poked around. They learned it was one part panic room, one part climate-controlled storage unit, and guessed that the cocaine had gone bad during the years when the mansion’s power was off.

When Patrick Mulcahy was told about the discovery, he had come downstairs, an old face mask pressed against his nose and mouth. He had stared into the hidden room for about five seconds, and then asked two questions: “What’s the best way to dispose of cocaine gone bad?” and “Is this room on the blueprints?” When he was told that cocaine disposal was hazardous and the safest thing to do was to bring in the DEA or the FBI, he sighed.

When he was told that no, the room was not on the blueprints, he smiled.

Mulcahy had his team of OACET engineers carefully remove the parquet floor in the solarium, and build a hidey-hole under the foundation that was just large enough for two thousand kilos of cocaine. Then he had the mansion cleared so he and Mako and eight other weightlifters could spend a full day transporting the cocaine upstairs, slow and steady so as not to damage the crumbling cellophane wrappers. Once the cocaine was secure in its new bed, he had the engineers entomb it under a cunning hidden door which blended into the parquet tiles. They cleaned the mansion again with sterilizers and chemicals and vacuums outfitted with ridiculously powerful filters, and then threw what Josh called the Ultimate Raw Meat and Ground Coffee Party.

This time, they didn’t clean up.

They opened the trap door in the solarium, and called the DEA.

As predicted, the DEA ran their dogs through the mansion, searching for any additional troves secreted throughout the building. The dogs came up empty. Confused, but empty.

They got some good press out of that one. Josh and Mulcahy, standing tall over the pile of ancient cocaine, the men from the DEA smiling and pretending their predecessors hadn’t messed up a bust three decades before.

And then the DEA had left, and the Agents had turned the old panic room into their new insane asylum.

Rachel leaned over a stack of boxes, and groped around in the eye socket of the skull with the gold tooth until her fingers found the switch. With an almost-unheard click, the wall began to swing open. She moved to the side so as not to bump into the boxes rolling towards her on their unseen casters, and ducked around the stacks of cardboard camouflage they used as a double layer of concealment for the hidden door.

The panic room had been renovated into a bunkhouse. Two twin beds and an overflowing bookshelf took up half of the room, and a couch and media center took up the other half. More books flowed off of the coffee table and across the floor, on topics ranging from financial analysis to roly-poly puppies. The selection of video games was as eclectic, as were the contents of the fridge in the corner: the permanent occupants of the room couldn’t remember what they liked.

The two men in question were lying on the floor, immersed in a Sudoku puzzle. Green light flickered between them as they passed numbers back and forth, their conversational colors a riot of anger, joy, pain, pleasure…

In the corner closest to the door, a third man was painting. Shawn’s core of weak-tea gold was visible, his conversational colors focused in intent blues on the canvas in front of him.

Rachel was running emotions just to check on Shawn, and she shut them down when she saw her friend was still himself. Shawn insisted on spending time with Adrian and Sammy. Everyone else in the collective thought this was a bad idea, but Shawn couldn’t be talked out of it. The panic room made him miserable—he had spent too much time stuck inside of it to not feel miserable—but he said he wouldn’t abandon the others. Not when he knew there was a chance they could come back, too.

She came up behind him and ran a scan across the painting. It was a seascape; Shawn was painting the ocean. “Hey,” she said softly.

“Give me a minute,” he said in the same quiet tone. “The light’s just right.”

Rachel reached out to him through a gentle link. She had been wrong: Shawn wasn’t entirely there. She traced his connection, and found part of his consciousness standing on the rocky cliffs of Maine.

Rachel sat down beside him, her back against the wall, and sent her mind north. Her bright green avatar appeared beside Shawn’s, who was staring out across the sea. Beneath them, the surf pounded against black rocks.

“I swear I can smell the water,” Shawn’s avatar said to hers. “It’s disorienting.”

Great. Now he wants to talk. Back in the mansion, Rachel clasped her hands across her ears and shut down all but the most basic visual scans. She hated going out-of-body.

“How do you do it?” she asked him. “Split yourself so you can focus on multiple things at once?”

His avatar shrugged. “I spent so much time out of my own mind, going out of my body is easy.”

“Ouch.”

Shawn gave her a wide green grin. “It’s either we laugh at ourselves, or go crazy, right?”

She gave Shawn’s avatar a fast once-over. His hair and clothes were tidy, and he looked as if he was finally getting some muscle tone back. Rachel reminded herself to check on Shawn’s physical appearance when they stepped out of their avatars to see if his body was as healthy as his mental image of himself.

“How’d you find this place?” she asked him.

“Somebody’s Flickr account,” he said. “They posted a photo I liked, so I came here to check out the location.”

“I love it,” she said, as she watched the waves smash against the shore. She adored water. When she was in her own body, it was as good as poetry to her expanded senses. “It’s wild.”

“Yeah, I was getting tired of painting meadows and haystacks,” he said. “I’m trying to come out here on sunny days. Harder to do than it sounds. This time of year, this place is always overcast… Okay, I’m done.”

His avatar vanished, and Rachel heard, as if from a very far distance, Shawn call her name.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, giving the shoreline a last look. It was beautiful, complex… Definitely a step up from haystacks.

She stepped off of the cliff and hovered in midair for a moment, then let her avatar drop. Her blurry visuals gave her an image of a set of eyes, just inches from her own face, and she instinctively threw up a hand. There was a faint papf! as she accidentally smacked someone on the chest, followed by grunting and scrambling noises as that someone scurried away. Rachel stumbled through her visual settings as quickly as she could until Shawn appeared in front of her.

“Shit,” she said. “Did I hit you?”

Shawn shook his head, and pointed. Adrian and Sammy were peering around the side of the couch, like wild dogs unsure if they were about to receive food or a thrown rock.

Cold fear shot up her spine as she realized she could have touched their bare skin. It had been pure luck that they were both wearing clothes today. “Who did I hit?”

“Sammy,” Shawn said, holding out his empty hands to the insane cyborgs. The two men glared at him before disappearing behind the couch. Shawn watched as they hid like wild animals in men’s bodies, and his shoulders folded in on themselves in despair.

She turned emotions back on, and deep gray appeared over Shawn, rolling thick and fast like the worst of storms. She realized his avatar was a clean copy of his body. Shawn was nearly a year removed from the days when he had been a full-time resident of the panic room, and he had recovered much of his mental and physical strength. Now, though, he seemed the same gaunt savage who had attacked Santino with a straight-edge razor. He was staring at his hands as if he didn’t recognize them, the beginnings of a panic attack moving across him as he began to tremble.

“Come on,” she said, as she stood and tugged on Shawn’s shirtsleeve. She took him over to the couch and settled him within a nest of throw pillows.

“I don’t like it here,” he said.

“Out loud, Shawn,” she reminded him. “You start to withdraw when you speak in the link, remember?”

He nodded. His conversational colors had started churning, showing emotions that weren’t drawn from his own thoughts and personality. “I know. I know. Please don’t make me mad.”

“Okay,” she said, as she curled up at the other end of the couch. She tried to ignore how the leather was sticky and filmed over, as if toddlers had painted it with a thousand different meals.

It took Shawn almost an hour to get himself under control. Rachel read a magazine until her head throbbed, and then turned off reading mode to let her mind drift around the room. She didn’t trust herself to turn off visuals, not after hitting poor Sammy in the chest, so she sent her senses crawling through the hidden spaces of the panic room.

She had done this many times before. Babysitting duty wasn’t fun. Sometimes, those on duty left things behind for the next shift, notes or books or…

Rachel’s scans tripped over a new addition in the room. Hidden under one of the beds was a long box, bolted to the floor and padlocked in three places.

A disassembled sniper rifle waited within its metal shell.

Damn, Mulcahy’s gotten fanatical about security, Rachel thought, before she remembered that if the rifle had anything to do with babysitting duty, he’d have told her about it. No, that gun had been left in the most secure site in OACET’s headquarters for a different reason.

She flipped frequencies as she explored the gun, coming to rest on one frequency in particular which showed the rifle resonated with a vivid blue aura. Her scans flinched away from the rifle at that, at learning the weapon had taken so many lives that it held traces of that unmistakable deathly blue, and decided Mulcahy probably had very good reasons for locking such a gun away.

If Adrian and Sammy knew the lockbox was there, it didn’t bother them. The men had come out from hiding, Rachel and Shawn forgotten, and had turned on the latest iteration of Call of Duty. They were exceptional at it, and like all men in their late twenties, their mastery of trash talk could put sailors to shame. The two crazy cyborgs verbally smacked each other around, the insults ranging from genitalia to scores on intelligence tests. As they played, their kaleidoscopes of conversational colors slowed and faded, with blues starting to show beneath the swarms of reds, blacks, and oranges.

“This is good,” Shawn whispered in a hushed mental voice.

Rachel was about to tell him again to speak out loud, when she realized that while Shawn was curled in on himself, hugging his own legs to his chest as he rocked back and forth, he was also intent on the two men playing their game.

“It helps to focus on something outside of your head,” he said. “They need to remember who they are.

“It’s the memories,” he continued. “They’ve got so many other peoples’ memories in their heads, and those memories are all so real. They don’t know what to do with them. They don’t know if their thoughts are their own. But you don’t need memories to play a video game.”

The two of them watched as Adrian shot Sammy in the head repeatedly, and was in turn blown to smithereens by a fortunate respawn. Adrian hurled a particularly poignant comment about Sammy’s sister, and as Rachel watched, Sammy’s small blues disappeared under a growing tempest of reds. He put down the controller and wandered away.

“Sammy’s an only child. He doesn’t have a sister,” Shawn told her. “Deep down, he knows he doesn’t have a sister. But he remembers having one—he remembers having hundreds of sisters!—and he doesn’t know what to do with that information.”

“Yeah,” Rachel whispered back across their link. If it had been any other Agent, she would have sent them the memories of her childhood Christmases, which had taken place in more houses and in more bodies than she could identify. But it was Shawn, and she didn’t want to pretend she had had it worse than him, and she definitely didn’t want to say the wrong thing to tip him back down that dark hole he was trying so hard to climb out of.

“Rachel? I want…” Shawn’s mental voice trailed off. Rachel saw his emotions swirl around an unmistakable cerulean blue. Then, his voice hardened as he blurted: “You need to tell Mulcahy to take them home.”

“They are home—”

“No!” Shawn’s head came up. “Where they grew up! Their parents, their families… They should be somewhere they recognize, with people who can remind them who they used to be.

“That’s how I came back,” he said. “I was trying to kill Santino. It was… It wasn’t me. I knew my mother wouldn’t have raised someone who would do that, and then I remembered her, and then…

“I was crazy.” He pushed on, needing her to understand. “I was hallucinating! I saw angels everywhere, blue ones, and one of them put a razor in my hand, and told me a stranger was trying to kill Zia. They were so real—

“And then…and then I saw what I had done, and I knew I’d never do that. It was the first thought I had about myself in so long, and…”

Rachel slid over to him and began to rub his back, keeping well away from his bare skin.

“They can’t stay here,” he finished. “Unless something changes, they’ll stay like this. They need the chance to break through.”

“I’ll talk to Mulcahy,” she told him. It might be possible. Load Adrian and Sammy into a van, drive them out to their childhood homes in the dead of night…

“No,” Shawn insisted. She didn’t think she had been broadcasting, but he had still managed to pick the thought out of her head. “They need to be around their families. They need to remember where they come from, or they’ll never find their way back to themselves.”

Rachel’s hand slipped into the pocket of her jeans, where the 3D-printed replica of the fragment from the Antikythera Mechanism lay against the curve of her leg. She wasn’t quite sure why she kept transferring it from pocket to pocket when she changed pants, but it was starting to take on the familiarity of a talisman. I wasn’t lost but three seconds, she thought to herself, and I still needed help finding my way back.

“Exactly.” Shawn had heard her again. “Can you help them?”

“Shawn—”

“Please, Rachel.” Shawn was pleading, his colors a pleasing mix of teal, wine red, and her Southwestern turquoise, all of them reaching out to her in a slowly twisting liquid wave. It was beautiful, and she didn’t understand what it meant.

A knock at the door saved her from making a promise she couldn’t keep, as an Agent arrived to relieve Rachel’s shift. Rachel barely nodded to her replacement, focused instead on forcing Shawn to come with her, out of the panic room, to put some distance between himself and a near-infinite number of memories.

He didn’t resist, not until the hidden door had swung shut. Then he froze in place, and looked up at the plastic ossuary with wide eyes. “Rachel,” he said, “why are we fighting?”

“We’re not,” she said, finding her way down the narrow corridor the Agents had left as a walkway between the cardboard boxes. “This is a tricky issue, and we’re discussing it like rational adults. We’re fine, Shawn.”

Rachel felt his confusion, and she turned towards him to see him still staring up at the ceiling. She followed his attention, through the skulls and the walls… Oh!

Halfway across the mansion, someone was getting his nose broken.

Rachel grinned at Shawn. “C’mon,” she laughed, and pulled him into a run.

Their path included two flights of stairs, and five long stretches of rooms and hallways, all of it layered in furniture and boxes and the occasional speedboat. Shawn struggled to keep up with her as she climbed and jumped, laughing the entire way.

Their race took them into the main entrance hall, and the two of them stopped and stared.

Rachel had never seen so many people in the mansion before. Never. Not even during their biggest parties, and OACET was renowned for events that would have been better suited to abandoned warehouses. It was a milling mess of people from the front doors of the mansion all the way down to the lawns and gardens. There were caterers and food trucks galore, with tents set up in the courtyard. She saw Santino’s cobalt blue standing beside Zia’s sweet violet, and the entwined greens of Hill’s forests and Ami’s spring meadows. There were others she recognized—hundreds of them!—and Rachel began to pick out the colors of those whom she had met through work. A kaleidoscope of colors from the MPD. Others she recognized from working crime scenes with the FBI… Oh! There, across the main room, was Alimoren’s workaday denim blue.

Friends, maybe. Allies, definitely. OACET had surrounded themselves with a thousand witnesses.

She reached out to Mulcahy, and found him sitting on the landing of the great staircase in the entrance hall. “You’re a fucking genius,” she told him.

He tilted his beer bottle downwards, to where Josh Glassman stood on stage, working the crowd. “His idea,” Mulcahy said.

“You could have told me to expect a party.”

She felt him laugh. “Puppeteering is our responsibility. I keep telling you—focus on alliances within law enforcement, and we’ll handle the rest.”

“Are you expecting a raid?” Rachel asked, casting her scans towards the road that led to the mansion. She saw nothing but a steady stream of cars moving into whatever parking spaces they could find. She stretched her scans as far as they could reach without bringing on a headache, towards the woods and open fields around the mansion, searching for the professional blues of a SWAT team…

“No. We’re good. Thanks to you, someone in the MPD or the FBI would have tipped us off if they were coming. But better safe than sorry. Besides,” he said, nodding towards the crowd, “we needed this.”

“Next!” Josh Glassman’s voice thundered over the crowd.

Josh occupied the only clear space within the main hall, and stood four feet above the crowd as he strode across the portable boxing ring. The boxing ring was an old friend, one of the first items OACET had repurposed for their own use when they had moved into the mansion. Over the winter, it had been packed up and put away to make room for the holiday decorations. Rachel had missed it: the ring had been more sincere than a glittery tree. After the decorations had come down, the space had been left empty, yet another sign they were starting to venture out of the safety of their first home. Instead, the entrance hall had begun to fill up with clutter as it began its slow transformation into yet another storage area.

During those few hours she had spent in the panic room, the clutter had been cleared and the boxing ring had been returned to its old location. It was surrounded, ten deep, everybody shouting and cheering. The smell of fresh buttered popcorn was heavy in the air, and Rachel felt kernels crunch underfoot as she and Shawn pushed their way towards the ring.

“Next!” Josh was actually wearing a hat. An honest-to-God carnival barker’s hat. His core, the unsaturated blue of fresh tattoos, was almost completely obscured by reds—rich reds, those of friendship, belonging, and more than a little lust—and the yellow-white energy that defined Josh whenever he was performing. “Come one, come all! Others say they have the greatest show on earth, but that’s because they can’t afford our rates!

“You’ve seen the rest,” he said, and spun the hat from his head with a twirl of his wrist. “Now see the best!”

Rachel grabbed Shawn’s arm again, the two of them giddy, as Hope Blackwell climbed up through the ropes and joined Josh on stage.

Mulcahy’s wife was a hand shorter than Rachel, with dark, wild hair over her strange core of blue-black light. She was barefoot, and wearing an old blue Judo gi that looked as if it had been through the wash a couple thousand times. Hope danced around to limber up, shouting and waving as the crowd cheered her name.

Two Agents in martial arts whites, both of them men with eighty pounds on her, joined her in the ring. They bowed to her; she returned it.

Then, they rushed her.

Hope swept an arm low, and brought her fist up into the meat of the first man’s thigh. He gasped in pain, and began to shift his weight to his good leg. This mistake took a fraction of a second, but it was enough for Hope: her leg shot out, her heel slamming into the tender skin on the arch of his foot. Off-balance, he began to fall, and Hope grabbed his belt and tossed him over her hip.

The name of the technique came to Rachel—Obi-otoshi, a belt throw—as the collective chattered about the fight.

Hope followed the first Agent down to the ground in a sacrifice fall. Mistake, Rachel thought, but Hope had already rolled to the side. The first man, struggling to recover, went after her with a low kick, and caught his teammate in the knee. Hope hit that same knee from the other side, and the second Agent crumpled into her range. Hope’s legs wrapped around his head and neck in a scissor hold, and he found himself locked down tight. Caught, his free hand began tapping on the mat, and the match was over.

“What?!” Josh Glassman crossed to the edge of the boxing ring, one hand trailing against the top of the ropes as he worked the crowd. “That wasn’t a fight! We’re not here to watch a demonstration! We’re not here to learn!”

The crowd responded with boos and catcalls, and the schoolyard chant of Fight! Fight! Fight! went up.

“Someone get up here and give this woman a fight!”

“Hey!” Hope Blackwell leaned over the ropes, Southwestern turquoise blazing in her conversational colors. “Peng! I heard you saw my ass last night!”

Rachel laughed, and shouted back: “Saw a lot more than that, Blackwell! Bring a bathrobe if you’re gonna let Mulcahy tag you in public!”

High above them on the landing, Mulcahy maintained his poker face, but his colors flushed red in embarrassment.

“Up for some fun?” It was Josh, his presence in her head alive with good humor.

“Always!” she replied, as the adrenaline surged.

“Peng!” Josh shouted! “Get up here!”

“If I do, we’re boxing!” Rachel shouted back. “None of that tricky Judo shit!”

“Deal!” Hope said, punching the air.

Rachel whooped, the sound lost within the uproar from the crowd.

She shed clothing as she ran towards the ring, until she was down to nothing but her tee-shirt and jeans. Phil took her gun before he taped up her hands, and patted her on her butt as she squirmed up and through the ropes. She bobbed and hopped in place to warm up, windmilling her arms until her heartrate found its fighting tempo.

“Rachel!” Santino’s voice drew her scans to where her partner was clapping and shouting her name. “Kick her ass!”

She yelled back at him, a nonsense phrase thick with excitement, and let Josh slip a mouth guard between her lips before she moved into the center of the ring.

Hope Blackwell grinned at Rachel, her own colors high, and the two of them began to circle.

Rachel knew she didn’t have a chance in hell of taking Hope in a fair fight. She had sparred with Hope in the past, and unless Hope held herself back, those bouts were always short and painful. The woman had been training in Judo since she was five years old, and once she had started traveling the world for competitions, she had picked up other martial arts along the way.

Boxing, however…

Martial arts was punches, kicks, and throws. Boxing was a straight-out slugfest. Rachel was counting on Hope’s lifetime of training to work against her, to mentally exhaust her as she forced herself to keep both feet on the ground and concentrate on using boxing-legal techniques.

Rachel threw the first three punches, quick jabs to see what Hope would do. She expected Hope to be a counter puncher, watching for Rachel to make a mistake, and then closing on her in a quick rumble. Wrong. Hope lunged, pairing hooks and jabs to drive Rachel to the ropes, and Rachel realized she was a swarmer.

Damn! Should have expected it. Weird woman’s all energy, Rachel thought, catching the punches on her shoulders before coming in with an uppercut. It landed square against Hope’s chest, and knocked her back. Rachel followed up on that first punch, bearing down hard to drive Hope backwards, until the ropes were all that kept Hope from falling four feet to the floor.

The first round was over faster than it should have been. Josh was there to pull her off of Hope, to send her to the corner where Phil was waiting with water and a dishtowel. “Good one,” Phil said. “You got her mad.”

“She should be mad. I wasn’t pulling those punches,” Rachel said. Her left hand was throbbing: she had injured it last October, and it was prone to acting up when she abused it.

“Keep her off of the ropes,” Phil said. “It’s a rope-a-dope. You keep her there, you’re gonna wear yourself out while she’s still fresh.”

“Right,” she said, nodding, and he stuck her mouth guard back in before he pushed her into the fight.

Hope came out low and hard, throwing jabs, looking for a way to drag Rachel into a legal clinch. Rachel kept some distance—if Hope managed to close, the round would be over—and landed two right hooks, split with a short left jab.

Hope saw her favoring her left hand, and her colors exploded in bright yellow-whites as she moved forward. Rachel tried to drive her back with another right hook, but Hope spotted this one before it could land. A fast parry, and she was in tight with Rachel.

Fuck! Rachel thought, as she felt Hope’s shoulder press against the side of her windpipe. It wasn’t illegal, but only because boxers didn’t know how to maintain this kind of chokehold. Worst place to be with a Judo master. Absolute worst.

She began to drive her right fist into Hope’s ribcage, hitting the same spot again and again. If she were fighting a big man, the move wouldn’t have worked; the distance between him and her fist would have been too close to build up any real momentum. Against a woman, there was plenty of room for Rachel to maneuver. Six hard strikes, and Hope was forced to drop the clinch before Rachel broke her ribs.

They circled, then closed again, Hope listing slightly to protect her injured left side. Rachel noticed, just in time, that the pain red coming from that area was shallow, more of a patina than what she’d expect from an actual wound…

She barely got her hands up in time to block Hope’s left haymaker. The crowd roared.

Hope recovered before Rachel could slide under her raised left arm, but it was an instinctive act. She dropped Rachel’s forearm almost as quickly as she had grabbed it, walking away and raising her taped hands to show she recognized the foul. Too late: Josh had already called a halt to the second round, breaking up the action before Hope could turn the illegal arm lock into a throw.

They limped towards their corners. Phil had a folding chair waiting for her, and Rachel collapsed into it. “Ow ow ow ow ow…”

“Where’d she get you?”

“Nowhere,” Rachel said, rubbing her right hand. “Woman’s all muscle. It’s like punching a brick wall.”

“Rachel!”

She tossed her scans down, and saw Becca on the other side of the ropes. Rachel felt her face split in a wide grin. “Aaa-dri-aaaan!”

Becca laughed. “Kick her ass, Rocky!”

“One more round!” Josh called out. “These lovely ladies have work in the morning!”

The crowd booed his decision.

“Like this is the last fight of the night? No! Let’s spread out the damage to our collective’s brain cells, friends,” he said, and gestured for Hope and Rachel to get on their feet. “Let’s go!”

Rachel knew she was starting to flag, but she forced herself to bounce around like a tennis player before the last match. Hope just grinned at her, and then dipped to the left. Rachel turned right to block—she’s going left, she’s building momentum for another haymaker—and couldn’t get her arms up in time to block Hope’s sudden shift in weight and a lightning-fast right cross.

Stunned, Rachel vaguely realized Hope had followed the first punch up with a second, both of them solid hits across her jaw. Hope backed off a few steps to see if Rachel was done. Rachel shook her head to break out of the daze, and then charged.

Now it was a fight, both of them going all out. Rachel knew Hope could take a punch, so she laid into the other woman’s head and torso with everything she had left. She went after Hope with power blows, trying to put her on the ground before the fight ended. No luck—there was no way to get through her defense. Hope blocked half of what Rachel threw, and turned the other half into openings for her own attacks.

Rachel stumbled. It was fast and next to nothing, and Hope still managed to follow it up with a powerhouse of a left hook.

“Time!” Josh shouted, and the crowd cheered.

Rachel fell against Hope in an exhausted embrace, both of them laughing. Josh stepped between them, and the crowd went silent as the scores came in. Then, Josh held up Hope’s hand. “Winner!”

“Boo!” Becca shouted from Rachel’s corner. “Recount! Recount!” Her colors were all high reds as she screamed for her girlfriend. The banker had caught a bad case of bloodlust, and Rachel realized she could probably spend the rest of her life with this woman.

She slumped against Josh, and he helped her towards her corner.

They were all waiting for her, Becca and Santino, Phil and Shawn and Jason and Hill and Bell and…Oh! When did Zockinski get here? She dropped into their arms, feeling strong. Feeling sane.

Feeling whole.

She reached out, across the room, to find Mulcahy within another cluster of Agents and their friends as they held his wife above their heads. “I want you to talk to Shawn about Adrian and Sammy,” she told him. “He’s got some good suggestions on how we can help them come back.”

She expected resistance. Stalling and delays, possibly some wordplay that would leave her reeling worse than Hope’s left hook. Anything but his quick, decisive: “Yes.”