ELEVEN

 

OF THE MANY CHANGES THAT had happened at First District Station over the last few months, the one she liked the most was her new desk. Prior to August, she’d had a lap desk, its bottom stuffed like a beanbag, tucked underneath a small chair in the corner. Now, she had a desk equal to Santino’s own, one which held her computer monitor and keyboard, their shared printer, a large carved wooden owl, and nothing else; she had threatened to pistol-whip her partner if even so much as a dried leaf touched its worn laminate surface.

An extreme threat, yes, but well-deserved. If Rachel’s house had become a tidy secret garden, their office at First District Station was Conrad’s living heart of darkness. Santino had staked claim to the space with as many plants as he could cram into it, and then went up from there. Rachel had to untangle the Golden Pothos from her hair whenever she stood upright, and Santino walked hunched over to keep his head from crashing against the pots.

“Well?” he asked her as he crabbed his way towards his desk, the last of his lunch swinging from his hand in its plastic sack.

They had played this game before. “It all looks the same to me,” she said, scanning the room. It was a wall of vegetation, the plants growing into each other in a curl of ozone and greenery, exactly the same as the day before…

Her implant did that nagging thing again. She let it work as she threw out her hand, and found herself pointing to something with dagger-shaped leaves and a spray of tiny purple flowers. “Wait. No. That one’s new.”

Santino was pleased in pinks. “Phalaenopsis,” he said. “A Moth orchid. Nice job.”

“Not entirely happy with you using me as a test subject,” she said, as she pulled her own chair away from her desk and sat, facing him. Over the past month, he had been testing her response to environmental stimuli. Zia had been playing around with autoscripts that provided itemized inventories for objects she encountered during her daily routines, and it had inspired Santino to see if he could get Rachel to write a similar script independent of his girlfriend’s. Rachel had agreed to the experiment before she learned it was also an excuse for him to buy more plants.

“Notices new objects?” he asked, leaning back and knitting his hands behind his head. They had been doing this on a daily basis, and he didn’t need to consult his questionnaire any more.

“Check,” she sighed. “I’m going to have to stage an intervention for you.”

“Plant hoarding isn’t a real thing,” he said.

“It is. It so obviously is. You have a serious problem.”

“Time taken to recognize new object?”

“Uh…” she consulted her internal clock. “Three centiseconds? That doesn’t sound right.”

“It probably is. You corrected yourself as you were talking, so it was working as fast as your mouth was.”

She lobbed a cheese puff at him. He scooped it off of the carpet where it landed and deposited it in the trash: no floor food for him.

“Was any other object moved in the room?”

“Yes, uh… No,” she decided. After she had started making progress, Santino had begun to rearrange the plants to throw her off. Except for the addition of the new orchid, it seemed as though he had left the room untouched since yesterday. “Been busy?”

He arched an eyebrow.

She chuckled and returned to her lunch. It had been a stupid question: she didn’t know when he had found the time to buy a new plant. Additional proof he created them from raw aether, maybe.

There was a knock at the door.

“Jason,” she said to Santino. “Irritated, angry verging on furious, but also pleased with himself.”

“Six-pack of hard cider says he’s done something he wants to brag about.”

“You’re on,” she said. “I bet he’s found something critical to the case, and wants to be praised.”

“I can hear you,” said the far side of the door.

“Come on in, Jason,” Santino called out.

“You two are assholes,” Jason said as he entered, pushing through the curtain of Pothos and spider plants.

Santino looked at Rachel, who said, “You didn’t know? He’s right. We’re totally assholes.”

“Here,” Jason said, dropping a newspaper on Rachel’s desk. “Thought you guys would want to see this.”

She glared at Jason, then flipped her implant to reading mode and began to struggle with the text. She made out the name of the reporter and gave up: anything on the front page and with a byline by Jonathan Dunstan couldn’t be good news. Rachel shoved the paper towards Santino and read the article by his colors. Nope, she thought as he went orange, red, and gray by turns. Certainly not good news.

“Dunstan broke the news of the connection between Homeland Security and Gayle Street,” Santino said.

“What?! Is he trying to blow up the country?” she snarled.

“There’s an unnamed source who confirmed this information,” Jason said. “Apparently, this source sits on a Senate defense committee. Any guesses?”

“God damn him,” she said, and kicked the back wall of her desk as hard as she could. The wooden owl rocked on its base and she lunged to steady it. “Josh was telling us just last night how every politician knows the country’s starting to destabilize. That… That person will do literally anything to save his own skin.”

She didn’t have to use his name. Even if Dunstan hadn’t written that article, the others would know who she was talking about. Senator Hanlon was never far from their minds.

“Is there anything we can do?” Santino asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing that I can think of, anyhow. This is politics, not police work. I guess we just try to not get shot.”

The three of them sobered. The officers who had been fished out of the Potomac had been family men, and the entire city was mourning. Rachel felt a new wave of anger towards Hanlon; he had just increased the pressure that every officer or federal agent was already feeling. If Hanlon had walked into the room that instant, she probably would have dug her fingernails into the thin line where his skin met his hair, and then peeled his face apart like an orange.

Or maybe she’d just wait a few days, and then feed him to his own mob.

Santino’s phone rang. Rachel and Jason tensed.

“Do I want to answer this?” Santino asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s Sturtevant.”

“Oh hell,” Santino muttered, pressing the button.

It was a short call, and the cyborgs listened to every word of it. When Santino dropped the receiver, the three of them started their slow march to Sturtevant’s office.

Rachel never visited the Gold Coast if she could help it. As First District Station had been renovated from an old public elementary school, she felt the sinking dread of visiting the principal’s office every time she walked the long length of the hall. The MPD had set aside an entire wing for their supervisors, and she knew they were on display, Sturtevant’s roving team of freaks and weirdos, marching past the brass and their staff.

She made sure to smile warmly at each and every one.

Sturtevant’s secretary, a mousy gossip of a man whose name Rachel couldn’t be bothered to learn, tried to make them wait in the hall. Santino cleared his throat, loudly. The phone chirped on the secretary’s desk, and Sturtevant’s voice crackled in the room. “Send them in.”

Sturtevant’s office was small, barely large enough for the four of them and the furniture. When Sturtevant motioned for Rachel to close the door, she gave the secretary a glare; the man made a habit of trying to listen in on their meetings.

“Why haven’t you fired that guy yet?” Rachel asked, loudly, as she shut them in Sturtevant’s office. Through the door, she saw the receptionist’s colors blanch.

Sturtevant didn’t bother to answer her. His conversational colors were hard browns and professional dark blues; he had called them down on business, his walls firmly in place.

“Sit,” he told them. There were two chairs and she let Jason have the other, preferring to spend her mental energy on reading Sturtevant instead of sparring with him. She fell into parade rest and listened as Santino updated the Chief on what had happened over the past twenty-four hours.

“Agent Atran?” Sturtevant turned to Jason. “Have you made any additional progress on the video footage?”

Jason shrugged. “Yes. I haven’t found anything that might be useful from the security cameras, but we might be getting somewhere on the facial recognition scans.”

Rachel remembered the thirteen fully-rendered green statues that had greeted her in Jason’s office, the rogues’ gallery of felons who had been present on Gayle Street prior to the bombing. “Did one of the suspects pop?” she asked him.

“No, not them,” Jason said to her. He turned to Sturtevant to explain. “One of the things I noticed when I ran population analytics was that ranking military officers had stopped coming down to Gayle Street. This seemed off to me, so I called around. Turns out that someone made an anonymous donation to a catering company. The last week? Gourmet meals and high-end coffee and desserts, free of charge for almost every military organization in downtown D.C. The company sent me copies of the menus; it was really good stuff. I wouldn’t have gone looking for food, either.”

“Didn’t anyone think that was suspicious?” Santino asked.

Jason shook his head. “Happens all of the time,” he said. “It’s backdoor lobbying. An anonymous party supplies the food, then someone ‘accidentally’ lets the name of the donor slip out, usually before a decision on a grant or a contract. The catering service isn’t usually a five-star affair, but Congress is planning a massive budget overhaul on the military next month. No one questioned it.”

“We’re trying to track down the donor?” Sturtevant asked.

“Of course.”

“Good. And this?” Sturtevant said, moving aside his mug and an old piece of cardboard stained with multiple coffee rings. A newspaper had been under these; Rachel didn’t bother to flip frequencies to check the headline.

“We didn’t have any knowledge of that story,” Santino said.

“I know,” Sturtevant replied. “Neither did I—neither did anybody at MPD—and we should have had some warning. Usually when someone up on Capitol Hill drags us into a situation, there’s someone else ready to block them.”

He drummed his fingers on the newspaper for a few seconds, and then pointed at Santino and Jason. “You two can leave.”

Rachel and her partner exchanged a long look before the two men stood and saw themselves out of the office. Rachel settled herself in Santino’s chair, and watched Sturtevant’s colors weave in and out of each other, a professional blue over and through a mesh made up of yellows and her own turquoise core.

“Is there,” Sturtevant said, “a particular health issue you’d like to tell me about?”

“I was not injured in the fall,” Rachel said, her insides suddenly plummeting as if she were back in Bell’s rickety old elevator. “Other than my hands, and they’re healing well. Thank you for asking.”

“We’re doing this the hard way, then,” Sturtevant said. “Agent Peng, are you blind?”

“Sir, would you like to go down to the shooting range with me?” Rachel said.

“Yes or no, Agent Peng? Are you blind?”

“No,” she fired back. Short of a medical test, which the MPD was not authorized to perform on her, there was no way they could confirm the condition of her eyes. Besides, she was not blind.

“Agent Peng? Are you capable of processing visual data and interpreting it in a manner similar to myself?

“Actually, wait. Let me rephrase so there can be no possible misunderstanding,” Sturtevant said. He leaned forward and wrapped his fingers together, his colors a focused, piercing blue. “Agent Peng, can you process and interpret visual data in a manner similar to the majority of persons within the general sighted population?”

“I don’t know if I can answer that, sir,” she said, almost sadly. “That’s one of those trick questions, isn’t it? How can I know if you and I perceive the same colors? I have no way of knowing what you experience when you see the color blue.

“Sir? Is this a test?” she added, as he glared at her.

Sturtevant closed his eyes. Rachel counted to ten, slowly. When she reached ten Mississippi, Sturtevant took a deep breath, then reopened his eyes and fixed them on her. “I can’t protect you if you won’t let me,” he said.

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t need your protection.”

“If you work for me, you get it, whether you’re on my payroll or not. Somebody out there hates you, Agent Peng, and when he’s ready, he’s going to try to destroy you. I would very much like to do what I can to prevent that from happening.”

They sat, staring at each other. Rachel knew she needed to either blink or look away before he did—staring contests with her tended to end when the other person got the squirming sensation that something about her eyes was really, really off—and she wasn’t about to do either of those. Instead, she said, “You remember last August? When I told you we needed to talk?”

“Vividly.”

“Excuse me for a minute.” Rachel stood and yanked the door open; Sturtevant’s secretary was listening by the keyhole. “You are on a coffee break,” she told him. “Starting now. Run.”

As the mousy man raced off, and Rachel closed and locked the office door, she reached out through the link and told the head of OACET to come join her at First District Station. Then, she began wrapping frequencies into an invisible silver sphere around her and Sturtevant. When the weaves were secure, she expanded the sphere to encompass all of Sturtevant’s office, just in case. “Your phones won’t work until we’re done,” she warned him.

He glanced towards his computer monitor, where a notification had popped up to warn him that all network connections had dropped, and nodded.

“You are aware that a certain Senator is biased against my organization in general, and myself in particular,” Rachel said.

“I am extremely aware,” he said. “Did you know that Senator Hanlon has been trying to have me fired? That he has been whispering in certain ears that the MPD is corrupt and needs to go through a good housecleaning?”

She blinked. Sturtevant wasn’t lying. “This is news to me, sir.”

“You’re not the only one who’s got a target painted on them, Agent Peng. Now, what is it I need to know?”

So she told him. How Senator Hanlon’s tech company had discovered the technology to build organic computers that weren’t restricted by current security protocols. How this technology would only work if there was a sentient biological component integrated into its hardware. How Hanlon had recognized not only that donating this technology to Congress was safer than conducting illegal experiments on human beings, but that doing so would make the government eat the costs.

Sturtevant had heard all of this before, so he waited, fingers knit tightly together and hands resting motionless on his desk, until she reached the part of the story that was new to him. How Hanlon would only benefit from this plan if the human test subjects lost their sense, their reason, their ethics and morality…

How Hanlon didn’t want people with consciences who could resist his instructions: he wanted machines who would do what they were told.

How Hanlon needed to purge them of their humanity.

This was the second time she had told this story to an outsider—the first had been Santino—and she was surprised that, yes, the second telling was actually much easier. Sitting there in front of Sturtevant, Rachel found she was able to gloss over the worst parts of those five lost years, from the moment when she received the implant to when it had been fully activated. She didn’t use the word brainwashed; that word always left a bad taste in her mouth. She did say they had been conditioned through an insidious form of cognitive behavioral therapy to avoid introspection, compassion, any form of higher thinking or emotion…

Towards the end of her story, Sturtevant asked one question: “How did you snap out of it?”

She answered, truthfully, “We still don’t know.”

Patrick Mulcahy, who had been just another near-mindless cyborg back then, had saved them. Mulcahy said he didn’t understand how he had broken free, not exactly, and Rachel knew he wasn’t lying… not exactly.

(And as she heard herself disclose the collective’s secrets to Sturtevant, her lizard brain squeaked and shivered with the knowledge that Mulcahy was going to lop off her head and stick it on a pike in the front yard of the OACET mansion, as the heads of traitors were displayed by the kings of old.)

When she was done, she realized she had unconsciously flipped off the emotional spectrum. She turned it back on, and Sturtevant was the deep wine rose of sympathy and weeping pity, shadowed at the edges with gray stress and a yellow-orange anxiety.

There were a few long moments where he didn’t speak. “No wonder Hanlon wants you all dead,” he finally said.

“Dead, discredited… Hanlon will settle for either. If he doesn’t shut us up before the news of the brainwashing—” (oh, God damn it) “—gets out, he’ll be ruined.”

“I take it you have no hard evidence that he was personally responsible for any of this,” Sturtevant said. “Otherwise he’d already be in jail.”

Rachel stared up at the ceiling, pretending to find patterns in the constellations of dots in the acoustical ceiling tiles.

“Or,” Sturtevant corrected himself, catching on. “You have plenty of evidence, but you can’t use it without also incriminating Congress.”

“They weren’t happy with us, up on Capitol Hill,” Rachel said. “OACET couldn’t go public without suggesting there was a conspiracy to keep us hidden. We lost almost—ah, more than, actually—one out of five Agents to the cover-up. But it’s better to be a dupe than a villain, and we’re happy to let Congress claim they were innocent. Most of them were innocent, really; only a couple of them were directly involved with the... the culling. As long as Hanlon is held responsible, the others who helped him? They get a pass.”

“And there is evidence of brainwashing?”

“Plenty,” Rachel said, trying not to wince at that word. “Different set of doctors, different set of notes. Hanlon’s fingerprints are all over those, metaphorically speaking. We’ve got proof he was directly involved in the development of the therapy program.”

“You’re going to leverage Congress,” Sturtevant said. He reached into a desk drawer and removed a bottle of Scotch and two small glasses. He poured a thin finger into each glass, and pushed one towards Rachel.

She nodded, and took a sip of Sturtevant’s bargain-basement Scotch. “They aren’t stupid. They know we’ve got enough on their role in the cover-up to do some real damage. We choose to keep it to ourselves as a gesture of goodwill? Well, from that point on, they owe us. They know all we want is Hanlon.”

“Was Hanlon the source of both sets of information?

“Yes.”

Sturtevant’s conversational colors went solidly gray as the pieces clicked. “If OACET can’t use this evidence without incriminating Congress, Hanlon can use it as leverage against Congress. So they can’t just sacrifice him or turn him over to you. It’s a holding pattern.”

“You got it.” Rachel pushed her glass back towards Sturtevant for a refill. He obliged; work hours or not, this was a conversation in need of lubrication. “But this,” she said, tapping a fingernail on the newspaper, “might resolve these problems for us.”

His colors shifted to a curious yellow.

“How long have you lived in D.C.?” she asked him.

“Twenty years, give or take.”

“I’m betting you’ve seen a lot of odd coincidences over the years. Like, oh, how unpopular politicians seem prone to dying in their sleep.”

His colors were a sudden deep red, offset with his usual direct professional blue. “There are certain attitudes I don’t sanction, Agent Peng.”

She spread her hands, pure innocence. “Us, too. Hanlon is not in any physical danger from any member of OACET.” Sturtevant didn’t need to know about the fights, the screaming battles between those Agents who wanted immediate satisfaction versus those who wanted Hanlon to pay, and pay, and pay… Josh and Mulcahy had been very busy, that first month, keeping certain Agents from going for their guns.

Sturtevant stared at her over the rim of his glass. “But if… If someone else were to take care of Hanlon…”

“Kill him, you mean,” she said. Sturtevant’s colors blanched. “A rose by any other name still smells. Yeah, if someone else decided they were fed up with Hanlon and his baggage? We wouldn’t shed a tear.

“But,” she added, “OACET will only—only!—survive if we can prove we act within the confines of the law. Every Agent agreed to that before we went public. We have the capacity to do great, unbelievable harm, and the only way we won’t be… How did you put it? ‘Taken care of’? Since we don’t want that to happen, we police ourselves.”

Sturtevant grinned. “Who watches the watchmen?”

“The watchmen, obviously. Unless they can’t be trusted, and if they can’t, they shouldn’t have been made watchmen in the first place.”

“Point taken. So, how does this news article break the holding pattern?”

“It was utterly irresponsible of Hanlon to release that information,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you how the public has been demanding information. This is a national crisis, in a nation already on the edge, and Hanlon just dumped gasoline on the fire. Personally, I see no motivation for that, other than to shift attention from himself. Congress won’t approve.”

“Or he’s playing to the public,” Sturtevant said.

“Hm?”

“This isn’t exacly an anonymous source; everybody knows who Dunstan really works for. If Hanlon’s about to be shown as a lying, manipulative bastard, wouldn’t he want to do something to pump up his credibility? And if he’s already on Congress’ naughty list, it seems like he won’t do any additional harm to himself by bolstering that credibility with the general public.”

Rachel snapped upright. Nailed it, she thought.

“And if anything happens to Hanlon after he—”

“He’s just sealed himself in a nuclear bunker,” she interrupted him. “Shit. Shit. Nobody can touch him now without turning him into a martyr. I bet Dunstan and Hanlon’s lawyers have sealed copies of a letter that begins with the line, ‘Should something happen to me…’”

She felt her palm burning and opened her left hand; she had clenched the shot glass so tightly she had popped a few stitches.

“Here,” Sturtevant said, handing her a box of tissues.

“Shit,” she said again, crushing the tissues in her fist to sop up the blood. “I thought we finally had him.”

“Do you think Hanlon is behind Gayle Street? We already know he’s not above that sort of thing, and we also know he can call the kind of people who can pull off something as complex as Gayle Street.”

She was not yet ready to go all-in with Sturtevant—there was no reason for him to know the wheels-within-wheels of what had really happened in August—but there were other ways around that answer. “No,” she said. “I don’t think Hanlon would do this. He knows he won’t bounce back from something like Gayle Street if he gets caught. He’d capitalize on the opportunity, but it’s not worth the risk to set it up.”

Sturtevant nodded slowly. “Not sure you’re right,” he said. “Sounds good, but I’m not sure you’re right.”

“Look at it this way: our job is easier if he’s not a suspect.”

He almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Chief? If I thought Hanlon was responsible for Gayle Street, I would move heaven and earth to bring him down. But I don’t, and that’s hard for me to admit.”

“All right,” Sturtevant agreed. “So. What do we do now?”

“I go back to work, and you stay here and have a conversation with Patrick Mulcahy.”

“Hm?” His tone was easy, but professional blues snapped shut around him like armor.

Rachel wrapped the bloody shot glass in a tissue, and stuffed it in her handbag to wash it later. “What I’ve told you is confidential, but if it’s to be of any use to you, or if you’re going to be of any use to us, you need to talk to someone higher up in OACET’s Administration than I am. That’s either Josh Glassman or Mulcahy, and Mulcahy was available.”

There was a knock at the door, and the head of OACET let himself in.

Rachel stood as he entered.

Patrick Mulcahy was a smaller man than Mako, but not by much; the top of his head barely cleared the lintel. He was built like a linebacker, but was light on his feet, and the only sound he made when entering the room was when he greeted Chief Sturtevant like an old acquaintance. His core of cerulean blue was covered by a curiously-pleasing combination of pink, purple, and orange; if Rachel didn’t know better, she would have assumed the head of OACET was bemused by the whole thing.

Rachel noticed that Sturtevant was standing, too. “Agent Mulcahy,” the Chief said. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you. How are your kids?”

“They’re doing well. Molly’s just started her sophomore year at Brown. She’s thinking law.”

The small talk continued until Rachel wondered how the two men could stand it. Mulcahy played politics better than anyone she had ever met, while Sturtevant didn’t play politics at all, yet they both managed to seem enthralled with the minutiae of each other’s personal lives.

When the pleasantries were finally over, Mulcahy said, “Agent Peng tells me she disclosed some sensitive information.”

Sturtevant nodded. “I’m sorry about what happened to you and your people. I understand why you need to keep something like that quiet.”

Translated as: You can trust me. Don’t worry about me spilling the beans, Rachel thought.

“Thank you,” Mulcahy replied. “We know it will come out sooner rather than later, but it’s best to control it before that happens.”

Oh, nice one! A mild threat to Sturtevant, with a concise, “My Agent opened her big mouth ahead of schedule but this is the closest I’ll come to shouting at her in public” in the same sentence. Well done!

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Translated as: Is there anything… Huh. Sturtevant’s sincere.

Mulcahy shook his head. “If you’re willing to let Agent Peng stay active at the MPD, that alone would be a huge help to us. Although you’ll probably catch some fallout if it comes out you knew about the mental conditioning and still kept her on your staff.”

Aaaaand fuck. Didn’t think that would be the reason I’d be kicked out of the MPD—I figured it’d be because Mulcahy had me walled up in the ossuary and I stopped coming to work.

Sturtevant weighed Rachel’s turquoise core against the blues and golds of the MPD. “We work with more than thirty mental health professionals,” he finally said. “If Agent Peng would consent to five separate evaluations, that would prove I did my due diligence after I found out.”

Rachel forced herself to stay loose in her chair. If Sturtevant wanted to slip a physical in there, she wouldn’t be able to dodge an eye examination. Not if she wanted to stay at the MPD. Sturtevant took a quick breath, as if he was about to add something, and the fingernails on Rachel’s left hand bit into the wadded tissue.

Then Sturtevant let the moment pass.

“That sounds fair,” Mulcahy said. “It would also help us to show that Agent Peng was independently vetted by the MPD, and found to be mentally stable. Could you make sure that Agents Atran and Netz receive the same evaluations?”

Sturtevant agreed. Rachel didn’t, but she kept her mouth shut. Adding Jason into the mix was a bad idea. She could beat a psych evaluation without breaking a sweat, and Phil had nothing to hide. Jason, on the other hand, was a narcissistic mess; he might lack some of her more aggressive tendencies, but any good shrink would be able to draw him out.

“Agent Peng?”

Rachel turned to Mulcahy. “Sir?”

“Anything you’d like to add?”

“Chief Sturtevant may be too polite to mention it, but you should know that Senator Hanlon has decided he is also a target.”

“Ah.” Mulcahy nodded to the Chief. “I apologize for getting you caught up in our affairs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sturtevant said. “We get very few opportunities in life to do lasting good. I’d consider it a privilege to help take someone like him out of public office.”

“Thank you,” Mulcahy said, standing. “I’ll check to see what we can do to keep Hanlon off of your back.”

“It would be appreciated.”

“If she’s free to go, I’d like to borrow Agent Peng for a few hours.”

A southwestern turquoise flickered within Sturtevant’s conversational colors, and was quickly submerged in yellow-orange trepidation. Nice to know that Sturtevant was worried about her. “She’s yours,” he said.

So much for being under Sturtevant’s protection, she thought. It was not as though Mulcahy was going to kill her for spilling OACET’s secrets to Sturtevant (well, not kill-kill... probably), but she was sure he could make her crave the sweet peace of the grave ten times over.

Mulcahy held the door for her, and Rachel hastily unwove the silvery EMF barrier around Sturtevant’s office. It was a rush job, and she felt the beginnings of a migraine as she let the ends of the weave collapse on top of them. Mulcahy’s surface colors took on some red; he had felt the backlash, too.

She opened a link. “Sorry.”

They both knew she meant her apology to cover more than a dropped barrier.

Mulcahy wasn’t buying it. “Jason says you read him the riot act for breaking the rules just a couple of days ago,” he said. There was a little bit of red in his colors, but not nearly as much as she had expected. He was still mainly orange (irritated, probably at interrupting his workday to come down and bail her out), a small touch of purple (amusement), and pink. She had no idea what the pink meant, or why the purple was there at all.

“This was the kind of situation where I couldn’t beg forgiveness after the fact,” she said. “If I was to continue to work with Sturtevant, I needed to prep him.” She didn’t mention that while she might be begging for forgiveness herself, she hadn’t needed to ask for permission. Mulcahy was the one who had promoted her to OACET’s administrative team. If he didn’t think she had the good sense required to manage their allies, he shouldn’t have promoted her.

At first, Mulcahy didn’t reply. She felt slow anger in his head, but he was more annoyed than anything else. After a few moments, he said, “I know.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home,” he told her. “So Jenny can take care of your hand.”

Oh goody, she thought. Now everyone can be in a passive-aggressive huff with me today.

Picking up on private thoughts was a side effect of a casual link. Mulcahy heard her: she saw it, the strong flash of purple as he suppressed his grin, and knew she’d be fine.

“What’d you drive?” she asked aloud.

“The Goat,” he said.

A little thrill ran up her spine. Mulcahy had a weak spot for classic muscle cars, and his 1967 Pontiac GTO was a favorite of hers. The thing was a beast. If she still trusted herself to drive, she would have stolen it out from under him.

They took a side door and stepped into the late morning sunlight. First District Station’s garage was still being repaired, and they had to walk several blocks to where Mulcahy had parked. Rachel refused to run after her boss like a small child, so she slowed her pace until he remembered how he covered nearly twice the distance with a single step. He shortened his stride, his reds rising as he dealt with this newest irritation.

The best defense was a solid offense. “I thought you’d be furious,” she said.

He looked down at her; it was a long, long way up to meet his eyes. “I am.”

“No, you’re angry, not furious. Furious is a burning red. You’re just on a slow boil.”

The strange combination of purple-orange bemusement grew stronger. “This wasn’t the first unauthorized disclosure I’ve managed,” he admitted. “After you showed Santino could be trusted, there’s been something of a rush on confessions.”

“Really?” Rachel was honestly shocked. She hadn’t heard a word about this, and Agents were awful with secrets.

“We’re up to at least three a day,” he said. “Mostly family members. I’ve actually been waiting for your call to let me know you spoke to Sturtevant.”

Mulcahy must have felt her sudden anger; he went yellow-white in mild surprise. “What?”

“You do realize if you had told me full disclosure is now an acceptable policy, I could have arranged a formal meeting? Maybe not stressed myself stupid about it?”

He stopped walking. “It’s not acceptable,” he said, the red anger flaring. “We put ourselves first. Always. You’re Administration—you know this!—and yet here I am.”

Rachel wasn’t about to back down, and pushed her words at him as hard as she could. “Bringing Sturtevant in? That was putting us first. He’s a good ally. He’s smart, he’s connected, and he knows if he helps us, we’ll help him.”

Mulcahy nodded. “I know,” he said. “That’s why he and I arranged for you to come to the MPD in the first place.”

She gaped at him.

“Sturtevant never told you he was the one who wanted an alliance between the MPD and OACET?”

Rachel closed her eyes and flipped off visuals. She had known someone at the MPD had insisted on working with OACET, but Sturtevant?

Well…

It would explain why the Chief of Detectives had attached himself to her and Santino. And why he had appointed himself as their supervisor at the MPD. And why he had allowed her to bring in Phil and Jason… And had increased Santino’s budget… And made sure she got a desk… And those fancy business cards, and…

And Rachel felt very stupid.

And now she was the one who was furious.

They crossed a four-lane road. Anger had shut her visual control down to almost nothing; all she could see was black, and her feet within the crosswalk. A horn blared and a man’s voice shouted something cruel; Mulcahy had been spotted.

They ignored the shouted threats and kept on walking.

“Did you ever ask yourself,” she said to him, after the tunnel vision had started to recede. “if I might have made faster progress at the MPD if you had told me Sturtevant could be trusted?”

“No.” His answer came almost before she had finished with her question. “I put you there to fight and win. Your purpose was to build new alliances, not develop those we already had.

“And you’ve done that, Penguin,” he added in a softer tone, his red anger shifting towards pride. “Faster—better—than I thought was possible.”

She flipped off the emotional spectrum: it was nearly impossible to be angry with someone when they held positive thoughts about you, and at that moment, she wanted to be angry at Mulcahy. “I don’t like being used.”

He shrugged through their link; she shuddered at the sensation. “I know,” he said. “I wish it could be different.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said aloud. She didn’t need to see his colors to know he was carrying guilt. None of the Agents had wanted to be in their current situation—Mulcahy certainly hadn’t woken up one morning and decided to crown himself the Cyborg King. Sometimes you just had to play the hand you were dealt, even if that hand was nothing but the two of clubs and a bunch of venomous spiders.

They reached Mulcahy’s car, gleaming black and riding low against the curb. She felt him reach out to ping it, and the Goat’s engine turned over, purring; some purists would consider a remote starter on a classic car an act of desecration, but they weren’t cyborgs.

She slipped into the passenger’s side and settled down in the leather bucket seat, ready for a long and silent ride to the mansion.

Mulcahy surprised her. After a few quiet minutes, he asked, “You trust Sturtevant?”

She flipped emotions back on. Yellow and blue. Curious, mostly. Professional blue… Aw hell. Every single conversation with Mulcahy turned into a performance evaluation. “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I don’t think I implied it, either. But it’s… interesting… that you trust him.”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “Or imply it, either.” A flash of purple flipped over his surface colors like a wink.

“Oh my God,” she sighed. Testing her and playing games. “Why hasn’t your wife strangled you in your sleep?”

“She says I make her laugh.”

Rachel blinked at him, then broke down in a mild case of giggles. “You can be a real jerk, Mulcahy.”

“So I’ve heard.” This time, he actually cracked a grin.

She wondered, just for a moment, what he had been like before the implant.

“I used to sing.”

“What?”

“I used to sing. Before.” He must have noticed her expression. “Sorry. You were loud.”

Damn. Rachel looped her scans through the road running under them, seizing on the strength of concrete. “Better?”

“Yes.” He turned onto the highway and steered them out of the city. “Your conversation with Sturtevant? I assume you were running emotions. How did it go?”

She told him. When she had finished, she glanced up at Mulcahy. Curious yellows has replaced the last of the blues. “What?” she asked.

“There’s usually some psychological stress when we do full disclosure.”

“Oh, there was plenty of pity. He just didn’t show it. And I think he’s more vested in what we do next than what happened in the past—as long as we’re mentally stable now, what they did to us isn’t relevant to our role at the MPD.”

A wisp of gray spun through his colors. “Could be.”

“I think it’s a good sign,” she decided. They hadn’t been sure how the general public would react when they learned how the cyborgs had been victimized. “If Sturtevant doesn’t think we’re an inherent risk, maybe it means that the other normals we work with will vouch for us when the brainwa—uh, that—hits the press.”

“Probably not,” he said. “Josh and I work with Congress, remember?”

“I meant people who mattered.”

This time, Mulcahy laughed, and the gray in his conversational colors blew apart like smoke.

“You should have let me know that others are doing full disclosure,” she told him. “It would have helped me plan my strategies.”

“That’s why I didn’t,” he said. “It shouldn’t be an option. If we don’t control what others know about us, they’ll have control over us.”

“Except now Sturtevant understands what we went through, and he’s probably going to be a better ally because of it.”

He tapped his index fingers against the steering wheel, orange-yellow annoyance beginning to appear as she pushed him. “Did you tell him about Shawn?”

“What? No!”

“And are you still going to hide your calorie consumption from him? Did you tell him about the missing fifty?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; Mulcahy already knew.

“We have to keep control,” he said. “It’s the only way we can survive.”

Rachel nodded and muttered something agreeable. It was easier than fighting with him; Mulcahy didn’t even realize he was lying.