Brute Force

BRUTE FORCE

K.B. Spangler

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Brute Force is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com

Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising, at redmoonrising.org

This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords.com and its affiliates. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com to learn more.

Two hours past naptime and all hell had broken loose.

The toddler had reached that transcendent screaming phase of a tantrum, the one that could only be found after fifteen minutes of warmup weeping. The little girl was not quite upside-down in what was not quite a fireman’s carry, but the woman holding her had the determined look of someone who had accepted that reason, begging, and loving threats no longer applied, and that the screaming would only stop once they reached the car.

The second woman, slightly shorter than the first and deliciously curvy, marched a few steps in front of the others, leading the way. She kept turning towards the toddler, then back towards something unseen ahead of them, her attention divided.

His men waited, hidden behind cars and the stony twisting structure of the parking garage itself, their heads down as they pretended to play games on their phones, just in case.

Even so, the woman carrying the little girl paused.

He saw her eyes search the dark corners of the parking garage, knowing there was something wrong but unable to find it.

The little girl also paused, and in that moment of stillness, he saw months of planning fly apart.

He breathed out, slow and relieved, when he saw the girl had been gathering strength for the ultimate stage of a toddler’s meltdown. The screaming returned, but now she also began to pummel the woman holding her with tiny fists.

The girl’s mother—and even if he hadn’t planned this day down to the smallest detail, he still would have known the shorter woman was the girl’s biological mother from the way the child’s face was a smaller, softer clone of her own—spun towards her.

“Avery,” she said, in the universal tone mothers used when they had Had Enough, “you do not hit!”

The child, utterly inconsolable, wailed on.

The taller woman pushed forward, oblivious to the child’s fists banging against her face and shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. “C’mon, we gotta move. The paparazzi will be here soon, this is like blood in the water for—”

She stopped dead in the center of the lane, and he knew he was caught. He thumbed the button on his phone which sent the text to his men: GO.

“Carlota,” the taller woman said, as she lowered the screaming child into her mother’s arms. “Call for backup, and get yourself and Avery behind those cars. Right now.”

“What’s happening?” The girl’s mother glanced about the parking garage, not seeing anything other than the usual orderly mess of concrete and metal.

“There’s nobody around.” The taller woman pulled her dark hair into a ponytail, and then quickly cracked every knuckle on her hands in order of smallest to largest, like a pianist warming up before a concert. “There’s always somebody around.”

“The security cameras are dead. There are… There are cell phone signals all around us!” The shorter woman glanced around, knowing his men were there but unable to see them. Her daughter caught her mood; the screaming stopped, replaced by frantic sniffles and arms wrapping tight around her mother’s neck.

“Get behind the cars,” the taller woman said again, and pushed the girl and her mother towards a nearby pickup truck. “Hell, break into one and lock it behind you. I’ll keep them away from you until backup gets here.”

The woman moved back towards the center of the lane as she shrugged out of her jacket, leaving her arms bare. “Hey!” she shouted, and her voice ricocheted around the garage. “Wanna get this over with? We’ve got a little girl who needs a nap!”

He stepped out from behind a nearby support pillar, no more than ten feet away from her. He saw her take him in—the camouflage clothing, the enormous hand cannons holstered at his waist, the hunting knife in his boot—and judge him in that same moment.

“Howdy, Try-hard,” she snapped. “Militia men travel in packs. Where’re your buddies?”

There was a sharp cry from behind her; the taller woman’s eyes widened at the sound of a body hitting the pavement, followed by the piercing plea of “Mommy!”

“Shit,” the woman hissed. She turned to find one of his men holding a gun very near the toddler’s temple, her mother crouched beside her, pressing her hands to her head. “Carlota?!”

The first man grinned at her with a movie star’s perfect smile.

“The Agent will be fine,” he said, as he knelt to roll a glass vial towards the woman standing in the road. It bumped into the tangle of her jacket, and she snatched it up before it could spin under the cars.

“Brevital,” she read, the liquid swirling around the vial as she shook it at him. “Holy fuck, did you use this on her? Do you know what too much of this stuff can do?”

“I’m okay,” the other woman said, her voice muffled by her arms. “They didn’t… I didn’t feel an injection...”

“See?” he said. “She’s fine.”

He tossed a baggie after the vial of sedative.

She picked it up: a fresh plastic hypodermic syringe.

A large sedan pulled up beside her. Its trunk opened, slowly, on silent hydraulics.

The woman looked from the baggie to the terrified toddler to the dark recesses of the trunk. “Ah,” she said in a quiet voice.

“You’re a doctor,” he said to her. “I’m sure you know the dosage. So do I. Show me before you inject yourself.”

In reply, she tore the package open with her teeth.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said, as she filled the syringe and tapped the air bubbles out. “Leave the kid and her mom here, and I’ll be the best-behaved hostage ever.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I bring the kid as insurance, and anything you do to me or my men? We’ll take it out on her.”

He nodded to the man holding the gun on the child. The gun vanished as he lifted her into the back seat of the sedan. The toddler couldn’t quite remember how to cry: fear was layered over the old tantrum tears on her face, and then the door shut her away from her mother.

“Avery?” The girl’s mother tried to stand on unsteady legs. “Avery?!”

“I’ll keep her safe,” the woman promised her friend. “It’ll be okay.”

She held up the syringe. The liquid pressed against the plunger; a small amount, but still enough to put her out. He nodded at her to proceed, and she tapped her own arm until she found a vein.

He didn’t let himself blink as she injected herself, just to be sure.

Once done, she threw the vial and the syringe at his feet. The glass vial broke, spraying droplets of surgical anesthetic across the parking garage floor.

“If you please,” he told her, gesturing towards the black hole of the sedan’s trunk.

She snatched up her jacket and climbed into the trunk. When she vanished from view, the other woman’s face went blank, her gaze distant, as if lost in a critical conversation.

He gave the Brevital another ten seconds to work before he looked in the trunk.

The woman’s resiliency was amazing. She was still conscious, and her eyes managed to focus on him.

“You better pray I’m the one who kicks your ass,” she said softly. “Because if I don’t, my husband is coming for you.”

“I’m counting on it, Doctor Blackwell,” he told her, and he slammed the trunk closed.

TWO

Rachel Peng was doing yardwork.

Resentfully, yes, but she was fairly certain nobody in the history of the civilized world had ever done yardwork without some resentment. She would not call a landscape company and spend good money to get out of doing her household chores. She would not call Santino and roar about how he had turned her backyard into a veritable Garden of Eden and then all but moved out. She would not reach up into space and see if a top-secret defense satellite was in the right place at the right time, because she would not nuke her own home from orbit because it was not the only way to be sure…

“And I will not shoot you to shut you up!” she shouted at the neighbor’s bulldog on the other side of the fence.

The bulldog blinked at her before it resumed snarling and throwing itself against the chain-link mesh.

She tore great armfuls of winter-dry honeysuckle down from the fence and hurled them aside. The fence, hidden under layers of vines, began to appear. It was old, but sturdy and well-suited to keep the bulldog out, at least until those vines really got some summer into them and their weight would start to bring the whole thing down—

A man’s silhouette emerged from behind the vines.

“Aw hell,” Rachel muttered to herself, flipping frequencies to see which of her neighbors was creeping up on her today. She expected the washed-out reds of the bulldog’s owner, or maybe the bright urine yellow of his brother. Both of them liked to poke at the neighborhood’s favorite freak, and they tended to make an appearance whenever she was outside.

A rich light brown came back to her.

Sandalwood!

Her gun was in the house. She knelt, her scans never leaving the center of the man’s chest, as she picked up the garden shears lying beside the mountain of honeysuckle.

Her scans locked into the frequencies she used to see facial features, and her heart stopped pounding in her ears as she saw a stranger on the other side of the fence.

“Hey there!” she said, forcing a smile as she lifted the shears like a sword.

The man nodded at her, and knelt to scratch the bulldog’s ears. “Mornin’,” he said. The bulldog leaned against the man’s legs, tongue lolling out the side of its mouth.

Rachel waited.

And watched.

The man was perfectly calm, his conversational colors looping across themselves in slow, peaceful waves. A strong streak of her Southwestern turquoise ran within these, but that wasn’t unexpected—everyone knew who she was.

She saw nothing else. None of the dangerous reds or professional blues that accompanied that particular color of brown within her memory. He was the right height, the right weight, and had the muscle tone of a professional athlete, but…

Sometimes sandalwood is just sandalwood, she decided, and began to apply the shears to a large clump of wisteria that was competing with the honeysuckle for possession of the fence.

She didn’t bother to ask if he was friends with the bulldog’s owner. The same beast that attacked the fence if she so much as dared step into her own backyard was lost in the joys of a belly rub, squirming on the ground like a wiggly puppy.

“New to the neighborhood?” she asked.

“Got a place about five blocks over,” he replied in a heavy Southern drawl that reminded her of home. “I’ve been here about two years.”

“Me, too,” she said, as she hacked through the wisteria. It wasn’t yet full spring, and the wisteria was still dry and woody from the winter freeze. “What brings you by?”

He didn’t reply as he rubbed the bulldog’s belly.

The silence began to itch.

She dropped her shears and turned her back on him as she dragged the vines off to the compost heap in the corner of her property, her scans fixed on him the entire time. He was calm, his mind at rest; there was no hint of red lust chasing her turquoise around in his emotions, or an awkward orange as he searched for something to say, or any of the other colors she had come to associate with too-long silences.

Rachel took a quiet breath before running her scans along the deep contours of the skin on his face. She didn’t entirely know what she was looking for—would she recognize the signs of plastic surgery if she saw it?—but her mind tripped over unfamiliar bumps that might have been scar tissues.

She marched straight from the compost heap into the house to get her gun.

When she came out, the man with the core the color of warm sandalwood was still waiting by the fence.

Rachel walked back to where she had left him, the cold grip of her gun warming in her hand.

He glanced up at her, and they stared at each other through the metal diamonds.

“Why are you here, Glazer?” she finally asked.

“That’s not my name any more,” he said. His normal voice was steady, all trace of Southern drawl gone. The bulldog came alive at the sound of it, lunging to its feet and scrambling across the grass to hide beneath its owner’s porch.

The man who used to be Jonathan Glazer stood, slowly and carefully, and brushed off the knees of his jeans.

“Who have you called?” he asked. He placed both hands on the fence, fingers curling through the chain link. He gave the fence a quick jerk, as if testing its strength, as if he hadn’t expected her to do yardwork today and the loss of a layer of vegetation meant she might be able to get over the six-foot fence faster than he had planned.

“For backup? Everybody,” she lied. “Better start running.”

“You’ll just shoot me,” he said, nodding towards her gun.

“No one would blame me,” she said, grinning.

The psychopath on the other side of the fence returned the grin. “Maybe not at first,” he said. “But give it a week, and you’ll kick yourself for it.”

“I really don’t feel too much guilt when I kill murderers, Glazer. My conscience has convenient blind spots.”

It was an intentional turn of phrase, and his grin grew slightly honest.

Fuck, she thought. He knows. Or, at least suspects...

“That’s not what I meant. I’m here on loan,” he said, and then reapplied his slow drawl to his speech, easier than she ever could, even when she was thoroughly saturated with the South after visiting her hometown back in Texas. “I’m your new best friend.”

“Sorry, I’ve already got a couple hundred best friends. I don’t need another one. It’s already too crowded in here,” she said, tapping her skull. “But don’t worry—you’ll get to meet them soon. They’ve been watching us chat.”

“No,” he said, “they haven’t.”

He leaned towards her and the chain link squealed beneath his weight; she planted her work boots against the earth and moved her index finger to her gun’s trigger.

“Do they know you helped me escape?” he asked. “Do they know you let a mass murderer blow up a police department? Don’t think so.”

“Mass murderer?” she asked, cocking her head like a curious sparrow. “You getting braggy on me, Jonny-boy? I only caught you for that one.”

“Don’t play dumb. You knew what I was. And I,” he said, moving close to the fence so his eyes cut through to hers, “know that this conversation is between you and me.”

Rachel stared straight back at him.

In her brief but ongoing experience as a blind woman, she had yet to meet someone who could match her in a staring contest. Glazer was no exception: his conversational colors began to quiver around their edges, but instead of dropping his gaze and backing away, he lunged forward, rocking the fence until metal sang up and down the line.

She had her gun out and as close as she could get it to the center of his forehead before the chattering song of the fence had faded.

It took her a few moments to convince herself her voice would be steady before she said, “Are you finished?”

The conversational colors of the man who had been Glazer changed, becoming a wild ruby red made from crazy edges. He responded by pushing his head against the barrel of her gun, hard, twisting it just a little bit, just enough so she felt his force run from his skin, up through her gun, into her own body—

Rachel made her gun vanish under her hoodie. “Why are you here?”

“I’m on loan,” he said again, the jagged red madness leaving his colors as quickly as it had appeared. A dark blue the color of a business suit replaced it, wrapping around him as he set himself to work. “I’m yours for the week. Maybe ten days, if things get complicated.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I’m your new assistant, Agent Peng,” he said, his false Southern drawl crawling all over her title. “I’m here to do the things you can’t be caught doing.” The man who used to be Jonathan Glazer leaned against the fence again, spreading arms and legs wide, turning himself into a large, convenient target. “Things are about to get bad for OACET, and he sent me here to help you.”

“He? Who’s he?”

Glazer didn’t say anything, but a soft bluish-gray came over his colors, twined into the red affection and deep teal Rachel associated with close-knit families.

Oh goodie, she thought. The psychopath loves his daddy.

“I don’t think he’s willing to do me any favors,” Rachel said. “Last time I saw him, I nearly killed him.”

He cocked his head at her. “Telepathic,” he said, a note of orange surprise working its way into his mood. “There are rumors about you, but we didn’t believe them. Why are you telepathic?”

“I don’t need to be psychic to read a one-note nutjob like you,” she said.

The man nodded. “True.”

He stepped away from the fence, and his hands went towards his pockets. Rachel didn’t react; he wasn’t carrying weapons.

Then again, he doesn’t need to, not him, not a man who can escape from a police lockdown using nothing but office supplies.

A cheap cell phone came out of one pocket, its battery out of the other. The man who had been Glazer powered on the phone and held it up like a tiny trophy.

“Got it?” he asked, after he had given her a few moments to register the phone’s unique signal.

“You think you’re walking out of here?” she said, touching the bulge of her gun beneath her hoodie.

“Smile,” he said, pointing towards the house behind him. “You’re not on camera.”

He was right—Rachel couldn’t feel any of the relentless directed chatter in the digital ecosystem that meant she was being monitored. Instead, she noticed the dull red and the urine yellow of her neighbor and his brother, along with a handful of other core colors she didn’t recognize. They were watching her and their good friend Not-Glazer from behind the dubious safety of a sliding glass door.

One of them was eating cake.

“You’re crashing a birthday party as an alibi?” she asked. “Cute. Real cute.”

“You shoot me as I walk away,” he said, “and that’ll go over great for OACET.”

“Didn’t you just tell me you’re here to help us?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said. “So don’t fucking shoot me.”

She weighed the situation: the witnesses; the time it would take for her to clear the fence versus the time it would take for her to run around the block; the complete lack of any police presence…

Now, that was strange. Rachel threw her scans out as far as she could go without giving herself a headache, and came back with nothing using police scanner frequencies except the occasional bored trucker.

“There’re usually at least two or three patrol cars within a quarter-mile of my house,” she said. “What did you do?”

“Nothing serious.” The man who used to be Glazer shrugged. “Nothing that would let you justify shooting me.”

“If you hurt a cop, Jonny-boy—”

“Don’t get in the habit of calling me that,” he said, as he turned to leave. “These days, I go by Marshall Wyatt.”

“Marshall What—like hell you do!”

He popped the battery out of the phone, and waved as he walked away.

Rachel fixed his new face in her mind. High forehead, a receding hairline…very, very British. She cast back through her memories to the real Marshall Wyatt, a man long gone from her life.

Yes, it could be Wyatt’s face with ten years of weathering stamped into his skin.

“New best friend, indeed,” she muttered to herself.

She watched the mass murderer let himself through the neighbor’s front gate, and then followed him through her scans as he strolled down the road. Unhurried, unworried, just another neighbor out for a walk on an early spring afternoon.

Rachel wanted to hurtle down the street and intercept him before he got out of range. She’d start by tackling him to the ground, and then see where the fight went from there. It’d be a great one, she was sure of that. No matter whose face he wore or whose name he hid behind, he carried himself with the confidence of a man who had spent much of his adult life in an elite military unit.

But…

“Let him go,” she whispered, and forced herself to break off her scans. Jonathan Glazer—No, he’s Marshall Wyatt now—disappeared from her expanded senses as completely as if he had never come close to her home.

Rachel found herself standing in her kitchen, checking the locks on her windows, and wasn’t quite sure how she had gotten there.

“Stop,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice echoed back at her, a hollow reminder that she was alone. “Stop,” she said again, more quietly. “Get your shit together.”

First things first. She reached out through her implant and activated her security system. Santino had installed it in spite of her protests, declaring that a cyborg should have complete control over her own home. She had laughed at him and gone to clean her gun, saying that anyone who was stupid enough to break into this cyborg’s house would get what they deserved. Now she was grateful for the cameras that covered every corner of her property, the contact elements which assured her that every door was sealed. If Wyatt was going to murder her, it’d have to be with a sniper’s rifle—

“Shut up, brain!” she growled.

The urge to run around the house and draw the blinds surged within her, and she had to talk herself down by running over the many, many ways that Wyatt could shoot her without needing to see her. Thermal imaging. Tracking her personal GPS. Using a goddamned rocket launcher.

Her hands unclenched.

She paused and took stock of her kitchen. Empty plastic bags that had held takeout food were thrown across the counters, and the glass contraption her erstwhile roommate used to brew coffee hadn’t been cleaned in almost a week. Behind this light layer of filth was an explosion of paint which (she had been assured) was an offense to working eyeballs, the multicolored rainbow of acrylic swatches that Rachel had slopped across every available surface with her fingers, names and moods and other descriptive labels written next to each color in thick black Sharpie...

Her home. Hers. And no psychopath was going to drive her to panic when she stood in her own home.

“Okay,” she said, and this time her voice didn’t echo in the kitchen. “Okay. Wyatt’s wrong. I’m not alone in this.”

She cleared her mind, and concentrated on a dark gray the color of an expensive wool overcoat.

When that didn’t get Jason’s attention, she reached out through the link to locate him. Jason Atran was in his digital imaging suite at the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s own Consolidated Forensics Laboratories. She kept the link light and conversational; when Jason opened his end of their connection, she made sure to hold back from spying on his work. Thus far, they had never needed to testify on the same case for the MPD, but if they kept moonlighting with the city’s police, it was inevitable. As inevitable as a defense attorney accusing the two cyborgs of collusion or whatever straws were within grasping distance at the time. Better to play it safe, forever and always.

“Jason!”

“Busy.”

She sent him the image of a man made from warm sandalwood, then painted the man in a red the color of blood.

Jason appeared beside her a moment later, shaped in the bright greens of OACET’s digital projections. His avatar looked like a male French model, lean and haughty in a buttoned-down shirt and slacks, the perfect copy of Jason’s physical self on the other side of the city.

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” she asked.

Jason’s avatar rolled its eyes. “I saw a dark gray,” he said. “I know that’s supposed to be me, but you always call direct when you want to talk. I thought I was just on your mind.”

She pushed the sandalwood towards him again.

Jason’s avatar gestured for her to pull out a chair from the table for him. Avatars might be mirror images of their owners, but they were nothing but electrons dancing on a spectrum that other cyborgs could see and hear. Rachel pulled out two chairs, and sat, cowboy-style, her chin pillowed on her hands.

“He’s back,” she began.

Jason sat beside her, his face tight. “Tell me.”

She did. It took a long time, much longer than if she had used the telepathic connection that cyborgs used as their primary means of communication, or even something as clunky as spoken English. Instead, she passed Jason the colors and images that defined her world.

Rachel was, according to all legal definitions, blind. Macular degeneration had reduced her own eyes to nothing but useless collections of cells and fluids. Her implant allowed her to mimic many of the regular processes of normal vision. When she used the right frequencies, she could read, or recognize strangers by their faces, but her expanded senses couldn’t duplicate the exact mechanisms of the human eye.

The closest she could come to normal vision was to project her own digital avatar at head level, and watch the world through her duplicate’s eyes. The effect was similar to watching a horror movie shot with a handheld camera, and tended to trigger her motion sickness something fierce. She used this overlapping perspective only when she was applying makeup, as lip liner needed extra attention or it tended to make a break for it.

She found it much easier to go without normal vision entirely. For Rachel, people had become human-shaped core colors. Over these was a surface layer of colors that shifted to match the person’s mood. Core colors tended to be unique to each person, and unchanging. The conversational colors that covered these were in a continuous state of flux, and were reasonably universal among those who shared the same mood.

It had been hard enough for her to learn this new language of colors. Anger was red…but so were other emotions, like love and lust and pride. Teaching the nuances of the emotional spectrum to someone like Jason had been next to impossible. But they had realized that colors would allow them to talk without worrying that they’d be understood by the rest of the collective, and so Jason had forced himself to learn.

Despite nearly a year of practice, he wasn’t very good at it.

She stuffed her impatience down the rabbit hole and showed him a human-shaped blob of sandalwood entering a threshold of Southwestern turquoise. That sandalwood came with a bloody red stripe which whipped around like a barb at the end of a leather tether, the red barb seeking to bury itself in flesh but finding no target. Then, it left the turquoise, shrinking until it vanished into the edges of their shared consciousness.

Jason’s avatar closed its eyes. “I think I understood that,” he said, and then pushed sandalwood back at her, along with the hue of yellow-orange that went along with questions and curiosity.

Rachel felt confident enough that they could talk through the rest, as long as they hid the names behind the colors.

“He says that something nasty is about to happen,” she told him.

Jason replied by showing her the vivid chartreuse green that OACET had claimed as their official color, and Rachel nodded.

“How does he know?” Jason asked. “Is he setting something up, like last time?”

“I didn’t get that impression,” she said. “More like he knows what’s coming and he’s here to help keep us from getting hit.”

The digital man sitting across from her shook his head. “He’s got to know you’re gunning for him. Coming here puts him at risk. If you arrest him—”

“—I finally put things right,” she finished.

Secrets were next to impossible to keep within a hivemind. While she knew that some of the other cyborgs had secrets of their own, Rachel was absolutely sure that she and Jason shared the biggest one between them: Rachel had helped the man who used to be Jonathan Glazer escape from police custody.

It had been a matter of cost versus benefit. He would have escaped on his own, and probably would have killed a whole lot of people on his way out the door. In exchange for her help, he had provided OACET with leverage over a prominent politician, and had left everyone in the MPD untouched.

Rephrase: relatively untouched. He had given Jason a concussion, and several of her coworkers would always carry the scars from where they had come into contact with flashbang grenades. It could have been much, much worse.

Jason knew. And Jason thought she had made the right choice.

If the others in OACET found out…

Well. She was sure that most of them would share Jason’s opinion. But they still would hold her accountable. Catching the man with the sandalwood core had been on Rachel’s to-do list for nearly two years. She needed to put things right.

“But why?” Jason asked. “Why risk it?”

“He said that he was sent by—” She sent him another image of a human-shaped blob: this one was slightly stooped and squishy when contrasted against the one the color of sandalwood, and drawn from a gentle bluish-gray.

Jason’s green fingers knitted together in a facsimile of fidgeting. “He doesn’t owe you any favors,” he said after a few moments. “In fact…”

She nodded. “I think they’re—”

That’s as far as she got before Josh Glassman appeared beside them.

Rachel reacted on instinct. She seized an empty beer bottle from the pile of trash on the table, and swung it at the intruder’s skull. It was only when the bottle passed through Josh’s head that Rachel realized she had overreacted: not only had she failed to recognize her friend’s digital avatar, she had greatly misjudged the force needed to club a skull with a bottle, and she ended up face-down on the kitchen floor.

Josh didn’t notice. “Penguin,” he said to Rachel, his voice tight. Then his avatar’s eyes slid to the side, and he spotted Jason. “Good, good. I was going to track you down after talking to Rachel. You both need to get down to the Batcave, right now.”

Rachel took a breath, and let herself feel Josh’s tension, tight and hot, as he sat in OACET’s downtown headquarters a couple of miles to the south. She had no idea how Josh had found out about Glazer (Wyatt!), but she picked herself up off of the floor and fell into parade rest, readying herself for the reprimand.

“We can explain—” Jason began, but Josh cut him off with a hard wave of his hand.

“Hope has been kidnapped,” he said.

And, before Rachel could burst out laughing, he added, “Avery, too.”

THREE

The Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies finally had a permanent office. The old postal hub near the Judiciary Square Metro Station had been fully gutted and repurposed for the cyborgs. Rachel thought it was a nice enough place, and much easier to reach than the Agents’ old headquarters out by the Potomac River. But it was a long run from her house to the center of Washington, D.C., and her subconscious took it as an opportunity to act the asshole again.

They hate you.

Rachel pushed on and tried to focus on her feet, the feel of the rough layers of asphalt layered over concrete layered over gravel cutting through the cold earth beneath her…

They hate you. You’ve been out for nearly three years, and they still hate you. You’re nothing but machines to them. They won’t be happy until you submit. Become tools. Like they planned.

“Shut up,” she said through gritted teeth.

You thought you could get used to this? You thought you could have a life? Even if you did, they’d still be there, in the shadows, waiting for you to slip up, to think you were safe, to steal your children—

“Shut up shut up shut up!”

She threw herself into an all-out sprint, but her subconscious had sunk its teeth into her fears and was shaking them apart.

The worst day of her life had been the one when she had woken up with second- and third-degree sunburns across most of her body, a pair of dying eyeballs, and an endless waking dream of meetings and rote tasks as her only memories of her mid-twenties. That was until today, when her niece had been taken—No. Had been stolen. And with her went the peace of mind they had tried to shape around themselves. Even if Avery toddled through the front door of OACET headquarters right now, right this second, before anything worse could happen to her, nothing would ever be the same again.

They hate you.

Well, maybe they were right to hate her, to hate all of OACET.

Or at least not wholly wrong.

It had been nearly two years since three hundred and fifty cyborgs had told the world that the U.S. government had discovered a way to control all networked machines, and that these controllers happened to walk and talk and celebrate birthdays.

Nearly seven years since Rachel had a teeny-tiny quantum organic computer chip implanted in her parietal lobe.

Nearly eight years since a certain U.S. Senator had offered her a place in a new federal program that would be, in his words, “revolutionary.”

Her footsteps sounded like lost moments.

They hate you.

I know, she assured herself. I know.

The sounds of heavy traffic and random car horns joined her footsteps as she crossed into the city. Around her, pedestrians and drivers turned an uncertain orange at the sight of the tall Chinese woman running at full speed in dirty jeans and work boots.

Jason caught up with her after she crossed into Dupont Circle. He popped the locks on the passenger-side door of his Mustang, and she swung herself inside as the traffic lights turned green.

Neither of them spoke until they pulled into OACET’s private parking garage. Jason killed the motor. He slumped over the steering wheel, his shoulders rounding in on themselves.

She reached out and touched his hand. Skin contact between Agents deepened a link, bringing the organic aspect of those computers in their heads more fully online. The emotions she felt at the periphery of their conversation—panic, loss, fear, hate!—crossed over and joined hers.

“I’ll say this once,” he said quietly. “If he—” Here, Jason flashed an image of a human figure made of sandalwood. “—is responsible for taking Avery, I’ll kill him myself.”

“You won’t have to,” she said, as she wrestled their shared bloodlust under control and shoved positive emotions—calm, control, reason—across their link until they both believed it. “He’s my responsibility.”

They left the quiet of the parking garage and walked the half-block to the front entrance of the Batcave.

It was a lovely building. It had started out as a beautiful piece of neoclassical architecture, with thick columns and thin black windows spaced out beneath ornamental friezes. Mare Murphy, OACET’s Agent in charge of administerial tasks, had made sure the repairs had been performed by restoration experts, and the sandstone veneer of the old post office shone a light gray in the light of the Sunday afternoon. The front doors were huge metal monsters covered in a bas-relief mural of Roman gods, and wore their age well. Bronze rings the size of Rachel’s head served as knobs, with the metal of the right-hand ring polished to golden and rubbed thin beneath a million different hands.

She paused as she picked up the ring. Jason laid his hand over hers, and they steadied each other before they opened the door on its well-oiled hinges.

The Batcave was cold, the heat turned down to save on energy over the weekend. She sent her scans into the large central lobby to take stock of what the others had done with the place. Her own office was over at the MPD’s First District Station, and she only dropped by OACET’s headquarters when her physical presence was required. Normally, she’d delight in the small changes around her, signs that the other Agents were adapting their new headquarters to their needs. Today, she moved straight through the entrance hall, past the gymnastics spring floor that had been installed in the lobby (When did we get a spring floor? Why did we get a spring floor?), and up the stairs that led to Patrick Mulcahy’s office.

An FBI agent at the front reception desk checked their badges. Jason glanced around, his colors moving towards grays.

“Nobody’s here,” he said aloud.

His comment earned him a pointed glare from the man from the FBI, but Jason was right. The building seemed empty. Even on Sundays, there was always a skeleton crew of cyborgs roaming the halls, tugging on the digital aether of the collective’s link. Now, the alarm systems and WiFi signals of the building twitched and moved around them without guidance.

Rachel reached out through her implant to tweak a perimeter alert system and make sure it was active; it slapped her mind away, focused on its task.

Good, she thought. There was no better security system in the world than the one that OACET had designed for themselves. Even without supervision from the security teams, it was still humming along, still protecting itself from intrusion.

The Agents didn’t take chances.

No, that’s wrong, that’s so wrong, Avery’s gone, we didn’t do enough—

Jason placed a hand on her shoulder, and the two of them moved to where the minds in the building came together. A cluster of core colors had gathered in a conference room on the second floor, surrounded by electronic fields that burst into life as unfamiliar equipment came online. Rachel didn’t recognize many of those colors. She assumed they belonged to the FBI: kidnapping was a federal crime, and OACET wasn’t going to shoulder the responsibility of getting Hope and Avery back.

Shouldn’t, she corrected herself, as she finally spotted the cerulean blue that was Patrick Mulcahy. We shouldn’t be the ones who try to get Hope and Avery back.

She wasn’t sure how that was going to play out—the Cyborg King had taken control of the Batcave.

The head of OACET was a quiet flurry of commands. Under his direction, the FBI agents were setting up shop. They bustled about: here, they set up their own computers; there, they linked the FBI’s computers into OACET’s own systems. Rachel watched as Mulcahy reached over and yanked a power cord on an anonymous piece of machinery, handing it back to its owner with a strong warning about making sure the equipment stayed out of OACET’s private servers.

Over by the windows was a woman with a core of blue slate. She radiated deep red sorrow as she answered questions from a stranger in a suit. A gigantic man with a core of forest green stood behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders, carrying his own share of misery.

A trace of wooly charcoal and Southwestern turquoise appeared in his conversational colors: Mako Hill had noticed their arrival. He gave his wife’s shoulders a gentle squeeze, and came over to meet them.

“Guys…” he began, his voice a heavy rumble, his fingers twisting aimlessly as he tried to find the words.

Rachel hugged him.

Mako was the largest man she had ever met; her head barely came up to his sternum. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as hard as she could, letting him go only when she felt the dampness against her forehead and realized he was crying.

She and Jason steered the grieving father out of the conference room. Mulcahy’s office was across the hall, and Rachel popped the digital lock so the two of them could move Mako to a nearby couch. He dropped, sobbing, onto the overstuffed leather, Rachel and Jason to either side of him. They covered his hands with their own. The force of his anguish was unreal: the two of them might love Avery as their niece, but their own concern was nothing in comparison to what a parent experienced when a child was missing.

Not missing, she reminded herself. Stolen.

There was no such thing as a happy ending in a kidnapping. Even if the victims were rescued or returned unharmed, there would always be the knowledge that it had happened, and the fear that it might happen again. Rachel and Jason could offer nothing except their presence, holding Mako with the shared knowledge that he was not alone in this. It was enough, and it wasn’t, and he was angry and grateful to them, all at once.

No, kidnappings didn’t have happy endings, but if you were lucky, you found peace.

When he had calmed down enough to pass through the worst of his sorrow, Rachel asked him: “What do we know?”

“Multiple men,” Mako said. His voice hitched, and he unconsciously fell back into the cyborgs’ version of telepathy as Jason passed him a box of tissues. “The security cameras in the garage were disabled. Carlota began recording once she realized what was going on, so we’ve got the leader’s face on file.”

“On it,” Jason said. He snapped his side of their three-way link and left the room.

“He’s got this,” Rachel assured Mako. “Nobody’s better with digital images than Jason. If Carlota got anything useful on tape, he’ll pry it out.”

“They had it all planned, Penguin,” Mako said. She tugged on his shirt until he allowed himself to lean against her. He was all heavy muscle, and it was somewhat similar to comforting a rockslide. “They wanted Hope, but they… They took my daughter! She’s nothing to them!”

She began rubbing her friend’s back as his fury rose, pushing calm, control across their link as hard as she dared. The last thing they needed was a three-hundred-pound, six-foot-eight-inch weightlifter on a rampage.

“Easy,” she told him. “Easy. They took Avery because they knew it was the only way to control Hope. Hope might have been the target, but Avery’s wellbeing is their priority. If anything happens to Avery, Hope will bring Hell itself down on them.”

Mako’s rage ebbed as she got through to him. Hope Blackwell was violence incarnate. The woman was a psychological hot mess, held together by decades of rigorous training in judo and a massive daily dose of Adderall. And, while not public knowledge, Hope was also one of the handful of normals able to perceive the Agents’ digital projections. Abducting Hope was stupid on so many levels that—

Well. If the kidnappers were willing to risk abducting Patrick Mulcahy’s wife and his oldest godchild, Rachel was sure they must have planned for the fallout.

The door opened, and the head of OACET walked into his office.

Mulcahy moved like a boxer before a match, tight with unspent energy and ready for the fight. Rachel had turned off the emotional spectrum so Mako’s heartbreak and fury didn’t overwhelm her senses. She flipped it on again to read Mulcahy, expecting to find the same mournful reds worn by Carlota and Mako. Instead, she saw his core of deep cerulean blue, and…nothing else.

Nothing. No emotions at all. No red-white blur of sadness and shock, none of the deep blue of professional suits to go along with his negotiations with the FBI. Not even the uncertain yellows of hidden fear.

Her confusion must have jumped across her link with Mako, as the big man sat up. “What’s happened?” he asked.

“Nothing new,” Mulcahy replied. “Could you step out of the room? I need to speak to Rachel.”

Shit, she thought to herself.

Mako caught it, a small smudge of curious yellow appearing in his conversational colors.

“It’s not about the kidnapping,” she assured him. “I’m just going to get my ass handed to me before he puts me to work finding your daughter.”

He nodded, not convinced but too preoccupied to care, and left without a word.

Mulcahy waited, the two of them watching through the wall as Mako walked down the long corridor to the nearest bathroom. Rachel counted her heartbeats—ten, eleven, twelve—before Mulcahy turned towards her.

His shields went up. Rachel blinked: Mulcahy had taught her the trick of twisting electromagnetic fields around them to block out all electronic surveillance, but she had never seen him use it in the Batcave. OACET’s new headquarters was, by design, a private sanctuary, and no Agent would dream of spying on Mulcahy while he was in his own office.

This was going to hurt.

She sighed and stood, falling into her reliable Army habit of standing at parade rest, and waited for him to burn her to ash.

“Have you called Santino?” he asked.

Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t know how far you wanted this to go, but he’s spending most of his time at Zia’s,” she replied. “If she knows—”

“She doesn’t,” he said. “We’re trying to keep this as quiet as possible. We’ve got maybe an hour left before the media realizes the abductions are connected to OACET.” He was silent for a long moment before adding, “Hope and Avery weren’t the only two who were kidnapped.”

Rachel fell out of parade rest at the news. “Who—”

“Nobody else associated with OACET,” he assured her. “It seems as though they grabbed another dozen people at gunpoint as they made their getaway.”

“Hostages?” she guessed, and when Mulcahy nodded, she nearly gasped in relief as she realized she had been stupidly selfish, that he still didn’t know about Wyatt, that he needed her to get his wife and godchild back… That she needed to pull her head out of her butt and concentrate on the bigger picture. She slumped down on the couch and raked her fingers through her short hair to hide her face. “That’s not good,” she said. “Hope and Avery might not be expendable, but random strangers? They could kill them, use them as armor or decoys, anything.”

“That’s what the FBI thinks,” he said.

“Do we have any suspects?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nobody,” he replied. “The only current threat on OACET radar is the China faction.”

The China faction… Possible. Slim, but possible. Last week’s security briefing had contained a credible rumor that a paramilitary organization in China had begun work on its own version of the cyborgs’ implants.

Which made nothing but sense. Rachel may have used her implant as a substitute for her eyesight, but it had been sold to Congress as a means of networking all branches of the U.S. government, with a wink and a nod to its use in espionage. By this stage of the geopolitical game, it was widely presumed that other intelligence agencies were playing catchup to OACET, with Israel and China leading the pack.

But the data that had led to the development of the implant was gone, in no small part due to Rachel’s own actions. She had already gotten a certain U.S. Senator removed from office because of what he had done to OACET, and she had no intention of stopping with him. Those who had been responsible for those five lost years needed to pay.

Is this a way for the Chinese to get their hands on— No, she decided. Just no. China might be trying to build their own version of OACET, but there were better ways to get information than by stealing Mulcahy’s wife.

“You want me to get my team together and start doing what we can?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, his face turned towards the conference room across the hall. “The FBI is excellent, but I’m not taking chances.”

“What are my limits?” she asked.

Usually he’d raise an eyebrow at that, an implied You should have learned this by now, Rachel, really, and follow it up with a martini-dry joke. Today, all he did was say, “When this hits the media, everything we do will be dissected. Play it like you already know you’ll be on the witness stand.”

“Better than at the defendant’s table,” she said, the slightest push.

Mulcahy ignored her; she shivered at that, glad they weren’t sharing a link tight enough for him to feel it.

“Call Phil, too,” he said. “I’m pulling him off the MPD’s Bomb Unit and assigning him to you. We’re going to need everyone you’ve trained on this.”

“The MPD’s not going to be happy,” she said. She had taught Phil all she could about deep scans and how to see through walls, and the MPD had snatched him up and assigned him to their bomb squad. With Phil on their team, injuries and other unsavory incidents had fallen to nearly zero. The MPD wouldn’t want to go back to their old methods, no matter how temporary. “Hell, I don’t know if I have the jurisdiction to pull my guys and have them run an OACET case.”

“You know you do,” he replied.

“No. No way,” Rachel said. “I’m not invoking the charter unless I absolutely have to.”

“Agreed. Ask first,” Mulcahy said, “but get it done.”

She nodded.

A blur of yellow-white energy came over his surface colors. Not an emotion, not exactly, but it showed Mulcahy’s attention had shifted from her to something unseen. It was gone as quickly as it had come—he had dealt with it and moved on—but was the only color she had observed in him, so she chased it down.

“What happened?”

“The FBI turned on another piece of equipment,” he said. “Every time they boot up something new, it tries to get onto our network. I’ve been running security all morning.”

And managing personnel, and setting up a response plan, and freaking out about your wife and godchild… She checked his colors again to be sure; there was still nothing resembling anger or concern. Or fear. Or any emotion at all.

Or not.

“You doing okay?” she asked him.

They weren’t close, her and her boss, but they were in each other’s minds often enough that she knew what his reaction should have been. There should have been a wave of red anger at the question, held in check by his professional blues; anger at those who had stolen his wife and godchild, anger at her for asking such a stupid question…

Nothing.

“As well as can be expected,” he replied, and turned to rifle through the stack of papers on his desk.

Dismissed.

“Do I salute you or smack you?” she asked.

“Good luck, Rachel,” he said as he flipped through a notepad. “Work fast.”

She paused. What would happen if she really did smack him, just haul off and crack him across that steel jaw—

Mulcahy looked up from the papers and stared at her.

“Right,” she snapped, and went to look for Josh.

He had to be nearby. OACET’s second-in-command handled their major media appearances. Something like this would require his full attention. But…

She couldn’t find him.

All Agents had their own GPS, and they kept these open and available unless they wanted privacy from the collective. When Josh wasn’t on duty, he tended to play games with his GPS, setting it to rotate through multiple locations. Finding him became a game of hide-and-seek, when you knew he was within spitting distance but spitting distance could be anywhere from the local coffee shop to OACET’s office supply closet.

You didn’t want to barge in on Josh when he was in the supply closet. Not unless you wanted to join in on whatever—or whoever—he was doing.

Rachel wasn’t in the mood for such shenanigans, and she was willing to bet that Josh wasn’t, either. She sat down at the top of the stairs and scanned the building from roof to foundation, looking for the person with a core color the blue of fresh tattoos.

She found him two floors down in the War Room, surrounded by the glowing green avatars of other Agents. Rachel had no trouble picking out the details of those avatars: she recognized Ami and the two other members of OACET’s internal team of wetworks and demolition specialists. Mulcahy didn’t allow his former assassins to practice their old trade, but the Cuddly Hippos were more than just mindless killers. If stealth and information gathering was required, the Hippos would fit the bill.

Rachel went downstairs, tossing polite words back and forth with the personnel from the FBI she met along the way. Not right, her subconscious nagged, not right at all, get them out of here, they don’t belong.

She told herself to shut up, that there was a huge difference between a crumbling mansion on the Potomac and a state-of-the-art government facility in downtown D.C., and that the FBI were only here to help.

Her subconscious rolled over and went back to sleep, muttering to itself.

When she reached the basement, she found the door to the War Room had been gaily painted in ponies.

Not horses. Ponies. Cartoon ponies with large eyes, and rendered in colors that spoke to the back of her brain. She took a moment to absorb this cartoonish mutiny against federal regulations before she knocked; the ponies weren’t photorealistic (thank goodness) but they had been painted by an expert hand, and appeared to be sliding down an iridescent rainbow into a sun-drenched pond.

On the other side of the ponies, Josh’s surface colors flickered. A strong thread of Southwestern turquoise appeared, and this chased away the core colors of the Hippos. As Rachel watched through the wall, Josh said something to the Hippos, and the three avatars winked out of the air.

“Come in.” Josh’s mental voice wasn’t exactly weary, but it did carry with it the sense of things getting much worse before they got better.

“What’s up with the door?” she asked.

“Shawn,” he replied. “He said he wanted to do something quick and fun.”

As she entered the room, he moved to retrieve a file from one of the ubiquitous filing cabinets that lined nearly every vacant space in OACET’s new headquarters. In this post-Agent age, paper trails had taken on new importance; the War Room had been named for its files, most of which held the names and last known locations of those whom OACET considered viable threats to their organization.

Rachel threw a scan through the filing cabinets on the west side of the War Room, double-checking the hidden safe secreted away in the wall behind them. It was a smallish safe, about the size required to store a decent collection of shotguns. That safe held the really dangerous files, the ones that had the names of senators and congresspersons and the other powerful folks who were responsible for OACET’s creation. Not the sanitized story that had been sold to Congress in exchange for funding. That story was a happy tale of government agencies coming together to work for the Greater Good, an alignment of young professionals from different federal agencies to smooth out the problems inherent in complex bureaucratic systems.

No. The files had nothing to do with that story.

In the real story, the one hidden in those dangerous files, networking the Agents had only been the first step in building America’s new cyborg army. The next step had been five years of intense mental conditioning. Brainwashing, really, a thorough deconstruction of personal autonomy. The technology which allowed them to access any networked machine was bioorganic in nature, and needed a human host to function. The politicians, though, didn’t need those human hosts. No, they didn’t need them at all. Those who were involved in this part of the plan didn’t want cyborgs; they wanted robots in human bodies, ready to act and react as directed. So they had planned that the five hundred young people who received the cybernetic implant would be broken down, slowly, until nothing was left but the willingness to follow orders.

It hadn’t worked out that way.

Rachel knew she could never repay Mulcahy and Hope Blackwell for what they had done to break the surviving Agents free. If it hadn’t been for them, she would still be in California, living alone in a cold apartment, blind from staring up at the sun for days—

Nope.

Rachel scanned the edges of the safe again, making sure that it was invisible to any members of the FBI who might need to run a security sweep. She was one of the few Agents who knew Mulcahy and Josh had copies of those files somewhere else, backups kept in yet another secure location that wasn’t on government property in case the worst happened, but they had never told her where and she hoped she’d never need to learn.

Josh’s conversational colors moved in and out in varying shades of orange as he searched through the files. She flipped frequencies to look at him, and found he was fairly neat and tidy: his too-long-for-government-work dark brown hair was neatly combed, and his clothing looked less rumpled than usual.

“You okay?” she asked. His colors glazed over with orange-red irritation, so she quickly added, “You’re too organized.”

He glanced up at her, and she pantomimed running her hands through her hair.

“Shit,” he said. He used his hip to slam the filing cabinet drawer closed, and began to finger-comb his hair so it fell across his eyes. “Thanks. I’ve got to go on camera soon.”

“Your clothes, too,” she said.

“Yeah, this suit came straight from the cleaners. I didn’t expect to work today,” he replied, as he stripped off his pants and handed them to her. “Here. Mess these up a little.”

Rachel wadded his pants into a tight ball and sat on them. Her friend did the same with his suit coat.

They faced each other across the War Room’s small table, and she gave him an anemic smile.

Josh knew her too well. “What?”

“I think—” That sickening sensation in her stomach rolled into the back of her throat, and she paused to bite down on it. “I think I’ve got another problem for you.”

“It’s the right day for it,” he muttered, as his digital barrier sprang into place. “Shoot.”

Josh’s shield differed from hers or Mulcahy’s. Where Rachel took strands of frequencies and wove them into shining chainmail, and Mulcahy forged them into an impenetrable fortress, Josh’s shield looked like a glowing plate of spaghetti. His barrier contorted and writhed, a mess of frequencies that seemed to have no purpose other than to clutter up the EMF.

Except anything that touched this mess got tangled up within it.

It had taken a few light pokings before Rachel had realize that Josh’s barrier was as intentionally sloppy as the rest of him. When he was under his shield, any targeted contact was bundled up and moved aside, its information registered so Josh could follow it back to its source at his leisure. Josh was as safe as she was behind her own shield, and had the additional benefit of trapping the signal of anyone stupid enough to snoop on him.

She felt him reach out and tug on the ends of a few loose frequencies, pushing them into an order that must have made sense to him. “There we go,” he said. “I don’t like how this place is crawling with the FBI. Better safe than sorry. What’s on your mind?”

Rachel wanted to tell him—she started to tell him!—but her mouth sidestepped the inevitable one last time by moving to the newest problem on her list. “What’s wrong with Mulcahy?”

Josh’s colors shot towards an anxious orange. “What do you mean?”

She thought about the best way to describe what she meant and came up empty. There was no good way to describe the lack of Mulcahy within Mulcahy. Vagueness would have to do.

“He’s here,” she said, tapping her head, and then laid her hands across her heart. “But he’s not all here.”

Blue relief came over him. “Christ, Rachel, you see too much,” he said. “Leave this one alone.”

“Josh—”

“This is how he’s getting through it,” he said. “He’s fine.”

They weren’t sharing a link, but her reaction to the dimples in his conversational colors—Liar!—was so strong that it jumped between them.

“He’ll be fine,” Josh amended. “Once he’s done what he’s got to do. Leave it alone.

“Please,” he added. “This’ll just waste time we don’t have.”

It wasn’t as clear a dismissal as the one she had received from Mulcahy, but coming from Josh, he might as well have taken her arm and escorted her to the door. She told herself to stand, and couldn’t.

He moved to place a hand over hers; she yanked her own hand away before he could touch her. Skin contact would be the end of any secrets. Jason, she reminded herself. There’s Jason.

He closed his eyes as the sorrow and stress strengthened within his colors. “Tell me,” he said, softly.

She sighed, and did.

Rachel told him nearly everything, all about Glazer—now Marshall Wyatt—and helping him escape, about what had happened in the police station. About the psychopath who had practically turned up on her doorstep and had offered to do the things she couldn’t. About how this might not be just a kidnapping, not if he was involved.

She let the words run together, fast and sometimes in the wrong order, and even though she couldn’t help but think about Jason, she managed to keep his wooly gray fixed in her mind. Gray, gray, gray, gray…

Never his name.

Through it all, Josh kept his fists pressed hard against his temples, his colors frozen and yellow-gray from shock and sickly horror. “You realize…” he began.

“What I’ve done? Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“No.” He shook his head, his brown hair sliding over his knuckles. “This is… This goes way beyond…”

He stopped. She counted along with him—ten, nine, eight, seven…the simple grounding technique that all Agents used to keep themselves in the here and now—and he tried again when his colors finally unwound themselves from their tangled knots. “I knew the police station had been booby-trapped, but you think they did that just to facilitate an escape?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s disturbing,” he said. He stood up, and swung his suit coat over his shoulders. “Almost epically disturbing. How long had they been planning for Glazer to be captured?”

Rachel shrugged as she handed him his pants. “Best I can tell, as soon as they learned I was to start working at First District Station. The building renovations were mostly finished by the time I was finally cleared to work.”

“Right. So, how’d they learn you’d start working there?”

She blinked.

“They didn’t learn it from us,” he continued. “Our internal security is too good. Nobody has ever been able to break into our systems and snoop around, and they’ve tried. Hard.”

She began to run the options around in her head. The idea of a spy within OACET wasn’t even a consideration, and she trusted Josh’s knowledge of their digital security. Two options emerged, neither of them all that pleasant.

“Someone on the MPD,” she said. “Or someone....a private party with connections to Congress.”

“Let’s consider the MPD option first,” he said, as he ran his fingers along the surface of the nearest filing cabinet. There wasn’t much dust, but he smudged what he could find along the collar of his white dress shirt. “Why would they think to have connections at the MPD on the off-chance that they could get a shot at OACET? That’s bullshit. That’s too much ground to cover for any two people, no matter how smart they are.”

“Could have been coincidence,” she said. “Somebody from the MPD said something to someone, and it got back to Wyatt.”

“Except now he’s back,” Josh said. “The moment before things got bad.”

Now it was Rachel who was rubbing her temples. “Oh shit,” she muttered. “Yeah, that’s definitely not coincidence. Shit shit shit.”

His hands slammed down on the table beside her. “Find his source,” Josh said, his colors picking up in a red whirlwind. “Your only job is to learn who’s feeding him information. Because there’s a huge difference between your part-time job and this kidnapping, and if the information on both of those came from the same place—”

“—then the kidnapping was protected information,” she finished. “He only found out about it after enough people got involved to create a leak.”

He opened a link, and the sensation of close-kept terror crashed into her. “And if it’s protected information, we’re screwed.”

Rachel nodded. The idea of protected information made her feel sick. Bad enough that Avery was taken; worse—unimaginably worse—if she had been taken as part of a professional operation.

She pushed back against their link until it broke. “Say this is protected info. Who do we want running it, a government op or private party?”

“Either comes with its own special brand of fuckery,” Josh said, electric blue energies running across his conversational colors. “Did Wyatt ever say that he knew what was about to happen? Did he even hint at kidnapping?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Just that something bad was about to go down.”

Josh began pacing the length of the War Room. “So he’s probably not in the loop,” he said. “Not directly. He probably just got word of mobilization when whoever’s in charge hit the switch and the plan went into action.”

“Could be something simple,” she said. “Maybe he’s monitoring email, phone calls… Has an active keyword search, like the NSA.”

“That wouldn’t be enough reason to go to the effort of booby-trapping a police station,” Josh said. “It’d have to be a sure thing. You’ve got to find his source.”

“Right,” she said, and stood to leave. She kept herself closed tight, and tried to crush her relief into a tiny ball to be played with at a later time.

Josh placed a hand on her shoulder, high enough so his skin brushed against hers as he opened a link. “Not so fast,” he said, anger flooding her mind.

Busted.

“Yeah,” Josh agreed. “You are. There’s going to be a hell of a reckoning for what you did. But, unlike Mulcahy, I have to prioritize. Holding you accountable for something two years gone is on the bottom of my list.”

“Listen—” Rachel began aloud, and then gave up on trying to keep him out of her head. She knocked his hand off of her shoulder and turned to face him. “You weren’t there. Mulcahy had just finished telling me that Hanlon was pushing the Senate to get us forcibly impressed into military units! He told me to buy him time to keep Hanlon off of us. I did my job, Josh!”

He stared at her, weighing her Southwestern turquoise against OACET green, a slip of sandalwood moving through these dominant colors as he tried to figure out where it should fit.

“Mulcahy told you to buy time, not blow up a police station and let a murderer go free,” he replied. “If you had gotten caught, that would have been the end of us. Not might—would.”

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to cry.

She settled on nodding.

“It’s in the past,” he said. “We got lucky. Things turned out for the best—that was our first big break, and you made it happen. But that was a gamble you shouldn’t have taken.”

Rachel couldn’t find the right words to sum up impossible choices. What she could do was grab his hands with her own, and shove every ounce of those moments into his head. All of her fear, her panic… Forcing him to relive those moments when she knew that Wyatt would escape, and that he would commit a whole boatload of murder on his way out, and she was the only one who might be able to mitigate that damage.

No, not might. Would.

“Fuck gambling,” she said, as she felt her friend’s mind squirm beneath the onslaught. “I made a bad call, but the alternatives were worse. I did what I had to do. I’ve gone over the options a million times, and I’d do it again.

“And,” she added, as she gave him the image of Wyatt on the other side of a fence. A psychotic, a killer…and there to help. “Whatever else he is, Wyatt helped us once before. He’s here to help us now—he wasn’t lying, Josh! Do you want me to turn him away, or turn him in, before we know what comes next?”

She gasped as he pulled her into a hug. Fear, both remembered and all too recent, tried to come inside, and they held each other to keep it at bay.

“No, you’re right,” Josh said, all but whispering into her hair. “You’re absolutely right. They took one of our children, Penguin! Do whatever it takes to get her back.”

FOUR

Detective Matt Hill was waiting.

For who or what, Rachel couldn’t tell. She was on her way upstairs to find Jason when she caught a glimpse of his forest green core standing just inside those huge bronze front doors. She raced down the stairs again to find him staring down at the FBI agent running security. The FBI agent was on her com, chattering nervously about needing clearance for a Metropolitan Police detective who wasn’t saying much but also wasn’t leaving…

“Hey, Hill,” Rachel said, as she circled around the FBI agent. “Guess you heard. I’m so sorry.”

He cocked an eyebrow, and his conversational colors moved towards curious yellows.

Rachel’s own eyes widened. “Oh shit,” she hissed, and grabbed him by his arm to haul him aside.

He humored her: she didn’t have much chance of manhandling any member of the Hill clan. Matt Hill might have been nowhere near as broad as Mako, but he was just as tall and nearly as solid. She maneuvered him around the protesting FBI agent and deposited him in a nearby chair. “Okay,” she said, as she stood over him. “Who called you down here? Your cousin?”

Hill’s colors moved towards Mulcahy’s cerulean blues.

He was here officially, then. Good.

“Gotcha,” she said. “Promise you won’t freak out?”

“Peng—”

“Promise me!” Hill was standing again, the reds of alarm and panic beginning to surface. She pushed an index finger against his sternum until he returned to the chair. “Avery’s been abducted.”

His colors froze in place, white shock bursting within them. “No.”

“They took her and Hope Blackwell. Mulcahy’s told me to get our team together and start turning over rocks. Now. I bet the others are—”

One of the bronze doors opened with a bang. Raul Santino, his cobalt blue core nearly lost beneath layers of orange and red, blinked a few times to accustom his eyes to the dim light of OACET headquarters. Something in his jacket pocket began to beep, and he peered into the gloom. “Rachel?!”

“Here,” she called out to her partner.

Santino sprinted over to her and Hill, nearly knocking the FBI agent down on his way. The beeping grew louder; Rachel reached out to his phone and told it to shut the hell up, and the proximity alarm cut out mid-tone. It was replaced by the squeak of sneaker rubber on polished stone, followed by the semi-awkward half-hug shared by troubled men.

“Where’s Zia?” Rachel asked.

Santino and Hill broke apart. “I told her to stay at home,” Santino said, concerned reds and worried yellows growing more intense as he thought of his girlfriend. “It’s—”

“Perfect,” Rachel cut in. After her partner had fortified her own security system, he had then all but turned Zia’s house into a castle. Surrounded by a moat of lava. With an aerial defense grid of drones, and starving tigers roaming the grounds. “Best place for her. What do you know?”

“Nothing,” he said. “There are rumors that—”

Hill put a hand on Santino’s shoulder.

“Okay.” Rachel put both of hers up in surrender. “Hill just now found out about Avery. Let me run through what I know.”

It took her all of a minute. By the end, Santino had gone pale and Hill…

Hill was fiery, fiercely red.

Shit.

“Hey,” Rachel said, “don’t go getting any ideas.”

He glared down at her, the barbed tips of his anger beginning to point towards her.

“Be pissed at me all you want,” she told him. “Better that than a cop going off like some half-cocked bullshit action hero. Or do you think you can rescue your cousin’s kid all by your lonesome self?”

Hill’s fists clenched and unclenched a couple of times; his reds snapped and tangled with the blue of a police uniform. The blue won.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Zockinski?” Hill asked.

Good question. Rachel reached out to trace the cell signal of the fourth member of their small team. Detective Jacob Zockinski was halfway across town, his signal immersed within others she recognized, as well as hundreds she didn’t. Next to Zockinski’s signal was the silver-bright pulse of Phil Netz.

“He’s already at the parking garage where Hope and Avery got ganked,” she said. “Phil’s with him.

Washington D.C. being what it was, it took them nearly thirty minutes to travel ten miles, and that was with the police strobe light affixed to the top of Santino’s tiny hybrid.

None of them spoke, but Hill’s reds looked like the caldera of a volcano.

When they finally reached the garage, they found it crawling with cops. The majority were FBI, but a few other federal agencies and the local MPD had a strong presence. Enough of them knew the team from First District Station well enough to let them on the scene.

Rachel ignored the flashes of OACET green that popped up as she walked through the checkpoints, Santino and Hill following close behind. Those flashes of green were usually a warning to her, and anyone with OACET in their thoughts received her full attention. Today, considering the victims, the green was to be expected.

She led the men straight through the crowd, to the colors of autumn orange and bright silverlight that stood together on the edge of the active zone.

The source of the silverlight was Phil Netz. Barely a hand’s width taller than Rachel, the other Agent was pulsing with energy. As soon as she was close enough, he reached out to shake her hand. As they touched, his mood spilled into her: nervous, anxious…eager. Ready to fight.

Her adrenaline rose in response. The sounds of the crowd clarified, the edges of their colors crisp and sharp. The mingled scents from all of those people slammed into her like a sledgehammer, body odors and shampoo and food and a hundred other smells that went along with cars and cities.

She stepped away from Phil, reminding herself she couldn’t start punching strangers for the hell of it.

“News?” Santino asked.

Jacob Zockinski was just over forty, broad and brooding, with hair beginning to go to salt-and-pepper at the temples and a razor for a jawline. “Nothing to go on,” he said. “The FBI’s on Forensics. MPD’s out patrolling, interviewing witnesses, the usual.”

“Nothing?” Rachel wasn’t surprised. Anyone who could steal themselves a Hope Blackwell and survive had done plenty of prep work.

“Nothing,” Zockinski replied. “Or, at least they’ve told me nothing.”

Phil turned towards her. “Run the crowd?

“Guess we have to,” she sighed. “Boys, we’ll go high.”

“We’ll go low,” Santino said. The three men from the MPD each had a small carbon fiber case in their hands, and were fitting earbuds into their right ears. “Ping us when you’ve found something.”

“If,” Phil whispered as they moved into the shadows of the parking garage. “If we find something.”

Rachel cast a scan behind them, to where Hill was pacing angrily under dark, hateful reds, and didn’t reply.

Phil fell silent as they went deeper into the garage. He was somewhat out of his element: as an explosives expert, he was used to a certain type of crime scene, one which was typically soggy, smoky, or still on fire. Kidnappings were alien to him—rather than hunting for clues from what had been left behind, they instead sought to find what was had been taken. Still, he kept his back straight and his steps sure as he tailed her through the garage, his silverlight core visible beneath cloudy layers of professional blues and orange-yellow uncertainty.

Rachel took the stairs. Somewhere below, a man shouted at the FBI to let him get his car and go home.

“Another hour, if we’re really lucky,” she said to Phil, as the push of yellow curiosity that preceded a question reached her scans. “We probably won’t be, though. The media’s already down there.”

“Stop that,” he replied. “Or at least wait until I’ve asked the question.”

“Hey, it’s on my mind, too,” she said aloud, and pointed towards the streets four flights down. A crowd had gathered, mostly shoppers from the nearby mall who were beginning to demand answers. Further down the street, a van with a startling array of antennae was crawling through the checkpoints. “The clock’s ticking.”

They left the stairwell at the top floor of the garage, emerging into bright afternoon sunlight. Phil winced in mild red pain and adjusted his sunglasses. She picked a convenient flatbed truck and hopped into the back, then stretched out to get comfortable. Phil did the same, brushing aside a few leftover autumn leaves before settling down beside her.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Let me run some scans of my own,” she replied. “Then we’ll get funky.”

“Sure,” Phil said, and closed his eyes so he could do the same.

Up here, Rachel could take in everything. The sun was warm on her face as she flipped off the visual frequencies she used to see, and began to run the garage from the top down.

Structural elements came first. She probed the interlocking network of concrete and rebar which formed the shell of the garage, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Then, the utilities: she traced conduits and pipelines back to their sources. Basic police work, really, or basic for all OACET Agents working with law enforcement. Start by checking off the fundamentals to make sure there’s nothing hinky about them, and then proceed to those areas of the scene most likely to have been involved in the crime. Necessary, but it was also time-consuming, which is why she and Phil had retreated to the empty fourth floor for privacy.

Her scans found nothing unusual about the structure, so she moved on to the security system. It was a decent mid-range system with the usual collection of cameras and motion detectors. As she poked around the system’s digital storage unit, she felt Phil’s mind moving along with hers.

“Anything?” she asked. Phil was better with computers than she was; if there were hidden secrets within the system, Phil would be more likely to find them.

“No,” he said. Then: “Ready?”

She took a breath to steady herself, and then reached out to twine her fingers through Phil’s.

Her world exploded.

Rachel had introduced Phil to the finer points of scanning the physical environment, but that had been more than two years ago, when they were both new to cyborgery. Since then, their abilities had gone their separate ways, with Phil teaching himself how to recognize the trace components of bombs—chemicals, molecules, and the like—and Rachel continuing to focus on the little details that made up the strangeness of human nature.

Together, their scans could pry the fabric of the world apart.

Her version was full of color and textures and movement entwined into one; his was of sights, smells, and strands of music, each holding its own space in his mind. She reopened parts of her brain that were rarely used and let herself take in everything that existed below, and she stopped existing in the single body that housed the majority of what she knew as Rachel Peng.

Hive minds were…complicated.

Their shared link was mostly Rachel and Phil, but along the periphery of their joined minds were the others in the collective. The presence of the others was felt rather than seen or heard—if they had wanted, Rachel/Phil could have reached out and asked if others wanted to come along for the ride as they plunged themselves into their scans. They didn’t: adding more minds would just make a mess out of things. Skin contact kept them contained and focused.

Together, they knew what this mess of senses below meant, where reds and the heavy bass of OONCH OONCH OONCH had meaning. They understood that the repetitive beat of dance club music signified a null state in which no chemical traces stood out as significant, that the orangey-yellow that was the dominant color of the crowd meant confusion and uncertainty, with a large dose of the grays of boredom as they waited.

Their minds swept down and out, tracing the building, the people…

Is that Bryce Knudson?

They paused and determined that, yes, it was indeed Knudson’s raspberry core standing beside the FBI at the crime scene. The Homeland Security agent was more red than yellow, anger radiating from his body in whiplike threads. OACET green lay trapped within the reds, the vivid green all but choked beneath Knudson’s emotions. The music that came from his body in steady streaming pulses was reminiscent of mid-90s acid metal.

He doesn’t like us very much.

There was a flicker of guilt between them. The part of Rachel/Phil that was Rachel had come up against Knudson up on more than one occasion, and had won every time.

Not our fault, they reminded themselves. The same memory from two different perspectives: Rachel dodging Knudson’s fist, both from within her body and from Phil’s perspective on the ground a story below. A hand clenched: Rachel’s, stiff from scar tissues from where the man from Homeland had allowed her to cut herself to pieces on a broken window pane. God save us from those who think we’re unstoppable machines.

Down, down, into the crowd, to look for those who knew more than they should.

These were close scans, almost intimate. They kept themselves on the outside of clothing, scrutinizing every inch of what each person chose to show to the world. They found traces of blood and fluids, poorly-concealed weapons…one woman’s jeans were coated in a chemical agent they dismissed as household fertilizer; a man had apparently spilled gasoline all over his boots several days before.

Many of those gathered near the parking garage had handled firearms recently. Their hands fluoresced in a busy disco beat, an indicator of trace amounts of gunpowder. The singular being that was Rachel/Phil swept low, scouting, paying close attention to anyone whose hands blinked in a steady rhythm.

There!

A man in a suit, his emotions a nervous yellow straining against a professional blue. The suit was the right size and a decent cut, but he wore it with resentment, tugging on the tie between attempts to find a place to house his hands.

Those hands pounded in the yellow-white drumbeat of someone who had recently fired a gun, and within that professional blue was a melody of OACET green.

Curiouser and curiouser… Why would an innocent bystander have us on his mind?

They inspected him. He was chatting on a cell phone but didn’t have any other electronic devices. There was nothing in his pockets which gave off an RFID signal, and he carried an old automatic pistol in a well-worn shoulder holster.

But the damning factor was his shoes.

They were polished leather, shiny and new. So new that the soles hadn’t even been scratched up with more than a block or two of walking.

Somebody remembered the suit but forgot the shoes, they agreed, and then they reached out to Raul Santino’s earpiece.

Rachel’s partner in the MPD answered as quickly as if he was an Agent himself. “What have you got?” he asked, his voice muffled as he pretended to cough into his shoulder.

“White male, standing by a blue Volvo. Brown hair, brown eyes, gray pinstripe business suit.”

They had never asked how their mental voice sounded when they were joined. Not good, apparently; Santino paused, then rolled with it. “Anything we can use to bring him in?”

“No. He’s got a weapon, but he’s carrying concealed. You won’t be able to notice unless you’re lying on the ground, looking up under his jacket.”

“Damn,” their partner said. “Time to take a fall. Got it. Stand by.”

Rachel/Phil pulled back from Santino’s earpiece. They tracked him with their scans as he joined up with two other men. Santino was the one who didn’t look like either a cop or soldier. He was tall and lanky in jeans and a dark blue windbreaker, with dark hair swept back from his face and pinned behind his ears with a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. His body language changed, falling from confident into awkward in a single step.

Behind him was a man so obviously a detective that he could have been typecast in a procedural: Zockinski, moving like a bull through cattle.

And behind Zockinski was a black man built like a basketball star, who was carrying himself like a predator on the hunt—

Shit, they thought, as they spotted the reds seeping into Matt Hill’s conversational colors again. They reached out to Hill’s earpiece.

Beneath them, Mako’s cousin paused as he touched his ear. “Go.”

“Stand down, Hill.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Hill’s head snapped up towards the upper levels of the parking garage. “He’s got my niece,” he said, and Rachel/Phil shivered at the menace in his tone.

“Which is why you need to fall back. We’ll give him to you,” they promised. “We just have to take him down first. Legally. Or he walks, and Avery stays where she is until we catch another break.”

Hill paused. Again, they saw the red of his anger weigh itself against professional blue. There was more red this time—much more red, and moving like a tornado around him—but the blue slowly engulfed it.

“Thanks.”

Hill didn’t answer. They watched as he stalked off towards the road leading out of the perimeter to cover the most likely exit.

Three hundred feet away, Santino and Zockinski pinned the man in the gray suit between them.

They had the element of surprise on their side, and not much else. All they could hope for was that the man in the gray suit would spook and give them a valid reason to arrest him.

Or…

Rachel/Phil sighed to themselves as the suspect spotted Zockinski. His apprehensive orange deepened, and he began to slowly move away as he pretended there wasn’t a cop in plainclothes nearby.

That’s when Santino tripped and stumbled against the man in the suit.

It was a hard fall, and clumsy enough to look accidental. Santino went down and came up holding the hand that he had smacked against the barely-there lump on the man’s lower back.

“Sorry, dude!” Santino was flat on the ground but was smiling worriedly at the man in the gray suit, the stereotypical nerd desperately trying to make friends with the class bully before the ass-kicking began. He winced, rubbing one hand with the other to try and shake the pain out. “Whatcha got there? A metal spine? Like tripping into a rock!”

Out of instinct, the man’s eyes shot sideways towards Zockinski, and found the detective watching him.

Zockinski began moving towards the suspect in a big-shouldered cop’s walk, pushing through the crowd as if they were merely objects in his path.

Rachel/Phil held their breath.

The man in the suit was good. He wrestled his orange under control, and bent to help Santino stand.

Shit, they thought, but the part of them that had boundless faith in Santino’s cleverness added: Wait. Just wait.

Santino kicked the man’s legs out from under him.

It was quick. Even Rachel/Phil wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t seen that blue-lined streak of white that went with Santino’s trickier schemes. One soft-heeled sneaker pushed against the closest leather-soled shoe, and that took the man in the suit off-balance just long enough for Santino to pull him down.

Judo? Curiosity, brief, asked and answered in the same thought: Santino’s been sparring with Hope Blackwell.

The man in the suit didn’t hit the ground. He took a knee, then came up with a hard shove against Santino’s chest. It was nothing but a testosterone bump, but Santino cried out as he fell backwards and sprawled against the pavement.

“Hey!” Zockinski had nearly reached them. He pointed at the man in the suit. “You! Stop!”

The man broke and ran.

Rachel/Phil felt themselves jerk sideways as their bodies tried to follow their mind. On the ground, the man cut across the parking lot, straight towards an opening between the police vehicles. There was an embankment on the other side, and a highway behind shallow hurricane fencing beyond that. They saw what was about to happen…the mystery man would go over the fence, into a car, and would disappear—

Matt Hill stepped out from behind a news van and shot out one long arm.

The man in the business suit didn’t see Hill until it was too late. There was a brief flash of yellow-white surprise, and then he was on the ground, hands pressed to his throat as he tried to rediscover the ancient art of breathing.

Hill bent down and seized the man by his lapels, the spectrum of anger and fury covering him in a burning red halo.

“Don’t.”

“Fuck off,” Hill growled. The man in the suit cringed.

“You need another lecture?”

They had stalled him long enough. Zockinski arrived, full of pointed questions about concealed weapons and gun permits. The questions came so fast and hard that the man in the suit had admitted to carrying before he remembered that silence was the better part of a legal defense, and was bundled into the back of Zockinski’s unmarked sedan in handcuffs.

As Zockinski and Hill drove towards First District Station, Rachel/Phil did one last low sweep. The song of the crowd had changed with the commotion: the onerous beat of the dance club was still present, but there was a new strain of electric guitar shooting through this beat. Adrenaline, they knew, the hormones heavier in the air thanks to the slow generation of cortisol and the arrest of a stranger.

No new threats, they decided, and their joined minds flew back up to the roof.

Separation came in stages.

They were too deeply entwined to simply break apart from each other’s psyches. A puddle of motor oil was their doorway to their own bodies. The stain on the pavement of the parking deck was an electric melody of rainbows moving in a slick jazz melody. Motion and tempo began to separate; the feeling of a shoe skidding across oil came apart from the percussive smell of petroleum. A spark of unique thought came through—this spill is a chemical hazard—and the mind which thought of spilled oil as merely an unattractive blotch pushed itself away from the mind which had been trained to think of errant chemicals as the seeds of destruction.

Then, their joined selves broke apart, and they found themselves in their own skins.

Reorientation involved lots of wiggling, an unconscious survey to make sure that all of the right bits were still in their remembered order. Bodies were strange. They stretched and moved and meant everything until you went out-of-body, and then they meant nothing.

(It was more likely that bodies meant everything, as entwined deep links were an anomaly within the collective. It was more likely you’d accidentally trip over someone else’s mind and find yourself in two places at once, or ten, or a hundred. Limbs and knees that were intimately yours, with scars you remembered collecting in childhood or an ass you’ve wiped each day of your sentient life, suddenly becoming as much a part of the collective as the mind itself. What a nightmare.)

Rachel stretched. Her right elbow throbbed; the injury wasn’t hers, and she shook out her arms until the pain went away.

“Overextended it while boxing,” Phil explained, tucking his own arms around himself protectively as he settled himself back in his own body.

“Getting old is going to suck,” Rachel grumbled aloud as she snapped their link. She hopped down from the bed of the truck, and began brushing the dirt from her pants.

“Yeah,” Phil said. He followed her down, favoring his bad arm. “All the problems of aging, and we won’t even need to complain about them.”

“We’ll still complain,” Rachel said, taking point and leading them back down into the dark recesses of the parking garage. “But it’ll be by shoving our sciatica into each other’s heads.”

“Or Alzheimer’s,” he said.

“Jesus!”

“You haven’t thought about that? If someone in the collective gets dementia or worse… There are enough of us so the odds are really good it’ll happen.”

Dementia within a hivemind… Rachel had to stop and lean against a nearby sedan. “Fucking ray of sunshine, Phil. That’s what you are.”

“Yeah, well,” Phil shrugged and kept walking, moving his right arm gingerly to test its range. “We’re still young. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll cure old age by the time we get there.”

She wasn’t too sure about that. OACET Agents tended to live fast. No one had died since the collective had been fully activated, but Rachel figured it was only a matter of time before the good-looking corpses began to pile up.

Knock on wood.

They backtracked through the parking garage. The relative peace of the upper levels gave way to the chaos of the crime scene, and the two of them plunged into the mess.

“Want to see if they’ve learned anything new?” Phil asked, nodding towards the local and federal crime scene techs.

Rachel paused and checked their colors: yellow-orange frustration was beginning to blur into gray stress, with none of the complex colors of hope within them. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

“Nope,” she replied. “They know less than we do. Plus we’ve got a suspect to question, and they don’t.”

“Point.”

They kept their heads down and crossed to a staircase safely away from the yellow crime scene tape. Rachel’s attention was on the grounds below, so she was just as surprised as Bryce Knudson when she opened the door and walked straight into him.

The Homeland Security agent recoiled from her, but as he leapt backwards, he started grinning. His mouth was in no way involved: the thick line of smug pink split Knudson’s conversational colors like a smile.

“Hi, Bryce!” She waved at him with her left hand like an eager child. He saw the mass of scar tissue and his colors flinched towards red shame. She felt no qualms whatsoever about poking him. Twice a day, she had to massage lotion into that hand and run it through a physical therapy program, just to maintain flexibility. In her opinion, Knudson could deal with some reminders of the consequences of being an asshole.

“Peng,” he said with a nod, and tried to push past her.

“And Netz,” she said, cementing herself in his way. “Agent Netz. You’ve worked with him about a half-dozen times, I think? He’s with the MPD’s Bomb Unit? Has probably saved you guys from big booming painful death?”

Knudson’s colors were already bright with OACET green, but they took on some of the greens of guilt and Phil’s silverlight. “Yes,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

Liar, she thought, even before she spotted the dimples across his shoulders. She stood to the side and grinned back at him.

Knudson stared at her as his smug pink grew until it swallowed the rest of his conversational colors, and then the door slammed closed between them.

FIVE

Rachel loved interrogations.

She especially loved running them with Hill. The detective saved up a week’s worth of words and honed them to arrowheads, then used them to pierce his suspects until they were all but bleeding to death on the floor. But today, Hill was pacing on the other side of the one-way glass, his murderous reds whipping towards the man in the too-new suit.

Instead of Hill, it was Santino who sat beside her in the interrogation room, the two of them watching the man across the metal table squirm.

“Really?” Rachel asked him. “You’re a Staff Sergeant? What unit?”

The man glared at her with deep-set eyes. He could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties, depending on how well life had treated him; Rachel guessed he was much closer to twenty.

“John Smith, Staff Sergeant, eight-four-eight.”

“This is hilarious,” she said to Santino. “He couldn’t come up with anything better than John Smith?”

“Could be true,” Santino said, as he nodded kindly to the man. “There’re a lot of John Smiths out there. I heard there’s even a John Smith convention.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Google it.”

She cocked her head to the side and stared off into space as they let the man fidget in his suit. He had removed his tie and opened the buttons on his collar, showing off an impressive bruise where Hill had clotheslined him.

“In case you’re wondering,” she told him, “we’re trying this new thing in interrogations. We’re all friendly-like nowadays.”

Santino nodded. “The Obama administration sponsored an investigation into police interrogations, what works, what doesn’t. Turns out that when we treat you like a buddy, you’re more likely to talk.”

“Ideally, we should be holding this conversation in a neutral location, like a coffee shop or a hotel room,” she said. “It’s been shown that police stations aren’t the best place to build a friendly rapport. But we’ve got to follow protocol.”

“Takes protocol some time to catch up to the science.”

“So true.”

“People hate change.”

“Preaching to the cyborg choir, brother.”

“Amen.”

The suspect’s conversational colors twisted in on themselves in the grays and oranges of stress and annoyance.

They were lying, of course. Not about the research, but about having to keep the man in the suit in that particular interrogation room. The cops at the MPD loved that room. Two years before, Jonathan Glazer had picked his handcuffs and escaped from that very room, leaving a trail of smoke and flash bombs behind him. The cops had decided the damage made a lovely backdrop for their routine harassment of criminals. The linoleum floor was puckered from the grenades, charred streaks of soot marred the paint around the doorway, and, if you knew where to look for it, there was a dent in the metal tabletop the exact size of Jason’s forehead.

Rachel drummed her fingernails against that dent, glancing from the man in the suit to the tabletop as if to say Your Head Goes Here.

“Would some coffee help?” Santino asked him. “Some studies have shown that you’re more likely to trust us if you’re holding a hot beverage.”

“Oh, no no no,” Rachel cut in. “I’m a little too angry at this guy. Let’s not give him something that I can throw at his face.”

“We’ve got no proof he’s part of the kidnappings,” Santino said. “So what if he’s giving us nothing but name, rank, and serial number? He could just be an antiestablishment nut.”

“Well, I do my best to be all righteous law and order.”

“Chung-chung.”

“Exactly. So while I’m happy to question our alleged Mr. Smith, I’d rather not push the limits of my tolerance. After all,” she continued, as her eyes began to bore into the suspect’s, “I don’t know what I’ll do—this is the first time anyone’s kidnapped my niece.”

The man’s colors blanched, then flashed shock-white as someone pounded on the other side of the one-way mirror with a large fist.

“Sorry. De facto niece,” she said. “But Avery Hill is Detective Hill’s cousin’s child. I still don’t know what that makes them, exactly, except that Hill is very likely to beat the everlovin’ shit out of you if you don’t start giving us answers.”

Santino cleared his throat.

“If we let him,” she amended. “Which we won’t. Because we’re all friends here.”

Hill pounded on the mirror again.

“We’re just thinking of your safety,” Santino said.

The man in the suit took a deep breath. “John Smith, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “Eight-four-eight.”

Rachel stood up so quickly that the man in the suit jumped in his chair. She leaned forward and gave him a big toothy grin before she moved to the door.

“Ah…” Zockinski was on the other side, one hand raised as if to knock. Rachel grabbed a file from his other hand before she slammed the door on him. She dropped the file in front of Santino, and resumed smiling at the man in the suit.

“Ah, Mister John Smith?” Santino said, skimming through the papers with the perfection of a professional scholar. “Your prints came back. Says here your real name is Damian Brady. Also known as Lobo, last seen with the Sugar Camp Militia in Pennsylvania.

“FBI’s got a hell of a file on you,” he added. “They’re sending it over. Until then, we know that you’re mushrooming us.”

“Keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit,” Rachel clarified, then shouted: “It’s a joke!”

The man in the suit jumped again, ever so slightly.

“This is a good time to start talking, Mr. Brady,” Rachel said.

“Maybe he only answers to his alias,” Santino said. “You could start calling him Lobo.”

“No, I can’t. Not ethically.”

Santino stood and left the room.

Rachel began to whistle. She was terrible at whistling. Santino had told her on more than one occasion that he wanted to stuff her inside a tea kettle to see if she could learn anything. Today, she was working on a nautical medley, with lots of high, shrill notes.

Santino’s phone number flashed through her mind. She opened the connection, still whistling.

“Rachel?” Her partner’s voice wasn’t muffled, as it had been back at the parking garage. It was as clear as if they had been joined in a link, with none of the emotions that came with contact with another Agent.

“Go.”

“How’s he look?”

“We’re not going to break him. He’s fighting stress and anxiety, but he’s got those under control.”

“Yeah, Hill says he’s jumpy but locked down.”

She cranked up the volume on her whistled sea chanty, and watched AKA: Lobo begin to turn green. “Does the FBI want him?”

“No. Hell no! The guy Zockinski talked to? He said the Sugar Camp Militia is one of those sovereign citizen organizations. You arrest one of their members, they bury you in claims and litigation. He recommended holding Lobo as long as possible, but that we should avoid actually arresting him.”

“Too late for that,” Rachel said. She had never gone up against a suspect who subscribed to the common law doctrine before, but she had known she’d trip over one of them eventually. It was too easy to use the legal system against itself. The legal system was a bureaucratic labyrinth of procedural items that needed to be just so! in order to function. Sovereign citizens walked up to this labyrinth and dumped enough paperwork into it to drown anyone unlucky enough to be inside at the time. “He was carrying concealed and tried to flee the scene.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told the guy at the FBI. He said we should turn him loose before the militia’s lawyer gets involved. Said the lawyer’s a real shark.”

“They have a lawyer?” Rachel’s sea chanty hit four false notes in a row; the man in the suit began to grind his teeth. “Militias don’t have lawyers. How the hell did that happen?”

“They might not respect the law, but they have no problem using it to their advantage,” Santino said. “Think of it as a DoS attack on the legal system.”

“DoS?”

There was a long pause. “Are you sure you’re a cyborg?”

“Right!” Rachel said aloud. Blue relief appeared in Lobo’s conversational colors as the whistling ceased. “New deal, dude,” she said. “We’re going to hold you for forty-eight hours. If nothing else comes up, we’ll let you go.”

The suspect glared at her, then nodded.

“Anything else?” she asked.

The man in the suit shook his head.

“You’re okay with this? With sitting on your ass in a police station? During what I assume is a very exciting time for your militia buddies?”

The man sat motionless.

“Anyone you want to call?” she asked, her hands knotting into fists. “A person who might be able to help get you out of here, perhaps someone in a legal capacity…?”

Nothing.

“Lawyer, motherfucker, do you want one?!”

This time, when she lunged forward, the man jumped away hard enough to fall out of his chair. The door opened with a crash: Zockinski grabbed Rachel around the waist and hauled her out of the room, with Rachel thrashing and shouting obscenities at the suspect the entire time.

“That was fun,” she said, after the door was firmly shut and Zockinski had tipped her onto her feet. “I never get to play the crazy cop.”

“I’ll take another run at him in a few minutes,” he said. “Why’d you go at him so hard?”

Rachel shrugged. “He’s not going to break,” she said, “or call that lawyer. But if he really is a sovereign citizen, I don’t want anybody claiming I didn’t try to cram a lawyer straight up his butt.”

They entered the observation room. It was dimly lit, with a couple of comfy chairs and a twin to the metal table in the other room, minus the head-shaped dent and the rings welded to its face to hold the handcuffs. Hill was leaning against the one-way mirror, both palms pressed flat against the glass as if trying to mentally compel the man on the other side to talk. Beside him, Santino was on his phone, and Phil had the thousand-yard stare of an Agent talking through a link.

“We need to find that lawyer,” Rachel said.

Santino held up his phone, one hand covering the receiver. “Already on it,” he whispered. “The FBI’s getting Lobo’s recent history for me.”

“Got it,” Phil said, his eyes snapping back to the interrogation room. The cardinal red that belonged to Joie Young, one of the Agents on loan to the FBI, was beginning to fade from his conversational colors. “Joie says the lawyer’s moved around a lot recently. Started in Pennsylvania, but moved down to Maryland this past year. I’m tracking his mobile phone number, and it puts him in Maryland right now.”

“It’s a short drive between Washington D.C. and Maryland,” Zockinski said.

“Yeah,” Rachel replied. “If I were the lawyer for a militia involved in something shady, I’d like to be within shouting distance when the cops come knocking.”

“Yeah,” Santino said. “Now, if we could…”

He trailed off.

“Can anybody think of a legal reason to track that lawyer’s phone?” Zockinski asked.

“Nope,” Rachel said. She felt the finger-light touch as Phil tried to open a direct link, and she shook him off. “Don’t,” she said aloud. “I can’t know that phone number—I’ve run too many traces and might run his without meaning to.”

“I’ve already run it,” Phil said.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not the Agent who’ll get dragged into court over this.”

Hill banged a fist on the glass so hard that it shook in its frame.

Beside him, Santino’s surface colors turned yellow-white with excitement.

“What?” she asked him.

“He came in with a phone, right?” Santino replied.

“Shit! Yes!”

Santino ran down to Intake to grab the phone, and Rachel started the long, tedious process of unlocking it.

Worst part of the job, she thought as she reached out to her golfing buddy. Access to Lobo’s phone would have taken her all of a thought, but she was carrying the judicial system around her neck. At least today there was less of the usual hullabaloo that came with getting a warrant: Judge Edwards had heard about the kidnapping.

“What can I do?” he asked.

“I need to crack a suspect’s phone,” she told the judge. “I’ll be honest, we don’t have anything that isn’t circumstantial—he’s a member of a militia, and the abduction was carried out by men who were wearing militia gear.”

“What did you bring him in on?”

“Carrying concealed at the parking garage and trying to flee the scene.”

“That’s slim. Can you make a case for resisting arrest?”

“Nope,” she replied, remembering Hill’s long arm across the suspect’s throat. “He didn’t get much opportunity to resist.”

“Try to make this easy for me next time…” Rachel heard the sounds of a keyboard from the judge’s end of their connection. “All right. He’s got an established history with militias?”

“FBI says yes.”

“Since there’s a child involved, I can plead urgency, but you’ll be limited to call histories and contact files on this go-around. No photos, no private files unless you get something more. Send me the details so I can write up the warrant,” Edwards said. “It’s Sunday, so I’ll fax a copy to you. Just have someone drop by my house and pick up the original file.

“Oh,” he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him, and wasn’t the reason he had answered her call on the first ring. “Should we cancel Wednesday’s game?”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “But maybe ditch the other members of the foursome? I’ve got the feeling someone will want to catch a round with me between now and then.”

“Gotcha,” the judge said. Then, because Edwards was a sharp cookie and the two of them spent entire afternoons wandering across well-manicured fairways while talking about every little thing, he asked: “Anything else I should know?”

“Well…”

“Rachel?”

“The militia might be a sovereign citizen organization.”

“What?! Those guys have it in for judges! Son of a bi—”

Rachel hung up on him.

Sovereign citizens. She had heard them described as ants with guns. Alone, a sovereign citizen was one person who had decided to live outside of the law. Tax evasion was their siren song, with members of the movement aligning themselves with the idea that the U.S. government was illegal, and therefore any taxation was likewise illegal.

Not much of a threat, really. Yes, the movement tended to collect racists, misogynists, and anti-Semites like lint on tape, and yes, there had been the infrequent hyper-violent ant who took up his private arsenal and blew away those who stood in his way. Terry Nichols had been a sovereign citizen, after all. But dangerous lone sovereign citizens tended to be outside the norm: violent actions summoned cops, and cops had guns, and escalation played hell with everybody’s plans for the weekend. (Besides, who didn’t secretly sympathize with those who had the stones to tell the IRS to go fuck itself?) But, together, sovereign citizens could pool their resources, and woe to the idiot who kicked their anthill.

As she went to the nearest printer to pick up the judge’s warrant, Rachel had the feeling that most of her immediate future was going to be spent stomping around in anthills.

By the time she returned to the observation room, Santino was back with the suspect’s phone. Rachel made everyone wait while she futzed around with her vision and struggled through the dense language of Edwards’ warrant.

“All good?” Santino asked when she dropped it on the wooden table.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her eyes in reflex. “All the Ts are dotted and the Is are crossed—”

Zockinski reached for the warrant. She shot him a Look, but slid it across the table for him to double check. Once done, the five of them gathered around the table.

The phone lay in one of the ubiquitous small plastic Tupperware boxes that First MPD kept on hand. An evidence bag rested beside it, ready for the phone’s official indoctrination into the judicial system. It was an iPhone, shiny and new, a recent model fresh from the production line.

“Remind me to join a militia,” Rachel muttered. Her own phone, used for emergencies when she wanted to stay out of the link, was nearly three years old and scratched to hell from swimming in the sea of trash at the bottom of her purse. She thumbed the button, and when the passcode screen popped up, she told the phone to accept her print as its owner’s.

She grinned as the phone unlocked itself. There was always some minor enjoyment when a locked piece of technology broke open for her. Sidestepping passwords had been her first job at the MPD: for months, she and Santino had done nothing but manage warrants and open password-protected electronics. Small reminders helped keep life in perspective.

Once unlocked, she turned the phone over to Santino. Her partner’s thumb moved as he scrolled through its call history.

“Who was he talking to when we busted him?” Zockinski asked.

“Wasn’t the lawyer. At least, not the number registered to the lawyer,” Santino said. Then, to Rachel, “Run it for us?”

“Yup.” She did, but… “Whoa.”

She opened a link with Phil. “Can you double-check this number?”

“Sure…” he replied, with the press of an unformed question underneath his thoughts. This vanished as his conversational colors changed to a complicated mess of oranges, with stray colors spinning off as he found a new puzzle. There was some royal purple, but none of the red she associated with pride; something had impressed him but he wasn’t happy about it.

“I’m not crazy?” she asked.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m still following the signal. It’s…bouncing?”

“Yeah.” Rachel nodded. “I’ve tracked it all over Maryland and Delaware. I can’t—”

Hill pounded on the window again.

“Sorry,” she said automatically. “We can’t track it. It’s got a…thing…happening....”

Phil hopped in. “We can’t get a fix on it. Its GPS is bouncing all over the place.”

“What happens if you call it?” Zockinski asked.

“The signal will probably settle down, but the guy on the other end will know something’s happened to his buddy,” Santino answered. “This is a one-shot deal.”

Zockinski looked from Rachel to Phil, his colors an uncertain orange with the sickly greens and yellows of someone who wants to be polite but needs to ask an impolite question.

“We’ll have someone else at OACET look at it,” she said, and Zockinski’s colors changed to blue relief.

“Too much time,” Hill said from the other side of the room. “That’ll take…”

She was too focused on the phone, and didn’t see Hill’s colors snap into the hard stony blues of resolution until it was too late. The detective turned and snatched the phone in its Tupperware box away from them on his way out of the room.

The other men tried to rush him; Rachel held them back. The whipping fury of reds that had defined Hill for the past two hours was gone. Clear bright white purpose, shining like a lance and aimed straight at the man at the suit, was coming through his usual professional blues.

They watched through the one-way mirror as Hill—calmly, so calmly—entered the interrogation room.

He didn’t bother to sit. Instead, he stood, arms crossed, and stared at the man in the suit until Lobo’s colors began to twist and run.

Then, Hill began to talk.

“I got burned pretty bad a few years back,” he said, as he slid out of his jacket. He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt to show Lobo the pale wrinkled skin where the flashbang grenades had hit him during Wyatt’s escape. “Needed some surgery, couple of skin grafts. Hurt like hell.

“Not as bad as when I served in Afghanistan,” he continued. He stood and put his left leg on the steel chair. He tugged on his pants cuff, and the man in the suit blanched white at the sight of the holes that dotted Hill’s shin and calf muscle. “Could have been worse, but it was bad enough.”

Hill smoothed down his pants again, then sat. “You’ve got my cousin’s kid,” he said. “That’s a whole different kind of pain for me. It hurts. I can’t push it down, I can’t take drugs to shut it off. It’s there in my head and my heart, like I’ve been shot and left to die.

“If it’s this bad for me,” he said, leaning forward, “I don’t know what it’s like for my cousin. His kid is gone. He doesn’t know where, or why, or if he’s gonna get her back. But you do.”

Hill tapped the Tupperware box on the table. “The Agents say that whoever’s on the other end of this phone? They know how to duck a trace. All the usual shit we do when a kid goes missing? We can’t do it. Not here.

“There’s pain, and then there’s pain.” He rolled down his shirt sleeves, the white scars disappearing beneath the cloth. “You know this—it’s why you took her. To get results. So, you’ve got them. We’ll help you out, okay? Just…help us get started. Point us in the right direction. Give us something that’ll help us get her back. You don’t have to give up the person on the other end of that phone, but you can tell us what they want. Maybe we can give it to them, maybe we can’t, but we won’t know unless you give us something.

“You’ve got to,” he said. “’cause if it’s this bad for me? This pain of not knowing what comes next? I can’t imagine what it’s like for a kid who’s not even three years old.”

Rachel knew that was as close to begging as Hill would ever come in his entire lifetime. She also knew it couldn’t work, not with a member of a militia. Threats worked. Coercion worked. Reason and empathy didn’t—men who branded themselves with stupid-ass nicknames such as “Lobo” couldn’t be reached by pleas for basic humanity.

And yet…

Well, fuck me sideways, she thought to herself, as the man in the suit’s colors slowly turned a sympathetic wine red. What did Hill see in this guy that I missed?

“It’s actually working?”

Rachel jumped: she had forgotten she was still linked with Phil. “Yeah,” she replied. “The guy’s starting to…”

Starting to…what? Not crack. Not cave. Just…

He’s thinking about Hill, she realized. Hill’s become a real person to him.

The man in the suit nodded, very slowly.

“Can I ask you where she is?”

The man in the suit didn’t reply. To Rachel, his conversational colors showed strands of a careful, cautious orange-yellow, each strand working to turn Hill’s core of forest green around and around in his head.

“Why OACET?” Hill tried a different approach. “Is that why you took Hope Blackwell?”

“We didn’t take anybody.” A moment later, Lobo added, “But if Blackwell went with us willingly, Mulcahy’d be more… He’d listen. Help us out.”

“Help you do what?”

The man in the suit sat, silent.

Hill wasn’t done with the OACET angle. “Why would Mulcahy help you?”

Lobo stared at Hill, not fully understanding the question. “Guy’s a hero.”

On the other side of the glass, there was a rush of emotion between Rachel and Phil. Confusion (Mulcahy’s a hero to these assholes?) turned to clarity (Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.), followed by teeth-grinding frustration. There had been rumors that Mulcahy was the new patron saint of wingnuts, but OACET’s research team had said they should focus on how that played in Washington rather than profiling how those outside the political sphere might respond.

“Fuck,” whispered Rachel.

It did make sense, in a crazed roundabout way. Rather than participate in an ongoing cover-up, Mulcahy had taken OACET public. He had said the world had the right to know that the U.S. government had funded a weapons-grade cybernetics program. Going public had made OACET some powerful enemies, yes, but now, two years after the fact, they had more allies than enemies. Most politicians now admitted that what Mulcahy had done was better than if the world had learned about cyborgs who could control everything from refrigerators to nuclear weapons from a WikiLeaks article.

If you were antigovernment, if you wanted to lionize a powerful man who had successfully stood against a system you saw as inherently flawed, you could do worse than Patrick Mulcahy.

“You think he’ll help you?” Hill asked the man in the suit.

“Can’t,” Lobo shook his head. “Not publicly. Got his image to protect.”

“But if his wife and godchild are on the line…”

“They’re not. They went with us—”

“Willingly. Yes.” Hill’s bright patience was beginning to dull around its edges. “If they’re with you, you think he’ll use that as an excuse to start fighting for you.”

Lobo started smiling. “We know how the game is played,” he said. “All about image. All about how strong you are. He’s too good at it, too careful. Helping us won’t help his image. Not like taking down a Senator. We get on his radar, let him know we’re here, give him a good reason to fight for us? Then he’ll help.”

On the other side of the glass, Phil tapped Rachel on her shoulder, then nodded towards her clenched fists. Let it go, she reminded herself as she shook out her fingers. Assholes be assholes.

“You did this for him?” Hill asked. “Took Blackwell and the girl to…protect Mulcahy?”

Lobo was starting to glow with red pride. “Think I’m done talkin’,” he said. “But now you know, that girl of yours is as safe as if she was in her own bed. Nobody’ll do nothin’ to hurt her, promise, even if they wanted to.”

“Why would they want to?” The detective’s voice was quiet.

“You know, the kid’s a—” The man in the suit remembered where he was and who he was talking to just in time, but the word he didn’t say still hung in the air between them. “She’s black,” he said instead.

—Rachel was sure the whole world had stopped, waiting, wondering if Hill would lash out and choke the man in the suit to death—

“Thank you for telling me all of this,” Hill said, ever so politely. He gathered up the Tupperware box and left the room.

Hill didn’t stop at the observation room. He dropped the box outside the door and kept going, moving as fast as he could without running, moving down the corridor and…away.

“Rachel?” Zockinski asked.

“On it,” she sighed, and broke her link with Phil as she left the room.

The fresh green of a forest in springtime was out of place with the reds raging across it, and became her beacon through the halls of First District Station. Once she had figured out where Hill was going, she stopped at the nearest vending machine and grabbed two cans of soda before she resumed the chase.

She found him in his usual spot on the roof. There was a corner between two ventilation shafts and a wall, a three-sided hole that Hill sometimes used as a retreat when he was exhausted of having to deal with other people. From within the nook, Hill had a clear shot of the stairwell door leading to the roof and an eagle’s-eye view of the street below.

Rachel had never asked what Hill had done when he was stationed in Afghanistan. Before she had found his nest, it had never come up; after she had found it, she hadn’t needed to ask.

She came out of the stairwell, shaking one of the soda cans as vigorously as she could.

Hill pointed at the other can. She lobbed it at him, slow and easy.

“Watch this. Saw it on YouTube.” Rachel began tapping her own can with her fingernails. She turned the can around, tapping its metal skin the entire time, then sat it down on the roof and pulled the tab.

Soda bubbled out and ran across the roof in tiny streams.

Hill smiled, a little purple humor edging through the reds.

“Shut up,” she said. “Mister Wizard said it would work.”

She carefully picked up the can to avoid the stickiness, and moved to stand just outside Hill’s nest. The two of them watched the traffic below: him, the cars and pedestrians in the street; her, the half-organized muddle of those who worked within First District Station.

“They think Mulcahy took down Senator Hanlon,” he said.

“Let ’em,” she said. It didn’t sting, Mulcahy getting the credit for something she had nearly broken her neck to accomplish. Nope, it didn’t sting at all.

“No.” Hill shook his head. “It’s important to them, to think Mulcahy’s fighting the system.”

“Yeah. At least we know this means Hope and Avery are safe,” she said. “They want to stay on Mulcahy’s good side.”

The strange two-toned blues and blacks of Hope Blackwell’s core appeared in Hill’s surface colors, weighed against orange uncertainty.

“Hell if I know,” Rachel replied. “Hope’s hard to predict. She might fight back—she might sit quietly and wait for rescue. She won’t do anything to endanger Avery, though.”

“Not intentionally.”

Rachel shrugged.

He glared at her.

“No, I’m not worried,” she told him. “OACET’s got ways to talk to Hope, even if she doesn’t have her cell phone. Whatever she does, it won’t spill over on Avery. Promise.”

Hill went back to watching the street below.

“Guess the next step is learning what they want Mulcahy to do,” she said, almost idly. “Got to be something big. If they’re sovereign citizens, they probably want him to step in and solve a legal problem of theirs.”

Hill’s colors took on a pigheaded iron gray with red gilding its edges; Rachel filed that unfamiliar combination under: “I will go downstairs and resume being a detective when I am good and ready and no longer a danger to others, thank you.”

“Nope,” she told him. “This is a big-boy-pants day. Time to buckle up and ride.”

An ember of red anger caught fire, just a little bit, before Hill stomped it out in a surge of professional blue. He stood and stretched in the manner of all athletes, his body coming fully on-line and readying itself for action.

They were most of the way to their office when Hill finally said, “Scary as fuck.”

Rachel double-checked his conversational colors. The reds of sadness and anger and sympathy, the grays of hopelessness and depression, the oranges and yellows of anxiety and an inability to comprehend… All of these were bundled into an enormous tight knot that rode on his shoulders and chest like a weight, and trailed behind him until it dissipated into colorless energy.

“I can’t read that,” she admitted. “There’s too much going on in your head right now.”

Hill didn’t reply. It wasn’t until they reached their office door that he said, “They think they’re doing the right thing.”

“Most people do.”

“Think they believe it?”

“Like, committed to the cause?” She paused, one hand on the cool metal of their office door. “Probably. This wasn’t an impulse kidnapping.”

Hill’s grays grew deeper.

“I need some words, man. I’m not a real psychic.”

“Martyrs,” he said, as he pushed past her. “Scary as fuck.”

SIX

Sometimes, when Rachel was feeling especially grumpy, she’d kick herself about how she never realized how Chief Sturtevant had set her up. Set all four of them up, actually—it had seemed a normal course of events when she had begun working with Santino, and then later had picked up Zockinski and Hill, but now she knew that Sturtevant had been steering them all together. Why else would he have given Santino a private office large enough to house four people comfortably?

Not to mention a pinball game.

Their office at First District Station changed with their mood. Santino kept it full of plants, all of them thriving despite Rachel’s best efforts to thin them out by leaving the windows open during January. Two recliners were pointed towards an oversized television hanging on the east wall, a small beer fridge serving double duty as a side table between them. The four of them had agreed on long plastic folding tables instead of desks: these were pushed against the bank of windows to the south, their steel legs squeaking at the hinges from the weight of their computers and peripherals, with Santino’s and Hill’s books crammed into milk crate shelving below.

The wall across from the television was kept bare. Half of it was covered in corkboard, the other half painted in glossy white, with a wire rack holding a prism of dry-erase markers drilled into the cement blocks at waist height.

That wall got a good, solid glare from Rachel as she stomped into the room. Santino and Zockinski had already tacked up pictures of Hope Blackwell and Avery Hill on one side of the corkboard, with Damian Brady (AKA: “Lobo” and no, she would never stop thinking of that as the dumbest alias, why in the world would someone choose—) on the other. Santino was typing away at his computer, running searches as quickly as he could. Zockinski was on the phone.

Phil was playing pinball.

Phil had been to their office on many occasions, but the pinball game was a recent addition. He was shooting metal balls at plastic monkeys, racking up points with each flick of the flippers. She watched the flashes of kinetic energy burst from the machine before she reached out to him through a link.

He allowed the connection, but took one hand from the pinball paddles to wave her off. “Busy,” he whispered.

There were others in his head with them; Phil was catching up with the home office. She felt Josh in there, along with a distracted Mako, but pulled herself back before she disrupted their conversation. Phil would catch her up once he was done.

She headed over to Santino. Her partner nodded to her, but his fingers didn’t pause as they banged away at his fluorescent-green keyboard. He was murder on computer peripherals, and anything less than a keyboard designed for professional-level video gamers tended to break within a month.

He was also much better with online searches than she’d ever be. Or Phil. Or Hill, or Jason, or…

Or anyone.

“Whatcha got?” she asked as she dropped into the desk chair beside him.

“What do you know about sovereign citizens?” A few extra browser tabs joined those open on his monitors as he chased rabbits through their digital warrens.

“Magical thinking meets white supremacy,” she said.

“Why?”

“They’re wingnuts who’ve convinced themselves that there are multiple layers of government,” Rachel replied. “There’s the surface government, which is laws and taxes and whatever, and then there’s the real government beneath it. Most of their interactions with government are done to try and get access to that shadow government. They think if they use the right pen colors, or write their name in capital letters, or… If they discover the right combination of any one of a billion small details, they can join the secret society of real America.”

“Wrong,” he replied.

“Bullshit. OACET knows its fringe groups.”

“Not very well, apparently,” he said with a sad grin and a nod at the whiteboard. She winced as she marked up a point for her partner in the air between them.

“No, seriously,” he said, stretching. “That’s the stuff that’s cute and wacky enough to get played up in the press. And yeah, there are some sovereign citizens who’re invested in that myth. But if one person files the same lawsuit several hundred times, making tiny changes to each file, there’re practical repercussions.”

“Right,” Rachel said, drumming her fingernails on the plastic tabletop. “The fog of bureaucracy.”

“Exactly. For them, it’s not about gaming the system. It’s about forcing the system to shut down. And since they stand behind their claims that using multicolored pens is a legitimate political belief, any resistance from law enforcement or the courts can be framed as persecution. These guys can turn any single interaction with the government into an endless paperwork nightmare. The best part? Some of it is completely legal. Not all of it, but enough of it so they can say they’re doing their best to comply within their understanding of the law.”

“Legal system logic bombs,” she said. “Like South Korea airdropping anti-North Korea propaganda that’s been printed on the back of photos of Dear Leader. Must destroy the propaganda! Can’t destroy the propaganda! That’s really pretty brilliant.”

“Yeah. Honestly, I’m surprised more people aren’t doing it,” he said. “Seems like any defense lawyer worth a damn would advise their clients to claim to be secessionists.”

“…um…”

“Well, any defense lawyer with zero ethics. And I haven’t cross-referenced sovereign citizenship against the professional code of conduct for lawyers in Maryland, Delaware, and D.C., so there might be prohibitions against—”

“What have you found?” she asked quickly. Santino’s rabbits sometimes simply plummeted headlong into endless space, and could take her with them if she wasn’t careful.

“Lobo’s militia?” He turned the monitor towards her. A series of digitalized mugshots were displayed, with relevant case files attached to each one. “Splinter group from a larger one in rural Pennsylvania. They relocated to Delaware a couple of months ago. Seem to be relatively recent converts to sovereign citizenship, too: before then, they were typical antigovernment isolationists. They started displaying sovereign citizen traits after they relocated.”

“Militias don’t relocate,” she said. “They’re almost pathologically territorial.”

“These guys did,” Santino said. “Got themselves a lawyer and everything.”

She threw up her hands. “Militias. Don’t. Have. Lawyers!”

“These guys do.” He tapped the monitor. “Most of the casework they’ve filed has to do with property ownership. There are thousands of files… I’m still working to find the core case that spawned them.”

Rachel blinked.

Santino’s face went blank. She knew that expression: if she had been running emotions, his conversational colors would have glazed over with crystalline irritation. “What I’m looking for is the one case that started—”

“No, no, I got that,” she said, and turned away so she could hop back into Phil’s link.

“Guys,” she said by way of greeting. “We’re looking for one man. He’ll be white, educated, between the ages of thirty to fifty, and is currently involved in a property dispute somewhere in Maryland, Delaware, or the D.C. area.”

“Hello to you, too, Rachel,” said Josh, bemusement crossing from him to Phil to her. “Explain?”

“Phil told you about the militia angle? Good. This militia got religion a few months back, and the new pastor took his converts south. We’re looking for that pastor. And there’s a cause out there, too, a catalyst which caused that pastor to go looking for a ready-made flock.”

“Or a general who needed an army.”

“I’m analogizing off the cuff here, Phil. But yeah, looks like their leader has a legal problem, and he’s gotten astonishingly creative in solving it.”

“What’s the rationale behind thinking this is all because of a land dispute?” Josh asked. He felt distracted: Rachel pinged his GPS and found him standing in the same room as Mulcahy, as well as several cell phone signals that came from a block of numbers used by the FBI. Carrying on two active conversations at once would do that to most Agents. Josh was normally exceptionally good at it, but today was anything but normal.

“Santino says most of the documents filed by these militia members are in some way related to property ownership. Who wants to bet that if we find that property, we find Hope and Avery?”

“No bet,” Josh said. “Good work.”

“Rachel—” Mako began, as a wash of emotions came through their link.

“Let’s get them back first, big guy,” Rachel told him, and broke away from them before he could feel how his gratitude had brought her close to tears. She reached out through her implant to caress the steel-reinforced cement support posts running beneath her office. Concrete and cement were her touchstones, and these support posts were so familiar that she wondered if her scans might eventually wear them down, like water across stone.

Once grounded, she stood and went over to the whiteboard.

The others stopped to watch: since Rachel could read text written with a dry-erase marker without too much effort, most of their best work was done on windows and whiteboards. Her marker squeaked across the board as she drew out the timeline of known events, beginning with, “Leader Arrives at Pennsylvania Militia,” and ending with, “Current Location Unknown”.

“What am I missing?” she asked Santino.

You think a single person’s responsible?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Probably a white male under fifty, with more education than the average militia member. It helps to know how the game is played before you jump in and grab the ball.”

Zockinski came up beside her and tapped on the first point on the timeline. “There’s a story here,” he said. “How did he find that militia, and how did he manage to split it? Those guys are tight. Brothers to the end.”

Rachel scowled. “Let’s try and get lucky with court records before we decide we’ve got to drive out to Pennsylvania. God, interviewing fundamentalists? That’d be a horror.”

“Rachel.”

Josh’s presence was quick and strong, the link much tighter than the communal link they had just shared. She glanced over at Phil to see if Josh was talking to him, too… No. Phil was still head-down in the pinball game, and she couldn’t feel him ride along. Apparently this was a private call.

“Josh?” There was anger on his end of the link. “What’s happened?”

“Hope’s regained consciousness.”

“Where is she?”

“Maryland. An old warehouse near the ocean.” GPS coordinates suddenly appeared in her mind; she scribbled these on the whiteboard and pointed at Santino. Her partner nodded as his gaming keyboard began to clatter and sing.

“Safe?” She had to ask. Josh was too angry for something to not have gone wrong…

“Hope is groggy but otherwise okay. We’re still searching for Avery—they’ve separated them.”

“Fuck.”

“And they’ve called us. They don’t want ransom. They want Mulcahy to… Listen, I’m on my way over to pick you up. There’s a news report that you should watch first. It’ll save time. Ping me as soon as it’s done.”

“Sure,” Rachel agreed, and he vanished from her mind.

She snapped her fingers a couple of times until the men were looking at her, and then pointed towards the television. It was an older model, and burst on in a cascade of noise and light before the signal stabilized. She flipped channels until she landed on the local news. An Indian woman with shoulder-length hair was talking into an old-fashioned microphone, the channel’s call sign stamped onto a plastic square on its side.

“—Blackwell, wife of OACET Assistant Director Patrick Mulcahy, has allegedly been kidnapped, along with a two-year-old child who is reported to be the daughter of two OACET Agents.”

The woman stepped to one side. The camera zoomed in on a gigantic factory, a small wedge of ocean behind it, and all of it beginning to glow pink from the sunset. The building was in the middle stages of chronic decay: the structure appeared to be solid, but most of the windows had been replaced by blue film, and whatever paint had been applied to the exterior was peeling into the wind.

“How did the media learn where they are before OACET?” Zockinski asked, as he ran a hand beneath the minifridge.

Rachel shot him a Look.

Zockinski wasn’t mollified. “Shoulda told us, then,” he said, as he shook lint balls from his personal notepad. “I thought they were still missing.”

“I can find the three of you whenever I need to,” Rachel said. “You better believe that as long as she’s awake to tell him where she is, Mulcahy can find his wife.”

The sound of knuckles cracking; she looked towards Hill. “Hope just woke up,” she added quickly. “They’re still looking for Avery.”

On screen, the reporter was walking towards the factory. “We’ve been granted an exclusive interview with the man who claims to be responsible for these alleged abductions—”

“Exclusive?” Santino said quietly, as the white noise from several competing news crews reached the reporter’s microphone. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“—and he’s promised to address these rumors. Stay with us for more—”

Rachel muted the reporter as the channel cut to commercial. “Fuck,” she said, as she fell into one of the natty armchairs. “Fuck fuck fuuuuuck.”

Phil poked the back of her head, and she glanced up at him.

“What?” she asked.

“I asked you a question.” Curiosity came through their link. “You’re not running emotions?”

“Oh. No, I don’t do that when I’m in the office. The guys think it’s invasive.”

“They’re getting a guided tour of part of the kidnappers’ lair,” she explained aloud. “Which means… I don’t know what it means. Nothing good.”

“Could be overconfidence,” Zockinski said.

“Which’s better?” she asked. “An overconfident kidnapper or a paranoid one?”

“Paranoid,” Hill said.

“Agreed.” Santino nodded. “A paranoid kidnapper knows things will go wrong. An overconfident one thinks they won’t, and when they do…”

He held off on finishing that thought, but there was the quiet shriek of metal on linoleum as Hill leaned too heavily on a filing cabinet.

Rachel waved the television back to normal volume as the dancing slices of pizza faded to black and were replaced by a shot of the abandoned factory. The reporter had resumed walking towards the main doors, repeating her earlier comments about the kidnapping and an exclusive interview.

“We’re about to meet the man responsible for the events of this morning. While OACET has confirmed that Hope Blackwell and a minor in her care were abducted from a parking garage, the man claiming responsibility has said that no abductions have occurred—”

“Anyone else starting to hate parking garages?” Rachel asked aloud. Three of the men raised their hands; Hill didn’t move.

On the screen, the reporter had reached a loading dock. Chattering away in the near-meaningless babble of time fill, she walked up a readied ramp and into the belly of the factory. Her cameraman was good at his job. The scene was straight out of a movie, crystal-clear and panoramic. A factory, old and rusty, full of gears and gigantic machines that Rachel couldn’t put a name to. Dusty light streamed down through windows covered in blue film, giving the scene an unearthly blue glow, and spray paint covered every inch of the walls within arm’s reach.

“No trash,” she murmured aloud, noticing the generally clean floors. Santino nodded; they had been in enough abandoned buildings to know that most of them collected teenagers, junkies, and their castoffs.

The camera pulled back to focus on a youngish man with perfect teeth. He was wearing military camouflage, well-worn and patched, but clean. The man smiled for the camera, a wistful smile; Rachel thought he looked like Clark Gable in his more outdoorsy roles.

“I’m Jeremy Nicholson, and welcome to my home,” he said. “This factory has been in my family for generations. If you’re over thirty and you grew up on the East Coast, you’ve probably used metals that were smelted in this very plant.”

He turned slightly, and began to walk towards the center of the factory. The camera followed. “The government forced us to close in 1986,” he said, placing a paternal hand on a monstrous piece of equipment. “They claimed we hadn’t done enough to meet environmental regulations. They lied; my father had complied with every code on the books. I’ll make a long story short and say that if you look up a man named Arthur Bennett, you’ll find that he was an inspector who went to jail in the late ’90s for accepting bribes.”

Hill stood and walked over to the white board, and the names Jeremy Nicholson and Arthur Bennett went up in green marker.

“Is that true?” Zockinski asked the room at large.

Santino, fingers still clattering away at his keyboard, nodded. “Bennett’s name turns up in multiple news stories about bribery and corruption. Looks like some of the good folks in the regional EPA were living large for a couple of decades before they got caught.”

On the screen, Nicholson resumed his slow tour of his family’s factory. “My father refused to pay Bennett, and tried to go through legal channels to keep the factory open and get Bennett investigated for corruption. The system failed him. Twice. By the time Bennett was convicted of bribery, my father had spent most of our family fortune just trying to hold on to the factory.

“Ironically…” Nicholson paused for effect before he continued. “My father wasn’t able to reopen the factory because environmental codes had changed during the time it was closed. It would have cost millions to bring the facility up-to-date.”

He pressed on, one arm sweeping out to take in the factory. “He filed a civil suit against Maryland. He filed another against Bennett. My father lost those cases. But through it all, he paid his taxes on this factory, and never gave up the dream of reopening it.”

Nicholson’s winsome movie-star smile fell. “Sadly, my father passed away before he could realize his dream. I’ve followed in his footsteps, trying to secure finances to invest in the factory, to invest in the community!

“I was making progress, but a couple of years ago, the banks began turning me away. It took some digging, but I found that True Ally, a local real estate company, had been snatching up every piece of property in the neighborhood. I approached them and offered to sell them the factory, thinking I could rebuild my family’s legacy in a new location.

“No.” Nicholson shook his head. “Instead of negotiating, they laughed me out of their office. I didn’t know why, until the notices came… The government is demolishing the property and reclaiming the land for development.”

“To be fair, I was offered money,” Nicholson said. “But pennies on the dollar, and not nearly enough to rebuild.”

“True,” Santino said, reading documents faster than either Rachel or Phil could have located them. “Or true enough… I think if I dig deeper, some of this won’t hold up. There are time stamps on some of these that look a little hinky—”

Hill shushed him as Nicholson moved closer to the camera.

“Tell me, friends, what was I supposed to do? My father and I followed the law—all of the laws!—that were supposed to protect us. I’m a lawyer myself; I went to school to study property law, to find some way to preserve this valuable part of the local community.”

“And we just found Lobo’s lawyer,” Rachel murmured. “That was easy.”

On screen, Nicholson pressed a hand to his face, as if it hurt to talk. “Nothing has worked,” he said. “We are days away from demolition, and my land has been seized under the guise of eminent domain. They aren’t building a highway or a power plant—they’re claiming my land has been abandoned and are selling my property to True Ally.

“So,” Nicholson said, holding out his hand. The camera turned, taking in a large number of men dressed in various shades of urban camouflage. They were armed, each of them carrying a minimum of two weapons. Some of them appeared to be wearing body cameras. “Here we are. My friends and I have occupied my own building ahead of demolition, peacefully, to ask the government to reopen my family’s case. I have followed all legal channels to the fullest extent of the law; the least I expect is the government to do the same.

“I need to emphasize that this occupation is not a military movement. It is a peaceful protest. Every person on site is here willingly, and no one will be harmed. In fact, we met some people today who were glad to join our cause…”

The men stepped to the side, and there was Hope Blackwell.

She was furious. There was no doubt about that; she glared into the camera with the burning hatred of someone who was ready to tear the world apart with her mind alone. But her hands weren’t tied and she was standing on her own two feet.

“We came voluntarily,” Hope said, rolling her eyes and sighing like a teenager caught in a lie. “Because of course we came voluntarily, because this man none of us has ever met before is just so freakin’ amazing that he won us to his cause as soon as we met him, because there’s nobody holding a gun to—”

A little girl’s whimpered cry came from somewhere off-camera.

Hope shut her eyes. When she opened them, she was somewhat calmer. “We are in no way restrained,” she said, her voice still as sharp as razors. “These men are occupying this structure as part of their ability to exercise their constitutional rights. They are willing to negotiate.”

“Thank you, Dr. Blackwell,” Nicholson said, draping an arm over the woman’s shoulders companionably. Phil sucked in his breath; Rachel’s skin went so cold that she thought her heart had seized. It was only after Hope allowed herself to be steered away that they let themselves relax.

The reporter’s face filled the screen and she resumed chattering, dragging out a summary of what everyone had just heard to prologue her time. Interview, over.

“Okay,” Rachel said, thoughts racing. “Okay. This isn’t a hostage situation.” Hill’s chin came up, and she hastily clarified. “Not a normal hostage situation, anyhow. Unless there’s proof they’re under duress—”

“Bullshit!” Phil snapped. “Blackwell was coerced. That speech was so obviously fake that she might as well have been waving the cue cards around.”

“I know that, you know that, but it’s probably not enough to stand up in court,” Santino said. “Not without additional evidence.”

“Video of the abductions?” Zockinski asked.

“The kidnappers had shut off the cameras in the parking garage,” Santino said. “Everything we’ve got came from Carlota’s perspective, and there haven’t been enough court cases involving testimony from OACET Agents to set precedent.”

“They weren’t the only ones abducted,” Zockinski said. “What about the other hostages?”

“Jason’s working that angle,” Phil said. “He says that all of the footage they’ve located so far shows a van pull up to a person on the street, and that person gets into the back a moment later.”

“At gunpoint?” Santino asked.

“Probably, but unless we can get a clean view of the gun, there’s no proof.” Phil shrugged. “Jason’s running the videos. If there’s anything there, he’ll find it.”

“So what have we got?” Zockinski asked.

Hill rapped the butt of the dry-erase marker on the painted side of the wall. Jeremy Nicholson and Arthur Bennett had been joined by the words True Ally (real estate company).

“And the Sugar Camp Militia,” Rachel said. “And that shark of a lawyer the FBI warned us about, except I’m betting Nicholson is playing that part, too. Do we have his name yet?”

“Not yet,” Santino said. “But you’re probably right.”

The printer in the corner began to spit out high-resolution photographs. Rachel flipped frequencies until she saw Nicholson’s face come rolling off the tray, followed by those of men she recognized from the militia in the background of the interview.

“Jason’s work,” Phil said, as he moved to gather up the prints. “He’s made stills of the men from the factory. He’s running facial recognition through the usual databases.”

“Good,” Zockinski said, and stood to help Phil tack the printouts to the corkboard.

Busywork, Rachel thought, but couldn’t quite bring herself to join them. She was sure that this same wall was being duplicated in at least ten different law enforcement offices throughout the city. We need to work on something new. Something different. Some angle no one else would think to check out—

“Rachel? I’m outside.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed aloud, as Josh’s voice broke into her mind. “Guys, I’ve got to go. I’ll call… Phil?”

“Go, go,” Phil said. “Tell us what you learn.”

She grabbed her purse and jacket, and ran out of the room.

There was another heavy bang! as the metal door to their office flew open a second time. Rachel reactivated the scans she used for the emotional frequencies and saw Hill’s forest green core pounding down the hall behind her, angry reds twisting within the oranges of confusion and the grays of anxiety.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she told him.

“Find out.”

She reminded herself that, no, this was certainly not the best time to punch Hill.

“Why do you want to punch Hill?”

“Because I want to punch everybody today, and he made a good point,” she told Josh. “Tell me what’s happened. Where are we going?”

“You saw the broadcast?” He was anxious: more than his emotions were spilling over into their link. She felt a steering wheel gripped by hands that were too large to be her own.

“Yeah.”

“Jeremy Nicholson called OACET right before that news report aired,” Josh said. “They wanted Mulcahy to come and meet with them in person, but they settled for me. I’ve been allowed to bring one other Agent. You’re it.”

There were stairs: Rachel pulled herself away from Josh until she and Hill reached the bottom. Stairs and too-tight mental links made for twisted ankles. It was as good a time as any to catch Hill up on Nicholson’s phone call to OACET.

“I’m coming,” he said once she had finished.

“Yeah, I got that,” she said. “But you need to stay in the car. Josh is negotiating this mess, not you. Not me, either—I’m just his portable mind reader.”

Hill’s reds knotted around themselves once more.

Rachel stopped dead in her tracks and spun, putting the flat of her hand against Hill’s chest. “Listen to me,” she said. “If this was a normal situation? You could get Avery back yourself, no doubt in my mind.

“But this isn’t normal,” she continued. “Nicholson’s got something planned, and we need to learn what it is. They’re not going to give us anything today—not even one of the other hostages. It’s too soon. This is a fact-finding mission, not a rescue mission. Got it?”

He made as if to push past her. Rachel set her heels and pushed back, staring him down as hard as she could.

Hill had no problem meeting her eyes.

The moment before she toppled backwards down the stairs, he relented. The wall of reds that was towering over her like a tidal wave eased into itself.

She turned away first, and led them outside and into the fading daylight.

SEVEN

“Stay in the car,” Rachel said.

Hill’s knuckles were tight as he gripped the handle of his car door, dark skin going pale from the strain. He was violent reds, layer upon layer of them, each distinct hue whipping around and giving him the appearance of being wreathed in flame.

“I mean it,” she told him. “You come in with us, this’ll be nothing but a bad joke. A Jew, a Chinese woman, and a black man walk into a militia standoff? Josh is already going to be dancing in there. All I’m going to do is keep my mouth shut and read the crowd. Unless you’ve suddenly discovered you’ve had an implant all along, you’ll just be an extra liability.”

Hill’s conversational colors twisted around the handle.

“Thanks,” Rachel said as he mentally bound himself to the car. “Um… If you hear gunshots…”