Traffic in the Quantico area was always a bear. The roads leading into the city were in a perpetual state of construction, and the roads out hadn’t been expanded to allow for congestion. Quantico was a bottleneck of bumpers as far as the eye could see; Rachel threw her scans down the highway and found that the traffic was nearly at a standstill for the next half-mile.

Santino glanced at her in curious yellows.

“We’re screwed,” she said. “Totally screwed. Stop-and-go for the rest of forever.”

“There’s no way you’re getting back in time for that meeting.”

“They don’t need me,” she said. “The only reason Josh wanted me along on that factory run was to watch his back. If Nicholson is coming to the Batcave, they’ll be safe as…as a…”

She gave up and flipped off visuals again.

“How’s the head?” Santino asked.

“Not getting better,” she admitted.

He sighed, and Rachel felt the car begin to turn. She turned on visuals to find Santino moving off of the main road and into the parking lot of a local sandwich shop.

“This isn’t going to get us to Quantico any faster,” she said, as five cars went to war over the space they had just created.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Eating hadn’t been a priority since Wyatt had shown up, although Josh had crammed a heaping plate of spaghetti in her last night to help offset any energy loss from the link. “This morning, I guess? I had a bagel.”

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared inside the restaurant. He returned fifteen minutes later with drinks and two greasy paper bags. Before she could stop herself, Rachel had grabbed the nearest one and was tearing into the first of three sandwiches.

“That’s what I thought,” Santino said, slightly smug in pinks.

“Shut up,” she muttered, as she dove into the second sandwich.

“How much energy do you think you burned last night?”

“No idea,” she said. Chicken salad? Usually not her favorite, but this one tasted like it had honey and spices mixed in. “It was exhausting, I know that.”

“You know the brain burns more energy than any other organ in the body?”

“You’ve mentioned,” she said. The third sandwich was a meatball sub, the bread and meat nearly lost under a slab of toasted provolone. “Mako has mentioned. Jenny Davis has mentioned. All of you, probably a hundred million times or more. Damn, this is good!”

“You know what housekeeping is?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Especially since my roommate has all but moved out because he’s shacking up with his girlfriend, and now I’m stuck doing all of the chores.”

“Yeah, well…” He winced in orange uncertainty and green guilt, but those were offset against a pale soft blue she didn’t recognize. “In neuroscience, housekeeping is what they call energy expenditure designed to maintain non-signaling functions—”

She held up a hand.

An opaque glaze filmed over his conversational colors. “You’ve heard of synapses, right? How the brain uses electric impulses to activate them?”

Rachel nodded as she fumbled with her straw. Mountain Dew? A king-sized dose of caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup sounded like just what a very shady doctor would order.

“Well,” her partner continued. “When a synapse is involved, that’s a signaling function. Those are responsible for the majority of energy consumed by the brain. Housekeeping tasks are what the brain spends the rest of that energy on—they’re processes that the brain uses to clean up after itself. You remember me telling you about the research which is used to show that there are higher energy requirements after mental exercises?”

“Yup.” She could practically hear the rabbit scream as it fell to its death down the tangent-hole. “But I ate last night, right after the link. Josh carb-loaded me.”

“You loaded on the front end. Has your headache been getting worse all day?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. That smug pink was getting fierce.

“I’m betting your brain has a lot of housekeeping to do after last night,” he said. “That type of link probably needed a lot of cleanup. Josh made sure you replaced your reserves to recover from the active signaling functions, but housekeeping has been sucking you dry all day. How’s your head now?”

“Still hurts,” she said. She craned her neck to test it. “But getting better.”

The smug pinks overtook him, as he pulled back out into traffic.

Rachel pointed at him. “No more experiments.”

“Sure,” he said, as his colors rolled over themselves in a saucy wink.

Eight miles and ninety minutes later, they showed their credentials at the FBI’s first security checkpoint. The FBI Laboratory at Quantico was one of the most sophisticated buildings she’d ever visited. She was familiar with the general layout; Jason worked at the Consolidated Forensics Lab, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police had borrowed heavily from the FBI’s design when they constructed their new state-of-the-art forensics department. While older, the Quantico building was similar in that it was steel, glass, and concrete, and above all, clean. The leather soles of Rachel’s boots squeaked on the smooth composite floors as they walked to the first security checkpoint.

Elissa Smith was waiting for them. The FBI ballistics specialist had a core the color of a purple orchid, and was bouncing on her toes in eagerness. “Agent Peng!” she shouted, waving. “Officer Santino! C’mon down!”

Rachel waved back. Smith was small and almost flighty, except when she was handling weapons. Put any type of firearm in her hands, and she turned from a bubble-headed soccer mom into a calm, steady-handed professional with deadly aim. Rachel imagined her kids won every Bring Your Parents to School Day, especially if their mother showed up with visual aids. Say, oh, a bazooka.

“Come on, come on,” Smith said. “Hey, Agent Peng, while you’re here—”

“I can’t,” Rachel said, forestalling the inevitable. She liked Smith, but the woman had an inexhaustible interest in ballistics science, and that made Rachel and her shooting abilities a treasure in Smith’s eyes. Every time Rachel came down to Quantico, Smith took her out to a different firing range and put her through a dozen tests on different weapons. “I want to get back to the city after this. The kidnappers are coming to OACET headquarters later today. I should be there if I can.”

“Oh.” Smith’s bright yellow anticipation of an afternoon at the firing range blurred in grays. “Yes. Yes, of course. Let’s get going, then? Coffee first? Coffee later?”

Smith’s prattling moved off to the edges of Rachel’s consciousness as she handed her credentials over to the guard at the second checkpoint. His conversational colors sharpened to a point as he checked her ID, traces of cautious yellow and uncertain oranges appearing around OACET green.

Caution? Maybe. This wariness was new.

No. Not new, her subconscious reminded her, as it stretched and rolled over, ready to resume an already full day of nagging. It used to be like this all of the time.

As Santino moved to take her place with the guard, Rachel scanned the others in the main entrance hall. Most were going about their business, treating her and Santino as part of the background.

Others, a very few others, were watching her. They all wore that same cautious yellow.

Stupid woman, you thought things had changed.

She told her subconscious to shut up, and kept walking.

The Firearms-Toolmarks Unit was kept in the basement. As they descended via the usual chain of stairs and elevators, Rachel noticed familiar faces here and there, old acquaintances from past cases. When they spotted her, OACET green bloomed, followed by that same cloud of yellows and oranges. One man, caught off-guard as he turned a corner and nearly bumped into her, froze in shock before turning yellow and walking quickly in the opposite direction.

Santino had noticed. He bent low and whispered, “What’s going on?”

She moved her scans up and down the hall to be sure.

Yup.

She leaned towards her partner and whispered back: “They’re scared of me.”

 

 

 

TWELVE

 

AKA: Lobo’s handgun was simple.

She kept trying to think of a better description, but “simple” worked. Not cheap, not complex, just a decent all-purpose gun from the NORINCO factory in China.

“We’re seeing more and more NORINCOs over here,” Smith said, her colors darting back and forth as she searched through the FBI’s firearms database. “They’ve been trying to break into the international market. Decent weapon. Inexpensive. This model is used by the People’s Liberation Army as their designated sidearm. Ever fired one?”

“Hmm?” Rachel shook her head and broke away from her deep scan. “Yeah. In Afghanistan.”

“Right, right, Afghanistan is the global clearinghouse of weapons,” Smith said, tapping on her tablet’s miniaturized keypad. “Used to be. Syria is catching up. Caught up, I suppose. 2012 was a good year for Syrian arms dealers. Not so good for the rest of us… Ah, found it! You’re sure of the serial?”

“Yeah.” Rachel was having a hard time following Smith’s train of thought. The woman’s conversational colors bounced from topic to topic faster than she could fire them off verbally. Smith’s emotions didn’t shift too much—everything stayed within the hues of professional blues—but the yellows and whites of intense concentration moved around like a laser light show across a dark navy sky.

“This is it.” Smith flipped the tablet around and tried to pass it down to her.

“I’m good. I’ll read it from over here,” Rachel said. Her headache was back. Grabbing the serial numbers from AKA: Lobo’s handgun had been relatively easy, but she had gone through every pore of the gun to make sure she hadn’t missed any evidence. Her scans had come up with black dirt, a different kind of black dirt, granite dust, gun oil, and yet another kind of black dirt, for all the good it did them. She rested her head on the cool steel tabletop of Smith’s office workstation and began reading. Her head came up a moment later. “The PLA reported this gun as stolen?”

“Yes, along with a larger shipment of firearms,” Smith said. “Much larger. Several thousand guns. All makes and models from NORINCO. What was in those crates?”

“Not several thousand guns,” Rachel replied. She had told Smith about scanning the crates. (Had scanning those crates been legal? Santino had argued that anyone knowledgeable about Agents should assume that an ‘in plain sight’ standard applied to hidden objects as well as objects left in the open. He felt that since Nicholson and his men had obviously done their research on OACET, they should have expected Josh and Rachel to poke around in the figurative medicine cabinet. She’d have to talk to Judge Edwards at their golf game tomorrow to see if this would fly in court, or whether it should be introduced at all since very few other Agents had her capacity for scanning; doing so might unnecessarily complicate the already-complicated discussion of Agents and the legal system with the assumption that what one could do, they all could do, and damn them all for differences. For the time being, she had cloaked it in the chaos of the kidnapping. Smith had accepted that excuse at face value, and Rachel had to resort to her old fallback of crossing her fingers and hoping that everything she did wouldn’t spin around to bite her in the ass.)

There was a knock on the door to Smith’s lab. Rachel tossed her scans over her shoulder to see Santino let himself in, three bottles of soda stacked on top of each other like a precarious tower. His core of deep cobalt blue was covered in a shifting layer of gritty gray sand.

Rachel raised an eyebrow; her partner mouthed “Later,” and passed out the drinks.

“What have we learned?” he asked.

“Another arrow pointing straight towards some level of Chinese involvement,” Rachel said, poking the handle of the NORINCO pistol.

“How convenient,” Santino said, as he nudged aside a few papers on the lab table and hopped up beside her.

“Occam’s razor,” she reminded him.

“Occam needs an update,” he said. “If the simplest answer gets blamed for everything, anything even slightly complex gets a free pass. It’s why we’ve been so busy.”

“Apparently…” Rachel sighed. “…Lobo’s gun was part of a large theft of Chinese weaponry. Since when is major weapons trafficking considered slightly complex?”

“If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that a conspiracy is just a bunch of assholes with access to resources,” Santino said.

Rachel twisted open the cap on her soda and didn’t bother to answer him.

“All right. Try this. Which makes more sense? That Nicholson went to China and became indoctrinated in a militia mentality that’s unique to the United States, or that he picked up the sovereign citizen ideology first and went over there to start laying the groundwork for a false trail? Or, hell, maybe he just took a vacation.”

Smith, who had been watching this exchange like a cat following butterflies in the garden, added a slight, “Um?”

“Yes?” Santino said, rather sharply.

“Sovereign citizens? We’re—the FBI, I mean—we’ve classified them as domestic terrorists. To be honest? Nicholson scares us. The movement doesn’t have many charismatic leaders. If he manages to unite them? He gets an army of about a hundred thousand soldiers. And most of them? Gun owners who hate us.”

Smith’s voice moved up and down as she went from question to statement, and her hands fidgeted around her tablet. That, along with the threads of uncertain oranges that kept tearing themselves away from the whole cloth of her conversational colors, drew Rachel’s attention from the handgun in front of her.

“Nicholson’s just a rich kid,” she said to the ballistics specialist. “I’ve seen him. He’s got no experience in leading an army.”

“He’ll find someone who does,” Smith said quietly, the oranges beginning to wrap around her in futile self-comfort. She ran her hands along the pieces of a disassembled assault rifle lying across her work station, then began to put it back together. A metallic shink shink shink echoed around Smith’s office as she slid each piece of the weapon into its place. “The smart ones always do.”

“Yeah,” Santino said. “They know they can’t handle everything on their own, so they delegate responsibility like any good manager. If Nicholson has a good second-in-command, he’ll do his job and let his second manage everything else.”

(Rachel’s subconscious took an older memory out of storage and blew off the dust. An OACET Administration meeting in the War Room, Josh and Mulcahy planning strategy for the coming week, Mare telling Mulcahy that he needed to lay off and let her and Josh manage more of the administrivia of day-to-day operations…)

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “I can see that. But, guns and hair triggers for cops aside, why does that make him a threat?”

Smith’s hands were flying, with shink shink shink chasing each piece of the weapon home.

“The smart ones might start out leading militias,” Santino said. “If they’re lucky, they end up leading countries.”

Smith nodded as she completed her task, and set the assault rifle on the table. “We’re not saying that will happen,” she admitted. “Armed rebellions can be put down. But, you know, it’s not that we’ll win, but that we’ll have to fight. Right?”

(Her subconscious whispered again, not a memory this time, but a threat about martyrs and blood in the streets.)

“Gotcha,” Rachel said. She stood and placed AKA: Lobo’s gun back in its evidence bag. “Thanks,” she told Smith.

“Good luck,” Smith said, one hand resting on the assault rifle, her colors now set in steady blues.

Smith’s office opened into the main floor of the Firearms-Toolmark Unit. The hallway was wide and painted in industrial beiges, with the intermittent muffled sounds of gunshots coming from behind the thick steel doors.

“So, what happened?” she asked Santino.

“This way,” he said, and set out down the hall.

He led her back the way they had come. At the top of a stairwell, a man with a core of pea green was waiting.

“Hey, Campbell!” Rachel brightened.

Special Agent Campbell flushed in reds and the same gritty gray stress that she had seen in Santino. “Peng,” he said. “How you doing?

“Busy. We’ve got to get on the road,” she admitted. “Nicholson’s coming to OACET headquarters this afternoon and I want to be there.”

“I’ll walk you out,” he said, his colors flashing OACET green.

Rachel glanced at Santino. Her partner nodded.

“Yay, intrigue,” she muttered, as she and Santino followed Campbell through the door.

She had worked with Campbell on several occasions. The FBI Special Agent was one of the best crime scene technicians she had ever met. He and his team specialized in homicides; she assumed this was why he hadn’t been called in on the Nicholson case at the parking garage.

Santino picked up his pace. With his long legs, he put a few lengths between them, all the while pretending to be immersed in his phone. Campbell waited until he and Rachel were halfway to the parking lot before he stopped talking about his kid’s softball team. “We’ve been waiting for someone like Nicholson to come along,” he said quietly. “You guys have to wrap this up, and fast.”

“We’re trying,” she promised. “What have you got?”

He glanced behind them, as if looking for shadowy men with microphones. Rachel sighed and tried to direct him over to a nearby bench.

“Listen, I can’t—”

“Cyborg,” she reminded him, as she began to weave her shield around them. “I won’t mess with any snooping devices, promise, but they won’t be able to hear us either.”

“That’s no good,” he said. “Not for me, not here. That’d be as bad as if you tampered with them.”

“All right,” she said, and let her shield drop. “Can I ask a question?”

Campbell’s conversational colors wrapped around himself, like armor. It was a reflexive gesture she associated with interrogations, and it was disconcerting to see it happen in someone she considered a casual friend.

“Sorry,” she said, hands up and empty. “Forget I asked.”

“It’s weird when you do that, Peng,” he said, as a good-humored purple appeared beside an uncertain orange.

“Telepathy’s a timesaver, but I can’t read minds. Not really.” She turned and started walking towards Santino. “Call me if you decide you want to talk.”

“Fine,” Campbell sighed, going just a little red around his edges as he hurried to catch up. “We’re all wondering when you’re going to take over.”

Rachel stopped. “What?”

“Not you,” he clarified. “OACET. Well, maybe you, unless there’s someone else at OACET who’d be better at running a criminal investigation.”

“No, that’d probably be me,” she admitted. “Trust me, this is the first I’ve heard about taking over. Do you know something I don’t?”

Campbell’s colors shied away from her Southwestern turquoise.

“Hey, I’m not lying,” she said, as she turned to face the FBI agent. “Why would I kick you guys out?”

“No, you’d keep us around,” Campbell said. “We’d just be…” He shrugged, and gestured towards the FBI Laboratory behind them. “I guess we’d be yours.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked. It was a gentle tap to his equilibrium; she waited to see how he’d spin.

His surface colors weaved in and out of themselves, OACET green warring against professional blues and the burnished gold of a special agent’s shield, but he pulled away from answering.

“Campbell, listen,” she said. “There’s no reason why OACET would want to bundle you into our assets. The FBI is the best there is when it comes to kidnappings—it’s not like we could tell you how to improve on what you’re already doing.”

“You say that now,” Campbell replied. “But what happens if we haven’t made progress by this time next week? Your charter—”

“Oh shit,” Rachel groaned, as she finally understood the wariness in the FBI agents that she had passed in the halls of the Laboratory. “That fucking charter!

“I hate that thing,” she said, more quietly. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have taken your head off. It just…”

“I get it.” Campbell nodded. “But we’re worried, okay? We deal with enough inter-agency bureaucratic bullshit without OACET crashing down on us.”

“Where’d this rumor come from, anyhow?”

“It’s just been going around,” Campbell said, without a trace of dimpling. “Everybody’s talking about it.”

“I’m not going to take over,” she said. “You’ve got my word. I can’t speak for my boss, but I know he doesn’t need any additional complications right now.”

“But it’s already started.” Campbell began walking towards the cars again. “Mulcahy’s already begun locking us out.”

“What?! What do you mean?”

“At OACET headquarters—Mulcahy’s not allowing our tech team access to your database.”

Rachel had thought her headache was gone, but it had just been napping. It woke up with a nervous shriek and started kicking the back of her eyeballs again. “Honest to Christ, Campbell, you guys are just dying to see monsters. If you had to solve the kidnapping of the head of the CIA, would you expect them to give you full access to their internal files? Same damned thing.”

“We’d insist on it.” The gritty grays around Campbell deepened. “If we thought it was relevant to the case? Yeah, we’d go through every file we could.”

“Do you think Mulcahy and Nicholson have planned this?” she asked. A hundred yards away, Santino had reached his car. “Does the FBI think we’re running some kind of scam on y’all?”

“We don’t know what to think,” Campbell said. “We’ve suspected something big was going to happen with the sov-civ movement, eventually. Stack it with OACET, and you’ve got two big unknowns going up against each other.”

“Right,” she said, as the headache kicked around her skull like a ninja. “Thanks for telling me this.”

“You’re good people, Peng. You’ve always been honest.”

Ouch.

Some more small talk, mostly for closure’s sake. After that, she said goodbye to Campbell and escaped into the relative safety of Santino’s car.

“When did he get you?” she asked, as Quantico fell behind them. “Cafeteria?”

“Yup, cornered me while I was buying the drinks. He’s worried.”

“No shit,” she said. Campbell was at the limit of comfort for her scans, his colors still warring between orange and blue. “He says the FBI thinks that OACET’s going to invoke our charter and take full control of the investigation.”

“What?” Santino’s colors shifted towards white. “That’d be the stupidest thing you could do.”

“I know,” she said, and yanked on the seat toggle. “Give me a minute. I want to rest before I call the office.”

She turned off her implant, and felt the collective disappear from the periphery of her senses.

Blessed silence.

…that fucking charter…

She supposed that, once upon a time, the charter for the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies would have made sense. In that fairytale time, a bamboozled Congress believed OACET would bridge the many different organizations within the federal government and was not, in fact, a mad Senator’s scheme to take control of modern civilization. If OACET was to provide a networked infrastructure of high-level leadership, a charter which allowed Agents to come in and take control of various committees, procedures, and actionable events was logical.

There were limits to the charter, of course. Even the most cunning madman couldn’t convince Congress that the Agents should be able to seize control of the Supreme Court, or the office of the President. But if Rachel wanted a criminal investigation to call her very own, she could have taken over this one with a word and her signature on a document she kept folded into a tiny square in her wallet.

Fuck the charter, she thought. It was good for nothing except causing friction between OACET and other agencies. She had never officially invoked it, and only once had dangled it as an implicit action against stonewalling. Better to pretend it didn’t exist than flaunt it.

In her opinion, OACET should have gotten rid of the charter entirely, gone to Congress and begged them to take it away, or at least revise it so the level of power an Agent could wield on a whim was hamstrung to shreds. But no, Mulcahy had decided they needed every ounce of leverage they could hold, even as he advised them to avoid using it whenever possible. As a result, the charter—or at least the threat of the damned thing—remained intact.

“Could I take over the FBI if I wanted to?” she asked Santino.

“Thought you were resting.”

“I am. Could I?”

“Nope.” Santino had read paragraph and verse of the charter, and had an undergraduate’s degree in procedural law besides. “Best you could do would be to insert yourself in their organization in a supervisional position of authority.”

“Right.” That made sense: that madman had sold OACET to Congress as a form of government-wide Internal Affairs. “But OACET could take over the Nicholson case.”

“No question,” Santino said. “Why?”

“Why am I asking, or why would OACET do that?”

“Why are you asking? There’s no logical reason on earth for OACET to take over this case.”

“I know. Something’s clicking around in my head,” Rachel said. “It feels as though we’ve gone back to the bad old days when OACET first came out, and nobody trusted us because they didn’t know what we’d do.”

“You’ve only been out a few years.”

“Yeah, but we’ve established ourselves,” she said. She flipped her implant on again and felt the asphalt bleed and squeeze beneath them. Asphalt was so useless, plastic pretending to be stone. The car wobbled slightly. “Our media guys say the public trusts OACET more than they trust Congress.”

True: they had built their walls piece by careful piece, shaping their image within the public as reliable. Credible. Trustworthy.

Will they still think we’re trustworthy after this? she asked herself, as her mind wobbled down its own road.

Probably? This wouldn’t be the first time their image had taken a hit. It had all but been shot and left to die in the street the previous spring, when the media had broken the story of what Senator Richard Hanlon had done to them. The public had already known that Hanlon had developed the program where five hundred young federal employees were turned into cyborgs, but the news that they had been slowly brainwashed into mindless machines? New information. They learned how Hanlon had introduced an intentionally buggy AI interface, and that this AI had been programmed to break down the Agents’ resistance. Triggered not just by action but by thought and emotion, the AI had slowly conditioned them to obey. Unconscious, immediate responses replaced critical thinking. Hobbies, personal relationships, all of the finer things? Also gone—the AI was always there, and there was no reason for it to recognize the boundary between work and home lives.

Five years of this. Not living. Not death. A mechanical existence, office drudgery punctuated only by consuming enough food to survive, maintaining enough comfort to sleep, and the infrequent screaming fit during the morning shower when the bubbles of how wrong it all was made it to the surface of your dull routine and popped.

When Mulcahy had broken them out of it, they didn’t even realize what had happened to them. Not at first. But the conditioning hadn’t been completed, and they slowly came back to themselves.

(Most of them, anyhow. But those who hadn’t weren’t anybody’s business but their own, and OACET kept its secrets.)

After the brainwashing story had broken, there had been some loud discussions over whether OACET should have disclosed this part of their history when they first went public—didn’t the public have the right to know the risks posed by these obviously unhinged, psychotic cyborgs?

Mulcahy had responded by unleashing the psychiatrists. The psychiatrists had torn through the Congressional subcommittees, and had left no foe unassessed. When the Rorschach tests had settled, the Agents were found to have acted within the standards of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, and, more importantly, were judged to be clinically sane.

(Rachel watched the road run beneath them and wondered about Shawn, and Adrian, and Sammy, and the others who had left but might come back, and what might happen if they did, or, worse, if they wanted to come back but couldn’t—)

“Your tires are low,” she said, as her scans finally placed the wobble.

“Bad?”

“Getting that way.”

They pulled off the highway at a gas station. It was a newer place, built after the gas companies realized that travelers were more likely to stop at a building that didn’t look as if it were home to multiple homicides. Rachel sprinted inside for the bathroom and a sandwich or eight.

When she came out, Santino was on the phone and staring at two flattish left tires.

“What the hell?” she asked.

He covered the mouthpiece and said, “Look.”

Rachel ran a scan through the flats, and found small perforations along both inside tire walls. “When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when we pulled off the highway on the drive down. We’re lucky you noticed and got us to pull off before they went.” His attention snapped away from Southwestern turquoise to the nondescript beige of the service industry, and he stepped away to talk to his insurance company. “Yeah, two flats… I’ve got roadside assistance coverage…”

“Of course you do,” she muttered. She went back inside the gas station and bought a fistful of candy bars as sandwich chasers.

Santino joined her at the lone convenience table in the gas station. “They said they’ll be here in an hour.”

“So, five hours. Maybe three, if we’re lucky.” Rachel shook her head. “No way I’m getting back to D.C. for that meeting.”

“Honestly, Penguin,” Santino said as he took out his phone again.

Ten minutes later, she was in a northbound Uber. The driver was a college kid and the car stank of dirty clothes, but they were making deadly time. The kid drove as if she were competing for post time at a rally, and when Rachel managed to gasp out that she was a cop and maybe obeying the speed limit was a good idea? Please? the girl gave an exaggerated sigh and put the car into the travel lane.

City traffic was bad—it was always bad—but the driver darted through it like a water bug across the surface of a pond. By the time they had pulled up at OACET headquarters, Rachel’s fingernails had cut little half-moons in the dashboard. The limestone steps of the old post office were warm from the afternoon sun and welcoming, and Rachel collapsed on top of them to watch the girl in the Uber speed off, another passenger already waiting in her queue.

Rachel wasn’t alone; the reporters were setting up camp in preparation for Nicholson’s arrival. Rachel fended off questions as she waited for her heart to decide it was safe enough to climb down from her throat.

“Peng.”

Sandalwood.

“Wyatt.”

The psychopath grinned down at her, then gently ushered the reporters back to the far side of the yellow sawhorses that OACET used as crowd control barriers.

“Sweet Jesus, they’ve got him doing chores,” she muttered. She sent her scans up, to where they caught on Ami’s core of meadow green high above in her hidden sniper’s perch. She pressed on Ami’s mind until the assassin opened a link.

“Has he been a good boy?”

“He’s been really useful.” Ami was…chilly. Polite, but the emotion behind what she said was restrained. “He’s helped out around here all day. Pointed out a few flaws in our security, actually.”

“Well, he is a trained killer, Ami.”

“So was I,” Ami said, and snapped their link.

A little too much wistfulness in Ami’s last words, and Rachel lied when she told herself she didn’t know why.

Up the stairs and through those grand metal doors, leaving the reporters and the man with the sandalwood core behind…

…strangers everywhere…

…through the first checkpoint, the second, and the third, and then left waiting until someone from the FBI was available to escort her upstairs. Rachel allowed five minutes to pass, and then gave the FBI agent at the last security checkpoint a good hard staring until the woman agreed that, yes, this was OACET’s headquarters, and yes, since Rachel was undeniably a member of OACET, maybe they were being a little overcautious? Yes?

Rachel agreed, and trudged her way upstairs.

Mulcahy’s office was the only room on the entire floor that was empty of FBI agents. She opened the digital lock and let herself inside to wait for the other members of OACET’s administration.

If Josh’s office was the center of a bureaucratic sex tornado, Mulcahy’s was the sound stage for a docudrama about contemporary politics. The office smelled of wood polish and leather. There were expensive Persian rugs and paintings by contemporary American artists, their straight lines and orderly patterns offset by the clutter of the awards and mementos that OACET had acquired along the way. Near the door was a TIME magazine cover with Josh and Mulcahy smiling at the camera, white and black typefaces chasing each other across the page in varying sizes of “men” and “year.”

And the desk.

That fucking desk.

The mahogany executive’s desk in the center of the office was a relic from a Roosevelt administration; she didn’t know which one, and didn’t care enough to find out. It was a massive piece of furniture, with elephants, lions, giraffes, and the rare stork in flight carved across its front and sides. It was ugly as hell, reeked of ostentatious wealth, and everybody in OACET despised it—the desk had been a much-publicized gift from ex-Senator Hanlon. A peace offering, Hanlon had claimed, a little piece of history to show that he wanted to improve his relationship with Mulcahy.

Peace offering, my skinny ass, Rachel thought. That desk was nothing but an insult. Every time an Agent entered Mulcahy’s office, that desk loomed before them, a memento from Hanlon to remind them that he was still around, that what he had done to them would always be around.

She planned to set fire to the desk around Christmastime. It was the best she could do for Mulcahy. Her boss was impossible to shop for.

Rachel ran her scans across and through the desk, a familiar exercise as she searched for hidden bugs that she already knew weren’t there. Any surveillance equipment would be a valid reason to get rid of the desk, and Hanlon didn’t want that desk anywhere but in Mulcahy’s office. Four hundred pounds of dead tree, gleaming in knots of browns and reds, to show up on camera whenever Mulcahy hosted a small press conference or entertained a visiting dignitary.

That fucking desk, indeed.

As she picked out a spot on the leather couch to wait, she decided that since Mulcahy’s birthday was coming up in a couple of months, she’d just have to order the kerosene and find him an alternative Christmas gift instead.

She let her scans wander away from the desk and across the room. Not much changed in Mulcahy’s office: it was a backdrop, with each piece on display carefully chosen to tell a story. But there, on a shelf that was in direct line-of-sight from the desk, a new photograph rested in an antique silver frame. A candid photograph from Mulcahy’s wedding, taken late in the day when everyone was feeling the hours press down on them: Hope Blackwell resting in her new husband’s arms, her dark hair swept back and tamed beneath her veil; Mulcahy in his tux, his jacket open and his boutonniere missing. The two of them were staring at each other as if they were the only two human beings alive, with enough love and lust crackling between them to survive the challenge of repopulating the entire planet.

Rachel stood and moved to examine the photograph. The old frame was heavy; sterling, not plate, and freshly polished.

Mulcahy was smiling down at his wife.

She set the photo down, carefully, and returned to the couch.

The factory in Maryland was more than thirty miles away, and her headache was still kicking the back of her brain’s chair. She resigned herself to another six hours of misery, and closed her eyes.

Her avatar opened them, and the sight of the factory floor greeted her.

Green was her first thought, as she spotted the digital avatars of other Agents keeping watch throughout the factory. Blue was her second: the afternoon sunlight was pouring through the filmed windows, and the place glowed in false neons.

The avatar of the nearest Agent nodded to her. He was standing over a small group of militia men as they played cards. Rachel pushed off of the floor and glided over to him, and the two of them watched as the dealer started a fresh hand.

“…gin rummy?” she asked.

The other Agent shrugged. “They’re pretty good, believe it or not.”

She walked around the table. “Why are they wearing so many guns?”

“They think they might be raided while Nicholson’s at the meeting.” He pointed towards the windows. Men were stationed along the catwalks, staring into the parking lot below, rifles bristling across their backs like porcupine quills.

Rachel swore. “This isn’t dangerous in the slightest.”

“Nope,” he said. “Not in the slightest.”

“Avery?”

He pointed towards the far end of the factory. She followed the line of his finger, but her avatar’s limited range of vision crashed into the wall before she could spot the little girl. “She’s fine. Mulcahy stationed a team around her, and Mako and Carlota check in with her every hour. Kid thinks it’s a game.”

Rachel doubted that: Avery was one sharp cookie. She nodded goodbye and flew skyward, towards the second floor of the factory.

The windowed front room where they had held Hope was empty. Rachel steeled herself to a sensation that she knew she wouldn’t feel, and walked through the door.

Sounds of a television, somewhere down the hall. She followed the noise of the laugh track to another door. Someone had moved a refrigerator in front of it, and had braced a desk between the refrigerator and the hallway wall to hold the refrigerator in place.

“Yup,” Rachel whispered to herself, and pushed her avatar through the second door.

She found herself in a windowless office, large enough for a desk and a few filing cabinets. Faint blue specks of light chased themselves around until her avatar’s eyes made sense of a room lit by nothing but a sitcom. A man, different from the one with the core of fresh-made iron who had guarded Hope on Rachel’s last visit, sat with a shotgun aimed at Hope’s head.

Hope was roped to a chair.

No, not just roped, but chained, with layers of duct tape wrapped around her arms and legs for good measure. The chair itself was an industrial steel contraption that had been bolted to the floor. Her face had been beaten to hell and back. Some of the beatings had been recent, too: there was fresh blood oozing from a shallow cut across her forehead.

As Rachel stepped into the space beside Hope, the woman’s eyes moved reflexively towards Rachel’s avatar, then returned to the man standing guard over her with the gun.

The man with the gun caught the gesture, and his body snapped tight. “What?!” he exclaimed, jerking his body sideways to see what she had been looking at.

Hope coughed. The sound twisted Rachel’s stomach; it was dry and raspy, the sound of a woman gone too long without water. But the look she gave the man with the gun held as much venom as if she was well-fed and thoroughly rested.

“Paranoid much, fuckhead?” Hope snarled at him.

He hit her.

Hope rolled with the punch as best she could. It wasn’t much—they had lashed her down so tightly that she could barely move. Her head rocked backwards and smacked against the metal crown of the chair.

The woman spat blood and laughed.

“That’s nine,” she said. “Wanna make it an even dozen? I’ve got time.”

He backed away from her. “Crazy bitch.”

“Kill the cameras,” Hope said to Rachel.

“What?” The thug pulled back, head bobbing around to see who Hope was talking to.

In a single fluid move, Hope stood up and slammed the ball of her foot into his chin. The man’s head whipped backwards before he fell to the ground, solidly unconscious, the chains that had bound Hope to her chair crashing down around him.

“Asshole,” Hope muttered. She knelt and checked his pulse, then turned him to lie on his side, before she began peeling the pieces of duct tape off of her arms and legs.

Rachel gaped at her, amazed. The tape that had bound Hope to the chair was shredded into tiny strips, the shackles on the chains unlocked. “Hope, what the hell?!” she shouted. “How do you keep doing that?”

The other woman shrugged as she walked around the tiny room, stretching and whipping her limbs around to get her circulation going. “Would you believe it’s an old martial arts trick?”

“Really?”

Hope stopped dead and stared at Rachel. “Oh shit, that’s right. You’re out-of-body,” she whispered, then said, almost hesitantly, “Yeah. They can’t keep me tied up. Anything they use to hold me down, I can escape or break.

“Which is why they moved me,” she added, as she gathered up the duct tape and began unpeeling it from itself. Her fingers flew as she began to bind the pieces back together into the shape of a flower. “All right, catch me up on what’s happening before they notice the cameras went dark.”

“They didn’t,” Rachel said. “I backed up the recording so it’s playing on a loop.”

“That doesn’t work,” Hope said. “Sparky tried that. They notice inconsistencies, but it’ll take them a while to get in here. That barricade works both ways.”

“Damn,” Rachel said. She pushed her avatar through the doorway to check the hall. “We’re good,” she said, as she bobbed back into Hope’s cell. “Nobody’s coming.”

“They’ve started checking in on me every fifteen minutes,” Hope said, as a second duct tape flower joined the first. “And they bring Avery to me on the hour. I think they’re reminding me that I shouldn’t try to leave this room.”

“Why do they only post one guard? They’ve got plenty of men.”

“Probably because I can take down three men as easily as one,” Hope said. From anybody else, it would have been bragging; from Hope Blackwell, it was a statement of fact. The weird woman finished another flower, and began to twist them together into a sticky daisy chain. “This way, they only lose one at a time.”

“No,” Rachel said, as she peered back into the hallway again. Still empty. “That’s beyond stupid. Why lose any at all?”

Hope shrugged.

“They have access to sedatives,” Rachel said. “So if they’re now okay with beating you instead of keeping you fresh for the cameras, why aren’t they keeping you drugged?”

“No idea. Hell, why kidnap me at all, while we’re at it? Everybody knows you can’t make my husband bend. Even if they kill me, it’ll just piss Sparky off and he’ll come after them that much harder.”

“Maybe,” Rachel said, but she had her doubts. That photograph from the wedding was too fresh in her mind. “I think it’s more likely they’re testing your limits,”

“Fuuuuuck,” Hope groaned. “Shit. You’re probably right.”

“Yeah. Stop breaking loose,” Rachel told her. “Next time they tie you up, let them think they finally got it right.”

“Aww!” Hope rolled her head backwards and sighed. “Rachel, this place is soooo boring!”

Rachel squashed the urge to slap her. “You sound like a kid,” she said. “A whining child. Avery needs you.”

“Sorry,” Hope squeezed her eyes tight. “I know, I know.” She knelt over the unconscious man and began to attach the daisy chain to his hair, twisting his locks into the sticky clumps of duct tape. She gave the daisies a savage tug; the man’s head followed, and then banged against the floor as she shook them.

“I hate to ask, but are they keeping you up on your medications?”

“No, not so far.” Hope said with a shrug. “I haven’t been here long enough to know for sure, but they haven’t given me anything.”

“Oh boy.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m good for a couple more days, at least. If this standoff lasts for more than that, I think we’ll have bigger problems.”

Rachel watched the man’s head jiggle beneath its duct tape crown and didn’t reply.

“Listen,” Hope said with a deep sigh, “nobody wants me off of my meds. I’m a fucking menace. Two days of sitting in a chair is gonna be bad enough, but…” She dropped the man’s head and stood. She resumed moving and stretching, trying to burn off what energy she could in the tiny room. “I’ll be fine,” she said quietly.

She rounded on Rachel. “I’ll be fine,” she said again. “And don’t you go running back to Sparky, telling tales of his poor wife going violent, okay?”

“Don’t go violent,” Rachel said, “and we’ve got a deal.”

Hope glared at her. After a moment, her face softened. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

Rachel sighed. Somewhere, miles away, her fingers knitted together. “Would you believe I’m just here to check on you?”

“Nope.” Hope paced across the room to check on the unconscious guard. “Sparky has OACET’s foresters and tax consultants watching me and Avery. Everybody who’s in law enforcement is working to get us out.”

When Rachel didn’t answer, Hope read her face like a book. “You think something’s wrong with him.”

“He should be freaking out,” Rachel admitted. “We’re all freaking out! Everybody in OACET has been quietly panicking since you and Avery got snatched. But your husband… Hope, there’s nothing there.”

“God damn it all,” Hope muttered. “He said he wouldn’t let himself go that far any more.”

“What?”

“Sparky…” Hope paused, her head cocked to the side to listen for footsteps. After a moment, she went back to making her silver flowers. “You remember how you all got turned into zombie-robots for a few years, right?”

Rachel didn’t bother to reply. Hope glanced at her face again, and grimaced.

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “Of course you…sorry. Anyhow, Sparky—”

Shouting—distant, at first, but moving towards them, followed by the sound of running feet. A Crash! Bang! from the other side of the door, and the scraping sound of furniture being moved away.

Hope scrubbed the last of the sticky residue into the hair of her captor. “Later,” she promised Rachel.

“Hope—”

The door opened with a crash. Four men rushed in, but froze in place when they saw the wild woman in the center of the room. They started to fan out, trying to push Hope into the corner.

There were no guns, but two of them had Tasers.

A brilliant grin lit Hope’s face. “Talk to Josh, Peng,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “I’m gonna have me some fun.”

 

 

 

THIRTEEN

 

Jeremy Nicholson breezed into Mulcahy’s office like a conquering hero, his blood-red core neatly contained within a cage of yellow-white excitement.

The man with the core of freshly minted iron followed behind him, blending seamlessly with the four other henchmen in militia camo. Rachel wouldn’t have paid him any mind at all, had not his colors been snapping across the office in professional blues as he weighed personnel, security, tactics…

“Found you,” she whispered to herself as Nicholson’s second-in-command weaseled his way over to a windowless corner with clear line-of-sight to Nicholson. He all but vanished in that corner, looking like nothing more than another silent sentry, and one who didn’t want to be there.

Nicholson was dressed in his best camouflage business suit. An oversized semi-automatic rifle (not a NORINCO, of course, because why would a sovereign citizen who claimed to be trying to cut to the heart of the problems with America’s legal system carry anything other than a gun made in the good old U.S. of A?) dangled like a prop from his shoulder. He flashed his movie star’s smile at the reporters who had been invited to attend the meet-and-greet phase, and walked up to Mulcahy all a-grinnin’, with a wink and a nod for the reporters as he offered his hand to the man whose wife he had stolen.

Mulcahy took it.

The man with the iron core watched the exchange, his attention focused in laser-bright whites, as if waiting to see if Mulcahy would break Nicholson’s hand off at the wrist. No. Instead, Mulcahy escorted Nicholson to a pair of club chairs, and let the kidnapper choose his throne. Nicholson took the chair closest to the lights and cameras, the wide windows with their near-panoramic view of Washington behind him, and made a big deal of passing his rifle to Mulcahy as a peace offering.

Rachel scanned the rifle and found it empty. Unlike Mulcahy’s own service weapon, which was fully loaded and lay like coiled death against the skin of her palms as Mulcahy instructed her to lock it up for the duration of the meeting—

As she moved, Southwestern turquoise and yellow-white surprise flared across the room.

She kept her head down and her face pointed towards the digital locks on Mulcahy’s desk as Iron Core recognized her. As she watched him, an equal dose of her turquoise joined the cerulean and tattoo blues within his conversational colors.

If Nicholson doesn’t give two shits about me, why would this guy rank me up with Mulcahy and Josh? she thought, and began to scan him in earnest. Hidden weapons, of course: as leader of this fiasco, Nicholson’s impractical-in-close-quarters metal phallus had been granted an exception by the FBI. They had searched the other militia members (snerk!) and had gone over them with metal detector wands besides, but plastic knives had come a long way and held a fabulous edge. She went deeper, past cloth and into skin and bone: the contours of Iron Core’s face had the same lines as Wyatt’s, where skin and muscle had been parted and stitched back together to form something new.

“Oh, I am very interested in your tragic backstory, sir,” she said quietly.

Beside her, Josh flared in curious yellows, and she felt the press of his mind against hers.

Rachel opened a link. “That guy,” she said, gesturing towards Iron Core with her thoughts as she showed Josh his conversational colors.

She felt Josh nod. “Got him?” he asked.

“You sure you don’t need my scans for the meeting?”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got him,” she said. She snapped her head up and towards Iron Core, and broke away from the other OACET Agents to stand beside him.

Iron Core did his best to ignore her, so she snuggled up beside him and draped her arm around his waist.

“Hey, cutie!” she said, her fingertips brushing against the handle of the knife he had concealed inside his waistband.

“Get away from me.” He tried to sidle away.

“Don’t be rude,” she said, tugging him towards her. “We use the buddy system here. You’re my buddy! Don’t you want to be my buddy?”

He twisted; she countered. His hand went to where he had left his knife, and found it missing.

“You don’t want to be my buddy?” she asked, as she pressed the resin blade against the back of his camouflage windbreaker. Its tip was aimed at his left kidney; his colors blanched slightly as it pricked him through his jacket. “Lots of reporters here,” she said, waving her free hand at those who had overheard their scuffle and were watching them with the black-eyed stares of sharks. “Lots of FBI, too. Did you want them to pay attention to you? If I were you, I wouldn’t want them to wonder why an Agent’s getting all chummy with me…”

Iron Core crossed his arms and let her curl her arm around his waist.

“You’re such a good buddy,” Rachel said quietly, tugging him towards her. “So good. So polite. So willing to play along, even though you know about me…about what I can do…”

He stayed dumb, but his colors twisted towards uncertain orange and the green of disgust. Good, she thought. Prime the pump until the red pours out.

“Microexpressions,” she said. “The little details of the face, the body…” She grabbed his arm and pulled him close enough to whisper in his ear. “…all laid out for me to see.

“You were hiding, weren’t you? When I came to the factory with Josh? Volunteered to guard Hope so I wouldn’t make you as the brains behind this shitshow?

“And I wonder why you were so surprised to see me today?” she added, running her free hand along his arm. “Did you think I’d be stuck at a gas station on I-95? Got a buddy of your own who knows how to slash tires?”

The orange darkened towards annoyance, but now the sage green of comprehension was beginning to thread itself through the orange.

“There you go, that’s exactly what I needed to see,” she whispered, as she laid her hand over his. “What a good little buddy you are!”

The man with the iron core shuddered in green revulsion.

She felt positively filthy. Avery, she reminded herself. Hope and Avery and a whole bunch of other people, huddled together in the dark.

Across the room, Nicholson told the reporters he was done with them. He was more polite, of course, with broad statements about resolving issues quickly and how he would be happy to set up an interview with each and every one of them.

The reporters left: if they hadn’t been charmed by Nicholson, they were willing to pretend they were in exchange for their exclusive. As the door shut behind them, the militia’s nominal leader turned to the FBI agents.

“Shoo, flies,” Nicholson said to the FBI. “The grownups need to talk now.”

Professional blues took on the dark shine of gunmetal, and the FBI agents looked to Mulcahy.

“We’ll call if we need anything,” he said.

“It might get loud in here,” Rachel said in her sultriest voice, as she pulled Iron Core against her. “Just ignore us.”

There’s the red, she thought, catching the embers of hate within Iron Core’s conversational colors, and began to stroke his hand. Her scans showed the FBI taking position down the hall, close enough to come running but not close enough to overhear.

“Nothing to drink?” Nicholson asked, as he draped his feet on top of Mulcahy’s coffee table. The table was fairly new—at least, its current iteration was new. The round top was made from slabs of reclaimed pine from Germany’s Black Forest; the aluminum legs had spent their last lives as ribs inside a decommissioned Sea Harrier. In Rachel’s opinion, it was the nicest gift Mulcahy had ever received from a British Prime Minister.

“No,” Mulcahy said.

“You’re a poor host, Mulcahy. I put on the nicest dinner for Glassman—”

“I…” Mulcahy said, as he leaned forward and put both of his plate-sized hands flat on the coffee table. He pressed down; the coffee table began to groan under his weight. “…am not Agent Glassman.”

He stood and hurled the coffee table across the room with one hand. His aim was perfect; the table hit the door—that one spot in the office that was empty of shelves, tchotchkes, or people—and clattered, spinning, to the floor.

Rachel didn’t miss how the militia members turned to Iron Core for permission to react, or how Iron Core held up two fingers, ever so slightly.

She pulled him close to her again and stage-whispered, “Your pets are so well trained!”

Angry reds and oranges flared like fire across the room, and she leaned against Iron Core and tittered like a drunken cheerleader.

“Back off, girls!” she said, as she drew her hand up the center of Iron Core’s chest. “He’s mine!”

The FBI agents in the hall kicked open the door in time to see Iron Core grab her by her hair and drive her face straight at the mahogany abomination of a desk. Their guns were drawn; they were shouting commands.

Rachel screamed as she let her weight come down on her hands with a Wham! and pretended to collapse. She rolled to the side and beneath the desk, the world’s slipperiest sack of potatoes.

Iron Core did not, despite her dearest wishes, puddle on the floor beside her in a disgusting rain of blood and bone and tacky camouflage pajamas. Through the desk, she saw him with his hands up, calling for peace, while the surface colors of the FBI whipped around the room, plucking colors off of different surfaces and fitting them together like a puzzle—

Damn, she thought, as the iron gray slid into place beside an electrified (but non-threatening) reddish-blue. So close.

Well, there was more than one way to deprive Nicholson of his second-in-command. She reached out to an anonymous burner phone two floors below.

Wyatt answered on the first ring. “Peng.”

“Got a job for you,” she told him, and flipped frequencies to take in Iron Core’s physical details. “I’m chasing a man out of the meeting. White male, early thirties, brown hair, about six feet, two-ten.”

“What’s he wearing?”

“Camo.”

“Ah,” Wyatt chuckled. “What’s the job?”

“I want DNA or clean fingerprints. Make sure he knows you’re just extra security hired by OACET, and not an Agent.”

“Yup,” he said. “Tell your friends with the sniper rifles that I’ve been cleared to leave the grounds.”

“Nope. Do a chump bump when he passes,” she said. “I’ll tail him if he leaves the building.”

The connection closed with a sharp beep.

“Goodbye to you too, asshole,” she muttered, and took stock of the room. The FBI had moved over to Iron Core and were making the kind of threats that could only be made when they were in someone else’s home. But Iron Core was so nice and polite and sorry and it would never happen again—

Oh hell, they’re letting him stay.

She sighed, and bit the inside of her lip until flesh crunched beneath her teeth. She gave herself a few moments to let the blood trickle down her face before she came out from under the desk, groaning. As soon as she appeared, the FBI agents helped her to her feet and hustled her as far away from Iron Core as the room allowed.

“I want him out of here,” she said groggily, running her hand through the blood so it smeared across her cheek. “Just…get him gone…”

“I agree,” Mulcahy said to Nicholson. “Ask your man to leave the room.”

Nicholson was panicking, the sickened yellow in his conversational colors panting like an overheated dog. “He’s—”

“Now!” Rachel cried, her voice tapering up to its breaking point. She pushed away from the FBI and found an empty space near the wide windows.

“This meeting is over,” Mulcahy said.

“No!” Nicholson’s colors twisted over themselves as Mulcahy’s cerulean blue started to slip away. “No,” he said, more calmly. To Iron Core: “Ethan? Would you mind?”

Ethan most certainly did mind: Southwestern turquoise burned within hateful reds. But once he began to move, he walked straight out of the door without stopping.

“Can you control your men?” Mulcahy asked, standing in the hole where the coffee table once was.

“Can you control her?” Nicholson pointed at Rachel. “She provoked him!”

Mulcahy raised an eyebrow. “By flirting?”

“I’ll stay right here,” Rachel all but whimpered, curling into a small ball on the window sill. Pity emerged in deep reds across the FBI agents who had seen her take the hit; with the exception of Mulcahy, everyone from OACET was riotously, uproaringly purple.

As the FBI pressed Mulcahy for permission to stay for the duration of the meeting, Josh watched as she carefully tucked Iron Core’s knife behind a set of thick curtains.

“I probably wrecked any fingerprints on that when I disarmed him,” she said.

“We’ll see what we can do,” Josh replied. “You okay?”

“Bad headache,” she said. “But that’s nothing new.”

“Are you going after him?”

Her scans, tight on Iron Core, watched as a man in sandalwood crashed into him in the hallway. Iron Core, already nothing but red fury, closed in on this convenient target for his rage.

“Definitely,” she told Josh. “He’s so mad he’s making mistakes.”

“Good luck.”

“You too,” she said, as Mulcahy won and the FBI left the office again.

Silence, broken after a moment when Rachel opened the catch on the new windows in their old wooden frames.

“Bye, fuckers,” she said to the militia men, and, with a wink to Nicholson, she jumped.

Mulcahy’s office was on the top floor of what was undeniably a very short building. It was only three floors, and one of those a basement. Still, she was thirty feet up when she leapt into space.

She was twenty-eight feet up when she grabbed the trellises that covered the front of the building. There were no plants to get in her way, not yet: below, OACET’s gardeners were training tangerine crossvines to climb up the side of the building and cover the ironwork. For now, there was just metal—hot metal, she realized, soaking in the full heat of the afternoon sun—bolted to the stone.

As quickly as her too-hot hands would allow, Rachel spider-walked around the corner and hid beneath a convenient cornice. Above, several members of the militia had reached the window and were looking for her broken body in the street below.

She let Mulcahy call them to order before she began the climb down.

The trellises were solid. They were new, installed at Mulcahy’s request during the recent renovations. Rachel was sure that if they could hold his weight, they’d hold hers, easy. The hand that Bryce Knudson had shredded kept complaining, pain surging across the scar tissue as she lowered herself from bar to bar, but she pushed on.

She got within nine feet of the ground before anyone noticed her—the trellises ended there, and she had to pause and dangle before she let herself fall. By the time her boots hit the pavement, a swarm of reporters had moved from covering the front doors over to where Rachel stood, questions locked and loaded. She ignored them and walked across the street, hailed a cab, and let it take her away.

“Stop here,” she said, after the cabbie had turned the first corner and had removed itself from the reporters’ blast zone. The cabbie, accustomed to the habits of politicians on the run, didn’t even bother to nod before dropping her on the curb.

There was a coffee shop, doors open to let in the breeze of the warm early spring afternoon. Rachel bought a cup of iced tea for the price of admission, and tucked herself on a stool by the window.

Her scans, still fixed on Iron Core’s distinctive colors, watched as he pushed his way out of OACET headquarters and into the bustle of city traffic.

Now, buddy-o-mine, Rachel asked herself, where do you go from here?

There was nothing she could do if he took a car. If that happened, she’d grab the number off of the license plate and turn the tail over to Zockinski. But if he was on foot…

Nope, he’d be on foot, no question. A guy like him knew that in a city, a car was basically a slow-moving prison that could turn right on red.

Iron Core didn’t disappoint. He set out on 5th Street, heading north, his surface colors dead-set on orange annoyance beneath a layer of mottled grays and greens; he must have known, in this era of mass shootings, that he stuck out maybe just a little too much in his camouflage onesie. Anywhere else but downtown D.C. and he would have blended in fine, maybe gotten a free coffee or two out of it besides, but the locals knew the difference between a soldier’s uniform and off-the-rack hunter’s gear.

Rachel left the coffee shop, the plastic cup full of iced tea pressed flat against the palm of her (mildly) burned hand.

She was whistling: this was the part of the job she loved.

Running tails as a cyborg was like an adult playing hide-and-go-seek with a toddler, lots of “Wherever could he be?” and “Surely those feet sticking out from under the curtains mean nothing,” with a dose of “Why is that closet giggling?” besides. Rachel put herself one street over from Iron Core and watched him through the buildings. She turned when he turned, as if they were connected by a string the length of a city block.

There was purpose in his colors, professional blues with a white center of bright attention. Her own Southwestern turquoise was in there, along with a fading dose of sandalwood: Wyatt had gotten under his skin.

North and east, through the city, towards Columbia Heights and the ruckus of the rougher neighborhoods. He was leading her towards an edge, she realized, a place where the different sides of the city came together. She was a recent arrival to D.C. and had heard the city was greatly changed from its Mayor Barry days, but the smooth roads still gave way to cracked pavement, and the faces of the buildings began to blur beneath a patina of graffiti.

He turned down an alleyway and kicked open the door to an abandoned storefront. Rachel flipped frequencies until she could read the signage: an old tire dealership, long gone to ruin. She watched from the relative safety of a bodega as Iron Core chased two people out of the building, then sat down on the skeleton of an upholstered chair.

“Buying anything?”

“What?” Rachel blinked, her scans moving away from Iron Core to the bodega’s owner. A slight woman with an unknowable accent was staring at her in suspicious oranges. “Yes,” Rachel said. “Got anything for a bad headache?”

The oranges eased into wine red. “Aisle Three,” the woman said, pointing.

Calling it an aisle was generous: cough drops and other mild pharmaceuticals drooped in cellophane packets from a wobbly wire rack. Rachel searched the rack until she found an assortment of headache medications, and, after admitting to herself that her doctor’s advice hadn’t gotten rid of her headache, decided to go with a powder endorsed by a prominent race car driver. She poured this into a cup of coffee so old that its surface shone like an oil slick, and went to pay.

“Not healthy,” the woman said, nodding towards the coffee.

“It hasn’t been a healthy day,” Rachel replied. She flipped up the tail of her coat to give the bodega’s owner a glimpse of her badge. “Can I stay here for a few minutes? I promise I won’t make trouble.”

The woman nodded, giving Rachel the shy smile of someone who was grateful that she was no longer responsible for anything bad that might happen, even if was just for the length of time that the cop was in her store.

Iron Core still hadn’t moved. He seemed to be waiting. She stood by the window and watched as the clock in her head counted the minutes, while strangers came and went around her.

Half an hour later, he began sorting through the piles of trash around his feet, his colors sharpened into a point as he searched for something. He came up with a loose piece of paper, and reached into his pocket for a pen.

(She was somewhat offended that Iron Core would think to carry a pen, but placated herself with the knowledge that whatever he was, he wasn’t really a member of a militia.)

He wrote for what seemed an eternity, and, from the Southwestern turquoise and OACET green in his colors, she had a pretty good idea what he was writing about.

“Thanks,” Rachel said to the woman behind the counter, and dashed out the door.

The tire dealership was worse than abandoned—it had become a trash dump, with black plastic bags piled up against the broken windows as a wind block. Some of the local homeless community had carved out a large space on the other side of the building where the walls came together and the wind couldn’t reach. Iron Core stood in that hollow, still writing.

He set his pen down and moved to the wall. There was a hole in the cinderblocks, and he shoved the paper into it, so deep that Rachel was sure he’d come out with a rat where his hand had been. Then, he left the way he had come, moving up the street towards the heart of D.C.

What to do, what to do… Follow Iron Core, or stop and read the letter?

Not much of a choice, really. Either option started with grabbing that letter for safety’s sake—no telling what might happen to it after she picked up Iron Core’s tail.

She gave him a whole block’s lead time before she snuck into the building. It was…ripe. Overly ripe, to the point where her scans started to pulse with the airborne signals of decomposition.

Phil wouldn’t be able to scan in here, she thought to herself. Too many different chemical signals.

It was a stray thought. A nothing thought, the kind that usually came and went without leaving its mark. But her mind snatched at it and caught it, and suddenly she was down a rabbit hole of her own.

—maybe he could, maybe he’s worked out which chemical signals go with bombs, and which go with this amazing bouquet of liquefied foods and dirty diapers and God knows what else—

Rachel’s scans hit on the dead body of a pigeon and she froze, nauseated at the thought that she and Phil could probably find corpses by the chemical traces of decomposition alone. The MPD had used her scans on cadaver searches before, but it was one thing to run a scan through clean soil and find a skeleton, quite another to know that the silent signs of the dead hung in the air. The urge to run home and scrub her skin until it bled rose up and she started to move—

No! She forced her feet to anchor themselves to the floor. Stop. You’re no stranger to dead bodies. You’ve seen, smelled, touched, and even caused them, so just stop and get your shit together, okay?

That didn’t work. Apparently, reminding herself that she was a killer on occasion wasn’t much of a comfort. She started chasing logic instead.

It’s a trash heap. It’s unsanitary, yeah, but you’ve been in worse. The latrine outside of Ghazni? Remember that? You’ve got a job to do, and the faster you get it done, the faster you can get out of here.

The overwhelming urge to flee and scrub herself raw dissipated into the stinking air, and Rachel allowed herself a cautious first step.

Her legs went where she wanted them to go. Good.

Everyone in the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies struggled against obsessive-compulsive urges; it was a natural side effect of having a quantum-organic computer chip grafted into their brains. Rachel had been assured that their implants lacked the capacity to learn, but they did adapt and evolve through a feedback process—as the user experienced their environment, the implant acquired data that could be used to enhance the user’s performance within that environment.

Rachel was fine with having an improved sense of balance, or completing the daily Sudoku puzzle a little more quickly than she could have before she had been recruited to OACET. It was the gestating germaphobe in her skull that worried her. Thanks to her scans, she was aggressively aware of the microbial world around her. The kicker was that she couldn’t tell if she was being overly cautious, or if her implant was warning her about environmental risks her conscious mind didn’t recognize. All assurances that the implant wasn’t a tiny sentient mind lurking within her own didn’t help when some part of her was shrieking about danger. Instinct was a bitch, augmented instinct doubly so. Not being able to tell which of those was in control at any given time was infuriating.

She knelt beside the hole in the wall, gave it a meticulous scanning, and went after the letter.

It wasn’t just a hole: it connected to a pipe, which sloped downward. Iron Core’s arm was longer than hers; her fingertips brushed the paper, but it was in too deep and there was a risk of pushing the paper further down the pipe. She sat back on her heels and sighed.

Hurry it up, she reminded herself. Iron Core was at the edge of comfort for her scans, still retracing his steps to OACET headquarters. She had to lose track of him now for the sake of her aching head, but she didn’t want to let him go for longer than absolutely necessary. Instead, she turned her scans to the trash pile around her.

Something long. Something sturdy…

There wasn’t much left of the old tire dealership. The car lifts were gone, either removed when the shop had closed, or stolen for scrap. All that was left were blocks of concrete, crumbling from age. There was a pile of old tires that had been picked over, with mostly shredded rubber scraps left behind. The tools were long gone.

Something long. Something sturdy… Bingo!

A crowbar, long forgotten between a wall and crack in the floor. Easy to retrieve, too—she moved a few trash bags and was able to pry the crowbar out of the crack without needing, oh, say, a smaller crowbar.

Back to the hole again. Careful work, this… The paper was thin with age and misuse. She used the crowbar to pull it a couple of inches forward, then shoved her hand back into the hole.

“Vic-toh-reh,” she said in a dreadful Schwarzenegger, and carefully unfolded the paper. She flipped frequencies until the handwriting showed her name in prominent block letters at the top of the page. Rachel Peng is on to us…

“Oh boy,” she said quietly. She smoothed out the letter so the creases wouldn’t register as text artifacts, and began to read.

 

Rachel Peng is on to us. You were right to try and stay away from her. She says she reads microexpressions. I don’t know if it’s true but she got me thrown out of the meeting. Nicholson can hold his own without me there.

 

“Hello, active self-delusion,” she muttered. Nicholson had as much chance of holding his own against the mouth of a loaded cannon as going one-on-one against Mulcahy. She pulled the letter flat again, and tried to make out the next lines.

 

It’s time to move up the schedule. Catch the train to the third rail. The flowers will be waiting. The bagels are on the counter. Repeat: the bagels are on the counter.

 

“What the hell is this supposed to—” she began, and then a slip of cold metallic gray was her only warning before Iron Core crashed into her like a runaway truck.

 

 

 

FOURTEEN

 

Rachel was flying again, but in her own body for once, and only briefly before her head struck the wall. The nonsense thoughts of surprise and shock stopped as she landed, face-down, in the pile of rubber castoffs from stripped tires.

Get up. The icy part of herself that navigated through a crisis took over. Move or you’re done.

She tried to get her hands on her gun, tried to roll to the side, but her body wasn’t listening, the rubber kicked out beneath her as she tried to find a purchase—

“Bitch.” Iron Core glowed above her, haloed in red rage. He had her crowbar and was holding it over his head, a pause in her murder while he took aim.

The crowbar came down.

Halfway through its arc, the crowbar jerked sideways as Marshall Wyatt tackled Iron Core around his waist.

Get up, she told herself. Get up. Now!

The two men tumbled across the floor, grappling in reds.

Iron Core was a good fighter. Strong, smart… He closed with Wyatt, grabbing the other man’s shirt for leverage. Wyatt broke the hold with an elbow across his face, then took Iron Core by his other shoulder and threw him to the floor. Iron Core rolled with the throw and came up with a brick in his right hand.

Wyatt had a knife. A short silver combat blade. No, it was—

Rachel blinked. A butter knife?

“Get up, get up, get up…” she muttered, as she fumbled around in the scrap rubber to find the floor below. Her fingers brushed against something hard and stable: not the floor, but enough to put her back on her feet. She tried to clear her head of a new and suspiciously sloshy sound as she staggered towards the two men, drawing her gun on the way.

Wyatt closed, the butter knife held point-out. Iron Core swung the brick towards Wyatt’s leading hand. There was a sharp tink! as the brick met the butter knife, then another and another, small sparks leaping into the air when the stone came in contact with the metal. Their free hands went from fists to claws and back again; they fought filthy, with eyes and genitals both up for grabs.

They tripped over something that went skittering across the floor—the crowbar, just out of reach. The brick came up; Wyatt stabbed down. Iron Core roared as the butter knife bludgeoned its way through fabric and skin, and sank into the meat of his forearm. Wyatt put his foot into Iron Core’s shin and kicked off, diving towards the crowbar. He came up spinning, the crowbar in his hands.

Rachel put a bullet in the ceiling.

The two men froze.

“Children,” she said. “Behave.”

Iron Core glanced between her and Wyatt, his colors churning.

“He’s thinking about rushing me,” she told Wyatt.

Wyatt nodded and swung the crowbar. The curve of the hooked end cracked off of Iron Core’s jaw with the sound of a baseball tagged by the sweet spot of the bat. The militia man’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell backwards on the reeking garbage heap of a floor.

Wyatt pulled the bar back for a second swing, this time with the business end of the hook aimed right between Iron Core’s eyes.

“Don’t kill him!” she shouted.

Wyatt lowered the crowbar. “Right,” he said to himself. The red bloodlust began to seep back into his sandalwood core like water soaking into dry earth. “Right. You need him alive.”

“That, and you don’t have to kill people,” she said.

“Maybe you don’t,” Wyatt said in a low voice. There was some bubbling as the bloodlust fought to reclaim his focus.

“Gimme that,” she snapped, and took the crowbar from him. “Were you raised in a murderbarn or something?”

The psychopath had the decency to look embarrassed.

“Why are you here?” she asked. Sirens in the distance; the call she had placed to the MPD after Iron Core had clocked her had been given priority.

He tilted his head towards the sirens like a hound.

“Hurry up, man.”

“After I tangled with this guy, I told the Hippos he was the real deal,” he said. “They had to stay and monitor the meeting. Ami sent me after you as backup.”

There were too many implications stuffed into that package. Rachel shook her head. “Get out of here,” she snapped.

Curious yellows appeared in his conversational colors.

“Go,” she said. “Just go. There’ll be questions, and I don’t want you anywhere near First District Station. Hill will know who you are the minute he sees you.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“Go!”

When he didn’t move, she sighed and went to collect the note that Iron Core had left for her.

“Go,” she said again. The paper was old, thin from abuse and feather-light in her hand. She tucked it into the inner pocket of her suit coat for safekeeping.

“What’s that?” Wyatt nodded towards the paper.

“Bait.”

She didn’t reply until the sirens turned onto their street. “He would have killed me,” she said. “You saved my life.”

It hurt to admit it. Both of them knew what would have happened if Iron Core had swung that crowbar, but it still hurt to say it aloud. (Not as much as that crowbar would have hurt, true, it was the principle of the thing.)

“I’m here to help OACET,” he said. It was the mildest of comments, but his colors were thick in smug pinks, with the purple of riotous laughter popping throughout.

“It’s not funny, and don’t be such a smug asshole,” she snapped. “You look like a little girl’s bedroom.”

“What?” Yellow confusion chased the other colors away.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she muttered, as the first police car pulled up outside. “Last chance. Go.”

“Your story will be stronger if you say you had help,” he replied. “Especially since you’re bleeding pretty bad.”

“What?” Rachel was suddenly aware of the sticky mass of hair drying flat against her forehead. She touched it, and winced when she found the lump underneath. “Aw, damn it.”

The police rushed in. Rachel and Wyatt stood, hands up, with Rachel shouting her bona fides until everyone’s colors turned blue. An ambulance was called for Iron Core: Rachel’s diagnostic autoscript put him with a broken jaw and a fairly serious concussion.

One of the EMTs treated her head wound while she gave her statement to the officer. Straightforward stuff, and pretty much the truth: Rachel had thought something was hinky when the militia man was in the meeting, so she had gotten him thrown out and then followed him to see where he’d go. Unbeknownst to her, an old friend (*cough*) that OACET had hired to work security had tangled with the militia man in the hall, and when he spotted Rachel tailing him, he had followed along as backup.

“Good thing he did,” Rachel said, as Iron Core was loaded into the ambulance on a stretcher. “Otherwise, that’d be me.”

Wyatt, lurking about the EMTs as if waiting to make sure his friend was okay, was thoroughly pink and purple again.

Once the cops had left them alone to manage the endless bureaucracy of modern crimefighting, she leaned towards Wyatt. “Is he military?” she said quietly.

“You know he is.”

“Ours?”

Wyatt shrugged. “Somebody’s.”

“You recognize the fighting style?”

He shot her the mustardy yellow of scorn. “It’s not a movie, Peng.”

“I’m a detective,” she sighed. “Systema? Krav Maga? Anything?”

“You talk a lot.”

“Blame it on the head wound.”

Wyatt pushed off of the ambulance and disappeared into the crowd. No one moved to stop him. Rachel wondered if she should, then saw that OACET green and the soft browns of sandstone had moved into his colors: he was headed back to the old post office.

She bummed a ride from the EMTs and rode shotgun with them to the hospital. Howard University Hospital, as luck would have it, and several members of the staff recognized her as the person who had torn up a good part of their landscaping the previous year. Rachel declined a thorough examination on the grounds of “Because I’m a cyborg, that’s why!” and said her own doctor would check her for a concussion after she made sure the prisoner was secure.

The doctors weren’t happy about that. They made her fill out forms.

By the time she was finished signing away her right to sue, Santino had arrived. He pulled her away from the desk and the two of them tracked down Iron Core. He had been moved to the Intensive Care unit, just in case—doctors didn’t take chances with concussions, as she had just notarized in triplicate.

“Do me a favor,” she said, as she handed her partner the paper. “Take a photo of that and send it to Jason.”

“Sure,” Santino said. He laid the paper flat on the reception booth and jiggled around with his phone until he got the lighting right. “Whoa,” he said, as he checked the clarity of the photograph and started reading. “What’s this?”

Rachel tried not to hate all things everywhere as her partner took ten seconds to skim something that had taken her five minutes to read, and had nearly gotten her killed besides. “He knows about me,” she said quietly, as Santino finished absorbing the balderdash in incredulous oranges. “He set this out as bait.”

“Does he know you’re…” Santino left the last word unsaid, but his colors turned opaque over his eyes.

“Maybe? I don’t think so,” she said. “But he knows it takes me forever to read, so he left this for me, gave me enough time to lose track of him, and then came at me as hard as he could.”

“That’s a compliment, I guess,” Santino said. “Trying to take you out, instead of interrogating you.”

“You can’t question an Agent,” she said. “Not without bringing the rest of OACET down on you like a load of dynamite.

“Whereas we,” she said, as she took the paper back from Santino, “don’t have that problem.”

Two uniformed officers were stationed outside of Iron Core’s hospital door. Rachel didn’t recognize them; the assault hadn’t happened in the First District. The cops knew her and Santino by sight, though, with Southwestern turquoise and cobalt blue moving into their conversational colors.

“We’d like to talk to him,” she said to the first officer. “What’s his status?”

“Conscious. Doctors cleared him. They’re gonna watch him for twenty-four hours to make sure his concussion doesn’t get worse, and then he’s off to Holding.”

“Great,” Rachel said. “Hear anything from the FBI?”

“You’d know before us.” He was a slight man with a core of soft, fluffy brown, and gave the impression of a determined teddy bear piloting a human suit.

“Orders?” Santino asked them.

“Hold the room, make sure he doesn’t leave, keep the media out,” the second officer replied.

“Is he restrained?”

The officers looked at each other and shrugged in oranges. “Don’t think so,” the first one said.

“Oh, that’s a mistake,” Santino said. “This guy’s lethal. Can you get that started?”

The second officer nodded and stepped away to make the call, and Rachel headed towards the door.

The first officer moved to block her, but in the nicest of ways, his professional blues holding her back until he was sure she was aware of procedure. “This on the record?” he asked.

“No,” Rachel said. “Detective Hill from First is going to handle the interrogation. I’m just his warmup.”

“Hill?” the cop said, his colors brightening in excitement. “Sure. Just leave the door open.”

“Right,” Rachel replied, before she cranked the knob and opened the door to the hospital room as hard as she could. The door slammed against the rubber bumper hard enough to shake the walls. On the bed, Iron Core winced in streaks of red pain that showed through the white bandages holding his broken jaw in place.

“Headache?” Rachel said. “Yeah, me too. Even before you gave me this.” She pushed back her blood-soaked hair to show him the bandaged abrasion across her forehead.

“Forgive me for monologuing,” she continued, “but it’s not like you can chime in and set me straight.” She accidentally kicked the foot of his bed as hard as she could. It set her own head to pounding, but it was worth it—even with the drugs in his system, Iron Core went bright red around his jaw.

“So…” she flopped down in the armchair beside the bed, and dropped her boots on the arm that held Iron Core’s IV drip. The man in the bed made a noise like a whimpering kitten as a needle twisted somewhere. “Oh, sorry. So careless of me. Head wounds, you know how it goes.”

Outside the door, the uniformed cop coughed once, politely.

Rachel moved her feet to the floor. “Ethan Fischer,” she said, and his colors jolted towards yellow-white focus as he heard her use his name. “You were fingerprinted while you were unconscious. You’ve got no military record, which we both know is bullshit. You do have a criminal record that’s very suspicious, in that it’s got the right number of arrests but we haven’t found anybody who remembers arresting you. Or prosecuting you. And that time you spent in jail? Well, you have prisoner IDs and room numbers and all sorts of data, but so far you haven’t shown up on the security footage. At all. Our digital specialist still has a couple of years to process, but we’re guessing…”

She looked over her shoulder to where Santino was standing in the doorway. Her partner said, “Nope.”

“Yeah, we’re guessing nope,” she said.

“Oh, right,” Rachel said, as Fischer’s colors took on some of the colors of confusion. “You’re dealing with cyborgs now. We move really fast when properly motivated.”

“Future of law enforcement, you know,” Santino said. “Ideally, we’ll use the same legal processes as we have in the past. They’ll just be performed much, much faster.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to be Judge Dredd. Judge, jury, and executioner? No thanks.”

A flicker of red anger, and the twist of colors away from her Southwest turquoise that meant he didn’t believe her, oh, no, he didn’t believe her one bit.

“Ah,” Rachel said, leaning in close. “There we go.”

“Oh?” Santino asked. “Whatever do you see, Agent Peng?”

“He thinks I’m lying,” Rachel said. “I don’t know if he joined up with Nicholson because he’s a true believer, but he definitely thinks I’m up to no good. I wonder if it’s just me, or all of OACET…

“How about it, buddy?” She propped her chin on Fischer’s bed and stared at him with puppy-dog eyes. “Is it me in particular, with these freaky things I can do, or is it OACET in general?”

“Can you tell the difference?” asked Santino from beneath the world’s worst poker face.

“Ask him some questions,” she said. “I can figure it out from there. It won’t be admissible in court, of course, but this will never get to court, will it, buddy?”

Fischer’s stare was hard enough to take on her own in a cage match.

“Too bad we don’t know who he is,” said Santino, holding his hands palms up and pleading for divine assistance. “Well, who he really is.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said, and stood to leave. “He’s covered his tracks pretty well. Too well for someone working alone. But however will we learn who those mysterious partners are?”

She stopped and turned before she reached the door, and imagined she could feel a dirty trenchcoat swirl around her as she added, “Oh, just one more thing…” She reached into her pocket and retrieved the letter. “You gave me this,” she said. “A handwriting sample.”

Fischer’s eyes widened as orange-yellow confusion crashed down on itself in sage green comprehension.

“See, I’m guessing you’re military,” Rachel said. “From the way you fight, I bet you’re special forces. Ours, theirs… Who cares? Whatever. It means you’ve been part of the system for forever. Whoever set you up with this cover didn’t go through and delete every document you’ve ever signed, every form you’ve ever filled out…”

He lunged.

This time, she saw the attack coming—the yellow-white intensity of a man determined to confront her narrowed itself into a lance made from furious reds. The bed flipped sideways as he bore down on her, medical equipment raining down behind him as the tubes tore from his arms. Blood ran from his wrists and elbows, but still he came, focused on nothing but Rachel and the paper in her hand.

She punched him.

She expected Fischer to black out from the pain of a second hit to the face, especially a solid shot to his broken jaw.

Then—too late—she realized she had never fought a special forces operative pumped up on painkillers before.

Fischer rocked back on his heels from her punch, but didn’t go down. He recovered, twisting away to block her follow-through before he sprang at her like a wounded tiger. She swore and went for her gun, but he had already closed the distance. Her breath shot from her as he crushed her against the wall, both hands wrapped around her neck.

Santino and the officers were shouting at her; the cops had their guns out, Santino had his trusty Taser… There was no clear shot. Not at that angle. Not with him pressing against her throat with his full weight.

Things were getting awfully sparkly around their edges.

She finally got her gun out; he slammed his knee against her hand until she dropped it. She brought her own knee up; he was off-balance and she brought him straight down to the ground. Air—glorious air!—chased the blackout away, and she took a page from Hope Blackwell’s book by grabbing a handful of his hair and using it to slam his head against the floor.

He rolled, one arm out and moving to throw her. As she fell, she reached out and grabbed the nearest weapon, and used her momentum to swing it at his skull.

There was a sound like a plastic window cracking. Rachel turned the cheap flower pot over and began to bash it into Fischer’s face, dirt and begonia petals flying. He hissed, one hand across his eyes, as the edges of the pot began to cut his skin to ribbons.

“Rachel, move!” Santino shouted, and she abandoned the flower pot to throw herself clear.

Fischer lit up in whites as Santino’s Taser tagged him. The militia man seemed to hover on his knees for a mild eternity before collapsing face-first on the floor.

Rachel pulled herself to her feet. Her headache was roaring in bloodthirsty vengeance, and the crowd of new arrivals—doctors, hospital staff, the stray patient who had suddenly gotten a ringside seat to a beating—who kept shouting at her wasn’t helping. She stood over Fischer and ran her diagnostic autoscript over his unconscious body.

“What’s craniofacial dissociation?” she asked her partner. When he winced in yellows, she added, “No, don’t answer that. Just tell me if it hurts.”

“Definitely.”

“Good.” She gave in to the tickle at the back of her throat and coughed up potting soil. When she could breathe again, she knelt to gather up Fischer’s note and what was left of the begonias. The first went into her pocket, the latter to her partner, who started making the miserable noises of someone who has been handed a badly beaten puppy. “Sorry.”

“I can fix it. I hope.”

A glass of water entered her scans; one of the officers had found the sink. “Thanks.”

“Listen, Agent Peng—”

She cut him off. “Get him in restraints,” she said. “Have the lawyers talk to me if they give you any shit.”

With that settled, her headache decided it was as good a time as any for her to black out.

 

 

 

FIFTEEN

 

Mulcahy’s office wasn’t nearly as vivid as usual, but the humans had faces, with eyes and ears and all the pieces in between. They wore clothing that was more than just fabric, color, and folds, and stood in a room where the books had titles on their spines. The scents of the room were less distinct than she was used to, but sounds were sharper; she wondered how Josh could go through life when every little noise sounded like the beginnings of something serious.

Smell… Musk and gun oil, standing out in equal parts, with a little bit of leather wafting up between them as Josh leaned to one side and his nose came closer to the couch. All masculine smells, which surprised her—she would have assumed Josh’s senses would have been cued to the women in the room.

“I was working,” he reminded her, a small measure of irritation coming into their link.

“I’ve seen you multitask,” she said, and he laughed aloud.

She tried to swing her perceptions around to check for other differences, but experimentation hadn’t been Josh’s priority when he made the recording. His attention was on Nicholson and the militia men. Anything else was peripheral information that had made it into his memories of the meeting by exposure, not intention, regardless of its interest to Rachel.

(Case in point: Memory-Josh finished resettling himself on the couch. Rachel, riding along in the sensations of his body, felt the unfamiliar relief of testicles freed from the weight of a nearby thigh. Weird!)

Mulcahy picked up the coffee table and threw it across the room.

“That’s when you started recording?” she asked.

“Yes.” In the memory, Josh’s focus swung towards a tall Chinese woman with short black hair. Rachel couldn’t place the woman’s face until she heard her taunt the man in the camouflage jumper beside her.

“Oh Lord,” she said, as the man in camouflage—Ethan Fischer—grabbed Memory-Rachel by her head and drove it straight at Mulcahy’s mahogany desk. Memory-Rachel screamed like a movie starlet as she landed with a crash. “Why did anybody buy that? I phoned it in.”

“Everything was moving too fast,” he said. The perspective of the memory swayed from Fischer to the door. FBI agents swarmed into the office, shouting commands. Most of Memory-Josh’s attention was on two of the FBI agents with their fingers on the triggers of their guns; out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Fischer put up his hands and played the part of a good submissive minion.

“That’s a tipoff right there,” Rachel said. “Everything we’ve got on sovereign citizens says that when law enforcement pushes them, they make a stand and fight back. This guy’s got to be a plant.”

“Yeah, but why?” Josh replied. “And who put him here? Did you get a read off of the FBI?”

“They’re legit,” she said, as the FBI agents stood down. “Real reactions. None of them were playing along with Iron Core.”

“Who?”

“Sorry. Ethan Fischer. Nicholson’s second. The guy who’s hogtied in the hospital as he waits for them to reset his face.”

Fischer wasn’t literally hogtied in his bed, but only because Rachel had been unconscious when the officers did the tying. Her body had decided it was done getting clubbed in the head for the day, and the hospital floor was comfortable enough. Santino had saved her from the doctors and whatnots by insisting that no, she didn’t need a CAT scan, and did you need to reread those forms you made her sign? He had still been shouting when Rachel’s personal physician had arrived: Jenny Davis had thrown around the proper medical terminology until everybody had calmed down, and woken Rachel up long enough to get her out of the hospital and back to OACET headquarters.

Jenny had told her to lie down and rest until her headache went away. So Rachel had ordered an extra-large pizza and asked Josh to brief her on the meeting while she stuffed herself with pepperoni and cheese.

Rest was relative.

To be fair, nobody was resting this afternoon. It was getting on towards sunset, but the building was still full of Agents, agents, and others. The guys from Homeland weren’t even trying to be subtle about their presence anymore, and were lurking openly in the halls. Worse, the FBI said some randos had jumped the barricade and snuck in while everybody’s attention was on Nicholson and the media in his entourage. They had torn through the old post office, grabbing souvenirs whenever they could. There were signs of snooping everywhere.

Mulcahy had let the FBI know that this would not be tolerated. To their credit, the FBI had taken this to heart—the only places where they hadn’t set up guards were in the private offices. Hence, this briefing on the couch in Mulcahy’s office, as Josh was firmly believed that a recorded memory should be viewed under circumstances as close to the original conditions of the recording as possible.

It was an odd experience, to be sitting in the same place across time and in two different bodies. Rachel would have been happier sitting in one of the comfy club chairs, but nooo, she had to sit right here where Josh had sat when he made the recording, and deal with the phantom discomforts of anatomy.

Not so much of that at the moment, though. She shuffled around on the leather couch as the top layer of Memory-Josh shouted around her, waving his arms and doing everything he could to make the stand-off in the office as bad as it could get. He kept telling the militia men to back off, Back Off! his voice cracking from panic. The militia wasn’t nearly as well-trained as Fischer; they began to press forward—

“So close,” she sighed through their link, as Fischer soothed the room through calm assurances. “He knew exactly what to say to get everybody back under control.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Thanks for getting him out of there.”

“No matter what else happens, Nicholson’s lost him. Did you see anyone else who could take over for him?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a fallback waiting at the factory.”

They watched as Fischer left the room. Then came Mulcahy’s assurances that there would be no more misunderstandings, and the FBI followed him out. The woman standing by the window opened it, and Rachel watched herself leap from the third story.

“At least that looked believable,” she said.

“Heart-stoppingly believable,” her friend muttered.

In Josh’s memory, the militia men gasped and rushed to the window.

“Stop.” The remembered version of Mulcahy’s voice was as hard as the original. “Calm down, or the FBI will come back. You won’t be able to get rid of them again.”

This time, the militia men looked to Nicholson, then to each other when he offered no guidance.

“Stand down,” Mulcahy told them, and they moved away from the window. The memory of Josh shook as he tried to keep from laughing, his quiet puffs of air lost in the shuffle of combat boots on expensive area rugs.

Mulcahy turned towards Nicholson. “You wanted to talk to me,” he said, standing in the space where the coffee table had been. “Talk.”

“Yes. Yes, well…” Nicholson squirmed as the blond giant in front of him walled him off from the rest of the room. “OACET… Your organization has been… Yes. Three years ago, when OACET—”

“No,” Mulcahy said. “No sales pitches. No prepared speeches. Tell me why you kidnapped my wife and oldest godchild.”

“Listen—”

Mulcahy held up his hand. It appeared to be a call for silence, but a glowing red dot appeared in the center of his palm. Nicholson’s mouth snapped shut at the sight of it.

“This isn’t yours,” Mulcahy said, as he moved his hand through the air. The dot tracked the center of his palm, pulled together from fluid motes of light which seemed almost alive.

“What?” Nicholson couldn’t pull his gaze from that red dot.

“My team took down your scouts before the meeting,” Mulcahy said. “Don’t worry, we didn’t hurt them. They’ll be released when we let you leave.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Nicholson said loftily as he tore his gaze away from the laser.

“It was a cute workaround.” A voice—a very close, very loud version of Josh’s normal speaking voice—dominated the recording. Rachel felt her cheeks contort as the memory of Josh grinned at Nicholson. “You can’t use normal communications when OACET’s involved. We’d yank a cell phone signal or an email out of the air, just like that!” Their fingers twisted and a snap! shot through the room. “We had to watch the EMF around the warehouse until we figured out your communications strategy.”

“A ten-milliwatt laser can be seen from over three miles away,” Mulcahy said. “You’ve been running Morse code with someone in a local high-rise. That line of communications will be closed by the time this meeting is over. We’ve located your contact and we’ll have her taken into custody as soon as you leave this building, and we are very interested to learn who her contact is.”

“I don’t have a contact—”

“We thought you’d double up on the same strategy to let your men back at the warehouse know we didn’t screw you in this meeting,” Memory-Josh said. “You didn’t disappoint.”

“Your spotters took a position where they could see into my office from the roof of that building,” Mulcahy said, pointing towards a nearby skyscraper. “They planned to signal another spotter in position on the east side of the city. The go-between is the one with the phone, and he’s the one who’d call the factory if the spotters saw us take you down.”

“Same way you’ve been getting messages in and out of the factory,” Memory-Josh said.

Nicholson was shaking his head. “That’s not what I’ve done,” he said. “The spotters, yeah, I put them in place for this meeting. Can you blame me? I need to stay in contact with my men back in Maryland. But I’m not getting Morse code messages… I’m not sending them, either! I don’t have to!”

“You don’t,” Mulcahy said. He put his hand down, and the red dot vanished. “Someone else does. Who gave you the idea for the communications setup for this meeting?”

Nicholson’s eyes darted towards the corner where Fischer had stood, but he didn’t reply.

“You’re being played,” Mulcahy said. “Someone is manipulating you, and they’re using…Ethan, I believe? as their mouthpiece. You’ve got five minutes to convince me that you’ve got enough control to salvage this situation before I take all choice away from you.”

Nicholson stared up at Mulcahy, dumbstruck.

“Get him out of here—” Mulcahy began.

“It’s too big!” Nicholson blurted.

Mulcahy took another step towards him.

“I know what we said, but you should always have your elevator pitch locked and loaded, no matter what,” Memory-Josh said. “Otherwise, you’ll miss the best opportunities.”

Nicholson just shook his head, but another member of the militia spoke up. “No!” The other man paused, as if shocked that he had opened his mouth, but he pulled himself together and added, “Not…not the plan. He means the government.”

Nicholson tried to stand; Mulcahy laid a hand on Nicholson’s shoulder until he sat back down. “We want the same thing,” Nicholson tried. “We—everybody here—just wants to be free.”

The head of OACET didn’t respond, but Nicholson pushed on through the silence. “This country has lost its way,” he said. “The government is too powerful. Not the elected government—the one that exists behind the bread and circus. The people don’t have power anymore! That’s why Hanlon tried to take control of you—he knows that politics isn’t power. I mean, the guy decided he wanted to be a Senator, so he became a Senator. But he did that to get control of OACET. If politics was power—real power!—he could easily have become President. But why should he want to? The so-called most powerful man in the world is just a figurehead who gets five years older for every one that he’s in office.”

Nicholson paused to catch his breath. “That should mean something to you,” he continued. “That to him, political office was just a means to get control of OACET.”

Mulcahy didn’t respond. Neither did Josh, or any of the other Agents in the room.

The militia leader tried again. “The government doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “Not in the way that was guaranteed to us by the Constitution. The system is set up so there are no more winners or losers, just an endless status quo.

“You can’t let them do this,” he said. “They could hurt—No! They do hurt too many people. OACET can change that. You have the power to wipe the slate clean. Everything’s gone digital. You can dump it. Dump it all. Wipe out this system of lies so we can start from scratch.”

“If what you’re saying is true, you’ve admitted that OACET is in power,” Mulcahy said. “What makes you think we’d be sympathetic to you?”

The militia man who had spoken before called out: “Hanlon.”

Nicholson nodded. “You’ve been hurt,” he said. “He tried to break you, but you fought back and broke him instead. He gave you power and you used it to take down a Senator—Why not take them all down?

“Listen, America might not have started out as a feudal society, but that’s what it’s become. As it stands now, the system is set up to profit from the people. The system is broken—irreversibly broken! We’re here…” he said, as he gestured towards his men, “…because we love our country. We don’t want to see it destroyed.”

His men were nodding. The brave one said, “You have to help us.”

“No,” Mulcahy said. “We don’t.”

Nicholson stood and tried to stare Mulcahy down. It was like watching a Honda Civic drive straight at a canyon wall. “Yes,” he shouted, “you do! You’re obliged to help your country!”

“Obliged?” said Memory-Josh.

“Morally obliged! Ethically obligated!” Nicholson shouted. “You’ve got the power to help us break free of this system, and if you can’t recognize that, we’ll make you!”

“Fuck!” Rachel broke her link with Josh and leapt off of the couch. “Fuck fuck fuuuuuuck!”

Josh rubbed his temples as the recording snapped into fragments of light and sensation. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” Rachel’s voice sounded high and strange in her own ears. “What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and sit on Chuck Palahniuk until he comes up with a better plot.”

“He’s not completely wrong,” Josh said. “Nicholson, that is. Not Palahniuk.”

“I know,” she said. Then, more quietly: “What do we do?”

Josh didn’t reply.

The memory had faded away and had taken the sharp details of the room with it. The familiar soft forms of her world weren’t nearly as welcoming as usual: the room still stank of agendas and frightened men.

“We’re trapped,” Josh finally said. “We can’t negotiate with Nicholson. Not at all. If we do…”

“…he’ll be the first of thousands of anti-government conspiracy nuts,” she finished for him. “All of them looking to OACET for salvation.”

He nodded. “The terms have changed. It doesn’t just end with getting the hostages back. We’ve got to have a decisive victory, real scorched-earth. No survivors, figuratively speaking. Or we might as well not win at all, because others will see us as sympathetic to the cause and they’ll keep coming.”

Rachel flopped back down on the couch; the smell of leather puffed around her. “Fuck Hanlon,” she said. “He knew this would happen.”

“No, he didn’t,” Josh said. He stood and moved to search a spot high on a bookshelf, nudging framed photographs aside but coming up empty. “He’s not a god. All of us together are four hundred times smarter than he is… Where’d Pat hide his brandy today?”

She pointed to a drawer in a nearby cabinet. “Check the shoebox behind the legal briefs.”

“Thanks.” He returned to the couch with a squat glass bottle, and they took turns passing it between them until they began to feel marginally better.

She didn’t realize she had sighed aloud until Josh said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

Rachel burst out laughing.

“I know, right?” he said with a grin.

“Oh God, we were such sweet summer children,” she said, and opened a new link. She sent him her own memory, of a stairwell and a tall man made of forest greens, with a complicated mess of colors stitched over that green. The man-shape said, in Hill’s voice, “Martyrs. Scary as fuck.”

Josh took another drink, and asked, “Is Nicholson a martyr?”

“You tell me,” she said. “You’re better at reading people than I am.”

“Couldn’t tell.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He seemed sincere, but not to the point of sacrificing himself for the cause.”

“Where’s the woman? The one on the building who was sending the messages to Fischer?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know. She slipped her tail.”

“Great. Just great. Is there more to the meeting?”

“Yup.”

“All right,” she said, as she resettled herself in Memory-Josh’s position on the couch. “Let’s do this.”

“Where were we?” Josh asked, as images and sounds moved themselves around.

“You didn’t pause it?”

“You can’t pause a memory.”

“But you can record one?”

She felt him push aside the bundle of complex answers before saying, “Ah, we were here. Ready?”

She consented, and the feeling of being crammed inside a body larger and heavier than her own crushed her down against the leather couch again, as the physical details of the room took on edges, letters, and faces.

Nicholson was shouting: “Morally obliged! Ethically obligated! You’ve got the power to help us break free of this system, and if you can’t recognize that, we’ll make you!”

“Obliged and obligated?” asked Memory-Josh in his too-loud voice. “Those who can do, must do, for the overall good of society? Sounds like communism to me.”

The members of the militia shot weighty glances at each other at the mention of communism, but Nicholson wasn’t about to back down. “Not communism,” he said. “Far from it. I’d call OACET the perfect weapon for true democracy. You have the ability to make sure that government plays by the same rules for all people. Not just the rich and powerful.”

“That’s wishful thinking,” Memory-Josh said. “If—if!—we could equalize the playing field, there’s no guarantee it’d stay that way. And once we took steps against the government, we’d be removed from office so damned fast—”

“It’s a—” Nicholson tried to move around Mulcahy, but the head of OACET pushed him back down in the chair again. “Could you back off? You’re not in this alone!” Nicholson snapped at him.

For the first time since he had hurled the coffee table, Mulcahy took a step away from Nicholson. The militia’s leader took this as a triumph. “You wouldn’t be removed,” Nicholson said, a smile beginning to turn his mouth. “Everyone would be too focused on me and my men. The obvious threat. You work behind the scenes, and we do the hard work on the battlefield. By the time they figured out what was really happening, there’d be so little left of the establishment that there’d be no choice but to start anew. With both of our groups in positions of influence.”

The memory of the same cold sweat that had broken over Josh prickled over Rachel’s skin, and blended with her own. “Holy shit,” she whispered across their link, as if Nicholson might be able to hear her. “Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

“Watch,” Josh told her.

“Battlefield?” Mulcahy asked, as calmly as if he were inquiring as to whether Nicholson wanted sugar in his coffee. “That implies you have an army.”

“There are thousands of us!” Nicholson said proudly. “Tens of thousands! And more will join once the fighting starts. They’ve—we’ve—been waiting, Mulcahy. All of us waiting for a leader to step up and do what needs to be done.”

“And you’d lead this fighting force?” Memory-Josh asked.

Another involuntary glance at the corner where Ethan Fischer had stood, but Nicholson nodded.

“What you’re suggesting is treason,” Mulcahy said.

“I’m sure you’re familiar with the Founding Fathers,” Nicholson said.

Mulcahy closed his eyes and exhaled, ever so slowly, and Rachel wondered if he had finally reached the limits of his seemingly infinite self-control. A moment later, he opened them to stare down at the militia leader. “I’m a Constitutional scholar,” he said. “And I very much doubt the Founding Fathers would perceive the current government as a worthy target of open revolt.”

“Only because the current system would benefit them,” Nicholson said. “If they were down here in the trenches with the rest of us, they’d want another revolution. No, they’d demand it! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants!”

“Don’t quote Jefferson out of context,” Memory-Josh said. “Just...don’t.”

“I’m not,” Nicholson said. “He addressed the necessity of rebellion to preserve an informed society.”

“And claims that lives lost in the process are nothing in the grand scheme of time, a point with which I personally disagree.”

“What do you propose?” Mulcahy asked Nicholson.

Nicholson brightened, as an almost palpable sense of eagerness moved among his followers. “The sovereign citizen movement isn’t perfect,” he said. “But it’s founded on a core of truth. I need you to help us get to that truth, where the rules for the powerful are also those that apply to the general population. All we want is to bring the government that exists in line with the version that’s been promised to the people.”

Mulcahy closed his eyes again, as if considering. “It’s difficult to hear you talk about moral and ethical obligations when you’ve abducted the same people you claim you want to protect,” he said. “Including a very young child.”

“They haven’t been harmed,” Nicholson said. His smirk had returned. “I’ve made sure of that.”

“Have you seen my wife’s face today? How many of your men have taken turns beating her?”

Nicholson seemed dumbstruck. “The cameras,” he said softly. “That’s right. You can look through the cameras.”

“With that in mind, you must appreciate that I’m having a hard time trusting your word,” Mulcahy said, his eyes still closed.

“Your wife is…difficult,” Nicholson said. “She’s resisted. When she attacks my men, they hit back.”

“You kidnapped a world-class martial artist who’s renowned for her short temper, and you expected her to play along,” Memory-Josh said. “I see a few flaws in this plan right out of the gate.”

Mulcahy opened his eyes. “I’ve heard you out,” he said. “Now, let the hostages go.”

“It’s not that easy,” Nicholson said. “We need assurances that you’ll help us before you get them back. And you have to make sure that nobody takes this as an opportunity to come after us before the uprising.”

Rachel felt the press of smooth top-grain leather on both sides of a hand that wasn’t hers, as Memory-Josh snuck his hand between the couch cushions.

“I apologize for the misunderstanding.” The head of OACET opened his eyes and stared down at Nicholson. “We won’t be helping you. Not now. Not ever.”

“What?!” Nicholson tried to rise to his feet again, and this time Mulcahy let him. He stood, furious. “You have to help. And it has to be soon—this is an opportunity that won’t come again! Congress will force you to join up with Homeland Security or the CIA soon, and then you’ll be watched too closely to act!”

“Work behind the scenes to pull down the government while you set yourself up as the new General Washington?” Memory-Josh said. “Don’t think so.”

There was a scuffle around the room as the militia men protested. They began to move, closing in on Mulcahy from all sides—

A small pfft! sound, about as loud as a glass bottle breaking. Nothing loud. Nothing remotely like a gunshot. The men still froze where they stood—they knew a silencer when they heard one.

“Easy,” Memory-Josh said in his too-loud voice. A semi-automatic pistol hung in his hand, the silencer on its muzzle pointing at nowhere in particular. There was a new hole in the thick wood of the monstrous mahogany desk.

“This meeting is over,” Mulcahy announced. “Go back to your factory. Get your affairs in order, release the hostages, and give yourselves up.”

Nicholson was turning red, the tips of his ears burning in anger. “Who do you think you are?!” he shouted. “I’ve got your wi—”

Mulcahy reached out one giant hand and, as gently as if he were plucking a peach from a tree, wrapped that hand around Nicholson’s throat.

“Gurk?” said Nicholson, eyes wide.

“Indeed,” Mulcahy said.

There was a rush of movement as Mulcahy picked Nicholson up by the neck. Nicholson clawed at Mulcahy’s hand with both of his own, strangled gurks! slipping through his lips as he tried to breathe.

Mulcahy bent his arm and brought Nicholson in close, so close that Memory-Josh with his poor sense of hearing couldn’t make out what he whispered in Nicholson’s ear…

“He asked Nicholson if he wanted a demonstration of true abuse of power,” Josh said, as the memory hung within the moment.

Mulcahy lowered Nicholson to the floor and released him.

“There will be no negotiation,” Mulcahy said. “Here are our terms: abide by them, or we will come into your house and tear it down around you. Release the hostages. Give yourselves up.”

“We’ll say you’ve cooperated,” Memory-Josh said. “We’ll spin this so you guys will play like princes! Freedom fighters so committed to the idea of fixing this country that you were willing to do anything to call attention to its problems.

“Hell,” Memory-Josh said, “Why don’t we make it a party? We’ll call a huge press conference, give you guys all the media time you want. You can turn yourselves into heroes after this, you know. You’ll be booked on all of the talk shows. I bet some of you can get movie deals.”

The militia men shuffled in place. Heroism and royalty payments seemed to have some universal appeal.

“Thirty-seven hours,” Mulcahy said to Nicholson. He took a cell phone from his pocket and pushed it into Nicholson’s trembling hands. “Talk it over with your men. Reach a deal. There are more effective ways to make your case than open revolt.”

“Trust us on this,” Memory-Josh said. “We’ve gotten really good at working the media angle.”

The memory faded. Mulcahy’s office was darker, now—the sun had finally gone down, and the streetlights outside weren’t able to pick up the slack.

“After that, it was just logistics,” Josh said. The bottle of brandy was more than half gone. “We gave them thirty-seven hours to surrender. Deadline is nine in the morning, day after tomorrow. In the meantime, we offered to provide meals and entertainment. If we’re lucky, they won’t recognize this as prep work for a raid.”

“Are we that lucky?”

“Yeah,” Josh sighed, as the weight of the world moved between them. “Sure we are.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Rachel asked aloud.

Her friend severed their link as his thoughts spun away from the image of Mulcahy, standing with one hand around—

“Nothing,” he said, as he went to return the bottle to its hiding place. “He’s fine.”

“Josh!” Rachel stood and began to move around the room, feeling like Hope Blackwell trying to burn off her captivity. “We’ve already had this discussion. He’s not fine. You’ve admitted it, and Hope told me to ask you about it, so hi, Josh, I’m asking you again—What’s wrong with him? He’s not…” She groped for the right words. “He’s not acting human!”

“He’s not human,” Josh said, as gray stress and the pitted textures of depression swirled around him like a cloak. “Not right now.”

It was true, or at least truth as best as Josh knew how to put it. She tried to reopen their link, but he waved her off, orange frustration rising.

“Okay,” she said. “What do you mean?”

He turned into the weaving and weighing of colors, a balance of OACET green against Mulcahy’s cerulean blue. “You remember what it was like?” he finally asked. “Back before activation?”

“The brainwashing?” she snapped, only hearing that much-hated word after it sprang loose. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember. Thanks.”

“He can tap into that,” Josh said. “That…the conditioning. He can put himself back in that empty place. It helps him get through events like this.”

She was sitting on the couch again with no memory of how she got there, and wasn’t sure whether to thank her feet or curse their timing. “No,” she whispered. “He can’t do that.”

“Yeah, he can. We all can, probably—Pat’s just the only one of us who finds it useful. Or the only one who isn’t terrified to use it.” Sorrowful, stressful yellows and oranges and even the green of guilt as he tried to shoulder some of the burden.

“He can’t do that!” she gasped.

“Obviously he can—”

“No, Josh, there’s no way he’d do that to himself—not willingly! Put himself back in that living hell?”

“Do you really want him angry?” Josh asked. “You know what he did before he got tapped for OACET. If he loses control, there’d be a body count.”

“I think…” she began, before she decided she didn’t know what she thought, that maybe Josh was right and it was better that Mulcahy stayed in control.

Patrick Mulcahy hadn’t started out as a bureaucrat. The U.S. government had its own internal messaging service, couriers they used to move special packages from Point A to Point B. He had been one of these, instead. When most people learned that he had been a delivery boy prior to joining OACET, they usually laughed and congratulated him on his promotion. When those who had the proper security clearance learned what he had done, they usually needed to sit down and put their heads between their knees for a few minutes. They knew that, if mishandled, some packages tended to die, or explode, or spread little tiny viral pathogens all over the place, and that sometimes these packages needed to be moved behind international lines or through active warzones. The U.S. government’s specialized couriers received training equivalent to SEALs and the Green Berets combined, and nobody made too much fuss about their methods as long as the job got done.

Mulcahy had been very good at his job.

“Body count, my ass. If he gets pushed over the edge,” she murmured, “it’d be a bloodbath.”

“And if Mulcahy falls, we all fall with him,” he reminded her. “He’s made sure OACET stands for honor and integrity. He could get his wife back any time he wants, but there’d be a cost we’d all pay. He’s choosing to let diplomacy win out, for us. He’s shut himself down, for us.”

“Jesus.” She flipped off her implant and buried her head in her hands.

“This is what he’s got to do,” Josh said. “And we all do what we’ve got to do.”

“We can’t let him do this,” she said, her mind trying to bundle ‘all that we’ve got to do’ into a single idea. It wasn’t working—there was too much that needed to fit inside of it, and the details were spilling out from the cracks.

“No, we can’t,” he agreed. “And we shouldn’t stop him.”

“This isn’t right!” Rachel said, loud enough to start her headache up again.

“If you can think of any way to end this, please do,” he said.

Rachel tapped her fingertips on her temples. The blood in her hair had gone hard and crunchy, and it shed tiny shards of dried biocontamination when she moved it. “I need to go see that militia,” she said. “The one up in Pennsylvania. That’s the only trail I haven’t chased yet.”

“Right now?”

“Can’t. I’ve got a golf game in the morning” she said.

She felt him nod. Josh was a golfer, too, because help came from the unlikeliest places and there was no better way to forge a lasting relationship than to demonstrate how skilled you were with a bludgeoning weapon while standing in the middle of nowhere. Or something.

She sprawled out across the couch, and most of Josh. He nudged her foot until the toe of her boot stopped poking him in the ribs.

“Going to be tight,” he said. “Golf early, Pennsylvania later… We need you back here and rested for the raid. Phil’s scans are good, but yours can’t be beat.”

“I’ve got that figured out, but I need your help,” she said. She told him what she was thinking, and he laughed.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll put it together.”

“You using your office bed tonight?” she asked.

“Nah, got to go back to my place and feed the cat,” he said. “All yours.”

“Thanks,” she said, and reactivated her implant. She sent a text to Becca that said she was working late and would see her soon, maybe not tomorrow, but definitely after that and they’d have a nice date night. And then she sent a follow-up text to let her know the psychopath was still being watched by the Hippos and she shouldn’t worry. And then a second follow-up text that was three red hearts and an emoji of shrimp tempura.

She waited. Three hearts came back across her mind. A moment later, the shrimp emoji followed.

“Becca?” Josh asked, as she smiled.

“Mmm-hmm.”

Sleep. The idea was almost intoxicating. If she went to bed right now, she could put on that autoscript that boosted her healing and sleep for thirteen hours. Thirteen full hours of blissful, uninterrupted—

And, just as she began to acquaint herself to the idea that she could look forward to a day in which she was fully rested and ready to take on the world, the sweet electronic voice of a mostly-dead computer swept through her mind.

“Look at me still talking when there’s science to do…”

“Aw hell,” Rachel muttered. Santino’s ringtone, and something was wrong: he had been so distant lately that he only called when it was important. She opened the line and her partner began shouting.

Josh drove her to the hospital. He didn’t stick around. Rachel didn’t blame him for leaving. There was…quite a lot of blood.

It might not have looked like a murder. Not if the victim hadn’t been tougher than hammered nails and unwilling to go down without a fight. The officers had put Fischer in restraints, and had moved him to a bed designed for that purpose, with metal railings bolted to a weighted platform. No chance of flipping this one, or of breaking the leather straps belted around his body and fastened to the railings. But he had fought back so hard that the bed had wiggled nearly a foot away from the wall.

The medical examiner thought the needle from the syringe that had been used to inject him had broken off in his neck. The needle was gone, but whoever had removed it had needed to dig it out with a scalpel.

…quite a lot of blood. Yes. Quite a lot…

“He couldn’t call for help,” Santino said. “Not with those bandages around his jaw.”

“Yeah,” she replied. Her voice sounded distant. “Any leads?”

“Jason’s going through the security footage now. There’s a woman in a nurse’s uniform who nobody recognizes, and the officer at the door went on a five-minute break after she said she’d watch him while changing his bandages.”

Santino was quiet for a moment, staring at the body of the man they had, however indirectly, helped put on the path to his own death. “Why’d they kill him?”

“Did Hill get a chance to go at him yet?”

“No.”

“That’s why,” she sighed. “Time to find out who this guy is, and where he came from.”

“I don’t even know where to start with that,” Santino said. “Tracking down that handwriting sample will take too long, even for Jason.”

“I do,” she said. “I need to learn who else is in my foursome.” 

 

 

 

SIXTEEN

 

The man sitting beside her had a monster’s face, but she wasn’t worried—the monster had stolen her friend’s face, not the other way around. He was a youngish man with a Texas drawl and a cowboy strut, even though he had never been near a ranch, let alone a horse. A man from a sleepy suburban home, just like hers, with two upper-middle-class parents who loved him, just like hers, and who couldn’t understand why their beloved only child had run off to join the circus. Just like hers.

They were sitting on the roof of a mess hall in Afghanistan, watching the stars.

“Sorry,” she said, and since this was a dream, he already knew why she was buried up to her neck in a stinking pile of guilt.

“Hell, Peng,” he said in the warm sounds of home. “You were a mind-controlled ’bot when I died. You couldn’t’a done anything.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “Something would have been better than nothing. A phone call, an email…”

He threw her off the roof.

Rachel hung in mid-air: flying in dreams had become much easier since she started soaring around in her avatar. But Wyatt—a Wyatt three years younger than he had been on the roof—was waiting for her on the ground. She landed and felt her body twist into that of an eighteen-year-old girl’s, and started crying.

“What’s your bitch, kid?”

Younger-Rachel scrubbed at her face, hot with embarrassment at getting caught crying behind the women’s privies. “Go away,” she snapped.

He called her names until she was mad enough to take a swing at him, and then they pounded the shit out of each other until they were too tired to stand.

“There you go,” he told her. “Stay mad. It helps.”

They aged a year; the stars overhead stayed the same.

“Criminal Investigation Command.” Wyatt’s tone was half-scorn, half-anger. “The hell are you doin’, puttin’ in for CID?”

“I don’t have as many options as you.” Rachel was throwing rocks into the desert. The moon was just at the edge of the horizon, and huge. She had never seen a moon this large. It was silver and red, and called to the wolf in her. She wanted to race across the desert in the moonlight, but there were landmines out there, right below the sand. “CID is a good start. I can move up in the ranks, build a rep…”

“As a cop,” he said, still angry.

“You know what CID does out here?” She flung a baseball-sized rock into the emptiness, and waited for an explosion that never came. “Everything. You and me, we sit around waiting for something to happen, and then it’s chaos for a day, maybe two. Then we go back to waiting. CID gets shit done.”

And then she started talking about opportunities in the CID, mostly for women, but hell, Wyatt could put in—should put in—for the transfer, too. It was all puzzles and scams and putting things right, and didn’t they spend all of their time complaining about how things around here weren’t right, right?

Another rock. Another two years on their bones. The same stars overhead, the same moon touching where the world dropped off.

“Gonna miss you, y’know.” Wyatt was sitting on a flat-topped boulder, a can of beer in his hands. He held the can gently; beer was almost unheard-of around here, a forbidden treasure from home.

“Yeah.” Her own beer was warm, old, and skunky, but she drank it anyhow. God only knew where he had found it for her going-away party. “I’ll be back.”

“As an officer.”

“Hopefully,” she said. “You should put in. You’d do good at West Point.”

Wyatt shook his head in disgust. “Dragging me into CID was bad enough—”

“Fuck, man, you need some ambition or you’re gonna die a nobody!”

Wyatt started laughing. She couldn’t figure out why he found that funny, or why she thought he should be purple. Then the shell of the dream cracked, and she remembered.

“Sorry,” she said. She crushed the can down and it became a stone, and hurled this into the minefield.

The dead man shrugged. The beer can from her memory stretched into an ice-cold stein, overflowing with fresh beer and foam. “It’s not all bad,” he said, as he raised the glass in a silent toast.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I’m still around. I’m just harder to reach.”

“Stop talking to my inner Catholic.”

“Wasn’t,” he said, and his grin was made of secrets.

“Want me to track down your body?”

“Nah,” he said. “I’m not using it any more. Let your new buddy have it.”

Light spilled out of the moon as the dream cracked so hard it nearly split open, and she remembered the psychopath in Wyatt’s skin.

“What aren’t I seeing?” she asked him.

Wyatt pointed.

The moon had grown a shadow: a man, haloed in black against the silver. He was walking down the desert road, head high, focused on what lay ahead of him.

Mulcahy.

And suddenly, she knew the road was full of landmines—so, so many more landmines than in the desert around it!—and he was about to blow himself up.

“Get him off the road,” Wyatt said, before he punched her in the face for old time’s sake.

She woke in Josh’s office, with yet another headache.

Probably the same one, she reminded herself, as she let herself wake up in the dark. Head injuries, thrown into a wall, late night at a murder scene… At least this one isn’t too bad.

Snoring from two points in the room: Rachel flipped on her implant and went to the loudest source; Josh, asleep on the couch, alone, with a magazine over his face and a hungry cat at home.

She moved to the second source and found Ami asleep beside her. On the other side of Ami was the fake Wyatt, snoring away in duckling-like peeps.

The two of them were naked.

“No. Just no,” Rachel groaned, and left the room at a run.

Becca always says I can sleep through anything. She’s gonna laugh so hard—

No, it was her autoscript. The one that put her into a deep sleep so she could rest and rebuild. It had to be the autoscript, because there was no way on God’s green earth she would have let herself sleep while that was happening beside her.

Gah! With him? What the hell was Ami thinking?!

Rachel had never been completely comfortable with casual sex. It bashed up against her nature. And with somebody like Wyatt? Not that she was judging Ami, oh no, but…

…okay. This one time? She was definitely judging Ami.

“Could’ve at least gone somewhere else,” she grumbled, her bare feet slapping quietly against the stone floor as she ran out of Josh’s office, trying her best to get into yesterday’s clothing before she bumped into someone from the FBI. Or worse, Homeland. “Me, right there…ugh!”

She found a side door and fled into the night.

Alone in the relative quiet of the city streets, she allowed the dream to set up shop in her head.

Her dreams had never been anything close to vivid, not until she and Santino had fished a piece of ancient history out of the basement of the White House. Since then, they had turned into living Technicolor on top of Technitouch and Technisound, with some Technismell creeping in around the edges.

She had asked her doctor about this, and Jenny had said that it was most likely that Rachel’s dreams were changing as her senses redefined how she perceived the world. Her doctor pointed out that much of the early research on dreaming indicated that dreams took place in black and white; later, it was found that these colorless dreams were attached to kids who had grown up in the era of early cinema. Black and white dreams were the exception, and once television sets got a bunch of extra tubes crammed into their cases, most folks went back to dreaming in full color. As Rachel’s subconscious was probably adapting her dreams to align with her new senses, it wasn’t anything to be worried about.

Rachel, who still had dreams of being torn apart by small crustaceans on the bottom of the Mediterranean, didn’t agree. Especially as every other Agent who had touched the artifact had stopped eating seafood, too.

Dreams weren’t just dreams. Not anymore.

A dream about her dead brother-in-arms had turned into a dream about her live superior officer.

“Get him off the road.”

Nothing ominous there, nope.

“All right,” she muttered to herself, and this time she included that odd triad of her conscious brain, her subconscious mind, and her implant. “We’ve got a road, we’ve got Mulcahy, and we’ve got hidden landmines. Anybody want to dispel the symbolism so I can do something about it?”

Silence.

She yelled at herself a little, then a lot. Nothing. Whatever was rattling around in her head would shake itself out when it was ready. Hopefully.

Maybe.

No more cookies until you cough up something useful, she grumbled at her mental triad. It was a sorry state of affairs when your own augmented brain somehow managed to team up against you.

The city felt warmer than it had during the day, and she put herself on autopilot and let her feet take her to a building ten short blocks from OACET headquarters. It was an old office building, five stories high, granite and brick in the Greek revival style. The windows of the bottom floor were covered in sheets of butcher’s paper, with a tasteful new sign for an aikido studio hanging above the front door, the words Coming Soon! draped across it on a removable ribbon.

The door had a digital lock, but this popped open before she could activate it. Four floors above, a man with a core the color of quick-brewed tea leaves waved down to her.

She took the stairs two at a time, at least until she reached the first landing. There, she paused, and let her scans wander over a large metal object, beaten from abuse and blackened by fire. It had been a door, once, a fantastic door in the truest sense of the adjective. Here, it was nothing except a memorial: Hope Blackwell, the building’s new owner, had rescued it from a maker space that had been targeted by a couple of itty-bitty riots. Hope had it suspended from silver cables running from the walls and ceiling, and had declared that in a year, she wanted the door gone and its component pieces to have been given new life. The last time Rachel had been here, the object had still looked more or less like a door. The artists, vultures all, had been at it—if she turned her scans to the correct angle, it took on the shape of a woman’s profile.

Her scans showed the second floor as empty, or at least as empty as rooms could be in a building frequented by those who were driven by creative chaos. The space was gradually filling with project overflow, with signs of temporary residences here and there, backpacks and piles of blankets and the like. Hope hadn’t said what she intended to do with the second floor: she said her choices were either turning it into a gallery or apartments that could be allocated to artists like grants, but Rachel knew she was hoping that the owner of the aikido dojo would relent and agree to live on-site.

Unlikely: the third floor was a machine shop, with all of the smells and noise that a machine shop entailed. Most of it was set up for woodworking and metalsmithing (and no overlap between those two in respect to the sharing of power tools, or there would be blood), but a sculptor had recently moved into a back corner. There was always someone active on the third floor; even at this hour, Rachel spotted a man pressing pieces of wood into the lid of a carved box. Across the room, another two forms were sprawled out across the workbenches, their conversational colors slow with sleep.

She crept up the next flight of stairs, quiet as a mouse, and kept her thoughts far, far away from those two men.

One more flight, and Shawn greeted her with a hug.

Warmth flowed from the other Agent into her, and the smell of oil paint and turpentine wrapped around her. She took a moment to take in his emotions—peace, wholeness, belonging—before she stepped away.

“Come in,” he said, his mental voice gentle, and brought her into his studio.

Rachel loved the fourth floor. It was the dust-free zone, set aside for artists who might kick up a fume or two but otherwise avoided sanding and polishing and all that airborne mess. The center of the room was home to a large bank of computer equipment, walled off in glass partitions. Around the edges of the room were cubicles for those who mucked around in various media. When the sun was up, these studios were awash in light; tonight, a single floodlight over Shawn’s studio lit the entire room.

She stepped through the (still depressingly ordinary) door and ran her scans through the building. The floor above them was an apartment, with space for three permanent residents, and a fourth room for a rotating caregiver. Nobody was in the fourth room, but Shawn’s bed held the sleeping form of Rachel’s doctor.

“Are you here to see Jenny?” he said, a little wistfully.

She sent him the image of waking up next to an assassin and a psychopath in their full post-coital splendor, and he shuddered.

“Yeah,” she said aloud. “This has not been the best couple of days. I’m just…here.”

“Well, I’m glad,” he said. “We miss you.”

Rachel followed him into his studio. “I almost never get over to the Batcave,” she said. “And Santino’s practically living at Zia’s now, so I have to call a cab whenever I go anywhere.” The excuses were weak; Shawn knew it, and forgave her in rich reds and purples.

“It’s not you,” she whispered.

“I know,” he replied.

Agents were trapped in the strangest of government employee conundrums. The implants in their heads were quantum organic computers, and were integrated into their hosts at a cellular level. They had been expensive as hell to manufacture, and couldn’t be removed and re-implanted in a different brain if an Agent decided to move to another job. When Rachel had enlisted in the Program, she had signed all other career opportunities away—she had known that after the implant was in, if she wanted to quit OACET, she’d have to repay the government to the tune of thirty-seven million dollars. Plus inflation. She could retire at sixty-five with benefits, but until then, the chip in her head was government property and so, by extension, was she.

(No one really wanted to test the clauses in their contracts that covered what could happen if they were fired for due cause. Brain surgery might be involved, followed by severe neurological damage. And there were worse things, such as complete loss of pension.)

Rachel turned her scans to the floor below them, where the two men asleep on the workbench had curled up in a knot for warmth. Adrian and Sammy. The last of the cyborgs who never made it all the way back to their own heads.

They were still on OACET’s payroll. Mare had put them in the Public Relations department; Shawn showed up at the Batcave during work hours to file paperwork and answer the phones.

Adrian and Sammy…didn’t.

“Do they ever sleep upstairs?” she asked.

“Jenny and I put them in their beds when we can,” he said. “Mostly they just build until they crash, and then they wake up and start again.”

“What are they working on these days? More robots?”

He nodded, blue wonder coming across his colors. “You should see them—amazing things!”

“What do they do?”

“Do?”

She laughed. “Why are you awake?”

Shawn’s colors clouded over. “I…don’t know?” He shook himself, and smiled weakly. “Maybe I knew you were coming.”

She slipped her arm around his waist. “Show me what you’ve been working on.”

A large space had been set aside for Shawn’s studio; the cyborg-in-residence got a full corner of the fourth floor, with shelf space and—*gasp!*—storage racks. A stretched cotton canvas was settled on a metal easel in the pool of light; other paintings in different stages of completion took up the rest of his studio space. One of these caught Rachel’s scans as soon as she spotted it: the piece was round instead of square, and painted over wood instead of cotton canvas. The wood had been covered in a thick layer of gesso, and Shawn had been roughing out an image of a lush garden in greens with a palette knife.

“This is lovely,” she said, running her scans across the paint. It was dry, not drying; Shawn hadn’t worked on this piece in the last few days.

“It’s for the baby,” he said.

“Who’s expecting?” Avery wasn’t the collective’s only child. She was their first, and forever would be special because of it, but there were nine other joyful rug rats running around these days. Each new child was cause for aggressive, deliberate celebration. Rachel didn’t spend too much time at OACET headquarters, but she was sure she would have heard if someone was pregnant.

Shawn went slightly orange. “I don’t know,” he said, as he fell back in the comfort of the link. “I just…know. I can’t remember if I heard it, or if I dreamed it, or…”

“Hey, maybe you can help me,” Rachel said quickly. “I had a weird dream, right before I woke up and came over here…” She told him about the dream, and the minefield, and Mulcahy walking straight into danger. “I’m pretty sure I know what it means,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Who was Marshall Wyatt?” Shawn asked, speaking aloud again. Rachel exhaled in relief. His bad moments were few and far between these days, but they could turn grim.

“A big brother when I got to Afghanistan,” she said. “A little brother when I left.”

“Oh.” Shawn’s colors fell slightly, then rose as he found his footing. “Symbolism is pretty crazy stuff. Even when it seems clear, sometimes the meaning is... Well, come take a look at what I’ve been working on.”

They moved over to the single spotlight. Shawn glanced up, and the light dimmed; he was more photophobic than most Agents. He moved a wooden footstool aside, and let Rachel have center viewing so she could flip frequencies and take in the piece.

She looked. She flipped frequencies, and looked again. Then, she flicked her implant off and on a couple of times, and looked again, as hard as she could, before she accepted there was nothing wrong with her scans.

“Is that supposed to be me?” she finally asked.

Her friend brightened. “You can tell?”

“I’m a little confused. What’s happening…with the… Is that a cornucopia?”

“It’s not sexual, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, in the pure blues of an artist who had confidence in his work. “All cornucopias are symbolic of vaginas.”

“Maybe,” she hedged. “But not all cornucopias are symbolic of my vagina.”

She flipped frequencies again, and made herself look away from the central image of the piece. The rest of it was rough brushwork over light pencils; Shawn had barely begin to fill in the forms. There were handcuffs and guns, an owl shaped from green light, a man made of shadows, and more.

“I’m trying to depict hypocrisy,” he said, as he picked up a brush and dabbed some paint on the canvas. “It’s an interesting idea—we see hypocrisy as evil, right? It’s a negative concept; if we’re being hypocritical, we’re wrong.

“I don’t think you were wrong, though, or intentionally doing harm,” he said. “So how could it be evil? I’ve been rethinking it, and hypocrisy is, perhaps, when you make decisions that aren’t…authentic.”

“Authentic,” she said, as she rolled the word around to taste its flavor. “Interesting.”

“Not sure it’s coming out the way I intended,” he said, gesturing towards the painting with the tip of his brush. “The symbolism is too aggressive. I’m thinking something more like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, with you lying naked on a bed…”

“Um—” Rachel began, and then noticed that Shawn was rippling with purple humor as he held in his laughter. She socked him in the arm hard enough to bump the paint brush across the canvas; he grinned at her as he spun more blue paint across his brush, and then painted over the woman’s figure on the canvas in wide strokes.

“You didn’t have to wreck it,” she protested, rather weakly.

“I did. I think this version is better.” He turned the canvas over. On the reverse side, framed by exposed wood covered in canvas, was a white square contrasted against a black square. The edges of these overlapped as if they were becoming as one. “There’s a meditation exercise where you have to envision a white shape and a black shape simultaneously. They need to occupy the same space in your thoughts, but not shift into each other, or turn into a single gray shape.”

“Sounds impossible.”

“It does at first, but it’s not. I think it’s easier for me than most people, though,” he admitted. Two squares of different shades of green appeared in midair as Shawn shaped his digital projection. These two squares slid into each other effortlessly; he flipped the projection around in the air, and the squares separated. “This is how I think of you. At least, since your confession the other night.”

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” she admitted, as she traced the lines of the green squares with her mind. Separate, always, even when together…

“I want to buy this,” she decided. “How much?”

He laughed. “Let me flip the canvas and paint over the reverse,” he said. “If it comes out clean, we’ll talk.”

“Keep it the way it is,” she said. “You can say the positioning is symbolic of the dual meanings of…hyperbole and…other shit.”

“Always the poet,” he said, still purple. “I’ll think about it.”

They left the fourth floor and went downstairs to collect Adrian and Sammy. They were curled up in the center of a table covered in small pieces of metal and electronics; Sammy seemed to be building a robot that looked like a silver block of cheese. They were both wearing clothes, which made it easier; Rachel managed to get Sammy on his feet and walking without clashing up against the mutiny of his mind.

“C’mon, Sammy,” she whispered, her emotional scans off and her own sleeves pulled down over her fingers. “Let’s get you to bed.”

He looked at her with huge brown eyes, and let her lead him upstairs.

“I still think this is dangerous,” she said to Shawn, as Sammy leaned against her. She braced him as they climbed to the fifth floor, one slow step at a time. “Has anyone figured out they’re Agents?”

“Probably,” he said. “But we’re all artists now, and artists are supposed to be nuts.” He grinned at her as he kissed Adrian on top of his head.

“Eccentric,” Adrian murmured quietly. “We’re eccentric, not nuts.”

Rachel squeezed her eyes tight as hard as she could to keep herself from crying, and hugged Sammy to her.

She took the bed in the empty fourth room. The sheets smelled like bottled gardens and home, but sleep kept yanking itself away—as soon as she got close enough to touch it, the bed would drop an inch beneath her and she would jolt awake.

Rachel activated her implant and peered through the walls; everyone but her was sleeping in soft cloudy blues.

Instead of activating her healing autoscript, she conjured two squares of different shades of green, and tried to force them to fit together until the sun came up.

 

 

 

SEVENTEEN

 

It was Rachel’s deep and secret shame that she adored golf.

Worse, she was good at it.

Correction: she was great at it.

Had her stars aligned differently, she could have gone pro. But no, they had aligned in such a way that her parents, upstanding suburban white-collar laborers that they were, had seen her aptitude for the sport at an early age and had (horror of all horrors) encouraged her. In those days, the Second Coming of Tiger Woods had put them in mind of a daughter who could place in the LPGA and fund a respectable lifestyle on endorsements alone. Her golf bag had been full of clubs with fancy names and space-age alloys, which were replaced annually as she outgrew them. They had made sure she had the best instructors, and sent her to exclusive summer camps to work on her follow-through.

As soon as she had graduated high school, she had gone straight into the Army. It wasn’t as if her parents had given her much choice in the matter, right?

These days, Rachel assumed her parents spent a lot of time laughing about the way things had turned out.

Wind, southeast, 5mph. Distance to pin, 130 yards. The autoscript that helped her plan her strokes took her scans down the fairway, exploring the local environment and turning it into advice. She instinctively knew that this hole had been built with an easterly pitch, and the bent grass was still in dormancy. The ball would have a choppy landing.

7-iron it was, then.

Her golf gear was second-hand but decent. Not top-of-the-line, not like when she was a kid, but definitely decent. The 7-iron was easy to find: she used a pink sock with white kittens stitched into the fabric as its cover.

“Agent Peng?” The man’s voice was nasal and irritating, even for a congressman’s. “You should probably use a different club.”

She ignored him.

“Agent Peng—”

The 7-iron came up, paused, then whipped down to strike against the ball with a solid crack! The ball shot forward like a missile until it shed momentum, bounced once, twice, and rolled onto the green. A perfect shot. Even a blind moron (*cough*) could sink it in a single putt.

She smiled politely at the congressman on her way to gather up her bag.

Charlotte Gallagher fell in step with Rachel as they moved down the first greenway. “Remind me to never play you for money,” Gallagher murmured.

“Back at you—you’re two strokes behind me.” Rachel shrugged, settling the heavy bag across her shoulders. “If I’m ever roped into a playing a ladies’ tournament, I might drag you along as a partner.”

Gallagher laughed, a ripple of purple humor running over her core of dusty pollen-white. “Deal.”

The other members of their foursome reached their balls ahead of Rachel and Gallagher. The women fell back to allow their partners to play through, mainly out of self-preservation. Chief Judge Andrew Edwards, current chair of the Joint Committee on Judicial Administration in the D.C. circuit courts, could shank a ball into the rough like nobody’s business. He was an absolute menace: since October, Edwards had hit two caddies, four golf carts, a snack stand (the same one twice), and managed to shear the head clean off a Canada goose.

The congressman was no better. Gallagher’s partner made a fantastic show of checking the lay of the land, even going so far as to toss a handful of yellowed grass into the air to test the direction of the wind. Rachel and Gallagher each made a conscientious effort to avoid eye contact as he drove his ball straight into the nearest sand trap.

Whatever. It wasn’t as if they were there to play golf, anyhow.

Gallagher had been a pleasant surprise. Most of those whom Edwards invited along tended to be like the congressman—there to invest in three hours of quality schmoozing with the judge, the Agent, or both.

(Rachel went along with it in part so she could shut down Josh’s lectures on the importance of making and maintaining political connections, but mainly because of Edwards’ coveted new membership at the Congressional Country Club. She had been politically ambitious herself, once upon a time, but the paisleys of political ambition clashed hard against a hivemind’s houndstooth. Ambition tended to be fairly one-sided, and if you did enter politics for the sake of your people, you tended to end up like…well, like Mulcahy. Sane through force of will alone.)

The women watched as Edwards finally managed to put his own ball in the general geographic region of the pin, and they resumed their walk up the hill.

Gallagher’s pace was slow; Rachel hung back and fell into step beside her.

Oranges weighed themselves against professional blues in Gallagher’s conversational colors, but Rachel wasn’t worried. Edwards had told her that the bidding had been fierce to get into the fourth slot on their Wednesday roster, as plenty of people wanted to the opportunity to talk to Rachel about OACET’s position on Nicholson, militias, and similar.

Gallagher had won, and Rachel was glad of it. As one of the FBI’s foremost experts on kidnappings—and, by no coincidence whatsoever, sociopaths and psychopaths— Gallagher should have been brought in the moment that Nicholson set up shop in his family’s factory. But no, she hadn’t been tapped for the Nicholson case. So, here she was, walking up a fairway with Rachel.

Who, also by no coincidence whatsoever, was involved in the Nicholson case.

“What’s on your mind?” Rachel asked.

The oranges were joined by OACET green, and these pushed back against the blues. A mournful red appeared, but it was hazy, as if Gallagher was viewing it from a great distance. “We had Nicholson’s militia under surveillance before he came down to Maryland.”

Rachel blinked, and forced herself to keep to their steady pace instead of shouting, oh, perhaps, “Holy balls, woman, why didn’t you do anything!?” or some other bridge-burning phrase.

“Really?” she said instead, very mildly. “Undercover, I assume.”

The older woman nodded, her tight brunette bob sweeping across her shoulders. “It’s no secret that the FBI’s been infiltrating militias.”

“Right. Militias are the new terrorists.”

A flutter of purple amusement came and went across Gallagher’s colors, but she didn’t allow herself to laugh. Terrorism was apparently still not a laughing matter, at least not in public.

“On the record? International terrorists who have set up cells within the United States are still our top priority.”

“And off the record?”

“We’re broadening our internal definition of what it means to be a terrorist.”

“Ouch.”

Gallagher nodded. “The memos are starting to slip out. You’ve probably seen them?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “Your national domestic threat assessments are bumping up against…Oh, jeeze, I forget the term du jour. Are we talking about sovereign citizens here?”

“No,” Gallagher replied. “There’s some overlap in the ideologies of most militia groups, but members of the sovereign citizen movement share the same basic manifesto. If they’ve been shown to be aggressive but don’t identify as sovereign citizens or survivalists, we usually just call them extremists.”

Extremists. Rachel hated that word. Such a mealy-mouthed attempt at pacifying everyone at once, to assure the public that, yes, we’re all generally good at heart but never forget that one person in a million thinks nothing of setting the world on fire. Oh, and it’s partially your fault if we don’t catch him before it happens, because we can’t be everywhere at once. Now get out there and watch your neighbors.

“Question for you,” Rachel said. “Are they still called extremists when there’s a couple hundred of them living in the same compound?”

“I’ll ask,” Gallagher said dryly. “To be honest, we prefer it when they gather in large compounds. Those’re easier to monitor than small cells.”

“Easier to put a man on the inside, too.”

“Yes,” Gallagher admitted. “But extremists aren’t dumb—most of them aren’t dumb,” she corrected herself. “And militias run by stupid people don’t stay in operation very long. It’s relatively easy to get someone inside a militia, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to gather intel.”

“What about Nicholson?” Rachel asked.

“Textbook narcissist,” Gallagher replied. “Most militia leaders have some narcissistic personality traits, but in Nicholson’s case, it’s full-blown.”

“That’s usually good for getting a man inside,” Rachel said. Narcissists tended to underestimate those around them. As nobody could possibly be smarter than they were, these people with excellent dental work and suspiciously useful skillsets couldn’t possibly be threats.

The FBI agent nodded. “Except…” That mournful red came into focus and clung to her professional blues.

Rachel felt like eating her own foot, and perhaps punching herself in the face for good measure. “What happened?” she asked.

“We don’t know.” Gallagher paused, then lowered her golf bag to the fairway. She pretended to look for something in the side pocket; Rachel unslung her own bag and knelt beside Gallagher, their heads nearly close enough to touch. Anyone watching would have seen two women searching through the endless peripherals required for the act of putting a small ball into a hole. “He went missing three months ago.”

“I hate to ask, but—”

“It’s likely,” Gallagher said. “There’s no body, no evidence he’s been killed, but—”

Rachel sighed. “But three months is three months.”

“Yes. It wasn’t my case, and everything I’ve heard has been secondhand…” Gallagher paused as her surface colors roiled; it didn’t take her too long to collect her thoughts, and the reds and blues spun themselves into order as she continued. “He was undercover using the alias Kyle Vanning. Young guy, early thirties. Had worked undercover as a vice cop before joining the FBI, so the Sugar Camp militia seemed a good fit as a first field test for him.”

“Why? Nicholson seems like a hard first assignment.”

“Nicholson didn’t run Sugar Camp. In fact, Vanning was at Sugar Camp for nearly four months before Nicholson joined. We were thinking about pulling Vanning out, since he didn’t find anything of concern, but then Nicholson showed up and introduced the sovereign citizen rhetoric. Sugar Camp is a more traditional operation, and we decided to keep Vanning in place to see how the new ideology integrated with the old.”

“Gotcha.” Rachel spilled every golf ball in her bag onto the ground before handing one at random to Gallagher. The other woman began to pack up her bag; Rachel followed suit.