“Except…” Gallagher sighed. “Except Vanning disappeared instead.”

“Disappeared? Any idea where he went? Witnesses?”

“We have no real leads,” Gallagher said, as she resettled her bag on her shoulders. The two of them resumed their slow stroll up the center of the fairway. “He was last seen at a bar, drinking with another new member of Sugar Camp. The bartender says that the new member was later seen almost exclusively in Nicholson’s company.”

Rachel felt as if she had been hit in the gut by an invisible sledgehammer. A deep, quiet breath to pull her rush of anxiety back so as not to call attention to herself within the collective… Concentrating on the grass, the birdsong, those brief hints of spring that proved the world was coming alive... “Ah.”

“Thought you should know.”

Rachel sent an image of Ethan Fischer to Gallagher’s cell phone. “This the guy?”

“Vanning? No, it’s not him. And we never got a good photo of the new militia member.”

“I’ll send some files over to you, but it might be a closed case—the man in this photo was murdered last night.”

Gallagher whistled quietly. “Is he the one who attacked you?”

“Yup. We think he was operating as Nicholson’s second-in-command, but manipulating Nicholson as they went. That’s about all we know about him—his history is pretty ripe.”

“Where do you go from here?” Gallagher asked.

“I’m interviewing the leader of Sugar Camp Militia after this,” Rachel said, as she checked the clock in her head again. She had over three hours before her ride arrived, and was very diligently checking the time at the insistence of the annoying voice in her head that kept chiming it’s all about time…it’s all about time… “I owe you,” she said. “Big.”

“Pay me back by finding out what happened to Vanning,” Gallagher replied.

“Deal.”

“Thank you. I don’t know where—” The FBI agent stopped. She tilted her head towards the breeze. “Do you smell—”

A gunshot broke the air apart.

Rachel pushed Gallagher towards Edwards and the congressman. “Get them to cover!”

The FBI special agent went one way; Rachel went the other.

There was nothing as unnerving as a sprint across an open space when a gun was in play. Rachel put her head down and charged towards the nearest stand of trees, hoping, praying… Once she hit the treeline, she tucked and rolled, getting as small as possible before she wriggled deep into the well-manicured brush. Then, she threw out her scans—

Sandalwood.

Of course.

(A surge of relief went along with that particular shade of brown, which she didn’t want to think about, followed by the realization that the man with the sandalwood core was standing over a body, which she really didn’t want to think about but would certainly have to, as bodies were something of a priority in her line of work.)

She stood and ran through the underbrush.

When she broke into a small clearing, Rachel had to cover her mouth to hide her smile. Sandalwood, yes, but sandalwood wearing a white polo shirt and plaid pants? Her fashion sense shied away from the notion that Wyatt might be caught dead in plaid, but her sense of humor hadn’t had much exercise over the last few days and was loving it.

“So, whatcha been doing?” she asked, as she threw her scans around to make sure a second shooter wasn’t taking aim from somewhere in the trees.

Wyatt pointed towards the body on the ground. It was a woman in her late twenties with dark hair, lying face-down and unconscious. Like Wyatt, she was dressed in golfers’ casual; unlike Wyatt, she had the chemical signature of gunpowder residue across her hands.

The psychopath was leaning on a putter in an abusive manner. Rachel would have put money on that club being the source of the divot in the unconscious woman’s hairline.

She reached out to Gallagher’s cell phone, and the FBI special agent answered on the first ring: “Rachel? Go.”

“Shooter is down,” she said aloud for Wyatt’s benefit. “Apparently, Mulcahy sent backup in case something like this happened.”

She glanced at Wyatt for confirmation. He shrugged and made a wavy more-or-less movement with his hand.

“What do you need?” Gallagher asked.

“Paramedics—the shooter was armed and sustained a severe head wound when my backup intervened. Tell them we’re near the 13th hole. Look for a grove of cherry trees, then turn east into the pines.”

“All right. Send your location to my phone. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

Rachel signed off and went to check the body.

“Gimme,” she said to Wyatt. He held out his putter, handle first, and she used the club and her feet to roll the unconscious woman onto her back.

“Nice bedside manner, Peng.”

She ignored him, and flipped frequencies to take a photo of the woman’s face. “Where’s her gun? I’m not finding it.”

“Disarmed her during the fight. It’s over there.” He pointed towards the underbrush, where a century’s worth of raspberry brambles knotted themselves into a spiky wall.

Rachel stared at him until he sighed and walked off to search the thicket.

Sirens, far in the distance.

She gave her inner prude a professional talking-to, and then scanned the strange woman’s body for tattoos and microchips. Neither, nothing, but there were some interesting layers of recent scar tissues on her buttocks where RFID implants might have been concealed and then removed.

Wyatt came out of the thicket, bleeding through his plaid pants and exceedingly grumpy, gun in hand.

“Oh goodie,” Rachel said. “A NORINCO semiautomatic pistol. Don’t you just love how every giant screaming clue we’ve found points us straight back to China?”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Wyatt said, as he dabbed at his bloody legs with a tissue.

“Agent Peng?”

“Over here!” Rachel called, before her mouth closed with a snap as she realized it might, perhaps, be a remarkably stupid idea to introduce Wyatt to the FBI special agent who had been in charge of the Glazer case. But then Wyatt was greeting Gallagher in his new role as Rachel’s long-lost Army buddy, and Gallagher was buying it because there was no reason on earth she shouldn’t buy it, and Rachel wondered anew about long cons.

This was followed by the arcane bureaucratic rituals required when a shooter was apprehended on a private golf course that catered to politicians. Rachel swore she would never again be involved in a shooting incident without an FBI special agent present: the paperwork was wrapped up within a half-hour, with Gallagher’s assurance that Detective Hill would have the first chance to interview the mystery woman when she woke up.

For her part, Rachel sent the photo of the suspect to Jason, and cross-referenced the serial number of the NORINCO semiautomatic against the master list of stolen weapons that Smith had given to her. Jason said the photo matched that of the woman who had snuck into Ethan Fischer’s hospital room (surprise!), and the serial number matched one of the stolen guns on the list (and surprise!).

After that, they rejoined Judge Edwards and his partner and the four of them went to finish their round, because it wasn’t the first time any of them had been threatened at gunpoint, and they were playing the coveted Blue Course and it was unlikely that a new club member like Edwards would get the Blue Course again if he rescheduled, and anyhow Rachel and Gallagher were ahead by six strokes and there were some forms of injustice that just couldn’t be allowed to stand.

Wyatt caddied for Rachel on the last holes. He was good at it.

At the end of the game, the judge and the congressman settled up. Rachel and Gallagher left for the women’s locker room, each fifty bucks richer. Well, Gallagher was richer; Rachel had passed her winnings on to Wyatt as a tip. The psychopath had thanked her as he pocketed the money, bemused grayish oranges hanging across his body like an overladen golf bag.

Rachel folded herself into a fresh business suit and waited for Gallagher by the locker room door. When the older woman appeared, she seemed slightly brighter than she had been at the end of their golf game.

“Good news?” Rachel asked her.

“Does it show? Got some useful information about a suspect for a change.”

“Excellent,” Rachel said. “This job is hard enough without the occasional break.”

“You aren’t kidding.”

The two of them moved into the bar. It was senselessly opulent. Rachel’s boots clicked across marbled tiles with inlayed mosaic frescos. Exposed beams ran across the ceiling and tied into huge wooden pillars, and the far wall was devoted to photographs of famous golfers. She tossed a scan over these and wondered—briefly—about life choices.

“Agent Peng?” Gallagher’s colors were threaded with yellow concern, and her voice was just above a whisper.

“Yeah?” Rachel pulled her attention away from an alternate timeline where she played Augusta and Pebble Beach on the regular. “Sorry, went woolgathering. Yes?”

“Do you know anything about Homeland taking over OACET?”

Rachel chuckled. “I know Homeland’s wanted to roll us into it since OACET went public. But we’re not law enforcement—what I do is just a tiny part of OACET’s overall operations. We’re mostly civil servants and administrators. If anything, OACET’s closest equivalent is that we’re the IRS for data systems. Homeland can’t make the argument stick.”

“That’s good.”

Ah. Knudson’s core of sour raspberries floated around Gallagher’s colors. “Did someone from Homeland reach out to you?” Rachel opened her left hand and rubbed the scars across her palm. She had never filed an official complaint against Bryce Knudson for injuring her, which meant absolutely everyone in Washington knew how she got those scars.

“Let’s just say that someone would be much happier with OACET if Homeland were overseeing your agency.” Gallagher opened the door for her, and they walked outside into the early spring air. “I’m not rooting for him—I’d hate to lose access to those Agents you’ve loaned me.”

“Put in a good word for our autonomy, and you can keep them forever. When did this happen, by the way? After the kidnapping, or before?”

Gallagher did the single-shouldered shrug of women who didn’t want their purses to slip down. “Rumors have been floating around for a while.”

Knudson, smug in his pinks.

“I’ll bet,” Rachel said darkly. “Well, if it happens, it’s because Homeland’s found a way to bully us into joining. And that’s not going to happen.”

They shook hands and parted ways, Gallagher towards her car and Rachel towards an old unused putting green far behind the clubhouse. Wyatt was waiting for her. He had changed from his golf clothes to his usual rough-and-ready jeans and Henley, with an old baseball cap to complete the image.

“She seemed nice,” he said, as dry as the Sahara after a sandstorm.

“You take a lot of chances,” she muttered.

“I get bored. Why’d you ask for me to come on the interview? You said there’s no way you’re putting yourself in a car with me.”

Rachel didn’t reply, and let him stew until his colors began to run red and beige.

Not that she’d tell him, but her decision to bring Wyatt along to visit a militia had been a stroke of genius. The list of people she was willing to drag into the serpent’s den was depressingly short. Other women were out. Just one hundred percent out. Yeah, they probably weren’t going to be raped and murdered, but…

The fact she had to add that “but…” was reason enough.

Hill was right out, obviously. Santino and Zockinski, too. She couldn’t bring Phil, because Phil was too trusting, or Jason, because Jason was too Jason. If she brought Josh or Mulcahy, they might never come out again for a whole host of reasons including public image, kidnapping, extortion, and the (highly unlikely but still possible) casual murder spree.

She needed someone who looked like an all-American good ol’ boy. A former soldier. Someone who was absolute murder in a fight.

Wyatt’s colors sharpened as he scooped up an old golf ball and took aim at a turtle sunning itself in a nearby water hazard.

“Do it and I’ll break your arm,” she warned him.

He threw the ball, missing the turtle by intentional inches. “Is this it for the rest of the day?” he asked. “’cause it seems like you’ve got better shit to do.”

His timing was excellent: she pointed towards the sky.

Wyatt looked up, and began to laugh.

 

 

 

EIGHTEEN

 

The ground slipped away below them, a patchwork quilt of early spring greens against winter browns. It was lovely, unexpectedly so—Rachel had expected rural Pennsylvania to be more about missing teeth and the passionate romancing of cousins, not these clean squares stitched together by orderly lines of trees.

Live and learn, she told herself. Besides, coal country was out there, maybe just ahead of them, maybe right around where the Sugar Camp Militia was located. A wide open strip mine would set the mood nicely.

Wyatt was asleep across from her. Almost as soon as they had gotten in the helicopter, he had smirked at her in pinks before he pulled his hat down over his eyes. He had gone to sleep as quickly as blinking, his conversational colors popping off like he was his own blown bulb.

Not his first time in a helicopter, then.

Not hers, either. As helicopters went, Rachel had been in bigger, better, and faster. But the model AW109 had been in service for forty years, and was ideal for ferrying her and Wyatt from one of the most prestigious country clubs in the world to a backwoods group of militants. It was quick, light, and sturdy, and (most importantly, from Rachel’s point of view) cheap to operate.

The helicopter dipped slightly as it began its descent. Wyatt woke, his colors snapping to attention in camouflage greens as he instinctively reached for a gun that wasn’t there.

“At ease, soldier,” Rachel said.

He pushed his hat back and sat up with a glance out the window. “Nice country.”

“Ever been here before?”

Wyatt shrugged in indecipherable grays.

“Help me out,” she said. “You seem like the kind of guy who’s spent time in a militia. Are we walking into a war camp or what?”

He pointed to the dossier that Gallagher had provided on the Sugar Camp Militia. “Should be in there,” he said.

“Your opinion.”

Wyatt’s attention moved to the window again. “Depends on who started it, and who’s running it now.”

The helicopter began its final descent. Rachel pushed her scans down and away… Yup, there was the edge of a quarry, big enough to scar the farmland all the way to the nearby mountains. The hole cut in the earth was hemmed by rows of evergreens along one side, with what appeared to be a series of smallish buildings separated by fences.

Rachel plastered pure boredom to her face and stretched out her legs so she wouldn’t have to tug her pant cuffs down once she stood.

“Do I get a weapon?” Wyatt asked.

She reached into her jacket and removed her service weapon from its concealed holster. The gun had come back with her from Afghanistan, and the only time she refrained from carrying it was when she needed to squeeze herself into a cocktail dress. Wyatt recognized it: when she held it out to him by the handle, his colors brightened in interest.

He reached to take it, and she turned and slipped her gun into the helicopter’s open lockbox. “Psych,” she said, as she punched the digital lock. “Wait, do the kids still say that? Probably not. Seems like they never should have said it in the first place.”

Wyatt sat back and fumed in irritated oranges.

“What are we going to find here?” she asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “I didn’t do any prep work on this place.”

“C’mon.” Rachel prodded his shin with the toe of her boot. “It’s a militia. They’re all the same.”

Purple humor appeared in his colors. “That’s your first mistake,” he replied, and wouldn’t say anything else until the helicopter’s landing skids hit a long patch of dirt road about two hundred yards from the buildings.

Rachel rapped on the partition between the cockpit and the cabin, and waved to the pilot. Wyatt slid the door open and jumped out first; when his head stayed nice and intact, Rachel leapt from the helicopter.

She nearly blacked out from the silence.

“Whoa,” she said, as she groped her way back to the helicopter and took a seat on the nearest piece of stable metal.

“Airsick?” Wyatt grinned at her in smug pinks.

She waved him off. “Not sick,” she said, trying not to gasp for breath. “Kinda… Kinda the opposite.”

There was so little here.

She hadn’t been out to the country much since she got her implant. The stray bed-and-breakfast with Becca, of course, because Wall Street type-A personalities apparently had to go antiquing in the Poconos twice a year or their licenses were revoked, but the Poconos were infested with cell towers and Wi-Fi. Those trips had set her benchmark for the digital ecosystem. The digital ecosystem—that persistent chatter of the Internet of Things, as well as those non-Things that were offline but were plugged in or battery-powered or hand-cranked or otherwise gobbling and spewing energy—was unavoidable for the Agents. It was as pervasive as cicadas in the summer, and eighty times as annoying. When her implant was active, Things and non-Things screamed. Always. They might be a little quieter at night, but they were always there.

Stepping out of the helicopter was like plunging into a void.

“Get your shit together, Peng,” Wyatt muttered.

“Yeah,” she gasped. “Yeah.” She let her fingertips linger on the metal skin of the helicopter as long as possible, as if drinking deep from the machine’s EMF, before pushing off and clomping up the dirt road.

A large metal gate lurked at the end of the road. The gate was set into a wall made from steel-reinforced concrete, and chained tight at its break point. Off to the side was a person-sized door, also made from steel, but with intriguing locks and slots that seemed designed for weaponry. It reminded her of an Afghani warlord’s fortress.

Except for the small fruit stand sitting off to one side of the main driveway. The building was shaped like a small fairy tale cottage, with an open front and a dozen different kinds of eggs and honey for sale. The woman behind the counter wore a thick cotton and crinoline dress in greens and reds, and had her hair braided with red felt flowers. She smiled warmly at Rachel and Wyatt, even as her surface colors hung around her like a wary gray cloud.

Rachel flipped frequencies to read the sign over the gate: Sugar Camp Christmas Trees.

She turned her implant off and then back on again. Yup. The sign still read: Sugar Camp Christmas Trees.

In a very merry cursive script.

With candy canes on either side.

And a snowman.

“Oh, screw this nonsense,” she grumbled under her breath, and then shouted: “Hey! I’ve got an appointment, and I’m on a tight schedule. Let’s not pretend you missed the arrival of the freakin’ helicopter, okay?”

The wicket gate in the wall swung open. An older man stood there, with a core the same color green as old-fashioned carnival glass. “Guests knock,” he said. “Usually.”

“Right.” Rachel stepped quickly over the hard-packed earth and stuck her hand out. “Agent Peng,” she said. “Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies.”

“I know,” he said, as he ignored her extended hand. “I’m Ahren. C’mon in.”

With a last almost-wistful scan towards the helicopter, Rachel entered the militia’s camp, her personal psychopath following close behind.

“I’m assumin’ you’ve been briefed,” the man said.

“No,” Rachel said. “I prefer to do cold interviews. Helps me keep my sources of information straight.” A total lie, but a plausible one she’d used many times before. And she hadn’t been able to do more than skim the file that Gallagher had given her on the flight up.

So she had utterly missed any description of the front entrance of the militia’s camp as Santa’s workshop.

Becca had taken her to a Renaissance faire right around Halloween, and the two of them had rented sweaty costumes and spent too much money on turkey legs and ridiculous-smelling soaps. The militia’s village put her in mind of a small-scale version of that, with five tiny but ornately decorated buildings painted up like Christmas. These were all closed, but her scans told her they had been recently used, with no dust and all products laid out in well-ordered displays.

“…and what is it you do here?” Rachel asked.

“Folks like to come out and cut their own Christmas trees,” he said. “Lots of places like ours around, so we give ’em an experience. First o’ November through the first weekend of January, we got trees, ornaments, local chocolates. Rest o’ the year, we rent the space to vendors. Flea markets an’ gun shows, normally.”

“Where are the reindeer?”

“Don’t keep reindeer.” His conversational colors blurred towards orange-gray bemusement. “Critters live where it’s cold. They’d suffer down here.”

Rachel disagreed. She was getting chilly herself; early spring in the northerly reaches of Pennsylvania was much colder than she had expected. It didn’t help that there was a wind ripping through the quarry and back into the mountains. Everything was crisp and smelled slightly of dust and evergreens, with a faintly metallic note beneath that.

“Why Christmas trees?”

“I bought this land, ’bout twenty years ago. Mining company turned it to shit, so I bought it for pennies on the dollar. Evergreens ’bout all that’d grow back then. They like acid soil, you know? Ground’s getting better, but I’ll be long dead before we can do more than chickens and wildflowers.”

Rachel threw a scan over her shoulder. Wyatt was walking about five steps behind them, his focus on their conversation, with long yellow-white sweeps across the buildings as he searched for threats. She could have saved him the trouble: the buildings were empty. The only people within the length of three football fields were Ahren and the quiet lady selling honey in her after-season Christmas costume.

“You’re the owner?” she asked.

“Free an’ clear,” Ahren said, with a strong streak of red pride. “No liens, no loans, just taxes.”

“You pay taxes?” The words were out of her mouth before she could strangle her subconscious into silence.

Ahren stopped and looked at her. “Don’t you?”

She stared at him. Not her full-bore cyborg’s stare, but enough so he began to get wavy and orange around his edges.

He sighed and began walking again. “Yeah, I pay taxes. All of my taxes, an’ my tax accountant would be happy to talk to you.”

“Not what I meant,” she said. “Just that this isn’t what I expected from your operation.”

“Y’mean, my business?” He stressed the last word as the reds around him changed from pride to anger. “We pay our share, no more, no less. I got problems with people who don’t.” An angry red pointed directly at Southwestern turquoise.

“Oh, right. Here.” Rachel pushed a slip of paper into his hands.

“What—” He took a pair of bifocals out of his shirt pocket and perched these on the tip of his nose so he could study the paper. “Is this a receipt?”

“Yup,” she said. “Estimated cost for use of the helicopter from D.C. to here, and back again. Paying for the fuel and maintenance costs out of my own pocket. Since we haven’t formally charged Nicholson with a crime, my being here isn’t part of a criminal investigation. No taxpayers footing my bill today.”

“Ah,” he said. “I don’t see labor costs on here. What about the pilot? Who’s paying his salary?”

“She is a good friend of Agent Joshua Glassman, and they’ve agreed to work out payment between them. And no, I intentionally didn’t ask for the details so that’s all the information I can give you.”

He laughed. It was a warm, hearty sound, almost like what she’d expect from Santa Claus if he were a CrossFit enthusiast, and his reds slipped away. “All right,” he said. “You came prepared. Good for you.”

“Help me out here,” Rachel said, as Ahren turned and began leading them towards a large log cabin. “From what I’ve been told, you’re a militia, but you pay taxes?”

“Damn right, I pay taxes. I pay them ’cause I don’t want you people comin’ in and shooting up my family,” he said. “I’m not givin’ you an excuse.

“An’ I noticed you admitted you’re not here in an official capacity,” he added. “I’m seein’ you because Nicholson is an ass, an’ lettin’ him spin his lies might get my people hurt. If I’d thought he’d do somethin’ like this, I’d never’ve taken him in.”

Ahren opened the door of the log cabin for Rachel, and he followed her inside, the two of them dogged by Wyatt. The office was built like an old-fashioned cabin, the cracks between the exposed logs chinked closed with putty. The beams holding up the A-frame ceiling were draped with furs and blankets, and the windows were hung with large sheets of tanned cowhide in lieu of curtains. Almost everything in the room was yellow-gray from a veneer of cigarette smoke, misted across the walls through years of saturation.

Even the guns.

Rachel had expected some firearms, perhaps the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece or whatnot. But every square inch of available wall space served as a gun rack, or held a windowed cabinet overflowing with handguns and rifles, sometimes stacked two or three deep. There were multiple gun safes against the east wall, each of them much larger than the hidden document safe down in OACET’s War Room.

There were guns that were obviously, flagrantly illegal in many states. Maybe not in rural Pennsyltucky, true, but there were automatic rifles and sawed-off shotguns and—

Oh dear Lord, that’s a fucking anti-tank rifle, isn’t it. Is that legal? That can’t be legal. Not even here.

“Nice collection,” Rachel said, as she flopped down in the nearest chair with the silent hope that her scans would warn her if the cushion was stuffed with even more guns. “Love the useless showpieces. Really lovely. Just the nicest fake felony collection I’ve ever seen.”

Ahren feigned confusion.

“Let me guess,” she said, as she pointed at each of the big-ticket items. “Critical missing pieces or—” Rachel paused to scan the interior of one of the shotguns. “—molten metal poured down the barrels?

“Hey, what kind of test is this, exactly?” she added. “If you clear up exactly how you want me to react, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

He laughed again, but this time he trailed off into a long, hacking cough. He took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and coughed heavily into it. Rachel was bemused. She hadn’t seen a linen handkerchief since…ever? It struck her as quaint and homey. More quaint than homey, considering its status as a hotbed of germs, but still.

“I said we do gun shows here, yeah?” he said, once the coughing spell had passed. “Dealers know I’ll buy broken products. Hobby of mine.”

“And no never mind that a huge collection of broken firearms is excellent cover for any working versions you might have on the property?”

The older man waved towards his wall of weapons. “If you see any evidence of that, Agent, lemme know.”

“Sure thing.”

Ahren took a good, long look at her. It was the same kind of look she gave to suspects before she started to pick them apart. “You one of those liberal anti-gun nuts?”

“Nope,” Rachel said. “I’m a cop, and former Army, and I’ve been up against too many full-grown infants with automatic weapons to think the world can be fixed with flowers and happy thoughts. I’m about as anti-gun as you are.”

“Maybe I think you should be,” Ahren said. “Same technology that reads your thumbprint, unlocks your phone? No reason it can’t go in a gun.”

“Well,” Rachel said. “No reason except me.”

Wyatt began to laugh in purples.

“I’d love it,” Rachel said. “Don’t get me wrong. Me and my buddies have to go into a firefight? The enemy tries to unlock their weapons, I shut ’em down before we even get out of the car… Now it’s no longer a firefight. From a law enforcement perspective? It’s nothing but appealing, and I’d back the shit out of that legislation—pardon my French—but gun companies will never invest in the tech now. It’ll be blocked as a Second Amendment issue before it can get to market. OACET’s effectively killed the chance of any personal firearms tech that could be used to save lives.

“Sorry,” she added.

“Unintended consequences,” Wyatt said from his spot near the window.

She shot him a Look: his conversational colors rolled over themselves in a purple-gray sigh, and he went back to pretending to be furniture.

“He’s right,” she said to Ahren. “For every innovation we introduce, we manage to screw up something else. It’s usually unintentional, and almost always because the general public’s convinced that OACET wants to dominate the planet. Have you seen the conspiracy theories about how we’re murdering people through their pacemakers? Someone’s filed a wrongful death suit against us because her husband’s pacemaker broke. And she lives in Kansas! Kansas!”

Rachel realized she was shouting. Just a little, but a little shouting was usually too much.

“Sorry,” she repeated.

Ahren’s conversational colors weighed her Southwestern turquoise against the teal of family and belonging. “Let’s talk somewhere else,” he said, as the scales in his mind balanced out.

He led them through another door to a wide hallway, and down that hallway to a pair of double doors at the rear of the cabin. Once through, they were behind the second fence, with the Christmas village and its cutesy-twee shops safely on the other side. The doors opened into a small apartment complex, with a dozen two- and three-story buildings on either side of wide evergreen tree-lined street.

Interesting, Rachel thought. The only way into this second part of the compound was through the office hallway. She was sure there was another entrance somewhere (if for no other reason than to move dirt and other farming equipment), but it didn’t trip to her short-range scans.

“Can’t help but notice that there’s nobody here,” Wyatt said.

“I sent everyone out,” Ahren said. “Free day—no work, no school. Couple of folks stayed behind for the chores that need doin’. There’s always chores on a farm.”

“I don’t see any lights on,” Rachel said. Partially true: she was more curious about how there was very little happening in the local digital ecosystem. The buildings didn’t have any power running through them. All of it felt lifeless and empty.

“Turned the generators off,” Ahren said. “Saves money when no one’s around. We’ll have a windmill in a few years, if sales stay good, but until then our grid’s on during peak hours ’n that’s all.”

He had much less Good Ol’ Boy in his accent than before, and the red pride was back in his conversational colors as he showed off the compound. He paused to yank a weed from an otherwise barren flowerbed, and then took them to where the street ended.

There was a playground, and beyond that and a third layer of fencing, a shooting range.

Rachel sent her scans along the range and drooled.

Sugar Camp’s shooting range was finger-kissin’ primo delicious! It was built with safety in mind, with the quarry to the left and wide open scrublands to the right, and easily a full ten acres to play with in the middle. There were blinds and targets carefully placed to take advantage of the landscape, and two towers of different heights set at different angles about five hundred yards to the north.

The taller of these towers had wide panels set across the top. Rachel recognized the form but couldn’t detect the function.

Ahren noticed. “We’re negotiating with a cellular service provider,” he explained. “The tower’s not active yet. But if the deal falls through, we get a great setup for solar power.”

She nodded. The cell company had most likely bumped into a possible public relations fiasco when upper management learned that they were leasing land rights from a militia.

“Did you plan for that?” she asked.

He smiled and kept walking.

At the head of the range was a fiberglass pergola frame covered with translucent plastic roofing. One wall of the shelter was made from DIY plywood cabinets. Rachel scanned these and found the usual safety peripherals found at shooting ranges, including some high-end ear protection.

“I was wonderin’, Agent Peng, if maybe you could show off for me a little.”

“Not all Agents are good with guns,” she said, a light poke.

“But you are. I’ve seen that video. The one with you in the parking garage, takin’ down that man.”

Wyatt went red at that.

Rachel grinned over her shoulder at him, then smiled at Ahren. “You know who I am.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re famous around here. Be a real pleasure to watch you shoot.”

She flipped open her suit coat to show him her empty holster. “Unarmed,” she said. “Thought you wouldn’t appreciate it if I brought a gun along to the meeting. Especially since I’m not here in an official capacity.”

“I think we can find something,” Ahren said, and his colors came damned close to twinkling in purples.

Five minutes later, a Sako 85 Finnlight was in her hands, a pair of ear protectors clamped around her head. Ahren cupped both hands to his mouth and shouted to nobody: “Clear the range!”

Rachel was pretty sure she was the best marksman in the world. Markswoman. Whatever. Nobody was about to argue nomenclature with someone capable of putting a bullet in their skull from a quarter-mile away, and blindfolded besides. Autoscripts similar to the one which allowed her to assess the lay of the land at a golf course also helped her line up a bullet to a target. And she could pull off trick shots like nobody else. Her ability to see into objects helped her assess density, and density could be used to plot a bullet’s ricochet. Not perfectly—ricochets were accidents by definition—but with enough reliability that she could confidently send a bullet into a piece of metal and bank a shot at a predictable angle.

Two years ago, she had crippled Wyatt’s Daddy Dearest by bouncing four shots off of the steel and concrete of a parking garage. That had been mostly luck: it had been her first time firing solid metal rounds, and as much as she adored her beloved concrete, it fractured too readily to be of much use to her in trick shooting. Now, two years and close to five hundred hours of practice later, her service weapon was always loaded with custom solid brass rounds so when she did have to use it, she could be sure she wouldn’t have to use it to kill.

Rachel sent her scans down the range, just to be sure, and took a test shot to check the quality of the gun. “Whoa!” she said appreciatively, as the Sako bullseyed the target at a thousand feet. “Nice rifle!”

Ahren said something in reply, but she couldn’t hear him. It was probably something nice about the gun: the synthetic blacks and silvers of the Sako’s stock and the reds of pride were twining together quite nicely.

Four more shots—each of them landed dead-center of the targets as she worked her way down the range and got a feel for the land and the wind—and then the gun was empty.

“Really nice!” She stood from her hunter’s crouch and removed the ear protectors. “This is a very decent piece!”

“It’s a favorite,” Ahren said. “You’re an incredible shot.”

“One of the benefits of being a cyborg,” she said, as she handed the rifle to Ahren.

“She could do this blindfolded,” Wyatt said dryly.

Ahren stood a little taller. “’s that true?”

This time, when she shot Wyatt a Look, she nailed him with the full weight of her cyborg’s stare. “Oh, it’s true,” he said, suddenly engrossed with fixing the band on his ear protectors. “She’d never do it in front of a crowd, but since it’s just the three of us, you’ve got no problems doin’ a little more showin’ off, right, Peng?”

And of course Wyatt had a convenient strip of heavy cloth handy, and it was just about long enough to be a small scarf.

She wound the blindfold around her head, twice, and knotted it tight.

A blindfold.

Oh no, she did not want to do this in front of Wyatt. The psychopath already had suspicions about—

Her skin crawled as she saw Southwestern turquoise walking through his conversational colors, surrounded by walls of sandstone.

Oh. Oh, no.

She had left him wrapped up like a sausage in its casing and handcuffed to the radiator. So, naturally, he had escaped and gone wandering around the halls.

A man’s scent, his footsteps—

Rachel snatched up the Sako, reloaded it, and fired five shots as fast as the bolt action would permit.

She yanked off the blindfold and shoved the rifle at Ahren. Her ears were ringing; she had forgotten the protectors. “We good?

Ahren blinked, eyes moving between her and the furthest target on the range. He checked the target through the scope, colors swirling into a single razor-sharp point. “Ah…” he began. “Ah…yeah.”

They retired to a patio table beneath the canopy. The table was old, one of those round pieces of tin from the ’60s, with a set of matching wirework chairs. The entire thing had been spray-painted in a fresh spring green.

“You smoke?” he asked, a beaten pack of cigarettes appearing in one hand like a magician’s deck of cards. He reached down and picked up an old metal coffee can that had entered a second life as an ashtray.

“No,” she said. “But I don’t mind the smell.”

“I do,” he said, wetting a finger to test the wind. He decided he was fine with where he was sitting, and lit the cigarette with a cheap plastic lighter. “Bad habit, I know. Too expensive. Been tryin’ to quit but I keep pickin’ it back up.”

He used the cigarette to point at the furthest target before taking a long drag. “That’s some impressive shooting, Agent Peng.”

“I was a good shot before I got the implant,” she said, watching Wyatt. He had moved over to the playground’s fence, out of earshot but close enough to respond if needed. “I’m a great shot now—we think the implant creates a biofeedback process that improves physical performance.”

“You think?”

“We’re not sure. Most of the documentation for the implant disappeared, thanks to Hanlon. But from what we can tell, it wasn’t designed for biofeedback,” she sighed. “Unintended consequences.”

“Can you build more of them? These implants of yours?”

“Not with what’s left,” she said, thinking of Santino. “It’s dead tech until we can reconstruct it, and that might take decades.”

He nodded. The two of them watched the birds return to the nearby trees as the memory of gunshots faded.

“What can I tell you about Nicholson?” he finally asked.

“Everything,” Rachel said. “Start with your first meeting.”

Ahren took a short drag on his cigarette, his colors falling into place as he organized his thoughts. “Guy calls my office up, out of the blue,” he said. “Says he’s looking for a new life. We get a dozen or so like him a year, folks who say they’re tired of society. They’re not, you know. They want society—what they’re tired of? Bein’ told what to do. That’s not gonna change, not here.

“Sometimes we take ’em in, if they’re harmless enough. They’re good for a laugh. One or two might stick around. Most of ’em decide their old life was good enough after I put ’em to work.”

“What kind of work?”

Ahren nodded towards the old quarry at the edge of the firing range. “Rocks out, dirt in. Can’t work the land if there’s no land to work.”

“And Nicholson was okay with that?” Rachel couldn’t imagine Nicholson working with his hands. Or associating as equals with anyone who did.

“Never put him in the quarry,” Ahren said. “He said he was a lawyer. Came in dressed for an interview, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Showed up in a shiny truck, and a pair of khaki six-pockets so new they’d never been washed. Said he wanted to join.”

“And you let him?”

“I got no use for one more useless know-it-all gun freak,” Ahren said. “I got all the use in the world for a good lawyer. Told him if he wanted to join, he needed to be licensed to practice law in my state.”

“Was he?”

“Nope. Not then. He drove off. Called my office three months after that, said the paperwork had gone through. Wanted to set up an appointment to discuss terms.” Ahren chuckled, low and slow.

“This had to be raising red flags with you.”

He nodded.

“So why take him on?”

“Free legal advice, m’dear,” he said. “And he got my curiosity up, I’ll tell you, this rich lawyer who shows up on my doorstep, talkin’ to me like I’m dumber than mice. If there’s a game goin’ on, thought I’d play better if I knew the rules.”

“Did you…” Rachel paused, nudging around the edges of what Gallagher had told her. “You’ve heard about the FBI hiding agents in militias, right?”

This time, when Ahren laughed, it was in short, wheezy bursts. “C’mon,” he said. “Credit where it’s due, m’dear. I can spot them a mile away. I’ve been here more ’n twenty years—after 9/11, feds were all the new blood we had.”

“How can you tell they’re FBI?”

Another gesture with the cigarette, this time towards the quarry. “They’ll move rocks all day long without bitchin’.”

Rachel made a mental note to tell Gallagher to remind her men to complain more, and then asked, “What did Nicholson do when he showed up?”

“Took a spare apartment. Moved right in, started goin’ through my files.”

“You let him? Just like that?”

“You keep things from your lawyer, Agent?” He stared at her in curious oranges. “That’ll get you in trouble in the long run.”

Rachel laughed. “You are not what I expected from a militia leader.”

“Militia…” Ahren lit a second cigarette off of the first, and stubbed the old one out in the coffee can. “That’s the third time you’ve used that word, Agent Peng, but I don’t remember using it with you.”

“What do you call this place, then? A commune?”

“Sugar Camp Christmas Trees,” he said with a grin. “Best damned Christmas trees in Pennsylvania. Proudly family-owned and operated.”

Rachel shook her head, and asked, “How big is your family?”

“’bout two to three hundred, dependin’.”

She turned towards the small apartment complex at the front of the shooting range, which would have housed maybe thirty families. Nowhere near two hundred people could have lived there, let alone three. Ahren noticed and said, “More ’n half of my people live ’n work elsewhere. Some of ’em all the way down in New York, New Jersey… They show up on weekends, ’n pitch tents when they want to stay overnight.”

“How many people left with Nicholson?”

“’bout thirty-some men. Almost all of ’em were weekenders, or lived out here in tents.”

“And you let him leave? After he saw your files?”

Ahren held up a finger, pausing their conversation long enough to cough into his handkerchief again. His cough was rougher this time, a wet hacking sound that went on far too long. When it was over, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, the handkerchief going back into his pocket. “He was here for six months, and that was six months too long. Laziest shit I’ve ever met. Talked about nothin’ but how good it’ll be when we rise up an’ take our country back.”

“Seems like the kind of topic an upstanding Christmas tree plantation owner such as yourself has probably heard before.”

The annoyed oranges in his conversational colors solidified. “You know why I offered to talk to you, Agent Peng?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“There’s always a government. There’ll always be a government. Takin’ down the one you’ve got doesn’t get rid of government—it just puts a new one in its place, an’ there’s no promise the new one will be better’n the old. I want to be left alone, Agent Peng, and if that means payin’ taxes and makin’ nice with the county sheriff, so be it.

“These little turds, the ones who come out here, hopin’ for the world to end so they’ll rise up ’n take their rightful place as kings? They want the Wild West they see in movies.” Ahren turned the cigarette over in his fingers before taking another long drag. “Never stop to think that there were rules in the West. An’ the kings of the West? They made ’emselves that way through sacrifice and goddamed hard work.”

He paused. “Pardon my French, too.”

“You sly silver fox,” Rachel said. “You used Nicholson to clean house.”

Ahren nodded. “I did,” he said. “He was here for six months and spent every hour yellin’ about what was wrong with America. Talkin’ about armed revolt. I’ve got children livin’ here, Agent Peng. Talk like that makes the sheriff start thinkin’ twice about leaving me and mine alone. Makes the sheriff start thinkin’ I’ve got somethin’ evil goin’ on up here at my little farm. A cult, maybe, or an army.”

The cigarette pointed again, this time at the nearby playground. “Nothin’ evil about protectin’ children, Agent Peng. If that meant chasin’ Nicholson and everyone who thought like him out so he became someone else’s problem, I was okay with that.”

Rachel was so very glad she had left her gun in the helicopter. “Except he took one of our children,” she said, when she was sure she wouldn’t pull a Mulcahy and try to dangle him over the ground by his throat. That wouldn’t work for a bunch of reasons, starting with her height and ending with her fingernails digging out his larynx.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said, red sorrow hanging around him. “I swear, I thought he was a spoil’d rich kid, no real threat to anyone. I just wanted him gone.”

Rachel went over a dozen possible replies, and went with the one that didn’t involve beating the snot out of this self-implied king with the butt of his own rifle. “Right,” she said, as she took out a photo of Iron Core out of her pocket. “Tell me about this guy.”

“Ah.” Ahren barely glanced at the paper. “Him.”

“Nicholson called him Ethan. His arrest records put him as Ethan Fischer.”

“Yeah,” Ahren nodded. “That’s right. Fischer showed up about three months after Nicholson.”

“After? You’re sure?”

“Yup. Made friends with Nicholson the day he got here. Nicholson got real mouthy after that—he was bad before, but he started recruitin’ after. Always when I wasn’t there, always where I couldn’t see it. He was clever, all a’sudden, and you an’ I both know those new smarts weren’t his. Worse, I’m pretty sure Fischer killed a man while he was here.”

“Really?” She reached out to her phone in her nearby purse, accessed its memory, and began recording. The conversation would never show up in court, but it might provide Gallagher with new leads, or even closure.

“Yup. Goes to a bar with one of my men. Kyle Vanning. Good guy. I liked him. Fischer comes back to the farm, says Vanning went home with a woman. I never see Vanning again.”

“Why do you think he killed Vanning?”

Another long, slow drag. “Well, he was one of yours,” Ahren said. “FBI, I think?”

Rachel laughed before she could stop herself, and then groaned silently; Gallagher would kill her for that slipup. “Hard worker?” she asked.

“Yup.” Ahren stubbed out his second cigarette and stood. “An’ he never made a move on any of the women while he was here.”

“Gay?”

“Professional,” he said, and started walking back the way they came. “You people don’t start what you can’t finish. An’ the FBI came out a few weeks after he disappeared, askin’ questions but sayin’ nothin’. No, he’s good an’ dead, an’ I’m sorry for that, too.”

Interview, over. She pressed him on the details as they retraced their steps—Where was Fischer from? (Don’t know.) Do you have any files on him? (No.) Was Nicholson already a sovereign citizen when he arrived? (Yup.)—and filled in what remaining blanks she could. Nothing stood out as critical.

Once they reached the helicopter, Ahren stuck out his hand. “Been interestin’, Agent Peng,” he said. “An’ while I’ve got you here, let me say that what Hanlon did to OACET was pretty damned low. Government’s been getting in our heads for years. Glad you took yours back.”

“Thanks,” she said, and decided, hey, why not, she was here and she lost nothing by being the bigger woman. “Hey, you saw what I can do with scans on the gun range? I’ve got a set of medical diagnostic scans that an OACET physician made for me. If someone were to ask, I could scan them and point out any health concerns that might pop up.”

Ahren’s hand moved towards the linen handkerchief in his pocket before he could stop himself.

Rachel shrugged, still staring at the far-off too-close mountains. “If I were asked.”

He stared at her, suspicious oranges showing in his conversational colors for the first time since the gun range. “Don’t think anyone’s asked,” he said. He took out his pack of cigarettes and tapped it against his hand, hard. One slid into his fingers. “Good luck figurin’ out this mess you’ve made.”

He lit his cigarette, turned, and walked away.

 

 

 

NINETEEN

 

As the helicopter cut its way south through the air, Rachel let her mind wander across the fields below, and over the matter of Ethan Fischer.

Time…

Fischer had showed up at Sugar Camp three months after Nicholson’s arrival. Good. That was a point on the timeline. And Josh had confirmed that Fischer had arrived just days before certain politicians working at the Capitol Building had begun discussing their ‘holiday plans’ in earnest. That was another point on the timeline.

She was pretty sure that the chain of events pointed towards a power grab by those same politicians, and that it started when they sent Fischer into Sugar Camp to take control of Nicholson. She was somewhat less sure that the purpose of this power grab was to divest OACET of its autonomy and bundle the agency into, oh, say, Homeland Security, but that was probably wishful thinking on her part. If OACET lost its autonomy, then everything the Agents had fought to prevent would likely come to pass.

Such as being turned into instruments of war.

Rachel had no interest in being someone else’s gun. It was bad enough that she was sometimes dehumanized as part of her job—she refused to be turned over to the Army and sent on missions from the comfort of a padded cell. She would not be the instrument of destruction for China’s civic infrastructure, or the reason that Iran’s centrifuges melted down and irradiated an entire country. Or any one of the many ways that a clever cyborg could undermine modern civilization.

She’d rather die.

Let’s not let it get that far, she told herself. She unclenched her hands and looked at the half-moon circles her fingernails had sliced into her palms. Let’s get off this road before that happens.

One last wistful scan across the pastoral landscape below, and then she kicked Wyatt awake. The psychopath nearly jumped her; she had her gun out and aimed between his eyes before he remembered where he was and brought himself under control.

“How’d you know?” she asked him.

Wyatt stretched, his hands bumping into either side of the bulkhead. “Know what?”

“That we weren’t walking into a hotbed of racist inbred shitheads.”

“Might be,” he said in purples. “You didn’t get the full tour.”

“C’mon.”

He smirked and settled back in his seat again. “Two things. Guess.”

“They were willing to talk to the cops.”

“No, they knew enough to get ahead of talking to the cops.”

She made a non-committal noise. Made sense. Willingness to talk to cops was one thing; that showed they recognized legal norms. But getting ahead and offering to do the inevitable interview… “What’s the second?”

“They’re smart enough to know that Nicholson was poison. A bad militia lets anyone stay. Thinks there’s strength in numbers.”

“And a good one is selective.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ahren is a million times scarier than Nicholson,” she said. “And a lot more dangerous.”

“If he wanted to be,” Wyatt said. “But he knows that his community is one mistake away from being turned into a crater.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes again, but this time he was feigning sleep; his colors moved back and forth across the cabin, as if he was pacing the floor.

One mistake away… That was relatable, even if she was a little itchy about comparing OACET to a decent law-abiding Christmas tree farm made from acidic soil and firearms. Ahren had been helpful, but she still had too many questions. Her subconscious kept nagging her about connections between Fischer and Nicholson. If Fischer hadn’t been murdered, she could have asked him—

Oh!

She sat up and kicked Wyatt in the soft spot beneath his kneecap. He winced in reds and cracked an eye at her.

“I’m gonna interrogate you,” she said.

He rolled his shoulders one at a time, like a cat making biscuits. “Thought we were past this,” he said.

“Not you-you. You’re roleplaying the dead dude you stabbed with a butter knife,” she said. “I figure you’re basically his doppelgänger. Hell, we’re lucky space-time didn’t fracture when you two made physical contact. So I’ll ask you the same questions I’d ask him, and you’re gonna answer for him.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, tugging his hat low. “He wouldn’t answer your questions. Not unless he had something to gain.”

“Do it,” she said. “Pretend I’ve got leverage.”

“Fine,” Wyatt said, as traces of the warm teal of family appeared in his conversational colors; she filed that tidbit away for later.

“What’s your master plan?”

“Fuck, Peng, how should I know?” Wyatt sat up, finally ready to talk. “That depends on who I’m working for.”

“All right,” she said. Beneath them, the patchwork of soft spring colors rolled by. “Let’s pick it apart. Why work with a militia?”

“’cause there’s a thousand different kinds of militia, and nobody knows what any one of them is doing,” he said. “Like you, walking into that gun show and expecting a bunch of ignorant dicks.”

“That’s fair,” she admitted.

“Militia confuses the situation. Makes you wonder what’s possible. If there are limits on how far they’ll go.”

“Anything else?”

“Good camouflage,” he said. “Nobody aligned with a militia would be working for someone legit.”

“Okay, good,” she said. “Why sovereign citizens?”

“They’re about the best camouflage out there. Nobody understands what the hell they’re doing, and they’re willing to go the distance. Makes ’em scary as fuck to law enforcement.”

“All right. So let’s say your real boss is a politician who works at the Capitol—”

“Sounds likely.”

“—they see this report from an undercover agent in the FBI. The agent’s entrenched in a militia that’s picked up a lawyer who’s also a sovereign citizen. It’s a scenario that’s unusual enough that most folks in law enforcement would sit up and notice. So…what? Your bosses decide this is an opportunity they can exploit, and your boss sends you in to infiltrate the group?”

“Wrong.” Wyatt said. “The objective is to get to Nicholson. The FBI agent’s in my way, and there’s a chance he’d recognize what I am.”

“Oh God, I don’t want to think all of this started with us killing our own,” she muttered.

“Why not? It’d be a red flag if they pulled the agent out, and killing him would endear me to Nicholson. Especially if I could get the agent to confess before I killed him. That’d make Nicholson paranoid, and he’d trust me. He’d rely on me to do what needed to be done.”

Rachel had the urge to go stand under a hot shower for the rest of forever. “What a lovely and very intentional phrase you just used,” she said, as Wyatt grinned at her in pinks. “Why start with a kidnapping?”

“Kidnapping is gold,” he said. “People move around. They’re easier to steal than anything else. And they get a damned high return on investment.”

“Right, but why take Hope and Avery? Why not Josh, or Mulcahy himself?”

Wyatt shrugged. “Josh would fight back.”

“And with Mulcahy, it wouldn’t even be a fight,” she said, as a streak of gray the size and shape of a Desert Eagle appeared and disappeared in Wyatt’s colors.

“I would have taken Agent Murphy,” he said. Rachel’s face must have shown murder, because he added, very quickly: “You asked. She’s a soft target, unguarded, but critical to OACET.”

Rachel had to give him that one. “Mare would have been the safest bet,” she said reluctantly. “I can’t figure out why they thought taking Hope was a good idea. Hell, we would have worked just as hard to get anybody in OACET back! But they took a freakin’ wild creature and expected she’d do okay in a cage…

“No,” she corrected herself, as something Fischer had said in passing blinked into her conscious mind. “No… He didn’t expect her to behave.”

Wyatt’s expression of disinterest fell away. “Whatcha chasing?”

“Fischer didn’t know I was listening,” she said, mostly to herself. “I went out-of-body to check on Hope, and he said… He said he couldn’t wait until he got to kill her.”

“Those words?”

“No,” she said, tripping back through three days’ worth of chaotic new memories. “He said, ‘Can’t fuckin’ wait ’til I get to kill you.’”

“You sure? Those words?”

“Yeah,” she said, as the familiar feeling of puzzle pieces coming together toppled into a complete picture. She scooted forward and banged on the cockpit partition. “Hey!” she shouted at the pilot. “Get us back to Washington, now!”

Time… her subconscious reminded her. It’s all about time.

Human beings were conditioned by the idea of clocks and schedules. These imposed order, a sweet routine which let you know that this was when breakfast was supposed to happen, or then was when you went to bed. You expected the workday to begin at nine o’clock sharp, and excitement and impulsivity was reserved for after ten at night.

Giving Nicholson thirty-seven hours to get his shit together was an open declaration of psychological warfare.

Unless someone in his militia had advanced combat training (other than Fischer, who was steadily cooling in a hospital morgue and thus not a reliable source), Nicholson wouldn’t realize that thirty-seven hours was the exact amount of time required to render his brain to mush.

It went like this: Nicholson would expect a raid to come on the first night, once it was safely dark. Around midnight, of course, because that’s the high time for excitement. The militia would amp themselves up into a frenzy, watching for signs of incursion, invasion, intrusion… Every little noise would be the first sounds of a SWAT unit storming the building.

It helped that Josh had shipped an outdoor movie screen to the police camp in front of the factory, and they were playing military siege movies at high volume. Bit of a risk, considering the sounds of gunfire might mask the sounds of gunfire, but that concern worked both ways.

And then came the food.

The first pizza truck arrived last night at dinner time. Fresh pizzas straight out of the oven, and plenty of bottled water and sodas. A volunteer from the local police department knocked on the door, waited for Nicholson to give the go-ahead, and then drove the truck straight up to a loading dock where five men waited with guns. The OACET Agents whose avatars were stationed around the interior of the warehouse said the next hour was spent subjecting the hostages to random slices of pizza and waiting to see if they’d keel over. After the hostages were well-fed and the pizza had gone bone-cold, the militia members began to eat. They stuffed themselves until someone realized that heavy food might make them slow, so they dropped everything and spent the next few hours ready for the attack.

Dawn came, and with it a catering truck overflowing with coffee and pastries, bells ringing to announce the arrival of another day’s worth of calories. Lunch was fresh seafood, with deli sandwiches for those who didn’t enjoy lobster. Dinner was more pizza, with an ice cream truck close behind.

Nobody would be the wiser when the catering truck got close enough to disgorge two dozen FBI agents the next morning.

Everything had been put into motion the moment Nicholson walked out of OACET headquarters. The raid was a go—no matter what Rachel did, that wouldn’t change.

It was up to her to make sure it was the right kind of raid.

Rachel leapt out of the taxi and barreled through OACET headquarters as fast as the ever-present hordes of FBI would allow. She spared the passing disparaging glare at the agents from Homeland who were starting to sneak in—a few of them noticed her, and flashed Southwestern turquoise and yellow concern—but most everyone else was brushed aside as she raced upstairs to Mulcahy’s office.

Wyatt followed her, ever obedient.

The clock was running out.

Get him off the road.

She burst into Mulcahy’s office and shouted: “It’s about you, you son of a bitch!”

Mulcahy glanced up from the architectural blueprints spread flat across a folding table. He nodded towards the raid coordinator from the FBI and said, “Would you give us a moment?”

The FBI agent blushed in secondhand embarrassment, and left the room.

Josh poked his head inside. “What’s up?”

“Get in here!” she snapped at him. “And ping Mare. She needs to hear this.

“And you!” Rachel pointed at Wyatt. “Stand guard outside! Nobody outside of OACET comes near this room.”

As soon as the door clicked shut behind Wyatt, Rachel spun back to Mulcahy. “They want Hope dead,” she said, “because they want to push you over the edge.”

He stared at her, conversational colors blank.

“Oh, fuck this,” she muttered. She grabbed him by the hands and hurled herself into his mind.

Rachel had been deep inside Mulcahy’s mind once before. He had gone robot then, too, when she got too close to learning a secret he had promised to protect and he had to throw her out. She hadn’t realized what his cold emotionless state had meant at the time. Today, it was easy to get around his walls: he was unyielding stone, impenetrable metal; she was water and light. He was inflexible, unable to respond; she flowed around his walls as if they didn’t exist.

She dumped the relevant details straight into his memory.

Congressional hearings, so many they blurred together: Politicians, shouting about how OACET should be under the direct control of This Agency, or That Department; Agents, fighting back, telling them No!, that No, No, No! You have no legitimate reason to come in and take us over!

The timeline: Nicholson at Sugar Camp Christmas Trees. Fischer’s arrival. Vanning’s disappearance. Nicholson’s move south to reclaim his factory.

The notes: politicians and their strange holiday shopping lists. The back-and-forth of acceptable losses. Consensus on the need to take down the Comptroller before they could buy what they wanted.

Campbell and Gallagher: both worried about how OACET might be pulled apart, but in very different ways.

Homeland Security, skulking through their own halls.

And a man— Fischer—sneering at Hope as he promised to kill her.

“They want you to break,” she told Mulcahy. “They want you to break in a big public way! They need you to snap and go nuts, so they can come in and take over OACET!”

Rachel released his hands.

For the first time in days, a spark of real emotion flamed within him. It was small but it was there, a bloody, furious red.

“You’re leading the raid, right?” she said aloud. “There’s never been any real doubt that you’d lead the raid, right? Even if it means invoking the charter and forcing the FBI to run backup?”

Mulcahy nodded, slowly, as the spark began to burn.

“What happens if they kill Hope and Avery in front of you? Everybody who’s anybody knows what you used to do! Can you think of a better way to get you to snap and make a lot of really bad decisions in a high-pressure situation? When you’re holding a freakin’ gun?!”

The red spark burst apart, so fast and bright that Rachel thought Mulcahy had caught fire and exploded.

She was half-right.

Well, she though, as Josh grabbed her around the waist and pulled her behind the couch. Maybe this wasn’t the best way to break him out of his trance, but it sure was effective.

Mulcahy threw the couch across the room and came at them.

Rachel kicked at Mulcahy’s left leg, Josh went at his right. Mulcahy leapt up and came down, both feet just missing Rachel and Josh.

“Oh goody,” she said, as she scrambled sideways and hid behind a bookcase. “He’s not actually trying to kill us.”

“Let him burn it off,” Josh said, as Mulcahy reduced one of the club chairs to scrap. “He’ll be fine in a minute.”

Knobby chair legs flew at her like shotputs. “Do we have a minute?”

“Consider it your daily workout.”

“We’ve got to keep the FBI out of here,” she said, glancing towards the nervous person-sized shapes on the other side of the door. Wyatt didn’t have the authority to hold them back, and if he went for a weapon—

“Mare’s on it,” Josh said, as he dodged a flying guillotine made of elegant woods and leathers. “Why was this a good idea, again?”

“Do you think he’ll stay in robot mode if they kill Hope in front of him?” Rachel replied, and rolled sideways as Mulcahy seized the bookshelf and began using it as a club. “I want to snap him back to reality here, where it’s safe!”

“Yeah, right,” Josh said, as glass from the antique light fixtures rained down on him. “Safe.”

Mulcahy abandoned the bookshelf and seized his computer monitor, and began swinging it around his head by its cord. Rachel jumped sideways as the monitor slammed into the floor, then fell backwards in self-defense as the cord broke and the monitor bounced once and flew at her head.

Stupid thirty-two-inch screen, she thought, and Josh laughed. “Stop enjoying this!” she shouted aloud at him, as Mulcahy roared and threw his desk chair so hard that it cracked the plaster walls.

Mulcahy turned, and the desk was in his way.

That fucking desk.

He stopped moving, just for a moment, and stared down at the desk. The red inferno that raged across his surface colors turned inside out—she got a glimpse of what was under it, a blue-black core entwined around his own, with the unmistakable red of heart’s blood connecting them—and then the red became a sharpened blade.

He seized the mahogany desk by one end, and pushed.

The carved feet on the old desk slid across the smooth floor. When the edge of the desk met the wall, Mulcahy tipped the desk on one end and lifted it over the sill.

“Don’t!” Rachel shouted, out of instinct more than protest.

There was a moment in balance, and then he pushed again.

Breaking glass, followed by an almost-soft crash.

“Shit!” Josh sprinted to the window and looked down.

“It’s fine,” Rachel said, her scans turned on Mulcahy as if he were a rabid dog who might come at her again. “There’re crowd control barriers up. Nobody’s close enough to the building to get hurt.”

“No! I mean, good, but that goddamned desk is famous!” Josh trailed off, and began smiling and waving at someone down on the street below. “How do I explain this?”

Rachel was watching Mulcahy. He was standing in place, his anger finally ebbing. Apparently, launching a four-hundred-pound weight from the third story of a building was enough to take the edge off.

The door opened. Mare stormed into the office, long red hair ticking like a pendulum behind her with each step. The waiflike woman walked up to Mulcahy and jabbed him in the sternum with her clipboard. “Sign these.”

“What?” Mulcahy asked, his voice scraped down to the bones from roaring.

“You remember how you said you’d have to be out of your mind to open negotiations with Senator McKillip? This is about as close as you’re going to get. Sign these.”

He chuckled. It started small, barely a chuffing sound in the back of his throat. Purples and grays rolled out from his core and covered him, repressed dark humor swallowing him like a fog.

As Mare kept poking Mulcahy with the clipboard, Rachel righted the couch and checked the cushions for broken glass. Mulcahy shied away from the papers, real laughter beginning to spill from him. “No, Mare,” he said. “Not even now.”

Mare poked him over to the couch and managed to get him seated. “Lie down,” she said, still poking away. “You haven’t slept in days. You’re worthless until you get some sleep.”

“Oh, God, what did I do?” he said.

“Nothing you shouldn’t have already done,” Mare said. “We’re all pretty relieved, to be honest. Now, sign these.”

Mulcahy pushed the clipboard away, still laughing, but weakly now.

Mare sighed and went to find something to use as a blanket.

“I’m leading the raid,” Mulcahy said.

“Sleep,” Rachel ordered him.

His hand closed around her arm like a vise. Anger, frustration, and weary relief rose from his skin into her own. “Promise me,” he said, as his mental voice began to fall away.

“Nope,” she said. “Not unless it’s what benefits OACET.”

She wasn’t sure if he heard her before he dropped out of the link, but she thought he might have still been laughing in his head.

“He’s got a grip like a freakin’ pit bull,” she muttered, as she pried his fingers from her arm. “Anybody got any bacon?”

“I’ll stay with him,” Mare said. She shook out Mulcahy’s suit coat and tossed it over his torso. “Josh, honey, go do what you do and make the normals think this is normal.”

Josh smiled at her in sweet rose pinks, and left with a smile and a song for the FBI.

“This is good,” Mare said, dimples running deep across her shoulders. She tugged up the edge of the rug and rolled it away from her, broken glass and all. She sat on the floor, and her long red hair puddled around her. “Maybe he’ll wake up delusional and I can get his signature then.”

“Good luck with that,” Rachel said, and Mare sighed.

Rachel scanned the new room-sized garbage bin, and began to pick up papers. “I need Ami and Phil,” she said. “Can you ping and pull them?”

“Why?”

“’cause until Mulcahy is good to go, I just got a major field promotion. Now,” she said, as she rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under her arm, “I’m off to plan a raid.”

 

 

 

TWENTY

 

The relief boat chopped across the surface of the water as a woman shouted at her about neoprene.

“The dry suits will keep you warm, but only if you don’t breach the seals!” The FBI’s diving instructor checked the cuffs on Rachel’s suit; the seals sucked at her wrists and ankles, and the one around her neck was slowly suffocating her. “The suits use a layer of air as insulation. You get water in there, the water’ll act as insulation, but once that suit comes off, you’re cold and wet!”

Wyatt’s black drysuit was worn beneath bemused oranges. Apparently, the original Marshall Wyatt never had any dive training, and this new version had forgotten to write it into his revised history. He feigned intense concentration as the dive instructor talked him through suiting up, and complimented him on how quickly he seemed to catch on.

(For her own part, Rachel was glad that her girlfriend was rich and enjoyed doing the dumb things that rich people pretended to enjoy, such as exploring old shipwrecks off the rocky coast of northern Oregon. But she hoped the FBI instructor would hurry up so they could get in the water—the extra heat that her cyborg metabolism threw off as a waste product was starting to cook her alive.)

“Rebreathers,” the dive instructor said, as she handed Rachel what appeared to be a reverse backpack. Rachel slipped her arms through the holes in the rebreather vest so the instructor could cinch her in, and then stood so the rebreather could be settled over her chest and shoulders. The pack was uncomfortably bulky against her breasts, and the dive instructor gave her the usual Sorry! shrug she had come to associate among female professionals who didn’t design their own gear.

“Never used a rebreather before,” she said to the instructor. “Anything I need to know?”

“Try to leave it someplace safe, so we can recover it,” the instructor said. “They’re expensive.”

“Um—”

“You’ve got a quarter-mile swim to shore in a calm sea,” the instructor said. “Stay just below the surface of the water, and come up early if you need to. You’ll be fine.”

“Right.” The relief boat began to slow as it pulled aside one of the cruisers. Ropes were exchanged; FBI and police from the cruisers began to move back and forth between the boats. Rachel nodded to Wyatt, and the psychopath joined her on the far side of the boat.

She opened a connection with his earpiece. “Check.”

“Received. How do I talk to you?”

“Think at me. Really hard,” she said. His colors blanched to yellow. “I’m serious. And stay as close as you can—I’ve never done this in the water.”

As the dive instructor did a final equipment check and positioned their mouthpieces, Rachel began to spin her shield around the two of them.

In theory, there shouldn’t be any difference between air and water in respect to her shield. In practice…

Well. Too late to worry about it now. Either they’d make land without tripping the cameras and motion detectors, or they wouldn’t.

The factory was a long, dark spread of black and blue on the horizon as she and Wyatt tipped backwards off the boat.

Bright light, all around her, as the kinetic energy of the ocean took her in. She reached out and tapped Wyatt on his shoulder, and the two of them sank beneath the boats. They gave the propellers a wide berth and set out for shore.

She loved night swimming with her implant. Back in the day, night swimming had been slippery terrors, more of a test of will than anything close to enjoyable. Since activation, night swimming had become immersion within…well, for lack of a better analogy, life itself. Water was alive! Not in a filthy germy way, but in the way of the clean press of a liquid jungle, cells within cells blooming, growing, moving from one state to another before dying and repeating the cycle anew. It was a bath in the heart of the planet, not careless but carefree, free from any trivial concerns except the wholeness of just being.

And the frequencies!

Water didn’t play nice with the EMF. The digital ecosystem was heavily distorted beneath the waves, and the deeper she went, the worse that distortion. Rachel had heard rumors of whales and other squishy mammals beaching themselves as a response to sonar tests, and she believed it—the ocean wasn’t pure by any sense of the word, but it was its own true self. The digital ecosystem wasn’t welcome here, and those trillions of creatures that lived in the ocean weren’t equipped to deal with it when it was forced on them.

Her shield kept its shape as they swam. She had been concerned that it would move with the water, maybe pull thin and dissolve like spun sugar with each wave, but it remained a perfect sphere. It was weaker than she would have liked; some of the frequencies she relied on to block audio and visual frequencies were buffered, and she had the feeling that if they dove any lower, she might lose those parts of her shield entirely. But here, a few feet below the surface, it did its job.

Sure did seem to be attracting a lot of fish, though.

She and Wyatt were still a couple hundred yards from shore, and it was plenty deep. Fish of all shapes and sizes were swimming out of the liquid light beneath them to check out these strange invaders in their realm. Rachel remembered a nature program about how predatory fish navigated using electrical impulses, and was about to make a note to ask Santino about how her shield might play into this when her spinal cord noticed the huge dark shape swimming towards them and crawled straight up its own vertebrae.

Oh, that’s right, she thought to herself, as calmly as possible. Sharks are fish.

“Hey,” she said to Wyatt, her mental voice calm—so calm. “Hypothetically speaking, have you ever fought a shark before?”

Purple humor colored his sandalwood; he thought she was joking. His was the only color in this bright white expanse of energy. Even the very large dark shape—ah, yes, that would be shapes, there are two of them now—swimming beside him didn’t give off any emotions other than more of this intense living white.

“Humor me and get out your knife,” she said.

His colors took on orange annoyance and rolled like eyeballs as he took out his flashlight instead.

“Don’t,” she warned him. “The guards might see it from the shore.”

He nodded, and they continued swimming.

As they entered the shallows, the fish got bored and swam off, taking the sharks with them. Rachel and Wyatt stopped just outside of the spotlights and stayed low, shedding dive equipment and the diving suits as they moved. The waterproof case which held Wyatt’s rifle was clipped to his stomach beneath the suit; same with her own service weapon. Rachel gave the guns a quick scan. “They’re dry,” she whispered to him. She checked her shield and tightened what she could.

Then they ran.

There was no beach. It was hard-edged rocks and shattered beer bottles and rusty car parts, every inch of it slippery with seaweed. They were on all fours most of the time, tactical gloves and shoes finding purchase in this tetanus minefield. They dodged the arcs of the FBI’s searchlights (which seemed focused on the north end of the shore while they ran up the south, hmm so strange) and made it to dry land.

Concrete beneath her feet and scans—blessed, shark-free concrete. The last sprint to the side of the building was as easy as a run through a park.

They began to climb.

OACET’s scouts had chosen well when they had selected this part of the factory for the ascent. There were window ledges and industrial gutters aplenty, and between these were spots on the wall where enough mortar had fallen out from between the bricks for shallow finger-holds.

They paused before they reached the roof, clinging flat to the black wall in their black suits, so Rachel could run one last scan and make sure they weren’t about to leap over the ledge into a trap. Or drop into a hole. Or meet predatory roof-roaming wolves. Rachel was lost in her scans when Wyatt went pale and yellow beside her. She scanned up, then down and around, unable to find the threat she had missed. Wyatt tapped her on her shoulder and pointed towards the ocean.

There, in the pool cast by the FBI’s searchlights, swam two dark arrowheaded shapes that were nearly as long as the boats.

Rachel grinned at him and resumed the climb.

The factory’s rooftop was a wasteland. It was as close to the minefields of Afghanistan as she’d seen outside of her dreams: mostly wasted rubble with plants struggling to grow, and holes that snuck up on you without warning to drag you down into the hollows. Beneath that was a jungle canopy made of metal, with iron and steel beams twisting every which way.

She and Wyatt chose a nice sniper’s perch in the middle of the roof with those holes all around them. The perch had a structural support column beneath it, and Rachel felt relatively sure the support column would keep them from crashing through the rotting roof into the factory below.

Right beneath them were the hostages.

Avery was asleep in the lap of the woman with the copper core. The woman was awake, barely, with the soft colors of sleep dissolving around her like a slow morning mist. There were militia men around them, some sleeping, some keeping watch in drowsy shades of beiges and grays.

They were heavily armed, of course.

Two soft taps on a flap of peeling tarpaper; Wyatt had turned yellow again, but this time it was an inquisitive yellow. The light coming up through the holes in the roof was a cold filtered blue; he could see her, or at least the outline of her, so she shook her head in answer and touched her wrist where a watch would rest.

Wyatt settled himself and started to unpack his rifle. He unsnapped the flaps on his carry bag and stared at the pieces, then began to assemble them, his colors dipping to orange scorn. He hadn’t been happy with the idea of less-lethal weapons, especially when he was supposed to be covering the enemy from a distance. Rachel agreed—weapon accuracy counted in a firefight, and while the idea of rubber impact rounds with a pepper spray additive sounded nice and all, she was somewhat concerned about how the enemy carried real guns with armor-piercing rounds.

He finished assembling the odd-looking rifle and lay flat on the roof, gun pointed at the militia members deep inside the factory.

Above them was the night sky, overcast and starting to drizzle.

This was the weirdest sense of vertigo.

Sniper duty with my own pet psychopath, she thought to herself. How in the hell did I get here?

(The answer was that she needed a bodyguard while she was in deep scans in hostile territory, and everybody but Wyatt was needed on the ground. Especially as it was safer for the main team if Wyatt didn’t go with them, what with his sudden but inevitable betrayal still yet to occur. Plus, she had planned this part of the raid, so she had willingly stuck herself with him. But a good rhetorical question deserved a good rhetorical flailing.)

Below—multiple stories and most of a wastewater system below—Mulcahy opened a link.

“In position,” he said.

“Us, too,” she replied.

“Report.”

“Clear up here,” she said. “One guard on the roof. He’s over on the far side of the factory, near the front doors. I think he’s watching the movie.” She took a moment to throw her scans to the movie screen below—Sean Connery was busy saving Alcatraz from Nicholas Cage, or some other equally unpleasant threat—and the guard’s colors flickered slightly as the scenes changed. “Yeah, he’s worthless.”

“Worthless? Not if he’s up and moving,” he said as he pressed back against her mind. “Focus.”

“You’re not as pushy when you’re a robot,” she replied.

She felt him laugh, quietly. He was so very tired, and his walls were thin enough to tear, but at least he laughed. In exchange, she let him into her scans so he could contrast her rooftop perspective against Phil’s sewer-cam.

“Wait,” he said. She did; a few moments later, she felt him pick up the threads of her scans and Phil’s, and weld them into a single image. Mulcahy was much less skilled at this than she and Phil: Rachel was in two places at once and her dinner threatened to come up and then go down the nearest roof-hole, and that would certainly notify the militia that somethin’ sticky was a-brewin’.

Focus, she told herself, in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. We practiced this. Focus.

Rachel wrapped a lovely cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey around her mind like a Pendleton blanket—

 

I know

Not these my hands

And yet I think there was

A woman like me once had hands

Like these.

 

—and let her own body go.

The sights and smells of the open rooftop took a step sideways, and blended into those of the wastewater tunnels beneath the building. Mulcahy was there, and Phil, and Josh, and the Hippos, smooshed nose-to-ass in a pipe so tight that Mulcahy had to keep his shoulders folded in as close he could. They wore black Teflon coveralls over black tactical gear, and the last person in the chain (Ami, who was the smallest and therefore the most maneuverable in that claustrophobia clusterfuck) dragged a long waterproof bag packed with guns and less-lethal ammo.

She felt the Agents in the tunnel take a long drag of fresh air through her senses. She would have given them the sky and the liquid light of the sea, too, except the crushing weight of the tunnel might swallow them whole when she cut her end of the feed.

“Fifteen minutes until sunrise,” Mulcahy said, and all the Agents set their timers.

Breathe, she reminded herself. They’re—we’re!—the best of the best. All of us combat-trained and ready. This’ll go like clockwork.

Across the link, she heard the tail ends of the others’ thoughts, all of them trying to convince themselves of the same thing—

Time… Her subconscious whispered again. It’s all about time…

“Running deep scans. Ping me when you need to bring me back in,” she told Mulcahy, and left their link to concentrate.

She lost herself to her search, stretching her mind to try to get the last part of the puzzle to drop into place. The militia members were well-fed and slow. Dawn was almost there. The catering truck carrying the FBI’s tactical response team was cruising towards the crowd barricades…

What about time? she asked herself, as the barricades lifted. What am I missing?

Get him off the road, her subconscious said.

I did! She shouted back at herself in her own head, and could have sworn she heard echoes. He’s off the goddamned road! What am I missing?

“What happens to me after this?”

Wyatt spoke so softly that her ears thought she had caught the breeze talking. She hauled her senses back inside her head and turned them on him. “Huh?”

“What are you going to do with me after this?” His head was pointed down, rifle ready. She might have been able to trick herself into thinking he hadn’t spoken if his colors weren’t bright with yellow curiosity.

“Oh, Jesus,” she sighed, and pressed the backs of her gloved fists against her forehead. Train of thought, derailed before the station. Mass casualties, paramedics en route. “I dunno. Depends if you’re running a game. You turn on us in here, and anyone who survives will make you suffer.”

His conversational colors picked up a great deal of iron, and this was clubbed away from Southwestern turquoise and OACET green.

“Yeah, I know you saved my life,” she said. “Honestly? I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t even know why Adam sent you here. I mean, you’re helping, yeah, but…”

Wyatt’s colors went slightly purple-gray around the edges, a smooth blue-gray held within this melancholy.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“No.” He shook his head. Truth.

She pushed him anyhow: Adam was his soft spot. “Did you kill him?”

A flash of bright red fury—his eyes moved away from the factory floor towards her.

“Had to ask,” she said.

“No,” he said, the fury turning to hard gray granite as his eyes moved downwards again. “You didn’t.”

“Maria Griffin,” she said. “Remember her? Nice woman? You cut her throat and let her bleed out on the floor? Not exactly a good first impression.”

He nodded, the slightest movement of his chin.

“I don’t know you,” she told him. “I don’t like your methods. All I know is you show up after people start getting hurt.”

Wyatt stopped talking. The two of them went back to keeping watch, her slow scans moving across the rooftop and down into the factory, touching on the FBI agents lying in wait in the van outside—

“Saw you in the corridor,” he finally said. “That first night at OACET headquarters.” His conversational colors turned opaque over his eyes.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Your implant was off, right? You’re blind without it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He waited a moment before saying, “You ever stop to ask yourself if maybe I’m getting something out of this, too?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “But I can’t figure it out.”

“You ever wanted to do the right thing, but have no idea what that is?”

“Always,” she sighed. “Case in point—you.”

Wyatt’s colors rolled over themselves again in a purple-gray sigh of resignation, and he fell silent.

Seven minutes. She ran her scans again. The FBI’s coffee truck was still at the barricades, offering coffee and such to the local officers. In the factory below, word was spreading among the militia that breakfast had arrived; the men were beginning to brighten in anticipation, and the slow mass migration towards coffee had begun.

She pulled herself back to check on Wyatt, and felt metal jab at her through her thick canvas pants. The roof of the building was rusted steel, and there was no part of it that wasn’t covered in sharp edges; Rachel stopped squirming to get comfortable when she realized that only made everything worse.

“Calm down,” Wyatt whispered.

“I’m not a sniper,” she muttered. “I’m not trained to lie in one place for eight hours.”

“Eight? Try eighty.”

“Liar.”

“Can be done,” he said. “You gotta work in a team, but it can be done.”

“Don’t see you as much of a team player,” she said.

“I always work with a partner,” he said. “Always.”

There was weight in those words, and his colors had some wine red in them. She had no clue where that sympathy belonged; he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, and the wine red moved into his core of sandalwood.

Three minutes.

The FBI’s truck started moving towards the loading docks. Rachel reached out to Mulcahy: “Status check?”

“We’re at the entrance point. Good to go,” he replied. Through his eyes, she saw the last streaks of heat fade from an access hatch, as the plasma torch finished cutting through the locks and hinges.

“Us, too. FBI’s almost in position. No movement on the militia.”

“All right. Breaking cover.”

She felt hands that weren’t hers attach a magnet lift to the hatch, and her body complained about lifting something as massive as that solid piece of steel. Below, Mulcahy swung the hatch aside and set it down on the ground, as soundless as snowfall.

Agents poured out of the wastewater tunnel and fanned out, one-third moving to the north side of the factory, two-thirds moving to the south. All carried less-lethal weaponry; all wore gas masks and eye protection.

Rachel took out her own gear from a hip pocket and fixed her mask to her face. Wyatt didn’t: snipers liked to keep their field of vision as unimpeded as possible, even if they were shooting a glorified paintball gun.

Ninety seconds.

“Cover me,” she said to Wyatt. “This is about to get poetic.”

He nodded, his colors locking down into steady professional blues.

She reached out to Phil, still crouching in the cover of the wastewater pipe, and the two of them joined their senses into one. Focus, they reminded each other—skin contact made this so much easier, but at least there was no loss of self in this type of link—and stretched their perspective into every nook and cranny of the factory. Rachel began to pare off the extra pieces. There was no need for chemical sensors, or structural assessment, or even the emotional spectrum: these were clutter, a confusing mess to anyone without months of practice in deep scanning. All the Agents needed was the ability to see through walls and machines, and know where the members of the militia were hiding.

Once done, she added some color: red for the militia, blue for the hostages.

“Good?” she asked, once she had removed everything but the most rudimentary form of x-ray vision.

“Yeah. Bring them in.”

She did—she offered their perspective to Mulcahy, and she and Phil stepped away from control of their own senses as he joined them to himself, and, through him, the others. Nineteen Agents, online, aware of the location of every human being in the warehouse.

And Nicholson, sitting upstairs with Hope Blackwell in her office prison.

“The poem is ‘Dreamers,’ by Siegfried Sassoon,” she told them, and took Phil and herself into the words of a man long dead.

The Agents began to move.

“Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land…”

Ami led the strike force in the hostage room; Mulcahy led the one to rescue Hope. Twelve Agents, including Josh and the other Hippos, followed Ami. Before they hit the room, they peeled off into three groups; one group raced up the catwalk, while the other two hung back, hidden behind either side of the doorway.

“Drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.”

Mulcahy took his four Agents north. Every member of the militia had a phone: these were taken off of the network with a tug and a thought. There was a guard stationed along the way: he was poking at his useless phone up until the moment Mulcahy crushed his nose and flipped him into an unconscious heap of camouflage clothing. An Agent with a bundle of zip ties lashed the man’s hands together, then twisted his thumbs until they popped out of the sockets.

“In the great hour of destiny they stand,”

The catering truck arrived at the loading dock. An FBI agent in a night-black tactical suit shot a couple of tear gas canisters into the building, easy as pie.

But Nicholson was moving; all of the militia men were moving! Something was wrong. The phones! someone thought, and someone else agreed—when all the phones went down at once, the militia knew the raid was on. Faster, the Agents agreed, and pressed forward.

“Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.”

Ami rounded the corner and began painting the militia members with less-lethal bullets loaded with pepper spray. Less-lethal weapons weren’t non-lethal weapons; every shot had to be well-aimed for safety’s sake, and a second round fired in case the first bullet didn’t release its payload on impact. Ami and the others were fast, but the process was slow. The hostages were pulled away from their sleepy community, woken from uneasy dreams to be held in front of the militia men as human shields. Above, Wyatt began firing, shooting men in camouflage with explosive rounds of pepper spray, the steady prap!-prap!-prap! of high-pressure air lost in the din below.

Avery, awake—her high child’s voice cut through the sound of gunshots as she called for her parents.

“Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win…”

The FBI had reached the south room. Gas canisters flew; the smell of tear gas and pepper spray soared up to the roof and into the morning sky.

Avery—coughing, held close and covered by the woman with the core of copper.

Rachel highlighted the little girl in her scans, a soft green shape amid the hostages and militia men, and Josh’s team on the catwalks leapt from covering Ami’s team to offense. Josh was a whirlwind: two shots, prap!-prap! and another, prap!-prap! as he broke through the militia’s cover, grabbed the girl, and ran.

The woman with the core of copper screamed for Avery.

“Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.”

Ami took three shots to the chest.

Her body armor ate the rounds and spat them out, but she still went down. Wyatt changed targets and took out the man who shot her—prap!-prap!—but the man behind him was still coming, gun aimed right between Ami’s brown eyes—

—Wyatt’s gun clicked on empty and he went to reload with machinelike efficiency—

—and Rachel broke cover to fire at Ami’s assailant. No weak praps!-praps! from her gun, oh no. She had the only active service weapon, and was firing solid brass bullets with the traditional bang!-bang! of serious gunfire. Two shots went into the right arm of Ami’s assailant, and it fell apart into so much useless meat.

“Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin…”

The militia men were panicking; their lizard brains turned them towards the new noise in the room. Rachel and Wyatt rolled back from the edge as semi-automatic rounds chipped their snipers’ nest apart. Wyatt was silent as the roof gave way beneath him; Rachel lunged, caught him by his arm, but still they both fell.

“They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.”

Becca’s core of smooth green jade flashed in Rachel’s mind as she reached out…out… The support pillar was a chunky thing, with steel limbs shooting off like the branches on a tree. Her fingertips grabbed one of these, and she twisted with all of her strength, whipping Wyatt towards the pillar. He wrapped an arm around a branch and returned the favor, pulling Rachel into the limbs of the pillar behind him.

They scrambled down, almost in freefall. Bullets ripped past them. Wyatt took a shot in his leg and fell again, and this time she couldn’t stop it. She let go of the pillar and fell after him: they were fifteen feet from the ground, and they landed hard.

Gunfire all around her. There was more to the poem, but she needed to drop the perspective link and start moving—“Phil!” she cried.

“Go, I’ve got this,” said the slip of silverlight in her mind, and Phil pushed calm, control back at her. She grabbed at these emotions and wrapped them around her, as she severed herself from the perspective link and let her own senses come back online.

Red, she realized. We’re drowning in red.

Pain red, panic red, the reds spun into the yellows of bone-deep fear. She had Wyatt’s gun with its less-lethal rounds and was crouched over him like a cat guarding her kill, firing those almost useless pepper spray balls—prap!-prap!-prap!—at anyone holding a real gun.

Wyatt’s leg was bad; blood was beginning to soak through the knees of her pants. But Ami was there; the assassin had recovered from the shock of taking three shots to her chest. She ripped the gun from Rachel’s hands, and started laying cover fire. The psychopath was cutting through his own pants leg; Rachel ripped off her belt and cinched it high around his thigh. An instant to scan him with the diagnostic autoscript—“They missed the artery,” she told him, and saw some blue relief through his pain—and she started running.

She had dropped her service weapon on the roof: she had nothing but her fists and her feet, and she used these on the first militia man she found. He was bleeding when she was done with him, and she took his assault rifle; she flipped this around and waded into the fray, swinging it like a club which was the stupidest thing she could ever do with a loaded weapon and she knew that and she was so fucking mad she couldn’t just kill these assholes and be done with it!

And then it was over.

Not completely over: there were still a couple of militia men standing, shouting, calling attention to themselves until the prap!-prap! of the less-lethal rounds took them down. But the battle itself was done, and Rachel felt herself giggling in relief.

“Status report.” Josh’s voice, all business. She poked the giggles back down and replied, “I’m uninjured, Wyatt got hit in the leg. Needs a medic.”

“Sending one over. I need your doctor’s eyes.”

“Right.” She handed her weapon to the nearest FBI agent and shuffled her way towards Josh. Say what you wanted about Chinese manufacturing standards, but NORINCO made good clubs.

Her ankle was in bad shape. She wasn’t sure if it had been the fall or the fight, but it was making small screaming noises with each step.

She was within arm’s length of collapsing on top of Josh when Mulcahy pinged her. “Rachel?”

“…sec,” she said aloud to Josh. “What’s up?” she asked Mulcahy.

A pause, then Mulcahy’s reply: “We have a situation over here.”

 

 

 

 

TWENTY-ONE

 

Hope Blackwell had seen better days.

Admittedly, Hope being who she was and all, if she had been having a better week, she’d have probably thought that having a gun pressed against her head made for a pretty good day. But she had been in a constant state of battle since Sunday, and Nicholson had managed to drug her senseless when he realized OACET had begun their raid. She was barely able to keep her eyes open—fighting back was not an option.

Nicholson was holding her in front of him as a human shield. As Hope was close to going full rag doll, Nicholson had compensated by propping her up against the window of her office prison. A thick smear of blood from Hope’s cheek blurred much of the view from the ground. All that could be seen of the two was the dark outline of Hope’s hair.

“Shit,” Rachel said aloud.

“Is Hope playing possum?” Mulcahy asked, doing his best to keep his own fear chained down. “I don’t think she is, but—”

“No,” Rachel replied. Hope’s conversational colors were trying to lock on furious reds, but every time they got close, her concentration spiraled sideways. The woman was tripping balls. “She’s completely out of it.”

“What options do you see?”

Rachel ran the numbers for the worst-case scenario: an armed sovereign citizen with a hostage, backed into a corner by law enforcement. By now, he had realized OACET had lied to him about the deadline, and had played him for a fool. Nicholson was vividly red in pure hate. There were also…what were those odd-shaped boxes?

“Did Phil say anything about explosives?” she asked.

“Yes. Small charges, just big enough to take out the office. They’ve been disarmed,” Mulcahy replied, before adding, “Nicholson already tried to set them off.”

Her heart gave a little jump; she and explosives did not play well together. “Great. So he’s actively suicidal.”

“Yes.”

Worst-worst-case scenario, then.

Options… Her service weapon with its solid metal rounds was up on the roof—no trick shooting to win the day. There was pretty much only one way to win this. …and shit.

“What’ve you got?” he asked, the complex colors of hope kindling near his heart as he felt her plan come together.

“When are his thirty-seven hours up?”

“About three hours from now. What are you thinking?”

“That he needs to be reminded that OACET’s word is gold, and we’re the only ones involved in this mess who haven’t lied to him.”

Rachel limped forward.

It was still dark within the warehouse. The pre-dawn light was beginning to seep in through the windows, and the place was a very deep shade of blue. Anybody else might say it felt like walking along the bottom of the ocean. Not her, though. She knew the ocean was made of light, and the occasional shark.

Nicholson’s colors whipped towards her as she walked to the bottom of the wire staircase. Okay, she told herself. I’m wrong. There’re sharks here, too, and this one’s a spoiled brat. Time to bleed in the water.

“Howdy!” she called out. “Remember me? I’m the OACET Agent who works with the MPD? Got your man Ethan Fischer thrown out of the meeting, and then got him killed?”

The reds twisted across themselves as some Southwestern turquoise appeared in his colors, blue-green threads that didn’t seem to know where they belonged.

“Bet everything’s gone to hell since he left,” she said. “Bet you’ve been giving a lot of thought to how he manipulated you, twisted things around… Turning you into the fall guy for a lot of really despicable shit.” She made it to the bottom of the staircase. One foot placed on the first step… Nope. Her bad ankle was most definitely done. “You wanna crack that door so we can talk? Your thirty-seven hours are almost up!”

Rachel leaned against the railing and waited.

The door opened. Not a lot, but enough for air and swear words to pass through. “I want to talk to Mulcahy.”

“You’re talking to me. You lost your chance to deal with him when you failed to comply with his terms.”

“He lied!” Red anger, spliced through with yellow-white panic. “He told us we’d have thirty-seven hours!”

“Thirty-seven hours before he razed this building to the ground,” Rachel corrected him. She turned her back to him and sat on the stairs. “Thirty-seven hours where he gave you a choice to have some control over your own future. At what point did we lie to you? We gave you almost a day and a half to walk out of here and surrender. This is as close to the last minute as we could come without endangering the hostages.”

Yellow curiosity appeared. Not a lot, but enough to work with.

“Honestly, what did you expect?” she asked. “Your army and ours to meet on the battlefield at high noon to exchange harsh language? Mulcahy said that if you wouldn’t surrender, he’d tear this place down around you. Has he done that yet? No. Will he? Absolutely. You’ve still got a choice in how this plays out.

“Well,” she added, “you would have, if it weren’t for that ticking bomb you’re holding.”

Nicholson glanced at his gun.

“No, dumbass,” Rachel snapped. “The woman? You would’ve had more than two hours to negotiate, but you had to go and drug her, didn’t you? If we don’t resolve this before Blackwell wakes up, she’s going to murder you, and there’s nothing we can do to stop her.

“Oh,” she added, “by the way, if you kill her, Mulcahy will burn down this building with you and your men in it. She’s what’s keeping y’all alive right now, so even if you don’t value your own life, think about theirs.”

Rachel pointed across the room, to where the militia men that Mulcahy’s team had taken down were kneeling in their handcuffs. They were staring up at the office, sickly yellow terror ripping their conversational colors apart; she doubted Mulcahy had told them the bombs had been disarmed.

“Want to talk this over like grownups?” she asked. “Time’s running out. If you want to save your men and this building, we have to work fast.”

(She was getting a little nervous about Hope, to be honest. Whatever drug Nicholson had given her was being metabolized at rocket speed, and those furious reds were about to lock themselves down. Rachel figured she had another three minutes at the most before Hope woke up enough to fight back, and God help whoever was in her way when that happened. Nicholson would probably shoot her in justifiable self-defense.)

The door opened a little wider.

“How about this,” Rachel said. “I come up there, I tie Blackwell up. Then you have two hostages again.”

“No!” Nicholson cried. “She’s Houdini! She can escape anything!”

Rachel winced. Damn it all, Hope, she thought. I knew that trick of yours would backfire!

“All right, here’s what we can do,” she said, as she stood and hopped up the first stair, all slow and clumsy, the decaying iron railing wobbling under her hands. “You can exchange me for her.”

Hop.

“Put her outside the office, take me inside, and lock the door.”

Hop.

“When she comes to, she’s nowhere near you. You’re safe.”

Hop.

“I’m OACET Administration,” she said. “You’ve seen me during every part of this shitshow. I’m more valuable to OACET than somebody’s wife.”

Hop.

“Stay where you are!” Nicholson shouted.

“Dude, you no longer have the luxury of time!” Rachel didn’t bother to hide her frustration. “If you don’t get Blackwell out of there, you are done, do you hear me? She will kill you, and if she doesn’t, Mulcahy will, and destroy this whole factory along with you!

“C’mon,” she said, as she put her dignity aside and crawled up the last few stairs to the landing. “I can’t freakin’ walk. Move her outside, take me in her place, and then we can start negotiations again. Hurry!”

Orange confusion wrapped around yellow fear. These snapped into place like a taut string; the door opened, and Hope Blackwell’s semi-conscious body was nudged outside. Rachel reached over and grabbed her, and hauled Hope into her lap so the metal of the landing didn’t slice up Hope’s skin. Hope twitched as Rachel touched her, and Rachel wondered if this was when Hope woke up and began to slaughter everyone in range, which was at this moment a woman with a bummed-up ankle—

“Get inside!” Nicholson was crouched on the floor, using glass walls and the thin metal of filing cabinets as his bunker.

“I met someone yesterday,” Rachel said, as she lifted Hope from her lap and gently set her on the landing. “Didn’t catch his last name, but I think you know him? Ahren, at Sugar Camp Christmas Trees?

“You should have spent more time with him.” She grabbed the railing and pretended to use it to haul herself to her feet, as she scanned along the length of it… There. A weak spot in the metal. Very weak, crumbling from fractures and rust. “Or at least listened to him. If he were here, I’d be worried. That guy has his act together.”

Hop.

She grabbed the glass door and yanked it open; Nicholson glared up at her in reds. “You don’t worry me at all.”

Taking his gun away from him was one of the easiest things she’d ever done. He was so low to the ground that all she had to was step on it with her gimpy foot and kick, and it went sailing off of the landing. It hurt, but not nearly as much as what was to come.

“Hi,” she said.

Now for the hard part—Nicholson had to go down. In flames.

Or, lacking the availability of fire, headfirst from a decent height.

Yup, this was going to hurt.

But maybe that was okay. Yeah, that was fine. Good, even. She was long overdue for heavy penance.

She retreated and stuck her butt against the weak part of the railing. “C’mon,” she taunted him. “Come out here. Nobody’s going to shoot you. We just want to have an adult discussion.”

Nicholson retreated behind the door again.

“Coward!” she snapped. “Ahren would have the balls to talk! To stand up to a cop!”

Nicholson’s colors rioted. The mingled blues and blacks she had come to associate with death were still heavy on his mind, but now those colors lanced forward, pointing directly at her heart.

The glass door opened so quickly that it slammed against the stair buttress and cracked.

“Nobody move,” she said through the coms. “He’s going to try and jump me…suicide-by-cop. He’s got a knife and I’ll disarm him when he jumps. Stand down—do not shoot. Repeat: do not shoot. Confirm?”

“Confirmed,” came an echo of OACET; the FBI agents got the message through their earpieces, and their professional blues strengthened.

“You’re under arrest,” she said. She was weary, suddenly, bone-weary and ready to sleep for a month or more. A lengthy stay in a hospital bed was beginning to sound like a viable alternative to standing here and arguing with this manchild. “For assault, kidnapping, and…and we’ll start with those, because I’m tired and I want to get this over with.”

Nicholson began to move, the hunting knife she pretended not to see sliding out of its holster.

She put her weight on her good ankle and pretended to slump to her side, where the ceramic plates of her body armor would catch the knife and (hopefully) turn it aside. Or maybe just hold it inside her liver. Hard to tell with body armor, really.

“Peng, no!”

Wyatt’s voice, from waaaaaaay across the room.

Four gunshots.

(Wait, real gunshots?)

Jeremy Nicholson, white in shock, then slowly fading into that twisting blue-black color of life giving way to death as Wyatt’s shots took him in his neck.

(She was extremely angry about having to watch that process again, as every time someone died in front of her, she needed six months and a case of whiskey to scrub it from her mind’s eye.)

Then, general pandemonium as Nicholson’s body flopped over the railing and landed on its head.

“Huh,” Rachel said. She couldn’t hear herself over the shouting on the floor below. She grabbed the weak spot on the railing and yanked once, carefully. When nothing happened, she yanked as hard as she could. More nothing.

“Yup,” she said, as she sat a safe distance away from Hope to watch the bedlam unfold. She touched her face; it was covered in an unpleasantly sticky liquid that was definitely not sea water. “I’m done.”

And, just like that, her brain tipped the last piece of the puzzle over.

It slid into place, and she sent her avatar out, out…out to Washington, to OACET’s headquarters, and the War Room in the basement. Then, she reopened her link with Josh, and asked if his helicopter pilot friend was willing to do them another favor.

Five minutes later, the FBI brought Wyatt over to her. The psychopath had the hangdog expression of someone who knew he had fucked up, and the triumphant reds and purples of someone who had scored the winning touchdown at the Superbowl. They left him sitting on the stairs beside her.

“Where’s your earpiece?” she asked.

“Gee, Peng, I dunno,” he said. “Musta fallen out during the fight.”

“Too bad you didn’t have it,” she said. “You would have heard me telling everyone to stand down while I took on Nicholson.”

“Too damn bad,” he agreed. An FBI agent appeared with two cans of soda and a pack of Wet-Naps for Rachel; she ignored the soda while she set to work ridding herself of the last bothersome traces of Nicholson.

“I refuse to believe,” she said, after the agent had left, “that you had this specific ending planned from the beginning.”

“Told you I was here to do the things you couldn’t.”

“Oh, Lord,” she sighed.

He handed her own service weapon back to her, handle first. She grabbed it from him and scanned the magazine; six shots fired. All accounted for.

“Thought this was left on the roof.”

“It was,” he said. “Ami got it for me. We were on our way to give it back to you when I saw him go after you with that knife. Instinct and training took over.”

“Did the FBI buy that?”

“Looks like it.”

She held out her left hand. After a moment, Wyatt slipped a NORINCO pistol out of his body armor and dropped it in her open palm.

“What would your story have been with this?” she asked, as she tested the weight of the unfamiliar gun.

“Does it matter?”

“Guess not,” she said.

She stood; her ankle screeched like a yard owl, and she took a few wiggly sidesteps to play with her balance before she hopped down the stairs. When she turned around, Wyatt was still sitting where she had left him.

“I’ve got to go wrap this up,” she said. “If you’re gone when I get back, I won’t look for you.”

Purple humor exploded throughout his colors. “Why wouldn’t I be here?” he asked. “Agent Glassman offered me a full-time position working security. I start Monday.”

His scans didn’t show any signs of lying. She checked again, and then again, looking for the dimples or stray colors to show that he was dicking her around.

“Pick you up for work, neighbor?” he asked.

She flipped off her scans, counted backwards from ten until she could remove her hand from her gun (negative thirty-six), and limped away from the psychopath laughing silently in purples.

 

 

 

TWENTY-TWO

 

It had taken a couple of years, but the Agents had finally settled on their new logo. Not their official government seal—seals were easy, all add-an-eagle-and-done. But logos? A logo had to be quick, recognizable, an all-purpose image for those many occasions when the formality of an eagle just wouldn’t do. None of them had been trained in graphic design, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have Passionate Opinions about typefaces, color selection, layout… There had been wars fought over kerning alone, with entire rooms back at their old headquarters turned into a digital battleground over text alignment.

The result was something that Rachel thought looked like a bastardized version of the London Underground logo, but she didn’t much care. It was green, it said OACET, the background elements were ripe with technobabble, and it looked less garish on her running shorts than their official seal.

It was also easier to insert RFID chips into a design that already looked digitized.

The War Room’s door was ajar. Pretty cartoon ponies glared at her with glassy eyes from over stacks of black canvas backpacks, as the RFID chips yelped at her from within. A haze of dust from disturbed papers poured, slowly, from the doorway into the hallway; it had all but settled, and Rachel doubted anyone could see it but her.

Inside was a splash of raspberry, along with an assorted six-pack of colors she didn’t recognize.

“Idiots,” Rachel muttered.

Beside her, Mulcahy tensed; this already long morning wasn’t over yet.

Rachel laid a hand on his bare arm and pushed iron calm across to him.

“Let me go first,” she told him. “I know how to rattle this guy.”

Her boss nodded.

Rachel took a breath, and limped her way into the War Room.

“Good morning!” she said, as brightly as if she were the cheeriest diner waitress in the history of strong coffee.

Bryce Knudson froze. Around him, several other Homeland Security agents glanced at him, fingers twitching in yellow-white energy as they thought about going for their guns—

“Don’t,” said Detective Hill in his best cop’s voice. Rachel felt the butt of his tactical shotgun rest against her shoulder as he took aim at Knudson’s center mass. As long as she didn’t move, Hill wouldn’t have to worry about Knudson seeing his stance waver. (And as long as Hill didn’t shoot, she didn’t have to worry about permanently losing the hearing in her right ear.) “Metropolitan Police Department. You’re trespassing on government property.”

“They’re stealing government property,” Mulcahy said as he entered the room.

Knudson’s colors snapped and twisted in reds—Caught!

She scanned the mess against the far wall. The filing cabinets had been removed, and a new hole had been opened in the wall, roughly the size of a gun cabinet. Behind it was an old-fashioned metal safe, with an external layer of modern digital locks. The door to the safe had been opened, with bare shelves where the files had rested.

“Man,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “You guys prepped for everything. Did you bring paint in case you scratched something? I bet you brought paint.”

Knudson’s team stayed silent, but their yellow caution and orange anxiety twisted over each other and pointed directly towards one of the canvas bags on the floor. Her scans dipped into the canvas bags…

“Yup,” she said, as she used her mind to poke around the contents of the cans. “Federal institution beige, green, and cream. Those are about as basic as colors get, trust me.”

“Come in, extract, and get out,” Mulcahy said. “Leave no trace.”

“Leave no leverage,” Rachel clarified. “We knew they were down here as soon as they tripped the locks on that safe.

“And yes,” she said, “we could have trusted the FBI to arrest you, or called the cops. But right now, it’s just us, Knudson. Just OACET and Homeland, having a nice discussion. Plus one cop, who is currently not on duty and decided to come down to the Batcave to see if his friends wanted to get some breakfast, and has found something very odd in the basement.”

“You’re on their side?” Knudson asked Hill, very quietly.

“I’m on the side of the people who didn’t kidnap my niece.”

Knudson’s colors blanched, and the gunmetal gray that had been swirling around the edges of his attention jumped straight to the middle of his chest.

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “You should have done more research.

“Oh,” she added, as his attention swung wide as he continued to search for an opening. “Those dudes you had at the top of the stairs standing guard? They’re on their way over to Sibley Memorial Hospital.”

Knudson went extremely still, traces of red anger starting to work its way into his colors. “What did you do to them?”

“Me? Nothing. OACET? Nothing. The MPD? Nothing. How-ev-er…”

Hope Blackwell flowed around Rachel like a wave.

The weird woman had lost weight during her time in captivity, and her cheekbones stood out beneath furious dark eyes. Or maybe that was just the streaks of blood across her face—some were smeared and drying, while others were stark, fresh red. She was wearing what must have been one of her husband’s white dress shirts. It hung around her like a smock, untucked and draped over a pair of athletic shorts, with more fresh blood across its front and sleeves.

She was also barefoot, which somehow drove home the fact that she was there for no other reason than to commit unspeakable violence.

“We can either do this on the books, or…” Mulcahy let the offer hang.

Knudson’s colors twisted between professional blues and sickly greens.

“Both options have their good points,” Rachel said. “If Hill arrests you right now for breaking and entering, Hope can’t touch you. But if we do this all casual-like, then we can keep this quiet. Our reporter friends are waiting for an exclusive about the reasons for the kidnapping.”

He didn’t have to think about it. “Off the books.”

“Good,” Hope hissed as she moved, sliding to the side of the room. She kept away from the shotgun, stopping just far enough away so she could bring down Knudson if the gun went off. Her fingers knotted and cracked as she stretched them, readied them—

“Off the books means no one will ever know what happens here,” Mulcahy said. “Just us, and whomever we choose to tell.”

He took a step forward; the men from Homeland began to move. Hope grabbed the nearest by his arm, turned him upside-down, and put his head straight into the floor. The others stopped, and looked to Knudson again as he held up a hand for patience.

Mulcahy took one of the chairs from around the table and handed it to Rachel.

“Thanks,” she said, and sat so her screaming ankle was finally able to rest. Hill moved the shotgun accordingly; it dropped a little lower than dead center on Knudson, and the Homeland agent’s colors solidified themselves as he accepted the inevitable.

“What do you want from us?” he asked.

“Me?” Rachel lifted her hands. “I’d like you all to go tell your superiors how you fucked up. Hell, I’d like to do this official, myself. Make an example of you. Press charges, drag you out in front of the media. Tell the entire fucking world how you kidnapped a child to get control of OACET.”

“But then I wouldn’t get the chance to beat the shit out of you,” Hope said, her voice ragged and dry. The man lying on the ground before her groaned quietly; Hope lifted one foot and stomped.

Knudson glanced at his man, and then back to Hope. “Let us sit down,” he said. “We’ll answer your questions, and then we’ll go. No tricks.” Hope lifted her foot again, and he added: “Please.”

Mulcahy agreed; the Homeland agents were disarmed and were placed around the War Room’s small wooden table, hands laid out flat and empty.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Knudson said.

“We’re OACET,” Rachel said. “We cause more chaos before sunrise than most civil servants do all day.”

“I’m aware,” Knudson said. Streaks of angry red ran across his colors at her words.

“We’re cyborgs, Knudson dear,” Rachel said, with a nod towards the files and their RFID tags. “Our security system is the best in the world. We’ve known you’ve been snooping around the building since we allowed the FBI full access. We just weren’t sure when you were planning to make your move, not until you tried to get into that safe.”

“At first, we thought you were trying to get into our databases,” Mulcahy said. “But we don’t keep anything of critical intelligence in our databases.”

“Agent Murphy is just fanatical about paper documentation,” Rachel said. “You must have known that—she’s monologued for hours about the importance of paper trails. And after that fake break-in where you raided the offices, looking for our intelligence caches? We realized you didn’t want any ol’ run-of-the-mill documents. You were here for the good stuff. Our rumored Grade-A blackmail materials.”

“You waited until our entire security team was at the raid,” Mulcahy said. “And then you spent the last hour trying to bypass our codes.”

One of the Homeland agents had been flailing in impotent orange confusion. The cell phone in his hand continued to broadcast the supposedly live feed from the factory down in Maryland. According to the reporter, the Agents were still in the factory, Nicholson was down but his militia wasn’t, there would be a press conference as soon as the details were wrapped up—

“No tricks, honey,” Rachel said to him. “Reporters are willing to bend over backwards for you when you promise them a really juicy story.

“So,” she continued. “What type of story are they going to get?”

“We’re not giving anybody up, if that’s what you want,” Knudson said. “This was all us.”

Hope laughed, a harsh, choking sound. “Even I know that’s a load of crap,” she said, as she pointed to the files.

“It’s plausible, though,” Rachel said. “I suppose Knudson and his men could have planned this alone. They could be after these files to ensure that certain politicians would support them when they move to bundle OACET into Homeland. They let the militia do the dirty work, and come in behind them to clean up.

“Pretty clever,” she said. The urge to scurry over to Knudson and scream right in his face was slightly—so very slightly!—outweighed by the pressure of the shotgun resting on her shoulder. “I’m not even sure if we’ve got any evidence against y’all.”

“Except for…” Behind her, Hill’s conversational colors moved in an arrow, pointing towards the safe and the canvas bags full of papers.

“And…” Mulcahy said, as he unslung his shoulder bag and removed a file. He placed it on the War Room’s table. “We have this.”

To Rachel, it looked like any other standard government-issue file; a little past its prime, a little worse for wear. Maybe a few too many handwritten notes on the cover, but scratch paper was never around when needed.

Knudson’s eyes widened as if they had threatened him with a bomb.

“Now,” Mulcahy said, his fingers resting lightly on the file’s cover. “I’m going to speak in hypotheticals, so as not to place the blame on any one person or organization. Besides, I’m sure that those who orchestrated this scheme left little evidence of their own involvement, and it’s not fair to punish those who work under them while letting those responsible slip away.”

“I think it’s fair,” Rachel said, grinning at Knudson. “I really do, but Mulcahy says different. And that’s the heart of this whole mess, right? Where Mulcahy goes, so goes control of OACET.

“Now, the only reason I’m not hauling off and beating you until you’re nothing but trace evidence?” Rachel said. “You’ve been used almost as much as we have. Because—and here’s the heart and soul of this cockup—it’s impossible to get Congress to pay for an unstoppable cyborg army when the country’s already got one.”

“One that’s proven they obey the law,” Mulcahy said as he stepped forward, his huge hands wrapping around the back of the nearest unoccupied chair.

Knudson seemed hypnotized by those hands; Mulcahy was grasping the chair like it was mere moments away from becoming two halves of a chair. Two very sharp and pointy halves.

“You can’t go after OACET,” Rachel said. “Not directly. Senator Hanlon tried that, and we spanked the shit out of him. We’re an unimpeachable organization. We’ve defined ourselves as such. We’re aware that any slipup will be an opportunity to take us down, and we behave accordingly.

“So if somebody wanted to take control of OACET, it’d require a two-stage attack. First, you get Mulcahy to make a mistake. An incredibly public blowup that he can’t recover from. Then, you get control of the documents that nobody has ever seen but everyone in Congress somehow knows we have. With Mulcahy disgraced and our leverage gone, we’d be unable to defend ourselves.

“You knew Mulcahy’s history, how he could break in and rescue Hope and Avery whenever he damned well felt like it. But it’s all about public perception, right? Nicholson made sure the standoff was national news. If Mulcahy rescued his wife and godchild, he’d have to leave behind those other hostages while he got them out, and I bet they’d all be in very poor condition by the time he got back to make a second trip.”

“Bad press for OACET,” Mulcahy said. “Worse for me—I’d probably have to resign.”

“Alternatively, the standoff lasts long enough for Hope Blackwell to come down from her meds. Or they give her something else which amps her up beyond what she can manage. She’s already in a high-stress situation, and she’s the kind of person who fights back.

“Sorry,” Rachel added as an aside to Hope.

“Nah,” Hope said in her too-hoarse voice. “’s fair.”

“If this happened, Hope might get Avery out of there, but she’s not trained for covert ops… It’s more likely that whatever she did would end really, really poorly. It’d be a slaughter. Dead hostages, definitely, and possibly the beginnings of a firefight with the FBI and officers when they reacted to the situation inside the factory.”

“Not so bad for OACET,” Mulcahy said, as he leaned on the chair. It began to creak and sag beneath his weight. “Very, very bad for me. I’d definitely resign.”

“Diplomacy couldn’t work,” Rachel continued. “Your man inside made sure that Nicholson wouldn’t agree to any terms. Once I took him down, Nicholson went completely cheese and crackers. He was an egomaniacal rich kid—he was never someone you could reason with! He thought that once Mulcahy heard him out, we’d be so swept up in how right he was that we’d fall in line. He had no idea what to do once he actually met us; Fischer would have been able to aim him like a gun.

“It was a really good plan, guys. Kudos. You plugged our escape holes ever so nicely. But the one thing I can’t figure out?” Rachel leaned forward, hands tented in her lap, as she glared at Knudson. “The China connection. What’s going on there?”

Knudson had spent the last few minutes staring into space, his surface colors moving in tempo with Rachel and Mulcahy as they laid out the reasons for the kidnapping. He shook his head. “A distraction,” he said. “We got our hands on a few crates of guns stolen from NORINCO, and it turned out they were part of a larger theft. Since Nicholson’s recent history included travel to China, we thought you and the FBI would waste time chasing down the idea that China was arming U.S. militias.”

Rachel leaned forward so her jaw rested on her hands and tried to look thoughtful, and not completely poleaxed by the realization that if Wyatt hadn’t shown up when he did, that would have been exactly what happened.

“Interesting,” she said. “And the rumors that China is developing an implant similar to OACET’s? Did you put those out there as part of the false trail?”

Red—furious, burning red across the table, as each of the men from Homeland sought to hold their tempers.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness. That got y’all going!”

“Peng?” Mulcahy asked.

“Answer the question,” she said to Knudson.

“Those rumors are true.” The Homeland agent spoke through gritted teeth, red spinning off of him like gouts of flame.

“Well, damn,” Rachel said, as she sat up again. She cocked her head so she could look at Mulcahy. “They think a version of China with OACET’s capabilities is a serious threat. I think…” She turned back to Knudson. “…you did this because of national security, right? I mean, there were probably a few suitcases full of unmarked bills, plus the promise of job promotions and all that sweet stuff, but there was some fundamental civic duty in there, too. You did this so you could bring OACET under Homeland and get ahead of the Chinese threat.”

Some of the Homeland agents nodded, and Knudson said, “Not just China. If the technology was invented once, it’ll be discovered again. We need to get ahead of the threat, not react when it finally happens!”

“I’ve heard all of this before,” Mulcahy said. “A million times over. And our answer is the same: we were not intended to be weapons. We have free will and the ability to use it, and if the situation arises in which we might act as weapons to save American lives, we will address that situation as it comes.”

“And that’ll be too late,” said one of Knudson’s team.

Mulcahy picked up the chair, broke it in half, and set it aside with the same casual grace his wife had used to drive a man’s face into the floor.

Knudson’s professional blues wrapped around himself as protection. “We did what had to be done,” he said loudly, calling the center of attention away from his men and back to himself. “You’re too powerful to be left uncontrolled. We needed to do this.”

“Sure,” Rachel said. “Absolute power corrupts and all. Definitely does not set a bad precedent to break into a fellow federal organization that hasn’t given you evidence of wrongdoing.”

Knudson pointed to the documents from the safe.

“Hey Mulcahy?” Rachel asked, falsely bright. “If those documents contained compromising information, and I’m not saying they do, have you used it?”

“No,” Mulcahy said.

“Would you use it?”

“Only—” Mulcahy said, as he prodded the pieces of the broken chair with his toe. “—if pushed to the point when it needed to be used.”

“And when would that be?”

“Considering how we’ve been fighting for three years without resorting to its use? Never, I hope.”

“You were played, Knudson,” Rachel said. The shotgun resting on her shoulder was becoming annoyingly heavy, and she was still so tired, but this was so close to being finished… “The politicians who could be ruined by what’s in those files wanted them back, end of story. Everything else was a nice song and dance about patriotism and preserving the American way to get you to fall in line.”

Mulcahy slid the file towards Knudson. “I’m sure you’ve noticed this,” he said.

Knudson swallowed. “Where did you get it?”

“I believe you know her as Agent Johnson? Rachel apprehended her at the Congressional Country Club. Detective Hill spent most of yesterday interrogating her.”

The shotgun lifted from Rachel’s shoulder as Hill stood. “Ethan Fischer’s partner. She slipped OACET once in Maryland, when they tried to arrest her after the meeting with Nicholson. Still, that managed to kill communications between you and Fischer.

“But Johnson wasn’t just the go-between for Fischer. She was also the primary connection between you and six men in Congress.” Hill pointed to the file. “She said this was yours.”

Knudson nodded.

“She’s not saying much,” Hill said. “Enough to convince me she’s not going down alone. She gave up that file as security. It’s got your notes on the kidnapping in it, and some of Fischer’s notes on the same pages.”

“Fischer was good enough to give me a handwriting sample, and tried to kill me to get it back,” Rachel said. “I’m sure those pages would hold up under scrutiny.”

“I’ve read your notes,” Mulcahy said to Knudson. “You seem to be missing some information. Did you know it was always part of the plan to kill Hope, and possibly Avery and the other hostages?”

Knudson didn’t reply, but Hill said: “No.”

“Why do you say that?” Rachel asked Hill.

“These guys are law and order,” Hill said. “They think they’re doing the right thing. They wanted to minimize casualties, not build a plan around them. Tell ’em about the dead agent.”

“Right,” Rachel said. “Did you know the FBI had an agent inside Sugar Hill? And that he was almost certainly murdered by Fischer to convince Nicholson that he was on his side?”

The Homeland agents turned a deep orange gray.

“What are you going to do?” Knudson asked.

In response, Mulcahy took an RFID sticker in the shape of OACET’s new logo out of his pocket, and affixed it to the front of the file. He carried this to the open safe, and set it on the empty top shelf.

“Fill ’er up, boys,” Rachel said, and pointed at the canvas bags.

The Homeland agents stood and started loading.

It was a long five minutes before the safe was full again. Rachel scanned the Homeland agents from head to toe, and they were told they had to leave the bags behind, just in case.

Hope escorted them out, dragging the unconscious man across the floor by his arms.

Knudson was the last to leave. As he reached the door, he stopped and turned to face Rachel. “This can’t be allowed to continue,” he said to her. “OACET can’t be left as its own organization. Not with the kind of power you have—the kind of power we need. You have to come in. There’s too much at risk.”

Rachel took a long look around the War Room before she met Knudson’s eyes. “I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing,” she said. “But I’d shut up if I were you.”

Storm clouds of black and red anger rolled across him, and he turned to leave.

“Wait.” She held up her left hand, stretching it open as far as the scar tissues allowed. “A child might have died because you were dumb enough to let yourself get dragged into politics. My boss is letting you walk out of here, but do not confuse that with forgiveness.”

He glared at her until Hill loomed closer with the shotgun.

And then they were gone, and it was just Rachel and Mulcahy left in the War Room.

She collapsed across the table and thought she might spend the rest of the day right there. Or the week. She could probably get pizza delivered, if she tried hard enough. “That was close,” she sighed through the link. “If Josh hadn’t bribed his pilot friend to fly us back here in time, things might have gone sideways.”

“Maybe,” Mulcahy said, as he went to reset the locks on the safe.

She sat up. “What did you do?”

He grinned. It was the old Mulcahy grin, the one a wolf wears when he’s turned a trap on the hunters.

“What did you do?”

“Scan the wall,” he told her.

She did. Cinderblocks over thick unyielding sandstone. But behind that—

Rachel stared at him.

“You didn’t really think I’d keep our best intel in a tiny safe,” he said. “Did you?”

Rachel couldn’t help but laugh.

 

 

 

 

TWENTY-THREE

 

She was resting her eyes—not sleeping, thank you very much, she was not so old yet that she’d accidentally fall asleep at a party—but there was Marshall Wyatt, grinning at her over a Texas-sized steak. Young Wyatt. Her friend. Not the phony older version chatting up Zockinski’s wife at the buffet.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked, before she saw a matching plate loaded with steak and accoutrements resting on her lap. “Ah,” she said, and she fell upon the golden ear of corn resting atop a mountain of mashed potatoes. She glanced around with working eyes, and saw they were in Afghanistan again. Well, Afghanistan by way of Hope and Mulcahy’s colossal private greenhouse: she and Wyatt had never been to a catered function in Afghanistan, and there was that jazz band combo playing on a flat fiberglass rock in the middle of a manmade river. “Another dream?”

“Not for me,” he replied. “But the lines blur when you’re dead.”

She waved a waiter over for a refill on her champagne. And got a second glass for Wyatt, because when your friend comes back from the dead for a chat, it was simply good manners to offer him some champagne.

Wyatt’s ghost stared at the fluted crystal as if it were poison. “Beer used to be good enough for you.”

“Still is,” she said. “But if Mulcahy wants to serve expensive champagne, I’m drinking expensive champagne.”

He shrugged, sipped, and his eyes went wide.

“I know, right?” she said, and relaxed against the eucalyptus tree.

“You’ve got a strange life,” Wyatt’s ghost said, as a Caspian cobra twisted around their feet. It hissed at a passing koala, who ignored it.

“You get used to it.”

“You happy?”

“Yeah,” she said, as she watched Becca and Jason on the dance floor. “Most days, I am.”

“Good.” He nodded towards the fake Wyatt: Ami was twisting the psychopath’s arm to get him to dance with her. Literally. “He’s sticking around?”

“Yup,” she said, as she shook her head in absolute bemusement. “Josh offered him a job working with the Hippos, and he accepted. Officially, he’s you, forever.”

Wyatt’s ghost laughed. “Good for him,” he said. “Maybe he can make something out of me.”

Rachel kicked the cobra off of her boots. It turned into a giant flying squirrel and scampered up the nearest tree.

“Not okay with that?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “He’s not you. Shouldn’t be wearing your face.”

“Told you, I got no use for it. Let him have it.” When she didn’t reply, he added, “Thought you didn’t notice faces any more, anyhow.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said, and stabbed at her steak with her knife.

“But you think this is the best place for him,” Wyatt’s ghost said.

She’d been trying to convince herself of this for days. It was getting easier: they couldn’t turn him over to the cops without dangerous explanations, and this way the Hippos could keep an eye on him.

And…maybe…she had finally realized what he had been trying to tell her on the factory’s roof. It took her longer than it should have: the poets she loved so much always spoke of a sense of morality, a sense of ethics, a sense of fair play. There was always more truth to be found in words, if you went digging.

Not that she had any sympathy for a murderous psychopath. Really.

“I don’t know what else to do with him,” she said. “But is this the best option? No. We’re letting him walk around free. No punishment for what he’s done in the past. Even if we keep him honest from here on out, that’s on me.”

“You still think he’s running a long con?”

No, she thought, but she didn’t answer him.

“Well,” Wyatt’s ghost said, as he finished his champagne, “I’ll catch you around, Penguin.”

“What, you got plans?” she chuckled.

The ghost grinned. “You’d be surprised,” he said, and faded into the tree.

The giant squirrel hung upside-down from a nearby branch and chittered at her.

“Quiet,” she told it, and the squirrel disappeared.

Let there be peace, she told herself, as the band played a tune by Miles Davis and the children chased the koala through a field of wildflowers. Or something like it.

Across the greenhouse, Hope and Mulcahy sat close beside each other, legs entwined. Hope’s bruises would take time to fade. Healing—for both of them—would take longer. They carried reds and grays on their shoulders, and it was only when they were close enough to touch that some of that weight was lifted. They watched the room like wary predators, and when one rose to get a new plate of food or make conversation with friends, the other followed close behind.

Avery’s protector during the kidnapping had turned out to be an unemployed single mother of three. The woman with the core of copper had children who weren’t much older than Avery, and she had brought them to the party. None of those children, Avery included, seemed to have been affected by the kidnapping: they all screamed in glee as they romped with the koala and splashed in the stream. The woman with the core of copper sat beside Mako and Carlota, the three of them not talking. All three of them wore their heavy cloaks of reds and grays, but while Mako and Carlota shared theirs between them, the woman with the core of copper carried hers alone.

Josh was—

Oh!

Rachel yanked her scans out of the coat closet and made herself wake all of the way up, as quickly as she could, because she had just learned something new about human anatomy and where on earth did Josh find women who could bend like that?!

A half-eaten plate of food slid off of her lap.

She nudged it aside with a sigh, and resigned herself to another year in a starring role in the annual OACET holiday bloopers reel. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had filmed her while she was talking under the influence of drowsy.

The greenhouse was much smaller now that she was awake. It held only a small fraction of the party, although the jazz band was real. Everything else was located through the open doors, which led to Hope and Mulcahy’s mini-mansion, or to the lawn and the dance floor outside

It was tight quarters all over. Parties with more than two hundred people used to be the norm for OACET in their mansion out on the Potomac River. There was nowhere to hold large events these days, and she felt the loss.

She touched the stone in her necklace. It was a pink sapphire set in gold, and she only wore it for special occasions, or endings, or both.

She knew it was selfish, but she was so tired of the constant loss of small things.

The bone-weary exhaustion that had swallowed her at Nicholson’s factory hadn’t faded with time. It was hard to move. Hard to pull herself forward. Hard to think about anything but blue and black, and Nicholson tipping over into—

How long are you going to allow yourself to sit here like a useless shit on the floor?

She stood and tested her ankle. Five days after Nicholson’s death, and she was able to limp around without crutches if she wore an ACE bandage under heavy leather boots. Becca’s core of jade green was out on the lawn, moving beneath a galaxy of twinkling string lights as she swayed to the music, and Rachel wanted nothing more than to steal her away and go home and curl up in her arms—

“Hey.”

Santino was standing a few feet away, uncertain in oranges. He was holding a small potted begonia.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and used the tree to lower herself back down to the ground. She had a feeling she knew what was coming, and a few more minutes of being a useless shit on the floor seemed appropriate.

“Can I sit?”

“What is with you lately?” she snapped. “Of course you can sit.”

Her partner folded his long legs up and dropped to the ground, several feet away. The orange grew deeper, and it started to push the Southwestern turquoise away—

Santino thrust the begonia at her. “Here,” he said. “I think this belongs to you.”

She didn’t move. After a moment, he set the begonia on the ground between them.

“Could you stop running emotions?” he said, almost sadly.

“Yeah,” she said, and snapped off her scans altogether. Whatever was coming, she didn’t need to see it.

“I’m moving in with Zia,” he said.

“Yeah.” She nodded; no surprise there. “Is it because of Wyatt?”

“What? No, why?”

Curious, she activated her scans again and flipped frequencies until she could see Santino’s face. He was older than she remembered, with crow’s feet beginning to crack around his eyes. “Figured Wyatt was the last straw,” she replied. “I pushed you hard last year—this was worse.”

“No!” He laughed, and the crow’s feet crinkled. “No, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Then why?” she asked, before she could swallow her words and keep herself from sounding like the world’s biggest self-pitying teenager.

“I really liked living with you,” he said. “Big yard, finally got the garden the way I wanted…”

“Shut up,” she said, smiling, and picked up the begonia. “Is this what I think it is?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s not rooted yet, so be gentle. But you used it to fight off a trained killer, so it’s yours by right of conquest.”

Rachel stroked the plant’s soft leaves. A single flower remained; a bud had survived the beating and had coaxed itself open despite the stress. “Thanks,” she said.

“I want to tell you something,” he said in a rush. “But you’ve got to keep it a secret for another few weeks.”

“What—” she began, and then whipped her scans around to find his girlfriend in the crowd. She flipped the emotional spectrum back on, and honed in on Zia’s violet core.

Zia was carrying blue around in that core—a babysoft blue, with the seafoam greens of dreamless sleep.

“You son of a bitch,” Rachel said to her partner.

“Most people lead with ‘congratulations’.”

“You could have told me!”

“I am telling you!” He rose up on his knees and hugged her in blues, purples, reds, and the most joyous yellows she had ever seen, colors brighter than the sun, or maybe the bottom of the ocean. A whole future cascaded around them in rainbows. “We wanted to wait until we were safe in the second trimester,” he said. “But you’d know, so we’re asking you to keep it quiet.

“Oh, that reminds me,” he added. “Want to be my best woman at the ceremony?”

“You are such an asshole,” she said.

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

 

There’ve been a lot of jokes about how 2016 was an especially wild year. All I know is that I had a decent chunk of Brute Force written before Ammon Bundy and his militia took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. When that happened—January 2, 2016—my draft of a handful of madmen with a vendetta against OACET became too tame for a work of fiction. I spent the next nine months expanding the plot to keep ahead of current events, and sent the final draft out to my copyeditor during the first week of November.

…yeah…

A wild year, indeed.

Sovereign citizens shouldn’t be overgeneralized: I hope I haven’t done that here. They are a highly diverse group with no central governing structure, and are only loosely united by a broad view of government corruption. Some of their members are, however, a serious threat to law enforcement. The FBI has identified “sovereign-citizen extremists as comprising a domestic terrorist movement,” especially during confrontations with law enforcement. If pushed, sovereign citizens will push back.

Three works of poetry appeared in this novel. These were, in order, Carl Sandberg’s “Prayers of Steel,” “Amaze” by Adelaide Crapsey, and “Dreamers” by Siegfried Sassoon. Rachel never got to recite the second part of Sassoon’s poem:

 

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.

 

It’s a shame she didn’t have the chance to introduce the other Agents to these lines, as I feel they would have embraced Sassoon’s tribute to mundane normalcy.

As always, this book wouldn’t be possible without the goodwill and support of my husband, Brown. As always, this book would have been finished much, much more quickly if it weren’t for my dogs. Thank you for purchasing a copy: you’ve helped offset the cost of their numerous vet bills and the cost of the three windows they’ve broken.

Thanks goes to my beta readers, Fuzz, Gary, Kevin, Tiff, Joris, and Cora, for their critical and necessary feedback. To Danny and Jes, thank you for the copy edits. And to Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising for the fantastic cover art.

Finally, Brute Force is set in a larger fictional universe. Patrick Mulcahy’s story is free to all readers, and is in graphic novel form at agirlandherfed.com. The novels in the Rachel Peng series, fill in the five-year gap between when Mulcahy discovered the purpose of their implants and when he was finally able to establish OACET as an independent federal organization. Please excuse the talking koala; he has a good heart.

You can find updates on current projects and novels at kbspangler.com and agirlandherfed.com. Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Rachel and Santino will be back!