None of us talk much during the twelve-hour flight from Norfolk, Virginia to St. Petersburg, Russia. The nice thing about our association with the CIA—the only one, so far—is the private plane. There are leather couches, dorm-style sleeping spaces, a fully stocked kitchen and even a sick bay. Like a spy movie come to life.
It gives us plenty of space to spread out. Most of us managed to sleep for at least a few hours, but as we make our descent, the recirculated air is thick with nerves and questions. It’s slick on the way down until it expands in my lungs. They’re clogged, no room for answers even if they were forthcoming.
Nightmares interrupted my sleep more than once during the flight, each one ending with Jude running to the edge of the building, too late to catch Pollyanna’s falling form. As hard as I try, I can’t see whether or not the rest of those people jump with her. They must. She told Jude to save them, but he could never stop anyone from following her lead. Not when she’s in a mood like that and he only has two hands.
By the time the wheels touch down on the runway at a small, private airport I feel eight years older, and a look in the mirror reveals rumpled clothes, messy hair, and deepening circles around my eyes. We aren’t going to be here long enough to succumb to jetlag, but I’m going to sleep for a week when we get back.
None of the other Cavies look twice at me as we haul ourselves down the metal rollaway stairs and across the deserted tarmac where three cars wait, idling. It’s probably because none of them look any better. The twins are the only ones who seem unaffected by the trip, chasing each other around the tarmac and fighting over who gets the bigger limo. Polly has taken care to stay as far away as possible since we touched yesterday. Haint’s quiet, introspective, but that’s her default in stressful situations. Mole’s watching us all with a nervous expression that resembles the one the Professor used to adopt on assessment days, or on the days he knew the Philosopher was taking Mole or Reaper out for their special training activities.
Geoff seems…put out. Whether it’s because we’re here in the first place, because we chose to leave Saint Stephen’s when he would have stayed, or because he’s stuck with me on the boring assignment is hard to say. We left Flicker back in Charleston at a CIA safe house with Madeline since my father will be back from his trip any day now, but leaving one of our own was hard on all of us. Especially when we feel so responsible for her well-being, and leaving her with the government is probably the last thing she would choose for herself.
Well, maybe not. We really don’t know, and we’re doing the best we can. Hopefully she’ll understand that if she ever wakes up. Madeline seems worried that it hasn’t happened yet, but she’s not a doctor.
As we draw closer to the idling cars, I squint into the early-morning sunshine in an attempt to make out the three figures standing by the doors. One is Agent Bishop, the friendly woman we met the other day. One is a stranger—I’m guessing based on our conversation with Marlow that he’s the other agent assigned to Athena’s group. Agent Warren, I think.
The third is Dane Lee. He’s got a look on his face that suggests he’d rather be anywhere but here.
“Wait.” Haint stops walking. “We’re splitting up now? Aren’t we all going to some central place to get briefed or something?”
“You’ll each be briefed on the details of your team’s goals en route. The mission will be complete in less than ten hours whether all objectives are accomplished or not, at which time we will all reconvene here for the flight home.” Dane steps forward as he talks, hands in his pockets. “You’ll all be issued burner phones with maps. The airport address is preprogrammed and a timer will alert you when you need to leave in order to make it back here before takeoff.”
“Why would we all need that? Won’t we be together?” I ask, feeling my nerves creep back up to dangerous heights. It’s ludicrous to me that the CIA would assume any of us are equipped for something like this. We have a leg up on most people because of our mutations, sure, but we’re also a bunch of teenagers who haven’t even spent that much time in the real world. I assumed we’d be with agents the whole time. “Are you expecting us to be left on our own?”
“Expecting?” Dane shakes his head, avoiding my gaze in favor of sweeping the circle. “No. But we need to be prepared for every eventuality, and I’ll tell you, the pilot is instructed to take off at fifteen hundred hours, no matter how many of us are on board. In fact, he’s not even aware of our numbers here.”
“Why such a strict schedule?” Mole asks, looking as ill as I feel.
“Because that’s as long as we can comfortably set down here without the Russian government learning of our presence.” Dane’s tone is clipped now, clearly irritated by us asking questions instead of following orders. “Anything else or can we go?”
The seven of us look at each other. A million emotions tug me in as many different directions—fear, excitement, loss, love—and they’re reflected back at me in spades. I want to run up and hug them all, to be dramatic and tell them how much they mean to me, because what if I never see them again?
But I don’t move. They don’t move. We watch one another, spilling emotions around our circle until we’re all connected, and I know we’re all thinking the same thing—that it would be silly to make a scene.
The CIA wants to act as though this is all business as usual, that they’re not worried, and everything Madeline and I saw points to the same conclusion. Sort of. I mean, not dying and not being in serious trouble are two different things, but the former will have to be enough to get me into that car.
Mole is the first one to turn away, toward Agent Warren, and the twins peel off after him. They slide into the backseat of their car and disappear behind a slammed door. A moment later, Haint and Pollyanna go with Agent Bishop, Geoff and I follow Dane into the backseat of the last car, and we all go our separate ways.
Once we’re on the road, Dane pulls a knapsack from under his seat and extracts two envelopes, handing them to us. Mine slices my thumb and I stick it in my mouth, sucking the blood off while I wipe the tears on my cheeks with the back of my hand. Geoff and Dane don’t mention them, unless Dane nudging a travel package of Kleenex my direction counts. Part of me wants to wave them off, but there’s really no point in showing up to my first CIA mission with snot all over my face.
I peruse the contents of the envelope to nudge my mind back on track, finding a Swiss passport with my picture and the name Mary Swanson on it, and a bunch of Russian cash.
“If I’m Swiss, shouldn’t I be able to speak German or French or something?”
“Or Italian,” Geoff adds, looking concerned for the first time since we left Virginia.
“You guys, there are plenty of English speakers all over the world. No one is going to look at your passport, first of all. Second, they’re not going to think it’s odd you speak English if they do. Half the people in St. Petersburg use it as their primary language.”
“What are we doing in the city, anyway? I thought the virus was coming from Siberia.” My question comes off grumpy, and even I’m not sure if I’m stalling.
“The signal originated in Siberia, but the majority of the deaths have affected people in the St. Petersburg area. At least the ones in Russia. And we’ll mostly be doing research, anyway.”
“I thought we were going to interview some of the survivors,” Geoff says, his eyes narrowed.
“If we can find one who’s still capable of speaking that will be awesome, but mostly we’ll be looking for connections between them,” Dane replies. “We do have an appointment to observe one survivor this afternoon.”
We pull to a stop in a gray alleyway after a ten-minute drive.
“Okay. So what’s the plan?” Nerves aside, I’m ready to get moving. We’re not getting anything done in this car and the longer we sit here, the more potentially disastrous scenarios for the others run through my head.
“There’s an internet café around the corner. It will be empty, because we own it, but from the outside it appears to be a legitimate business. One of our agents—the Cavy our team will be working with—has unlocked the sanctions on the two computers in the far northwestern corner so we’ll be able to search any sites we need to. She’s also uploaded the files we have on the survivors of the virus. We’ve run cross-referencing programs on them but come up empty, so that’s where you come in. We’ll compare them by hand and see what we come up with.”
“And then?” Geoff looks as though he’s just realized what I guessed back in Charleston. They’re just keeping us busy so the other Cavies—the useful ones—can carry out the real mission.
“Then we go visit our survivor, a Miss Nadia Dimitrov, to see if she’s improved at all or can tell us what happened to her. Or why it happened to her. Then we head back to the airstrip.” Dane pulls out a third envelope and checks his passport. “From now on you’ll refer to me as Randoph Spitz. Geoff, what’s your name?”
“Adam Lintz.”
“Okay. Let’s take five minutes so you can memorize the information on your passport, just in case, then we’ll go.”
A whole new bunch of questions thud around in my head, like why anyone would ask us questions if we’re going to be in the internet café alone, why we’re using a public internet café instead of a CIA house somewhere, who our Asset is, but he won’t answer them anyway.
My biggest worry should be not being able to remember the name and address on my passport, but I find that after a quick run-through, the information is locked into my brain.
I look up, surprised, and find a similar expression on Geoff’s face. Could increased memory capabilities be another side effect of the GRH-18 that we haven’t had occasion to encounter until now? We’ve always had the ability to recall things other people wouldn’t, but our minds aren’t technically photographic. It typically takes me two or three times seeing something before I can easily recall it.
Five minutes later, Dane opens the car door and I step onto a street in another country for the first time in my life. It’s barren and so cold that the spots on my face still wet from tears become stiff and frozen. There’s actual snow on the ground, too, but just a dusting. At the airport there had been lacy flurries blowing over the tarmac, but in the city it’s settled on the sidewalks and built up in the gutters of the street, black and filthy. It looks nothing like the beautiful white drifts that show up in movies of Christmastime.
Figures.
My feet are soggy and wet by the time Dane ushers us into the internet café. The windows are dark but not curtained, and the name of the place is in Russian so I can’t read it. There’s a sign outside that’s not lit up, and I assume it says the place isn’t open for business.
Geoff goes in first, muttering something under his breath about bringing us to the coldest place on earth for some stupid time-wasting gig, and Dane puts a hand on my arm, stopping me.
I look up to find my old friend in his face. Concern in his eyes, conflicting with something else—probably duty. “Are you okay, Norah Jane? Really okay? You’re worrying me.”
“I’m fine.” I shake off his hand because I can’t afford to think of him as two different people.
“If something’s going on, you can talk to me about it.”
“So you can run back and tell Marlow all the reasons he should cut me loose? Or all the reasons he should keep me against my will, maybe get me all banged up like he did Flicker?” I curl my hands into fists, refusing to be moved by the startled betrayal in his dark gaze, covered up but not quickly enough.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. We don’t have to be enemies.”
“Maybe not, but it would be nice if you’d stop pretending that us being friends is any more likely.”
He lets me go and I step over the threshold. It does look like the internet cafés in the movies, with its orange neon sign, rows of computers, and tables with printers on one end and a coffee bar on the other. There’s a girl behind the espresso machine with raven-dark hair. She’s muttering over steaming milk, but when the condensed water clears and her face is revealed, my jaw falls all the way open.
Reaper.