“Christ on a bike, what the hell happened?”
Herc’s voice boomed across the giant space like thunder. Pan twisted her head around, a bolt of pain dancing through the tendons, to see him striding toward the elevator. Bullwinkle and Hope were walking out. Staggering might have been a better word for it, though. They looked like they’d just fought ten rounds against a rhino in there. Bullwinkle’s face—never a pretty sight at the best of times—was stained red, his nose twisted at a funny angle. Hope was as pale as he was bloody, teetering across the room with a limp.
“Where is he?”
Herc’s growling voice stopped them both dead. He towered over them like a parent over two frightened children, looked for a moment like he was about to cuff them both around the head.
“Tell me you stuck him, at least.”
“Yeah,” said Hope. “I got him.”
“Well thank heaven for small mercies.” Herc grunted, shaking his head. “Two fully charged Engineers against an injured lamb, what is the world coming to? Go, clean yourselves up.”
Pan followed him across the room, wincing every time she put weight on her broken leg. The wounds had healed, the bone knitted back together, but it still felt like she had razors sewn into her flesh. The scan had shown she was all clear. Her heart had a new layer of scar tissue—“The scars are the only thing holding it together,” Betty had joked—and her left lung would probably never fully inflate again. She was alive, though. She was still here.
“Problems?” she said when she was close enough. Herc was standing by the window, big hands clutched behind his back. He was staring at the street thirty stories below. Pan swallowed the sudden rush of vertigo, squinting down to see that traffic had ground to a halt. A crowd had gathered, surrounding a naked shape sprawled on the ground. Among the bloom of yellow taxis was a blue-and-white cop car, lights flashing. Two officers pushed through the onlookers. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the blazing sunlight, Pan could see it was Marlow, writhing around on the street, legs and arms paddling like he was trying to swim upside down. She almost smiled before she remembered herself.
“Look at him go,” she said. “How much did you give him?”
“Enough,” said Herc. Then, a heartbeat later, “To floor a goddamned bear.”
He snorted, and the laugh spilled out of her before she could clamp her teeth shut. They coughed together, both of them trying to cover up their giggles. Man, was it good to laugh, though. In this line of work, you never knew which joke was going to be your last. That thought made her remember Forrest, laughing at some joke about a penguin the night before the mission. Had he known he’d never laugh again? She swallowed loudly.
“I’m sorry, Herc,” she said, croaking out the reluctant words. “About yesterday, about what I said. I…”
I what? An apology wasn’t going to bring the boy back to life. It wouldn’t bring any of them back. They were down there now, drenched in the eternal fire of hell. Couldn’t she hear them screaming?
“Suck it up, Pan,” he replied, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “There’s no room here for sorrys, not anymore. You do what you do, you are what you are.”
A kid, she thought, suddenly feeling her age, not even old enough to drink and yet here she was driving events that could change the world.
Or end it.
How long had it been, now? Four years? Almost. And how different would things have been if Ostheim had never sent Herc to her cell that day, if he’d never offered her the chance to start again? She’d be locked up tight, thirty years at least. Maybe even death row.
That’s what happened when you took a life.
“We need you,” Herc said, seeing the expression on her face. “Not many people can do what you do, remember that. We need you. They need you.” He gestured out of the window with a broad sweep of his hand. “Things are heating up, Pan. The Circle’s attacks are growing bolder. They don’t give a crap about the rules anymore. Something big is coming. So stop apologizing and get back in your ice cube.”
Herc was right, things really had been heating up. And they were paying the price, too. Eleven Engineers dead this year alone. She used her fist to smudge away the breath from the glass. The cops were trying to heft the kid up from the road but he was squirming and flopping like a landed fish. Everyone had their phones out, snapping away happily. Even in the deranged carnival that was New York you didn’t often see a half-naked guy drunk off his face trying to fight off the police.
“This is gonna be everywhere,” she said. “Twitter, Instagram, you name it.”
Herc shrugged, and she looked at him.
“The first law,” she quoted. “The world must not know. Funny way of going about it.”
“Desperate times,” Herc said.
She looked down again to see the cops manhandling Marlow into their car. It swept away, siren bleeping.
“You better go get Ostheim on the comm,” Herc said when it was out of sight. “We’re gonna have to move soon.”
“No rest for the wicked, eh?” she said, snorting another laugh, this one with absolutely no humor in it.
“No rest for them, no rest from them. What’cha gonna do.”
“What about the other Engineers?”
“Truck and Nightingale are en route,” Herc said, checking his watch. “The jet should land in a couple of hours. Hope and Bullwinkle have ten days left on their contracts, nothing to worry about.”
Unless Ostheim leaves it to the last second again, she thought but didn’t say.
“I need to get back to the Engine,” she said, feeling the familiar itch in her gut, her bones, her soul. It was always this way. Once the Engine got inside you it was an addiction. You couldn’t go without it for long—even when it almost cost you everything. She scratched at her skin, hard enough to hurt, to take her mind off the ache. “I need to make a new contract, I have to be there.”
“Not up to me, Pan. It’s Ostheim’s call.”
And Ostheim was the last person she wanted to talk to. She’d failed her last mission and the aftermath had destroyed a hospital. She’d pretty much broken every rule in the book and her employer wasn’t going to go easy on her.
“Don’t look so worried, kid,” Herc said. “Cover-up team is in full swing. The world won’t know. Ostheim’s already planted evidence that it was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell; the video’ll be on CNN within the hour.”
“You think the kid will talk?” she asked. Herc turned to her, cracking his knuckles. His burned, scarred face twisted into something that was probably a smile.
“He’d better,” he said. “This whole operation is counting on it.”
Pan frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.” Herc coughed, scratching at an invisible fleck of dirt on the glass.
“What operation?”
“Operation, um, Live Bait, I guess is the best way of describing it.” He must have seen the look Pan threw at him because he shrugged. “Ostheim’s idea, not mine. Anyway, it’s not like you actually liked the kid.”
True, Pan thought. But not liking him was one thing, and throwing him to the wolves was something very, very different.