Chapter 6

It started with the repetition of faces.

At first Anya put it down to a subconscious glitch, threads of memory slipping through gaps in the wall erected by Reconditioning, but after the third sighting she determined that she was being followed.

She’d been on an op once where the sign and countersign had been “lemon” and “grass”. For weeks afterwards she’d heard “lemongrass” in snatches of conversation. She’d thought it was just a word, not a plant. When she encountered it at the market she’d held it up to her nose, absolutely dumbfounded.

In the same vein she’d thought the man with mismatched eyes was just a stranger. Then she started seeing him everywhere.

This was happening because she’d tried to bust into temporary holding, Anya was sure of it. She’d barely even touched that MP. If he’d just read what she’d written down she wouldn’t have had to pick him up.

The spy muffled a belch. He was pretending to peruse a shelf of old atlases; this was so insulting.

It wasn’t just his dark brown skin and short stature that made him stand out; it was his eyes, the right a deep brown, the left the vivid blue of a robin’s egg. A scar dragged the corner of that eyebrow up into an expression of permanent surprise. He couldn’t have hidden from Anya if he wanted to.

And apparently he didn’t want to, because they’d taken the same trolley downtown, and he’d fondled some heads of lettuce at the same market where Anya had purchased a truly foul cup of coffee to hide some whiskey in. Now he was pissing her off in the library. The public branch, not the one on the Farm; she wasn’t stupid.

His uniform was inconsistent. Last time he’d been a private, now he was a lieutenant. Fucking amateur.

Anya was a bad thief and a worse spy, despite Aiden’s coaching. Shock and awe were braided into her muscle and sinew. People noticed her, and they got out of her way. Even at her worst she was better than this idiot.

Still, after two weeks of directionless boredom it was nice to have something to do. Maybe later she would try to shake him by going to a succession of odd places, like the Museum of Lost Technology’s unidentified objects room, or that brothel by the Oldtown gate that also sold chicken-fried steak. Let him report that back to his handlers.

The fake corporal knocked a book off the shelf, swore, and glanced sideways at her. Terrible. But she needed Owen or whoever to stop having her followed, so she pretended to be oblivious.

“Hey,” the man whispered, re-shelving the book. “Psst. Turncoat.”

No talk, Anya signed, tapping her scarred throat. Fairly self-explanatory.

“We have a mutual friend,” he pressed on. Maybe he was stupid. “In the hospital. Private wing.”

For a heart-seizing moment she remembered Lily’s mostly healed bullet wound and Michael’s trouble with his right side. She hadn’t seen them. Hadn’t been able to see them.

Anya didn’t have any other friends, but neither, she suspected, did they. Not friends like this.

She made an exaggerated zipper-closing motion over her mouth, in case this idiot hadn’t figured it out yet.

“Listen, could you deliver this? They won’t let me in there.”

He flicked something into the air. Anya’s perfect reflexes took over and it was in her hand a millisecond later.

What the hell kind of spy was this? Anya frowned at the large coin with its graven image of an alien bird, its outstretched wings shedding flames. It was no currency she’d ever seen, and felt lighter than it ought to.

She offered it back.

“I believe in you,” he said, over his shoulder. Already walking away. “You’ve got this.”

A librarian shushed him. He walked faster.

Anya almost put the coin back on the shelf to puzzle some future browser, but without really knowing why she tucked it into her pocket instead. Just in case.

Cheap ink smeared outside the outline of a figure in all black, peering through optics with red lenses. Coalition Spies Are Everywhere, the poster proclaimed in ominous block letters. Report All Suspicious Activity To Your Local Watch Unit.

It was pasted very deliberately in the officers’ mess hall, the one all the former Operatives frequented. Anya had to see it every day as she got her coffee, and had long ago decided that the Operative looked like Miles, whose stiff leg and fused vertebrae kept him from spying on much of anything.

Next to it hung a blood drive notice and an enlistment flyer: Serve the Republic! Protect Her Shores! Defend Your Home From The Menace In The East!

That one was doubly stupid. Weren’t they already serving the Republic? Even KP duty fell to a rotation of sullen cadets; no civilian ever saw the inside of this room.

Except her.

For the first time in her life, Anya had no military obligations. No duties. No one had evicted her from housing or told her to stop eating in the mess. Her civvies made her look like a vagrant and spending money on clothes was idiotic, so on went the fatigues every morning. And no one cared.

Anya tore the Operative poster down, wadded it up, and tossed it in a neat one-handed arc straight into the trash bin.

“Good aim.”

Juno had appeared in her wraithlike way. The neat braid of honey-colored hair that circled her head left the awful puckered scar in her temple exposed.

Rumors swirled around her like mayflies, but Anya was privy to the truth: she’d snuck across the border and made it as far as Ashville on a rare solo infiltration mission. Probably would’ve made it further if she hadn’t been shot in the head. Afterwards she’d gotten up and walked twenty miles before surrendering to a convoy of missionaries, validating their entire worldview in the process.

“I heard what happened.” Juno selected a sad-looking apple from the bowl; carefully, to hide lingering trouble with her fine motor skills. “How are you holding up?”

Bored, Anya spelled.

Juno’s brow furrowed as she mouthed the letters, her own fingers mirroring the shapes. Then she brightened. “Ha. Me too.”

Actually Anya was not bored. She was stressed.

She’d tracked her friends down. Lily had in fact been quite sick, but they hadn’t taken her to the hospital. Allegedly Michael was with her now. Juno was here, Connor was in Nola. All un-hospitalized and accounted for. So who was she supposed to give the stupid coin to?

It wasn’t money. She’d checked. The broker at the pawn shop said even the metal itself was worthless.

She also hadn’t seen the strange little man since their conversation in the Library the previous day, which bothered her more than she could articulate.

And she missed him. Aiden.

So bored, Anya reiterated.

“Well, the new one is finally stable. Did you know we got a new one? She came in while you were gone.” Juno put the apple back. “She’s cooperating now. Owen wants us all at the hospital.”

Ah, the hospital again. Anya would love to stop thinking about it. Then again, the new defector would be convalescing in the private wing, and Anya did kind of want to see if something clandestine and intriguing was going on up there.

“Come with me,” Juno ordered, arrowing in on Anya’s indecision. “She’s from your batch.”

Anya didn’t have the heart to tell her no. She downed her coffee in a scalding gulp and matched her pace to Juno’s long, ground-eating strides.

They breezed through the gates of the Farm, Juno beaming at the sentries as they passed. People had difficulty refusing her things when she smiled, because they were terrified of what would happen when she stopped.

Aside from Victor, she was also the only one who still wore a long Operative blade at her hip. She kept it sharp enough to shave with. One drunken night she’d demonstrated.

More soldiers clustered at the hospital, outside as well as in the corridors of the public wing. One of them grinned at Anya as she passed, and she scowled at his familiar scarred face and mismatched eyes. Today he was a Sergeant First Class.

He kept on grinning as they passed his post, like he’d told the cleverest joke and was just waiting for Anya to get it. The coin sat heavy in her pocket.

The private wing was cool and empty. A nurse let them through a set of locked double doors without asking for identification. Presumably a handful of other blonde, blue-eyed, socially deficient people had already come this way. If not, she was in for a treat.

One door had a guard posted outside. Bored. Civilian. Anya heard people talking and laughing inside, including children. She doubted this was her target. Private security was easy to bribe; even a bad spy could’ve gotten past him.

As they rounded the corner a graying man in a stained travel coat rose stiffly from a bench, distracting Anya from her survey: Connor, formerly Operative 99. Back from the field at last.

He was also the subject of many rumors; namely that he’d found some hellish and unnatural way to disguise himself as a normal person. He had green eyes instead of standard-issue blue, and in his youth his hair had been an ashy brown.

He encouraged all speculation with a fatherly good humor that infuriated the conspiracy theorists, and offered no personal information.

“Owen’s going to have a coronary,” he said. “He’s already worked up about something. Hello, Anya. I heard. I’m sorry.”

She saluted lazily.

“It’’ll be fine.” Juno took his hand; Anya filed that away. “Owen loves me. Why are you out here?”

“Victor brought his ego,” Connor replied. “It got crowded.”

Anya mimed something specific about Victor’s anatomy. Connor choked on a laugh as Juno looped her other arm through Anya’s and steered them both into the room.

Elin was already there; a brick wall with a face who haunted the nightmares of an entire generation of NCA cadets. And Victor, wearing a plate carrier in a hospital like a massive prick. No Miles. But that wasn’t a surprise.

All of them were standard-issue: blonde, blue-eyed, with an air of unnatural stillness.

Juno whispered something in Connor’s ear as she took his hand again. He laughed quietly. Oh, gross. He was so old.

Owen noticed Anya and sighed. He looked like he’d rather be somewhere else, and kept shooting glances at his watch, at the clock on the wall, and at the door. His foot tapped restlessly, then stilled as he looked back at the hospital bed.

The woman in it was translucently pale. The whole right half of her face was swathed in bandages and an IV ran into the back of her hand.

Anya was taken by a full-body memory of that NCA hospital tent. Bloodstained canvas, buzzing flies, Aiden cleaning his revolver in a chair by her cot.

“I carried you in here,” he’d said, “and you were fucking heavy. Least you can do is tell me how many Operatives y’all deployed to Jackson.”

In the present Owen waved Elin forward. She advanced carefully, as if afraid she would break something, her abbreviated right arm tucked behind her back as if they all weren’t battle-damaged. “Elin was 1034. You trained together.”

Anya had also been part of Batch 10, but of course she hadn’t been mentioned.

16 stared straight ahead. She looked like she was only alive because she had nothing better to do. Her fine-boned face remained slack and unresponsive.

“Operative B1016,” she rasped, staring straight ahead. “3rd Expeditionary. DC.”

The designation landed like a punch.

Aiden had handed her a notepad. Back then. In the medic tent where she’d been handcuffed to a cot. Asked her to write just numbers, whatever she could remember about the force occupying the port town of Jackson.

Instead, she’d printed the following in uneven block capitals: Operative E1023. 5th Cavalry. New Ark.

For two weeks she’d done that, over and over again like an unruly schoolchild, and all that time Aiden had talked to her like a person. Joking. Cajoling. Confusion had been an easy introductory emotion; everything after that had been worse. Finally she’d told him: four Operatives. It had been six, until her Ranger hit that IED.

She kneaded her stomach, trying to ease the nauseating twist. Why, why did she still love him?

“Operative B1016. 3rd Expeditionary. DC.”

Clearly Owen had asked something else. Her jaw flexed. Her hands lay pale and inert atop the blanket, one of them bandaged and splinted.

Why wasn’t she restrained? Anya felt a twinge of alarm. She’d been ready to slaughter a whole medical brigade to gain her freedom, so what was stopping 16 from getting up and—

Oh.

The light blanket ended at mid-thigh. Her right leg ended at the knee.

“You were offered asylum,” Owen said, low and calm. Out of sight his fist clenched and unclenched compulsively. “You accepted. You know what it would mean to return.”

16 opened her mouth, then shut it again with a click.

When cumulative damage finally outpaced their healing abilities, Operatives were Retired. It was a fatal overdose of morphine, administered in a warm room with soft lighting. The first and last kindness.

Most of the people in this room had defected to escape that needle. Missing limbs, deafness, muteness, brain damage…

“You can belong here,” Owen pressed softly, his rigid posture belying his tone. “We just need to know how you made it across the border.”

Ah. This wasn’t a meet and greet, it was a show of force. B1016, 3rd Expeditionary, DC was holding out and holding back. Good for her.

“Operative C0874,” 16 said flatly, turning her head painfully as she catalogued them one by one. “B1034, A0986, D1203, A0999. E1023.”

“Good memory for faces,” Connor remarked mildly.

16 turned her blank stare to the far wall. “You should kill me.”

Owen stood, clasping his hands behind his back. He looked at the clock again. “I’m not going to do that. Get some rest, we’ll continue this another time.”

16 blinked. “You should kill me,” she repeated. “Before my partner gets here.”