Chapter 7

Cicadas screamed in the trees and the aroma of the stables was inescapable. Temporary holding itself smelled like dark mold under layers of ancient paint. Shit on top of more shit.

Seven faded, dusty New Columbian flags hung from the common room ceiling. Anya could just about reach one if she jumped, but she didn’t feel like it. Too hot.

She propped the window frame open and dragged a battered table into the thin breeze. The red and tan linoleum floor was missing chunks of itself. One leg of her chair hovered uselessly.

Four soldiers escorted Michael in, rifles slung but ready. They took up positions in the hall on either side of the open door. Anya had half expected one of them to be that infuriating little man, but none of their faces were familiar.

Michael’s curly white-blonde hair was disheveled, his face unshaved. Presumably he’d spent the last two-plus weeks doing literally nothing in a room too comfortable to be called a cell, and yet he looked like absolute dog shit.

And it was so good to see him.

He dropped onto the metal folding chair like someone had cut his legs off, and frowned at Anya with his whole face. “You said they were going to hang you.”

Actually she’d conveyed that information via charades. Anya opened her notebook and scrawled, Disappointed? How’s Lily? I heard you get to bunk together now.

“Sick. Getting better. Also no I’m not. Disappointed, I mean.” Michael leaned across the table. His voice dropped to half a whisper. “I was at the hospital yesterday.”

You met 16? I think she wants to kill us.

“What? I don’t know who that is,” Michael whispered. “I saw Owen.”

Oh, so this was an existential crisis. Anya would make a bad therapist. She’d killed her own duplicate thirty seconds after meeting her, but telling him to do that was off the table.

After a deep breath, Michael forged ahead. “He said Lily has been charged with sedition. They want to take her to Houston to stand trial. If I enlist he’ll convince them to drop the charges so she can stay in Dallas. If not…”

Anya stared, pencil in hand.

It made no sense. Lily hadn’t incited anything. If anybody was to blame in all this, it was Aiden and his stupid secret orders. And even if Lily was a criminal mastermind, no one in their right mind would want Michael badly enough to blackmail him into military service. He’d been a catastrophically bad Operative, and now he had only one working arm.

What does Lily have to say about this?

He pressed his palms flat against the tabletop. “She doesn’t know. That’s why I need you, Angie. Tell me what to do.”

He didn’t seem to notice what he’d said. Anya felt like she’d been shot in the lung.

How long do you have, she scrawled, instead of dying. Instead of asking if he remembered any other times he’d called her that.

There was no solution to either of their problems in the flags, or the dusty grille covering the banks of defunct lights, but Michael looked up anyway. “Well. I already said yes.”

The pencil snapped in half.

Anya exhaled through her nose, set the useless end aside, and wrote, you’re so fucking stupid, how are you alive.

She snapped her fingers to make him look back down.

“I don’t know,” Michael sighed.

The truth was that she had taken care of him all their lives. Better for him to have forgotten. He’d been so sad, back then.

“Don’t tell her,” he said, scrubbing one bloodshot eye with the heel of his hand, hard enough to make Anya wince. “She’ll just worry.”

Lily would find out whether Anya told her or not, because a sieve held water better than Michael held secrets. Every thought sat clear on his face; right now it showed desperation and bone-deep weariness.

Anya circled the word stupid.

One of the guards put his head through the doorway. “Is everything all right?”

“Should I speak louder,” Michael said, without turning around. “Or would you prefer to come in.”

The head withdrew.

Michael plucked the pencil out of Anya’s hand and drew a single line down the exact center of the page. It was perfectly, unnervingly straight.

“She traveled two thousand miles, alone, to save my life,” Michael said, as the line ended. “She deserves so much more than I can give her. I have to fix this. Tell me how.”

Anya stared at him, eyebrows raised. He stared back blankly. Then he returned the pencil.

You have to desert again, she wrote. Obviously. How is this a question?

Michael tilted his head toward the door. The words were almost lost. “Erase that.”

Anya scrubbed the page until not even a shadow remained.

“I can’t go anywhere without a military escort,” he whispered. “Lily can’t leave this building. We wouldn’t make it off the compound, much less out of the city. What do I do?”

You need to get some sleep. Anya finished the last letter with a flourish.

“Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

He’d always been deadly stubborn and unwilling to take good advice. So was Lily. Let them butt heads like rams for the rest of their lives; they’d probably enjoy it.

Give me two days, Anya scribbled. If he tries to ship you out, tell him about your arm.

Brief panic darted across Michael’s face. Anya pretended she hadn’t seen it, or the way his hands clenched into automatic fists. Or tried to. The right one wouldn’t respond. “My arm is fine.”

Talk to Lily. I bet she already knows.

“No, she doesn’t. I’m not an—”

The soldiers entered. Clearly social hour was over; they moved as if to pull Michael to his feet, but he stood on his own.

“Am I anything like him,” he asked. “Like Owen.”

The cicadas screamed louder. Michael awaited her answer like a man awaiting sentencing, but Anya couldn’t give it to him. She couldn’t grant him a reprieve, either.

Finally the guards guided him out and she was left behind, staring at a page still divided cleanly down the middle.

Fragrant drifts of withered petals surrounded the vase in 16’s window. It was clear no one had been here in the past week except to change the sheets and drop off a prosthetic leg.

Anya sort of felt bad. She’d only come herself because she needed a distraction.

She couldn’t keep her promise to Michael. The two days had come and gone and she was no closer to working a miracle, or to removing Owen’s larynx with her bare hands. Fortunately for his larynx, Owen had proven difficult to locate.

16 watched her cross the room with clinical disinterest. A gauze patch covered her right eye and rough scar tissue already showed like pale roots around the edges. Operatives were designed to heal quickly.

Anya dragged a chair over to the bedside and unloaded her offerings: two books, one orange, and a tiny little shooter of bourbon with a bow on it.

16’s eye passed over each with disinterest until Anya started writing. Then she arrowed in on the words with the alertness of a hound that had spotted a rabbit.

I brought you something to read.

It was incredibly boring stuff. The NCA Charter, the Constitution, and a history book for children. With pictures. Better to start off slow, and anyway Aiden’s shoddily printed copy of The Founding of the Republic had gone into the ground.

16’s mouth hardened. She touched the corner of her remaining eye, then her ear.

More battle shorthand. Invented so deaf motherfuckers like Victor could give and take orders in combat, while getting blown up and shot at.

This particular sign meant surveillance. 16 thought she was scribbling on a notepad because the room was bugged. Anya grinned as she shook her head, tipping her chin up to expose her throat. And the scar.

A spark of interest came to life and died on 16’s face in the span of a second. She folded and unfolded her hands; her fingers were long and graceful, nails bitten ragged.

When is your partner coming to kill us, Anya wrote. I’m so excited. Can’t wait.

16 read, then returned her gaze to the far wall, to the slanted bar of light shooting through a gap in the curtains. “My partner is dead.”

Memory sucker-punched Anya in the stomach.

Flies crawled busily through 66’s eye sockets. The crow perched on his head gave a hoarse squawk and dipped its reddened beak again.

She hadn’t thought of him in years.

They couldn’t have been partners for more than a few months before the IED. He’d died slowly, even with that piece of their Ranger’s steering column driven through his stomach. Anya remembered that he hadn’t made a sound, even as he clawed at it—

“I lied,” 16 continued, voice thin and quiet. Her remaining eye closed. “The road was mined. I was in the gunner’s seat. I was ejected, everything else burned.”

Familiarity chilled Anya’s heart. The last words she would ever speak in life had been, ‘There’s something in the road’.

“She would have come for me by now,” 16 went on, jarring Anya out of her downward spiral. “If she was alive.”

We’re a long way from the border.

“She would have come,” 16 repeated, as calm as the blue sky just visible through the sheer curtains.

Anya slapped her breast pocket. She’d completely forgotten. Hastily, she withdrew the bird coin and showed it expectantly to 16.

She frowned. “I’ve seen this insignia before,” she said, “on insurgents that we captured. Where did you get it.”

A man with one blue eye, Anya wrote, letting 16 keep the coin. He said to give it to you.

“To me,” 16 repeated, blinking. “I don’t understand.”

Anya scratched her nose. She didn’t understand either. She’d actually forgotten that she was supposed to deliver it to someone, and it was starting to weird her out. And anyway she had to save Michael from himself, per usual.

She wasn’t a messenger, she was a hardened killer. A terrifying, horrible beast. And she’d tried to sell the thing three times, unsuccessfully.

Just keep it, she wrote. Fun souvenir!

16 turned the coin over, examining its edges like she might find a seam. Then she set it aside.

“Our mission was to infiltrate New Dallas and assassinate all Coalition deserters,” she said, her voice even and plain. “If I was whole, I would complete that mission. I would do anything to go back.”

Anya listened for footsteps in the hall, running feet, shouts of alarm. None came. The guards outside hadn’t heard.

Careful what you say in here, she wrote, but 16 didn’t even read it.

She kept on staring straight ahead, back straight, hands clasped. “The Coalition is not your enemy. We just want a functional, orderly world. Everything clean and in its place. Is that so terrible?”

It wasn’t fanaticism, Anya realized, studying her with a sick, sinking feeling. It was longing.

They won’t take you back, they’ll kill you. Isn’t that why you claimed amnesty?

16 absorbed this without reacting. “A moment of weakness. Retirement is appropriate.”

Anya gnawed on her pencil. Then she tore a page from the notepad and scribbled a long instruction while 16 watched in long-suffering silence.

If you’re here to kill us, then get out of bed and do it.

16 frowned.

I’ll be back in a few days, Anya added to the bottom of the note, if you want to try and kill me then.

Something had shifted behind the other woman’s eyes; confusion into calculation. Assessment.

Anya felt very good about it. She put her foot up on the bed and used her thigh to stabilize the notebook as she scrawled, you have your orders, Operative 16: get out of bed and kill me. Or else.

She tucked the page under the orange for safekeeping. As she marched out the door and turned the corner, she glimpsed 16 reaching for it.