withdrawing from foreign war zones. Everyone laughed it off; they were just glad to be home. Rumors persisted, and then a group of active-duty personnel were arrested, charged with sedition, and then…nothing.
Nobody talked about it officially. It was water cooler talk for a short time. Maeve hadn’t tried to make sense of it. It had just seemed too fantastical, too ridiculous. Besides, if something were truly on the horizon, wouldn’t they have been training for it? There were other things to worry about.
She was her brother’s legal guardian, except he was turning eighteen, wanting to leave. Then there was a boyfriend, who wasn’t really a boyfriend. She’d figured that in order to be a boyfriend, one had to be semi-reliable, and not dropping off the off the radar constantly.
Fergus fulfilled neither of these qualifications. Not that she’d been overly concerned when she’d gotten home after eighteen months from a blast furnace of a deployment. It had been nice to have hot showers, carefree and endless nights, as well as beer and bacon. She had wanted to care about nothing. It should not have surprised her to see two little lines on a stick, but it had. She had been knocked back on her heels.
She looked into the fires still raging on the beach. Through the smoke, a slight figure emerged. Maeve swallowed, the smoke stung her eyes and lungs, but she knew who it would be. It was a wraith. A ghost of a child who had never come into the world. She remembered.
One night. One night had changed everything.
۞
“On someone’s radar? You mean besides the people who sent him here?” Leif jabbed a thumb in Wallace’s direction.
“I think he’s talking about the Mithraic Alliance.” Wallace was a little white around the edges. His eyes were fixed on the table where Jemila Solomon lay. He felt a sting of guilt at being relieved that they had not walked in to find Jules.
“What are we talking about?” Dmitry was watching Tark, trying to determine how much of this his friend had already puzzled out.
“The new face of the group we were originally meant to go after, am I right?”
“Yes. After everything that happened, originally, they went deep underground, and didn’t emerge until about ten years ago. That was why Ju…Ramirez and I were pulled out. They wanted to find out if anyone was still viable. They’d been looking for us for a long time, and now we’re supposed to do what we were always meant to do.”
“Right. Wake up to die. Sounds like a perfect day.” Leif ran his hand through his increasingly long red hair. “This is jacked…up.”
“Wait a minute, who said anything about dying?”
“Colonel, Major, sorry, that’s the part you don’t seem to get yet. We were meant to be disposable…no, that’s the wrong word. They spent a lot of money on us, but we had an expiration attached, see? They didn’t want to have to spend the money to deprogram us, so they built in this…suggestion.”
“Uh, right, I’m not following at all.”
“We were…I guess you’d call it brainwashed. Or were supposed to have been. One of the researchers realized what was happening and rewrote the programming, from what we were told.” There was silence in the room, and Wallace realized he and Jules hadn’t mentioned this to the others yet. Crap.
“Excuse my asking, but just how did this researcher figure that out, precisely?” Dmitry had a feeling he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it out loud. Wallace sighed miserably. Leif uttered the kind of noise one might expect from a wounded bear. He already knew. Or had guessed as much.
“Are you kidding me? That’s what was going on? All this time, she’s been walking around thinking she was crazy.” Antonio felt a pang as he considered all the unkind thoughts he’d had about Maeve.
“I know, I know. They took her, and….” Wallace shrugged.
“They said they took her to Bethesda.” Leif was eyeing Wallace angrily. He didn’t like what it implied that the other man knew all this.
“Who knows, maybe that’s where it was in the beginning.” Dreams of explosions were fading into the background. Grace realized that she was trembling at the thought of having been so irritated at Jemi. Now she was gone. And Jules? Where was she? She’d forgotten how fragile the threads of life could be.
“That sounds like a marvelous place to start.” Tark indicated to the M.E., who came over. “Doc, sorry for the intrusion and all the noise. Let us know when you can release her.”
Grace went over to her friend’s still form, and gently smoothed the hair from her brow. “I can’t believe this.” She fought through angry tears. “Please tell me we are going to kick the shit out of the animal that did this.”
“It’s a promise.” Dmitry took her by the shoulders. Grace was startled by the rage in his own eyes. “This does not happen on our watch.”
“Not again it doesn’t.” Tark turned and stalked out, followed closely by security personnel. Everyone else followed, submerged in varying degrees of shock, grief, and anger.
“Here’s one question I still have, people.” Tark spoke as he continued to walk, purposefully, toward the lift that would take them to the operations deck. “Actually, two. First, did anyone ever reverse what was done to Ms. Howard, since you say it was discovered? And, since I suspect the answer is no, then the obvious second question is, what happens if she goes ‘active’, as it were?” They all looked at Wallace. He shrugged.
“Right now, it’s hard to predict. I mean, they tried at the time, I guess. She was already…fragile. That was supposed to be the ideal mind state. It’s not a pretty chapter of history.”
“She was more than fragile, you idiot.”
“I wasn’t there, I admit, but she’d told me to go away. In a lot less polite way than that, too.” He wasn’t ready to tell them where he’d gone to. They weren’t ready to hear it anyway.
“I know. Problem is, you never paused to ask why! You were so wrapped up in yourself…and then you got Daddy to help you ease your troubled mind, in whatever way you wanted.” Leif was struggling to control himself, while Wallace finally let his emotions have free reign.
“Let it go! My father didn’t use any influence to help me. You know what, though, by the time I got there, she…was…gone. I thought I could help, that’s all. That’s why I kept looking.”
“Help what?”
“Fix her.”
“Listen, you can think whatever you want, but it was pretty obvious what was going on.”
“Oh right, that’s all that matters. Like you know what my life was like? I’m not blind, Christensen, it was always really pathetically obvious what your motivations were, too.” That was enough. Leif picked him up two-fisted by the collar and tossed him into a wall.
Dmitry dove in between them, praying that he wouldn’t be mangled for his trouble. Leif was a titanic bulk when enraged. There was no predicting an outcome. It suddenly made sense for him to have been part of this strangely pieced-together team. Dmitry looked at the others, seeing the same logic for each of them, while they stood fast and did not interfere.
“Wallace, you have no clue. None.” This came from Josh.
“Naturally. That’s where you go, every time. Predictable. I’m the bad guy, I get it. The dilettante, the joker, the fool. It’s okay. I can admit it.” He pushed a finger into Leif’s chest, reaching around Dmitry in the process. Dmitry could only imagine that this was a dangerous action. “You’re the one in denial. But go ahead, keep blaming me. Keep telling yourself that I was the reason why, for everything, including your own cowardice.” Dmitry’s eyes widened. Leif might be big, but he was quick. Wallace was stumbling backwards with a bloody nose.
“That’s enough!” Tark had been willing to let them get whatever it was out of their system, but he couldn’t have wholesale brawling in the corridors. Leif stormed off down the hall, away from where they were meant to go. Josh cautioned Tark not to stop him.
“He’ll be back. It’s a touchy subject.”
“I can see that.” He turned back around to face the group. “Mr. Walla
ce, I don’t know what that was about, but I’d recommend you not repeating it again.” He got a curt nod in reply. Blood continued to trickle down Wallace’s chin. Tark handed him a handkerchief, and walked on.
۞
Josh held out an arm to keep Wallace from following the others.
“It’s tempting to see him the way you think he sees you. It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”
“Josh, he’s in love with her. We all know it. That’s the only reason he’s so overprotective, and he can’t see past the end of his nose because of it.”
“It’s not the only reason. You know what happened with her brother, and what happened that night, but we, well, we kept you out of the loop about something else.”
“The only reason for doing that is if it had to do with me, is that what you’re saying?”
“Like I said, it’s complicated. She didn’t want you to know before, and so we kept our mouths shut.” Josh twisted his mouth, searching for the right words, hoping that Leif wouldn’t suddenly reappear at the wrong moment.
“Does this have anything to do with why she dumped me?”
“She didn’t dump you, dumbass. You think she was kidding herself about a future with you? She was just letting you go back to where’d you come from.”
Wallace took the blow, and swallowed it down. It wasn’t an untrue accusation. Maeve had been a complication that he hadn’t anticipted. He thought about the ways in which he’d rationalized using her. She’d let herself be used that way, he knew, because she wanted to have someone in her life. It had been her doing the pursuing, tracking him down. Maeve had been an easy refuge from reality. For a while, anyway.
He had decided that he’d give it a try. That he’d give the two of them a shot. It had been against his nature. Nights spent in the same place, over and over, in spite of intimacy…bored him. Now, of course, he knew why she’d wanted to stay rooted, why everything was always safe and secure. She’d been desperately seeking a stable life. That last fight, though, that had always stayed with him. It was like a small cancer in his soul, and it would not let him be at peace again until he excised it.
“I don’t know what else to say. I was trying to put things right between us, but as you know, the bezerker there wouldn’t ever let me near her.”
“She was pregnant.” Josh let the words come fast, intending them as a blow. He struck home. For a moment, the world reeled, and then Wallace remembered he was in space.
“She…I, what now?”
“You heard me.” Josh stood impassively, unmoved by Wallace’s shock.
“This isn’t some sick joke, is it?” He was grasping at straws.
“No.”
“That was why she told me to leave.”
“Yep.”
“What happened? To it?” He was afraid he knew.
“You’re not going to ask the other question?” The obvious one, thought Josh, to most guys.
“It would have had to have been mine. She wasn’t like that.” Wallace was beginning to wish Leif had succeeded in knocking him senseless. “Frick.” He sat back against the wall into which he’d recently been thrown.
Josh could only go by what he knew, which was a lot less than either Leif or Wallace. That said, he tended to agree. Leif had said she’d admitted that her ‘wild’ days had been brief, embarrassing, and not something ever to be revisited. Confined to a single ninety-six libbo, by all accounts.
“Uh, yeah. Look, I’m not trying to tell you that was what broke the camel’s back. It was….”
“Complicated. Yeah, you keep saying that. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I know.” They watched each other for a few moments.
“Did she lose it, or did she…?”
“No, she did not do that. It may have crossed her mind, but as I have it, she’d apparently made up her mind otherwise.