Sanctuary. Prague, Czech Republic

  Everything went from silence to chaos in a fraction of a second and Alyosha thought he might know what it would feel like to be shot out of a gun.

  He hit the ground at an awkward angle, wrenching his shoulder. Reeve landed hard on top of him as they slid to bang against the far wall in a jumbled pile with their bags. The pressure in his ears was screaming and he definitely needed a minute to recover, but Neptune was already shooting. They had silencers, but after the dense noiselessness of that room, it felt like fireworks going off in his skull. Gareth, thrown clear of the tangle, gave them some cover fire and moved in front of them, shouting at them to move. They scrambled to their feet and got around the corner of the hallway where Reeve shoved him through the door of the first bedroom. Reeve knocked over the pile of stacked cots into a tangle of metal. It didn’t give them much physical cover, but it was something they could hide behind. Gareth rushed in and slammed the door. His movements were jerky and he was clutching his stomach. He was bleeding from multiple spots on his torso.

  “You’re shot,” Reeve panted, as he shook out a pill bottle from his pocket. Alyosha guessed there was no point in trying to hide his telepathy now.

  “Yeah,” Gareth answered, getting down with them behind the cots.

  “A lot.”

  “I know.” They were all breathing hard and it made the room feel very crowded. “What’s the plan?”

  “Kill them,” Alyosha offered. Movement to his right caught his eye. An arm and head of a woman in a Neptune black mask were melting out of the wall. There was a gun in the hand. Alyosha fired. The others swore and nearly jumped out of their skins. He missed, but it did the trick, and the arm and face slid back behind the wall.

  Gareth belatedly announced, “Phaser,” and spun around, scanning the room. “Reeve.”

  “I’m working on it,” he called, “They’re trained to defend against telepaths.”

  She appeared through the wall again and Gareth managed to get off a shot that clipped her arm before she could fire. Alyosha pulled himself up and set his back against Gareth’s.

  Another round went off from the adjacent wall, making them spin. Then again. This time he saw it, just an arm sticking through the wall and firing blindly.

  Gareth cleared his throat. “That’s very bad.”

  “What?” Reeve asked. He had moved farther away from them and crouched down, his eyes shut and concentrating.

  “They’re distracting us,” Alyosha told him. Alyosha kept shooting back, and hitting the wall. She was moving too fast.

  “Get down,” Reeve warned.

  He and Gareth dropped to their knees in time to avoid being plowed over by the bedroom door as it was flung off its hinges. The cots were thrown to the sides of the room along with the bedside table and a low wooden trunk, all held against the walls as if they were being spun in a centrifuge. It made them an easy target in the dead center of the room. Two agents in the doorway opened fire. Before Alyosha could move, Gareth covered him with his body. Alyosha realized he didn’t actually know how many bullets someone with Gareth’s knack could take before his body couldn’t keep up. Could he take a headshot? Alyosha gripped his gun tight enough to hurt while the two agents emptied their magazines.

  When the shots stopped, Gareth leaned back and turned around, a bewildered look on his face. Alyosha didn’t wait. He fired off three rounds, hitting the shorter agent and knocking him down. As he took a breath to re-aim, he saw that the floor to the left of him was all torn up, full of ricochet marks. The other agent reloaded and fired again, hitting the ground six inches to the right of Gareth, amidst another scattering of wood splinters where more bullets had hit before. The agent stared at the floor and shook his head violently. With a gesture, he hurled Reeve across the room to smash into a twisted pile of cots.

  The rest happened too fast to follow well. Alyosha fired until a side table slammed into him, driving him into the far wall. He blinked, his head ringing as he lay on his back and saw Reeve forcing his way out from under the tangle of cots. Gareth was trying to shoot, but he was getting shot more and was knocked back down to one knee. The angle of the shots hitting him wasn’t right, as though they were coming from Alyosha’s direction. He looked up and saw the third agent leaning through the wall just above him. She hadn’t seen him. It was an easy shot and he took it. It hit her in the soft skin under the jaw and he flinched at the spray as she fell backwards through the wall. Alyosha looked up to see the last agent take aim at him but faltered, staggering before falling badly. Then it was too quiet again.

  Alyosha sat up gingerly. He was sore and bleeding from somewhere, but he was too numb to tell how badly. Reeve stood and hauled Gareth up with an effort. Gareth was making sickly wet hacking sounds.

  “Is he okay?” Alyosha called to Reeve.

  “I’m fine,” Gareth grunted. “Been better.”

  Alyosha pointed to the last agent down and tapped his head. “Was that you?”

  Reeve nodded and walked over to him. “Are you hit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reeve knelt and muttered, “I hate that answer.” He started looking Alyosha over, hands fast and methodical. There was blood matting down some of Reeve’s hair—a blow taken from one of the falls, but he didn’t know which one. Reeve finally sat back. “You’ll live, but we ought to take it out to clean the wound.”

  “I’m shot?” Alyosha looked around, feeling his heart pounding harder. He just did this in Brazil. Being shot is definitely something you feel.

  “Shoulder blade,” Reeve said, his voice soft. “It didn’t go in far. Honestly, it probably went through Gareth first.”

  Alyosha turned his head, trying to see it, and focused on locating the pain, but his whole body was a shiver of adrenaline.

  Reeve put his hand on his jaw and pulled his head to face him again. “Hey, you’re okay. Stay with me.”

  Alyosha nodded. Reeve gave his cheek a pat and gently helped him to his feet, keeping an arm under him for balance. There was a lot of blood on the floor, most of it Gareth’s. A strange pattern of bullet strikes on the floorboards where Reeve had caused the agents to miss them framed where they had been huddled and it raised gooseflesh on Alyosha’s arms and legs.

  “Those meds really help.”

  Reeve shook his head and eased himself out from under Alyosha’s arm, making sure he was steady. “They take about twenty minutes to kick in, but they’ll help with cleanup. We should take their guns with silencers for next time.”

  Next time. Alyosha looked at the two agents laid out by the doorway. Gareth was stooped over them. “They’re alive,” he said flatly. “Knocked out. This one might be bleeding out I think,” he said, gesturing to the shorter agent.

  “The phaser?”

  “She’s very dead,” Alyosha said.

  “What do we do with these two?” Reeve asked.

  Gareth stood back up with a groan and spat blood. “What do you mean?”

  “If we leave them, Sol gets information about us. That we’ve split up, and they’ll stop looking for a group of five.”

  Alyosha used his foot to right one of the knocked over cots and sat on it. “That would make life more dangerous for us.”

  “And the others,” Gareth added.

  “So we kill them.”

  Alyosha couldn’t tell if that was a question or not. “We were just trying to a minute ago, yes?”

  Reeve carefully touched his bloody hair. “When they were awake and trying to kill us.”

  “Reeve,” Gareth started.

  “Are you going to tell me you feel good about killing a man after you’ve knocked him unconscious?”

  “Of course not, but what are our options? Wait for them to wake up so we can hand them guns and then kill them?”

  “There are always options,” Reeve breathed, exasperated.

  “Yeah, I just listed them,” Gareth argued sharply. “Unnecessary risk to Hannah and Alex, kill them, or stupidity.”

  Alyosha pushed at his hair; it was stiff and stringy with sweat. “If you can’t—”

  “I didn’t say that,” Reeve snapped.

  He put up a hand. “I’m just saying you don’t have to.”

  Reeve’s lip curled into a sneer. “I didn’t pull you from Entropy so you could execute defenseless men.”

  “And you left Sol so you could stop.”

  Reeve sat down next to Alyosha and put the heels of his hands over his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

  There was a shuffling sound that made him jump.

  “That’s Thomas,” Reeve said quickly to settle them. “He didn’t sell us out.”

  Thomas appeared at the door, holding onto the frame to steady himself. His face was bloody and already bruising. “Hey,” he smiled weakly. “Sorry about that.”

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  “It was worth a shot,” Gareth said. “We’re just trying to figure out what to do with these two.”

  “The bodies?”

  “They’re not dead.”

  “But they need to be,” Reeve sighed.

  Thomas nodded solemnly. “Then it’s cruel to make them wait.”

  Gareth cocked his head. “Crueler than killing them? They’re passed out.”

  “They’ll wake up.”

  “At some point.”

  “And then they’ll feel pain and fear.”

  Beside him, Reeve let out a drawn out breath through his nose and said, “He’s right.” He straightened and walked toward the door. Alyosha stood. He saw Gareth fumbling for his pistol but they’d both emptied their guns in the fight and their ammo was in their packs in the hall. Reeve hadn’t shot off a round. He fired two, then, in quick succession.

  Reeve looked at Thomas. “You got a prayer for that?” His voice was rough.

  Thomas swallowed, eyes shifting in rapid movements. He cleared his throat. “‘If I am wicked, woe to me. But if I am righteous, I still do not dare raise my head because I am so filled with shame, so soaked in my misery. You rise up to hunt me like a lion. To hurt me, you have worked miracles.’”

  The sound of sirens rose around them. Alyosha shut his eyes. All the gunfire. The pain in his body was creeping in now, red-hot and sharp.

  “Amen,” Reeve breathed. He shoved his gun into Gareth’s hands and stepped over the agents. “You take care of this. I’ll take care of the cops.”

  “Can he do that?” Thomas asked after he’d left.

  “Probably,” Alyosha shrugged and immediately regretted it as pain radiated from his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve got a mad headache and I have to move out of the city now, but otherwise.”

  “Good.” Gareth clapped a hand on his shoulder. “So what’s the best way to get rid of these bodies?”

  Thomas choked on a laugh then sobered, looking mortified. “I can store them in another pocket and dump them across the city. I’d rather not burn this Sanctuary.”

  “Let’s do that. Wait,” Gareth stopped them. “Would you really have to set this place on fire?”

  “No,” Thomas retorted, making a face. “It’s an expression.”

  They helped load the bodies into one of Thomas’ portals in an old towel and he took it and left. By then the sirens had long stopped, but Reeve was nowhere to be seen. Alyosha stood at the window, watching Thomas walk away, worried he’d suddenly be snatched up by some force, swallowed up like a stone dropped in the ocean and it’d be their fault.

  “Let me see your back,” Gareth called.

  Alyosha had just started to get used to the stabbing pain and was learning which movements would send his muscles into a screaming fit, but he went. Gareth cut his shirt off. There was no saving it, anyway. The benefit to the voice of reason being away dealing with police was that Gareth hunted down a bottle of liquor for Alyosha to nurse while he worked. It helped, but not that much. From what he could see of the tools in the med kit, Sanctuaries were much more set up for closing gashes and cuts, not so much removing bullets.

  Afterwards Gareth got him settled on his stomach on the couch, surrounded by pillows. The pain in his shoulder was like a living thing, yelling for attention, and he wasn’t nearly as woozy as he wanted to be. He downed what was left and handed the bottle to Gareth.

  After a moment, he said, “Thank you,” voice thick.

  “Yeah, man, ‘course.” Gareth’s voice was somewhere in the kitchen cleaning up.

  “For taking it out and for getting shot with it.” He wasn’t saying it right. Part of his brain was insisting he shut up, but another had some dream-logic conviction that he was speaking important truths.

  There was a gap of silence. “Get some rest,” Gareth called.

  He tried. Mostly he listened to the shush of the mop against the floorboards. Reeve came back a bit later. Raising a few fingers was the best wave he could manage. A face swam into his vision as Reeve squatted by the couch to study him. Reeve’s eyes and face were red. Alyosha tried to speak, but his tongue was stuck. In a dizzying rush that made Alyosha’s head reel, Reeve stood up.

  “Is he okay?” Reeve asked.

  “Yeah,” came Gareth’s voice. “He’s just drunk.”

  “Jesus Christ, Gareth.” Alyosha heard Reeve’s footsteps walking away. “It’s a blood thinner.”

  “He’s fine. Are you?”

  “We won’t have any issues with local law enforcement or neighbors. I take it Thomas is tying up the other loose ends?”

  “Mmhm. Seriously, are you okay?”

  “We need to leave first thing tomorrow.” A long silence. “Just drop it,” Reeve sighed. “Give me this one. I don’t question you when you walk out.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the telepath. You know when I’m about to go off the rails.”

  “No one’s going off the rails.”

  “Fine. Listen, I found the phone in the pile of our shit.”

  “Good. I must have dropped it when we got thrown out of that thing.”

  “Right, but I can’t get it to turn on.”

  “Fuck.” Reeve’s eyebrows lowered and he held his breath for a moment before letting out a sigh. “Okay. Just charge it overnight. I’m not going to be sleeping for a while, so I’ll take over cleaning and wait for Thomas. You should sleep. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take so many hits.”

  “Won’t argue.”

  “Thank you.”

  Alyosha slept.

  ---

  Sol LAHQ. Company Housing.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Mackenzie massaged her temple while she read and reread the two documents that had prompted her to send Fox into such a precarious assignment. She hadn’t been able to get them out of her head. She’d hoped sending an agent she trusted would help, but it had only gotten worse. They were scraps of information, really. Fragments regarding a man named Austin Greene. She often wished she had more control in her outpouring over how much of each piece she was able to record before the next one possessed her, but maybe no more so than right now. Whatever was in these two puzzle pieces was more than it was on the surface. It was as if the fragments had invisible threads that reached deep into her cortex, calling out to whatever information was on the other side of those connections. She’d known, once, when she knew everything. There was a chance it was written down somewhere in this room. Maybe it wasn’t.

  She looked again at her writing, the one ripped from a yellow-lined legal pad, translating from shorthand.

  Austin Greene is running. He’s outside the entrance to Sol Headquarters, running towards the door. It’s sunny; the sky is a beautiful blue but there’s smoke in the air, two dark plumes of it. The building is smoking. There are people all around. So many people. I… they’re panicking. His white shoes are one size too big, enough to feel with each step. People are scared. Austin is scared. There are thirteen small flecks of green broken glass laying on the portion of the parking lot his shoes are passing over. They come from a carbonated water bottle, dropped while trying to juggle too many bags when Julian del Sol was moving in. That was six days earlier, when…

  She’d lost the thread, or not lost it, just followed elsewhere. It was all one thread when you pulled back far enough. The foreboding image of the smoke lingered in her mind more and more. Mackenzie set the sheet of legal paper down and picked up a drawing she had done with scrawled notes around the margins. The drawing is of a car, parked, all four doors open, while a young man is working to clean the upholstery. She studies his slight frame, facial hair, and the scratchy way she’d drawn his hair. Mackenzie wasn’t an artist skilled in rendering, but she could get the point across.

  The margin simply read: Austin Greene is in Paris, cleaning his car. There is blood on the backseat from the dead body.

  It wasn’t much, she could acknowledge that. She’d pulled it because the name matched, despite taking place across the globe. When she’d put the name through Saturn’s search, she was able to locate a French citizen, an American ex-pat, whose passport photo could realistically match her crude sketch.

  There was more somewhere. There had to be. Maybe Fox would find her a clue.

  “Mack.”

  She looked up to see Rafe leaning into her office.

  “They’re here,” he told her.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Mackenzie waited for him to close the door before collecting the two documents and slipping them back into their envelope. She pried up the modified floorboard underneath her desk, slipped the envelope inside, and replaced the board so it was flush.

  Dusting off her pants, she headed out to the dining room, which was full of her Saturn officers: Louis, Grace, Sandford, and Stormy. Once a month, she hosted them all for dinner. Logan often joined as well, even though Rafe held his own Terre officer gatherings. Logan was family, even among spies.

  They greeted her loudly with their joyful ruckus, even Louis, though his eyes rested on her with a more serious light to them. He knew what she must have been working on, if not the contents of what it was. After some playful hellos, she went to help Rafe bring dinner to the table.

  Dinner was a breath of fresh air, with its good food and distracting, if familiar, banter. When they were finished, Louis and Logan had taken up the task of clearing the table and began cleaning, even though they didn’t have to. You couldn’t tell those two not to.

  “Am I going to get my rematch?” Grace asked, sipping her wine.

  They often played some sort of board game as a group after dinner, if they had the energy and time for it. She honestly didn’t think she had either, but the others were in such a pleasant mood, she wouldn’t ever dissuade them. Last time, it had been some sort of resource game that relied on deceiving your opponents—which meant that Logan and Rafe tended to get in a bit of trouble, trying to stick it out with a group of Saturn agents.

  “If you want to get your ass kicked again,” Sandy replied brashly.

  “He got lucky,” Stormy added sweetly. Stormy tended to win most any game they played, but they were gracious when they lost, unlike some of the others.

  Grace was smiling, even as her voice rose. “He’s a dirty cheater is what he is.”

  Sandy stood, being overdramatic. “That is a grave allegation and I’ll have you know that—”

  More was said, but Mackenzie didn’t hear any of it. She was gliding across threads, connections, blind and reaching.

  “Stop,” Rafe called, voice pitched over them, loud enough to cut through her haze. He leaned down to touch her shoulder. “Mack, love. You okay?” The words were soft in her ear, but only barely penetrated.

  “I have to go check something.” Making her mouth work was harder than it should have been. Louis was watching her with a knowing quiet. She didn’t wait around to get any response.

  Back in her office, she locked the door behind her. The words were reverberating in her skull. Louder and louder. She made her way to her audio file storage and struggled to remember anything to do with the phrase in her head that might help her nail down a date. Nothing.

  Mackenzie pulled her hands up, stopping herself from blindly rummaging through them. She slowed her breath, then held it and waited for the thumping pressure in her chest urging her to breathe and the fuzziness that made the periphery of her vision seem to melt into nothing. That was the space that felt most like when she was recording. Think.

  Her throat complained, feeling pulled by the vacuum of her empty, convulsing lungs, while she held what Sandford had said in her mind. She closed her eyes, watching colors swirl.

  There. Something. A motorcycle crash. A drawing she’d done.

  Mackenzie took a whooping breath in. She remembered that drawing from four years ago—it had been upsetting to view, but that meant she could look up when that was recorded and check the voice recordings from around that time.

  It took her hours. Rafe knocked once, calling in to check on her. She pulled herself away long enough to assure him she was fine, but only because if she didn’t, he was likely to try to break down the door. She was close; she knew it. It was here.

  It was near midnight when she found it. A recording of her voice in its flat, monotone done.

  “A man bends over Austin Greene’s shoulder while they look at a computer screen. The screen shows a Sol intranet directory, lots of small faces, some I know. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. His name is Reeve del Sol. Their voices are so loud in my head right now. It hurts. Why are their voices so loud? ‘You’re saying you’ve seen him coming out of an Entropy building?’ Reeve asks. There’s a deep pain in his body that nothing touches. Austin is frustrated, angry. ‘What part are you not hearing? I have one-hundred percent seen this motherfucker around Entropy folks.’ I can’t know the screen well enough. I can’t. I push into it and feel the pixels firing. The computer. 01010011 01101111 01101100 01000011 01101111 01110010 01110000 00100000”

  She forced herself to not fast-forward through the numbers.

  “01000100 01101001 01110010 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00100000 01010000. No. Hmm. Oh. Their voices. 'That's a grave allegation,’ Reeve tells him. Austin turns his back on the computer. ‘It’s a grave fucking fact.’ There are so many people crowded into the little house. Too many and so many in pain. There are sounds seeping in from outside, cats yowling, fighting. Two cats. One black with white socks. She’s seven years old and owned by…”

  Mind swimming, Mackenzie switched off the recording and hid it with the other files. Sitting at her desk, she did a search of the Sol registry and found no record of any agent named Reeve del Sol. That could mean one of two things. They weren’t there in time yet, or he was an Icarus. The only one she could trace was Austin Greene.

  It was three in the morning by the time she climbed in bed, shivering from cold sweat and exhaustion.

  Rafe gave a sleepy inhale of surprise as she slid in beside him. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes,” she told him. It was all locked away for now. “I’m sorry to do that to you, love.”

  “I understand,” he murmured, finding her hand and bringing it up to kiss her fingertips. “Just part of the privilege of being married to such a brilliant soul.”

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. Mackenzie had thought he’d fallen asleep, but his voice flowed out into the darkness of their room once more.

  “You know how much I love you?”

  She laced her fingers in his. “I know everything.”

  ***