Manchester, England.

  Anise’s redeye flight was uneventful. She found she sort of liked flying, or rather that she liked airports. The tiny, cheesy shops, high ceilings with ornate light fixtures, and endless choices of heavy food in portions that made no sense right before loading into a cabin where you couldn’t move for hours. There was no better place to people-watch than in an airport. Packed tightly into terminals, anxious, and overtired, no one seemed to care who was listening, and her telepathy gave her an extra layer of insight. Layovers were never boring. She studied the women, archiving their walks, unique nervous tics, the way they held themselves as they sat in chairs, and their patterns of speech into her memory to pull from later when she might need them.

  For now, she was Elizabeth Halloway. (She decided she liked Beth more than Liz.) Studying abroad, Beth was flying to the UK to meet up with a man she’d met online for the weekend. She’d be stood up, of course, and be properly heartbroken.

  The taxi ride to her hotel in downtown Manchester was less than pleasant. The condition of the streets varied greatly from perfectly acceptable to keep-a-hand-on-the-ceiling rocky, and graffiti seemed to be a real issue in some areas. After she’d checked in at her hotel by North Bay, having made small talk to the receptionist about her plans, Anise pulled out her laptop, sat on the crisply made bed, and checked into her secure Saturn dashboard.

  As promised, a file was waiting for her and she rushed to open it, then felt the blood freeze in her veins.

  The name listed as the target was Ace del Sol. It wasn’t someone she knew, but taking out a fellow Sol agent wasn’t anything she had considered for herself growing up. She also knew that the breadth of Saturn’s overview wasn’t something she could name a hard limit on. It was possible this was normal.

  She read on. He was known to visit the Cardishead Chippy whenever traveling to the Manchester office and his flight had landed just a couple hours before hers. There was a photo that appeared to be taken from a company ID and nothing else.

  With shaking hands, she grabbed her phone, brought up Adler’s number, then hesitated. What was she going to say? “I won’t do this?” What made her think she could bother someone like him with her objections to her first assignment after he’d spent so much time helping her get into the field.

  Instead, she called Nina.

  “Hey, make it there okay?”

  “Yeah,” Anise said, then went tongue-tied.

  “You’ve read your assignment,” she said gravely.

  “Yeah.”

  “Anise,” she sighed. “What was unclear?”

  “I guess, I guess I just needed confirmation.“

  “And if I hadn’t picked up? You carry out your orders. It’s important to make sure it can’t be linked to you and obviously it needs to be off Sol grounds.”

  Anise swallowed bile. “Understood.”

  “Are you going to ask me why him?”

  Of course she wanted to ask why. She wanted to yell it. Her voice shook but she managed to get out, “That’s not part of the job.”

  “Listen,” she said, voice softening, “you never get to choose and you don’t have to understand. The goal of the Reformation is to have as little disruption as possible, so that if we do it right, everyone else won’t even notice and it will be a natural shift in ideology. In order to do that, certain obstacles need to be removed.”

  “I understand.” Worse things had been done by knacked people and humans to justify obtaining a greater peace. All the hits Sol assigned to their Moons, the private military contracts they committed their Mars people to, and the assassinations Saturn agents carried out were all done for a greater good. She didn’t have the bigger picture to see all the pieces on the board—yet. He’d said she would, if she stuck with him. “Should I call you when it’s done?”

  “Only call me if there’s a problem.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you soon.” She hung up.

  Anise felt a creeping numbness in her hands and feet and she breathed deep to quell the anxiety. Still there was a wordless pull deep in her foundation that was telling her to move. Who was she to argue? This is what she had worked for, wasn’t it? She had a job to do.

  Her return flight was that night, so she had only that day to get it done. Showering and putting on something cute, but not too cute, she plastered on a smile and had the front desk get her a cab to Cardishead, a southwestern neighborhood of Manchester that housed several industrial buildings, including Sol Pharmaceuticals. There was a small public park entrance less than half a block from the restaurant, so she stood by the big blue sign, eyes down at her phone, waiting for her date. It was a hazy day with little sunshine and a nip in the air made her shiver as she considered her options. She’d never used it but she knew unleashing her telepathy could disrupt a brain enough to kill, except Sol would know what that looked like. While she thought, she plucked her image from anyone who began to notice her too much or wonder why she was still there. It was easy now to simply remove herself from their minds, as though she didn’t exist. She was doing so for the fifth time as the day stretched on into the afternoon, and she thought of Asher and the teacher who’d never heard of him.

  She had to put that on pause as a group of three got out of a car in front of the place. Ace was there, which meant that the other two were likely Sol agents too.

  The tingling sick feeling at the base of her spine surged and her stomach flipped. She had nothing on her but her purse, but she supposed that if something went wrong, she wasn’t meant to survive. That was the job too. She gave them five minutes, then went into the little fish and chips shop and got a table for two. She was meeting a boy there, after all.

  Keeping her telepathic profile low, she listened while awkwardly staring at the menu. It wasn’t hard to pull off seeming anxious. She filtered through the information she could get just by being near them, without actually penetrating their barriers. They were Neptune agents and, in a stroke of luck, none of them were telepaths. They were in Retrieval, the branch of Neptune that saw combat, which meant they didn’t go anywhere unarmed.

  Her foot began to bounce and she forced it still, not allowing herself to look at them anymore. She didn’t need to. She could hear and feel them enough to know they were still there. As she began to steel herself to do what she had to do, a small voice fought its way to the surface of her mind.

  She wasn’t in Kyiv anymore, isolated and far afield. What would happen if she approached them? the voice asked. If she told them everything? Begged asylum and protection? Probably they’d see her home to LA safely, where she’d be put through Reintegration. All she had to do was go sit at their table and say, ‘Please, I need help. I’m trapped.’ Or even just think it to them. She could narrow it down to one sentence: Help, Entropy has taken over Kyiv. That would set everything irrevocably in action.

  “Did you seriously bring your own silverware?” she heard one agent burst out laughing, snapping her out of her thoughts.

  “You would too,” Ace joked back, good-natured.

  “Psychometrists,” the third agent scoffed, shaking her head.

  Unsettled, she tried to find that tiny voice again, to think things through, but it was like trying to speak with laryngitis. You can push but nothing comes out.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  This was the job. She’d never know whether the people she’d be ordered to take out in her career really deserved it. Del Sols or not. Maybe she was naive to think Neptune was the only mechanism with which Sol disposed of threats. A chill ran through her and a thought blotted out everything else. This is the job. They’re expecting me to be good at it. He is.

  Taking a breath, she drove into Ace’s head and took control fast enough to subdue his shock. She was strong enough to do that now. She dredged up his darkest pains, his most agonizing thoughts and memories, pushing them forward.

  “Are you okay?” one agent asked. “Hey.”

  Anise glanced over, a reasonable response for a bystander.

  Ace was crying, his expression suddenly drawn and his mood turned black.

  “I’m fine,” Anise snapped through Ace’s mouth, though the sobbing was twisting his voice. “I just need a minute.” He stood up hard enough to nearly knock his chair over. She didn’t have quite the finesse she needed puppeting like this, and Ace was fighting her. He was trained to defend against telepaths—all Neptune agents were. She needed more practice on people besides civilians around town, who had no defenses at all. She turned Ace around and walked him into the bathroom at the back of the place. Anise felt cold. She planted her instructions as deep as they could go and got out of his head.

  “What the hell was that?” one agent asked.

  “You’re the one who’s met him before.”

  Anise struggled to keep her breath even while she stared blindly at the table surface, waiting for his mind to wink out, like flipping off a lightswitch.

  The gunshot set off a chaos of screams and scrambling from the other patrons just as it sent the Neptune agents to their feet. In an instant they had their guns out and were rushing to the back of the shop. They wouldn’t find any threats back there.

  Shaking, she sat stock still as if she’d woken up. Ace’s mind was gone from her awareness, an expected side effect of a bullet passing through it. Had she actually done it?

  A hand grabbed her arm and she lashed out with her mind, scanning him. He was another Saturn agent—one who knew what she had been there to do.

  Rocked back on his heels, the man in his forties, Brian, kept hold of her arm. “Time to go.”

  Confused, she let him lead her out of the restaurant and past the clusters of patrons on the sidewalk talking in hushed tones. When they were about a block away she found her voice again and pulled them to a stop.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Getting you out of here.” He pressed a button on his keys and the car beside them lit up.

  Glaring, she got in and they sped off.

  “They sent someone to watch me?” she asked, not bothering to hide the weight of her offense.

  “Don’t take it so bloody personally,” he said, checking his mirrors. “Every Saturn agent is shadowed on their first real mission. There are no dress rehearsals and not everyone can do it their first time—and fuck, they gave you one helluva first assignment. Does someone hate you or something?”

  She turned her eyes to the road and fumed.

  “I’m just joking,” he continued. “We’re all doing our part. I’ll tell them you did well. I won’t tell them you were thinking about trying to get asylum, but that doesn’t mean they won’t know, so just be prepared.”

  She snapped her head back to him. “You’re not a telepath. Why the fuck do you think you know anything about my mind?” She was trying to not sound too defensive, but it wasn’t working.

  “You had the look.” Brian replied simply. “We all know that look. We’ve all had that look at one point or another. It’s okay. They’ll have expected you to think it.”

  She sat, speechless. She began to recognize things and suddenly, too fast it seemed, he had pulled over to the side of the road in front of her hotel.

  “You can’t, you know,” he told her. “Even if there weren’t enough of our people to come for you inside the building, now there’s no going back. What you did there, which was clever by the way, ended all that. There’s no asylum after that. Give my love to Kyiv.”

  She got out of the car and bent at the waist to look back at him. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t.”

  Without looking back she marched inside, rushing past the desk and up the stairs to her room to go be sick. After her belly had been emptied out, Anise stood in the shower. Had she really done that? Had that really happened?

  She realized with a jolt that she couldn’t remember the color of the car that had brought her back to the hotel or even form a clear image of Brian’s face.

  He’d been right, though. She’d sat there, alone as far as she knew, nothing keeping her from going up to them and asking for help. Certainly no one there to coerce her to do what she did. No immediate threat to her safety. And she’d carried out her mission anyway. There would be no forgiveness after that. There was no explanation she could give.

  Her cell phone was ringing when she walked out into her room, wrapped in a white hotel towel. It was Adler.

  She swallowed and picked up. “Sir?” Her mouth still tasted bitter.

  “I got an alert that some agents just called in a suicide in Manchester.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s with this meek attitude all of a sudden?”

  Hearing his voice, a conversation drifted back to her that they’d had just after her Post-Breathe about how few psychometrists there were. ‘They're rare because that's how we wanted it. It was the only way this would work,’ he’d said. She realized it was very possible that the only thing Ace had done wrong was have a knack that put their plan at risk of being discovered.

  “Anise.” His voice was loud and annoyed in her ear.

  “Sorry.” She sat to keep from getting too dizzy.

  She heard him heave a frustrated sigh. “Come home.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  She packed her bag and checked her flight information. What else could she do?

  ---

  Sanctuary. Prague, Czech Republic.

  The phone was dead. Gareth checked it when he woke up, but the screen stayed black. He messed with the buttons, took the battery out and replaced it, and resorted to smacking it. He called Reeve in and watched Reeve do all the same things. The fall had killed it.

  Gareth scratched at his head. He needed to shave. “That was our only way to find Hannah and Alex.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, now what?”

  “It’s fine, we’ll figure it out.” His voice didn’t sound fine. Gareth knew that going without sleep for this long did a number on his ability to lie.

  “You got anything else to keep me from panicking? We’re two small groups of people laying low across the globe and we have no way to reach out to each other without getting killed.”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got over two weeks to make a plan?” Reeve threw up his hands. “If nothing else Misha is enough of an asshole that he shouldn’t be impossible to track down within the Church. He leaves an impression.”

  “What about calling Noah?”

  “Sure, if he’s still got the same number he might be able to relay us, but mostly he called me because he switched phones so often. Anyway, we’ll need a phone first. We should pack up.”

  They were on the road a few hours later. Thomas had hugged them all and called them “brother.” He was leaving soon too, heading back west. Gareth half wanted them to go with him, but there was no sense getting the guy killed. They stole a car the old fashioned way and Reeve started driving.

  “I didn’t want to ask in front of Thomas, just in case,” Alyosha called from the backseat, “but do we know where we’re going?”

  “I know where I think we ought to go, but I want your input.”

  “Nice of you,” Gareth quipped.

  “We need to lay low and I can’t use my telepathy, so would you be okay with hunkering down with one of my contacts?”

  “Fuck yes,” Gareth burst out. “No searching for Sanctuaries and looking for goddamn monsters?”

  “It will keep us out of the loop if Misha tries to get hold of us through the Church.”

  “So would being dead,” Alyosha added.

  “I’m much more into this acting like agents thing, instead of wandering the streets like these fanatics,” Gareth said. At least that was familiar. He knew more of the steps and he could fathom what was coming when things went wrong. “Is there a reason why we didn’t just go straight there in the first place?”

  “Well it’s a long-ass drive and I sort of thought it might be the direction Misha would be taking them, since it’s closer to his home.”

  Gareth nodded. “That makes it an even better idea, now. So it’s east?”

  “You’re not going to like where. It’s in Ukraine.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like that.”

  “A little over an hour outside of Kyiv.”

  “Kyiv as in Sol’s Kyiv Office?”

  Reeve didn’t respond.

  “Are you crazy?” Gareth shook his head.

  “The man I placed there was in no danger of setting off alarm bells. It’s remote. Remote enough that we wouldn’t be on their radar, either, and at least Shvedov can speak the language.”

  No one spoke. Gareth turned around to look at Alyosha, who had his eyebrows halfway up his forehead, but he couldn’t read his eyes. He slowly realized he’d been looking for Hannah. He turned back around.

  “I don’t know. I’m all for getting distance from this shit. What do you think, Alyosha?”

  “Eh,” Alyosha stalled. “It’s no worse than being on the streets and living with people who interact with the families. And I like the idea of no hunting.”

  Gareth nodded. “Okay. That’s a consensus.”

  “Okay,” Reeve said with a reluctant sigh.

  “What?” Gareth said a little loudly. “What else?”

  “This guy’s a true civilian. Worked maintenance, solid single dad. Sol took his knacked daughter when she was small. For whatever reason, he was another one who was resistant to brain wipes. They kept trying to erase her from his mind, but it wouldn’t stick.”

  “And we were their solution.”

  “Thing is, I lost contact with this guy over six months ago.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s not answering my calls. Which could be a lot of things. He could have lost his phone, which we’re finding happens. He could have moved or he could just be sick of hearing from me.”

  Gareth could see that happening, but he resisted making the joke. “Or?”

  “Or Sol may have found him.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened. If they had, Sol would have picked me up months earlier.”

  “That is actually a valid argument,” Alyosha said. He leaned up to be heard and grimaced. Gareth knew his back couldn’t be feeling too great right about now. “Are we doing this?” Alyosha asked. No one answered, so Reeve kept driving.

  ***