Agent Zero

by Lilith Saintcrow

  He shut the car door gently, pulling his gloves on. Balsam and pine, a rill of cold dampness from the creek to the west, the grit of stone close to the surface. Deer, an oily dry scent, very fresh. Other animals, including a thread of acrid weasel musk he almost wrinkled his nose at. No hint of humans, except the exhaust from the idling car.

  That was partly why he wanted her closed up, so he could get a good lungful of all this without her distracting, maddening, wonderful proximity.

  The shed was still in good shape, and the hulking shape in the corner, covered with canvas, was another insurance—if mice hadn’t been at the wires. He’d check that out later. For right now, the chain had just torn, and there was another set on a listing wooden shelf. “Nice,” he congratulated himself, even though there wasn’t enough wood. He could fix that easily.

  As soon as he stepped out, kicking the wedge firmly under the shed door, he knew Holly hadn’t listened. Clumping around the side of the house was enough time for him to take a deep breath, that thread of her on the cold air like champagne.

  He was opening his mouth to say something a little sharper than was really necessary when she came into view.

  She’d stepped away from the car, tipping her head back. A new knitted cap, a fur-collared coat, the new boots and her gloves tugged on, she stood in the snow, staring up at the sky. Her mouth was open and her little pink tongue out, catching snowflakes.

  Just like a kid.

  The cold blushed her cheeks, visible even in the failing light, and her charcoal lashes blinking rapidly, gemmed with melting snowflakes. Her hands turned out, cupped to gather more of the falling flakes, and Reese’s heart gave a sudden, violent, painful lunge inside his chest.

  God, please... He didn’t even know how to finish the thought.

  She might have heard him crunching through the snow, drier now that the temperature had started to drop, because she laughed, a low pretty sound, and brought her chin back down. Biting her lower lip now, a little shyly, then the smile broke out over her face like sunrise. It was the first unguarded one he’d seen from her, and it walloped the air right out of him.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, hushed in this cathedral of trees and ice. “I love snow.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded hoarse, and sharp. What could he say? Nothing he was thinking.

  I will do anything for you, just don’t go anywhere. Just don’t leave. Stand there and smile at me, and I’ll do anything you want. It wasn’t precisely pain. Was this what cardiac arrest felt like? Just let me get close. Just please, please don’t go anywhere.

  It was coming down faster, gathering on her shoulders and her cap. He had to get her inside. He cleared his throat, and her smile faded, bit by bit. “Let me get the key. I have to dig it up. You can go in—it’s pretty bare, but it’s shelter. There’s water, and... I, uh...”

  “Okay.” She hugged herself, cupping her elbows. Was it the cold, or had his traitorous face showed something? “I’m sorry, I just wanted out of the car. I know you said—”

  Christ. “It’s all right.” Nothing in his throat would work right. “Really. Let me grab the key.”

  * * *

  Enough wood to get them through the night, and the deep pump was still functional. It only took a bit of monkeying around and waking the thing up before he was rewarded with a low hum. The former owner of this place had been a survivalist and had sunk plenty of cash into getting a source of weak but useful off-the-grid electricity. The geothermal would even heat the shower water; no doubt Holly would be glad about that.

  He locked everything up nice and snug. It would take a little while for the power to steady out, and they’d have to run the water for a bit to clear the pipes, but all in all, it wasn’t bad.

  Inside, Holly had lit a candle in the kitchen and was rummaging in the grocery bags. “You have a fridge, but I suppose with the power out we can put stuff outside to—”

  He flicked the switch, and the pale glow from a single overhead bulb made her laugh with delight, the sound shivering all over him. Her breath plumed, mostly because the door was open to stage the rest of the supplies in. The car was safely in the shed, and next was the goddamn fire and warming her up. The geothermal would also raise the temperature in here, but too slowly. Plus, why make it work that hard?

  “You’re a magician.” She actually grinned, and the aforesaid fridge—a small antique white enamel number—clicked into humming life. “This is amazing.”

  “Good place to go to ground.” Once we leave we can’t come back, if there’s an agent tracking us. “Where’d you put the matches?”

  “Oh, right here—” When she turned around again, she flinched, probably because he’d moved too quickly.

  Again.

  “Wow.” She held up the cardboard box, shook it a little. “This means I can actually cook, too. If that range is functioning.”

  “Should be. There’s no oven, though.” The goddamn rock was back in his throat. “Sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.” That’s the last thing I want.

  “You don’t.” Very softly. She probably wasn’t aware she was lying, but he could smell the fear on her. Keyed up and nervous, adrenaline a copper thread. “I mean... I trust you.”

  The yellow-metallic tang rasped against his palate, and that made him uneasy. His gloved fingers touched hers, sliding the matches free. “Good.” So close he could feel the heat she gave off, the warm draft of her breath, hear her pulse rise again. A pleasant rasp of arousal sliding through her scent; she leaned over that invisible line, judged by fingertips and skin response, that separated friend from more than friend.

  If it hadn’t been so cold he might have lost it right there, again. Instead, he froze, trying to think of what to do next.

  She went up on tiptoes, her gloved hand sliding around the back of his neck, and her gentle irresistible pressure made him bend forward. Her lips pressed against his scratchy cheek, a soft fiery kiss.

  Her fingers slid away, and she sank back onto her heels. The shakes going through him made it hard to straighten, and the ache below the belt wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

  “I, ah.” He had to search for words. “Should get a fire started.”

  “Yeah.” She turned away, peering into the closest grocery bag. “I should wash some dishes. You have dishes here, too?”

  “I... I don’t know.” About all he’d done was sleep on the couch and chew an energy bar after he’d signed the papers and gotten the key. It had been a full four days off the grid to close the sale, and it had been worth the stern talking-to Bronson dished out and the double round of ridiculous tolerance tests afterward. “I’m, um. Yeah. Just going to get us closed up and a fire.”

  “Okay.” She kept digging in the bags and opening cupboard doors. Playing house. Another woman might be snotty about the lack of comfort, or angry at him, or any of a thousand things. Holly just got to work.

  It took another few seconds for his head to clear. The shaking went down, and he told the ache in his pants to go away. It probably wouldn’t listen, but at least he was making the effort.

  She kissed me. It wasn’t until he had nursed a handful of tinder into a respectable flame and started building a proper fire up that he realized he was grinning like an idiot.

  * * *

  Trinity kept her head down, pacing behind Bronson and Caldwell. The tension had broken, and the reek of relief spreading from both of them was matched only by the smell of a bacon double cheeseburger pumping out through the older man’s skin. They thought they had a reason to celebrate.

  She could have told them otherwise, but they didn’t ask. So she simply followed along, a ghost in a woman’s body, her face a mask. It was becoming more difficult to guard against flickers of expression. Just four hours ago she had stared into the slice of mirror over an indifferently scrubbed ba
throom sink in the lowest, most secured part of the base, and watched her face move as she thought. Strange, how concentrating could change the architecture of that collection of muscles and bone.

  “There’s a storm moving over, things have fuzzed out a little. Eight’s working like a charm, though.”

  Only temporarily. She could have said it, didn’t. It had been...nice, she supposed, to get into clean clothes. Who had bought them? The gold hoops she’d been wearing in her ears since she woke up after the induction process, whose were they? Her own?

  She’d never been able to hold her own file. She was perhaps the only person who had noticed several other files, not just the doctored ones, missing after Eight was cleared for release. It was, after all, her job to bring them when Bronson wanted them. He had not asked for any, but perhaps he would, soon?

  “Good. What about that goddamn doctor?”

  “Tied off.” Caldwell sounded happy about that. He had a fresh crewcut on his sandy head, and his uniform was ironed, as well.

  Trinity watched her shoes, diligently carrying her forward. Tied off could mean any of a number of things. The odds favored a staged suicide at said doctor’s apartment. The doctor had taken Trinity’s vital signs more than once, asked her questions. Now he was gone.

  It...bothered...her. More than it should. How many casualties had she reported on since the induction?

  Had she really signed up for this? Without her memory, who could tell?

  “Thank God.” Bronson slowed down. He sweated, even at this pace. It was amazing, how his body kept going through all the cholesterol abuse he piled on it.

  The guard at the double doors saluted; they plunged into the nerve center. Grids running, cores being checked, screens everywhere, people running back and forth with papers and clearances, phones softly beeping. They thought they were hunting a terrorist. The patriotism was astonishing. You could almost smell it, bright and shiny but with a rancid undertone.

  Caldwell was immediately swarmed, Bronson reduced to tagging along and listening. Trinity glanced over the room once, collating information. Ah. Eight has made his move. Too late, though. Assuming he did not wish to catch Six. It would take them, she calculated, approximately six more hours to realize they had lost him for good, unless someone here noticed one or two small things. Perhaps she should help them?

  Why?

  It was such an elementary question. Terrifying, in all its implications. Why do anything? Control over her autonomic functions was not complete, but she could perhaps, with enough concentration, stop her own heart. Why bother continuing, especially if she was to be used in this fashion?

  Illogical, Trinity. What did it matter how she was used?

  She stopped, head down, swaying slightly. Caldwell and Bronson kept going, information they didn’t need being thrown at them from all angles. Trinity could have told them ninety-eight percent of what they were taking in and collating was useless now that they had sent Eight out, that removing Eight’s civilian entanglement would simply intensify a certain dangerous sector of the emotional noise. How had he talked them into it? Fatigue and Bronson’s arrogance no doubt had given him an opening, but—

  “Three?”

  She replayed the last few moments of mental footage. What was that rasp against her nerves? It wasn’t physical at all.

  Irritation. She was irritated at being disturbed.

  “Sir?” A single word, uninflected. Sweat prickled along her lower back before she brought that system under control.

  “The chances Eight will bring Six and the civilian in alive.”

  Calculations tangled inside her head. Zero. He doesn’t want to retrieve them. She had a choice, now.

  Was this what other people felt? How did they stand the uncertainty?

  Answer as if his assumptions are correct. Immediately the pressure eased, and she found answers. “Both alive, forty percent. Six alive, thirty-three percent. Civilian alive, sixty-eight percent. Civilian alive and uninjured, seventy-four percent.”

  “Why is Six’s survival chance so low?”

  Assuming he and Eight engage in combat, and Eight wins. It was much easier when she simply added their inaccurate assumptions to what she was supposed to answer. “Six will ensure the civilian survives, even at the cost of his own life.”

  “That goddamn emotional noise,” Bronson muttered. “At least you’re still working, Three.”

  Am I? She had felt. Only mild irritation, true, but still...she was to report any oddity, no matter how slight.

  If I do, odds of my own survival go down drastically. She gazed over his head at the screens—traffic feeds, information flashing by rapidly, grainy surveillance footage of Six and the civilian. Her long black hair, distinctive, and her pinched, pale face when they had brought her in reeking of sedation. Why had Six settled his attention on the woman? Candless, that was her name.

  Irrelevant.

  The only relevant thing, Trinity decided, as a harried-looking brunette woman brought in a fresh pot of coffee and Bronson quizzed one of the engineers about draining satellite platforms to track the car they thought Six was driving, was her own chance of survival. If she began showing signs of emotional noise, there was an unacceptable risk of them seeking to imprison or liquidate her.

  Or to try the induction process again.

  “Three.” It was Caldwell. He’d had a chance to shower, too, and he held out a cup of coffee. “Here. As soon as we find them we’re going to scramble copters.”

  She took the mug and thought about her odds of escaping, as both Six and Eight had done. As Fourteen had done before they liquidated him, as some of the others were showing signs of doing.

  It was not enough to calculate.

  Trinity began to plan.

  * * *

  Holly’s back didn’t ache for once, and the quiet was full of tiny sounds—the snow, deadening all outside noise, just underlined the crackling of a fire and the faint static-rubbing sound of the AM radio station. Reese cocked his head to listen to the recital of air pressure, place-names, precipitation, forecast, but at least he ate. It wasn’t much—pancakes, bacon, eggs—but it wasn’t industrial food, and a glass of orange juice convinced Holly she wasn’t dreaming. She managed a few bites of bacon and at least two pancakes, a banner event. The orange juice even stayed down.

  The dinette set—two plastic chairs and a table leftover from the ’50s, to judge by its pink top—was rickety but adequate. The cabin was one large room except for the tiny bathroom, a burlap-covered couch that folded down into a twin bed and one ratty old armchair with a dusty afghan flung across it. Other than that and the stove, there was nothing but a collection of woolen rugs over a hardwood floor, polished silky smooth but gritty with accumulated dust.

  Her nose kept itching, and her throat was a little scratchy. Probably just the change in the weather, and God knew she’d itched all over, relentlessly, for months now anyway. Holly snuggled deeper into the blankets—everything was new and full of store and packaging smell, and while that was distracting it was better than dusty and nasty—and tried to get comfortable on the lumpy couch. He’d even thought of flannel pajamas for her, but not for himself. Did he ever relax?

  They probably trained him not to.

  The flickering from the stove was soothing. Reese, by the front window, stood in what she was beginning to see as a habitual posture—head tilted to listen, hands loose, shoulders back.

  “Hey,” she finally whispered. “Reese?”

  He didn’t move. “Are you warm enough?”

  “Sure. Can you...can you come over here?” Why am I nervous all of a sudden?

  There were lots of reasons, she supposed. Here she was with this stranger in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t find her body until spring, if he had ideas. Of course, he wouldn’t have dragged her out
all this way and...she could just go on and on in circles until she dropped. It wasn’t like she was going to survive this anyway. Each time she used the restroom there were traces of bright red in her urine. She couldn’t eat, her hair was falling out, and really...it was going to be all downhill from here.

  So it didn’t matter. At all.

  Except even when you were dying, some things did. Even if you were in an exotic—to say the least—situation, on the run with a bionic agent who looked so lost and forlorn, standing there watching, that her heart lit up inside her with a sweet aching.

  He glided silently across the floor, not even a betraying squeak from the boards. “What’s wrong?” Dark eyes a glimmer in the dimness—did he have a cat’s vision now? Just how strong and fast was he?

  I don’t have a lot of time left. So why not make it count? “Nothing’s wrong.” She snaked her arm out from under the pile of blankets, the couch creaking as her weight shifted, and felt blindly in the cooler air outside. You could tell it was cold, that it was freezing outside, even if it was warm enough in here. The air just felt different.

  His fingers threaded through hers, warm and rough. “Holly...” Was he going to start making excuses? Or telling her, I was wrong, sorry, you’re not what I thought you were?

  That was the thing about staying out of the dating pool. When you were thrown in, you found out you’d forgotten how to swim. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be out there. Why don’t you come to bed?”

  If that didn’t get the point across, nothing would.

  “I, uh... I thought, the floor...”

  “I don’t want you to freeze to death.” She tugged on his hand. He’d gone so still he probably wasn’t even breathing.

  “Well, you know, the couch, it’s not very big. I don’t want—”

  “Reese.” As if she was talking to Doug when he was on one of his rampages, nice and firm. “Take your shoes off and get under the blankets with me. Please.” So I can do at least one nice thing before I go.