Agent Zero

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Looks like. Aren’t we the lucky fellows. Um, Reese? She’s heating up.”

  “I know.” A chill against her forehead—a washcloth? She was dimly aware of more movement, a rising scream, a cracked, hoarse voice.

  Was it hers?

  The shark decided to quit playing around and rose with eerie speed. She could almost see it, fins jagged from the chaos of old battles, scars on its sandpaper sides, mouth open and triangular teeth in rows, its dead-glowing eyes fixed on the small struggling human above. It streaked for her, and she screamed, over and over, thrashing, struggling, and there was that voice again, the one she knew.

  “Holly... Holly, shh...come on, baby, it’s all right, you’re all right...please, Holly, Holly!”

  Jaws closed with a snap, teeth in her flesh, bones creaking, then, thankfully, the shark swallowed.

  And she was gone.

  * * *

  He had another forty-eight hours before he started getting tired, but the lump in his throat just wouldn’t go away. He was hoarse, too, from talking to her as she thrashed. The worst part was when she screamed, or when she made that low hurt noise, as if she was expecting to get hit.

  Cal brought him a bottle of water; he cracked it one-handed and took a sip. The other agent squatted, easily, still consciously keeping out of anything approximating fight range or threat perimeter. “Fever’s going down.”

  I know. Reese didn’t say it. This guy liked to talk, might as well let him.

  “So,” Cal continued, “I knew you were gone over this girl. I said to myself, what’s the last thing anyone would expect this guy to do? Which made it easy—all I had to do was look at your domestic jobs and choose the route that gave me the most options on my way south, figuring you’d have hidey-holes as a matter of course. Then it was just following my nose. I wandered around a little before finding this place, had a couple cold camps.”

  Is he gauging me? Waiting to see if I’m distracted? It could also be that Cal hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a long, long time. Keeping secrets made for psychological pressure.

  Even for an agent.

  “What about your friend?” Reese watched the rise and fall of Holly’s chest. “The one they killed.”

  A long silence. Maybe that would shut the man up.

  “Tracy,” Cal said, softly. “Nice. Easy. Uncomplicated. No questions. Heming tried to off me, too. I got out and went to pick her up. I... They knew about her, they came for me, I wasn’t...she didn’t deserve that. I didn’t keep her quiet enough, I guess.”

  Things really could have gone either way. If they had, would it be Reese talking about how he hadn’t done enough to keep Holly hidden? Lots of uncomfortable questions, soldier. “I’m sorry.” It sounded strange, and he realized why.

  He actually meant it. It was a kindness, something Holly might say. That empathy of hers. What was it like to swim in the emotional noise all the time, to feel it the way she did?

  “Yeah.” A drift of changed scent, Cal shifting his weight as well. A blue tinge to him now. Actual sadness. “Me, too.”

  Thankfully, that shut him up. Holly dozed, her eyelids fluttering every once in a while. She didn’t seem to be sweating quite as badly now. Her pulse was slowing, too.

  Just let her live. Bargaining. A human response. Who was he asking, though? A god cruel enough to let all this happen? Cruel enough to make Holly suffer?

  God didn’t do that, Reese. You did.

  He flipped through yet another file, his eyelids full of sand. Tox screens, tolerance tests, psych notes. What Cal had grabbed was almost as interesting as what he hadn’t managed to get.

  Three files on women: two were just autopsy results. One, a Tracy Moritz, had caught a spray of AK-47 lead. Cal’s escape was noted as a failure-to-capture, and he’d left a great deal of his own blood at the scene—Moritz’s nice little farmhouse, the mortgage paid up out of foreclosure recently.

  Sloppy. But he’d have done the same for Holly, wouldn’t he?

  Another agent had gotten sticky with a girl; they were both listed as failure-to-capture as well, with possibly-dead notation. The third file on a female was so heavily redacted it was almost useless, but it looked kind of as though the program had found a girl candidate for the little swarmers about the same time they’d found Reese. There were further notes about some other kind of process. Induction, it said once.

  Intriguing.

  Reese’s own dual files were thought provoking. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a hole in any of Cal’s story. The man could be exactly what he said he was. In fact, it was looking like he had to be. Just enough suspicion attached to him to be normal.

  “So.” Reese took another swallow of water. His neck ached, and the floor was cold. He was going to stiffen up if he crouched here much longer, but he didn’t want to move. “What’s your plan?”

  “Ah.” Cal nodded, as if he’d said something profound. “Um. Well, you know, I was hoping you had one. I’m geared for on-the-fly tactics—you’re more of a long-range guy. You’re, um, more strategic. I was hoping you had some ideas.”

  Maybe I was hoping you did. Reese couldn’t help it. The laugh burst out of him, swallowed halfway so he didn’t wake her, and the momentary flash of rueful surprise crossing the other agent’s features convinced Reese that he was, indeed, legit.

  The funny side of it hit Cal, too, and their shared, strained laughter brushed tension out of the tiny cabin. Holly stirred, mumbling softly, and subsided when they both shut up.

  “Maybe I do,” Reese said, very quietly. Time to come up with one, at least. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Fair enough.” Cal shrugged. “I’m going to get some sleep.” He stood, carefully, backed up until his calves hit the sagging recliner, dropped down into the chair’s embrace, and was gone inside seconds. His pulse dropped, breathing evened out, and the smell of glands opening as autonomic control eased into unconsciousness was just right, too. Nervousness, true, but Reese supposed in the other man’s shoes he’d be the same. Dealing with a hair-trigger agent who had every reason to doubt you would make anyone a little jumpy.

  How long had Cal been running, to pass out like that?

  Reese settled himself against the couch, paging through the files more slowly now. Holly’s breathing deepened, too, and he started to think maybe she might survive.

  If she doesn’t, we’re going to see how fast two agents can dismantle an entire goddamn government.

  It didn’t even bother him to think like that. It should have, but it didn’t.

  Reese turned another page, and settled himself to studying.

  * * *

  Blood warm, soft even though it was lumpy, the bed cradled her. Little creaks and crackles, twitching under her skin. Her head ached, savagely, and it was loud. She turned away, burying her face in the pillow, her greasy hair rasping against cotton. She could feel every single hair, every inch of her skin, crying out for a shower.

  Soughing. In and out. She lay there for a long while before she realized it was someone breathing. No—two someones. The thump-thumps she heard weren’t bass from a car on Bicknell Avenue; they were...

  Heartbeats.

  “I think she’s coming around,” an unfamiliar voice said.

  An unfamiliar, male voice.

  Movement. Bare feet scrabbling for purchase, the sweat-soaked blankets tangled around her trying to trip and send her headlong, the world spinning sideways; her hip barked the pink-topped dinette table and sent it flying. Her back crashed against the cupboard, her heels still scrabbling, and she had inhaled to scream.

  His hand clapped over her mouth. “Easy, baby. Easy. I’m here.” Familiar dark eyes, and the smell of him—healthy male, deliciously appetizing, her own unwashed reek disappearing into it to make something deep and warm and soft
. Comforting. Everything inside her turned over, and she gasped against his hand, her stomach jolting.

  The starch went out of her legs. She sagged, Reese caught her, she buried her face in his chest and inhaled. He smelled really, really good—clean and warm, safe and solid. A tinge of something brassy and sharp that made her think worried, a peculiar sharpness that smelled like hunger, too. Her nose was on overdrive, sorting and cataloging, impressions flashing so quickly she almost forgot to breathe.

  “You’re going to adjust,” he said into her hair, his breath a warm spot. “It’s all right. You’re absolutely going to adjust, everything’s okay, you’re doing just fine.”

  I am not! This is not fine! She inhaled again, deeply, shuddering as her brain shivered inside her skull.

  Finally, when the shakes had passed, she was able to peel her cheek away from his T-shirt. Her throat was dry, she was gummed all over with crusty, nasty effluvia and she realized her pajamas were in tatters. There was a weird silence outside—snow melting.

  She could smell it. Pines, and frozen water warming back up to a liquid, and a thousand other little things.

  Including another person. Unfamiliar, harsh and strange, and dangerous. Holly froze, but Reese didn’t seem to notice.

  “See? You’re just at threshold, perceptions are shifting. You’ve got some better senses now, Holly. You can see more and smell more, and do more. Just let it happen—you’ll adjust. I promise.”

  “We all did.” That unfamiliar voice. “Welcome to the family, ma’am.”

  Holly stiffened, but Reese didn’t let go of her. He was just as immovable as ever. “That’s Cal. He’s going to help us.”

  “N-no—” Her mouth didn’t want to work correctly. She could taste the sickness leaving her body, her heart pummeling the inside of her ribs like it wanted to escape. There was a clot of something in her abdomen, high up on the right, but it was swiftly shrinking, starved of nutriment. Another clot behind her stomach, high up and massive, pressing against her heart. The bits of it elsewhere in her body were shrinking, too, their nasty yellowblack tar taste filling her mouth as she focused. They made tiny sounds as something else ate them, the same warmth smoothing and repairing any damage left behind.

  Her back didn’t hurt. She felt wobbly, and thirsty, and so hungry she could eat cardboard. To be actually hungry again, without nausea—she’d forgotten what that was like.

  What the hell? Her head tilted back. She stared up at Reese, seeing the fine lines at the corners of his eyes again. The individual threads of color in his irises—she could actually see, if she focused, the blocks of cells, the colors, a glint off his pupil—

  “Holly.” Very quietly, with no trace of anger or fear. “Breathe.”

  Another walloping hit of scent, but this one wasn’t quite so bad. Her head hurt, a swift lance of pain through her temples quickly vanishing. Every inch of her started twitching, individual muscle fibers contracting and releasing at random, but there was a jolt of scent from Reese and that stopped. His heartbeat was nice and even; her own fell into step. She found herself inhaling as he did, and an odd calm swamped her.

  “What.” She had to cough, her throat was on fire. “The hell.”

  That got her a smile, and a snort of laughter from behind him. Reese propped her against the counter, one hand at her shoulder. He lifted her arm, and the tremors went down.

  “That’s right,” he soothed. “Just got to get your proprioception down.”

  What? “Hungry,” she managed.

  “I know. We’re just going to teach your body where it is in time and space, okay? Your nerves need the feedback, it’ll help you adjust.” He switched sides, lifted her right arm. There was a final burst of discomfort as the clots of malignant cells buried in her rib cage and abdomen both finished shrinking, and a quiet warmth began in their places.

  Pancreas. And liver. I guessed the pancreas, I knew I was sick. I was right. It wasn’t as comforting as it could have been. She’d been prepared for...what?

  To die. I was ready. Only, she hadn’t been. What was she supposed to do now? “I... I want a shower.”

  “I’ll bet you do. Here, your knee. Up here.”

  Her knee jolted up, almost as if he was a pushy guy she wanted to hurt. He struck the top of her knee lightly with the back of his hand, and the touch seemed to snap the limb into place, all of a sudden bringing it back into her body instead of just floating off in never-never land. The other side was the same, and when he slowly uncurled his fingers from her shoulder, she found she could stand up, and it didn’t seem so...overwhelming. The world was full of fresh color and detail, but it no longer slammed into her over and over again like a baseball bat.

  “Interesting,” he said, and his mouth quirked a fraction. “Hey, Holly. Let’s get some food in you.”

  Wait. Wait just a second. Her brain finally engaged, spinning through the last few minutes. And before, but those memories were curiously...darkened, like old photographs. “You...wait. Wait. This is...you did this to me.”

  “It’s a virus,” that other voice supplied, helpfully, and she peered around Reese to see a shorter man, built compact and wide shouldered, sandy haired and with a beard she could tell he didn’t like crawling up his cheeks. His eyes were very blue, and nothing about him was familiar. “CTX-48, if you want to be specific, code-named Gibraltar. It crawls into your mitochondrial DNA and—”

  “Breakfast first,” Reese said, and Holly slumped against the counter, staring at him. “Explanations can wait.”

  Ninety percent casualty...infect...thirty percent...little swarmers... I’m all flesh, Holly. You smell good.

  “My God,” she whispered, and Reese’s heartbeat sped up just a fraction. Which meant hers did, too. “What have you done to me?”

  * * *

  The pancakes were vanishing at a good clip, the eggs were all but gone and the oranges had been reduced to peels and seeds. Hungry meant she’d survived, and that was just fine by Reese.

  Still, she was too quiet. Eating in starveling bites, those smoky eyes wide and distrustful, and that glorious scent coming in waves. Mixing with the bacon Cal was putting a dent in as well as the richness of coffee, her scent was more intense. More alive.

  More like an agent’s. And there was something else—that metallic yellow streak, gone. It had been so much a part of her scent before, no wonder he’d thought it intrinsic. Had she been really sick, like she’d feared? Being distracted by her at every turn might have covered something up. She kept folding a hand over the right side of her abdomen, as if it hurt, but nothing sounded wrong, and she didn’t smell like pain.

  She also wouldn’t—quite—meet his gaze. She kept quiet as Cal kept talking about absorption rates and virology, every once in a while throwing the goddamn man a glance just a little too fearful to be inviting or even thoughtful.

  When she finally stopped eating and stared into her coffee cup, even Cal seemed to notice something was wrong. At least, his explanations trailed off, and he kept looking at Reese as if asking for direction. Too goddamn late.

  It was all right, though. It meant Reese didn’t have to explain, and whatever anger surfaced would probably fasten on the interloper.

  Finally, the silence turned absolute, and thickened. He poured himself a cup of coffee. There wasn’t a third chair at the tiny table, so he leaned against the sink and watched her.

  She was alive. Dependent on him, maybe even more thoroughly than before. She still smelled so goddamn good it made his eyes water and his hormones rebel. And he’d been with her long enough to know that there was trouble brewing on the Holly horizon.

  She pushed her chair back, gingerly, as if she expected it to fall apart on her. Stood up, with that same finicky care. The tank top did nothing to hide the shape of her breasts, and his own throat had gone dry by now. A crackle
glaze of dried sweat all over her, and every fresh drift of her scent made him remember touching her in the dark.

  “I think I should take a shower now,” she said, very quietly. “Is there hot water?”

  “Ah.” He had to swallow, twice. His imagination was just too good. “Yeah, there should be plenty. Holly—”

  “Okay.” She turned, grabbed at the back of the chair as if she was going to overbalance—and he found himself right next to her, his hand closing around her elbow even as she tried to twitch away.

  She flinched. Halted, staring at the floor.

  Cal cleared his throat. “I, ah...can I use the head before you go in there? Thanks.” He scrambled off his own chair with unseemly haste and vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door and turning both the sink faucets at once.

  As an attempt to give them privacy, it only half worked. The place was so small he couldn’t help but hear them.

  “Holly.” He wasn’t hurting her elbow, he was pretty sure. “Are you...are you okay?”

  “Is he your friend?” She was very pale. Her pulse kept wanting to rise, and his, hitched to it, was difficult to keep down.

  How did he even begin to explain? “He’s...another agent.”

  “He found us?”

  Yeah, I’m going to have to think about that. Predictable is dangerous. “They tried to kill him, too.”

  “How do you know? Never mind.” She tried to pull away, he didn’t let her. “Reese, stop it.”

  Not until I’m sure you’re okay. And not going anywhere. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I just didn’t know what you’d do, and...” He ran out of words. Come on. Say something reasonable. Something she can relate to.

  His brain chased everything he could say around on a hamster wheel, and promptly vaporlocked. It didn’t help that he was practically drooling, because the musk of a healthy black-haired woman threatened to dial everything in him over into the red. With that goddamn yellow-metal component gone, it was even more fascinating, and it was a damn good thing her scent hadn’t been this intense before. It could knock a man out.