Agent Zero

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Bronson must have a very thick skull.”

  Who? “Bronson? Oh, the man you—”

  “I should have snapped his neck, but I thought Caldwell...it doesn’t matter. Next time I’ll calculate better.”

  There might not be a next time, if what I’m hearing is them discovering we’re roaming around. “So now what?” A sudden realization hit her. Wait a second. Six and Eight. “You’re Three. All those numbers. Not names.”

  Trinity turned her head very slowly, and now she had an expression. Dull rage stained her cheeks with a sudden flush, and Holly watched, fascinated, as the color faded and the face became a doll’s mask again.

  “I was Three,” she said. “Now I’m Trinity. Please don’t call me the former.”

  God. “I’m sorry.” Holly swallowed, dryly. “I won’t.”

  “Good.” Trinity set off down the hall again, this time at a quicker pace. “Come on.”

  They rounded another corner, and Holly stopped so quickly she swayed, her nostrils flaring. Wait. Is that... “Reese. I smell him.”

  Trinity took a deep whiff. “Interesting. Why would they be held here? It doesn’t compute. Unless...”

  “Unless what?”

  “It’s more bad news.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Generally hostiles are held here, until they’re interrogated, or...”

  “Or?” I hate pulling this crap out of people, come on!

  “Restructured through induction, but that liquidates the males. Perhaps they wish to test the Gemini males?” She shook her head, slightly. “Not enough data. The only other reason would be simple liquidation.”

  “You mean killing. We can’t let them—”

  “Not our problem at this point,” Trinity muttered, but another expression crossed her face. This one was odd, as if she was straining to recall the lyrics to a long-ago song. “Odd. There’s two agent tracks. I wonder...”

  “Reese and Cal? It’s got to be. They are our problem.” Her heart leaped at the thought. “We have to rescue them.”

  “Rescue two fully trained liquidation agents, seventy percent chance of them drugged into insensibility? Oh, that’s a marvelous idea. They’re probably beyond rescue by now, and the chances of getting away ourselves would go down.” A faint tinge of sarcasm. Still, Trinity hesitated, her face changing by another millimeter or two.

  A faint, rhythmic stamping began. It grew in volume, and Holly realized it was booted feet. Men. At least six of them. Heading straight for them, from a corridor to the left. “They’re coming.”

  “The best exit is this way. If we find the agents along the way, that will alter the calculations. But—”

  It was at that point Holly lost her temper. “Look, I don’t care about the calculations. It’s Reese and Cal. We have to help them. If you won’t, I’ll do it myself.” Even though I have no idea where I am—but you know what? I can follow my nose, maybe I can move as fast as Reese, and... I’ll figure something out.

  My smart girl, her father whispered inside her head.

  Trinity shrugged. “They’re probably in the A5 cellblock. A dead end. The timescale is—”

  “Which way?”

  “What?”

  “Which way? To this cellblock.”

  Trinity pointed, and Holly set her chin, squared her shoulders and set off.

  * * *

  Reese’s shoulder was a ball of hot red pain, but he stayed still, wedged into the corner of the cell. The socks were too slippery, so he’d shed them, and the soles of his feet gripped the wall as his fingertips used a faint lip in the concrete to keep him aloft. A good core workout, but he could have done without it. Cal, his sweat full of that damn trank burning off, was opposite him, jammed into the other corner, holding himself there with sheer will. The cell door groaned and drew aside, clattering, and the lead for the team outside looked in, a yellow beam from his flashlight playing over the two empty metal bunks. “For God’s sake,” the leader snarled, “is this the right room?”

  “Got to be,” someone else said. “Right on the sheet, A-54.”

  Come on, Reese prayed, his feet slipping by millimeters as he strained, silently, his own acrid sweat stinging as it dripped into his eyes. Give me something here. Get curious. Where did we go?

  Cloth moving. “Can’t have vanished—” The dumb jerk covering the door opening made his first mistake, edging inside the cell as the flashlight beam played around the shadows underneath the bench.

  Reese dropped, light as a cat, and then it was a blur, bones snapping and a spray of blood from the one whose nose he broke with a quick hand-heel up, dropping his center of gravity immediately afterward to power through the doorway, Cal landing behind him and the greenstick crack of a neck breaking. Slapping the gun aside, smelling refried beans and pico de gallo on the backstop guy, cheap beer and good steak on another, their uniforms familiar and strange at the same time. A highly trained transport team had a good chance against two tranked, restrained agents—had they expected him and Cal to still be zoned?

  The leader managed to squeeze off a shot that whined and ricocheted down the hall before Cal was on him, the other agent silent and economical, a strike to the throat and subtracting the gun as the leader folded down, and between the two of them, they had just killed four men. True blue American patriots, no doubt. Just following orders.

  Had one of them shot Holly? Or had that pleasure been reserved for a higher-up? Was she still alive?

  She’d better be.

  The only sound was their breathing and soft rustles as the agents canvassed the bodies for gear. Boots that fit, still warm, a piece of luck. Ammo, service guns, a crackling walkie-talkie—someone would get nervous and start looking for these guys soon.

  Cal stiffened, his blond head coming up. His blue eyes blazed, and the difference between this man and the one who couldn’t shut up back in the cabin was night and day. Maybe he’d just needed someone to talk to.

  Don’t we all. Reese heard it too. Six sets of footsteps, moving in doublequick, almost on them. Something else nagged at him, but he didn’t have time to figure it out. He was already moving, Cal following to cover. The gun in his hand was a good start, and a multiplicity of targets meant that maybe he could neutralize and interrogate one of them. First step was to find out where he was, and the second...well.

  Louder and louder, and he smelled adrenaline, determination, a chemical reek and the peculiar staticky unsmell of men carrying live weapons. Jingles and little creaks of gear. A cross corridor ahead, and if he and Cal could reach it before they did, the ambush would be simple to—

  No.

  He dug his heels in, hard. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be that lucky.

  Faint noise underneath the louder footsteps. Agent-strong, beautiful scents, both female, but one raised his hackles. The other had quite a different effect.

  It was Holly. Riding some current of air that almost vanished, and everything in Reese collapsed for a moment before reforming in a different constellation.

  “You smell that?” Cal mouthed. He’d stopped, too.

  Reese nodded, and the impossible happened.

  They surged around the corner at a run, two slim female figures, one all in black, skirt and very practical flats, her hair tied back in a too-tight ponytail and her scent rasping a little unpleasantly across his nose. The other, in an unzipped blue parka and still-damp boots, with a glory of mussed black hair, wild-eyed and fuming with fear and adrenaline, was Holly.

  A shout behind them, echoing strangely, and the pop and zing of live fire.

  Reese didn’t remember the intervening space. He just moved, and Holly ran into him, her breath coming high and hard. She was whole, and alive, but both the women reeked of blood and exhaustion.

  The other woman, holding a s
tandard issue with the barrel down, moving smoothly and professionally, barely broke stride. “Incoming!” she barked, and Cal bolted straight for her. Weird—the new woman’s smell almost vanished into a powerful burst of something from Cal, a blue-tinted wave that might have knocked Reese down if his anchor hadn’t been in his arms, coughing as her eyes welled with tears that were probably, if Reese was lucky, at least partly relief.

  “Come on!” the stranger said, but Cal grabbed her, neatest trick of the week, and shoved her against the wall, almost knocking the gun out of her hand.

  “Stay there,” he snapped, and turned, his gun coming up.

  Thank you, God. Thank you. But they weren’t out of the woods yet.

  Reese pushed Holly behind him and had bare seconds to brace himself before the first of the pursuers appeared.

  * * *

  Chaos. Bullets zinging, Reese yelled, “Get down!” and Holly stumbled aside, fetching up against the wall instead. Her cheeks were slick and hot, the pain in her head had vanished, and deep relief at seeing Reese—mussed and dirty, with blackened fingers and a pair of boots that looked hideously uncomfortable—turned her knees to jelly. Cal was similarly dirty and didn’t even bother glancing at her, instead sinking to one knee and steadily aiming at the opening she and Trinity had just run through. Trinity raised her gun as well, sliding along the wall with oiled grace, and Holly realized what was going to happen.

  The men chasing them were going to walk right into a shooting gallery.

  Uh-oh. She snapped a glance back down the hall, impelled by a gleam at the edge of her peripheral vision.

  Everything seemed to slow down. Later, she would wonder if it actually had, or if her newfound senses had played some trick of perception. Maybe she’d just found a cosmic pause button.

  Trinity, Reese, Cal. They all wore the same expression—set and thoughtful, though Reese’s expression shaded into worry, and Cal’s into puzzlement. Trinity’s was faintly puzzled, too, but a casual observer would probably just call it blank.

  There was a slice of brilliance behind their little group. That gold was electric light, spilling out in a slowly widening scythe, and the shadow behind it filled Holly’s throat with cold dread. She was suddenly, completely sure that the shadow belonged to a man with pitted skin and eyes cold and dark as leftover coffee. He would be holding a gun, and when he stepped out he would be able to fire down the hall, right at their unsuspecting backs. They were like fish in a barrel here.

  Do something!

  But what? What could she do?

  I am so tired of being afraid. And another thought, at the same time, familiar and strange.

  I want to live.

  The shadow was growing closer, because she was running, her boot soles squeaking as a racket started up behind her. Pops and pings, a scream cut off on a gurgle, shouted obscenities.

  It was him, the man with the bad skin. Everything on his face was puffing up, dried blood and bruising turning him into a leering grotesque. His mouth had opened, maybe surprised at walking into this chaos. He did have a gun, the same kind the others were carrying, and Holly’s entire body went cold.

  Because its ugly black mouth—and why did it look so big, she didn’t have time to figure it out—was pointed directly at Reese’s back.

  Crunch.

  Later she would be amazed that she could remember, very clearly, the sound of ribs snapping as she crashed into Bronson. The gun skittered away, an eye-searing flash as the shot went wide, and Holly realized she was screaming as they hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and a hot burst of blood from his wounded face, because her forehead had clipped his broken nose again.

  For one blinding instant, she remembered the light shining in her eyes—the rest of the room was black in comparison, and her unresisting body had been strapped to a hard wooden chair. Their voices—Trinity’s, Bronson’s, someone else’s—as they discussed what to do with her. The terse, low conversation as two men carried her up to her apartment, and Reese’s face, pale and drawn as he pulled her up from the floor. Holly? Holly, look at me.

  Reese in a chair, the scalpel bright as he dug something small and silver out of his hip, his face betraying nothing but distance. No pain, not even a wince.

  This is probably the man who made him that way.

  She thrashed, trying to get free of the tangle, and there was another sickening crack. The man’s body sagged, and Holly, blinking, his blood on her face, stared up into Trinity’s expressionless gaze.

  The blonde woman had shot Bronson.

  Next time, I’ll calculate better.

  Holly’s stomach lurched, but Trinity stooped a bit, and her warm hand closed around Holly’s. Trinity sank back, and Holly rose in a rush, her head spinning dangerously. They stood almost nose to nose, for a moment, and Holly had time to see a spark of...something...struggle to stay alive in the other woman’s pupils.

  The flash died. Trinity snapped a glance over her shoulder, her ponytail whipping. Then she was gone, past Holly and running, and she nipped neatly through the door Bronson had used before it closed with a dull, heavy, final thud.

  “Holly!” Reese skidded to a stop, sliding a fresh clip of ammo into his gun. “Come on!”

  But Trinity—

  There was no time. Reese grabbed her right arm and pulled her along. When they passed Cal, the other man grabbed her left arm, and hanging between the two of them Holly didn’t have to time to think about that awful cracking sound, the blood and Trinity’s blank, horrified gaze.

  * * *

  Getting off a high-security base smack-dab in the middle of the desert was made fractionally easier by the fact that it was the middle of the night and the alarms hadn’t started going off. The key fob Cal had plucked from a casualty’s pocket matched a nice little sedan full of a ghost of drive-thru meals and the heavy smell of a man who wouldn’t ever be eating another one again, Holly went in the backseat, and Cal drove sedately through the base, navigating by feel and instinct, until they found a gate. Flashing Bronson’s badge got them through it, and as the klieg lights of the installation faded behind them, Reese could finally let himself sag in the seat, blowing out a long breath.

  “She didn’t give another name?” Cal asked, again. He couldn’t let it go.

  “Just Trinity. They called her Three, but she...” Holly’s voice broke. Reese reached down to find the lever on the right side of the seat, hitting the seat belt’s catch with his other hand. All the way back, and he could squirm into the backseat as Holly scrambled to make room. Cal let out a short, frustrated sound, but twenty seconds later the passenger seat was back up and Reese had Holly in his arms. Trembling, full of sharp fearsmell cutting through the rest of her glorious scent, she was still whole and alive. He buried his face in her hair.

  “Christ.” Cal snapped the radio on, flipping it to AM and searching through the bands for any news or emergency chatter. “Get a room, you two.”

  “God,” Reese said around a mouthful of Holly’s tangled hair. “God.” True to form, his body wanted to prove she was alive another way, but that could wait.

  Everything could wait. She was here, and alive, and everything else was just noise.

  She shook like a leaf, but she wasn’t crying. She just clung to him, and after a little while Cal cleared his throat. “I, uh, should probably split off from you guys and go find her.”

  What? Reese’s brain started working again. “You think she’s—”

  “She smells good, Reese.” Cal tapped at the steering wheel, once. “We have a freeway. Looks like Utah. Great. So, north or south?”

  That was an easy one. “South.” Lost my damn backpack. Need liquid resources and fresh ID. Wonder if that place in Phoenix is still open? “How good does she smell?”

  “Good enough that I’m going to track her down.” The
other agent sounded very certain. “Ma’am, when we’ve had some time to calm down a bit, I’ll ask you for everything she said that you can remember, all right?”

  “She...she’s...” Holly shook her head, and the movement against his chest made his entire body ache in the most frustratingly pleasant way imaginable.

  “Not now,” he said, nice and low and easy. “Not right now. Just breathe, honey. Everything’s okay. I’m here.” Lucky. So goddamn lucky.

  “I th-thought you were d-dead.” Maybe she was going into shock. Her teeth were chattering. He hugged her even harder.

  “Not even close.” And even if I was, I’d come back for you.

  “I hate to interrupt, lovebirds, but we have stuff to do.” Cal peered at the signs flashing by. “They’ll be on us as soon as Bronson’s missed.”

  “Just keep going south. We need to get urban and vanish.”

  “Right. Campgrounds around here, too.”

  “Start of winter. Might be a cabin or two.”

  “Want to risk it?”

  “No. Installation this size has to have a hub near it.”

  “It’s Utah. The hub might be a survivalist compound full of polygamists.”

  “Then we’ll deal. Does the glove box have a map?”

  “I’m busy driving. Sir.”

  And I’m busy. But he had a job to do. “Holly. Baby. Be easy, okay? It’s over. It’s all over.”

  “N-no, it’s not.” But she wriggled away from him, his arms suddenly cold without her breathing weight. “We still h-have to escape.” Her face was a pale smear in the darkness, her eyes just a suggestion of glitter, but he could see her chin lift a little and her shoulders go back. It made his chest feel a little funny. Loose and weird inside. “I’m all right.”

  Oh, Christ. Reese lost every battle he’d ever thought of waging with himself, leaned forward, and kissed her.

  She tasted like gunsmoke and citrus and adrenaline, and everything that was good and beautiful and maddening in the world. Her hands cupped his face, soft and shaking just a little, and he fell into her for an eternity before she retreated, breaking free with a low inquiring noise that tightened every string in his body. She rested her forehead against his, their breath mingled, and Reese realized she wasn’t the only one shaking.