My father stood up straighter, his small smile fading. “Right,” he said. “Of course.” He shifted on his feet, his eyes roaming around the room before settling again on me. “We’ll talk more, though?”
My muscles clenched at the thought, but I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.” I walked past him, shoving Nikki toward the door.
Still, he called after us. “After class?” I froze feet from the exit, biting my lip hard. I turned around to find him watching me expectantly. “I’ll meet you?” he asked.
My heart was pounding harder than it should for something like this, and I forced myself to nod. “Sure.”
His face lifted. “Great!”
I pushed Nikki before he could stop us again. She pulled away from me once we were outside. “What was that about?”
I eyed her wearily. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her eyebrows knitted together. “Did it go badly?”
I shook my head. “It was mostly just—strange.”
She shrugged. “You guys have missed a lot of time. I’m sure things will get better.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said, rolling my injured shoulder as if I could shake away the extra tension.
“I am right,” she said. We came to a stop in front of the academy building. “I grabbed this from the cafeteria.” Nikki pressed a wrapped sandwich into my hand. “I figured if you were cleared to train, you’d get caught up in it.”
My stomach growled as she shot me a knowing look. I smiled lightly. “Thanks, Nikki.”
“Let’s not make this a habit,” she called over her shoulder. I ate my sandwich before heading inside.
Chapter Two
OVERLOOKED
My quick escape from my father had made me a little early for class. Our brief conversation was enough to drag up old memories and I found myself caught up in the past.
I was six years old, lying on the floor on my stomach, across from my dad. Cards were spread out facedown between us. We were playing a memory game. With eight cards left, I was winning. I had never beaten him before, and it was my turn. I flipped a card over. It was a penguin.
“Come on,” my dad said. “You know this.”
He was right, I did. I collected the match and turned over another card. I found that pair too. Before long, I had gathered the remaining sets, not giving my dad a chance to stage a comeback. I stared at him for a moment, with a smile as big as my face, almost afraid to believe I could really have beaten him. “I won.” I kicked my toes against the carpet.
Across from me, my dad smiled back, his eyes twinkling in triumph. “Yeah, kid. You did.”
It was what I needed to hear. I jumped up, bouncing around the living room in sheer excitement. “I won, I won, I won, I won, I WON!”
My dad laughed and I stopped running around long enough to look at him. He was all smiles. “That’s my girl.”
I snapped back to reality, squeezing my head at the temples.
I was his girl.
I was sure he knew enough of KATO to have an understanding about what things may have been like for me, and I hated the thought of him ever learning the specifics of my time there. Because I wasn’t that girl who ran around the living room anymore.
“Whoa,” Gwen said as she and Olivia arrived. “You’re having some deep thoughts.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, sitting up straight.
Gwen’s forehead crinkled as she scanned my face. “It’s not nothing,” she said. “But it’s nothing you’re ready to share.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re good.” Her observations were small, but specific and incredibly accurate. She always said she was skilled at reading people, but I hadn’t realized she was this talented.
Olivia nudged Gwen. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“You could be good too,” Gwen said. “If you gave in to your natural instincts.”
Olivia turned away. “Don’t start with that again.”
Gwen shrugged. “The sooner you decide to accept your path as a strategic planner, the happier you’ll be.”
Olivia scowled at her. “Seriously. Stop,” she said, before spinning around to face the front of the room.
Gwen held her hands up in surrender and looked at me. “It’s a touchy subject.”
She turned back as Agent Lee started class. This issue had been debated for as long as I’d known the two of them. Gwen was planning on being a future grifter for the IDA. Olivia was looking to go into observational intelligence, which would mean she’d blend into the shadows of a given situation and pick up whatever intel she could. Gwen believed Olivia to have more of a big-picture mind, and that she would be better suited for planning operations. Based on what I’d seen, I thought Gwen had a point.
A few minutes after Agent Lee had begun teaching, Sam Lewis sauntered in, taking the seat next to me.
Sam was the most advanced tech student in the IDA. So much so that he had helped me out on several occasions, including my mission into KATO a month ago.
“It looks like we’re getting close to cracking the files,” he said.
My head snapped in his direction, and I tried not to be too eager. Travis, Sam, and I were working on retrieving Eliza Foster, a girl KATO had kidnapped to force her father, a known weapons expert, into working for them. It was just like KATO had done with me and my mom. Travis had been responsible for keeping Eliza safe before she was taken, but things went sideways and he wasn’t able to. I managed to get an approximate location on her when I was in their headquarters, but now we were having a hard time pinning down the specifics. Our first goal was to get Eliza back—she was taken under the IDA’s watch, which made her our responsibility—but we also had to consider what retrieving her would mean.
My main goal when I came to the IDA was to shut down KATO’s agent training program, which could be done most effectively by targeting their satellite safe houses. These houses were primarily used for agent housing and training. Shutting them down would almost certainly cripple the entire agency. Eliza was being kept in one of them. If we went for Eliza, we’d be showing KATO we could get to their houses, which would run the risk of them raising security across the board. The ideal scenario was that we’d be able to hit them all at once and get Eliza back that way. Though it was proving to be challenging enough to find her house, let alone the others. However, we did have one potential lead.
It hadn’t gone unnoticed by Sam that I’d taken the time to look up Eliza’s location when I was in KATO. What I didn’t know at the time was that when Sam saw where I was poking around, he figured it had to be important. He copied as many files connected to Eliza’s as he could in ten seconds, but he hadn’t said anything until a week after the mission.
“By the time the files ended up on our servers, they were seriously encrypted,” he’d told us when Travis and I met with him in Simmonds’s office. “I wasn’t even sure I came away with anything we could use.”
“But you did?” Travis asked, making no attempt to hide how eager he was.
“It looks that way,” Sam said. He explained that he hadn’t anticipated the protections KATO put on copied files. Despite the fact that we had infiltrated their system, copying the files triggered an automatic encryption so sophisticated and layered that even with the IDA’s most advanced technology it would take weeks to crack. Sam and the tech team had been working on it since we’d gotten back, which is why it meant so much to hear there had been progress. It was our hope that the other files would give us insight to other locations just as Eliza’s had.
“How close is close?” I asked Sam, trying to tamp down my excitement.
He shrugged. “Hard to tell exactly, but it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days.”
A few days seemed like nothing compared to the weeks it’d taken so far, yet still not soon enough. “
You’ll find me?”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t ask stupid questions, KATO girl.” He remained the only person who could get away with calling me that. He looked back at his phone.
“As soon as Lewis and Steely are ready, we’ll be starting our individual and team assessment unit,” Agent Lee said, looking directly at the two of us. I gave her an apologetic look as Sam put his phone down.
She nodded in brief acknowledgment before continuing her lesson. “Our goal for this is to have a better understanding of how to recognize the strengths of an individual, and how to either utilize them on a team or work around them in an enemy.” In front of me, Gwen was staring at Olivia, who was very pointedly ignoring her. Agent Lee turned to the whiteboard. “Strengths can primarily be sorted into two groups—physical and intellectual—but within each group is a wide variety of skills.”
She proceeded to list the different physical and intellectual strengths a person can have, and I forced myself to push my other problems aside and focus.
The rest of my classes passed without much else to note—until I reached Agent Harper’s room. He’d spent most of the year going out of his way to get under my skin, mostly by using my history at KATO to embarrass me in class. I had gotten a brief pass after I’d left the medical wing, but that only lasted for a few days. Since then, he’d been growing increasingly hostile—pushing every KATO button he could think of. The edginess I’d felt since I got back from North Korea had only made the situation worse.
“Viper.” Harper’s voice cut through the pre-class chatter, effectively silencing the room. My stomach tightened as Sam, who had just crossed the threshold, caught my eye. Then he glared at Harper and stepped purposefully in front of him on his way back to his seat.
My eyes locked back on Harper, who was unfazed by Sam, while I pressed my palms into the table. I was in no mood for anything that might come next.
“I’ve been thinking.” Harper’s tone was perfectly innocent, but his lips were twisting in a way that was anything but. “In order to better understand the enemy, it would help if we knew how one thought. I’d like you to tell the class what it’s like to kill someone.”
Everything went quiet and there was a ringing in my ears that I couldn’t seem to shake. It was just loud enough to make me think there was a possibility I had heard him wrong. “What did you just ask me?” I couldn’t help the growl in my voice.
Harper smirked, his cockiness reaching unmanageable levels. “What is it like to kill someone?” He asked the question slowly, leaving no room for error. “More specifically, what is it like to want to kill someone?”
A fire ignited in my chest and quickly spiraled through me.
Harper came closer when I didn’t answer. He stood next to me, towering over me in what I was sure was some kind of power play. “Plenty of people in this room will fight killers like you—”
He never got to finish his sentence. I’d had more than enough of Agent Harper and his questions. I barely thought about what I was doing when I found myself standing over him, my hand around his neck, holding him to the table. Harper’s eyes were wide with surprise and a flash of fear. I felt like I had in the training room earlier—like I finally had a release from all the tension that had been building over the past few weeks—or even months.
I forced myself to let go of him, but I didn’t back away. I stayed hovering over him. Sam shot me a series of questioning and concerned looks, while Gwen, Olivia, and the rest of the class stared at me wide-eyed. I heard someone on the other side of the room mutter that it was about time. As much as I was mad at myself for giving in, the kid wasn’t wrong. It was about time.
I leaned in just a little bit closer to Harper. “You’re not going to tell anyone about this,” I hissed at him. “Because if you do, I’ll tell Simmonds what it was that pushed me.” I strangled a teacher. If it got back to Simmonds, I would most definitely be in more trouble than Harper would be for provoking me. But he had been crossing the line with me since I showed up on campus. I knew from Olivia that Harper was too young to be assigned in-house, which meant teaching had to be some kind of punishment. He couldn’t afford another black mark on his record, no matter how small.
He gritted his teeth and glowered at me in a way that told me I had him. I stepped back, giving him the chance to get up. Harper hurried to the front of the room, staring straight ahead as I attempted to burn a hole in his skull using only my mind. He threw a worksheet at us and spent the rest of the class hiding behind his computer screen.
As good as it felt to put Harper in his place, I was still agitated that he’d dragged up my history again in the first place. I was so distracted that I completely forgot my father would be waiting for me after class. I stopped short when I saw him standing across the hall.
There were days in KATO where I dreamed that something like this would happen—that I could actually find myself face-to-face with either or both of my parents. But I thought KATO had killed them both, so I never believed this could be a reality. It was something I’d made peace with a long time ago. Now I was seeing my dad for the second time that day and it felt overwhelming. I still had that six-year-old running around my mind. I couldn’t stop comparing who I’d become to who I used to be.
I crossed my arms to keep from fidgeting.
Behind me, Gwen and Olivia slipped out of the classroom, congratulating me on my victory as they passed.
“What’s that about?” my dad asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “You wanted to talk?”
“Right.” He shifted his weight awkwardly, glancing around as if he had forgotten why he’d come here. “I saw an empty meeting room down the hall. I thought we could use that.”
“Yeah.” I bit my lip. “Okay.”
He took a hesitant step toward the room and I followed. The space was no bigger than a classroom, but arranged to look more like a conference room. There was a long table in the center with a large monitor behind one end and a whiteboard behind the other. My dad took the seat in front of the monitor and I sat down next to him. He wheeled his chair over so we were sitting across from each other without the table to separate us.
For a long moment neither one of us said a word. He studied me, seeming to be waiting for something, though I didn’t know what. Eventually he spoke. “I know this might be strange.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Because we’ve haven’t seen each other for ten years?” I asked. “Or because you thought I was dead?” His jaw clenched. “It’s okay that you did.” I sat up straighter. “I understand why you would. KATO isn’t exactly known for turning enemy kids into spies. Aside from me, there are only two other foreign agents I’ve come across.” I killed one of them in a KATO training exercise, but he didn’t need to know that. “Plus, I thought you were dead too.”
He held his hard expression and watched me steadily. “I—” He struggled to get the words out. “I figured out pretty quickly that KATO wanted your mom for her science background. And if that was true, it had to mean that you were leverage.” I swallowed hard and he continued. “I spent three years doing everything I could to get to you. I knew you had to be in KATO’s headquarters, but I could never get a lock on their location.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had softened. “When your mom turned up—when her body turned up—I was certain you wouldn’t be far behind. KATO had my full attention for three years. I thought I understood how they operated. Everything I’d found said that they killed the people they were finished with. So if your mom was dead it meant they didn’t need you for leverage anymore. And I couldn’t handle seeing you like that.” He gave his head a hard shake. “I shouldn’t have given up so easily.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” I said, looking away from him. I wasn’t going into this any deeper. Not now. “Even if you found out I was alive, you wouldn’t have gotten close to me.” He dr
ew a sharp breath, and I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or angry. I paused for a beat then tried again, speaking more gently this time. “This isn’t your fault.” His eyes sharpened considerably. “It’s KATO’s. There was nothing you could have done.”
Pain flashed across his face, and he took a moment to find his voice. “We can get away from them now.”
My stomach jumped into my throat and I wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement. He couldn’t mean what I thought he did. “What are you saying?”
A smile fought its way onto his face. “I’m saying I can get you out of this world. We can leave together. I can make us disappear.”
I bit down on my tongue, not daring to speak until I was certain I had heard him correctly. “No.”
He stiffened. “What?”
“I said no.” I crossed my arms and shifted away from him, leaving no room for misunderstanding. “I have too much to do here.”
His face wrinkled with confusion. “I don’t know much about what happened to you over the past ten years, but I got the highlights of what’s gone on since you’ve been back. I heard you’re being hunted.” He leaned forward, invading my space. “I can get you away from that. I know how to stay hidden.”
I pushed myself out of the chair and spun to stand behind it, gripping the back tightly. “I don’t want to stay hidden! I didn’t come here just so I could get away from them. I came here so I could hurt them. I’m not finished with that.”
Of course, part of me loved the idea of falling completely off the grid; the damage KATO had done over the years has been devastating, and they used me as a tool. But I was too far in to let them get away with it.
He blinked a few times, clearly struggling to comprehend. “What’s the point in hurting them if it gives them the chance to hurt you?”
Enemy Exposure Page 2