Min finished stripping down, including removing the small ceramic knife strapped to his calf. The door on the bin slid shut.
“Face the opposite wall,” the faceless voice commanded. It was slightly mechanical, filtered to be difficult to recognize.
Min did as ordered, and a new panel slid open, exposing another camera and what he knew to be an X-Ray machine. A few seconds passed.
“Turn right, forty-five degrees,” the voice ordered.
He complied, and another two times, letting them grab pictures of his entire body.
“Stand at ease.” The voice didn’t give away any emotion.
Min set his feet shoulder-width apart and clasped his hands behind his back, never flinching that he was still nude.
They were looking for hidden weapons, but also comparing his body to the one they had on file. Everyone here had scars and healed bones. If his wounds didn’t match, he wouldn’t walk out of here as Erek.
Min wasn’t concerned. Except for his mind and a locked-away access to his magic, he was Private First Class Erek. Kirby’s transformation was just as complete.
Seconds ticked away into minutes. He let Erek twitch uncomfortably but didn’t break his stance. Erek’s mind knew everything he needed to do, to make this deception look like genuine nervousness, and not like he had something to hide.
Sliding into the course language, the casual lies, and the desire to smash his fist into something to relieve his tension was foreign to Min, but Erek understood it all.
The panel in the wall slid open again, and different clothes sat inside.
“Get dressed.” The voice, no longer synthesized, was male. Familiar, but not someone Erek spent a lot of time with.
Min put on the uniform. Jeans. T-shirt. Sneakers. There was nowhere to sit in the small box, so he waited.
“Exit through the door.” One of the walls slid open.
Min stepped into a slightly larger room, almost as barren, save for the metal chair bolted to the floor, its back to a second door. His every instinct told him not to get comfortable, and muscle memory insisted he bounce on the balls of his feet. None of this mindset was familiar, but he’d adopted people’s ka enough times over the centuries that he knew how to let the other soul take over.
It was one of the hardest things to do without practice, and it was the other reason Kirby made the best stand-in for Brit—they had enough shared experiences and similar backgrounds that Kirby wouldn’t be fighting most of Brit’s instincts.
The door behind the chair opened, and Loki strode in. Erek was terrified of him, and Min let that show in the slightest of trembles. This was supposed to be an interrogation, disguised as casual conversation. Something friendly but slightly aggressive, designed to get him to slip and change his story. Min knew exactly how that worked. It was the same tactic Starkad had used with Brit.
It didn’t matter. Min knew Erek’s story from start to finish, and the only place it was made up was at the end. Loki wouldn’t be asking anyone else for a different version.
“Private. Good to have you back in our ranks.” Loki’s tone was too bright. Too friendly.
It set Min’s teeth on edge. “Thank you, sir.”
“Care to tell me where you’ve been? We were worried about you. An entire strike team went missing, and you’re the only one left.” While Loki was a few centimeters shorter than Erek, his presence consumed the room.
“Uh... yeah. They were at the warehouse, like we thought. The god—Gwydion, right?—he found me bleeding out. I woke up in a hospital room. They took care of me, then dumped me here in front of the gates.”
“That was nice of them.”
“It was stupid. Who the fuck heals their enemies and sends them home?”
Loki smirked. “Gwydion. But you don’t have any new scars, and he’s a doctor, not a magical healer.”
They’d anticipated this, too. And apparently everyone on campus knew about Kirby at this point. “That Valkyrie traitor was there too. Bitch actually healed my wounds.” Min hated the way this language tasted, and despised this man’s disdain for Kirby.
“Did you see anyone else?”
Min shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Hear any other voices?”
“No, sir. The god, the Valkyrie, and the same white walls for two days.”
Loki shrugged. “All right. Welcome back.” He gestured to the door he’d walked through.
“Sir?” Min didn’t like this.
“We’ll be watching you for a while. Keep that in mind. Expect to be brought back here at a moment’s notice.” Loki turned and strolled from the room, leaving the door open behind him.
Min should be relieved this went so smoothly, but even without a soldier in his head, he knew it wasn’t right. His only choice was to play along until he figured out what was going on, whether he liked that option or not.
Chapter Fourteen
Kirby-as-Brit stepped off the plane in LaGuardia Airport, and the memories rushed back twofold. The last time she’d been here, Brit was by her side, and they were in love. Not Kirby thought they were in love.
Seeing that moment from both minds at once altered her perspective. Brit loved Kirby as much as Kirby did Brit, and knowing that—having it rock in her head with as much reality as anything—squeezed Kirby’s heart in a painful grip.
Back then, they’d walked through this same terminal hand in hand, joking about how grateful they were they didn’t need condoms, because—fuck—those were expensive in gift shops.
Being Brit, living her life, wasn’t like when Kirby recovered her own memories. There was no abrupt rush of the past, trying to crowd itself all into the same space at once. Brit’s life was already there, hanging out casually and waiting until called upon, as if it were Kirby’s.
And this airport called so loudly, it was deafening. This was coming home, over and over, after every mission—so many of those missions with Mark. Resentment, loathing, and disdain spilled from Brit’s memories. Years spent faking everything, while she looked for an escape.
Kirby stowed the memories and continued her journey toward the taxi line. She didn’t have much luggage. A few uniforms, toiletries—nothing that couldn’t be replaced. She didn’t expect to keep any of it beyond the TOM entrance.
She was arriving at campus nearly a week after Min, having spent the last few days living as Brit. Aeval had deposited her on the Cayman Islands, where Brit had IDs and a small stash of money. Not enough to survive on for long. Six months to a year if she was frugal.
Kirby had lived on the island while she waited, acclimating to having Brit’s memories and personality in charge. She was used to a certain degree of self-doubt and destruction, but Brit was a heavy dose of self-loathing and regret. The feelings were peppered with every truth and lie Brit had told Kirby.
And there were a lot more truths than Kirby wanted to see. She’d had to stop prodding the memories, because some of them were so achingly raw.
She stepped to the curb, hailed a taxi, and was on her way to campus. When Brit and Mark took off from this place, more than six months ago, they’d left a car in long-term parking. It was a relief to not be picking that up. To not have him driving. To not have to make halfhearted conversation with the asshole who’d fucked her again and again—physically and life-wise.
Brit knew better than to tumble down that chasm of pain, and turned away even while Kirby teetered on the edge.
She steered her thoughts back toward the current mission. Analyzing the details from a removed position was safe.
The ride was over far sooner than she expected or wanted. She paid the driver and stepped onto the path in front of home.
She approached the campus’s entrance. Any minute now, someone’s disembodied voice would tell her to hit the ground, and she’d be grilled to prove she was Brit.
The closer she got to the entrance, the louder her pulse roared in her ears. Would they simply shoot her?
As she reached the gate, her
senses were on critical alert. Campus police stepped from the guard house and approached. “Sergeant.” The woman kept her hand on her firearm. “Welcome back.”
“Thank you, Private Amy.” Kirby recognized her, but Brit knew Amy. Her rank. How long she’d been here. Whom she hung out with, including Erek for several years, when they were younger.
“I need to know if you’re going to comply,” Amy said. “We’re being watched. Please don’t try anything.”
Kirby dropped her bag and held her hands up in surrender. “Pistol at my hip. Another on my outside right leg. Happy to answer any questions.”
“No questions, sir.” Amy took her weapons.
Kirby didn’t like this, and neither did Brit’s knowledge. “Since when do we offer leniency to anyone, Private?”
“Following orders, sir. Please come with me.”
The interrogation building was only a few hundred meters from the front gate—no reason to bring uninvited guests too far onto the grounds—but Kirby didn’t expect to walk there. She was shown to a room with a single metal chair in the middle. No surprise, it was bolted to the floor. That was the only thing about this situation that felt right.
She didn’t sit. No one had told her to, and she’d rather not keep her back to the door. It wasn’t long before the door opened again, and Loki strolled through.
Well, fuck.
His warm smile and soft eyes made her gut sink. What was he up to? He closed the distance between them with long, confident strides.
She kept her hands behind her back, fingers twitching at the dagger strapped to the inside of her wrist.
When Loki cupped her cheek, shock spilled through her in quantities large enough to mute the revulsion. “Welcome home, lover.” He murmured against her lips.
She flicked her knife into her hand and pressed it to the base of his throat in a single sweep. It’s a test.
Loki stepped back several feet, his smile melting into a smirk. “You led Private Amy to believe you’d handed over all your weapons.”
“And you should have had her frisk me and put me through the same check-in you give every person who’s been MIA.” This part was easy. Kirby and Brit shared an open disdain for Loki, as did a large number of campus residents. He was the public face of the campus, but Hel had been behind the inner workings. “I assume you’re responsible for the stupid command to let me walk in here however I wanted?”
Loki took the single seat and crossed one ankle over the other knee. “You’re our best and brightest.” Sarcasm bled into his reply. “The prodigal-fucking-daughter. I want them to see you getting special treatment.”
“Why?” This couldn’t be good.
“You’re the Chosen One, lover. Gifted by Hel herself, to return after her destruction. How’d that all go down, by the way?”
She wanted to throat-punch him every time he called her lover. She settled for flipping her blade in the air, catching it, and throwing a well-aimed shot at his shoulder.
Loki snagged the dagger from the air, vanished, and buried it in her arm when he reappeared next to her.
Kirby screamed at the pain that tore through her, but never paused. She grabbed the hilt and stabbed at Loki’s gut.
He was already gone, back in the chair.
She recovered from the stumble and fixed a glare on him.
“You certainly fight like Brit.” Loki’s grin was gone. He studied her with a critical eye. “Bleed the way she should. Do you need to get that looked at?”
Kirby wiped the blade on her jeans, sheathed it, and pressed against the already-clotting wound. “I’ll be fine in a few hours. Do you want answers, or are we playing games?”
“You know better than that. Games can provide more answers than questions.”
Kirby hadn’t missed anything about being here, and the culture of bullshit was on the top of her TOM-Sucks-Sweaty-Balls list. “How many staged attacks will it take, for you to find out what happened with Hel? Because I’ll tell you right now.”
“Start before then.” Loki looked at ease in the way no one should when they were in the middle of an interrogation room. Then again, he was the interrogator. “Debrief me on your last mission.”
Kirby let out a long sigh. “Well, you know we ran into an old friend. We thought we’d killed her. Mark wrapped a fucking garrote around her neck”—Kirby faltered at a wash of hundreds of overlapping memories, hers and Brit’s—“and she was dead on the ground when we walked away.” Her voice wavered. A ghost of a gunshot throbbed behind her ribs, carried on conflicting emotions. Kirby, feeling betrayal over and over. Brit, telling herself shooting Kirby was the only way to save her life, though she didn’t know why.
“Something wrong, Sergeant?” Loki’s tone was flat.
Brit had so much regret for what she’d been forced to do, to earn Hel’s trust. Every moment her mind drifted, she fell back into shooting Kirby again and again, and hating herself, even though it hadn’t been real. Even though it was all for Kirby in the end.
Kirby shook her head. It didn’t rattle the past or the pain loose, but it freed her vocal cords. “Just reliving the moment. Hel tested me with what happened there. Put me through it a thousand times, if it was any. To prove my loyalty. Had me relive killing Mark. Let me finally put a bullet in Kirby’s head.” Brit had starkly different feelings about each person, but there was no reason to let Loki see anything except satisfaction.
“Hel must have liked what she saw,” Loki said. “Do continue. With reality, not the test.”
“I shot Mark. I hated the fucker, and he pushed one too many buttons, because yeah, seeing Kirby alive after all that time was a shock, and then he eliminated her. After that, I went after Starkad. Tried to kill him, too.”
Loki gestured for her to go on. “And? How’d that work out for you?”
“I’m guessing you know he’s immortal.”
“For centuries now.” Boredom was leaking into Loki’s voice. “And?”
“And... did you know”—Kirby-as-Brit stalled on a truth everyone knew at this point—“Kirby’s a Valkyrie? She stopped me. Fuck, that hurt.”
“So that’s when you found out. Everyone here has been told who and what the traitor is.”
This was tiresome. “You obviously don’t want the entire drawn-out story,” Kirby said. “Short version—Starkad paid me a nice lump of cash to fuck off, and dumped me in Europe. I kept waiting for someone to come after me, and when I found Hel’s weakness, I thought if I killed her, I’d buy myself some time. That didn’t go according to plan—because of course it didn’t—and I realized I’d been wrong to turn on the group that raised me. I went back to her and begged forgiveness.”
“Yeah.” Loki examined his nails. “Big fight that wrecks part of Wales. Hel dies. Supposedly so do you. And then you show up here, six months later, strolling in like nothing happened. Where have you been?”
“Lost. Wandering. My brain was muddled after I woke up, and I’ve been sorting things out. This is home, though. It always has been, it always will be. Any other questions?” Brit had always been the ultimate at hiding her feelings behind a mask. If Kirby had to be spewing this bullshit without the mental help, she’d crack. Probably try to kill Loki again.
Loki stood and straightened his suit. “Private Erek came back almost a week before you.”
Her arm had stopped bleeding, and the dried mess itched. She flexed her fingers, wanting to scratch, but not wanting to reopen the wound. “Who? Oh yeah. A grunt.”
“They prefer to be called soldiers.” Loki chuckled.
“Good for them. A lot of people come and go. Do you have a list you’d like to walk through with me?”
Bored amusement vanished behind Loki’s irritated snarl. “As you said, short version. He went missing. So did you. When our people encounter Kirby, they tend not to return. Two of you have come back within a week of each other.”
She wasn’t supposed to know anything about where Erek had been or the circumstances behi
nd his release. “From what I’ve seen, Kirby plays fast and loose with who she fucks, and she’s not as removed about it as she tells herself. Did you ask him if Valkyrie pussy feels any different than the regular kind?”
Loki blinked across the room again, reappearing nose-to-nose with Kirby. “Everyone here believes you’re a sign that Hel will return. I don’t know where Hel got that bullshit, because gods don’t come back from destruction. Not even in Urd’s world. But I’m letting you walk out of here, to feed their faith. You’re being watched. Always.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less.” This was the point where she was supposed to quake just a little at Loki’s threat. It was nice, to not have to hide that fear. She’d expected scrutiny, but not from him. Not immediately.
That needed to be her last mistake while she was here.
Chapter Fifteen
Brit’s room was still available. There were a limited number of single-person apartments for the sniper teams, but more than a dozen individuals had died in the last few years, and they weren’t easy to replace.
Kirby took a hint of regretful satisfaction from that.
As she strolled through the grounds, Loki-appointed grunt on her heel, memories trickled back. Kirby’s and Brit’s.
She stepped inside the building where the snipers lived, and the avalanche slammed into her. Of the last time Kirby was here. Being marched to the hearing by campus police, confusion and irritation melting to disbelief and ultimately devastation at the betrayal.
Brit had a few possible routes to get back to her room, but she always took the one that brought her past Kirbys old place. Kirby followed the path, letting Brit’s habits drive, and struggling to sift through her thoughts.
The setting in her memory was the same, but the details were different. Mark’s smirk made her blood run cold. That was worse than the calm, neutral expression he’d been wearing. “Tomorrow morning, Kirby’s going down.”
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