by Ann Pino
Galahad looked at her, every movement a study in calm resignation. “Maybe I just wanted to see her one last time. If that makes me some kind of criminal, shoot me.” Without another glance, he strode out the door.
Cassie made like she would go after him, but Julilla got to the door ahead of her and slammed it shut. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I—” she tried to think. “I want to see what he left me.”
“Bullshit. It’s probably a trick. Men do that, you know. When a guy thinks he’s about to lose a girl, he’ll lure her into a place where they’ll be alone so he can kill her.” At Cassie’s disbelieving look, she added, “Wait until he’s gone. If he really did leave you something, it’ll still be there.”
“But I— oh, fine.” She threw herself on her bed and buried her face in the pillow.
Julilla rested a hand on her shoulder. “Why are you being this way? You were doing real good before. Why are you acting all weak and girlie now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. But she did know. If there had been any hope they might reconcile, it was gone now. He wouldn’t come back from this mission. If he didn’t get killed, he would die from Telo. He had gone away because of her and now even if there was some way to make things right, the opportunity had passed. “It’s just so…final.” Cassie raised her head and swiped at her nose. “I’m sick of everything being final. Aren’t you?”
Julilla sat on the edge of the bed with a sigh. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am.”
EXCERPT FROM CASSIE’S JOURNAL:
Jay is gone and it’s probably forever. I’m trying not to care, but it’s hard. He left me the keys to the penthouse, but that only makes it worse because everything there reminds me of him.
I took Julilla up there with me, making her the third person to know about it. She was impressed and when she saw the cupboard of cookies, mustards and jellies, she said she too would’ve loved a guy who could give her all those things.
“I wasn’t doing it for food and feather pillows,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean it’s pretty overwhelming.” She made a motion with her good arm that indicated the entire suite. “A place like this could make anyone think they were in love.”
I wanted to be angry and tell her I loved Jay before he showed me the penthouse. I wanted to tell her my love was as real as the sun in the sky and the stars at night, but I was too sick from the way my thoughts kept running on the same stupid hamster wheel to nowhere. I told her to pick a snack and we went into the library.
While I made tea, Julilla examined the books. She got pretty excited over one called The Art of War, saying Alex had mentioned it once and could she borrow it. I said sure, since what difference did it make to me? When the tea was ready, I poured it into china cups and we talked.
“You know,” she said, “There’s a lot of space up here. We could make this a damn fine training room.”
“I don’t want anyone else knowing about it. I only brought you because you’re my friend. No one else, though. Not even Doc.”
“I didn’t mean like we’d bring the whole squad,” she said. “Just me and you. It’s nice up here and I bet we could get a lot of practice in, without the guys, the children, and everything else down there that distracts us.”
This made me smile. “Up here, it’s a whole different world. Anything’s possible.”
“It might even be possible you’ll get over being in love.”
“Does anyone really get over that?”
Julilla looked away and I think she was embarrassed. “It gets easier.”
For the first time I wondered what her past was like. I’ve been so caught up in my own stupid love affair and the growth hormone mystery that I never thought to ask what Julilla’s family was like, how she ended up with the Regents, and whether she had a love of her own. Maybe she’s like me and dumped someone because he turned out not to be who she thought he was. Or maybe there’s someone she’s still crazy about, rotting in one of the Telo pits.
How could I have been so selfish as to think I was the only one who had loved? Why do I think my pain is so special?
“Well,” I told her, “This place is ours now. We can make it whatever we want it to be.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Cassie began training under Julilla’s watchful eye. There were the regular sessions with Alex and the other guards, but it was in the penthouse with Julilla that Cassie developed her best skills, growing quick and strong in both mind and body. Now that she was a guard she had access to better food, and she and Julilla supplemented their meals from the penthouse’s larder. Cassie’s occasional bouts of dizziness and nausea disappeared, her body filled out with lean muscle, and to her annoyance, she even started getting her period again.
Frustrated by the upkeep on her hair now that she was out of camp shampoo, she contemplated cutting it all off. Instead, Julilla enlisted Alaina’s help in braiding it, producing dozens of small braids that hugged her scalp and flowed down her back. Sometimes she tied up all the braids in a knot, annoyed with even this much work. At other times, feeling sentimental, she tied little pieces of colored cellophane in them in imitation of May, whose shop she went to, pretending to buy bangles but really to deliver and pick up messages from their embedded team with the Obits.
Cassie didn’t like to admit that it was the possibility of a message from Galahad and not the errand itself she liked. Not that any of his messages were directed to her. They were official dispatches, written in code and describing the team’s contacts, hints of news, and their efforts to gain the trust of both Pharms and Obits so they could penetrate deeper. Sometimes May had more specific news of Galahad and these were the days Cassie lived for, even though she had to stand stony-faced, feigning nothing more than professional interest while May’s knowing eyes bored into her soul.
Cassie couldn’t let Galahad go. She trained to exhaustion, only to dream of him. She drank whiskey when she could get it, only to break down in drunken sentimentality. She even dated, such as was possible, but the kisses and fumblings of other boys left her cold. She wished her mother was alive to explain all this to her. Julilla didn’t get it and Rochelle understood only too well, still trying in vain to get Doc to see her as something more than a child nurse. So Cassie took out her anger on Julilla’s punching bag and ran up and down the stairs until she thought her heart would burst, but as the days grew warmer her longing for Galahad grew worse, leaving her petulant and irritable.
It was on a warm day in early summer after nearly two weeks of petty drop-bys and threats from the Pharms that Danny and Danica showed up, dressed for summer in matching black pants and cotton tanks overlaid with studded bandoliers. They hadn’t been to the hotel in awhile but now they walked right up to her guard station. After a critical scan of Cassie’s clothes and hairstyle, Danica got to the point. “May is in danger. The Pharms closed down her shop.”
“We haven’t seen her come out,” Danny added. “It looks like they’re holding her prisoner.”
“Do you know why?”
Danica shook her head. “She was doing so much double-dealing it could be anything.”
“We heard them breaking things,” Danny said. “But there were too many of them for us to try and rescue her. We thought—” he looked at his twin and fell silent.
Cassie caught the look and understood. The twins weren’t used to asking for anything and probably weren’t aware that May was their primary link to the embedded team. “Of course we’ll help.”
She took them to Mundo’s summer office on the covered deck by the potato garden, but if she had hoped to be allowed to stay and strategize, she was disappointed. “You can return to your post,” Mundo told her. “We’ll let you know if you’re needed for anything else.”
Annoyed, she returned to the front door and two hours later was further frustrated when she wasn’t chosen for the rescue team. “What the hell?” she told Jul
illa. “I train like the rest of you. Why not me?”
“We can’t all go. Besides, you’re needed here.”
“Rochelle can cover the afternoon clinic shift. She’ll do anything to spend more time with Doc.”
“Cassie—”
“Fine.” She leaned against a pillar and pretended to watch the street for danger. She didn’t know how to explain her new longing to fight, since she didn’t understand it herself. “People are going to think you don’t believe in me. They’re going to say I must not be any good since you never let me fight or forage.”
“It’s you who don’t want to forage,” Julilla reminded her, making Cassie blush as she remembered her refusal to take orders from David. “And no offense, but you’re mostly a defensive fighter. That’s why we want you here, in case there’s trouble while we’re gone.”
“If I’m in the clinic, I can’t do much good.”
“Don’t talk like you think I’m stupid. When have you ever been chained to the ward?” Julilla gave her a sly look. “Would you rather spend the afternoon out here? I can recommend you be put on double shifts.”
“No thanks. Morning is enough.”
“Then quit complaining. Things are getting weird and you’ll probably have plenty to keep yourself busy with real soon.”
* * *
Cassie made the ward rounds in sullen silence, taking vitals and making notes on charts. The room was stifling in the early summer heat, even with a window broken out and replaced by netting held in place with duct tape while they waited for Sid to come up with a better solution. The sickest patients were allowed battery-powered fans, which didn’t help much. Everyone else was supposed to be fanned in rotation by one of two children assigned to make the rounds with sturdy palm fans from the hotel gift shop. The children spent more time fanning themselves and each other though, and Cassie was in too sour a mood to correct them.
They had a new Telo victim—a girl named Mella who had been one of Sandra’s assistants in the kitchen. Cassie tried to help her sit so she could breathe, but Mella gurgled and flailed, bruising her delicate veins. Frustrated, Cassie eased her back onto the pillows. Mella no longer knew anyone around her or even where she was. She would likely be dead within twenty-four hours, so perhaps it was pointless to help her breathe, and it might even be cruel.
Cassie stood and wiped the sweat beading her forehead. If it was this hot now, what would August be like? She went into the treatment room to speak to Doc. They needed to start thinking of what they would do in late summer. No way could they get people well in an oven like this.
She found Doc examining the baby while Rochelle stood by in exasperation. “It’s just ordinary heat rash,” she said in a tone that suggested she was repeating herself. “I looked it up. We need powder, not zinc oxide.”
“Well, it’s a moot point, since I don’t have either.” Seeing Cassie in the doorway, Doc asked, “Don’t you girls have powder or something?”
Cassie shook her head. “Not me. If there’s anyone who does, it’s probably not the right kind.”
“It should have corn starch,” Rochelle said, snapping the baby’s clothes together and scooping him into her arms.
“Good luck with that.” Doc frowned in irritation. “Anything that’s come into this place containing corn starch probably ended up in one of Sandra’s dinner pots.”
“If it’s really just heat rash,” Cassie added, “The best thing would be to take the baby out on the deck instead of hanging around in here where it’s all stuffy. Doesn’t Mundo want to see his kid?”
Rochelle shrugged. “He was playing with him earlier, but asked me to take him away when we got word what happened to May. You know the rescue team is back already, right?”
Cassie hadn’t known. It was too early to expect them back and she had expected there would be at least one or two casualties. “That was fast.”
“Yeah,” Doc said, his face settling into grim lines. “They got there just in time to see a van pulling away. A black one.”
“Obits? They wouldn’t want her. They take young ones, not—”
“That’s all I know,” Rochelle apologized, bouncing the baby as he made irritated mewling noises. “Mundo sent me away. He said they needed to talk strategy and the baby would be a distraction.”
“So they’re up there talking now?”
“They were when I left.”
Before Doc could call for her to wait, Cassie made for the door. She didn’t make it far, though, running into Julilla in the hallway. “What happened?” Cassie demanded. “Rochelle says—”
“I know. Something’s not adding up, although we have some theories.” Julilla motioned toward the stairwell. “Come on. We want your take on this, since you’ve been going over to May’s lately.”
* * *
Cassie had no idea what information might be helpful. She answered Mundo’s questions about who and what she had seen on each of her trips to the jewelry shop, but none of it was information she hadn’t given at earlier debriefings. She struggled to keep her mind on topic. Without May, how would they get Galahad’s messages? Would the Pharm turncoat who was acting as middleman try to make contact in some other way?
“You’re sure you never saw anyone who looked suspicious?” Mundo asked for the third time. “Any spy would’ve likely been a girl, you know; someone pretending to buy jewelry like you were.”
“There was the time I ran into those Zoo girls trading ostrich plumes for zebra pendants,” Cassie said. “But we followed up on that at the time it happened.”
Alex nodded and shoved his sweaty hair off his forehead. “I remember that. They were just what they appeared to be—ordinary monkey-eaters.”
“That’s not a nice thing to call them,” Kayleen said, lounging in a bikini at Mundo’s side and occasionally taking meeting notes. They were settled underneath a hinged flap Sid had attached to the deck awning and she motioned for one of the children to pull the rope harder so the fan would move more air across her body.
“They are monkey-eaters,” Julilla said. “They also eat cheetahs, bats, and toucans. Might as well call it like it is.”
Mundo took a sip of his drink. “Let’s not have any name-calling. If nothing we did tipped off the Pharms and Obits, then it was something someone else did. That might be good, since it means no one in the alliance is working against us.”
“Unless May herself was,” Julilla pointed out. “Maybe they knew all along she was feeding us information and got tired of not knowing who she was really working for.”
Everyone fell silent, pondering this possibility. If May was unreliable, the entire mission was compromised. Their embedded team might not be alive and their messages could have been fakes, composed by May herself with the intention to deceive. The idea was so troubling that Cassie reached for her glass of tequila in warm lemonade mix. There was a dead bug floating in her glass but she picked it out and took a long swallow, feeling the alcohol burn all the way to her stomach.
“No,” Alex said. “I think she was what she said she was. We had the twins monitoring her and—”
“They’re about as reliable as a weather forecast,” Julilla said. “They do good work when they’re not otherwise engaged, but….”
Heads nodded. Everyone knew what the twins were like.
“We can speculate all day,” Mundo said, “And at the end of it all, we’ll still need a plan. Let’s cut to the chase.” He looked at Kayleen. “Read off the key issues, babe.”
Kayleen sat up and squinted at her notes. “In no particular order, we must re-establish contact with our embedded team, create redundant lines of communication, whatever that means, and we need to find May and either rescue her or kill her.”
Alex nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“So what’s the plan?” Mundo said.
“The problem,” Cassie said, embarrassed to feel all eyes upon her, “is that we don’t have enough information.” She glanced at Julilla for confirmation. “
We don’t know for sure who picked May up and we don’t know where she was taken. We don’t know how to reach her middleman, so we don’t know where to find our embedded people. How can we make a plan without information?”
“I’ve got the twins waiting for an opportunity to go through May’s shop,” Alex offered. “They ought to turn up something within the next twenty-four hours.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Mundo said. “But since it’s all we have to go on, we’ll break for now.” He tossed back the last of his drink and ran a hand down Kayleen’s back to the tie of her bikini top. “You can all go, and tell Truong to keep the kids off the patio for the next thirty minutes or so.”
* * *
After supper and evening chores, Cassie and Julilla escaped to the penthouse. They selected pretzels and mustard from their diminishing supply of snacks and sat in patio chairs to talk. As the high evening breeze cooled their bodies, Cassie felt some of her worries cool as well. “You didn’t really mean that about May, did you? That she might’ve been a Pharm double agent instead of ours?”
Julilla crunched a pretzel. “I’d be surprised if she was, but I thought we needed to have that possibility on the table. If you’re prepared for the worst, anything else that happens is no big deal.”
“But if the Pharms were on to the whole thing, wouldn’t they have come here first?”
“They have. Over and over.”
“You know what I mean.”
Julilla sighed and got to her feet. “Yes, it does seem like if they were using May to get information about us, they would’ve attacked by now. But a smart leader doesn’t do the obvious.”
“So we know nothing, and have to wait.”
Julilla looked at her. “Yes. Most of what soldiers do is wait. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
They spent the next hour in lazy gossip. Julilla read aloud from The Art of War, and Cassie shared a few pages from On the Origin of Species. They were relaxing on chaise lounges, cool and comfortable for the first time all day and wondering if they could get away with sleeping on the patio for the night when a distant sound made them sit up.