The Mouse

by Lauretta Hignett

  “What a fucking dick! I can’t believe he blew you off like that.”

  “Well, I complained to him, and you and Simon witnessed it. That’s all I can do for now; we’ll see if Jake reigns it in a bit.”

  Despite Annabel urging her, Sunny was happy to let the matter drop. She had more than enough on her mind today to distract her.

  Only four more classes, then she could see Hunter again.

  Chapter 11

  After the final bell, Sunny took off into the bathrooms at school and quickly changed into her funky blue trainers, black leggings and a white jacket and tank top. It was handy that she could take her bag with her, she thought, as she slung it over her shoulders. She took off directly from the bathroom – no cameras in there – and soared up over the school.

  Two minutes later she was outside Hunter’s apartment door. She knocked, her heart knocking against her ribs in a dim echo. Hunter pulled the door open and saw her standing there, wide-eyed with excitement.

  Reign it in, idiot, she thought to herself. “Hi,” she said out loud, nonchalantly.

  Hunter smiled. He was wearing his jeans again, with a black t-shirt this time. He hadn’t shaved that day – his jaw held a bit more stubble than she’d seen him with before. The cologne she had picked up on his pillow was faintly around him, it was subtle and sexy and delicious and she wanted to rub herself all over him like a cat.

  “Come on in,” Hunter said, holding the door open. Sunny had to walk past him to get in; she felt like she could feel the heat radiating from his body.

  She walked through to the kitchen and perched up on a stool by the island. “So, what are we working on first?”

  Hunter walked into the pantry and pulled out a bag of Doritos, opened it and put in down in front of her. “Do me a favour,” he said. “Eat something first.” He picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. “I wouldn’t want you to deplete your life force or anything.”

  She tried to munch on a few nacho cheese triangles as delicately as she could. “Yeah. Well, it turns out that I was a bit hungry, and I was about to get my per… uh… I was tired from basketball earlier yesterday.”

  “Let’s write it up as a learning experience. I’ll make sure I’ve got a few ham sandwiches on hand before you go transcontinental,” he said, giving her a faint smile.

  She cocked her head; he seemed a bit chattier than usual. Pushing her luck, she asked: “So, how did you get into Army Intelligence anyway? Aren’t you a little bit young for that?”

  “Oh, you want to know about me?” He raised his eyebrows at her. “But I can’t know who you are? Tell me what you did at school today.”

  “Fair point,” she said. “But I’m sure general stuff is okay, right? Besides, I could just follow you around for a couple of days, and I’d know everything there is to know about you.”

  “Not everything,” he said softly, looking up at her slowly.

  She met his eyes and felt electricity zing throughout her entire body.

  “But I wouldn’t do that. I promised you that I’d respect your privacy,” she said begrudgingly. “But, in an effort to level the playing field a little, I had a terrible day at school. My English teacher is a dick.”

  This topic seemed safe enough, every kid in the country had to take English at her age. The curriculum was always pretty similar in each school, so there was little chance of him identifying her. Besides, out of all the English teachers in the whole of Australia, she was betting that a majority of them were dicks.

  “We’re doing Othello – I’ve got a part in the production of it that we’re performing in three months. Not the part I wanted though.”

  “I’m guessing you got Emilia?”

  Sunny was impressed – he knew his Shakespeare. “Desdemona,” she said flatly. He furrowed his eyebrows. “I wanted Iago,” she explained.

  He took another sip of his coffee. “Ah, I get it. You don’t want to do what people expect you to do.”

  “No,” she replied. “I just want to do what I want to do.”

  He smiled. “A Daddy’s girl, right?”

  “No!”

  Hunter raised one eyebrow.

  “Well, maybe. Yeah,” she finally admitted. “Anyways, how do you know your Shakespeare so well?”

  “I always wanted to be an English teacher,” he said solemnly. Sunny looked up, alarmed, but saw he was grinning at her. “Even though my schooling was a little… unconventional, we did cover the classics. It wasn’t long ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “You want to know how old I am? I’m almost twenty-one.”

  “You’re only twenty? You’re kidding! I thought you’d be much older. Late-twenties, at least,” Sunny said. “How in the hell did you get into Military Intelligence so quickly? Shouldn’t you still be eating dirt in a training camp?

  “I started my career very, very early.”

  “How early?”

  “That’s not something you need to know.” Hunter folded his arms over his chest.

  Hmmm, she thought. Interesting.

  But he wasn’t about to spill any secrets to her, not right now anyway, so she changed tact. “So you like the military, then?”

  “I did. It’s my family.” Hunter replied, frowning. “Literally. Everyone I’m related to is in the Military. My parents were both Majors. Two uncles, one aunt, four cousins, all of us in one corps or another.”

  “You’ve served overseas?”

  “Yeah. Once in Afghanistan, once in Timor, once in Iraq.”

  “At your age?”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t going to elaborate. If what he was saying was true, he would have been a kid at the time.

  “Was it… scary?”

  “Yeah, at times it was, for sure. But I was luckier than most. I had specific missions, and I was valuable enough that I got protected pretty well,” he said, his jaw tense. “But yeah, a war zone is no walk in the park. That’s why I’m so worried about the missing guys in Korea. I know what they might be going through.”

  “Me too,” Sunny said softly. They stared at each other in silence for a moment. She was replaying the conversation in her head, trying to put her finger on something he’d said. “You mentioned that you did like the military?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not do like the military?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And you weren’t in uniform when I first saw you yesterday…”

  “You’re a bright spark, aren’t you?”

  Sunny couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  “So, what are you?”

  He paused for a minute, regarding her thoughtfully. Finally, he spoke.

  “ASIS.”

  “Don’t you mean ASIO?” The Australian Security Intelligence Organization was the national security service, like Britain’s MI5 or the USA’s FBI.

  “No.”

  She waited for him to continue talking. When he didn’t, she raised her eyebrows at him and set off a staring competition. Her eyes were big enough anyway, and when she did her deer-in-the-headlights routine, she knew she looked adorably cartoonish. It was usually enough to get what she wanted. Slowly, without breaking her stare, she lifted a Dorito and slowly crunched it in her mouth. After a minute, Hunter gave a smirk.

  “ASIS. Australian Secret Intelligence Agency. More like MI6 or the CIA.”

  “Oh. How is it different from ASIO?”

  “They have no powers of arrest and aren’t armed. We do, and we are. ASIO officers don’t get overseas that often. We do.”

  “How come I haven’t heard of ASIS?”

  A hint of a twinkle shone in his eye. “I don’t know. It’s not a secret. You can find us on Wikipedia.”

  “You’re really an ASIS agent?”

  “Technically, no.”

  She waited for a full minute, but he didn’t elaborate. He was ASIS, but he wasn’t?

  He was a spy. A hot young spy. Whatever unit he was in probably wasn’t on Wikipe
dia.

  “Okay, fine. So what were you doing at a Military Intelligence building?”

  “Giving them information, taking some in return. Someone has to liaise with the generals. At the moment, that person is me. I have the military background, so I know the culture, and I’m young enough that the top brass aren’t backward in coming forward, if you see what I mean. I play it right, and the Generals get all paternalistic and share information that they might have withheld if they were their usual staunch selves.”

  “Right.” This was working out better than she’d planned – it seemed that Hunter would have access to the most classified information, in the first instance. She couldn’t have chosen better if she’d actually tried.

  He was still staring at her carefully as if she’d done something interesting. She felt slightly awkward, so she changed the subject.

  “So what would you do instead, if you weren’t a secret government agent?”

  Hunter looked startled. “What?”

  “You know, a different career path. In case you get sick of bullets and espionage? A landscape gardener perhaps? Dental assistant?”

  “I’ve never thought about it. It’s what I was trained for.”

  “I bet there are loads of things you’d be good at, if you were a civilian. Your apartment is fantastic; you could be an interior designer.”

  “Naw, all my clients would expect me to be gay. I’d hate to disappoint them.”

  Sunny perked up.

  “Besides,” he continued, “this place is all me, I don’t have a feel for any other styles besides my own.”

  “You seem to have a real empathy for people, you could have been in the Peace Corps or something,” she said sarcastically.

  “That’s still kind of like the military.”

  “Underwear model?” Sunny murmured under her breath.

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing.”

  Hunter put down his coffee cup and shook his head.

  “Are you done?”

  “My interrogation of you? Yeah, sure. What do you want to do first?”

  “I meant with the Doritos. But yeah, let’s go.”

  He led her around to the lounge, and she took the same spot on the squashy sofa that she was beginning to think of as her spot. He sat opposite her in the leather armchair.

  “We know that you can take stuff with you when you fly, right?”

  “Yeah, but it has to be touching my skin. I have to concentrate at the moment when I’m buzzing into the Alternate too, but otherwise, it’s pretty effortless”. Sunny had almost had to hold her backpack in her hand on the way over – when she’d slung it over her shoulders over her jacket and tried to fly off, it had thudded onto the bathroom floor behind her. Guessing the reason why, she took off her jacket and stuffed it into her backpack and put it back on her shoulders just over her tank top – it was touching enough skin to come with her, apparently.

  “Here,” Hunter said, handing her a magazine. “Put that in the kitchen.”

  She smiled at him and disappeared. She reappeared in the kitchen and put the magazine on the counter.

  “Now see if you can pick it up and bring it over here without becoming visible.”

  “Huh?” She stood in the kitchen, confused.

  “It will be helpful if you’re in the enemy territory and you have to grab something. Then you won’t have to become tangible to steal stuff.”

  “Oh. Good point. Um, I’m not sure where to start.”

  He stood over and walked back to her in the kitchen. She watched him with her mouth hanging open. God, he was heartbreaking.

  “You can become transparent, right? Can you run your hands and arms through things and still be visible?

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Well, see if you can do the opposite. Become invisible – go into the Alternate, or whatever you call it, and try and stay there but make one of your hands substantial and grab something.”

  “Okay, I guess…” She pulled the vibrations all over her and went into the Alternate. The atmosphere in the apartment was even more beautiful when she was looking through these eyes - It was almost tangible – it was soft and warm and gently caressed her like a lover. She tried to concentrate and push the vibrations back, from her fingertips first instead of her head. She moved her arm down and tried to pick up the magazine. Her fingers moved right through it to the counter underneath. She tried a few more times, frustrated.

  “It’s not working!” She huffed, looking over at Hunter. He ignored her.

  She was surprised at how it bugged her.

  Yes, he was so far out of her league it was insane. He was playing another sport entirely. He was a hyper-skilled, young hot secret agent. He would be used to dating older, more mature women. Twenty-something supermodel types, long legged blondes or dark, dramatic secret agent women, probably. She was a wide-eyed and crazy haired seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with a very bad crush, but she was starting to think that they were developing a bit of a rapport. At the very least, she’d like to be friends. She stared at him, gorgeous swirls of golden light drifted around him softly.

  Then she realized: She was still in the Alternate. He couldn’t see or hear her. She came back to reality, and his eyes met hers immediately.

  “I thought you’d gone!”

  “I was trying to grab the magazine; I just couldn’t do it.”

  Hunter paused for a moment, then slowly moved towards her – her heart started to thump - but he turned to the pantry and rummaged around a little. He pulled out a Snickers bar, waved it at her and placed it on the counter.

  “There you go, a little bit of an incentive for you. If you can steal this from the table and take it back to the sofa without me seeing you, you can eat it.”

  “A Snickers? Seriously?” Sunny feigned disinterest.

  “Well, I’ve been saving it. But it’s yours if you can do it.”

  Sunny took up the challenge. She pulled the vibrations all over her and looked at it in her Alternate eyes. She concentrated on the feeling in her fingertips, isolating the sensation, and slowly pushed the tingling back. Her hands stayed slightly watery – they were still invisible, she could tell. She reached out and put a finger on the Snickers – she could touch it – feel the crisp wrapper underneath her fingertip. She heard Hunter beside her, just a small intake of breath. She knew she’d done it. The Snickers had disappeared and was with her.

  Sunny smiled broadly. Hunter was still there looking at nothing in particular, she zoomed over to the couch and settled in her spot. When she reappeared, she grinned at him and opened the Snickers and took a bite.

  He smiled at her and walked over. In an intimate gesture that took her breath away, he took the Snickers from her and took a bite before handing it back. “Let’s try something bigger.”

  Over the next hour, they discovered that she could carry things many times her weight into the Alternate with her. She’d had to be careful how she put things down though – she’d almost broken her wrist trying to move Hunter’s dressing table, and it had left a dent in the floor where she’d dropped it. Most objects seemed only a fraction of their weight to her. She’d also discovered that Snickers bars don’t taste of anything in the Alternate.

  It was all the chocolate Hunter had, and she didn’t want to share.

  She also discovered she couldn’t take anything alive with her. The yukka on Hunter’s balcony steadfastly refused to come into the Alternate. Hunter’s cat Angus was even more alarming – he hissed and clawed at her when she was supposed to be invisible, and when she managed to get hold of him, he refused to budge from reality.

  “I didn’t think that you’d be a cat person,” Sunny gasped, rubbing her clawed arms.

  “I’m not,” Hunt replied shortly. “But it would appear that Angus is a Hunter cat.”

  “Wha..?”

  “He followed me through downtown Beirut for almost three hours. I was trying to avoid some people… anyway. I got cornered in a blind alley
and Angus turned and attacked the guys tailing me. It distracted them long enough for me to slip away. I thought I’d lost him, but he showed up half an hour later, still following me. He was covered in shit and crawling with fleas, but for some reason, I felt compelled to smuggle him back to… where I was staying.”

  “And you smuggled him into Australia, I’m guessing. That feral bastard would never pass quarantine.” Sunny rubbed the scratch marks on her arms again. “I wonder what border protection would say about that?”

  “I’m sure if they knew about it, their files on Angus would mysteriously disappear,” Hunter said dryly. “I think that’s enough for now.”

  She sat at the counter in the kitchen with a Coke in her hand, making gurgling noises as she sucked at the empty can. “Okay. What next?” She was reluctant to leave.

  “I need you to go to North Korea again.”

  Sunny felt ice in her stomach. She knew what Hunter needed, and she wasn't sure she could witness it again. She looked down in her lap, and the thought came to her that she wasn’t strong enough for this, not mentally.

  He came to sit beside her, and she was suddenly shy. He put a finger under her chin, lifting her head softly to meet his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s horrible, and I know you don’t want to know what goes on in places like that. But we need to get those men out of that death camp. I need you to get whatever you can to help us get in and save them. We need your help. I need your help.”

  His eyes were so dark and warm she wanted to tumble into them and take a nap. She could tell he wasn’t really sincere – he was using everything in his arsenal to get her to do what he wanted, including taking advantage of her crush on him. She didn’t expect anything less.

  But she could also tell he didn’t want her to have to go through this. But, as fate and a literal bolt of lightning had decided – she was probably the only one who could do it.

  She had heard what the commander had said to him – they were going in dark. They couldn’t get any intelligence out of the area at all. Sunny might be the only one that could get passed the enemy lines, and back out alive.