Spycraft Academy

by B N Miles

  Mattie shook her head and finally looked up from her shoes. "No! I would never trick you like that, and we do belong to each other...I just...well, you know how..."

  She made a sound of frustration and scrubbed at her cheeks. "I can't explain it. But something just feels right about this. I saw the way you were looking at Rosin. I saw the way you looked at Drina. I knew you wanted them, so I watched them closer than I usually do with new crew members and I...I started wanting them to want you too. Then I wanted them. I wanted to feel connected to them, for them to feel connected to you, for all of us to just...to be a part of each other, if that makes sense."

  It didn't, really. And yet it did at the same time. Logically, he understood her words, but this just wasn't the Mattie he had known his whole life.

  "Want is one thing. Want isn't need," he said slowly. "Your want doesn't explain why you need to feel that close to your crew members. You weren't kissing the other guys back home and letting us share you, so why are you kissing the girls and letting them share me? I try to put myself in your shoes to figure out why you do the things you do, and most of the time I can understand why you make certain decisions, but in this I'm lost. What is it that you're trying to get from this...connection you want us all to have? Help me understand, please, because you're confusing me."

  Mattie took a deep breath. "Love," she said, "belonging. Security. Trust. Freedom."

  "And you don't think you could have these things without encouraging the man you're in love with to be disloyal?"

  "It's not disloyalty," Mattie said, her voice firm. "And while I probably can have the things I need without including Drina and Rosin in our relationship...I would just rather not."

  Sam tried to process what she was saying but it still wasn't making any sense. He was the one who was reaping most of the rewards. Drina may desire Mattie and shower her with affection and attention, but as far as he could tell, Rosin didn’t have eyes for her. How would sharing Sam fulfill her? What did she get out of it?

  Mattie took a small step toward him. "And I was hoping that you would want this too."

  "But why?" His voice sounded remarkably small. Almost vulnerable. He had to know, he had to understand why.

  "Because I'm greedy," she said with a self-deprecating smile. "I want you. I want Drina. And now I want Rosin too. I want you because I'm in love with you and have always been, because you're remarkable and stronger than you know. I want Drina because she makes my knees weak, makes me feel like I'm the only person in the world. I want Rosin because she's sweet. And she's beautiful. And the thought of touching her makes me...I just want. And I've never been able to have the things that I want, so when the opportunity presented itself, I didn't think about the 'why,' only that if I didn't take what I wanted now, the opportunity would pass me by."

  Sam didn't say anything. What could he say? He didn't disagree with her. In fact, he agreed with her completely. But something in him fought against it. What would people say? It gave his enemies more people to target. It meant that more people could break his heart. It meant more complications if one of them was angry at another. What if one of them got jealous? What if one of them wanted to bring somebody else into the crew? What if one of them assumed that because they were all sharing each other, they could bring another man into the fold? Sam didn't think that he would be able to contain himself if one of them did that. He didn't want to share any of them, so why was he okay, thrilled even, at the prospect of being shared by them?

  He was a bloody hypocrite. He was just as greedy as Mattie.

  "Sam," Mattie said, "can you just do me a favor and try? If it doesn't work out, if it gets weird, if you don't like it, we'll stop, I promise. But for now, just let me have what I need."

  Just do it, his mind whispered.

  "Okay," he breathed. The smile she gave him was blinding.

  "Is there anybody else?" He suddenly asked, fearing her answer.

  Mattie's smile dimmed and she bit her lip. "Yeah."

  She was insatiable.

  "Who?

  Mattie shook her head. "It doesn't matter. Nothing will come of it."

  "Keeping secrets now, are we?" He tried to lighten the mood, but then her eyes flashed and she stared into his face intently.

  "Is there anybody you want?" She took another step close to him and he sputtered. Prin's sweet smile bled into his imagination and he forced himself to think about Delcan so he didn't blurt anything damning.

  "What? No! I have three..." He stopped talking. What even were these women? How could this relationship be articulated? Were they his crewmembers, his lovers, his girlfriends? Should he ask them to be with him like he asked Mattie? Were they committed to Mattie and Sam? Were Mattie and Sam committed to them? There were so many unanswered questions, questions that needed answers before this went any further.

  "You know, it's okay, Sam," Maddy said, shuffling closer. "It's okay to be a little greedy "

  Her hand slipped up to his chest and rested above his beating heart.

  She whispered, "Sometimes I lay in bed at night and think about all of us with you. We'd bring you to the edge, over and over again, tearing down those walls that I still can't get past, even after all these years, forcing you to realize that somebody does love you, somebody does care, that somebody wants to take care of you, just like you take care of everybody else."

  Her hand ran down his chest to his abdomen, her fingers tracing light patterns into his skin and making him shudder.

  "I want to watch you shatter and break apart so I can see what really lies underneath."

  She lifted herself on her toes, her lips hovering inches away from his, her breath fanning against his face. Mattie whispered against his mouth and a shock of warmth shot from his neck to the small of his back. "I want to drive you so mad with want that you won't be able to think straight enough to beg us to stop."

  A loud click broke them apart and they flinched away from each other. The storeroom doorknob turned. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. No doubt it was an instructor. He and Mattie were about to be dragged to Mode's office in the middle of the night to be disciplined, demerited, and maybe even expelled thanks to the contraband in Mattie's satchel.

  Mattie seemed to have the same thought because she hurriedly tore the bag from her shoulder and tried to stuff it between the shelves as quietly as she could. Sam snuffed their candle and pulled the shadows around them both, though if there was direct light from the other room, his shadows may be useless anyway.

  The door squeaked open. Time stood still. A quiet voice spilled into the storeroom.

  "I told you, it isn't in there," the voice said, far too distant to be the person at the door. No, it wasn't just any voice. It was Franklin. What was he doing here in the middle of the night, and who was opening the door? There was a quiet growl and the wooden door was suddenly shut again.

  Sam didn't realize he'd stopped breathing until he exhaled the entire contents of his lungs. He inched closer to the door, straining to hear the muffled voices on the other side. Mattie rotated her wrists and then suddenly the voices became much clearer.

  "Well go get it!" a woman hissed. She had a nondescript voice, familiar and yet unknown.

  "Not until I feel confident about it," Franklin said. There was a bit of silence from the other side of the door, and then suddenly Franklin yelled, "No, you can't do that!"

  When the woman spoke again, her voice was dangerous, quiet, a sharp hiss of derision. "Don't tell me what I can and cannot do, you fool. If you push back against me, you know what will happen."

  Sam held his breath. Somebody was threatening Franklin, and Sam didn't like it.

  He didn't realize he was reaching for the doorknob until Mattie clasped his wrist and held him still.

  "Don't be an idiot," she whispered.

  "I apologize," Franklin said, "but please don't touch that. Just wait until the agreed time and I will get you what you asked for."

  Another beat of silence.

  "You be
tter," the woman said. "Do not keep me waiting again. I do not give third chances."

  There was no more talk after that, only the opening and closing of the classroom door. Sam pressed his ear against the wood, straining to hear footfalls, shuffled papers, anything to give him a sign that they should stay in the storeroom.

  He and Maddie stood there, just breathing and listening, for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes. No sound came. Sam turned the doorknob and slowly peeked through the crack in the door. The poisons classroom was completely empty and still, not a thing disturbed or out of place.

  "We need to go. Now." Mattie nudged his back, hurrying him into the classroom.

  Sam threaded his fingers through Mattie's and together they rushed across the classroom, out the door, and into the corridor, walking briskly in the direction of their dormitory.

  "Who was that? Did you recognize that woman's voice?" Mattie muttered when they were far enough from the classroom to be considered strolling inconspicuously.

  "I have no idea," Sam said. "But I'm positive that Franklin is in trouble."

  19

  The next day went by in a haze. Sam could barely focus on his studies; every time somebody tried to talk to him, he would become distracted, their words blurring out of existence. His mind kept wandering to Apelles and what they were planning on doing with the spymaster in just a few short hours.

  Drina and Rosin brewed the potion the night before. Everything was in place. The girls knew what they were supposed to do. Sam spent most of the day planning strategies in his head, imagining the layout of Apelles' home by going on assumption alone.

  It was a squat, one story building like the rest of the instructor cottages. Only one person lived in it. The fireplace was to the right of the front room because the chimney was on the right of the roof. The kitchen and washroom probably stretched away from the front of the house while the bedroom, needing the heat from the fireplace, would be situated directly across from it, which meant that one of the three windows around the building would be situated in the middle of the bedroom. The bed was most likely flush against the left wall to give Apelles cover should any intruders barge in.

  Sam and the girls would wait until Apelles inevitably disappeared to do whatever it was that he did, and they would wait for him to come home. When he did, they would grab him when he came into the bedroom. After that, Drina would stab him with the dart while the rest of them held him down, allowing the poison to work its magic.

  Sam wasn't sure how they were going to get information out of Apelles, and that's what worried him the most. Given that he was a Varin spymaster and in his mid-thirties, given that he often talked about foreign missions in class, Sam guessed that he spent a decade in the military's special foreign operations unit and survived it. He was probably trained thoroughly in interrogations.

  Sam doubted that anything they could think of would break him. They could go with Mattie's idea of psychological torture but that probably wouldn't work either. Drina suggested blackmail, though her specific suggestion was too extreme for Sam to be okay with. Rosin suggested bringing a third party in, somebody who could worm into his mind, but Sam knew of no such person to begin with, never mind one he trusted.

  He figured their best bet was blackmail, though they would not be using Drina's suggestion of putting him in an inappropriate situation, staged or not.

  One thing was certain: they would have to do something, and they would have to do it well, because messing up meant expulsion if Apelles didn't exact revenge first. Neither expulsion nor death was an option, neither was forgetting about it and letting their entire country fall to ruin.

  If worse came to worse, if Apelles got away and reported them, Sam would take the blame. He would tell everybody that he coerced the girls into doing it by blackmailing them.

  Sometimes, lying was alright for the greater good. It was his idea, after all. He was the one that insisted on getting involved.

  By the time dinner was finished, Sam was a mass of nerves. He became hyper-focused on the things immediately in front of him, his plate of food, his outfit, his hair as he combed it in the mirror. He kept saying to himself, you can do this, you can do this, you must do this. Everyone is relying on you right now.

  He stared into the mirror until he could no longer see himself as he was but as the person he needed to be right now, somebody taller, broader, older, smarter, more dangerous. Fletch watched him get ready but he didn't say a word. He'd learned not to ask questions probably long before he met Sam.

  Once Sam was as ready as he would ever be, he collected the girls and they went on their way. They seemed much more at ease, more natural as they chatted and walked down the hall like they were just out for a bit of socializing after supper.

  They took the rarely used courtyard passage, the one Delcan cornered Sam in, and followed it out the back of the school and toward the forest. Sam wrapped his cloak of shadows around the lot of them. Stretching the shadows to cover four people moving at such inconsistent speeds made his eyes heavy and his brain foggy.

  By the time they made it into the blackness of the trees, he was yawning. Granted, it probably didn't help that he didn't really sleep anymore. He was too busy with trying to trail Apelles. Whether or not it was Apelles was irrelevant. If it turned out the spymaster was innocent, then Sam could cross somebody off the list at least.

  Sam slipped through the forest with his crew, walking heel-toe in line with Drina. She took point because she knew how to move through the trees better than the rest of them, having grown up in the thick-wooded countryside. It was only early evening, but without the moon, the canopy above cast them in absolute darkness.

  It was like he was blind, his hand on Drina's shoulder, Mattie's hand on his shoulder, and Rosin's hand on Mattie's shoulder, forming a chain of blind people tiptoeing through the dead leaves of autumn. He considered it a good sign when Drina only made them stumble over one another four times.

  They didn't walk for long, a few minutes at most, before Drina took a sharp right and slowly lead them toward a soft, blushing pinprick of light that got brighter the closer they got. By the time the soft light revealed itself to be a candle in a window, they were already crouching in the bushes.

  Sam once again wrapped them in his shadows. The four of them bent low and snuck across the small expanse of grass between the forest and the administrative living quarters. They crept down the row of stone houses until they got to the very end, where Apelles lived.

  Sam motioned for them to stay low while he slowly lifted himself and peered into the window he assumed to be in Apelles' bedroom. He assumed correctly. The candle on the small table beside the door was unlit. Sam rarely saw lit candles in Apelles' house—he was either out or asleep every time Sam watched the place.

  Just as he thought, tonight would be no different. The bed was empty and uniformly made, everything was neat and tidy, nothing undisturbed. It looked like a staged room, like nobody lived in it, which amplified Sam's suspicion tenfold.

  He formed the hand signal he'd practiced with the girls and Rosin quickly scampered past the rest of them, sliding around the corner of the house and disappearing to peer into the kitchen and the entryway. Apelles wasn't home, but one could never be too careful. He might have traps set for all they know.

  A few minutes later, she scampered back and shook her head. All clear. For an academy made of spies and military specialists, they sure didn't take security very seriously. Every window Sam came across on the school grounds had been latched by the same device, one that was extremely easy to open.

  He reached into the utility belt resting at the back of his hip and brought out one of his four lockpicks. It was quick work to slide it through the crack between the panes and lift the latch from the inside. He pulled the windows open and one by one, the four of them snuck inside.

  They waited for a very long time. Sam counted the hours by keeping the seconds and then counting the minutes up to each hour. It was a mem
ory challenge, and he lost track at one and a half.

  It was nearing the dark hour now, and after that, there would only be six hours until dawn. Yet Apelles was still not home. Where could he be running off to every night? And how was it that he always managed to slip past their watch? Sam supposed they would find out if Apelles ever decided to show his face.

  Another hour passed by Sam's estimation and his nervous energy had calmed into agitation and impatience. He yawned. He should have gone to bed early last night. He should have conserved his energy with those shadows.

  They could do this; it was just a matter of getting to a place where he could see it and believe it because it was already done. Although Apelles was slim, it was clear that his body was packed with lithe muscle. He was swift. He trained. He was probably an elite in the Varin ranks.

  If Sam or the girls had any hesitation, if they screwed up, that one tiny mistake up was all it would take to fail. They could not fail. And although Sam trusted his crew to be proficient at what they did, to be smart about the choices they made, he was also keenly aware that he was the only one he could truly control. And so he'd changed the plan right before they left; instead of Drina, he would be the one to engage Apelles.

  The girls. Well, they would help him if he needed it...which he probably would.

  All four of them waited silently in the darkened bedroom, passing the time by making faces at each other or playing a guessing game out of the words they mouthed.

  Drina had volunteered herself as a distraction. She was kidding of course, but it didn't make it any easier to watch her disrobe down to her small clothes and lay on Apelles’ neatly made bed like she'd been waiting for hours. Sam didn't know why he felt so irritated when she did it. It wasn't like they were exclusive. Or were they? After this, he would really need to ask her. Rosin too.

  Twenty minutes after Drina pulled up her pants for the third time, the front door opened and all four of them stiffened.