The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  She hadn’t felt the muscles in her stomach tighten, but she became aware of their strain, a tremble that was a precursor to fight-or-flight. Fight was her preference, though Alisha deliberately loosened her fingers from the fists they curled themselves into. It took conscious thought to turn toward the line of trees that shadowed the side of her house, picking Brandon’s form out of the semi-darkness there.

  His blond hair had grown out of the usual sharp, preppy style he wore, falling to his cheekbones in shags that made him look more skater boy than scientist. He’d lost weight, his cheekbones hollow, making him look haggard instead of handsome, and the smile he offered clearly cost him in energy.

  “I’d say it suits you,” Brandon said again, “but I hope to God it doesn’t.”

  “What are you doing here, Brandon?” The question came out before Alisha could stop it, though even as she spoke she lifted a hand sharply, cutting off the reply. “You can’t be here,” she said instead, keeping her voice low. “This is my life, Brandon. My family is here. Whatever your reason for being here, it can’t be good for them. You need to go.” She could hear the steel in her words, overriding curiosity without mercy.

  “I have nowhere to go, Alisha. You’re the only one I trust.”

  Alisha took a few quick steps away from the car, glad for the snap of cleats against concrete while wishing the shoes were silent. “You’re not hearing me. Those are my nephews in there. I don’t give a damn who you trust. You need to go.”

  “Alisha.” Her name broke as he said it, desperation coloring the single word. “Alisha, I did it. Or she did it. I barely know. I’ve got all the paperwork, the research and the files, but they’re hunting us and we have nowhere else to go.”

  Alisha thrust her jaw out, taking one more step toward him. “You’re not making sense, and I don’t want you here.”

  “Alisha, I created an AI.”

  The fists Alisha had deliberately loosened reformed. “I know, Brandon,” she said through her teeth. “I’ve been chased down by half a dozen of them.” She flickered a hand at her hair, forcing her fingers to open again. “Remember?” The scent of singeing curls came back to her, and the pain of skin blistering. Laser blasts from a Firebird, one of Brandon’s airborne death gliders, had cost Alisha her hair while just barely sparing her life. The still-short locks were a reminder of the world she’d walked away from.

  “You don’t understand,” Brandon blurted. “She’s sentient.”

  Chapter 2

  Shock uncoiled in Alisha’s stomach, a thrill of iciness that leaped outward and stung her fingers with cold even as she felt heat rush to her cheeks. “Sentient?” She barely heard her echoing of the word, making it more a shape than a sound. Just as Brandon’s name had been a ghost on her lips less than an hour earlier. Alisha shook herself. “Brandon, that’s not—”

  “Possible,” he finished harshly. “Do you remember what I told you about the Attengee and Firebird programming, Alisha? That it was capable of learning independently from its own mistakes and extrapolating what it’d learned to suit new situations?”

  Shivers coursed over Alisha’s arms despite the heat of the afternoon sun. “Yeah.” Her mind’s eye conjured up the smooth silver dome that made up an Attengee combat drone’s body. The first time she’d encountered one it had assessed her as a threat, and laser-blasting gun turrets had opened on her. The machine’s malevolent awareness still made hairs lift on her skin. “Are you telling me one of your killer combat machines has a mind of its own?”

  “No.” Brandon took one step forward, as if he’d seize her shoulders, then flexed his hands, stopping himself. “Alisha—”

  “Aunt Ali, where are you? Jeremy spilled his ice cream all over the floor!”

  Alisha turned as Timothy appeared in the doorway, eyes wide with distress. “I gave him mine so he’d stop crying, but it’s melting all over and I can’t pick it up.” He lifted his hands, covered in drying, sticky ice cream. Alisha set her front teeth together and pressed her eyelashes closed briefly before pulling a smile into place.

  “Okay, Timm—mothy. Aunt Alisha to the rescue.” She shot one quick glance back toward Brandon, not surprised to find him blended with the shadows. The trees made poor cover, but gave enough to disguise him from a child. Alisha sighed and bent to scoop Timothy up, despite both his ice cream coating and his protests. “Thank you for trying to clean up. Your mom’ll be here in half an hour.” She spoke as much to her nephew as to the man hiding from him. “We’ll get everything straightened out by then.”

  Timothy’s eyes, calculatingly, welled up with tears. “But I didn’t get my ice cream.”

  Alisha toed her cleats at the doorstop, kissing the top of Timothy’s head to ward off a laugh that felt incongruous. “I’ll see what I can do about that, too.”

  “Alisha.” The low warning note in her sister’s voice told her that the conversation wasn’t meant to be overheard by little pitchers. Alisha took her gaze from the little boys, giving her younger, if not smaller sister a quick smile. Teresa had shot past her by the time they were both in their teens, and it was to her everlasting chagrin that greater height had never allowed her to out-arm-wrestle her “big” sister. Alisha flexed her biceps and smiled more broadly.

  “What’s up?”

  Teresa’s gaze was serious, even as her mouth continued to smile for her childrens’ benefit. “I think I saw someone hanging out around your house,” she answered quietly.

  Amusement sparked in Alisha’s breast, turning her smile into a brief laugh as Teresa proved herself both observant and circumspect. She would have made a good spy, too. “Blond? About this tall?” Alisha lifted a hand to indicate Brandon’s height.

  Teresa nodded, then arched an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’ve finally got a boyfriend, Ali. After what, eight years? Bring him in, let me meet him!”

  “How long did it take you to introduce Jim to the family?” Alisha said. “I don’t think so. Besides, he’s an old coworker, not a boyfriend.” It was a haphazard skinning of the truth, but it would do.

  “I’m not the one who got engaged to a man my family’d never met,” Teresa stressed.

  Alisha’s eyebrows shot up. “And I was right not to introduce him, wasn’t I, since I didn’t marry him after all. Anyway, it isn’t like that, and thanks for watching out for me. I just thought I’d spare him the indignities of having your rugrats crawl all over him.”

  Teresa knocked her shoulder into Alisha’s. “You love the rugrats and you know it.”

  Alisha offered her sister a toothy smile, widening her eyes in mock sincerity. “And yet somehow you haven’t convinced me to settle down with a nice boy and have rugrats of my own.”

  Teresa glanced toward the door and gave Alisha a knowing smile. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Alisha’s heart knocked against her ribs, making a tiny knot of excitement and nervousness tighten in her stomach. If only you knew, she wanted to say. Teresa believed she’d spent the last decade traveling the world, living a bohemian lifestyle as a yoga teacher. If there were any expectations of someone who made her living teaching yoga, it was that such a job would take her to places most people had never heard of. It was the perfect cover job for a spy: nothing tying her down, no regular hours, simply the freedom to go when and where she wanted.

  The truth was far more complicated. Complicated enough that she’d found a barely legal method of dealing with her own reality: the Strongbox Chronicles. She called them that for their hiding places, safety deposit boxes in banks all over the world, each one entered under a different alias. They were journals of all her missions, full of passion and anger and fear—emotion she couldn’t allow to spill over onto the pages of the dry, detailed reports she turned in when missions ended. There were days that she thought the personal record of her life was all that kept her sane.

  And that, Alisha reminded herself, was why she’d walked away from the espionage world in search of something simpler. In search of a life in whic
h the dead did not return to haunt her, not only in dreams but in reality, and in search of the peace of knowing those around her could be trusted.

  But her heart beat too hard at Teresa’s insinuation that Brandon might become a part of her life. Alisha put on a smile that she didn’t feel, one of a multitude of skills learned in her years as an agent. Compartmentalize. Separate true emotion from what needs to be shown. Give away nothing. Trust no one but yourself.

  The litany of behavior modifications and old habit made her want to shudder with repulsion. Alisha suppressed that, too, still with a smile, and agreed, “Not yet.” The subject of Alisha’s romantic fate was both tired and comfortable, and she let herself fall into the banter without putting much thought behind the words. Despite Teresa’s hopes, Brandon Parker wasn’t likely to carry the promise of a settled life, though of the men she knew, he might be the best choice for such a thing. Still, it wasn’t the idea of ordinary days lived out with a handsome man, children growing up under their watch, that made Alisha’s breath catch. It was the chance she would find a reason—an excuse—to fall back into the world she’d left behind.

  Alisha folded her arms around her ribs, dragging in a deep breath. This is what you chose, she reminded herself. A life where you could trust people. A life where extraordinary things really are extraordinary, and not just part and parcel of your daily regime. This is what you wanted, Leesh.

  No. It was the life Ali wanted. The part of her that was pampered princess, delicate and fragile and capable of getting men to do her bidding. It was the life of what nice girls want and what everyone expected. Not since an afternoon in Egypt when she’d been offered a door into the CIA had it been something Leesh had wanted.

  Just where, Alisha wondered ruefully, did the line between compartmentalization and schizophrenia lie? She pulled a wry smile, tilting toward Teresa to knock their shoulders together. “I love you, you know that, little sis?”

  Teresa blinked, startled out of her lecture on a nice settled life, then smiled. “I know. Everything all right, Ali?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just love the way you look out for me. You’d think I was the little sister.”

  Teresa put her arm around Alisha’s shoulders and leaned heavily, pushing up onto her toes enough to emphasize their height difference. “You are. Shrimp.”

  “At least I’m not a giant prawn.” Alisha made wiggling shrimp legs out of her fingers, then laughed. “I can’t believe I still do that after fifteen years.”

  “You’ll still be doing it in fifty years,” Teresa predicted. “Okay. I’ll get the rugrats out of here so you can go hook up with your boyfriend. You still coming over tomorrow morning, or should I not expect you until later?” She gave a suggestive waggle of her eyebrows, making Alisha laugh again.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she repeated.

  Teresa gave her another knowing look and a nod. “Right. I won’t expect you until lunch, then. Tim! You have your brothers rounded up?”

  “Nooo!” came a wail from the back of the house. “Jeremy’s stuck under the bed!”

  Teresa cast her sister a look of baleful amusement and ran for the back bedroom. Alisha followed, voice rising in bewildered self-defense. “I swear there’s no way he could have gotten under the bed!”

  “You like them, don’t you?”

  Alisha didn’t allow herself the luxury of a startle, Brandon’s voice expected as she stood in her doorway, watching Teresa drive away with the boys. Jeremy, still sniffling with fear—he had managed to cram himself between boxes under the bed, and was properly frightened at being stuck—waved goodbye through the minivan window. Alisha raised her hand in farewell, not looking toward Brandon. “You’re slipping,” she replied, rather than answer. “Teresa noticed you.”

  Alarm sharpened his words. “She shouldn’t have.”

  “I guess it runs in the family.” Alisha turned, noting that his color had run white. “I’ll listen to what you have to say, Parker, but you’ll never come anywhere near my family again. I don’t know why you came to me, but the Sicarii can’t be happy with you, and I don’t want you leading them to Teresa and the boys. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to protect them.” Her voice was steady. Not a threat, she thought, simply a statement of fact. Brandon lowered his gaze, accepting the rebuke and the warning implicit in it. Alisha said, “Shit,” under her breath, and nodded toward the door. “We’ll talk inside.”

  “Is it safe?” Brandon stepped out of the evening sunshine and into the comparative darkness of Alisha’s home as she barked a hard, humorless laugh.

  “You mean, is it proofed against bugs and listening devices? Yes. You mean, is someone watching me? Not last I checked, and yes, I do check regularly. But if you’re here, all bets are off. Who’s after you?” The brusque questions didn’t seem to offend Brandon as he followed her into the living room and sank into an easy chair.

  “I went back to work for the Company after last October.” The reply was muffled, his head in his hands as if he didn’t want to meet Alisha’s eyes. “Straightforward R & D, none of this espionage deep-cover crap. I’ve had enough of that.”

  “Really,” Alisha said. “What was the final straw? I’d have thought after nearly blowing my head off once and betraying me more times than I can count, you’d be pretty blasé about the whole double-agent gig.”

  Brandon lifted his head, staring bleakly at her through his fingers. “You’re mad. I don’t blame you.”

  “How generous.”

  “Alisha, I didn’t know—”

  “You didn’t know what, Brandon? You didn’t know your so-called Sicarii handler was my former CIA partner? You didn’t know she’d been the subject of a manhunt that I thought had ended in her death? You didn’t know what?” It wasn’t enough, Alisha realized. For all that the idea was thrilling, even a perfect excuse to return to the life she’d known didn’t mitigate her anger with Brandon or the situation that had driven her away from the CIA. For a few months, safe amongst her family, she’d seen only the appeal of the job she’d left behind. Now, cold memory came back to cushion her from the temptations offered by a dangerous, clandestine world.

  “Of course I knew Cristina was my handler.” Brandon slumped back in the chair, sweeping his hand over his eyes. Alisha remained on her feet, too full of angry energy to sit and listen without action. “I knew you thought she was dead. I knew she was undercover, because of that supposed death. I couldn’t tell you, Alisha. I couldn’t blow her cover after so many years. She was one of the Agency’s deepest moles. I didn’t know Director Simone was working for the Sicarii. I’ve never seen her genealogical files, Alisha. I had no idea she was one of them. She was my superior, for God’s sake. I thought she was one of the good guys.”

  “Stop.” Alisha lifted a hand, palm out, fury driving the motion. “I don’t care. I don’t care why you did anything anymore, Brandon. Susan Simone could have been Prince Charles’s love child and heir to every throne in the western hemisphere, for all I care. I just want to know why you’re here and how I can make you leave.”

  “I need to get Lilith out of the country,” Brandon answered with a shrug. “She’s too vulnerable here.”

  “Lilith?”

  Brandon brushed a hand over his eyes. “The AI. She named herself after Adam’s first wife. The one who was supposed to be his equal.”

  Alisha dropped into a chair, dark humor creasing her face. “Did you program irony into her or did it come naturally?” She threw the words away with a gesture. “I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. I’ve been out of the loop for nearly a year.”

  “That’s why it has to be you. I don’t know who else to trust, Alisha. You walked away. You wouldn’t have, if you’d had other alliances. You’re the only one I’m sure is clean.”

  “What about your father?”

  Tension made a thin line of Brandon’s mouth. “You know Cristina disappeared last year, after Paris?”

  “What do you mean, disapp
eared? Last I heard they were making her director in Simone’s place. It was part of why I left.”

  “Things changed. She refused it. More than refused it. She disappeared entirely, went off the radar.”

  “Thank God. The idea of her in a position of power in the Agency…” Alisha’s lip curled again, raw distaste. “So everybody got what they wanted. Cristina’s gone, I’m out, and Greg got Boyer’s job.”

  A wave of loss pushed away the rancor Alisha felt over Cristina’s survival. Richard Boyer had been her boss for more than half a decade, his deep rumbling voice and calm manner a rock in her ever-changing world. His death at the hands of a Sicarii-placed car bomb had shaken both Alisha personally and the CIA ranks as a whole. When the latter had settled into place, Gregory Parker, Brandon’s father and once Alisha’s handler, had stepped into the director’s position left open by Boyer’s assassination.

  Brandon sank into his chair, passing his hand over his eyes again. It was a gesture Alisha didn’t remember as part of his body language, and it opened a trickle of sympathy for the man. “I don’t know. It could be nothing. But Lilith was running war games based on current geopolitical alliances and economic standards in the Agency databases—”

  Alisha made a short explosive sound that cut off Brandon’s speech. “Tic tac toe?”

  “Mutually assured destruction,” he answered, without missing a beat. “Dad used to talk about how you referenced half the world’s spy movies as part of your vernacular. He thought it was amazing you and he could communicate, sometimes.”