Firewall (Magic Born)

by Sonya Clark

  “Do you remember Colonel Talbot? I don’t think you would have met him but you might remember hearing about him.”

  “No. I never paid much attention to the higher-ups.”

  “He should be a one-star now but his career, along with a whole lot of others, got sidelined after you left. He holds a grudge.”

  “Do you? It’s my fault you’re at a desk instead of out in the field. Do you hate me for that?”

  “Of course not. I could never hate you.” Except sometimes he had, when boredom and regret sank him into depression and it was easy to blame her. But then he’d always remember the night she left, remember the choice he’d made. Then he’d hate himself for a while. He’d blown his chance with her. Over the years he’d come to accept that, but he didn’t think he could ever stop regretting it. “Be mad as hell at you, yeah. But I could never hate you.”

  “What about for shooting you?”

  “Honestly, I was more upset about you stealing my bike.”

  Tuyet stared at the floor for a long moment. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what she was thinking, but he stopped himself. They weren’t those people anymore, the ones who could sit quietly together and talk about whatever. The trust was gone and along with it the illusion that there could ever be anything between them. She’d made that decision when she decided to run, and he’d made it too when he decided not to go with her.

  “Tell me about Talbot,” she said.

  Hayes gave her a quick rundown of his initial meeting with the colonel and the video of her.

  “So he wants you to bring me in?”

  He hesitated for a moment before answering. “Yes. Those are my orders.”

  Her eyes filled with the kind of challenge that used to make him smile. “You know I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “You got away the first time because I let you. I caught you that night. I found you here, twice now. Keep thinking I’m just a dumb blond, Snow. See what it gets you.”

  “I never thought you were dumb. Naïve, yes. Too quick to follow orders, definitely.”

  “I’m a soldier. Follow orders is what I’m supposed to do.” It was an old argument between them, one that always cut too close for comfort. “What are you doing here, Tuyet?”

  “Whatever I damn well please.” She swept to her feet and strode to the tiny kitchen area. “The soup burned.” She dumped the contents of a pot into the sink, then ran water in both. “Hope you’re not hungry.” She wiped the counter down with jerky movements, trying to hide her anger and failing. For the first time he wondered how she had money to live, but he made no plans to ask. Stepping on her pride could get him a broken bone or three.

  “You never could cook for shit. Why are you in New Corinth? I thought you’d be someplace better. One of the magic-friendly countries.” He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and tried not to fidget. If she saw it, she’d know she was getting to him.

  “Well, I’m here.” Arms crossed over her chest, she faced him and leaned on the counter. “So how do I get rid of you? Because you’re sure as hell not taking me in.”

  Her words should have made him angry at her. Instead, anger at Talbot that had been simmering for weeks came to a sudden boil. Hayes wanted his career back, but not at Tuyet’s expense. Who knew if Talbot could even do what he’d offered? Or what he’d threatened.

  That wasn’t the part that mattered, though. What mattered was what Hayes was willing to do.

  “If I don’t bring you in, he’ll send someone else.” Hayes shrugged. “Hired contractors, maybe. Alert the local PD. With what’s going on here, don’t you think a Magic Born fugitive wanted for desertion and assorted other crimes would motivate the cops to blow this neighborhood to hell and back? Plus the zone and anywhere else they think you might be hiding.”

  She started to speak but he stopped her. “Plus there’s a reward. Ten million dollars to bring you in. It’s kept quiet, mostly just Ranger and intelligence circles, defense contractors with the right clearance. They don’t want a lot of questions asked about you but they still want you bad enough to dangle reward money out there.”

  Tuyet was quiet for a moment. If he hadn’t known her so well, he would have missed it, the look on her face that said she’d been caught unawares. The reward was news to her. “So you think I should surrender and make your job easy? Is that it?”

  “There’s nothing easy about this, believe me. Just being here with you right now, I’m going against my orders. That means I’m going against my oath as an officer. Laugh all you want but that actually means something to me.”

  “I’m not laughing,” she said softly. “It’s why you didn’t come with me. I could never make light of that.”

  The admission hung between them, weighting the air and adding to his resolve to figure out the right thing to do. There might have been ten feet between them but it felt like miles. An endless chasm with no way across. He huddled deeper into the blanket and refused to look at her. “I know how bad Gehenna was for you. The hell I climbed out of may not have been as bad, but it was still hell to me. The service made me who I am. I got an education, I traveled, I’m a better person because of it. Being a Ranger was the pinnacle of that. From the minute I heard of them, it was all I wanted.”

  “Dale.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut at the hated name and shook his head. “Don’t call me that. And hear me out. You owe me that much.”

  “Okay.” She dropped her arms to her sides, resting her hands on the counter.

  Everything he’d wanted to say for the past three years slammed into his head all at once. He tried to untangle it, put it in order so it would make some kind of sense to her. This was probably the only chance he’d get, so he had to make it count.

  “The service made me a better person,” he continued. “It made me believe in something bigger than myself too. That I could contribute to something meaningful. The way I grew up, there was no room for meaning. Just backbreaking work for shitty wages. You might make it to the eighth grade if you were lucky. Forget about getting out. Your world was the wastelands.”

  He stood, securing the blanket around him, and began to pace. “My dad was a mechanic and he could work on the big biofarm machines, so we even had it better than most. I know that. But he was sixty-three years old when he died and he never once set foot out of the wastelands. Never saw a city. He never saw anything. He worked and he drank and he watched TV and that was it.”

  “You wanted more.”

  “I ran away when I was sixteen. Did I tell you that? I know we talked about some of this before, but I don’t remember how much detail I went into.”

  “I knew you ran away but you didn’t say how old you were.”

  “Sixteen. I worked odd jobs, I stayed out of trouble. Enlisted as soon as I could. I had to work harder than everybody around me. I was skinny, malnourished. When they tested me they said I read on a fourth-grade level. But I could take anything apart and figure out how it worked, how to fix it. I had to fight to keep from being stuck in an engineering unit.”

  Tuyet left the kitchen area to sit on the floor close to the boarded-up window. “You know what I always thought about you?”

  He stopped pacing and sat next to her, barely a foot between them. “Should I be scared?”

  “I knew you believed in what you were doing. That a meaningful existence was important to you. That taught me more than you’ll ever know.” She canted her head toward him and grinned. “But you liked the fun parts too. You liked having a security clearance and knowing things other people didn’t. You liked the gadgets, the crazy assignments in places you couldn’t find on a map before getting orders.”

  He laughed. “My geography got better over time. Just like my spelling.”

  “You liked the prestige of that Special Forces badge on yo
ur uniform. The mystique. Having to tell people you couldn’t tell them what you did in the service, but giving them this big wink and a smile. I saw you do that a few times, when we’d be in Virginia for training. You impressed a lot of girls with that act.”

  “Got me laid a few times, I admit.”

  “A few times?” She scoffed. “New recruits would study our missions in the classroom and rumors of your extracurricular exploits over beer.”

  “My extracurricular exploits were never as exciting as people made them out to be. How could they be? I couldn’t have the woman I really wanted.” The admission tumbled out before he could stop it. Not that it was a secret. She’d known all along. He’d just never said it out loud before. Doing so should have made it more real, but all it did was make him sad.

  Tuyet placed her hand on his and squeezed gently. “Dale, I—”

  “God damn it, I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” He didn’t want to talk about what might have been. It hurt worse than any of the cuts and bruises on his body, worse than any of the old wounds that had left scars. “Look, we both know this time-out can’t last forever.”

  “So what are you going to do?” She took her hand back and he regretted his outburst.

  The number of regrets he had concerning Tuyet Caron was far into the double digits, verging on triple. “Tonight, not a damn thing. Got a spare pillow?”

  The shock on her face would have been funny if he’d been in the mood to laugh. She said, “You can’t be serious.”

  “No way am I going back out into the middle of a police action. I’m extending our time-out until tomorrow.”

  “I don’t remember negotiating any time-out with you.”

  “That’s because I issued a royal fiat and said nobody’s arresting anybody or beating anybody up for a while. Is that soup really all you had to eat?”

  “I did have a nice little stash of chocolate, but someone stole it.”

  Hayes scratched his chin. “I did you a favor. That was some subpar chocolate.”

  The sound of sirens penetrated the thin walls of the building, punctuated by yelling and screaming. Tuyet stood and took out a phone. She connected it to a small sound dock on one of the bookshelves and called up music. “It helps to drown out the noise on Friday nights.”

  A woman’s sultry voice filled the room. It was deeper than most female singers but had an ethereal quality that he found relaxing. Turned him on a little too.

  Okay, maybe that was the woman actually in the room. How the hell had he ever even for a second thought he could arrest Tuyet and bring her in to face charges? She belonged out in the world, free.

  “I don’t have a spare pillow,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept on bare floor.” Hayes closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The music did a good job of camouflaging the sounds from outside, but it did nothing to cover the noise in his head.

  There had to be a way out of this, a middle path that would keep them both free. He just had to find it.

  If he thought of it tonight, it would have to come to him in his dreams. Between the soft music and his exhaustion, he was asleep in minutes.

  Chapter Eight

  City councilwoman Sheila Copeland had an office in one of the quieter areas of her Rockenbach district, but on Saturday afternoons she and a handful of others gathered in a private dining room at the back of an Indian restaurant several blocks away. Tuyet attended infrequently, preferring to get caught up to speed on anything she needed to know from Jason later. This time, she decided not to wait. She slipped out of the apartment before Hayes woke, taking a chance on the length of this time-out between them.

  The hostess recognized her, so she was able to slip into the room without any trouble. Sheila was speaking so Tuyet stayed by the wall and listened.

  “Thirteen people were admitted to hospitals last night. The clinic was overrun with way more than that. Chemical burns, tear gas exposure, all sorts of various injuries from running and fighting with the police. Today, supplies are depleted and Rose is dealing with cops who want the names of people that were treated there last night.” Rose was the councilwoman’s wife and ran one of the two public clinics in Rock.

  “Can they force her to give up that information?” The question came from an older man who glanced from Sheila to a law student who’d volunteered to help the protesters.

  Sheila gestured to indicate the student should answer. He said, “The clinic doesn’t bother with records on Friday nights anymore, partly because of that. Doctor-patient confidentiality should protect the clinic, but the police and the city can try other ways. Inspections and accreditation are things to worry about in the long run but for right now, all the cops can do is try to intimidate Dr. Copeland. And I think we all know just how much that’s not going to work.”

  Relieved laughter broke some of the tension in the room. Shelia let it go on for a moment before continuing. “We don’t talk much about what goes on after our people leave the protests. We try to pretend it’s a separate matter, that the rioting and violence aren’t a part of what we’re trying to do. But we need to be honest with ourselves. We’ve all been hoping that it would help spur the city into action, into doing the things that we want. We all know the agitators. The ones who light the fires and throw rocks and provoke the police into fights and chases. Just because they don’t sit at this table with us doesn’t mean anything. Anything.” She looked from one face to the next, meeting their gazes with the force of her own. “And it is not working.”

  Tuyet didn’t roll her eyes but it was a close thing. Every other month or so, the councilwoman advocated changing the protests. A different day of the week, different locations. Anything to put distance between the people the councilwoman thought of as legitimate protesters and the thugs who did battle with riot police. She didn’t want to admit that peaceful demonstrations and petitions were useless. Throwing rocks at cops wasn’t helping either, but Tuyet couldn’t blame people for expressing their anger.

  No longer interested in the meeting itself, she scanned the room for Jason Beckwith. He wasn’t there. She did find Duane Mendoza, who used to work for Vadim’s partner Lizzie Marsden when she was on the council. That was before her very public revelation that she was Magic Born. Tuyet slipped through the room quietly and knelt next to Duane.

  “Hey, have you seen Jason Beckwith?”

  He leaned over and whispered softly, “Sheila asked him to stay away for a week or two. Let things settle down.”

  Tuyet drew her eyebrows together. “What happened?”

  Duane pointed to the entrance that led to the kitchen. They left the area as unobtrusively as possible and huddled in the doorway. “Somebody accused him of being Magic Born.”

  “Why would someone do that?” Maybe half a dozen people knew that Jason really was Magic Born, but none of those people were part of Sheila’s semiorganized group.

  “Same reason anyone with that kind of money gets accused.” Duane shrugged. “There’s still a lot of anger over Lizzie. People assume it’s still going on.” He meant wealthy families bribing officials for fake Normal DNA tests for their babies. Tuyet agreed that it probably was still going on, all over the country. It was another thing that fed the rage in communities like Rockenbach, where no one had the resources to circumvent the Magic Laws. So far, Rock was the only place where people were taking that rage to the streets, but she didn’t think it would stay that way forever.

  “He’s using his money to help people here. Who do they think will resupply the clinic when the city says it’s not in the budget?”

  “I know,” Duane said. “But you can’t talk logic and sense to people when they’re that angry. Sheila’s right—it’ll blow over if he stays away from the meetings for a week or two.”

  “They’ll take his money but they don’t want to see his
face?” She shook her head in disgust. “I expected better of her.”

  “Try not to be too hard on her. She’s walking a tightrope here.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as Tuyet.

  “Aren’t we all?” She tapped her fist on his arm. “I gotta go. See you.”

  “Say hi to Lizzie for me.” He knew that Tuyet could get into FreakTown but he didn’t know how, or that she was a witch. He had good instincts about when to not ask questions.

  “I will.”

  Tuyet left through the kitchen, grabbing a piece of naan on her way. The flatbread was warm and fragrant, nowhere near enough to sate her hunger, but it would have to do for now. She texted Jason, who agreed to meet her at his home in Central City.

  The subway was slow and miserable. The air conditioning wasn’t working and the car reeked of greasy food, cheap beer and something suspiciously like vomit. She stayed on her feet, one hand on a pole, constantly aware of her surroundings. A group of kids who looked like they would be happy to continue last night’s mayhem filled up one end of the car. They didn’t worry her. A glamour hid her true face from the CCTV cameras. If she was stopped, no one would be the wiser about the phone in her pocket because they wouldn’t be able to access anything important.

  What kept her on edge was Hayes.

  She shoved thoughts of him away and focused on the here and now. Dredging up the past wouldn’t do either of them any good.

  Jason’s building security was familiar with the particular glamour she sported today. They believed her to be either the yoga instructor he told them she was, or that perhaps he wasn’t as faithful to his boyfriend as he claimed. Shawn knew the truth so it didn’t matter. She passed through security easily and took the elevator to Jason’s apartment.

  Jason met her at the door with a cup of coffee and a worried expression.