Alliance

by Leigh, Trisha

“Get some rest,” Madeline says, patting my knee. “I’ve got the boys cleaning up, but I suspect Haint and Polly will be up to crowd you out of your bed sooner rather than later.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I wake up in the middle of the night with a warm hand pressed against the sheet, covering my nose and mouth.

  I sit straight up in my bed, thrashing like crazy against my attacker until I land a heavy blow to his midsection and fall onto the floor in the process.

  “Christ, Gypsy. You’re jumpy as hell.”

  The familiar sound of Mole’s voice calms my racing heart, but I still have to wave my arms to dry the sweat in my pits. “What the heck do you expect when you wake me up like that?” I hiss.

  “I didn’t want to wake anyone else up,” he whispers back.

  “Too late,” Haint groans from the middle of the bed.

  “Now get the hell out of here.” Pollyanna shoves Haint out of her space now that I’ve vacated the other third of the bed. “Some of us want to sleep.”

  I scramble up from the floor and look at Mole, who motions to the hallway.

  “Grab some clothes.”

  It’s odd to be woken up and ordered around, and it takes me five minutes after he shuffles into the hallway to orient myself enough to strip my pajamas off and tug on a pair of jeans, a Charleston Academy sweatshirt, and a pair of warm socks and boots. Mole’s leaning against the wall outside the door when I emerge, not feeling particularly friendly. My watch says it’s a little after four in the morning.

  “What on earth do you want at this hour?” I grump, wiping crusties from the corners of my eyes.

  “I want you to fight me.”

  “Pardon?”

  He sighs, tugging on his hair, which needs to be cut. The honey strands are darker in the winter than the summer and hang almost to his eyes at the moment. “I suck at fighting with weapons other than my eyes. You’re good—the twins won’t shut up about how surprised they are about how good you are. Will you help me?”

  Declining doesn’t cross my mind, despite the hour and the fact that it’s cold outside. And that we have a long day ahead of us. Mole needs my help. “I’ll try. Where’s your coat?”

  “Downstairs.”

  We tiptoe down the dark steps and into the mudroom, where we’ve been keeping our jackets and coats. We find and shrug into ours, then I add a scarf to the mix. Mittens would be good, too, but I’m not sure about handling a weapon with them on, so I leave them in the pile on the dryer.

  The sun is peering over the horizon ever so slightly, fingers hooked into today but its body still slumbering. My breath marches in front of me in white puffy clouds, dissipating as I walk through them on our way to the shed. Everything inside is exactly as we left it, all the weapons back on their hooks or resting on the correct shelves.

  I hand Mole a tire iron and grab a crowbar for myself, then guide him back into the frosty morning.

  “Advice?” he asks, shifting the iron’s weight from one hand to the other.

  “First of all, keep it in your dominant hand. Second, I’m not sure why you’re having so much trouble with this because it’s not so much about knowing what move you’re going to make as it is about knowing what move the other person is going to make. You always seem to sense placement and movement.”

  “More so with you than the others.” He frowns. “You’re saying you go on the defense?”

  “Yes and no. If you can guess your opponent’s next move, then you can not only avoid injury but use their imbalance to strike.” I purse my lips. “And don’t give me too much credit. It’s only because I know all the Cavies so well that this is working. I suspect if I ever try to actually fight someone, it won’t go so well.”

  “I don’t know. You’ve always been better at things than you give yourself credit for, Gyp.”

  Delight breaks over me like sunlight, unexpected but strong. I smile but don’t respond, a little uncomfortable being the focus of compliments. “Okay. Settle your weight into your toes. Distribute it evenly between both feet so you can move either way.”

  He shifts until he’s balanced. “Okay.”

  “Good. Now, let’s just practice a few times. I’ll move and you guess when and which way I’m going.”

  The first time I parry to the left and he guesses wrong. The second time he guesses the direction right but is too late to cut off my attack. It takes half a dozen tries before he catches me and turns my surprise back around on me. After that he manages to win our tussles at least 50 percent of the time.

  We’re both panting, sweating even in the chilly air, but it feels good. My muscles are tight, alive, as they move my body into spins and crouches, the iron of our weapons ringing as they clash in the January morning. Mole surprises me again by sweeping my legs out from under me the same way Fake Flicker—or Sepasiph—did to Pollyanna that very first day in the graveyard. The move sends me flopping onto my back so hard it punches all the air out of my lungs and the success alarms Mole so much that he trips and crashes on top of me.

  The pain is expected but the panic that comes with not being able to breathe isn’t. My brain registers that I look like a foolish idiot, gasping for air like a fish tossed carelessly in the bottom of a boat. Mole can’t see me, thank goodness, but my desperate struggle to push him off me clues him in that I’m freaking out.

  “Gypsy, are you okay?” The humor in his voice suggests he knows I’m fine, but there’s enough worry around the edges to tell me he’s not making fun of me. Yet. “Breathe, girl.”

  It takes a few more seconds but then my lungs allow the tiniest sips of air in. They reinflate and I stretch out on the cold ground, the fingers of my right hand grasping crunchy blades of grass while my left hand reaches up to whack Mole in the chest.

  “Hey,” he groans. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

  Mole rests on his back at my side, close enough that I can feel the heat from his body and the twitch in his fingers where they lie millimeters from mine.

  “I’d say you’ve got the hang of it.”

  “With you. I can’t read the others as well, but I guess now that I’ve got a sense of how to make it work for me, I can learn. A total stranger will be a challenge, though.”

  “For all of us.”

  “Thank you, Gypsy.”

  “Anything for you, Mole.”

  We stay there in the silence. I have no desire to move, to cast off the peaceful rightness of the moment. It’s as though we’re in a Gypsy-and-Mole bubble, a version of the same one we’ve always had but smaller, with less room to move around.

  “Goose saw you kissing Jude yesterday.”

  My breath catches in my still-struggling lungs at the thought of them all talking about it. The thought of our private moment being witnessed. Mole takes a deep breath and goes on before any sort of response can form.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt, Gypsy. And this thing with Greene…you know how it ends.”

  “I know.” All the words are there—the fact that I kissed him yesterday so that I could get more clues about the circumstances of his death, most of all—but they stick in my throat. It’s not the only reason I kissed Jude, and it for sure has nothing to do with the fact that I enjoyed it. Plus, it’s none of his business.

  “That’s it?”

  The pause between us lengthens but Mole’s not going to let it go. I’ve known him long enough to know there wouldn’t be much point in lying. “I’m not ready to give up on him.”

  “He still doesn’t know? About his death?”

  I shake my head. “No. He knows about us, though, and he’s not afraid. He still wants to be…friends.”

  “I might be blind, Gypsy, but that guy wants to be more than friends.” Something in Mole’s voice, like he’s chewing tacks, makes it hard for me to swallow.

  “Maybe. Probably. There’s so much we don’t know, Mole. About our abilities, about what’s going to happen to us in the next month. Hell, in the next twenty-four hours…” I s
wallow and turn my head toward Mole. The ground is hard against my cheek and anchors me to the world. The real one. “I don’t want to keep giving things away. The world is probably going to take them from us anyway, but what’s the harm in admitting we want more for ourselves?”

  “And Jude is your more?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. So is Maya and my dad and maybe even Peter. They make me happy. They make me feel like the girl I want to be.”

  “And we don’t?” That pain returns, squeezing his words. His head turns, too, so that we’re looking into each other’s faces.

  Or I’m looking. He’s just facing me.

  “Don’t make it into an us or them, Mole. I love you guys, but you only know the girl with the useless mutation who tried to make up for it with sarcasm and smiles.”

  “You never have to make up for anything. I like you the way you are, too, and I’d never, ever describe you as useless.” He frowns. “I’m suddenly very sorry I never said that out loud until now. I’ve never felt any differently.”

  Mole’s face changes from the one I know so well into something else. The expression in his green eyes is intense, pummeling me with pent-up emotions—frustration, longing, fear, maybe even more hidden behind those—and my stomach lurches. Maya’s notion that Mole feels more than friendship for me plays in the back of my mind and I can’t shut it off.

  Worse than that, my body and mind suddenly can’t tell me how I feel about him.

  “Mole…”

  “Don’t. I’m not going to say anything or do anything that’s going to change our relationship, Gyp. Not right now, not when you’ve got feelings for someone else and our lives are in this state of flux.” He reaches out, fumbling until he finds the strands of my hair lying on the grass in between us and runs them between his fingers, a faint smile on his lips. “I just want you to know that I’m kicking myself for waiting too long to tell you I think you’re amazing. That you’re more than my best friend. You’re the person who makes me happy to get out of bed in the morning. The girl I wanted to talk to when a day of training got particularly bad because she can always make me feel better, even if she’s being a sarcastic wench.”

  Tears gather in my eyes as his words slide in my ears and tattoo themselves on my brain. I’ll never, ever forget them, but given the confused snarl of emotions they’re lodging in my middle, it might take me the rest of my life to decipher how I feel about them.

  About Mole saying them.

  “Are you two going to stop gazing into each other’s eyes and eat breakfast or what?” Goose shouts from the screened-in porch.

  “Are they really staring into each other’s eyes?” Athena asks, his whisper probably carrying to the neighbors’ yard.

  Mole rolls his eyes and sits up, brushing grass off his arms. “We’re coming in, you idiots.”

  He starts to get up but I put out a hand, closing it around his arm. The expression on his face when he turns back shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. He’s Mole again—in good humor, perfectly at peace. As though none of this is awkward or should make us feel weird or different.

  I take a look inside myself and find that I don’t feel strange. This is Mole, whether he says unbelievable things to me or whether he’s knocking me over and pulling my pigtails. “Hey, Mole?”

  “Yeah?”

  A smile spreads my lips so wide my cheeks threaten to crack. “I think you’re amazing, too.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  None of us talk much during the twelve-hour flight from Norfolk, Virginia to St. Petersburg, Russia. The nice thing about our association with the CIA—the only one, so far—is the private plane. There are leather couches, dorm-style sleeping spaces, a fully stocked kitchen and even a sick bay. Like a spy movie come to life.

  It gives us plenty of space to spread out. Most of us managed to sleep for at least a few hours, but as we make our descent, the recirculated air is thick with nerves and questions. It’s slick on the way down until it expands in my lungs. They’re clogged, no room for answers even if they were forthcoming.

  Nightmares interrupted my sleep more than once during the flight, each one ending with Jude running to the edge of the building, too late to catch Pollyanna’s falling form. As hard as I try, I can’t see whether or not the rest of those people jump with her. They must. She told Jude to save them, but he could never stop anyone from following her lead. Not when she’s in a mood like that and he only has two hands.

  By the time the wheels touch down on the runway at a small, private airport I feel eight years older, and a look in the mirror reveals rumpled clothes, messy hair, and deepening circles around my eyes. We aren’t going to be here long enough to succumb to jetlag, but I’m going to sleep for a week when we get back.

  None of the other Cavies look twice at me as we haul ourselves down the metal rollaway stairs and across the deserted tarmac where three cars wait, idling. It’s probably because none of them look any better. The twins are the only ones who seem unaffected by the trip, chasing each other around the tarmac and fighting over who gets the bigger limo. Polly has taken care to stay as far away as possible since we touched yesterday. Haint’s quiet, introspective, but that’s her default in stressful situations. Mole’s watching us all with a nervous expression that resembles the one the Professor used to adopt on assessment days, or on the days he knew the Philosopher was taking Mole or Reaper out for their special training activities.

  Geoff seems…put out. Whether it’s because we’re here in the first place, because we chose to leave Saint Stephen’s when he would have stayed, or because he’s stuck with me on the boring assignment is hard to say. We left Flicker back in Charleston at a CIA safe house with Madeline since my father will be back from his trip any day now, but leaving one of our own was hard on all of us. Especially when we feel so responsible for her well-being, and leaving her with the government is probably the last thing she would choose for herself.

  Well, maybe not. We really don’t know, and we’re doing the best we can. Hopefully she’ll understand that if she ever wakes up. Madeline seems worried that it hasn’t happened yet, but she’s not a doctor.

  As we draw closer to the idling cars, I squint into the early-morning sunshine in an attempt to make out the three figures standing by the doors. One is Agent Bishop, the friendly woman we met the other day. One is a stranger—I’m guessing based on our conversation with Marlow that he’s the other agent assigned to Athena’s group. Agent Warren, I think.

  The third is Dane Lee. He’s got a look on his face that suggests he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  “Wait.” Haint stops walking. “We’re splitting up now? Aren’t we all going to some central place to get briefed or something?”

  “You’ll each be briefed on the details of your team’s goals en route. The mission will be complete in less than ten hours whether all objectives are accomplished or not, at which time we will all reconvene here for the flight home.” Dane steps forward as he talks, hands in his pockets. “You’ll all be issued burner phones with maps. The airport address is preprogrammed and a timer will alert you when you need to leave in order to make it back here before takeoff.”

  “Why would we all need that? Won’t we be together?” I ask, feeling my nerves creep back up to dangerous heights. It’s ludicrous to me that the CIA would assume any of us are equipped for something like this. We have a leg up on most people because of our mutations, sure, but we’re also a bunch of teenagers who haven’t even spent that much time in the real world. I assumed we’d be with agents the whole time. “Are you expecting us to be left on our own?”

  “Expecting?” Dane shakes his head, avoiding my gaze in favor of sweeping the circle. “No. But we need to be prepared for every eventuality, and I’ll tell you, the pilot is instructed to take off at fifteen hundred hours, no matter how many of us are on board. In fact, he’s not even aware of our numbers here.”

  “Why such a strict schedule?” Mole asks, looking as ill as I feel. />
  “Because that’s as long as we can comfortably set down here without the Russian government learning of our presence.” Dane’s tone is clipped now, clearly irritated by us asking questions instead of following orders. “Anything else or can we go?”

  The seven of us look at each other. A million emotions tug me in as many different directions—fear, excitement, loss, love—and they’re reflected back at me in spades. I want to run up and hug them all, to be dramatic and tell them how much they mean to me, because what if I never see them again?

  But I don’t move. They don’t move. We watch one another, spilling emotions around our circle until we’re all connected, and I know we’re all thinking the same thing—that it would be silly to make a scene.

  The CIA wants to act as though this is all business as usual, that they’re not worried, and everything Madeline and I saw points to the same conclusion. Sort of. I mean, not dying and not being in serious trouble are two different things, but the former will have to be enough to get me into that car.

  Mole is the first one to turn away, toward Agent Warren, and the twins peel off after him. They slide into the backseat of their car and disappear behind a slammed door. A moment later, Haint and Pollyanna go with Agent Bishop, Geoff and I follow Dane into the backseat of the last car, and we all go our separate ways.

  Once we’re on the road, Dane pulls a knapsack from under his seat and extracts two envelopes, handing them to us. Mine slices my thumb and I stick it in my mouth, sucking the blood off while I wipe the tears on my cheeks with the back of my hand. Geoff and Dane don’t mention them, unless Dane nudging a travel package of Kleenex my direction counts. Part of me wants to wave them off, but there’s really no point in showing up to my first CIA mission with snot all over my face.

  I peruse the contents of the envelope to nudge my mind back on track, finding a Swiss passport with my picture and the name Mary Swanson on it, and a bunch of Russian cash.