“We’re about to find out,” Jason said, and laced his fingers together. “Make sure I shut down if I’m about to stroke out or something, okay?” He brightened as he came back online, and sighed in relief as the link welcomed him home.
“Better?”
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes and let the collective wash over him.
Rachel gave him a few minutes to let him catch up with the link, then asked: “What did you want to talk about?”
Jason paused before he closed himself tight against the others. “I think this might be for you,” he whispered.
His voice was so low that she had trouble hearing him. “What?”
“This,” he said, and pressed something into her hand. “I found it in my pocket when I woke up.”
She didn’t bother to flip her implant to a close scan; she knew what it was by the feel of it. “I am so sorry,” she whispered back. “I thought Glazer was going to cut his way out of here. I didn’t know they had a real escape plan. And we needed... You know what we needed.” Her voice cracked on a giggle that was too close to a sob. “I’m so sorry.”
Jason already knew; she had been carrying guilt when he touched her. “It’s okay,” he assured her, still speaking in a whisper. He covered her hand with his own and his sincerity flooded through her. “I wanted you to know it really is okay. Mulcahy told me you just saved us from the think tanks. That’s worth a concussion any day.”
She wasn’t as sure, but she slipped the small object into her own pocket for safekeeping.
A paperclip twisted into the shape of a heart.
TWENTY-TWO
There were late fireflies and a new baby, and the promise of barbeque after the caterers finished setting out the steam trays. This was one of OACET’s civilized parties, open to friends and relatives; Shawn, almost casual in jeans and a light long-sleeved tee, had promised he would talk about nothing but fishing and would keep the conversations short.
She had stolen the baby and commandeered an overstuffed chaise lounge that had been dragged out onto the patio. Rachel lay supine with a pillow stuffed under her busted knees and Avery wrapped in a gentle bear hug on her chest, occasionally planting kisses on the baby’s thin scalp. Avery was in that fleeting stage where she could sleep through a full-blown bacchanalia, which was convenient; even when they kept themselves on a short leash, the Agents would start the next day with a hunt for their clothes.
Babies are blue, she thought. And silver and gold and cream and seafoam green, all puffing in a cloud, but mostly soft, soft blue. Rachel might never move again.
“Any chance you’ll let me hold her?” Santino plunked down beside them on an ottoman.
“Nope.” Rachel snuck another kiss. “I’m not giving her up until she’s hungry or I have to pee.”
Her partner handed her a fresh beer with a swirly straw.
“Dirty pool, Mister Bond,” she said, and swept the beer over her head in an awkward arc so the condensation wouldn’t drip on the baby.
“Sturtevant called,” he said.
“Is he coming?” Rachel asked.
He shook his head. “Said he had a prior commitment.”
She wasn’t surprised. The Chief of Detectives had avoided her most of the week, but she didn’t hold it against him. Rachel was sure someone at the Metropolitan Police Department was pressuring him about their alliance with OACET, but she didn’t know how, and tonight she couldn’t be bothered to care. Sturtevant would probably resolve it without her help; if not, she’d wait a few more days for the dust to settle before she kicked it up again.
The whole mess had ended beautifully for OACET, with back-to-back press conferences leaving barely enough time for the pundits to nitpick each one apart. They lacked the legal language to define why the Witcham shooting wasn’t a good one, the circumstances being so surreal that Rachel had been given a pass. She was federal, not police, and those four perfect shots through Glazer’s legs made it impossible for Internal Affairs to argue that Rachel had intended anything other than to incapacitate. If she had killed Witcham, or if he hadn’t kidnapped children? Well, things probably would have been different. But the video of her turning his legs into shards of bone made it a little easier to accept that Witcham hadn’t gotten away entirely scot-free.
(That video had been viewed over eighteen million times on YouTube this week alone; Rachel had nearly achieved talking dog status. The conspiracy theorists had seized on Witcham’s incrimination of Senator Hanlon and were running wild with it. Maybe, with luck, some intrepid reporter would try to fact-check those rumors and would do OACET’s work for them.)
Several days after the shooting, Charlotte Gallagher had arrived on the mansion’s doorstep, unannounced. Rachel had been at First District Station at the time, so Mulcahy had taken Gallagher on a tour of the upper floors, the two of them working out the details of a liaison of Agents to the FBI. Four Agents had been reassigned on temporary loan. Rachel and Phil were teaching them the finer points of looking through walls.
Edwards had cornered Rachel in the coffee shop, demanding to know why she hadn’t bothered to keep him updated on the case; he had learned about Eric Witcham after he had been served the subpoena. Rachel had shrugged and played dumb until Edwards swept her cappuccino from the table, and then Rachel had lost her temper and manipulated him into a brief staring contest until he fled the store, shaken. On impulse, she had limped after him to apologize. They ended up taking shelter at a bus stop from the sheeting rain of a late summer storm, reminiscing about the man both she and Edwards had come to know as Charley Brazee. They had shaken hands before she caught a cab home.
And then Carlota had gone into labor. All of OACET had fallen silent while their first baby was born. (Mainly because they couldn’t hear each other over Carlota’s shouting; when Rachel had asked Mako why he hadn’t blocked his wife from the link, the huge weightlifter blinked at her and walked away, shaking his head.) Jenny Davies and the rest of the medical team had concerns about the neurological implications of introducing a new mind to the world in the middle of a technological psychic maelstrom, but the kid was loved beyond belief and they all decided that nothing else mattered.
Everything had wrapped up neat and tidy, except for those last two questions.
She had walked in on Mulcahy, drawn by her own voice as she passed his office. The lights were out and he had his feet up on his desk as he listened to the audio recording of her brief phone call with Witcham. She stood in the doorway and heard herself say: “Then why try to break us? Why not help us?”
She and Mulcahy had locked eyes, and he shrugged. Rachel had eased herself back through his door and limped away.
Neither of them had felt the need to ask whether Witcham was just that good.
Or what it might mean that she had crippled the man who had singlehandedly altered the public’s opinion of OACET.
Avery twitched, a tiny infant dream tugging at her. Rachel snuggled her chin up beside the baby’s soft peach fuzz hair and listened to her breathe.
Rachel ran a quick scan through the crowd. The outsiders marveled at the mansion. At night, lit by the faux gas lamps, it was easy to overlook how run-down the place was. There was a volleyball game and some early swimmers paddling in the pool, and enough talking and laughter outside of the link to make it a real party.
Across the patio, Josh was tending bar. The crowd was stacked three deep, most of them running a lustful red as they watched him flip bottles and pour cocktails.
There were the usual family dynamics. The gardeners were clustered by the edge of the new grass, sipping their drinks as they eyed the volleyball players with trepidation. The couples nagged and bickered sweetly. Those with quick hands or combat experience were juggling knives, lit torches, running chainsaws... The mansion provided a wealth of props for those who loved to show off.
She couldn’t find either Phil or Jason, but they had brought dates from outside of OACET. They were enjoying the spoils of fame; Phil said
he’d never been asked out more in his entire life than over the past week. If they were holed up behind a stack of boxes somewhere, she wasn’t about to interrupt.
Zockinski’s core of autumn orange popped at the edge of the driveway, Hill’s forest green beside it. Rachel nearly sat up in surprise before the topheavy weight of the baby pushed her flat against the lounge. The detectives had come together and arrived late. Rachel hadn’t thought they would come at all. Both men had declined her first invitation, but she had pushed it on them the rest of the week until they finally accepted. She had assumed they had agreed just to get her to shut up.
Avery made a tiny mewling sound, and her hands clenched on Rachel’s shirt as she started to stir; Rachel pinged Mako to come and get his daughter.
Santino scooted his ottoman so his back was against a pillar. “How are the knees?”
“Fine. Davies says I need to take it slow for a few weeks, but there’s no permanent damage.” Rachel had been coerced into a second physical before the party started, but Jenny Davies had had ulterior motives. The medical researcher had received a copy of Phil’s adapted scanning autoscript, and was obsessed with its potential as a diagnostic instrument. Davies had all but held a gun to Rachel’s head to teach her how to apply this new autoscript to deep tissue, blood, and bone. Rachel had tried her best to show Davies what she could, and fought her nausea for almost an hour until she finally threw up in the trash can.
“So…” she said, and paused to search out the end of her straw.
“I haven’t seen her,” her partner said in a flat voice.
“Okay,” Rachel said. Santino had driven her to the mansion earlier that afternoon and had disappeared after they arrived, so she had assumed the best even though Zia was conspicuously absent from the party. Last Saturday, he had gone out to meet Zia for coffee, claiming they would work through their shared attraction like reasonable adults. He had come home an hour later in a red-white rage. Rachel had taken him straight to the OACET shooting range to let him blow off his anger with a semiautomatic tactical shotgun. He refused to say what had happened and Rachel had gathered that the conversation had not gone well, but his core colors were thoroughly and permanently saturated with Zia’s and he had stopped mentioning his inevitable reunion with his ex-girlfriend. On Sunday morning, Rachel found a check taped to the coffee pot with “rent & utilities” scrawled across the bottom. They had gone shopping for furniture for the guest room that afternoon.
Mako shuffled towards them over the lawn. The man’s conversational colors were layered in exhausted grays.
“Where’s Carlota?” Santino asked.
“Sleeping, where else?” Mako glanced towards the mansion. “She’s conked out in one of the bedrooms.”
“You’re not with her?” Santino asked. The dark circles under Mako’s eyes made him look as though he was ready to suit up for the Superbowl.
“Pat and I were…uh…” Mako was suddenly interested in everything other than Santino. “…moving stuff for the party.”
“Where’d you and Mulcahy put his car?” Rachel asked.
Santino choked on his beer. “My car? What?”
“It’s your own fault for driving a hybrid,” Mako sighed. “So light, so tiny.”
“What did you do with my car?”
“Don’t worry,” Rachel shushed him as Avery began to squirm. “You’ll get it back. We’ve got his baby.”
Zockinski and Hill came out of the crowd. “Holy sh—poop,” Mako said, fumbling his way through a new parent’s self-censorship.
“I know,” Rachel sniffed. A gorgeous brunette hung off of Zockinski’s arm; his wife was stunning. “How is that fair?”
When they were close enough so she didn’t have to shout, Rachel asked Zockinski, “No kids?”
“Got a sitter,” he said. His conversational colors dimpled slightly as he told a white lie. “We’ll probably be out past their bedtime.”
Oh well, Rachel thought. He trusted them enough to bring his wife. It was a good start.
“This place is amazing,” Zockinski’s wife said. And it was, a fairy kingdom at twilight as long as you could overlook the cracked concrete and the areas roped off to let the seedlings grow.
“Thanks,” Rachel said. “We’ve been renovating it since we moved in. The work is finally starting to show.”
“You find the mansion okay?” Santino asked Hill.
“Got here a while ago.” The tall man shrugged and took a pull from his bottle. “We would have come over sooner but there’s this guy standing by the bar who really wants to talk about fish.”
“Fishing?”
“No, just…fish.”
“Right,” Rachel said quickly. “Introductions. Mako, this is Detective Matt Hill. We worked with him on the Eric Witcham case. Matt, this is Agent Marc Hill. We call him Mako.”
Zockinski looked between the two Hills and opened his mouth, and Rachel jabbed him in the thigh with her nearest big toe, hard.
The two men shook hands and appraised each other. Rachel noticed their core colors had the same hints of green. Their handshake started as casual but their conversational colors picked up speed as they shifted from casual small talk to vivid red recognition.
“And Matt?” Rachel rolled forward onto her feet and pressed the drowsy baby into her father’s arms before either man could speak. “This is Avery. She’s your first cousin once removed, probably? I think that’s how the genealogy goes.”
Santino coughed, then roared with laughter. Zockinski was right behind him.
The Hills blinked and gaped, and looked down at Rachel.
Who smiled.
Acknowledgements and Apologies
Brown, you put up with my nonsense and give so much good in return. I love you and I’m lucky to have you as my husband.
This book couldn’t have been written without the help of the second readers. Thanks to Fuzz, Gary, Tiff, Joris, Greg, Jackie, and Elizabeth, who slogged through countless drafts and gave excellent critical feedback. Danny, thank you for the copy edits. As always, Dave, my friend and website administrator, helped me when I had no idea I needed help, and is apparently far more knowledgeable about gun ownership and ballistics than I had realized.
Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising is responsible for the fantastic cover art.
Credit goes to the Foglios at Girl Genius for the lovely and inspirational phrase, “mad social scientist”—Eric Witcham will be back.
With apologies to Dante, who let me know that as a person of Irish ancestry herself, she was horrified that I credited whiskey to Tennessee. And my sincere apologies to those readers, authors, and artists I have met online and have no doubt offended in some way. Social awkwardness: it’s how I roll.
I have taken some liberties with locations. The OACET mansion does not exist (although I wish it did), and while First District Station is indeed a recently remodeled elementary school, the rodeo chute off of the Interrogation wing and its attached parking garage are my own additions.
The Portsmouth Marine Terminal is in the same place but is slightly smaller than described. Directly across the harbor is its sister port, the Norfolk International Terminals, and I’ve combined them into a single entity. The environmental problems associated with the dumping of shipping containers are quite real.
The Smithsonian will soon be shutting its dinosaurs away while they renovate the hall. The estimated time required for this renovation is five to seven years. Get in while you still can.
Finally, Digital Divide and the other novels in the Rachel Peng series are set in a larger fictional universe. Patrick Mulcahy’s story is free to all readers, and is in graphic novel form at agirlandherfed.com. Digital Divide, as well as the four upcoming novels in the Rachel Peng series, will fill in the five-year gap between when Mulcahy discovered the purpose of their implants and when he was finally able to establish OACET as an independent federal organization. Please excuse the talking koala; he has a good heart.
You can
find updates on projects and novels at kbspangler.com and agirlandherfed.com. Thanks for reading!
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