by Adam Bender
Eve rubbed her bruise. “Excuse me? Our mission? I’m working alone.”
There was a long pause. “Um, have you checked your messages recently?”
“Hold on,” she grumbled, pulling out her phone. Indeed, she had three new messages. “Huh,” she commented.
“May I come in now?”
“One minute,” she said, thumbing through the first e-mail.
Eve,
We have decided to partner you with Mr. Rik Rodriguez, a rising young star we are considering for the Elite Guard. He is an expert marksman, but could use some more experience. We believe that you will make an excellent mentor.
“Great–they don’t trust me,” she muttered, sheathing the phone. She adjusted her hair with one hand and pulled open the door with the other.
The sight of the Elite-in-training made her gag. It was that fool from the blockade who’d asked her if she was crying!
His eyes widened as he, too, made the connection. “Oh!” he gasped.
“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out dir-ecting traffic?”
He grimaced. “I was promoted?”
Rodriguez looked horrified as Eve collected her suitcase and stomped out the door. Ten feet down the hall, she looked over her shoulder. “Planning to follow?” she fumed.
“Yes, ma’am–sir,” stammered Rodriguez, jogging to catch up. “Where…where are we going?”
“To get some coffee,” she said. “Or possibly hard liquor–I haven’t decided yet.”
The desire to rouse her brain eventually beat out the thirst to numb it, so they went to the base’s coffee house. The only other person there was a cashier whose only responsibility seemed to be asking customers from which self-serve dispenser they poured their drink. Eve chose the extra dark variety, while Rodriguez opted for hazelnut light. The seasoned agent took her coffee black; the rookie dropped in two packets of white sugar and a dollop of heavy cream.
Eve picked a table that was as far away from the cashier as she could find. She dusted a scattering of sugar off the top and they sat down.
The coffee was awful, tasting staler than even the atmosphere. She put the drink down and slid her cell phone across the cold-steel table toward Rodriguez, who was smiling a bit timidly. “This is a photograph of the target,” she said. “His name is Jonathan Wyle but lately he’s been going by the alias Seven.”
Rodriguez picked the phone up carefully, as if it might break in his hands. He squinted at the image on the screen, and choked a little bit on his drink.
Eve’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Is that you in the back? Wearing the bikini?”
She turned red, leaned over the table, and snatched the device back. “We were at the beach, and it’s not a bikini. It’s a two-piece swimsuit.”
“Wait, the target is your boyfriend?!” he exclaimed. “Oh my God, is that why you were crying earlier?”
This was exactly why she didn’t want a partner on this mission. “You don’t know the whole story,” she seethed.
“With all due respect, sir, it might help if you told me.”
“Fine.” She leaned back in the wooden chair and sipped her hot drink. “So as I was saying, the target’s real name is Jonathan Wyle. He was one of us–an Elite Guard–but recently he elected to take part in a top secret mission to infiltrate the Underground and expose their secrets.”
“It didn’t work?” Rodriguez asked.
“No, it worked,” she answered. “It was actually because of this mission that we just nabbed Daniel Alexander Young–you know, industrial giant by day, secret leader of the Underground by night? But there were some…complications, I suppose, arising from the, shall we say, experimental nature of the mission.”
Rodriguez nodded.
Eve scowled. “Don’t act like you understand.”
He blinked helplessly, like a fish caught on a line.
“See,” she began, “it’s not exactly an easy task to get into the Underground. If it was, we would have done it a long time ago. The thing is, for all the shit we give the rebels, they’re actually kind of clever. And they’re really good at sniffing out Guard.”
“So you’re saying the Underground is too smart for us to infiltrate by ordinary means?”
“Well, phrasing it like that would be borderline heresy,” she snapped. “All I’m saying is that their ideology is so contrary to our own that we tend to stand out like a wolf in a flock of sheep. We needed a disguise.”
“More than a sheepskin costume, I hope?”
“Science,” she answered. “Our best engineers designed a microchip implant that could block out selected memories, essen-tially resetting a person’s beliefs about the outside world, the government, and etcetera. His mind would be like a hunk of fresh clay, ready for sculpting. Am I getting too science fiction for you?”
“I love sci-fi.”
“Good, that will help you in this line of work,” she said. “Anyway, we saw the chip as an opportunity to finally carry out a successful undercover mission. The thinking was an Elite who doesn’t think like one just might have a chance of monitoring the Underground without arousing suspicion. So we sent the chip back to the labs and asked our guys to add a few more functions, like the ability to record sound and relay it wirelessly to our computers. It would be our most advanced surveillance effort to date.”
Rodriguez nodded. “And your boyfriend took the mission.”
“Fiancé,” she corrected. “It was a little over a week ago. We turned Jon into a blank slate, and with careful intervening nudged him toward the Underground. He joined up, made friends, and absorbed critical information. The mission was successful. Unfortunately, there were some unforeseen…um…”
“Side effects?”
She sighed. “Because the chip had rendered his mind so malleable, Jon couldn’t defend himself against the Underground’s poisonous influence–and they brainwashed him. That had kind of been the point, but what we didn’t expect was that he’d put up so much resistance when we tried to bring the real Jon back.”
Rodriguez furrowed his brow. “Even if he resisted, couldn’t we have just knocked him out and removed the chip anyway? I mean, this Seven, it shouldn’t be his choice, he’s not real. The old him, buried inside, would want us to restore his memory, right?”
“Right,” said Eve sadly. “And we were going to take the chip out, no matter what he said. But, see, this all happened last night.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, you mean…”
“We were in the Capitol Tower. The bombs struck and Jon escaped. Worse, I gave–I mean–he got access to a memory stick providing access to all the recordings stored on the chip. Now the Headmaster is worried he’ll use that evidence against us.”
“Like blackmail?”
“Maybe, but…Jon is so brainwashed now…The truth is…I don’t think he cares about making a deal with us. I think his plan might just be to pass it on to the Underground and let them deal with it. Maybe he’s already done it.”
Rodriguez released his breath in one whistling burst. “Is the chip still active?”
She raised her eyebrows. “The only way to turn it off is to remove it. But we can’t track him that way. The memory stick is the only key, and Seven has it.”
The purple minivan got long stares as it cruised down Main Street in the small desert town of Loganville. “What are they looking at?” asked Seven, adjusting the air conditioner. “I know this clunker is ugly, but–”
“It’s probably just me,” Talia said. “I’m used to it. Even if I wasn’t Watched I wouldn’t fit into a secluded, hick town like this.”
“But you said your brother lives here. Does he fit in?”
She cackled. “No, but he’s stupid.”
A painful swallow reminded Seven that he hadn’t had a thing to drink since leaving the Underground’s hideout in the city. There was no water in the car, and he could feel the dry heat coursing through the windows, even with the air conditioning on. De
sperately, he sought distraction. He tried analyzing the architecture of the post office, general store, and other assorted buildings, but the maroon and adobe red only added to the overwhelming dryness.
“What do people do for fun in this town anyway?” he asked with a slight rasp.
“Um,” Talia strained. “Like, get drunk, I guess. There’s a tavern somewhere that’s pretty popular.”
Imbibing copious amounts of booze sounded like a pretty good idea at the moment, Seven thought. A tall, cold beer sounded particularly refreshing. But none of this was helping. “What do the kids do?”
“Probably they get wasted, too, only they do it in their parents’ basements. Also, I guess there’s a movie theater. I would imagine they do a lot of making out in both locations.”
A smile crept onto Seven’s face. Talia was rude and frequently insulting, but not entirely unenjoyable to talk to. He wondered how old she was, but pushed the thought aside almost as quickly as it had arrived.
They turned right at the next intersection and rode past a baseball diamond. Some boys were throwing a ball back and forth, pausing every few seconds to wipe their brows. Seven was appalled. “Are they crazy?”
“I told you!” said Talia. “Want another example of this town’s insanity? Check out that cluster of town homes up ahead.”
The construction of each two-story building looked identical, right down to the baby cactus on the porch. “Modern comfort, I guess?”
“No, that’s exactly the problem. C’mon, how out of place are they? Did someone forget to tell the architect that his spaceship houses were gonna be planted in the middle of freaking nowhere? Those cactuses…”
“Cacti.”
“Whatever. They were probably an afterthought. Ugly, ugly, ugly!” Flicking on the blinker, she added, “I can’t believe my brother actually bought one.”
The van seemed to float over the freshly paved driveway leading into the community. Upon closer inspection, Seven noticed subtle variations among the houses. The first featured a rather large and shiny gold ball propped up in the middle of the yard. At the second home, the ball was magenta. The third home had the biggest difference of all–a dead-brown lawn. Talia parked in front of it and announced, “This is his place.”
She tapped the doorbell until the door cracked opened. A bug-eyed man squinted out at them.
“Wow, Shaan,” Talia greeted. “You look like you haven’t been outside for months. You trying to turn white or something?”
“Talia?” he choked, pulling the door wide to get a better look. “What are you doing here?”
“Haven’t you been following the news?” she demanded. “The Capital was evacuated.”
He looked annoyed. “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking what you’re doing here at my house!”
“Where the hell else was I supposed to go?”
They glared at each other. Seven eyed the bare concrete doorstep and then his shoes. Maybe this was a bad idea, he thought. He should have asked Talia to drop him off at a hotel or something. Not that he had any money to pay for a room, but perhaps he could work out some kind of deal and–
Talia punched Seven in the arm. “Stop being awkward.”
Jostled by the impact, Seven looked up and extended his arm. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Seven.”
Talia explained. “I helped him get out of the city.”
Seven looked at her. That wasn’t how he remembered it.
Her brother considered Seven’s hand for a few seconds, and then clasped it. “Shaan,” he said.
“Now,” said Talia, “are you going to keep us hostage on your porch, or are you going to let us in for some tea?”
He grumbled unintelligibly and waved them inside. They stepped into what appeared to be a living room, given the large-screen TV and sofa. But it seemed to Seven to really have more in common with a messy closet. Some stray dust tickled his nos-trils and he sneezed.
Shaan whispered something to Talia that seemed to get a rise out of her. “He’s not!” she sneered. “Look, I’ll tell you everything in just a minute.”
A sudden sleepiness overtook Seven, and he found himself looking longingly at Shaan’s black leather sofa. “Have a seat!” Shaan burst with false enthusiasm. “Make yourself at home! Blah, blah, blah.”
“Thanks. This is a nice house.”
Talia shook her head and told Shaan sweetly, “I’m sure he’s kidding.”
Shaan ignored his sister and beamed at the compliment. “It looks expensive, but believe me, I paid more for my old studio in the city,” he said. “Tea?”
“Just water would be great,” answered Seven.
“Tea for me,” said Talia, looking pleased by the rhyme. “Seven, why don’t you stay here. Shaan and I need to talk in the kitchen.”
Seven considered the clutter on the floor for a few seconds before snaking toward the couch. There were books and copies of Computers Weekly magazine in a variety of bad places, including the tops of lamps and millimeters from a fireplace. Finally, he fell into a milky soft cushion and yawned magnificently. He picked up the black remote control on the seat next to him, but quickly reconsidered. In all likelihood the news would be on, and Seven wasn’t sure he was ready to hear more about death and destruction, let alone the Guard’s likely diabolical response. No, he would just sit here and try to relax.
Closing his eyes, Seven couldn’t help but overhear the raised voices of brother and sister in the kitchen.
“Why are you being such an asshole?” Talia cried. There was a metal clang, followed by the snap and whoosh of an igniting gas stove.
“I want to know how you got through the blockade,” Shaan replied angrily. “Last time I checked, sister, you were still on the Watched list. The president was just on the news calling for the arrest of all Watched, and I heard they were stopping cars at the border. I’m glad you’re safe, but the fact you’re here in Loganville means you evaded arrest!”
“Yeah, well I guess it runs in the family,” was the bitter response.
An unpleasant laugh shot from her brother’s lips. “What if they followed you? Do you know how much work it took for me to start a new life here? You’re going to undo everything!”
“They didn’t follow us,” whimpered Talia. “I’m sorry!”
Shaan sighed, clearly won over by his sister’s display of sorrow. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, too. I’ve been on edge since the attack. And it really is good to see you–I was worried.”
For some time, they said nothing. Seven considered the re-mote control again, but couldn’t bring himself to pick it up. A sharp whisper broke the silence. Seven leaned forward to hear. “…not your boyfriend in my living room,” said Shaan, “then who is he?”
“Shut up! He’s just someone I met on the way out of the city. He forced me to share a car with him.”
“And did he also make you bring him to my house?”
“No,” she said. “But I got him in trouble with the stunt we pulled at the blockade, and he doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go.”
“Well, that’s uncharacteristically nice of you,” Shaan dead-panned. “Should we order a pizza and have a party? You could invite your friends.”
“Oh, go to Hell!”
He laughed merrily. “Ah, now there’s the Talia I know and love!”
Something beeped.
“Is that a cell phone?” Shaan asked suspiciously.
“Text message,” she said. “Just one of my girlfriends telling me–hey!”
There was a clamor of falling pots and pans.
Talia yelled, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give that back!”
“Are you stupid?” Shaan snapped. “The Guard is probably looking for you, and you keep a cell phone? Don’t you realize they can track your location on this?”
“I got the model without the GPS chip!” she snapped. “Give it!”
“It doesn’t matter. If your phone’s on, they can triangulate your locatio
n! All they need is three cell phone towers and your signal!”
“Yeah, as if this crappy town had three cell phone towers. You’re just being paranoid.”
“Can’t take the risk,” he grumbled.
“What are you doing with that? Shaan? No!”
There was a loud bang followed by another high-pitched scream. The kettle whistled. Talia, with lips twisted in malice, entered the living room and dropped a tall glass of water in front of the guest.
Seven gave a look of concern. “Everything okay?”
All he got in response was a growl, so Seven let the issue drop. He snapped up the glass of water and began gulping it down.
A minute later Shaan arrived with two mugs of tea.
“Seven,” he asked, “do you have a phone by any chance?”
“No, why?”
“Good man,” he replied. “Good man.”
The siblings sat across from each other and sipped their tea in long, angry silence. Seven considered the ceiling.
Talia pointed at the window. “Are your curtains always closed, Shaan?” she sneered. “There’s a sun out there you know.”
Shaan scrutinized the thick white fabric as if for the very first time. “I guess I don’t like the idea of people looking in.”
“You’re such a hermit.”
He shrugged. After several more sips of tea, he turned to Seven. “So, my sister tells me you helped get her through the blockade. Have you always been such a nice guy?”
Seven laughed. “Well, you kind of have to be nice when someone’s holding a gun to your head–”
“I didn’t point it at your head!” protested Talia.
Shaan turned violently to his sister. “You carry a gun now? Do you even know how to use a gun?”
“Want to find out?” she sneered.
“I apologize for her foul mood,” Shaan said without shifting his glare. “She’s angry because I smashed her cell phone with a hammer.”
Talia looked as if she was trying to singe her brother with her eyes.
“To be fair,” offered Seven, “the gun didn’t have any bullets in it. But she was quite convincing.”
