Blades of Winter (33 page)

Wait, that’s not true. I look back at my pillow. Behind the warmth from my head there’s another heat source. I reach under the pillow for Li’l Bertha and check her status indicator. It says “ready,” meaning she’s turned on. I always power her down when I’m in bed. She boots up
so quickly that it’s not worth the risk of having a live firearm only an inch from my head while I sleep.

Weird. She’s never booted herself up before. I’ll have to take a good look at her in the morning. I turn her off, lie back on my pillow, and wait for my pulse to slow down. I’d like to use some Kalmers, but I’m trying not to rely on them so much.

I turn off my infrared and switch to starlight vision. Tree-filtered light from the main quad creates a pattern like a flock of birds on the ceiling. A light wind brushes the trees, and the birds look like they’re flying. I’ve still got Li’l Bertha in my hand. I hold her up in front of my face and slowly turn her from side to side. The spiraled neural interface connector built in to her pistol grip is magnetic. I click it in and out of the WeaponSynch pad installed in my left hand’s palm while I think.

Who called to me? It was familiar, but it wasn’t my mom. I don’t remember my father ever calling to me. He didn’t have to. When he was home, I constantly shadowed him to make the most of him being around. I switch off my starlight vision and put Li’l Bertha back under the pillow. I’m drifting back to sleep when I hear it again.

Alix!

My body freezes, and my eyes pop open. I activate my visual enhancements again and reach for Li’l Bertha under the pillow. My thumb feels for the “on” switch, but she’s already on. Dammit! What’s wrong with her? I fret and mull for a minute, then I have an idea. I rewind my Day Loop a couple of minutes and listen to the playback until it catches up to the present. The only thing audible was my breathing. I don’t know what to think now. The voice didn’t actually make any sound.

I carry my gun into the bathroom, splash some water on my face, and look in the mirror. My reflection seems to stare right through me, like I’m the one made of glass instead of the other way around. I turn away from the mirror and dry my face with a towel. I won’t be able to sleep anymore tonight, so I field strip Li’l Bertha on the
bathroom counter. I might as well figure out what the fuck is wrong with my sidearm.

I had trouble sleeping when I was younger, but it’s been awhile and I’ve forgotten how frustrating it is. Once the staff at my grade school figured out that my home life was why I was so spacey, they took it easier on me. They’d gently suggest that I visit the nurse’s office to lie down on her sofa. There I was in third grade and I still needed nap time, like I was in preschool.

The kids never made fun of me, though, because of what I did to Bobby Houseman at recess one day. You need to scare the shit out of people only once. The secret is to make it so frightening that they’ll never forget it. I was the smallest kid in class, I had an alcoholic semiabsent father, and a misspelled boy’s name. Yet nobody ever teased me. My daddy would have been proud of his little Hot Shot.

I’ve got Li’l Bertha completely apart when Trick knocks on the bathroom door. When I answer his knock with a grunt, he opens the door and pokes his head in. His hair is mussed up, and his eyes squint in the light.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I can’t sleep.”

“What’s up?” He rubs his eyes, then leans on the door frame. I don’t say anything. “Alix.” He’s a lot more awake all of a sudden. “What is it?”

I take a deep breath and blurt, “A fucking voice called my name.” Patrick doesn’t respond, so I tell him how I rewound my Day Loop and there was no actual sound.

“Trick, please don’t say anything to Cyrus. He’ll bench me for sure, and then I’ll never find my dad.” That last part surprises both of us. I’ve never said that out loud before. I’m not sure I’ve even consciously thought it before. He crosses the room, wraps his arms around me, and gives me a nice squoosh. Then he sits on the counter.

We both fall silent for a moment. I whisper, “I guess we have to tell Cyrus?”

“Are you kidding?” Trick says, “A field agent hears a nonacoustic aural signal? It might be some kind of psyop.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. “Could my hallucinations be the same thing?”

“Could be. I don’t have them, but you take a lot more stress than I do.” He yawns and rubs his eyes again. “How about nightmares? Did you have the same one you had last night?”

“Yeah.” I sigh. “Jackie-O killed me, and then I was in that temple again.”

“She killed you in the Hungarian restaurant?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Was anything different?”

“Nope. Same room, same waitresses, same Jackie-O and Hector.” I stretch my arms over my head. “I was wearing the same clothes and hiding under the same Redskins hat.”

Patrick looks at the floor and thinks for a few moments. Then he slowly raises his head and locks his eyes on to mine. “You mean,” he scowls, “my Redskins hat.”

Oh, dammit!

“Alix,” he gripes, “I looked all over for that thing!”

I’m snagged and I’m tired, so I take his hand and put myself at his mercy. “Trick, I’m sorry. I lost it in the firefight, and I keep forgetting to get you another one.”

“Wait.” Patrick is still scowling. “Was my Redskins hat supposed to be your
disguise
?”

“Okay, okay. Jesus!” I throw my hands in the air. “The Front Desk already reamed me for this.”

“Yeah, but Cyrus didn’t know you were wearing …” He stops in midsentence, and his eyes drift off to Massive Brainstorm Land. He mumbles, “Oh, my God.”

“What?” I ask, desperate to change the subject. “Are they gonna win the Super Bowl this year?”

“No, no.” He shakes his head and says, “The Five O’Clock Club!”

I tilt my head. “What?”

“The Five O’Clock Club,” he repeats. “Fredericks, at our meeting, after we rescued your mom.”

“Trick, do you need to see a shrink, too?”

“Sorry, I’m not saying this straight.” He starts over. When Fredericks berated me about my conduct on the Hector job, he said that it was a covert op, not a meeting of the Five O’Clock Club. As any good Redskins fan knows, the Five O’Clock Club is an informal postpractice gathering of players in an old equipment shed near the stadium. The guys hang out, drink some beer, and blow off steam. The sports writers found out about it, and the club became an open secret. The coaches figure it’s a good bonding experience for the players, so they pretend not to notice.

The reason Patrick has latched on to this is that there were only three people who knew I was wearing a Skins hat on that mission: Jackie-O, Hector, and XSUS One, who received a picture of me from Jackie-O before I blew her into little Protector meatballs.

Trick pensively holds his hand up to his mouth. “My God, Alix, you may have been right all along. Fredericks
could
be XSUS One. Which would mean … holy crap!”

It would mean that the Director of the Strategic Services Council is in bed with a terrorist organization, that he betrayed his own agent to the enemy, and that he took out a murder contract on that agent’s daughter to cover it up. If Fredericks is capable of all this, God knows what else he’s up to!

“Ho-o-oly crap,” I echo. “Should we tell somebody?”

“Well … Jeez.” Patrick rubs his chin. “Not yet. It’s still a guess. I need to run a trace on Fredericks’s comm code to see if it comes back positive for XSUS One.” He leans on the counter. “I’ll need a terminal. We’ll find one later this morning, when the school’s buildings are open.”

Fatigue sneaks up on me like a ninja kitten. Even with these stunning revelations, my head droops onto my chest. Patrick takes my hand and leads me back to bed.
The two of us curl up together, with Trick spooned behind me. We face the window, so I see it’s slowly getting light outside. I’m tired, but I’m afraid to shut my eyes.

Trick doesn’t fall asleep right away like he usually does. He’s probably figuring out some fucked-up unsolvable math formula in his head. I’m convinced I won’t sleep at all, so of course two minutes later I’m out like a light.

I wake up to full daylight outside. I pat my hand around on Trick’s side of the bed, but he’s not there. I turn over and see him in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. He’s already dressed in his white Chucks, blue jeans, and a gray long-sleeved shirt with a big yin-yang symbol on the back. His sneakers still have some dark brown smudges on them from the bloody mess we made at the Hotel Luther.

I flop back toward the window while I build up the energy to get out of bed. I’m exhausted from missing so much sleep last night. Madrenaline would help, but I worry it’s contributing to my hallucinations. I drag myself out of bed and get dressed. I pull on a gray T-shirt printed on the front with some unexplainably popular blue-skinned German cartoon character wearing a floppy white hat. I complete my outfit with my jeans, black Purcells, shoulder holster, and dark red leather jacket.

Our cover is that we’re chemistry students from New York University, so we want to look like everyone else. The fad in student fashion lately is peace and unity. This is symbolized by wearing iconography and fashions from all the major powers. We don’t have anything Russian on, but this is German territory, so that’s a good thing to leave out. Those two countries have always had tense relations.

Patrick and I shuffle downstairs to the school’s main
quad. Our time here has been spent scouting around, looking for clues about Kazim and Carbon. We’ve seen some of the labs but not all of them. Naturally, the ones we can’t get into are the ones we’re most interested in. We keep getting stonewalled by the university staff. The Swiss are graciously consistent about politely refusing access to restricted areas.

We walk to the cafeteria for breakfast. Trick takes two pancakes, and I snag everything else: eggs, potatoes, waffles, bacon, toast, and a big mug of coffee. We sit next to each other with our backs to a wall and dig in.

This is a swanky university, so they’ve got a luxo eatery with a high ceiling, large picture windows, and real china plates. The big room is full of overachieving international students, all chowing down and jabbering about how smart they are.

Two big, muscle-bound guys sit a few tables away. I notice that they’re twins. I nudge Trick and nod my head in their direction while I comm, “Hey, look at those bruiser twins.” Trick sneaks a peek at them and glances away. Then he turns his eyes back to them and takes a good, long look.

“I don’t think those are twins,” he says under his breath.

“What are you, blind? They look just like each other.”

Patrick doesn’t respond. He keeps studying the twins. They’re both tall dudes with blond hair. One has a close buzz cut, and the other wears his hair in a ponytail. Now that I really pay attention, I notice that their table manners are terrible. When they pick up hash browns with their forks, it’s like they’re stabbing a dead animal. They talk with so much toast in their mouths that some of it falls out. They keep stealing bacon off each other’s plates. Buzz Cut protests one such theft, and his mouthful of orange juice splooshes into his lap, earning Ponytail a punch in the shoulder.

Trick continues. “I mean, they look exactly like each other.”

“Well, duh. They’re identical twins.”

“Yeah, but they’re too old to be
that
identical.”

My mission brief included notes about how our genes dictate most of what we look like but not everything. For example, our ears typically don’t line up with each other because our genes don’t carry specific instructions for that. The little bio–worker bees that assemble us just wing it. Our uniqueness compounds as we age, too. By the time identical siblings are old enough to go to college, they’ve manifested minor physical differences from things like diet, sun exposure, and health issues. The identical twins we see now look like they’ve lived identical lives, which would be mighty unusual.