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“I’m not… I’m just. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I need Tom.”
He looks at me, and for a moment, I’m almost certain he’s about to tell me that I don’t need Tom at all, that I can do this on my own. But I can’t and we both know it.
“Fuck,” he swears half under his breath. “I can’t go with you.”
“Where is Tom? Do you know?”
“Word is that she’s stashed him somewhere offshore. The location is still yet to be determined. Whoever she used to transport him isn’t talking.”
“What’s taking so long?”
A girl gets out of the driver’s side, slams the door and stomps around to glower at us. It’s Mary. Dark hair and pissed off eyes tell me she belongs to Ken. I can see instantly why he loves her. They fit. I wonder if Tom and I fit the same way. Could people look at us and see that we were made for togetherness? I feel a sinking sensation in my stomach when I realize that the answer to that question is probably no. Tom has a gentleness about him, and a civilized strength which I do not have. I am a whirlwind of barely contained chaos.
I look at the pieces of world flying by, and I feel small. My rage and my proclivity, even talent for violence aside, I am nothing in that great rush of humanity. A hundred people must have driven by in the time it took me to have that thought. How can I go out there among them and survive?
“We can’t just turn her loose. She’s not ready.” Ken says what I’m screaming inside my head.
“What do you mean, she’s not ready?”
“She doesn’t know what money is, Mary. We put her out here and she’s not going to be able to find a place to live. My bet is she’s going to steal something, get caught, kill a lot of people and end up back where she started.”
“Well she’s not that stupid, is she?”
Mary is rude and blunt. I like her.
“She’s not stupid. She’s just not used to the world as we are. You don’t know how complicated it is.”
“Uh. Sure I do,” Mary says. “And I bet she does too. Tom taught her for months.”
“It takes most humans years to become ready to exist in the world,” Ken says.
“She’s an adult. She’ll work it out.”
“While also being tracked by the Head.”
“We were just going to let her go with trackers in her? Are we fucking stupid or something?”
Mary raises a good question. I have several trackers implanted in my body, sewn so deep into my neurological tissues they cannot be removed without brain surgery. If I were to flee now, I would be picked up in less than an hour. I cannot run. I am owned. There is no flight. There is only fight.
“We are not fucking stupid,” Ken says. “There are ways of disrupting trackers, routing them through other centers. She might be broadcasting, but we can make that signal seem as though she’s in Kyoto, Japan or Vladivostok, Russia, or up the Head’s own ass.”
“Oh,” Mary says. “Well. That’s good.”
I felt a momentary rush of relief at the idea I might not be able to escape. Now that freedom is once more back on the table, I feel an ache of anxiety inside my chest and stomach. I can’t do this without Tom.
“Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going dark,” Ken says.
“That doesn’t mean anything. What do you mean, going dark?” She turns to me. “He forgets I wasn’t in the military too and he uses all the terms on me, Alpha Bravo Footrot, etcetera.”
“I mean we’ll all run. The three of us.”
“So, we’re throwing our lives away,” Mary says. “The Head will be pissed. I was getting on so well with her too. She showed me her tummy scars. We’re basically best friends now.”
I’m thinking that is sarcasm. Nobody is best friends with the Head. She is not a woman capable of forming human bonds. She is a cold machine with a taste for sadism where human compassion should be.
“We worked for her because that was the best option we had at the time. It got you out of hot water with the government. It gave us somewhere to be together. But she’s taken Tom. That’s an act of war as far as I’m concerned. We’re going to fight her.”
“We can’t fight her,” Mary says. “She has near infinite resources and she can have us all killed from outer space if she wants. Hell. She has that!”
When she says ‘that’, she points directly at me.
“I’m not a that. I’m a who.”
“You’re a borderline case, if what I’ve heard is true,” Mary says. “I’ve got a better idea. What if, instead of throwing our careers and lives away, we actually do whatever this mission is, lull the Head into a false sense of security, and not get our heads blown off?”
