The two women passed through a sliding screen door and into the rock garden. The formality in the general’s steps was gone, replaced with the stiff casualness of someone who sleeps like a mummy. Mia didn’t know why the general had recognized her. She may know about the cythrax bomb, Mia thought, but I’m not a Volunteer. I made the choice to leave. I made the choice to come home.
General Collins took a seat on a wood bench. Mia smoothed her dress and did the same. A ribbon of a stream wrapped around the garden, nourished by a tiny waterfall dribbling down a slope in a far corner. The waterfall’s soft hum gave the garden its only sound. Somehow, an elevated, outdoor garden in the heart of Empire City was as insulated as a shrine. Mia found herself taken by the calm of it all.
“Where are you now?” the general asked, cigarette between her lips. She cupped it with one hand and lit it with the other. “Job, family, future. Et cetera.”
“Well.” Mia organized her thoughts as quickly as she could. Generals valued brevity. “I work at a bank. Corporate compliance. Just got engaged to a Bureau man. Staying here a few more years. No hard plan after.”
“Kids?”
“No, ma’am.” Mia resisted the impulse to touch her stomach. “Not for a while.”
“Call me Jackie. I’m not one of those generals who get off pretending they’re still in.” General Collins took a slow, deep drag and leaned over, twisting her body to look at Mia. “I do miss it, though. Don’t you? That purpose of being. The team effort, the team focus. Langley’s not like that at all. There’s just—nothing like it.”
“There’s not,” Mia said, remembering. “And I do. I do miss it.”
“I’ll cut to the mustard.” General Collins took another long drag and then flicked the half-smoked cigarette to the stone path under them. “I’m going to announce for the Senate in two months. The fanatics have too much sway, too much influence. The new parties on the far left and far right have just made it worse. One kind of extremism just enables another. If you look at our history, the center is what has made America strong. The center needs a lot of help right now. It must hold. Ever since the jihadists got Javy in Istanbul…”
Mia had forgotten the general had been close with the fallen ambassador. She’d still been in high school when that had happened. He’d been a founding member of the Council of Victors. Mia waited in silence until the older woman regained her verbal stride.
“I’ve seen all this before. When I was your age. We’re on the brink again. My generation swore we’d never let another Vietnam happen. Yet here we are. Victory, but at what cost? Extremists, militants, separatists… all here, in America! The jihadists have evolved, too. The things they’re capable of now, in terms of destruction… it keeps me up at night. It really does.
“I intend to win this seat. I intend to win because this country is in dire shape and needs to be reminded of the power of service. It needs to be reminded of the power of the center, and the hope it offers us all. In order to win, I need a good campaign team. Sharp. Dynamic. High energy.”
Mia nodded, waiting for the general to continue. When she didn’t, Mia asked, “How can I help?”
General Collins unwound her body on the bench. A medley of cracking joints followed. “Fund-raising through your connections, for one. An independent party from the radical middle has no chance without Wall Street money. You could help with that, a lot. But it’ll be an all-hands-on-deck operation. We’ll need team members comfortable doing it all. You’re a special young woman, Mia. Someone with many talents. And you come highly recommended.”
Mia couldn’t help herself. Something about the way the general had said “special” intrigued her.
Something about the way the general had said “talents” bothered her.
“By who?” she asked.
“A few folks,” the general said. “Pete Swenson, especially. He couldn’t stop singing your praises.”
Mia tried to remain straight-faced. “Of course,” she said. The garden’s shadows rolled through her, and she reached for a sweater around her shoulders that wasn’t there. “Pete will do that.”
First his sister and now this, Mia thought. I told him to leave me alone.
The two women exchanged contact information, Mia with a business card, the general by writing her phone number on another of Mia’s cards.
“My personal line,” she said. “Be ready. Politics is war without bloodshed.”
“Chairman Mao,” Mia said, and the general smiled at the attribution.
“Be ready,” General Collins said again. Then she walked into the building.
Mia sat in the rock garden alone, listening to the waterfall’s dribbles. She didn’t care that it was fake. She only cared that the calm it brought was true. She’d heard the rumors about why the general hadn’t gotten her third star, stories swapped by national security journalists and think-tank types. Jackpot had punched a War Department superior. No, others said, she’d thrown a commemorative pistol at him, a gift from a tribal leader overseas. Because she’d been lied to about a warfighter surge. No, because she’d blacklisted a subpar private military company and they’d gone around her back. Because she’d been promised the Sinai command before the privateers took over. Because after thirty years of war, she’d just had enough.
All the stories, all the rumors, agreed on one thing: General Collins was not to be crossed.
The cinder of the general’s half cigarette blinked out on the ground, thin curls of smoke waning into the air. Before leaving herself, Mia picked up the half cigarette and dropped it into a trash can. Litter on the streets was one thing. Litter in a garden was another.
Apprehension shook at Mia all afternoon, though why, she couldn’t quite work out. There was the baby, or not-baby, but that wasn’t it. Not entirely. More than anything, Mia wanted to rip off her prosthetic and fly through the sky for hours on end, until her lungs burned cold and her skin was coated in thick, soapy vapor. Then she’d be able to figure it out.
But she didn’t do that anymore. So she wouldn’t.
CHAPTER 3
WHAT WAS MEMORY and what was dream? Jean-Jacques couldn’t be sure anymore. Taut, frenzied firefights in night-vision green had filled his life, so they filled his sleep, too. Midnight raids coming upon villages from the holy above, blades churning, quiet as sin, loud like virtue. Propellant, hot blood, and emptied bowels, or what passed for them in the dreamscape, slid through his mind like rainwater. A mission for someone, or something, so a mission like any other, except for the missions that were different.
A hunt’s thrills, a hunt’s terrors. Dark everlasting.
Boot steps and battle rattle, rifles probing, into the compound they go. Shouts like hammers, voices of command and voices of care and voices of alarm all whirling together into one singular monk chant of violence. Red lasers dancing on walls, searching, seeking, proclaiming, first in brittle English then again in sky-soaked kreyol, in power, in glory, like the voice of God itself.
A touch of smoke. The taste of dust. A rifle burst into shadow. Oh, to know the unknown. The long, dirty pause before clarity, when anything is possible, nothing ripping out into everythings, mind in chest and heart in head, ready, ever ready, always vigilant.