They don’t even see me coming.
I rev up the engine and go charging forward. Shoddy instincts, I guess, with Ross out of the picture. They don’t make Nighthawks like they used to.
No situational awareness.
For shame, for shame.
And that’s how I clock two of them, easy, as I go plowing into the uneasily milling crowd pretending to work around Durham’s jet, just as Fuchsia tears up the steps of the airplane boarding ramp and surges to the waiting door.
It’s not a pleasant feeling when bodies go thumping around under the wheels of the baggage cart. I hear a couple of shouts, dull crunches, but even as heavy as this thing is I don’t think it’s enough to kill those men. Not when they’re honed into heavily reinforced tanks of human beings.
Just enough to knock them down for a while.
And almost enough to flip me, too.
My heart leaps up in my throat as the sheer bulk of one of my human speedbumps sends me tipping onto two wheels. Then the clumsy baggage truck flops back down and shoots forward, sending the others scattering as I make a beeline right for the jet.
It’s enough of a diversion to distract the Nighthawks who’d started running after Fuchsia to box her in once she was on the plane, scaring them away from the steps, making them scatter like a flock of startled birds.
For a moment, she stops, glancing back at the commotion.
Grey cutting eyes land on me.
Fuck.
She doesn’t even recognize me.
I can see it in her blank, puzzled gaze, the way it slides over me, perfunctory, quick, before dismissing me as good luck and moving on.
I know I’ve changed a lot—missing an eye, missing a leg, years of ravaging age—but damn, that stabs deep.
But she barely sweeps over me for half a second, and I’m moving again, slewing the baggage truck to a halt at the foot of the stairs and vaulting out, using that extra bit of spring in my titanium leg to rocket me over the door and onto the concrete.
She’s already gone, disappeared into the plane.
And I’ve got a dozen men hot on my heels.
I don’t even hesitate.
With the rain driving down on me, slicing through my clothes to steam against my skin, driving me on with its pounding, I go, go, go.
I charge up the stairs after her.
Save my wildcat?
You’re damned right I will.
Whether she ends up fighting me like the total stranger I’ve become or not.
Because I don’t think even Fuchsia herself understands the true depths of Leland Durham’s treachery.
Or that he’s probably already waiting for her and has no intention of letting her walk away alive.
Fifteen Years Ago
I’m not even supposed to be here.
There’s something to be said for Leland Durham’s remarkable ability to upend my life.
Pulling me out of my office in the middle of the afternoon when I’d already been looking forward to going home and whipping up a celebratory dinner to officially cement my future with Fuchsia and our unborn child.
There’s a ring in my pocket.
Probably another dumb idea I know she’ll laugh at.
Sentiments and softness, the kind of things she’s been conditioned to think are weak, though deep down she loves them.
The woman can’t hide the truth from me.
She loves anything that makes her feel, and I love getting the chance to peel past the hardened layers of the soldier to find the girl who’s brave enough to bring a child into this world despite the life she’s had.
The woman who was brave enough to trust me to stay with her when she told me about that child.
The woman who’ll tease me about the six-figure price tag on the ring but won’t quite be able to look me in the eye when I slide it onto her finger, because if she meets my eyes, she’s done.
Then I’ll see the emotion in hers.
Yes, part of loving Fuchsia Delaney, Patty Brin, whatever she calls herself, is letting her keep her guard up when she needs it.
She’ll let it down when I least expect it.
The sad thing is I can’t really marry her. Not legally.
She doesn’t exist on paper.
According to official records I dug up last year, Patty Brin died in a car accident along with her parents over fifteen years ago.
Even her civilian aliases—and she has many, cycling through them depending on where she’s deployed—are all thin shells.
Shame. We can’t risk holding up under scrutiny with an official marriage license, and possibly linking her to Galentron, when the time comes to blow the coop with nothing left of this fucked up organization.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t be official to us.
Someday, I’ll find a way to make it true, even for the state.
As long as she says yes.
We can even throw our own unofficial private wedding, no officiant needed.
Hell, I’m looking forward to it. Fine excuse to give her a chance to wear the most obscene, expensive dress of her life.
And knowing her, she’ll decide to get married in all black.
That ring is in my pocket now as I follow Leland down a dark street in D.C. at three o’clock in the morning, surrounded by a security team of over a dozen men.
To call it a long fucking day would be a monster understatement.
I don’t even know why we’re out here, really.
Durham’s been immensely cagey and secretive since he ushered me and several other top officers onto a plane under full guard yesterday.
Something about a high-profile, top-secret project with the highest-level military brass.
Something so classified we may even end up speaking with the president himself.
The biggest project Galentron has ever seen, he says.
So massive, so confidential, so good for his ego that he can’t even breathe a word about it to me until we’re alone in a secured, bug-proof room with the politicos and military chiefs who apparently summoned us out here with zero warning.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
Things have been weird at Galentron lately.
Lines crossed.
That facility they’ve started building in an old silver mine out in that tiny Montana town for biological research...
Durham’s reaching too far.
And he’s giving me exactly what I need to finally do something about it.
Agent SP-73 is too big. Too dangerous. Too likely to fuck things up beyond any repair the company could ever do if the virus ever got loose.
Too damning.
I wonder if that’s what this meeting is about.
How to keep things hush-hush in the horribly likely event they move forward with this crap? It’s the same crap crafty young Fuchsia brought back to our data boys years ago from her raid in the former Yugoslavia. This lethal doomsday project the Soviets were working on before they went tits up, and a couple years ago, a Galentron team retrieved a sample from some godforsaken place.
They brought a man-made disease that was supposed to be extinct back to life.
I fucking shudder, and it has nothing to do with the chill tonight.
I think I know why we’re walking around in the dead of night on a wet, frozen D.C. street, silent and moving under guard, taking old streets where no one will see us—not even anyone up to more mundane kinds of no good.
No streetlamps here.
No windows facing the street, or else they must have blackout blinds.