The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (16 page)

Afterward, Elliot emerges from the kitchen where he retreated out of politeness. “Flynn of the Apocalypse Squad?”
he asks, handing me a glass of water. “Flynn who pulled a gun on you?”

“That wasn’t her fault. That was Rawlings.” I drink the water in one go. “I should head home.”

“You’re going to call a cab, right?”

“No.” It’s strange, but I feel a little less scared after talking to Flynn. “I’m going to walk. Nothing happened on my way here. Nothing is going to happen if I walk home.”

He shakes his head. “That’s a dangerous assumption. You’re not going to get your old life back, Shelley. It’s not a matter of will. Your world has changed.”

I head for the door. “Let me know what time tomorrow.”

“Stubborn as ever. Hold on a second. I’ll go downstairs with you and show you a back way out.”

We go to the first floor. I follow him to a fire door on the side of the building. “It’s not as obvious as leaving by the front . . . I mean, if you think there’s a chance the bad guys followed you here?”

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know what’s real and what’s paranoia, but I’ll play the game. I ease the door open just wide enough to get through. “See you tomorrow,” I tell Elliot. Then I take off, running flat out to the corner, where the light’s against me. I look back, I look around, I look for someone, anyone out to kill me, but there’s nobody. I don’t even see the microdrones anymore. Maybe the cops got rid of them after all. The light turns and I walk across the street.

•   •   •   •

Twenty-five minutes later I’m two blocks from home and no one’s tried to slam me yet. It looks like I might make it.

The sun has set, but there’s still plenty of light as I approach the corner. The traffic light’s against me, so I slow my pace, waiting for it to change. On the opposite corner a group of
four is waiting to cross. One of them is an older man. He’s chatting with two women, both of them wearing pretty white masks with gold filigree. A third woman stands a few feet away, half turned, looking back toward my dad’s apartment building. She’s slender, dressed in boots, dark slacks, and a gray coat, with blond hair down to her shoulders. I follow her gaze to where four or five mediots are still loitering on the sidewalk.

If I were going to set up an ambush, it would be here, where sooner or later my target would show.

I change my mind, deciding I’m not ready to go home yet. I step around the corner and into a shadow, to wait and watch.

The light changes. The pedestrians on the other side of the street step into the crosswalk. The man and the two masked women walk and talk together, but the other woman, the blonde without a mask, walks by herself. I catch my breath as my overlay identifies her.

Her eyes look gray in the waning light. She’s three-quarters of the way across the street when she sees me. She hesitates. Her lips part in an expression of disbelief. Still in the street, she turns to look again at the mediots. Then she hurries to the curb. Her face is smooth, unmarred by smile lines.

“Delphi.” My heart is beating hard again, but it’s a good thing this time.

“Hi, Shelley.” Her voice is magical. It’s comfort. Delphi’s no-nonsense guidance kept me alive more times than the Red. She cocks her head; still no smile. I want to move in, sweep her up in my arms, let her know how happy I am to see her, but I don’t quite dare. I don’t know what our boundaries are.

A faint blush in her cheeks hints that she’s feeling awkward too. She says, “I was waiting with the paparazzi, hoping I’d get to see you, but it started to feel like a bad idea. . . . You’re not still recording everything, are you?”

“No. Not since the army got deleted from my overlay. You want to get dinner?”

She looks me up and down, eyeing my titanium legs and my running clothes. “You’re not really dressed for it.”

I do not want her to go away. “Can we just walk?”

She lifts her chin to indicate the cross street, and that’s the way we go. As we walk, she studies the street, the buildings overhead; she eyes the traffic. Every few steps, she looks over her shoulder. After the first block I ask her, “Have you seen the microdrones?”

“Yes.” We walk another half block in silence. Then, “You probably don’t know this, but after Black Cross I resigned my position.”

That catches me by surprise. I think about the other soldiers she handled, feeling sorry for them.

“I moved back home to Madison, but when I heard about your pardon, well . . .” She looks up at me—she only comes up to my shoulder—and for the first time she gives me a little smile. “I worry about you, and I just . . . I really wanted to see you one more time. That’s why I’m here.”

I think if I could convey to her the truth about how glad I am she’s here, I’d scare her away. So I just tell her part of it. “Geez, Delphi, if I could have picked one person, one living person, to magically appear on the street in front of me tonight, it would have been you.”

She overlooks my joy and reacts to my grief. “I’m sorry for your girlfriend, Shelley. And I’m sorry for Ransom. He was a hell of a soldier. And Colonel Kendrick too.”

“Do me a favor?”

She looks back over her shoulder. “I can try. What do you need?”

“Tell me your name.”

•   •   •   •

It’s Karin Larsen. A name as smart and no-nonsense as she is. Walking with her, I feel my nervousness leach away. I stop looking at everything with suspicion. I start to relax.

We hit one of those lulls when, for a few seconds, the sidewalk is empty. The street is clear. Delphi points down the block. “That’s my hotel on the corner.”

I don’t want to let her go. “Is there a bar? Maybe we could sit for a few minutes.”

“Do you drink?” she asks, sounding surprised.

“No.”

She laughs, looking up at the buildings across the street, looking over her shoulder. “Glad to hear it, because that’s what I remember from your personnel—”

There’s a catch in her breath. “Drop!”

I do it just like I would on patrol. She’s still standing, looking up at something behind us when I hit the concrete. In the field, I’d take the impact on the struts of my dead sister, but here it’s my forearms. I have just enough time to register how much it hurts when a little crater bursts open in the sidewalk a meter in front of me. Concrete chips and hot metal fragments tear into my face. I roll toward the building as another bullet bites the sidewalk where I was until half a second ago. I roll to my feet.

“Shelley, get in here!”

Delphi has retreated into an alcove with a glass door. She’s got the door open. I hurl myself after her and we stumble together into the building.

She looks at me. “You’re bleeding.”

We’re in the hotel lobby, near the elevator. On the other side of the lobby, the desk clerk is busy checking in two guests and hasn’t noticed us. No one else is in sight. I pull Delphi away from the door. “They could shoot through it.”

“They could
come
through it. I’m calling the police.”

“No, hold on.” My dad’s been through enough. He doesn’t
need to know about this. “I don’t want to deal with the police. They’re going to use words like ‘protective custody.’ And anyway, there’s nothing they can do. The shooter will be long gone. These things get done in secret or they don’t get done at all. No one is coming through that door.”

I feel a warm trickle on my face and wipe it away.

Delphi looks like she wants to argue, but instead she grabs my arm and drags me toward the elevator, which opens at her touch. “If anyone asks, you fell down.”

No one asks. We get to the fourteenth floor and into her room without meeting anyone.

It’s a standard hotel room, with a king bed, two nightstands, a small desk, and a monitor on the wall above a set of drawers. The curtains are open, but the window looks out onto the cross street, not onto the street where the shooter waited for us.

Of course, a second shooter could be on this side of the hotel.

Delphi uses a remote control to close the blinds and the room goes black. Only after a few seconds can I see the green glow of a night-light from the bathroom.

“Even with the blinds closed, we need to stay away from the window,” I warn her. “A good surveillance drone can see through . . .” I catch myself, as it occurs to me that Delphi knows exactly what a good surveillance drone can see through. “Sorry. You’re the expert.”

Her voice comes out of the dark, low, annoyed. “Get in the shower and wash off the blood. I’ll be right back.”

•   •   •   •

She returns with skin glue from the hotel convenience store.

We put a chair in the bathroom, and I sit in my running shorts looking up at the bright makeup lights while she glues the broken parts of my face back together, using her
eyebrow tweezers to dig out bits of concrete I missed when I washed out the cuts in the shower.

It hurts, which is the only thing keeping my head clear.

My shirt is hanging up in the shower, drying after I washed the blood out. With the lights and the lingering steam there’s already a fine sheen of sweat across my bare chest. Delphi has taken off her coat and her boots. She’s leaning over me, wearing a silky white sleeveless pullover so sheer that every time she inhales I can see the contours of her bra as it cups her small breasts. Her skin’s scent is magnetic and my brain is soaked with it. I stare at her from six inches away, committing an assault with my eyes, trespassing with my gaze against her features: her pale, creamy skin, pink lips parted in concentration, blond hair hooked behind petite ears, glistening brown lashes, and her bright blue eyes firmly focused on the task of minimizing my scars.

“Stop,” she says without looking away from what she’s doing, “staring at me.”

“I can’t help it.”

She smiles, which does not improve my predicament. It’s all I can do to keep my hands off her.

Too soon, she’s done. I look in the mirror, to see each little cut glued neatly closed. “You’re really good,” I say, honestly impressed.

Her blue eyes meet my dark brown ones in the mirror. “Every handler gets three weeks’ training in first aid and trauma. We can’t coach you if we don’t know how it’s done.”

“Training, huh? I always thought of you as a magic genie who was there whenever I called your name.” I smile, gazing into her reflected eyes. “I guess I still think of you that way.”

There’s a flush in her pale cheeks as she looks away. “Too hot in here for me,” she whispers, and walks out into the room.

I’m thinking of her and that big bed out there with its creamy sheets when I should be thinking about a sniper outside the window or a death squad outside the door . . . but I guess every man has his priorities.

•   •   •   •

The room is dark except for the light from the bathroom. Delphi is half sitting, half leaning on the dresser, her arms crossed, looking at me with grave eyes. “You had no idea that bullet was coming, did you? You always used to know these things, Shelley. What happened to King David?”


“Gone.” If not for Delphi, I’d be dead. “I think it’s not my story anymore.”

If not for Delphi, I would never have walked down the street outside this hotel, and into an ambush. I give her a puzzled look, my heart running a little fast. “How the hell did they know I’d be here?”

Her arms are crossed tight just beneath her breasts. “I think it was a backup plan.” She frowns at the floor. “My guess: They had their primary shooter at your apartment. Then some analyst ID’d me while I was waiting there for you, and decided I might work as bait.”

People are predictable, and the more that’s known about them, the easier it is to call their next move. My life is an open book, so it wouldn’t have been hard for a skilled analyst to know how I feel about Delphi.

“If that was the plan, it was a good one.” I sit down on the bed. “I expected a sniper at the apartment—hell, I’ve been expecting a sniper all day—but when it finally happened, I was distracted.” I get up again and move closer to her. I touch her cheek. She looks up, surprising me with an angry glint in her eyes. I don’t understand what’s going on, what she wants, what she doesn’t want. “Delphi . . .
Karin
 . . . are you sorry I’m here? Do you want me to go?”

She answers with a little, exasperated laugh.
“No.”

“Then tell me what you’re thinking, because if you make me guess I’m going to get it wrong.”

“You’ve been expecting a sniper all day, but you’ve been walking around on the street. Why, Shelley? Do you have a death wish?”

This is not the conversation I want to have. “Look, I’ve been reading this whole thing wrong. I’m going to go.” My shirt is still wet, but what the hell.

“I thought you died at Black Cross,” she says, stopping me as I head for the bathroom.

I turn back, sure that I’m missing something, that there is more behind her words than I’m wired to understand.

Her voice and her gaze are steady. “You do crazy things, Shelley, and I can’t tell how much of it’s you and how much of it is the Red playing you. At Black Cross, when you went outside, I was there with you. Remember? I was looking through your eyes. I saw the flash when that nuke went off. I saw the analysis—and I knew it was over. You were dead. You had to be, and it didn’t make any sense to me.” She looks away. “That whole mission, I’d been so scared. And then we won . . . it seemed like we won . . . until you walked outside
for no reason
and then you were gone. All contact lost.”

She has started to tremble, though she’s trying not to show it. Her arms are still crossed, her shoulders hunched. She won’t look at me. I go back to her, touch her shoulder. I have no idea what to say. Black Cross was a lifetime ago.

She looks up at me with her somber eyes. “I couldn’t handle it.” Looks away again. “I went home and I cried for hours. I sent in my resignation. And no one bothered to tell me you were still alive. When episode two came out, I thought it was propaganda. It wasn’t until you came back from First Light that I started to think it might be true, that you really had survived. It’s stupid, but that’s why
I came here. Just to be sure you’re not some figment of government propaganda or a generated character conjured up by the Red.”