Had Sabra wanted to kill him, Jack would’ve let her. He owed her his life. He knew that, she knew that. They had worked together, and she had forgiven him (maybe, if you could ever forgive him for anything he’d done), but now with a few kilometers between himself and the brawl, Jack was not surprised that Sabra had shown up.

  It was just what she did. Charging into situations and arriving at just the right place at just the right time. The last time he’d been in a bind, she’d done what she did best: broke through the ceiling, made a nice speech, and then killed every single person in the room. Were it not for Revenant, she’d have been the scariest thing he’d ever encountered. The difference between the two was that Sabra still hesitated.

  His throat still ached from where she’d grabbed him. He thought to go back, but there was nothing he could’ve done. All he would’ve done was get in the way—he knew it, she knew it. So, when Sabra had leapt to attack the men in black, he’d grabbed Kortanaer’s computer and dived out the window. It sat now on the shotgun seat of his stolen car as he made good on his escape, heading back toward Geneva. It felt too much like heading back into the belly of the beast to escape its claws.

  He kept expecting sirens in the encroaching distance, floodlights from the sky. But none eventuated. It was an interesting thought to roll around in the back of his mind as the Alpine countryside gave way to the lights of Geneva. Whoever the guys in the black armor were, they didn’t have a line to law enforcement, nor were they friends of Kortanaer.

  So, who were they? Friends of Phalanx, sent to ensure everything went to plan? Maybe. The armor looked cutting-edge. Jack frowned. If they were Phalanx’s people, then there was another possibility, too: tying up loose ends. Ensuring that no one knew a former American operative had set off a bomb in the middle of Geneva. He made a mental note to tell Sam she was right.

  He left the car about where he had stolen it in the first place. He tossed the keys down the nearest drain, to prevent someone else from taking it on a joyride of their own. He hoped that the owner would find it. He had to keep his word, after all.

  He wasn’t a monster. At least, that much of one.

  He made it back to his apartment without issue. Sam was asleep. He thought to wake her, decided against it. He headed into his room and set Kortanaer’s computer on his desk, stared into the blinking prompt of a login screen.

  That was a problem. If Kortanaer was as paranoid as he had seemed, then even one wrong attempt might wipe the whole system. Kortanaer hadn’t told him anything, which was fine, because his computer held his secrets. There’d be ways into it, but all of Jack’s contacts were a long way from Geneva (and, worse, they were truly Elias’ contacts), and there was no way any technopaths within Europe weren’t IESA hounds.

  Shit. The IESA. He’d lost his rifle. That was a snag. He’d not left any prints on it—or, at least, he thought he hadn’t—but even then, if the IESA got involved, there were empowered methods that meant all they needed was the weapon itself. It was too risky to go back and get it. If Kortanaer’s place wasn’t crawling with law enforcement yet, then it soon would be.

  He could leave Geneva. He should leave Geneva. Leave Switzerland, get out of Europe and head east. But then what? Stake his chances on finding someone in the warlord territories, or Russia, or what was left of China who’d help him crack open a hard drive? What was even the point?

  The prompt blinked steadily.

  “You said if you came back to this apartment, it’d be the end of it,” Elias said.

  “Yeah,” Jack muttered. “And it will be. In about sixteen hours.”

  He didn’t sleep.

  The sun rose, and it was snowing. He heard Sam wake up, make breakfast, and go to work. Jack texted his work to let them know he was taking that medical leave. They asked him if he’d heard anything from Thomas. Jack said he had no idea, then smashed his phone with a hammer.

  He should’ve done it earlier. It’d been in Phalanx’s possession, and that meant it was as good as compromised. Jack had to assume that Phalanx knew where he lived, if he didn’t already. Leaving Geneva was still a solid option, but it’d mean losing the one trump card he had: that Phalanx might be less likely to come for him in downtown Geneva.

  “Less likely’s not exactly a good phrase, buddy,” Elias said.

  “Yeah,” Jack said, as he stepped into Sam’s bedroom.

  It was the equal of his in size and style but the opposite in layout. There was American memorabilia—the pre-war flag, her Chicago Cubs baseball cap—and Swiss tourist trinkets. Cookbooks she never used. A tan beret he’d never seen before. Jack moved through it like a ghost, not touching anything, barely breathing. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Something, anything. He didn’t want to believe that she was involved, but that was the point of the exercise.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe Monkey was a bad guy, either.

  Then, there was nothing to do but wait. He looked up whether a leopard could beat a tiger in a fight and found that the animal kingdom backed up his intuition—outcome not good. He wondered if there were any tigers or leopards or lions left in the wild. He sat by the window, and kept his eyes on the door and his handgun in his grip. His finger lingered on the trigger. Bad trigger discipline, sure, but it might be the split second between life and death. Like Elias always said—

  “Shoot first, Spots,” he said.

  The door to the apartment opened. Sam stepped inside, nodded to him, and made for the kitchen.

  “If you pretend not to know what I’m talking about,” Jack said, “I’m going to shoot you in the head.”

  Sam turned. Her expression was quizzical, amused. Then her gaze fell on his hand, and his weapon, and the simple trajectory from the end of the barrel to the middle of her forehead, and then back to meet his eyes.

  “Got something you wanna say, kid?”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Sam looked as if she was going to say something, then didn’t. She reached up and undid her tie, setting it on the kitchen counter, and then unbuttoned her shirt. However long she’d been out of the military, her body still bore the hallmarks, and the scars. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her in a state of undress, and he had no thoughts about her body beyond that she was more than capable of killing him if she pulled a knife from the block before he could pull his trigger.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Turn around,” he said.

  She did. There were tattoos all over her body. A prowling tiger at her collar bone, tally marks along her shoulders, and he figured they weren’t tracking baseball runs, nor were they comprehensive. Phrases etched in black ink: only the dead, leading the way, nothing lasts, fear only work left incomplete...

  And there, on her bicep: V4T.

  “There,” Jack said. “That one. V4T. Tell me what it means.”

  Sam glanced down at her arm, clenched her fist and popped the muscle.

  “You said you were going to leave this alone,” she said.

  “I said if I came back, it’d be the end of it—this is going to be the end of it, Sam. Of everything.”

  “It’s just a tattoo.”

  “It isn’t. The man who blew himself up had it. Thomas Evans had it. Your friend Reynolds, he has it. Kortanaer had it. And you have it. I’ll bet Phalanx has it, too.”

  Sam’s eyes hadn’t wavered from his own. She took a step to the left, towards the knives.

  “Don’t move,” Jack said. “I mean it, Sam—do not move.”

  Sam shook her head. “You’re not going to shoot me, Jack. Or you are, in which case, you should just do it. Either way, I’m getting a drink.”

  She took out a bottle of whiskey and a glass, added some ice, poured herself out two fingers, and then looked at him. “You good?”

  “I’m fine. Tell me about the tattoo.”

  “Gimme a second. I won’t just tell you about the tattoo, kid. I’ll tell you everything. But you’ll be pretty disappointed.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because we all need one person in our life who won’t bullshit us. And partially because I hope, if I tell you everything, you’ll fucking drop it.”

  She swirled her drink, ice cubes clinking. Jack flicked his safety on and leaned forward, setting his handgun on the coffee table. “Okay,” he said, “talk.”

  “It’s funny. Your voice drops low in times like this. ‘Okay, talk,’” she said, dropping an octave and exaggerating her rasp. “I’ve always wondered which one of you is the real you. Guess I’m getting my answer, huh?”

  “Sam.”

  She lit up a cigarette. “Jack,” she said, finally. “I got the tattoo in the war. About ten years back, when a bunch of capes cited some democratic mandate will of the people shit and took over the west coast. We all knew it was bullshit, everyone did. But the optics on military intervention weren’t good. They call it the Second Civil War.” She shook her head. “What a fucking joke.”

  She sat down on the other side of the coffee table from him. “See, war implies they fought for it. They didn’t because we didn’t. There were rogue units, of course. People who weren’t going to let our country tear itself in two. And the politicians just... let it happen. We had to sit back and watch as more states decided to flip, then as Mexico decided to sign on. And still we had to sit and watch and wait.

  “I was in the Rangers then. 75th, 1st Battalion. Best of the best. That was where I knew Reynolds. One day, I get a tap on the shoulder. Guy in a suit says Command’s putting together a team—black ops, Top Secret, never existed. They called the group Victory 14.”

  “Why fourteen?” Jack asked.

  “Beats me,” Sam replied, ashing her coffin nail. “There were eighteen of us. We had codenames. Tank, Thanatos, Trigger—that’s me,” she said, pointing to herself, “Teacher, Thunder—”

  “Trapdoor,” Jack said, and Sam nodded. Then, another circuit closed, and his eyes widened. “Taurine. You called her Vega. You knew her.”

  “Alexandra Vega,” Sam replied. “Never saw her in the field, she vanished real quick. And then there was your buddy Phalanx—or, as we knew him, Tyrant.”

  She reached into her pocket and found her phone. Tapped away, scrolled, and then set it on the table before him. On the screen, there was an image of a man in black-and-gold armorweave, with a golden wreath on his neatly-combed head, and an expression that was warmly imperious. Phalanx. Younger, leaner, but unmistakable. The very image of a Roman emperor. No, Jack thought, he looked like what those dictators had thought they looked like.

  “Our job was to bring down the Neo-American regime,” Sam said. “Assassination, abduction, sabotage—you name it, we did it. Thanks to Trapdoor, we riddled that place with time bombs. We waged a secret war for six years, kid. We never ran out of targets, we never failed. What we ran out of was time.”

  Sam tipped her glass back, finished it. Jack didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like there was anything particularly bad about Sam killing Americans who’d seceded from the greater USA. He’d started killing his own countrymen, after all. But that’d been for food, for survival...

  “Then what,” he said.

  “Someone upstairs found out about us. Regime change is something for the lesser continents, apparently. We were recalled. Some of us didn’t make it back back—the tattoo is to remember the ones who didn’t come back, or didn’t choose to.

  “Tyrant rebranded, went into heroics. Tank went back into the Rangers, ate a discharge, and now he’s in Firmament. Trapdoor ended up here, and you just killed him. And me? Well, I moved back to Chicago and went domestic.”

  She reached up and tugged the gold chain around her neck, a golden ring hanging from it. “Didn’t last. I couldn’t handle it and neither could he. Decided to try my hand out east, which is where we met. You two didn’t know the fuck you were doing. I thought it’d be fun to see how long it took before you got yourselves killed, or your pal gave me a reason to hurry things along.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “And not for lack of reasons,” she replied. “Maybe a few years in that townhouse had softened me. Maybe it’s because I never had a kid of my own. Either way, I’m trying not to take this—” She gestured to his handgun “—too personally.”

  Jack sat back in his seat, sighed. “I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, and was pretty sure he meant it.

  “Don’t get weepy on me, kid. I hate it when you do that. But if you dare pull this tough-guy crap on me again, I will fucking murder you in your sleep.”

  “If you tell me that’s everything you know, I’ll believe it.”

  “It is. I know you think I’m involved in whatever happened at the train station, but I ain’t. I’ve had no contact with Bradshaw since the war, or any of them. Maybe Trap thinks the IESA is to blame for not stepping in years ago—shit, he wouldn’t be the only one. Maybe Teach volunteered to be his living bomb. But they wouldn’t roll in Phalanx for no reason. Someone back home is nervous.”

  Jack took a deep breath.

  “I think I could use that drink,” he said.

  Sam nodded, hopped up, and went off to make it. The thought that Sam had been a traitor in his midst felt like a stupid joke someone else had told him. And he’d based it off, what, a fucking tattoo?

  She returned, held out the glass to him.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “I made it strong,” she said, and then sat back down on the other side of the table. He took a sip, and then a long drink. It burned on the way down and out his nostrils. He leaned back and exhaled again, if just to sweep away the one-two of alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke.

  “You know what your problem is, Jack?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “You killed your best friend,” Sam said, leaning forward. “The guy was a fucking asshole, sure, but you killed him. That’s gonna fuck a guy up. Especially a guy who used to spend so much time arguing that we shouldn’t kill anyone. You’re grieving, Jack. And that was before you got blown the fuck up.”

  His ribs spasmed. He coughed, eyes stinging. His throat refused to obey him. “Okay,” Jack said.

  “I’m not going to tell you how to handle that. Everything I’ve done, Jack, and I sleep soundly. You ever want to talk about it, I’m here. But stop digging, stop looking for patterns that aren’t there. Because if Phalanx is anyone like who he was back when I knew him, he’ll kill you the moment he thinks you’re a threat.”

  “And if he already knows I’m here?” Jack asked. “I’m the only witness to the people he killed at that farm. I could link him to the hit on Kortanaer.” The thought of going to the authorities was bitter and hard to swallow, but he’d done it before. The IESA monitored heroes like Phalanx. It’d be some protection, at least.

  Hadn’t Kortanaer said he’d been set up?

  Sam shrugged. “Yeah, and I’ll the bet the only reason he didn’t kill you was as a favor to me, and a warning.” Sam ran her hand through her mane of hair, and leaned forward to extinguish her cigarette against the glass of the coffee table.

  “But, Jesus, kid. When you asked me to take my shirt off, I thought you wanted to fuck me. I just didn’t think you meant it like this. Shit.”