Chapter 10

ten

Two attendants comeand make the double bed.

“Tristan,” Mark says, standing and unbuttoning his shirt after they leave. I realize he’s about to change into the provided pajamas right then, and my heart flips. “Stop looking at the bed as if it will bite. I promise I won’t kick you in my sleep.”

“I don’t think it’s big enough for both of us,” I hedge, although it’s true that the bed does seem a little narrow for two former soldiers. “I can sleep in my seat—”

Having unbuttoned his shirt, Mark strips it off and then opens his belt. I stand and turn to give him privacy, the stretch of tan, muscle-etched stomach burned into my mind.

“Tristan,” Mark says again, this time in an amused voice. “You’ve seen me put on a condom. Surely me changing into pajamas is tame stuff by now.”

“I didn’t want to intrude, sir.”

“I hired you to follow me day and night, to be near me while I conduct business and more personal affairs. I’m not shy.”

Swallowing, I turn back around. Mark is wearing the pajama pants, but only the pajama pants. His chest and shoulders are bare; hair like dark, tarnished gold glints softly from his chest, and more stretches from his navel to the drawstring waistband of his pajama pants. His nipples are a muted pink, the inside of a seashell seen at dusk, and there is a tattoo of a bird in flight on his left forearm. I’ve seen part of it before, when he’s had his sleeves rolled up, but now I can see all of it: precisely drawn feathers and a sharp beak and a single closed eye, all rendered in black ink.

The pants hang low enough that I can see another black tattoo on his hip, just above the waistband. It’s two words, small enough that I can’t read them from here.

“Tertia optio,” says Mark, noticing the direction of my gaze.

“The third option.”

Mark looks surprised. “That’s right.”

“My father,” I explain. He was familiar with the adage that if diplomacy fails and war isn’t a possibility, a third option should be chosen. The third option being any plausibly deniable thing the CIA deems necessary, of course. “He didn’t believe in it. To him, if diplomacy fails, then transparent conflict is the answer. Not whatever it is the Special Activities Center does.”

Mark pulls back the covers on his side of the bed. “Spoken like a soldier” is all he says.

I don’t know why, but I bristle. “He thinks any fight should be a fair one. Soldiers fight fairly, honestly.”

“Okay,” replies Mark, and that amused tone is back. He gives me a look, and I get the distinct impression that he thinks I’m being cute. It makes me bristle even more.

“He’s not wrong,” I say stubbornly. “Special ‘activities’ is just a euphemism for murder—”

“There are things worse than murder,” Mark interrupts, like a teacher who’s had enough of a student getting an answer wrong. “Lots of murders, for example. Isn’t it better that one or two people die rather than hundreds or thousands? If one or two deaths stops months or years of killing, torture, rape, famine, utter misery?”

“But it’s not right,” I say stubbornly. “It’s not a fair fight to come through a window and just kill someone—”

“We didn’t always kill people,” Mark cuts in impatiently. “Special activities is a lot more than that. And as for fair fights?.?.?.?if you consider drones and Hellfire missiles against rebels armed with forty-year-old guns and their great-grandfathers’ bayonets a fair fight, then I’m not sure what to tell you.”

He’s wrong, I know he’s wrong, but I struggle for the words to tell him so.

He lets out a soft breath.

“You should change into your pajamas,” he says. “Even if you sleep in the chair.” And then he climbs into the bed, arranging himself on his side, facing away from me.

I quickly change, pulling on the pajamas—top and bottoms—and then go back to my recliner. It’s been a day of nothing but sitting, and I doubt I’ll be able to fall asleep, but this will be my best chance, here on a secure flight with a door closed to the rest of the plane. Once we land, I’ll need to be alert and watchful, awake, and if I learned anything while deployed, it was to sleep while I can.

A fair fight?.?.?.

Mark is wrong, of course he is, but when I close my eyes—just for a moment—I see Sims.

Sims framed by trees and fog, and he’s holding his gun with a shaking hand, and I’m dreaming, I think, asleep and dreaming the familiar nightmare.

Everyone put your goddamn guns down, he says in the dream.

We are motionless, staring. Unable to think. We trained and trained and trained for the enemy, but with one of our own pointing a gun at us, we’re lumps of confused meat, worse than boots, worse even than civilians.

This can’t be happening.

Now! Sims snarls. I’m not fucking joking!

We got out of our escort vehicles to scout a potential rebel trap in the surrounding woods. Rebels that Sims said he saw.

But there are none and now we’re out of our vehicles like fucking fools. He’s going to kill the woman nominated as Carpathia’s next prime minister, who will lead in conjunction with its president. He’s going to kill everyone else in the car we’re escorting, including her family.

I don’t drop my gun.

Sims, I say, and my voice is shaking like his hand. What the fuck are you doing?

The fog is clammy and cold, and makes everything hazy. The children in the car are crying and I can hear them through the windows. Their father is holding them. The ministerial nominee steps out of the car, her back tall, blocking the window and her family behind her. When I give her a quick glance, she’s dry-eyed and pissed off.

Sims, I say again, swinging my eyes back to his gun. Stop it right the fuck now.

His hand is still shaking, shaking so hard, and his eyes are begging me. Put your gun down, Tristan. I’ll make it fast for them. I’ll let the whole squad go. Just put your gun down and walk away.

Sims. My best friend. He shares his Nintendo Switch with me, steals my Pop-Tarts; he helps me hold on to the memory of McKenzie. He’s kept me safe for three of my four deployments, the shield at my right when we’ve cleared villages, dry creeks, and damp mountain caves.

And he’s about to kill the people we’re supposed to protect.

I don’t drop my gun.

Tristan, he says, and he’s begging me now. Begging me to let him kill a democratically elected leader and three civilians, two of whom are kids.

.?.?.?my best friend wants to kill two kids.

The look on Sims’s face when I raise my gun to his chest is awful. Now I’m begging him right back. Fucking, please, man, fucking stop it.

I have to do this is what he said, and despite the desperation in his face, the shaking hand, I hear the dead, dull certainty in his voice. I know then.

I know there’s no stopping him.

It doesn’t matter that he points the gun at me now. I would have had to shoot him anyway because I’m the lieutenant and Jesus fuck, they’re kids—but it does sting, in a stupidly irrelevant way, that he would raise a gun to my chest.

I gave him my fucking Pop-Tarts.

Tristan, please, he says, eyes wild, but his voice is the same dull, inflectionless tone.

I move first, dropping the barrel of my gun as I duck to the side to put myself between him and the soon-to-be prime minister. I squeeze the trigger as I do, and my bullet strikes true—his knee. He buckles and I think, okay, we’re done now, he knows this is over, but even as he buckles, his gun is lifting.

He’s still going to try to shoot them.

The other soldiers around us—having watched the entire exchange in frozen shock—react, their own guns finally moving, but I’m faster.

My next bullet tears through Sims’s throat.

And that’s when dream splinters from memory. In my memories, Sims dropped like a sack of potatoes, a hand flying weakly to the side of his neck. There was blood everywhere, and I was calling for medevac, I was lunging forward and clapping my hand over his to add more pressure, I was looking down into his pale gray eyes and telling him to hold on, that we were going to save him, and his face was full of fear and he sputtered words full of blood, family?.?.?.?ease?.?.?.? family?.?.?.?ease?.?.?.

I’ll make sure your family is comfortable, I told him, as much ease as they need.

And his free hand reached up, like he wanted to grab the vest of my body armor, and then with a choked spray of blood from his mouth, it dropped back to the ground.

He was dead.

But in my dream now, he doesn’t drop. Instead, blood gushes slick and crimson from his neck and he shoots the woman behind me. I shoot him again, through the eye, and he steps forward, a gaping hole in his head, and he fires at someone in the car behind me. He’s killing everyone and I can’t stop him.

I shoot and shoot and shoot, and he keeps coming, bloody and pulpy and horrible, a monster from a movie, a nightmare from the grave, and he opens his mouth and it’s just blood and broken teeth and he says, I hope they prick you when they pin that medal on. I hope you have to bleed like me. I hope you get to tell everyone what real heroes do.

Stop, I whisper, but he doesn’t stop.

Shards of white teeth fall from his blood-slick lips as he speaks. How could you not know I was going to do this? How could you not see me faltering, struggling—how could you kill me when you didn’t even try to help me first—

I’m crying, but I need to keep shooting him, and I can barely breathe, and I need to scream, and I can’t. I’m making no sound because I can’t breathe, and then I realize I’m choking on blood too, on broken teeth and the pulp of my own torn open throat—

“Tristan,” comes a voice, solid and firm. “Tristan.”

I’m still choking on teeth and flesh and Sims is still lumbering toward me.

And the voice comes again.

“Tristan.” A hand is on my shoulder and then on my jaw. My eyes flutter open and it’s not the nightmare-Sims, but my boss, shirtless and bent over the recliner. And I still can’t breathe.

I reach for his hand, panicked, air-starved, and his blue eyes sweep over me in a cool arc, assessing. And then his hand is on the back of my neck, and I’m pushed down so my head is between my knees.

“Breathe,” he says, and it’s a command; I recognize it as a command.

I try to obey, my ribs working but nothing else, and I think I can still taste blood in my mouth, and then Mark snaps, “Breathe,” again, in a voice so sharp and mean that I’m shocked into sucking in a breath.

And then another.

And then another.

Mark keeps his hand on my neck, and it’s as cruel and insistent as his voice, and I’m shivering with relief—that the nightmare is gone, that I’m here and not in that cold, gray forest. That someone is telling me what to do and then making me do it.

When he’s finally satisfied that I’m breathing, he lifts his hand. “Sit up,” he commands, and I do. Something rolls down my jaw and drops—tears.

Embarrassment punctures the relief, and I try to wipe them away as quickly as possible.

Mark sits on the edge of the bed and watches me, his face in its usual neutral expression. But his eyes?.?.?.?there’s a recognition in his eyes that makes it harder to stop crying.

“I saw the reports, the classified ones,” he says. Quietly.

“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault,” I say. My voice is hoarse, broken. “Don’t say I’m a hero. I am so fucking sick of people calling me a hero.”

“Heroes are make-believe,” Mark says, and startled, I look up at him.

I didn’t expect him to say that. No one says that.

As if he knows what I’m thinking, a bitter smile crosses his face. “They’re all lying to you or they’re all lying to themselves, and no option is better than the other. I only knew one hero, President Colchester, and surprise, he’s dead now. You weren’t a hero that day because you did something much harder than being a hero, and that was doing the necessary thing, the fucking hard thing, the thing that no one else in your squad had the guts to do. And no matter how many times you wake up unable to breathe, you’ll know this: you couldn’t have done a single thing differently.”

He stands up and goes to the table next to me. There’s a clink, a glug, and a glass of amber whiskey is pressed into my hand.

“Drink,” he orders, and I drink. It burns, and the scald of it anchors me to?.?.?.?something. Myself, I guess.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Next time, just sleep in the bed,” Mark says.