Chapter 5

five

I’m givena half day to move my things to my new apartment at Lyonesse—not that I need it. After years of bouncing between deployments and bachelors’ quarters, all I’ve got are a few boxes of clothes, a handful of books, and a service cross I’ve only taken out of the case once, to wear to my father’s wedding. For a moment, I finger a picture from my graduation from West Point: a clump of eight of us, grinning in our grays and whites, slender cadet swords dangling from our waists.

We couldn’t wait to graduate, to join our compatriots in Carpathia, to go make a difference, whatever that meant. In Carpathia, a new country that had been carved out of the mountains a decade before, no one actually knew what a difference looked like or how anyone could tell if they’d made it. Because while peace had been won there once, it had only lasted until a man little better than a dictator came into power. And then after he’d been deposed, the American military had flooded back in to help the Carpathian government hold on to their own country.

We were there to keep the peace, to build infrastructure, to train their new soldiers and airmen—but the enemy wasn’t some outside force wearing brightly colored uniforms. They were the Carpathians, or rather a minority of them: zealous Carpathians wanting to see their country as the most violent and hostile version of itself. And they were willing to kill their neighbors and friends to see it happen.

All of us, in our West Point grays, had been walking into the last place on earth it was possible to make a difference.

My touch lingers over McKenzie Reed, all flyaway red hair and freckles, who I was too late to save on our first deployment. I’d dragged her and three others to the end of an alley while exchanging fire with unseen enemies at the other end of it. She’d died anyway, and if I’d managed to kill any of the fuckers, I never found out because there were no bodies there when we finally had enough soldiers to secure the alley for good.

I got the service cross for that, for the two others I’d saved, even though McKenzie had bled out into a puddle, her green eyes vacant behind her eyewear and her mouth open, like she’d been trying to call our names.

But it’s Sims whom my fingertips stop on, Sims whom I look at the longest.

Aaron Sims, who was alive four months ago and isn’t anymore.

I close the picture back in the book where I found it, put the book in a plastic tote, and then carry it out to my dad’s car. I lock up the farmhouse and give a cursory look around. I’ve said goodbye to this place so many times that saying goodbye now feels like playing to an empty theater.

I don’t look back as I start the traffic-choked drive to the city, two podcast hosts chattering about the proposed space exploration bill as I go.

“Who wouldn’t want to see this country enter its second golden age of space-faring?” one host demands.

“Forty-seven senators apparently,” the other dryly replies.

* * *

“Haveyou told your father about your new job?” asks Mark as his driver, Jago, takes us to a late lunch in Foggy Bottom. It’s only Mark and me in the back, Mark sitting with one leg out, his elbow braced against the side of the car. He’s the picture of dilatory ease.

I wonder how many glasses of clear liquor he’s had so far today.

“I sent him an email,” I answer after a minute. It was a short email, only a couple sentences long, because there was no way I could tell my father I took a job being his new brother-in-law’s bodyguard without it leading to a conversation, and there was no point in giving him more ammunition to work with before the conversation was inevitably sprung on me. It’s an Alpha Charlie waiting to happen; I have no illusions about that. I’m just grateful he’ll have to wait until he’s home from his honeymoon.

“I can’t wait to hear from my dear sister’s husband about it,” Mark says, moving his elbow down.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I say.

Apologizing for my father is a reflex by now. He’s a good man. He’s just very much General Thomas first, everything else second, and it’s been a pain in my ass since kindergarten, when he made my favorite teacher cry during parent-teacher conferences.

Mark waves a hand. “You don’t have to apologize. Or call me sir. We’re family now.”

“What else should I call you? Uncle?”

A small, private smile. “Maybe later. Otherwise, call me what you like.”

“Yes, sir.”

He huffs out a laugh as we roll to a stop in front of the restaurant. Familiar with the routine after yesterday, I step out first, do a quick scan of the area, and open Mark’s door. Mark emerges from the car, any traces of the smile on his face gone. His eyes glitter as he straightens and buttons his jacket. He gives me a curt nod, and then I trail him to the restaurant entrance, where we’re shown right away to a table, despite him not speaking a word to the host.

I’m a little unsettled by this sudden mood of his, but I tell myself it’s nothing to do with me or anything I’ve done. It’s probably something to do with this lunch and who he’s meeting.

A banker, Mark said in the car. Bounces between London and New York. Geoffrey Laurence.

The name meant nothing to me, and Mark’s mouth had quirked.

Don’t worry. It’s a good thing not to know him.

I’m given a small table behind Mark’s, where I can see the entrance to the restaurant and most of the people walking in or out. I can also see Geoffrey Laurence himself, a short, pale man with silvering hair and a cleft chin. His suit is the kind of expensive that hides itself in texture and immaculate tailoring rather than announcing itself with fashion and flash. Money so established it’s ceased to be aware of itself.

Mark’s demeanor stays the same for most of the lunch. I can’t hear what he and Geoffrey are saying, but when he speaks, the words seem to be brief and direct. He doesn’t gesture when he talks; he doesn’t look away from Geoffrey when he listens. His posture is so effortlessly controlled that even the way he yields his fork has something of a sniper’s precision about it. Only once do I catch a scrap of conversation:

You’re sure about the safety report?

The information will be leaked next week.

Then I’ll see it all sold before then.

I wonder what kind of safety report Mark could be talking about that would have him so rigid and cold, so utterly different from how he was last night at the club, when he was as languorous as a lion after a meal.

And then I wonder which Mark is closer to the real one: this contained vessel that gives nothing away or the sprawling lord of the underworld from last night?

And after the lunch has concluded—which is the minute the entree is finished, there’s no lingering over clear liquor or dessert today—Mark stands to leave with an expression on his face that’s something worse than unreadable. It spells danger, maybe, although in a way I can’t explain. His eyes aren’t narrowed; his mouth isn’t set in a snarl or even a hard line. It’s just that there’s a watchfulness to his expression, a patience.

Patience that should make anyone wary.

But the banker doesn’t seem deterred. Either he’s used to Mark, or he wants something and wants it badly enough that he doesn’t care what the consequences are of him getting it. I knew people like that in Carpathia. The local politicians looking for clout, the Marines looking for glory or at least a good fight, the wholesalers and middlemen swooping into a town the minute supplies got scarce to make deals and scrape the last bit of money out of the civilians there. It would be easy to believe that things ended miserably for them, but that was only true like a third of the time. Maybe Geoffrey Laurence will get what he wants from Mark and never have to discover what’s behind that aloof expression.

For Geoffrey’s sake, I hope so.

Mark is in a strange mood as we get back in the car and Jago takes off. His fingers are tapping against his knee, and his jaw tightens occasionally as we pass ugly college apartments and bland State Department buildings.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I say, and then regret saying anything at all when his dangerous gaze moves to me.

“What for?” he asks.

It’s too late to take anything back now without making his mood worse, so I force myself to reply. “For whatever safety report that has made your afternoon so frustrating.”

He looks at me a moment and then looks away. “It wasn’t the report that ruined my afternoon, Tristan. Only my company.”

The banker? I suppose I could see that—there had been that indefinable air of avarice to him, and while I think Mark thinks fondly of sin, I don’t know if he thinks fondly of all sinners.

“I offered him a business deal some years back,” he says after a minute. “And I’ve never forgiven him for his answer.”

“He refused?”

“No.” Mark’s voice is hard. “He agreed.”

I have no idea how to interpret this, and I don’t get the sense that Mark is welcoming questions on the topic. At any rate, he shifts, sitting up and turning to look over at me. “What did you hope for when you came back?” he asks.

I’m looking out of the window, but I can still feel the simmer of his gaze on my skin. “Back, sir?”

“Yes, Tristan, back.” In my periphery, I see his fingers flex over his knee. “From the war.”

“It’s not a war anymore,” I say automatically. “We were there on a—”

“A coalition counterterrorism mission, yes, I know what they called it in the briefing room, and I know what they still call it. Indulge an old man and let me call it a war.”

“You’re not—”

“So what did you hope for? When you were over there, tired and cold and scared shitless or bored to death? There must have been something. Something you held on to and built entire palaces in your mind around. Something you promised yourself you’d have within days of stepping off the plane.”

Something I’d hoped for?

I know what I would hope for now, in my right mind, with the horror—however freshly congealed—behind me.

For Sims not to be dead.

For McKenzie not to be dead.

For all of us to graduate from West Point and then decide we wanted to sit behind computer screens or embed ourselves like pointless burrs somewhere in administration, where our biggest headaches would be paperwork and space heaters that didn’t get warm enough.

For me to wake up and once again be the Tristan Thomas everyone used to know, the boy who liked honor choir and novels about dragons and basketball practices so grueling he couldn’t even walk after.

But while I was there? In it?

I think back. I’m sure I wanted a steak dinner at some point. The kind of steak dinner that made your stomach hurt it was so filling, with two different kinds of potatoes and fresh rolls and pie.

I wanted sex, I know that much, although it had been hard to conjure up specifics, since my imagination when it came to sex was blurry and mostly informed by porn. I wanted to nap for hours and hours, nap long enough and hard enough that I made a Tristan-shaped impression in a mattress so soft it barely met the legal requirements for the word mattress.

And then I remember.

I remember sitting on a cot once we’d returned from the outpost to the base for the last time. I’d stared at my hands. The hands which had killed Sims and so many other people besides that it no longer mattered how many they’d also saved. Someone had propped an old iPad against a rucksack on a cot, and a few soldiers were watching a movie about driving and crime, and at some point, I looked up and the two characters were kissing in an elevator. Kissing so slowly and tenderly that it felt like a fairy-tale kiss even though the movie was the furthest thing from a fairy tale.

I thought of that kiss as I’d gone to bed that night, as I waited for the lengthy, formal debrief the next day. As I sat in a folding chair, the cold metal biting through my uniform jacket, watching the major trying to pretend he wasn’t freezing his ass off after being used to the comforts of the permanent base near Uzhhorod.

I thought of how lovely that kiss must have felt for those actors, how soft their lips must have been, how tender their mouths. Soft like nothing in my life, tender like something could only be outside of a war, in the real world, in real life. Real life where you didn’t kill your best friends.

And I remember thinking that if I could only have a little of that softness, that tenderness, I’d be whole again. I’d be fixed, healed. I knew it.

Touch-starved. Like the counselor had said.

“A kiss,” I say softly.

“A kiss?”

I’m too lost in the memories of those last days at the forward operating base—of the shuffle back to Uzhhorod, and then to Stuttgart, and then home—to watch my words. To notice how much I’m talking. “I’ve only been kissed a few times before,” I say. “But I remembered how good it feels. We watched a movie with a kiss one of my last nights at the FOB, and it was all I could think of. How nice it would be to have someone’s mouth against mine, and their hands on me.”

Mark’s fingers have gone still. “Who was kissing you in these thoughts? A girl from home?”

“There was no girl from home,” I admit. “No boy either. I’m not good at starting things. And when someone starts something with me, I—”

There are no words for what I do. Even obsession doesn’t capture the swiftness and intensity with which I can fall in love. And like an infection, my obsession needs only the tiniest cut, the shallowest scrape to take root. A single glance, a kind word as I’m handed a cup of coffee.

I think of it as a kind of curse, one I’ve had since birth, and the only cure I could think of when I was younger was transferring that curse to an entire country rather than to a person. A country, at least, was big enough to hold an obsession, and the army was more than happy to nurse utter devotion inside my chest.

“I get attached,” I say finally.

“You’re telling me that a soldier as beautiful as you, as strong and stupidly noble as you, can’t find someone to kiss because you get attached.”

I become aware that his attention is still fixed on me. And the word he used—beautiful—feels stuck and quivering in the ground like an arrow at my feet.

He called me beautiful.

“It’s a problem,” I answer distractedly, my mind on that arrow of a word. Beautiful.

“I find that hard to believe,” he says. “Who wouldn’t want you to get attached to them?”

He says it so casually, so mildly, that I know he doesn’t understand. Falling in love at the smallest provocation?.?.?.?no, most people don’t want that. In fact, nobody I’ve ever met. It’s smothering. Cloying. I can be those things and often was in high school.

And I feel a little embarrassed now, having revealed this unwanted flaw of mine when I typically do everything I can to keep it hidden. There’s a reason I lean on army discipline so much, on silence. If given the smallest opening, the worst of me will burn its way out, a fever no medicine can contain.

“What did you hope for, sir?” I ask, hoping to redirect the conversation away from myself. “When you got out?”

“Of the army? I don’t suppose you’d call it getting out, since I left to join the CIA.”

“Of the CIA, then,” I say. “What did you want when you left?”

A serrated laugh as he looks out the window. “I wanted to kill a lot of people.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Especially because from the way he says it, I know he means it.

His fingers are tapping his knee again, and his jaw is tight as he stares out at the city. I get the feeling he’s not really looking at the world beyond his tinted reflection.

We pass the rest of the ride in silence.