Chapter Sixty-Four

NICK JONES WALKED through the dark forest. Between the whispers of his footsteps on the dry leaves came Breecher’s footsteps from somewhere not far behind him and to the right, so that the rhythmic beat of their journey kept a quick pace in his mind. Crickets and night birds abruptly stopped their sounds as the two humans made their way further and further into the blackness.

The sea appeared beyond the reach of the forest, seeming to glow. No wave sounds. Nick watched it as he walked, trying not to think about the gun at his back.

“OK,” Breecher said. “We’re out. Tell me the password.”

Nick stopped walking. He turned around, expecting the lights of the house to be a speck in the distance. But they were nowhere in sight. He decided he must have walked farther than it seemed he did, his mind twisted by worry and fear.

“If I tell you, you’ll just shoot me,” Nick said. “I’ll give you the password when I’m safe.”

“That doesn’t work!” Breecher barked, throwing her hands up. “What—I’m supposed to just let you go and I—I just hope you’ll shout the password back at me? Tell me the fucking password! We’re running out of time!”

“You’ll just have to trust me,” Nick said. “You have to trust that I don’t want the world to know what we did any more than you do.”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s true.” Breecher snorted bitterly. “Part of me thinks you’d really love wallowing for the rest of your life in a military prison. You’ve been a miserable self-involved dope ever since that guy in the cornfield.”

Nick balled his fists as he remembered. They’d been approaching a hostile village south of Bari Qol. He’d only been on the ground three weeks. He was young, unscarred, still flinching at the sound of gunfire. Nick and Master had been working their way through a cornfield, side by side, when they’d happened upon a man in dusty jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. Forties maybe. The guy had frozen at the sight of them, a stick in one hand and a ball cap in the other, just a man taking a stroll through a cornfield on a nice clear morning. Nick’s training had kicked in. There was no decision. No weighing the danger of escorting him out of the red zone, only to have him come back and warn the villagers of their approach.

Nick had shot the man in the head.

It was his first kill ever. A civilian. Nick had held it together through the occupation of the village, back to the base, out onto patrol. He’d finally cracked in front of Breecher, only her, in the quiet of an empty mess hall in the early hours of the morning after his patrol had returned.

Nick had always believed his first kill would be the thing that shut off the emotions, the pain. His “blooding.” War was supposed to be easy after that. But instead, that had been the moment he became lost. Irredeemable.

“The password,” Breecher growled. “Tell me.”

Nick said nothing. She lowered the gun and shot him in the kneecap.

The pain didn’t register at first. It was so extreme, so overwhelming, that his mind simply blocked it. Nick went down, clutching the limb, warm blood rushing between his fingers. Then the pain rippled around his body like a shockwave, a plunging into icy water. It stole his breath so that he gasped against the grass and leaves for a moment before he had enough air to wail.

“The password, or I’ll put a bullet in the other one,” Breecher said.

“OK,” he breathed. “OK. OK.”

He murmured the letters, the numbers. In the blackness of the night, she raised the phone and started to type. The phone bleeped as it accepted her login.

It was the moment of distraction he needed. Nick lunged sideways at her legs, defying the pain that wanted to seize every muscle in his body. Breecher fell on her backside on the forest floor, her lower legs encircled in his arms, both phone and gun flying from her hands. Nick scrambled for the pistol, dragging his injured leg behind him, Breecher’s weight suddenly on his back, her fingers raking at his as he grabbed the weapon. The blood on his fingers made grip impossible. She took the gun from him easily, and he rolled over underneath her and looked up at her as she pressed the barrel to his chin.

The phone bleeped. A single high-pitched chime in the stillness of the woods.

“We didn’t have to do this,” she said. “You could have made it much easier on me.”

“I guess I really am a glutton for punishment,” Nick groaned.

The phone bleeped again.

And again.

Breecher shivered, her finger sliding in the blood on the trigger.

The phone bleeped again.

“What… what the hell is that?” she asked. Nick smiled beneath her. She got off him, holding the gun on his face as she backed toward the glowing phone screen sitting up against the base of a nearby tree. Breecher took her eyes off Nick for half a second to glance at the phone in her hand. She glimpsed all that she needed to. A mess of notifications springing up one after the other, a sea of sky-blue boxes and white birds, the phone vibrating as retweets went flying. The alerts wouldn’t stop. Ding-ding-ding-ding.

“No,” Breecher said, swallowing hard. “No. You said seven. You said seven o’clock!”

He listened to her panting as she put it all together. That he’d lied. That he had indeed wanted it all to come out. That he was the miserable, self-obsessed, guilt-riddled mess she’d said he was. That he’d scheduled the video to go live at 6:50 p.m., not 7 p.m., just in case. She threw the phone against a tree and came marching back to him. He felt the gun against his temple.

“You’re gonna die now, Nick,” Breecher said.

“Not if you still want that million dollars,” Nick replied.