prairiesongserial

[prairiesongserial]

25.5

Cody saw Friday’s eyes widen as she took in the blood on his hands and clothes. He waved her off before her mouth was even halfway open.

“I’m fine.”

“The hell you are,” she snapped.

“Worry about Marcos,” he said urgently–then found that someone was already relieving him of the other man’s weight. Claire. One of the kids must have gone and gotten her.

“Let’s sit you down,” she told Marcos, who groaned in response as she carried him off to the kitchen. A trail of children followed behind her like ducklings; Cody could hear Claire issuing orders to find a needle, thread, bandages, and silently thanked God that someone with a soldier’s temperament had taken charge. He’d almost forgotten that there was more to Claire than a smiling face shaking an overturned hat for coins.

“Is there liquor around?” Claire asked Señor Hugo, urgently. “He needs that.”

It was unclear if she meant to drink or to clean the wound with. If there was any follow-up, Cody missed it–his attention was snapped back to Friday, who had grabbed one of his hands in hers.

“The blood is mostly Marcos’s,” he told her. It wasn’t as reassuring as he’d meant it to be. He saw the fear in Friday’s eyes spark and catch like the flame of a lighter as her gaze roved over him, searching desperately for where he’d been injured.

“Mostly?” she hissed.

Cody gestured for her to follow him out to the patio, and sat on one of the long benches. Below them, Barcelona hummed with activity, the colorful bird-machines flying in long figure-eights over the coast.

“Cody–” Friday began.

He held up a hand, then pushed up the right leg of his jeans to show her the scratch along the side of his calf. It was no longer bleeding and, in fact, had barely bled at all. It had barely stung on his way back up the mountain–probably because he’d been focusing everything he had on dragging Marcos along with him–but it was starting to throb with pain now.

He heard Friday’s sharp intake of breath, and said, “It’s just a graze. Not even as bad as last time.”

“Someone shot at you?” she asked. “Bandits?”

“Yes–no, what?” Cody asked, frowning at her. “There are bandits around here? Right now?”

She shrugged. “Señor Hugo was telling me that he used to run with them, before he settled down.”

“He did? That’s crazy. Are you sure you heard him right?”

“I swear,” Friday said. She finally sat down next to him, straddling the bench and leaning forward to get a closer look at his leg. “Can we stick to the subject? Do we need to be worried about anyone following you up here with a gun?”

“No,” Cody said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. It was slick with sweat. He was still breathing hard; his body didn’t know he was out of danger yet, but Friday forcing him to hold up his end of the conversation was keeping him present. “It wasn’t like that.”

Friday gave him a look that bordered on exasperated. “Then what was it like?”

Cody forced himself to take a deep breath in, and exhaled heavily. Adrenaline was rapidly flooding out of his body, leaving behind the ache of overworked muscles and–worst of all–the panic he’d been shoving down the whole way up the mountain. He balled his hands into fists in his lap, like that would convince them to stop shaking.

“I asked Marcos to take me down to get a closer look at Barcelona,” he said. “Just to see what I could see, you know. Maybe start figuring out a way to get across the water.”

“And someone shot at you?”

Cody waved her off, though he sensed he couldn’t do much more of that today before Friday blew up at him. “I’m getting there. Marcos said he hadn’t been down that way in years, but he showed me the best way for us to go when we head out. Took me all the way up to the city limits, I think.”

He was dancing around the point, and Friday knew it. He could tell by the way she was looking at him.

“That’s where you got shot,” she said.

“Yeah.” He took another breath. “Look–what I’m gonna say next is gonna sound crazy.”

“Can’t be as crazy as anything else that’s happened lately,” Friday muttered.

Cody laughed through his teeth. “Fair. You remember when we got to the Canadian border, how we couldn’t cross it? Ezra showed us those eyeball things that would shoot us, if we tried.”

“Drones,” Friday said. She could probably picture it with more clarity than Cody. He’d still been recovering from standing next to the explosion that had killed Johannes. “I remember.”

“Well,” he said, “Barcelona has ‘em too.”

Friday had been staring down at his scabbed-over wound, eyebrows furrowed, but now she glanced up sharply. Cody expected her to interject, to ask something, but she just waited for him to explain. At least she seemed to believe him.

“They didn’t talk to us, or warn us, or anything,” he went on. He and Marcos had barely even seen them coming. The strange discs had zipped over the horizon and been above them in seconds, vultures honing in on carrion. “Just came right over and opened fire. Same kind of…I don’t know, invisible bullets? That the ones from Canada had. Not the best aim, but I guess you don’t have to aim when you can just spray like that.”

Months ago, Cody had watched Ezra use one of the Canadian drones to light a cigarette. He hadn’t had the capacity to wonder, back then, what that sort of white-hot energy would feel like going through flesh and blood. And now he never needed to wonder, because he knew. It was the kind of heat that half-cauterized a wound as it was still causing it; the reason Cody’s leg had barely bled at all.

“I tried to shoot back at them,” he added. “I know it wasn’t–smart, but it was all I could think to do. I knocked one, I think I got it out of the air, but there were still a bunch firing on us. So we had to run. That was when Marcos…got hit.”

Marcos had been shoving Cody ahead of him, trying to drag Cody out of a shootout he’d never win, and one had gotten off a lucky shot. It had punched a hole through his side. Cody had felt sick with guilt the whole way back up the mountain. He’d apologized to Marcos for asking to see Barcelona, for firing on the drones, for Marcos feeling the need to protect him, but it wasn’t enough to make it right. He still felt sick now, with no sign of what was happening inside the kitchen. 

“Shit,” Friday said, grimly. “How’d you get away?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Cody said. He took another breath to steady himself, and finished the story. “I dragged Marcos into a bush and we just laid flat on the ground ‘til I poked my head up and saw the drones were gone. Maybe they thought we were dead, or they can’t go past a certain point.”

“Or someone’s controlling them, and turned them around,” Friday said. It was a good guess; Cody hadn’t considered that there could be a human touch directly guiding the drones’ malice. He’d assumed they had minds of their own, that they acted like pack animals or birds of prey circling in on anyone they perceived as an intruder. But anything was possible.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe what?” Claire asked, stepping out onto the patio and shutting the door behind her. Her eyes dropped to Cody’s leg, but she tossed him a wadded-up, soaking wet scrap of cloth rather than comment. “Should we be worried about anyone chasing you? Marcos said no, but–”

“No,” Cody said, catching the cloth one-handed. The scent of alcohol made his eyes water. “I was just telling Friday, it was machines that fired on us. At the Barcelona border. How is Marcos?”

“He needs to rest, but I think he’ll live. Nothing vital got hit, as far as I can tell, and he was shot clean through.” Claire turned to look at Friday. “Machines?”

Cody tuned Friday out as she began relaying his story to Claire. He bent over his injured leg and used the cloth to clean the tacky, drying blood from his skin. A part of him that had been rigid with tension the whole way up the mountain finally uncoiled as he focused on the sting. Marcos was going to be fine. Maybe not all the way fine, but he would live.

Cody wrung out the blood-soaked cloth onto the stones of the patio, and slowly tuned back into the conversation. His hands weren’t shaking as much as they had before.

“Can’t we go around, find another port city?” Friday was asking. “If Barcelona’s too dangerous to get into, then–”

“No,” Cody said. Both Friday and Claire looked startled to hear him speak up again; he brushed off their reactions and kept going. “We can’t waste any more time going around. We go through Barcelona.”

“How?” Friday asked.

“Actually,” Claire said. “I think I have an idea.”

25.4 || 25.6

[prairiesongserial]

25.4

Claire grimaced as the cold scissors slid across her forehead. Friday held the comb with her other hand, pulling the hair down against the blade as she cut.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Claire whined, squeezing her eyes closed as the lock of hair fell away.

Friday winked at her–not that she saw it. “Yes, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been cutting my own hair forever.”

“Sure, but you have that windswept beachy look that you don’t have to be too careful with. My hair is thick. It’s straight. It feels like you’re giving me a bowl cut.”

“Relax, Claire,” Friday sing-songed. She pulled the comb through Claire’s hair and slid her scissors into place. “Let the master work.”

She and Claire had run out of shingles, but the roof was looking much better. All they had to do now was wait on supplies. The last few days, they’d found plenty to do with themselves. Marcos had recruited them for a major laundry undertaking–all the bedding needed to be washed before winter. There were also regular house chores to do: cooking, cleaning, and splitting firewood. He kept them busy.

But today Marcos was going into town with Cody, and Señor Hugo refused to give them anything to do.

“You girls work too hard,” he’d said. “Rest today.”

Friday was getting better with Spanish. They’d been staying with Señor Hugo for a few weeks now, and having people to talk to all day really pushed her along. She could have simple conversations without Cody’s help.

Señor Hugo watched Friday and Claire’s conversation curiously. Since Marcos had gone to town this time, Señor Hugo was making lunch today. He worked around the two of them in the kitchen.

“Quieres que yo…corto tu pelo?” Friday asked him. She showed him her scissors and pointed them at him, eyebrows raised.

Señor Hugo grimaced and waved away the offer, returning quickly to the vegetables he’d been chopping. Every so often he turned to check on Friday’s progress with Claire. She was not in any danger of a bowl cut. Friday was giving Claire a pixie cut since she’d been complaining of her hair getting in her way up on the roof. Even tied back, little strands escaped and blew in her face. Friday had plans to pounce on Cody when he came back as well. He’d hacked his hair off himself a while ago, and now that it had grown back, the man was scraggly.

“Puedo hacerte una estrella,” Friday teased, waggling her eyebrows at Señor Hugo.

Señor Hugo laughed and shook his head.

Friday finished up with Claire, who scurried away to find a mirror.

“No trust,” Friday clicked her tongue. By the time she turned back around, there was a little girl in the chair Claire had just been sitting in. This one was Monserrat.

“Oh,” said Friday. “Bienvenido el salón.”

Monserrat giggled. “És la cuina,” she said.

“¿No la perruqueria?” asked Señor Hugo playfully.

Monserrat spoke too fast for Friday, but Señor Hugo jumped in. Everyone in the orphanage also spoke a language called Catalán, which they used interchangably with Spanish. Though genuinely Friday couldn’t hear the difference–fast was fast.

Eventually Señor Hugo looped Friday back in. Monserrat wanted a haircut. She was already taking out her braid as Señor Hugo carefully explained how Monserrat wanted it to look.

“No tan corto,” he added with emphasis as Friday began to comb water through Monserrat’s hair.

“No tan corto,” Monserrat agreed.

Friday got to work. She decided to play an over the top character, despite her difficulty with Spanish. A flamboyant hairdresser apparently transcended language, because Monserrat giggled through the whole thing.

“Mwa! Excelente, tan bella,” Friday exclaimed. She gestured dramatically with the comb for emphasis. She was having a great time; it was like doing a burlesque performance for an audience of two.

When she finished, she asked for Señor Hugo’s input. She spun Monserrat around to face him.

“Que adorable,” Señor Hugo said.

“Es tu turno,” Monserrat said as she dropped down from the chair. She gave a vain flick of her hair, enjoying how much lighter it felt. She smiled brightly and was about to leave when Friday blocked her way.

“Where’s my money?” Friday said, still in character. “For a haircut that good, I need…a thousand gold pesetas.”

“¡Un mil!” Monserrat yelled. “¿De oro?”

She began to appeal to the saints with a tone that suggested she was cursing Friday out. Señor Hugo pulled the dismayed Monserrat aside and stage-whispered something in her ear. Monserrat nodded.

Señor Hugo sat down in the kitchen chair and called for Friday’s services. Friday acted like she didn’t see Monserrat start to tip-toe away as Señor Hugo pointed out how short he wanted various parts of his hair. When Friday started to turn around, about to catch Monserrat in the act of slipping out on the bill, Señor Hugo called her back around with a frantic “Mira aquí, aquí, aquí–Mira qué largo tiene esta sección de cabello.”

Once Monserrat had successfully fled the scene, Friday dropped the character. She grinned at Señor Hugo.

“It’s your turn,” she said, repeating what Monserrat had declared earlier. “How about it?���

Señor Hugo acquiesced. He didn’t give her any direction, so Friday let her own taste lead her.

He closed his eyes as she worked on him, and the kitchen fell silent except for the clean snick of the scissors.

“Your Val is a priest, is that right?” he asked her.

“Oh,” Friday said. “That’s right. I guess Cody told you about him.”

“Mm. It’s not an easy road,” said Señor Hugo. “To be with someone whose heart is divided.”

Friday was slow to understand, and slow to respond.

“I wouldn’t say I’m with him,” she said. “I just would be. If he wanted that.” Friday let the scissors rest heavily against Señor Hugo’s head. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

“Love is never stupid,” Señor Hugo said.

Friday continued to cut his hair. She tried to stop thinking about Val. When she met him again, she was going to do something crazy, but she didn’t know if she was going to kiss him or hit him. She wanted to hear it from his mouth that there had been no other choice, that splitting up had been the only way. She didn’t like knowing that Val and John had run into an obstacle so much larger than them that the only way around was apart. It scared her. 

“So how did the two of you meet?” Friday asked. She closed the scissors on the hair behind Señor Hugo’s ear. “You and your priest.”

“Ah…en aquel entonces, yo era bandolero. Vivía en las montañas al oeste como miembro de una banda.” Señor Hugo looked sheepish, but all Friday really caught was that it had been in the mountains.

“Banda?” she asked, and mimed strumming a guitar.

“Ah–no,” Señor Hugo said. “Una banda que robar a los viajeros. ¿Entiendes? Son muy malos, los bandoleros.” He looked very sheepish now. “Mi vida había fundado este orfanato después de un desastre. Y nuestra banda decidió robarle a ella. Conocerla cambió todo.”

Friday nodded along, but there was smoke coming out of her ears. She was pretty sure she couldn’t be interpreting him correctly, because if she was, Señor Hugo was saying that back in the old days, he used to be a mountain bandit.

“You…you robbed the orphanage?” Friday asked in halting Spanish. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Señor Hugo confirmed it and continued his story. He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully, rephrasing each idea until he landed on words that Friday recognized. “I was impressed by her fearlessness when we arrived,” he said. “She was a beanpole with glasses, very weak. But she didn’t cower or beg. She told the leader of our group that she would give him all the money she had, but she wanted him to see the children that would be dead before winter even arrived.” Señor Hugo had a fond smile on his face as he continued. “She beckoned all of us inside, and we saw the sick and injured children. She told us to wait with them while she fetched the money.”

Friday had long since finished giving Señor Hugo his haircut. She leaned against the kitchen counter, scissors forgotten in her hands.

“She made us wait for a long time. Some of the children were crying. Marcos was there, just a baby. He was held by one of the older children, who was barely strong enough to carry him.

“Before the priest came back down, I told my companions, ‘If you rob this priest, I’ll kill you.’ For years, these men were my brothers. I knew them; I knew none of them wanted those children to starve now that they had looked them in the eyes. They made a show of spitting on me and beating me, but when they were finished, they left–without the money.

“After that, I needed a new job,” Señor Hugo laughed. “I told the priest I would work for her. If she kept me around, she wouldn’t need to worry about that kind of trouble anymore. But my life, she raised her chin and told me: ‘I need a gardener. I can’t pay you much.’ And that was that. I had no choice but to devote myself to this place.”

Friday hummed and nodded. In the nave, there was some sort of commotion. One of the older girls, Genoveva, if Friday wasn’t mixing her up, rushed into the kitchen. She spoke quickly and breathlessly. It was something to do with Marcos.

Señor Hugo was still rising from his chair when Cody and Marcos arrived in a flock of hovering children. Only Marcos was calm in the sea of panic. Cody looked almost gray with the effort it must have taken to drag Marcos up the mountain. Marcos had been shot in the side; red bloomed from under the hand he had pressed to the wound.

In all the commotion, Friday almost didn’t notice that Cody’s hands were red, too.

25.3 || 25.5

[prairiesongserial]

25.3

Cody couldn’t sleep. It should have been easy after a day in the fields that had worked every muscle to soreness, and he was generally good at willing himself to sleep even through anxiety. It was a skill he’d been forced to pick up after leaving Levering–how to keep from jolting awake at every motor revving outside, every motorbike racing past. But tonight the inside of his head felt too loud. He’d been staring at the ceiling, thoughts racing, for what had to have been an hour with no reprieve. 

Eventually, he had gotten up and crept through the silent house to sit on the back patio. It was much colder out here at night. Cody shivered every time the wind rolled through, hugging the blanket he’d dragged along with him tighter around his shoulders. With his vision fully adjusted to the dark, he could still see Barcelona sprawling in the distance; its lights winked at him, their reflections shimmering in the water.

One of the large birds he and Friday had seen earlier was still flying around, making low, swooping circles over the sea. Cody watched the bird circle for a long time before it dipped down to the water and seemed to land there. It had lights on its front–a fact that Cody only registered after they shut off.

“Headlights?” he muttered, his voice nearly lost on the wind.

“Jeez,” a voice said from behind him. “You’re still awake?”

Cody startled, then relaxed as he turned to look. It was only Friday. She lingered in the doorway, similarly swaddled in a blanket, looking bleary and rumpled.

“Did I wake you?” he asked, with a pang of guilt. She needed a full night’s sleep just as much as he did. It had been a long day for all of them, and comfortable spots to sleep had been few and far between for the past two months.

“Nah,” Friday said, coming to join him on his bench. “Got up to pee and couldn’t get back to sleep. You?”

“Couldn’t sleep at all,” Cody said. “Figured I’d rather be out here looking at something besides the ceiling.”

“What’s wrong? You hurt yourself?” Friday gave him a sharp, assessing look.

He shook his head. “Just thinking too much, I guess.”

His conversation with Señor Hugo had stuck in his mind like a kernel of corn between two teeth. It was hard to put it out of mind–put John out of mind–when they were so close to the coast. To passage into Italy, and whatever would come after that.

“Do you think…” he began, then stopped and swallowed, collecting himself. He felt that he was teetering on the same precipice as he had earlier at the gravesite, too exhausted to keep a handle on his own feelings. “Do you think John and Val are okay?”

He hadn’t asked Friday this before. It had been unspoken and unbroached, lingering silently over every other conversation they had. They’d talked vaguely about the promise to meet Val in Italy, but nothing more concrete than that. It was like the plan hadn’t become completely real until today, when they’d all laid eyes on the coast and knew the only thing left to do was cross it.

“Do I think they’re still alive, you mean.” Friday nudged up against Cody, leaning her head on his shoulder. She was also looking out at the city below them; he could see her chewing her lip, maybe considering the question or already knowing her answer.

“Sure,” Cody said.

“I do,” she answered. She sounded confident. Which was fair–she knew, almost for a fact, that Val had lived to leave behind a message for her. Maybe she sensed that Cody was about to say as much, because she went on, “Both of them.”

The answer didn’t make Cody any more sure than he had been. Despite the lack of bounty on their heads, it felt as though the world outside the States had been trying to kill them all from the jump. Even the Demeter had been packed to the gills with murderers.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because I know Val,” Friday said, which was also fair. Cody had said it himself earlier. Friday and Val knew each other so well, they could practically read each others’ minds. “He wouldn’t have left John if John was injured. And if John had died, he would’ve told me so I could tell you. He wouldn’t let you wonder.”

There was a subconscious kind of fondness in her voice that made Cody’s throat tighten.

“What if something happened to them after they left the tunnel?” he asked. He was just retreading the thoughts that had been racing through his mind, keeping him awake, but there was something of an exorcising quality in voicing them aloud.

“Nothing’s gonna happen that they can’t handle,” Friday said. She sounded like she really believed it. “Come on, it’s Val and John. They were probably shaking hands with the Pope while we were busking in Boltaña.”

Cody thought of the gun, John’s gun, that he’d been given custody of, and wasn’t so sure. If he remembered correctly, neither John nor Val had a real weapon between them. But maybe Friday had a point–they were both resourceful, both stubborn, and they’d gotten this far without getting themselves killed. They could take care of themselves, and each other.

“Can I tell you what I’m worried about?” Friday asked.

Cody tilted his head to one side, knocking it against hers. “Yeah.”

“How we’ll find them,” Friday said. “I mean–all Val’s message meant to me was to meet up in Italy. But it’s gotta be big, right? Maybe as big as Spain?”

“No idea.” Cody hummed, his hair shifting around his face as a gust of wind blew through. He’d hacked it short, once he’d recovered enough to do so, but it was down to his earlobes again. “How’d you and Val find me and John, back when you were chasing us across the States?”

Friday laughed. “That was pretty much a miracle.”

“Then we wait for another miracle, I guess.”

“How do you think we’ll get across the water?” Friday asked, raising a hand and tracing the shoreline with her index finger. “We don’t have the money to pay for passage.”

“We have a month. We’ll figure it out,” Cody said, well aware that the longer they put off doing so, the more it was going to become tomorrow’s problem in an extremely literal sense. The worry was cut short by the memory of what he’d seen just before Friday had come out onto the patio. “The birds we saw earlier, on the water–I think they’re machines.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I was watching one of them fly, before you came out here. It had lights on it.”

Friday was quiet for so long that he thought she’d fallen asleep again. He shot a glance at her; her eyes were still open, her teeth back to worrying her bottom lip as she stared out at the water.

“We should go straight to the water, when we get down there,” she said. “Find out what it takes to get across.”

“We don’t have money,” Cody reminded her.

“Not everyone needs money. Señor Hugo needs a new roof. Maybe the people down there need something else.” Friday stretched her legs out in front of her, curling her bare toes against the stone surface of the patio. “Like you said, we’ll figure it out.”

Cody looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Not worry so much.”

“Of course I’m worried,” Friday said plainly. “But Señor Hugo’s roof is something I can fix, so right now I’m more worried about Señor Hugo’s roof. When we get to Barcelona, I’ll start worrying about getting across to Italy.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Cody said, and yawned. It seemed like a sensible approach, only worrying about the problems right in front of your nose. He let his eyes slide shut, just for a moment, as he considered it.

25.2 || 25.4

[prairiesongserial]

25.2

Señor Hugo had not overestimated the amount of work that needed to be done. The orphanage needed to prepare for the winter, which meant clearing the fields, finishing the season’s canning and pickling, and chopping firewood. Of the household, only Señor Hugo and Marcos did any of the heavy labor–the others were still too young. So Señor Hugo said, anyway. There were plenty of teenagers clustered curiously at the windows and doors who looked capable of swinging an axe.

But it worked out in Cody’s favor if Señor Hugo wanted to extend some hospitality, so he wasn’t about to complain. He worked out in the fields with Señor Hugo, raking up the brittle stalks of whatever had been planted here.

It was cold up in the mountains. If Cody had counted right, it was early November–though there was a period of time when they’d first landed in Spain, where Cody had been too sick to keep track. He, Friday, and Claire had all been laid up for days, too dehydrated to keep down food or water, only alive at the mercy of a curious fishing village. Cody had been completely delirious. He hadn’t heard Spanish in so long, he’d thought it was Miriam talking to him.

Even when they’d recovered enough to try and work off some of their debt, they’d lost a lot of weight and muscle. They gained some of it back hauling fishing nets, but the town couldn’t afford to feed them much. Eventually, Cody sensed that their presence, as helpful as they tried to be, was more of a burden to the town than anything else. He’d still felt half dead when they decided to move on.

Somehow, Officer Liang had become Claire during all that. That was how she’d introduced herself to the town, so that was what Cody and Friday started calling her. She’d been sick the longest. She had broken her arm trying to keep their boat from capsizing in the storm that broke their rudder. She’d gotten a rope wrapped around it, and next thing Cody knew, she had passed out on the deck from the pain. Claire was part of the reason they’d lingered so long. Cody and Friday would come back from a hard day on the water to find Claire trying to help out with chores one-handed.

They had more or less let themselves forget that Claire was supposed to be arresting them. It wasn’t within her power to do so, so why worry about it? They were all more interested in surviving until their next meal.

Cody and Señor Hugo reached the end of the field. Cody was breathing heavily from trying to keep up, and his back was killing him from being bent double for so long. Señor Hugo offered him a drink from a steel canteen.

Cody mumbled thanks around the rim of the canteen.

“How much of your story is true?” Señor Hugo asked casually.

Cody nearly coughed up the water.

“Uh–all of it.” He returned Señor Hugo’s canteen to him. “Except it’s not mine. It’s Friday’s. The woman with the tambourine. She can’t speak Spanish, though. It’s simpler to say it’s about me.”

Señor Hugo hummed acknowledgement.

“She and Val–his name’s Val–they’ve been friends for years.” Cody walked with Señor Hugo on to the next field. “Val is a priest, and Friday was a singer at the bar across from his church. Uh, a lot happened, but they left their town to travel with John and me.

“The story was about the two of them. The coded message in the tunnel, the ‘meet me in Italy’ thing. I mean, the two of them argue all the time, but they know each other well enough that they can read each other’s minds.” Cody felt his cheeks go hot. He hated that he was jealous. John hadn’t left anything for him in the tunnel. Cody had looked. All Cody had was John’s gun strapped to his waist, and for the life of him, he still didn’t know what it meant. At some point, they’d fallen out of time with each other.

They kept walking in silence until they reached the next field.

“Then who is John?” Señor Hugo asked.

Cody’s face must have said something for him, because Señor Hugo immediately insisted they get to work– “It’s good for the mind.”

*

The sky was darkening when Señor Hugo finally called it quits. They’d cleared almost everything left over from the harvest.

“Go on ahead,” Señor Hugo said. “I’ll come later.”

Cody hesitated. Señor Hugo’s eye was on the olive grove, even further from the orphanage than the fields. They had passed it on the way up the mountain, and the path was steep and uneven. And it would be dark soon. 

“Can I go with you?” Cody asked.

“Just like Marcos,” Señor Hugo grumbled, but he motioned Cody along.

Cody followed silently. They took each step with extreme care, loose stones sliding under their shoes. When they finally reached the olive grove, Cody’s sweat had cooled, and the sky was dark blue.

Señor Hugo walked through the trees without slowing his pace, even in the dark. He only stopped when he came to a statue of a saint. Cody assumed it was Saint Francis. Señor Hugo took a seat on a low bench across from it. Cody, a beat behind, sat on the ground beside him.

Señor Hugo stared at the statue, almost as if in a trance. Tension seeped from his shoulders, and even his gaze relaxed, no longer seeing anything. Cody felt the beginning of anxiety. The statue was carved from wood, not stone–olive wood, maybe. It blended in with the surrounding trees. But it had clearly been polished with wax, and flowers had been set all around the base. They were only just beginning to wilt.

Cody glanced at Señor Hugo, then dared to move in for a closer look.

It wasn’t Saint Francis. It wasn’t any saint that Cody knew. At first, he took the figure for a woman. The face was soft and smiling, impressively lifelike. That part had been carved with the most care. The figure’s hair, carved by a novice hand by comparison, at first glance resembled Mary’s veil. But the figure wore a priest’s vestments. The body was rough, an odd contrast to the detail of the rest of the figure, but you could still tell what the dress was supposed to be if you knew what you were looking for.

“You look like a man who is still living after his life has ended,” Señor Hugo said.

At first, Cody thought he was talking to the statue. It was the first thing he’d said since they sat down.

“I’m sorry?”

“There is nobody deader than the forgotten,” Señor Hugo said. “Who is John?”

“He’s–” Cody realized in full what he already knew–that he was sitting at a grave. “He’s not dead. I don’t think he’s dead. He might be. I don’t know, would I feel it?”

He felt himself getting surprisingly emotional. Maybe it was the hard labor and the skipped meals and the constant, constant retelling of the lie that he had a lover waiting for him alive and well, but he felt himself losing control.

“The last real conversation we had, I told him I’d protect him. I’m wearing his gun–he trusted me with it, to take care of both of us. That was months ago, and anything could have happened to him.” Cody bent double, burying his head in his knees. “He doesn’t even want me to feel this way about him anymore, but I can’t stop it.”

Señor Hugo rested a warm hand on the back of Cody’s neck, squeezing gently.

“Who is–who is–?” Cody struggled to raise his head under the weight, trying to decide whether to call the statue él or ella. Señor Hugo released Cody, taking his hand back.

“My life,” Señor Hugo said. “The priest who ran this orphanage. Thirty years ago she hired me to take care of the garden.”

“What was her name?” Cody asked.

Señor Hugo shook his head. “She didn’t have one that she liked.”

*

Cody was trying not to shiver by the time Señor Hugo was ready to leave.

They began the long walk back to the orphanage. Cody didn’t talk for a while, but eventually, he couldn’t help it.

“I think we’ll go in the morning. If Barcelona is so close, we should go as soon as possible.”

“You could stand to eat a few more meals,” Señor Hugo said.

Cody shook his head. “No–”

“I can’t let you leave starving,” Señor Hugo said. “I’m not good at this, so don’t argue anymore.”

Cody snorted under his breath.

Soon enough, they made it back to the orphanage. It was in chaos. The partitions had been moved, along with the rows of beds. The bookshelves had been draped in blankets. The entire nave was coated in a layer of white dust. Claire and Friday were in the center of the room, half-dressed, sitting on the floor eating supper apart from everyone else. They were covered head to toe in dust and grime, and looked too tired to move.

When they saw Cody come in, they brightened.

“We’re fixing the roof,” Friday called in English. “I’ve helped Val patch his leaky roof a dozen times, but we had a hard time explaining that we knew what we were doing. Can you–”

Next to Cody, Señor Hugo abruptly put his weight on Cody’s shoulder. He looked like he was going to be sick.

Marcos hurried in from the kitchen area. “Tío, I tried to stop them, but they don’t speak any Spanish. They found the ladders and shingles and just did it on their own.” He took Señor Hugo by the elbows and guided him out of the room, into the kitchen. Cody trailed behind them. Señor Hugo’s gaze was distracted, focused on the nave without seeming to see it.

“Uh–Friday has done this work before,” Cody said. “Señor Hugo, Val, the priest I was telling you about–Friday has helped him fix the roof of his church many times. She probably thought nothing of it. I’m so sorry for the mess. We’ll clean up.”

Cody glared daggers at Friday, who looked over curiously as if she couldn’t sense the uncomfortable tone of the conversation.

Cody hung back in the doorway between the kitchen and the rest of the church. Marcos had sat Señor Hugo down in a chair and was trying to offer him different things.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Señor Hugo grouched, waving everything away. “Make sure everyone eats.”

Marcos rolled his eyes, nearly ready to explode with exasperation.

“Is he okay?” Friday asked. She’d appeared at Cody’s shoulder, her shirt unbuttoned nearly to her bellybutton. She and Claire must have only just stopped working if they weren’t cold yet. Claire was ignoring the conversation, digging into a bowl of chickpea stew like it could disappear out from under her at any second.

“No!” Marcos exclaimed. “But this word you apparently don’t hear.”

He grabbed both of them, tugging them away from Señor Hugo. He dragged them all the way outside. Out in the night air, Friday finally shivered. She began to button up.

“We aren’t allowed to fix the roof. I’ve tried. Tío won’t let me. Even talking about it is too upsetting. He doesn’t want to see this–” Marcos gestured back to the church behind them. “--he doesn’t even want to think about it. And it’s not too bad to put out buckets when it rains. We can live with it.” He turned on Cody now. “And I know she understood me while I was yelling at her and taking the tools out of her hands and putting them away again. She just pretended not to understand.”

Cody turned on Friday, arms crossed, not bothering to translate. Marcos was right; she did understand when someone was asking her to stop, no matter if she couldn’t actually understand the words.

Friday squared her jaw. “Whatever Marcos just said, please tell him that if you don’t fix the roof while you still can, you’re in danger of it falling down on your heads one day, which is much more peligroso than going up on the ladder.”

Marcos gestured angrily at her use of the Spanish for ‘dangerous.’

“Is that how she died?” Cody asked. “The priest who used to run this place?”

Marcos seemed to swallow his tongue. “You’re terrible houseguests,” he said finally. He took his glasses off to clean them on his shirt, and started to calm down. “Yes, Father Ortega fell trying to fix the roof. He broke his arm and died of infection later.”

Cody whispered this to Friday, who abruptly changed from defiant to horrified. Meanwhile, Marcos had a pensive look on his face, focused on Cody. He hadn’t known, maybe, that the priest was a woman. Maybe that was something she had only told Señor Hugo. Cody didn’t know why Señor Hugo would open up to him about something that his own family didn’t know.

“I’m so sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused,” Cody said. “We’ll go clean everything up.”

He translated for Friday, expecting her to agree, but she shook her head.

“No, we have to finish,” she said. “I’m sorry for your loss, but you can’t let those kids live here with the roof like that. If it comes down, someone else will die.”

Cody winced as he translated for her. Marcos looked defeated.

“It’s up to Tío,” he said. He stepped out of the way so they could go back inside.

Inside, Señor Hugo and Claire were attempting to communicate. Claire was using pantomime and a handful of Spanish words she’d picked up. When she saw Cody, she brought him into the conversation. She was trying to explain that the rest of the repair wouldn’t take long, except they were running out of shingles.

Cody translated back and forth. Señor Hugo calmly agreed with Claire about the timeline and asked her how many more she thought they would need. Friday joined in as well, explaining the project and insisting a bit too hotly that they be allowed to finish.

“Of course you should finish if you want to,” Señor Hugo said. “But if you need shingles... I can order more in town, but it could take a long time for them to be ready. I understand you have somewhere to go.”

“How long?” Friday asked.

“Weeks,” said Señor Hugo. “Not longer than a month.”

Friday looked to Cody, clearly conflicted. They had made John and Val wait for so long already.

Claire swooped up between them, an arm around each of their shoulders. She rested her head against Cody’s with a gentle thunk.

“As someone without any emotional stake, I hesitate to speak,” she said.

Cody looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Go ahead,” he said.

“I’m very hungry and tired of begging for scraps. I would like to eat as much of that stew as I can for as long as possible, because I sense that soon, you’re going to make me get on a boat again.”

“Nobody made you get on the boat the first time,” Cody grumbled. He sighed, and looked to Friday. 

“You decide,” he said. “I’m going to have something to eat.”

25.1 || 25.3

[prairiesongserial]

25.1

Friday shook a tambourine against her leg in time with the guitar. Cody was getting pretty good at playing left-handed, but ultimately it didn’t matter if he was good or not. Whatever town they happened to be busking in, it wasn’t exactly their quality of performance that drew a crowd.

They were traveling musicians who could barely play their instruments–and foreigners. Of course they were the center of attention wherever they went. Cody could at least keep up in Spanish, but he apparently spoke with an accent and sometimes called things by different names. The kids thought he was exciting. He was ‘el moreno de ocho dedos’ no matter how many times he introduced himself.

Friday put on an extra-wide smile as a man wandered closer to the music. He was an old farmer, judging by his clothes. He’d been carrying several large bags, but had set them down to listen. He crossed his arms and stared. They got a lot of that, too.

Without a map, they’d been wandering between small mountain farming villages, rarely hitting a big city. People mostly didn’t have the extra coin to toss to a street musician, and outsiders were more suspect than welcome.

Friday suppressed a wince as Cody played a G slightly flat. It also didn’t help that he had been reteaching himself how to finger-pick with his right hand. The first few towns, where Cody could do little more than fumble through scales, had been rough living. Once Cody finally worked his way up to real songs, the money began to trickle in–at first, only the occasional bribe to please play something else or move on, but things were better now.

Big smile on her face, Claire stepped forward and offered her overturned Palace Guard cap in the old farmer’s direction. It jingled with the Spanish coins they’d put in there themselves.

The man was not moved. At the start of the next verse, Friday joined Cody in harmony, but the man’s expression didn’t change.

When Cody finished the song, he thanked the man for listening and introduced their group. They were but three poor travelers trying to earn enough pennies to reach the coast–the usual spiel.

The man asked something–more interest than Friday would have expected, considering his clear disdain.

Cody shook his head in reply. “Necesito reunirme con alguien,” he said, and strummed a few notes. He fiddled with a tuning peg, then played the notes again. G sounded a lot better. “Él me está esperando en Italia.”

“Que romántico,” the man said, still not sounding impressed. Friday knew what they must be talking about. Cody had told this story enough times that Friday could recognize it. It was a story which Cody had embellished to a point that Friday was a little afraid to ask him if he actually believed the version he was telling. If she recalled correctly, she was pretty sure John had dumped him.

Tragic lovers brought tips, true story or not, and Friday nodded along as Cody embellished the tale of his and John’s separation in London. Cody would idly strum in a minor chord as he recounted how he hadn’t even known if John was dead or alive after the tunnel collapsed. Then he’d found the sign that John had left for him–really, that Val had left for Friday, but Val, in this story, was an afterthought, sometimes not even mentioned at all. The sign was painfully brief: he could not safely return, but would be waiting in Italy. He was trusting Cody and Friday to find a way to meet him there.

Cody spoke quickly, gesturing emphatically, as he explained how he and Friday had escaped the English Queen only to be dogged by one of her Palace Guards–and here Claire showed her cap as proof of their story. Cody and Friday had ultimately succeeded in drawing the Queen’s attention away from John for long enough to allow John the opportunity to flee across the border and keep his promise.

The details of their own escape from England was an entirely different type of story–Cody saved that one for when he had a crowd of kids. They liked the way Cody acted out the gunfight. And the part when Claire snuck onto their boat, hidden under a blanket until she could leap out and subdue them, brawling so fiercely they nearly capsized in the middle of the Celtic Sea. By the time Cody got to the part where their boat’s rudder broke in a sudden squall, leaving them adrift until the current brought them down into the bay where they’d been rescued by Spanish fishermen, his audience was hypnotized. It was too bad children didn’t have any money.

Cody continued to strum the guitar, picking out a few notes that Friday recognized from a love song he’d been taught in Boltaña.

The old man asked him something. Cody responded with a lovesick look on his face, and again, Friday pretty much knew what he was saying: “I don’t know whether John made it out of England, but I believe in my heart that he did, and that he’s waiting for me now.”

The man nodded along to the story. At the end, he took an extra few seconds to examine the three of them, but he didn’t reach for his pockets.

Eventually, the man spoke. Cody scrambled to put the guitar away, offering eager thanks. Friday knew what that meant; Cody would go do farm chores for the rest of the day while she and Claire continued to busk. At the end of the day, Cody would be paid in a hot meal to share and a place to sleep for the night.

If they were lucky, tomorrow they’d catch a ride to the next town. If no one was going east, they’d walk it. They’d been forcing their bodies across Spain like this for two months, taking the winding paths through the mountains, stopping to work for a few dinners whenever they stumbled across a town. They stayed just long enough to get their strength back, and then set off on the road again.

“Vosotros también. Venid conmigo.” The man gestured repeatedly, beckoning to both Friday and Claire, until they understood that they also were meant to go. Cody scooped up two of the man’s bags, nearly folding in half under the weight. Friday decided she was best suited to carry Cody’s guitar for him, while Claire struggled to lift a bag herself. Impatiently, the farmer took it back from her.

Cody talked with the man while Friday and Claire lingered outside the conversation, all three of them following the man out of town. Cody did most of the talking–the man was quiet, only answering direct questions.

Eventually, Friday gave Cody a subtle tap and a look that meant ‘time to let the rest of us know what’s going on.’

“Señor Hugo says that bandits sometimes come through town this time of year, so we’ll be safer with his family,” Cody whispered. “And there’s work for all of us. Clearing the fields, chopping firewood, the usual stuff.”

He turned back to talk to Señor Hugo. Cody chatted with him the rest of the way up the path, though Friday sensed poor Señor Hugo flagging, his answers getting shorter and shorter.

They finally reached the farm nearly an hour later.

“Oh,” she gasped.

The peasant farms they’d been working at had led her to expect more of the same. But this was an enormous stone church tucked away on a mountainside.

“Impressive,” mumbled Claire.

Señor Hugo nodded and gestured for them to keep up. They passed olive trees and empty fields on the way to the church. Friday walked a little more slowly, tired from the trek uphill, but also taken in by the old stone building. Friday had an eye for crumbling old churches, and this one wasn’t in great shape. An old farmer couldn’t possibly maintain it.

There was a shout–a young man emerged from the church and jogged up to meet them. He spoke to Señor Hugo with the disrespectful tone that meant he was family. They quibbled as the man tried to take the heavy bag that Señor Hugo carried–eventually, Señor Hugo handed it over, though that didn’t stop the man from scolding him. The man grumbled as he doubled over under the weight, then slowly straightened.

“Soy Marcos,” the man said. “¿Y vosotros?”

Cody answered for them. The man, Marcos, became much more friendly as they talked. He led the way inside the church. It was massive, four or five times the size of Val’s church in Vegas. Friday had been right about the state of it; the disrepair was even more obvious on the inside. There were holes in the roof in some places, and the sounds of nesting birds high up in the rafters.

It also wasn’t a church at all. Friday looked for familiar touchstones–an altar, pews–but despite the saints carved into the walls, there was nothing of the kind. Instead, the place had been converted into a home.

There was a kitchen, pantry, tin bathtubs, laundry supplies in haphazard order, and bookshelves with an even split of Christian doctrine and children’s picture stories–all clearly undisturbed for a long time. The nave had been split by several hinged partitions that could be moved out of the way if need be.

Friday poked her nose around, and saw two even rows of beds, eight in total. A boy sitting on the edge of one of the beds, lacing his shoes, gave her a look. Friday awkwardly raised her hand in greeting and retreated.

Cody and Claire had gone ahead with Marcos, Cody still lugging two of Señor Hugo’s bags. More family members began to poke their heads out of various nooks and crannies–children, most of them teenagers. There were half a dozen of them, quietly curious.

Friday looked for Señor Hugo. He was by the door, still.

“Hola, mi vida. Por fin, llegué,” he said.

Friday turned awkwardly around in the middle of the room, all curious eyes on her since Cody and Claire had disappeared with Marcos. She raised a hand to wave, and received a few hesitant waves back.

“Friday, where are you? Come look, ven aquí.”

Friday followed Cody’s voice. The heavy bags were gone; Cody stood with Claire and Marcos outside on a patio with a long table and benches. A team of kids appeared to be using it as a canning or pickling station, stuffing glass jars with vegetables. That brought Friday’s count up to ten children.

Friday walked up to join them where they were standing. The wind was strong on the face of the mountain; it felt good.

“Oh,” Friday breathed. “That’s…”

There was a gigantic city visible to the east, thousands of red roofs and churches all clustered tightly together. Friday had never had a view like this. Everything was so delicate, so small. Out from among the buildings, one stood out for being so much taller than the rest. It was either a church or a small mountain. Friday found herself fixated on it.

Cody grabbed her arm and held on tightly. “Marcos says that’s Barcelona. It’s on the water. It’s a coastal city. We made it.”

Friday gripped his arm right back. Beyond the city was water–a sea or an ocean shrouded in fog. And dipping in and out of the mist were brightly colored birds. She shouldn’t have been able to see birds from this far away. They were huge. They twisted in the air, cutting the mist and leaving streams of clouds in their wake, and never once flapped their wings.

epilogue 24 || 25.2

[prairiesongserial]

epilogue 24

Enis slammed the door to Hamlin’s private study open with such force that it banged against the wall. He and Hamlin looked at each other, both momentarily startled by the noise, each waiting for the other to speak.

“Are you busy?” Enis asked, when he couldn’t stand another second of silence.

“I guess not, if you’ve got something you’re this excited about. Come, sit.” Hamlin gestured to one of the mismatched, cushioned chairs in front of his desk. “Did you run all the way up here?”

Enis had, in fact, run up four flights of stairs to the penthouse. Waiting for the elevator had felt too excruciating. He shut the door behind him, considered sitting down, and elected to stand and pace instead. He felt like he might vibrate out of his skin if he didn’t.

“It’s a race,” he said.

“What’s a race?” Hamlin asked.

“The Hemisphere election.” Enis could tell Hamlin was winding up for a quip–he had a sixth-sense for it that came from being Johannes’s brother–and headed him off. “Not a race for votes, like a regular election–it’s a race. With cars. Whoever wins gets Lady’s job.”

“You think they’re aware of the double entendre?”

Enis considered. “They have to be, right? But I don’t know, no one’s acknowledging it.”

“So, what,” Hamlin said, “they just give the keys to Central to any schmuck with a fast car? Where are you getting this, kid?”

“The phone lines,” Enis said. He felt like that should have been obvious.

“You’ve been living out of that switchboard,” Hamlin said. For the past three months, ever since Enis had started properly tapping into the Central phone lines, Hamlin had been making weekly trips down to juice the system and keep it running. He’d made it abundantly clear what he thought about Enis spending more and more of his waking hours in the dimly lit room.

“Look–we can’t do that argument again,” Enis said. “There’s more than just me knowing there’s a race. I’m getting there. Can I get there?”

“The way you ran in here, I should hope there’s more.” Hamlin waved him on. “Go ahead.”

“So, the phone lines. Central. They’ve been talking about this race. I think it’s a members-only thing, but anyone with Hemisphere connections can throw their hat in the ring. Which is still a lot of people.” Enis had been carrying a pad of paper tucked under one arm; he opened it now, flipping through pages filled margin to margin with handwritten notes. “So, where it gets crazy is–I think everyone thinking of entering the race is trying to fuck their opponents over before it starts.” He tried to channel Johannes and pause for dramatic effect, but couldn’t keep himself from adding, “More than just America and Canada, by the way. My count’s at seven countries with some kind of Hemisphere presence.”

This made Hamlin sit up a little straighter. “Seven?”

“Six if you count England as under Canada’s control. Which it is.” Enis stopped, turned on his heel, and pointed at Hamlin. “Ask me how I know.”

“Okay, I’ll bite.” Hamlin sighed. “How do you know Canada is annexing England?”

“Wrong question.”

Hamlin paused, then asked: “How do you know there’s more than just an American Hemisphere?”

“Hemisphere Central has a Foreign Office.” Enis began to pace again. “I couldn’t figure out how Iris knew for sure that Cody and his friends were in Europe until I listened to a bunch of Central Intelligence’s outgoing calls. There’s an office just for sending agents to other countries to see what the other Hemisphere operations are up to.”

“And you found their phone line,” Hamlin guessed.

“And I found their phone line,” Enis said, a little smug. “Took me weeks to tap, but it was worth it.”

“So,” Hamlin said, counting on his fingers, “America, Canada, and England. Who else?”

“Italy, Russia, and Japan, and I’ve heard Spain mentioned a couple times. Maybe more not mentioned by name, I don’t know. Have we spent enough time on this for you to wrap your head around the concept? Do you need a minute?”

“Yes, but you’re not gonna wait,” Hamlin said, massaging his temples. “Okay. Multiple Hemispheres. They communicate with each other?”

“Sometimes,” Enis said. He began to pace again, unwilling to stay still even a second longer. He still had energy to work off. “Our Foreign Office has been fielding a lot of calls from Canada, the past couple months. Guess why?”

“Well,” Hamlin said, “seeing as you led with the election–”

“Exactly,” Enis said, snapping his fingers as he cut Hamlin off. “Like I said, they’re using the prep time to fuck each other over. There was an international incident on a train from Germany to Italy a couple months ago–America and Canada have been yelling at each other about it since then. Which has been great for, you know, pinning down the details of what happened.”

“You know,” Hamlin said, “when I was your age, I was more concerned with girls than geopolitics.”

“And that’s how you ended up with a whoopsie baby who tried to commit high treason,” Enis replied flatly. “Can I finish?”

“Hey, the high treason was some of his best work,” Hamlin said, sounding vaguely offended. “Can you get where you’re going with this?”

“So–as far as I can figure, there were four sets of Hemisphere agents on the train. American, Canadian, Russian, Italian. Three of them were after this mechanic who invented an engine they wanted for the race; the American was there for something totally different and got caught up in the whole tzimmes.” Enis paused, glanced at Hamlin to make sure he was still paying attention, then resumed pacing. “The mechanic gets shot, nobody knows what happened to the engine schematics he supposedly had on him. The Canadian agent also turned up dead, and the American took weeks to report back in–hence all the back-and-forth over the phone.”

“Canada thinks America killed their agent,” Hamlin surmised. He had leaned back farther and farther in his chair while Enis was talking, and now had both feet propped on the desk in front of him, one leg crossed over the other.

“She did kill their agent,” Enis said, then reeled himself back in. “Or–well, I’m pretty sure she did. Central won’t admit to anything, obviously, but I know how to read between the lines.”

Hamlin whistled between his two front teeth. “Crazy stuff.”

“Not the craziest part.” Enis flipped to a new page in his notebook. This one featured a hand-drawn timetable and map that had been heavily annotated in five different colors of pen. His hands were shaking, which Hamlin probably noticed. “The American agent? She was on the train tailing two Americans that the Foreign Office asked her to keep tabs on. I think it was Val and Cody.”

It felt absurd to say it out loud. But Enis had been sitting on this theory for nearly a month, quietly gathering information to either support or debunk it. The whole Madsen and Graves family knew at this point, thanks to Iris, that Cody and his friends had somehow hopped on a ship to France. From there they’d gone to England, and after that…things got fuzzy. Enis had been trying to figure out what had happened in the months since then, but it was difficult when Central’s communications were becoming more and more concerned with election matters to the detriment of everything else.

“How sure are you?” Hamlin asked. His fingers were steepled over his stomach; he was drumming the tips against each other the way he did when he was in deep thought about something.

“Not a hundred percent. Closer to seventy. But,” Enis said, holding up a hand to preemptively delay more skepticism, “some of the reports from the incident mention a nun acting suspiciously, accompanied by an American man. Which Val is. And he used to be a priest. I have a physical description of the man somewhere, here, hold up…”

“There were four of them in that group,” Hamlin said, giving voice to one of the exact questions Enis had been stewing on since he’d begun putting the pieces together. “If two of them were on the train, what about the other two?”

“I don’t know,” Enis said honestly. “I don’t even know who the other American is. Maybe it’s not Cody, maybe it was John. All I have to go on from the agent’s report is what’s been litigated over the line, and the report said two American men, a German traveling companion, and two children. Possibly the princes of England?”

Hamlin raised his eyebrows.

Enis shrugged. “Yeah, I didn’t quite get that part.”

“What about the nun?” Hamlin asked.

“No idea,” Enis said. “I’ve been trying to follow that thread, but nobody at either Foreign Office seems too concerned with her. Lots of nuns on the train, apparently. On some kind of pilgrimage. Goyische shit.”

He had finally stopped pacing, and was standing with one hand on the back of the chair that sat immediately in front of Hamlin’s desk. His other hand still clutched his notebook. He studied Hamlin’s face, curious to know how much of this Hamlin really believed and how much he thought was bullshit. Hamlin studied him back, probably wondering the same of Enis.

“Where do you think they ended up?” he asked Enis. “Your Americans, I mean.”

“Milan,” Enis said. He didn’t even have to look at his notes to know that much. “Well, that’s where the train ended up. Most of the passengers got off in Basel, where the mechanic was shot, but I think the Americans stayed on until the end of the line.”

“And they’re still there? They’ve been in Milan this whole time?”

“Don’t know. Italy’s kind of a black box–they don’t communicate with any other Hemisphere Centrals. America and Canada are both kind of scratching their heads over what they’re up to.”

There were non-zero odds that Hemisphere Italy had been holding the Americans captive for the past several months, or had killed them as soon as they’d set foot in Italy. Enis didn’t voice this, but saw in Hamlin’s face that he already knew.

“You’re a clever kid,” Hamlin said. “I should be paying you for intel this good.”

“Please. If I wasn’t doing the work, I’d go bugfuck insane,” Enis said. There was a reason he’d stayed in New York instead of shipping up to Judith’s place in Maine, even after the coast seemed more or less clear for the remaining members of the circus to disperse. He wasn’t built for the quiet fishing village lifestyle.

Hamlin laughed. “So, what’s next? You got all this information, what are you gonna do with it? I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you not to rope your brother in, if this is all–” Hamlin gestured in the air, the universal sign for wishy-washy conspiracy.

Enis waved the rest of the statement away impatiently. Hamlin nodded, apparently satisfied with that.

“It’s leverage,” Enis said. “Oh, that’s the other thing–I need to borrow a car.”

“You need a driver?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Just me. I’ve gotta be in Central in two days for a meeting with Iris. Well–she thinks it’s with one of the Bellamys, but I might have pretended to be a secretary on the phone.”

“Wheeling and dealing in Central, huh?” Hamlin looked positively delighted by this. He tipped his chair forward, planting his feet firmly back on the carpet. “What’s your endgame? Point out the gaps in their system, get yourself a job in Intelligence?”

“A desk job? Are you kidding? I’d kill myself.”

“Okay, so, what?”

“So, if I know Iris, she’s putting together a team for the election. Maybe behind Lady’s back. And whatever engine that mechanic in Europe designed that everyone wanted, I can do it better.” Enis leafed through his notebook again, and flipped it around to show Hamlin. After the map and timetables it was pages on pages of drawn schematics for car parts. “Probably more efficiently, too. Considering that he got jumped on the train by four international factions, I doubt the guy got the assignment that it was for a race.”

“You want a spot on her team,” Hamlin said, a little proudly.

“No,” Enis said with a snort. “I want to run it.”

24.29 || 25.1

[prairiesongserial]

24.29

With the dining car to himself, Kaoru settled in. He took the time to rifle through both briefcases–and in doing so, learned some interesting facts about the dead man on the floor. According to his collection of European passports, his name was either Jeremy Delmoore, Julien Dupuis, Stephen Boucher, Jean Jensen, or Antoine Black. He had also been carrying a book hollowed out to hide a set of throwing knives, a spare change of clothes, a garotte disguised as a tube of lipstick, and an unlabeled tin of teabags that almost certainly didn’t contain any tea. 

It hadn’t crossed Kaoru’s mind that the dead man could be another international agent. This assignment was one close call after the last. At least he would probably net himself a bonus for bringing both briefcases back to Shinjuku; surely one of the analysts there would be able to figure out which, if any, of the man’s identities were real, and who he’d been working for.

Kaoru popped Hennig’s briefcase open next, and was pleased to find it only contained clothes and a few overfull file folders. No surprises there. Oikawa’s intel had been right about the one thing that mattered.

He closed the briefcase again and carefully secured the latch. After a minute of sitting around drumming his fingers, he got up to get a handful of napkins to try to wipe some of the blood off.

The dining car’s intercom buzzed to life, and a steward announced that the train would be stopping in Basel in five minutes. Kaoru stood, his drink long since finished, and took a briefcase in each hand. That was his cue to begin moving downstairs and towards the doors. Time to get off the train as fast as possible before anyone realized Hennig’s luggage was unaccounted for.

Kaoru took the stairs quietly, pausing halfway down to eavesdrop when he heard passengers unloading their luggage and bickering. He didn’t hear the Russians among them. They were likely still up at the front of the train, waiting for their chance to slip away.

Had they killed Valerie by now? They must have, right? Kaoru clenched his teeth and banished the thought. Valerie was not his problem, he reminded himself. Valerie was never going to be his problem again. Therefore, it didn’t matter if Valerie was dead or alive.

“Excuse me, coming through,” someone muttered in German as Kaoru finished descending the stairs. The throng of passengers parted to make way for two young boys toting suitcases. Everyone seemed eager to get off the train at Basel. After seeing the state of the dining car, Kaoru didn’t blame them.

The train jerked to a stop as it came into the station. Kaoru braced himself against the stairwell wall, then slipped out behind the first rush of passengers, using the briefcases to carve himself a path. He squinted as the sunlight hit his face, then began to walk at a brisk–but not too brisk–pace towards the cover of the station’s interior. It was more effort than he would have liked; his legs were wobbly from running up and down the length of the train all morning.

He was in the midst of a gaggle of civilians when the gunshot rang out. They all instinctively scattered for cover, running in a crouch as though it stood a chance of deterring any sniper who might have been aiming for center mass. Kaoru’s own instinct was to dive behind a bench, wedge both briefcases between his knees, and pat himself down to see if he’d been hit.

He hadn’t. His ears rang, and his heart was pounding like he was a step away from full cardiac arrest, but whoever had fired the shot hadn’t shot at him. It was a little hard to tell over the sudden din of passengers screaming and shouting at one another, but it didn’t sound like there had been more than one shot, either. The shooter had hit their target–or they’d only fired to cause a distraction.

Who had it been, though? The Russians? The cardinal? Someone else? Kaoru twisted and lifted his head to peer between the bench’s slats. The crowd on the platform had formed a ring around something–someone, Kaoru amended, seeing the pool of blood that was fast breaching the wall of rubberneckers. 

Someone was very injured over there, or even dead. There was no telling who it was or who had shot them, unless he risked getting close. Which would risk being noticed; worse, it meant the briefcases could be noticed by the sniper unless Kaoru stashed them somewhere first. That was a non-starter of an idea. After the hell he’d been through to get his hands on the briefcases, there was no way he was going to let them out of his sight.

“It’s none of my business,” he said under his breath, in Japanese. As he stood, briefcases once more in hand, he repeated himself with slightly more conviction. “It’s none of my business! Whatever is back there is absolutely none of my business.”

A woman rushing past–a conductor or engineer, judging by her uniform–gave him a strange look. Kaoru supposed that talking to himself several yards from where someone had just been shot would do that. He smiled in response, somewhat hysterically, and hurried inside the station.

A group of uniformed officers were flooding towards the outdoor platform’s entrance. Kaoru stepped aside and held the door for them–aside from a nod and a tip of the hat from the lead officer, none of them even acknowledged him. His heartbeat calmed, evening out from the jackrabbit pace it had been thumping at.

It occurred to him, for the first time since he’d picked up Hennig’s briefcase, that he had really done it. And not only that, but he might have been the most successful Hemisphere agent on the train. Or, at least, the only one to leave completely unscathed, in possession of useful intelligence. It was the sort of thing he could have leveraged into a hefty promotion–but, as things stood, Kaoru was probably going to leverage it into a month of vacation instead.

All of this for a bunch of blueprints. Kaoru snorted. At least now if Japan lost the election, he could still honestly say he’d given it his all. Maybe this field agent thing was easier than he’d thought.

24.28 || epilogue 24

[prairiesongserial]

24.28

Imani’s senses were coming back. So, she wasn’t dead. Surprising. She felt dead. She felt like she was lying on a bed of nails, had been shot, and a cartoon anvil had fallen on her head. In that order.

Her sense of touch more generally informed her that there was a hand closed around her arm–her wrist. She was disarmed. She couldn’t feel the weight of her pistol in her palm. Maybe it was there, but the whole area of her hand was numb and cold.

Someone was breathing in her ear. Talking in her ear. Imani blinked the stars out of her eyes. She twitched her hand out of the grasp of the person hovering beside her. They sat up, and the annoying tickle in her ear stopped.

Imani’s eyes focused on the concerned face pouting down at her. Fat, androgynous, orange.

“Cassidy,” she growled. Her lips moved awkwardly around the name. She was having trouble filling her lungs. Maybe just the pain, but she wouldn’t discount fatal injury either.

Cassidy delicately brushed some glass off Imani’s uniform. “Yes, that’s me,” they said quietly. “We have yet to come to an understanding, though, so don’t get too familiar. Can you move?”

Imani tried it. Half-numb arms and legs scraped over glass. Ow. Two children appeared over Cassidy’s shoulder. British princes. Cassidy, noticing where her eyes moved, whipped around to push them back down by their little blond heads.

“Honestly, kids don’t listen these days,” Cassidy grumbled. “When I was their age–well, present company excluded, it used to be that children–”

Cassidy abruptly stopped wasting air. There was a sudden feeling of pressure as the train stopped. The emergency brake? That wasn’t right. The conductor should have radioed ahead to Basel for an emergency response and continued as usual. Pulling the emergency brake did nothing but buy time for the criminal element to accomplish their goals before then.

Imani supposed she’d just answered her own question. The princes were in danger–and until the train started moving again, Russia, Italy, and who knew who else had given themselves plenty of time to recover them. Imani tried to tell Cassidy this, but they abruptly put a hand over her mouth.

There was a sequence of gunshots.

“Ah, we missed our opening,” Cassidy sighed. They whispered something to the princes on their other side. 

There was talking–Russian. It sounded like the Italians had lost the stand-off. Surprising, but Imani counted her lucky stars that at least one faction was out of commission. Minutes passed, then she felt herself being heaved up, glass tinkling to the ground as she was slung over Cassidy’s shoulder.

Imani tried to get a look at the state of the dining car as she was hauled away. One Italian remained, kneeling, facing the other direction. Imani held her breath, but despite the sound of shoes on glass announcing their every movement, the Italian agent didn’t turn around.

Cassidy ushered the kids ahead, bringing up the rear. They put one sleeper car between them and the site of the gunfight before bundling all four of them into an empty sleeper compartment.

Cassidy spoke quickly in German to the boys while the room slowly became dark at the edges. Imani felt an impatient series of slaps against her face.

“Ah-ah,” Cassidy said. “Not yet.”

One of the princes whined something in German, but Imani didn’t understand it. It was garbled, like it was being spoken backwards. Imani wasn’t necessarily concerned about that–the encroaching threat of unconsciousness could explain a lot–but Cassidy stilled, suddenly stiff.

That was important. That told her something. What did that tell her? Imani squeezed her eyes shut, desperately willing herself alert, then opened her eyes again.

Baveldertshtet. The Yiddish newspaper.

The boy who had spoken had his hands pressed over his mouth. He glanced worriedly between Cassidy and his brother.

“Who–” Imani began.

“Don’t waste your energy. You’re not doing too well,” Cassidy said. They shifted into Imani’s eyeline, filling her field of vision. “You were shot in the hand and the gut, and they grazed you here and there. Plus, you were dragged over glass, not to mention you hit your head when you fell…” They grinned at her. Although their tone was friendly, their smile was very much threatening. “You will want to conserve as much energy as possible for the Italian authorities. I hear they’re pretty tough.”

Imani would have sworn, but Cassidy was right. She really didn’t have the energy to spare if she was going to have to make a case for her life in Milan. Imani breathed deeply. She felt a lurch that she thought was her stomach rebelling, but turned out to be the train jolting into motion. The conductor had regained control of the train, then, because the British princes were still–

Cassidy stared down at her like they were trying to keep her from figuring it out with only the power of will.

“Who are they?” Imani asked, in English. “Don’t try to tell me Gawain and Percival picked up Yiddish over a long weekend.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cassidy said. “You’re crazy from blood loss.”

Imani stared at the two boys, putting the pieces together. The unaccompanied minor in Car 8 that didn’t appear on the manifest. Judging by his age, he would have been the elder prince–Percival. She hadn’t noticed another unaccompanied minor, but Gawain could have quietly slipped in among any of the families. Or maybe he was on another train–Friday Wilmot and Cody Allison could be following on the next Gottingen to Milan.

No wonder every time Imani had passed by, either Lecter or Cassidy or somebody was out of their seat. Going to the bathroom, stretching their legs–they were checking up on the real princes. It was a great plan, except that while the British princes went quietly unnoticed, Hemisphere was closing in on their stand-ins.

“You switched them out,” Imani said, struggling. “You figured out you were being tailed. That’s smart. But you’ve got to get these kids out of here, or they’re going to die.”

Cassidy looked down at her with a blank, almost callous expression.

“Yes, I’m sure you’re just here to help,” they said, finally. “That’s why you found so many reasons to pass by our seats. You’re just a very helpful stewardess, right?”

Before Imani could answer, Cassidy continued.

“I don’t see why you think that business with the missing princes has anything to do with us. I was visiting my family in Germany, and now I’m escorting my little nephews to Switzerland for their schooling.” They kept right on smiling through the lie. Imani knew Cassidy had crossed the North Sea with John Graves and Valerie Lecter. Sure, it had only been a hunch at first, but the fact that they’d been sitting in the same cluster of seats, chatting over the Yiddish news, all but confirmed it. “Since you’re so interested, you must be some sort of spy, hm? British? That’s fascinating, I’ve never met a spy before. What’s it like? They pay well?”

Imani groaned. She felt very unwell. Unwell like she wasn’t sure she was going to live to see what the Vatican would do to her in Milan. She felt a few light taps on her cheek as Cassidy attempted to bring her back around.

“Where are they going?” Imani asked.

“Hm? Where are who going? My little nephews are going to school in Switzerland.”

“You know who,” Imani said. “Graves. Lecter.”

“Huh. That’s a little bit stupid of you, isn’t it?” Cassidy said, tone more curious than anything else. “I expect more from a spy. You know the names of a couple nobody Americans, but you don’t even really know what the British princes look like. You’re showing your cards.”

Was it stupid of her? Imani should just shut up. But if she just asked the right question, then at least she’d be able to call the Foreign Office and let them know where to send the next agent. She might even be able to get to a phone before Milan got to her.

“You’re right,” Imani said. “I wasn’t sent for the princes. But there are dangerous people on this train–”

“No kidding,” Cassidy teased. “And you’re one of them. You shot the man in the white suit. And I heard Italian and Russian in that fight, so that’s Hemisphere and the Vatican both interested in something on this train. You think they’re after Gawain and Percy–now, that’s interesting, because I don’t think so. You’re the only agent who’s paid us the time of day. What’s your name, by the way? In my head I’ve been calling you Agent Hewitt–but I’d like to amend that. It sounds too British, and you’re clearly not working for the Queen.”

Imani clenched her teeth. Infuriating. They were infuriating.

“Trade with me. Give me something and I’ll give you something. I’m already fucked here, Cassidy.”

Cassidy’s smile faded slightly.

“You first. As you say, you’re already fucked.”

Imani breathed deeply through her nose. She focused on the pain she felt as the movement of the train jostled her injuries. She wouldn’t pass out. She’d get the information she wanted. Lecter and Graves–had they already disembarked, were they disembarking in Switzerland, or were they going all the way to Italy? She could find out that much, she could get it out of Cassidy. There was time, just as long as she didn’t pass out.

“You’re right,” she said. “I was never after the princes. I didn’t even know they had the princes. I’ve been tailing Lecter and Graves…just keeping tabs. These are major people of interest.”

Cassidy gave a pensive hum, scratching at the stubble under their chin.

“Alright?” Imani said. “That’s what you wanted. I’m working for the American Foreign Office of Intelligence. Your princes aren’t in any danger from me, sorry you had to go through the bother of switching them out for nothing.”

“No bother,” Cassidy said. “And not for nothing. I won’t discount the presence of better spies than you. Just because you’re the only looky-loo I noticed doesn’t mean no one else was watching.”

True–Canada very well could have been a credible threat. Did Imani believe that, or was it more likely Canada had a finger in whatever fucked up shit Russia and Italy had going on?

“Okay, you have what you want,” Imani said. “Where are Lecter and Graves going?”

“That’s your question?”

“I’m in no state to follow. They’ll have at least a week’s head start.”

Cassidy laughed to themself. The boys were little blond-headed blurs, just outside Imani’s shrinking range of focus. She willed herself to make it a little longer–another few minutes–but she was fading fast. The idea that she might die of blood loss before she even made it to Milan didn’t actually sound too bad. There were places in Europe foreign agents didn’t come back from.

“I just feel that you could have used your question much more wisely. There’s a window right here.” Cassidy tapped on the glass, and the sound thudded in Imani’s head. “You can watch until they get off at their stop. Shouldn’t be a big problem for you, since you’re so good at keeping an eye on us.”

Cassidy ruffled Imani’s hair, and it felt like they were shaking her head like a sloshing snowglobe.

She must have passed out for a few seconds, because when the stars cleared from her eyes, the sleeper compartment was still and empty.

“Fuck,” Imani groaned. It must have been more than a few seconds; Cassidy had propped her up so she’d have a view out the window.

24.27 || 24.29

[prairiesongserial]

24.27

Salome continued to apply chest compressions to Frankie’s body until another passenger entered the dining car. This would not have given her so much pause if she hadn’t recognized the man’s face. It was that of the nun who had been with Valerie Lecter earlier, though Lecter no longer appeared to be accompanying him.

Was he a Hemisphere agent as well, or was he wanted by Hemisphere like Lecter? Had he been here to kill Lecter for some reason? It seemed improbable that this man was a regular civilian, particularly now that the nun habit proved to be a ruse, but a quick check of Salome’s facial recognition database returned no results. If he was Hemisphere affiliated, he was either a very new agent or from a branch that she had limited information on.

“You should not be here,” Salome told him. This held true even if the man was a civilian. The dining car had been destroyed, and there were two corpses on the ground.

“Okay, well,” the man said, “my ticket included a drink and a meal, so.”

He had stepped behind the counter and was rooting around for something. Salome tracked his movements, in consideration that he might have come to retrieve a hidden weapon, but his movements were too random for that to be true.

“You are acting illogically,” she said, watching him procure a disposable coffee cup. “You could be killed.”

It was intended both as a warning and as a veiled threat. Salome could easily kill him and prevent a potential loose end, but she lacked concrete evidence that this man was a danger to her or her mission. She preferred not to kill civilians without a reason; she was aware that Ezio did not approve of it, even though it was occasionally the most logical means to an end.

“Sister, if there’s anything I’ve learned today,” the man said, “it’s that you can’t stop people from being completely fucking illogical.”

This gave Salome pause. Her prediction models should have been able to take that into account, but all day long, she’d failed. She and Frankie should not have lost. They should have easily removed the threat of the Russians, but they’d left themselves vulnerable to chance, and by the slimmest of odds–

The Russians had left the dining car with Hennig. Salome had been too preoccupied with Frankie to think anything of it at the time, but now she was free to reprioritize. The Russians could not be allowed to disembark with Hennig at Basel–the next stop, now that the train had begun to move again.

The man behind the counter was not looking at her; she could have incapacitated him, but that was valuable time to waste. Salome tore the crucifix from Frankie’s neck, pocketed it, stood, and left the dining car.

*

She went down to Car 7 to find her arm. It was exactly where it had fallen off of her body, give or take being shifted a bit by the motion of the train. Salome spent some time attempting to reattach it to her shoulder, to no avail–the repair required tools she did not have. Ezio would be glad, at least, that she’d recovered the part. She draped the arm over her shoulders like a second cloak to keep her other hand free as she passed through into Car 8.

The nuns looked at her warily. Salome stared back at them.

“The two men with large guns,” she said, bluntly. “Did they pass through this way? Towards the back of the train?”

Several of the nuns shook their heads. More of them averted their eyes, and did not move.

The Russians had headed to the front, then. That meant they had more than likely been the ones to get the train moving again. This posed several problems. Salome and Frankie had not explored the cars towards the front, so there was no telling how many passengers were there to get in the way, or if Gusev and Ostrovsky had set some sort of trap. Salome was also not fit for a second brawl; already riddled with bullets and down one arm, the probability of her continuing to hold her own against the two men was low.

Killing Gusev and Ostrovsky was the quickest and most logical way to end this. Ezio would not have agreed with her. But Salome did not wish to factor Ezio’s opinions into her calculations at this moment, nor did she wish to make any more concessions for humans. All day, she had made herself care about the sanctity of life, about not killing when she had the opportunity, and the only tangible thing it had gotten her was a dead partner.

Salome turned on her heel to leave Car 8 and head back the way she’d come. If Gusev, Ostrovsky, and Hennig were still in the conductor’s compartment, she would simply corner and shoot both Russians and take Hennig into her own custody. In such a small space, they would not be able to fire their own, larger guns properly without risking ricochet or recoil.

She passed through Car 7, then Car 6. Her exit from 6 was impeded, because a passenger had gotten up to block her way. Salome’s facial recognition showed him as a match to John Graves, wanted by Hemisphere America. A known associate of Valerie Lecter.

“You are impeding an agent of the Vatican,” she said, and overrode her politeness protocols to place her hand on Grave’s shoulder. “Move or be moved.”

He didn’t wince. He only stared at her, matching her unblinking gaze.

“Move or be moved,” Salome said again, gripping him so tightly she knew it would bruise.

“No,” he said. Then, “Are you going to kill those men.”

“Yes,” Salome said simply. There was no point in denying it.

Graves pressed his lips together, and stayed that way for a long moment. Salome debated tossing him aside, but waited; he looked like he was running his own calculations on what to say next.

“Okay,” he said. He nodded stiffly, and shook himself free of her hand. “Kill those men. Not anyone else.”

Salome did not feel she had to agree with him. She pushed past him, throwing open the door to Car 5 so hard that it jammed and stuck that way. When Graves followed her, possibly in search of Lecter, she took the stairs to avoid him. Illogical, yes, but–

*

She stayed on the upper deck, walking briskly towards the front of the train. but paused halfway through a sleeper car to look out the window. A train station was visible in the distance. As if underscoring the point, the train’s intercom chimed, and a steward announced tersely over it that they would be stopping in Basel in five minutes. 

Salome ran the calculations and found that they were not in her favor. Gusev and Ostrovsky would likely have left the conductor’s compartment by now for a more advantageous position near the train doors, where they could easily take Hennig, disappear into the crowd on the platform, and slip away. Once they disembarked, there would be no chance of shooting at them without potential civilian casualties–which Salome did not mind, but the Vatican would.

These thoughts ran through Salome’s processors within half a second’s time; she then reiterated them aloud, slower, mimicking the way she would often hear Ezio talk himself through a particularly difficult mechanical problem. The other cardinals were going to want to understand why she changed the mission parameters, and they would only have access to her audio-visual logs. They could not peer into her thoughts.

“Ezio,” she said. “It is improbable that I will be able to retrieve Hennig,” she concluded. “I apologize for failing to meet my mission parameters.”

It was a less than satisfying conclusion. No one would have custody of Hennig, at the end of it. But Frankie was dead, and Salome was feeling an emotion she had very limited experience with–spite. The Russians probably did not think she was capable of it. Perhaps that would change, in a few minutes.

She put her fist through the window in front of her, a spray of glass cascading down the side of the train. A nearby sleeper compartment slid open, presumably to look for the source of the noise, then slammed shut again. Wise passengers.

The train had slowed. The Basel platform was nearly upon it; Salome planted her feet and did not move as the cars jerked and ground to a halt. The noise of commotion rose up from the lower deck. The Russians were very likely threatening their way to the front of the queue, so they would be allowed off before anyone else.

“Ezio, I am going to employ the use of a firearm as a last resort effort,” she said calmly, leaning her entire upper body out of the broken window. Her eyes fixed unblinkingly on the platform, where passengers would soon begin to disembark.

Every set of doors on the platform-facing side of the train slid open with a pneumatic hiss. Salome scanned the heads stepping out and into her field of view, narrowing in on small groups–an adult herding children, a group of young tourists, and then there was Gusev. He stood out in a suit with the arms torn away. He emerged, then Ostrovsky behind him, dragging Hennig along by the arm like he was a piece of luggage.

She would have one chance before the Russians were able to use the crowd on the platform as cover. Salome lined up a shot with Frankie’s pistol, braced her elbow against the window frame to account for recoil, and fired.

The bullet struck Hennig’s skull, and shattered it. Blood sprayed onto Gusev, Ostrovsky, and the concrete beneath them. Cries of distress rose up from the platform; Salome gave herself just a moment to watch the Russians swing their heads around in anger and confusion before she came back through the window and began to move towards the closest set of stairs. She didn’t think the Russians would try to return fire, but she wouldn’t do anything to attract it, either. They were illogical. They might try anyway.

“Ezio, Hennig is dead,” she said calmly, to herself. “If he must be lost as an asset, at least he will be lost to everyone.”

24.26 || 24.28

[prairiesongserial]

24.26

Kaoru had begun to strip out of his habit as soon as the train was stopped, trusting Valerie to watch the door to the compartment and keep the other two men from bolting. The reasons for this were twofold. One: Sister Grace Marie had been thoroughly burned as a disguise. It was no longer convenient for him to be recognized as that precocious nun. Two: he needed to get at his cigarettes, and they were stuck in the pocket of the jeans he’d been wearing beneath the habit.

“Uh,” Valerie said, looking somewhat scandalized by the swift dissolution of Sister Grace Marie as Kaoru ripped off his wimple.

Kaoru didn’t acknowledge Valerie’s distress. He fished a pair of glasses out of one pocket, and the dented cigarette box out of the other. He slid the glasses (which he did not need) on, then opened the box, shook loose a cigarette, and stuck it between his teeth.

“I don’t suppose you have a light,” he said to Valerie, expecting the small, baffled shake of the head he got. He turned to the engineer and conductors. “What about you gentlemen?”

As they were sweatily searching their pockets, Kaoru closed the distance between himself and them in two long strides. He brought a hand to each man’s neck; their eyes barely had time to widen before they were rolling backwards. Two bodies hit the floor.

Kaoru was not a smoker. Inside the box, along with the cigarettes, were several small syringes. Each one contained a cocktail of substances precisely calculated to knock out a man of average height and weight, which had worked exactly as advertised on the engineer and conductor. Valerie, on the other hand, was not a man of average height and weight. The syringe would still act as a sedative, but would run through him faster. Still, it would give Kaoru ample time for a head start, which was all he needed.

There was a shuffle of movement behind him. Kaoru wheeled around, sure Valerie was already trying to bolt. Instead, he found the other man with both hands raised slightly above his head, palm out, looking lightly bemused.

“I don’t understand,” Valerie said. “I told you–”

“You don’t have to understand,” Kaoru said. If Valerie hadn’t worked out by now that he’d been working with a rival Hemisphere agent, then he would have plenty of time to sit here and puzzle it out.

Assuming he wasn’t killed by the next person to open that door. Kaoru took a moment to remind himself that there was no need to feel guilty if that did happen. Who cared if an American he’d known for an hour, who was probably also a Hemisphere agent, got shot? Not Kaoru.

“Who are you?” Valerie asked him.

What reason did Kaoru have to be honest? Valerie certainly hadn’t been. He smiled thinly. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Is your name even–” Valerie began, then sighed and shook his head. “I’m not going to fight you. You clearly have a reason why you’re doing this, even if I don’t get it.”

Kaoru blinked at him. “Really?”

“Of course,” Valerie said. He lowered one hand, and offered it to Kaoru, bridging the gap of space between them. “I meant what I said about helping you, no matter what.”

“You would do that for me?” Kaoru asked. He reached out hesitantly, then placed his hand in Valerie’s.

Valerie gave him a very serious, earnest look. Those fucking purple eyes. “Of course.”

“Wow,” Kaoru said, sliding the tip of the syringe into the vein on Valerie’s wrist. His thumb felt for the plunger, and hit home. “What a rube.”

The gag, his wadded-up habit bound tightly in place by a stocking, had been an afterthought after tying everyone up. Maybe not strictly necessary, but at least Valerie couldn’t ask him anything else.

*

Kaoru paused midway through Car 6, catching his reflection in a window and running his fingers through his hair. It was bedraggled and greasy from running around, sweating in a wimple. The best he could do was force it into a semblance of a neat part and let it flop over his eyes. Hopefully the glasses would disguise the rest of his face, and the other nuns wouldn’t expect the erstwhile Grace Marie to now be roaming the train in jeans and a tank top.

In all honesty, Kaoru would have liked to end this with some kind of victory clawed from the jaws of defeat, even if the getaway wouldn’t be as clean as he’d imagined. Maybe he could still turn things around. He had one last chance to make a run at the briefcase while the other Hemisphere agents were distracted, and he didn’t intend to waste it.

He passed into Car 7. Hennig was obviously not here anymore, as there was no longer a Row 4 for him to be seated in. The car was abandoned–the fight had either moved somewhere else, or stopped completely. Kaoru no longer heard the sound of gunfire. The only passengers were those trickling down the stairs from the train’s second level, which told him that the fight had moved upstairs. No one dared to join Kaoru in the destroyed car, even in their panic, not with the seats ripped out of the floor and–was that an arm?

Kaoru clenched his jaw. Time to see what everyone else was fleeing from, then. And hope that Hennig was at the epicenter of it. He checked the overhead luggage compartments one last time to make sure Hennig’s briefcase wasn’t there (it wasn’t), then found the stairs and took them two at a time to the largely vacant upper deck.

There was no question of where the rest of the fight had taken place. The inside of the dining car looked just as trashed as Car 7–shattered glass littered the ground, and any furniture not nailed down had been tipped on its side or flung into a wall. Blood streaked the floor tiles. Two bodies had been left here; the blond man who had been accompanying Hennig, and one of the cardinals.

The other cardinal was also here, kneeling wordlessly over her partner. It looked like she was attempting chest compressions, though the body was obviously mangled beyond repair. She didn’t seem to notice Kaoru as he came in and carefully walked across the car to the drinks counter, then slid behind it. There was a blood trail on the floor back here, too, and he nearly slipped on it before catching his balance against the wall.

As he did, his eyes caught sight of two rectangular shapes under a booth near the blond man’s corpse. Kaoru’s breath caught in his throat. There was no way.

The train lurched, and began to move again. That was fair, Kaoru supposed. Possibly the men with guns had made it to the conductor’s compartment. He wondered, briefly, what they might have done with Valerie if that was the case, then swatted the thought out of the air before it could fully materialize. What happened to Valerie was no longer his problem, nor should it ever have been.

The still-living cardinal straightened up. She was missing one of her arms, and the other was soaked in blood up to the elbow. She swiveled her head in an entire three hundred and sixty degree turn to take in the entirety of the dining car, then fixed her gaze on Kaoru.

“You should not be here,” the cardinal said.

Kaoru forced himself to take a more relaxed posture, and said, “Okay, well, my ticket included a drink and a meal, so.”

The cardinal stared at him blankly, without blinking. Had she recognized him? A bead of sweat dripped down Kaoru’s neck.

“You should return to your seat,” the cardinal said, eventually.

“Sure,” he said. “After I get a drink.”

He turned to the back wall of the concessions counter and began to search for a glass that hadn’t yet exploded into a thousand pieces. Failing in this task, he opened one cabinet after another and rooted through them until he found a sleeve of disposable coffee cups.

“You are acting illogically,” the cardinal said. “You could be killed.”

“Sister, if there’s anything I’ve learned today,” Kaoru replied, “it’s that you can’t stop people from being completely fucking illogical.”

The cardinal hesitated in place, but didn’t seem to want to waste any more time with him. She knelt, retrieved something from her partner’s body, and left the dining car in silence.

There was a small fridge filled with even smaller bottles of alcohol behind the counter. Kaoru took three little bottles of gin and poured them simultaneously into his cup, then filled it the rest of the way with soda water, and drank his improvised cocktail. It tasted awful. It also quelled the desire he’d been feeling for a strong drink, and untethered him from some of the panic that had become stuck in his chest. He tossed his cup to the floor.

“Right,” he said quietly, to himself. The briefcase was here. He had left his camera back in the conductor’s compartment, but what was stopping him from simply taking the blueprints, rather than photographing them? Maybe he would even score some points with Central that way.

Now that he was alone, Kaoru moved out from behind the counter and began making his way over towards the briefcases. He peeled them from the half-congealed blood glueing them to the floor and laid them out on the nearest upright table. He would determine which one was Hennig’s, he would get off the next stop with it, and then he would find a way to call Oikawa and beg for an extraction from Switzerland. And then he would use all of the leverage he’d gained from doing this awful, shitty job to propel himself directly back into his desk job. Where he belonged.

24.25 || 24.27

[prairiesongserial]

24.25

Vanya held his right hand down for Yuri. He watched as Yuri struggled to get his feet under him with the bottoms of his shoes sliding in a pool of blood. His right wrist was bent at an odd angle, curled up against his chest. He growled in frustration as he relied entirely on his left side to drag himself upright enough to accept Vanya’s hand.

“Look, we are twins again,” Vanya said. After firing Yuri’s rifle six times, Vanya’s broken left wrist was unusable–not that Yuri could see the bruising easily against his dark skin. Yuri grunted; Vanya pulled him to his feet. “Let’s hurry, before she kills us.”

The Vatican’s invincible metal cardinal was crouched over her partner, wrist deep in her chest. Whatever first aid she was attempting to deliver was only desecrating the corpse.

“Eugh,” Vanya said.

“Hennig,” said Yuri.

Hennig was sitting at a booth, his face as white as a snow-capped Alp.

“Take your gun back, I’ll take him,” Vanya said.

“Where’s yours?”

“Broken. Pieces.” He clapped Yuri on the shoulder. “In a fair world, we would be dead.” Vanya switched to German, smiling down at Hennig while Yuri hauled the man out of his seat. “Whoever stopped the train, they have very good timing. We should pay them a commission.”

“We need to get it moving again,” said Yuri.

They swapped gun and hostage so Vanya was holding Hennig. Yuri was right; they needed to get the train to Basel so they could disappear with Hennig before the cardinal came to her senses.

“You were in the seats behind us,” Hennig said, clearly not yet himself. “I’m supposed to be going to a conference in…in Milan…”

“Perhaps I can interest you in a new career opportunity,” Vanya said. He guided Hennig out the door by the shoulder, Yuri trailing behind. “Chief Engineer in Residence, how does that sound?”

“What?” Hennig asked.

“This position is very coveted. Herr Hennig will have his own villa outside St. Petersburg, and I will personally introduce you to beautiful female assassins.”

“Assassins?” Hennig blanched.

“Vanya,” Yuri said.

“Is that the wrong word? My German is flawed,” said Vanya, gripping Hennig’s shoulder more tightly. He steered him briskly down the aisle of the sleeper car. “I mean a woman who commits political murder for the state. Attentäterin, yes?”

“I don’t want to meet any assassins,” Hennig said, attempting to wriggle out of Vanya’s grasp. “I don’t know what I’ve stumbled into, here, but–”

“Stumbled into? Herr Hennig, this is all about you. You are the star.”

Behind him, Yuri cursed under his breath. He didn’t approve, but too bad–both of them had looked death in the face to kidnap this man. Vanya wanted to bully him a little. 

“What do you mean?” Hennig asked. 

“Your conference in Milan, what do we think, Yuri, this was a set-up? There was no conference. Italy lured you in, and it was their hubris if they sent inattentive babysitters. Russia will treat you much better.”

“Oh God,” Hennig said. “You’re lying.”

“He is not,” said Yuri. “There was an American agent as well.”

“Oh? No kidding. Was that ‘red brogues’?” Vanya asked. 

“No. The American killed him.”

Vanya swore. “Yuri–are we cursed, or were we set up as well?”

“I was wondering that.”

“Anyway, there’s no need to feel upset, Herr Hennig,” Vanya continued. He guided Hennig down the stairs. “You were always going to be kidnapped today–the only question was by whom.”

Hennig turned out of Vanya’s grasp before Yuri reached the bottom of the stairs, bolting into Car 7 before the two of them could flank him. However, he came to a sudden stop when he saw the state of Car 7. The aisle was blocked by the seats Salome had ripped out of the floor. While Hennig was still trying to figure a way through, Vanya recaptured him with a yank.

“Haven’t you ever heard the phrase ‘No point throwing punches after a fight?’” Vanya said, grinning. “Next time you try that, I’ll dislocate your arm.”

They rejoined Yuri in the vestibule; Vanya caught Yuri shooting a curious look into Car 7 before they continued toward the front of the train.

“Didn’t I tell you we should be dead?” Vanya muttered in Russian.

They attracted stares as they marched Hennig through the next car, though Yuri’s gun was intimidating enough to put a stop to any heroics. Vanya shot a wink at a hard-eyed man with a blond ponytail who looked like he was measuring his odds.

They passed through several clumps of panicked stewards and stewardesses who fell abruptly silent at the sight of them.  

“Excuse us, what has happened? Why has the train stopped?” Vanya asked with a wide smile. The nearest steward–ah, Vanya recognized him, he had been working the pastry counter in the dining car–only shook his head rapidly.

“Did you expect an answer?” Yuri said. “Keep moving.”

“Cranky,” Vanya said. “As soon as we get the train moving again, you have to eat something.”

“Keep moving,” Yuri said again, doing even less to disguise his irritation.

“That tone,” Vanya clucked. “You wouldn’t talk to–”

Vanya continued through the train car as if he hadn’t started to say anything. Yuri also, until they passed into the next car.

“Wouldn’t talk to who?” Yuri asked in Russian. “Anna?”

“The joke ran through all its flavor. It’s disgusting to keep chewing old bubblegum. It starts tasting like the old food between your teeth.”

Vanya chanced a look over his shoulder. Yuri looked pensive.

“Rare to see you in a bad mood,” Yuri said.

Vanya was going to prove Yuri’s point with a rude reply, but they were already at the front of the train. Vanya tried the door to the driver’s compartment; it was locked.

“Hey, let us in,” he called, giving the door a kick. “This is a hijacking, okay?” There was no reply from within. “We’re crazy, man! We’ll start killing hostages at any inconvenience,” Vanya yelled, giving the door another kick. “Yuri, shoot somebody.”

Yuri shot the lock. “Calm down,” he said. The door slid open under the force of the lock breaking. “I won’t let the Italian kill you.”

“Don’t try to guess,” Vanya snapped. “It’s annoying.” 

Vanya tossed Hennig into the compartment with more force than necessary. He went hurtling forward, tripping into two men lying prone on the floor, tied back to back. Judging by their smart uniforms, these were the conductors.

Yuri hummed under his breath. Then he abruptly turned on his heel, raising his gun. There was a man against the wall beside the door. He had a gag in his mouth, his hands also tied behind his back, looping around some fixture protruding from the wall so that he wasn’t able to fully sit or stand.

Unlike the conductors passed out on the floor, he was very much awake. He glared at Vanya and Yuri with surprisingly purple eyes.

Yuri gave a curious sound. He turned the man’s chin up with the end of his rifle. There was an unmistakable puncture mark on the side of the man’s neck–more than a week old, but still bruised. The man flinched, still glaring. Yuri let his chin slide off the rifle.

“How do we start the train?” Vanya asked him.

The man said ‘fuck you’ through the gag. Yuri pulled it down for him–he pulled a face when he realized he was holding a nylon stocking. The man spat out the primary material of the gag, a spit-soaked piece of white cotton.

“Untie me,” the man said in English.

“No,” Vanya said. He didn’t want to speak English. He was tired. If the man had been bitten by a vampire recently, maybe he spoke French. “I have all the power, and I’m not sharing. Tell me, or my partner shoots you.”

The man appeared to have difficulty processing that.

“Yuri, threaten him.”

Yuri whipped the butt of his rifle into the man’s stomach.

“Brake,” the man gasped–still in English. “The conductor pulled the brake. I don’t know how it works.”

“He’s worthless, do you want to eat him?” Vanya asked. He went up to the conductors on the floor and nudged them experimentally with the toe of his shoe. One of them groaned.

“Depends,” Yuri said.

Whatever–if Yuri didn’t eat, that wasn’t Vanya’s problem. He wasn’t going to waste breath dragging an explanation out of him. He squatted over the conductor who had groaned and began to lightly slap his face.

“There we go. Good morning,” Vanya said. “Take us to Basel now.”

The conductor groaned again, blinking against the overhead light. Vanya hauled him over to the console, the other conductor dragging as dead weight. Vanya heard a body lightly fall against the aluminum wall. He tossed both conductors into one chair. Yuri was leaning against the wall, bent double. He motioned for Vanya to continue his work.

“Just eat him,” Vanya yelled. “You were picky in Stuttgart, too, or you wouldn’t be having this problem.”

Vanya hastily cut the ties binding the conductors together.

“Basel,” he repeated. The sleeping conductor slumped gently onto the floor. The concussed one got to work, arms trembling with either fear or the blood returning to his limbs. Soon, Vanya felt the train begin to move under his feet. “Faster,” he snapped.

The man muttered something in tearful German. Vanya joined Yuri by the wall. Yuri looked up at him, slightly unfocused.

“I want your meal stipend,” Vanya said, thrusting his arm under Yuri’s nose. “Hennig, sit down, you’re making me dizzy.”

Hennig abruptly stopped pacing. Vanya raised his eyebrows at him, and Hennig lowered himself to the floor. Satisfied, Vanya let his gaze wander out the window as Yuri’s teeth found a vein.

The Swiss countryside whipped by. The wheels of the train screamed over the tracks. The man who’d been gagged by the door was trying to convince Hennig in a mix of English, French, and Latin to come over and untie him.

“Be good, Herr Hennig,” Vanya said. “Think of your villa.”

24.24 || 24.26

[prairiesongserial]

24.24

Salome took the stairs two at a time, blocking Gusev’s attempts to slip around her in the narrow stairwell. Fending him off was difficult with only one arm; she should have recovered the one she’d lost, but carrying it with her only functional arm wasn’t currently a viable option. There would likely be time to collect it later, once she had collected Frankie.

As Salome reached the upper deck’s landing, Gusev tried to push past her. Salome pivoted on her heel and shoved him, satisfied by the short, indignant cry he gave as he tumbled backwards down the stairs. That would both injure him further and slow him down for another thirty to sixty seconds.

The upper deck was still conspicuously silent of gunfire. Passengers were fleeing through the sleeper car and down the stairs, as far away from the fight in the dining car as they could manage. Salome allowed most of them past, letting the tide of bodies further hinder Gusev’s progress up the stairs and push him farther away from her.

Two stewards were attempting, largely in vain, to contain the panic. One of them stepped out in front of Salome as she passed through the sleeper car, holding his arms akimbo to prevent her from passing.

“There’s a situation in the dining car, miss,” he said. “You can’t go that way.”

“No,” Salome said, simply, and knocked him aside. 

She continued to travel against the flow of foot traffic, forcing everyone else to walk around her or be similarly tossed towards the walls. She paused only once, when a face in the crowd pinged her recognition software. Hennig. Salome grabbed him brusquely by the collar of his jacket. He shouted in protest; she ignored him, and dragged him with her through the rest of the sleeper car.

When they reached the door, she stared at it for a long moment. She only had one hand to open it with, but that hand was required to keep a grip on Hennig. He would run if she didn’t. She thrust him towards the door in front of her.

“Open it,” she said.

Hennig did so, then opened the door to the dining car as well. Apparently he had decided it best not to argue with her after being so easily manhandled. Salome tossed him down into a booth that was missing its table, and stood over him.

“Your life is the highest priority of everyone currently in this car,” she said, not particularly caring if he believed her or not. Salome wasn’t sure if she even believed that the Russians were invested in Hennig’s life, but the fact that he hadn’t yet been shot indicated as such. “You will stay here.”

Hennig shut his mouth and stayed.

Ostrovsky was on the ground near the doorway, struggling to stand. He gave Salome a look of disbelief as she stepped away from Hennig, towards him. Salome was unsure what that look was for. She didn’t have enough situational data on Ostrovsky to say. It could equally have been because of her missing arm, because of the bullet holes riddling her clothes, or because Gusev was not currently accompanying her.

Ostrovsky was also disarmed. He’d had a gun, but had lost it somewhere. Salome scanned the dining car, but with the overturned chairs and tables, she couldn’t confirm the location of anything else. Finding the gun would be her next priority. There was no need to consider Ostrovsky a threat for the moment; perhaps he could be used as a bargaining chip against Gusev, but that would be for Frankie to mediate.

“Hey, Sal,” Frankie said, from the other end of the car. She was also getting to her feet, shaking glass out of her robe. Blood was dripping down her face from some unseen head wound; based on the sluggish flow and the glitter of glass in her hair, Frankie had fallen and hit her head when the train had abruptly come to a stop.

“I was just about to kill this clown,” Frankie said. “Unless you wanna do the honors.”

Salome’s feet encountered an obstacle on her way to Ostrovsky, and she looked down. There was a dead body on the ground in a pool of blood. A man. He looked to have been shot in the throat fairly recently; his body was only just going into rigor. Salome scanned his face, and the Hemisphere database unexpectedly returned a 99% match for Julien Dupuis, Canadian assassin.

“Julien Dupuis. Was he trying to kill Hennig?” she asked Frankie. Ostrovsky was incapacitated and Gusev was not here yet–and weaponless, besides. They could afford a moment to debrief.

“Dunno,” Frankie said. “He was dead when I got here.”

“Who killed him?” Salome asked.

“Stewardess. She had a little gun on her.”

“Why did the stewardess have a gun?”

“She’s Hemisphere, I think. Maybe American.” Frankie shrugged. She kicked a large piece of glass across the car, sliding it toward Ostrovsky at Salome’s feet. It stopped a few inches short of his nose.

Salome frowned. This was as equally unexpected as the Canadian assassin, and deeply troubling. None of her predictions had taken into account the probability of American and Canadian agents aboard the train, because the probability was just too small to bother factoring in. And yet, here they both were.

“You worry too much,” Frankie said. “She’s dealt with. Where’s the other Russian? You kill him?”

Salome chose not to reply. She flicked her gaze to Ostrovsky, nonverbally communicating the reason for her silence. She did not want to give Ostrovsky a clear idea of what had happened to his partner–that would afford him hope, which would give him more of a will to fight.

As if proving her point, Ostrovsky tried to crawl forward towards the exit. Salome brought her boot down on his back, applying precisely enough pressure for her weight to keep him in place. He groaned, and decided not to move anymore.

“Where is your gun?” Salome asked him, in Russian.

Ostrovsky’s eyes darted past her, and he bared his teeth in a strained smile. His canine teeth were uncommonly sharp.

“When the train stopped,” he said, slow and labored, “it slid out the door.”

Salome followed Ostrovsky’s eyeline to the doorway behind her. Gusev was standing there with a sniper rifle over his shoulder.

There was a series of deafening bangs, the sound of a rifle firing at a much shorter distance than it was meant to. Salome braced in anticipation of more bullets impacting her exterior chassis, and unexpectedly felt none; it took her a moment to draw the logical conclusion.

“No,” she said aloud, taking her foot off of Gusev.

On the other side of the dining car, Frankie lay in a pool of blood, nearly mirroring Dupuis’s body. She was no longer breathing. Salome knew that before she crossed the car, just as she knew that Ostrovsky had fired the rifle six times and each bullet had struck home in Frankie’s chest. Nonetheless, she had strict protocol to follow; she knelt by Frankie, blood soaking into her robe and staining it a deeper shade of red, and began to perform chest compressions with her single working arm.

Salome had seen corpses before on several occasions, but never the corpse of someone she knew. Though Frankie’s expression was still lively, a half-smirk fixed on her lips, her eyes were glazed and unseeing. It stirred something inside of Salome that she couldn’t name, another unexpected and unpleasant feeling on the stack of such feelings she had encountered today.

Distantly, she was aware that the Russians were moving around the car, making their exit before she could retaliate. She could not make herself prioritize that. She should have been able to. Something was wrong with her.

The Russians were speaking to Hennig now; Salome heard him shout in dismay, but no gunshots or blows followed. She didn’t look away from Frankie. She couldn’t make herself. Blood pooled between her fingers, oozing out from the holes in Frankie’s chest each time she applied pressure.

“Ezio,” she said aloud, though he would not hear this audio log until later, well after he found out his sister had died. “I have encountered another bug that has affected my prioritization. I apologize.”

24.23 || 24.25

[prairiesongserial]

24.23

The farther away from Car 7 Val and Kaoru walked, the more inaudible the fight they had left behind became. If you were listening for it, you could hear the occasional clang of metal on metal, but they were hard to pick out over the usual noises of the train chugging along down the track. Many of the passengers who had gotten on at the last stop were shaken and panicked, but the ones who had been seated since Germany had hardly looked up from their newspapers.

There were no Hemisphere agents in this part of the train, either. Or, at the very least, none Kaoru recognized from skimming faces as he and Val passed them. It was a relief to know that the conflict was confined to Car 7. On the other hand, Kaoru was almost certainly going to have to head back into what was shaping up to be an international warzone if he ever wanted to get his hands on Hennig’s briefcase. That was a problem he was trying not to think about until the current problem had been resolved.

Valerie had been quiet as they’d passed through the next few cars. As they left Car 4, he turned to Kaoru and said, “That man who was fighting the cardinal.”

It was a half-thought at best. Kaoru stared at him, waiting for him to continue, until he did.

“That was one of the men with guns you saw?” Valerie asked.

“Uh,” Kaoru said. He hadn’t had anyone in particular in mind when he’d originally come up with the story, but the man in the grey suit had certainly had a gun. A large one.

“How many did I say there were?” he asked. Maybe it was tipping his hand too much, but he had forgotten. And Valerie–infuriatingly but correctly–wanted the two of them to be on the same page.

Valerie gave him a strange look. “Five or six.”

“Let’s say I was exaggerating,” Kaoru said slowly. He suspected that the man in grey was another rival Hemisphere agent, and they didn’t tend to come in packs.

“Fine,” Valerie said, “let’s say that. How many are there, actually?”

“One or two. Probably. And the two cardinals.”

“Only one of the cardinals was in that fight. The other one must still be around somewhere.” Valerie pulled a face–he looked troubled. “I wish we knew…”

He trailed off. Kaoru watched him expectantly again, hoping for another continuation, but none came. They passed through the rest of Car 3 and into Car 2; Valerie rubbed his chin thoughtfully but still said nothing.

“What are you thinking?” Kaoru prompted. He couldn’t predict Valerie at all, and he hated it. Working with unpredictable people was one of his least favorite things in the world. 

It was for exactly this reason that Kaoru was infamous on the ninth floor of Central, the handlers’ floor, for being picky about which field agents he worked with. He refused to work with loose cannons, new hires, or anyone who had proven bad luck or a history of improvisation. This generally meant that Kaoru had a very small pool of agents he was willing to provide support to. His coworkers poked fun at him for it, and a large portion of field agents thought of him as standoffish and strange, but his perfect record spoke for itself.

That was because this was the only place improvisation and bad luck got you. Stuck between a gunfight and a hard place, in a foreign country, without a handler to assist. Kaoru had thought that three years on the other side of the desk had prepared him well enough for field work, that he knew better than half the agents Central sent into the field, but he had to admit that today had substantially humbled him. He was never going to do this again.

“I’m thinking I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Valerie said. “And I know this sounds crazy, but I still don’t think those were really cardinals.”

“They were,” Kaoru said. He added, wryly, “trust me.”

“No they were not,” Valerie said, firmly. Well, he could believe what he wanted to. “They and the men with the guns are fighting over…something. On opposite sides.” He was visibly struggling to square what little information he had with what he’d seen in Car 7. “I thought they must be Hemisphere, but they’re clearly not after–”

He cut himself off. Kaoru suddenly desperately wanted to know what he’d been about to say. “After me”? Or “us,” maybe? Kaoru didn’t think Valerie was an American Hemisphere agent himself, but he and his companions clearly had some prior experience that had clued them in to how dangerous Hemisphere could be.

“What do you think they’d be after?” Kaoru asked, innocently.

Valerie shook his head. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why they’d be fighting each other like that.”

“Should we still stop the train?” Kaoru asked. He still had no idea how he was going to go back for the briefcase once they did. The circumstances had changed completely since he’d come up with this plan–and he was proving to be pretty shit at improvising, all things considered. He was going to have a word with Oikawa about what he considered a “simple” first field mission when he got home. 

If, by some miracle, he got home. And then Oikawa was going to treat him to gyudon. No, Kaoru could dream bigger than that. Oikawa was paying for hot pot. And liquor.

“I think so,” Valerie said. “If nothing else, we’ll be able to get the passengers evacuated.”

“Once the brake gets pulled, we have to get out of there,” Kaoru said, as they crossed into Car 1 and approached the driver’s compartment. The likelihood was good that the men in gray suits or the cardinals would come rushing up to the front to get the train moving again, by force. Anyone anywhere near the controls at that time would be caught in the crossfire.

Valerie nodded, probably thinking the same thing.

“Let me do the talking,” he said, surprisingly grave. There was a hard set to his jaw that Kaoru had to wonder about. 

“If you insist,” Kaoru said, out of breath and secretly glad he wouldn’t have to put his sniveling Grace Marie face back on.

They reached the driver’s compartment. Valerie pounded on the door with both fists until it cracked open from within; when it was, he promptly stuck his foot into the newly made gap and shoved it open wide enough for him to fit his entire body through.

Kaoru followed quickly, leaning up against the door as it clattered shut behind him. Neither of the two men in uniform who had already occupied the compartment seemed to notice his entry–both looked cowed by Valerie, who was looming over them.

“You need to listen to me now and listen well,” he said, in a more commanding tone than Kaoru had heard him use all day. His entire bearing had changed; he stood with his back a little straighter, like someone who was used to giving orders and having them listened to. “There are dangerous people aboard, they have weapons, and some of them have already opened fire. All of your passengers are in danger unless you stop the train immediately.”

The men blinked at him like deer in headlights. Kaoru mirrored the expression–then realized part of the reason for their bafflement. They didn’t speak English well enough to understand what Valerie was trying to convey. 

Kaoru swallowed, and translated to German. The response this time was more immediate.

“Right now?” one of the men asked, in halting English. “Our next stop is–”

“Lives will be lost,” Valerie snapped, eyes flashing.

This apparently broke through the language barrier. It sent the two men–Kaoru assumed one was the conductor, the other an engineer–into a flurry of action around the compartment. Valerie watched them for a long moment, arms folded over his chest, then cleared his throat and looked back towards Kaoru.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said politely.

What the fuck? Kaoru clenched his hands into fists at his sides, feeling himself turn red up to the tips of his ears. Where had that personality come from, and how had Valerie turned it on and off so quickly? Kaoru was supposed to be the undercover spy with a false identity, not the random civilian he’d chosen as a patsy. He really couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. Maybe it was a little too blunt, but fuck it. He deserved an answer. “You’re Hemisphere, right? Are you Canada? America?”

Valerie shrugged, as the train rolled to a stop. “I’m just nosy. Let’s go evacuate a train, shall we?”

24.22 || 24.24

[prairiesongserial]

24.22

Yuri’s vision was a field of red and black spots. That damn stewardess had kicked him in the kidney. His sunglasses had gone skittering across the floor, the scope of his rifle rolling in the opposite direction. Yuri slowly gathered himself together, pain radiating from his side.

He retrieved his sunglasses, his vision still swimming from the chop to the back of the neck. Then he resumed assembly of his gun. Vanya was down there alone, maybe facing the Italians already. He wasn’t going to last long if Yuri didn’t move quickly.

Yuri didn’t even want to guess how the stewardess played into all this. He liked simple problems. Like assassinating diplomats. Straightforward. This complicated business of keeping possession of a civilian in a game of ‘keep away’ with an unknown number of interested Hemisphere agents–this he did not like. Plus, he was hungry.

Yuri marched through the door of the next sleeper car. There was a shot from a silenced weapon in the next car–the dining car. Yuri slowed his pace. He was forced to presume that that had been the sound of Hennig being assassinated. After a certain amount of bad luck, Yuri had to wonder if the home office had set him and Vanya up to take a fall. The analysts had been pretty cool to him and Vanya after Helsinki.

Yuri opened the door to the dining car, already drafting a contrite report to the home office. He wondered how many times he could use the word “unfortunately” without seeming like he was attempting to dodge responsibility. Twice, he thought.

The stewardess was standing in the middle of the dining car, a pistol lowered at her side. Yuri appreciated that she hadn’t killed him when she’d had the chance. She’d been in a hurry, he guessed–but not to kill Hennig. Instead it was ‘red brogues’ lying on the floor, blood streaming from the bullet hole in his neck. His shiny blond hair looked like a pink and orange sunset, his face already taking on the gray waxiness of death. The pool of blood seeped outward, its surface vibrating with the motion of the train, so that it almost seemed to have life of its own. Yuri breathed in deeply. The fortifying scent of iron clung to the inside of his nose.

Around him, the people in the dining car were standing, frozen in arrested movement in a large clump. A couple of children and their guardian had wisely taken cover under one of the tables. Yuri only spared the civilians a glance, just long enough to pick Hennig out among the crowd. In the opposite doorway stood one of the cardinals. She was a woman with short curls and a smug look on her face. She was playing with a high-caliber pistol.

“Ciao!” called the cardinal cordially. Then, continuing in disconcertingly slang-ish Italian, she asked Yuri if he knew what the States were doing here. She gestured to the stewardess with the drooping tip of her pistol.

No, Yuri didn’t know. He definitely didn't know why an American agent–if the cardinal was telling the truth–had shot red brogues. All signs pointed to red brogues as a fourth involved party.

Safely nestled among the trembling civilians, Hennig stared at the body lying under the table. Red brogues’s blood enveloped two briefcases. Very distracting, all this mess.

“So, looks like we’re all here for the same thing,” the cardinal said. “I don’t like the sound of a three-way shoot-out, what about you?”

Yuri raised his rifle.

“Ah-ah-ah, look at you, you’re wide open! The American is going to shoot you while you’re aiming at me.”

The stewardess had her pistol raised, but like Yuri and the cardinal, she was in a bind. Choose poorly who to shoot first, and you would wind up dead. In the worst case, all three of them chose a unique individual to shoot and none survived. In the best case, there was one survivor and two dead: one shot once, the other shot twice. Determining the survivor would be a matter of psychology, not speed or aim.

This was why Yuri preferred assassinations. He heaved a sigh, rifle still pointed squarely at the cardinal.

“I think we should team up,” the cardinal said, gesturing between Yuri and herself. “Kill her, clear the slate. The two of us raise our chances from 30% to 50%.”

“Where do you get 50%?” Yuri asked.

“American’s death is assured between the two of us, and once she’s dealt with, we go at it one-on-one. There’s your 50%.”

The stewardess whipped around and fired a shot off at the cardinal. The cardinal pre-empted her, her lazy handling over her pistol abruptly reverting to excellent form as she shot the stewardess in the shoulder. The stewardess’s shot whistled by the cardinal’s ear, punching a dime-sized hole in the door behind her.

“Wow, you blew that,” the cardinal said with a laugh. “See how distracting she is? Think how annoying it will be to drag yourself all the way back to St. Petersburg with a little pea-sized hole in you. So uncomfortable.”

The stewardess knocked over a couple of tables as she tried to take cover behind the clump of civilians. Yuri raised his gun, following her with the barrel. The civilians scattered in terror. Yuri sighed and lowered his gun. Neither the cardinal nor Yuri fired again, not with Hennig bumbling in a panicked zig-zag through the dining car. The stewardess shoved a young couple out of her way and took cover behind the pastry display case.

The cardinal lazily fired a few rounds through the case, roughly estimating the stewardess’s position. Broken glass exploded everywhere. The civilians bounced between the corners of the train car, too frightened to do anything but squeeze themselves against the walls, arms over their heads and faces.

There was a moment of silence in the car as the panicked shrieks became soft wheezing breaths. From behind the pastry case was the sound of scraping glass shards. The cardinal raised her pistol again; Yuri saw the barrel of the stewardess’s silencer peeking out from between the ruined wood veneer of the counter. He hastily shot the gun out of the stewardess’s hand while the cardinal emptied the rest of her clip, spraying up shards of mahogany and plywood.

Both Yuri and the cardinal paused to listen. No further sound or movement came from behind the counter. Yuri cleared his spent cartridge case. From the opposite doorway, the cardinal casually reloaded, clearly not particularly worried about Yuri shooting her.

“So, you been in this business long? Salome says you and your partner are pretty good.”

Yuri grunted.

“You were the uh–you did the Bulgarian ambassador, right? I heard about that. That was a tough break.”

Yuri watched her finish loading her gun.

“We got him in the end.”

“That’s your M.O., right? Get yourselves backed into a corner, then pull out a miracle.”

Yuri’s lip twitched.

“And where do you believe we are in the process? Am I backed into a corner?”

The cardinal gave a wobbly gesture with her hand as she raised her other arm to take aim. Yuri dodged out of her path, dropping low. The cardinal’s aim followed him, blasting chairs and tables to splinters as she tried to get a bead on him. The civilians screamed and huddled even closer together.

Yuri counted bullets as he moved at a crouch through the sea of tables and chairs. The cardinal had reloaded after nine shots last time. After seven shots, she stopped firing, knowing as well as he did that as soon as her clip ran out, Yuri would pop up and shoot her.

They’d returned to a stalemate. Yuri could bait her by giving her something to fire at, but she’d probably land the shot. That was a measure of last resort.

“I’m surprised Salome isn’t here yet,” the cardinal said idly. Yuri watched her boots as she paced closer. “Gusev must be giving her a run for her money.”

Yuri adjusted his grip on his rifle. The cardinal had paused in front of the pool of blood.

“You know what this guy’s deal was?” the cardinal asked. “Why’d the American kill him?”

Yuri didn’t reply. He was crouched behind a table, not far from the door he’d come through. He was low enough that the mess of tables and chairs that the stewardess had overturned interrupted the cardinal’s eyeline. If he got all the way down on his belly, he’d lose his cover, but he might have an angle on the cardinal’s knee. He wasn’t sure he could get clear in time, though. As soon as she went down, she’d have the same line of fire on him.

The cardinal began to circumvent the pool of blood, her boots crunching over the broken glass of the display case. Yuri needed to decide his next move quickly. The cardinal intended to put the huddle of civilians at her back, knowing Yuri wouldn’t shoot carelessly in case he killed Hennig by mistake. Yuri should take the risk and shoot her now, even if it meant giving her the opening to do the same. He could hear her footsteps. He knew exactly where she was, whereas she only had an approximate guess of his location among the broken and overturned furniture.

Yuri heaved himself up, aimed, and fired. The cardinal had pre-empted him. She was already standing at the ready, gun trained on his head, finger mid-pull of the trigger. Disappointed that they were both going to die, Yuri wondered how she’d known where he was.

The answer, of course, was that she had known she was fighting a sniper. He’d taken the most advantageous spot available to him in the wrecked train car, the one with the greatest coverage and easiest access to an exit. The cardinal had won the psychological game, even if in the end, both of them had lost.

A force knocked Yuri’s feet from under him. He was confused. He’d fallen sideways, not back, in a clatter of tables and chairs. He hadn’t been hit by a bullet, although he had heard both guns fire. Yuri hit the floor hard with a high-pitched, metallic screech ringing in his ears. His gun was knocked out of his hands as his wrist collided painfully with the corner of a formica table. It skittered down the aisle and only stopped when it slid into the doorframe.

The train had stopped. This wasn’t the normal slow deceleration for a planned stop, but an immediate change–the pull of an emergency break. Yuri hissed in surprise as the pool of half-congealed blood surged up the aisle to soak into the legs of his trousers, red brogues sliding along on his back like Ophelia in the river.

Not far from him, Yuri heard the cardinal curse, followed by the shift of glass.

Yuri got his feet back under him with a grunt of discomfort; it felt like his wrist was broken.

“How do you like my miracle?” Yuri said.

24.21 || 24.23

[prairiesongserial]

24.21

Vanya cackled as the cardinal wrenched a row of seats out of the floor, bolts popping.

“Man, what is your deal?” he said. He didn’t bother with German or Italian, but the cardinal still seemed to understand him perfectly.

“I’m an agent of the Vatican,” she replied, also in Russian. She hurled the row of seats at Vanya. He dodged, but the impact of the seats made the whole train car rattle in place, including his teeth.

The cardinal darted back in for another round of close combat before Vanya could formulate a reply. Vanya was forced to focus all his attention on the fight. He swung his gun up to deflect a blow, wincing as the delicate instrument gained a new dent in the shape of the cardinal’s fist.

“Say, what do you think about–” Vanya cut off as he dodged a strike. “--shooting each other like civilized people?”

“I prefer not to,” the cardinal said flatly.

“Well then, you should really consider surrendering.”

Vanya parried a strike of the cardinal’s hand, the muscles in his arm bulging with the amount of force necessary to stop himself from being bowled over. He thought he heard a seam pop in his sleeve.

“Surrender is not in my best interest,” said the cardinal.

Vanya was getting tired, going blow for blow. He dodged out of the cardinal’s way and put some distance between them again. The cardinal heaved another row of seats into the air and tossed it; Vanya ducked down, and the seats sailed into the doorway with another tooth-rattling clatter.

“What did you say your name was again?” Vanya asked her. “Salome, right?”

“And you are Ivan Gusev,” said Salome. “A Russian agent for nine years and one half of a Special Team for four. Your Special Team partner is Yuri Ostrovsky. You were personally responsible for the Helsinki fiasco and the assassination of Anastas Radulov.”

“I wouldn’t have used the word ‘fiasco,’ but other than that small error, you speak Russian remarkably well. May I ask how long your Revered Reverend Eminence has studied?”

“That question cannot be answered.”

Vanya dodged another blow; he hadn’t been careful, and he’d let Salome get close again. He was huffing and puffing with effort, muscles trembling under the impossible amount of force Salome was able to command with just her fists. Vanya was going to be covered in bruises.

It was spooky how nothing seemed to so much as wind Salome. There wasn’t a single drop of sweat on her face, and no color either. Even vampires could turn red, if you put the effort in. Dirty jokes sometimes did the trick.

“Why? Would that be fraternization?” he asked, voice strained. “We’re all Hemisphere, here, there’s no need to be shy.”

Somewhere on the train, there was the sound of gunfire. Vanya used the half-second that Salome was distracted to put some distance between them again. He struggled to catch his breath.

“That’ll be our better halves,” he said. “Let me guess–you two also decided to flank us. That’s funny. Despite our best efforts, it’ll be a fair fight, eh?”

Salome didn’t reply. The gunfire overhead was slow and measured. Shot, aim, shot. Vanya could almost fill in the picture of what was happening up there. He could hear the difference between Yuri’s sniper rifle and Frankie’s handgun. She had the advantage of the right gun for the job, but Yuri had a decent chance. You couldn’t beat his marksmanship or his cool head.

Vanya was too slow dodging the next seat Salome chucked his way; it clipped him, and he went down hard in the aisle, head buzzing. The seat bounced off an overhead luggage rack and fell right in front of him, nearly hitting him twice.

Vanya’s pulse hammered in his ears. His sleeves were falling off, he realized. He tore the excess fabric away, which only revealed just how bruised his arms were. Salome stalked toward him down the aisle, each footstep a metallic clang.

“You hear that?” Vanya asked.

Salome stopped a few feet away.

“Be more specific,” she said.

“No more gunfire,” Vanya said with a groan. He’d fallen on his wrist; it was definitely broken. He gritted his teeth and powered through, even though trying to bear weight with that hand threatened to white his vision out with pain. “Who do you think won?”

Salome hesitated. Then she stalked forward again without answering.

Vanya rattled off a barrage of machine gun fire–maybe fifteen bullets–before the gun jammed on him. He’d been using it as a bludgeon, so fair was fair. All fifteen tore through the train seat between him and Salome, and all fifteen buried themselves somewhere in her body.

Salome staggered a few steps back. She made a soft grunt, then stood still. Vanya took his time getting to his feet. It was impressive that Salome was still standing, but sometimes that happened. Shock could offer a few borrowed seconds to the dead, but eventually the heart had to stop.

Salome stood perfectly still, her eyes vacant. Vanya gave a disbelieving chuckle the longer this went on. His laugh turned nervous when he watched her reach into a bullet hole and pluck a perfectly clean bullet from the wound. She did this to several more of the bullets, dropping them carelessly to the ground. There wasn’t so much as a drop of blood.

“Ezio,” Salome said. She scooped the train seat in the aisle up on the tip of her toe then used her leg to hurl it out of the way. “I encountered a bug which affected my prioritization. I was presented a scenario with a high number of unknown variables, and I attempted to predict the probability of a certain outcome.” Salome wrenched another seat out of the floor. “Prioritization should not have been diverted from the movement of an active threat. My reaction time was affected by .001 seconds.”

“Good to know that if not for .001 seconds, we’d be evenly matched,” Vanya said, managing to more or less keep up with the Italian. “Hey, what the hell are you?”

Salome hurled the train seat at him. Vanya dodged. Vanya scanned her up and down. One of her arms moved jerkily, as if injured, but otherwise her movements were fluid. As if he hadn’t just shot her fifteen times. Maybe she was wearing bullet-proof armor under that big red robe. But Vanya had shot her practically point blank. He didn’t know of any armor that good. She should at least have been laid out with a few broken ribs.

“They give you amphetamines or something?” Vanya asked. “Or are you actually not human at all?”

Salome didn’t answer. His mind reached for an advantage, any advantage.

“I think Yuri won,” Vanya said, raising his gun to meet Salome’s punch in a clash that sent reverberations through his broken wrist. “You want to know why?”

Salome didn’t answer. Vanya still met her hit-for-hit, but he was slowing down.

“I said, you want to know why? Why I think your partner is dead?”

Vanya seized an opening and kicked Salome’s knee, popping it out of the socket. Salome staggered, and Vanya slipped away, giving himself a few seconds to rest before the next onslaught.

“One outcome is not significantly more likely than the other given the information at hand,” said Salome.

Vanya waggled a finger at her.

“Ah-ah,” he said. “You see–” He faltered, watching her expressionlessly put her own knee back in the socket, but he recovered. “...You see, Yuri has too much to live for. He’s going on holiday with his wife, just as soon as we submit our final reports. A month in beautiful, temperate Latvia, which he’ll spend snuggled up in a cabin on the Baltic Sea, eating nothing but smoked sprats and Anya’s pussy. That man cannot be killed.”

“You’re attempting to trick me,” Salome said. “That is not the name of Yuri Ostrovsky’s wife.”

Vanya’s smile dropped from his face.

“For God’s sake, don’t tell me,” he said.

Salome rushed forward. Vanya let out a yell as he raised his gun in defense yet again, weathering yet another impossibly powerful blow. The muzzle bent at a ninety degree angle.

“Why would I give you proprietary information?” Salome asked. “Are you possibly losing your cool?”

The truth was, Vanya was at a severe disadvantage. Vanya wasn’t sure how many more hits he could take before he went down. Yuri’s situation wasn’t much better. Assuming he and the other cardinal were an equal match, Yuri still had the wrong gun for close quarters. And he hadn’t eaten. Vanya knew they should have found something in Stuttgart.

Vanya laughed. “Lose my cool? Why would I? You know all about Ivan Gusev and Yuri Ostrovsky, don’t you? So you know we’re at our best in a tight spot.”

Vanya swung out with the bent barrel of his gun, jamming it under Salome’s shoulder blade. He wrenched the gun like a pry bar, and sure enough, her injured arm popped out of the socket. He’d guessed right, that her reaction time would be slower on that side.

The arm should have dangled uselessly for the rest of the fight; instead, it slid out of Salome’s sleeve and clattered to the floor.

“What’s the matter with you?” Vanya asked, kicking the metal arm out of the way. “Still having problems prioritizing? If somebody ripped my arm off during a fight, I’d never live it down.”

“Why don’t you want to know Ostrovsky’s wife’s name?” Salome asked. “I believe I was distracted by your bizarre and illogical statement.”

“That–” Vanya didn’t have a tinned answer ready to go. He swung at Salome with the gun, but this time she caught the barrel and snapped it off. “--That’s supposed to distract me from the fact that your arm just came off? Are you made of metal all the way through? Wait, I knew you had a glass eye, but it actually is both of them, isn’t it?”

The resumption of gunfire from somewhere above them cut the conversation short. 

“Well if that isn’t irregular,” Vanya said mildly. “Are they both still alive, or do we have another stakeholder, I wonder?”

The train came to an abrupt stop, knocking both of them off their feet. Salome’s arm went rolling up the aisle.

“This is not consistent with any of my models,” Salome said. She got to her feet and walked over Vanya, heading for the door. It slid open only when Salome forced it, metal crumpling and warping as she crammed it into its slot.

“What, you worried?” Vanya called from the floor. He was still struggling to get his feet under him with his broken wrist.

“You’re not? What do you know?”

“Me? Nothing.” Vanya joined her by the door. “I have faith in my partner. And the saints would never allow him to lose to a Catholic, I’ve been praying.”

“Bizarre and illogical,” Salome muttered. She started up the stairs, apparently calling their match a draw.

“Bizarre and illogical,” Vanya said, following quickly after.

24.20 || 24.22

[prairiesongserial]

24.20

Before the cardinal gig, Frankie had been a getaway driver. It had been a two-man operation between herself and her brother Ezio–he souped up the cars, she drove them. They’d been working out of New Jersey back then, leasing their services to various gangs, taking payment from anyone and staying loyal to no one in particular. Their reputations kept them safe; they got their jobs done quickly, discreetly, and without fucking anyone over.

Then, by chance, they’d met Pope Boniface X. Bonnie. Frankie hadn’t known him as anyone so important at the time; that came later, once she and Ezio had moved to Italy on the promise of big plans and bigger positions of power. But she’d liked the guy immediately. Considered him like a second brother, even if she’d never said it out loud.

When Bonnie had invited her to his office for breakfast and asked her about the train job, she’d turned him down. Told him to find someone else. The Pope encouraged the cardinals’ input on Vatican operations, liked a good debate as well as the next guy, and Frankie figured he already had a shortlist of replacements lined up. Surely she wasn’t his first and only choice.

“You’re the only one I want to go with Salome,” he’d said, so unexpected that she’d nearly choked on her coffee.

“Why?” Frankie asked. “Make Ezio do it. The robot’s his pet project. And he loves trains.”

“You and I both know he’s not built to be in charge of a kidnapping,” Bonnie said. His face betrayed no other emotion besides sympathy about this. This made sense; he’d often remarked to Frankie in confidence that Ezio would have been more useful to the Vatican if he’d just been better at firing a gun.

“You said yourself, it’s simple,” Frankie argued. “In and out. Just get to Milan, get off with the guy. Anyone could do it–why me?”

Bonnie considered the question for a long moment, then said, “You’ve got the sixth sense.”

“What, like for fuckin’ ghosts?”

“For danger. You always know when something’s about to break bad, before it does. I trust you to get yourself and Salome out of there if you think it’s about to go to shit.” He shrugged, then hit Frankie with a beatific smile. “It’s like you can smell it. Maybe it’s a driver thing.”

Frankie was flattered, if confused about the priorities at play. “You care about the robot more than the mechanic?”

“We spent a lot of Vatican money and promises,” Bonnie said, “on the robot.”

He was being very open with her, which meant this was an errand she couldn’t easily weasel out of. Still, she had a feeling she wasn’t getting the full story here. Maybe she never would. Bonnie was a hard guy to read. Frankie sighed, took a biscuit from the tray on the desk, and dunked it so aggressively into her coffee that it splashed little droplets all over the mahogany.

“This is a thing for the race, huh,” she said, so they couldn’t dance around it anymore.

Bonnie gave her a strange look. “I thought that was pretty obvious.”

Everyone in the Pope’s inner circle had heard the murmurings that the seat of power in America would soon be up for grabs; that Hemisphere would be organizing its first election since before most of the cardinals had even been born. With that context, the kidnapping of an automobile mechanic became something pretty important.

“If I do this–actually do the thing, get the guy here,” Frankie said, “I want to be our election driver.”

Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have asked for anything in return. Especially not anything of this magnitude. But this was a job that deserved a larger reward than the satisfaction of completing it, and Bonnie must have known that, too. Hell, he would probably have been disappointed if she hadn’t tried to negotiate a deal for herself.

“You shouldn’t ask me for that,” Bonnie said, quickly. “Ask for something else.”

“Tough shit,” she replied. “That’s the only thing I want out of it.”

“Then you’re cutting a bad deal,” he said. “You’re the only person I want driving, anyway. You know I wouldn’t trust any of these other idiots behind the wheel if you’re an option. So, c’mon, get yourself something else out of this.”

Frankie exhaled through her nose. She wanted a cigarette, but smoking in the Pope’s office was where most of the cardinals drew the line of appropriate behavior. Even Bonnie smoked outside, on a balcony.

“Fine,” she said. “I want three weeks off, and then I want to drive in the fucking election.”

“Done,” Bonnie said.

They shook on it.

As she went up the stairs to the dining car, Frankie called bullshit. She didn’t have a sixth sense for danger. She hadn’t sensed anything off when she’d first boarded the train with Salome, and she hadn’t registered a wrench in the plan until she’d actually laid eyes on the Russians. Maybe Salome had been right earlier about Frankie’s real purpose for being here: Bonnie considered her a less important cardinal. An expendable game piece.

Salome, with the benefit of a removed, analytical eye, could offer a plain view of political machinations as they were, not as Frankie wished they would be. Bonnie was the Pope, and Frankie was just a cardinal vying to stay in his favor. Debates were encouraged, but in the end she always went where he pointed her.

She set the thought aside for later–her mood was already turning foul. Nothing today had gone as expected. Even Hennig’s safe arrival in Italy wasn’t guaranteed anymore.

The irony of that thought became clear as Frankie arrived at the door to the dining car and heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being fired through a silencer. She reached for one of her pistols, then decided not to draw it. Better to assess before she made herself an active threat to whoever was already shooting.

She opened the door. When she saw the scene behind it, a nervous laugh escaped her.

Neither of the Russians was here. In the silence that immediately followed the gunshot, Frankie thought she could hear a tussle somewhere on the lower deck–Salome must be really getting into it. But if the Russians were caught up with Sal, someone else was shooting people.

The scene in the dining car was entirely civilians. A man in bright red shoes and a previously white suit had collapsed on the floor, unmoving, in a pool of blood. On the other side of the car, closer to the opposite set of doors, was the stewardess who had rushed past Frankie and Salome more than once on the lower deck. Ah, there was the gun. It was a tiny .22 with a silencer twice as big as the pistol itself.

“What the fuck?” Frankie asked in German, still laughing–it was more a defense mechanism than anything. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t sensed even a hint of this, whatever this was, coming. Who was this stewardess, and why was she shooting passengers?

Or–passenger, singular. The stewardess didn’t seem to care about the other panicked passengers in the car, most of whom had been scrambling towards the door Frankie had just opened. They backed up, now, sensing they shouldn’t get too near Frankie, either. A few of them cast frightened glances over their shoulders at the obstructed path towards the other door. Frankie caught Hennig’s face among the group, and allowed herself a small sigh of exasperation. Of course he was here in the line of fire.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked the stewardess, switching to English. She could only think of a few other Hemisphere operations in Europe who could have sent agents to intercept Hennig with any degree of efficiency, and there was something about the way this stewardess held herself. “American?”

The stewardess didn’t answer. Frankie thought this was a fine opportunity to draw her gun, and did so, casually toying with it in a way she hoped communicated that this didn’t have to end in a shootout. If the stewardess hadn’t fired a second round yet, maybe she could still be reasoned with. Maybe she wasn’t even Hemisphere, and she’d just been hired to kill the guy in the white suit, for whatever reason. Frankie didn’t recognize him. This would have been easier if Salome were here, but another dull, echoed crash from below told Frankie that Salome was still busy with one or both of the Russians.

She sensed that the door behind the stewardess was going to open before it did, just as she knew exactly who would be behind it before she properly laid eyes on him. Maybe she did have a knack for this. Frankie met Yuri Ostrovsky’s eyes from across the full length of the dining car, each of them taking up a doorway, and flicked her gaze pointedly towards the stewardess. 

Yuri followed her gaze, glanced back to Frankie, and nodded his head a fraction of an inch. They would take out the wildcard element first, then have a proper one-on-one brawl. Good to see the Russians could be gentlemen about this kind of thing when they weren’t weaseling out of a confrontation.

Across the way, Yuri cocked his gun and stepped into the dining car proper. Frankie did the same. This was all going to be worth it, she reminded herself. She was gonna be Bonnie’s driver. He wouldn’t have anybody else.

24.19 || 24.21

[prairiesongserial]

24.19

Imani set the intercom receiver back in its cradle. Gabler had started barking orders as soon as the PA was off. A child stowaway on an international train journey was a huge ordeal with a dozen protocols. All hands would commence a search of the train; local police would have to be involved.

Imani tuned Gabler out. She walked out of the staff area. The train cars were flooded with new passengers boarding from Freiburg, dallying in the aisles with their suitcases and children underfoot. Someone asked her in Dutch if she would help him with an oversized piece of luggage. Imani ignored him; she turned back the way she’d come and took the stairs up to the second level. She passed quickly through the mostly empty sleeper cars–in fact, she was in an all-out sprint.

She wanted to see the princes. Just get eyes on them. It would make her report more accurate if she could document everyone’s movements accurately. And if she couldn’t find them, she’d at least be able to confidently report that she’d given all her effort. It wasn’t even her job to watch the princes. She was here for Graves and Lecter. But since they’d all been traveling together, she was sure Cataldi would expect some follow-through. The movements of deposed heads of state naturally trumped Imani’s assignment.

Imani was an uninvolved observer–that was her mission. Naturally, she needed to know where the princes and Cassidy had disappeared to so she could keep her timeline organized. The most likely spots were the dining car or bathroom, if the move had been self-motivated. Imani would strike those locations first, and if she still hadn’t found them, she’d take up the drinks cart again for reconnaissance on the lower deck.

Imani caught herself doing a poor job of controlling her breathing as she hurtled through the sleeper cars. That was ridiculous. She was only running for the sake of time-efficiency. She was not running from anything, and she certainly wasn’t running to save the day. If the princes were assassinated, they were assassinated. It would be unfortunate if Imani was unable to piece together who had done it from the evidence, but that was nothing to injure a lung over.

Imani changed her breathing pattern with intention as she ran, listening to her heart rate stabilize. After she’d confirmed the location of the princes, she thought she might change into civilian clothes and sit herself with Graves and Lecter for the rest of the journey. She really didn’t want to get entangled in Gabler’s twenty-step child abduction prevention protocols.

The sliding door closed behind her with a bang as she entered Sleeper Car 8. A man in a gray suit had his back to her. It was one of the Russian agents. He was slowly piecing together a sniper rifle, though at the sound of Imani’s heels and break-neck pace, his head whipped around.

Imani, uninvolved observer, kicked him in the back. 

She tried, anyway. Yuri was turning around, so the point of her heel got him in the kidney. He doubled over. Imani gave him a chop to the back of the neck and kept running. She heard the gun and related bits and bobs fall to the ground, but she wasn’t going to wait around to see if Yuri got back up again. Imani was well aware that she had the element of surprise and little else going for her in a fight.

Well, she had a gun. But Yuri Ostrovsky had a bigger one.

Imani made a frustrated, muffled yell as she picked up her pace through Sleeper Car 8 and Sleeper Car 9. Now she’d done it. She was cooked. Cassidy must have sensed this coming and moved the princes–Imani was already writing her report in her head–but the problem with making moves was that your opponent also took their turn.

Imani had goosebumps all over her body. She’d never assaulted another agent in the field. It wasn’t her job. This was the European theater–their assassinations, their business. She was only here to spy. It was an affront for an uninvolved observer to start moving the chess pieces around, a breach of inter-agency etiquette that would have Imani reamed out by the boss–if she even made it to a telephone before–

Imani wasn’t going to finish that thought. Fearing death was just dying twice. Instead, Imani imagined Cataldi receiving her report straight off the typewriter, his face turning red as he scanned each line, before he finally tossed it down in fury. She could practically hear him dictating her Notice of Dismissal out to the steno. That was the future she was aiming for. The door to survival was quickly closing, but Imani was confident there was still a way. She’d be able to make her report. She would live long enough to reach a telephone. She wouldn’t be able to continue following Graves and Lecter, let alone the princes–she’d have to abandon the assignment. She would have to change clothes immediately, slip in among the passengers, and disembark at the next stop. Imani wouldn’t know what happened to Graves and Lecter, and she wouldn’t know which faction took–or killed–the British princes. That was how she survived. That was probably the only way she survived.

Imani caught herself breathing irregularly again, and with a growl of frustration, refocused on her running form.

Cataldi was really going to lose it. She could hear him now: “Did you forget the difference between a spy and a babysitter? Some fucking field agent–I pay you way too much if you’re going to moonlight as a nanny on company time.”

Imani released her gun from its holster at her thigh, the metal warm from her body heat. It was just a tiny .22. It would have been small enough to fit in the palm of her hand if it wasn’t equipped with a silencer, but she’d rather have it ready than not when Ostrovsky caught up with her.

Imani flung open the door to the dining car. Heads turned. A woman let her book fall closed. A couple playing cards paused mid-deal. Javi’s head peeked out from behind the pastry case.

Cassidy and the princes were sitting by the window. A chill went down Imani’s spine. Cassidy had turned around in their seat; they were staring right at her, glaring with such intensity that Imani realized Cassidy must have made her. Is that why they had brought the princes up here? When had they realized that she was tailing them?

The two men from Car 7, Row 4 were here as well, obnoxiously breaking up Imani’s line of sight. The blond one was standing, holding a lemon danish.

“What's the hurry?” the man with the danish asked. A perfect blond curl fell across his forehead as he raised his eyebrows.

Imani’s eyes widened slightly. She felt her nostrils flare. That was Julien Dupuis. There was a picture of him behind Darvish’s desk–though not for the usual reasons. Darvish was infatuated with the Canadian assassin. She tracked his movements globally as a hobby.

It made perfect sense that Dupuis would show up now. Imani cursed herself that she hadn’t been looking for him; Russia and Italy had been out of left field, and Imani had been too distracted to see what was right under her nose. Of course Canada would send one of their best assassins after the princes, now that the political situation in England was in shambles.

Her hand raised itself. Imani shot Dupuis in the throat.

The dining car fell into chaos. Cassidy had shoved the princes under the table in a flash–before Dupuis’s body fell. The man who’d been sitting with Dupuis stared at Imani in blank shock. Then Dupuis’s body struck the table, knocking two cups of coffee and two briefcases onto the floor.

The rest of the passengers scrambled, wailing, for the far door–but they were stopped in their tracks. One of the cardinals was standing in the doorway, with no apparent plans to move out of the way. A slow smile bloomed on her face as she looked Imani up and down.

“What the fuck?” the cardinal laughed–she started in German, but seemed to change her mind the longer she studied Imani. After a long, shrewd look, she switched to English. “Who the hell are you? American?”

Imani very carefully stopped herself from looking at Cassidy and the princes–no need to reveal her whole hand if she didn't have to. The cardinal drew her pistol and turned it over in her hands, playing idly with the filigree details while she waited for Imani to reply.

Behind Imani, the opposite door slid open. The passengers had been inching their way toward that exit ever since it became clear that the cardinal was also a shady person. Now they stopped, trapped in the middle of the dining car. The hesitation on their faces gave Imani a pretty good idea of who was standing there.

24.18 || 24.20