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She’s not sure why she came.
Well, she is; her parents are dead and she’s in a foreign country under the care of an intelligence agency that she’d never heard of until three days ago, and the only person she remotely trusts is Alex, even if his last name is Rider and not Friend. Besides, what are Special Operations going to do? Ground her? It’s not really like things can get any worse for Kyra Vashenko-Chao. She hit rock bottom the moment her parents announced that they’d had enough and that she was going to be completing her secondary education at a reform school in the Alps.
What Kyra really isn’t sure of is why she lied.
Alex’s parents are dead, too. They told her, when they got to the safe house, when Kyra threatened to expose the whole Cold War-era secret service shtick the moment she got internet access. They let her read his whole file, because, seeing as Kyra was about five minutes away from getting replaced by a carbon copy of herself before Alex stepped in, it wasn’t as if she could've gotten any closer to the heart of things. She’d practiced telling him all the way to Brooklands School, thinking about what she’d say, what he’d look like now that his nightmare was over and hers was only just beginning. And then he called out to her across the playground, and her words had stuck in her throat like the morning porridge that Laura had so abhorred, seeing him in his school uniform with the gash in his temple all healed over. Like Point Blanc had never happened, his cover story shrugged off like an old coat.
She’s sitting in a bus shelter and replaying the conversation in her head, a stuck record. They’re all I’ve got. She could run back now, catch him before the end of the school day, before that woman - Jones - sounds the alarm and sends her fleet of non-descript Range Rovers after her. She won’t, though. She can’t. She came, Kyra is beginning to realise, to tie up her loose ends, the same way Greif wanted to tie up his by killing the originals and Baxter. Because if she didn’t say goodbye to Alex, the version of Kyra who lived at Point Blanc - the one who refused to engage in ridiculous foam parties, the one who watched a boy bend an ironing board into a snowboard and thought about kissing him - would keep hanging over her shoulder, a bad memory.
It’s bad enough that her parents are dead. Kyra’s not in the mood to haul around more ghosts than necessary.
Anyway, she saw the look on Alex’s face when he told her to search for his uncle’s name in Greif’s files. He’s not the type to back down easily. As far as Alex is concerned, the whole ordeal is over and it’s back to crappy school dances and exam coursework. If Kyra tells him otherwise, he might do something stupid, like march back to Jones’s office and demand to be put back in the field, the way he did when they mounted the rescue operation. And Kyra isn’t Alex’s keeper, has never been, but she’s pretty sure that the guy who placed the order to have them all put in a safe house, Blunt, wouldn’t say no if Alex asked, wouldn’t bat an eyelid if Alex died, even. It’s easier just to take the choice away from him.
And there’s the fear, of course, that Alex wouldn’t do anything like that. That he’d just blink mildly and do what Crawley did, offer a lukewarm sorry for your loss , and Kyra wouldn’t be mad if he did that, of course she wouldn’t, but she’s built him up in her head now and - and -
Well, put it this way: a school in Chelsea isn’t really the place for Kyra to have her first full-frontal breakdown since this whole ordeal began.
Still no Range Rovers. Kyra wonders what they’ll do with her, now she has no place to go back to. Hand her off to some distant relative on her mother’s side in Russia, maybe; her grandparents died years ago, and her father was an only child. Another boarding school, most likely. One where there are no clones, no pseudo-Hitler headmasters, just Olympic-sized swimming pools and luxury student accommodation and facilities that allow her to stay year-round.
Not worth thinking about, she decides. She casts one last glance over at Brooklands, the fence still visible from down the road. There’s a blond boy standing by the gate. This far away, she can almost pretend it’s Alex. Can pretend that he’s going to run after her, is going to save her again.
Kyra’s really fucking tired of needing to be saved. She puts her hands in her jacket pockets, and starts to walk.