Archive of Our Own

Palm tree retirement with no extradition, Six said once upon a time.

As he alights from the last charter flight to the province of Dumaguete, shoulders laden on one side with his modest duffle and on the other with Claire’s backpack, he glances around at the tropical panorama and takes it all in. With the sea-salt breeze ruffling his hair and the penetrating freshness of fruit and life in the air, he decides that two out of three is not a half-bad tally for a pipe dream to start all over again.

“Wow, wow,” Claire breathes at his side. “Guess you were right about the whole Ecuador thing, after all. Look at that.”

Of course, following the disastrous encounter with the double-dipping cleaner, Six had decided against Ecuador on the off chance that those plans of his had leaked beyond the brick walls of that animal trap. Loath as Claire was to sit cramped on an economy-class flight for more than double the time it would have taken to reach Quito, it seems that now she has to admit the extra day of gunky, crusty air travel was worth it for the view here.

For his part, extradition laws be damned, Six figured that the abundance of American and European men on long-term visas in the Philippines—coupled with the country’s sheer population, and the advantageous abundance of denizens who speak flawless English—outweighed the risks with the heightened potential of being able to fit in.

“Look,” Claire says again.

“Hey. I’m looking,” Six murmurs to the girl beside him.

As they near the sea walk—a long, wide promenade lined with a low wall of mortared stones and a smattering of gregarious street vendors—the waves kick up a spray of pure oceanic fragrance in their direction. The moment it courses through Six’s lungs, something hits him squarely in the solar plexus with the shudder of an epiphany.

This could be the first place he could start longing to set down roots and call home.

He is not so undisciplined as to entertain these thoughts willy-nilly, of course. Claire’s adjustment, social and academic or otherwise, is his main priority; their long-term bid at safety and anonymity is a close second. But, G-d, if only this could be it.

Claire shoots him a sly look as they stroll down the sea walk, deliberately matching the unhurried pace of locals and tourists alike. Six is bracing himself for an outlandish request to buy out the nearest vendor’s stock of tropical-flavored ice cream. Instead, she opens her mouth and it’s much worse.

“I can’t imagine you kicking back with swim trunks,” she says impishly. “Do you even own a pair of swim trunks? Like, I know they probably taught you to swim and hold your breath a ridiculous amount of minutes underwater, but…hey, I bet if you had swim trunks, they would just be a tailored suit and shorts in, like, waterproof assassin gray or something.”

Six lifts a single brow at her. After a second of silence, he pronounces, “Ha,” deadpan.

Her answering look is droll.

He lets one hand land heavily on the back of her neck and steers her forward. “Come on, Caroline,” he says pointedly. “We still need to get to our rooms and scope the place out.”

“Yes, father,” she drawls. “I’ll be extra sure to check the cupboards for booby traps and everything. I heard they’re all the rage around here.”

—

Their rented townhome is a modest one. Not as riskily exposed to the public eye as one of the cheaper apartments on the second floor over a downtown strip of establishments, but affordable enough that Six has some breathing room to think and observe their surroundings and weigh his employment options before the need for grocery money kicks in. While foreigners in the country are legally permitted to purchase an attached townhome—an option he considered heavily at the time of planning his and Claire’s great escape—he rather thinks the occasional contact with the landlord to drop off the rent money in cash is preferable to the more uncontrolled risk of having his alias and photocopies of his counterfeit identification stored in some deeds office in any official capacity.

The first thing Claire does after marching into their place and dropping her bags in the entryway is to cross the icy-tiled floor to the windows on the opposite wall and fling them open. They are jalousie panels, oriented horizontally rather than vertically as they normally are in the West, and they are bracketed on the inside wall by intricately crafted sliding shutters of mahogany and capiz shells. Claire lets out a soft yelp as she nearly brains herself on the semi-sharp edge of one of the glass panels in her eagerness to press her nose to the outside and peer at the sluggish foot traffic below.

The hum of life outside reaches Six’s ears as he is methodically securing the front door and other possible points of entry. The asthmatic putter of tricycles, punctuated by shrill jeepney horns and vendors’ bicycle bells and the constant rise and fall of chattering gossip from passersby on the sidewalks below, fill the living room with a comforting layer of noise over what would normally be a stifling sort of silence.

Six has made quick work of installing the necessary deadbolts and digital lock on the front door. He has turned to contemplate the door to the tiny washroom off the foyer, when his decades-ingrained reflexes make him snap out a hand and catch the object Claire just tossed at his head.

“The landlord left a basket of food,” Claire says unapologetically by way of explanation. She’s pointing at a low rattan basket on the little square dinette against the wall, where individually packed pastries and sweets await them in a pile. She’s already got half a golden bun shoved into her mouth. “Eat first, then do your broody spy shit later.”

Color drains from Six’s face. “Claire—” He starts toward her in an aborted movement.

“Relax. It’s not poisoned. I checked the seal, just like you taught me.” She chomps down again, and then a moment later releases the most uncouth-sounding moan of ecstasy he’s ever heard. “What the hell even is this? It’s so good.”

Six finishes crossing the floor over to her to gently wiggle the crinkling plastic from her hand. The label reads mini ensaymada espesyal, ube flavor. When Claire grins up at him, the sticky-sweet dark purple filling stains her teeth.

He glances down at the pack she lobbed at his head. Pan de coco, it informs him, with an enticing photo of the croissant-soft bun torn in two down the middle and spilling out sugary white coconut strands in jelly.

“It’s dinnertime,” Six says gruffly. “You’re not supposed to have sugar with your regular meals.”

She gulps down another bite, just mere seconds away from finishing the treat in her hands—so much for his floundering attempt at dietary discipline—and divulges, “Yeah, but we’re in the country of sugary meals! I was reading about it on the plane ride. Did you know, they cure a lot of their meats here with brown sugar? There’s this spicy sausage I read about, and the sauce is entirely sweet, and it’s dyed kind of dark red—”

“You’re joking,” he says straightly.

“I can literally show you the picture if I remember the name of it.”

“You’re making this up.”

“So, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, right?”

“Your teeth are going to fall out.”

“We saw a looot of people on our way here. Nobody seemed like their teeth were falling out, did they?”

“That’s because they don’t eat half as much sugar as you’re trying to make me believe they do.” Six glances down at the remaining morsel of royal purple-filled bun in her hand. “What does that taste like, anyway?”

She shoves it in his direction at the same time he reaches for it. He tastes it tentatively, wholly unprepared for the explosion of happiness in his mouth.

“You didn’t even wash your hands first,” says Six, munching and swallowing. He points toward the washroom. “Go. Wash up, you unsanitary. Go check the cabinets for booby traps.”

She grins.

—

Their new place has exactly two bedrooms and two baths (if the pocket-sized washroom by the front door can be counted as a full bathroom, he wonders critically). He picked this place partly for the view—from each bedroom window, beyond the night-blinking streets is a clear shot at the beach singing with evening life winding down—but primarily, the layout he garnered from the blueprints in the online ad were close enough to perfect for his purposes.

He outfits each bedroom door with deadbolts. Between the galley-style kitchenette and the living room, he erects a semi-permanent divider wall, just wide enough to hide the breadth of a full-grown man and his shadow but narrow enough to be unobtrusive at first glance. Discreet stick-up cameras go up at strategic corners of each living space. Battery-powered for now will have to do; once he's gathered the right tools, he will hardwire them to the best of his ability.

Inside the surprisingly spacious closet of his room, he builds a false backing behind his spartan collection of joggers, cargos, and multi-pocketed windbreakers in utilitarian shades of gray and black. (Claire's jab at his fashion may have mildly stung, but there is a rhyme and a rhythm to these things.) In the center of the false backing, panels unlock on their hinges and flip down to reveal his secret computer setup. The dummy laptop and mouse and hard drive are strewn across his desk at the foot of his bed. After all, if he is to adopt the identity of an expat working remotely in information technology, every corner of the home must play the part.

He doesn't neglect Claire's side of the townhome, either. He makes no attempt to hide what he's doing, but he feels a little small under her piercing gaze anyway as he installs more secret panels around her room and under her nightstand. She's sorting clothes on the bed: some woeful mishmash of her pastel-hued phase from the time he first met her at Fitzroy's safehouse—the one with far too many glass windows, in his expert opinion—and the grungy forest-colored plaids and denim pieces she picked up at thrift stores and random lost-and-found bins in their drive across America before the flight here.

“Geez, with all the extra square footage you're pulling out of thin air, you think you could build me a new walk-in closet?”

Six doesn't turn around, but he flicks his gaze at her over his shoulder. “Not unless you're planning to hide a body in here.”

She doesn't miss a beat. “And what if I am?”

This time, he turns his head to glance at her in a rare moment of bewilderment, hex key held between his teeth. “Who?” he speaks around the metal.

She widens her eyes and gives a whole-body jerk in his direction, like you, of course, you dingus.

The look he sends her is flat and entirely unimpressed.

When he runs into a snag because the hole he thought he cut to the precise measurements doesn't hold Claire's emergency kit perfectly, Claire heads off his bout of huffiness by wheedling him into helping her hang up clothes on the upper rack inside her closet.

“You've got those ridiculous arms,” is her justification. “All you ever use them for is nonsense. Help me out.”

Twenty minutes and much feigned fussing from her later, Six collapses on his haunches on the floor at the corner of her bed, nose tucked into the junction between his palms. He is, infuriatingly, much calmer than before when he was about to punch a hole into the drywall over the snafu in his construction project.

“You're just hungry,” Claire proclaims. “Your brain needs glucose, Six. Now are you regretting bashing all those sweet meats I was telling you about?”

“Can you just—shut up and be a normal, selfish teenager for a second?”

On cue, she flops back against the pillows and crosses her hands over her stomach with a pout. “I'm so booored,” she drawls in exaggerated parody. “We should have a TV. Why don't I have a TV?”

He knows it's for the bit, but Six can't help lifting his head and glancing around the room, anyway. He'll help Claire get some color in here soon enough, but she is sort of right. There is no source of diversion in here fit for a teenager.

Her foot nudges him lazily in the shoulder. “I'm kidding. What do we need a TV for when we got actual spy computers here? Can you imagine?”

—

Six needn’t have worried about ennui eating away at his new ward, after all. As clever and practiced as Claire is at entertaining herself with a smartphone, a book, or a source of music, the lure of trying out every local delicacy provides them both with enough goal-oriented distraction to kill the days.

Street food is near dirt-cheap out here, and especially so in this particular province, Six gathers. It’s so expertly prepared, too, that anything he and Claire could ever dream of whipping up in their kitchen after a quick run to the grocery store would end up being more expensive, less sumptuous, and entirely not worth it in comparison to the options down the block.

Six still gets uneasy at the overexposure to people outside. There is a balance to this, he understands—to blending in without fading so much into a ghost that you paradoxically become revived as a local legend. He grits his teeth when Claire drags them downstairs to try another peanut-themed dish or suck down orange soda through a curly straw stuck into a clear plastic bag (because it’s different from Fanta back in America, I don’t know what to tell you, it just is) at one of the stands on the sidewalk. He reminds himself that if people don’t see enough of them, it will be excuse enough to turn into gossip, the likes of they never come out of their place, or what do you think they’re even up to if they’re not busy exploring the city? They’re tourists, for goodness’ sake.

Six tries to keep a tight lasso, at least, around the circle of people that regularly cross their paths. The mute kid that cuts hair at his grandfather’s barber shop impresses him, not just with his ability to keep a secret, but also with his skillful, lithe hands on both their heads. He gives Claire a fashionable long angled bob; the taper he shaves up the back of Six’s head leaves the skin of his neck feeling oddly vulnerable but free. When he glimpses it in the three-way mirror, he startles at how much more relaxed and less haunted it makes him look.

Claire has her fun at the playing spy-house thing, evidently. She roots around Six’s duffle bag when he’s gone alone on one of his restless early morning reconnaissance jogs, and by the time he gets back, she’s dyed her hair an admittedly fetching deep brown-black that brings out the little smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

“Wanna go dark?” she offers him with a goofy wave of the near-empty box dye bottle in her hand, wrapped in a too-large crinkly transparent glove.

“A little too late for that,” he says mildly.

He assesses her with a peering look as he washes his hands in the low sink in the kitchenette. When he goes out this early for his run, he doesn’t feel the sweat build up against the balminess of the sea breeze, but now back inside the enclosed space of their townhome he can sense the lower back of his compression shirt adhering to his skin. He carefully plucks the material away from his torso and fans himself in slow, deliberate motions as he comes closer and circles her at the kitchen table.

There are droplets of dark dye, bruise-blue in the low light, scattered across her side of the table. The corner of his mouth twitches. Amused: that’s how he feels. He can’t understand how any adult could look at that, and see the naked excitement in a kid’s eyes, and then turn around and bash their head in with a beer bottle for it.

He’ll wipe it up later. If it comes down to it, he can ask her to help him scrape it, but make a fun activity out of it. Put one of her oldies playlists on shuffle while they work.

“Suits you,” Six says at last. He gestures with his chin at the bottle. “How’d you figure I wasn’t planning on using that?” He’s curious.

Just as he hoped, she shows no fear at the question. “You would’ve done it already before even landing in Manila, if you were.”

Ah. She’s got him and his neurotic undercover agent ass there.

“Everyone’s going to say your mom must be Filipino, now,” he points out.

Her smile feels like an indulgent little duh. “That’s ’cause every other white guy is coming out here to marry a Filipina and then have beautiful halfsies kids like me, y’know.”

“Hm.” He taps his chin. “Is that what Michael Johnson did?”

“Yeah. And then he had Caroline Johnson, and his wife died, which was, like, super tragic, but now they’re living out here in memory of her because she always wanted to go to Dumaguete and see the waterfalls at Siquijor.”

Six allows himself a smile. Two weeks ago on the plane ride here, she came up with half of their cover story. He never told her then, but it beat his elaborate explanation of embassy work by a mile. Sometimes, if it didn’t actually give him sleep paralysis at night to think of her coming near any ounce of danger or death again, he could imagine her doing all right as a spy.

Six pretends to contort his face in disbelief. “This Michael Johnson dude sounds like he was down bad for his wife.”

She nods sagely. “He was. He carries around her urn of ashes and everything.”

An unwilling snort slips out of him. “And he’s a digital nomad?”

“And he’s a digital nomad,” Claire affirms with a grin. “He’ll start up an interview with anyone if you let him, but he’s so bad at it.”

“Hey,” Six says, with no heat to it. He points in her direction.

She wiggles the bottle of congealed dye at him again. “Is Michael Johnson gutsy enough to dye his hair, too?”

It’s a throwaway question, of course. He’ll change his appearance if and when it is warranted, they both know. Still, he plays along.

“I don’t know. Maybe Michael Johnson tried the dyed life and decided it wasn’t for him. He’s going back to his roots now, living the ‘natural’ lifestyle.”

Her face scrunches up. “Boring.”

“Maybe not so boring when you find out Michael Johnson’s real hair color isn’t mousy brown.”

There’s a beat of silence. “Wait, what?”

—

Another week later, Claire is grabbing him by the top of his hair as he’s seated on an overturned wash bucket and checking out the wiring inside the stick-up camera in the northeast corner of the living room.

“Holy shit,” she gasps. She’s still in her too-big sleep tank and noisy flip-flops. “You’re a natural blond.”

Both eyebrows raised to his hairline, Six blinks up at her. “Morning to you, too, Fresh Breath.”

She has no patience for his one-liners today. She tugs his head gently this way and that, peering at the telltale dark golden roots creeping into the flax brown of his locks. “You’re, like, a real-life Ken doll.”

He doesn't know this reference. “Am I supposed to know this reference?”

“Is your beard blond, too?”

“That's—none of your business.”

“Hilarious.”

“I'm the gray man,” he finds himself explaining to her. Why the hell is he explaining anything? Sierra plucked him out of hell, trained him, molded him into the perfect weapon to fade into the perfectly ordinary horizon between consciousness and forgetting. Average height, average face, average hair color and style, nondescript clothes and gait: he's had it down to a science for more decades than he ever spent just being himself. If Claire knew just how much his heart dances a nervous tango sometimes over the mere notion of letting his slightly lighter hair color grow out, she wouldn't be crowing now.

“I know,” Claire deadpans. “With the gray closet. We've established this.”

She relinquishes her grip on his hair with a jesting little flick at the back of his head. As she bustles her way to the kitchen to fire up the stove and put some of those sweet sausages on for breakfast—she’s managed to rope him into the local sugary traditions, after all—he fights his face tooth and nail against whatever humiliatingly fond look is clawing to get out.

He remembers the grip of Henry Gentry’s calloused hand at the back of his head. It was the kind that ripped strands out of Court's scalp as he was dragged up the stairs to the bathroom by his hair. It was definitely the kind that left the very nerves in his skull singing with agony for days after that.

Six blinks. A plate of sweet sausages, sunny side-up eggs, and yesterday’s leftover jasmine rice slides toward his side of the dining table.

He gets up and joins her. The sugary sauce clinging to the side of one of his sausages is charred black.

He doesn't smile, but it's a near thing. He can't fathom how anyone would try to waterboard his kid in the kitchen sink for an honest mistake like this.

—

There are some regulars that Six passes by on his morning runs. A fair number are the so-called ‘expats’ from various Western countries, taking their daytime exercise in the less brutal heat of the dawn. Some of them, shirtless and sweating, skirt past him at a sprint, hollering on your left, as they guzzle water from their squeeze bottles. Others, older and slower with their soft, round paunches under breezy novelty t-shirts, nod and wave at Six as he jogs his way past them. Just as numerous are the Filipino residents themselves, health buffs who often perform their daily ritual in groups, laughing and grinning on their jog together or as they race one another on their fully kitted titanium road bikes.

Six makes no fanfare about it, but he keeps mental track of all the faces he passes on the regular.

Sometime in the third week of their stay in Dumaguete City, he notices a brunette woman—average height, muscled, perhaps described by flippant men as on the stockier side, with titanium-rimmed unisex glasses—cropping up in more than one spot on his rounds. Behind the dimness of her transition lenses, she appears to be watching him on more than one occasion. Suspicious, he deviates from his route for two days. She doesn’t appear on his radar, but that could mean nothing.

Sure enough, the day he returns to his normal path, she falls into step with him near one of the public drinking fountains at the outskirts of the beach.

“Haven’t seen you around in a few days,” she says affably enough.

Six deliberately leans forward to slurp down a stream of cool water before he replies. As he lifts his head, he cases the walk around them: the screen of palm trees swaying ahead, the distant gaggle of teenagers flying kites to the side, the smattering of solo joggers whooshing past. No one immediately stands out to him as possibly partnered up with the woman.

He carefully matches her tone. “Was I supposed to have seen you?”

He makes eye contact with her when he’s speaking. When she responds and she is naturally distracted to cease tracking his eye movement, he takes the opportunity to let his own gaze casually wander across her person.

“Maybe.” She smiles. “I’ve been living in the area for some time. Just enjoying life off the grid, you know? But I started going this route a couple days ago, and I noticed you.”

She is clothed in nondescript, dark athleticwear. The only remarkable detail of her outfit is the papaya-orange piping around her sleeves and along the seam of her billowing shorts, approximately matched to the vermilion laces on her worn black running shoes. He wonders if the traditional tie laces are the personal preference of an ordinary civilian woman, or the ploy of an agent aiming for the appearance of nonlethality. He always goes for elastic no-tie laces on missions, if he can help it.

“Didn’t know there was much about me to notice,” he says.

She pushes her tinted lenses up to the top of her head. Her eyes are almond-shaped, brown. “I think it’s precisely because you don’t make a fuss about yourself that it was easy to notice you.”

His brow furrows. “Come again?”

She gestures at a panting, bare-chested Swedish-looking young man that whips past with a triumphant holler like the perfect punchline to her remark. “Everybody else is making a big hullabaloo about themselves. Look at me, I’m young and hot and fit and I should be on the cover of the next Tropics Lifetsyle magazine. That’s—eugh.” She shakes her head. “You, though. You seem to just keep your head down and your attention focused on your regimen.”

Six feels his mouth dry a little as he flounders for what to say. “I’m just trying to get my steps in.”

She grins, a quick, here-and-gone-again thing. Her teeth are a little crooked but pearly white. “That’s the kind of guy who gets shit done.”

He stares at her. Over her shoulder, a shadow shifts, but the uptick in his pulse is a false alarm. It turns out to be a large seagull in the distance alighting on the beach from its flight.

Six hums. He says, “...Okay.”

That, of all things, makes her laugh.

“You new here?” she asks.

“Sort of.”

“Moved here for work? Family…?”

His smile is tight-lipped. “Both.”

He wishes desperately he brought some gum with him.

In halting, teeth-pulling increments, she extracts bits of his cover story from him. By the end of it, Michael Johnson has walked Melody Reyes to the end of the seawalk—or she has walked him; it’s not immediately clear—and she has forced a rather one-sided pact on him to stick to the same morning routes for ‘camaraderie.’

When he opens the door of the townhome to Claire dismantling and reassembling the coffee table because the four legs were so not balanced, Six, what if one of us knocked into it and the glass top fell through, he gives her a faint smile and says nothing about the curdled-milk feeling in his gut.

—

In theory, they sleep in their respective bedrooms. Six prepped each one with its own security system, the primary defense being a keypad and thumbprint combination. This way, he hopes, any would-be intruder can only dream of catching either one of them unawares.

In practice, it goes a lot more like this:

Six sits upright against the kamagong wood headboard in his room with his eyes half-open and his midsection tucked under a throw blanket. Keeping any of his four limbs under the blanket would be a waste of precious time to disentangle in the event of a break-in, so it suffices that he has his hands folded over his stomach on top of the throw in an affectation of rest.

From his vantage point, he checks the movement on the street. He listens for activity from Claire’s side of the place. His eyeline roves over the window frame, the lintel, the internal side of the lock system on the door. He takes a peek every few dozen seconds at the security cam footage on his laptop on the desk at the foot of his bed. All is quiet and drowning in a provincial city-bustling sort of silence.

In the quiet, he breathes. He has to count his breaths.

Sometimes he ends up sleeping. Other times, not. When he doesn’t, he caves and pulls out a pack of watermelon gum and gets to chewing.

A few times a week, Claire opens her door and tiptoes into the living area.

What are you doing up at this hour? he confronts her.

I needed water, is her defense.

You could have filled your bottle with water before you went to bed. The locks are in place for your safety.

He tries to reprimand her a grand total of two times—what is the point of a security system if she is going to disarm it at one in the morning, anyway? But sternness for a thirteen-year-old was never built into his bones.

The third time it happens, he is in her room in the morning to double-check the windows. He notices the bottle on her nightstand, still full. He starts to understand her nighttime wandering a little bit more after that.

When he hears the lock click and measures the seconds for the silent hinges of her door to swing open, he stands from his spot on his bed and unlocks his own door, too.

He opens it to be greeted by Claire’s giant eyes, misty in the dimness, with her fist poised as if to knock.

He stares at her. She stares at him.

He stares at her some more.

“Okay, your super-spy skills are just getting freaky at this point,” she breaks the silence.

His mouth twitches. He gently grabs her by the hand—still partially raised in the air—and guides her to the kitchen. There, he cracks open the freezer with a burst of cold in the tropical humidity of the room that somehow still can’t be shaken off, no matter if the window A/C units are on, and he roots around for the small tub of Selecta ube keso ice cream. (Ever since Claire discovered the purple yam on their first day here, she hasn’t gone twenty-four hours without something in that flavor.)

Claire is bundled on the creaky little couch and still watching him with wide eyes as he approaches with two spoons stuck in the frosted top of the ice cream carton. Though her skin is pale and her hand not so steady as she accepts the offering, she’s still a snarky teenager at heart.

“Don’t help me finish it all at once, now,” she admonishes him.

He folds himself cross-legged across from her on the couch and holds the little tub by his fingers around the bottom between them. “Putting dairy back in the freezer with saliva from these spoons is very unsanitary,” he says dryly. “Didn’t you know that?”

Between the two of them, they demolish the treat before it even has a chance to melt into a puddle of royal purple at the bottom.

—

He doesn’t ask if she wants to talk about it. He’s built for many things, but talking is not one of them.

He rather thinks that Claire draws him out of his shell and earns about seventy percent of his total conversation time out of a year. Before he met her, speaking was unnecessary. It was also, more often than not, a jeopardy on his life. And that included even the decade and a half of his existence before Fitzroy found him at that Florida state correctional facility.

Sometimes, on their nighttime escapades to the living room, they turn to other silent activities they can share besides sugary midnight snacking. She brought a pack of cards with her from America. He’s not sure if encouraging her to hone her skills at blackjack portends a life of gambling addiction.

He buys a game called sunka off one of the talented old woodworking vendors in the area. The long, unevenly shaped playing boat, curved along the natural lines of the wood it was carved from, houses cowry shells in little wells that they grab and try to dexterously outspeed each other in plonking into their own goal holes.

Sometimes Six makes a show of complaining about the lack of agility in his right hand, still healing from the knife wound months ago, as Claire races to the finish line first with a crow of triumph. She rolls her eyes at him and says that handling the tiny shells is good physical therapy for him, anyway.

He likes it. The clink of shells against polished wood is repetitive and predictable, small explosions of happy sound that make it just a little too loud to talk but not loud enough to make his mind drift to other things that have exploded in his memories.

Increasingly, their nighttime rendezvous turn into stargazing from the couch out the jalousie windows. There isn’t a whole lot of the sky left they can spy, given the light pollution from the moderately developed city around them, but Claire devises a game out of the blinking lights that move sluggishly across the blackness and pretends they’re comets to wish on rather than the planes flying to and from the regional airport.

Once, after the night Claire convinces him to allow her to name a made-up constellation after his pissed-off face, see, that bit at the bottom looks just like your goatee, Six is irresponsible enough to let them both fall asleep on the couch. He wakes to the dawn breaking through the capiz shutters and the distant crow of many roosters, which is what first alerts him to something different, because normally neither of them can hear the cocks through the closed windows of their bedrooms with the A/C humming.

He glances down at Claire where she and her gangly limbs are curled up against his side. There’s a crick in his neck and a twinge in his bicep where he pushed them away to make room for her to nestle into him under the throw.

He wonders silently what he’s going to do with himself when it’s time to re-enroll her in school.

—

Melody Reyes keeps popping up on his runs.

The thing about her that infuriates him, because he can’t cleanly eliminate the possibility of her being an asset, is that she is flat-out athletic enough to keep pace with him.

He keeps the conversation to a minimum. Even still, he learns random snippets of her life that he would much rather not know. If, by some wild turn of fortune, Melody turns out to be an innocent bystander who suffers violence or death because of her association with him, he doesn’t need to know about the birth of her solo food vlogging career in Quiapo, or the complicated family drama between her father and his money-grubbing siblings surrounding their inherited mango plantation in Guimaras, or the many, many fondly exasperating cousins who tease her and call her Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter because apparently the American half of her parentage means she smells like butter to them at all times.

Claire is hanging around the corner stand two blocks away from the townhome when Six and Melody walk up for a soda after their jog. Claire’s face lights up with pure joy upon seeing them. Six feels like his stomach has suddenly turned to lead.

“Dad!” Claire calls out and waves with exaggerated affection.

Six forces his muscles to unfreeze and moves to her. Wrapping his arm around her shoulders is natural; keeping an even grip on his heartbeat is not.

Melody is laughing in delight. “Is this your daughter? You didn’t tell me you had a daughter!”

Claire gasps into Six’s armpit. “You didn’t tell her you have a daughter?”

“I said I had a family,” Six defends himself, hand out to wave off the woman’s chuckling barbs. “Melody, this is my kid, Caroline. Caroline, meet Melody. For some reason, she won’t stop following me on my runs.”

“Oh.” Claire wiggles her brows up and down at him. “‘For some reason,’ huh.”

Melody is appropriately charmed by Claire’s personality. She is far more smiley around the girl than she ever was around Six himself, which does absolutely nothing to ease the growing gnawing sensation in his gut.

You look just like your dad, she coos.

Thanks! I got the hair from my mom, though, Claire replies.

Oh, is she Pinay, too?

From there, somehow, as Melody begins to chat excitedly about her own mixed heritage, Claire is able to navigate the conversation as if she knows anything about being half-Filipino herself.

Six bites the inside of his cheek and glances away, his arm still hanging loosely around Claire’s shoulders. He had better watch closely that she doesn’t follow in his spymaking footsteps.

He really, really wishes he had some gum to chew right now.

“Why were you outside the apartment?” he blurts out, the moment they’re home and the front door is shut behind them.

Claire turns to him and crosses her arms with a mulish look. At the very least, she does him the service of not playing dumb. “It was hot in here. I needed fresh air.”

“Why? Was the A/C not working?” The flat delivery of his demand lets her know he already knows the answer.

She glances down and away, her jaw working. “You can’t just keep me in here all the time.”

“I’m not the one keeping you. It is physically not safe for you to be out there, by yourself, without an adult supervising you, in a foreign country surrounded by strangers where you don’t even know the local dialect.”

“I know some of the local dialect.”

“You know how to say three phrases. Kumusta, salamat, and nasaan po ang banyo. Great. Now you can greet your kidnappers and thank them for showing you where the toilet is.” He pulls out the jazz hands. “Congratulations.”

Her arms uncross and her fists ball up at her sides. “Why are you being such a dick about this?” she yells.

“Because someone has to get it through your thick head that you are not safe. Nowhere in the world is safe. You are only safe if you’re with me.”

Her puckered lips twitch and the corners of her eyes mist up with the obvious flaming desire to say something else.

“What? What.” One of his palms smacks down on the counter—he winces internally, but she doesn’t so much as flinch. She’s still glowering at him as he runs his trembling hands through his hair. “What is it you got to say to that? Seriously, was losing your parents and your uncle not enough of a lesson for you? Do you know the meaning of the word caution?”

The moment the words leap from his mouth, he knows he’s fucked up.

The impact of the question shatters like glass across her eyes.

“Screw you,” she whispers. Chest heaving, breaths coming hard, her voice rises. “I don’t see you exercising any kind of ‘caution’ with your new girlfriend, so screw you!”

With that, she whirls on her heel and marches into her room with a backward slam of the door.

In the sudden quiet, Six crumples against the counter, feeling boneless and wrong.

—

“I’m sorry, kid,” he speaks from his seat on his butt on the tiled floor outside her door. “That came out wrong. I never meant to hurt you.”

Silence greets him.

He rubs a hand down the side of his face, scratches at the skin beneath his beard, and sighs. He pulls his legs up to his chest and dangles his forearms across the hills of his knees.

“I know what it’s like to lose a parent. I…know what it’s like to lose both parents. Knowing that kind of pain…I should never have used it against you. No matter how upset I was.

“I was worried, kid. I was scared shitless the second I saw you alone at the shop. Didn’t know what to do with myself. Almost nothing scares me anymore these days, Claire, believe me. But thinking about what could have happened to you if I’d arrived even five minutes later is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. So…I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He clears his throat. “I hope you can understand where I was coming from. I need you to be safe.”

A series of soft thumps issues from inside the room. Six lifts his head from his hands in time to see the door crack open and one of Claire’s eyes peep through to meet his.

“I was being stupid,” she says after a long pause, and nothing else.

Achy relief shoots through his veins. “Yeah,” he breathes. It almost sounds like a frenetic little laugh. “Yeah. You were. So was I.”

“I won’t do it again.”

“Please don’t.”

“’M sorry I yelled about your girlfriend. I’m not a hater, I swear.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

That, of all things, prompts Claire to open the door the rest of the way and to sit up in rapt attention. She leans forward with one fist on the floor. “What?”

“I don’t know who she is. She keeps following me. I’m keeping an eye on her and logging my findings. I was going to tell you at some point, but I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily if she turned out to be just a civilian.”

Claire stares at him for a long moment. Whatever she finds in his hopeless eyes makes her suddenly burst into a toothy, split-lipped smile. “You’re so stupid, Six.”

—

Six gets a job as a security guard at one of the local beach hostels. It doesn’t pay the highest out of the slew of options he first considered, but too many of the others seemed like upstanding establishments that would require all sorts of work permits and copies of his visa. All such things would be feasible enough to obtain, but that meant searching for an old contact in the Indo-Pacific, and in turn that meant another person from his old world who could tip off the CIA to his existence or who could be tortured enough into giving up the information.

He also briefly considers lifeguarding, since that seems to be one of the most informally enforced types of employment in this area, but he takes one look at the gnarly scar tissue running down his left arm and the prison tats on his right and decides against it.

The hours of his shift at the hostel, at least, are sane. He leaves for work at lunch and gets back home just a little after dinnertime, in time for the night guy to take over and for Six to greet Claire with a styrofoam container of her favorite chicken satay skewers and rice.

You should eat without me, he tells her constantly. It cannot be healthy waiting to eat for so many hours all the time.

Who says I’m not eating when you’re gone? she retorts, and will say nothing else about what he is increasingly sure is a secret stash of sweet goods somewhere in her room.

She pesters him for stories about the guests that come and go at the hostel. Decades of training for silence have snuffed the gossip gene right out of him, but Claire is different. He takes one look at her shining, lonely eyes, and he decides it isn’t the worst thing in the world to open his mouth and talk with her late into the night about the most scandalous things he’s seen some of the tourists do around the place.

Pretty soon after his first paycheck, he goes out and buys her a secondhand TV.

It’s nothing like the technological luxury she grew up with, between her wealthy parents and her well-to-do uncle and all the loaded safehouses she was carted off to before and after Six’s first dip into her life. And yet, the moment he comes home with it, everything seems to light up in her body and she forces him to endure a lanky, sharp-elbowed hug about it.

She also insists that they set it up in the living room for their mutual enjoyment.

—

One night, Claire doesn’t come to his door. She wakes him up with her screaming.

It takes entirely too long from the time he tumbles from his bed to the door, to the time he jams his shaking thumb against the keypad on her lock and bursts inside to her bedside.

There is no intruder.

He jerks his head around, wide-eyed and rabbit-pulsing. There is no one there, except Claire herself, twisted in her sheets and whimpering.

He scoops her up in his arms and carries her bridal style into the living room.

On the way there, her eyes open in bleary slits. Her eyelashes are clumped together with wetness. She looks like she's bitten the inside of her bottom lip straight through.

“You're not dead,” she rasps. She stares at him. And then again, she says, you're not dead, you're not dead, over and over again as her face crumples and her body melts into his.

Six holds her against his side with her ribs pressed to the arm of the couch and his body between her and anything else around them. He rubs his hand up and down one of her bony, exposed arms, willing color and life into them. He tips her chin up with a knuckle and gently presses the pads of two fingers against the pulse point at her jugular. It's cantering, but slowing down. All he can think about is her heart and the pacemaker inside her frail chest.

“I'm here,” he promises her, somehow hoarse himself, and that seems to be enough for her. She sags further into his body.

A staccato flurry of knocks at the front door kicks both their heart rates into overdrive again.

Claire's eyes are wide and bright like floodlights.

“Don't answer it,” she whispers. “Please. Six, don't answer it.”

“They must've heard something. A neighbor. If I don't answer it, they might go away now but come back with someone willing to batter that door down.”

Claire bravely swallows down what looks like a painful whimper in the lump of her throat.

For want of something squishier to give her, Six balls up the throw blanket and thrusts it into her hands. Her entire torso folds over it like a puppet with its strings severed.

His calloused hand finds purchase in the hair at the top of her head. He runs his fingers briefly through the strands and tucks a stray one away from her eyes. “Don't worry. It's gonna be some nosy grandma, and we'll tell her we were watching TV.”

Mutely, she nods to the floor. Her hair rasps against his palm with the gesture.

Six keeps one hand in his pocket. The fan knife tucked there will have to do.

When he cracks open the door, he wonders if he's having a stroke.

“Michael!” Melody exclaims from the other side. “Wait—you live here? I thought I heard screaming. Is everything okay?”

Six’s brow furrows. He doesn't bother hiding the thorough once-over he gives her person. No visible weapons, but that means nothing.

“You live here?”

“Two doors down. I'm usually not home. I heard the scream and I ran over as fast as I could,” Melody gasps. She is, indeed, short of breath. She attempts to peer anxiously around the side of Six’s head. “Was that Caroline? Is Caroline okay?”

“Affirmative. Uh, no. She—she saw a spider and freaked out.”

Six wants to bash his forehead against the lintel the instant the lie leaves his lips. Even Melody looks appropriately dubious. He searches behind her for inspiration.

“It was a gigantic spider,” Six finishes lamely. “I kind of freaked, too.”

“Oh.” The tautness of Melody's body unscrews somewhat. “You sure she's okay?”

The soft padding of bare feet on tile preludes Claire's appearance at the door. The girl nudges it open a little wider and bravely tries on a smile as she peeks around Six’s side.

“Hi, Tita Melody.”

Melody softens instantly. “Hey, baby girl. Everything all right?”

“Like this guy said.” Claire hooks a thumb in Six’s direction, and it's all he can do not to roll his eyes. “The spider was, like, the King Kong of the arachnid family.”

Melody and Claire share the briefest of midnight chats. After a minute, Melody squeezes Claire's hand and makes her promise to swing by to try her cassava cake.

Finally, the woman bids her leave, though not without fixing Six with a long and searching stare.

“You keeping her safe?” she asks him cryptically.

He gives her a thumbs-up. “That's the goal.”

He blames the adrenaline crash for the absolutely idiotic hand gesture, afterward.

—

He invites Claire to sleep at his side in his bedroom that night. The couch is their normal go-to, but now that Melody has let slip that she is their neighbor, sleeping without additional locks and security between them and the front door is no longer negotiable for the kid.

Claire takes a while to fall back asleep, tossing and turning with half-hearted complaints about how his anxiety hormones stink up his room. She gets there eventually, though.

Five minutes after Claire's breath has evened out, Six slides his arm out from under her neck, rearranges the covers over her shrimp-curled form, and walks on the balls of his feet to the foyer.

He ties one of his nylon ropes around the handle of the front door. He slips on his combat boots and settles into a spot on top of the closed toilet seat inside the tiny washroom, and stamps his foot on top of the end of the rope on the floor. Once it's stretched taut across the foyer, he takes out the pistol from his ankle holster, ensures it's loaded and kitted with the suppressor, and then props it up with one fist under his firing arm over his cocked knee, aimed at the open doorway.

He gets a total of two hours of sleep that night.

—

Six skips his morning run. He dawdles around the townhome as long as he can in Claire's presence before heading out for work. The girl doesn't seem to be complaining about his codependency, anyway.

When he gets back that evening, Claire shoves a note into his hands. It's a piece of paper torn from a hotel notepad, and apparently it was slipped under their door sometime after lunchtime.

Caroline, are you safe at home? Come knock on my door if you need to talk.

It's signed by Tita Melody.

—

Six can't avoid his morning runs forever. At some point, he has to face Melody and ferret out, once and for all, what the woman is up to.

When he finally returns to his jogging routine, Melody doesn't look all too ecstatic to see him.

“Michael,” she calls out to him. “Walk with me.”

“I thought the point of this little exercise of ours was to keep our regimen up.”

She's not impressed. “We need to talk. We can't run and talk at the same time.”

Six has some rather extensive experience in the department of talking while running for your life, thank you very much, but he wisely refrains from commenting.

“Is she safe with you?”

Of all the things that could come out of her mouth—

Six barely catches himself on the pavement. “Excuse me?”

“Where's her mom?”

Oh. Oh.

Suddenly, things make sense.

“Dead,” Six says around a truthful lump in his throat. “She died. Caroline's got no one else left except me.”

When he looks to the side to assess Melody's expression, he finds the woman assessing him right back.

Six understands, now. And he knows he has to give away just a little bit more of the truth to put this matter to rest.

“She has nightmares,” he divulges. The tiny crack in his voice doesn't even have to be feigned. “It was—her mother's death was horrible.” He swallows again. “I was not around to stop it.”

Melody draws in a deep, deep breath and then expels it in a long, gusty sigh. Finally, she unpins her scrutinizing look from him and turns to lean against the wall of the sea walk and gaze out at the beach.

“I'm so sorry to hear that,” she says quietly.

“It's a little fresh, still,” he replies.

“I'm sorry for making assumptions,” she says. “I didn't mean to cast aspersions or anything. I was just—”

She glances down and away. She pulls her transition lenses down from the top of her head to shield her eyes, and Six understands the impulse intimately.

After a tense silence of indecision, Melody seems to come to some sort of resolution.

“My dad did some real fucked-up shit to me. That's kind of why I'm here in the Philippines now, instead of the States. Also why I go by my mom's name these days.

“I’ve put a lot of it behind me. It makes me see things, though. Maybe I'm looking for signs where there aren't any. I don't know, it's some kind of bullshit sixth sense that isn't always even accurate. It's just looking for danger signals in other kids when maybe there isn't any.”

Six returns a sigh of his own. He thinks of Henry's fingers in his hair, the cigarette butt singeing the skin over the delicate tendon of his wrist. He thinks of his little brother Ryan howling in pain from their father's boot colliding with his balls because Henry thought that crybabies deserved to be castrated.

He thinks of the blood surging in his veins at the sight of their father looming over Ryan, a trembling small heap at the bottom of the stairs, and how it took nothing, after all, for a fifteen-year-old to seize the gun from the nightstand and thunder down the stairs in cold rage and chase his suddenly wide-eyed sperm donor out the back door and shoot him three times in the back.

He thinks of being carted into general population without an ounce of regret except for the fact that he never answered any of Ry's letters before he was transitioned out of juvie.

Tracing the silhouette of a young dad tickling his toddler on the beach, Six says, “I understand way more than you know.”

Melody glances up at him a little sharply. Her mouth opens and closes: to apologize, maybe. Six wishes she wouldn't. He thinks he'll break out in hives.

Evidently, she decides on something else to say.

“For what it's worth, Caroline seems like a really, really happy child, despite everything,” says Melody. “I've never seen anything in her actual demeanor to suggest she was in danger at home.”

“I understand,” Six reiterates with careful emphasis on every syllable. “I think…if we had to make an error in judgment, the direction you took was better than the other. If we…”

He wonders when his throat got so tight.

“If there were more people like you looking out for strangers’ kids, we'd have a lot less shitty childhoods these days.”

Melody's hand lands on his elbow, firm and muscled but comforting. “Hey, now. I think we're a little past the ‘strangers’ part, don't you think?”

Six inclines his head toward her. “Oh, yeah?”

She flashes him another one of her crooked, blitzkrieg smiles. “At the very least, we're overactive-amygdala buddies, right?”

As she's leaning toward him, his brain briefly short-circuits.

He has to put up a hand gently between them.

“You're beautiful,” he says, “but I'm sorry.”

She grimaces a little self-deprecatingly. “Totally misread that one, huh?”

He has some inane compulsion to let her down as softly as possible. “To be fair, I was paying attention to you because I didn't know what you wanted. Anyone whose motives I can't figure out might be a threat to me and my family, and Caroline…I need to make sure she's safe. So, no. You weren't imagining me paying attention to you.”

“Gee,” Melody grouses with a smile. “Thanks for the spy treatment, I guess.”

They spend the rest of their allotted jogging time walking at a temperate pace. They get some salted chicken feet from one of the snack vendors, and Six makes sure to grab some orange soda and Skyflakes mango crackers for Claire.

This time, Melody joins him on the walk home to their townhouses, too.

Six turns to her at the top of the pathway. “In another lifetime, maybe, I would have space in my brain to consider what you're offering,” he says solemnly.

She casts him a small smile. “Just not in this one?”

He shakes his head. “Not in this one. Caroline…”

“Understood. Say no more.” She gestures with her head. “Tell her to come over for lunch any time, though, when she gets lonely.”

He thinks of locks, and fragile glass windows, and sleeping upright on the toilet with a cord under his boot and a gun in his fist.

He also thinks of Claire's room, filling up with tchotchkes and evidence of all the little hobbies she's invented to keep herself sane inside. She's probably hung up at least fifty multicolored origami cranes over her bed by now.

He thinks of her sad, wide eyes.

“Okay,” he agrees with a smile. “I think she'd like that.”

—

That evening, after dinner has been cleared away and they've washed and dried the dishes in silent tandem, by tacit agreement Six and Claire gather themselves on the couch rather than proceeding to their respective rooms.

Claire pops on something K-pop-related on the TV. Six pulls out his laptop and lets Claire bundle herself closer to him as he works.

“’R’ you checkin’ the security cams again?” she asks him around a yawn.

“Negative.”

Her brow furrows. “Putting out résumés on Indeed?”

He gives her a droll look. “What, listing twenty-three years’ experience in tactical reconnaissance and strategic lethal asset management?”

She grins. “Don't forget thirty-eight years of experience being a full-time dickhead.”

He runs a hand down his face, mostly for show. “One of these days, I'm going to get around to teaching you not to fucking swear.”

She laughs. “You're not my dad.”

The way she says it doesn't even sting. Six’s face scrunches up. “No, I'm really not.”

Claire isn't finished. “You're more like…hm…my really, really weird cousin who has an insane knife collection and doesn't sleep for thirty-six hours straight.”

Six's heart squeezes. No matter what shit she gives him, she's still bestowed on him the title of family.

She pokes him in the side. “So? Not faking another identity to break into a corporate job?”

He rolls his eyes. “No. I'm looking up my brother.”

Claire goes very still. “Your brother?”

“Yeah, kid.” He doesn't look at her, though he can feel her penetrating gaze boring into the side of his head. “My little brother Ryan. We got separated after…” She doesn't need the burden of the whole story right now. “After our parents died.”

“Holy shit,” she whispers. “Well, what are you waiting for? Look him up.”

He hasn't done so in years, is the thing. Decades. He had the tools at his disposal, and he could have broken protocol even during his agent training to sneak a peek at Ry’s records, sure. But he knew himself; he knew there was no way in hell or on earth that he would be able to stay away once he found out where Ry had been placed and with whom.

He's not so sure what it says about him now that he's about to face down a single internet search and cave to whatever compulsion ensues, target on his back or not.

Silently, with the encouragement of Claire's impatience at his side, he types in ryan gentry jacksonville fl.

He has to click around and type some more. When he does and he's landed at the bottom of a social media rabbit hole, he learns that Ry was placed with the Grace family. Just a middle-aged couple looking to adopt, and who both passed recently of peaceful old age, it seems.

One striking fact he learns: Ryan Gentry is now Ryland Grace.

The realization of where the portmanteau in Ry's new name came from hits him squarely between the eyes.

Claire observes the thin trickle of moisture from the corner of his eye. She's been quietly reading everything on his screen, the TV muted and the K-pop concert onscreen long abandoned.

“My old name,” says Six, “was Courtland.”

Claire butts his shoulder with her cheek. “He didn't forget you.”

Another, even more mind-boggling tidbit he discovers: his brother is smart. Insanely, chart-toppingly smart. As in, earned a doctorate in molecular biology from one of the top schools in the country and wrote an expert-challenging thesis that gained him notoriety smart. There are news articles about him, praising him and excoriating him in the same breath.

And he has a fucking Facebook.

He's blond, lighter than Six, retaining that sunwashed look from their childhood. He still wears glasses. Better ones, he would hope. He teaches children, and if the newsletters of him being voted by students for teacher of the month are anything to go by, he is every bit the man that Henry Gentry never could be.

Six’s chest is tight. Something hot and urgent swirls in his stomach, not unlike the rush of anger that would consume him every time Henry laid a finger on his brother.

He's infuriated. Most of the fury is directed at himself: for his selfishness, for his cowardice, for his refusal to open up a search tab and find Ry and just fucking call him when his brother's information has been out on the internet for years.

He pats his pockets. Claire watches him, nonplussed at first, and then realization dawns on her.

She digs into the candy dish on the side table and unearths an old pack of watermelon gum. She presses a single stick into his hand.

He almost chokes on a laugh as he stares down at the unwrapped gum. His eyes watery, he meets her gaze.

They do make some pretty rad overactive-amygdala buddies, he thinks.

As he chews, he ruffles her hair in thanks. Claire snuggles deeper into his side.

“When you're done freaking out,” she says sleepily, “you can go dig up one of your bajillion burner phones and call him. Or send him a message on the dark web. What? What? Stop looking at me like that. I don't know how any of this works.”

Six is smiling lopsidedly at her, unable to help himself at all.

“Just don't tell him about the sleeping on the toilet thing. Ease him into you being a freak, y’know?”

Wetly, he hugs her and laughs.