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She’s dirty, cramped and pretty fucked off, but Elide manages to steel herself as she finally comes face to face with the stranger that, her suspicions confirmed, has been following her for the last few days. It’s this resolve that earnt her a place on the most secretive and elite squad of the CIA, and it’s her resolve she relies on now, in the face of this hulking lump of meat. He’s pulled over at the side of the road, has climbed to his full height out of the driver’s seat. For a moment, she thinks she recognises him, and she tucks that moment of recognition away to examine more closely at a later date.
But then as far as he knows, she’s just some lost college student on some ill-advised road trip. She’s had long enough stood here with her smoking wreck of a stolen car to see that she’s in about as much trouble as she could be. The sun has already pretty effectively roasted the top of her head, turning the tip of her nose and the tops of her cheeks an ugly red.
The fierceness seems to falter in her face, replaced by a nervous, calculated giggle as she bats her eyelids at him, “Can you even believe my luck? I’m so happy you came along! I think there’s something wrong with my car, I just can’t get it to start!”
The sugar she lays thickly over her words makes her want to gag, but the stranger seems to accept her story, though he’s yet to speak.
She uses the opportunity, under her lashes, to note the telltale bulges under his arm, at his hip and on one calf to locate his various weapons. He’s too heavily armed to be anything but another agent. Or possibly police. Or then again, he could just be some gun-crazed lunatic. There are enough of them. Or he could be exactly the man she’s been looking for.
At the same time, she takes a quick inventory of her own physical capacity. Dirty, weaponless and without any other means of communication to let Fireheart, or any of her other colleagues, know she’s alive after all. She’s been hitchhiking her way across the country this far, trying to make it back to base in Langley. The tracker in her ankle is gone, forcibly removed by the people who’d tried their best to kill her, and even now the mangled remains of her ankle sends a shooting pain up her leg. She can barely stand, let alone walk much further, and she finally seems to be utterly stuck, here in Hellhole, Nevada. Or New Mexico. Or Colorado.
Her options are pretty fucking limited, at this point. She has no money. Her branch of ops is so secretive that she doesn’t have any way to contact any of them without the removed tracking device, or the one burner phone that had been removed immediately from her possession. If she makes any public attempt to find them, she’ll be shut down with no acknowledgement that she or her branch of special ops exist. So her options are pretty fucking limited. The only thing she has to go on is a building in Langley, nondescript but inside braced with classified activity, separate from the main complex in the city. She doesn’t even know the address, just that its codename is Terrasen.
So she has to get back to Terrasen.
The hulking figure opposite her seems to be analysing her as much as she is him. Not some lunatic, then. His body screams Agent – he’s too built to be some beat cop, and the odds of anyone else actually choosing to be out in this fucking place are slim at best. He’s handsome in a dangerous way, long hair twisted out of his face in a bun, his strong jaw shaded with stubble. Younger than she had thought, too. He’s probably in his early thirties. His car is sleek, Wisconsin plates. Too deliberately random to be here. Her own car is still smoking at the side of the road. She had thought she’d finally stumbled upon some luck when she found it unlocked in a small town not too far from Las Vegas, but that luck seems to have died with the engine.
And the chances of anyone else coming along before she’s died of dehydration, some poisonous creature, heat stroke, infection in her weeping wounds, or any combination of the above are pretty slim themselves.
The Asshole, as she has decided to christen him, still hasn’t spoken, has hardly bothered to acknowledge her at all. Elide stands straighter, unwilling to let the stranger notice any slight advantage he might have over her. The leg of her dirty combat trousers covers her injuries, for now.
“I’m going back to Raleigh. I go to school there. I’ve never driven it before, but I thought it would be fun,” she lets her smile get wobbly for a second, “I didn’t think it was quite so far.” North Carolina. Close enough that it explains her eastward route, far enough away that it has no associations with anything deemed classified. With the right cover story, you can do anything. Still no response. “I’m Marion!”
Silently, she curses her lack of imagination. In the face of his silence, her training has faltered and she’s given the name of her mother. It’s a rookie mistake that she had thought she was past. She’s been drilled to give her own first name, to avoid slipping up later on. First names mean so little. If she forgets herself later and doesn’t respond to the name she’s given, he’ll know something is amiss. It’s fucking textbook. Marion. Marion. I’m Marion. College student, airhead, innocent.
Not that there’s a great deal of innocence left.
“Lorcan,” he finally deigns to reply. There’s a ring of truth about it. Presumably he has the same training about how to deal with questioning from a potential enemy. “And you happen to be in luck, Marion. I’m going to DC.”
She blinks at him, calculating, trying to work out the likelihood of another young college girl in her position actually accepting a ride from a strange man. His inflection pretty clearly states that he doesn’t believe that her name is Marion, but he appears to be going along it it. Would another girl in her position give a fake name? It surely isn’t out with the realm of possibility. She’s far from helpless, but the person she’s pretending to be might very well be, and he gives off an aura of danger.
But then, she’s no simpering college girl anyway.
Anything is better than dying out here in the desert, and the sun has already begun its slow descent into the horizon. The desert during the day is tough enough, but she won’t survive the freezing night.
“Any chance of a ride? Just to the nearest truck stop or town.”
--
He’s about as verbose in the car as he has been outside of it. Elide is grateful for the air conditioning, soothing her reddened skin. The sunburn is going to be painful. She subtly presses her heated skin against the cool leather of the seat, grateful for the relief it gives. She tries to keep her hands from forming defensive fists, chattering away at him about courses she invents, school friends and whether or not she’s going to rush a sorority in the spring. It’s all bullshit, but the more useless shit she gives him, the less likely he is to be able to pick any of it apart.
She’s completely unsure of what he thinks she might be, but as the sun slowly descends from the sky, she thinks he might finally be loosening up just a little bit. Occasionally, he will even deign to respond to her stream of consciousness. They pass the truck stop. Then the town. She makes no attempt to leave, and he doesn’t kick her out, and the air conditioning is too much of a relief to willingly give up.
--
“So why DC?”
It’s pointed, her first direct question to him after so much inane babble. It seems to catch him by surprise, she notices the way his dark eyes flicker over to her, before refocussing on the endless road in front of them. She doesn’t think he’s going to respond for a moment, almost reverts to her previous soliloquy, but then he does, “A meeting. Someone high up in the CIA.” Several reasons for such a meeting run through Elide’s head as she mentally ticks through them. It’s bold to acknowledge the CIA these days. They aren’t afforded the same status they had ten years ago. It could be anything. Could be just a passing comment, for all she knows. But he isn’t flying, which means he doesn’t want his movements recorded. Could it be…?
An agent for sure, in any case. “That is so exciting! I went to DC once on a school trip. We got to see all the government buildings. Not the White House though, obviously.” She grins. Something about him seems to tighten at her casual mention of the institution that has come to mean something much uglier than it was intended to. She gauges his response. His reaction is unexpected. She just can’t work out which side he’s on.
Six years into the current presidential term, it’s about as bad as it could be. There’s a reason Elide’s division of the CIA is as secretive as it is. Officially, it doesn’t even exist. Because, under the direct supervision of the current head of the agency, an Agent known to Elide as Fireheart, they are working to undermine the current President. It’s tantamount to treason. Before Elide had been caught by a branch of zealous State Police in California, bundled away to a blacksite in the desert as a rabble-rouser, she’d been working in Los Angeles with Manon Blackbeak, a military veteran turned gang leader turned vigilante. LA was – still is, she presumes – a warzone. Seceded from the rest of the state, effectively run by Manon, the whole place was on federal lockdown, surrounded by Maeve’s latest spectacularly awful executive order: a huge, hulking wall surrounding the city. Elide’s job was to try and convince Manon to join their cause, coming under Fireheart’s supervision, while returning the city to federal rule, at least on paper.
Manon’s drive, as Elide came to discover, came from her ex-military service, and she surrounded herself with other veterans. They were collectively referred to as the Thirteen, and they were known for their brutality and their effectiveness. What Fireheart was interested in was the zeal they managed to work up, their ability to protest and fire people up by simply existing. As far as Terrasen was concerned, if they could harness that energy, it was a game-changer. Elide was brought in as an expert at reading people, using that knowledge to cajole, convince and bully people into doing what was needed of them.
Elide had managed to win their trust. It was a shame she’d been lifted from one of the protests by Maeve’s state police. When she’d failed to arrive at the rendezvous point for her extraction back to DC at the end of her assignment, and the tracking chip she’d been implanted with was removed and prevented from reading her vital signs, Elide had assumed they had realised she’d been captured. They trusted the chips completely. She knows now that they all think she had died in the black site known as Morath, with no official papers to identify her.
She knows that with her apparent death, she’s been granted something very specific. The opportunity to leave it all behind, to scrape together some money and leave the country. Europe, or South America, or anywhere. She could leave this all behind without any guilt, and they would let her slip through the cracks. But there is no-one else. There is no civilian life to return to, only her bastard of an uncle. And she can’t leave now, not with everything that they have managed to do together. She has been on missions with the other members of their division. She doesn’t even know most of their full names, but she trusts them with her life. She has had to, time and time again. Their job is inherently dangerous: to those that oppose the administration, they look as though they are part of it. And if those sympathetic to the regime knew what they’d actually done, they would be, at the very least, in the worst kind of prison for the rest of their lives.
And more likely dead at the hands of one of Maeve’s group of secret service agents, made up exclusively of ex-military hitmen. The Cadre.
Elide refocuses herself on the man at the wheel of the car. Lorcan. He’s dark and stereotypically broody, built like a brick shithouse. Dangerous, but not immediately so. There’s a tenuous trust that seems to have sprung up between them. Not so strong that she is willing to fall asleep, or let down her guard in any other way, but present nonetheless. The silence that has fallen between them after her mention of the White House seems strained, but it’s the quietest she’s been since he picked her up, and her voice is raspy with her constant chatter.
--
The desert at night is about the most formidable place Elide has ever been. She can’t feel the chill through the windows of Lorcan’s car, but she might as well be able to. Her skin pricks just thinking about it, and she pulls her beaten up jacket more tightly around herself. They have only stopped once for them both to relieve themselves. Any other girl might have been mortified, but frankly Elide has pissed in worse places.
Through the skylight, she can see the stars, illuminating the landscape around them. The road stretches away in front of them, as endless as the path of lights above them. Even Lorcan seems softer in the starlight, the light diffusing the shadows on his face. He looks tired. As if he can feel her eyes on him, he shifts under her gaze. Then he looks at her, his dark skin bleached white. Elide blinks, and shifts her gaze away to the landscape around them. She hasn’t seen a car for hours. They might as well be on the moon that hangs above them, it feels so removed from everything. The landscape that rises and falls dramatically ahead of them, the long straight road ahead, the miles of rocky ground that stretch as far as either of them can see in all directions. An ache builds in the pit of Elide’s stomach. She’s never felt so utterly swamped by everything. What business does she even have pretending to be significant?
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she breaks the silence with her question.
“What is?”
She gestures around them, “To think that something is still untouched by all of that.” She doesn’t have to elaborate. He surveys everything before him. As though it hadn’t occurred to him that something might be untouched by her; as if it has never occurred to him that Maeve’s reach might not be infinite.
“It’s beautiful.”
The road stretches interminably on.
--
She wakes in a strange town when he pulls over. She doesn’t remember deciding to let herself sleep, or how long ago that might have been, and she blinks, embarrassed at her slip up. The small town is everything that old American movies have taught her small towns ought to be. Little more than a couple of crossroads, linked by a row of facades, old general stores and more dubious establishments. Of all places, they’re parked by a motel. It’s before dawn, but the sun feels imminent. He must have driven all night to get here. He certainly looks like it. She hasn’t slept for long, and her muscles are contorted and painful from sleeping against the window of his car. “Where are we?”
She isn’t sure if she should still be pretending. In the earliest moments of waking, she reminds herself of everything she has told him thus far. The air between them feels stilted again in the daylight.
“Texas. North, somewhere.” She nods, only a little surprised. The car she stole would never have made it here, but his sedan is obviously more reliable.
“Sleep for a bit. I can get some food.”
For a second she thinks he might argue, but apparently something has changed between them in the night. He reaches behind him to a bag she assumes has his belongings in it, fishing for a wallet. He flicks her a credit card, his eyes sliding shut as he reclines the chair he seems unable to move from. She’s not sure how he knows the desperation of her financial situation, but she’s grateful. She’s had very little to eat since she left Los Angeles, only the occasional shared meal with whoever she’d managed to hitch a ride with. Or perhaps he’s noticed her significant lack of possessions. Either way, she cracks the door, grateful for the way her muscles scream as she climbs stiffly out. He seems to already be asleep.
She could leave him here. She has money, now. But there’s no physical way she could remove him from the car to steal it.
(Perhaps he knows this, and has decided to sleep in his seat to prevent exactly that)
In any case, she feels a strange sort of attachment to the man. He is clearly more faceted than she had originally assumed. And he’s been decent company so far, even if he’s a little quiet. She has missed company more than the agent in her would care to admit. It’s refreshing to have someone not trying to kill her. Her ankle feels like it’s on fire, a constant reminder of what she is running from. She twitches the leg of her trouser up to confirm what she already knows: the wound, though perhaps healing, looks like hell.
The only place open is one small diner. Elide orders two coffees and a couple of bacon rolls. She eats them both while she’s waiting for the coffee, the greasy sandwich making her moan embarrassingly. Thank god she’s the only person here, apart from one sleepy cook. Quickly, she orders a couple more of the rolls. It would be churlish to return with nothing for Lorcan. While she waits, she leans on the counter, licking her fingers, and watches the street outside. It’s less of a ghost town now. Someone even enters, though he pays her as little attention as the diner’s cook has. She can see her own reflection in the dirty window pane, and is aware that she looks about as rough as she feels. But perhaps this town is often populated by dirty young girls passing through.
Elide weighs her options as she watches the town wake up. The coffee tastes burnt but it’s hot, and once she loads it with sugar it’s tolerable. Staying with Lorcan is hardly ideal, but he is going exactly where she needs to, and his car is much more reliable than anything else she’s been able to find. She desperately has to get back to Fireheart.
Across the street is a small hunting shop. The idea of being armed again brings Elide more relief than she had anticipated. She swallows the last of her coffee, thanks the cashier for the sandwiches she’s just been handed, and leaves.
--
The sandwiches are cold by the time she climbs back into Lorcan’s car, and the sun is up, but it’s worth it for the knives she now has strapped to her ankle, thigh and shoulder. Her beaten up, bulky clothes hide her new arsenal. With any luck, he won’t notice the charges to his credit card until she’s long gone. In any case, she feels better than she has in days, especially with her full stomach. She’s pretty loath to wake her companion. He looks almost peaceful, something of his permanent frown evened out by sleep.
His bag is on the back seat.
Careful not to disturb him, Elide leans over the central console, easing his wallet from the top where he tossed it after giving her the card. Her breathing even, as though she’s merely flipping through something irrelevant, she opens it.
It’s almost empty. She nearly groans with frustration. A driver’s license that proves his name is what he told her. A couple more credit cards. And then – slipped away in the back, so that she almost misses it – an identification card. It’s worn, as though it’s been swiped through a scanner several thousand times. A picture in bad lighting that does nothing for his sharp features. But that isn’t what causes her breath to catch. It’s a White House ID card. The sort, she assumes, that gets one into all sorts of places in the building. The sort one isn’t given unless one is particularly friendly with the sitting administration.
Lorcan Salvaterre, Security
Shit. Shit shit shit. He’s probably best fucking buddies with the President. Not an Agent, then. Secret Service. It wouldn’t say on the card. Probably the head of the fucking Cadre himself. She should have seen this coming. Hardly daring to breathe, she slips the card into her back pocket, returning his wallet to the top of his leather holdall.
Silently, she surveys the sleeping giant beside her, weighing her options. If she could get him back to Terrasen, he would be a huge bonus to their division. He probably has all sorts of information Fireheart would deem pertinent.
The real question is; why would he tell her he was going to see someone from the CIA? They aren’t all involved, but the CIA has unquestionably been a thorn in Maeve’s side since she took office. Not all of the branches are as direct as they are, but the general feeling is that Maeve is a liability. She’s slashed their funding not protected by law, generally publicly mocked and shamed them until, at least in the view of the public, they are a shadow of the former Agency.
Why would a member of Maeve’s innermost security detail be meeting with anyone from the CIA? Much less doing it so secretly. Unless...
High profile assassinations used to be a thing most Americans associated with foreign powers. They’re much more common now. Fireheart wouldn’t be the first director, CEO or unknown power to come up against Maeve and lose their life in the bargain. Nothing provable, though: she isn’t that stupid. Just a rise in the unexplained deaths of those that cross her. Suddenly the Wisconsin plates make sense.
She pauses, reminds herself to breathe. Fireheart is surrounded by highly secured walls, not to mention the little, lethal court of agents she presides over, all of whom would give their life for her. Lorcan might be tall, and vaguely menacing, but Fireheart is no damsel in distress. And they've been looking for an opportunity like this.
Elide is still trying to work out if it’s safer to stay with him, goad him into taking her right to Terrasen itself and hand him over in the bargain, or maintain her cover story. But surely… surely she has to warn them. She has to make it to them before he does, and she’ll never do that alone.
He wakes up the way one might imagine a slumbering pile of muscle would: suddenly, and fists raised. She’s still there. Wordlessly, she passes him his cold coffee. They share a cigarette, and then they drive on.
--
“Of all the – fucking hell.” Elide can’t control her mouth. They’re by the side of the road, still probably in Texas somewhere. Her steady stream of muttered swear words is quiet, but apparently it isn’t quiet enough.
“Marion?”
Bless his heart, he almost sounds concerned. She almost snarls at him as she hears him coming.
He stops just out of sight and she pulls up her trousers, covering the knives she’d almost exposed to him. And everything else. “Marion? What is it?”
“I started my fucking period, alright?” She’s been eating sporadically; she’s almost surprised at its appearance.
She can practically feel the embarrassment radiating off him. They’re probably a hundred miles from anywhere. This, apart from anything else she’s dealt with recently, is pretty monumentally shit. She hears a car door open, and for one wild moment thinks he’s about to dive in and race off, rather than have this conversation with her. Instead, he reappears with a white shirt. It’s clean, in spite of the many creases from where it’s been shoved in his bag. In front of her now, he rips the hem into strips. He still won’t meet her eye as he passes them to her.
“I’ve been in the field with women before,” he offers, a sort of explanation. Elide takes them, aware of how much she owes him in this moment. She has nothing suitable, and anything she might have used is filthy.
“Thank you.”
It’s not enough, but he nods, a tinge of pink in his cheeks at her fervency. Then he disappears back behind the car for her to clean herself up.
--
They next stop in Oklahoma city. He’s still only had a couple of hours sleep, and she’s pretty sure he doesn’t trust her enough to drive while he’s unconscious. He leaves her to go and get some food and supplies again after collapsing into the bed in the motel room they rent. Everything about the small, cramped room screams backwoods motel, and Elide almost laughs when she opens the door. But there’s also only one bed. Neither of them acknowledge it. Perhaps they’ll take it in turns. In any case, it goes unacknowledged that he gets to sleep first. She’s pretty sure he has passed out before she’s even left the room.
The air feels sticky here. Outside of the artificially cooled air in Lorcan’s car, there’s a thin sheen of sweat on her face almost immediately. She’s never been here, never been in Oklahoma at all.
Their next issue is going to be Tennessee. She doesn’t have the ID to get her past the checkpoints she knows are installed on the border of that state. Anything she had originally, fake as they were, was stripped from her along with the rest of her earthly possessions, clothes and weapons. At some point, she’ll have to mention this to Lorcan. Avoiding Tennessee isn’t particularly easy, and most reports imply that Kentucky isn’t much better.
--
When she returns to the motel room, he’s still asleep, face down on the single bed. He’s much too big for it; his feet stick comically from the end. There’s a second when she feels her mouth twitch into a smile, and she’s so startled that she even retains that ability that she feels the expression fall from her face. She hasn’t truly smiled in weeks.
Elide sets down the basic toiletries she managed to get with his credit card, and heads for the shower. The water isn’t particularly warm, but it’s a relief as she lets it pound on the top of her head for a few minutes, her eyes closed. She can picture the grime of the last few weeks being washed down the drain. She’s never going to take her little bathroom in her flat just outside DC for granted again. She has to stand on one leg for the most part, keeping the weight off of her ankle. That’s going to take some time and potent antibiotics to heal. Even now, as she lets her weight drop ever so slightly, she can almost feel the infection spreading. She hasn’t been able to clean it properly, and it throbs now under pressure.
Still, she might die happy under this shower head, even as the already cool water loses what heat it once had, and she shuts the water quickly off, shivering in the sudden cold. She’s so content she’s almost forgotten she isn’t alone, and starts when there’s a knock on the door.
His voice is muffled through the wood, “I have a shirt, if you want it.”
Elide glances at her pile of filthy clothes, although there isn’t much to consider. Clean clothes would be a dream come true, and she might be able to wash hers in the sink. Towel wrapped around her, she opens the door. She can’t help the pink that tinges her cheeks, and is only somewhat gratified by the fact that the tips of his ears are the same shade as he averts his gaze. She takes the offered shirt, and closes the door on him, though he’s already turned away.
His shirt reaches her knees, but it’s soft and thick, and the scent of clean clothes seems pretty miraculous, currently.
She realises her mistake immediately when she leaves the bathroom and feels his eyes focus on her ankle. There’s nothing for her to hide behind. The wound encircling her ankle still weeps. The initial slit ran along her ankle bone to remove the tracker there, but the real damage was inflicted by the manacle she’d been kept in in her cell, the two metre chain that kept her movement restricted. It’s ugly, and it’s not the sort of wound that can be explained away.
“What is that?” He’s direct, his words lashing around her like a razor blade.
She can’t help the flush that covers her face. Her knives are tucked away in the pile of dirty clothes, she can’t get a grip on any of them without giving her whole cover away.
“Marion. Who did that to you?”
She still can’t answer, her mind ticking over things she might be able to say to explain any of this off.
He’s defensive, his hands at his side curling into fists. Instantly on edge, she forgoes all propriety and drops the clothes she’s holding. The hunting knives she finally reveals are wicked. To his credit, he hardly flinches, though she’s now stood between him and the only door with two deadly weapons.
Finally, after all this, she lets the sugar she’s overlaid on her words throughout the whole time together slide away. Her real voice is low and unrelenting.
“Here’s what is going to happen. You are going to pretend you’ve never seen this. You’re going to give me the keys to that car and you’ll walk away from this motel room right now. We’re done here.”
His face twists cruelly. But he shed his jacket in the car, she watched him do it. The weapons he carried when they first met are out of his reach.
Still, he seems unable to accept any of this, “Could you use one of those on me?”
Her cold smile says she’s done worse.
She moves quicker than he anticipates. In a second she’s on him. She’s tiny, but she’s fast. One knife caresses the skin of his neck in less time than it takes him to blink. The other is lower, angled at his lower back, where he knows his kidney is on one side. He feels the single drop of blood as it slides down the skin of his neck, and in the same moment he raises the hands at his side.
“Would you like to test me, Lorcan?”
He lets her take a breath, focuses on the ways her dark eyes flicker over his face, watching every tiny twitch of movement as he weighs his options.
“You’re an agent.”
She almost scoffs at his deduction. “Congratulations, Salvaterre.”
She doesn’t see it, but feels the knife at it pricks into her side. She snarls at him in surprise. There’s no telling where this knife has suddenly appeared from, but she has no doubt that he knows exactly where to cut in order to sever her spinal nerves. “So am I, Marion.”
For several long seconds they stand this way, locked together. His knife has put a hole in the shirt he gave her. Hers edges into his neck, the blade of it slick with his blood.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. I assume you’re going to Langley. In fact, I assume –“ his eyes harden “- that you’re the missing agent we have intelligence on. Former member of the Court, presumed dead in all correspondence, official and unofficial.” She might have flinched, but everything he is saying rings true, and she’d assumed as much. The only worrying thing is that he apparently has access to the correspondence in the first place.
“I’m going to DC, too. And I’m not going to leave you here to get yourself killed.” Her sneer is violent. And then she hears the words he’s spat at her, and she’s so surprised she almost lets her knives slip. Her gaze turns calculating.
His matches hers, “We both have to get back to DC,” he smiles grimly, “Call it inter-departmental cooperation.”
He is the first to remove his knife from where it rests against her spine. She almost presses her advantage, but to kill him now would be bad form, and however deeply her military training has buried it, there had been a great deal of compassion in her, once.
She lowers her weapons. They step away at the same time. Both of them remain armed.
“The Executive branch hates us,” she states, baldly, “Inter-departmental cooperation is a fucking joke.”
“It shouldn’t be.” He’s firmer, now. There might even be a flicker of regret in his face. “Maeve is wrong about the CIA.”
“I fucking know she is, asshole.” She hasn’t spent the last years killing herself to gather intelligence on Maeve and her supporters to diminish the agency she loves. But they are stronger than one administration, however much that administration has slashed their budget, derailed their reputation and slandered them publicly. Elide doesn’t know Fireheart’s first name, but she does know that they don’t take salaries. Any of the higher-ups. They do it because they have to.
“Fine. A continuation of this little fucking buddy road trip it is.”
He lights two cigarettes, and passes her one.
--
When she wakes up, he’s watching the news. She almost throws something at the tv. It’s filled with her beautiful poised face. Maeve’s cloying voice makes her feel physically ill.
“…Trying to do, here. The state of California is a lost cause. They are led by immigrants and the poison that has seeped into this country from outwith our borders. It emphasises, more than ever, the importance of separation. We have walled off Los Angeles to great success. It’s one of the greatest engineering projects of our time, it has created millions of American jobs. The next stage is to separate the wider area, followed by the state of as a whole. We will increase pressure on the protestors. We will stop shipments of food. The United States of America does not, will never negotiate with terrorists. We will purify this country and we will make it great –“
Elide finds the remote, and mashes the button to turn the device off with a lot more force than is necessary. Lorcan turns towards her, surprise written on his features. Apparently he hadn’t noticed her waking.
“How can you?”
She’s spitting fire, fully awake now, furious. He blinks at her, “You know what I mean. There are children in that city. Innocents that were trapped when the wall went up.” She’s almost screaming.
His calmness makes it worse.
“You don’t even care, do you?! She’s ruining lives, separating families, and that means nothing to you.”
“Of course it means something to me.”
His tone is much lower than hers, measured. She can’t say the same for her own. “How do you sleep at night, knowing what she’s done? To say nothing of the international community. She normalises hatred. She’s poison. And you… you’re part of it.”
He only nods. She snarls at his lack of defence, almost goes for her knife again, but he surprises her.
“She’d kill me if I left. Not just me. Anyone I care about. Everyone important to me. The rest of the Cadre.”
It’s confirmation of what she suspected before, and it almost stops her short, but only for a moment, “The Cadre?! Murderers, all of you. You deserve to die.”
--
The road through Arkansas is long, made longer by their silence. It’s only as they approach the border of Tennessee that Elide resumes her doubts. She winds down the window on her side. He doesn’t like her smoking in the car, but her cravings haven’t disappeared. Instead picking a fight over it, he takes a lighter from the central console and gives it to her. It feels like a truce.
She smokes it, and she sees him inhaling her second hand smoke.
--
“I don’t have the ID I need,” she finally confesses, half an hour later.
He nods, as though he might have anticipated this. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “I have mine. If we’re together they shouldn’t question it.”
She focuses on that one word. “Together how, exactly?”
Instead of answering, he gestures to the glove compartment. When she opens it, beneath the receipts and old CDs, there’s a ring. She removes it, pinching it gingerly between two fingers. “This?”
She can’t bring herself to ask why he has a wedding ring in his car. By way of answer, he nods, “My ID will get me through. If you’re my wife, it speaks for you, too.”
She doesn’t think she imagines the regret on his face, “It’s the south. They put way too much stock in the institution.”
She catches sight of her own expression. It’s stony. His wince is pronounced. “I’m not saying I agree with it. Just practically, it’s true.”
In response, she lights another cigarette.
--
His outdated prediction proves true. It takes a great deal of effort, and every inch of training that has ever been drilled into her, to submit to the inspection they go through at the border near Memphis. She simpers at the guard, grateful that she’d taken the time at a service station to wash her face and hair.
“I can’t believe I forgot it, Officer! We’re on our honeymoon. I guess I was so distracted by the wedding to remember it.” She’s hanging off Lorcan’s arm, her disgust at the scenario expressed only through her fingernails putting what feels like permanent dents into his skin. He’s remarkably stoic.
The guard examines Lorcan’s passport in detail. Elide assumes this is a fake. It is completely blank. Any stamps signifying international travel would prove red flags, she assumes. Once upon a time, Elide had had a very similar duplicate of her real passport.
“Everything appears to be in order, Mr. Salvaterre,” Elide almost screams. The officer can’t even bring himself to acknowledge her. But that shouldn’t surprise her. She’s been a second class citizen for years now.
Lorcan only nods. She tries again, “Are we free to go? I’m just so excited to get home with this one! It’s been such a long trip.”
For the first time, the guard’s disinterested gaze flicks to her. For a second, she thinks Lorcan bristles, but when she looks up at him he’s as still as ever, though his eyes are fixed on the man now.
The guard pales visibly, “Of course. Whenever you’re ready.” He returns to his post, raising the gate that will let them through. Lorcan and Elide return to their respective seats. Elide bats her eyelids at the guard as they drive past. Her teeth are still gritted.
But she owes him now. It’s doesn’t sit quite right.
--
If Arkansas felt huge, Tennessee is neverending. Elide can appreciate the fact it’s beautiful, but people here don’t like strangers. The wedding ring helps, so she keeps it on. Being detained at the border had cost them a couple of hours, so it’s almost dark again when they stop for gas near Jackson. They’re both wary of big cities, seeming to have some understanding that they will avoid them where possible. She leans against the side of the car while he fills it up, eyes as she soaks up the last of the sunlight before it dips below the horizon. For a huge man, he moves with a deadly quiet, but she can tell when he comes to stand beside her. As she’s taken to doing, she removes the knife from where it normally tucks into her thigh holster, pressing the sharp edge of it against the pads of her fingertips, gently enough that her skin doesn’t quite break.
Neither of them say it, but they’re unnerved by being here. This is truly Maeve’s territory, her heartland of support. She’s actually from near Atlanta, but Tennessee feels close enough to that that her presence hangs over them.
They haven’t discussed Elide’s outburst back in Oklahoma City. It still feels too raw between them to bring it up, but every so often she feels Lorcan’s gaze on her, and she knows that there’s a lot he is weighing up.
She can almost hear the thoughts tumbling over each other behind his eyes. It’s ridiculous. They’ve known each other for little more than a few days, and most of the time she’s been lying to him. But something rests between them, now. Some unspoken bond that she’s never anticipated.
“I’m going to get out.” His words are so soft she almost doesn’t hear them. She turns to him, blinking, something vulnerable in her face, and she sheathes her knife.
“I admire that.”
It isn’t an exaggeration. She’s taken aback by his promise, but it feels significant.
She sleeps in the passenger seat, and when she wakes he lets her take a turn driving for the first time since they met. There’s an unspoken agreement that they both want to get out of the state before anyone else questions them. Something about the way he’s able to sleep immediately in her presence reminds her of how much things have shifted between them. She’s stiff, unpractised, but having something to focus on feels productive, rather than her usual passivity. He sleeps through her soft singing along to the radio. Country music is a guilty pleasure, and it feels cinematic, driving through the smoky mountains with the soft music.
--
She’s so distracted by her thoughts that she barely notices when they pass into Virginia. Even as they move closer to Maeve's city, it's a relief to be moving out of the south. Lorcan is still asleep when the sun crests the horizon. Elide can't feel anything but relief that soon, finally, this might all be over.
She undoes her seatbelt. It feels too much like restraints, and the traffic on the road is moving slowly enough in the mid-morning sun that it feels unnecessary, anyway.
--
They aren’t far from DC any more. Elide can’t tell if he’s slowing purposefully, but they decide to stop near the city. Perhaps the city is as painful for him as it is for her. They’re in the mountains somewhere, and he pulls over, and with little explanation climbs from the driver’s seat, snagging his jacket from the back seat, and climbs onto the bonnet of the car. They've been delayed by the traffic, their drive through Virginia frustratingly slow, and it's past midnight again now. It's nice to stop.
Still pretty fucking cold, though.
She stares at him through the windscreen.
All she can see any more is the dark shape of him blocking out the stars. For a moment she huffs, frustrated. Then she resigns herself to it, and follows him out the car.
She has to jump to get onto the front of the car, and she doesn’t miss the way he tries to hide his smile. He doesn’t look at her, even when she leans back against the front window of the car. She has to brace the bottom of her worn-out boots against the hood to keep from sliding down. There’s a chill in the air she hasn’t felt in weeks, and it’s a relief, even as she pulls her jacket tighter around her.
They’re far enough from the city still that the stars are numerous, scattered above them.
“Will you tell me your name? Your real name?”
He still hasn’t looked at her. His words are a surprise. She hadn’t thought he cared enough to wonder at it.
For a moment, she debates sticking to her original story. Or giving him some other bullshit to avoid the question. But something about the quiet night makes her more honest than she usually is.
“Elide.”
“Elide,” he repeats. She likes the way his tongue curls around the syllables. Likes it more than she should.
She glances at him, so she sees his eyes slide away from her.
“You should try and sleep, Elide.”
Instead, she looks at him properly. “Tell me about her,” she whispers, “Maeve.”
It’s the first time either of them have acknowledged what both of them are aware of. His mouth twists cruelly. “I doubt it’ll help you sleep any better.”
“Will she truly kill you for deserting?”
He waits for a second, then nods, “She’s done it for less. It won’t be outright, maybe not even straight away, but she’ll make some accident happen.”
“And you’d risk that?” She turns properly to see that, her head cushioned by one hand against the windscreen. “Do you love her?”
He turns to see her fully. His incredulity is palpable. “I just mean – why work for her at all, if you disagree with her?”
That seems to be a better question, and his expression shifts, considering. “Someone has to. I have made myself invaluable in many ways.”
When she looks at him again, his eyes are on her lips. “Couldn’t you be just as… invaluable, elsewhere? Couldn’t you just… leave?”
“I’m sworn to her. It’s not as easy as that.”
She almost rolls her eyes at the stubbornness. He chest hurts a little bit at the certainty that permeates his words. “So you will just blindly follow her forever?”
Elide can’t look at him anymore, her disgust clear. She stares firmly upwards, until he reaches over and takes her chin in one hand, making her look at him. “Do not make the mistake of believing me to be a foolish minion. If I can dissuade her from doing things I disagree with, I do that.”
“And you think that’s enough?” The words aren’t quite as sharp as she had intended.
Suddenly, there’s a vulnerability in his face that she’s never seen. “I thought it was.”
“What do you think now?”
Neither of them seem to have noticed the single breath that is all which remains between them. Instead of answering, one hesitant, large hand comes to rest very gently on her cheeks.
“I would hide you. In Terrasen. If you… if you need somewhere to go. You could have a place there.”
His eyes seem to reflect the starscape above them. They’re somehow both darker and brighter than she’s ever seen them. She feels heat bloom across her cheeks. “You don’t have to answer now. Or ever. You could just show up in a couple of years, and the offer would still stand. But you can do better on the outside than you can with her, Lorcan. There would be a place for you – if you should ever need or wish it.”
Their faces are so close together, it only takes the barest movement for him to press his lips to hers. It’s the gentlest first kiss she’s ever had, completely at odds with the pained expression on his face as he pulls away, just a fraction. “I’m sorry, Elide, I – “
She cuts him off with another kiss, this one harder. Her hands fist in his shirt, and one of his tangles in her messy hair. It isn’t gentle any more, there’s a desperation between them. Two people who have seen things, who have spent so long fighting that it’s impossible to completely let go of that intention. She feels his other hand slide to her waist, pressing her weight fully into him. Her tongue brushes against his lips, and he opens to her, the kiss deepening between them. She hasn’t been this close to anyone in so long. The contact is so precious it’s almost unbearable.
Her head snaps up just as thunder rumbles over the hill. Thunder – or something else. An engine. She extricates herself from where they’ve become tangled on the hood of his car. He hears it the second after she does, and pulls her with him as he rights himself.
They are both soldiers once more, instantly aware of every tiny sound.
Except for one more stolen moment, when he takes her face in his large hands – she’s never noticed quite how large he is, comparatively – and lets his lips fall onto hers once more. It’s desperate, and fierce, and he has to tilt her face upwards to meet his. When he pulls away, his eyes shine. “Let’s go to Terrasen.”
--
The outskirts of the city are deadly familiar to them both. They’re quiet as they pass by boroughs of offices and flats. Langley is close enough to DC that it feels uncomfortable. She’s driving along the boulevard near the main CIA headquarters. There’s a process, for being noticed, gaining access to Terrasen. A tiny, nondescript café with links to the organisation.
Elide parks the car. They look at one another. They’ve been driving for days, they’re both dirty and sweaty. She’s still wearing the same clothes she was when she left LA, and though they’ve been washed now, they’re little better. Elide’s expression is hardened. She’s been warring with herself about this all night. This could be the biggest mistake of her career, exposing Lorcan to all of this. For a moment longer, she considers calling the whole thing off. She could forget this. There’s still time to disappear.
Instead, she makes her mind up undoes her seatbelt, killing the engine of the car, “Get rid of your weapons. They won’t get in, and you look hostile enough without them.”
He only nods, divesting himself of the knives she knows he has hidden on his person. The gun goes too. She does the same, their little armoury on the back seat growing to a fairly comical extent. When they’re both done, Elide allows herself a tiny smile, “Remind me again how we both survived this?”
He allows a small smile in response, his gaze on her steady.
“No matter what happens to me, Elide –“
She shakes her head firmly, “They know me. We’ll be interviewed, but they shouldn’t split us up. You’ll have to tell them things.”
He has expected this, so he nods. Selling out Maeve is something he wouldn’t have considered even a few weeks ago, but he’s been uneasy for much longer than that.
For just a moment, Elide allows the tiniest glimmer of hope to infiltrate her thoughts, “If we can prove what you’ve done – what she’s made you do – we could make congress act on it. She could be impeached.”
His uneasiness is still present, but he lets himself think of that too. They could be rid of her. The Vice President is young, but he’s politically different from Maeve - a moderate, brought on board in the first place to appeal to younger voters. He’s made motions that he isn’t entirely happy with Maeve’s administration from the beginning, and something in Vice President Havilliard is markedly different.
Elide’s hand comes to grip his upper arm. It’s almost painful, but there’s something shining in her face that he can’t look away from, “Are you ready, Salvaterre?”
--
They’re blindfolded when they are picked up, immediately whisked into cool vehicles. Her hands are tied, or Elide would press firmly on Lorcan’s leg as it twitches next to her own. She knows he’s nervous. Something about being blindfolded in the back of an unknown vehicle was always going to be uncomfortable. She’s nervous herself, though the drive to the secret building is familiar. She’s done all of this countless times, but the sensory deprivation of the hood makes her heart rate spike. It’s no different from the ones they use at Morath. In the past she’s counted the turns, kept track of the seconds, although Lorcan beside her is setting her on edge enough that she’s lost count twice already.
What feels like hours later, they’re let out of the car. There are two others who have picked them up, though Elide hadn’t caught their faces before the hood had been up over her head. She focuses on her breathing. She has never liked this part.
They’re led inside. She still can’t see anything, but the air conditioning is strong against the bare skin of her arms. She shivers at the sudden temperature change. It hasn’t occurred to her before, but it becomes clear, all of a sudden, that Lorcan is no longer beside her. She hasn’t said anything yet since they were picked up, but she’s suddenly, irrationally anxious.
“Where is my friend?”
The hood is lifted off. She recoils at the sudden light – that never gets easier. In the sunlight from the wall of windows, Fireheart is radiant, her golden hair looking more like a halo than Elide has ever seen it.
“Aelin.”
It’s almost reverent, the way she says the name. She hasn’t acknowledged it, hasn’t even thought the name, but it rushes out of her now. Aelin’s smile is blinding. Elide’s arms slacken at her sides. Her face drains of colour. She forgets everything, staggers forward the one step that remains between them and the two women throw their arms around one another.
Aelin releases her first, holding her at arm’s length. Elide always forgets how young the other woman is, barely a couple of years older than Elide herself. Aelin’s grip is strong around her upper arms.
“I fucking knew you’d be back, Aneith.” Her code name. It’s never sounded so sweet.
She’s been so fiercely wrapped up in being reunited with her mentor, she’s barely registered that the others are here too. Hawk. Snow Leopard. Wolf. Her eyes fall on all of them, one after the other. The relief she feels is almost painful, taking the breath from her lungs all at once.
It returns to her in a rush when her gaze falls on Lorcan behind her, still cuffed, with the hood over his head.
“Aelin, I know what he appears to be, but he’s my friend.”
The agent known as Fireheart only nods, and from behind her two more huge men appear. They’re the same build as Lorcan, hold themselves the same way. They are, without a doubt, trained the same – made from the same mould. They’re both focussed on Lorcan, whose hood is removed.
“You?” In all their time together, Elide hasn’t been able to imagine Lorcan truly shocked, and it’s a picture. “You two, as well?”
The two large men don’t move, but their faces are broad and welcoming. Aelin answers for them, her broad grin taking up her whole face, “What, Salvaterre, did you think you were the only one we were intent on recruiting?”
Lorcan’s face is dumbfounded, glancing between Elide and Aelin, then up to two other now-former members of Maeve’s Cadre. Elide’s smile is victorious in the moment, her relief at being back amongst her fellow agents palpable. It suddenly strikes him that perhaps she has been two steps ahead of him this whole time.
A final, silver haired figure steps forward, and Elide thinks she might sob, because after all she’s been through – none of it was in vain. Manon Blackbeak looks out of place in this government facility, but she smiles faintly at the group, looking more formal than Elide has ever seen her out of her beaten leather jacket.
Aelin’s broad, bright smile is the only thing anyone can see, “Let’s take this bitch down, shall we?”