1. Reincarnated
reincarnated
Solomon
I feign sleep when I hear the guard return to check on me—and give me a quick kick to the ribs, just to make sure I don’t actually get any sleep. These guys are no joke—they physically put eyes on me once an hour, twenty-four hours a day. The only chance at a getaway is in that hour between checks. And even then, it's gonna get hairy.
I can't fucking believe Scarlett is here. How is she here? Seriously—how in the shitting blue fuck does she even know I'm still alive, much less my current predicament? How did she find me way the fuck out here in the middle of the Brazilian jungle?
I don't know, but I plan to find out. I've been tracking the hours—there's a gap between the hinge and the door that gives me a good look at the sky, and I can watch the sun arc and the moon rise. Plus, the guards come every hour. When the sun goes down, I watch the moon rise and vanish beyond the doorway—it's midsummer, and the sun goes down around nine, which leaves three hours till midnight.
The guard unlatches the door; it creaks open; a brief silent pause follows; the door creaks closed and is re-latched.
No kick this time.
Two hours.
I doze off, starting awake when a boot hits the wooden porch slats. Another check. This time, I do get a boot to the ribs, rolling me over and driving an unfeigned groan of agony from my cracked and bleeding lips.
One hour.
Doze off again, knowing I'll need all the energy I can get for what's to come.
Last check.
I wait till his footsteps have receded before rising to my feet. I do some squats, bend and touch my toes, arch backward to crack the kinks out of my stiff spine, and swing my arms around.
I grasp the hard tip of the four-inch-long leatherworking needle I hid in the seam of my jeans, work it free, and then wait, listening. Even at night, it's sweltering and humid, and sweat slides down my back and burns in my eyes. There's desultory chatter and a quiet burst of laughter, but nothing too close.
Time to go.
I use the needle to lift the hook out of the eye and then slowly ease the door open; they depend on regular checks to keep me in, and the remoteness of the unforgiving jungle to kill me if I did escape.
Joke's on these fuckers—I can survive anywhere, and that's without Scarla out there. Me and Scarla, together again? Shit, son, it's over.
My heart pounds just thinking about her. I don't know how she's here, but god damn am I grateful. She was raised in a concrete jungle somewhere in Central America until she was eighteen, at which point she walked, by herself, from Colombia to Texas, illegally crossed the border, and somehow managed to get herself recruited by the CIA. I still have no fucking clue how she went from illegal immigrant to CIA black ops badass. The woman's as closed off as a walnut and twice as hard to crack. I spent years working with, living with, and fucking that woman, and I still know very, very little about her other than she's tough as nails, cold as ice, hard as concrete, and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
I listen again. There's a flurry of shouts, a gunshot, and then silence. More shouting.
Now.
I pitch black out, only the light of the moon and the stars providing illumination. I can make out the jungle twenty feet away. Scarla's out there—I can feel her, sense her, a viper coiled under a leaf, waiting to strike.
Slip off the side of the porch rather than the creaky-as-shit stairs. Pause, listen, look. Nothing. Creep forward slowly and silently, scanning my surroundings.
I'm almost to the edge when a guard emerges from a path junction, pauses to light a cigarette, and glances around idly. I freeze, holding my breath.
He frowns, wedging the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and gripping his rifle as he saunters this way. He sees something, just isn't sure what.
I inch backward toward the coverage of the jungle, hoping he'll follow rather than sound the alarm. He keeps coming, barrel angled down and held with one hand, the other snagging his smoke to tap ash off the cherry.
So far, so good.
I crouch; I hear a rustle nearby—Scarla, alerting me to her proximity. "Got it," I hiss. "Hold your position."
The rustle happens again, twice—an affirmative.
He's fifteen feet away.
Ten.
Five.
He tosses his cigarette to the dirt and crushes it with his foot without breaking pace, tucking his rifle against his shoulder. Slows to a crouched shuffle, peering in my direction.
"Quem está aí?”
My muscles tense, ready. Three feet. I see the moment he realizes what he's looking at, but by then it's too late. I spring, one hand shooting toward his throat, the webbing between forefinger and thumb smashing into his Adam's Apple, silencing his cry before it leaves his lips. He gurgles, dropping his rifle to hang from the strap at his hip. I step behind him, wrap an arm around his head and choke him to unconsciousness, hopefully short of killing him. Which, by the way, is a fuck of a lot harder than it looks in the movies. Don’t try this at home, folks.
He goes limp and I let him drop, strip his rifle and hang it from my shoulder, rifle through his pockets for his shit—a soft pack of Colombian smokes, a cheap plastic lighter, two spare mags, a small folding knife, and a packet of gum. His shoes are several sizes too small, so I cut his shirt off of him and take it deeper into the jungle with me, trusting Scarla to follow and find me.
Shit—I left the door to my erstwhile prison open; I’d meant to close it.
Once I'm a hundred yards into the jungle, I sit on a downed tree, cut the shirt into strips, and wrap them around my feet. Not exactly a nice new pair of Danners, but it'll have to do.
"Sol?" Her voice is barely a whisper behind me.
I go still, taken back years just by the whisper. I hear her pad toward me and stop just behind me. I feel her. Smell her—she's been out here a while.
"Scarlett." I pitch my voice to a murmur.
She's silent for a moment, and still. "I got your email. Took a chance it was really you, despite…" she trails off.
Climbs over the tree trunk and sits beside me. I have to make myself look at her. Fuck, she's more beautiful than ever. Thick, raven-black hair pulled through the back of a jungle-print camo ballcap. Torn, wet, filthy camo fatigues, the sleeves of the top long-since ripped off, as per her usual style, to reveal hard, densely muscled arms. Narrow, heart-shaped face, big deep black eyes. A long, wicked, keloid scar runs from her hairline down to her jawline, tugging down the corners of her eye and mouth, making her scary and intimidating to most. To those who know her, scary and intimidating is the nice version; you don't want to be on the wrong end of the not-nice version of her.
Neither of us speaks for a few minutes—we can go hours without speaking to each other. It's part of what makes us so good together.
"What email?" I ask, finally.
She swivels her head in that robotic way of hers to look at me. Frowns. "Encrypted to fuck and back, with a set of coordinates and the date three and a half days ago."
"What made you think it was from me? Was it signed?"
Her glare is pissed off, but then, Scarla is usually pissed off. "It came to my Scarlamon email."
"Oh."
Years and years ago, when we first started knocking boots, we created secret, private emails for just the two of us. Heavily encrypted, pinged halfway around the world a dozen times to a bunch of bogus IP addresses, they're email addresses literally only the two of us know about. We’d use them to communicate when we were on assignment away from each other. We'd send each other nudes, jokes, email versions of sexting, updates, whatever.
And then, I died.
When I was resurrected, I was far from everyone and everything I knew, and the whole world—including the US government, my team, my CIA handler, and Scarla—thought I was dead. I wasn’t sure why I wasn't.
The only one I cared about was Scarlett. But Inez told me in no uncertain terms that if I contacted her in any way, it would get her killed and reveal that I wasn't dead. Which would be bad. Very, very bad.
So, I stayed silent. It was agony. I hated myself for it—still do.
I checked that email daily for years.
In the years since I received one single email from her. "I miss you, Sol." Those four words, nothing else.
I never sent her an email.
Her email address was Scarlamon, mine was Solarett. Cheesy and stupid, but it was for us and no one else.
"Who did you tell about the emails?" she asks after a minute.
"Fuck you. No one."
She glares at me. "Then how did I get it?"
I sigh. "Probably either Inez or my boss. The Boss has deep pockets and a lot of resources."
"Who's your boss?" she asks.
"That's a conversation for later. We gotta put klicks between us and these tangos." I eject the magazine from the rifle and check the load—full. "Come on."
"Where are we going? We’re in the middle of the goddamn jungle, Sol." She stepped in front of me. Stares hard into my eyes.
"Fuck if I know, just not here."
She holds my gaze as only she can, speaking volumes without a word out loud. "You fucking died , Solomon."
"I know."
No emotion, visibly or in her voice. Only in her eyes. "I mourned you."
"I know."
"The fuck you do, Solomon Alexander Cabot." She steps close, so close I can smell her body odor, which doesn't bother me; we've spent more time like this, dirty, smelly, hurting, and up Shit Creek without a boat, much less a paddle, than we have showered and clean and in civilization.
I lift a hand to her face, stopping short of trailing my index fingertip down the line of her scar the way I used to. "I know, Scarlett Luisa Gutierrez. I mourned you, too."
"I didn't die."
"You may as well have."
She snorts, shakes her head, and twists her AK-47 around behind her back, pushing past me, heading south. "You owe me a story," she says. "The truth, for once in your slippery life."
"You'll get it." I catch up to her, grab her hand and pull her around to a stop.
She breaks my hold and knocks my hand away in a swift, painful move. "Don't fucking touch me, Sol." In a flash, she has a knife out. "You don't get to fucking touch me."
"Scar, hold on a second." I don't touch her because I know better; if she has a knife out, she'll use it, no matter who you are.
She glares at me. "What?"
"Thank you for coming."
For a split second, her face softens, then goes back to hard as stone. "I didn't have a choice."
"Of course you did."
She shakes her head. "No, I did not." She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them to look at me. "It was you."
There's too much to say and the words to say any of it don't exist in this moment. Just seeing her in the flesh is overwhelming. "Fuck, Scar. You look good."
She smirks. "You don't. You look like moldy shit."
I laugh "Well, I've spent the last few weeks being starved, dehydrated, beaten to shit, locked in hot boxes, and kicked around. I'm not exactly in peak shape."
"You gonna make it, WindWalker?"
I shake my head at the old nickname. "Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time."
I'm rewarded with a lip twitch. "Still with the Star Wars quotes, huh?" she says.
“Always.”
The faint sound of shouts filters to us through the jungle.
"And that's our cue," I say.
The next few hours are grueling. Both of us are well-trained and experienced in evasion tactics, and we put every trick we have to the test. Voices echo all around us, but it's impossible to tell if they're just grid-searching or if they have an idea where we are.
Also, hiking through the jungle at night is hard.
Furthermore, despite my bravado to Scarla, I'm not in the best shape. I mean, I have been worse. As in, clinically dead. But this is pretty bad. My ribs scream like a motherfucker with every move I make. My feet are killing me. I haven't eaten in days. I'm damn near the edge of very problematic dehydration.
Finally, I reach a point when I know I need to rest. My feet slow against my will and eventually refuse to carry me a step further despite my usually iron and indomitable will.
I'm dizzy.
Nauseated.
Everything hurts.
"Scar." My voice is raspy and scratchy. "Need a minute."
She pauses and looks back at me, frowning. In the ten years I've known her, I have never once "needed a minute,” even when shot.
"You good, Sol?"
"Uh, yeah. I just…need a minute."
She comes back toward me, where I'm leaning against a tree trunk. "You really do look like warmed-over death."
"I've felt better, if I'm honest."
This makes her blink in surprise. "Sol, you're worrying me."
My legs give out, and I land on my knees and then topple backward. Fuck. Not good. Not good at all.
"Sol!" She drops to her knees and pulls my head onto her lap. "You gotta talk to me. I can't help you if I don't know what you need. And don't say you just need a minute."
"I may have left out the torture."
"Fuck me." She shifts to her butt, putting her back to the tree I was using for support. "Talk to me, Sol."
"You know, the usual. Needles under fingernails, which they then heated up. A lot of beatings. The beatings were fine; I can take a beating. The unholy acupuncture wasn't my favorite."
"The what?"
"I called it unholy acupuncture. They tied me face down on a table, stuck a bunch of needles all over my back, and heated them up. Nice and red hot. Felt super awesome."
"What were they after?" she asks, grabbing my hand and examining my fingernails.
"No clue. They didn't ask any questions. They did video the torture sessions."
"So it was just for the hell of it?"
"Don't think so. I think I'm bait." I groan as a wave of nausea passes through me. "I need water, Scar."
Just then, thunder rolls and cold droplets sprinkle on us, and then the sprinkle turns into a torrential downpour.
She shifts my head off of her lap. “I’ll be right back."
My time sense is warped, so I have no idea how long she’s gone. She returns with a makeshift bucket woven out of fat, thick, glossy leaves. The rain is so heavy you can barely see ten feet in front of you. She finds a spot where the rain runs off a wide leaf in a steady stream, catching it in the bucket. Which, obviously, isn't exactly watertight, but she is able to collect enough that she can bring it to me. I lever myself on an elbow and she helps me sip. She takes a few sips for herself, and then collects more. Feeds me some, and herself.
Eventually, I feel a good bit refreshed. Enough to not be nauseated anymore, at least. It's something.
"I haven't heard anyone in a while," she says. "I think you should try to rest a minute."
"Mmm. Yeah. They kept me awake for a while, too."
"How long is a while?"
"Few days."
"Sol."
"Mmmm?"
"On a scale of one to ten, ten being the best day of your life, one being the day you died, how would you say you feel? Truthfully."
"One point five."
"Fuck."
"How about you?"
She snorts. "I'm fine. I could eat something, but I'm good." She tosses the bucket aside and finds a seat next to me, leaning against the same tree, shoulder to shoulder. "Just worried about getting you out of here in one piece."
"I'll make it, babe. You know I will. Quit ain't in my lexicon."
"Don’t call me babe."
"I dunno why you're so mad at me. I fuckin' died, Scarlett."
"Yeah, but not all the way."
"Yes, all the way. I was dead. Clinically fucking dead for several minutes."
“You're alive now, though. You've been alive for three fucking years , Sol. You could've contacted me."
I sigh, my eyes heavy. "Scarla, I left the club one time since I died. Once. That was three weeks ago. My mother murdered my father and then killed herself. My brothers and I went to the funeral. Six hours after the funeral, I was driving my car south on Ninety-Three and got boxed in by three semis. Bunch of dudes in elite tactical gear jumped out, surrounded my car, and hauled me out. I had no fucking chance to even pull my piece. They zip-tied my hands to my ankles behind my back, gagged me, blindfolded me, and kicked the living hell out of me. It was a planned grab by very serious and very well-trained professionals." I let my eyes close. "If I had contacted you, there was a very high probability you'd be dead. Or, at best, used as bait to get to me by whoever the fuck it is that hates me so much."
"Which is a long list."
"Very long. Most of the people I've pissed off the worst are South American, though, so this tracks for me, I just don't know who it is that had me."
"Extremist off-shoot of the F-A-R-C, as far as I could tell."
"Cool, cool."
She's processing what I've told her—I'm familiar with the flavors of her silences, and this one is a thinking silence. "What club?"
"Long story."
"I've got time."
"Scar, babe, I told you—I'll tell you everything. I promise."
"And I told you, don't call me babe."
"Okay, sweetheart."
"Sol." It's a growled warning, the kind that is usually followed by someone missing body parts.
I chuckle. "Fucking with you. Relax."
"Fuck you. You relax."
"Trying. Someone keeps asking me questions."
She lets out a sound that's equal parts sigh and snarl. "Fine. Come here, you big baby."
She grabs a handful of my hair and hauls me, not exactly gently, onto her lap. "Shut the fuck up and sleep."
Despite her rough treatment and sharp words, her fingers trail absently through my hair.
The way she used to, back in the day. We'd fuck like pornstars, and I'd always fall asleep with my head in her lap, just like this. She'd play with my hair. Nothing has ever soothed me like Scarlett's fingers in my hair.
I don't dare move, barely breathe, for fear of making her aware of what she's doing.
I know she's angry—because she's hurt.
She has reason to be angry and hurt.
Eventually, I let myself drift off to sleep, knowing Scarla will keep watch.