12 - Olive
S lowly, the world comes back to me. My throat is tight and scratchy, my eyes feel crusted over, and my head is pounding. For a moment, I just let the fuzzy world between sleep and reality hang, unwilling to wake.
But then a panic hits me—what day is it? Am I late for something?
I force my eyes open, unable to make sense of what I’m looking at. I’m on the couch.
Noooo. I’m bent over the back of the couch.
“Shit,” I mumble, trying to straighten up. But my back is aching so bad from being in this position, the most I can manage to do is slump to the floor.
This is where I wait as my head slowly clears and the blurry vision sharpens into clarity. My memory comes back with the vision.
“Brose?” My voice is croaky because my throat is so dry. “What happened?”
What did happen? What were we doing?
Then I remember, he had me bent over the couch and we were?—
My reflexes come back in an instant. Years of muscle memory take over and I force myself up, holding on to the couch as I stand.
I’m alone.
“Brose?” I call out again. And I manage to walk the length of the couch so I can get a peek into our little kitchen. I already know he’s not here. He’s gone.
I push some messy hair out of my eyes, still looking around as I try to make sense of things. “What the fuck happened?”
Maybe I passed out? I mean, yes. Of course. Clearly, I passed out. And just as I’m thinking this I look over at the chair where Brose was sitting and spy the bottle of champagne. On the little table next to the chair are two glasses. One full, one empty.
I drank it.
He didn’t.
The sudden realization that he drugged me is so unsettling, a chill runs down my spine.
He drugged me.
I squint. He drugged me? Why would he do that?
But then I can hear him whispering in my ear right as I was closing my eyes. I’m leaving now, Olive. You can’t come. Today was your last chance. We’re over.
I look around, then stumble over to the closet. I pull the door open and start shaking my head. “No. No, this isn’t happening.” There are clothes in there, but they are all mine. Just mine.
Desperate, I make my way over to the dresser and pull open the top drawer. His drawer. Empty. I pull open mine and find it filled with underwear.
He’s gone.
You failed. I’m very, very sorry, Olive, but you failed.
The memory of these words hits me like a gut punch.
But I refuse to believe them. It can’t be real. It has to be… something else. A test, maybe. Yes. It’s a test, that’s all. He was getting jealous of Shep. He’s trying to teach me a lesson, that’s all.
I straighten my skirt, briefly consider changing my clothes, but decide against it. Maybe he’s downstairs. From the angle of the slanting sun shining through our floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows, I figure it’s morning.
That’s it. It’s just morning and he let me sleep in.
You know that’s not what’s happening here, Olive. You know ? —
But I don’t know. Not really.
So I don’t change, I just rush over to the door, pull it open, and start running down the hallway towards the stairs. I don’t pass anyone, and that’s the first clue, but I keep going anyway. All the way down to the main level where there is… no one.
It’s empty. Not just of people, though it is, it’s empty of everything .
It’s just a big room with no tables, no chairs, no coffee bar.
And no Brose.
What the hell is happening right now?
You know what’s happening, Olive.
You failed. I’m very, very sorry, Olive, but you failed.
They’ve erased this residence.
Why?
You failed.
They can’t just… leave me here. They would never evacuate everyone, pull up roots so completely, and just leave me here .
Wouldn’t they, though ?
I run back up the stairs, enter our room, and start searching for my phone. I find my purse on the floor near the couch and my phone inside it.
But when I try to wake it up, the screen refuses to come to life.
You failed .
I slump down into the couch cushions, feeling confused and lost.
He left me.
I failed and he left me.
No, he did a lot more than that. He drugged me, had the place swept clean of all evidence that anyone but me ever lived here, and then he left me.
Why?
Come on, Olive. You know why. Because someone is coming to clean you up. Just like they cleaned the rest of the place. They just haven’t gotten here yet.
The moment these thoughts manifest, I know it’s true. My training kicks in. I go to the closet, toe off my shoes, and slide my skirt and tights down my legs. Then I pull on a pair of jeans. I don’t change my shirt. I don’t have time. I simply slide my feet into a pair of boots, pull on a coat, and leave.
I skip down the stairs in a heightened state of anxiety, my heart thumping inside my chest. When I get to the empty lobby, I start heading for the door that leads outside.
But then I pause and look over my shoulder towards the stairs that go down.
Should I take the train?
Is it even there?
I laugh a little. Because it’s a ridiculous notion. Of course the train is there. Well, maybe not an actual train, but the tunnel is still there.
As soon as I think these words, I know it’s a lie.
I know there’s no train down there.
I force my feet to start moving towards the door that leads outside, but I only get a few steps before I turn around and start running for the stairs that go down.
The staircase is wide. Not like stairs that lead to a basement, but actually like stairs that lead to a subway. But I stop at the top of them, not bothering to go any further.
Because the entrance to the tunnel has been bricked up.
Bricked. Up.
This is when everything catches up to me. The drugging, the emptiness, Brose.
I have been abandoned.
I turn back to the door and walk outside. This is the front of the estate, but it’s nothing how I remember it being. The main house in my memory was always grand and well-kept.
This place looks like no one has lived here in years.
I scan the grounds, noting the dying lawn, the untrimmed hedges and… the absence of the other houses.
What the fuck?
Sealing up a train tunnel is one thing. It’s an improbable thing, but it’s certainly not impossible.
Removing entire houses on this estate while I was passed out is another thing altogether. It doesn’t make sense. I must be in the wrong place. I must be… dreaming, or hallucinating, or something.
The sound of a helicopter approaching pulls me out of my stupor and I make a run for the nearby woods. I duck under the heavy canopy of limbs just as the helicopter flies over. It doesn’t land. It’s not after me. It’s some billionaire who lives nearby. Or a senator, maybe.
As the thumping of the rotors fade, all I hear are birds and my own heartbeat pounding in my head. Get a hold of yourself, Olive. You’re a highly trained CORE operative. Act like it !
I shake my head, take a deep breath and hold it, then let it out and focus.
Whatever’s happening here doesn’t matter. What matters is my reaction to it.
I turn my back on the estate and walk further into the woods.
This is the outskirts of Leesburg, Virginia, so while it feels remote and there are certainly lots of farms and open land here, it’s all relative to the small city just over the hills and the Potomac, which separates this tranquil landscape from the nearby hustle and bustle of Maryland, and, by extension, Washington DC. Which is where I need to go.
But first, I need to pick up my go-bag.
It takes me about twenty minutes to find the marker where I buried the bag two years ago when Brose and I were assigned to the estate. It wasn’t part of protocol, but Brose insisted that I do this. “You never know, Olive. You just never know when you’re gonna need a bag.”
Which is true. It was a lesson drilled into all of us in my early academy days.
Rule number one—know your exits. Which feels a lot like face the door whenever you take a table in a restaurant, which it is. But it applies to everything. If you enter a stairwell, you had better know how to get out. If you get in a car, you better be ready to throw that door open on the freeway and roll out. And if you’re told to live in a country estate as part of an elite group of CORE operative, you better have a go-bag buried in the woods.
And I do.
I haven’t thought about it in years—that’s why it takes me so long to locate it—but the gray backpack filled with survival gear, should my shit ever hit the fan, is here. It’s packed tight too. I was always losing points in the academy for over packing my bag, but it’s better to have too much of what you need than too little.
I don’t bother to check the contents, just shoulder it on and keep going, heading east through the woods towards the nearby public rec center. When I get to the edge of the woods, I pause to scope out the parking lot. It’s filled with cars. Commuters who take the bus over to the Ashburn Metrorail, then on to Union Station in DC. Which is exactly what I’m gonna do too.
Brose, despite being a company man to the core, was a Plan B, C, and D kind of guy. We’ve got pre-established local check-in points in DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Philly, just in case we were ever separated while on a job.
Before leaving the woods I take the pack off, set it on the ground, and bend down to open the front zip compartment so I can find my SmarTrip card. Pulling it out, I realize this is real. I’m on the run .
It’s surreal and I don’t understand how I got here. It doesn’t make sense how one day I can be living on a CORE estate with access to a clandestine high-speed train tunnel system, and the next day I’m staring down at a prepaid bus pass, ready to take public transportation hauling a twenty-five pound go-bag on my back.
From now on, Olive, you won’t be thinking. You’ll be acting .
These were the first instructions Brose ever gave me. I was eighteen, he was twenty-five, and boy, was I ever enamored with him. Right from day one.
If you think , he’d said, you’ll make mistakes . And if you make mistakes, we’ll fail. I don’t fail, not at anything, so you won’t either . Everything you do from here on out needs to be instinct .
He thinks for me, I act for him. That’s where it came from. That very first conversation.
I blow out a breath as I stand back up and hike the pack onto my back. “All right, Brose. I don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but instincts it is.”
Then I head out of the woods and down the grassy embankment and join the crowd of commuters waiting to get on the bus.
I sit next to a professional woman on the bus who talks on her phone the entire twenty-five-minute ride to the train station. I look out the window, watching the world pass.
In Ashburn, I catch the Silver Line to Union Station. The slow, methodical motion of the train wants to lure me into sleep for the ride in, but I fight the sleep. I force myself to stay awake and on high alert, making up stories in my head about nearby passengers to keep me sharp.
Brose taught me this little trick. Sleep is your enemy, Olive. If you’re ever on the run, and you get tired, you just look at everyone around you and tell yourself they’re a spy. They’re here to get you. They’re here to kill you. Trust me, you won’t be able to fall asleep. And this little trick will probably save your life .
So that’s what I do. I target everyone in my vicinity and make up a backstory. This lady here, she’s an assassin. That guy over there, that’s her handler. The old man reading the paper three seats up is a spy.
It sets up a purposeful kind of paranoia.
But Brose was right. I do not fall asleep. In fact, I’m more alert than ever, almost buying into my fake backstories about my fellow commuters, when the train pulls into Union Station.
I wait for them all to get off first, watching them as they continue on with their day. Because wouldn’t that just be my luck? That my fantasies about them turn out to be true and one of them takes me out in an alley outside?
But they don’t. No one follows me as I leave the station and make my way over to a landmark coffee shop on 2 nd Street. It’s nine-forty am now, so while the place is busy, it’s not crowded.
My eyes are sweeping over tables the moment I step inside, desperately looking for Brose. But he’s not here.
I get a table anyway. It doesn’t mean anything. He has no idea when I’ll arrive. So I’m gonna wait.
I order coffee, consider breakfast but decide against it—my stomach is not in the mood—and wait.
At ten-thirty I can tell that the waitress is frustrated with me, but I ignore her. Instead, I open my go-bag and start searching through the front compartment for the burner phone I know is here. I don’t want to use it because the moment I do, I have to throw it out and I only have two in total. But I need to know what’s going on. I could be waiting around DC all day. Days, even.
I grab the SIM card, shove the phone charger into the battery pack that, even after two years, has two faint red bars of charge left in it, and slip the card in. Then I key in the number and wait.
It rings once, making my hopes soar, but then I get the three shrill special information tones followed by, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service?—”
I end the call, blowing out a long breath.
Because that was my worst fear. I was hoping that this was some sort of test, maybe? While this particular scenario never came up exactly like this during my years of training with Brose, we certainly prepared for it.
But it’s not a test. It’s real. I’ve been abandoned. He’s not going to meet me here, everyone around me probably is a spy, and I’ve got nothing but a two-year-old go-bag to my name. Which is far better than having no go-bag, but still. My life consists of the clothes I’m wearing and survival gear.
What do I do? Call my parents? I don’t even have their numbers. I haven’t talked to them in twelve years. The first thing CORE did was take me away. I didn’t belong to them, anyway. They’re not my real parents. And at this point in my life, those first years I spent with them feel almost like they never happened.
I don’t have a family anymore. Brose was my family.
So I have nowhere to go.
I have nowhere to run to .
But as these words roll around in my head, I realize they’re not actually true.
I know where one member of my family is. I know where Collin is. He’s home, in Disciple, West Virginia.
I scoff out loud, shaking my head. I can’t run to him .
Could I?
Before I change my mind—because this is the first bit of hope I’ve felt all morning—I do a search on my phone and pull up the train schedule for Union Station. I scan the routes and then I smile.
The Cardinal Line will drop me off in Charleston. But my hope dies when I realize that it only runs on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and this is Monday.
Well… wait. Is it Monday?
I check the date and gasp. Not just because of my luck, but because I lost two days. It’s not Monday, it’s Wednesday . I was up in our room for two days.
This both frightens me and makes me feel slightly saner, because two days would be enough time to clear things out of the estate. They could even brick up a tunnel in two days. I can’t really explain the missing houses, but logic points to me just… misinterpreting that. Mirrors, maybe? Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, perhaps? I mean, it’s all just tech. And the tech inside CORE is quite advanced these days. Decades ahead of what the general public knows about.
But why would they want to make me think I’m crazy? (Because that’s what I’m starting to think.)
Why would they abandon you, Olive ?
Because I fucked up.
Well, not technically.
But I was about to.
I was, too. Even I know this. I was latching on to Shep for some reason. I can’t explain it. I was going to tell him things I shouldn’t. I was going to get involved with him.
I was going to sleep with him.
Not as an assignment, either.
I… like him.
And Brose saw it. He saw everything. That’s why he walked away, both times. He knew. He knew and he reported me to CORE. So he drugged me with that champagne left me in the room. And while I was out, CORE sent in a clean-up team.
It makes perfect sense now.
I look back down at the train schedule on my phone, then notice that I have time. The Cardinal Line won’t depart Union Station until eleven thirty-one and it’s only ten forty-five.
It’s doable.
I can run to Collin.
And, by extension, Shep.
So that’s what I do.
I run to Shep.
The very man who got me here in the first place.