THIRTY-TWO #2
Maine, who painted my nails black because my hands wouldn’t stop shaking in the days before he left, back when he still believed small things could keep me together.
Maine, who taught me how to climb through bathroom windows because he said the front doors were for people with too much faith in humanity.
Maine, whose voice still lives in every single rule that keeps me hidden.
Hair covered.
Scent dead.
Keep moving.
Maine, who left.
Maine, who didn’t come back.
Maine, who became a wound so old I started mistaking it for bone.
My laugh comes out all kinds of wrong. Small, flat, and ugly. Then I shake my head and mutter, “No.”
Mercer doesn’t talk, and that makes him a very smart man.
“No,” I say, louder this time. “That’s not possible.”
Fletcher’s eyes flick to me, but not with pity. It’s understanding with a bruise lined under it.
Ewan whispers, “Kota.”
I turn on him so fast that he actually stops breathing for a whole second. “Don’t.”
He lifts both hands, one palm open while the other hovers close to the headphones. “Wasn’t going to.”
Liar. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t know fucking anything.
“That could be anyone,” I say.
Mercer’s voice is careful when he agrees, “It could.”
“Loads of people have names,” I push, my mind spinning too fast.
“Yes.”
“Loads of people knew my father.”
“Not many knew enough to use that name here,” Mercer says, and my teeth clack shut.
He looks down at the paper, and I hate that he looks sorry before he reads.
“Male. Mid-twenties at med check. Pale blond hair. Gray eyes. Scar through left eyebrow. Proper experience with field medicine, improvised chemical filtration, and scent suppression compounds.”
My lungs hurt. Like, actually hurt.
No.
Maine had gray eyes like rain clouds, a matching set to Dad’s.
He had the same ashy blond hair as mine and Dad’s, hair that never stayed tidy.
That scar through his eyebrow came from the time when we tried to teach me how to swing a bat in the garage and I missed the ball, hit the shelf, and brought half of Dad’s toolbox down onto his face.
The idiot laughed while bleeding and called it character development.
No.
No, memory is a filthy liar.
Grief is worse.
The world could be filled with pale blond-haired men with scars. Probably. Statistically speaking.
I grip the table harder as I rasp, “What else?”
Mercer hesitates, and that’s bad choice number two.
“What else?” I snap.
Valeria shifts near the door. “Kota—”
I look at her and she stops. Beautiful. It means we’re all becoming trainable. Fucking love that for us all.
Mercer turns the page. “He’s listed as a field consultant attached to cure-response work. Primarily outside sample recovery, unstable marker tracking, and counter-Vector supply routes.”
Cure response.
Marker tracking.
Counter-Vector.
Maine is alive.
Maine is dead.
Maine is alive.
Maine is something else.
All three possibilities are clawing relentlessly through me all at once.
“Where?” I ask.
Hale finally chimes in, telling me, “That information is restricted.”
And would you look at that. That’s bad choice number three.
The room temperature changes. Or maybe it’s just me. My scent splits loose, wild honey and rain flashing sharp through disinfectant. Not soft and certainly not sweet. It’s storm and hive and every bitten-down scream I’ve swallowed for the past six years.
A guard inhales and Xeon moves. Not fast or threatening, just closer, frost and steel slipping between me and the room’s sudden attention. Clean. Sharp. A blade held flat rather than pointed.
Fletcher steps toward the door, not blocking my exit but claiming the path I’ve already mapped out in my head.
Kaito remains between me and the rifle. Ewan points at the headphones around my neck again, but this time his other hand hovers near his own empty belt like he momentarily forgets they took his weapons and his body hasn’t fully accepted that insult.
Hale notices all of it.
Good.
He should.
“You don’t want to keep that information from me,” I say, my voice quiet and filled with a deadly warning. I like it better that way, because quiet means the knives are awake and freshly sharpened.
Hale’s stare hardens. “I have an entire compound to protect.”
“And I have one person.”
The words land like bone hitting metal.
One person.
Not brother, not family, not the sole reason I survived long enough to become the person I am today.
The Alphas around me grow still, but not because they didn’t know Maine mattered. But maybe because now they might understand they were looking at the wrong part of the wounds I’ve failed to hide from them.
Maine isn’t a memory. He’s the foundation. He’s everything I built after him that sits all crooked and wonky because the ground disappeared and never returned.
To his credit, Mercer tries, “Commander.”
“No,” Hale snaps. “Field-team locations remain classified. If Vector has tracking equipment, if this marker is active, if we’re right about who this is, then sending them running blind puts every external unit at risk.”
If we’re right about who this is.
I smile under the bandana and it feels horrible on my face. “Who do you think I am?”
No one answers.
Pussies. Fucking cowards. Scientists, soldiers, and leaders. All of them love naming things until that very thing asks back.
Mercer closes the folder halfway, but his hand remains on the page.
“I think you’re Conrad’s child,” he eventually says. “I think your scent response matches unstable marker-positive profiles. I think your father hid more than just research. And I think Maine O’Reilly might have been trying to continue work here no one fully understands.”
“Maine hated labs.”
Mercer’s eyes flick up, because it’s there. A piece of him connected to another piece of me.
“He preferred fieldwork,” he answers softly.
My throat closes, because of course he did. Of course that fucking idiot did. Only Maine could survive the apocalypse and still find a way to get close enough to danger just to personally insult it.
I step back from the table and my knee protests. I ignore it.
“You said might have been,” I say instead, words coming out slowly. Mercer’s face stills, and everything in me turns colder. “Why past tense?”
Valeria looks away, but Hale doesn’t.
Mercer says quietly, “His team went dark twelve days ago.”
The floor disappears from under me. Not literally, though I think I would have preferred it if it had. I stay standing because my body has always been really annoyingly loyal in the face of emergencies. But something underneath me falls away.
Twelve days.
Maine survived six years and went dark twelve days ago. Twelve days while I was eating cold beans off a knife. Twelve days while I was pretending the world didn’t have any more ways it could take anything else from me. Twelve days while he was alive enough to go missing again.
A sound scrapes out of me. Not a sob. Not even close, because sobs belong to people who believe softness has somewhere to land. This is something uglier, something coated in a thick layer of rust and grime.
Ewan says, “Kota.”
I don’t look at him. I know if I look at any one of them, I’ll break in a direction I can’t control. So I look at Mercer instead and ask, “Where?”
Hale cuts in sharply. “No.”
I move for the folder, and two guards shift.
Kaito’s growl fills the room then, a low sound. It’s not loud, not dramatic. It’s worse. It’s controlled and lethal. A warning from something patient enough to wait exactly one second before resorting to violence.
Hale’s hand drops to his sidearm but Fletcher speaks before anyone dies. “You put hands on her, and this room gets real small, real fast.”
The second the words leave his mouth, the room notices.
Her.
My blood goes cold, my body turning to stone. Fletcher does, too, but only for a fraction of a second. Then he moves, slow and deliberate, as if he meant the file now tucked under my hand. Like that’s what he meant all along.
“Touch the file,” he says, voice flat, “and I’ll start hurting people.”
It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not clean, but it’s enough of a shove in the other direction that Hale’s eyes flick down to the folder instead of my face.
Valeria then snaps, “Everyone stop moving.”
It’s surprisingly sensible, but I don’t stop. I leave two fingers on the folder and drag it toward me, and Mercer lets me.
Hale barks, “Mercer.”
Mercer’s eyes remain on mine as he says, “You wanted answers. This is how we get one.”
I flip the page and the words blur. I force them still, reading over them with an urgency I can feel all the way down to my bones.
FIELD UNIT M-7
Last check-in: twelve days prior.
Route: East corridor/Red Line tunnels/Blackwater relay.
Objective: recover dormant NOVAC stabilizer components and locate surviving O’Reilly private notes.
Team Lead: M. O’Reilly.
My heart literally tries to exit my body through my throat, choking me with emotion I don’t want to feel.
M. O’Reilly.
It’s not proof, yet it’s proof enough. Enough to ruin me.
Under the name is a grainy printed photo clipped to the paper. The quality is shitty. Black and white. A man half-turned away from the camera, face partially obscured by a hood and scarf.
Pale hair.
Sharp jaw.
Scar through the left eyebrow.
Older. Thinner. Alive.
My hand touches the photo before I can stop it, and the paper wrinkles under my fingertips.
Maine.
The roof disappears all over again.
Suddenly, I’m twelve years old and the shithead is stealing the last cookie from the plate, holding it over my head like his height gives him the moral victory.
I’m sixteen and he’s painting my nails black on the bathroom floor while Mom cries in the bedroom and Dad doesn’t come back home until dawn.
I’m twenty-two and I’ve carried his hat through six years of dead streets because grief needed a shape and I chose fabric over bones.
I’m here, and he’s there. Somewhere. Maybe.
Maybe is the cruelest word ever to be written in the dictionary.