Liam #2
"I'm not saying she is one. I'm saying you need to be accounting for the possibility.
" She keeps her voice low and even. "She came to your warehouse voluntarily.
She handed you the receiver. She's here in your safehouse telling you she wants to help.
All of that is consistent with someone who has genuinely shifted her position.
" She meets my eyes. "It's also consistent with someone who's been tasked with getting as close to you as possible so that when the moment comes, she's already inside. "
I hold her gaze. "I know."
"Say it like you're keeping it in the front of your mind rather than the back."
"Mackenzie—"
"Say it."
"I know," I say, with the specific weight she's asking for. "I know she might be doing exactly what she looks like she's doing for reasons that aren't what she's told me they are. I'm not discounting it."
She nods. "Good." She looks toward the bedroom, where Nadia has returned after lunch. "She likes you."
"That's not—"
"I'm not saying it as a concern. I'm saying it as information. Because the fact that it's real doesn't make it safe." She looks back at me. "It might make it less safe."
She goes back to the kitchen.
She tells me about her father at nine in the evening.
Roise and Mackenzie have gone — I sent them back via the same routing they came in on, Mackenzie objecting and then accepting, extracting a promise that I'd return to the compound by Sunday — and the flat is quiet in the specific way it's been quiet before, which is companionable rather than empty.
She's sitting on the floor with her back against the couch. I'm on the couch. Neither of us chose this arrangement consciously; it assembled itself from the movements of the evening.
"He started training me when I was five," she says.
"Not with weapons. With observation. We'd go to a market — any market, it didn't matter where — and he'd give me a time limit and a task.
Find the three exits. Find the person watching the stall they haven't bought from.
Find the man whose jacket sits wrong." She turns the coffee mug in her hands.
"I thought it was a game for years. He let me think that. "
"When did you know it wasn't."
"When I was eight and I found the man whose jacket sat wrong and I told my father and my father said good and went and spoke to the man quietly and the man didn't come back.
" She pauses. "I didn't ask what happened to him.
My father didn't offer it. We went home and had dinner and I didn't ask.
" She looks at the mug. "That's when I knew. "
I say nothing. There isn't a version of something to say that would be better than listening.
"He taught me everything," she says. "Not because he was cruel.
I want to be clear about that." The specificity of it tells me it's something she's had to clarify before, maybe to herself more than anyone.
"He taught me because he believed the world was a specific kind of dangerous and that knowledge was the only protection against it.
He wanted me to be protected." A pause. "He also wanted me to be useful.
I think in his mind those two things were the same. "
"Were they."
She's quiet for a moment. "Sometimes. Less and less.
" She looks up from the mug, and her eyes in the lamp light have the quality I've been avoiding naming for two weeks, which is that they're the kind of eyes that show the whole thing — not unguarded exactly but unable, at a certain depth, to fully perform.
"He died because he refused something. I don't know what specifically.
The file says a rival operative but that's not—" She stops.
"He had principles. Underneath everything.
Things he would not do regardless of the order.
And at the end, the order was for one of those things, and he said no. "
"And they killed him."
"And they killed him."
I sit with this. With the weight of it — the specific kind of weight that comes with understanding the shape of someone's life. Not the outline but the interior.
"You're afraid of the same thing," I say. "Getting an order you can't follow."
She looks at me. "I'm afraid of everything that comes with that." She sets the mug down. "He didn't have a plan. He just said no. And there was nothing after the no." She holds my gaze. "I want there to be something after the no."
"That's why the burner."
"That's why the burner."
I look at her on the floor with her back against my couch in a safehouse above a laundromat, and I hold what Mackenzie said earlier — it might make it less safe — alongside what I'm hearing now.
I find I can hold both. The careful part of my mind hasn't gone anywhere.
It just isn't winning the argument, and it isn't losing it either.
It's sitting where it belongs, and the rest of me is doing what the rest of me is doing.
"Your father," she says quietly. "He was also—"
"Yes," I say. "This life, yes."
"Did he teach you the same way."
I think about my father. The particular shape of his lessons, which were less precise than what she's describing and more instinctive — the way he moved through a room, the way he spoke to people, the economy of what he said and didn't say. "Different method," I say. "Same result."
She nods. Like she understands what that means without needing me to explain it, which she probably does.
"You're not a weapon," I say.
She looks at me. Something in her face changes — not dramatically, not a collapse of anything.
Just a small internal shift, the kind that happens when someone says a true thing that you have been carrying as a question for long enough that hearing it stated as a fact does something you didn't entirely expect.
"You were trained as one," I say. "That's different."
She is quiet for a moment. Then she picks up her mug and finds it empty and looks at it with the expression of someone who has run out of something to hold.
I get up and take it to the kitchen and refill it without asking, and when I bring it back she takes it with both hands and says nothing, which is sometimes the most complete response available.
We sit in the quiet above the laundromat.
Outside, the car park is lit by one yellow security light that throws long shadows across the concrete. The city does its city thing beyond it, constant and indifferent.
I stay on the couch.
She stays on the floor.
And neither of us suggests anything different, which is its own kind of answer to a question neither of us has asked yet.