Nadia
I wake up in the compound on a Saturday morning feeling like someone I don't entirely recognize.
This is not new. I've been feeling like someone I don't entirely recognize for approximately six weeks, with increasing frequency and decreasing alarm about the frequency, which is itself a change from the version of me that arrived in New York two months ago with a cover story and a plan and the specific confidence of someone who has always been the most prepared person in any given room.
I am still prepared. I am still — professionally speaking — the most capable person in most rooms I enter. That hasn't changed.
What's changed is the weight of what I'm prepared for.
I lie in the grey morning light of the room Liam showed me to last night — a guest room on the second floor, which he indicated with the careful deliberateness of someone who had thought about the optics and made a choice — and I think about Viktor's timeline and the Antwerp shell flag and the week I bought with last night's message.
I think about the capsules.
The capsules are in a drawer at the safehouse.
They have been there for five days. Viktor thinks they are still in my coat pocket, waiting.
The story I've been telling him is the story he gave me, slightly bent — the cardiac event needs to read as natural, which requires a public setting, which Liam has not been in.
The story has held because, until yesterday morning, Liam has been visible and uninjured in his public movements, which is consistent with someone Viktor's asset is managing rather than someone who has switched sides.
Yesterday morning, Liam stopped being uninjured.
The story starts losing tension at exactly the rate Liam's face stops looking like a man who has not been in a fight.
The week of patience I bought last night is real because Viktor is still working on the assumption that the capsule operation is dormant, not failed. The moment he begins suspecting it has failed, the week becomes nothing.
I have a week. Maybe less.
I let myself think about that for thirty seconds, and then I think about Dara.
Dara, who is in the apartment in Astoria keeping the light on, who told me to do what's best for myself and meant it without reservation, who has been in this operation because she was assigned to it and who I have not — despite everything I've told myself about protecting her — actually protected.
Not yet. Not in any way that means anything beyond intention.
Intention is cheap. My father taught me that. What counts is what you actually do.
I am lying in a compound I was sent to destabilize, beside — in proximity to — a man I was sent to incapacitate, thinking about a friend I was supposed to be protecting and haven't, and feeling, beneath all of that, the specific warmth of a night spent with my head against someone's shoulder and his heartbeat slowing under my ear and neither of us saying anything that needed to be said because everything had already been said.
The guilt and the warmth coexist. I find I can't resolve them into one thing or the other, so I let them coexist and look at the ceiling and think about what today is.
Saturday. No briefing. No Viktor contact required until midweek. The Brennan secondary analysis can wait until the west corridor meeting on Sunday.
Today is, technically, nothing.
I'm not sure I know what to do with nothing.
Mackenzie appears at my door at half past nine with the specific energy of someone who has a plan and has already started executing it.
"You're awake," she says, leaning in the doorframe.
"Yes."
"Good. Get dressed. Nothing operational." She looks at my overnight bag with the assessing eye of someone who has opinions about its contents. "Something comfortable. Do you have something comfortable."
"I have clothes."
"Comfortable ones."
"Mackenzie." I sit up. "What are you doing."
"Planning your Saturday," she says, with the breezy authority of someone who has decided that planning someone else's Saturday is entirely within her remit.
"You look like you slept but not enough and like you're already thinking about three things you're not supposed to be thinking about on a Saturday.
" She meets my eyes. "I'm taking that away from you for a few hours. "
I look at her.
"Ailish is coming at ten," she says. "We're going to be in the main sitting room and we're going to do nothing operationally useful and if you try to bring a file in I'll confiscate it."
"I don't have files."
"You have the burner."
"The burner stays in my pocket."
"Then it stays in your pocket on silent." She pushes off the doorframe. "Ten minutes. Comfortable clothes."
She goes.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my bag and think about the last time someone planned my Saturday, which was never, because my Saturdays have been operationally structured since I was approximately fourteen years old.
I find the least operational thing in my bag, which is a soft grey sweater I brought because the safehouse gets cold in the evening, and I put it on, and I go downstairs.
Ailish arrives at ten past ten with the specific efficiency of someone who has coordinated timing and is mildly disappointed it isn't exact.
She comes into the main sitting room carrying a bag that produces, in sequence: three kinds of tea, a box of something from a bakery that smells like cardamom and butter, two film magazines that she hands to Mackenzie without explanation, and a small jar of something she sets on the side table.
She looks at me. "You look better than yesterday."
"Yesterday I arrived," I say. "I didn't look like anything."
"You looked like someone who'd been carrying something heavy for a while." She sits in the chair by the window with the ease of someone for whom this chair is a known quantity. "The sweater's an improvement."
Mackenzie is already on the floor with the film magazines, which appears to be her natural state in a sitting room. "She owns one comfortable thing," she tells Ailish.
"I own multiple—"
"One that she brought," Mackenzie clarifies.
Ailish looks at me with something that is not quite sympathy and is adjacent to it. "We'll address that eventually," she says. "Not today."
Tea is made. The bakery box opens to reveal something that has cardamom and pears and a layer of something sticky on top that I identify as honey and which is extraordinary.
"What is this," I say.
"A thing I found," Ailish says. "There's a place on the west side. A Hungarian woman makes them on weekends." She drinks her tea. "I've been going there for two years and I've never learned her name."
"She won't tell you," Mackenzie says, not looking up from a magazine. "Ailish has tried. She just hands over the box and takes the money."
"I respect the boundary," Ailish says.
I eat the cardamom thing and look at the two of them — Ailish in the window chair with her tea, Mackenzie on the floor with the magazines, the room doing its Saturday morning thing, and I think about the specific strangeness of being here, in this room, with these people, who have no operational reason to be sharing a Saturday morning with me and are doing it anyway.
"You're thinking again," Mackenzie says.
"I'm allowed to think."
"Not the heavy kind," she says. "We talked about this."
"You talked about it," I say. "I was in the process of being informed."
Ailish looks at me. "What kind of thinking."
I look at my tea. "The kind about things I can't fix on a Saturday."
"Then it's the right kind of Saturday to not fix them," Ailish says, with the practical logic of someone who has made peace with the category of unsolvable things. "What would help."
I consider the question with the honesty she seems to require. "I don't know," I say. "I don't usually have Saturdays."
Mackenzie looks up from her magazine. "What do you mean."
"I mean—" I stop. Try to find the right shape for it.
"My Saturdays have always been structured.
Training, or operational preparation, or contact management.
There was always something the Saturday was for.
" I look at the window. "I don't have a—" I pause.
"I don't know what I do when there's nothing it's for. "
The room is quiet for a moment.
"Ballet," Mackenzie says.
"Not today."
"Why not today."
"Because—" I stop. Because today I don't want to be in a room with a mirror, I think. Because today I don't want to find faults. "Because Petya doesn't run Saturday sessions," I say instead, which is also true.
"Then we'll find something else the Saturday is for," Ailish says, with the matter-of-fact quality she brings to most things. "That's what we're doing."
I look at her.
"Some Saturdays are for planning," she says. "Some are for doing. Some are for sitting in a room with people you trust and letting the week finish leaving you." She holds my gaze. "You're allowed to have that kind."
I think about people you trust. I think about when that became the correct category for the women across from me in this room.
"Gianna's coming later," Mackenzie says, returning to the magazine. "She texted this morning. She and Finn went to look at something in the city — she said she'd be back by noon and that she was bringing food."
"What kind of food," Ailish says.
"She didn't specify. Which means it'll be elaborate."
"It'll be extraordinary," I say, thinking about last night's dinner, which produces a look from both of them that is the specific look of people who have just confirmed something they were already thinking.
"You liked the food," Mackenzie says.
"The food was — yes," I say. "The food was exceptional."
"She'll be pleased to hear it," Ailish says. "She doesn't cook for praise but she receives it well."