Thirty-Six
Camp Peary, Virginia
Julian surfaced from the darkness with a wave of nausea that threatened to immediately pull him under again. He managed to
push himself up onto his elbows, mattress dimpling under the weight of his body, and then lean over the bed to retch.
He was in an unfamiliar room with four white, windowless walls. The fluorescent lights seemed to burn his still-blurry vision.
Julian reached around clumsily until he found a bedside table, and his glasses. With another tremor of nausea, he slipped
them on.
The room came further into focus. Save for the bed and the table, it was completely empty. There was a metal door on the far
wall.
As his senses returned to him, he felt a prickle of pain. Julian looked down. The silver cuff on his wrist was gone, but it
had left a ring of burned skin, raised and red.
Memories began to take shape slowly. The tunnels. The pulsing blue light, the cube. The capsule sliding between his teeth,
its acid taste on his tongue. Klaudia’s eyes, burning but cold, determined and silently furious as she bit down on her own
tablet. And then it had all been lost to blackness.
Klaudia. Julian struggled into a sitting position. Nadiya. Giselle. Crispin . . .
His head spun as he remembered the moments that had brought them all there: Klaudia solving puzzle after puzzle, Nadiya shooting
down the supply bag, Giselle getting them through the doors. Deckard’s men charging them, his back hitting the impenetrable
door, fear rising to choke him. And then . . . they had simply vanished. As if dissolved into air.
It all felt like a strange, distant dream.
Julian rose to his feet, head throbbing. If anything, Deckard had undersold the adverse effects of the pills. He hadn’t felt
this awful since the morning after election night, an empty bottle of gin on the floor next to his bed and Christabel Cabot
asleep beside him.
With a sudden panic, he thought again of Klaudia. She had told them to take the pills, directly flouting Deckard’s orders.
Would she be punished for her disobedience? Julian stumbled toward the door and pushed it open.
An empty corridor stretched out on either side, fluorescent-lit and pure white. The air had a chemical quality. He had accompanied
Aurelian to the psych ward many times before, and Julian recognized the starchy, antiseptic scent of a hospital.
But unlike the familiar corridors of Massachusetts General, there were no gurneys parked against the wall, no steadily beeping
EKG machines. Julian could discern no sign of life at all. His pulse thudded as he walked, Klaudia’s name on his lips. The
instinct to call out for her was strong, just like the instinct to reach for her in the dark. There, in the elevator, Klaudia
hadn’t hesitated to grip his hand back.
Julian was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t hear the approaching patter of footsteps.
“Julian?”
It was Giselle, hurrying down the corridor to reach him. Like Julian, she was wearing what appeared to be hospital scrubs,
and her feet were bare, but she looked unharmed. A slight feeling of warmth penetrated the icy block of fear in his chest.
Hopefully Klaudia was unharmed, too.
“You’re here,” Giselle said breathlessly. The relief was clear in her voice. “Are you all right?”
“Sick as a hungover dog, but I’ll live.” Julian regarded her. “What about you?”
“I just finished throwing up. Deckard wasn’t lying about those pills.” Giselle grimaced. “But that might be the only thing he wasn’t lying about.”
The memory crashed back into his head. This isn’t an extraction mission. It’s an assassination. We’re not supposed to rescue Satow. We’re supposed to kill him. Naturally Klaudia had discerned the truth within moments. We’re taking another way out.
“Deckard is a prick,” Julian said, but he was too weary to imbue the words with appropriate venom.
Idly he wondered if he should be concerned about a hidden device overhearing him. Were they finished with the mission? Had
they left Traumstadt behind for good? Or was this another one of Deckard’s tests?
“We should find the others,” Giselle said. “I hope they’re—”
“Yeah,” Julian cut in. “Me too.”
They set off down the corridor together, their pace cautious. As they walked, Julian watched Giselle. Her reddish hair was
more unruly than usual, and her face was almost green. Julian imagined he looked similarly worse for wear. Giselle’s throat
kept pulsing, as if she wanted to speak but was swallowing the words down.
Maybe he should have swallowed his own words. But Julian had never been a paragon of restraint.
“About what happened in the tunnel,” he began slowly, “with Deckard’s men—”
Giselle’s head snapped up. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened, or how I did it. If I did it.”
It seemed impossible. It was impossible. Those men were real—or at least, their bullets were. Maybe it was a shared hallucination, Deckard piping some
invisible psychedelic gas through the walls. Otherwise, Julian could conjure no explanation.
His skin prickled. Giselle had begun to unnerve him, in an odd way. But he shook off the sensation and looked pointedly away,
his thoughts returning to Klaudia. He needed to find her, to see her face.
They turned down the corridor, identical to the last. Perhaps he should have been keeping track of their course, so they could retrace their steps.
He opened his mouth to voice his concerns to Giselle, but then a figure appeared at the end of the hall.
Black-clad, crisp-edged, and horribly familiar.
“Welcome back to the waking world,” Deckard said.
“Where’s Klaudia?” Julian demanded, at the same time that Giselle asked, “Where’s Nadiya?”
“Safe and well,” Deckard replied. “Just like you two.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily agree,” Julian said through gritted teeth.
Deckard did not even indulge him with a scowl. “Get dressed,” he said. “It’s time for your briefing.”
In hardly any time at all, Julian was slouched in a stiff-backed chair, wearing a sky-blue button-down with the sleeves rolled
up and a pair of khaki pants. Civilian attire—precisely what he would have worn if he were free. It even smelled like his
housekeeper’s choice of detergent.
Deckard had been generous enough to return him his watch, Aurelian’s watch, but both of the hands were stopped at twelve.
He fiddled with it, though was unable to get it running again.
Giselle sat beside him, also dressed in civilian clothes: a pair of loose jeans and a fluttery white blouse. Her hair was
only slightly tamed and she still looked wan, exhausted. There was nothing else in the room except the circle of chairs and
a low table. Julian was reminded again of going to see Aurelian in the psych ward, hunched with his mother in weary silence
as the visiting hour ticked down.
The door opened and Julian sat up with a start.
Nadiya stepped in, wearing civilian attire of her own: a black leather jacket and belted black trousers.
Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her usual sleek, high ponytail forgone.
When Giselle saw her, a look of unabashed joy and relief came into her eyes.
It would have been impossible to miss the increasingly moony stares between the two of them.
Klaudia entered at last. Julian had expected his heartbeat to steady, but instead his pulse kicked into an uneven rhythm.
She was wearing a navy cardigan and skirt set, very much like what she had worn in the courtroom sketches Julian had seen
all those years ago. Her dark curls were shiny; one errant strand clung to her lower lip.
For a moment, Julian was transported to another world. A world where the four of them met under completely different circumstances,
as ordinary teenagers, not as conscripts, not as reluctant allies. Maybe they wouldn’t have even been friends—they were both
too alike and not. But at least they would’ve had the choice. At least Julian would have been able to sidle up to Klaudia
at a party—or, more realistically, a chess tournament. He would have tried to charm her, as he always did, and maybe it would
have worked, but more likely she would’ve rebuffed him with her typical coldness.
But they would’ve had the chance to pretend. To play at normalcy. He could have given Klaudia the girlhood that had been stolen
from her. If she even wanted that. If she even wanted that with him.
Deckard’s voice, both sharp and icy, returned Julian to the present. “Look alive, agents.”
“So we’re officially agents now?” Nadiya asked flatly. “Even though we didn’t complete the mission the way you wanted?”
“You came close enough,” Deckard said. “I trust that, in the real world, without the safety net of the simulation, you will
follow my commands to the letter.”
Klaudia stood behind her chair, gripping the back of it rather than sitting. “You trust that we’ll execute an innocent man
on your orders.”
“Innocent?” Deckard raised a brow. “You presume a great deal about Moritz Satow.”
“My presumption is based on the information provided. We have been given no evidence to suggest that Dr. Satow is guilty of a crime that would sanction his murder under international law. Unless, of course, you’ve been hiding something from us.
” Klaudia’s tone was nakedly bitter, a challenge in her gaze.
“This is a matter of utmost discretion, requiring precarious maneuvering. It has been necessary to keep you in the dark.”
“That’s a pathetic excuse,” Julian said. “Come on, Deckard, are you even trying?”
Deckard’s eyes narrowed. “Ordinarily a clandestine officer would undergo years of training before they were allowed into the
field. Your backgrounds would be thoroughly checked; you would be tested in every way imaginable. Under such pressure, most
potential agents fold.”
Your backgrounds would be thoroughly checked. Julian did not believe that Deckard had truly neglected that step. The staticky echo of Aurelian’s screams made Julian’s
skin crawl. By what shadowy means had Deckard acquired that recording? And what else did he have to hold over their heads?