No good came of taking such footing for granted, and she didn’t. Once she hit the ramada at the end of the trail she picked up a jog, finishing off the ten miles when she reached the borrowed bike parked at the Goat Camp trail head.
Four miles back to Athena…long enough for her trail-cleared mind to clutter up again. Full of self-doubt, full of concern. Pedaling was no distraction at all.
When Cole was here, she’d turned to him for her strength. He believed that she’d be able to leave her Berzhaani demons behind, and for a while that made a difference. Several precious months of being in the same house, in the same country, and now he was gone again. They hadn’t started their family; they hadn’t resolved their future.
They’d damned well convinced each other that they had their now. That their now was good.
Selena heard her own harsh breathing and realized she was doing it again. Her legs burned as she sped along the closest thing to a main road in the area and she forced herself to straighten on the bike, one hand lightly keeping it on course as she swooped around a turn, coasting. Even in this dry air she’d worked up a sweat, and she pulled her water bottle free of its clip and squeezed lukewarm water into her mouth.
By the time she reached the school, cruising past the dorms to reach the paved circle through the staff housing, her flushed face was dry of sweat, but her hair under the helmet was still soaked. Selena parked the bike at the little bungalow that principal Christine Evans had offered for the visit. She went straight inside for a shower, then grabbed a protein bar as she combed out her hair, squinting at the length and contemplating a cut. Done, she glared at herself, giving her flat lower belly a resentful poke. Selena was long and lean from head to toe, and it seemed nothing so curvy as pregnancy would ever even temporarily alter that theme.
She wondered if Cole had truly considered that possibility.
She pulled a wide-toothed comb through shoulder-length hair to tame it into order, and clipped it carelessly at the back of her head, up off her long neck. It was a severe look for the strong bones of her face—long and lean like the rest of her—so she pulled a few tendrils loose to soften her jawline and take attention away from the little cleft in her chin.
Cole liked that cleft. But Cole wasn’t here.
Selena straightened the shower curtain and hung the bath towel and went out to the little kitchenette to grab some more ice water. Handy thing, this bungalow. Small but complete. Trust Athena to have extra housing on hand for alumni visits. Trust Christine Evans to understand how visiting the school could provide the grounding needed by its graduates, so many of whom had gone on to excel in the high-stress, high-risk jobs for which Athena had so ably prepared them.
Trust Christine to be waiting outside her door with a handful of letters and an invitation to walk around the campus. “Slowly,” she added. “You’ve already had your workout for the day, if I don’t miss my guess.”
Selena accepted, slipping on a pair of leather Teva sandals and slipping out the screen door. When Selena had attended school here, Christine had been mentor and supervisor; in the intervening years, her visits had allowed that relationship to mature into mutual respect and affection. They weren’t close—but then, Selena had very few people she would call close. Not her divorce-scattered and complicated family, not the fellow students at college who’d been intimidated by her acumen with law and language, and not her coworkers from her years of traveling overseas as an FBI legate. Trust, yes— that had been necessary to function in her role of building counterterrorism relationships in the tumultuous regions in which she worked. But not true, deep friendship.
Only Cole.
Now for the first time she looked at Christine with a friend’s eyes and realized that the older woman actually looked her sixty-plus years. Though her shoulders were as straight as ever, reflecting her army officer’s training, her short gray hair had gone almost entirely white. Her stride didn’t hold quite the assurance it had just over a year earlier.
Of course, getting shot in the abdomen would do that to a person.
“Are you well?” Selena asked, and they both knew the deeper question behind it.
“You should ask the students,” Christine said, raising one wry eyebrow.
Selena laughed. “They wouldn’t dare suggest otherwise.”
“Then there’s your answer.” Christine held out the letters. “From some of your classmates. I have permission to share them, of course. It’s one way we can all keep abreast of one another’s lives.”
Selena felt a stab of guilt. When was the last time she’d written such a letter?
Christine might well have seen it on her face, for she waved away the moment. “You were a Pandora, Selena Shaw. None of you turned into letter writers. Holiday cards will suffice.”
Selena laughed, short as it was. The Athena students matriculated in seventh grade, starting in a class of thirty, divided into small groups. By the time they graduated, they’d learned to live as a team, work as a team and compete as a team. The Cassandras had been one of those groups, legendary under the leadership of Rainy Carrington—and cohesive enough that when Rainy had died two years earlier, the remaining Cassandras had rallied and proved not only that she had been murdered, but that her death was part of a larger plot, one involving the international crime magnate Jonas White.
Jonas White. The same man who had masterminded the hostage snatch at the Berzhaani capitol eight months ago, trapping Selena inside the building with the rest of them. The man Selena had killed in order to save Berzhaan’s prime minister, and one of the few deaths that had failed to haunt her in the months since.
But Selena hadn’t been in the Cassandras. She’d been in the Pandoras, where instead of one-for-all, the girls had decided that they could most effectively serve their group by being the strongest possible individuals. I work alone first and best was the Pandora motto. Kim Valenti, Diana Lockworth, Ashley Sheridan and Selena made it to graduation, and all four had gone on to make an international difference in recent years.
Interesting, then, the circumstances under which she’d recently seen Kim and Diana.
And because she was thinking of that meeting, Christine startled her by smiling—as sentimental an expression as Selena had seen her display—and saying, “It’s nice to see that you do manage to work well as a team when necessary.”
Selena hid her startled reaction at Christine’s apparent synchronicity with her thoughts. After all, that recent Oracle meeting had been beyond clandestine. In fact, she still didn’t know who played the role of Delphi, the Oracle contact. Delphi had been the one to warn her about impending terrorist action in Berzhaan right before the hostage crisis; Delphi had been feeding her such tidbits for years, mining information from various security agencies in a highly secretive effort to overcome the interagency turf wars. And though Selena knew she was far from the only one at the receiving end of Oracle’s information, she’d been startled to discover that her fellow agents were also former schoolmates. Kim Valenti had been at that meeting, as had Diana and few more recent graduates. An unofficial Athena force.
And then there was Allison Gracelyn, the meeting’s facilitator—daughter of Marion Gracelyn and currently an NSA programmer. While still at Athena, she’d developed what turned into AA.gov, the Athena Academy Web site, but she’d kept a low profile since then. Selena couldn’t help but wonder just what she’d been up to behind the scenes…and just what she was up to now.
Selena’s reaction, checked
