Fox?”
She turned back to McAllister, who was leaning over his desk with an ominous frown on his lean brown face. His sudden formality wasn’t a good sign.
“You aren’t listening to me,” he said. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
Alexia returned to stand before the desk, taking a formal stance that betrayed none of her emotions. “Yes, sir. More than up to it.”
“It’s only been a year since your brother was—”
“I haven’t forgotten, sir.”
He cleared his throat. “The Examiners say you may still harbor resentment against the Court for sentencing him to Deportation.”
Deportation. Such a nice way of putting it. “I know the Court weighed the evidence thoroughly, sir. It was a fair trial.”
The Director sighed and sank back into his chair. “Was it?”
Alexia knew it was another test, and one she had to pass. “The evidence was conclusive, sir.”
“Then you no longer believe it was self-defense?”
The same questions the shrinks had asked her, over and over again, ever since Garret had been sent to Erebus.
“Without the laws there would be chaos, and the Enclaves would die,” she said with perfect sincerity. “I blame the leeches, sir. Only them.”
“But do you blame them enough to lose your objectivity in an operation of such extreme delicacy? That is the question.”
“Have the Examiners suggested that’s the case, sir?”
McAllister smiled without pleasure. “If they had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But the final decision rests with me. If I’m making a mistake—”
Alexia straightened, staring hard at the framed mission statement hung on the wall behind the Director’s chair. “You aren’t, sir. When do we go?”
McAllister made a show of shuffling a few folders on his desk and slid one of them across the desk. “Tomorrow. You and Michael will be the only team for the time being, and your mission will be to observe, and observe only.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Call Carter and study the report. There’ll be a briefing at 1100 hours.”
Before Alexia could salute, McAllister was back to his computer, typing away as if she had already left the room. She knew he preferred it that way. And so did she.
She returned to barracks and the small apartment that she, as a highly valuable Aegis asset, was permitted to occupy alone. Alexia unlaced her boots and allowed herself a small glass of the rare and expensive Riesling she had bought with the better part of last month’s pay. After a short breather she buzzed Michael, and they synced their computers to study the report.
“Looks easy,” her partner said when they had gone over it a second time. “In and out.”
Alexia glimpsed her reflection in the computer screen, briefly blotting out the image of Michael’s habitual smirk: straight auburn hair cut at an efficient and regulation chin length, tilted green eyes, slightly pointed chin. New recruits sometimes thought themselves clever by suggesting how much her appearance matched her surname.
But even a fox might not sneak out of this one. Not even a highly trained dhampir agent like her. If she’d thought Mike was taking this as lightly as his words suggested, she might have been genuinely worried.
She knew better. Her partner was one of the survivors, an agent who had made it through ten missions with only minor wounds and the same partner until Jill had been killed a year ago. Since then, he and Alexia had been on three assignments together, and they’d worked as a perfect team. She trusted him more than anyone else in Aegis, even the boss.
Michael had been deep into the Zone several times, while she’d never gone much beyond the Border. She would be relying on his greater experience, but she intended to pull her full weight. This was her chance to prove just how good she was.
She glanced at her watch. “Briefing in fifteen minutes. See you there.”
Michael gave her a mock salute. “Don’t even think about finishing that wine. I plan to drink at least half of it when we get back.”
“It’s a deal.” Alexia signed off, laced up her boots and sipped the last few drops of the wine in her glass, wondering who would be drinking the rest if she and Mike didn’t make it back.
Craving some fresh air, Alexia took the elevator to the lobby and walked out into the busy morning street. Twentysix years ago, on the day she was born, no one would have believed that San Francisco could ever return to what it had been in the years before the Awakening.
It hadn’t, of course. Not completely. But the rhythms of human life had resumed after the Treaty had permitted regular farming, manufacturing and inter-Enclave commerce. There were bankers and office workers, reporters and shopkeepers, cops and financiers all going about their business much the same way they had in the twentieth century.
But Alexia could never venture out among the general public without knowing what had changed. Because when her eyes met those of an ordinary human on the street, she saw the suspicion. Suspicion, or fear, or hostility—all the same emotions most humans felt for Nightsiders, only a little less severe because they knew she wasn’t one of the enemy.
The existence of dhampir agents couldn’t be kept from Nightsiders or Enclave citizens. But neither she nor any of her fellow Half-bloods could pass for human. Not with eyes like those of a cat and teeth a little too reminiscent of a wolf’s.
Or a Nightsider’s.
As Alexia paused at a fruit stand to examine a fresh orange, just shipped in from the Los Angeles Enclave, she heard a child’s voice on the other side of the stacked crates.
“Look, Mommy,” the little girl said. “Is that a bloodsucker?”
Alexia tried to smile at the mother, hoping to express her understanding for the child’s mistake. The woman looked mortified, but she couldn’t hide her distaste.
“You mustn’t say such things, Jenny,” she said, jerking at the little girl’s hand. “It isn’t polite, and anyway, she’s on our side.”
Our side, Alexia thought as she returned to headquarters. Yes, her loyalties could never be in question. It was her late human mother who had raised her, not her unknown and reviled Nightsider father.
But for the dhampires, there would never truly be an “our.”
The ferry slid quietly away into the fog, its wake swallowed up in the choppy waves stirred by a brisk late-summer wind off the Pacific. Unless an observer were standing nearly on top of Alexia and Michael at the old Larkspur Ferry Terminal, he or she would hardly know a boat had ever been at the dock.
But then again, Alexia thought, this was still technically part of the San Francisco Enclave, and there shouldn’t be any leeches here. Which didn’t mean a damned thing. They
