Hoisting himself over the windowsill, he decided on the latter. But first, he had to go check on something.

Chapter 6Fourteen

His equipment bag was a mess. He always made a point of checking all his equipment after a mission, so it didn’t take long for him to discover Cym had systematically vanquished any semblance of order he once had. Everything was going to have to come out so he could fix it.

He appreciated that Cym had gone through all his options during the time Fourteen had been compromised, but it was his equipment bag. As far as he was concerned, the guy might as well have rifled through his underwear while Fourteen was still in them. He was going to have to talk to Cym about it.

Though the underwear idea had him pausing for a moment. As long as consent was involved, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world…

Nope, he wasn’t going there right now. Fourteen was so exhausted he was about to drop.

After their talk, Fourteen was going to sleep. Steve and Frank had been adamant that he stay awake and stand guard while they slept, so he had been awake for over forty-eight hours by the time he met Cym. Then, of course, Fourteen had been too wired to sleep after being confronted with the mystery he’d been presented with.

Fourteen hadn’t been thinking clearly then; he could see that now. The first few times Cym had touched him had been a blur. He had known something important was happening, but he couldn’t have said what it was. It wasn’t until the battle at the cemetery that he’d understood what was happening. The unexpected and prolonged contact with Cym had done something to the blocks The Company had put on Fourteen’s mind.

Instead of the prison they once were, they were crumbling, brittle things now, with gaping holes that allowed him access to things and people long forgotten. While Cym was fighting for their lives, Fourteen had been swamped with repressed memories filled with horrors no human should have to face.

He also remembered the faces of his parents. And equally as clear, he remembered the face of the man who had sentenced his father to death. It was a face he was well acquainted with. He—the Colonel—would be expecting to debrief Fourteen any minute now.

Fourteen’s fingers tightened painfully around the clip he’d been about to stow in his bag. Slowly and deliberately, he loosened his grip and placed it in a side pocket with the other clips. He couldn’t think about it right now. Any of it.

Inside his mind, there were thousands of memories battling for his attention, and he knew if he gave in to any of them, he would become useless. Memories and emotions were so far outside his wheelhouse that he wouldn’t know what to do with them. So he dug into his training and stilled his mind, forcing the memories behind those crumbling walls and back into the cold, frozen space his training had gifted him.

Fourteen shook his head ruefully. If he could call such a thing a gift. He could go a lifetime without receiving more gifts like that.

Once he was certain the walls would hold for the time being, he hunted down a pair of black leather gloves to cut down his chances of accidental exposure, because he had no idea what would happen if Cym touched him again. There was a tentative lid on his mind at the moment, but if they encountered more surprises like the one at the cemetery, Fourteen could become a liability. He couldn’t do that to Cym. Whether the guy knew it or not, Fourteen owed him.

With that in mind, he threw some tear gas into his bag so he could show Cym how to use it in case Fourteen became compromised again.

Now that his bag was repacked to his satisfaction, he paused, reaching into his pocket to finger the flash drive he’d retrieved from Steve’s jacket. It was Fourteen’s operating system. He had been programmed to recover it if he lost his handler and report immediately to The Company.

Was Cym’s effect on him responsible for his ability to resist succumbing to the compulsion?

Fourteen frowned. He had chosen to ignore orders and follow Cym before they had touched. Was it possible he was capable of resisting his conditioning without help? When Fourteen got a chance, he would have to explore the thought further, but, for now, he would put it in the cold with all of his other confusing thoughts and emotions.

His phone chimed, letting him know that a window had opened downstairs.

Cym.

Fourteen allowed himself a heavy sigh and a longing glance at his bed before making for the door, slinging his bag over his shoulder as he went.

Instead of going to the window Cym had exited, Fourteen left by the side entrance, guessing his new charge would be heading out of the marina rather than further in. When he saw a pink, cat-encrusted backpack disappear around the corner of another building, Fourteen knew he had guessed correctly.

He had been expecting something like this from Cym eventually. In less than twelve hours, Cym had consistently exhibited the sort of self-sacrificing behavior that would lead toward such an action.

Instead of catching up and confronting him immediately, Fourteen decided to observe his habits, so that the next time Cym ran out on him, he’d have a better idea of where to look in case the guy managed to vanish on him completely.

Like the last time he’d followed Cym, his charge watched his back well enough to force Fourteen to stay farther away than he liked. Unfortunately, a traffic snarl caused by construction allowed Cym to get away. One minute, he was standing on a street corner looking intently at a map in his hand, and the next, he had vanished behind a long line of tour buses squeezing through the single lane open to traffic.

Fucking hell.

For someone like Fourteen, losing a civilian in traffic was an embarrassment, to say the least. An unfamiliar feeling broke free, paralyzing him with its intensity. His throat closed for a moment, and his heart raced, causing his head to spin.

Then memory kicked in. Fear. For a second he was an eight-year-old boy racing to the hospital with his father to check on his mother after the accident.

Fourteen shook his head to gain distance from the memory and waited impatiently for his conditioning to kick in and take the fear away, but it was slow to respond.

Was that part of his mind smaller than it was before? Fourteen took the fear and shoved it toward the cold, urging it to do its job. Slowly, the cold unfurled and wrapped around the unstable emotion, freezing it into nothingness.

Fourteen frowned. If his conditioning continued to deteriorate, he was going to have to learn how to get a handle on his emotions before they compromised his ability to function as a soldier. Until then, he was going to have to limit his exposure to Cym as much as possible.

Taking a slow breath, he centered himself and went back into mission mode. Once he was steady, he identified a break in the line of buses and darted across the street.

He spent as long as he dared to observe every detail his new vantage point gave him, but he saw no trace of Cym. Fourteen decided to kick himself later for his not-so-clever plan of hanging back to observe Cym rather than confronting him. Useless self-flagellation would only slow Fourteen down at this point.

Where would Cym go next? For Fourteen, the logical choice would be to steal a car and get as far away from the city as he could—preferably another safe house—but he didn’t think Cym had a safe house to go to. If his guess was correct, Cym had nothing to fall back on. No, Cym wouldn’t go for a logical approach. Fourteen wasn’t going to find him at the bus station or hitchhiking. Not yet, anyway.

His mind presented him with a play-by-play of all of Cym’s reactions to various stimuli during their short acquaintance. From his repeated insistence that Fourteen stay away from Cym for his own good, to Cym’s reaction to the devastation he and his family had inflicted on the cemetery, it wasn’t difficult to figure out where he would go first.

Cym would need to see for himself the fallout from the fight earlier. That was the kind of person he was.

It was over two miles from his current position, and traffic was backed up as far as he could see. Fourteen’s SUV would be useless.

He ran.

What had once been a graveyard was now a gaping hole surrounded by police tape, a variety of vehicles covered in flashing lights, and swarms of people in uniform. The only body bags he saw were near the building leveled by Cym’s family, though he didn’t imagine Cym would find any comfort in that. The kid would probably take the whole thing on his own shoulders.

Fourteen didn’t know Cym well enough yet to anticipate what he would do once he got here, which meant finding the guy in this clusterfuck was going to be a challenge, so Fourteen hung back to survey the scene. Delving into his sniper training, Fourteen stood still and allowed the landscape to talk to him.

First, he scanned the area in front of the police tape, hoping to find Cym stymied along with the rest of the civilians. When that turned up nothing, he began to filter out useless information, deleting the flashing lights from emergency vehicles and the low buzz of the crowd from his perception. He let the setting play out in front of him, waiting for something different to attract his attention.

On the top floor of a white building to his far left, he caught a quick movement that stopped abruptly, like something being jerked away from a window. It was as far away from the cemetery as a person could get and still be able to see, but Fourteen thought someone as cautious as Cym would choose distance over details right now. Sentimental he might be, but the guy wasn’t stupid.

It was easier to move away from the scene of destruction than it had been to get closer, so Fourteen got to the top floor only minutes after seeing the movement in the window. He was still running up the last flight of stairs when he heard the sound of something hitting the floor above him and a sharp yelp.

Through the open door on the landing he could hear, “It was stupid for you to leave your shield behind, Boy.” The voice was rougher than before, but Fourteen thought it was the older woman from the fight earlier. “Or maybe he just ditched you when he saw how much trouble you are?”

Fourteen drew his gun as he made it to the landing and burst through the door without slowing. In the hallway, he spied Cym sprawled out on the floor and moving feebly like he was trying to get to his feet but couldn’t figure out which way was up. Fourteen assumed the reason was the head-shaped dent in the wall behind him.

Towering over him was the lady from earlier, only she didn’t look as nice as she had in the graveyard. One side of her face was caked in blood and dirt, and her dress was torn. Fourteen processed the information as negligible—he was more concerned with the outstretched hand she was pointing toward Cym. Fourteen noted the boy from the cemetery pressing his back against the opposite wall, eyes wide with fear. His jacket was torn and missing half its buttons. And, like the woman, his bedraggled form was caked in mud.

Fourteen ignored the cowardly boy and shot the woman directly in the head.

Instead of seeing the normal result after shooting someone, Fourteen’s eyes registered something his mind couldn’t process. Before him, ripples in reality warped and bent around the woman. She jerked her head around to look at him, and her face twisted in rage at the interruption. She didn’t have a scratch on her.