Evan stood at the trunk of the Cadillac. Golden light filtered through the high windows of the ancient barn, lending a fairy-tale tint to the hay-streaked ground and empty stables. He braced himself and opened the trunk.
The girl erupted from inside.
This time Evan was ready. He ducked, and the tire iron strobed by, fractions from his skull. She landed, spun, and came at him again, but it was halfhearted. She knew she’d lost her one good shot.
He stripped the tire iron from her hands and deflected her onto the ground. She lay there panting, a strand of glossy brown-black hair caught in the corner of her mouth.
“Well,” she said, and spit out the strand. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
“No,” Evan said.
She sat, laced her hands across her knees, rolled back slightly onto her behind, and looked up at him. Broad cheekbones, long lashes, vibrant emerald eyes. The pose was youthful, disarming. She might have been watching a movie at a slumber party. But there was something haunted beneath her strong features. As if in her brief life she’d seen more than she’d wanted to.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” she said.
“The cop?”
“No,” she said. “Not the cop.”
“Who?”
“I only had him for a few months,” she said. “I finally had someone who…” Then she went blank, a screen powering down.
“Who?” he said.
Silence.
He tried a different tack. “What’s your name?”
“Joey.” Same empty expression.
“What’s it short for?”
Her eyes whirred back to life, clicked over to him. “None of your business.” She looked up at the high rafters. “Where the hell are we?”
“Off the beaten path.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Leave the Caddy here. There’s a working truck outside a storage shed a klick and a half north. I take that and leave you here. After.”
“After what?”
“You give me the package. We can go through your things, piece by piece. Or you can tell me. But there’s no way this isn’t happening.”
She just stared at him.
“Look, Joey, you know how this works. You are a classified government weapon—”
“No. Let’s be clear.” She stood up, half crossed her arms, one hand gripping the opposite elbow. Her shoulders tensed, rolled forward. Defensive. “I’m a defective model of a classified government weapon. I got pulled off the assembly line.”
“Meaning?”
“I washed out, okay? I didn’t make it.”
“Who was your handler?”
“Orphan Y,” she said. “Charles Van Sciver.”
Hearing the full name spoken aloud in the muffled damp of the barn—it was a profanity. For a moment Evan was unsure if she’d actually said it or if he’d conjured it, spun it into life from the primordial soup of his own obsession.
He breathed the sweet rot of old wood. His throat felt dry. “He trained you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Until he didn’t.”
He fought to grasp the contours of this. “Van Sciver was neutralizing the remaining Orphans. Everyone that wasn’t his inner cadre.”
“Yeah, well, he decided to rev up recruitment again. More assets, more power.”
A stab of eagerness punctured Evan’s confusion. “So that’s the package? Information on Van Sciver.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have any of that.”
“Then what were you doing in that apartment?”
“I lived there,” she said. “What were you doing in that apartment?”
“Jack Johns sent me.”
Her stance shifted at once, forward ready. “Who the hell are you? How do you know Jack Johns?”
“He was my handler.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Bullshit. Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Her eyes welled with an abruptness that caught him off guard, emotion rushing to the surface. “I knew it. You killed him.”
“Jack was a father to me.”
“No. No.” Her hands were balled up tightly. “If that was true, if he was your handler, you wouldn’t have killed those cops.”
“I didn’t.”
“Never let an innocent die.”
“The cops are all—” He cut off in midsentence. “What did you just say?”
It seemed all the oxygen had gone out of the barn.
“Nothing.”
“The Tenth Commandment,” Evan said.
She glowered at him. And then her face shifted, just slightly.
No one would have gotten the Commandments out of Jack. Evan knew that. Which meant she knew it, too.
“The First,” she said. “What’s the First Commandment?”
“‘Assume nothing.’” He drew in a breath. “The Eighth?”
“‘Never kill a kid.’” She brushed her hair out of her face, her lips slightly parted, her expression heavy with something like awe. When she spoke again, it was a whisper. “You’re Orphan X.”
The wood creaked around them. Dust motes swirled, fuzzing the air. Evan gave the faintest nod.
“Evan,” she said. There was something intimate in her saying his first name. “He told me about you.”
“He didn’t tell me about you.”
“Jack saved me when I broke with the Program.”
“Saved you?”
“You know how it is with Van Sciver. Either you’re with him. Or.” She didn’t have to complete the thought. “Look, I told you. I’m not a government weapon. I’m not an Orphan. I’m just a girl.”
It dawned on him, a full-body shiver like a wash of cold water. He sat down against the Caddy’s bumper. Tilted his forehead into the tent of his fingers.
“What?” she said.
“Jack wants me to look after you.”
“Look after me?”
Evan gazed up at her, felt the blood drain from his face. “You’re the package.”
* * *
They moved beneath the bright moon, high-stepping through a field of summer squash, vectoring for the truck Evan had scouted earlier. Joey’s bulging rucksack bounced on her shoulders, made her lean frame look schoolgirl small.
What the hell had Jack been thinking? Evan felt a pang of something unfamiliar. Guilt? He pictured Jack free-falling through the Alabama night and let in some rage to wash the guilt away.
“Let’s be clear,” Evan said. “I’m not Jack. It’s not what I do. I’ll get you to safety, square you away, and that’ll be that.”
Her face had closed off again. Unreadable. Their boots squelched. An owl was at it in one of the dark trees, asking the age-old question: Who? Who?
“How’d Van Sciver’s men find my apartment?” she asked.
“They were closing in on Jack. They must’ve gotten the address somewhere, staked it out.”
“You sure you weren’t followed?”
“Yes.”
“If they knew I was there, why wouldn’t they just have killed me?”
“Because I’m more valuable to them.”
“Oh. So they only let me live to lure you in.”
“Yes.”
A burning in his cheek announced itself. He raised his fingertips, felt a distinct edge. He picked out the safety-glass pebble and flicked it to the ground.
The girl was talking again. “Van Sciver had Jack killed.”
He kept on, letting her process it. It was a lot to process.
She dimpled her lower lip between her teeth. “I can help you go after Van Sciver.”
Evan halted, faced her in the moonlight. “How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“No.”
“Eighteen.”
“No.”
She squirmed a bit more. “Sixteen.”
He started up again, and she hurried to stay at his side. The only colors were shades of gray and sepia. The moonlight ripened the green squash to a pale yellow.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“When you lie, your blink rate picks up. You’ve also got a one-shouldered shrug that’s a tell. And your hands—just keep your hands at your sides. Your body language talks more than you do, and that’s saying something.”
“God,” she said. “You sound just like Jack.”
He took a moment with that one.
They cleared the squash and came onto a stretch where something—pumpkins?—had been recently harvested. Hacked vines populated the barren patch, pushing up from the earth like gnarled limbs. An aftermath scent lingered, fecund and autumnal, the smell of life and death.
“It doesn’t matter how old I am,” she said. “I can help.”
“How? Do you have locations, addresses for Van Sciver?”
“Of course not. You know how he is. Everything’s end-stopped six different ways. I didn’t even know where I was most of the time.”
“Do you have any actionable intel on him?”
“Not really.”
“Do you know why Jack was in Alabama?”
She colored slightly. “Is that where he died?”
“Joey, listen. You’re raw, totally unbroken—”
“I’m not a horse.”
“No. You’re a mustang. You fight well. You have extraordinary coordination. But you’re not finished, let alone operational.”
“Jack sent you to me.”
“To protect you. Not get you killed.”
“I have training.” She was angry now, punching every word. “I knocked you on your ass, didn’t I?”
“You can’t imagine the kind of violence that’s coming.”
“Did Jack advise you to just ship me off somewhere to hide for the rest of my life?”
The shed loomed ahead, a dark mass rising from the earth, the outline of the beater truck beside it. Evan quickened his pace.
“Jack died before he knew how this would all unfold. I have only one concern now, and that is finding Van Sciver and every person who had a hand in Jack’s death and killing them.” Evan pulled open the creaky truck door and flipped down the visor. The keys landed in his palm. He looked back at Joey. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“I’m not useless.”
“I never said that.”
She came around the passenger side, got in, slammed the door. “Yeah,” she said. “You did.”