Hellbent

“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.”