7 Kills + An Apple

Seventy-Nine: One More Talk

Brandon Prince

By the time I can get back up without seeing spots in my vision, I wish I could curse everyone in the Alliance Division for drugging me.

But I can't. They don't have an office in San Francisco or maybe even a hotline where I can call and complain. Well, if they do, they have a top secret hotline.

I absorb everything I can learn from Kalypso. It is weird a super-secret agency would recruit her, but I shouldn't be so surprised. She is smart, she is wealthy, she is well-documented, and she would be the last person anyone would suspect to be a spy.

But she didn't choose to go that route.

Neither did I.

"I came with Brigham and—"

"I imagine the Division managed to give them some alibis and sent them home," says Kalypso, shrugging. "Don't worry. Even though they are more secretive than the NSA, the Division isn't bad. Otherwise, I wouldn't be funding them."

"But they—"

"Gassed you? Put a bag of your head?" she guesses, her dark brown eyes blinking at me. "Well, that is what they do. Instead of politely asking you, they always drag you into their secret, secret safe houses. But they aren't bad. They helped me. They helped take down an ISIS cell right in the United States. They found an entire human trafficking system by accident, after one of their hackers drank too many little bottles of airplane beer and decided to call the number on a weird site he was looking it."

She gives me a look.

"That is weird."

"They are weird. But they protect the world, and for me, that is enough," she replies, standing up from the armchair and going in front of a white cabinet in the corner. "You and I do not share the same opinions, but you haven't been with the Alliance Division as long as I have. I have been with them for a decade."

I watch her put a thin blanket of floralpatterns on me, and then she walks away. I lay my head back down on the couch,and I slowly let myself fall asleep.