The thing you have to keep in mind about D.C. is that it's a two-faced city. I'm not talking about the people—I'm talking about the culture. On one hand, you have a city made for presidents and politicians. Visity royalty and the most influential artists that generations have to offer. On the other, there's the journalists covering doomed campaigns. Waiters working the late shift at the diner where Georgian republicans like to discuss healthcare and people too proud for the shelters scavenging through the dumpsters out back.
When we checked in to the hotel that night, overnight bags slung over our tired shoulders, I was expecting to see the second face. When we reached our floor and hunted down our room number, I thought that we’d be boarding up with the rats and the roaches, our room so small that one of us would probably have to sleep in the bathroom.
But when Will slid that keycard and opened the door, I was greeted by a suite fit for a king—maybe literally. The three of us stood there for a moment, struck to the core. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Will check the keycard as if it held some magical code that had somehow let us into the wrong room.
I spend the majority of my time in a centuries-old building—a castle, really. It’s a castle. The Gallagher Academy has some of the most beautiful architecture I’ve ever seen, complete with intricate stained glass and seemingly infinite secret passageways. With such an impressive place to call home, I shouldn’t have been all that impressed by the room in front of me, but I was. I totally was.
There was a view of the Washington Monument straight through the massive window at the rear of the room, the light of the reflection pool shimmering in across the cotton candy stripes that sat diagonally across the walls. One part of the room was wrapped around a massive fireplace that floomphed when we turned the light on, a pair of cushy sofas with little pink pillows sitting just in front of it. Our beds were just behind that, each decorated with draping canopies and (possibly) actual fairy dust.
The carpet felt like it was stuffed, golden swirls twisting into the creamy white. The first thing I did was fall onto one of the sofas, sending the decorative pillows flying. It felt like a hug for my butt. A butt hug.
Will and Bill followed me in, ditching their bags just inside the door. Bill went to close the massive drapery, golden fringe swinging with his movement. It was standard procedure, I remembered. These boys were all about procedure. I couldn't help wondering what procedure Will was acting upon when grabbed a washcloth from the neatly folded stack on the back of the toilet and started to wet it.
There was a pale, wooden coffee table in front of me, decorated with more pink stripes and a basket full of goodies. A note sat on top of it all.
Treats are paid for. Help yourselves. Good Luck.
-Hughes
Bill plopped down on the couch opposite me, lounging about in a way that he looked like he could grow accustomed to. Will flicked the light off in the bathroom and threw the washcloth at me, the wetness letting out a disproportionately loud snap as it smacked my skin. It was warm and soft against my torn up hands. “You look awful,” he said. He was trying to hide his guilt, but Will was so easy to get a read on.
I shrugged pulling off my dark sweater and throwing it aside.
The boys didn’t even blink at the sight of a half naked girl in their room, mostly because they didn’t notice.
They were too busy calling dibs on which snacks they were going to eat and even if they weren’t, the sight of me in a bra was one that they had seen many a time over those long, summer months (because if guys get to run drills without shirts on, then I get to run them in a sports bra).
I was pretty sure that my legs had gotten the worst of that thorn bush, but my arms had to be next in line. Some cuts were deeper than others, but thankfully, most of them were just a little pink and puffed. Others were surrounded by crusted up blood, already starting to scab over. I used Will’s washcloth to clean them, noticing that it smelled faintly of vanilla. “Part of the job,” I assured him.
Will didn’t look all that convinced. Next to him, Bill would wince when I winced.“Did you at least get any information?” Will asked.
“Something, yeah,” I said. “I’m just not sure what.”
“Well,” Bill said, throwing his shoes up onto the table with a clunk and tossing a handful of Whoppers into his mouth. “On with it then.”
And so I told them all of it, knowing that debriefing was just as, if not more important that the mission itself. I told them about the call to Russia and the way Subject X had sounded. How there’d been worry in his tone. And anger. Both. How he’d wanted autopsy records. I listed all of the uses I could think of, by my list wasn’t all that extensive. I told them that he was probably CIA and that he was investigating the death of Natasha Azarov, a name that neither of the boys knew. “That’s all you heard?” Will asked when I finished. I nodded.
"That’s all I got. Right up until he entered the dining room.”
The two of them seemed to process this information, maybe trying to connect it all into something that made sense. I could see their brains working as they plotted the data in their heads, but it didn’t look like any conclusions had been made when Will finally said, “Alright, Cap. Nice Work. We need you to write up a report.”
“Sure thing,” I said, fully expecting it. This was an op, after all. A MockOp, sure, but an op nonetheless and ops had paperwork.
I was already standing, off to grab the computer that Will had brought with us, but then both of them stood too, meeting me like a wall in my path. They glanced at each other like they were supposed to be surprised, but had long since grown accustomed to the idea of being on the same page. As I looked up to the two of them, I realized that, for the first time ever, I was on the wrong side of the Will and Bill dream team. “Not so fast, Cap,” Bill scolded, looking back to me.
“Go take a shower first,” Will ordered. “Or a bubble bath. Or whatever it is that girls take.”
“Umm… what?” I said. I resisted the urge to smell my armpits. Did I reek?
“Cap,” Bill said, a sigh in his voice.
“You look exhausted, you’ve got dirt all over you, and your forehead’s been bleedin’ for the past twenty minutes."
I reached my hand up to my forehead, feeling around for the stickiness. Sure enough, there it was, oozing over my right temple. Figured. Temples always bled for an outrageous amount of time. It always looked worse that it really was.
But it didn’t matter how much blood was oozing from my head or how cut up I was. There was a mission afoot. Reports to be written, debriefings to be had—death investigations to be, well, investigated. I’d shower when that was good and done. When my job here was over, which, let me tell you, it was not. The most important part of any op is the paperwork.
I took another step forward, but Will blocked me. He may have been the weaker of the two, but he still had a good amount of muscle on me. “Sorry, Cap. Team morale. Can’t have you getting grumpy on me.”
“I’m not going to get grumpy,” I said, this time blocked by Bill as I took another step. I shuffled back and forth between the two of them and together they were too fast for me. “Look, if I can just get the report—guys, stop can I just—okay, really?” I was vaguely aware of the heat rushing to my ears, but I didn't really feel it until someone started yelling. Until I started yelling. “I do not need a shower, okay?”
The two of them each cut me a look through the tops of their eyes. Bill crossed his arms in a rather accusatory fashion and that’s when I felt it. The blood in my face. The tightness in my shoulders. Each and every cut and scrape across my skin. “Maybe I’ll go take a shower.”
Will nodded, the corner of his mouth ticking up into a smile. “Great idea, Cap.”
Bill grabbed my shoulders and turned me in the right direction.“Bathroom’s right over there.”
That was when I knew. That was the exact moment I knew that Will and Bill knew me better than I knew myself.
The first thing I saw when I closed the door behind me was the mirror. It was massive, taking up the majority of the wall. It seemed like the bouquet in front of it swallowed most of the reflection, but there was just enough room to see myself. The boys were right. I looked pretty torn up. My face wouldn’t be horribly scarred forever, but there were definitely a few scrapes that would stick around for a while. The one over my temple was the worst by far, but one had come dangerously close to my eye and another stretched from ear to lip.
I reached past the shower curtain to the golden handle, letting the water run as I tried to figure out which way was hot and which was cold. Stupid hotel showers. Who could ever tell with those things?
At first the water stung as it hit the fresh cuts, igniting my entire body in a sore, slow flame. Thin pink streaks spiraled down the drain until the water turned clear, running smoothly down my back like slow, curling lava. I felt my shoulders unwind. My skin loosend. When I finally let my hair down and ran water through it, it turned to silk, my curls deflating under the weight.
I tried to detach from the mission, thinking of my grandfather’s words to me so many weeks ago. Most people stop. It was time for me to stop, but my mind kept wandering back to the mission. To Subject X and his thorn bush and something else. Something I couldn’t quite identify. It was that gut feeling that everyone talks about. Something jumping out at me, even if I didn’t know what. Natasha Azarov. I’d heard the name Natasha Azarov before.
No, Maggie. Forget about it. Just detach. Gather yourself.
You know it a voice whispered at me. Mom’s voice. How was it that she was always there still? It wasn’t fair. She didn’t get to talk to me if she was going to insist on being dead. You know the name.
Yeah. I did know the name.
Stop this. Relax. You’re going to burn yourself out.
Focus Maggie.
Focus Maggie.
You’ve seen the name.
I tried to shake her out of my head. I think I knocked myself around a bit and that worked for a while. There was a long time when Mom didn’t come back and I thought she was gone.
Natasha Azarov.
The words were slow and quiet, not quite a whisper, but not quite a breath. They hit me in the chest and suddenly I knew. I hadn’t heard the name before—I’d seen it.
I slammed the water off, hopping out of the shower as fast as I could, not even bothering to dry myself off before throwing clothes on again. I bolted towards the door, hardly turning the knob before ripping it open. “I’ve got it!”
I was met with a gentle shushing, looking to Will as he threw his thumb towards Bill, asleep on the sofa with a bag of Cheetos opened in his lap. “I’ve got it,” I said again, quieter this time.
Will was leaning up against the long windowsill, the light of the pool below swimming across his face. He didn’t look at me as he spoke, his gaze lost in the swirls and the waves. “Got what?”
“Grandpa Joe doesn’t read Espionage Today,” I told him. I expected him to join in on my excitement, the two of us jumping up and down with delight at the solved case, but he didn’t and I was jumping alone.
“That’s…” he said, his voice slow. It was like talking to a ghost. A shell. Like when you expect someone to pick up on the other end of the line, but only get their voicemail. “Good to know, I guess.”
Only then did I realize that I wasn’t making sense. “A few months ago,” I started, my mind flashing back to the sirens and the lights. “The day we had a code red, do you remember?”
He nodded, but still didn’t look at me. I joined him in looking out at some of the most historic marks in the country, the Washington Monument pointing towards the stars as I spotted the exact spot where a man had a dream. When I turned to Will, I saw him doing the same, his eyes stuck in one place—that long pool that stretched across the center of the Mall—and I had to wonder what William Kidd saw when he looked down at the Reflecting Pool. "Sure, Cap."
“Well, when we went to Grandpa Joe’s office, he had a copy of Espionage Today on his desk,” I explained. “But Grandpa Joe doesn’t read Espionage Today.”
He looked at me now, confusion turning to a smile. It wasn’t his usual grin, though. It was light. Exhausted. I’d seen it many times before, usually from Mom or Dad. Grandma or Grandpa Joe. It was a pity smile. When I was younger it had always been followed by a, “Alright, let’s get you to bed, kiddo,” from my Mom.
Will thought I was reaching. That I was drawing conclusions from something that wasn’t there. That I was just tired. “Don’t give me that look,” I said, but there was no power behind it because I wasn’t sure he was wrong. Maybe I was reaching. Maybe I just really wanted everything to make sense.
“When was the last time you got any sleep, Cap?” he asked, turning to look back out the window.
Will isn’t a particularly strong spy. He’s not a particularly smart spy. Sure, he’s exceptional in both of those fields by average standards, but spies have never measured themselves against the average. The thing that Will really has a control over is emotion. He can feel other people. He can manipulate them without even knowing it. He has that contagious smile and a warm personality. William Kidd is a master of emotion, but just then I wasn’t looking at the master. I was looking at the boy, wondering what on earth he could be feeling. “When’s the last time you did?”
He flashed a smile—a real one this time—looking like he’d been caught.
“What’s so revolutionary about Espionage Today?” he asked me, a textbook change of subject if ever I saw one.
“What?”
He let out a huff, not really amused enough to laugh. Or maybe, I thought, just not happy enough. “What is so urgently important about your grandpa’s magazine that you came running out of here half-dressed to tell me?”
Oh. Right. “The name. On the cover,” I blurted, recalling that day. I had been too busy feuding with my father to notice. Too stubborn to really see the expired magazine splayed across my grandfather’s desk and wonder what it was doing there. “The family of Natasha Azarov speaks out. Will, Natasha Azarov has been dead for at least a year.”
He shrugged, which looked funny given the way he was standing. Everything about Will was so awkward right then. Everything about him felt strange. “So what?”
So what? So this was our mission. Whatever puzzle we were supposed to be solving—this was a piece. “So what?” he said again, standing up straight now. His usual spark was gone. There was no more flame to his usual fire. “We already knew she was dead. That’s why he asked for the autopsy report.”
“A year later?” I asked. “Will, you and I both know that there’s only one reason why someone asks for an autopsy report a year after a death.”
And then, finally, the light returned to his eyes. “Are you saying…?”
“Subject X isn’t investigating a death,” I told him.
“He’s investigating a murder.”
There was a moment when I thought that Will’s normal self would shine through. There was a moment that I thought I’d see the version of him that got excited about a lead and always, always wanted to learn more. But I was wrong, because I didn’t get much more than that same pity smile. “Get some sleep, Cap. Write the report and get some sleep.”
I felt my smile fall. My confidence tumble. Right. Of course not. I was reaching. I was tired.My face was scratched up and my mind was fried.
“We did good work today, didn’t we?” he asked, looking out on the nation’s capital once more. It took me a second to realize that it wasn’t rhetorical. That he was actually asking, checking my data against his.
“Yeah,” I assured him. “Yeah, it was good work.”
“We almost got busted a couple of times, there,” he reminded me and this, I knew, was where his real regret came from. “There were a couple of close calls.”
“Hey,” I said, stopping the thoughts in their tracks. “It was a MockOp, remember?” I thought about the crawl from window to sidewalk. The way my heart was beating too fast or how my skin was burning with fresh cuts. The fact is that your body doesn’t care if the op is real or not. The fact is that the fear of getting caught is always the same. “We made it. We’re good.”
He nodded like that matched up with the data in his head, too. “Because, you know, if anything would have happened to you. Or to Bill…” He didn’t finish his sentence and I knew that it was because he couldn’t. He literally could not imagine the things he would do if Bill or I were ever in trouble.
So instead, he stood up, giving me a pat on the shoulder and holding it there. “Get some sleep, Cap,” he told me as he left the windowsill.
“I’ll write the report,” I promised.
“Sure,” he said, letting his hand fall back to his side. “But then get some sleep.”
As I went for the computer, ready to type up the report, I watched Will walk over to his best friend.
He plucked the Cheetos from Bill’s lap and set the bag on the table before grabbing two blankets from the back of each of the sofas. With a yawn, he threw one over Bill’s shoulders, who snored at the movement, then he stretched out across the opposite sofa, curling up inside of the second blanket.
At the rear of the room, there were two beds, but only one of them would be used that night. I had to wonder what sort of boys would choose to sleep on the couch when there was a five-star bed at their disposal. Blackthorne Boys, I thought. My grandfather’s handwriting found it’s way into my head, bits of the Blackthorne report from last year standing out. Boys with nowhere else to go.