Prison didn't agree with Anna Slaten. She didn't belong here. She never had. They'd just put her here. To protect her, they said. Six months, they said, maximum. We'll be sure you don't stay any longer than necessary.
That had been two years ago. Okay, twenty-three months and seventeen days, but who was counting? She was, and it was getting more and more difficult to distinguish one day from the other. Even with her artificially enhanced brain, she had to concentrate to keep track.
Today was Wednesday, April third, and it was cold. It was nearly always cold. For a few days in July and August it tended toward warmer, but in the dead of winter she always wondered if she was going to live until spring.
Spring was here, more or less, and she was alive. More or less. And a voice over the intercom was calling her cellblock to outdoor recreation.
She pulled her shoes on. They were ugly, soft-soled slip-ons to go with the ugly but practical plain jeans and blue chambray shirts all the prisoners wore. It was the same outfit for everyone, every day. At least they didn't have to wear orange prison jumpers except on laundry day. So it could have been worse. And she'd gotten a new set of clothes for her first incarceration anniversary. Her second anniversary was coming up; maybe she'd get a nice dress.
Thus properly attired, she headed out with her fellow inmates. They all proceeded toward the doors in an orderly fashion, following the instructions of the guards. They looked like sheep. Blue sheep on two legs. The thought usually made Anna smile a little. Today it didn't.
They filed out into the exercise yard. Anna wondered about the other women. Every day, seeing the faces, the various expressions of resentment and complacency, she wondered why they all were here. Had they truly committed some unthinkable crime against humanity? Were they political prisoners, serial killers, plotters of assassinations? Or were they like her, incarcerated to put her under the radar for a while, until things cooled down, people stopped trying to kill her, and they could come fetch her and put her back to work? Although at this point, she was beginning to wonder if her employers had forgotten about her.
Today there were two new faces. They didn't appear often, but when they did, Anna paid attention. The new guests at the prison party were both big women, tall and muscular. They looked less tame than the others in the yard—they always did for the first few days, until they found their places. Or, more accurately, had their places shown to them none too subtly by the other inmates. Anna participated in the orientation procedures far less frequently these days. The others knew too well what she could do and how she did it. They'd decided—quite rightly—it was best not to fuck with her.
Anna scanned the new faces impersonally, careful to avoid an inadvertent challenge. She wanted to remember what they looked like. The outlines and details sank through the layers of her memory to that place where she would never forget them, into the locked compartments she could access at will and in need. She also let the images flow into her normal long-term memory. The process occurred instinctively; her brain knew how to do it on its own. God knew it should—she'd been through enough training. Superficial things moved into normal memory, but anything she might need later went into what she and the people who'd reprogrammed her brain called the Vault. So this morning's breakfast menu? No special treatment. Make a note in ordinary layers of gray matter. But the faces of women who quite likely might attempt to kill her in the next few days? That information she hung on to.
With the women's faces properly catalogued, Anna turned her attention back to her surroundings. She enjoyed outdoor recreation as much as anyone could enjoy anything in prison. The fresh air made her feel alive, invigorated. Good, clean oxygen penetrating to every cell. She wasn't sure where this facility was located, though she'd made several educated guesses, but it was far enough away from civilization that the air was truly pure.
Beyond the high fences, topped with barbed wire and electric wires, mountains loomed in a not-so-far distance. In the winter, they remained wrapped in a hazy twilight for nearly two months by her reckoning; in the middle of summer, the sun stayed above the horizon for the same amount of time. Add in the alpine tundra that surrounded the facility, the occasional caribou and frequent marmots and pikas, and what she knew about Agency facilities in general, and she'd decided to put money on northern Canada or maybe Alaska. The grizzly bear that had wandered by last summer reinforced that assumption, as did everything she'd been able to excavate from the Vault. Strangely though, as much top-secret Agency shit as she kept hidden behind her mental firewall, she didn't seem to have any information on an Agency incarceration facility in northern Canada or Alaska. And she'd tried. If this place had no records in the vast stew of information that was her enhanced, segmented, and precisely programmed brain, it really was about as top-secret as anything could get. She had yet to decide if that made her more secure or less.
Strolling along the inside of the fence, she looked out over the greening stretch of tundra. Spring was definitely on the way; she could see tiny, white, star-shaped flowers among the short grasses. She wondered how long it would be before she would see babies—little mountain goats or bighorn sheep.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Absorbed in her thoughts as she was, she might have missed it, but even musing over the change of seasons, part of her was always alert, on watch. Hell, even sleeping, part of her was always alert and on watch. She spun and brought up an arm just in time to block the shiv the woman—one of the newcomers, Anna realized in a flash—had swung at her, directed at the base of her skull. Had the blade connected, it would have severed Anna's spine.
As it was, she caught the other woman's forearm against her own, like crossed blades, with a force that made Anna wonder for a moment if she'd cracked a bone. Ignoring the pain lurching up into her shoulder, she snaked into a counter move, ripping the shiv from the other woman's hand and unbalancing her to the ground.
It wasn't over though. A second woman—the other newcomer—came at Anna right as she straightened again. Anna slewed her body, avoiding most of the impact, and the second attacker face-planted into the wire fence. Too bad it wasn't electrified, Anna thought. She would have liked to see the woman flailing against the wire. But she only bounced back on her ass and glared up at Anna, flexing to initiate another attack.
"Okay, you're done. It's over."
Anna had been only vaguely aware of the guards moving in. She'd been too focused on avoiding sharp pointy things. But she'd known it was only a matter of time. The question, as always, was how much time? She straightened, lifting her hands to show she was unarmed and willing to obey orders.
Her two attackers, though, were not so complacent. One of them rushed the guard, distracting her. The other headed straight back for Anna.
With the woman between her and the guard, Anna didn't see the gun go off. She heard it, though, a horrible roar in the quiet, alpine morning. And when the bullet exited her erstwhile attacker's head, blood, brains, and bone spattered out behind it, striking Anna's shoulder, the side of her face.
The bullet missed her. The second attacker didn't. The big woman caught Anna hard, bearing her down to the ground. Anna brought up an arm to deflect the coming blow, but it was the same arm that had taken the impact of the shiv attack. Biting pain tore through her at the second hard hit, turning her vision red. The blow was partially deflected, but the woman's big fist caught her in the temple with a glancing blow. It was enough.
The gun gave a second bark, and everything went black.
* * * *
Evgeni Belyakov consulted his GPS with a skeptical eye. It said he was within a quarter-mile of the top-secret facility near Barrow, Alaska. But he saw no sign of it. If he'd taken his regular equipment, issued by the Agency, he would have been more confident in the device's accuracy. But for this mission he hadn't dared use anything that officially belonged to him. There was too much danger of being tracked.
He looked away from the GPS and instead took in the stretch of tundra around him. It looked pristine, unmolested. A ptarmigan, in its spring brown, hopped by not far from him. Evgeni could see a fox crouched a few yards away, ready to leap on its dinner.
"Psssht," Evgeni said, not sure why he did it. The ptarmigan took flight, startled. The fox turned at the sound as well. If foxes could swear, Evgeni was certain he would have gotten an earful. He was almost certain its eyes narrowed at him before it turned and loped away.
"Sorry, my friend," he said softly after it. The Russian words mangled the quiet. He returned his attention to his surroundings.
There. Yes, the landscape looked pristine, unbroken, but right there, at about eleven o'clock, he found a nearly imperceptible break in the silhouette of the tundra.
If he'd had any doubt that this facility was as deep undercover as any place he'd ever been, that doubt was gone. Above the Arctic Circle, in an area practically inaccessible to anyone who wasn't determined to get there, and hidden this perfectly, the prison was one of the most guarded areas he'd ever seen. Only in his earlier days with the Agency, when he'd been sent to the remote Siberian medical facility where he'd been refigured, had he ever seen such care taken to hide a place.
He squinted toward the slight anomaly, muttering to himself as he calculated distance. More than a kilometer, not so far as two. It wouldn't take him long to get there. And when he did, the forged paperwork he carried would get him past the guards, easy as could be.
He hoped.
He climbed back into his Humvee and continued his journey.
* * * *
Anna woke with her head buzzing. She lay still for a few moments, eyes closed, trying to assess her surroundings before she let anyone know she was conscious. The sharp bite of antiseptic in her nose made her suspect she was in the prison infirmary. The lumpy, uncomfortable nature of the surface under her—a hospital bed, she was certain—confirmed that suspicion.
She heard murmurs in the near distance, maybe from the corridor outside her room. The voices were female—all the personnel at this facility were female, as were the residents. Inmates. Whatever.
"He'll have to wait," one said.
The other voice countered, "He has priority paperwork. I don't know how long I can hold him off."
"Well, he can't exactly perform an extraction if she's still unconscious, now, can he?"
This seemed to Anna like an appropriate time to open her eyes. Her heart had lurched at the word "extraction." Were they talking about her? She hoped to God they were.
As she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings, the buzzing in her head resolved into something she recognized. She had heard something while she was unconscious. Her brain was signaling her to retrieve it.
It could wait a few more minutes. She lifted her head, hoping to catch the attention of the medical personnel who were talking about her in the hallway beyond the open door. A moaning noise would probably be helpful, so she added one.
Almost immediately, one of the doctors was at her bedside. Anna recognized Dr. Potter, who'd tended to her on previous occasions. "Welcome back, Anna," she said.
"What happened?" Anna knew damn well what had happened, but she wanted to keep up the pretense of being muddled, at least for now. Once she'd sorted things out, she could let them know she was okay.
"You were attacked in the yard," Dr. Potter said. "Do you remember?"
Anna nodded, pushing herself into a sitting position. "Yeah. Why? Why did they come after me?"
"They were new to the facility. We think someone might have dared them to."
It was a reasonable enough explanation. "Were?" she repeated.
"Unfortunately, the guards were forced to eliminate them both."
Anna nodded. Also reasonable, and not an uncommon occurrence. And she'd seen with her own eyes why the first one had been killed. Sorry—eliminated—mustn't forget proper Agency parlance. But something about the way Dr. Potter said it made hairs on the back of Anna's neck stand up, and the little alarm dinged again in the back of her head. Something was wrong. Painfully wrong.
"Your arm isn't broken," the doctor said, "so you're lucky there."
"But?" Anna had the distinct impression there was a "but."
"You were struck in the head. We have protocols to follow before can you can be allowed to leave the infirmary."
"I'm fine," Anna insisted.
"This isn't a public hospital," Dr. Potter stated. "You can't sign yourself out against doctor's orders."
"I'm fine," Anna stated again, more firmly this time, as if she could impose her will on the obviously stubborn doctor. Something shifted in the back of her brain—information reorganizing itself to bring the new data to the surface. "And if there's someone here to see me, I'd like to know who it is."
The doctor didn't manage to hold back the blink of surprise, but it was a near thing. Anna had to admire the restraint. But she saw the slight tightening of the other woman's eyelids and knew that, once again, the automatic recording features of her brain had performed as advertised.
"His paperwork is...irregular," the doctor said.
Anna was silent a moment, letting another memory float to the top. "No. There's something else bothering you about him."
The extraction conflicts with the orders we received yesterday. Anna heard the voice in her head as clearly as if the speaker were in the infirmary with her. But his paperwork looks to be in order. Should we call HQ to confirm?
Something strange was going on, no question about it. Anna swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her head hurt where she'd been hit, but there were no other symptoms—no vision anomalies or nausea that might indicate a concussion.
"If he's here to extract me, my orders are to go with him. No questions. Those orders came from higher up than anyone in this facility." She wasn't about to let a little head injury or confusion about her status keep her from getting the hell out of here. Just the thought of finally leaving had her heart pitter-pattering in her throat.
"I'm aware of that," said the doctor, her voice tight. Anna should be used to that kind of reaction by now; no one liked it when she pulled rank. "But there's still your well-being to consider—"
"I'm fine," Anna shot back. She rattled off a list of symptoms, accessing a catalog of medical data hidden in a place that felt like it sat behind her left ear. She didn't have any of them.
"You're a terrible patient," the doctor told her testily.
"I've heard that before." Dr. Potter, of course, knew about Anna's surgically reconfigured brain and knew her rank in the Agency. She also knew damn well that Anna had special privileges when it came to deciding her own fate. If Anna decided to walk out of the infirmary and go with whoever was waiting for her, there wasn't much anyone here could do about it.
"Fine," the doctor conceded. "But I want to look you over first to be sure you're responding correctly to basic tests. If they extract you and find out you got broken and I didn't treat it, it's my ass on the line."
"Fair enough." Anna could tolerate having her knees banged with hammers and lights shone in her eyes. But after that she was hightailing it the ever-loving fuck out of here.
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