He pulled the truck back onto the road just about the time Akard and Schroeder came tearing around the bend, and Rose would be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed the look of shock on their faces as they swerved hard to round either side of the truck and then spilled their four-wheelers into the rain ditch.
She rolled the window down quick and stuck her head out and yelled as loud as she could, “Fuck you, jack-offs.”
Then she plopped herself back into her seat, smiled her good smile again, and turned to the guy driving, who she realized hadn’t told her his name yet, and she said, “So.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Why? How old are you?”
He smiled and shook his head again and said, “Never mind.”
She looked at him closely then. He wasn’t ugly, exactly, but he wasn’t good-looking, either. His features, when taken individually — his nose, his lips, his eyes, his ears, even — were nice enough, but put together they didn’t seem to match.
Rose didn’t care. She wasn’t going to marry him. She was just using him for a ride.
“My name’s Henry,” he said. He waited for her to say her name; she could feel him waiting in the way he paused. Then, when she just looked at him, he said, “So. Where am I taking you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t ready to give her name just yet, but she wasn’t ready to get out of the truck yet either. “Where you going?”
He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and looked at the dash. “Well, in a second, I’m going to have to get gas, but after that, I’ll take you back home. Sound all right?”
She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, and then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
3
Finally, she gave that signal and the fucking mercs were off, pouring out of their vans like weaponized roaches, and then they were gone, and Colleen, jog-walking right behind the mercs as they charged into the offices of the Morrison World Travel Concern, patted Rose on her ass and gave her a peck on her cheek and told her, “Nice work, kid,” and then waved casually over her shoulder and called out, “See you on the other side” as she ran to catch up with the grunts, leaving Rose standing on the sidewalk feeling like she felt that one summer she agreed to help out with the pre-K kids at church camp, how relieved she’d felt every fucking day when it was recess and all those little shits had run screaming and hitting and shoving out of the multipurpose room and into the play yard and all she’d wanted to do was sit down and revel in the peace and quiet for one goddamn minute.
She took a deep breath. She let it out. She wanted to take, like, five hundred more, but there wasn’t time. She had a suspicion today would be a day full of deep fucking breaths.
Rose sprinted into the parking garage where there was supposed to be an elevator that she couldn’t take because where would be the surprise and fun in that? No, she had to find the vent because of course there was a vent. It was always the same with these fucking places: Something as stupid as a vent opened up the entire labyrinth of a place, no matter how secure the rest of the building was. And sure, there were measures set up to protect the vents, lasers and heat sensors and weight sensors and shit like that, but they’d been taken care of from the inside, from their girl on the inside. And sure, Rose knew that no matter how all-powerful and underground your organization was, you had to make it so the people working for you could breathe and shit, but, Jesus, when she was done with this line of work, she planned to find somebody good at making things, like an engineer or someone, and together they’d invent a way to ventilate air into a building without ventilation shafts and she’d make, like, a billion dollars in the secret agency business. Because if you worked hard enough at it, you could bypass laser sensors and shit, but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get down a ventilation shaft that wasn’t there, and that was the goddamned truth.
Rose climbed into the shaft, hooked her cable to the edge, and taking a deep breath, started counting to five, and then, because she liked surprises and hated waiting, let herself drop at three.
Rose dropped twenty or thirty feet and then caught hold of the rope, threw her feet against the aluminum of the vent shaft, leaving deep boot marks in it, almost breaking the shaft off its column. She should have been wearing gloves. She hated wearing gloves, though, hated the way they constricted her hands, the way she couldn’t grip things as well as she liked, not even with the grippy kind of gloves, not the way she liked to be able to grip into a thing when she needed to, and anyway, she hardly felt the burn of the rope as it burned in her palms. Still, she couldn’t help but hear Henry’s voice in the back of her head: Where the hell are your gloves, newbie?
God, though, she was bored. Bored of Henry’s voice in her head. Bored of this assault, which felt to her like nothing more than a glorified training session.
What was worse was if everything went the way it was supposed to go, she’d be bored the whole time.
Well. Most of the whole time. Taking care of the director of this outfit might offer its own — albeit brief — distractions.
Rose wondered what Colleen was doing. She wondered how the grunts were doing. Rounding up hostages, leading the oblivious fools in the travel agency down to the real offices of the Regional Office. She wondered if the travel agents even knew who they worked for. Probably not. People are idiots. She wondered what Jimmie and Windsor were doing, how they were handling their teams, wondered if they were already done with their assignments. Rose didn’t wonder if anyone had died yet — no one had but someone would soon enough and then others after that — because she hadn’t quite caught up to the idea that people — strangers and people she knew — were going to die. She was only seventeen, after all. So far it all seemed like a game, like an elaborate, somehow less fun game of paintball she was playing with Andrea and Colleen and Windsor back at Assassin Training Camp, but then thinking of Windsor made her think of Henry, which always dropped Rose onto shaky, spazzy ground.
Henry wasn’t even on the fucking premises. He was monitoring the operation from the rendezvous point, but as far as she knew, that meant watching Point Break on Netflix or some shit like that.
But at least he wasn’t with Windsor. Tall, gorgeous, white-blond, blue-eyed, smart, funny, age-appropriate Windsor.
At least there was that.
At least she didn’t have to waste time or brainpower trying to imagine or not imagine what shenanigans might’ve been going on with him and Windsor while she was stuck here in this shitty ventilation shaft.
Not that she cared.
Not that she gave two shits about Henry.
Not that she gave him another thought.
She stopped. Fuck. She’d missed her goddamn turn.
4
Rose didn’t know how long Henry had been driving around, how long she’d had her eyes closed. Not too long, of course. You couldn’t drive around this town for too long before you were driving out of it, but with the windows in his truck rolled down, the hot air blowing across her face, Rose didn’t feel any immediate urge to open her eyes, to see what the hell this stranger was doing or where he was driving her in his truck.
Then she became bored.
She opened her eyes just in time to see two girls she knew standing on the side of the road, looking over something dead on the pavement, giving it serious consideration.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Rose said. “Pull over real quick.”
Then she leaned out of her window. “What the hell are you girls doing?”