Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 12

T7 POV

By Thursday, T7 had learned his name, his schedule, the name of the school where he taught, the route he took to and from it, the name of his wife, and the fact that his wife was returning from Chicago on Friday afternoon.

She had also learned that the pull did not diminish with time. If anything it worsened. The longer she stayed in proximity the more insistent it became, the more it tugged at something that she had spent years being told she did not have. Something that felt, uncomfortably, like need.

She did not understand it.

She needed to understand it.

Understanding things was what she did. It was, in the absence of affection or autonomy, what she had built herself around. The Division gave her problems and she solved them. She was excellent at this. She had been told so many times by people who spoke about her excellence the way you speak about a machine's efficiency. Without warmth. With a kind of detached approval that was the only approval she had ever known.

She needed to talk to him.

The rational part of her, the trained part, said this was inadvisable. Her presence had clearly registered with him on Tuesday. He was aware of her. Going to him directly was a compromise of her position.

The other part of her, the part that had woken up in the alley and refused to go back to sleep, said it was necessary.

She compromised.

She would go to the wife.

…

Cassandra Rogers came home from Chicago on Friday at 3:47 in the afternoon, which was forty-three minutes earlier than the estimated arrival time T7 had calculated based on her flight schedule. T7 noted this with mild irritation as she recalibrated her position.

She followed her from the station on foot. The wife was small and quick-moving with the focused energy of someone who is already thinking about the next thing before the current thing is finished. She carried a rolling conference bag and a tote printed with a medical equipment diagram and she stopped once to answer her phone, laughing at something the caller said, and T7 had to stop walking because the laugh was the same as his and it did something complicated to her chest that she did not have a category for.

She followed her down the residential street. She had a plan. It was not a good plan but it was a plan. She would intercept her. She would ask her questions. She would be calm and rational and the wife, who was clearly intelligent, would understand that this was simply an information exchange and there was no need for alarm.

This was what T7 told herself.

What actually happened was that Miles' unit turned onto the far end of the street at 4:11 and T7 saw the vehicles and understood in an instant that her time had run out entirely.

She moved without thinking.

She was across the street and alongside the wife before the woman had registered her presence and she had the door of the house open with the keys she had duplicated on Wednesday, and she had the wife inside and the door closed before Cassandra Rogers had fully processed what was happening.

"Do not scream," T7 said. Her voice came out too flat, too controlled. She had not spoken to another person in five days and she had forgotten how to modulate. "I am not going to hurt you. I need to ask you something and then I will leave."

The wife stared at her.

T7 expected fear. She was used to fear. Fear was a predictable response that could be managed.

What Cassandra Rogers gave her instead was not fear. It was assessment. Her eyes moved over T7 with quick clinical attention, the way a doctor looks at a patient, cataloguing, evaluating, and then landing finally on T7's face with an expression that was, against all reasonable expectation, steady.

"You're a wolf," Cassandra said.

T7 blinked.

"How do you—"

"I'm married to one. I know what you people smell like." Cassandra set her conference bag down against the wall in the movement of someone who has decided that panic is not going to be useful here. "What do you want to know?"

T7 stared at her.

In all of her planning for this conversation she had not accounted for this.

She had not accounted for someone being calm.

The Division had trained her in interrogation resistance and negotiation and the management of hostile subjects. She knew what fear looked like in a body — the elevated pulse, the shallow breath, the eyes that moved too quickly to the exits. She knew what aggression looked like. She knew what compliance purchased through terror looked like.

She did not know what this was. This woman who set down her bag and straightened her spine and looked at T7 the way she might look at a patient presenting with confusing symptoms. With attention. With something that was almost, impossibly, professional courtesy.

"Why does your husband affect me like that?" T7 said, and hated how the question sounded out loud. Too raw. Too exposed. Nothing like the controlled information request she had rehearsed in the three days she had been standing in the dark outside this house, watching the lights and trying to find the right words for something she had no language for.

Cassandra's expression shifted into something complicated and knowing and not entirely unkind. She tilted her head the way intelligent people tilt their heads when they are putting pieces together that have been sitting in front of them for a while.

"How long have you been outside?" Cassandra asked.

T7 blinked. It was not the question she had expected.

"Three days," she said, before she had decided to answer.

Something moved across Cassandra's face that T7 did not immediately have a name for. It took her a moment to identify it as concern. Directed at T7. Which made no sense, given that T7 had just brought her inside her own house without permission.

"Oh," she said quietly. "Oh, that's what this is."

Outside, through the wall, T7 could hear the vehicles parking.

She did not have much time.