Other than the dead OI agents, there are only a few desks and two open laptops.
“Yes,” Jack answers simply. “Find anything back there?” He nods towards the door I came through.
I shake my head.
“Nah, seems all the action was out here.” Moving over to one of the laptops, I add, “Let’s just grab the laptops and go. Dru can do her thing with them when we get back.”
There’s not much point in sticking around now. Either the information we need will be on the laptops, or it won’t, so we might as well take them and see what Dru can find later.
Jack agrees with my plan and goes to snatch up the other laptop.
Once we have what we need, I lead us out through the back to the side lane. We are careful to make sure no one is around to pay attention to us before we run across the street and get back into the van.
I give Jack my laptop and get the van started.
It’s only when we’ve been driving for a couple of minutes that I glance over at Jack and notice he has a few flecks of blood on his face. I missed them earlier due to his freckles camouflaging them enough to miss them on a cursory look.
I was distracted by all the OI agents with their skulls blown out and blood seeping across the wooden floor. Blood looks so much darker and thicker in real life than it ever does on television. I dislike the smell of it, which is more pungent than you’d think when in large quantities.
“You got blood on your face,” I tell Jack, keeping as much emotion out of my voice as I’m currently able.
Jack doesn’t seem to mind. He blinks at me for a second before reaching to pull down the vizor and check out his face in the small mirror.
He licks his fingers and rubs at the specks of blood, removing them without any fuss.
“Well,” I say, to dispel some of the awkwardness, “at least we didn’t fuck up our first mission.”
But Jack is apparently less willing to play along. “You know you don’t have to pretend,” he says neutrally.
“Pretend what?” I frown at him.
“That you’re not bothered.” Jack blows out an annoyed breath. “Lots of the OI agents I worked with tried to do that, especially when I was a child. They all pretended it wasn’t bizarre to see a nine-year-old covered in blood with fully grown men dead at his feet.”
The way he saysnine-year-old, as if it’s nothing, is disturbing to me on a few different levels. Renewed disgust for OI and their treatment of the Liquid Onyx survivors hits me solidly in the chest. I taste bile at the back of my throat and have to swallow it down. The cause is likely a mix of imagining Jack as a child, bloody and forced to enact such horror, and the very real image I have of Jack standing amongst those dead OI agents today.
“It’s not really about you,” I say to him, which is true. This is hardly the first time I’ve run into difficulty reconciling myself with the necessity of killing while on a mission. “I’ve always struggled with the darker aspects of this job. You’d probably be better off with someone like Damon.”
“Why?” Jack asks, more sardonic now. “Is he trigger-happy too?”
“No,” I say, huffing out a short laugh. “He’s just less twitchy about pulling the trigger. He can do it if he has to, and he won’t feel bad about it. Not really. Not if someone gave him no choice.”
Jack is silent for a couple of drawn-out seconds, his brows furrowing in obvious discontentment, like he disagrees with what I’ve stated but doesn’t know if there’s a point in arguing about it.
“There’s always a choice,” he settles on in response.
“Maybe.” I shrug one shoulder. “But when the alternative is someone else getting hurt or letting yourself get killed, the choice becomes a lot easier.”
I know some of the calls Damon has made in the past have stayed with him. He gets sent out on a lot of high-profile missions these days, and the stakes are often, from what I know of them, astronomical. Damon has saved countless lives and would probably be lauded as much a hero as someone like Blue Storm if the truth wasn’t considered classified information. But he’s also killed a fair number of people too. Not without cause, of course, or hesitation when it was feasible. He doesn’t enjoy taking a life.
But Damon told me he was raised to believe that sometimes protecting people isn’t an easy, bloodless thing. He was taught to make difficult decisions that would save the most lives possible.
I sometimes wish I’d been trained from a young age like he was, to see the world with the eyes of, as Damon once called himself, an optimistic pragmatist.
I think, as much I’d like to deny it to myself, that I’m more an idealist than is likely wise for anyone with my job description.
“Not for everyone,” Jack says, and it almost sounds like he’s trying to reassure me, which is beyond odd if that’s the case.
“No. Not for everyone.” I tighten my grip on the steering wheel reflexively. “But that doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that I’m probably less reliable in a situation where lethal violence is required, which isn’t desirable in a partner.”
