The water runs. The steam thins. My breathing comes back in ragged increments, and I stand under the spray with my forehead pressed against steel and wait for the shaking in my thighs to stop.
It doesn't solve anything. It never does. The body empties and the want refills immediately, because what I want from Vix isn't something my hand can approximate. I want her voice. Her anger. The look she gives me when she forgets to hate me. I want the right to touch the scar on her collarbone and hear the story. I want to earn back the version of her that came apart around me in Moscow, shaking and raw and unashamed of it afterward.
I shut off the water and dress. The control reassembles itself the way it always does, piece by careful piece, each layer of clothing a layer pulled back into place over skin that still carries the memory of what I just did and who I did it thinking about.
I eat in the communal kitchen and exchange a few words with Dylan about Committee activity in Eastern Europe. I spend an hour reviewing Tommy's preliminary analysis on the operations center screens while the flat LED glow hums overhead and the mountain settles into its nighttime quiet. Every corridor I walk, I'm aware that Vix is somewhere in this facility, behind one of these doors, breathing the same recycled air, and the awareness is a constant hum beneath my skin that rest does nothing to diminish.
The corridors empty. The mountain takes on the hush of people sleeping underground.
I'm heading for my quarters when I hear it, the muffled, rhythmic report of a handgun, dampened by the acoustic insulation that lines the shooting range carved into the mountain's lower level.
The range is lit by overhead floods that cast the space in harsh, shadowless glare. Vix is in the far lane, ear protection on, stance set, emptying a magazine into a target silhouette with the mechanical focus of someone working something out of her system that conversation can't reach.
She doesn't acknowledge me. Her rounds land in a tight cluster at center mass, consistent and controlled, each shot placed with the deliberate patience of someone who learned to shoot from people who considered marksmanship a moral virtue.
I take the lane beside her, select a sidearm from the range rack, load a magazine, and settle into my own stance without speaking. The first round punches through the target with the familiar recoil that travels up through my wrists and into myshoulders, and the sound fills the concrete space with the percussion of contained violence.
We shoot side by side. The rhythm finds itself without negotiation, her shots and mine falling into a pattern that isn't synchronized but isn't random either, two people channeling the same tension into paper silhouettes that absorb what words cannot.
The range smells of burnt powder and hot brass and the cold stone of the mountain. Less than an hour ago I came in a steel shower with her name behind my teeth, and now she is close enough that I can smell her shampoo between reloads, standing with a weapon in her hands and her shoulders squared and her breathing timed to her trigger pull, and the proximity after what I did is its own form of punishment. Or its own form of reward.
The line between the two has been blurred where Vix is concerned since the first time I heard her voice in an Istanbul bar and understood that I was finished.
Vix reloads without looking at me. I reload without looking at her.
She empties another magazine. The grouping is tight, professional, every round inside the inner ring. I match it because matching her is what I do, in everything, always, whether she wants me to or not.
The last round lands and the quiet rushes back in, thick and sudden after the percussive rhythm that preceded it. Vix sets the weapon down, removes her ear protection, and stands in the fluorescent glare with her jaw set and her breathing steady and her eyes fixed on the shredded target at the end of her lane.
She still doesn't look at me. She doesn't need to. This is the most honest we've been with each other since she arrived at Echo Base, and the honesty lives in the things we're not saying, in the gun smoke and the shared space and the choice to stand next to each other without demanding anything more.
I set down my own weapon. The range holds us in its flat, unforgiving light, and the distance between us feels different than it has since London, less like a cage, more like a line we're both choosing to stand on.
Vix turns and walks toward the door. At the threshold, she pauses, just long enough that the pause itself saysI know you're herewithout the complication of saying it aloud.
Then she's gone, and I am standing in a shooting range inside a mountain with the smell of her shampoo cutting through the cordite, and the cracks in her walls are spreading in directions she can't control.
I can wait. I've been waiting for a decade, and patience is the one weapon she has never learned to defend against.
11
VICTORIA
The laptop screen casts the only light in my quarters, a cold blue glow that turns the concrete walls into something that could pass for the inside of a submarine. I sit cross-legged on the bed with the computer balanced on my knees and the door locked and the recycled air of the mountain pressing against the back of my throat, and I build the list.
It is not a kill list. I am not the woman who pulls triggers, and I have never pretended to be. But I am the woman who can dismantle a career with the right piece of financial evidence, who can collapse a funding pipeline by exposing a single routing node, who can end an intelligence officer's operational life by burning his cover across every agency that matters. The Committee took my people. I intend to take theirs, with the same systematic precision Webb applied to destroying everything I built, except I plan to do it better.
Ines is always first in my thoughts, because she is the heaviest debt I carry. Ines and her daughter who liked strawberry ice cream and had a cat whose name I don’t remember. Another failure I add to the column of things I owe her. Volkov ordered the interrogation. A man named Dresnerconducted it, according to the fragments of communications Tommy intercepted during my extraction. Dresner is on my list. His operational record is on my laptop. His financial vulnerabilities, his known aliases, and the locations of the properties he maintains under his wife's maiden name are organized in a file I've been building since Tommy granted me access to his systems after the first briefing.
I think of Henrik in Copenhagen next. He was former Danish military intelligence, retired to a consultancy that brokered information between Nordic defense ministries and private clients. I recruited him at a conference in Oslo, and he provided Scandinavian military channels that no one else in the broker community could access. He is dead because he knew me, and the man who killed him left a body for the Danish police to find in a manner designed to send a message. The message was received.
Sato in Vienna.
I think of the Berlin courier next. I do think of his name now, in the privacy of my own quarters where no one can see what it costs me. His name was Gerhard, and he ran dead drops between my Berlin contacts with the quiet reliability of a man who believed that small acts of courage added up to something meaningful.
Marek is dead because I walked to his door in Vinohrady and led the Committee straight to him. I gave him emergency cash and told him to run, and less than two hours later the police were pulling a sheet over his face. The money I left on his kitchen table was probably still sitting there when they processed the scene. Every person I tried to save during the purge died because I reached them, and Marek is the proof I carry that my warnings were targeting beacons, each one a death sentence dressed as mercy.
Baumann is still alive in Berlin as of our last intelligence update, still transmitting through channels Tommy monitors from the operations center. Every time his signal confirms an active status I breathe a fraction deeper, because Baumann is the last node in my European network that hasn't gone dark, and his survival means the Committee either decided he wasn't worth killing or hasn't found him yet. I am not certain which possibility is more unsettling.
