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“Excellent, now she’ll be asking me about humpbacks when I get home. And how you got to Alaska so quickly. Is that why you’re here? To report back to Mrs. Atkinson where I am?” I ask, stealing the opportunity to get a good look at what a year has done to her. Hardly anything, it seems. Her hair’s a little longer, and she’s got a scratch on her temple, but that’s not unusual in our line of work. For all the horrible shit we see, she’s always been radiant. Still is. Sparkling water full of life and energy in a dry, hot desert.

Scarlett tucks her phone away. “You first,” she says, and I know this is how it’ll be. We’ll go back and forth on the question until one of us gives in, and right now I’m too sore and too tired to put up a fight.

“I’m polishing up,” I tell her, though the training was pointless. I keep the resignation piece to myself.

“You haven’t been out in the field since—”

“No.” I rip off a chunk of my sub with my teeth.

Rarely do people talk about the sense of loss an agent feels after immersing themselves in an undercover op for years, only for it to one day just… end. The person you painstakingly molded yourself into becoming is suddenly no longer needed.

She doesn’t push it or ask more questions. Instead, she says, “Me neither.”

“You? Not out in the field? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“I’ve been a case agent, thank you very much.”

So she’s been calling the plays, not running them. “Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

Her chewing slows. “I’m not here to talk about that. I need to bring you in on something.”

“No.” I stand and grab both of our sandwich wrappers. We’re done with lunch, having learned to eat fast to move on to the next task.

“You don’t want to know what it is?” Scarlett asks, brushing off her hands on her pants.

“Not even a little.”

“It’s serious.”

“Don’t care.” I bite back the words. It’s a lie. Of course I care. Too much, probably. “You’re supposed to stay away from me. I’ll only get you in trouble.”

“I get into enough trouble on my own,” she mutters.

We walk down the empty streets. For being so out in the open, it’s the most private place we have to talk.

“But now you’re here.”

“Only because the man with the bag is trying to be the man with the body bags.”

I arch a brow. “Huh?”

Scarlett stops in the middle of the road, pulls out an envelope from her jacket pocket, and hands it to me.

“Whatever you’re inviting me to, I don’t want to go,” I say, seeing Santa requests the pleasure of your company at the top.

“Just read it.”

So I do. Top to bottom and then bottom to top. “You just might stay alive? Bombs away? Is this one of your weird jokes?”

“I wish,” she says as we move out of the way of an FBI SWAT truck. She explains what she knows so far.

“Why would Santa want to blow up a competition with such… jolly people?” I ask.

“Great question! I knew you were the right person to come to. I need you to go undercover to compete as one of the fifty Santas,” she says so quickly I nearly miss it over the truck’s engine.

This stops me in my tracks. “You want me to go undercover… as Santa Claus. As in Kris Kringle—”

“St. Nick, Père Noël, Saint Nicholas, Papá Noel, Weihnachtsmann, Shèngdàn lăorén, Babbo Natale, Father Christmas,” she lists off breathlessly.