He turned back every attack, naturally.
“You know, I’ve killed a Cassandra with my bare hands before,” I said, staring him down.
“You’ve killed a lot of people with your bare hands.” He sounded distinctly amused. “I’m not going to be one of them.”
“I thought you couldn’t read your own future?”
I came at him again, twice as furious. I was a little faster than he was, but I played careful. The last time I’d fought a Cassandra had been on a rooftop, and he—Phillip Delsim—hadn’t been particularly skilled at hand-to-hand. Harry wasn’t that skilled, either, but he was more practiced, though a hair slower than I would have expected. He turned every attack aside but missed every opportunity to counter me and strike a blow of his own.
Then he spun me around and slapped me—extremely gently—on the belly, which told me he was choosing to pass up on those opportunities, not just watching them sail by unnoticed.
I redoubled my efforts and soon I was wheezing, breathing heavily from the fury of the attacks I was throwing.
He caught my last kick. “That’s enough. Someone’s about to look.” And he let my leg go.
I doubled over, trying to catch my breath. “Gee, thanks … sensei …”
“You’ve had a little time to wallow,” he said, standing upright next to me. “But that’s not you. What would Sienna Nealon do?”
“Sienna Nealon is … going to kick your ass here in a second,” I wheezed, “as soon as … whoever is looking is … done doing so.”
“Keep going like this for another thirty seconds and you’ll be heaving up that candy bar,” Harry said. “It’s enough for now. We’ll work on your cardio more later. Cassidy and Eilish are waiting at the car.”
“Let them wait,” I said, pushing myself back up. “You asked what Sienna Nealon would do?” I looked out over the trees, taking a few steps away from Harry to turn my back on him. I just stopped talking there.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Sorry, figured you read my answer ahead,” I said.
“I did,” Harry said, easing in behind me. “But this conversation is not just about me.”
“It’s not?” I played coy. I liked playing coy. Unless it involved dressing up as a giant goldfish. (Yes, I know it’s spelled koi, don’t be a douchebag about my lame puns.)
“It’s about the fact you sent your friend Dr. Zollers away without so much as a hearing,” Harry said. “It’s about that bottle you keep hiding in.”
“You want me to talk it out?” I was still breathing heavily, my skin chilled with the perspiration beneath my clothes. “Are you my therapist now, too?”
“Well, you sent your real one away,” he said. “So … yeah. Lucky me, getting to crack open that delicate Sienna shell.”
I just stood there, staring at the trees. “The Sienna shell got pretty well cracked already, Harry.”
A pause. “I know.”
“‘What would Sienna Nealon do?’” I asked quietly into the morning. I waited for a response.
None came.
“No, really, Harry … what would I do?” I asked, turning to look at him as he came up to my shoulder. I was being earnest. “I honestly don’t—there’s so much I don’t remember anymore. Reed and I will be having a conversation and he’ll tell me about this time, doing something—there was a mission in Colorado we went on together, and he mentioned something about it and laughed—I just … I couldn’t remember anything about it.” Little cold prickles fell down my arms, down my shoulders. “Harry … there are holes in my head, in my mind.” I looked back at the woods. “So when I ask you … ‘What would Sienna Nealon do?’ it’s not me being funny, or playing—”
“I know,” he said softly.
“I really don’t know anymore,” I said, my shoulders shaking. “I don’t know what she took—don’t even know what I’m missing—just that—there’s so much gone, Harry …” It wasn’t the chill that had me shaking, but he steadied me with an arm. “I wake up in the night and—and I don’t—” I let out a gentle sob, and then one that was not nearly so gentle.
“… And I don’t know who I am …” I said, as he put an arm around me, taking me into his embrace. “I swear to God, Harry … there are days … nights when I wake up … when I don’t even know who I am anymore …”
“I know,” he said, taking hold of me and letting me shake, letting me pour the tears out on his shoulder, hot, wet, sliding down my face. “I know. But I promise you,” he said, after a few minutes like that, just holding me while I cried, “that I’m with you … and I will show you—again—exactly who Sienna Nealon is … by the time this is all done.” I could hear the smile in his voice, and it gave me just the slightest breath of hope. “And the world … they’re going to remember, too.”
21.
“I have to talk to my brother,” I said, once we were a few miles down the road. “But he’s not going to be sleeping right now.”
The sun was rising, the horizon brightening as it rose to our right. We were heading north, almost to Nashville, Harry at the wheel. I assumed he knew what he was doing.
“Sounds like a phone call is in order,” Eilish said.
“The problem with the phone is—” I started.
“The NSA will be listening to his calls,” Cassidy interjected, “hoping to catch a whiff of you. That’s why he assembled the team to come to Scotland almost entirely in person.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So I need a way to talk to him that isn’t going to trip their alarms.”
“Who cares if it trips their alarm, so long as it doesn’t lead back to you and definitely incriminate him?” Eilish said after a minute. “After all, it’s not what they know, it’s what they can prove.”
“Spoken like a true criminal,” Cassidy said, but she wasn’t sneering, she was more … calculating. “If you just want to talk to him and you don’t care if they hear, you could call with a voice scrambler on. It’s what I use when I need to hide my identity. I even have a program on my computer that can handle it. Couple that with a little call origin bouncing—I could set up a phone call with him that could last at least a few minutes without the NSA tracing it back to us here.”
“Interesting,” I said, though I was really feeling a sense of stark terror. I looked to my left and sure enough, Harry was white-knuckling the steering wheel. He caught me looking and nodded once, which I took to be an affirmation of the fear I was thinking but barely daring to say.
If I called my brother now, even with the voice scrambler, the NSA, the government—the interested investigative parties—would have enough reason to be suspicious that they’d probably start watching him a little more carefully.
Which meant he could no longer hang out on the Gulf of Mexico with me and escape notice.
Which meant … if I made this call, I was saying goodbye to seeing Reed, in person, for the foreseeable future.
I took a deep breath. There was this kind of warring clash within me. Why was this so hard?