“Why did you choose this… profession? Before they tried to kill you, I mean. Were you in the military? Did you volunteer?”
Again, the questions were spoken lightly, like he was inquiring how she had become a financial planner or an interior decorator. The very lack of emotion was its own tell. He kept his face forward, staring out into the darkness.
She didn’t evade this time. She would want to know this, too, if fate had saddled her with one of her peers as a companion. It was something she’d asked Barnaby in the early days of their association. His answer wasn’t much different from hers.
“I never actually chose it,” she explained slowly. “And no, I wasn’t military. I was in medical school when they approached me. I’d first been interested in pathology, but then I shifted focus. I was deep into a particular vein of research—you could call it a kind of chemical mind control, I guess. There weren’t many people doing precisely what I was doing, and there were a lot of roadblocks in my way—funding, tools, test subjects… well, most of it came down to funding. The professors I was working under didn’t even fully understand my research, so I didn’t have a lot of help.
“These mysterious government officials showed up and offered me an opportunity. They picked up the tab for my massive student loans. I got to finish my schooling while focusing my research toward my new handlers’ goals. When I graduated, I went to work in their lab, where every technology I could dream of was at my disposal and money was never an object.
“It was obvious what they had me creating. They didn’t lie to me. I was aware of the work I was contributing to, but it sounded noble, the way they described it. I was helping my country…”
He waited, still staring ahead.
“I didn’t think I would be the one who would actually use my creations on a subject. I thought I would just be supplying the tools they needed…” She shook her head back and forth slowly. “It didn’t work like that, though. The antibodies I’d created were too specialized—the doctor who administered them had to understand how they worked. So that left exactly one person.”
The hand on the small of her back didn’t move—it was too still, frozen in place.
“The only person ever inside the interrogation room with me, besides the subject, was Barnaby. At first, he handled the questioning. He frightened me in the beginning, but he turned out to be such a gentle person… We were mostly in the lab, creating and developing. Actual interrogations made up only about five percent of my job.” She took a deep breath. “But often, when there was a crisis at hand, they needed to be running multiple interrogations simultaneously; speed was always critical. I had to be able to work alone. I didn’t want to do it, but I understood why it needed to be that way.
“It wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought it would be. The hard part was realizing how good I was at it. That scared me. It’s never really stopped scaring me.” Barnaby was the only one she’d confessed this to. He’d told her not to worry; she was just one of those people who were good at anything they tried. An overachiever.
Alex cleared the sudden lump out of her throat. “But I got results. I saved a lot of lives. And I never killed anyone—not while I was working for the government.” Now she stared out into the darkness, too. She didn’t want to see his reaction. “I’ve always wondered if that was enough to make me less than a monster.”
She was fairly certain, though, that the answer was no.
“Hmmm…” It was just a low, lingering sound in the back of his throat.
She kept staring at the dark nothing in front of her. She’d never tried to explain this choice—the line of dominoes that had made her what she was—to another human being. She didn’t think she’d done a very good job.
And then he quietly chuckled.
Now she turned to stare up at him in disbelief.
His lips were puckered in an unwilling half smile. “I was braced for something really disturbing, but that all sounded a lot more reasonable than I expected.”
Her brows pulled together. He found her story reasonable?
His stomach growled. He laughed again, and the tension of the moment seemed to vanish with the sound.
“Did Kevin not feed you?” she asked. “This is a help-yourself kind of place, I guess.”
“I could use some food,” he agreed.
She led him to the freezer, trying to hide her surprise that he seemed to be treating her no differently than before. It had felt dangerous, speaking all of that out loud. But then, she supposed he already knew the worst of it, having learned it in the cruelest way possible. Her explanation was really nothing after that.