I closed my eyes at the sound of Rob’s booming laugh cutting through the air.
“Why don’t you try to sleep?” I said. “We’re going to be flying for a few more hours. There’s no reason we both have to be tired.”
“Okay,” he said. “I just wish…”
“You wish what?” I asked.
“Can we keep talking instead?” He confessed it to his knees, awkwardly drawing his feet onto his seat.
“You really can’t stand sitting in silence, can you?” I asked. “It actually kills you a little bit, doesn’t it?”
It was a long time before he replied, as if he were trying to prove me wrong. “No,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t like the quiet. I don’t like the things I hear there.”
Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t ask. “Like…what?”
“I hear them fighting, mostly,” he whispered. “I hear him screaming at her and the way she used to cry. But it’s…I hear it through closed doors. My mom, she used to put me in her closet, you know, because his temper was better when I was out of sight. I don’t remember what she sounded like normally, just the way she sounded then.”
I nodded. “That happens to me sometimes.”
“Isn’t that so weird? It’s been, like, eight years, and I hear them, and I think of how dark and tight it was, and it feels like I can’t breathe. I hear them all the time, like they’re chasing me, and I can’t escape them, not ever. They won’t let me go.”
I knew he was exhausted, and I knew firsthand what exhaustion did to your mind. The tricks it played on you, just as your defenses were dropping one by one. Ghosts don’t haunt people—their memories do.
“Will you talk until I fall asleep? Just—I mean, just until I fall asleep. And can you maybe never tell anyone about it, like, ever?”
“Sure.” I leaned my head back against the seat, wondering what on earth I could say to calm him down.
“There’s this story I used to really like as a kid,” I began quietly, just loud enough that he could hear it over the roar of the plane’s engines. “About these rabbits. Maybe you’ve heard it before.”
I started at the beginning, the escape. Fleeing through the forest, meeting a new danger at every turn, the desperation that came with trying to protect everyone when you could barely take care of yourself. The boy with the bottomless dark eyes, the betrayal, the fire, the smoke. And by the time I realized I had told him my own story, Jude was fast asleep, tucked firmly into dreams.
Here’s the thing about places like Boston: no matter what they were before, no matter the look of the population, no matter what businesses had flourished once, no matter what great person was born there, the city that people knew was gone. It was the loved one you saw in a rearview mirror, growing smaller and smaller the more time and distance you put between you, until even its shape became unrecognizable.
Red brick buildings remained firmly rooted in the ground, but their windows had been bashed in. The grass on the Common was dead in patches, overgrown in others, and scorched to ruin where there had once been trees. Grand townhouses were locked and shuttered, ice and old snow clinging to their dark stones. There was a crowded lane open on each road for cars and bikes to inch their way down, but many of the old, overlapping streets were filled with makeshift tents and the people huddled inside of them.
It was bizarre to see the bright, colorful bursts of old umbrellas and children’s bedsheets propped up as makeshift shelters. Some of the worse-off folks were exposed to the freezing air with nothing more than a sleeping bag or a wall to lean against.
“I don’t get it,” Jude said, staring through the tinted windows. None of the streetlights were on, but there were enough fires burning that we could see the scene—and the first flurries of snow—from the back of the ambulance a hospital had oh-so-helpfully exchanged for the Leda Corp supplies we had dropped off.
“A lot of people lost their homes and housing when the markets crashed,” I said, trying to be patient with him. “The government couldn’t pay off its debt, and because of it, these people lost their jobs and couldn’t afford to keep what they owned.”
“But if everyone everywhere is like this, why didn’t the banks just let everyone stay where they were until things got better? Isn’t there something we should do to help?”
“Because that’s not the way the world works,” Rob called from the driver’s seat. “Get used to it.” He was wearing a dark blue EMT uniform, and he seemed to relish his ability to flash the lights and sirens when people in the streets didn’t move out of his way fast enough. Sitting up front with him was the one member of Beta Team who had been assigned to serve as support on our half of the Op—his name was Reynolds, and I only had to take one look at Jude’s face as Reynolds and Rob slapped each other’s backs to know he had been one of the agents Jude had overheard plotting against us.
The rest of Beta Team were three blocks ahead of us, all seven crammed into the back of an old pickup truck. They were dressed as protesters of some kind—street clothes, ragged hair, Red Sox caps, jackets thick enough to hide the weapons tucked underneath.
This professor we were looking for lived in Cambridge, just over the Charles River. Harvard’s medical school, where he was conducting his research, was happily situated in the middle of Boston proper. Rob had decided, in his questionable wisdom, to divide the Op into a two-prong simultaneous assault. Beta Team would handle “disabling” the lab, and Jude and I would break into the target’s house and “pull” him in for questioning.
At least, that’s what Rob thought.
We backtracked to the Longfellow Bridge, crossing the river to the sound of Jude’s eager questions about baseball, the river, what the sticky substance was on the floor of the ambulance, how we were getting home, until Barton finally buzzed the comms in our ears.
“This is Leader in position, ready to commence Op at twenty-two thirty. What is your status, Minder?”
“Five minutes out from the Goose’s nest,” Rob answered, and I felt the ambulance accelerate under me. My anxiety took that exact moment to wake up. I sat a little straighter, bringing my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them.
“Are we connected to Home Front?”