“What is your real name?”
“Gertrude.”
I thought about that.
“Can I still call you Ashley?”
I felt her smile against my neck.
“Sometimes I think of her as a different person,” she said. “Gertrude. Someone I used to know a long time ago, like another person who really had died.”
I nodded. “Me too—the old me before the Sword came along. I miss him sometimes. The old me. Like I was wondering if OIPEP has a time machine. Does it?”
“I don’t think it does.”
“Be great if it did.”
“If it did, I would go back and be sixteen again.”
“Really? Why?”
She sighed against my neck and we didn’t say anything for a while.
“You’re not talking,” she said.
“Vampires,” I said.
“Vampires? That’s random.”
“Well, this morning I was thinking about vampires,” I said. “I never understood why people were so fascinated by them, girls especially—I guess because they’re usually good-looking guys with all these superhuman powers, plus the fact that I guess they’re sort of tragic and girls feel sorry for them. Maybe it’s because they’re blessed with immortality but cursed with death.”
“Maybe it’s the way they dress,” she said. “You never see a vampire in dorky clothes.”
“And they’re always handsome and fit. You never see a fat, ugly vampire.”
“Maybe it’s just the fact that love is blind.” Her voice got soft and lazy, as if she were drifting off to sleep. “You can’t help it, you know? Who you fall in love with. Sometimes you want to help it. You would do anything not to be.”
“Not to be what?”
“In love!”
She gave my shin a light tap with the toe of her boot, one of those girl kicks that isn’t meant to be taken as a kick.
“What about you?” I asked. “Have you ever been?”
“I thought I was—once. We broke it off.”
“How come?”
“I decided to leave the Company and he became the new Operative Nine.”
“Nueve?” I was floored. “Nueve was your boyfriend?”
“My taste in guys has never been that good.”
“Ashley, he was going to shoot you!”
“I know, can you believe it? The jerk. But being the Operative Nine means never having to say you’re sorry.”