Vallicose grunted along with the screams, hammering the steering wheel with her gloved palm.
“I love D Bob,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “God speaks through him.” She called over her shoulder. “Did you ever see that video, Sister Witmeyer? The entire forty-eight-hour torture session is on the Boxnet. Zodety never told those Jax animals a thing.”
“I saw it, Sister Clover. Inspiring stuff.”
Chevie got the feeling that perhaps Witmeyer wasn’t as devout as her partner, but she played along for politics’ sake.
Witmeyer pressed a button on the armrest, and the windows darkened until all Chevie could see was her own worried reflection staring back at her through round brown eyes.
“Just entre nous,” said Witmeyer, “where did you pick up those combat moves?”
Chevie was surprised to hear the Thundercat using a French phrase. Coming from any other mouth, those two words could be considered traitorous. One of her classmates, a snippy local London girl, had been shipped off to the Dublin factory for describing the gluey canteen soup as an apéritif.
Perhaps Sister Witmeyer was slipping a Jax phrase into the conversation in an attempt to trip her up.
Chevie replied. “They were not moves, Sister. I panicked and lashed out.”
“Believe me, little one, they were moves. I have been in enough fights to know the difference between panic and training.”
“I can only apologize, Sister. It won’t happen again.”
Witmeyer chuckled. “That it won’t, little sister. That it won’t.”
“Little sister”—that’s a little ominous, said Traitor Chevie. I’d watch my back if I were you. Wait a minute. I am you, only less stupid.
Chevie bit her bottom lip in case a whimper should leak out.
The drive to Mayfair would usually take up to thirty minutes during morning rush hour, but service vehicles parted before the luxury sedan’s high curved prow as soon as drivers spotted it in their rearview mirrors, and barely ten minutes later Sister Vallicose was parking outside Charles Smart’s town house, which was sandwiched between two monolithic apartment blocks.
I know how that house feels, thought Chevie.
“Look at this,” said Witmeyer. “An honest-to-goodness house. This Smart person must be something special to merit a house in the city center. I’m living in a cupboard, and this scientist who probably never killed a single person for Box is living it up in a house.”
A professor with a house was unusual, as most citizens were squashed into mega-blocks comprised of identical utilitarian apartments with barely enough room to swing a cat—if owning a cat had been legal inside Greater London’s boundaries.
“Citizen Smart may have left for work already,” said Chevie, hoping for a reprieve.
Witmeyer opened her door. “We called ahead. Though he doesn’t know it, Smart is waiting inside for us to come and execute him.” She handed Chevie the standard-issue sidearm. “Or should I say for you to execute him, Cadet.”
Chevie took the gun, and it felt like a cold block of guilt in her hand.
A cold block of guilt, said Traitor Chevie. This timeline is so moody.
Chevie was surprised that her legs carried her to Charles Smart’s door, but they did—a little shakily, maybe, but they managed to avoid buckling. She curled her fingers into a fist to knock, but before she could, the door was wrenched open and an old man appeared in the doorway.
“Just tell me,” said the man in a Scottish accent. “Is he dead?”
Chevie was taken aback. Dead? Is who dead?
“Dead? I don’t understand, Citizen.”
“I get a call from a Thundercat. ‘Stay at home,’ she tells me. ‘Don’t go to work.’ So is my boy dead? Was he killed in France?”
Felix, whispered Traitor Chevie. His son’s name is Felix.
“Felix,” she said aloud, which was a mistake.
The old man reeled as though struck and clamped his hands to his skull.
“I knew it!” he cried. “I knew it. You’re here about Felix. So which is it? Dead or captured?”
Witmeyer bent low, whispering into Chevie’s ear. “You know about his son. Curious.”
I don’t know about him, Chevie wanted to protest. The Traitor knows.
But this made no sense. How could the Traitor know things that were true yet outside her experience?
Perhaps I have the gift of second sight. Perhaps I am psychic.
There was some hope in this thought. Chevie knew that the Thundercats had a psy-division, and of course it would mean that she was not dying.
“We’re not here about your son,” said Chevie, touching the old man’s elbow. “It’s a different matter.”
Charles Smart drew several deep breaths, calming himself, coming back to earth from the hell of a parent’s grief.
“Felix is safe. Thank God. Oh, thank God. A different matter. What different matter?”
“Maybe we could come inside? Would that be all right?”
Before Smart could answer, Clover Vallicose actually growled and barged past Chevie and Smart into the hallway.
“‘Would that be all right?’” she said mockingly. “That’s not how we do things, Savano. We don’t ask permission.”
They sat in Smart’s kitchen, which was festooned with laboratory equipment. Circuit boards were piled high on the table, and yards of plastic-coated wiring crisscrossed the floor and ceiling. Banks of switches were screwed to the walls, and conduits were threaded through rough holes in the plaster. Colored bulbs blinked from the frying pan, and a block of glowing orange gel bubbled lazily in the oven like some sedated sea creature. Screwdrivers, hand drills, clippers, and assorted screws littered the drain board, and the sink was half full of greenish mist that seemed reluctant to leave the bowl. Chevie thought she saw a fin momentarily break the mist’s surface, but no one else seemed to notice, so she put it down to the Traitor.
“Nice place you have here,” said Witmeyer, brushing a few stray capacitors from the table. “Geek chic.”
Charles Smart had recovered his composure by this point, and it had occurred to him that if the Thundercats were not here for his son, then they were here for him. He sat facing the visitors, outwardly calm, but inwardly barely in control of the panic that bubbled under his skin. A visit from the goon squad was never a good thing.
“Mrs. Smart died a long time ago, Sister,” he said. “Without her, I’ve let the place go somewhat.”
“What is all this clutter?” asked Witmeyer. “Are you building something?”
The way Witmeyer said building something, it was clear that Smart should not be building anything.
Smart thought before answering. It was prudent to consider any possible interpretation of what you were about to say when dealing with Thundercats. A slip of the tongue could be the last mistake you ever made.
“I am working on various approved projects in my own spare time. Labor-saving devices, mostly, to aid with the war effort in France and here at home. My latest invention is a hoist that will allow enormous weights to be manipulated by one person. With my hoist, a single Thundercat could clear an entire highway pileup in minutes.”
Witmeyer was impressed. “That has definite military applications. I’ve seen bogged-down tanks cost a unit half a day to pull out of the mud.”
Smart clapped his hands. “Exactly! Exactly what I told my supervisor, but he won’t approve further funding.”
Witmeyer tapped her temple, taking a mental note. “Perhaps I could have a word.”
Chevie didn’t know how Witmeyer could give this poor man false hope when they were about to shoot him. When she was about to shoot him. Suddenly the gun, which had felt like a block of ice in her jacket pocket, seemed to burn into her skin.
Clover Vallicose had no patience for chitchat. “Cadet Savano see
ms to know your son. Can you explain that?”
“No,” said Professor Smart. “I was waiting for her to explain. Is it true, Cadet? Do you know my boy? Though he’s hardly a boy anymore. He’s well into his forties by now and still not married. ‘Felix,’ I said to him. ‘You need to lower your standards. You’re no oil painting, if you know what I mean….’”
Vallicose thumped the table, scattering fuses and memory boards. “Why do you prattle, Citizen? We are here on the Blessed Colonel’s business, and I feel you are not taking us seriously.”
Smart paled, and Chevie felt a kinship with the old man. They were both sinking in the same boat.
“Yes, of course,” said Smart. “You don’t want to hear about my son’s romantic problems. Why should you concern yourselves, Sisters?”
“Indeed, we do not.”
Smart cleared his throat. “In that case, perhaps we could get to the point of your visit. What exactly has brought you here?”
Vallicose nodded at her partner and grunted.
The grunt translated as: You take over, partner. Explaining things is your area.
Witmeyer drew a tin of chewing tobacco from her pocket and took her sweet time bunching a plug and depositing it inside her bottom lip.
“It’s like this, Citizen. We have an order, passed down from Colonel Box himself, to terminate your life cycle. He was quite specific about the time and date, but not about the method. That has been left to our discretion.”
I am the method, thought Chevie. I am about to become an instrument of death. An assassin who kills on command.
Chevie had always known this day would come. After all, wasn’t that what she was being trained for? But now that the day had arrived, she was far from certain that she could be a loyal Boxite and murder this somehow familiar stranger.