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She thought about the deliberate stress she’d been put under in agency training—learning to lose a tail and failing repeatedly, learning to fight, to secure an asset, and most of all, to separate her own interest from the nation’s.

Yardley seemed quite literally born to the trade.

With a deep, centering breath, Kris untied the string on the pastry box and pulled out a bun overfilled with custard. She took a big bite. Her hands shook.

“How’s baby?” Yardley asked softly. “I’m sorry we didn’t have more notice and you were frightened.”

“Kicking away.” When Kris smiled, her face looked a lot clearer.

“I don’t know where I stand with you lot, but I’d like to take a crack at pinning down those schematics you’re interested in.

I understand that my predicament means that I am more or less the CIA’s lapdog at this time, but the sooner the other drive’s in your hands, the quicker I have a chance to get home to start forgetting this ever happened. ”

“Yes,” Yardley said. “Do that. We should have about twenty minutes before we’ll hear where to meet a driver.”

“Give me a second.” KC retrieved a small plastic case from the box that had been in the mattress. “I need to reconfigure this router so we can plan without the agency seeing what we’re doing before we want them to.”

“Sure,” Yardley said. “We’ll get what we need unless we’re overridden and they decide to go with a raid.”

Kris shook her head. “If Mirabel suspects a raid, he’ll deploy the device in order to create chaos.”

A few quiet minutes passed. Kris was on her second pastry and had already jumped onto the signal KC set up, efficiently pulling packets of information from different civic and backroom sites, when she looked at Yardley with her eyes wide.

“A sale . Bloody, feckin’ arse! Mirabel’s decided he’s going to put the weapon up for auction. ”

Motherfucker. KC pulled her chair next to Kris’s. “He’s finished with subtlety. He’s been spraying this invitation around on the dark web like it’s an Evite to a church fish fry.”

Yardley came over to stand behind them. “That’s the guest list?” She pointed at a column of names that had just unscrambled itself on the screen in front of her.

“Looks like it.” Kris downloaded the list.

Yardley whistled. “I can’t go in. There’s not going to be a soul in that room I haven’t tangoed with, and half of them probably have a standing order to slip plutonium into my teacup the next time we cross paths. The operative has to be KC.”

KC’s stomach flipped over.

Not in a bad way.

She was starting to feel… better. Less like a hunted animal, more like a predator. Kicking ass side by side with Yardley had gotten her blood moving. Could be it was just the adrenaline making everything feel sharp and clear and a little bit easier, but KC didn’t think so.

She thought it might be that she’d come up against a bad thing and, for the first time in a long time, made a different decision.

“On the other hand”—Yardley was still studying the intel Kris was putting up—“spies change sides. I know how to disap pear in a room. There’s at least ten rivalries on that list I could exploit in an act of diversion.”

But she turned and looked at KC with a question in her eyes.

“I think it should be me.” This was an auction for tech, so KC had a lot of experience with what would be important in this sale.

And as soon as Maple Leaf was over, and Dr. Brown did what he needed to do to sweep up, she didn’t want to be in a basement anymore, where her circle was so small there was no hope of collaboration or sharing the very real burdens of projects and secrets.

She was going to need something like the distraction of field work to heal after she and Yardley said good-bye.

“How certain are we that the micro drive is on the premises?” KC looked at the schematics and blueprints Kris was pulling up of what she assumed was Mirabel’s estate.

Yardley snorted. “Mirabel’s probably going to have it on a silver platter surrounded by a garnish of bullets.

We’ll need a bidder plan A that comes with a briefcase full of gold bars, a plan C, the one with the helicopters, speed boats, and soldiers rolling out of vans with tactical gear—which, so far I have never used plan C and would rather keep it in the ‘never’ column—and a plan B that involves stealing and getting out alive. ”

KC watched Yardley scan the intel Kris was finding, the day already careening toward an evening that would have to be the end to all of this. After so many months—after the horror of the demo in Toronto—it was hard to believe. The stakes were so enormous to depend on a single night.

KC was still contemplating that when Yardley murmured into her comm, then looked up. “Grocer’s van in the west alley in five.”

Kris and KC stood to retrieve their things while Yardley gathered up KC’s comm set and pulled the one she had been using out of her ear. Then she piled them on the table, picked up Kris’s empty tea mug, and smashed them to bits, twisting the mug over their remains until they were obliterated.

Kris had stopped packing up the laptop in its case mid-buckle. KC couldn’t seem to make her thoughts move past the horror of two twenty-five-thousand-dollar comm sets reduced to silvery shards on the table.

Yardley put the mug down and brushed her hands together. “Before we’re on that van, then on a plane to Evenes to plan this mission, and while we still have some privacy, I do have a question.”

“Okay?”

“When were either one of you going to tell me that the architect of the weapon used in Toronto—the one that you, Kris Flynn, just made even better—was Katherine Corrine Nolan?”

Yardley raised one perfect inky eyebrow.

KC had been Unicorned.