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Even as Flynn sat back down, her hands settling instinctively over her belly, KC kept her chin up. She didn’t look away.

Her expression gave Yardley nothing.

Yardley depended on what she knew about people to complete operations at a high level in the field. What she had learned was that there were no coincidences in intelligence, to keep her eye on the women, and that a whole bunch of lies tended to eventually add up to the truth.

So far, she had worked out that KC seemed to be hiding and lying the most, even though, between KC and Flynn, Flynn had more to lose—unless her baby bump was a con, but when they’d taken the micro drive off her, that inside-out belly button looked very real.

Not to mention that a pregnant woman had gone through a lot of danger and trouble to get to her old friend.

KC started to open her mouth. Yardley held up a finger. “Before you answer, keep in mind that my options are significantly more vast than yours are. You can lie, but I can report my suspicions.”

She hated saying that, but she didn’t have a choice.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt—and Yardley had no compunction about calling it what it was—she was desperate to protect KC, whose situation had become untenable.

Worst case, the people trying to find her would get to her and take her out.

That outcome was unacceptable, so Yardley had put it out of the question by bringing in the agency.

They’d move to Evenes, where fences and guns would keep them safe.

But that meant they’d be under the CIA’s purview. Soon enough, the agency would figure out the same things Yardley had, come to its own conclusions, and Yardley would never see KC again.

Just as unacceptable. That outcome would force Yardley to go rogue to find where KC was on the planet, and, yes, that was exactly what she would do, which meant she understood what her nan had been trying to tell her. Finally.

She was still breathing, so it wasn’t too late.

She had to act as if she had no fear. She had to do what she should have done from the beginning.

Right now, that meant it was time to demand the truth from KC.

Yardley didn’t much care what the truth was. Once she had it, she would do whatever she needed to do to keep KC from harm. Anything. And knowing that provided not a little clarity about what she wanted in the uncertain future on the other side of this mission.

“I’m aware of what I am gambling by answering your question.” KC shoved her hand through her hair. “Are you aware of what you’re gambling by asking it?”

“Not even twenty-four hours in the field and full of vinegar, I see.”

KC, possible double agent , rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t call fighting off hostiles you lured to the door where we’ve been holed up since yesterday and were tracked down by our target being ‘in the field.’”

Her color had come up, and for the first time Yardley noticed she had changed into some jeans she’d likely retrieved from the wardrobe, because she’d had to cuff them at the bottoms. Those cuffs were hitting her black boots, and paired with the T-shirt that was a little small and showed off the muscles in her arms, KC looked like a darling, white-hot, redheaded James Dean.

It made Yardley dizzy to think of what she could do to her if every single circumstance were different.

“Don’t look at me like that.” KC’s tone was as stiff as her jeans.

“Like what, like I’m applying the necessary pressure to do what’s right for your country?” Yardley ignored her own blush.

“More like you want to work this one out on the horizontal.” Flynn sucked custard off her thumb. “But I’m interested to hear Nolan’s answer.”

KC closed her eyes. “This isn’t about you, Kris.”

“Ah-ha!” Yardley pointed at KC. “That answers at least half of my questions.”

“Unless she meant the screaming sexual tension wasn’t about me,” Flynn said. “Versus your spy-guy conclusions.”

“We’re losing the plot.” Yardley took a deep breath. “KC, did you make the weapon deployed in Toronto?”

KC also took a deep breath, and then, thank god, she met Yardley’s eyes, and Yardley could really see KC in there.

The KC she knew. The KC she had faith in when she was talking to Nan—the one who she’d never truly stopped having faith in, even when it would have been better, smarter, safer to give it up. “Yes. I did.”

Yardley’s stomach yo-yoed with a sick little drop.

“But it wasn’t a weapon.”

That was when Yardley remembered something KC had said in the Situation Room. We wanted to save the planet. We didn’t have a lot of nuance. “Is this device something the two of you had talked about when you were kids?” She directed this question to Flynn.

Flynn looked at KC. She waited for KC to nod before she turned back to Yardley.

Yardley liked this terrifyingly genius Irishwoman. She had integrity.

“We’d talked about how technology could be used to create fail-safes, but it almost never is,” Kris said.

“What if CCTV cameras scanned the environment for events likely to result in an accident? What if they could identify a vehicle whose driver is blind drunk behind the wheel and talk to traffic lights or patrol cars to shut him down? But then we started thinking bigger, because that would mean technology could also be used to override the cruel decisions made by politicians. Satellites could send a signal to stop drones and bombs that would harm noncombatants, for instance. What if you could connect things in just this way so that less people were hurt in the crossfire of global conflict? Or there was simply even more warning for things like earthquakes and whatnot, because more of the tools we already have could talk to each other?”

“We called it the Butterfly Wing device.” KC’s tone was sober. “After the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world could result in a hurricane on the other.”

Yardley’s heart squeezed painfully. The Butterfly Wing device. Two girls trying to save the world. Dang it .

“Did you make it?” she asked.

“We didn’t,” KC said. “We only knew some of the ways it could be coded, and we were teenagers and easily distracted from a project so big. But I never forgot it, and I mentioned it in pass ing, as idle conversation, to Dr. Brown. I wasn’t proposing it.

It was more like, ‘When I was a kid this is a thing I thought about, and wouldn’t it be a great counterterrorism project if it could be real?

’ He asked me if I’d actually be interested in giving it a try.

I didn’t see the harm in researching what it would take, but by the time I was talking to Dr. Brown about what the code would have to look like, he told me he had approval to proceed with the device.

He called it the Guardsman. He said it would have to be a restricted, Sensitive Compartmented Information, special forces project. ”

“A black op?” Black ops were vanishingly rare, and she’d never heard of one this extensive.

“Just until it could be confirmed to work. Then, information would be shared more widely, and from there it would be up to the executive branch to decide how to use it.”

“And Toronto?”

A familiar calm had settled over Yardley’s shoulders like a warm blanket. This was more complicated than if KC had been secured as an asset by a foreign agency. At least in that case the CIA would simply find a way to steal her back and get their hands on what she’d made.

Yardley had thought she would be minimizing the fallout from something like that, finding a way to largely pin it on someone other than KC so she could keep KC in the District and moving up in the agency.

But if this situation had been generated by the agency and then discovered by stateless chaos agents, the level of difficulty in resolving it became incredible. And rescuing KC would be much harder.

The agency protected itself first.

“After I had coded the beta version of the Guardsman, I raised significant concerns to Dr. Brown,” KC said.

“I could see too easily how it could be used as a weapon. How it could hurt people. So he had it independently analyzed. He informed me that a controlled demo was arranged in Toronto under the guise of a planned power grid reset. But something went wrong. Really wrong.” KC’s voice was rising, making her sound younger and more vulnerable than Yardley was used to hearing her.

“It was just me in the control center. Dr. Brown sent through a message he was hurt. I haven’t heard from him since.

He made it clear before then that my priority had to be to protect the op. ”

KC inhaled, harsh and choppy. “I couldn’t tell anyone. All I could do was break up the device and stash it where no one could find it. I didn’t have a secure hard drive big enough to dump it onto in the control center. I was going to do that as soon as I returned to the lab.”

Yardley’s ears were ringing with distress.

Imagining KC—and, she had to be honest with herself, she was imagining her KC—embroiled in such a nightmare, feeling such sickening accountability, was breaking Yardley’s heart in a brand-new way.

How was anyone expected to be okay in a situation like that?

How could any relationship have been okay?

“That’s when I was snatched,” Kris said.

“Mirabel knew what kind of thing to tell me to look for. It sounded so much like the Butterfly Wing, I started there and got lucky. Well, un lucky, really. I couldn’t imagine how KC had knit herself up with such a thing.

I did my best to focus on minimizing the damage and getting to her if I could. ”

Yardley tried to keep hold of the thread of all this, barely pinched in her fingers.

“Was there enough time after it deployed for anyone to make the connection that it was similar to what the Daisy Dukes had talked about making back in the day, and so assume you and Flynn were involved? And then take Flynn because, why, she was easier to find?”