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Thomas

W ill was still asleep when I slipped from the sheets, his body curled toward the place I had been. The morning light hadn’t yet bruised the sky, and the windowpanes were fogged with our breath from the night before.

My coat was still damp from the night air. The collar stiffened with cold as I pulled it high and fastened the top button. The street outside was silent but not still. It never was, not in Budapest, not anymore.

My usual tail was back. He fell into step a few dozen yards behind as I wandered two blocks east of the hotel. I passed an old kiosk advertising American cigarettes and Hungarian pop singers, and turned sharply down an alley flanked by broken railings and crumbling plaster.

The turn I took was quick enough to allow a slight gap in surveillance.

I stepped inside a shuttered candy shop, abandoned for months, maybe years. A hand-painted sign hung crookedly in the window, its slogan long faded, but the pane beside the door was what mattered.

My breath fogged as I reached forward and flipped the wooden placard hanging inside.

From “ ZáRVA ” to “ NYITVA .”

Closed to open.

By the time I slipped out the back of the shop, my tail was lurking outside, scanning the street to locate his missing target. I was fairly certain he hadn’t seen my tradecraft.

I hunkered down between a massive waste bin and an overgrown chain-link fence and waited exactly forty-two minutes. I rose, dusted off my trousers and coat, then circled once, walking the block twice to keep my feet warm, never moving more than a hundred meters in any direction.

She appeared like she always did.

Sudden, unremarkable, and impossible to tell how she’d materialized.

Lark wore a drab wool coat and a scarf pulled too high with a cigarette perched in the corner of her mouth. She looked like a woman who hated the world, which, based on our previous interactions, was probably true.

She didn’t speak at first, just walked past me, brushing her hand against mine as she passed. I followed her into the back entrance of a pharmacy across the street. We hid behind shelving and watched out the front window for another five minutes before our breathing steadied. Beneath the flickering gaze of the aged pharmacist, a sympathizer on a Western payroll, we moved deeper into the shop. There, in an alcove between storerooms, I met her eyes.

“You flipped the sign early,” she said, voice like wet stone.

“I didn’t see another choice.”

“Neither did he,” she said, explaining nothing—and everything.

“What happened? There were three plainclothes and two teams of uniforms at the extraction site. Then our man missed the meet. Things could’ve gone very wrong.”

“Our friends are always watching. You know this.” She offered the most European shrug I’d ever seen.

I blinked a few times, struggling against the fury rising in my chest. Lark was on our side—I had to believe it—and yet, she appeared unaffected by the turn of events.

“The doctor’s daughter was taken. He refused to leave without her. I contacted your menagerie late last night and was instructed to give you this.”

She handed me a small tin labeled, “ Zamárdi ,” cough drops.

“From Manakin?”

She nodded.

I turned the tin over once in my palm. The weight of it felt too small for what it would carry.

“How much do you know?” I asked.

“Only what I’m told to know. You’re not the only one dancing on thin ice.”

I didn’t thank her. This was the job.

She left without another word, disappearing into the pharmacy’s front like she’d always belonged there.

I waited until I heard the bell over the door chime shut.

Then I left, too.

Back at the hotel, with Will looming over my shoulder, I cracked the seal on the tin, slipped the message from the false bottom, and set to decoding. The message was written in standard cipher block—one Manakin and I had practiced over dozens of missions. It was the kind I couldn’t forget even if I tried.

The message was terse. KITCHEN IS EMPTY. CRACK EGG. SERVE AT FIVE. NO SALT.

I read it three times.

Will, still hovering, pointed to “No salt” and furrowed his brow.

I grabbed a notecard stamped with the hotel’s logo and scribbled, “He doesn’t know if we’ve been compromised or not, but assumes we have.”

Will’s eyes widened.

I returned my gaze to the note.

They weren’t pulling us. They weren’t sending backup. They were closing the chapter.

The melancholy harmonies of some forgotten symphony suddenly filled our room. I turned back to find Will standing in the bathroom doorway, pointing for me to join him. A heartbeat later, both the shower and faucet flowed.

I tried to stand, to make my body move, but I remained frozen in place.

Some part of me had known it could come to this.

Still—

There was a thirteen-year-old girl out there. She was fragile, bright, and afraid—and she didn’t deserve to be left behind as the cost of our operation.

Farkas had made his choice—maybe under duress, maybe not.

But the girl hadn’t.

Finally able to stand, I joined Will in the bathroom and closed the door.

“Well?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Orders are in.”

“Let me guess,” he murmured. “They want us to clean up the mess?”

“No,” I replied. “They want us to bury it.”

“Shadowfox?”

“Terminate.” I said it plainly, flat, like if I didn’t give it emotion, it wouldn’t be real.

“And the girl?”

I hesitated, then shook my head. “She isn’t part of the plan.”

Will’s eyes widened. “Jesus Christ.” He raked a hand through his hair. “They’re telling us to kill him and what . . . leave her? Just like that?”

“She was never part of the op, not officially.”

“She’s his daughter.” He wiped his face with both hands.

“We don’t even know where they’re holding her.”

“We’re spies. We can find her.” Will’s voice carried an edge, a tone that said he would not be swayed.

“Will—”

“She’s a child, for fuck’s sake.”

“I know that, but . . . she’s not part of our assignment.”

“Our assignment changed the second we learned about her.” His voice cracked—just slightly. “Now she’s leverage. That makes her part of this. That makes her our responsibility.”

“Will—”

“Don’t you dare,” he said, stabbing a finger into my chest. “Don’t you dare tell me we’re just following orders.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it.

Because I’d been about to say exactly that.

And because I didn’t believe it, either.

“You’ve seen him,” Will pressed. “The way he spoke about her, the way he looked at us when he mentioned her. He didn’t run. He was trying to protect her. If we walk away now—”

“I’m not saying we walk away.” My voice was lower, rougher. “But there’ll be hell to pay if we don’t execute the order.”

“We’ve lived through hell before.”

The room went still, save for the violins and running water.

Will pressed his body against me, wrapping his arms around me and whispering in my ear. “You and I both know what this is. All they care about is that machine.”

What could I say? He was right. Our government—the Western governments who knew of the threat posed by Farkas and his invention—were terrified by the power it represented. They would move heaven and earth to stop the Soviets from wielding it. We were merely the instruments of their collective judgements, the tip of their spear.

They didn’t care about the people involved, only the objective.

So, why should we?

Why should we care about a scientist who’d invented a terrible machine? Why should we put our lives at risk to save his daughter when he’d been willing to risk the entire world order with his mad calculations?

But . . . had that been his intention?

Farkas never planned to help the Soviets achieve power. Based on our brief interaction and everything we knew of the man, he had never intended to help the Soviets achieve anything. He was a genius who loved to create—and the Reds were the first to discover his workshop. It was that simple.

But did that knowledge change anything?

Did it justify ignoring explicit orders and putting the lives of our team at risk?

And for what?

“I’m not asking you to choose between them and me,” Will whispered. “But I am asking you to choose between doing what’s right and what’s easy.”

I looked at him. Really looked at the man who had walked through fire with me, at the man who had killed, bled, and held me in the quietest moments when the guilt became too much. And I knew—even before I spoke life into the words—that there was no world in which I could tell him no.

“Fine. We’ll try to find the girl. I have no idea how, but we’ll try,” I said. “But if we can’t find her in a few days or it gets too hot, we cut our losses and execute Plan B.”

Will exhaled, like he’d been holding the breath of the world. The loose hug I’d enjoyed while we spoke grew tighter, and I could feel his breath warming my neck as he nuzzled into his favorite spot just below my chin.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “This could get us all killed.”

I felt his lips curl against my skin as fingers clutching my back and sides dug in a little deeper.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Despite everything, I chuckled. Will was infuriating—and infectious—and I loved him more than life itself.

He pulled back and ran a hand through his hair, failing to subdue it into any sense of order. I stepped to the sink and retrieved a matchbook from my pocket. I then folded the message once, lit it with the tip of a match, and watched it curl and blacken, then drift apart in the flowing water of the sink.