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M any years ago, before the explosions and the blood and the betrayal, before he’d give up the name Charlie for the rest of his life in order to gain something much more important, the little boy who would someday become Dust Wrenshall stood on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

He watched the adults move around him on the sand during the golden hour when late afternoon bleeds into evening.

Two men from down the street waded into the slowly churning brown water, and Dust knew that it felt as warm as a bath. His skin was still salty from swimming in the morning, even after a shower, because it seemed to stay salty all summer long.

Dust grew up a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. He was an only child and intensely quiet. Unremarkable, and that was fine. But Dust was always watching.

There was so much to be learned from the ocean. His parents were protective but he never understood why. Maybe because he was the only child they had, or maybe it was because of some horror story they never shared with him .

The men walked away from each other, cutting a "V" in the water with the open mouth of the net expanding to swallow the sea in between them. The water pulled at the fine mesh of the net and already they were beginning to struggle as they trudged out, the water at their thighs.

The sea was rolling and slow that evening and Dust could tell just by looking at the water beyond where the waves were breaking that there was no strong current. He’d been taught to look for runouts — that supernaturally strong current of water that would snag a swimmer in its invisible grip and drag them out to sea until they were too exhausted and would drown.

You could see the slick pattern of water moving under water when it was a day with runouts, and the pattern caught his eye with the same strange bolt of fear that a shark's fin did.

But there was no runout that day and no white-tipped waves. Just the endless roll of the ocean onto the shore.

The men were up to their waists then as they waded down the gentle slope where the earth gave away to the ocean. Slowly they closed their loop and the "V "billowed out in a circle behind them. Once joined, they walked parallel to the shore until they were past the boundary of their net. Then they turned to the shore and began the arduous journey back to land.

The net sagged and pulled behind them. Dust tried to pretend like he wasn't excited, because even as a child he was concerned with dignity. He did not act like a child because he wanted to be respected as an adult. So, like the adults who had gathered on the shore to watch the men fishing, he stood stoic and unimpressed.

The strain was apparent in the men's mirrored postures as they worked their way back. The water pulled against their net and — Dust hoped — their bounty of life and treasures reaped from the sea.

Every summer day when Dust waded into the water, he did so while fighting the fear of what might lurk under the surface. The Atlantic Ocean there on the Georgia coast was brown and murky, and it was rare to have a day calm enough to see anything through it.

The dead and dying things that had washed up on shore gave him some clues. Most were harmless, like the empty oyster shells and the clear jellyfish that collapsed in their little puddles at low tide. But some days brought the alternately fascinating and frightening reminder that there was much more to the ocean: the sad and flamboyant fans of dead Portuguese man of wars, the sharp gray sharks’ teeth that were freshly shed and retained their serrated edges.

He was too impatient to see what they had caught in the long seining nets — and so Dust turned his attention to the adults that dotted the shore with him. People from the neighborhood had followed the two men down the street as they crossed to do their fishing. By the time they had walked the three blocks to get to the beach access, they were the leaders of an abbreviated parade of people who stepped into their flip flops on the way out the door.

There were no other children with him on the beach, and he felt a pang of regret. Yes, he wanted to be a grownup — but the presence of kids would allow him to feel less self-conscious about what he felt was a childish curiosity. He knew, then, that he would be the only one squatting beside the two fishermen, parsing through what they brought to shore. The other adults would circle around them with their backs straight as rods, tilting their heads down just a few degrees and pretending that they weren't just as fascinated as Dust was by the variety of aquatic flora and fauna the men caught in their net .

Finally, they were there, ropey muscles straining and shorts dripping as they padded barefoot in the shallows. They stood shoulder to shoulder, dragging the net then, hand over hand, until the white sinews began to expose their catch. Finally, everything was gathered on the shore.

The catch moved as if the net itself were a living thing. Fish and invertebrates and shells and trash — there was always colorful trash.

From the moment they pulled the catch onto shore, everything within the net was dying.

It was cruel to fish this way. Every unlikely thing that got stuck in the seining net's perimeter was dragged in, whether it was good to eat or not. Sometimes they would throw back the undesirable things and they would flop a little and wriggle through the few inches of water flowing over the sand until they could return to the sea. But more often than not, the things that were pulled up died there on the shore, flopping and gasping or silently drying out.

It didn't matter to Dust.

He realized it was cruel, and he valued every little life there in the net each time it was pulled back to shore. He would never have caught a fish in his hands and taken it back to shore to watch it die — but somehow it was different with the seining nets. It was cruelty, but it wasn't cruelty by his own hand.

It satisfied his curiosity. And so the lives lost in confusion and struggle and pain there on the shore a block from where he slept every night were worth it to him. He needed to know what was under the surface of those waves he waded into every day.

It did not matter that all of the beautiful treasures in the net died because he would hold them in his head forever, the answer to a riddle .

He fostered a deep cognitive dissonance in order to get what he wanted.

There was no other way for him to know.

Dust showed up on Carrow's radar a year before the two ever met.

He'd heard the name a few times, heard it surface when Nick talked shop with buddies and didn't think that Carrow was listening. He was listening, of course. He never stopped. And Nick Short pledged fealty for power, which always made Carrow nervous.

Nick was unstable. But he was the bomb guy. It was kind of fitting.

"What d'you got on Dustin Wrenshall?" Nick asked a buddy who had shown up at their back booth one night in August — some guy from the east coast.

Leta was talking to Carrow at the time. They were within earshot of the conversation. Guests made Carrow nervous and his partner knew it — so when he'd cut his eyes at the stranger, Leta had known immediately that Carrow was no longer listening to her. She adjusted several long braids, sighed, and began to talk softer so that Carrow could eavesdrop.

"What do you want to know?" Nick's friend asked.

"What's his story? He’s from your neck of the woods — right? He putting together a crew or what?"

"Strictly freelance from what I understand, and no interest in starting a crew or joining," his friend said. "Why — you worried Carrow's in the market for a new ballistics man?"

Nick Short wore sideburns like some extra on a 70s throwback television show and an expression on his face that suggested he was perpetually unimpressed. Dust would never meet him. It was integral that he replaced Short, and so as Dust trained, “Abe” quietly plotted the best way to eliminate him from Carrow’s crew.

Agents at AIIB — the American Investigation and Intelligence Bureau — didn’t mind the nickname. Over the last half of the century, "Abe" became a term that was thrown around with affection at the bureau. It became the type of word a criminal formed his mouth around with a unique kind of disgust.

Dust wanted to be FBI, but that was only because he didn't know much about AIIB as a kid. He grew up on “X-Files” reruns — and that , he thought, was exactly what he wanted to do. Not the paranormal part — he understood that was the schlocky hook of the show — but the boots-on-the-ground, trench coat-clad investigations. He fixed his sights on Dana Scully early and the character became his model: serious, capable, methodical in her pursuit of justice.

His first Honors Biology fetal pig dissection in middle school told him that he’d never grow up to be a Scully, though, calmly making incisions in dead bodies and examining them like a crime scene. The stink of formaldehyde seemed to get into his pores and he tasted it, even at dinnertime, as he moved neat bits of food to his mouth.

Still — he’d do something in justice. That was clear.

By the age of 16 , Dustin was structuring his life around a career in justice, trying to understand what would make him the most valuable agent candidate.

To catch a criminal, you should think like a criminal , or so the teenager thought. He started easily enough, learning how to pick locks. Lock picking expanded to safe cracking. Safe cracking became security testing. By 18, Dust would enter a room and catalog the vulnerable points automatically.

That's what people did in books, after all. They trained their brains to approach everything with a certain framework. And so that was what Dust did. He etched the lines into his consciousness until they were so deep he couldn't escape them.

(Truly, Dust could not turn it off. When his grandmother — his closest relative, the only person from his childhood who he felt had understood him — lay sucking her last breaths in a nursing home bed, Dust found himself distracted by the blind spots in the room's monitoring system. His memory of his last moments with her were imbued with this, and he hated himself even as he did it. He stroked her hand and told her that he loved her, that she was loved, that she could go and rest now. At the same time, he silently made a list of the exits, where he would position himself in the room in a hostage or sniper situation, and where the most defensible spot in the building would likely be based on what he'd seen of it.

He chose to make these things a part of himself — and although he never looked back, he sometimes regretted that every piece of his experience was run through this context.)

As an agent , Dust attempted relationships. It hadn't been uncommon for trainees in D.C. to hook up — and there were even successful marriages that sprung from the classrooms there.

Common Abe lore said that you either dated another agent — because they could understand you in a way that no one else could — or you dated someone dim and loving, who wouldn't resent your mental absence and the months of overtime and the way that you would marry them but always be deeply committed to your work. There was no in between. You dated someone from Abe, you dated someone dim, or you didn't date at all. Anything else presented a liability.

There was a brief time when he arrived for training when Dust thought perhaps he was asexual. There was something off-putting about suddenly being surrounded by people who were smarter than him after spending so very much time being the smartest man in the room.

He got over the big-fish-in-a-small-pond syndrome when he met Gordon: beautiful, whip-smart, and — maybe most importantly — just as ambitious as Dust.

Gordon had no time for romance, and Dust was just relieved to find that he was attracted to another human being. They crashed together without exclusivity, without dates. They kissed and fucked and compared test scores.

Dust thought they would be together forever. They simply worked , after all — and both of their needs were being met. Why ask for anything more or seek anything different?

Gordon had broken it off sharp and unexpected.

" Why? " Dust had demanded.

"Because you started to love me, Charlie," Gordon had said.

Dust had protested and railed against the break and screamed and cried and... realized, through it all, that Gordon was right.

The break was for the best. They kept it amicable.

After that, Dustin tried the dim route. That was much worse.

He didn't resent the men and women who he took out, who took him out. He didn't dislike the variety of physical affection he gleaned from the encounters — from platonic shared sleeping spaces to marathon sex. It was all good stress relief, all a welcomed change, and none of it took a toll on him the way that some of his classmates' relaxation methods tended to.

(Abe did a good job of looking the other way when it came to drug use. You could have students who were smart, endlessly productive, and casual drug users, or you could have students who were smart, exhausted to the point of fucking up, but completely clean. Abe chose the former.)

In the end, though, Dust realized he was drifting through one-night stands, no longer interested in second dates or conversations with people who couldn't relate to him on any level.

No one was driven. No one understood.

And so just as some of his classmates would hit a breaking point with their speed use, their coke consumption, so did Dust hit rock bottom with his casual hookups.

He was done. His work with Abe was more important.

Besides: there was no curiosity to be satisfied with sex anymore. The options just presented variations on a theme. Why continue to explore something that could be so adequately satisfied alone in his apartment — especially when the dating alternative was such a time suck?

When the plan to get Dust inside The Company was still gelling, Caroline Leiby brought him a fat binder. She’d been the first person he’d had contact with at the agency more than a decade ago, and she’d proven to be a powerful ally.

She wanted him undercover from the day she met him.

He resisted, working several other operations, getting into the Intelligence wing of AIIB rather than its thrilling, active brother: Investigation . But in the end, the desk jobs and surveillance felt like a dalliance. He was born for boots-on-the-ground work. Leiby had been right.

"Get intimate with it by Friday," she had said, dropping the binder and turning to go as if she hadn’t just delivered confirmation of the life-changing assignment Dust had spent the past several years hanging his hopes and dreams on.

"Hey — Lee –" Dust said. "This what I think it is?"

Leiby turned, smiling because she was unable to continue pretending like it was just another day for them. She nodded. Dust's future sprawled out before him.

He spent the next several days with the binder, reading it and then learning it and then incorporating it into himself like a new genetic code that could rewrite his DNA.

There they finally were: The Company.

With any luck he’d be spending a sizable chunk of the near future with them. Abe would take care of Nick Short, and when he was out of The Company’s good graces, Charlie Judge would die with him.

For a time, at least.

The binder felt sometimes like a yearbook, sometimes like a roadmap, and always like a love letter to his future. He knew snippets about most of them: Leta Wright with her perfect dark countenance and unflappable smile like she lived perpetually in the calm center of the Bermuda Triangle, Russell Wayles with his toothy grin and impossibly light green irises, and Herron Dent, who Abe had been following for nearly a decade.

But there were surprises tucked into those pages, too. The pages gave him Herron Dent's real face — the proof that there had always been a real person behind that eerie mask. They gave him the history of Vashvi Dhillon, which was less exotic than Dust had always imagined but no less interesting for it.

Leta, Wayles, Herron, Vashvi — these were the pieces he found himself running through his mind until he dreamed about the four of them every night.

For the first 48 hours, he only skimmed the pages about A. R. Carrow. He couldn't find a reason why he wasn't ready to unlock that door. Superstition, maybe, or fear — which was understandable. Because — while he knew the rest of the crew could maim, hurt, or kill him — they only felt like warriors on a battlefield.

Carrow was an atom bomb.

Carrow could erase him. The boss didn't leave loose ends. He left scorched earth.