CHAPTER 11

The man in charge took a brief look at Constantine and then continued scrutinizing Constantine’s record. “Looks like you screened a couple of times. Successfully.”

“Yeah.” This man was apparently something like a commanding officer. He was unequivocally in charge. But there was no rank here. This was not a military organization.

“Didn’t get picked up,” said the man.

“Did not.”

“Well,” said the man, closing Constantine’s record. “This is not the Unit. You know how we recruit?”

“I’ve heard a few things,” said Constantine. Most of what he had heard was only rumor, though. “You only take guys with a number of years tier one.”

“That’s not exactly true, but it’s close. We look for the right kind of experience. We can afford to be selective.”

Constantine nodded. He stood by, his hands folded behind his back, a more relaxed form of parade rest. He had expected this. There was nothing he could do about it. The man folded his hands, eyeing Constantine.

“The director has directed that you accompany us, so you will. But that doesn’t mean you’re on the team. You’re along for the ride. You’ll follow the orders of the team lead without question. If you get put at the back of the bus, I don’t want to hear about it. Clear?”

“Clear.”

The man nodded. “Welcome aboard Task Force Royal. Be humble and pay attention, and this might turn into a good recommendation for you.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“Talk to Security about getting a badge, and link up with Bob Sommers. He’ll get you checked in. You’re on temporary duty, so make sure to square that with your command.”

“Will do.”

“All right. Go to it. Looks like you’ll be in the air sooner rather than later.”

“Sounds good. Thanks again,” he said, and slipped out.

The man was right. Within a week he was on an airplane, alone, flying to a foreign country under non-official cover to meet up with other TF members arriving by other routes. On the plane, he thought about his son. The mission required that he bring nothing personal with him; his phone had pictures of someone else’s family on it.

Meanwhile, Melody found that her graduate education had taken a turn for the strange: The government had moved her to a hotel suite, for which they were paying, and she was to be working each day in an office full of the nation’s most elite cyber-security specialists, guiding them through the code her team had constructed to detect and classify distributed neural network traffic.

“Sweetheart, I can’t stay. I have to get back to school—and work,” said Doran, wheeling her down the hotel corridor.

“I told you you didn’t have to stay just for me,” she said. “I’m fine. I probably don’t even need to be in this stupid wheelchair. You should go home.”

“Are you sure? Like, really sure? I don’t want to leave you here alone. I mean, you got shot.”

“Yeah, well, I’d hardly say I’m alone, right?” There would be a man with a badge and a gun waiting in the lobby to pick her up. The government had taken her security quite seriously. “I’m actually pretty excited. And it won’t be for long anyway. I’m sure they’ll get this figured out pretty quick, and then they’ll kick me out, anyway.”

“Well, good,” said Doran. “The less time you spend working for Big Brother, the sooner you’re home and I can see you again.”

Melody giggled. “You’re so sweet! I should have gotten shot, like, months ago.”

“Excuse me,” he said. “You’re the one who’s been playing hard to get.”

“Yeah,” she admitted. She felt a flutter of worry. “Do you hate me for making you wait?”

“What? No. No, I guess some guys might? But I’ve… well, let’s just say I’m okay with it being different with you. I want it to be right.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! Seriously. I’m being dead serious.”

“Okay.”

“When you get back, we’ll start at that gym, too. I’m serious about that, too.”

“Actually…” She hesitated, and he looked down at her. “…what would you say if I said I wanted to learn, like, martial arts?”

They were in the elevator, now, and it hummed quietly as it lowered them to the lobby level.

“Because of what happened?”

“Yes. I want to learn to defend myself.”

“Well,” said Doran. “I think you should, if that’s what you want. And yeah, I’ll go with you. Absolutely. I just…” Now he hesitated.

She looked up at him. “What?”

The elevator stopped. The door opened. He wheeled her forth. “I don’t think you should do it out of fear—if you know what I mean. I don’t want you to, like, just be living in fear all the time, because of this.”

Was that what she was doing? Melody thought about it as he pushed her into the lobby. Was she still afraid, and turning toward paranoia? Was this a first step toward becoming a prepper, or some kind of crazy person with three locks on her door and a hoard of weapons under her bed?

“No,” she said. “No, I’m serious. This isn’t about being scared. I just don’t want to be helpless. I’ve been in this chair for, like, two weeks, now, and it sucks. I feel helpless. And I just realized that I was basically the same that night. I was standing on my feet, but I might as well have been in a wheelchair. I was, like, completely prey. I was completely dumb, and just walked out there, and when he said my name I just turned and let him shoot me. A person… a person shouldn’t be like that. I don’t want to be like that. Same way I don’t want to be overweight forever.”

She heard Doran sigh. “Well, if you’re sure, then we’ll look into it. They won’t let you do anything like that until your injury’s healed up, though.”

“I know. I’m going to call the doctor tonight and see about that.”

“All right. Just don’t rush it. Okay?”

“I won’t.”

“You promise?”

“Yes! I promise,” she said. He was standing over her, now, looking down with an expression of concern that she found endearing but also a little annoying.

“Fine,” he said. He bent down and kissed her, and she kissed him back, hoping by it to communicate to him that she did appreciate his concern, even if she was chafing a bit, lately, against all of the restrictions around her. “You’re sure you’re good?” he asked.

“Yes! Go!”

“Okay. See you tonight. Love you.”

“Good bye!” she said, shooing him away as her government chauffer approached.

“Miss Ritter,” said the agent, offering his credentials to her. “Mr. Cranston.” He shook Doran’s hand. “Pleased to meet you both. My name’s Jim.”

“Good to meet you,” said Doran, while Melody inspected the badge for the holograms that marked its authenticity. So she had been taught, but she had no doubts. She had received that morning from her liaison a text message with Jim’s full name and photo. They took her security quite seriously indeed.

“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” he said, taking over wheel-chair-pushing duty. “Shall we?”

“Yes,” said Melody. “Goodbye, Doran.”

Doran looked positively pained. “Bye,” he said.

“Seems like he cares about you a lot,” said the agent as he wheeled her out the door.

“Yeah. I probably don’t deserve him.”

“Well, you’re lucky to have someone.”

He held the door for her. She was perfectly capable of standing and climbing into the car; she just had to be careful not to move her right arm too flamboyantly, nor to put certain stresses on her ribs.

The agent packed her wheelchair into the trunk and then took the driver’s seat.

“Jim…” she began, as he pulled into traffic.

“Yes?”

“Do you do any martial arts?”

“Yeah, some. Most of us do some.”

“What would you say is the best martial art for self-defense against a guy with a gun who’s trying to shoot you?”

“Hoo boy,” said Jim. “Well, having a gun of your own, hands down. That’s the best way. But most civilians aren’t allowed to own handguns and such, so, barring that… I dunno. Let me give it some thought.”

“Okay.”

By the time he dropped her off, he still had not come up with an answer. “I’m taking you home this afternoon. I’ll have some suggestions by then,” he promised. She accepted, and he delivered that evening. The next day, Doran boarded a plane for home, and Melody called her doctor. After hearing her plea—by Melody’s standards an outright badgering, but by his almost comically deferential—he agreed to refer her to a local doctor for a progress assessment. A few days later, by virtue of that exam, she had escaped her wheelchair. She had also interrogated (by her standards) the local doctor on a few other topics, and the following week found her fully outfitted with a supply of mixed nuts and vegetables (she called it “bird food”) and access to the extensive gym one floor below the office where the government now employed her. The doctor had forbidden her to run, but had allowed that she could utilize a stationary bicycle if she wished to develop her cardiorespiratory endurance.

The work was marvelously fulfilling. Leading on her piece of the original thesis project had been a great opportunity (right up until she had been shot for it), but it could not compare to working with a team like this, much bigger, with far greater resources and years upon years of experience doing such unwelcome things to other people’s computers as she could hardly begin to imagine. And if they were Big Brother, they were the best big brother she had never had. The culture among them was profoundly nerdy. When they found out she was a gamer, that became a bond of familiarity, not to mention grounds for induction into a level of nerd culture even she had not previously experienced. She had been a video-gamer all her life, but she had never gotten into pen-and-paper role-playing games. Several of them invited her to join their campaign temporarily and try it out. Melody was happy to oblige. These were her people. There was something wonderful about the fact that a few of them got together and pretended to be elves and sorcerers after a long week of the most sophisticated and mind-bending digital espionage the world had ever known. Toppling dictatorships by day, rolling twenty-sided dice by night.

Melody had never before thought about such work as a career, but she began to consider it, and thus with no small sadness she greeted the day when Josh Carrington came to her and said that her impromptu internship was drawing to a close.

“I understand,” she said, trying not to tear up.

“But hey,” he added. “As soon as you finish your Master’s, you should consider putting in a package. If you do, I’ll personally write you a letter of recommendation. I think you’d make a great addition, here.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and meant it.

There were heart-felt goodbyes, and it was Jim who drove her to the airport. “So, you gonna look into those martial arts classes when you get home?”

“I’ve been looking into them,” she said. “I already sent my boyfriend a list of places to check out.”

“Awesome. Good luck to you, Miss Ritter.”

“Thank you.”

“I know all of this has been explained, but just remember that local PD should be meeting you when you land.”

“Yep. They said.” They had explained to her that she would no longer be under 24-hour guard, but that investigators had determined that any serious threat to her had passed. Everything she knew was now out in the open, and therefore any mission of containment had already failed. Pursuing her at this point would only bring unnecessary exposure upon whoever was behind it all. It made sense to Melody, enough so that she found herself genuinely at ease as she flew home. Sad, yes, to leave behind such an incredible project and a group of people she could have called friends, but happy that, at last, she could put this terrifying ordeal behind her and move on with her life in other than constant fear.

About the same time that she was flying home, Constantine was standing in the tiny apartment of a man he’d never met. A journalist had been made to disappear shortly after posting to his social media a photo he had captured of a “ghost” haunting a nearby government facility. Whoever had disappeared him had also cleansed his apartment and seen it allocated to new tenants. Constantine and his team were not in that apartment, the reporter’s erstwhile home; rather, they were in the apartment of a government functionary they believed had facilitated the reporter’s disappearance. They were not looking for evidence of the government man’s complicity in the cover-up; there would surely be none of that here. Rather, they were looking for leverage. They scanned photos of and identifying information relating to his immediate and extended family, copied the keys they found in the bowl by his front door, collected the usernames and passwords he had written on a notepad near his personal computer, and made a complete image of that computer’s hard-disk drive. Constantine had by now come to understand that he truly was along for the ride. This was not special operations; this was espionage.

When she arrived home, Melody took the afternoon to clean out her refrigerator and tidy her apartment, which had been mostly untouched since she had gone out for groceries one fateful evening. That done, and once she had unpacked and begun a load of laundry, she went to bed. The next day she spent reinstalling software on her computer. Investigators had taken it, gone through it she dared not think how thoroughly, and then wiped it clean down to the 1s and 0s. Everything had to be rebuilt from disks, downloads, and cloud-saves.

“Maaaaalll!” they hailed her when she at long last logged into the Voxo server.

“Where you been, Mal?”

“Yeah, we worried something had happened to you.”

“Sorry, guys. Some… personal stuff came up. I’m back, now, though.” She could say nothing to them. The non-disclosure agreements which she had signed forbade it, of course, but beyond that it could only needlessly endanger them.

Melody stared at the main menu screen of the Guardians application. She could never tell them, she realized, that Cookie’s death was her fault. Oh, sure, everyone would tell her it was not; that only the murderer was to blame and she had done nothing wrong, but was that true? Perhaps sometimes a person with survivor’s guilt was blameless, but not in this case. She had acted as best she knew how, and with the consent of her peers, and with Cookie’s consent, but that only made them all coconspirators. It did not change the fact that she had made choices that had manifested deadly consequences for him. Was it wrong to apportion blame where blame lay?—At least, was it wrong to apportion causation where causation lay? Let the murderer be called the murderer, but she could not—would not—deny that her actions had been an integral link in the chain. Never again, she resolved, would she move without thinking things through. That she could never tell them, never share the burden, would be her reminder forever to consider the worst possibilities.

“Sorry, what?” she asked. One of them had been speaking. “Little distracted, here.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“I was just saying we’re glad you’re back.” It was Nailoo. “Are you back to stay?”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

“Good,” said Beetle. “We’ve been getting totally boned without you.”

“Really? I’m sorry,” said Melody.

“We haven’t been that bad,” said Ninjas.

“Boned,” insisted Beetle.

“Well, I’m back, and hopefully I’m not too rusty.”

“As long as you remember how to work a teleporter.”

“Invite sent.”

She accepted the party invite and joined their game. It felt good to play again, and to play with nothing hanging over her head except that which was already done and could not be undone. It felt good to be helping her team—though it reminded her a little of the work she had been doing over the past months, and of the team there with whom she had been working.

The following week she reunited with another team, her thesis comrades. It was a quiet conference. By the strict letter of the law, they were forbidden to speak even to one another of the matters that had brought them under the umbrella of police protection. The others knew that she had been shot, and they suspected where she had gone after that, but they had signed away the right to ask more than, “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” she answered. “Glad to be back.”

After another awkward pause, they realized that all that could safely be said had been said. They were permitted to resume work on their more limited version of the AI project, so that they did. By the end of the week, Melody was fully engrossed in that and the backlog of classwork which had accrued in her absence. She felt buried in normalcy. The only differences were the mixed nuts and the time she spent at the campus gym, committing self-harm on an exercise bike.

As she spent yet another weekend doing homework and playing Guardians, Constantine was on a hillside in the woods overlooking a military compound. No camouflage. He and the one with him were dressed like civilians, their best approximation of intrepid civilian journalists. The cameras and telephoto lenses they used were strictly commercial off-the-shelf equipment. Their weapons were concealed. The only thing that might have marked them to the casual observer as more than a couple of bloggers would have been the fact that they had been in position for several days already, and still they remained, day and night, heedless of the weather.

When Melody entered the mixed-martial-arts gym for the first time, she was terrified—no, a few months ago she would have said she was terrified. Now… she thought for a moment about whether her fear of this action was any less than it would have been before she had been shot. Perhaps, but not so much less that she could say so definitively. Rather, it was not the fear she felt that was so different, but her reaction to it. It seemed silly. Nothing about it seemed worthy of heeding; nothing about it seemed like the kind of fear which one might even consider allowing to dictate one’s actions. It was a pitiful fear, if not absolutely less than it would have been a few months ago, then certainly relatively less by orders of magnitude than true fear, which she had discovered and then rediscovered and rediscovered.

Doran was with her as they met with one of the school’s instructors and inquired about a beginner’s curriculum, but she found herself leading a lot of the conversation, asking a lot of the questions, especially about how she could get a head start while waiting for a broken rib to heal fully. With him at her side, would she have taken a more passive role in this scenario in the past? Yes, undoubtedly, but more to the point she would not have come into this scenario at all. She never would have dared come here. An even weaker version of her might have allowed him to drag her in, she resenting it all the way—but she had never been quite that weak. She would have been too weak to go, and just strong enough to refuse. Pathetic, she thought. What was the worst that could happen? Failure? Trying, failing, and being shot in the chest had to be better than just standing there like a post, refusing to acknowledge reality, as she was being shot in the chest.

While she pondered the relativities of fear, Constantine was gunning down a prison guard. The rifle he used was of local make—very much like that slung on the shoulder of the man he had just killed—and his dress was the style of the region’s various and sundry militia factions, complete with bandana mask and hooded jacket. The rest of the Task Force personnel were likewise disguised. Even the grenades they used were locally procured, and the bombs carefully designed to mimic those produced by terror cells endemic to the region.

Their tactics, though, were pure first-world. This was the first time Constantine had seen the Task Force operators conducting a direct action, and their SOF roots showed clearly, but so did their experience. Much as it gutted him to admit it, his guys in Fifth Battalion would not have been this smooth. That was the reality of “vanilla” special operations: they were good, because their TTPs (their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) were good and because they were sufficiently trained in those TTPs. Generations of special operations units had refined missions like theirs into a science and had figured out how to teach that science efficiently to men of sufficient physical and mental stamina. However, they were never trained as well as they would like. There was never enough time to make them truly expert in any one qualification or mission set, much less all of the SOF missions, before they had to deploy. As SOF had become more ubiquitous, the opportunities for a higher tier of operators had become more obvious, and their advent had been inevitable: select units, for which already-experienced operators were selectively screened, and which could be manned and funded to support the deep level of training that truly high-risk missions required.

If it was true that Task Force Royal and other units inside the Agency’s Clandestine Activities Directorate in turn selected the most experienced and proficient individuals from those “tier one” units, then it was no surprise that they conducted an attack like this—with foreign weapons, minimal gear, no air support or higher headquarters assistance, and essentially no internal communication—as if they did it for breakfast each morning. The whole thing made Constantine a little angry. His boys could be this good, or nearly this good, if they just had the resources. If they weren’t overmanned, underfunded, and expected to save the world from all of the politicians’ embarrassments. The government these days employed SOF to fight all of its wars, because it could get away with saying it had no “boots on the ground.” Just special operators in an “advise and assist” role. They always left off the “accompany.” “Advise, assist, and accompany,” was the full phrase. And when all of the indigenous “partner” force inevitably turned and fled at the first shot fired (justifying scare quotes around the word “partner”), “assist and accompany” inevitably meant doing the “partner” force’s job for them, in nation-building or regional stabilization. If there was one reason everyone wanted to screen for a tier-one unit, it was because those units represented a chance to be and do what they had always thought special operations was and did, the direct action, the hostage rescue, the deep sabotage and reconnaissance. It was their chance to do real special forces work, and to be real special operators—even if they would never, ever admit in their daily work lives that they regarded it in those terms.

Constantine covered his angles each time they breached a room or crossed an intersection of corridors. This was not his first rodeo; he was not some green FNG liable to trip over his own feet or shoot a teammate in the back. He carried his weight and focused on the work, and by and large it was good work. They had taken this camp entirely by surprise, and, despite the use of unsuppressed weapons, they moved too quickly through the enemy’s critical centers of gravity for the enemy ever to get a clear sense of what was happening, much less to mount a coordinated defense. As such, they cut across the compound smoothly, wiping out even the stiffest pockets of resistance. The only moment that gave Constantine pause was when a couple of the Task Force men took a guard who was still alive, cut his throat, and then carved off his head. He understood why they did it: The mission required that they kill every guard, and that they make it look like an attack by a dissident group liberating one of their own. A beheading was the sort of signature those groups would leave behind. Constantine knew he would never forget the sight of it, though. The other men eyed him as they moved on, no doubt gauging his reaction.

“Are you in or are you out?” their glances demanded. There was no middle ground, in any special operations unit. You were in, or you were out.

Once the guards were dead to the last man, a team secured the separatist leader and made a show of escorting him out in view of the other prisoners, unlocking the remaining cells as they went, to much cheering and celebration. One other reason they killed every guard became apparent now: what the freed prisoners did to the guards’ corpses suggested what they might have done to one they caught alive. It was a small mercy, but it was a mercy.

Constantine did not go with that team. He and a few others stayed behind, and when attention was elsewhere, they unlocked the one cell that the decoy team had left alone. They put a bag over the head of its sole occupant, bound his hands behind his back, and swiftly escorted him out by another path. The few prisoners they encountered along the way, those who had lingered to take revenge on the dead, they killed immediately. There could be no witnesses whatsoever to this extraction.

In the forests a few miles from the prison, his group met up with the rest of the force. The separatist warlord whom the latter group had brought out to such fanfare would never be found. Together, the team unburied their trekking supplies, burned their terrorist disguises, and began the long walk to a staged vehicle. That would take them to a farm far, far from here, where they would transfer the package—the anonymous prisoner they had rescued—to the custody of a field officer under official cover. They would stuff him into the trunk of a diplomatic vehicle, and the field officer would drive him to the embassy, where he could be debriefed at leisure, and whence he could be shipped safely out of the country if need be.

By the time this former journalist-turned-political-prisoner was safely ensconced and telling the story of his “ghost” photograph, Constantine was on a plane back to friendly territory, and Melody was attending her first few MMA classes. The instructor had taken into account her injury and her doctor’s instructions and had constructed an initial syllabus for her centered on footwork and conditioning, plus slow-motion form-building exercises. Doran, of course, being already athletic and physically unrestricted, was allowed to progress along the normal track. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as other coaches worked with him on the basics of punching and kicking in addition to the footwork. He looked good, she thought, throwing jabs and crosses, kicking the bag, bobbing and weaving with his hands up. He was small compared to some of the instructors, which surprised her. She thought of him as muscular. Intellectually she knew there were bigger men out there, and he had mentioned in the past his desire to build mass, but this was the first time she had ever seen him in a setting where he looked genuinely light or scrawny.

It did not bother her, of course. He was cute, and she knew how strong he was. And if, in the course of this pursuit, he beefed up a bit, well, more power to him. She did not require it, but she would not complain about it, as long as he did not turn into one of those mutant muscle-heads.

Meanwhile, her own education demanded most of her concentration. For some reason, footwork was much harder than it seemed like it should be. The coach would tell her to put her feet a certain way, and she would comply—or so she thought—and then he would invariably make adjustments. It was the same with slow-motion punching. He would demonstrate, and she would imitate—or so she thought—and he would invariably make corrections, sometimes taking hold of her hand and arm and physically guiding her through the motion. Indeed, the mere process of making a fist somehow eluded her first few attempts. He repeatedly corrected the alignment of her wrist. Eventually she realized that when she clenched her hand in what she thought was a natural way, it caused that hand to tilt back slightly, so that she was presenting the wrong knuckles—the second row, or “proximal interphalangeal” knuckles, as he called them—rather than the first row of knuckles. It took her some time after that to discern that what she really needed, when she clenched her fist, was to feel a sensation of curling at the wrist, a sensation of tensing of the “curling” muscles, the flexors, of the inside her forearm, to bring her fist down and present the first two knuckles, the “metacarpophalangeal” knuckles of the index and middle fingers.

This was a very esoteric business—especially the names, which Melody enjoyed because they were so esoteric. But, more than the particulars of any one motion, such as making a proper fist, she found most esoteric the process of trying to identify what a correct position felt like. It always felt, initially, incorrect, for it was never the most relaxed or natural position. The sensations of discomfort—of muscles tensed in an unusual balance—she found herself using to identify the correct posture for any given part of her body. If it felt wrong, it was probably right. That exercise she found as engaging as it was frustrating.

“Of course it’s hard at first,” said her instructor, when she expressed her frustration. As soon as she had one piece of herself properly configured, some other part of her, relieved of her scrutiny, would go off on its own program. “If you’ve never done anything that required you to be conscious of your body, down to this level of detail, then of course there’s no way you’d know how to do it. Physical skills are learned. That’s why we start slow.” She glanced over at Doran, who was kicking and punching away, striking at a partner wearing padded mitts like he’d been doing it all his life. But then, in a sense he had. All of his athletics, though they might have been of a different sort, would have required him to pay attention to what his body was doing, and to get it right in a very precise way. What had she done, all those years? Sit in her chair? She was lucky not to be a hunch-back.

“Oh, God,” she thought.

“What?” asked her coach. He could tell some thought had distracted her. Perhaps he had already discerned that she was easily distracted by her own thoughts.

“Um…” she said. “I probably don’t have very good posture, either. Do I?”

He took a breath through his teeth, with the sort of wince of one being asked to address a very delicate topic that was sure to offend.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can be honest. I’ve been a couch potato forever.”

“Well… so, why don’t we work on that? Posture. Stand up straight.”

She did so—or, as she was now prepared to admit, she stood up as straight as she knew how. She stood as her body thought was straight.

“Okay, I’m going to do something that’ll probably feel a little weird.”

“Okay…?” She was not sure she liked the sound of that.

He took a pinch of her hair, right at the top of the crown of her head, and lifted it up. It did not feel so much weird as just painful.

“I want you to feel this, like a string attached to the top of your head—” Which it was, and also, ouch. “—and I want you to stretch yourself up, like you’re hanging from the string. Stretch. As tall as you can. Like you’re stretching your back out. There you go. Your shoulders will naturally pull back a bit. You’ll feel kind of like you’re sticking your chest and your butt out, but you aren’t really. It’s not over-exaggerated or anything. Just do what you have to do to make yourself as tall as you can in the direction I’m pulling. You should feel tight all around the core, belly and back. Like you’re trying to introduce your bellybutton to your spine, as my dance teacher once told me.”

“You dance?” she exclaimed with what breath she had left. But it did feel like she was sticking her chest and butt out, which was… well… she was not that kind of girl. Furthermore, it did not feel at all comfortable. It felt like something a teacher might have demanded of a wayward student as punishment, a hundred years earlier.

“How does that feel?”

“Not great. Like I’m going to get a crick in my back. Like, right between my shoulders. And I do feel like I’m sticking my butt out. And my… boobs.”

He laughed and let go of her hair. “I promise, you’re not. Or, you know, if you are, it’s only a little bit. Like, the right amount. What you’re trying to do is get the right S-curve in your spine. But you can’t really feel your spine, so the best way I know to teach it is to feel the top of your head, right where I had your hair, and just try to lift that point straight up, while keeping your feet flat on the ground. If you try to stretch yourself like that, like you did, you’ll naturally pull your shoulders back, straighten your spine—meaning make it the correct S shape—and take any tilt out of your hips. Most people walk around with a pelvic tilt. Anterior pelvic tilt is where your pelvis is tilted forward. You see this in the girls who are trying to stick their butt out. It also sticks the belly out. It’s weird, and not good. And then there’s posterior pelvic tilt, which is where people walk around with the butt kinda tucked in, like they’re trying to fold in at the stomach, which to me is even weirder, but you do see it. All I can say is, don’t worry about sticking things out or not sticking things out. Just do like you just did. Feel that spot on the top of your head and pull it up, and do what you have to do to make yourself tall. You can even go home and kind of fiddle around with it, to make yourself as tall as possible.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be tall.”

He chuckled again. “Yeah, but we’re not trying to make you taller than you are. We’re just trying to make you as tall as you actually are. Go ahead, give it a try.”

Melody took a deep breath, and then stretched herself up. He watched, appraising. If anything felt “weird,” as he had suggested, it was in fact that: the feeling of being physically appraised—not in the usual boys-looking-at-girls way, but like she was some kind of sculpture and he was deciding which bits to carve away and which bits to rearrange.

“That’s good,” he said, “but one small change. I want you to actually put your finger where I pinched your hair. Yeah, now pull up from there. What does your head do?—yeah, you see? You had kind of lifted your chin, right? Tilted your head up a bit? But that’s not what we’re looking for. If you actually feel that spot right at the top of your crown, and pull up from there, your head will stay in a neutral alignment. Just like that. There you go. That’s proper posture.”

“Ugh.”

“I know, right? Believe me, we’ve all been there. But, it’s so important, you know? Like, everything we do starts with that. If you can do that, then you can lift weights, or do other athletic stuff, without injuring yourself. And practicing good posture when you’re not fighting helps you keep from getting a boxer’s hunch. It’s real important. I would say that’s your main homework for next time. All the time, as you go through your day, try to work on proper posture. Make yourself tall. Use your muscles, and get used to feeling that way. Muscular engagement in your torso, your core, your shoulders and back, even when you’re just standing and sitting.”

“That’s gonna be really hard,” she said.

“Well, then it’s probably worth doing, right?”

Melody rolled her eyes. “Yeah…” she admitted.

That was how her first few classes went, and when she and Doran departed after a typical class both were sweaty and sore. He drove her back to her apartment to drop her off, and during the ride they did more commiserating than celebrating over their new experiences. Neither of them noticed the news reports of tanks and armored vehicles rolling into a small far-off country from its much larger neighbor. Constantine missed that news as well, as it broke during his transit home, though he heard about it when he landed. At the time, he thought nothing of it, but that changed when next he encountered Sing.

“Did you see the news?” Sing asked, before even so much as issuing a greeting.

“The tanks crossing the border?”

“Yes.”

“Saw something about it in the airport. Is this relevant to us?”

“It is. At least, I think it is.”

“Why? They’ve been wanting to do this for a while, right?”

“Yes, and they didn’t why?”

“Because they were worried about what we might do.”

“So what’s changed?”

Constantine was quiet. What had changed?

“Exactly. Our foreign policy hasn’t changed. So why are they now suddenly less worried about testing us? If nothing’s changed on our end, something’s changed on theirs.”

“The ‘alliance,’ you think.”

“Yes. A new axis, and an advancement in technology. They aren’t worried about what we might do—or at least, not as worried.”

“Our government is going to respond.”

“Yes. And we have to watch what the other major powers do. Who is part of this axis? Their reactions may tell us.”

“Okay…” said Constantine. “But in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we keep digging. The reporter you rescued is singing. And the Bureau’s team has some new leads, apparently, too. If you can, I want you to go meet them and find out what they’ve got so far.”

“Sounds good.”

“Look, if you want to take some time, though, I mean, we’re in this for the long haul.”

Constantine looked down at the pile of papers littering Sing’s desk. The long haul. He pursed his lips. “I’m fine.”

“Your family?”

“They’re fine.”

Sing eyed him for a moment and then gave a reluctant nod. “Okay. Well, look, if you want to get a drink or something sometime, you know…”

“You got family?”

“Divorced. Kids live with her.”

“Ah,” said Constantine.

Sing shrugged. “It is what it is.”

They did not end up at a bar together. Constantine made contact with the Bureau team, arranged travel for himself, then hit the gym. That night, his phone rang, and he saw that it was his wife calling.

“Yeah, babe.”

“Do you know there were federal investigators here today? They searched our house, Rob. Nicky was terrified.”

Constantine frowned. “It’s fine, babe. Are they gone?”

“It’s fine?” she shouted into the phone. “It’s fine? It’s not fine! What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. They won’t find anything.”

“I can’t believe you! Where are you? You need to get home right now and take care of this.”

“Babe, I can’t do that. I told you I’m involved in this thing.”

“Oh, yeah, your special project. I don’t care about your damned special project, Rob. You need to be here. You need to take care of whatever this is—” He could see her finger pointing at him, jabbing at him, in his mind. “—and take care of your son!”

“I promise I’ll be home as soon as this is taken care of,” he said. “Don’t worry about the investigators. They won’t find any—” A dial tone. She had hung up on him.

He was surprised; she had never quite done that before. It was probably a bad omen, but it meant the conversation was over, and that was something of a relief. There was never any true relief, of course. Constantine suspected that no one was ever truly happy; everyone was just half a step ahead of something terrible. Life was pain.

The next day, Constantine boarded a plane to track down the Bureau team.