“If you think there’s a mole, then find him,” the General said. “And find him fast. Because the world is about to change, and when it does, we must be at our strongest.”
“I will, sir,” Thomas said, energized by the General’s faith in him, grudging though it was.
“Good,” the General said, turning back to his paperwork. “Now go eat something. They can hear your stomach growling all the way up at the Academy.”
Thomas rode the elevator from the General’s office suite, which took up the entire 114th floor of the Tower, down to the 62nd floor, which contained the KES mess hall. The King’s Elite Service was a network that spread all over the country and the Tower was its nerve center. More than just a headquarters, the Tower was the workplace and residence of over twenty-five thousand agents and support staffers; they worked on the lower and upper floors of the building, but the middle floors were reserved for residential and other living spaces. Not all agents opted to take the General’s blanket offer of free housing, but Thomas hadn’t had a choice; when he received his assignment after he matriculated from the KES Academy, he’d been given his room number and that had been that. Housing quality was determined by years served, not by rank, so he had one of the smallest, least desirable rooms; it had a bathroom but no kitchen, so he was forced to take all his meals in the mess.
Not that he minded. The mess was one of his favorite places in the Tower, because it was where agents and staff came to socialize. He liked its noise and chaos; it reminded him of his time at the Academy. He’d only been there for a little less than six months, but they had been some of happiest months of his life.
It was a little too early for the breakfast rush when Thomas arrived at the mess, so there were only a few people scattered across the enormous dining hall, spooning oatmeal or scrambled eggs into their mouths while going over files or reading copies of the Royal Eagle, Columbia City’s largest daily newspaper. Thomas got his food and made his way to his usual table. He was looking forward to finally being alone, because it would give him some space to think about his rapidly growing pile of problems.
First, there was Sasha. Just about everything to do with her was a problem. He hadn’t realized just how much he would like her, but he had, from the moment they’d met. At the time, he’d put this down to her resemblance to Juliana, but it hadn’t taken long for him to see how different Sasha was from her analog. If people were houses, Juliana was like the Citadel she’d grown up in—beautiful and well-appointed, but guarded and set apart—while Sasha was her grandfather’s Hyde Park Victorian—cheerful and bright, with the windows and doors flung wide open. Sasha was curious and interested in people besides herself; she liked to laugh and didn’t take herself too seriously, while Juliana, accustomed to being used and befriended for her position, kept everyone at arm’s length. Spending time with Sasha on Earth had been easy and fun, and he’d meant what he said to her on the beach: it had been the best night of his life. Despite the fact that he’d been on a mission, Thomas had never felt freer than when he was on Earth; it had been such a relief to live a normal life for once, even if it wasn’t—and could never be—his forever.
It was the run-in with Libertas in the Tattered City that showed him how much he’d grown to care for Sasha. He’d been so angry with her for running off, and worried for her, too, but when he saw her in that alley with that stringy haired Libertine’s arm around her neck, his blood had run cold, as if a splinter of ice had become lodged in his heart. Fear was an unusual emotion for Thomas—he’d been trained so well over his years of military education to control it, to process it into swift, precise action. He’d learned long ago how not to let it paralyze him, and it’d been years since he’d properly felt it, like a drizzle of freezing rain down his spine. But he felt it then, and he knew—she wasn’t just an assignment anymore, a counterfeit Juliana. She was Sasha, and he was in big trouble.
So, then, what to do about it? There could never be anything between them besides a brief, loose friendship; the tandem was too high a hurdle, and he got the sense—silly as it would have sounded if he’d said it out loud—that the universes would disapprove. Besides, her opinion of him seemed … variable. She’d despised him at first, after finding out how he’d tricked her, which was understandable. He was sure he’d be able to coax her out of it eventually, and convince her to trust him at least so far as to take the help that he offered her. He’d thought it was working, but last night she was angry again, and nothing he said or did seemed to please her. In the end, he’d just stopped trying to talk to her, dropped her off at Juliana’s room, briefed the night agent stationed outside, and returned to the Tower for some rest. He needed to figure out what was bothering her, and fast; if he didn’t, it could compromise the entire mission.
But Sasha was only one of many things that troubled him. The Grant Davis situation enraged him, even more now that he suspected someone in the agency of funneling intelligence to Libertas, and of course there was Juliana, who he tried not to think too hard about. He wouldn’t put it past Libertas to kill her if the General didn’t give them what they wanted, which he never would. The only comfort Thomas had was the knowledge that Juliana would be doing her best to give them hell, because that was her way. She wasn’t good at taking orders, the natural consequence of a life of privilege.
And then there was the mole. Thomas’s involvement with Operation Starling didn’t leave him with a lot of time to run his own covert internal investigation, and he had no idea where to start looking for the leak. The KES was a huge organization, a complicated hierarchy with a seemingly infinite set of moving parts. All missions, even Operation Starling to an extent, required the diligent work of hundreds of agents in a wide variety of fields to successfully pull off. Any one of them could be the chink in the KES armor, but ferreting him or her out would require an exhaustive search on a scale outside what Thomas could do on his own. He couldn’t let that stop him, though. He’d just have to figure out a way.
Lost in his thoughts, Thomas didn’t notice his brother until he took a seat across the table from him and gave him a hearty, “Hey T.”
“Lucas,” Thomas said. “What are you doing here?”
Lucas was KES, too, but he was a mid-level support agent with no field duties or on-call minimums who’d chosen not to live in the Tower. Thomas knew it bothered Lucas that his younger brother was a senior level active agent at the age of eighteen, while he’d been denied admission to the KES Academy three times. The Academy was the one place the General’s favoritism didn’t go very far. Potential recruits had to score above a certain level on a number of mental and physical examinations to even qualify, and despite all efforts Lucas couldn’t make the grade. Thomas was sorry for that, because he knew how badly Lucas wanted to be active, and how much he hated having to settle for some mind-numbing desk job, but rules were rules, and Thomas was pretty sure the world was better off not having Lucas Mayhew on active KES duty.
“Just because I don’t live here doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to free breakfast,” Lucas said, lunging across the table to liberate a piece of bacon from Thomas’s plate.
“Actually,” Thomas said, swiping at his brother with his fork. “That’s exactly what it means.”
“Too bad.” Lucas set to work devouring Thomas’s scrambled eggs. “What’s on today’s schedule, princess? Manicures and dress fittings?”