“Connelly, just get on with it.” Head spinning, broken nose pulsating with agony, she looked around for the source of the voice, finally located a shadow standing in the darkened back of the room. The speaker walked forward, joined Connelly in the light. He was dressed in a similar suit, the same gloves, but his arms were crossed and he was holding a black leather folder in one hand.
“Fine.” Connelly’s eyes glared. “Fine.” He tore the folder from his companion’s hand. He opened the folder, spilled its contents onto the tabletop. Several blurred photographs, some nondescript sheets of paper, and a microdisc, which he gingerly picked up and slid into a video projector on the wall of the dark room. A series of images began to flicker across the wall.
“Magdalene Flynn. Is that your name?”
She looked at the images of blackened, burned car wreckage. Another shot of a collapsed storefront. She took her time wiping the now-congealing blood from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
“You are Maggie Flynn. Correct?”
“Aye. I’m Maggie Flynn, Soldierboy.”
Connelly uttered a sound that eerily resembled a growl, but the other man stepped forward, placing his hand on Connelly’s shoulder. Connelly moved to the back of the room, submitting grudgingly to the other man’s authority.
The images continued upon the wall, but now they had switched from depictions of bombed wreckage to photographs of Maggie with various groups of people. Images that must have been taken in public places, when she did not know she was being watched.
“Maggie, how old are you?” His nameplate, now visible, said simply “Smith.” His voice was not like her own, or Connelly’s. His was the voice of an American.
“What the fuck does it matter to you, Yankee?”
He smiled, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anything to me, Miss Flynn. It matters to you. It matters because some people think you’re just a kid caught up with the wrong crowd. It matters because other people think you should be shot in the morning, like the rest of your group will be.”
She became visibly upset for the briefest of moments, and then her face returned to the stoic, defiant demeanor that so infuriated Connelly, eyebrows drawn to a frown, chin held high with youthful pride. “What group?”
“Oh, I think you know who I’m talking about, Maggie.”
“Well, I was a Girl Scout a few years back—”
“Are you a member of the Northern Irish Blood Army, Maggie?”
She did not reply, but her sudden and intent interest in her hands on the tabletop was all the answer Smith needed. Her face had taken on a pale, drained sheen.
“Jesus. How old are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”
She studied her hands in silence. Smith turned to Connelly, who looked through his papers. “Sequencing says she’s seventeen.”
“Seventeen. Hell, when I was seventeen I was working at McDonald’s and saving up for a new car and trying to find a girlfriend to keep me company in the back of that car. You’re seventeen and you’re blowing up buses and churches.”
She began wiping her blood from her fingernails. “They’re going to execute you for that last bombing, you know, Maggie. The war ended twenty years—”
“The war never fucking ended as long as his troops are in my country!” She pointed out at Connelly. “Collaborating bastards! If they hadn’t… If they…” She started coughing forcefully, her hand reaching to grasp her right side. Smith frowned and looked back at Connelly, who shrugged his shoulders. Smith leafed through the papers on the table as Maggie continued coughing, her face turning a violent red.
“Did you see this report?” Smith held out a paper and Connelly took it, looked it over, glanced up at Maggie, and then looked back at the physical report. “What could have caused that? I’ve never seen anything like—”
“Pearl.”
“What?”
“She’s a fuckin’ Pearl addict. It’s a drug the Bloodies use to control their younger members. Keeps them loyal… And addicted. Makes them think they’re invincible.”
“And when had you planned on telling the ASA about this?”
Connelly shrugged his shoulders again. “We assumed MSI knew about it. We thought maybe MSI created it.”
Maggie had stopped coughing, but lay face down on the tabletop, hand still grasping her side.
“It’s an inhalant. It burns their lungs away if they take it long enough. Looks like she’s been hooked for years.”
Smith knelt down beside Maggie, his face inches away from hers. He brushed back her hair, looked into eyes too green, eyes too old for her face. “Are you addicted to Pearl, Maggie?”
“Fuck you, Yankee.” She unceremoniously spit into his face, or rather, attempted to spit at his face. The destructive nature of Pearl had begun its work on her salivary glands. Nonetheless, Smith pulled a pristine white handkerchief from within his jacket and patted down the area of his right cheek where her feeble attempt at real spit and her successful attempt at blood had landed.
Smith stood up, hands placed on hips, pacing slowly back to the other side of the table, returning the folded handkerchief to his jacket interior. “I’m trying to help you. We can save you, you know. In the ASA, we can rebuild your lung in just weeks. Hell, we can give you a matched set of clones if you want in a day or two.”
Connelly stepped to Smith’s side. “What the hell are you talking about? This little lady isn’t going to see another sunrise once we get what we need from her.”
“Step aside, Connelly.” Smith’s eyes took on a sudden frigid quality. “Your government isn’t running the show around here anymore, remember. I don’t really care about your centuries-old little war you’ve fought, either. And I don’t even care if this young woman was involved in yesterday’s bombing. I’ve been sent here for one purpose, and I’ve found my objective.” He walked around the table again and placed his hands on Maggie’s shoulders. “Her.”
“You—She’s directly responsible for the deaths of eighteen people in that bombing! Women and children. And she was involved in other attacks. We have evidence that—”
Smith extracted the microdisc from the wall unit, snapped it in half, and pocketed it. “What evidence?”
“You won’t get away with—”
“Connelly, I need this young woman more alive than you need her dead.”
“What for? Is the ASA using Pact tech now to—”
“Let’s just say that Milicom needs some fine young men and women for a project we’ve been working on. We need Maggie, and she’s ours now. Let us deal with her.”
Smith walked behind Maggie’s chair, bent down to speak directly into her ear. She looked blindly ahead, not at the tabletop but through it. She could feel Smith’s gaze upon her. She did not trust him, or the way he was looking over her young body. His presence was nauseating: the audible inhalation and exhalation, the scent of some American cologne and American shampoo and American toothpaste and mouthwash and chewing gum. Smell of leather as black gloves reached out, paused, gingerly swept back long curls of sanguine hair from pale white ear not pierced for fear of paternal retribution ironic because she was a terrorist but her father might still beat her if she got her ears pierced and white because of the gray skies that were filled with rain not sunshine and the beach was too cold to swim like the Americans did anyway she wanted to laugh but she shook with fear as this ASA brute looked at her profile. His black glove lifted up her chin and turned her face so that he could look into her eyes. His other hand gently wiped away the sticky coagulating blood from her lower lip. His eyes were black, and when they looked into her own green eyes, she felt paralyzed. Black and then silver for an instant she was not sure she had seen.
Connelly, forgotten for the moment, threw the black folder from the tabletop, and it spilled its contents across the floor of the room. Smith calmly looked up, his eyebrows drawing into a frown. “Is there a problem—”
“Fuck you, Yankee. She’s all yours now. The ASA can go to hell. Fuck you and fuck your Bloody too. Don’t come home again, Maggie. You come back and I will see to it that you die, young lady. Let the fucking Americans take care of you now.” Connelly knocked over a chair and slammed the door behind him. Smith was left alone in the room with his prisoner. He turned back to Maggie with his coal-colored eyes.
“I can give you a new life. I like you, Maggie. There’s something about you… There’s a fire inside of you, an
