Spy to Die For

who had been disciplined.

Her mouth fell open. She closed it, then bit her lower lip.

He had twenty names on that list. Sixteen had spoken to her at odd times. Sixteen. And a few of them had done so in such a way that she remembered thinking afterward, That was weird.

Jack watched her. She could actually feel his patience, as if it were a live thing. He was waiting for her to figure something out.

She had one more thing to do. She opened another holographic window and tapped on it, looking up vacation days from five years ago.

Fifteen of the names had the same date. And then again, each year. She didn’t have information for this year because that would be in the Guild’s current records, and to get those records, she would have to hack into the system.

She closed the screens, sat back down, and put her face in her hands. She was shaking.

The Guild hadn’t been a safe place for her, but it had been understandable—at least, she had thought it had been understandable. Everyone in their place, everyone with their assignments, people who had moved out of their place had either succeeded or screwed up. She had never thought of anyone cheating or gaming the system, because she hadn’t believed it was possible.

She figured all of the bad people would get caught. And those with questionable skills or a questionable commitment to the Guild, like she had, would get shunted aside in favor of better candidates.

Jack placed a tentative hand on her back. Then he rubbed gently, not in a sexual way, but in a soothing one. He probably thought he knew how upset she was.

Oddly, she was upset about the broken rules and about the misunderstandings. Not that these people had formed a conspiracy against the Guild.

The Guild didn’t treat everyone well. It was only a matter of time before someone rebelled.

Someone other than her.

But she had never expected the rebellion to take this form.

People from within, killing to obtain their desires. Surely, the Guild should have foreseen this? How had it missed the conspiracy?

She raised her head and tapped the screen one last time. Jack’s hand remained on her back, soothing and warm. She didn’t try to shake him off, which was unusual for her. His touch wasn’t a distraction at all, and she found his nearness comforting.

“That’s it,” she said to herself. “They control the information.”

“What?” Jack asked.

She looked at him. “You’re right. There’s a group and there has been for years. They set this up a long time ago, and they meet off-site at least once a year. But the key is that a lot of these people got demoted into what’s called The Office. They handle routine things, like the security for Guild members and vacation days and financial transactions. They do some investigating, mostly background of potential candidates for the school, and they have their fingers in a lot of the Guild’s management.”

“Do you think this conspiracy extends beyond these people that I found?”

“It would have to, wouldn’t it, to have part of the Council try to vote their own candidate in as the Guild’s director.” She rubbed a hand over her face.

She and Jack had spent so much time here, while Liora and her people were planning an active assassination. For all that Skye knew, it could be all over already.

Or about to happen.

It sounded like they had real plans, major plans, with at least two backups.

“We have to get this information to the Guild,” Skye said.

“If you don’t know which people are working together,” Jack said, “how are you going to know who to trust?”

Great question, especially since she’d missed so many cues already. She would ask Jack, who seemed to have a very good sense of other people, who to trust, but he didn’t have decades of experience with them.

“I guess we take this information to the director,” Skye said, “and let her figure out what to do.”

Jack was silent for a moment, as if he were considering what to say next. Finally, he nodded his head just a little.

“And what if we’re too late?” he asked softly.

Her heart twisted. She cared more than she thought she did.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll figure that out when we get there.”

Chapter 48

There was no quick route from their location in the NetherRealm to Kordita, the planet where the Assassins Guild made its home. Even with their speedy ship, it took four days of solid travel.

Jack got his lovemaking on the cockpit floor, mostly because neither he nor Skye wanted to leave the navigation system unmonitored, particularly after that explosion near Zaeen. The lovemaking wasn’t as exciting as Jack had hoped it would be.

Instead, like all of their interactions these days, it had a touch of sadness. They were still deeply attracted, and the sex was wonderful, and inventive. But it no longer felt new. It felt instead like the kind of sex people had after they had already broken up.

Jack tried to approach the topic a dozen times, but always elliptically. And he had started to learn that Skye wasn’t good with subtlety. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t understood the conspiracy recruitments when they happened.

She didn’t believe that people could think differently than she did, so when she was confronted by someone with a competing (but unarticulated) agenda, she simply ignored it, or failed to comprehend all of the subtext.

It wasn’t that she was dumb, it was that she lacked an interest in others that appeared in situations like that.

They had maybe a half a day to travel to get to Kordita when Jack decided to be as blunt as he possibly could. By then, they had finished all of the research they could do with the records available to them. They had decided to make a risky hack into the Guild’s database when they were still in the NetherRealm. That hack had lasted less than ten seconds and had garnered most of the Guild’s current information.

They had sorted through it on the rest of the trip here, but now they were done. Mostly, all they had gained was more confirmation that the people they suspected were worth their suspicions.

Skye sat in the pilot’s chair. Lately, she’d been doing hands-on flying because she worried about the proximity of some other ships. She said she paid better attention when she actually manipulated the controls herself.

She had done the bulk of the flying on the return trip. One of them had to monitor to make sure they weren’t followed, so when she needed sleep, he spelled her. During those times, he used the autopilot and did research nearby.

This meant that the two of them were on different schedules, so they hadn’t even had a chance to sleep in the same bed.

Jack missed it.

She had the screens open, so that she could see everything around them. He usually didn’t pay much attention to anything outside of a ship, but he did lately. And he was noticing just how much extra traffic there was here. It was as if they had left an unexplored part of the galaxy and arrived in a part that was running out of room for ships and humans.

Jack sat at his research station. The chair had become familiar to him, but it didn’t allow him to see her unless he swiveled toward her, which he did now.

“Skye,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”

She was staring at the navigation board in front of her. From this distance, it looked like a bunch of multicolored dots moving in a variety of directions.