Zhukov's Dogs (15 page)

Her shoulders rolled back, and she crossed her arms, trying to make herself look bigger than she was. She sneered at me and flipped the long braid over her shoulder. “Yeah, because
being nice
helps get work done.”

“Helps almost as much as your bitchy little remarks.” My body tensed. The words had slipped right through the filter I always maintained on undercover missions.

I couldn’t explain it, but the next thing I knew, Benji was laughing and holding his hand up for a high five. I slapped his hand and looked to Fritzi. She shook her head and resumed digging through the trunk without a word, a slight smirk on her face to indicate even she’d found it funny.

“Unless necessary, do not insult your hosts while undercover” was one of the first things dogs were taught. My slipup didn’t result in torture, threats to national security, or any of the usual consequences associated with failure to follow mission protocol, though. It was all very confusing.

At some point between Benji laughing and Fritzi tossing back a sarcastic one-liner, I realized something: On this mission I was a teenager, not a normal one by a long-shot, even with my cover story, but neither were the people around me. Confusion gave way to a sense of comfort, which every dog recognized as dangerous.

The sound of Anya’s quick footsteps pulled me out of my head. When she entered the library, Benji handed her the flower from his magic trick. Anya tucked it behind her ear with a smile. “Thank you, Benji.” She giggled.

Benji’s face turned as red as the rose itself might have once been. He was so smitten that all he could do was nod and hurry across the room, burying himself in the search for the blueprints again with his back toward her.

Anya watched him for a moment then looked to me. “Nik, can I borrow you for a second?”

“Sure,” I said, dusting my hands off on my jeans as I got up. Benji’s eyes flicked up at me and then back to the trunk. I’d have to talk to him later and let him know he had nothing to worry about, because while Anya was gorgeous, I wasn’t about to let her affections distract me from my mission.

Anya led me into the hall, walking backwards ahead of me. Even in boots with three-inch heels, she managed the feat with poise. “There’s something up in my closet I can’t reach, and you’re nice and tall.”

Benji was just as tall as me. Maybe Anya did have ulterior motives after all. Her room was on the second floor and shared with Fritzi. It was easy to tell which side belonged to which girl. Fritzi’s entire desk was covered with nuts and bolts, greasy looking wrenches, and power cords. Disassembled hunks of machinery were scattered over the floor, all the way to her unmade bed.

Anya’s side was a picture-perfect opposite—everything in its proper place, the bed made, and floor swept clean. She smiled and welcomed me in with a wave. “Sorry about the mess.”

“Your roommate doesn’t like to clean up after herself, huh?” I made notes in my head as I studied Fritzi’s half of the room.

“She keeps it on her side. Plus she’s my best friend, so I kind of let it slide.”

Anya and Fritzi were best friends? I barely managed to keep from laughing. Anya walked to the open closet and pointed up to a bin on the top shelf. I pulled it off the high ledge, metal clinking together inside, and Anya clapped her hands like it was some kind of huge achievement.

“Thank you, sunshine.” She took the bin from me and set it on the bed. As she slipped the lid off, she hummed a cheery tune, one which made the knives she pulled out of the bin all the more startling. She examined each of them closely, at ease as she tested the sharpness of the blades with her index finger.

I noted the way she flipped the knives expertly and weighed each one in her hand. She’d handled them before. It seemed there was more to Anya than a pretty face. “Won’t lie, Anya,” I chuckled as I walked over to get a better look at the collection, “I expected this thing to be full of shoes.”

“I keep that box somewhere I can actually reach.” Anya smiled. She didn’t look hardened at all, not like the others. I wanted to know why.
No. I need to know why
, I corrected. Wanting implied I was curious; needing implied it was for the mission.

“How’s a girl like you get into this sort of stuff anyway?” I asked.

“For your information, I like ‘this sort of stuff.’” She giggled. “As for how I got into it, you can thank Val. He’s the only family I’ve got.”

“I know your dad was a Grey, but what about your mom?” I asked.

Anya’s hesitation served as an answer in itself. I started to say I was sorry, but she stopped me. “It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize. I mean, I don’t even remember her that well… After she died, we bounced between foster care and an orphanage not far from here.”

I was right; Anya was way more than a pretty face. She was a chatty, giggling database of information I needed. Who were Val and Anya? Where had they come from, and what happened in their past to make them the people they were today?

“Then what?” I pressed.

“Well, you probably don’t know this, but fourteen is considered old enough to work in this city,” she began, slightly less enthusiastic sounding this time. “So, when we came of age, we tried make it on our own. We took whatever jobs we could find and squatted in vacant houses with other kids. It was safer living in numbers back then. That’s how we met Tibbs.”

“He was an orphan, too?”

Anya nodded, hardly paying attention to the knives in her hands anymore. “After his dad died, Tibbs started living on the streets… The three of us stuck together and managed to last on our own for almost a year before things really started to go bad. There were strikes and shortages on basic everyday goods. Even people who could afford to eat went hungry.”

As her voice trailed off, I found myself reaching to put a hand on her shoulder.
For the mission
, I told myself, disregarding the tinge of sympathy her story provoked. Val mentioned before that the city had suffered over the last several years, but he never mentioned how it had affected him and Anya.

She sniffled and gave a small, forced laugh. “Sorry, sunshine, I’m not usually this—”

“It’s fine.” I moved the bin of knives and gestured for her to sit down.

Anya thanked me as she sat on the bed, shoulders rising and falling with a shaky sigh. “It was just a really bad time for everyone.”

“Hard to imagine this place being any worse than it is now.”

“Oh, believe me, before Val went and…”

Anya shut her mouth and eyes simultaneously. She knew she’d said something she shouldn’t have, and it was exactly what I’d hoped to hear. I tilted my head, so when Anya opened her eyes, she saw I was waiting for her to continue.

Her eyes darted around the room to make sure we were alone, and even though we were, she still dropped her voice and spoke in a whisper. “That year really changed him. Then one day he just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“I mean he vanished, Nik. I woke up, and he was gone. Poof.” Anya gave a quick snap of her fingers.

People didn’t vanish without having a good reason, not by their own free will, at least. I pressed her for more. “Where’d he go?”

“I have no clue. Tibbs was betting on him being dead, but I held onto hope… Seven months later, Val showed up on a northbound train, wearing a suit and carrying a backpack full of cash.”

That sounded more than a little suspicious. I rolled it all through my head again then asked, “He never explained himself?”

“Anytime we brought it up, he’d just get snappy with us and say it didn’t matter. He left again a couple more times after that without any warning and stayed gone for weeks at a time… God, I should not be telling you all this.”

“It’s okay. I won’t mention any of this to anyone,” I lied through a smile.

I wanted to ask so much more, but the sound of someone running down the hall cut our session short. Fritzi appeared in the doorway a second later. She knocked loudly on the frame to get our attention. “There you are. Come on. Emergency meeting in the war room.”

We followed Fritzi upstairs and into the war room. Tibbs and Val stood at the table, an enormous blueprint laid out on the surface between them.

“Where’s Benji?” Val asked, not bothering to look up from the blueprint when we entered.

“He’s pulling all the maps we have of the topside, like you asked him to,” Fritzi replied

“Topside?” I repeated. “You mean the old city above?”

“The team we sent up there last week still isn’t back,” Val said, drumming his fingers together with his hands pressed to his lips.

From the way his fingers tapped, I knew there was something troubling him. I smirked and discreetly mimicked him behind Fritzi’s back. When Val looked up from the blueprint and saw what I was doing, his fingers stilled. Quickly, he folded his arms across his chest, cleared his throat and said, “The last time we heard from them was around six this morning. Just a blip from the two-way we sent with them, a distress call. They haven’t replied to our messages since.”

Anya sat along the edge of the table and looked over the map. She tapped one finger on the paper, and Fritzi and I moved in closer to see what she pointed at. “This is where they were going, right?” Anya asked.

Tibbs, who had stood stoic and silent up until that point, finally spoke. “Old brewery. We got a tip there’s over a hundred bottles of wine in there. Not the stuff people intentionally leave behind either.”

His massive jaw worked forward and back, like he was trying to gnaw through a steel cable. Deep lines in his brow and eyes narrowed into small slits. Not features I was used to seeing on Tibbs.
Who would be dumb enough to get on the bad side of a guy his size?
That was when I realized Tibbs was glaring at Val, whose fingers had resumed their tapping on his ribcage.

“A tip.” Tibbs sneered. “A tip from someone we’ve never even met.”

“He’s reliable,” Val said, staring down at the blueprint.

“Like Tristan?”

I didn’t think Val would stay calm at the mention of Tristan, but he didn’t skip a beat. He even stood up straighter as he told Tibbs, “I’ve worked with him before; there was nothing wrong with the tip. The team must have gotten lost.”

Tibbs shook his head, a grisly laugh rumbling in his throat. “It’s always the team’s fault. Never yours, right?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Didn’t have to!” Tibbs barked back at Val vehemently, everyone in the room flinching. He stormed out the door, footsteps loud and heavy all the way down the hall, the stairs, and then out the front door.

Val shut his eyes as the door slammed. He fell back into one of the chairs behind the table, cradling his head in one hand. “Great, so I guess this means Tibbs won’t be coming with.”

“Coming with?” Anya asked slowly. Her eyes grew wide when she figured it out. “Wait, Val, you’re going up there?”

“Someone’s got to go find the team,” he said with a shrug.

Fritzi volunteered to go along without delay, slightly more enthusiastic about the trip than Val. “I’ll go. We should get some help from east-base, too, since they’ve got more people topside than we do.”

“Good idea. Try and get Lee. Actually, just try and get anyone other than Patrick,” Val told Fritzi and then looked up to me. “What about you, Nik?”

I did not want to go. I would take another swim in the canal, maybe even two swims, over going up to the frozen city. The revolutionaries trusted me, though. Keeping that trust, which was so crucial to my mission, meant I needed to do what was expected of me.

“Of course I’ll go.”

At least if I froze to death under a snow drift, my phone had GPS. Maybe someone from headquarters would be kind enough to come dig me out someday.

Joseph M. Florence Lower Dock Yard—Seattle, WA
Monday, November 16th, 2076—3:12 p.m.

’d heard that people who suffered from claustrophobia found elevators to be one of the scariest environments. The one I found myself in that cold afternoon, however, was large enough to be a lofty apartment. The only thing making breathing difficult was the faint smell of urine and rotting trash. I pulled my scarf up over my nose to dull the smell.