assurance it had just over a year earlier.
Of course, getting shot in the abdomen would do that to a person.
“Are you well?” Selena asked, and they both knew the deeper question behind it.
“You should ask the students,” Christine said, raising one wry eyebrow.
Selena laughed. “They wouldn’t dare suggest otherwise.”
“Then there’s your answer.” Christine held out the letters. “From some of your classmates. I have permission to share them, of course. It’s one way we can all keep abreast of one another’s lives.”
Selena felt a stab of guilt. When was the last time she’d written such a letter?
Christine might well have seen it on her face, for she waved away the moment. “You were a Pandora, Selena Shaw. None of you turned into letter writers. Holiday cards will suffice.”
Selena laughed, short as it was. The Athena students matriculated in seventh grade, starting in a class of thirty, divided into small groups. By the time they graduated, they’d learned to live as a team, work as a team and compete as a team. The Cassandras had been one of those groups, legendary under the leadership of Rainy Carrington—and cohesive enough that when Rainy had died two years earlier, the remaining Cassandras had rallied and proved not only that she had been murdered, but that her death was part of a larger plot, one involving the international crime magnate Jonas White.
Jonas White. The same man who had masterminded the hostage snatch at the Berzhaani capitol eight months ago, trapping Selena inside the building with the rest of them. The man Selena had killed in order to save Berzhaan’s prime minister, and one of the few deaths that had failed to haunt her in the months since.
But Selena hadn’t been in the Cassandras. She’d been in the Pandoras, where instead of one-for-all, the girls had decided that they could most effectively serve their group by being the strongest possible individuals. I work alone first and best was the Pandora motto. Kim Valenti, Diana Lockworth, Ashley Sheridan and Selena made it to graduation, and all four had gone on to make an international difference in recent years.
Interesting, then, the circumstances under which she’d recently seen Kim and Diana.
And because she was thinking of that meeting, Christine startled her by smiling—as sentimental an expression as Selena had seen her display—and saying, “It’s nice to see that you do manage to work well as a team when necessary.”
Selena hid her startled reaction at Christine’s apparent synchronicity with her thoughts. After all, that recent Oracle meeting had been beyond clandestine. In fact, she still didn’t know who played the role of Delphi, the Oracle contact. Delphi had been the one to warn her about impending terrorist action in Berzhaan right before the hostage crisis; Delphi had been feeding her such tidbits for years, mining information from various security agencies in a highly secretive effort to overcome the interagency turf wars. And though Selena knew she was far from the only one at the receiving end of Oracle’s information, she’d been startled to discover that her fellow agents were also former schoolmates. Kim Valenti had been at that meeting, as had Diana and few more recent graduates. An unofficial Athena force.
And then there was Allison Gracelyn, the meeting’s facilitator—daughter of Marion Gracelyn and currently an NSA programmer. While still at Athena, she’d developed what turned into AA.gov, the Athena Academy Web site, but she’d kept a low profile since then. Selena couldn’t help but wonder just what she’d been up to behind the scenes…and just what she was up to now.
Selena’s reaction, checked as it was, must have given something away, for Christine’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Whatever you wandered off to think about… I was referring to you and Cole.”
Oh. Right. Work well as a team. That they did.
When they had the chance.
“We’re trying,” Selena said. “Maybe we’ll get another chance to work in the field together.” She realized that their rambling pace had taken them toward the stables, forty stalls worth of well-trained horseflesh. Arthur Tsosie had been the stable master here when she’d been enrolled, a quiet man with a lilting tenor voice and full of as much people sense as horse sense. It was nearly impossible to recall riding here and not think of the Navajo Codetalker, and how he so quietly and ably shepherded such prodigies as Athena encouraged. “I should take a ride,” she said, a total non sequitur that Christine accepted almost as if she realized that the most important parts of their exchange had indeed just happened in Selena’s mind.
“Feel free,” she said. “Just after dawn is still best. Tomorrow the girls will be back from their visit to the base, so you’ll want to beat them to the best of the trail horses.”
Luke Air Force Base. Along with trips to the Indian nation reservations, the weeklong survival course in Yuma, a week of study at the Flagstaff observatory, Christine made sure the girls got out to the base, to hospitals, to police stations…to see how people and organizations worked together.
And how they didn’t.
After all, there’d be no need for Oracle if the CIA, FBI, NSA, or recently created Homeland Security actually shared their intel as effectively as they all claimed to. But Selena knew better than to let her thoughts wander there again, not with Christine’s sharp eye on her. She changed the topic to inquire after the latest crop of Athena freshman, and led Christine to the barn to point out a few horses Selena might enjoy. And Christine let her do it, which Selena took as the gift it was.
Dawn brushed the mountains a pale taupe as Selena rode out—borrowed boots, borrowed helmet, but her own schooling tights with leather knee patches and bright lime racing stripes up the outside leg. The horses might have changed since her time at Athena, the stable master might have changed, but the trails were the same, and she knew right where she was going—a zigzaggy route through the clumpy brittlebush, skirting the various cacti and looking out at terrain unobscured by any significant presence of tree or shrub. The odd paloverde, a few scrubby creosote bushes. Low desert mountains: skeletons of the earth. She took her dun gelding through a series of switchbacks to the summit as the light turned from diffuse to etchingly sharp, and after forty-five minutes of rugged riding, she came to the three-thousand-foot summit.
There she dismounted, loosening the saddle girth a notch and sitting cross-legged with the reins loosely in hand, a process that let her know how much her body would pay for this particular emotional exorcism. Didn’t matter how fit she was…nothing used riding muscles but riding muscles. The gelding bobbed its head a few times to see if she really meant it—they were really just going to stand here—and then snorted loudly into the morning air, mouthing the bit a few times before finally settling into a hip-shot stance of equine patience.
“Just watch,” Selena told it. She waited, the southern part of the Phoenix valley spread out before her as the sun rose. The earth warmed and soon enough she saw the first of them—dust devils borne of a cold night followed by the desert sun on flat, hard earth. They spiraled sandy dirt into the air, creating miniature funnels that curved into the sky and danced capriciously across the ground, lifting tumbleweeds high into the sky. Selena grinned, watching them, remembering her younger self doing just this thing. Back then, she’d appreciated the power of the things—compact, giving way before no man, rising and subsiding on a whim. Now she saw their freedom and imagined that feeling in herself. Free from the impact of her past, from her unfulfilled future…free from herself.
Oddly, she thought about Oracle. She thought about her self-doubts, and how it surprised her that she’d been invited to the recent meeting. A meeting called not because of any particular current crisis, but because Delphi, the code name of the person behind Oracle, thought it was time to be proactive instead of reactive. They’d discussed the potential ramifications of the fall of Lab 33, the organization that had been behind Rainy Miller Carrington’s death among so many other things. Be ready, the carefully prepared notes had told them all. At any time, you might be needed to follow up on the information still being gathered in the wake of Lab 33’s downfall.
For