Sunset Volume 2: High Noon

Swansea, Wales

Maggie was up early to make them breakfast, but Reeve was awake when she tried to sneak past and he got up to give her a hand.

His voice crept into her head, softly, almost apologetic. We should be quiet so they can sleep. She would never get used to that feeling. No, we don’t have to chat like this, his voice added after a pause. She shook her head, thinking of how the others lived with all their thoughts constantly known, but she quickly tried to smother the thought and gave him a smile. He wasn’t much for chatter anyway. Very business-oriented. She couldn’t imagine what he might do in his free time. She supposed what he did was collect people like her.

They fried eggs and made a tall pile of toast and brewed coffee in silence. She watched him move around her kitchen, never needing to ask where she kept the forks or which cabinet the plates were in. When they had finished, Reeve turned to her and said out loud, “I just called them down.” He nodded to the stairs.

“Don’t you do anything like a normal human?”

“I’ll help you set the table,” he huffed, rolling his eyes. It made him look so young. He was so young.

The others filtered in to sit around her long table, except the pilot, who she didn’t know much about. She saw Reeve raise his eyebrows and Alex spoke up, still rubbing his eyes. “He’s okay. Just wanted to sleep some more.” Alex wasn’t what she had expected. His hair was a knotted, careless mess on one side, but he seemed older. Or maybe it was just that, looking at them together, the gap between him and the others didn’t seem like much at all.

She shook herself when she caught Reeve watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. “Did you all sleep well?” she asked.

“Oh my fucking god,” Hannah groaned, lifting a hand to cover a mouth full of toast, “the bed doesn’t fold up into a damn airplane seat! It was so nice. Thank you.” There were other nods and some laughter. Still, they all had the deep set eyes of people who hadn’t slept soundly in a while.

Maggie ate little. The eggs were all right, but watching the others scarf down what must be their first hot meal in days made her reluctant to keep anything off their plates.

“So what’s the plan?” Gareth asked. “Where to now? There’s no way we’re just gonna sit here for a while.”

Reeve wiped his mouth and sat back. “Sort of depends,” he started.

“They don’t know?” Maggie asked, eyebrows to her hairline. He didn’t answer, but she caught a glimmer of something that wasn’t frustration in the others’ eyes. “Reeve,” she scolded, “you need to learn that even though people will do it, you can still ask too much of them.”

He flushed and she regretted her tone, though some of the others looked like they were holding back smirks of satisfaction.

“Maggie here,” Reeve began after clearing his throat, “has been doing some—well, a lot—of research for me. She’s the one who’s been helping me determine which assignments were justified and which were political, and she’s been looking into how Icarus survive outside of Sol.”

“Wait, how?” Hannah leaned forward. “Have you been doing background checks on the names Reeve sends you? You’re his accomplice in all this?”

“Not exactly.” How to explain this? She shot Reeve another look for keeping them in the dark for so much. “I went through the background contained in Sol’s files.” They stared at her with furrowed brows.

“She’s kind of a hacker,” Reeve said flatly.

“You fucking hacked Sol?” Alex burst out and bent over laughing before she could answer.

“Technically, yes, but not like you’re thinking.”

Gareth was shaking his head. “How? I never even heard of Entropy staging a cyber-attack on Sol. Security is too high.”

“It is. I could never just take a run at its firewall and expect to live out the week. After Reeve got me out of the country, I started writing a worm—like a computer virus. It would never be able to breach their security all alone, but if it were sent as an attachment to the company email address of an active agent who, say, absentmindedly opened it while connected to their secure server?” She smiled at Reeve. “That might work.”

“Jesus Christ,” Hannah breathed, staring at Reeve.

“It took a long time,” he said, nodding at Maggie in thanks, “but it circulated enough that after about a year, the worm had created enough vulnerabilities that she could get in and poke around.”

“He’s got no patience,” she shrugged. “I couldn’t get full clearance, just one level above what you guys have.”

Gareth gulped his coffee. “That’s goddamn insane.”

Reeve raised his voice just slightly. “Anyway, she’s been doing some research for me on Icarus.”

“Mostly on the dark web,” she nodded. “Hidden message boards, that kind of thing. Most information of any use came from the Church.”

“What church?” Hannah asked, turning to Reeve.

“The Children of God?” Gareth asked, a tinge of shock in his voice, and Reeve nodded.

“Wait,” Alex said, “aren’t they just like crazy vagrants with knacks or something?” He pointed at Reeve, “You told me they were crazy vagrants!”

“They…” Reeve pressed his lips into a straight line while he thought, “aren’t.”

“Well, they are a little,” Maggie stepped in to save him. “Hey, I’m the one who’s been talking with them. Donating to their cause. And they can be pretty fanatical.”

“Anyway?” Hannah asked, moving her hand in a circle, trying to get them to the point.

“Some Icarus hide in the Church or join them outright. It seems like it could be helpful for Icarus to spend some time around people who regularly kill the Anthropophagi.”

“They don’t regularly kill them,” Gareth scoffed. “They claim to, but mostly they get eaten.”

Hannah had turned a little green.

Maggie cocked her head at him. “Is that what Entropy told you?”

He ground his jaw at her and said lightly, “Listen, I was just starting to maybe like you.”

“I’m only saying that they’re more effective than anyone who works with the Phagi would want anyone to believe. Entropy benefits from the idea that they are invincible.”

There was silence at that. She felt she had overstepped. Talking so often with Reeve had made her feel a part of this. Seeing them all together reminded her that she was on the outside.

“Who are you?” Alex asked.

“She’s a friend,” Reeve jumped in. “Like Alyosha.”

She cleared her throat. “The Children of God are spread out all over the world and they hear rumors.”

Reeve leaned forward to continue and she breathed out, glad he was taking over. “There’s talk of something called The Network. There isn’t much information on it, but some people in the Church have heard about it. It’s a group of Icarus who have banded together for protection. It sounds like they could be like me—resisting.”

“You want to fight Sol?” Gareth snapped, his voice low.

Reeve hesitated. “No,” he conceded. “I want to keep us all safe. If an Icarus can survive longer than a year, the chances of them ever being caught drop dramatically. I want to learn from them. Do I want Sol to stop killing innocent people? Yeah. But…” He pushed his plate away from himself. “Maggie has a contact in the Church. He’s sympathetic to Icarus and he said he’d help us hide while we look for The Network.”

“I just have to get a hold of him,” Maggie’s voice sounded weak to her own ears against the pressure in the air. “They’re sort of off the grid.”

She saw Hannah reach out and put a hand on Gareth’s arm and hold it there. He didn’t react, even though he seemed tense enough to snap.

“I asked her to wait until I’d spoken to you,” Reeve said quietly.

“What?” Hannah asked, “So we could take a vote?” She looked around at the others. Her voice was sharp. “Anyone else have ideas? We don’t want to miss a chance to have some input here.”

Alex lowered his brow and Gareth shifted uncomfortably while Reeve sat, stone-still.

“So that’s the long term-long plan?” Gareth asked, though it barely felt like a question. “We join The Children of God and try to find other Icarus?”

Reeve’s spine was impossibly straight. “It’s our best shot.” Alex stared at his empty plate, listening. Reeve turned to Gareth and Hannah. He said softly, “Try to be discreet.”

Gareth nodded stiffly, stood up, and walked away, climbing the stairs to the guest room. No one said anything, but Hannah craned her head to watch him go. He came back down with a jacket and walked out the front door.

More silence. “Are we okay?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah,” Reeve sighed. “He needs space. He’ll be back later.”

“Will this work?” Alex asked, lifting his head.

Something broke over Reeve’s face when he turned to him. “It has to.”

Alex rubbed at his hair. “Are we allowed to go outside too? I feel like I’m gonna go insane being inside for this long.”

Reeve stood up, and put his hands flat on the table. “Yeah.” He stared at the plates for a second and looked over to Maggie. The brief eye contact felt like an apology somehow. “Let’s take a walk,” he said to Alex.

He looked at Hannah, but she shook her head, saying, “I’m good here.” He nodded and put an arm around Alex and gave his shoulder a gruff squeeze as they moved for the door.

Once they were alone, Maggie got up. Hannah hadn’t moved, her face blank. There were small, tense lines at the corners of her eyes and along her brow. She was too young for all that. “Well,” Maggie said, “may as well help me do the dishes if you’ve got it in you, dear.”

She looked up, mouth parted but didn’t speak.

“It always falls to the girls, doesn’t it?”

Hannah laughed. “I guess.”

They cleared the table and stacked the plates in the sink. Hannah washed while Maggie dried and put everything back in its place. Maggie thought she was a pretty girl, despite all she seemed to be doing to hide it. The baggy t-shirt went well past the thighs of the oversized, drooping sweatpants.

“You don’t have to stay dressed on my account,” she said, without looking up. It’s not like Reeve hadn’t spoken to her about Hannah. “I promise I’ve seen it all before.” Hannah paused her work and looked over at her, laughing.

“Thanks, maybe later. Naked dishwashing isn’t all that great actually.”

Maggie pondered this. “No, I suppose not.”

Hannah chuckled at that and wiped hair from her face with the back of one soapy hand. “So what happened that Sol wanted you dead?"

"My son was sick." Maggie leaned her back against the counter as Hannah finished up with the last few dishes. "Heart defect. When he was nineteen, they put him on a new medication put out by Sol Pharma.” A mug slipped from Hannah’s grip and clattered in the sink, making them both wince. Maggie waited for her to start up again before continuing. “It helped until there was a complication from a side effect. He died."

"I'm sorry," Hannah sputtered after a pause. Always that same pause, every time she told anyone.

Maggie waved her hand, trying to relieve Hannah of any feeling of responsibility to comfort her. "Well later on, we found out that this complication had been covered up during testing, presumably to get the drug approved faster. His doctors hadn't known what to look out for and by the time we noticed something was really wrong, it was too late.”

"That’s fucking awful." Hannah turned off the water and dried her hands on her shirt.

Maggie nodded. "Anyway, it wasn't getting much media attention and I was angry. My husband had died young. It's just me now. So I organized an attack on Sol's website and made an anonymous post claiming responsibility and why. It was just a denial of service. I wanted them in the news. I never saw any of their information or ever accessed their system. Three weeks later, there was Reeve, offering to kill me or give me a new start."

“They were going to kill you for inconveniencing the IT department?”

“Bit drastic, don’t you think?” Maggie absent-mindedly tapped her fingers on the counter. "But it did make me damn enthusiastic about helping Reeve do anything that Sol wouldn't like.” She smiled and poured more coffee for the both of them, gesturing to the couch. Hannah sat, leaning forward on her elbows, brow furrowed, distracted.

“Sorry about concocting a story that you’re married to Reeve,” Maggie hazarded. “I didn’t realize it was you and—” she nodded her head up at the staircase leading to the guest room.

“Gareth?” Hannah’s eyebrows rode high on her tanned face. “No, we’re not together.”

“Oh.” Maggie played with a loose string on a throw pillow. “I just thought… Reeve then?”

She laughed and gave Maggie a face that said she must think she had more than a few screws loose. “No.”

Maggie’s attention drifted, trying to imagine living naked so casually. “They must have shown some interest, though.”

Hannah stared for a moment. “I mean, sure Gareth did for a while, but we don’t work. And Reeve, never.”

She cocked an eyebrow. Hannah stared back, waiting. “Humor me,” Maggie said. “The most exciting part of my life for years now has been helping Reeve across the ocean and have you ever had to talk to that man on the phone?”

Hannah bent over laughing loudly at that with a bit of a bray. Maggie sipped her coffee and waited.

“Reeve never hit on me. He knew it wouldn’t go well.”

“Do you not like men?”

“I like men just fine.”

“Does he not like women?”

“No, he’s had a few girlfriends, but it’s complicated dating civilians, or so they tell me. He’s bi.”

“Really?”

Hannah shrugged. “I’m asexual.”

Maggie furrowed her brow. “I’m old, dear. I don’t know what that means.”

Hannah gestured apologetically. “It means I’m not interested in sex. I’m not averse to romantic relationships but, with my knack, I don’t really date. When you’re an empath and can feel someone’s frustration...”

Maggie clicked her tongue and shook her head.

"Not like that,” Hannah added quickly. “Gareth never said anything but supportive, nice things, but I can feel his energy and could tell he was frustrated."

Maggie considered this and decided once again that life with superpowers was not worth it. "So you've never?"

Hannah quirked her mouth to one side and shook her head, matter of fact.

"But you must...?" She hoped her eyebrows would communicate what she was trying to ask.

"Zero interest. I mean, I can. It’s fine, I guess." Hannah cocked her head, slyly. “Do you? Since we’re getting to know each other, it seems like.”

“Alright, I catch your meaning,” Maggie laughed. "Do you have feelings for him though? Gareth, I mean."

She considered it, squinting one eye. "I used to, but not really anymore. I sort of let it fade when I knew it wouldn't work."

"I've never been good at that, myself," Maggie commented, not making eye contact.

Hannah shrugged.

"Where will he go?" Maggie asked her.

"To find a sex worker." It was blunt sounding, unworried.

"Oh," was all she could think to answer. Hannah craned her neck to look out one of the front windows. Her forehead was already creasing from a life of too much sun and worry.

Maggie set the pillow she'd been fiddling with down on the couch. "Do you like to play cards?" she asked, keeping her voice light. "And drink far too early in the day?"

Hannah grinned at her, surprised. "Yes, I do."

***