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She steps out of the elevator just as the man is closing the door to Vermouth’s suite behind him, and they both pause in their step, an unintentional synchronisation. He isn’t anyone Rena has met before, in any of her capacities. Slim, handsome, smartly dressed in a well-tailored suit jacket that almost completely conceals the gun at his waist. Bright assessing light in his eyes as he watches her watch him. The inarticulable demeanour of a fellow Organisation member, identification so instant it is almost reflexive; Rena would be a poor reconnaissance agent indeed if she couldn’t pick up on something as intimately familiar to her as this, and the same reflex tells her the identification is certainly reciprocated.
The man inclines his head in greeting. “Kir,” he says.
And this is another test in the long series she’s had to undergo ever since her codename came to an uneasy rest on her neck, more a guillotine than a title. The men Vermouth associates with closely enough to allow access to her private quarters is a vanishingly short list, even before the additional filter of Rena’s limited recognition. She knows Gin. Calvados is dead. Cognac is in Switzerland, the last Rena heard. That leaves—
“Bourbon,” she responds. Wary now.
What does she know about Bourbon? Next to nothing. That he is one of the Organisation's most brilliant minds. That he believes Akai Shuichi to be alive. A necessary corollary of that belief is that she must therefore be a liar and a traitor. One word from Bourbon to Gin and the blade comes down. She’s seen the burnt-out shells of various cars, each with their inhabitant of greasy ashes and bone fragments that had formerly been some low-level consultant before Bourbon sniffed out their police sympathies.
Odd, then, that Bourbon must not have spoken directly to Gin, since Rena is still alive. By all accounts Bourbon is a ruthless man, and he owes her no obligation. It’s as if he simply hasn’t realised her life is the collateral for his conviction that Akai isn’t dead. The blade still poised and hovering over Rena’s neck, close enough she imagines she can almost feel the cold steel kissing her nape sometimes.
Regardless, her immediate concern is getting through this conversation intact. Navigating the minefield of interacting with another reconnaissance specialist is always a headache, but the first step of any reconnaissance mission is discerning the parameters of the social territory. This litmus test is simple enough to administer: “It’s good to finally meet you. Scotch spoke highly of you.”
“The endorsement of a traitor hardly reflects well on me,” Bourbon says. Not a flinch.
“Perhaps,” she says. “Vermouth also speaks highly of you.”
This draws a smile out of him, faint tinge of condescension. Interesting. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Vermouth, too.”
What does Bourbon know about her? What anyone knows about her, probably. That she had torn out a traitor's wrist and shot him, out of loyalty to the Organisation. That she killed the man Bourbon has apparently been hunting for years, also out of loyalty to the Organisation. What he thinks of this, whether he is in possession of more intricate details, she has no idea. Bourbon plays his cards close to his chest.
Rena nods at the door Bourbon has just exited. “Visiting for business, or for pleasure?”
“Business is always a pleasure with Vermouth,” Bourbon says. “I won’t keep you from yours any longer. If you’ll excuse me.”
He walks past her, slight waft of Vermouth’s perfume clinging to his clothes, and Rena doesn’t wait for the chime of the elevator before proceeding into Vermouth’s suite. Vermouth, lounging amidst the pillows on her bed, is draped in a silk dressing robe, customary black flowing over her pale skin. “You’re late, Kir,” she says languidly. She gestures for Rena to take a seat, so Rena slips off her heels, shrugs off her blazer and settles onto the edge of the mattress facing Vermouth, as if they were two high school girls at a slumber party.
“I ran into some traffic. Including Bourbon in the hallway outside,” Rena says. She shifts her weight, mirroring Vermouth’s pose, watching for the pleased curl to Vermouth’s lips. Signals of attraction were some of the first things Vermouth ever taught her to look for and to imitate. Rena isn’t sure if it’s the performance itself Vermouth enjoys, or the knowledge that it’s a performance. “We had a chat.”
“How nice,” Vermouth says. “I do like to see my favourites getting along. Did he tell you he’s on his way to Raiha Pass? I don’t know what he expects to find there, though. The FBI was quite thorough with the cleanup. He doesn’t believe Akai Shuichi is dead, you know.”
“I’ve heard,” Rena says. Vermouth rests a casually possessive palm on the side of Rena’s stockinged knee.
“That’s why he was here. He’s helping me with a personal project of mine, so I’m helping him with his. You don’t mind, do you?” It is not actually a question of permission. Rena is well aware she is in no position to tell Vermouth what to do, or even to make requests. But Vermouth likes the glossy vanity of niceties, and Rena understands that appearances are everything in both their overlapping lines of work, so she dips her head in acquiescence. “To be honest, I don’t particularly care whether that man is alive or not,” Vermouth continues idly. “I never liked him very much, but Gin was the one who felt slighted by his existence, not me.”
“Akai Shuichi is dead,” Rena says, very calmly. “I would know, I killed him myself.”
“Yes, well, Bourbon’s logical reasoning has always been strangely incapacitated when it comes to that man,” Vermouth says. “I don’t think he realises Akai Shuichi is a man like any other and therefore susceptible to a bullet in the head.”
“Truthfully, I was surprised as well,” Rena says. The lie glides smoothly off her tongue. “I thought the Organisation had been trying to kill him for years. Though of course I’m glad it worked out as easily as it did.”
“So it won’t be a problem,” Vermouth says. “After all, Bourbon is on a wild goose chase bound for failure.”
“If I ask what your end of the deal is, will you tell me?”
Vermouth leans forward and taps her forefinger to Rena’s lips. “A secret makes a woman, woman,” she sings.
Courtesy of Gin’s distrust, Rena is still something of a persona non grata with the Organisation, which is obviously not very conducive to her objective. But, inexplicably, she has Vermouth’s favour. The signals are impossible to mistake: Vermouth likes her. In any other situation it would be comical, how much Vermouth’s regard for her outstrips her own regard for Vermouth. She isn’t the only person Vermouth is sleeping with, though she is the person Vermouth sleeps with most often.
Despite this, Rena finds it difficult to believe Vermouth harbours no suspicions of her own. Vermouth’s social acumen has a sharpness bordering on supernatural, an uncanny ability to hone in on the soft underbelly of any situation, and Rena isn’t deluded enough to think she’s good enough of an actress to fool Sharon Vineyard herself. So either Vermouth is toying with her food, or she simply doesn’t care. Or maybe the idiosyncrasy of some kind of predilection towards self-sabotage is a luxury she can afford, in the security of her executive position.
At any rate, Vermouth is a powerful ally, possibly the most powerful ally a person could have, something Rena sorely needs to lever her way deeper into the dark, so even if she’s only staving off a painful demise once Vermouth decides she’s bored of Rena, she has no choice but to stay with her. Vermouth likes Rena, and Rena needs Vermouth, and the difference is only an accident of perspective. Rena is never afraid to face Gin, no matter how liberally he waves firearms at her, but Vermouth’s pale, acidic gaze promises dissolution in a way that makes Rena’s throat go dry with some reawakened evolutionary instinct towards terror. This is easy enough to transmute into desire. Linking the two impulses may even be a prerequisite in this career.
So she moves her hands to undo the buttons of her blouse, lets Vermouth push her back down onto the mattress. Business with Vermouth may be a pleasure for Bourbon, but pleasure is a business for Rena. Vermouth’s mouth on the back of her neck, a caution or a premonition. Afterwards, Vermouth draws out a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table, and Rena obligingly lights it for her, forces herself to relax between breaths of the clove-scented smoke.
Vermouth is also a reconnaissance specialist. More than that, she never does anything without an ulterior motive. For whatever reason, she wanted Rena and Bourbon to meet. Whose benefit was it for?
“Be careful of that boy, Kir,” Vermouth says, eyes closed, cigarette dangling loosely from her fingers, portrait of indolence. The lax lines of her body belying the artful precision of their arrangement, control so fine it has the appearance of the complete opposite. “I should have killed him a long time ago.”
Rena is leaving the hotel reception counter with her Glock hidden in her handbag and her Organisation credit card duly expensed when none other than Bourbon walks into the lobby and their lines of sight collide. Unusual, but not improbable, to run into another agent here. This hotel chain is a popular choice for accommodation during missions, since the Organisation’s financial division has a hefty stake in the owner group. It’s just that Bourbon seems to operate in a separate world to Rena, and Rena isn’t overly ecstatic about the moments of overlap, given that they tend to result in a gun to her head sooner or later.
“I see you’re back in your own shape today, Bourbon,” Rena says, unable to scrub all of the resentment out of her voice. She thinks it’s justified; his stunt had almost netted her a bullet through the temple, after all.
The closed book of Bourbon’s face evinces neither surprise nor guilt, though Rena hadn’t expected that it would. “Yes, I’m on official business,” he says. Shards of light thrown by the chandelier overhead glitter in his hair. “Chardonnay broke her arm, so I’m filling in for her. My… personal investigation can wait.”
Rena doesn’t know Chardonnay. She’s only acquainted with a handful of other Organisation members, despite being a codenamed agent herself. Her father’s betrayal casts a long shadow, his final and greatest and most terrible gift to her; his life traded for hers, and it’d kept her alive but stained her with guilt by association. Bourbon, too, the three-person cell he had once been ensconced within now exposed as rotten to the core, though sins of the coworker doesn’t have quite the same ring as sins of the father.
She’d never been assigned to work with either Rye or Bourbon, but she had done a handful of paired missions with Scotch. Her first, even, a minor weapons contract she’d been sent to oversee while Scotch watched through a rifle scope one building over. She’d liked his easygoing professionalism, the quiet sound of his laugh over the comms. His kindness even after the mission was over. Against her better judgement she’d accepted his invitation to wait out extraction afterwards in a local bar. He bought her a drink. His sniper’s directness made her want to reciprocate, and over a crystal glass of his namesake whiskey she found herself saying, You're really nice, Scotch. Too nice. What's someone like you doing with the Organisation?
He smiled at her over the rim of his own glass—he’d opted for bourbon—and said, I could say the same for you. It took her by surprise. She’d been careful to whittle herself down into the coldest, emptiest parts of herself, and to have that seen through on her first proper day on the job was a little disheartening. But there was something thrilling about it nonetheless. The low light played flatteringly over the agile angles of Scotch’s hands. She stayed longer than she meant to. She kept staying longer than she meant to.
Rye may have been infamous in equal parts for his superhuman aim and his unsociability, but it was Scotch she trusted to cover her back, and trust was a scarce currency to come by in the Organisation. She suspected, but hadn’t known for certain, that he was like her. He was the best partner she’d ever had, and now he was dead.
“It looked like Vermouth’s work, the disguise,” Rena says. Bourbon nods. The marble floor is so polished there’s hardly any distortion to their reflections underfoot, a sensation halfway to floating. “You know, she told me you were helping her with something in return, but I’ve been wondering why she went to so much trouble for you. Do you know something special about her?”
“I couldn’t say,” Bourbon says lightly, which means that he does. Rena purses her lips. A concrete secret is a more secure foothold than sentiment, but it’s highly unlikely Bourbon would share his leverage with her, and if Bourbon lets Vermouth know Rena was asking then Rena would be squandering all of her own advantage. “But the nature of our arrangement is different from yours, I think.”
Bourbon’s expression is guileless, but he’s clearly administering his own litmus test. Conversations between reconnaissance specialists inevitably take the form of poking each other with small knives until someone strikes an artery. Luckily this one is a miss. “I wouldn’t mind either way,” Rena says. “I like to keep my work and personal lives separate."
Bourbon hums. "That's a good philosophy," he says.
Abruptly Rena is so tired her bag nearly slips out of her fingers. Scotch had been right. She was never supposed to be here in the ranks of the codenamed elite, trading verbal barbs poisoned with meaning. But if she doesn’t see her duty through to the end, then what was it all for? The iron of her father’s blood on her tongue. Smoke heavy and bitter in the air, fading echo of the gunshot and she hadn’t had time before Gin swept into the warehouse and that was it, Hondo Hidemi was as dead as the corpse at her feet. She has been feeling her way through the dark ever since. Further and further in.
Just as Rena is about to excuse herself and leave, Bourbon speaks up again. “Is it true, what you said?” His voice is flat and depthless as a mirror. “That Scotch spoke highly of me?”
“Yes,” Rena says. “I worked with him several times. He mentioned that you were a very competent operative. I was a little jealous, professionally speaking.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around,” he says. There’s an off note in his tone. Light like glass, floor like glass, herself just as brittle and Bourbon facing her like a warped reflection. “I don’t wish to be associated with a traitor. You understand, I’m sure.”
“Of course,” she agrees. “I’d also appreciate it if you let Gin know in advance, the next time you decide to resurrect a dead man. I think we can both agree that baseless accusations of betrayal are unpleasant to field.”
When Rena is driving back to her apartment and turning the memory of the conversation over she still can’t quite place the discordant note. A crack in the mirror, maybe. Something on the verge of shattering from the inside.
Once all the business with Curaçao is over, Rena is presumably placed on probation again, or maybe never stopped being on probation, but the Organisation’s work is never complete. The next day, Vermouth sends her an encrypted file and a business-class ticket to Shanghai with instructions to meet with Chianti at a local safehouse and await further orders. Must be a mission that needs a sniper of Chianti’s calibre, then; since Rena is one of the few agents that Chianti only hates a little bit and therefore won’t try to shoot on sight, they can still somewhat professionally make it through a job together.
Rena is valuable to the Organisation. That’s good. That’s what she’d worked for. The nausea is easy enough to suppress after all the practice she’s had.
She’s overcompensated for the leftover unease from her near-execution yesterday and arrived too early at the airport. Check-in hasn’t opened yet, so she sits down on a bench to wait, her overnight bag in her lap.
“Kir,” comes a voice Rena last heard ten hours ago insisting on its own innocence with an obstinacy approaching unhinged. She glances up, sharp.
Bourbon is in what must be his civilian identity’s clothing, a light blue button-down and dark jeans, fresh and cleanly fashionable in a way that would make him look approachable if not for the still-healing split lip and the patch of gauze taped under his eye. She’s heard his civilian cover is a waiter in a café. Her own public presence had been valuable enough to the Organisation that her missions were largely organised around her work, but evidently the same cannot be said of Bourbon; she wonders what kind of excuses he’s feeding his boss to have them put up with an employee liable to disappear at random times of the day on private business and reappear occasionally worse for wear.
“Bourbon,” Rena says, moderating her tone into polite surprise. “How unexpected to see you again so soon. Are you flying out?”
“Actually, I was hoping to catch you before you left,” Bourbon says. “I heard from Vermouth that you’d be here.”
He extends a small gift bag to her and bows, a neat and efficient motion. How easy it is to believe all of him is just as neat and efficient, a machine perfectly primed to maximum effect. But Rena has seen by now the desperation shimmering off him in palpable waves like heat haze, the vivid flash of startled fury that suffused his face in the brief moment of illumination as the overhead light clattered down. Bourbon is more restraint than he is effortlessness. There is something deep and seething under his closed-mouth smile. And uncovering secrets is, in the end, her area of expertise, too. Bourbon’s presence in that warehouse with her was very nearly a confirmation: Bourbon is more like her than she’d thought.
“Repaying a debt, with interest,” Bourbon says. “And my apologies.”
“Thank you,” she says, the courtesy perfunctory. There’s no point holding grudges over an occupational hazard. She takes the bag from his hand. It’s strange, this delicately civil back-and-forth after they’ve both seen each other at their worst, though she’d barely been paying attention to him despite being chained to the same pillar, what with the blare of her own impending mortality thundering in her ears. Appearances, again, even more farcical than the usual song and dance. Nonetheless, she appreciates the return to familiar territory, this shared field of expertise.
“I hope that the next time we meet will be under better circumstances,” Bourbon says.
“I’d like that too,” she replies. Then she smiles. “Perhaps we may even be working together in the future.”
Near-infinitesimal, but she catches the flash of it before it smooths out, the growing crack in the mirror: a slight narrowing of the eyes. And there’s the rest of her confirmation. PSB, she’s almost certain of it. Bourbon is a brilliant actor, but Scotch hadn’t been. He’d always spoken Bourbon’s name with a little too much fondness. Sins of the coworker; what were the chances? And Rye had been the one to kill Scotch. Suddenly she understands, a horrible scythe of sympathy slicing down. It had been her own finger on the trigger, in that dark warehouse, her father's hands slipping off hers.
Later, at the boarding gate, she takes a seat and opens the gift bag, pulls out its airy contents. There’s a good chance it could be a trap; NOC or not, she’s sure he wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of her in order to maintain his own cover, and Vermouth had been wary enough to warn her about Bourbon, back when she’d orchestrated their meeting. Still, there’s some kind of faith that keeps her hands moving. It’s the same instinct that allowed her to pick him out as an Organisation agent, or maybe its inverse.
She dismantles the rose-scented cloud of tissue paper and out into her cupped palm tumble five delicate hairpins. The practical kind, not ornamental, designed for invisible functionality. She lifts one up, pries the halves apart with a thumbnail, testing the tensile strength: surprisingly sturdy. Enough to, say, pick a lock. It pulls a laugh out of her, despite herself. So this is the code of honour that Bourbon operates on. A man who leaves no business unfinished, no matter how trivial.
She slides one of the pins into her hair, the outward construction of herself fastened just a little more securely against the world, and tucks the rest into her pocket. Maybe someday she and Bourbon will be able to talk to each other about it honestly, with a directness like snipers. Or maybe they will only be able to talk about it like themselves, veiled and circuitous and yet still synchronised, entirely without intent. Having aligned goals doesn’t make them allies—Bourbon’s feelings about Akai make that clear enough—but what a shock it is, the relief that washes over her, then. To know she isn’t alone in the dark.