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Ilsa woke cold. She was on the floor, a blanket over her, carefully tucked to cover her completely. She lay still, listening, for long minutes, but heard nothing and no one: no breathing, no scrape of feet on the floor. Eventually, she decided that no one was lying in wait, and that if they were she’d have to risk it.
Carefully, she sat up. The pain flared in her side as she did, and she dropped a hand to it, finding it wrapped carefully in bandages. Benji’s work. She hadn’t bled through them yet; later, when she checked the wound, she’d find a neat line of stitches.
She was, as she’d thought, alone. Ethan, Benji, and Luther were gone; maybe Grace with them, maybe not. Better that she didn’t know.
She could still feel the aftereffects of the drug; her extremities were numb and stiff, and she suspected that part of the lack of bleeding was the slowed circulation. She was in a new shirt, but otherwise all the same clothes, including her coat. She felt along the lining, found the packet sewed into it.
They’d left everything in her pockets, so she retrieved her knife and cut through the lining along the seam. They should have stripped all the tools, at least, from her pockets; they would need every resource they could get, where they were going.
Why hadn’t they? Sentiment? Ethan, maybe—she could imagine him thinking it wrong to take anything from her, even though she didn't need it anymore. Certainty? Benji had seemed full of doubt, to the last. Impossible to be sure.
Sometimes it was better not to know something. Then no one—not your traitorous boss, nor an ex-agent terrorist, not even an AI bent on world domination—could cut it out of you.
The feeling returned to her hands and feet, slowly. She sifted through the documents: a half-dozen passports, French and Russian and Hungarian, Brazilian and British and American. She peered carefully at the pictures, but they looked normal to her. Cash, mostly in Euros, with a packet of dollar bills as well. A list of a few addresses of safehouses; Ilsa could only guess how Benji had picked them, what criteria he’d used to decide they were secure enough for this purpose.
That was all; it would be plenty, even dodging all forms of technology, even with the throbbing in her side that kicked back in as she finally stood. Ilsa had always been very, very good at disappearing, even before she’d been a ghost.
---
Before, it had gone like this:
“Look,” Benji said. “I have a bad feeling about this one.”
Ilsa raised her eyebrows at him. Benji was the most nervous spy that Ilsa had ever met, but he wasn’t often wrong.
“Do you believe him?” she said. “That one of us will die?”
Benji hesitated. “I don’t think…” He tapped absently on the table. “I think that if you have enough resources and enough information, you can make a lot of things happen. And I think this thing—and Gabriel—are pretty bloody motivated to make sure that either you or Grace don’t make it out of this. So I don’t believe in—in fate, or whatever. I just think…”
“You just think they'll probably win,” Ilsa agreed. “What’s your plan?”
“Plan?” Benji laughed nervously. “Who says I have a plan?”
“That is what you do,” Ilsa said. “You have the next thing Ethan needs.” Ethan had said those words almost exactly to her once; they'd been in Thailand, and Ethan had been a little drunk, and happy. She could still remember the look on his face, gaze in soft focus. She’d been a little jealous, at the time. “So. What is the plan?”
“I don’t know if it will work,” Benji said. “But I’ve thought about it a lot, and—well. I think it will keep coming at us until it gets what it wants. So…I think you do have to die. One of you does. It has to know that it succeeded.”
“The next thing Ethan needs,” Ilsa repeated, and she looked carefully at Benji. “Is for me to die?”
“Is for it to know it killed you,” Benji said. “If it knows you’re dead, then you’re dead. Right?”
“You want to trick it,” Ilsa realized.
“I—want to try,” Benji said, and that was when he showed her the syringe. “It takes three minutes to kick in, so you’re going to have to really be careful with the timing. It’s going to slow the heart rate to almost nothing, suppress your breathing, partial paralysis.”
“That sounds…dangerous,” Ilsa said.
“Yeah, it’s a neurotoxin,” Benji said. “So it might, you know, actually kill you. Also, if you’re fatally injured, it won’t help, obviously. It will probably make it worse. So don’t—get shot in the head or anything.”
“When do I use it?” Ilsa said. “If it only takes three minutes…”
“You’re going to have to self-inject,” Benji said. “Sorry. What you have to do is—"
Ilsa snorted, cutting him off. “I have done it before.”
Benji blinked, then flushed. “Right, no, I knew that. Into a vein, though?”
She paused. “No.”
“Right, then,” Benji said. “You want a vein—flowing towards the heart. Show me your arm.” Ilsa obediently extended it. “Right. Can I…”
“Yes.”
He touched the vein with two fingers, testing it. “If you have time, tourniquet at least two fingers above. Doesn’t need to be that tight. I think you can probably make it work without it, but be careful, make sure the needle is parallel to the vein. It’s short and it’s sharp. Uncap it. Depress it until a drop appears, make sure there’s no air. Insert it, depress the plunger all the way, pull it right back out the same way you came. You shouldn’t have to worry about bleeding, because—yeah. It should slow down everything. Get rid of the needle. Um. I’m not going to…if you have an injury, I’ll take care of it as best I can, but I think we—I think we can’t know.”
Ilsa nodded. “No one can know.” She understood this. She had been on her own before.
“I have some—papers, for you. The most important thing, you can’t get caught on camera, okay? Assume if a lens can see you, it can see you. I’ve got—cash, passports, some other stuff but be careful.”
“They’ll scan the passport,” Ilsa said. He could have the digital version be different from the physical, but— “They will check the picture.”
“The passport photos are fine,” Benji said. “They can scan those. There’s this algorithm, you run it through, it looks basically the same to the naked eye but totally different to a computer. Any person who looks at your passport, they’re going to see you, but a computer’s going to see someone else. Just don’t let them take a new picture of you, I can’t do anything about that. I’ll put it in your coat.” He’d turned away from her, assembling the materials.
Ilsa watched him. In some ways, Benji was very easy to read; in others, he was totally opaque to her. She understood Ethan on a fundamental level. Luther and Benji were known quantities only to the point that they were both totally loyal to Ethan. Benji was very reliable in what he did; it was whatever was going on in his head that was beyond her.
“Are you doing this for Grace?” Ilsa wanted to know.
Benji wet his lips. “No.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to; Benji, who tended to be allergic to silence, filled it in immediately. “It’s not safe, first of all. She won’t listen to me. Well, there’s no guarantee she’ll listen to me, anyway, and I can’t risk it because if the Entity knows it’s pointless, right, and it won’t work.” He looked at her, awaiting something; she nodded, which was enough encouragement for him to keep going. “And if—I mean, if one of you—then there’s still the other one, right? There’s—evidence. You know, three can keep a secret if two of them—except it’s only one of you. And…” He stopped, then, and shrugged, carefully.
“And what?” Benji was a terrific liar, usually, but he’d decided to do it a heartbeat too late. Besides, Ilsa had already know there had to be some other reason. Benji had been with Ethan too long for Ilsa to believe he’d let something like high risk stop him.
“I have a bad feeling,” Benji said. “And—and he needs you. He’ll need you, if—maybe the world ends, in which case it’s sort of moot, but—Ethan needs you.”
Ilsa recalculated again. This was the known quantity of Benji, after all. She thought he was sometimes jealous of her, although it was hard to tell. Or perhaps she was projecting. But because Ethan was not only a plausible motive, it was his most reliable one. Whatever jealousy he might or might not have harbored, he cared for Ethan too much to interfere.
“You will have to look after him,” she said. “If—”
If Ilsa died despite this—and, too, if Ilsa died-but-not-really. She’d still be leaving him; leaving them all, really. She consciously declined to think about it; about Ethan, his too-expressive eyes, the way they lit when he looked at her sometimes. She refused to imagine what those eyes would look like then.
“You don’t think you will need me?” she asked. “For what comes next?”
“We better hope we don’t,” Benji replied. And then, more seriously: “If I thought we could get you both out…”
Ilsa nodded. “And you think it will be me.”
“I think Ethan can’t lose you,” Benji said. “And…” He looked at her. She met his gaze. He had interesting eyes—clear blue except for a brown patch in the iris. “I don’t think you’ll run.”
“Mmh.” Ilsa had spent a lot of time running. She was tired of it. In the next room, she could hear Ethan and Luther’s voices, rising and falling. “In my coat, you said?”
“Yeah. I’ll do that now.” He passed her the syringe. “Careful.”
She nodded. “Take care of him.”
“I will. Take care of yourself,” Benji said.
Then Ilsa ran, and fought, and died. And after that, she woke up: cold, and alone, and dead.
---
The syringe had worked, and the passports worked, too. Steady and careful and with her face covered whenever there was so much as a cell phone in her vicinity, Ilsa fled south through Europe to Greece, took a boat from Greece to Morocco, and carried on south through Africa. Staying rural was safest. After that first week, when nothing came to kill her even as she wound her way through the Balkans, she decided that it really had worked. The Entity didn’t know that she was still alive.
Of course, Ilsa thought—as she lay at night in a sleeping bag in central Algeria, staring up at the vast spill of starlight above—she also had no idea where Benji, Ethan, Luther, and maybe-Grace were, whether they had succeeded or failed, whether they were alive, what the plan was. And any attempt at finding out could doom them all.
Ethan had refused to choose between Ilsa and Grace. He’d thought he could save them both.
He’ll need you, if—
She’d asked Ethan to run away with her once. She knew him well enough now that she wouldn’t have asked. Ethan would stay as long as he felt that he was needed. Ilsa had not been enough; Julia had not been enough to disentangle Ethan from whatever he felt he owed the world.
She probably should have told Benji that Ethan didn’t need her. It was a nice idea, of course, but it wasn’t like that. Ethan needed people, and he’d already lost too many. But he would survive one more. Luther, Benji, maybe-Grace—they’d get him through.
And surely Benji—whatever jealousy he might or might not have felt—knew that, too.
If—
If the rest of us die, and Ethan is still alive? Had that been the broken-off implication of Benji’s sentence?
She was surprised how bad the thought hurt. She hadn’t meant to get attached, and yet—and yet.
It was the safest time to realize it, she thought. When it might not ever matter; when it might crumble into dust with the rest of the world before she ever saw any of them again.
She traveled, on motorbike, on foot, by Jeep and hitchhiking. She rarely needed Benji’s documents, now, but she kept them in her inside pocket anyway. Just in case.
She tried to help, mostly. On one hand, it was like tidying up the Titanic—when the iceberg came, what would be the point? On the other, if they were all doomed—and she couldn’t, in her heart, be certain of that, not knowing who was out there trying to save them—then why not? At least the world would be a little more bearable up until it ended.
---
She was in an outdated bar when it hit the news. Whatever had taken over the world’s nuclear arsenals had abruptly vanished; there was no sign of it anywhere. She skimmed all channels, found the report of an explosion in South Africa. The Doomsday Vault. She was several countries east, but on the right continent, it turned out. It wasn’t hard to get a motorcycle, stopping every few hours to ping her contacts for information. Some of them were missing, but not all of them.
She pinged Luther, then Benji, but neither pinged back. The last burner she had for Ethan was dead, too, months out of date. She traced the movement of the helicopters, though, the unusual activity, and found the right hospital that way.
In scrubs and a mask, no one looked at her twice. Ilsa walked through the hospital corridors as invisible as she’d felt the last half-year. The door to the hospital room was ajar; through it, she could hear the beep of a heart monitor and, more disconcertingly, the hiss of oxygen.
Ilsa braced herself. Then she looked. There, first: Ethan, sitting in the ubiquitous plastic chair installed at the bedside. He looked older than she pictured him in her mind, slumped forward. There was a brace on his leg, crutches discarded against the wall beside him. In the bed, Benji lay still; the mechanical hiss of air was a ventilator.
She paused in the doorway. “Paris,” Ethan said, inexplicably, and then “I thought we agreed—”
He turned and saw her then. Shock flitted across his face, and then a strange blankness. He shot to his feet—she saw him forget the damage to his knee, the pain visible on his face for a moment and then stifled by force of will—and he gripped the bed rail for support, the crutches too far to reach.
“Do not walk on that,” Ilsa said, instantly.
“Ilsa?” Ethan looked like he was about to step towards her anyway, so she closed the distance quickly. His hand flew up to her neck, and she let him trace her skin, looking for a silicon seam. Then he was holding her, one hand on her shoulder and the other cupping her face. “Ilsa, you—”
“Miss me?” she asked.
“How?” Ethan said, sharp and wanting—disbelieving and desperately wishing not to. “How are you—I saw you, I held you when—”
“A neurotoxin,” she said. “You will have to ask Benji how it works.”
“When did you—”
“He thought the Entity might insist on getting its way,” Ilsa said. “Contingency planning.”
Without letting go of Ilsa, Ethan turned back and looked at Benji, who hadn’t stirred. The steady rise and fall of his chest, compelled by the machine, was no comfort at all. “What happened to him?” she said.
“He was shot,” Ethan said. “I didn’t—he didn’t tell me.”
“In the lung?”
“No—abdomen. His lung collapsed. Paris, I guess he told her how to reinflate it, but—”
“Gabriel’s assassin,” Ilsa said. “This Paris?”
“She’s been helping us,” Ethan said. “She saved his life.”
There was no point in asking Ethan if he was sure about it. Besides, there was something to be said for not throwing stones in glass houses. Ilsa was pretty sure she was in the red, still, on the attempting-to-kill-Benji versus saving-Benji count.
“He saved mine,” she said, instead.
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “He—yeah.”
Ethan was looking at Benji with something like awe on his face, like Benji had hung the moon and stars. Ilsa anticipated jealousy, but none came; perhaps, she thought after a moment, because under the circumstances the moon and stars were Ilsa.
“Did they say…” she began.
“They think he should be able to breathe on his own,” Ethan said. “They’re reducing the sedation, they’ll take him off the ventilator, and—he should wake up.”
“Good,” Ilsa said. “Do you know, I think that was what he was most afraid of?”
“What?”
“Leaving you alone,” Ilsa said.
“He didn’t,” Ethan said. His hand was still on her, and he looked back at her then. “Ilsa, Luther’s dead.”
She sighed, soft. It was not as bad a casualty rate as it could have been—assuming Ethan was correct and Benji would wake again—but it was still a blow. “You are sure?”
“Uh—” Ethan glanced at Benji, as though he might suddenly do something. Ilsa supposed she had already credited him with one resurrection. “I can’t think of a way he could have—Ilsa, god—”
He pulled her into his arms, and she let him—leaned into it, wrapped her own arms around his neck and tucked her chin over his shoulder. She was so, so tired of losing people, she thought.
When they finally separated, she took a careful look at him. Ethan looked exhausted—not to mention obviously battered from whatever he had been doing while Benji was, apparently, getting shot and giving an ex-assassin first aid lessons. “Have you slept?”
Ethan shook his head. “When he wakes up—”
“Sleep,” she said. She looked at his leg, critically. “You must have a bed here.”
“Down the hall,” he admitted. “But—”
“I will stay,” she said. “If he wakes, I will tell him it is all okay.” She paused. “I can tell him about Luther.” She doesn’t want to, but to conceal it would be worse.
“He knows,” Ethan said. “Everyone else is—you’ll be the only surprise. Or maybe not.”
Ilsa shrugged. “I am not sure how certain he was.”
She could practically see the wheels spinning in Ethan’s head. “He never let on, if he was.”
That meant nothing. Benji was a terrific liar. Also, if he’d had any doubt at all, he’d never have breathed it to Ethan—to make him grieve twice would be unthinkable.
“Go rest,” she repeated. “He will need you.”
Ethan looked at her then like he knew what she wasn’t saying, the I statement folded in her sentence. He didn’t call her on it; he did look back, three times, before she finally heard the crutches thudding away down the hall.
Benji did wake, briefly, when they took him off the ventilator. There was no understanding whatsoever in his eyes—disorientation and pain and drugs muting all rational thought. When he saw Ilsa, his lips parted for a second, but no sound emerged. He just looked at her.
“It’s over,” she said, guessing at what he might have asked if he had the words. She reached up and carefully tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, more of affection than necessity. “Everyone is safe. Rest now.”
She was surprised how easily he obeyed—a flicker of recognition before his eyes fluttered shut again. It was, she thought, really quite unlike him.
---
Ethan came back after four hours. That, she’d expected. She didn’t put up a fuss; that Ethan had willingly slept even four hours, in the middle of the day, with Benji still unconscious–it was a sure sign that he’d needed it badly.
“He woke up,” she reported when she heard the door open and the tap of the crutches. “Only for a moment. He’ll be fine.”
Ethan sighed and sat down heavily. “He told me to go. He’d been shot, and—he made me go.”
“You listened?” She found that hard to believe. Realization dawned. “He didn’t tell you.”
Ethan shook his head.
There was nothing Ilsa could say to make him feel better. She looked at Benji instead, thought again, I never know what you’re thinking. He must have liked it that way.
“Have you eaten?” she changed the subject.
Ethan gave her a blank look, like the idea was unthinkable.
“I will be back,” she said. Ilsa was not much in the errand running business, but she supposed she could fill in for Benji. The hospital cafeteria was a specific kind of grim; she escaped with plastic-wrapped turkey sandwiches and water bottles, not making eye contact with any of the grim-faced people at the tables.
Back upstairs, she could hear that the sound of the heart monitor had changed before she shoved the door all the way open. She heard Ethan say, “Benji?” and stilled in the doorway, waiting.
Ethan was back in the chair, turned towards the bed; she could see his shoulders, the back of his head, part of his ear. He shifted slightly—Ilsa knew he had heard her—but didn’t turn.
She couldn’t see the bed from her vantage point, so it was only Ethan’s intense focus—and then Benji’s voice—that confirmed he was awake. “Ethan?” was what Benji said.
“Hey, you,” Ethan said. The line of his shoulders had softened. “Do you know what happened?”
“I think I died,” Benji answered, voice very faint.
“You’re with me,” Ethan said. “You’re alive.”
“I, um—” a hesitation. “I think I saw Ilsa.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Yeah, you did.”
Ilsa took her cue and stepped through the doorway. Ethan looked at her then, smiling; Benji struggled to sit up, locking eyes with her. Like Ethan, she thought, there was something that lit him from within; he looked far better with his eyes open, and something in her chest eased.
“Really, Benji,” she said, disapproving. “I should have told you to take care of yourself. My mistake.”
“It worked? It actually—” Benji started to laugh, pressing a hand to his face, shoulders shaking. The laughter had an edge to it; after a moment, Ilsa realized he was no longer laughing but sobbing, breaths gone wet and ragged.
Ethan took a hold of him, pulling his hand away from his face. “Hey, breathe,” he said. Benji gripped back at his wrist, struggling for air. Ilsa came and sat in the other chair, gaze flicking between their faces—Benji’s still-pale face marked with tears, Ethan’s eyes locked on his.
“How,” Benji said, when he had the air for it. He was looking at Ilsa searchingly, like he couldn’t quite believe what was in front of him. “The drug was experimental. You had a knife in your guts.”
“It was a good plan,” Ilsa said. “And your stitching was very good, it will hardly scar.” A slight overstatement, but she was enjoying the half-stunned look on his face, the way he didn’t seem to be able to stop looking at her.
“How did that work?” Benji said to no one. “And we found the coordinates, and you found the submarine, and the podkova, and we found you,” that was directed at Ethan, “—and we got you back, and—” He shook his head.
“And the trap worked,” Ethan said, “And I caught up to Gabriel, and Grace pulled the drive in time. And Donloe got that bomb disarmed, and Paris kept you alive.”
“I can’t believe it all worked,” Benji said, sounding more lost and baffled than happy. “It never all works.”
“Benj,” Ethan said, so warm and fond and happier, Ilsa thought, than she’d ever seen him. “You’re batting a thousand.”
“I can’t fucking believe it,” Benji said again.
Ilsa handed Ethan the sandwich. “Eat,” she ordered. “Benji, what’s this about a submarine?”
Benji grimaced. “Well—”
The plan was somehow worse than she could have ever imagined. The only consolation was that they were both in front of her—Benji, wincingly explaining the most absurd sequence of contingent events she’d ever heard, and that was saying something; Ethan demolishing the slightly stale sandwich and balling up the plastic wrap it had come in.
It was only when Ethan lurched to his feet to throw the wrapper away that Benji saw his leg. “What the hell happened to you?”
There had been more than one plane involved, it turned out. Benji and Ilsa exchanged horrified looks as Ethan recounted the events that had led to him getting the drive.
“Luther—he left me a message,” Ethan concluded, softly. “He wanted to...say goodbye.”
“He mentioned that,” Benji said quietly. “That he was going to…do something. I think he…I don’t know.”
“Had a bad feeling,” Ilsa suggested, looking at Benji.
Benji tilted his head at her, a tired acknowledgement. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t know what the doctors have told you, but I know you’re not going to listen. I also know we’re not giving that thing to the government and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to love that. So if you two want to get out of here, it might be a good time.”
“What about you?” Ethan asked.
“Well, I won’t be running for a while,” Benji said. “And I’ve got the kids to worry about. So—don’t worry about me.”
“If we go,” Ilsa said, because it wasn’t a terrible idea except for the don't worry about me part, “Where will you meet us?”
“Do you want to come back?” Benji said, an eyebrow raised. “Because I really thought you were on your way out before this, and Ethan—”
“But what about you?” Ethan said.
Benji shot Ilsa a look that said help me out here. “I don’t think it’s really—the same thing.”
Ilsa glanced at Ethan, his furrowed brow, that look in his eyes that said he was on the precipice of figuring something out. Then she looked back at Benji, grimacing a little, feigning stoicism as he argued for something he didn’t really want.
“You’re such an idiot,” she said, and leaned forward and kissed him.
“Yeah,” he said, when she pulled back. “Apparently.”
Ethan was smiling when she looked at him then. He reached for Ilsa, captured her left hand in his right; he reached for Benji with the other. “How about Venice?” he suggested.
“Yeah, sure, anywhere,” Benji said. His gaze flicked from Ethan’s hand, still wrapped over his, back up to Ilsa.
“Casablanca,” Ilsa put in.
“London might be easier,” Benji said. “…you think we can make it work?” He didn’t mean the city.
“We’ve had much worse odds,” Ethan said. He squeezed Ilsa’s hand; she wasn’t sure whether it was intentional, but she gripped back, as tightly as she dared. “I think we’ll be fine.”