The Last Orphan
Chapter 2

All That Annoying Zen Shit

A few minutes prior to midnight on the royal-blue padding of a training mat, Evan was on his hands and knees, holding tabletop position. Shoulders directly over wrists, h**s over knees, all joints at a clean ninety degrees. But one thing was different. His palms, placed down on the mat, were spun all the way around so his fingers pointed straight back toward his knees.

It looked bizarre, grotesque, as if someone had snapped his hands off and put them back on facing the wrong direction.

The stretch through his forearms, which had absorbed the shock from a number of well-placed punches in Langjökull, took on a biblical level of intensity.

He held the stretch in the quiet of his penthouse, 21A of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. His neck was sore, too. Bar fighters—especially the big ones—tended to go for headlocks, not understanding that that put you inside their guard with easy access to the groin, the stomach, the tender inner arch of the foot. Exhaling, Evan pulled his h**s back another few millimeters, the fascia of his arms tugging more intensely around muscle and nerve fibers.

He’d forgotten to breathe again. He centered himself here, in this spot on the planet, a seven-thousand-square-foot modern wonderland of poured concrete and stainless-steel fixtures, as sparse and cold as the Scandinavian terrain he’d traversed just hours before.

There were workout stations and motion-detection hardware. There were floor-to-ceiling bullet-resistant windows and retractable discreet-armor security sunscreens. There was a vodka freezer vault and a Vault of a different nature hidden behind the shower in the master suite. There was a floating bed held three feet off the floor by herculean magnets, and an aloe vera plant named Vera III who thrived on neglect. There was a mounted katana sword and a vertical garden fed by drip irrigation. There was a disco ball and a Velcro wall with compatible body suits for jumping and sticking.

The latter two were a long story.

The ache in his arms gave way to numb tingling, then pins-and-needles lactic-acid release, and then finally surrender. He breathed in the quiet. The air-conditioning here stayed pegged at a cool sixty-six degrees, the freestanding fireplace at rest. As was his habit, he’d already burned the outfit he’d worn on the outing and re-appareled himself in identical clothes. He liked the cold, the silence, the lack of external stimuli. Everything here felt frozen and sterile and safe, like an ice crypt in which he could rest for vampiric rejuvenation.

Since he’d fled the Orphan Program, he’d led a purgatorial existence as the Nowhere Man. With virtually unlimited financial resources and a stellar capacity to enact freelance retribution on behalf of others, he made sure to use his skills in keeping with the Ten Commandments handed down to him by Jack, a set of rules to ensure that he stayed operationally sound.

Given the past missions he’d conducted as Orphan X, he was considered a dangerous asset by those at the highest levels of the United States government. He’d been granted an informal presidential pardon contingent upon his ceasing all extracurricular activities as the Nowhere Man.

He hadn’t been very good at ceasing all extracurricular activities.

But he remained in the clear as long as no one found out. Not State, not NSA. Not CIA or FBI. Not Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton, who’d pursued him relentlessly as her job demanded. Not President Victoria Donahue-Carr, who had herself set the terms of his unofficial clemency.

As long as the RoamZone stayed quiet, he wouldn’t have to worry. He could just relax here, take a bit of a break, and make sure—

The RoamZone rang.

Evan released his hands, sat back on his heels, and flapped his hands a few times as the aching subsided.

The caller ID showed nothing.

Curious.

He answered as he always did. “Do you need my help?”

A slight delay as the call routed around the globe through more than a dozen software virtual-telephone-switch destinations.

Then the sound of sobbing.

Answering the phone as the Nowhere Man, he was accustomed to that. He often spoke to people at their worst moment of desperation.

He waited.

And then he recognized who was crying.

Joey Morales.

After she’d washed out of the Orphan Program, he’d been put in a position where, against all his wishes and his protocols as a solitary operator, he’d had to rescue her. In a manner of speaking, she’d rescued him, too. An unlikely familial bond forged between teenage hacker and adult assassin that puzzled him still. Before her he hadn’t understood the fierceness of affection. The vulnerability of it, too, how someone else’s pain could hurt worse than your own.

He hadn’t been trained to consider other people’s pain. He’d been taught to barely register his own.

He stopped the rush of questions—What happened? Did someone hurt you? Who do I need to maim?—and forced himself to wait.

The Fifth Commandment: If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

“Okay,” he said. “All right.”

Joey kept on weeping, soul-rending cries giving way to what sounded like a panic attack—jerky inhalations, rushed exhalations.

Somehow she forced out a half-formed plea. “Make it su-stop.”

“I’m going to breathe,” he said quietly. “And you match me. Okay?”

“… k-kay.”

He breathed audibly, slowly. At first they were out of sync, but slowly she started to calm to the rhythm of his respiration.

“Bottom out your exhalations,” he told her. “Twice as long.”

“I am!”

“No. Listen.” He modeled it. “Making room for more oxygen.”

It took five full minutes for her to mirror his breathing. Then they held the cadence for another two.

Finally he asked, “What happened?”

The RoamZone had a variety of features—a self-repairing screen, nanotech batteries, an antigravity suction case. It could also prop open a broken window. He thumbed on the holographic display and watched Joey’s words dance as the RoamZone threw her voice.

“Nothing,” she said. “Everything doesn’t always have to be a thing, X.”

He’d set her sound waves to orange so they flickered like a flame. It was all he had of her right now.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“A little motel outside of Phoenix.”

It didn’t surprise him that her improvised road trip had wound up in Arizona. Or that panic had overtaken her there. Before her beloved maunt—her mom-aunt—had passed, Joey had lived with her there for the first innocent, uncomplicated decade of her childhood. And then had come the foster homes. And her brief stint in Orphan training. Neither of which was innocent. Nor uncomplicated.

“Know what she used to say? My maunt? When I did something funny, she’d say, ‘I’ve created a monster.’ And I’d love that, because it meant she was proud I’d taken the best parts of her. She was so, so funny. No matter what kind of shit we were going through. And—” She cut off with a sharp intake of air.

Joey hated crying, fought it all the way through.

Evan gave her time. There was nothing else to give her.

Her voice trembled slightly but did not threaten to break. “She was the only person who was there when I came into the world, the last connection to … dunno, me. Little me. Riding her shoulders, birthday cakes, all that. You know?”

The only responses Evan could think of were trite and dismissive.

He heard a slurping sound—Dog licking Joey’s salty face. Evan had rescued the Rhodesian ridgeback as a puppy from a dogfighting ring and given him to Joey. She’d refused to name him properly, not wanting to grow attached, and by the time they’d become inseparable, the name had stuck.

Evan listened carefully, his senses on high alert. One of the goals of the meditation he practiced was to experience everything as if it were happening for the first time. Because everything always was.

“It just … came on,” Joey said. “All this stuff. Gawd, feelings suck. And they’re all up in my face. Like, I got sad today at an old man sitting alone at a bus stop. He had a little hat and everything.” A pause. “Come on, Dog. Let’s get some water.” She made a faint g***n as she rose.

Evan zeroed in on the noise. “Why are you groaning?”

“I’m not groaning, X. Jesus. I made a delicate feminine exhale.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. I’m just tight in my h*p.”

He closed his eyes, focusing. “Ache in the front of the socket?”

A longer pause now. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Did you get scared today? Something startle you?”

“No,”she said, with readily accessible teen irritation. “I didn’t get—”

Some epiphany made her cut off. He gave her the silence.

“Well, some dipshit in a Volvo almost hit me earlier,” she conceded. “At an intersection. But, you know, I’m a trained tactical driver so it’s not like I was scared.”

He waited.

“But maybe I tensed up. For, like, a femtosecond.”

He waited some more.

“Why? Why’d you ask that?”

“The psoas is the first muscle to engage when you go into fight or flight. You know how to release it?”

“Of course I know how to release my psoas. I’m not an amateur.”

Abrasive noises as the phone got tossed down. He waited while she grunted and shuffled around. Then he heard her breathing turn jagged, move to shuddering releases, and then finally even out.

When she picked up the phone again, her voice was much more subdued. She sounded exhausted, wrung out. “Can’t I just, like, not deal with any of this?” she asked. “Emotions or whatever.”

She was generally so energized and caffeinated that he relished these softer moments with her, even over the phone. He pictured her big smile that put a dimple in her right cheek. Those translucent emerald eyes, pure as gemstones. The tousle of black-brown hair heaped to one side to show off the shaved strip above her right ear.

He knew she was sleepy now, could hear it in her voice, how the words got slower, her upper eyelids heavying the way they did. She’d be curled up on the bed right now with the hundred-and-ten-pound ridgeback, winding herself into a cocoon. He knew that phase. The chrysalis when everything puddled together, formless and hopeless, a primordial reset before new structure and meaning took hold.

He said, “Sure.”

“Then what?”

“You won’t feel as much …”

“I choose that one.”

“… of anything.”

A pause.

He said, “‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’”

“Don’t give me all that annoying Zen shit. The Commandments are only about training.”

He said, “Right.”

A long silence.

“Part of why I left was to … dunno, replace myself. I know, sounds stupid. But what if there’s nothing new to replace?”

“Meaning what?”

“I mean, I was trained as an Orphan even if I never finished. But what if that’s all I can do? What if I’m really supposed to be a killer li—”

She halted, but he knew where her words had been headed: like you.

“I get it,” she continued, regrouping. “I’m just sixteen. But I’m also, like, way more badass than the majority of so-called adults. Did they make Mozart wait till he was eighteen to let him play the piano?”

“He wasn’t killing anyone with his sonatas.”

“That’s not the point.”

“There are places that you can’t get back from.”

“You’ve gone there. Why shouldn’t I?”

“The cost,” he said.

This silence was even longer.

“I’m so screwed up right now, X. Just f*****g damaged. All the time.”

“‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’”

“Snappy. You come up with that on the spot?”

“Nah, a thirteenth-century Muslim poet. It’s been kicking around about a thousand years.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Poetry never means something. It evokes.”

“Fine. What’s it evoke?”

“If I could describe it, it wouldn’t be poetry.”

“Super helpful. So, like, what am I supposed to do?”

“Either let it go,” he said, “or you sink with it.”

“The pain?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“The notion that the pain makes you unique.”

Her words were growing slower, drawing out. “’Kay. What happens then?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet. But maybe it illuminates—”

“What?”

“What’s actually unique about you.”

“So what’s actually unique about me?”

“From what I’ve seen so far? Your ability to eat enormous quantities of Red Vines.”

“You’re the worst.” On the verge of sleep, her drawl intensifying.

“You’re the worst, too.”

“Night, X.”

“Night, Josephine.”

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