One of the fellows glanced at me. I pressed my lips together and offered her an empty smile. The person I was pretending to be would not be muttering angrily to herself. She would be cheerful, calm, proud of her task and her uniform, never once considering that a career of such mindless servitude was an insult rather than an honor. The student gave me a vague look, then turned away to join her friends. Henke wrangled his sun-scarred face into some semblance of a grin. It looked worse than his scowl, but I didn’t scold him again. He disliked obeying me enough as it was. I had learned to choose my battles carefully.

You have to be one of them. A speck of poison in the cancer that is SPEC. That was what Adam had said to me before the mission began. Two months ago, in the cool desert darkness before dawn, he had brushed a strand of hair from my face and touched my cheek. I had shivered with guilt I hoped he saw as pride, with fear I hoped he took for excitement. He was our leader, our savior, and I could not turn away, no matter how certain I was that he had already guessed the secrets I kept from him, the selfish reasons I had for needing this mission to succeed. He had smiled and said, Inside you will always be my warrior, but on the outside you show them a servant.

We could not take chances. The Councils and SPEC were watching constantly. If we erred for even a moment, the whole mission would be forfeit. It was one thing to risk arrest and imprisonment for ourselves if we were caught, but it was quite another to endanger Adam and the family. They were too important. Adam was too important. The Councils had been hounding him for years: attacking our compound, poisoning our crops, stealing our family members away, all because they could not abide a free man living as he chose in lands outside their control. They would have no mercy for him if our mission failed. He often said he would choose death over imprisonment if we failed him and our beautiful future was snatched away.