Operation: Scorched Earth – Finding Your Feet

Hey there! So it's been a much longer wait than I anticipated it would be… but this chapter is finally done! Huzzah, right? I hope you enjoy this next chapter in Scorched Earth.

As always, a big round of hugs and kisses to my wonderful beta, prone2dementia, who is awesomeness personified. I also want to thank all of my wonderful reviewers. Your comments are love, and they get me through the day.

….

Alex was a wreck by the time the plane touched down at Heathrow Airport. Outwardly, he was calm, but on the inside, he was freaking out.

Had MI6 caught the mercenaries? Would they be waiting to arrest him as soon as he arrived? Would they risk exposing him in a crowded airport?

There were too many questions, and Alex didn't like it. So for now, he decided to keep his eyes open but to act as though he hadn't been compromised. If he let himself believe his cover was blown, he would undoubtedly do something that would ensure it was.

So instead, Alex calmly shouldered his bag and followed the line of weary travelers as they straggled out into the airport.

Alex looked down at the emergency contact address in his passport as he waited in line at customs. He could take a train from London to Ashford and, from there, buy a cab up to Kent. He had about 150 pounds in the bag Walker had given him, enough money that he should be fine to get to wherever he needed to go.

It was still early in the morning, and the airport wasn't very crowded. That made Alex uneasy as he moved through the throngs of people and got out into the street. He caught a cab to the train station, where he bought a ticket on the next train leaving for Ashford.

With about half an hour to wait, Alex slid into the bathroom and changed clothes. He put on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best he could do.

The train left the station with no problem. Alex settled in for the journey and managed to grab about an hour's sleep before the train pulled in to the stop at Ashburn.

He left the train feeling groggy and muttering curses in different languages under his breath. The stress was starting to get to Alex, and he felt exhausted and drained. The sun was rising in the sky as he stumbled onto the street outside the train station and hailed a cab.

Wearily, Alex told the driver the address and sat back. Twenty minutes later, the cabbie pulled in at the address in Kent.

Alex's first thought was that he couldn't have possibly gotten the right address. He couldn't believe that this was a safe house for mercenaries and assassins.

I think that's kind of the point, Alex thought, bemused, as he paid the driver and hoisted his bag over his shoulder once again.

The house was two stories tall, painted pale blue. There was a garden out front, bursting with brightly colored flowers. There was a line of tomato plants just under a bay window that Alex bet was made of bullet resistant polycarbonate glass.

There was a cobblestone walkway and even a perfectly painted white picket fence. A gate on the side of the house indicated a pathway from the backyard, though Alex would bet anything there was another escape route on the other side of the house.

It was just so… so normal. Alex made his way up the cobblestone walkway and rang the bell. The chimes sounded the first few notes of Here Comes the Sun.

I will never understand these bloody assassins, Alex decided.

The door swung open.

"Come in," someone called from inside. Alex stepped forward, and the door closed behind him with a snap.

Yassen Gregorovitch was standing in the hallway, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, drinking coke.

Alex decided from that point on that he would never again be surprised by anything assassins did. Ever.

"Hello, Alex," Yassen said. If he noticed that Alex's brain seemed to have just short-circuited, he didn't show it. "Perhaps you would like to join us in the kitchen and explain where the rest of my team is?"

That finally got Alex moving. He followed the Russian assassin through the tastefully decorated hall into a very modern kitchen. There was a window that opened on the side of the house, Alex saw, and three separate entrances into the room. He approved of the table made of reinforced steel, since it could be used as a shield against gunfire.

The Australian and Evert Zaaiman were sitting at the table with a laptop computer open in front of them, arguing with a third man, whose back was turned to Alex. He was obviously in a bad way – there was blood dripping heavily from his arm onto the table.

"It is fine," the man was saying, sounding like a sulky teenager as he applied pressure to the bleeding wound with a towel.

"Your brachial artery was hit, and I believe your humerus was shattered," The Australian said coolly. "Go see Lulu and have your arm repaired because, if you do not do so, your arm will be rendered useless, and I will simply have to shoot you. Hello, Yassen, Alex."

The man with the bleeding arm turned, and swore. Alex felt a wave of relief – and then panic, as he realized the implications of Anish's injury – wash over him.

"Anish, what happened?" he demanded.

"I will tell the story. You go have your arm fixed," The Australian ordered briskly.

"Yes, mother," Anish muttered under his breath. He smiled at Alex.

"Good to see you're alive," he said, and vanished through one of the doors into the dark hallway beyond.

"Is he going to be okay?"

"This house has a fully equipped medical facility upstairs," Yassen supplied for Alex's sake. "In a month, Anish will be more or less back to his old self, though he'll be as stubborn as ever in the meantime."

"What happened?" Alex repeated his earlier question, sitting down at the table.

"MI6 followed your trail from Uganda and found your hotel in Paris," Evert said, speaking for the first time since Alex had come into the room. "A trained extraction team broke into the room soon after you left. Anish escaped through the window after taking fire and used some of his contacts to fly to Bristol."

"What about the others?"

"One of our contacts from a private hospital in Dijon reported that Dan has arrived there safely and is being prepped for surgery. We'll know more in a few hours. Walker and Lee are still missing, and until they report in, we must presume that they are in the custody of MI6."

Alex nodded, but inside he was seething at his former 'employers'. For the moment, it didn't matter that the mercenaries who had saved his arse in Uganda were paid killers, murderers for a profit.

What mattered was that they had been there when he most needed them, and they had treated him as an equal. They hadn't belittled him, but they hadn't expected him to do more than he could handle either.

Remembering something, Alex pulled the miniature camera out of his bag.

"Proof of Kony's death," he said casually, placing it on the table in front of him. He refused to allow himself to think of what he had had to go through to get the image on that camera. He shoved the revulsion down, and looked up at the three men who had taken over for the executive board of Scorpia.

Zaaiman was already plugging the device into the laptop computer, bringing up the files. If he had any kind of internal reaction to seeing a dead man on his screen, he certainly didn't betray it.

"Well done, Rider," he said. Alex bowed his head in acknowledgement.

"Your end of the deal?"

"Ah, yes," The Australian said. "We laid a false trail from your hotel in Paris that will lead the extraction team across the globe. They will spent a great deal of time believing that they are hot on your trail until the tracks we have created end. That should give us enough time to get you settled in just fine."

"What did you have in mind?"

The Australian went over to a drawer under the kitchen counter and pulled out a false bottom from underneath. He pulled out a file.

"Let me introduce you to Michael Cooper," The Australian said. "Seventeen-year-old national of Britain, born in Scotland. Mr. James Cooper died on active duty for the Royal Marines three months ago – that would be your father by the way – and your mother ran off rather than support a teenager. You've been living on your own in Manchester since then, having dropped out of school."

"You will, of course, be planning on taking the GCSE tests independently, however," Yassen cut in. Alex stared at him. He knew that without decent scores, finding a job would be quite difficult, but they could have just hacked the Ministry of Education and done that as well.

Yassen had the ghost of a smirk playing around the edges of his mouth, as if sensing the question that was on Alex's mind, and just daring him to ask. Alex knew he wasn't going to win an argument with these men, however – they had been playing the semantics game long before he had even been born. Instead, he chose another, but no less relevant, line of questioning.
"This information is secure?"

"You could get into the Pentagon with this caliber of document," Zaaiman said with a smile. "There are people at your school in Dublin that would swear that they've known you all their lives, and a handful of soldiers who served with your father who would do the same. It is an entirely new life, one free of the machinations of MI6, just as we promised you."

Alex opened the folder and looked at its contents. There was a wallet with a school ID, driver's license, and credit card. There was a house key and even pictures of a family dog. A passport that looked like it had several years of wear indicated a trip to Costa Rica, and bore several stamps from various countries in the EU.

It was all that the renegades from Scorpia had promised and more.

It was an entirely new life.

Alex snapped the folder shut.

"That's in order then," he said. "Any of you know which train I can catch to Manchester?"

"There is one point of contention that we would like settled," Zaaiman continued with a smile that could only be described as a smirk.

Alex looked at the three men, wondering if now would be a good time to run as far and as fast as he could in the opposite direction. If they were about to attempt to double cross him…

"Yassen here believes that you require a… roommate of some kind, while Evert has pointed out that we have neither the inclination nor the agents to provide a caregiver for a teenager who does not want or need one."

"No one from social services would put a teenager on his own, and as Alex has repeatedly demonstrated, he can hardly find his own breakfast without managing to blow up a drug lab or something of the sort," Yassen said coolly.

"I didn't blow it up," Alex argued. "I dropped it into a police station."

"You are not disproving my point."

"So your assessment is that I need a babysitter," Alex said, trying to follow the logic.

"My assessment is that I – and now we – have made a heavy investment in your continued safety," Yassen answered. "It is only reasonable to protect that investment. There is also the fact that Alex has never lived alone before and is likely to forget to feed himself."

"So now I'm incompetent."
"I trust you to know which way to point a gun," Yassen answered dryly. "But you are just as likely to blow up your flat trying to cook dinner as you are to go after random criminals."

"And who would you send?" The Australian seemed to actually be seriously entertaining Yassen's arguments.

"Anish will be out of commission for several months," Yassen said. "This is an easy assignment – Alex just needs someone to keep an eye on him, which Anish can do and still heal from his injuries."

Alex thought about that. He got along well enough with the Indian mercenary, and it wasn't like Anish would be there to be his guardian, more like a roommate.

And Alex was adult enough to admit (even if it was only to himself) that he really didn't want to be left all by himself. He knew that this was a play by Yassen to keep him close to the renegades and set him up for later recruitment, but he didn't care. Anish could teach Alex a great deal.

Besides, when everything was said and done, Alex actually liked the man. So long as Yassen knew that he knew what the assassin was trying to do, he figured that there wasn't to great chance of him getting manipulated into doing something that he didn't want to do.

"Fine," he said. Yassen looked surprised and suspicious that Alex had given in so easily, but Alex ignored him.

"What?" Alex asked in response to the looks he was getting. "I'm told growing up does entail being able to admit one's own shortcomings. Yassen is right, however much I'm loathe to admit it, and so I'm agreeing with him."

Yassen was still looking suspicious, and the Australian was examining his hands, looking smugly entertained, but Zaaiman just shrugged.

"If that's settled, you can stay here for the night, as Anish won't be fit for travel for several days," he said. "There's a guest room at the end of the hall to your left."

Alex wondered briefly how mad someone would have to be to actually sleep in the same building as a handful of known assassins. Perhaps it made a difference now that he was one of them, but the idea didn't seem as absurd as it might have under normal circumstances.

Alex snorted inwardly. Normal circumstances hadn't applied since Ian had died.

He nodded to the three men and picked up his bag and his folder.

"See you, then," he said, and quickly removed himself from their presences.

"Oh, and Alex," Yassen called when Alex was already in the hallway. Alex turned back, sticking his head around the corner. "Please do try not to blow up anything while you're here."

"I'll take your objections under consideration," Alex answered, as seriously as he could muster, and then bolted.

Just because they weren't actively trying to kill him didn't mean that he should spend more time than necessary around them, after all.

Despite his wearying day, Alex rose with the dawn and went through a set of kata before getting ready for the day. It was a habit he had gotten into in Uganda that he had easily adapted into his normal routine. He really couldn't afford to let dodging bullets be his only outlet for exercise .

Alex grabbed a breakfast of cereal and coffee from the kitchen, and set about trying to find something to do.

The house was tastefully decorated, in a quiet neighborhood of tastefully decorated houses. He didn't want to spend too much time wandering around outside before he had the chance to change his appearance to that of Michael Cooper, but from what he could see, it was a neighborhood full of young couples and children. Kids rode up and down the block on bicycles (or tricycles, in the case of the very young children), and ran through the streets with jump ropes and chasing footballs.

Parents puttered away in gardens or chatted in doorways as they kept one eye on their work and another on their children.

Alex, who had never quite gotten around to actually liking small children, found it endearing.

It was also a very clever place to hide. In a small neighborhood where everybody knows everybody, it would only take a few pointed questions of a police officer to know nothing was amiss. Alex suspected that a couple of agents were posing as a young couple and living in the house. Their story would have to include coming from large extended families of eccentric billionaires or something, in order to explain the frequent comings and goings through all hours of the day and night.

Alex didn't see any of the head renegades again, and he strongly doubted they were even still in Britain. There were a few mercenaries wandering around, and it was a relief to sit and eat and speak with them.

Alex was still trying to figure out why he didn't feel uneasy around so many people who would turn on him for the right price.

Anish was lucid a day after his surgery, but he was confined to his bed for the entire week that followed. Alex visited him a lot, though the Indian clearly wasn't in good spirits. Most of their conversation was held between muttered Hindi curses and threats, mostly centered around Anish's clumsy and heavily bandaged arm. The fact that it was his right arm didn't help matters – Anish was slowly being driven insane by his own uselessness.

"I'm sorry you had to get injured because of me," Alex ventured when he first visited with the mercenary. Anish had shaken his head and grinned at Alex.

"I've taken worse for lesser men," he answered. "This too shall heal, and I'll go back to my job. In the meantime, I'd rather be keeping busy, but I can't even leave this damn bed!"

They ended up staying at the safehouse for the entire week. Anish knew better than to argue with his surgeons.

In general, it was difficult to argue with people that you know can boil you from the inside out without leaving a single trace of forensic evidence, so despite wanting to be on his way as quickly as possible, Alex didn't push for Anish to try and get out earlier.

Instead, they spent time talking about tactics or guns, and pretty much anything, really. Alex found that he was actually having fun. He suspected that Anish was only teaching him to stave off his own boredom, but the boy wasn't going to complain.

A few days after Alex and Anish had arrived, Dan checked in at the safehouse. He stopped by Anish's room to commiserate with the misery of bed rest, but he only stayed a few hours. Several large shards of glass had ended up in his leg as he fled the agents MI6 had sent after them, but he had healed just fine and was being sent out on an assignment. Alex stifled his curiosity and forced himself not to speculate on what Dan might be doing on assignment. It wasn't his business.

Walker and Lee never checked in.

Neither Alex nor Anish said what they were thinking. Either the two mercenaries were dead, or in the hands of MI6. Alex wasn't quite sure which one was worse.

Instead, he threw himself into studying languages. Anish had begun the process of teaching him Hindi and Hebrew, as well as Arabic, and he taught languages the same way Ian did, through lots of practical application and conversation. As he knuckled down to learn a whole new way of manipulating his vocal cords to speak the Semitic languages, Alex grimly thought about his mission in Egypt. He found himself wondering if Yedit would be proud of his progress.

As soon as Anish had the blessing of his doctors, he and Alex boarded a train. They switched lines five or six times to throw off anyone who might be following them, and once they arrived in Manchester, they took some time in a public restroom to change their appearances.

They got to their flat late in the evening. Anish's face was pale, and he seemed to be holding off pain from his arm, which still rested in a cocoon of bandages and was held in a sling.

It was actually a very nice flat. It was on the smaller side, but it was cozy.

The only real problem was the single bedroom.

"Toss you for the bed?" Anish offered as they stood at the entrance to the room.

Alex turned away.

"I'll take the couch," he answered. Anish sounded like he was going to protest that he didn't want any pity, but Alex was already pulling extra linens out of a cupboard.

"If you wake me up in the middle of the night because you fall off the couch and into that arm of yours, Yassen will kill me, because I'll likely end up killing you," he said. "It's just self-preservation. Take the damn bed."

….

Alex woke up early the next morning and went through his usual routine. Anish joined him after fifteen minutes, and Alex watched him out of the corner of his eye. Even with one arm in a sling, he still moved gracefully. He had to remind himself to focus several times before he was done.

Alex used the computer in the living room to do some job searching before grabbing a bite to eat.

"Alex, you realize that we do have plenty of money here, right?" Anish asked.

"I'd prefer not to end up owing anything to any of your bosses," Alex sniped back as he jotted a promising looking place down on a piece of paper. "No offense or anything, but I'm done being taken advantage of. Besides, call me crazy, but I'd like to earn my own money with a career that doesn't call for killing people, yeah?"

"Whatever, man," Anish said with a grin that belied his tone. "But with your luck, you'll end up working at a pet shop that's actually a front for drug dealers, or the mafia or something."

"I'm not that unlucky."

"I – and everyone I work for – heartily beg to differ."

"Well, you guys kill for money, so kindly get your nose out of my business," Alex replied. "How's the shoulder?"

"Great."

Alex shoved Anish slightly, and the man paled with pain.

"I thought so," Alex smirked. "Go take a painkiller while I try to find some food that isn't laced with some kind of horrible poison."

"There's cyanide in the Trix," Anish called as he headed for the bathroom. Alex, who had just poured himself a bowl of said cereal, glared in the direction of the door and dumped the cereal – bowl and all – into the trash, before he heard Anish barking with laughter from the other room.

"Oh, very funny, you moron!" Alex called back to the Indian man. "I thought that your toothpaste was starting to smell like almonds too!"

The two shared a breakfast of dry cereal (Alex still wouldn't touch the Trix), which seemed to be one of the few edible things the flat had in abundance. Of the six cabinets in the kitchen, one had cereal, one had canned food, two had a supply of vials labeled with chemical formulas that Anish immediately forbade Alex from touching on principle. Another cupboard had pots and pans filled with ammo and C4. The last one had first aid equipment.

"Okay, this is ridiculous," Alex said, staring at the open cabinets. "Don't we even get coffee or something?"

Anish tossed Alex a small package of instant coffee from a drawer. He didn't look thrilled with the food selection either.

"Don't use those pots and pans for cooking," Anish warned him, closing the cabinets. "The last time I stayed here, I used them to make napalm."

Alex blanched inwardly as he eyed the cooking utensils with a new eye, but kept a straight face. He had the feeling he would be eating out a lot.

"Right."

Anish opened the fridge and made a face.

"Okay, so it looks like someone left their blackmail material in the fridge."

"What?"

"There's a finger in here."
"Bollocks."

"No, seriously, there's a finger in here. Come check it out!"

"I'm not listening!" Alex hollered as he grabbed his coat. He didn't know whether Anish was joking, but if he wasn't, Alex didn't really need to see any human appendages in the place where he would be expected to store food.

He headed out into the landing and shut the door, but he was grinning even as he turned and ran down the seven flights of stairs that stood between him and the street.

He was going job hunting.

Alex had typed up a resume last night. He supposed he should be glad that Michael Cooper had actually had a decent resume, aside from dropping out of school (a minor detail). He refused to let himself dwell on the horrific assignment that had earned him this new life.

He wasn't going to look back. That was one surefire way of getting himself killed.

Today was a fresh start as Michael Cooper. Alex Rider was gone, and he wasn't coming back.

That put a smile on Alex's lips as he got onto the subway.

By lunchtime, however, that smile was back into a crooked line. Four of the five places he had tried to apply to had told him not to bother giving them a resume. The last had only accepted it with a sympathetic smile that left Alex little hope at being hired.

He was a college drop out, after all.

Alex cursed under his breath as he left the sixth place he had marked on his list. He had grabbed lunch at a deli between job interviews, but now it was well into the afternoon, and he decided to call it a day.

Dejectedly, he looked at the last place he had on his short list. It was a pub called the Queens' Apple. It probably wasn't even worth a try, but what the hell. At least it would allow him to stay away from home, where there were fingers in the freezer and napalm in the cooking utensils.

The pub that Alex had put on his list was clean and didn't have a reputation for fights. Alex wouldn't be able to tend bar, but he could legally work as a waiter, if he were ever hired, a feat which currently seemed impossible*.

Just one more interview, Alex decided. He really didn't want to be around when Anish found a head under the bathroom sink or anything. He didn't need or want to know.

The manager of the pub was a woman in her mid thirties, with shockingly green and purple hair. She spoke with a mild Irish accent and had just about a thousand piercings. A bat-like wing stretched around the back of her throat to make itself visible just above the woman's right collarbone.

"Hello, lad, what kin I do ye for?" she asked Alex.

"I'm looking for a job, ma'am," Alex answered.

"First of all, the names Piper, not ma'am," the woman said, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the teenager in front of her. Alex noticed she had an intricate Celtic knot tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, half hidden by the rag she had been using to wipe down one of the tables.

"And second, you look about three years too young to be working in a place that serves alcohol, and about the right age to be causing all sorts of nonsense trouble, so you should probably get."

"I'm seventeen, ma'am – I mean, Piper."

"Uh huh."

Alex bit his lip.

"Look, Piper, I'm really hurting for the work," he said. "I promise I won't be any trouble. I need a job. I'll do any work you've got for me."

Piper glared down at Alex for a moment and then held out her hand.

"You got a resume then?"

Alex wordlessly handed the paper over, bracing himself for the rejection that he had gotten at the last six places he had visited. Piper glanced over it, and then looked back at Alex.

"What's your name, kid?"

"Michael Cooper."

"You know how to clean tables?"

"Yes, ma'am – sorry, Piper."

"Can you unclog a toilet?"

"Excuse me?"

"Can you unclog a toilet?"

"Yes," Alex said. He wasn't certain about his competency in the subject, but he figured he could work it out as he went, just like he did with most everything else.

"Well, Michael Cooper, you've got puppy dog eyes, and I need someone to clean the bathrooms in back, so I'll try you on," Piper said at last. Alex felt his heart leap.

"You want me to clean toilets?"

"More than anything else in the world, kid."

Alex hugged Piper earnestly.

"When do I start?"

Piper pried herself loose from the teenager, a small smile slipping through the scowl that Alex already suspected didn't leave her face very often.

"Tomorrow, seven in the morning," she said. "You'll be cleaning up for the morning shift. Don't bother showing up if you're so much as a minute late. If you make it through the day with us, you and I can talk about your salary."

Alex nodded his head, promising that he wouldn't be late.

"We'll see," Piper said, scowl now firmly in place. "Now scat, kid, I got work to do."

Alex wanted to sing as he biked back to the flat.

With an independent source of funds, he wouldn't be reliant on the renegade mercenaries for charity, and he could get back some semblance of normalcy.

"Hey, Anish!" Alex called as he unlocked the door. "Did you find any more body parts?"

"No, but there was a couple kilos of cocaine under the couch."

"So it's party time?" Alex asked, not taking the Indian seriously for even a second. He heard a chuckle from the kitchen, where he found Anish sitting on the floor in front of a vat that smelled like extra strength bleach.

"Something like that," he responded. "C'mon, Alex, I've just starting cleaning this place out. Did you have a productive day?"

"I found work," Alex shrugged, grabbing a plate and a sponge, and sitting across from Anish on the floor. "How about you?"

Anish nodded towards the boxes that were packed to the side.

"Don't bring any matches into the flat from now on, okay?"

Alex grinned.

"Oh, by the way, I picked you up a Desert Eagle," Anish said conversationally. "I didn't know if you had any preference, but it's a solid weapon."

"Nah, the Desert Eagle works fine for me," Alex answered. "Mostly I just work with what I have."

Anish nodded thoughtfully and, without warning, switched their conversation into Arabic. Alex scrubbed at plates and skillets as they talked, cycling through languages without much care.

In some ways, this was so much better than the normalcy Alex had always wanted. He imagined that if he had known Ian was a spy, this kind of evening activity would be commonplace – switching through languages as they cleaned cooking utensils from their latest round of explosives making.

Alex shook himself out of the fantasy with a frown. That future was gone now. Ian had turned traitor. Alex wondered if he was dead now. If he was, it might well have been Yassen who killed him.

Or perhaps MI6 had decided that he had outlived his usefulness. Alex scowled, and the cup in his hand shattered.

Anish looked up,his eyes widening with horror.

"Clean that out. Thoroughly. Immediately."

His voice was only bordering on calm, and Alex didn't fight the urge to run to the bathroom. Anish was right behind him, and the Indian poured half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on Alex's hand as he ran the sink over it. Alex bit his lip to hold back the excruciating pain. Anish used tweezers to pull the pieces of glass out of Alex's hand, and dumped the rest of the bottle over the still bleeding hand. It was clumsy process with the Indian's left hand, but he made it work.

Anish was cursing in Arabic, and Alex was surprised to hear words not even Yedit had used. Anish forced Alex to hold the hand under the sink for several more minutes before he consented to wrap it up in gauze.

"Please tell me that you're just overreacting and there was actually nothing in that cup," Alex said, trying to stay calm. For all he knew, someone could have been making anthrax in there. Or explosives. There were all sorts of horrible things that could have been brewed in that cup, and now they were most likely in his blood.

"One way to tell," Anish said, with a frown. He grabbed a first aid kit from under the sink, and took out a syringe. "I'm going to test the glass and your blood."

Alex consented to having the needle inserted into his skin and filled with his blood. He waited anxiously as Anish put the glass shards into a bag with some chemicals.

After three minutes, when there was no change, Anish sighed with relief, sagging against the wall.
"Nothing on the glass," he said. "But I'm sending your blood to a friend to check, though. No sense in being too cautious, all things considered."

Alex nodded. He too was sagging from a release of tension he hadn't even known he had built up.

I'm fine, everything's fine, he told himself firmly.

"From now on, nobody touches those dishes without gloves on," Anish muttered. "Or better still, you don't touch them at all unless you're in a biohazard suit."

"Oh, har de har har," Alex answered. He stood up from the seat he had taken on the edge of the tub. "We good?"

"Yeah, we're good," Anish answered. He was still staring at the bag with the glass shards in it. His good left hand was shaking. "But no more close calls like that. I just don't want-"

"If you get sappy on me, I'll be forced to hit you."

Anish grinned and, with his free hand, slugged Alex on the shoulder, a blow Alex knew would bruise.

"Be more careful, man," the Indian said. "Do you have any idea what Gregorovitch would do to me if you died on my watch?"

But later that night, when he was laying on the couch, Alex replayed that scene in his head, and he knew that the look in the Indian mercenary's eyes had nothing to do with the cold Russian assassin.

It was nice to feel cared about, Alex reflected, as he pulled his covers around himself. Even if he and Anish did make the strangest pair that had ever been brought together.

Shifting to make himself more comfortable, Alex realized that he didn't feel like a stranger in his own skin anymore.

Maybe everything was going to be okay. Maybe the teenage spy who had seen too much actually could get his happy ending. Alex barely dared to hope that this could be the case, but the thought brought a smile to his face, knowing that possible future didn't scare him anymore. He was excited to meet what tomorrow would bring, not resigned, like a man facing the gallows.

With that cautious optimism, Alex slept like more soundly than he had for a long time, and he didn't dream.

*So, according to Section 153 of the Licensing Act of 2003, minors cannot sell alcohol in England, but they can serve it with a table meal, so long as the person who approved the sale is overage and is licensed to do so. I'm thinking that the place where Alex is going to work is less like the bars in the U.S, and more like a legit pub, where people go to eat, and sometimes to drink. Make sense?

Also, can someone explain to me the reason why I just spent half an hour reading up on alcohol licensing laws in a country I've never been to? =)

Anyway, you know the drill. Review please?

~InK