"What the hell is this place?"
She is striding across the large, empty room, her voice echoing across the cavernous space. The concrete walls, covered with years of graffiti, the crumbling walls, the musty smell, they all speak of this place being abandoned, but the large box in the middle of the room speaks otherwise.
"That is a lot of explosives," she murmurs to herself as she approaches the sleeping bomb, "and how exactly did you know this was here?" She spins to face him, still standing in the doorway, looking on with concern.
"A friend."
"A friend that set a bomb in the middle of the capitol of The United States of America?" She asks him incredulously.
"Of course not. A friend who knew someone who did."
She snarls in frustration at his answer, and examines the bomb again, looking for the most likely way to diffuse it. "I would not know this 'friend', would I?" She asks coldly. Her question is clearly rhetorical.
"No," he answers anyway, "I met her before you got here."
His pronoun choice strikes her dead still, and she turns slowly to face him, with deadly eyes.
"Her name is Tanya," he explains in exasperation, "She is a very good fighter."
"Then why," she snarls, "did she not diffuse it herself, instead of sending me to get killed?"
"She is better with her fists than with a bomb."
Leah mumbles something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like she is calling Tanya something impolite, and asking why she can't do her own dirty work.
She approaches the bomb again, pulls at wires, and mumbles something under her breath, cutting him off with a feral growl when he asks if he can help.
Seeming totally unfazed, she pulls the knife from her waist, and deftly clips three wires; green, red, blue.
The beast is ticking now, making an ominous noise from its depths, but she remains unfazed as she cuts a final white wire and the noise stops, the bomb dead for good now.
"Next time," she shoots over her shoulder as she gathers her things and prepares to leave, "tell Tanya to get her own damn bomb squad."
He rolls his eyes at her retreating back, muttering under his breath in Hebrew as she stomps out of the warehouse, but she turns on her heel and stomps right back. He shuts up quickly.
"How exactly did you meet Tanya?" She asks, warily, saying her name like an expletive.
"Mutual friend."
"You just have all sorts of friends now, do you not?" Her sarcasm is a weak attempt to cover the hurt in her voice.
All he can see is a sheet of red, painted by her wild accusations and jealousies, and he know the next words are cruel as he says them, but he can't bring himself to care.
"Just because you do not have friends does not mean that I cannot."
She is shocked into stunned silence, standing, frozen, as he takes his turn at gathering his bag to leave, but a second later she has grabbed his jacket, spun him around, and leveled a hard punch right at his face.
He manages to dodge, and reflexively throws a punch of his own, grazing her shoulder and sending her spinning onto the floor.
The look on her face as she lays there, staring up at him, is heartbreaking. She started this, but he ended it, and he looks at his hand as if he didn't quite know how it has come to be clenched in such a perfect fist. When someone is trained as a killer, as an unbeatable weapon, they kill whether they want to or not. And they will always swing back.
She climbs off the floor slowly, not meeting his eyes, shrugging off his arm to help her up. He has hit her before, by accident, when she didn't move quickly enough during one of their childish, friendly spars, but he has never hated her enough to deliberately aim to hit before. In one brief, unalterable moment, a line has been crossed, trust has been shattered by both parties. Their attitudes towards each other will be scar tissue now; masquerading as skin, but never quite as perfect as it was before.
He dropped his backpack when she fell, and she bends down to pick up the scattered articles now, freezing when she sees the last item.
"You stole my book?" Her voice is quiet, filled with an anger that simmers slowly, but does not lash out.
He is silent, wanting to console her, not wanting to hear his own voice shatter the silence.
She pushes the backpack against his chest, hard, and he wordlessly grabs it.
She's not quite sure how it happened, later, but it bears a haunting resemblance to her dream.
A flash of light, a single gunshot, and then one, more, as he flings an arm around her, forcing her to the ground.
She throws the knife at her waist as she falls, and the horrible ruckus of the gun stops as the knife finds its target and the attacker hits the ground.
Samuel fell somewhere off to her right, she remembers, and quickly turns her head to find him.
She kneels over his unmoving body, quickly pulling off her jacket and pressing it against the origin of the bright crimson patch blooming over his chest. Wordlessly, clinically, she takes in his condition, and her surroundings, deciding what to do next. In America, they never leave anyone behind. In Israel, they leave as few behind as possible. Casualties are a fact of life, and she is not trained to believe in miracles. If he is still breathing, keeping the cover is the first priority. She will not have to explain to authorities why a seventeen year old girl was diffusing a giant bomb in the middle of Washington D.C.
Leaving him on the floor, she pushes into the bright light and traffic of the outside world, shrieking hysterically for someone to call an ambulance, they'd been mugged and her boyfriend was dying. She runs back into the building and reconsiders.
The body? Their mugger. She stabs him a few more times with the knife for a cover, and wraps his fingers around the hilt, leaving prints. The story? Self-defense, she stabbed him with his own knife after he shot her boyfriend and turned on her. The bomb? Nothing to be done there, if they ask, the young couple was so wrapped up in each other, looking for a private place, that they didn't even notice. The mugger was defending his creation.
She rushes across the vast space back towards Samuel, pressing the jacket to his wound once again, removing his backpack and her book from under his body and setting them aside. She hears the sirens outside, and quickly returns to the façade of distraught girlfriend, faking tears and huddling over his body.
The next minutes are a blur of paramedics, medical terms, and two gurneys, one for the dead gunman, one for the dying boy. They shuttle her out of the way when she tries to help, so eventually she stops trying. The cover of distraught lover is becoming easier and easier for her to keep as she realizes the reality of the situation, the fact that the only constant person who has ever been in her life is barely clinging to his own, and all she can do is stand in the corner and clutch the bloodstained copy of "Emma" to her chest.