A/N: Another chapter.


A Comet Appears


A stronger girl would shake this off in flight
And never give it more than a frowning hour
But you have let your heart decide
Loss has conquered you

You've won one too many fights
Wearing many hats every time
But you won't win here tonight

— The Shins, Girl Sailor


Chapter Six: Resolution


Walker said nothing in the car. She stared ahead as Lola drove, apparently inattentive to anything external. Lola had found Walker, but Walker was lost.

They reached Lola's apartment — the one she was using as Sarah's backup on the Brenner mission, not far from the one Walker had been using — and she led Walker inside. Walker sat stiffly in a chair and wiped at her eyes again.

"So…" Lola said, unsure about exactly what to do, what to say, "...how about some coffee?"

Walker nodded — her nod as stiff as her sitting.

Lola hurried into the small kitchen and put on the coffee. While there, she took out her phone and called Craig, her pilot, waking him. She told him the address of Walker's cover apartment, and where a key was hidden outside the door.

She asked him to bring clothes and toiletries, anything he thought might be needed. As he woke, he was full of questions, but she put him off.

She felt herself slipping deeper into a relationship with him, one she had been trying not to have since spies and romance were an oily water concoction. But she needed his help, especially now, since clearly, Walker was not alright. She did like Craig; she always had; he was getting too close.

He agreed to go. Lola put her phone away and took two cups of coffee into the living room. Walker was now staring at a wall.

Handing Walker a cup, Lola sat down on the couch.

Walker took a sip.

Lola took a sip.

Neither spoke. Lola was waiting for Walker to give her some sign, a suggestion of a direction.

"So, I worked for the CIA," Walker finally said, her words clipped.

"Yes, for a while, more than ten years. We've known each other a long time, but only worked together lately."

Walker looked at Lola. The vulnerability Lola had earlier detected beneath Walker's adamantine surface was now fully displayed. The adamantine had shattered. Walker's eyes were unguarded, bottomless.

It made Lola's chest ache.

Another long, almost funereal silence claimed the room; the apartment seemed like a tomb.

But then Walker spoke again, her voice quiet, breaking. "Was I happy?"

The question shocked Lola. She did not recall Walker ever using that word of herself in any way. Perhaps of others, marks, on missions, but never of herself. Walker was a woman wholly foreign to the language of self-reckoning.

But the question disturbed Lola in relation to herself, to the warmth she felt for Craig, even now lingering after the quick, urgent phone call. She wanted that warmth. Maybe Walker's not the only lonely one.

Lola decided to tell the truth as she believed it to be. "No, Sarah, you were not happy. You were good, the best, but no, I can't say you struck me as happy. You seemed lonely."

Walker nodded once as if Lola had confirmed something she suspected.

"Do you want me to tell you about you? It's amnesia, right? Do we need to see a doctor?"

Walker finally looked at Lola as the questions somersaulted out. "No, I've seen one. The woman, Ellie, the sister of the man who found me, — or the man I found, on the beach, — she's a doctor, actually a neurologist. She's been looking after me, along with him, Chuck."

The intonation of the last name told Lola all she needed to know. She'd never heard Walker talk about her own happiness; she had also never heard her speak a name with tenderness.

"I found his shoes on the beach, this Chuck," Lola volunteered, "you must have knocked him out of them."

Walker smiled a little. "I think he already had them off; I made him forget them. I passed out on the beach. I had a head injury."

The picture was making more sense to Lola, filling out what had happened. "And this Ellie, she tended it?"

Walker touched her head gingerly. "Yes, she was nice to me, kind beyond just doctoring, even though she didn't… trust me."

"Did she suspect who you were, what you were?"

"Yes. Maybe. But, mainly she was worried about Chuck, my effect on him."

"Effect?"

"He fell for me," Walker said, hugging herself a little and smiling although the words seemed also to hurt her.

Another silence.

Lola gathered herself, the lights of her thoughts on Walker but a shadow of them on herself. "But you were leaving?"

"I remembered something." Walker's eyes dropped to the ground, then she lifted them. "I remembered killing, terminating, a man. I shot him in the head."

The horror in Walker's voice shook Lola.

Termination. This had been why Lola and Walker rarely worked together.

Graham used Walker often for wet work. That was not Lola's specialty, not at all. No. Their time at the Farm had divided them on that. It was clear from testing that Lola was not psychologically capable of wet work. She was a spy repelled by violence.

"You did that sort of thing, that sort of mission," Lola offered cautiously.

Walker inhaled sharply, a look of self-disgust claiming her face. "A lot?"

Lola shrugged. "I don't know. Not exclusively. Our mission here was not that sort of mission. But I don't know how often."

"But," Walker asked, swallowing hard, "more than just…the once?"

Lola nodded her head, hating to do it but not willing to lie.

Walker dropped her face into her hands, her elbows to her knees. It took Lola a second to register that Walker was weeping.

Lola felt tears start in her eyes.

She got up and squatted in front of Walker's chair, putting her hand on her friend's knee, then hugging her legs when Walker's silent tears became convulsions, bitter and contrite.

Lola stayed there a long time, despite the awkward posture, waiting for the storm to pass, hoping to soothe Walker.

Walker weeping, I would never have imagined it.

When the convulsions finally ended, shrinking to trembles, Lola asked a soft question, wiping her own eyes: "Who is Sam, Sarah?"

Walker looked up, her shattered countenance wet-eyed red and bluebird blue.

"It's me. An earlier me. A different version. Before all this. Before my dad, before all the other names, before the CIA, before Sarah."

Lola shook her head, stunned despite all that had already happened."Your dad? Tell me about Sam, if you remember."

Walker nodded. "I do, now…bits and pieces."


Ellie got out of bed, expecting Chuck's door to be cracked as it was the night before, but it was wide open. The bed was mussed, empty.

She padded down the hallway but began to worry when she heard no kitchen racket, smelled no coffee, and no breakfast.

Chuck was on the couch, among the sheets and blankets that had been Sam's bed. He had Sam's holster in his hands but he was not looking at it. He was looking at nothing. Sam was nowhere to be seen.

"Chuck, are you okay?"

He turned to her slowly, his body stiff, the way a lighthouse might turn. She saw the pain on his face and her heart sank to her soles.

"Sam? She's gone?" Ellie knew it at once for certain but asked anyway.

She was so focused on Chuck that she jumped when Devon spoke behind her, his voice loud but kind. "Not awesome, Chuckster."

Chuck's smile was a tragedy.

"I should have known last night was goodbye, not hello. But I hoped…What happened between us…" He trailed off, his smile vanishing, his hands twisting the holster. "I hoped…"

"I'm sorry, Chuck," Ellie said, joining her brother on the couch and taking the holster out of his hands. "But she was…well, like you said, a comet…Comets don't last."

Ellie looked at the holster. "Did you notice her scars?"

Chuck shook his head. "Scars?"

"Lots of them, well doctored, well healed, but all along her arms, her collarbone, her ribs. She's led a violent life, Chuck." She held up the holster. "This is no cosplay prop."

Chuck seemed behind. "Violence? But she was so gentle."

"She didn't remember, Chuck. And nothing happened here that would call out violence, activate her skill-set."

"Skill-set?"

"She's some kind of agent, Chuck," Ellie said carefully. "I'm betting she's CIA. Her memory returned — and then she did too, back to her life, her work."

"Why not wait and tell me?"

Ellie was unsure about how to answer that. To just leave, as Sam had, seemed either an act of mercy or an act of selfishness. Ellie was unsure which to choose since she was unsure who had chosen to leave — the struggling amnesiac or the recovered agent.

"I don't know. Maybe she thought it would be easier this way?"

"For her or for me?"

Ellie shrugged.

She pulled Chuck into a hug, hating that she could do so little for him. In a few days, maybe a few hours, the changes in him that Sam had caused would be gone. He would belong to the Buy More once more.

Unexpectedly, Chuck pushed her away — but appreciatively, considerately. "Thanks, Ellie; I need some time alone."

His tragic smile hardened into a tight line of resolve.

Ellie felt a small, involuntary thrill. "Okay, Chuck. I don't work till this evening, so I'll be here today if you need me."

He kissed her cheek and stood up ramrod straight. "Love you, El."

And then, with a salute to Devon, he marched from the room.


Lola had returned to the couch as she listened to Walker's broken story.

Walker's life had been a gauntlet, almost from the beginning. As Lola listened to the bits and pieces — the con man father, the cons, the absent, sickly mother — she slowly realized that the skills and behaviors that made Walker the CIA's perfect agent were all trauma responses.

She finally understood her icy, elusive friend.

Trauma on a massive scale, trauma atop trauma, stretched out over years and years.

Sam, the piece of herself Walker had recovered due to Chuck's ministrations, was the girl before the trauma, before the elaborate coping mechanisms, before the adoption of CIA protocols as themselves coping mechanisms, particularly as mechanisms to keep Sam from facing what she had done, first with her father and later, while an agent. Sam had perfected withdrawing herself from everyone, but especially from herself, perfected shutting down her emotions, and feelings, letting herself feel nothing. Sam had been abandoned physically by her mother and then abandoned morally, if not physically, by her father. Langston Graham had finished Sam's miseducation by teaching her to abandon herself.

Sarah was the result, the finished product, Agent Walker.

Craig arrived and Walker fell silent. He came in with a battered suitcase, stuffed. When Walker saw the suitcase, she stood up and ran into the bathroom.

Craig looked at Lola, but she just shook her head.


Chuck stretched out his arms, fingers interlaced, palms out, and cracked all his knuckles at once. It had been years since he had done any serious hacking, but, before Stanford, it had been his hobby, no, it had been more: it had been his mission.

He never stole. He just got inside — inside systems that were impervious, invulnerable, unhackable. Toppling walls was his specialty. He got inside and left his mark, his alias, The Piranha, like a taunting flag.

He did it because he could and because the flaming hubris of these companies needed to be extinguished. They deserved it.

Hacking was like riding a bike. He might be rusty, but he had not forgotten, couldn't forget. He got up and shut his door tight, locked it for the first time he could remember.

He sat back down and shook his hands, loosening them more. And then he put his hands on the keyboard and launched himself through cyberspace, hurling himself like a battering ram against the stonework firewalls of the CIA.

If she is in there, I will find her.


Ellie had not seen Chuck since the morning.

His door had been shut tight all day. She could hear rapid-fire typing, and the occasional curse word, but could not figure out what was happening.

He had not eaten and had not gone to the bathroom. She was due at work, and she was dithering near the front door, trying to decide what to do.

She recalled Chuck's resolve, the thrill she felt when she saw his face, and she decided to leave him alone.

Computers had always been his way of excelling — but for years he had only repaired them, not really used them, inhabited them, like he had before Jill bitched him from upright into a constant crouch.

Maybe something good would come of this after all, and not only heartbreak.

Ellie left the apartment, hopeful in spite of everything..


Chuck stumbled from his room into the dark hallway, his legs stiff, his feet numb.

He had to pee so badly that everything he saw on the screen took on a vague yellow hue.

After finishing and flushing, he walked into the living room.

He had made it through most of the CIA's protections and was waiting for the last wall to fall. His computer was running a program now that should get him in. A beep would be the victory sign, his trumpet blast.

Maybe it was a waste of time. Maybe Ellie was wrong. But Chuck's gut said she was right. He did not know how to imagine the woman who made love to him as a CIA agent, but he would figure it out.

I will. I will not lose her without a fight.

He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Local news was on. A woman, an executive at a place called Phish and Chips — Chuck knew of it by reputation — was on the screen, talking about the disappearance of her employer, Maxwell Brenner.

Brenner was missing; he had been missing since Tuesday night. His plane was missing too.

Chuck stepped closer and turned up the volume, something in his mind clicking over.

The woman was shaking her head. "We don't know where he is or his plane. There's no flight record, no record of his plane leaving the airport or arriving anywhere, but it's gone. He's just…gone. How can a plane vanish on the tarmac?"

Chuck heard his computer beep.


A/N: Drop me a line?