No one came for them in the night so Brooke heads out into the day, to make good on her promise to kill Seager's tail if it's necessary. She's in place drinking coffee from a roadside shack when she spots Seager's partner coming, driving home to her apartment that's across the street from Brooke.

Her name that might not be real is Barra Kane. She looks like she belongs to the island, average everything, lithe and unimposing. She drives a red sedan and pulls into the parking garage. From this street corner, Brooke can just make out the telescope shroud poking over the edge of the railing on Barra Kane's balcony but that's all she needs to see. When she was up there, she marked the specific cones of vision its user gets in what position. Right now it's aimed at Seager's villa—that's how she found it, and what she returned it to yesterday. Putting Brooke and Domenic's safehouse into focus across the water involved a stark shift to at least a 4 o'clock position from its current one. There was of course a lot of grey area, too, like watching someone out of the corner of your eye, but Brooke tried it herself up there, and she's certain she and Domenic have been inconspicuous enough if someone didn't know what they were looking for. Brooke will have to make that judgment call today. If the woman even glances at Domenic, Brooke will kill her.

There's movement up above. Brooke sees the shroud wiggle a little like a gun barrel. It doesn't move far, and she assumes the woman is just looking all over the house for Seager. Brooke inwardly bemoans signing up for this as she realizes she could be standing here for hours, given Seager's maddeningly unhurried schedule. Maybe the woman realizes this too, because the telescope begins to drift from the direction of Seager's villa listlessly, without measure. Her attention is lapsing it looks like, but still inching towards where Domenic is, Brooke can't help but remind herself.

Shit. With an unexpected jerk, her telescope stops past the point of no return; it's overtop a noticeable grime spot on the railing Brooke picked out that would show her what she needed to see. It's in that 4 o'clock position.

Like a knell only Brooke hears, her self-imposed kill order goes into effect and sinks in, and she feels a tippy sensation like she's floating ripple through her although she hasn't moved at all. She glances around at people who continue on with their day, then looks back up again, but she knows: Seager's tail has made Domenic.

Brooke gathers herself and crosses the street. Around the side of the building, in the alleyway, there's a door through the laundry room someone leaves propped open even though there's a taped-on sign that says please don't do exactly that. Brooke came this way yesterday and today it's still a viable entrance. She crosses the apartment lobby and enters the stairwell, and begins to move through the floors. When she hears voices on their way down, energetic and echoing, she pulls her cap down low and ducks into a doorway that's not her destination. She waits for the disturbance to subside, traipsing past her, and she makes no sound when she's back scaling the steps.

This woman, Barra Kane, must be more capable than she seems. Brooke wants to know how much she's held back from Seager—if he knows his lover's being paid to keep him safe. Brooke also wants to know if becoming intimate with the man was part of Barra's orders.

Or did she fall for him? Back in the woman's apartment yesterday, Brooke found pictures of the man—regular photos, not illicit or voyeuristic or anything—squirreled away in her things. Nevertheless, it could all be an act, but Brooke's not completely sure. Her spotting gear wasn't what gave her away; Brooke's been in this woman's position before, with Benson.

During the war, Brooke had been his handler. To him, she was simply his partner. To her, he was her ward and she always had one unspoken, standing obligation: if given the order by Rachel (their operational Six, in charge thousands of miles away), put Benson down. Such was the volatile nature of their experimental program—surety, results. She never needed to, but she monitored him like this. She didn't tell him or screw up or anything, but he was always distrustful and found out anyway that she wasn't on the level. They were lovers, but it's become doubtful to Brooke they were ever in love—if Benson is just another memory from before she doesn't really remember.

Or perhaps Benson knew all along her hidden purpose, and their time together meant just a little bit more to her than it did to him—because here she is still thinking about him—and that makes her somehow weaker or more foolish. It's a poisonous thought. But Seager's helpless like a boy, not an assassin like Benson was. His protector's task is nobler than Brooke's ever was—unless Barra Kane has that same order, to suddenly turn on Seager on command because her employer, this interested third party, has found a way or reason to rid themselves of him, the financial and resource drain he appears to be. And if that was the case, would she go through with it? What kind of woman is Barra Kane? What kind of woman is this person Brooke's about to meet if that answer is yes?

Brooke tugs on a pair of leather gloves that feel perfect on her, not knowing what she might be walking into. She and Domenic might have been made, but in a game of pure posturing so far, Brooke's striking the first bloody blow. She'll try to take Barra alive if she gets the jump on her, but if their roles were reversed, Brooke wouldn't let herself fall into the woman's hands without a fight, no fucking way. Why should she expect differently? She attaches a mean looking suppressor to her 9mm that she concealed inside her jacket as she walks down the corridor towards the apartment suite. Without breaking her step, she bends over and grabs a tubby mail package from off the ground from some other tenant and drops it in front of the Barra's door, an enticing fisheye lure.

She knocks on the door and stands way off to the side, her pistol overly comfy in her palm. She hears muffled clumps of bare feet on an old, squeaky floor nearing.

When the door pulls open, though, the hallway is empty. Barra herself ventures out and looks down both ends, mystified, but she's certain she's alone. She picks up the package and she's annoyed when she reads the shipping label.

Brooke thunders down the stairwell away, continually looking back over her shoulder, her hand still tucked inside her jacket. Her eardrums are still ringing from when Domenic—only seconds ago—came in over the line with a hoarse shout of "Brooklyn, stop stop stop, abort and get out of there!"

Her mouth drawn into a severe line, she's too preoccupied on fleeing to make a fuss so she lets him explain himself while she nearly bounds from landing to landing.

"You said track Seager, I know. He's still in bed. I was watching her—I was watching you. She was mucking about with her binoculars with her foot outside, having a smoke. She wasn't paying attention—she only had eyes on Seager. You disappeared, and when I saw her get up and check the door, she'd a look on her face, like she wasn't expecting visitors. I knew you'd gone for it. Christ. Maybe she's the tail, and it's even possible she isn't. But we get nothing if we take her now. It might even undo everything instead. So we leave her in play, yeah? Work around her knowing full well that she's there—intel doesn't stop being intel. We're still in this, Fields. Still in it."

Brooke barrels through the laundry room door and stumbles back out into the freedom of the day-lit alley where she catches herself against the opposite wall. All sound subsides back here. She lets go a long exhale laced with frustration and a choked note that's maybe something like puzzled relief. She's not winded, but she still feels like she's been knocked on her back, overcome. Her eyes dart around as she retakes hold, and the rustle of traffic gradually comes back to her.

"Brooke?" Domenic asks.

"Yeah," she says, sucking back gulps of air. "Yeah."

"Are you all right?"

After a moment, she says "I'll see you at home" and wrenches out her earpiece.

#

Her walk back is loopy, through the length of the beach and across town. She needs to calm down. She's angry at herself, mostly, because she almost ruined everything. Domenic was skittish the night before, understandably when he thought they were already dead people. She took a defiant gamble then and it paid off (they are still alive—no one came to kill them) but that was a situation she's used to being in: no exit, no way out but through. The day lacks the clarity of night, of Domenic in his chair, his cigarettes and his pistol, the door that was the only way in and out. Bad guys.

If all was already lost, it wasn't really much of a gamble to begin with but Domenic was partly right: you control this or you don't. You know everything there is to know or you're as good as knowing nothing. (Partial truths are by their own omission not the Truth, if truth is absolute.) It's costly to make a decision with anything less; catastrophic, with misinformation deliberate and malevolent. Brooke still doesn't know who the woman, Seager's lover, really is. She still doesn't know who Seager really is. This whole thing is murky and lagoonish. It's simple when you break it down into steps (Seager must live...) and don't think about it too much, like putting on huge blinders and pulling them tight with your own two hands. There are gaps only Rachel can fill in, but those gaps let Brooke and Domenic act the way they're supposed to, doors down a mile long hallway closed for their sake. Brooke can't be Rachel, and Rachel can't be Brooke. They need each other. That's what she keeps telling herself, at least.

When she comes back to the road she comes to the big, shouted sounds of a Saturday market, and she decides to investigate. It's barely noon and she thinks Domenic likely has things under control. Brooke goes from stall to lively stall running her hands over things delicate and fleshy and sweet-smelling. A woman crimps doughy pasta into piles. A man paints a gently decaying fishing boat moored to a cracked pier, nearly finished. Someone watching from over his shoulder makes an offer for it, and a small gathered crowd applauds. The noise draws Brooke and other curious tourists closer but when she sees Seager himself with the canvas, grinning at the attention, she peels off, head ducked.

She glances over her shoulder. She swears Seager is looking right at her. Not good. He shields the oily paint with his body as he bumbles his way out of the circle of onlookers. Brooke slips between two stalls and looks for a way out. She checks out his reflection in a shop window she passes—Seager is stumbling down the road after her, but his is a walk of intrigue, like he's figuring out the best way to say hello maybe because she's trying so hard to get away from him. But with his pace, he's counting on the chance that they may bump into one another when she comes to a stop she thinks.

When she hides, she is in part hiding from Domenic who will be either nearby or watching from the apartment. She is tired of letting him down. Brooke backs into a shop while Seager passes by casually looking everywhere. The door opens, and a jittery bell overtop lets out a panicked, strangled sound as Brooke's hand shoots up near her head and firmly stops it from giving her up.

The store is empty but she's surrounded by hundreds of clocks, antique and woodcarved, on shelves and lining the narrow walls. She's surrounded by the nattering clicks they make, a sensory engulfing feeling like dunking your head underwater to disappear for a while. Brooke peers out the window past a curtain and sees Seager outside, meandering. She makes herself thin. There's a trickling of stony beads near the back and Brooke's first instinct is to reach for her weapon, but she sees it's only an older woman with thinning black hair and suspicious eyes who appears—with her denim apron she's probably the store owner.

Brooke consciously drops her hand by her side and pretends to browse the displays. All the while she keeps an eye out the window. She smiles and says hi when the store owner does it first, but she doesn't venture farther away where she doesn't have eyes on Seager. The woman approaches her from behind, cautiously, Brooke thinks, judging by her footsteps when she hears them. The way she does this, with her bony hands gently outstretched, makes her look as if she's reassuring her she means no harm.

Brooke clears her throat. "Trouble with a boy," she says, pointing through the glass.

The woman glances out the window, then slyly draws the curtain shut. She even flips around the open sign.

"Don't," Brooke tells her. "It's a busy day in the market."

"It's not busy in here," the store owner replies. "Sit with me." Her accent is slight and clean sounding, audibly managed, without a forceful haphazardness Brooke has encountered with other residents.

They go to the back counter, and the woman calls up some stairs in Greek before taking her place on a stool. Brooke sits opposite her, looking out of place in her killing clothes but somehow feeling this subtle sanctuary warmth the shop seems to exude. The oldness of everything plays a part, taking her back. It makes her drowsy.

"I shouldn't be taking up any of your time like this," Brooke says. "It's very kind of you, but he should be gone by now."

"The trouble with boys is that they are remarkably persistent," the woman says. "In your case, he will stand there with his painting in the hot sun until his doubt gradually overtakes his willpower."

Brooke tries to keep doe-eyed, but she has a feeling she has underestimated this lady clockmaker like she has Domenic. While she spoke to Brooke, she slid on her glasses and resumed doing whatever she was doing before this disruption, her fingers carefully probing the insides of a dissected clock mechanism, tinkering. She has a sharp, all-knowing gaze that leaps up at Brooke, probing her too, when she asks, "What should I call you?"

"Brooklyn," she says, still feeling meek, like she's being compelled.

"I'm Evadine."

"Evadine, do you make all these?" Brooke stares at the rows of clocks around them.

"Every one."

"They're beautiful."

"But also flawed. If you know where to look," Evadine says. "The burden of creation."

"They look impeccable."

Evadine says, "You might see just a pretty face, but I see wounds. Places I slipped. Of lapsed judgment. Moments that remind us we're all just human." She fosters for a second a mesmerizing, deliberate smile.

"Show me," Brooke says. She points to one close by, a grainy mango wood hand-carved design.

Evadine shakes her head. "That is my secret to keep, paidi mou. If you found out, what would you do with the knowledge? Other than a change in your perspective, what do you gain? Would you use it against me? Blackmail me?"

Brooke leans away, taken aback. "Of course not."

"Then you're kind-hearted, or a liar. There are people like me, who know what to look for because we have years on our side, but they are people who look for these weaknesses, yes? Who would find some way to use it to their advantage. Watch out for these people. Maybe this you already know."

"If you're convinced all of your work isn't perfect, does it disappoint you, seeing this?"

"On the contrary. It's the imperfections that give them character," Evadine says. She bows her head over the one she has opened up in front of her and listens. "This one has a heart murmur. My anxious little one."

Brooke quiets, but she doesn't know what to listen for.

Evadine says, "I might try and fix it. Locate the bad part. But if it's a fundamental defect, then that is much more work for me. Sometimes it is not worth the effort."

"What happens then?" Brooke asks, but she knows the answer.

Evadine finds a hammer in a basket of tools and when she brings it all the way back behind her head, Brooke's Spartan hand whips forward—involuntarily, but something makes her want to do it—as to take the hit intended for the no-good machine. But Evadine keeps her blunt tool suspended. She never took her eyes off Brooke. She says, "It depends on the mood I am in. If I am feeling volatile or not."

Brooke doesn't move her hand until Evadine puts hers down, a slow hostage exchange. When she does, Brooke says quickly, "The sound would carry."

"My mistake." Evadine reaches inside the troubled clock and plucks free something, and the ticking dies there on the countertop abruptly. She studies Brooke's baffled face that she tries to hide so to not look so glum or horrified. Impassive, she tells her, "But what use have I a clock that does not tell time?"

Brooke looks bizarrely shell-shocked still and Evadine thinks she somehow broke her.

"It's not alive, Brooklyn."

There's a rattle by the stairs and a boy comes down carrying a wooden tray laden with tea and cups. Evadine relieves him of the load and touches his cheek and kisses him. They share an incoherent but resolute back and forth, and he disappears into the backroom after casting a suspicious look at Brooke. The bead curtain swishes and clacks behind him but Brooke hears, when she strains, the open and close of a back door, the boy evacuating the shop because he must have been told to.

Evadine pours tea ponderously for both of them, grasping the boiled kettle with two hands like a weapon. When she speaks again to Brooke, she begins to sound as if Greek was a second language for her. It's a subtle change, distantly German, but Brooke detects it—her overt menace too. Point blank, this Evadine demands: "What are you doing here?"

"I'm a tourist," Brooke says.

"Who are you hiding from?"

"You've seen him."

Evadine says, "Then he is the one in danger—from you. Are you going to kill him?"

"That's my secret to keep."

"Does he deserve it?"

"What if he does?" Brooke lets that hang there. With her efficient matter-of-factness, Evadine doesn't sound critical of Brooke, instead rapt, like she wants to hear gossip. But Brooke's come to her own conclusions about Evadine as well. She's not an outlier. She is from Rachel's generation—a survivor of the war. You don't need to go far to find someone who fought, on the frontlines or not. Brooke is positive Evadine has killed before: she is somewhere in between Rachel, cruel and composed; and Domenic, the rough handed thug, the cleaner.

Evadine sets down her kettle with a graceless clonk, without drawing out any more tension, and Brooke settles back in her seat like how you'd ease your finger from a trigger.

Intrigued, Evadine says, "You are too deadly to be just a woman with a gun." Brooke feels self-conscious again, her tucked away pistol a monstrous growth on her breast to Evadine's hard stare. Or she simply caught her twitched movement earlier because she knew what to look for. Perhaps she even knows what Brooke is. She has been testing her, after all. She asks, "You're on assignment, are you not?"

Brooke says, "That's none of your business."

"That is true."

"So why are you asking me?"

"Professional curiosity."

"What did you do during the war?"

"I made bombs," Evadine says, before putting her teacup to her thin lips.

Brooke is surprised at how forward she is, but she can see it—her in a cluttered shop like this, decades younger and hunched over miscellaneous pieces she painstakingly puts together, all precision and focus, expressionless behind her relic coke-bottle glasses, a russet cigarette tucked behind an ear. She's the secretive contractor, of course. ONI's used people like her before. They've used bombs made by people like her. It doesn't mean that she is ONI, though, or that her loyalties even lie with the UNSC.

When Brooke says to her, after thinking for a moment, "Who for?" Evadine just smiles. Brooke snaps, "Now you want to hold back? Why tell me at all?"

"For me the war is over. For many the war is over. I don't think you'll tell me, but I want to know why it is you're still fighting. Still a soldier."

Evadine doesn't get an answer. Brooke takes a teacup and lets the steam waft over her eyelids. "Is he your son?" she says to Evadine of the boy outside.

"Grandson."

"And what about your children?"

"He had a mother."

"I'm sorry."

"She was off-world. Nine years ago now... in Argjend."

Brooke thinks back to headlines she skimmed whenever she had free time (when Seager was napping, often) and recalls a socio-economic and historical "Now It Can Be Told" piece in a magazine regarding the problem colony New Cadiz. She says, "In the terror attack? The riots?"

"Auto accident." Evadine's short response is devastating in its own way. Too common, and too real that it catches Brooke off-guard. Everything is like a dream again: Domenic and waiting for an imagined hit squad, even her escape that morning, exhilarating now and free from the sick feeling of fear—any feeling at all. They're just images that she can barely get right and none of it feels real compared to this: the weight she feels in Evadine's surly voice, her remembered (or never forgotten) sorrow that's been in place for nine years.

When she finishes her tea, she gets another glimpse of reality as the front door flies open and both women look up, distracted. A man blows through, in his thirties, long-haired and scraggly, his jeans crusty with house paint. He gets into a harsh conversation with Evadine, pointing at the front of the store.

Then with evident restraint Evadine tells him, "I am with a customer."

He glares at Brooke, then throws his hands up and drifts past the counter, into the backroom. Brooke smells the booze and liquorice paint thinner coming off him. She looks down at her hands while he rummages around loudly. When he reappears, Evadine says, "Why don't you say hello to Thaddy, Nicholaos? He's playing outside."

"I will see him later," he says, as he heads out. "Keep the store open, Eva."

In such a raspy, defeated way, Evadine says to Brooke, "This is what she leaves me."

Brooke takes off shortly after Nicholaos does. Evadine walks her to the front door and tells her to stop by whenever she'd like, if she's still around. Brooke thanks her; she grasps Evadine's hands and touches her cheeks to hers, but when she pulls back, the woman is no longer the eloquent mystery she'd started out as. Instead she's just aged, succumbing to the ticking clocks that envelope her, every second an objective reminder of a mortal countdown. She used to make bombs. She's retired now.

#

When Brooke gets back to the safehouse, Domenic takes her by the hand and they dance through the apartment barefoot. He's already opened a bottle of wine.

"While you were having a day out, my sweet, I might have done it," he says. "Glory be, I might have found them."

"You made Seager's tails? Domenic!"

"We'll need another day to be certain, but I've a good feeling. I think you might've spooked our girl up in the Seer's Tower, unfathomably, to our advantage. She's a little jumpy tonight."

"And the king?" Brooke smirks.

"Still in the castle, love." Domenic dips her, sort of.

When Domenic goes to sleep that night, Brooke takes a seat behind the binoculars and wraps herself in a blanket. She can only watch the mark for so long before she makes a few adjustments and finds a tiny clock shop out there down by the pier with a light on inside.

Brooke is struck by today. Soon, she and Domenic will have to do what they came to Kyklos to do, pull off an amazing, daring raid and haul a man back to their safe house. Soon she will be faced with men with guns and she'll need to shoot them first. She doubts she'll feel anything after, because she'll be caught in the moment and then they'll be nothing to her. Only a far-flung, remembered scene: faces, blood specks—it happened, but so what? She doesn't need to deal with the fallout or the pain that comes after the initial, shocking blow that somehow numbs because it's so sudden. She knows how to make people cry out, coaxing from them an ever-present response called pain, but to her it's just one more thing to take advantage of, to get results she wants—and, if Rachel was to be believed, to save the world, sometimes.

Soon they'll be on their way. Soon she'll continue living this extraordinary life, doing extraordinary things. And Seager, his life couldn't be any more opposite of hers. She thinks he's living a fake life full of fake people, trapped inside the man-made confines of time and routine.

She's drawn back to the shop because she feels she has witnessed living for the first time since waking up—the volatility of it and popular problems. The feeling that there are things beyond her control, and not in the hands of anyone else either, only the universe.

Brooke has thought before that this whole thing, kidnapping Seager, feels like a game, like an upscale production. These are their taped down marks, everyone and everything in their rightful place. Here are their cues: Seager will sleep at 1am and wake up and leave his villa at 11.

When they kidnap him in a couple days, it'll be a pretty major disruption he'll need to contend with for a while. But they do need him alive, and if all goes well, according to some brilliant masterplan only Rachel knows, they'll let him go.

Soon it'll all be over, and Seager will go back to this. His fake life that's put on pause momentarily will just resume.