On her first morning in the bunker, Kim awoke with a dream of Shane lingering in her head.

She scowled at herself in the mirror in her tiny bathroom before putting on her makeup.

It had been a good dream, and that was what infuriated her. She and Shane had been on the floor in front of the fireplace, and the light had flickered and danced over his naked body as he kissed her neck and slid his hand between her legs.

All the things he no doubt did with her sister now.

She knew what had prompted it, too. For months, Shane had refused to let her touch him at all. When Shane had pulled her father out of the raging river, she'd run to hug him, as she would have hugged anyone who had just saved the life of someone she loved. Somehow the subtlety of Shane's rejection, the tiny hand gesture that had meant do not touch me, had made it all the more painful.

Shane actually had hugged her a few days before when she'd played Lawrence's humiliating tape.

I find her so, so entertaining. Kimberly believes that she's a judge of human nature, and yet I had no difficulty convincing her that it was the pills the caused my behavior. I used to stay up nights worry that Kimberly would figure out I stopped taking those pills months before my wedding night, but she never suspected a thing. She believed everything I told her. No one else did, but she did.

She supposed that she'd just looked so pathetic that Shane had been moved to break his own no-touching rule.

But then, last night, he had danced with her. Oh, he'd scolded her for no reason and complained about everything short of her mere existence, but he'd pressed her against his chest, and that had made her body remember things.

She decided to skip breakfast. She didn't want to see Shane, and she was reasonably sure that he'd skipped dinner the night before and therefore wouldn't be skipping breakfast, too. During their marriage, she'd often claimed that he wouldn't eat at all if she didn't drag him out of his ISA room, but presumably he would remember to eat once in a while while they were stuck at the training center.

Besides, from what she understood, the trek from her room to the dining hall was hardly worth it. Halfway around the bunker, up one flight of stairs and then down two flights, more twists and turns than she felt like memorizing at the moment.

On the other hand, the lecture hall was just over the bridge from her room. (The "bridge," of course, was just one more slab of concrete overlooking other slabs of concrete on a lower floor. Why there was a hole requiring a bridge was anyone's guess. It seemed neither practical nor aesthetically pleasing.)

Shane awoke long before the dining hall opened for breakfast. A few hours of troubled sleep had made his headache recede somewhat, but hadn't made his stomach any less empty.

He dressed while he considered the best plan of attack for getting himself into the kitchen before it opened, deciding that simply using the main door and waiting until the kitchen workers' backs were turned was the way to go.

It was almost disappointing when he found that the dining hall's door had been propped open and half a dozen senior agents— including Tarrington himself— were gathered around a table. By the look of it, none of them had been to bed at all. It was Dai Brown who caught his eye and invited him in. Dai was a senior agent who specialized in all things related to the Soviet Union, and, considering what Shane had seen on Tarrington's desk the day before, there was little doubt as to what the all-night discussion had entailed.

"Close the door behind you, Shane," said Tarrington pleasantly. "The next person who wanders by may not have your security clearance."

"Why was the door propped?" asked Shane, because that was more polite than asking why they were having a classified conversation in the dining hall.

"So our impromptu waiter could come and go with the coffee," said Dai cheerfully, and he pointed Shane toward the carafe and the stack of cups. Shane didn't need to be asked twice.

"We spent most of the night in my office with the door locked," Tarrington added, and Shane had to admit that it was good of Tarrington to assuage Shane's unspoken concerns without taking offense. "We're really just talking about the situation in broad strokes now. Any agents who may or may not be going in and coming out remain anonymous."

Going in? There was going to be a coup in Moscow sooner rather than later, and while the chaos would provide some sort of cover, any mission would be breathtakingly dangerous.

Exciting, absolutely.

A suicide mission, quite probably.

He didn't need to explain that to Dai or Tarrington or the others, though, and the conversation shifted to the day's class schedule. Most of the trainees would be subjected to lectures all morning, which meant that most of the senior agents in attendance would be free to spend their time as they pleased.

"It's always fun to see the physical fitness exams," said Dai. "I'll help out there this afternoon if they need me. And watch from behind the mirror if they don't."

"No taking bets on who passes," said Tarrington mildly, and the others pretended to agree.

"May I have access to the trainees' files?" Shane asked. Asking was a formality. He would find a way to review the files with or without permission, but perhaps he would take the easy route.

Tarrington casually tossed a disk in Shane's direction. "Bring it back to my office when you're done."

"Thank you."

Tarrington nodded, and listened quietly as Dai and the others debated the merits of Jaren Stroud and Gary Rogers, the trainees said to have the most potential.

At long last, they were called back to the kitchen, and Shane fell ravenously on the training center's best approximation of a full English breakfast.

He considered waiting for Kim, and making certain that she was able to get to her first class on time, but decided against it. He didn't actually care if she missed Gabrielle's lecture, and he wasn't in the mood for another argument. And so he left the dining hall half an hour before it officially opened, the disk of trainee background files burning a hole in his pocket.

Although she waited until the last minute to swipe herself into Gabrielle's lecture hall, Kim found the room only half-full.

"Congratulations, Kimberly," said Gabrielle as Kim took a seat beside Jaren Stroud and Trevor Conor, two young men she'd met the night before. "You are the last one to make it here on time."

A wave of chuckles, some nervous and some self-satisfied, passed through the room.

"We won't be waiting for the others," Gabrielle continued. "In the field, your contacts don't care if you didn't leave early enough to compensate for your terrible sense of direction. In fact, in the field, you can't count about anyone caring about you at all. That's why we're going to tell the story of Amelia, Pierre, and Georges. But not yet. First, I'm going to remind you that anyone captured while engaged in espionage does not enjoy prisoner of war status…"

Gabrielle spoke for an hour about international law as it applied, or didn't apply, to spies. She gave the class a break and then resumed her lecture.

"Now," she began, "we don't know Amelia's full name. What we know is that she was Belgian by birth and volunteered to work with the Office of Strategic Services when Germany occupied her country in 1940. In 1944, Amelia parachuted into a field with two other agents. Their names were Pierre and Georges. They landed near the Belgian-German border and planned to work their way into the German interior to see whether the troops were moving.

"Georges disappeared before they landed, and Pierre and Amelia, fearing that he was hurt, searched the field for him. They held hands, pretending to be lovers out for an illicit stroll. Romantic, right? Romantic until a group of armed German soldiers turned on the floodlights.

"They strip-searched Pierre and Amelia. It won't surprise you to learn that Amelia had a revolver strapped to her leg under her skirt. It also won't surprise you to learn that once the soldiers had Amelia's skirt up, they didn't want to put it back down. Pierre tried to protect Amelia's virtue, so they knocked him unconscious with the butt of a rifle."

Gabrielle paused to meet the eyes of each of the women in the class. There were four: Kim, a middle-aged woman who had the hard look of career law enforcement, Joan, and a pale redhead who looked to be in her mid-twenties.

"Four of the soldiers took turns raping Amelia by the side of the road. They raped her until she passed out."

Until that moment, Kim had been imagining Amelia as looking like a nurse at the hospital, the only woman named Amelia she knew in real life. Now she was imagining the story's Amelia as herself, which she was sure had been Gabrielle's intention.

"When Amelia awoke, she was on the floor of a cell. And I don't mean the bedrooms here in the training center that some of you don't like very much. I mean a room that was empty with the exception of a bucket. I'll let you figure out what the bucket was for.

"Amelia reached for the cyanide pill that she'd hidden in her hair. That was when she realized that her head had been shaved.

"She looked around and saw that Pierre and Georges were in the cells next to hers. She didn't know whether to be pleased or sorry that they were alive.

"The German soldiers interrogated them. It was standard stuff. They ripped out Pierre's fingernails. They put electrodes on Georges' testicles and shocked him. Finally, they had Amelia watch as they tied raw meat to her friends' bodies and set a pack of hungry dogs on them. As Pierre was lying in a pool of his own blood, he kicked one of the guards who came too close. The guard shot him, of course. That was the end for Pierre. He was the lucky one."

Beside Kim, Jaren was clenching his jaw and Trevor was white as a sheet.

Kim reminded herself that she'd heard stories like this before. Law enforcement ran in her family's blood. Some of the children she'd met at the abuse clinic had been subjected to atrocious acts of sadism without the excuse of a war.

"The next time the guards came into Amelia's cell to rape her, she bit one of them and refused to let go. They beat her. They punched her and kicked her and whipped her. She'd hoped that they would kill her liked they'd killed Pierre. But they wouldn't give her the satisfaction. They kept her alive, and after an hour they put her in restraints and ripped out her teeth one by one as punishment."

The red-haired young woman cried out and fled the room. Kim looked around; no one seemed inclined to chase her. Kim stood up. She didn't know what was in the redhead's past, but whatever she was thinking now, it wasn't right for her to be thinking it all by herself.

"Sit back down, Agent Brady," said Gabrielle.

"I can't handle it," Kim lied.

"You can and you will," said Gabrielle. "If you leave, you will be disobeying a direct order from your instructor, and you will not be invited to remain for the rest of the training session. I assume you have your reasons for being here, but if not, by all means, see if you can find her."

Kim realized then that she'd missed her opportunity when she's hesitated. She would have to be very, very lucky to guess which of the myriad identical corridors the redhead had taken.

She lowered herself back into her seat. Trevor brushed his hand over her arm and she tried her hardest to smile reassuringly at him.

Gabrielle was still staring at her. "My apologies for the delay, Agent Pascal. Please continue."

Gabrielle nodded and resumed her story. "Despite all of this, Amelia wouldn't tell her captors anything. They transferred her to the Dachau concentration camp. Does anyone need me to describe what happened at Dachau?"

Kim thought that it was Joan who had the presence of mind to call out "No thank you, Agent Pascal."

"In April 1945, American forces liberated Dachau. Georges was gone by then, but Amelia still couldn't seem to die. They brought her to a barracks. There was no hair left on her body. Her skin was grey. Her eyes had sunk into black pits. Since she had no teeth, her mouth had fallen in on her gums.

"Still, it seemed, the general himself recognized her when he came to tour Dachau. He promised that he would take her to a real hospital, that she would rest and be strong again, that the war was all but over and she had survived.

"And the OSS did see that she received excellent medical care. She was able to return to Belgium. Everyone told her that she would start a new life, and she seemed to agree.

"Within a year, they found her hanging from a rope tied to a rod in her closet."

Gabrielle's eyes swept over them imperiously. "If you thought that joining the ISA would be a little more like James Bond and a little less like Georges, Pierre, and Amelia, please feel free to withdraw from the course today without reprimand. There are many other ways of finding adventure and making the world a better place. Now, to get back to the dining hall for lunch, turn left out of this classroom and go down two flights of stairs. Turn right and follow the tunnel until it curves 180 degrees. I believe they're serving chicken sandwiches today."

Kim was impressed that none of her classmates threw up on the spot.

Shane spent most of the morning locked in a communications room skimming through the trainees' files. There was little of note, and he wouldn't have bothered but for the real subject of his interest: Joan Pascal. She was almost exactly Eve's age, and she looked so very much like Gabrielle that Shane would've been a fool not to wonder about her parentage.

He'd lost track of how many casual encounters he'd had just after losing Emma. He'd confessed to Peach using the most flowery language at his disposal: I touched their flesh, but not their souls. Peach hadn't needed him to draw her more of a picture. He'd been young and bursting at the seams with testosterone. Thanks to his looks and his station in life, a veritable parade of women— one of whom had been Gabrielle— had accepted his offer of sex, with no expectation of anything more.

He hadn't done anything wrong, not really; he hadn't taken any woman other than Kim to bed since he'd first laid eyes on her. But in dark moments, he periodically wondered whether Eve might not be the only child he'd unknowingly fathered with a woman he'd never seen again.

It just hadn't occurred to him to wonder whether Eve might not be the only child he'd fathered with Gabrielle. And he knew from experience that he couldn't count on Gabrielle to share the truth with him.

Joan's file, though, assuaged his concerns entirely. There were photographs of the entire extended family, and it was obvious that both Joan and Gabrielle favored Gabrielle's own mother. The birth records made it clear that Joan had been born in New York two weeks before Eve's birth in England. There were, indeed, far too many photographs and records for anything to have been fraudulent.

Satisfied, he ejected the disk from the computer and walked it back to Tarrington's office.

He wasn't entirely surprised to find Tarrington bidding farewell to a slender young red-haired woman he recognized from her file as Misha Fields. Her intelligence could not be denied, but nothing else in her background suggested that she was prepared for life as a field agent.

Tarrington accepted the disk without comment. "Shane, we have a car coming to bring Misha to Dulles in ten minutes or so. Please make certain that she makes her connection."

"Yes, Chief Tarrington," Shane replied formally. He could see Misha starting to object that she did not require an escort, and then registering that the escort was for the ISA's protection rather than her own.

Shane guided Misha through the front lobby, past the myriad cameras, and out to a stone bench by the driveway. "Are you all right?" he asked her at last. Choosing to drop out of the program after one day sounded unpleasant. Not that he would know. He couldn't imagine having done such a thing.

"I've never failed at anything so spectacularly in my life," said Misha with a valiant attempt at a smile.

"I've seen your file. I can believe that that's true."

"Is it true what Chief Tarrington said? That if in twenty years I magically became better at this, the ISA would consider me again?"

"Absolutely." He didn't tell her that magic would have nothing to do with it; it would be life itself that might harden her edges enough to increase her tolerance for the sacrifices demanded by the ISA. "Some of the finest agents I ever met joined the ISA later in life."

"That's nice," she said softly, staring up the road as if willing the car to come more quickly.

"Was it the story about Amelia that made you change your mind?" he asked curiously. The story was ugly, and true, but it hardly ought to have told anyone inside the training center anything she didn't already know.

"Yes and no. I already had doubts, and that— being in that room confirmed them."

That made sense, at least. "Better to have your doubts confirmed now than later."

She nodded her agreement, still looking very sad, as the car finally rounded the bend and came to a halt. Shane loaded Misha's bags into the trunk and watched until the car pulled out of sight.

For most of the students, the afternoon class was physical fitness exam. Kim, however, had been told that due to her particular circumstances she need not demonstrate an ability to climb a rope or throw a softball. Instead, she was to meet with the psychologist for an evaluation.

She laughed to herself. As if the organization that had historically had so very much trouble telling her whether the people she loved were dead or alive cared about her mental well-being. Still, it was good to get a reminder every so often of what it felt like to be on the other side of a counselor's questions.

The doctor introduced himself and thanked her for arriving on time before launching into a series of questions that he had clearly asked dozens of times already that day."Within the last two years, have you been physically assaulted?"

The odd thing was that she needed to pause and count. Lawrence had made a fool out of her, had used her in every way including sexually, but had he physically assaulted her? No. But it had still been less than two years since Cal had kidnapped her, somehow less than two years since Shane's memory had returned and they'd had a blissful reunion that had turned out to be a mirage.

"Yes," was all she said to the doctor. She reminded herself that she ought to look remotely interested when she asked the children who came to the abuse clinic this kind of question. She thought that she did. Didn't she?

"In the past month, have you had nightmares about that?"

"No," she said. She hardly had time to have nightmares about Cal when she could have nightmares about Lawrence and his virus.

"Have you gone out of your way to avoid situations that remind you of the events?"

"No." She hadn't had to. Shane might have sworn never to forgive her, but he'd made very sure that there were no traces of Cal left in Salem.

"Do you feel constantly on guard and watchful?"

"Not constantly," she decided. She'd probably have been better off if she'd been a little more on her guard around Lawrence. She'd known better. She'd known better, and she'd let herself get taken in anyway, not because her head was full of Cal but because her head was full of Shane and Kayla.

"Have you recently felt numb or detached from people, activities, or your surroundings?"

"No." Again, the doctor accepted the one-word answer.

"Do you ever feel guilty or unable to stop blaming yourself or others for the events or the problems the events may have caused?"

It should have been easy to say "no" one more time. But in that moment, she was tired of lying. Tired of lying about her relationship with Lawrence. Tired of lying about Bo and the virus. Tired of lying, as appropriate, about how she thought that Shane and Kayla were consenting adults and their relationship was none of her business.

She must have thought about the question for too long, because the doctor repeated it. "Do you ever feel guilty or unable to stop blaming yourself or others for the events or the problems the events may have caused?"

"All the time," she whispered. "Every day."

She'd let herself be convinced that Shane was dead when she'd known in her heart that he wasn't.

She'd let Cal into the bed she'd shared with Shane.

She'd shot Shane. The fact that he hadn't held it against her somehow made it even worse.

She'd barely given Shane a word of explanation when she'd left for California, when she'd decided to choose her daughter over her husband.

She'd become attached to Lawerence and had nearly destroyed the case against him.

And she blamed Shane for moving on from her instead of following her to California and offering to accept Jeannie as his own.

And she blamed Kayla for pursuing Shane and rallying their family to support her in her quest.

"Do you blame yourself or do you blame others?" The doctor prompted her.

"Both."

"That's normal."

"I know."

"I see that you have a significant background in psychiatric work yourself," doctor said, still not terribly interested. "Is there anything you'd like to discuss?"

"Not particularly."

He waved a dismissive hand. "Then you're free to go."

"Thank you, doctor," she said as politely as she could.

She returned to her room. Where else was she going to go? She had no desire to explore the unending concrete corridors.

She had just settled onto her bed with the binder of study materials— tomorrow's classes focused on lock picking, knot tying, and quickly searching a room, and she expected to do well and even learn some new skills— when there was a knock at her door.

"Kimberly?" Against her better judgment, she felt a thrill of joy when she heard Shane's voice. The last time she'd seen him, he'd accused her of, well, something at the opening reception. The time before that, he'd thrown her off of his plane. Overall, he'd gone out of his way to avoid her since insisting that it was absolutely essential that he accompany her on this so-called training mission. And when he had seen her, he'd made it abundantly clear that he loathed being in her presence.

But the idea that he had known that she was alone and had come to find her still made something inside of her sing.

She threw open the door.

He smiled warmly.

It was the smile that gave him away, and that was what broke her heart.

"Hello, Drew."

To be continued.

Note/Disclaimer: The story of Georges, Pierre, and Amelia was taken from The Dirty Tricks Department by John Lisle, which cites the memoirs of Robert Alcorn. That story gives the female spy's name as Adrienne; I switched it to Amelia because the the use of the name Adrienne in a Days story set in this time period felt distracting.