Matt glared at Jani. “Answer the question.”

    She shrugged and tossed her hair over her shoulder, “Or what? You'll 'make another exception?'”

    Matt took a step towards her, “Listen you little-”

    That was when Joey stepped up behind him. “That would be a really, really, really, bad idea.”

          Matt jumped and spun around, “you too?”

Joey put his hands in the air, “I'm unarmed.” This was not quite true, he

had at least half a dozen weapons concealed on his person. Not that he had any intention of using them. It would be better that way. “Look, let's just talk this out.”

“Oh, talk!” spat Matt, “you want to TALK?! Maybe you should have thought of that before you almost knocked me unconscious!!!”

Jani shrugged innocently, “he started it.”

“I don't care who started it!” snapped Joey, feeling a lot like his mom. It was a scary feeling. He took a deep breath and reminded himself what was at stake. “Okay,” he said, “we are going to use our INSIDE voices and not our fists.” He sent an exaggerated glance at Jani. She took the hint.

Sitting down to look less threatening, she glanced up at Matt. She did not like having to look up at people, which was one of the reasons she wore thick-soled shoes. The other was that she found them very useful for cracking people's toes. “How old are you?” she asked, directing the question at Matt.

“What?”

“How. Old. Are. You.”

Matt goggled at Jani, “You dragged me out here, and now you want to know how old I am!?!?”

“It's a long story.”

“Tell it!”

Jani and Joey looked at each other and nodded simultaneously. Joey turned to Matt, “Okay.”

Matt sat down hard. They were spies. At least they said they were. After their explanation, he had almost burst out laughing. Then he had remembered what Jani had done, without even breaking a sweat. Could the story be true? Matt told himself it was lunacy, but he couldn't suppress a small voice at the back of his mind that whispered otherwise. And they wanted him, HIM, to take them on a train. Not just any train, a train to California. He had explained how he was eighteen, how he had just aged out of foster care and was looking for a job. He had explained that no one would look for him. They had also handed him a wad of money with advice not to look into its past. If half of what they told him was true, that was good advice. Of course they said it would be dangerous, and deadly, but Matt only pretended to listen to that part. He had always been a dare-devil. Then they handed him a gun. When he asked how they knew he wouldn't shoot them, Jani calmly explained that then he would die a slow and painful death. He believed her. When he looked up they were staring expectantly at him. There was only one thing he could think to say: “Yes.”

Chapter two: Infiltration

        Matt woke in the middle of the night, sweating despite the cold. He struggled to recall a rapidly fading dream; he, Joey and Jani had been running from...from..he couldn't remember. He couldn't help but feel that if he stayed with the others something awful would happen. It was as if the night had sucked out all of his resolve. He took hold of his bag and quietly opened the tent flap. They had camped in the woods, next to a stream. The train station opened in the morning. It would be easy to slip away...he made it a few yards before something tackled him. He went down with a strangled, “Blargh!” That was when he realized the something was a person. A person named Jani in fact. Obviously trying to prevent him from doing exactly what he was doing. He decided to try one more thing, “Can't a guy do his business in private?!”

Jani was unimpressed, “you're a bad liar.”

“That obvious?”

“Pretty much.”

“I'll go back to bed.” He decided that trying to escape wouldn't work. Anyway, it was only a dream.

The Mercenary crouched as they examined the SCAN control room. Normally they would have killed the guard, but the less evidence the better. He would sleep till morning. They stood up and glided toward the window, silently removing the pane. They had what they came for-they had to beat the recruits to California. They strode towards the nearby woods where they had hidden their vehicle. The black motorcycle made not a sound as The Mercenary started down the road. Being children would earn them no mercy.

Jani stepped down from the tree she had been sitting in. It was time to wake Joey for watch. Halfway to their tent she froze-she had heard a cracking twig behind her. Just a deer, she told herself, just a deer. Slowly she turned around. She didn't think deer wore ski masks and carried a nine-millimeter.

“On the ground. Now.”

Jani's eyes darted around, looking for other hostiles.

“Don't even think about it. We have you surrounded.”

She gulped. She could take one or two gunners, maybe three. But enough to surround their camp, no way. He-the voice was male-could be bluffing, but did she want to take that chance? Cautiously, she laid down. Were they Atlantis agents? She decided not, too sloppy. If they were from Atlantis she wouldn't have heard them coming at all. Her best chance might be 'little miss scared-and-wimpy.' “Pu..pu..please...don't h..hurt me.” He laughed condescendingly, and nudged her with his foot.

She bit her tongue to keep from dislocating his leg. A false tear trickled from her eye. She'd always loved acting. Gently she tried a subtle probe, “What do you want?” It was a challenge to put a tremble in her voice.

“Money-where do you keep it?”

She whimpered softly.

He kicked her, “Where!”

She could have ripped his foot off, but instead she groaned twice as loud as necessary, “You're hurting me!” she yelled in the direction of the tent she and Joey shared.

The hostile picked her up by her collar, “Shhh! Where is it?” he put the gun to her head.

She pretended to flinch. “In...in there.” She nodded to Joey's tent.

He raised a hand and a similarly dressed person appeared out of the woods and crossed to the tent she had indicated.

Either she had helped Joey, or she had killed him.

Joey was laying still, trying to convince himself he was asleep. So when Jani shouted out her warning, it caused him to sit bolt upright with a taser in his hand. Naturally that was when the guy with the gun came in. He scanned the room, waiting a second too long before he got to Joey. He made a loud thump as he fell to the floor. The hostile...oh geez, I'm becoming just like Jani...the hostile wasn't alone, that was obvious, but what if they were surrounded? He could take out one of them, two if he was lucky, but otherwise....they were toast.

The thump was clearly audible from where Jani was laying. She let out a sigh of relief. She still couldn't see the hostile's face, but she heard the intake of breath. It was with great pleasure that she dislocated his right foot, “o...oh...n....n...no I'm so...so sorr...sorry,” stuttered Jani with a look of pure glee on her face. Nobody hurt her friends. Or held them at gun point. She ran over to Joey's tent, throwing open the flap.

Joey almost tasered her in the stomach. “Jani, are you okay? I heard your warning. Were they from Atlantis? How many of them were there? Is Matt okay? Are we going to leave now?”

Jani only really registered one of the questions. “Matt!” she gasped, running over to his tent. They hadn't trusted him enough to share. She shoved her head through the flap. It was empty. Then, with impeccable timing, she heard the cocking of a gun behind her. She turned around and there was Matt. She wished he had been alone, but he wasn't. In fact, he was gagged, with his hands tied behind his back.

“Mmmmfff!” he groaned, too late to do her any good.

She assumed that this was the last hostile, but she'd comb the camp after they took care of him.

“Oh look, a little girl,” said the mugger sarcastically. “Your friend here put up a fight, let's hope you're more cooperative.” He never got to finish threatening her because Joey tasered him in the back.

Matt didn't go back to sleep. He doubted he would ever sleep again. They would go on the train at daybreak. Until then, Jani's advice was to 'Shut your gob-hole and close your eyes,Wintergreen.' It was harder than it sounded. It felt like he had been laying in his tent for eons when Joey came to tell him they were leaving. He put his bag on his shoulder and crawled out through the flap, turning to pack up the tent. He wouldn't admit it to anyone, least of all himself, but he was scared.

Jani was surprised at how confident she felt as they boarded the train. The ticketing had gone as well as they could have hoped. While they were on the train, they had agreed, Matt was their cousin Fred, who was kindly escorting young Johnny and Sarah to their great aunt Wilson, who was dying of bowel cancer. She had added a few well-placed tears and nose-blowings for effect. Only a few days until California. Mentally, she sketched out an attack. Time to make a plan.

Matt peeked into Joey's pack, the lemonade looked inviting.

Joey saw him looking. “Leave that alone,” he said forcefully, nodding at Matt's hand.

Matt was furious. How dare Joey keep the good stuff for himself while everyone else was stuck with reddish tap water? Joey turned to Jani; Matt took his chance, quickly sticking his arm into Joey's bag. When he took a swig, his face crinkled. It tasted really odd. “Someone pee in this?” he meant it as a joke.

“Well...” said Joey, breaking into a smile, “the line for the bathroom is really long and...um...Nature calls”

Matt dropped the bottle and began clawing at his tongue.

Early the next morning, Joey was shaken awake by the screeching of train brakes. It was the last day of their ride. He looked at his watch; they wouldn't be at their next stop for an hour. Still shaking off sleep, Joey stumbled towards the front of their car. He gasped. The Mercenary was here. The first thing Joey did was pinch himself, then he ran.

Jani was watching when Joey got up and walked toward the front of their car, so she was also watching when he started running back in her direction.

He was mouthing one word, “Mercenary.”

She was paralyzed for a second. The Mercenary!??! He, or it, was a horror story at ATF. A rogue agent, disbanded for using...distasteful...methods. That must have also been a lie. She tackled Matt to the ground. A moment after that, a bullet embedded itself in her seat. Then the screaming started. People running in every direction, alarms blaring, attendants trying in vain to restore order. Throughout the chaos Jani tried to drag an extremely confused Matt to where she had last seen Joey.

Matt was not as clueless as Jani had assumed. In fact, he too was trying to get to Joey, a process made a great deal more difficult by Jani yanking on his arm. When Joey had started running back towards them mouthing “mercy, canary!” he had known something was wrong. That hunch was confirmed when a bullet landed where Jani's head had been. He reached for the gun they had given him. He flicked the safety off. When he pulled the trigger, a small flame came out of the tip. It was a lighter. He should have known Jani and Joey wouldn't trust him that much. They were screwed. Matt turned and saw two men and a woman wearing police uniforms launch themselves up at the hooded figure before them. Then Joey set off a smoke bomb. Through the clouds of acrid smoke, Matt saw the silhouette of a knife jutting from the back of an officer. It was an image Matt would later stay up late trying to forget. Then Joey was beside them, and they were blending with the crowd gushing out of the train, like the blood of a giant snake. Jani grabbed the two of them and shoved them, along with herself, toward a junk yard.

The Mercenary silently cursed themself, they had let the children escape. If it hadn't been for the officers... They were only obstacles, but they were also distractions... They popped a handful of nuts into their mouth. They didn't eat much since the accident, but they still required sustenance. They shook thoughts of the past from their head. They had lost the battle, but the war was far from over. That thought reverberated in The Mercenary's head as they put up the kick stand. They would not fail again.

They had slept under cars in the scrapyard that night. Passing around a water bottle and a small bag of crackers they had found in someone's old driver seat (they had bought food at the train station, but were reserving it). Joey woke up before dawn, exhausted yet aware of his inability to go back to sleep. When he crawled out from underneath the car, the others were waiting for him.

Jani looked grimly determined, “we need to stay ahead of The Mercenary. If ATF wants us this much, we're in trouble.”

Matt was confused, “who's this 'mercenary' you keep talking about?”

Her look could've melted a block of ice, and Matt flinched. “The Mercenary, is- was, an agent, one of the most talented that ATF had ever seen. Rumor is he, it, went bad, some horrible accident in the lab. We were told...it...was incarcerated, Atlantis has a secure prison where they put assets too invaluable to kill and too dangerous to set free. That must have also been a lie.”

Matt changed the subject, “I want to learn to fight. I can throw a punch, but, you know, not like you do.” She stood up. He was unable to tell if she was going to slap him or not-much less consent. So when she grabbed his arm and flung him to the ground, he thought he was a goner.

She stretched a hand out to him, “think you can do that?”

It had been a long evening. The three of them had agreed that they needed to stay on the move. So as a result Matt was left attempting and often failing, to dodge Jani's punches on the move.

Joey pulled out his smartphone, “we should be there soon, due west.

Twenty minutes later they were crouched at the top of a hill looking down at the HQ of The Matrix.

“Okay,” said Jani, “this is how its gonna go down.”

I shivered as I was led into a room. At least I thought it was a room, they had blindfolded me while I was asleep. The light stung my eyes when it was pulled off, they were drawn to the needle not an inch from my neck. It stung sharply when in it was inserted.

“Truth serum,” said a voice from behind me, “you will tell us what we want to know, Oakley Dogwood.” Then alarms started blaring.

Jani jumped the sentries at the front door, grabbed their guns, and tossed one back to Matt. Joey had hijacked the fingerprint scanner on the door and placed a virus (a polymorphic one, whatever that meant), into The Matrix's system. Matt was now positioning himself to cover her from a bush nearby. Jani poked the tip of the guard's AK-47 in the building first, pausing to see if there was anyone guarding the door. She charged in, placing a bullet in the leg of a hostile. She would try to avoid dropping bodies. The alarms were going off, she cursed herself, of course they would have an independent power source. She put a finger to her ear, “Joey?”

“Jani? Is that you?” Joey's voice rang through her ear.

“No! It's Pinocchio! Of course it's me.”

“Watch out for lasers,” there was a note of excitement in Joey's voice, like a young child watching a new movie.

She slipped on some stylish black sunglasses; immediately the room was lit up with beams of infrared light. If she touched one of those, steel doors would close over every possible exit. The same would be true if she triggered the pressure pads or went in front of the cameras. Across the room was an elevator with a fingerprint reader. She thought Oakley was probably being held underground. Jani did a back-handspring over the first one, stopping just in time to avoid another. She vaguely realized that, big as it was, the whole Matrix couldn't live in this mansion. They must turn the security off for scheduled times a day, maybe they should have clocked it and come in then. Before she knew it, Jani was at the elevator door. Pulling a smartphone out of her pocket, she held it up to the scanner and was about press an app on the home screen but a gun pressed up against her neck first. The sentry was on the ground unconscious in two seconds flat. Jani pick the phone back up and held it to the scanner. Less than a second later, the door opened. She knew she had made a mistake as soon as she started moving. A sound reminiscent of a fire engine split the air at the same time that the elevator stopped dead. Of course there had been a motion sensor! Jani could have slapped herself if she hadn't been unscrewing a panel in the roof of the elevator.

I grabbed the gun from the thug and shot her in the leg. When she was on the ground groaning, I slammed and locked the door behind me and veered toward the elevator. It was jammed! Next I tried the computer panel on the wall; all I got was a repeated message 'LOCKDOWN!' Suddenly a loud clang came from behind me. It was followed by the sound of the door to the elevator opening.

Jani heard a screech from below; it startled her enough to make her drop her screwdriver. Swearing, she bent to pick it up. A quake strong enough to throw her to the ground ran throughout the elevator. When she stood up, she barely recognized the boy in front of her. It was Oakley...and yet, it was not Oakley, not as she knew him. He had been the kind of kid to put gummy worms in his ears, just for the sake of it. He had had smile lines upon smile lines, and a constant twinkle in his eyes. Those eyes were dark, and untrusting now. He was also pointing a gun at her head.

“Jani?” his voice was cracked, “is that you? How-”

Jani jumped to her feet. Now that she knew Oakley wasn't going to shoot her, they needed to get out of here. “Long story. We need to go, like, right now!” She nodded at the elevator, “we can climb the cables.”

I looked up at Jani as she climbed the elevator cable, pulling herself up, hand over hand. She looked older than when I had last seen her. More wary too, like she didn't think she could trust anyone. Once she made it up to the door, she took a crowbar from her bag and pried it open. Ducking out of the way to avoid the hailstorm of bullets, she slipped on a gas mask and dropping the crowbar, tossed a grenade in. A cloud of green gas filled the room, followed by the sounds of unconscious bodies hitting the floor. Jani slipped on a gas mask, quite at odds with her sunglasses, and slipped into the haze. I

put on the mask she had tossed down to me and shimmied up the cable. I couldn't see Jani, but I could see the spiral staircase to the second, third and fourth floors. The vague diagrams I'd had seen all indicated that the control room was on the second; and if I couldn't find Jani, I also needed complete my mission.

Jani looked around for Oakley, where is he? She had a clear route to the exit. She spotted him, running towards a thick metal door, he was trying to complete Operation. Two things flashed through her head, one: he is a total idiot, two: he doesn't know about Atlantis. “OAKLEY!” she yelled, but the mask muffled her cries. She couldn't stop him, not if she didn't want to hit him with a rhino tranquilizer, and there wasn't enough time to explain everything. Jani caught up to him when he reached the lock on the door. He was fumbling around with the fingerprint reader, when Jani spoke, “Its on lock-down, nothing we do with the scanner will open it.

“I'm not leaving until I...we, complete Operation.”

That's Oakley, loyal to a fault. She grimaced as she pulled a blow torch from her bag, “who said anything about leaving...”

Joey and Matt were debating the best model of computer when Joey's radio buzzed to life.

“Kssssh...Joey do you read,”

He jumped to respond, “yeah Jani, whats up.”

“We're coming outt-ttt-tt-t-t...” the transmission died to static, and the sound of bullets ricocheting echoed out of the mansion.

Jani, true to her word, came running out of the door dragging Oakley by his arm. The moment was somewhat disrupted by the goons racing after them.

Matt didn't realize he had pulled the trigger until bullets were flying. One of the pursuers fell to the ground, clutching his leg. Jani jabbed the other in the neck with her elbow. The next few minutes were a blur of motion as they raced through the woods, into the nearest town, and hailed a taxi. the middle-aged man who was driving looked concerned,

“hey kids, are you lost? Maybe I can call you're paren-”

The wad of money Jani shoved under his nose, drove all concern from his mind.

“Where to?”

“the nearest motel.” she staggered into the taxi. Once inside, she rolled up her pant leg. Through a patch of otherwise pale skin stretched a trail of blood that led back to a gruesome rent in the flesh. She'd been shot.

Joey pulled down the glass separator between driver and passenger and pulled some tweezers from his pocket, “we're going to need some asprin.”

Joey had taken thousands of simulations on the the subject, but nothing prepared him for this. He felt the tweezers going in, trying to pretend he was looking for a chocolate. At last he hit something hard, he gave it a jerk.

Jani screamed and passed out.

The Mercenary's phone buzzed to life. The message displayed in bright letters across the screen: we know where the children are, there is a traitor in their midst.

Their grin was a terrible thing.