The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(84)

It feels a bit like penance, and Cass isn’t here to yell at me for this one.

“Our purses are in my car,” Sterling announces suddenly.

“Okay?”

“I drove to Stafford without my license.”

I twist around to stare at her in the middle seat. She meets my eyes with a sheepish smile and shrugs.

And suddenly I’m laughing my ass off, trying to imagine explaining to a police officer why we were going 135 without a license, and I can hear her giggling, too, and even Vic is chuckling, because he also knows how Sterling drives when she’s determined to get somewhere now. It’s stupid and ridiculous and I can’t stop laughing, until the laughter abruptly turns to tears and I’m sobbing into my shoulder so I don’t get blood all over my face.

Christ.

Sterling unbuckles her belt and slides up between the front seats as best she can, awkwardly bending over the center console, to wrap me in another hug. She’s saying something, her voice soft, no louder than Billie Holiday, really, but I don’t know what the words are. It takes me entirely too long to realize that’s because she is speaking Hebrew, and I wonder if it’s a prayer or a lullaby or a very gentle remonstrance for me to get my head out of my ass.

It’s Sterling. It could be any or even all of the above.

When we get to the hospital, Vic parks and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, wiping my cheeks and throat. I try to help, but he bats my hands away, and yeah, they’re covered in blood. For some reason I keep sticking on that.

Eddison, we learn, is in surgery, and they’re not sure yet if they need to put hardware in and around his femur. It’s broken, definitely, but given that he’s an active agent, the surgeon is going to do her best to avoid anything that could keep him out of the field. That’s how I remember Bethesda is a military hospital.

Sterling hauls me into a bathroom to wash my hands and face. When we rejoin Vic in the waiting room, he’s on the phone with Priya, letting her know about Eddison. I wasn’t sure he’d call her so late, but then, this is Priya. Not only is Eddison her brother, but she goes semi-nocturnal during summers anyway. Vic’s voice is calm and soothing, the kind of voice we all automatically respond to after so many years. Even Sterling’s shoulders loosen a few inches.

At some point, Vic goes off to find coffee and breakfast, leaving Sterling slumped half-asleep against me. I pull my credentials out of my pocket and fold them back to rest badge up on my knee. My badge is ten years old, and it shows in a million ways. The gold is worn and dull at the highest points of the letters, where the metal rubs against the black leather divider of the credentials case. One edge has a chip from getting slammed onto a curb in a takedown, there’s a line of dried blood down the inside of the U in US that no amount of cleaning can seem to get rid of, and the eagle at the top is mostly decapitated because baby agent Cass, with her fear of guns, used to forget that guns have this thing called a safety. The day Cass murdered the eagle on my badge, which had been sitting on the lane’s ammo shelf where it should have been safe, was the same day she got the range master as her personal tutor. The range master said it was in the interest of everyone’s well-being. Still, blind and burdened Justice stays in stark relief near the center of the badge.

Ideally, our task is to be Justice. Without prejudice or preconceived notions, weigh the information and bring down the sword.

I run a finger along the eagle’s wings, tracing the letters that have shaped almost a third of my life.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

When I first got the badge, I used to run my finger along the words in almost the same way, tracing them over and over like it was the only way to convince myself it was real. It was new and inspiring and terrifying, and so much changes in a decade.

Some things don’t. It’s still terrifying.

I knew better than most going into this that the FBI isn’t, can’t be, anything simple, and yet I still expected it to be easy. No, easy isn’t the right word. I expected it to be straightforward. Challenging, yes, and sometimes painful, but unwavering. It never occurred to me that I might come to question the good I do.

It’s never been a mystery that the system is flawed. My third set of fosters included a skeevy man and his near-adult son who liked to watch the girls when they showered. I learned to skip lunch and shower at school, and the older girls followed suit. The younger ones didn’t have showers or gyms, but we could move them through the bathroom at the house pretty quickly with one or two of us standing guard while the men were gone.

But I was also lucky. Most of the homes were safe, and if not all of them were warm, they provided necessities without stripping too much dignity from us in return. My last fosters, the mothers, they were different. Rare, and I think I knew that even then.

How many kids do we rescue who aren’t that lucky? How many, who don’t have a safe family to go back to, end up even worse than where they started?

How many Caras are out there, one trigger away from snapping and killing others in the course of their spiral of self-destruction?

How many have I helped create?

“You’re hurting my brain,” mumbles Sterling. “Stop it.”

“Trying.”

“No, you’re not.” She reaches up, arm heavy with fatigue, and clumsily pats at my face. “’S’okay. Bad day.”