The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(43)

“We have to conserve our . . . our b-b-b-body heat . . .” she stammered.

So I folded her into my arms. Her face pressed against my neck; I could feel her warm breath on my cold skin.

“I didn’t know,” she said after a few minutes. “What Nueve was planning.”

“I figured that,” I said. “Hard to believe anyone would willingly let herself be sliced open like that. The big question is, did Abby Smith know?”

“No. In the conference room, after you left with Mingus, she gave Nueve a direct order you were to be given nonintrusive tests only until she got back from headquarters.”

“So she’s not in on the lobotomy.”

“Lobotomy?”

“That’s what I figured. Nueve’s gone solo-loco and it’s better to apologize later than ask for permission first. He had the fix in from the beginning.”

Her arms tightened around me. “I’m cold. I’m s-s-s-o cold.”

I rubbed my hands up and down her back. “It’s gonna be okay,” I said. “I’ve been through worse than this and I’m not dead yet. I’ve got Nueve’s box . . .”

“Not the only one,” she said. “If he doesn’t have a backup for it in camp, they’ll chopper one in tomorrow.”

“What’s its range? Do you know?”

“N-n-not sure . . . maybe a mile, two . . . Doesn’t matter . . . can’t hike out—they’ll find us eventually, if we don’t die of exposure first.”

“Well,” I said, trying to think of a bright side. “I’d rather die that way than their way.”

“I’d rather not die at all.”

I felt something wet on my neck.

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t, Ashley. I’m working on it.”

“What are you working on?”

“A plan to get us out of here.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks. I feel much better now.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Night had fallen and I couldn’t see a thing, not even the top of her head two inches beneath my nose. I could smell her hair, though, and feel her body quivering against mine.

“What did you do with Nueve’s gun?” she asked.

“Put it in my pocket.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. She sighed with relief. “Good.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel so cold; in fact, I actually felt warm. The cold snow beneath me and against my back felt like a warm blanket, and I began to float off to sleep.

“Talk to me, Alfred,” she said suddenly. “We c-c-can’t fall asleep . . .”

“Okay,” I said, and immediately my mind went blank.

“What’s the plan?”

“Plan?”

“The plan you’re working on.”

“We can’t hike out,” I said. “So we’re flying out.”

“You saw a show about making a glider out of tree branches, deer droppings, and spit?”

“They’ve got one chopper here already and probably more on the way,” I said. “And only one place to land and take off. Can you fly one?”

“What makes you think I can fly one?”

“It’s a key part of my plan.”

“I can’t fly one.”

“It’s also a key flaw in my plan.”

She laughed. It felt good to feel her laugh.

“I keep trying to decide if meeting you was the best thing that happened to me or the worst,” she said.

“Maybe both. Why did you come back to help extract me, Ashley?”

“Because I knew what it felt like,” she said after a pause. “To lose everything. I went into Field Operations right after college, Alfred, and a field operative can’t have a past . . . family . . . friends . . . Medcon took care of it . . . OIPEP ‘kills’ all its field operatives, fakes their deaths . . . Ashley isn’t even my real name. And when I left, I couldn’t go back to my old life. Everybody from it thought I was dead . . . They gave me a new identity after I resigned, a new place to live, but it was like I was nobody. I couldn’t be who I was before and I couldn’t be ‘Ashley’ either. I was totally alone. I was . . . no one.”

“Ashley’s not your name?”

“No.”

“What is your real name?”

“Gertrude.”

I thought about that.

“Can I still call you Ashley?”

I felt her smile against my neck.

“Sometimes I think of her as a different person,” she said. “Gertrude. Someone I used to know a long time ago, like another person who really had died.”

I nodded. “Me too—the old me before the Sword came along. I miss him sometimes. The old me. Like I was wondering if OIPEP has a time machine. Does it?”

“I don’t think it does.”

“Be great if it did.”

“If it did, I would go back and be sixteen again.”

“Really? Why?”

She sighed against my neck and we didn’t say anything for a while.

“You’re not talking,” she said.

“Vampires,” I said.