Chapter 7: On Display

It was a short trip. Our guards were chuckling as they helped Billie and me out of the ambulance. We needed the help because we were in irons—handcuffs connected to a waist belt, leather cuffs connected to each other by a foot of chain. We were outdoors for only a moment and line-of-sight was blocked by walls and fences. The air was chilly at dawn, and we were hustled into a musty building. We were taken up a stage—the stairs were hard to manage with our feet hobbled. Then we faced a curtain. I could hear people on the other side of the curtain.

“How long are they going keep us like this?” Billie asked rhetorically.

“The rest of our lives, of course,” I said. “They can, so I expect that they will.”

“Good thing that I prefer being naked,” Billie sighed. “These chains chafe.”

“They’re afraid that we will escape,” I said. “Yet they don’t believe that we can. I find that funny.”

“Silence,” one of our guards commanded.

The curtains parted and there were seven people on the other side. The theater was empty.

“That’s Jackie?” Major Blake had been my commander in Berlin, and he pointed me out. “Why is he naked?”

“If you look more closely, you’ll see that Jackie is a she,” Athena said. “Go ahead and feel her up. She won’t object. It’s part of her training.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Major Blake said, blushing. “If you’re going to tell so many people in on the project, Admiral, you might as well take out full-page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I gave up my best agent for this project.”

“Be respectful,” a man in a plain brown suit said. “Just because I’m out of uniform doesn’t mean I’ve left the service. Gentlemen, which one of these girls did you visit in the hospital?”

“Looks identical to me,” the state detective said.

“I need a closer look,” the San Bernardino County deputy sheriff said. He asked that our belts be removed, then checked our backs with his fingers. “There’s no sign of injury. I get why you have them chained up, but it’s not necessary.”

“Nor is it effective,” Major Blake added. “My agent can be out of those handcuffs in a second.”

“Jackie can break those handcuffs now,” Zara declared. “Ask these two what happened in Barstow.”

“Six men trapped Jackie in an alley,” the deputy said. “She walked out. They died. We were on the scene to make arrests minutes after the men walked in. Nobody else was there.”

“Wait a minute,” the admiral said. “We had an eight-man arrest team. Do you mean that they could have escaped us at any time?”

“Jackie didn’t try because I told her not to,” Billie said. “I didn’t expect anybody to beat her up.”

“Willard isn’t our guy,” one of the guards said.

“He was a Company man,” the other said. “He checked out.”

“Jackie said that Willard was enhanced, just like us,” Billie announced. “What can we tell them?”

“Jackie asked us how confident we were that only we had reincarnation technology,” Zara said.

“We are Pallas Daughters,” Athena said, “and Willard is probably a Son of Ares. We’ve been at war for centuries. Jackie used to be a Son of Ares. They lost track of him during the War. Jackie was recruited and would have been working on the coup months ago except for the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were doing two things with that alley test—you got to see Jackie in action, and Sons of Ares would locate her. Well, they have. I assigned Jackie to investigate Marilyn Monroe’s death as bait. They found her and revealed themselves.”