Cole: Chapter 2

Cole watched Dala as she wrote. Once again, she was dragging the meeting later than it already was.

She stopped for a moment and flexed her fingers, and the y-shaped scar on the back of her hand caught the light. Not for the first time, he wondered how she might have gotten that scar.

Lots of things about Dala irritated him, but this unknown in particular – the origin of that scar – always felt ominous. Cole didn’t like loose ends. People like her didn’t keep scars, people with public roles and professional presences to uphold. She clearly held some sort of role that interacted with the public, her clothes and appearance made that clear. She carried a messenger bag and wore clean, professional-looking clothing. Not fancy business wear per se, but certainly not laborer. Even so, Dala didn’t erase her scars, and Cole found that seriously suspicious. It was like waving flag to anyone paying attention that she wasn’t a typical civilian. That she was engaged with their underground organization, Contesters.

The Contesters had found him and rescued him from the “boarding” school his father sent him to when he was young. Really it was an intensive full-time boot camp designed to condition and desensitize military kids for the more extreme and elite roles. After two years of hell in that so-called school, a delivery driver named Marrick had snuck him out and brought him into the fold with the Contesters. Marrick had very much become an older brother following that. He and his wife were the unofficial leaders of the local Contesters. They supported Cole, teaching him trades and providing food and shelter in the earliest years.

Cole couldn’t help but feel like Dala posed a risk to them, his family. He glared at Dala still doodling in her notebook across the room. He couldn’t figure out why Marrick liked her so much. Cole couldn’t stand being assigned to missions with Dala. She was always making things messy – diving in to take some action that didn’t have anything to do with their goal. His eyes wandered to some of the clearly visible evidence of this on her. A healed, jagged gash sticking out of her rolled up sleeve. She insisted on pulling some kid from a car that had crashed into their escape vehicle five years ago, instead of prioritizing the team’s secrecy. Another textured mark where her shoulder met her neck, a rope burn from dragging some normal guy out of building. She had slowed everyone down on a mission arguing about some normal guy they’d knocked out to secure the artifacts they needed, because she thought he’d die if the building caught fire.

The building did catch fire, and that had made Cole even more unnerved. Things always seemed to be going wrong when Dala was on missions. In more recent years, she’d been pulled into more of an administrative role. Cole had been pleased that Marrick had recognized her failures in the real world and pulled her back from it. It was better for everyone, she was always getting distracted and deviating from the objective.

Marrick walked across the room to look over Dala’s shoulder approvingly. Cole bristled.

What Marrick saw in her stupid book of doodles, Cole could only guess. He couldn’t understand why Marrick kept trying to find something of value in Dala. She was chaotic on missions, going rogue whenever it seemed to suit her own agenda. Cole never got the sense that Dala was really committed to the Contester movement.

He was glad that he rarely actually saw her on missions. They were assigned to different objectives most of the time, and almost nothing in the last few years. He still saw the aftermath of her excursions though in meetings like this one through the debriefs. And occasionally, when she was assigned as the exit plan on his exploits.

He’d seen another reason to keep her at arm’s length – and probably why Marrick had taken such a shine to her in recent years: she did her research. The last mission she’d pulled him out of, she’d gone a different direction than planned. It ended up saving them from being trapped, but he felt really off kilter about it.

He had been pretty amped up already after a soldier he hadn’t expected saw him sneaking out. He’d had to kill the man to prevent him from identifying Cole later. Cole had been pissed about it, he hadn’t been cautious enough to stay under the radar. He managed to avoid the second patrol on the way out, but he should have been more wary before that. The mission had been to secure the press of a key so that he could mold copies. It had been so simple to get in that he had thought the patrols were on break or in another sector – he’d become too careless on the way out. His mistake had cost that man his life.

Then Dala had gone the wrong direction halfway through the planned escape route. Cole had nearly tried to incapacitate her to stop her, but he’d managed to restrain himself and instead roughly tell her she took a wrong turn. Only then did she mention that the regular route had started construction only 12 hours earlier. They’d have been trapped in slow moving traffic, increasing the risk to the mission and themselves.

Dala looked up finally from her notebook.

“Thanks for waiting.”

Whatever. Let’s go.

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