"So that's the story of John Wells," Josh concluded as he and Becki walked along an anonymous, deserted Parisian street. As if in a belated courtesy to Mike, while he, unconscious and barely alive, was being maintained with what medical facilities the Red Home could supply, Josh and Becki at last took his advice. When they revisited the warehouse that had led them to the Alba Varden, they went in the dead of night, as Mike had formerly insisted they ought. It seemed to have been a sensible precaution thus far; they hadn't encountered another human in at least the last six blocks as they drew steadily closer to their objective.
Usually a night this dark in a deserted industrial area would raise the hairs on the back of Josh's neck, but for this particular evening he welcomed it. He kept his Jedi senses extended as far around them as he could, to be sure, but the area seemed to be as deserted as it appeared at first glance. Josh was uncomfortably glad of it, too. For good or for ill, he was glad to again be alone with Becki. It afforded him the opportunity to better explain his actions that morning, which he'd been doing since the moment the pair was out of earshot of their teammates.
It would also give them the opportunity to talk more freely if she were to admit now that the kiss had been more mutual than she'd made it seem in its immediate aftermath.
Despite her heavy jacket Becki shivered as she considered Josh's story in its entirety. "I'm not sure whether to hope he's on our side or not," she said.
"I've always found it's better to have him working with you than against you. But the line between the two has never been all that wide for him. And never something I want to take for granted."
"Hence the importance of not being seen by him."
"Exactly. So, you forgive me?"
"I suppose," she said uncertainly. She didn't entirely mean it. She couldn't forgive him because there wasn't as much to forgive as she made it seem. In her heart she knew she was an active and willing participant in their illicit kiss as soon as the first moment of surprise passed. What was more, his comment that morning had angered her all the more because of its accuracy: she did enjoy the kiss. The anger came from her own guilt over not only enjoying it, but wishing, even for the barest of moments and only in the quietest parts of her heart, for another.
She looked up from her introspection to find him staring at her. A rosy blush crept across her face as it occurred to her that his Jedi talents might give him ready access to her true feelings on the matter. She fervently hoped they wouldn't.
Why did things have to become so complicated? she sighed to herself as she stared back at him. Why did I let them become so complicated? If only she'd remained in closer contact with Thayer. If only she'd gone to see him as soon as she returned to Mendellia. If only she hadn't allowed herself to feel attracted to Josh.
"Becki, I . . ." he began, interrupting her train of thought. "Truly, I'm sorry about the kiss. I should have found a better way. You've become very important to me, in ways I couldn't possibly explain. Of everyone here, you're the only one who's always had faith in me. That means more to me than you know. I don't want to do anything to change that." Even to his own ears his tone was pleading.
"Neither do I," she said, so quietly he had to strain to hear. "If it's not already too late."
"What?" He'd automatically drifted closer to her to catch her words, so when she suddenly stopped and turned to face him, they stood nearer to each other than at any time since the kiss itself. Blushing, eyes averted, each stepped back to a more comfortable distance.
"Too late," she repeated. "Already changed. Even if we wanted to I don't think we could just go back to what things were like before the kiss. Can you just forget what happened? I doubt if I can. And," she tried, and failed, to fight back a rueful half-smile, "every time you look at me I get the impression you don't want to go back."
"Are you sure you want to?" he challenged.
"I--" she blushed and glanced away before answering, "I don't know. I do--I mean, it was so much less complicated then!--and yet . . ."
He pointedly didn't say it. He just raised one eyebrow and, with it, the corners of his mouth, until the weight of silence pressed it out of her.
"All right!" she sighed. "You were right; I liked it too. And I like you, and I do have faith in your leadership; in spite of myself, despite my better judgment at times, I find myself trusting you. And I can't seem to stay angry at you, even when I ought to." She shrugged and looked down; though the darkness alleviated the threat of blushes, she found it suddenly difficult to meet his eyes.
"Thank you," he said finally after a moment's silence. "I'd suspected, but I didn't want to pry--I doubt your mind's weak enough for me to read uninvited, anyway--but it's good to hear it from you. So I know where we stand."
"It doesn't make things any easier," she warned him, glancing up suddenly.
"Clears the air," he grinned. "Anyway, maybe we're looking at this the wrong way. The kiss might not have been such a bad thing. Maybe a bit premature, but--"
"Josh, stop," she insisted. "There's the question of what's right. And this--" She held up her hand so he could see the ring she wore there, its reds barely distinguishable from its purples in the darkness of Paris's streets.
Gently, wary of alarming her, he lifted her fingertips in his own hand for a closer look, squinting first at the ring and then at her mournful expression. Her hand tensed at his touch but did not pull away. Finally he said, "I don't think I've seen it before, have I?"
"My own fault," she said, "not wearing it as publicly as I ought to have. I kept it hidden back home. I kept everything connected to Terra Group hidden, you know, and at first I guess I thought of this as just one more thing connected to Terra Group." She did withdraw her hand then, clenching it in a fist against her waist. "Thayer gave me the ring, when I agreed to marry him."
"Oh . . ." Josh looked away uncomfortably, suddenly forced to recall the last time he had seen Thayer, whom he'd long counted a friend despite their disparate backgrounds and stations in life. It had been the morning that the Terra Group team had left Mendellia for Paris. And the Dictator had been trying to find his fiancée. "Your engagement ring?" he asked, keeping his voice light to disguise the sudden heaviness of his heart.
"The Queen's Ring," Becki said quietly. "There seems to be more to it than just an engagement ring, though I've never heard the full story. But I wear it because I'm supposed to be the next Queen."
"And marry the King."
She nodded. After that there seemed to be little else to say. When the silence grew too much to bear, they both at once, as if the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, turned to resume their walk to the warehouse.
After a while Josh braved the silence and noted, "You don't seem very excited about it."
She made a none-too-excited noise that avoided being either assent or dissent and kept walking. A bit further, he tried again, asking, "Do you still intend to marry him, then?"
"I'm wearing his ring, aren't I?" she said in a tone that prohibited further discussion. Unsatisfied, he let the question drop for the time being. He was still thinking over the best way to raise it again when their journey came to an end: the dreary façade of the warehouse before them drove more sensitive issues out of his mind for the present, as he found himself once again called upon to take the lead in the chaos of the mission dubbed Arrakis.
Even after proving Mike's judgment sound on the virtue of saving warehouse inspections for after dark, his teammates did not escape a moment of stunned amazement when the warehouse turned out to be what Mike had also formerly insisted it ought to be: abandoned.
Gone were the neatly stacked crates. Gone were the forklifts and cranes. The debris of Terra Group's brief battle there was gone as if it had never been. All the damage they'd caused in the main warehouse had been perfectly repaired, without so much as a visible seam to mark where it had been. Creeping warily through the hallways beyond the unsettlingly, cavernously empty main room, they found that the offices were likewise empty; even the fish that had flooded the upper hallway just two days ago had vanished completely.
"Were we even really here?" Becki finally exclaimed in frustration as they ended their inspection where it had begun, back in the deserted main room.
"It is the same building," Josh said, his voice echoing widely in the open space. "How they cleared it out so fast, though . . ."
"And why?" Becki frowned. "Because of what happened when we were here? We blew their cover, so they just vanished into thin air?"
"Very thin," he muttered, noticing a lack of even ordinary dust on an empty shelf against one wall. "What I wonder is how they managed to evacuate so quickly and yet clean the place up so well. . . ."
"Maybe the whole place was here just for the focusing matrix we found. Maybe once it had shipped out, they had nothing left to do but pack up and move on as well."
"I doubt it. There was too much other equipment in here yesterday for that. I'd like to know where they moved to in such a hurry." At a sudden thought, Josh grinned down at his companion. "Hey, maybe they meant to follow the matrix to the Middle East. We might run into them again when we're there."
"You don't need to sound so excited about it," she said dryly. "The last time we 'ran into them' they very nearly killed us."
"All the more reason to run into them again. I have some choice words for them about that." Then, almost as an afterthought, "Damn! Why didn't I bring a scanner?"
"We packed everything to leave, remember? And from the looks of the place," she said as she gestured expansively to the empty room, "there's nothing for even a scanner to find."
Futilely Josh closed his eyes and stretched out with the Force to search the building one more time, but even that sense found the same thing his eyes did. Nothing. He heaved an enormous sigh of defeat. "Well, no sense in hanging around here, I guess."
"Right. Let's go meet the others," Becki agreed.
A few minutes later on a street corner several blocks away, Josh and Becki slipped unknowingly back into their earlier cover as a pair of lost American tourists. Looking all about helplessly, a map of the city held between them, they certainly looked the part. Undoubtedly that's what the few Parisians who passed them at this hour thought they were.
Fortunately, they weren't actually lost. They just didn't realize how much further away from their rendezvous at Bertie's their trip to the warehouse had taken them.
"No way. I've spent the last week walking over every square mile of this city. I'm tired, I'm sore, I'm sleepy. I'm not spending the rest of the night walking twenty miles across town!"
"I won't disagree with you," Becki said, smiling at the plaintive tone in Josh's tirade. "We could have them come pick us up."
Josh looked around hopefully, but then dropped his eyes back down in defeat. "Nah, there's no where for them to pick us up around here. We could get a cab."
"They seem to be in short supply this time of night," Becki said, indicating the empty streets. "Maybe we could try the subway again," she suggested.
They both looked rather doubtfully towards an underground Metro station a short distance away. Under Josh's orders nobody in Team Paris had tried using the subway system since their first day in the city, when the stations had all been guarded by machine gun-toting Gendarmes. Now the entrance spilled warm, inviting light out to the two agents who stood shivering in the frigid January night. No Gendarmes were in evidence here. Neither knew when they last saw one in front of a Metro station, but all that mattered was that there didn't seem to be any here and now.
Josh shrugged. "Hey, my rule, I can break it if I want to." A mischievous grin split his face. "I won't tell if you won't."
"Tell what?"
Turning their backs to the street, and thus a long walk across town, they followed the short flight of steps down into the Metro station. There were no Gendarmes patrolling the inside of the station. In fact, the station seemed deserted, save for a lumpy form thinly draped by newspaper on one of the benches. If others were present recently they must all have boarded the train whose last car was leaving the station just as Becki and Josh entered.
"Seems to be par for the course on this trip," he muttered at the sight of their transportation leaving them behind. "The next one's probably not until noon."
"It looks like the trains run every forty-five minutes at this time of night," she said, nodding toward a schedule posted prominently on the concrete wall.
"I hate waiting," he complained, punctuating it with a heavy sigh.
"It's that or walk across town," she reminded him as she tried to stifle a yawn.
"Maybe waiting's not so bad."
They flopped onto a bench - as far from the newspaper lump as possible - to wait for the next train. "So, when's your wedding supposed to be?" Josh asked without preamble.
Becki's face clearly showed his question caught her off guard. "Haven't thought that far ahead. Anyway, tell me more about Wells. How did you two first become so adversarial, anyway? He has enough in common with you that you ought to have made good friends."
Leaving his own question unanswered, he obliged her curiosity. "Well, at one time, we were," he began. Starting out slowly, he wove for her a tale of friendship poisoned by suspicion, mistrust, jealousy, and anger. As the story went along he moved beyond the simple question of John Wells to the more complex issues of honor and courage and faith that lay at the heart of the matter. Eventually he brought the story all the way up to the cause of his unexpected departure from the Air Force, not having stopped for much more than a breath for more than half an hour. Suddenly becoming conscious of just how much of himself he was revealing to her, he looked down at Becki to gauge her reaction to these revelations.
And found that, somewhere in his long, rambling story, she'd fallen asleep. He gazed at her for a long moment, not sure whether or not to be glad she missed part of his speech. She was the only person he'd known in Terra Group with whom he felt comfortable sharing most of what he said. That was a frightening truth, for it revealed more of his feelings about her than he was comfortable admitting even to himself. He knew their kiss that morning was another sign of how those feelings had changed in the past week, and that worried him even more. It forced him to wonder if he ought not have some of the same doubts about his own honor and loyalty he'd just expressed about Wells.
That deeply troubling thought occupied him for quite a long while as Becki slept peacefully. Time and trains both passed unnoticed as he wondered what would come to pass from his actions that day with the beautiful girl asleep next to him.