kitchen, but they were loud. With that, plus the space needed to prepare and package the food, it was easier to do it out here.
A small window up near the ceiling was open, just a crack. It must have been Ava’s access point. “I hope you were planning on closing that before you left. It’s supposed to rain tonight.”
“Of course.” Ava walked the length of the table, running her fingers over crates piled to the brim with fresh peaches. “You didn’t shoot me. In the clearing. You had a clear shot, but you didn’t take it.”
“Jumping right in with both feet, huh?”
Ava picked up a peach and turned it over, examining its pristine skin. “I never had much use for small talk.”
“Okay.” Nina crossed her arms over her chest and waited.
After a brief, tense silence, Ava set the fruit aside and squared her shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about how different our training was. You and the other A-designations were taught never to question orders. Chain of command, obedience to authority … Those things were beaten into you from the cradle.”
Beaten. The word evoked a flash of somatic memory—standing for hours, arms outstretched, muscles burning. The agonizing lash across the delicate bones of your wrist when you wavered or broke form.
Nina blinked it away. “We were ground troops, Ava. Any thinking we learned to do, we had to figure out on our own.”
“Being a B-designation was different. We were dangerous.” Ava’s short laugh was bitter. “They had to make us smart and suspicious in order to make us effective. But smart, suspicious trainees cause problems. That’s why you got a job offer after we lost Zoey, and I got…” Her eyes darkened for one haunted, furious moment, then the expression vanished.
“Decommissioned.” Nina whispered the word. “I didn’t know. You understand that now, don’t you, Ava?”
“They told you I was dead, and you had been conditioned to believe them. Intellectually, I know that. Accepting what they said at face value would have been logically consistent with your training and your personality.”
If Nina closed her eyes, she could still see Knox, bemusement tilting his brows into severe angles as he called her an idealist. “I didn’t know that they would lie. Not about something like that.”
Ava’s fingers curled into helpless fists. “Believing you should make it stop hurting. It’s irrational to still feel betrayed.”
“Feelings aren’t always rational. Sometimes, they just are.”
“I don’t like irrational feelings.” The words came out on a snarl, and Ava blinked, as if shocked at her own loss of control. Then her lips quirked into a rueful smile. “No. I don’t like when feelings make me act irrationally. Which they have clearly done recently.”
“But you’re here.” It meant more than Nina had known. She hadn’t gone looking for her sister—if Ava didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be found—but she only just now realized how much of her had been arrested, waiting for Ava to show up. “That means something.”
“It means I’m still behaving irrationally.” Ava reached out, her fingers hovering close to Nina’s temple, touching her hair. Zoey had been the nurturing one, the one who expressed her feelings with hugs and easy contact. Ava’s love had been less direct. She’d solved problems, or acquired coveted contraband as gifts. Her one tactile expression of affection had been to spend her evenings twisting her sisters’ hair into impossibly intricate braids.
“I missed you,” Ava whispered. “Even when I thought I hated you. You’re part of me. A better part of me.”
The vague pressure that had lived in Nina’s chest for the last few days twisted suddenly, sharpening into a bolt of breathtaking pain. She breathed through it, then tried to smile. “Then you already know why I didn’t pull the trigger.”
“It might have been easier on me if you had. I could have kept hating you.” Ava exhaled shakily and let her hand fall away. “But you didn’t, so I can’t.”
As admissions went, it was small. Except that it had come from Ava. “Does that mean you’ll stay? There isn’t a spare room upstairs, but you can have mine, and I’ll sleep in the gym or the study—”
“Nina, don’t.” Ava shoved her hands in her pockets, her expression carefully, heart-wrenchingly blank. “You have your new family. It’s all very cozy and domestic, but I don’t know how to live like this. Besides, I already have my next mission.”
“Mission?” The phrasing startled Nina. “Are you working for someone? I just assumed—”
Ava cut her off with a perturbed noise so familiar