Chapter 17 : The Other Spy
Two Guardians stood at the intersection checkpoint, and one of them was the most dangerous man in the district.
I recognized Nick the moment he arrived for the overlap shift. Dark hair, quiet posture, the driver's uniform that marked him as Waterford's personal Guardian. He moved with the careful efficiency of someone who'd been trained to be invisible—not the invisibility of submission, but the invisibility of competence. A man who wanted to be overlooked because overlooked men could watch without being watched.
Eye, my memory supplied. Double agent. Future resistance contact. Father of June's second child.
The temptation to approach was immediate and nearly overwhelming. I knew Nick's trajectory—the moral compromises, the gradual turn toward resistance, the alliance with June that would eventually help bring children out of Gilead. If I could accelerate that turn, bring him into the network now—
No.
I forced myself to stand at my post and process checkpoint traffic with mechanical efficiency.
Nick was an Eye. A real one, still actively reporting to Gilead's intelligence apparatus. Whatever sympathies he might develop later, right now he was dangerous. An approach before he'd made his own choices would expose the entire network to someone whose loyalty was genuinely divided.
Watch. Wait. Let him become who he's going to become.
The shift was two hours long. We stood at adjacent positions, checking papers and stamping passes, and the professional silence between us felt electric with unspoken assessment.
I watched him from the corner of my eye. The way he checked sightlines automatically—a trained behavior, not learned on Guardian patrol. The way he positioned himself with exits covered, back never fully exposed. The way he observed the Handmaids who passed through our checkpoint with professional attention rather than indifference or desire.
He's cataloguing them. Not as potential conquests—as potential assets. He's thinking about who might be useful.
An Eye's habits. Visible to someone who knew what to look for.
The question was whether Nick saw the same thing when he looked at me.
I forced myself to behave normally—or rather, to behave the way a normal Guardian would behave. Stamp papers. Check transit authorizations. Maintain appropriate distance from the women passing through. Don't process information; just stand and serve.
But I could feel Nick watching. Subtle glances, the kind that could be explained as professional awareness but felt more deliberate. He was reading me the way I was reading him, and neither of us could afford to acknowledge what we were seeing.
Two operatives. Same checkpoint. Both pretending to be furniture.
At the shift's midpoint, Nick pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one.
I didn't smoke. Kessler probably had—the wear patterns on his footlocker suggested someone who'd kept tobacco supplies before Gilead's rationing made it expensive. I accepted the cigarette because refusing would draw attention to the difference between who I was and who I was supposed to be.
The lighter flicked three times before it caught. In the flame's brief glow, I saw Nick's face clearly for the first time—angular features, dark eyes, an expression that gave nothing away. He saw mine too. Two masks illuminated in the same moment, both of us pretending we couldn't see past the other's cover.
"Cold night," Nick said.
"Getting colder."
That was all. The cigarette tasted harsh and unfamiliar, but I smoked it to the filter rather than stub it out early. Kessler would have finished it. Kessler would have been comfortable with the ritual.
The shift ended at twenty-two hundred. Nick signed the duty log, nodded at me with the professional acknowledgment Guardians exchanged when shifts transferred, and walked toward the Waterford car parked at the corner.
I watched him go, cataloguing what I'd learned.
He knows I'm not what I appear. I know he's not what he appears. Neither of us can afford to act on that knowledge.
Spy-versus-spy. Parallel operatives in the same district. Both waiting for the other to make a move.
The show had never covered this period of Nick's service in detail. I knew his eventual arc—the turn toward resistance, the alliance with June, the difficult choices that would define him—but I didn't know the specific events that pushed him from Eye to ally.
Maybe nothing pushes him. Maybe he makes his own choices, in his own time, and all I can do is be here when he's ready.
The Waterford car pulled away from the curb. Nick's eyes found mine through the windshield—a half-second of contact, too brief to mean anything official, too deliberate to be accidental.
Two hours of pretending not to recognize what the other was, and the pretense was already thinner than either of us wanted.
I walked back to barracks through streets that were darker than they'd been when I arrived. Somewhere in the Waterford house, June was learning to navigate her captivity. Somewhere in the driver's quarters, Nick was reporting to handlers I couldn't identify.
Don't approach him. Let him make his own canonical choices. Focus on what you can control.
Tomorrow's dead-drop would tell me if Clara's integration had been successful. Tomorrow's patrol would put me back in the market district where Erin—the fifth node—was waiting for contact.
Tomorrow would bring the next step in building something that might eventually matter.
Tonight, I carried the weight of a recognition I couldn't acknowledge and a cigarette's aftertaste that reminded me I was still learning how to be the man whose uniform I wore.
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