Operation Shield: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel by Joel Shepherd

Author:Joel Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Pyr®, An Imprint of Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Picking the kids up from school was the most incongruously, weirdly, surreally civilian thing she'd ever done. She had to rush there from FSA HQ, with special dispensation to skip the mid-afternoon's crush thanks to a rescheduled meeting and a delayed review of ongoing Pyeongwha operations, which kept a couple of field agents waiting who'd travelled all the way back to Callay to make their reports. But she'd said she just wanted to walk her kids home from their first day, and people had smiled and said “aww” and made the arrangements.

All the kids at Canas School were high-security kids. Sandy had considered putting them elsewhere, but they were all from Droze, couldn't be asked to pretend otherwise given their ages and accents, and while news media weren't allowed to show their faces or names, they did know their ages and genders. With all three in the one school for mutual support, with matching ages and genders to the “Kresnov kids,” people would put two and two together as even in a city the size of Tanusha the odds weren't great they'd be anyone else. And once people knew what school they were at, outside a secure zone, travelling back and forth on their own became genuinely unsafe, which meant armed escorts, and guards at the school, and comments from the other students, the whole mess.

And so they were here, with pretty, old brick buildings, green playing fields, and big trees, looking about eight hundred years older than it actually was, like the rest of Canas. She waited by the playing fields with the rest of the parents or private minders or nannies; no car pickups in Canas, the district wasn't big enough, nor the streets wide enough, and you could walk across it in fifteen minutes—not that that would have stopped some of them from driving if they'd been allowed, but the school deliberately had a no-parking policy. If you attended, you walked or cycled, teachers and students alike.

Other parents politely avoided eye contact while she waited, the way people did who were accustomed to the presence of “big names” and were often “big names” themselves…but this time it was different, everyone desperately curious to see her here, of all places, and looking while pretending not to. Especially given that it meant that her kids, the three they'd heard about from the war zone, were also here, mixing with their kids.

Danya, Svetlana, and Kiril emerged amidst the stream of other kids leaving across the grass and down the paths, and were delighted and surprised to see Sandy waiting, and ran to her. She hugged Kiril, then Svetlana, then even Danya, who hadn't invited it but didn't protest at a kiss on the cheek. There were other parents watching, and now lots of other kids too, looking to see if what they'd been told about these three new kids was true. Sandy listened to them talking, hearing tuned to those farther frequencies even as she listened to Kiril and Svetlana

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