The night air is cool, brushing the hair off my forehead as I stand with Pie under Mike’s balcony.

’68,’ I say. It’s the first time I’ve called Pie by her code-number, but we agreed before-hand that using names would be foolish at best, dangerous at worst. She glances over me. ‘Do you have everything?’

She nods, patting the bag slung over her shoulder.

‘Okay.’ I gaze up at Mike’s house. All the lights are off; the windows gaze blankly down at the street. It looks lifeless. ‘Come on.’

+

The plan is simple. Up the wall, in through the sliding glass doors, hit every room and leave in under an hour. Mike’s brother, he had said, was arriving Sunday morning, which gave us over seven hours to bug each room with the equipment Aunt In left along with the case file in the chest of drawers. Ten bugs, small circular devices with sound amplifiers. More than enough time.

As Pie and I had said over dinner, a relatively low-hazard operation. We aren’t even properly dressed, decked out in all blacks but without the bulletproof jackets we’d found in the closet.

We climb the wall, the bricks providing easy hand-holds, and pick the lock of the sliding doors with relative ease. They open onto a living room. Part of me, the part that still remembers the Australia mission, the part that knows what it’s like to have a bullet graze the side of your head, whispers that maybe it’s a bit too easy. I try to quiet it, creeping through the room and looking around. In the moonlight, the black furniture looks like concentrated patches of darkness, substance-less. Pie presses one of the bugs into the slot under the television that houses the DVD player and we move out onto the landing. Down one end is Mike’s empty bedroom, the door shut tight, and down the other is a small bathroom. Pie hands me a bug, I quickly cross to Mike’s bedroom. The door opens with a slight creak. I wince reflexively, before remembering there’s no one else in the house, and step inside. The bedroom is neat, bed clothes almost sharply perfect. I press the bug into the gap between the bookshelf and the wall, and back out of the room to find Pie standing in the hall, waiting for me. Together we descend the stairs. At the bottom there’s a door that opens onto the kitchen. Pie pushes it open.

‘I’ll do the bathroom on this floor,’ I whisper. Pie nods, and I begin walking to the left when –

‘72,’ says Pie. Her voice is soft, it barely touches the air around her. I move to stand beside her, and look.

It hadn’t truly occurred to me that this was a real mission. Just Pie and I living in our house, shopping for groceries, having dinner with Jane. A part of me thought that it was a vacation of sorts. I didn’t even believe Mike was dangerous. Not really.

Lying before us on a clinically white table is a blue vial. And a gun. It rests besides a bowl of fruit, a dirty plate, so starkly contrasting from the domestic scene played out around it. I open my mouth, not knowing what I’m about to say, when behind us a door snaps shut.

Pie stiffens besides me.

There are quiet footsteps, muffled on the smooth wooden floor. I push Pie noiselessly away from me, she spins around, staring.

‘Hide,’ I hiss, and then I’m moving in the opposite direction. Ahead there’s a room with the door ajar, the light off. I slip through the gap and slide into the cranny created by the door hinge and the wall. I can feel sweat on my back, a drop is sliding down the side of my face with tantalizing slowness. The footsteps are still audible; after a moment I realize they’re getting louder. I close my eyes briefly, clenching my hands into fists and praying that Pie found a hiding spot of some kind.

What if she –

The steps get closer. The wall I’m leaning against is smooth except for one paint flake, it catches on my fingers as I rest them beside my face, listening. Closer. I know I’m breathing, I can feel my chest rise up and down but it’s still as if I’m holding my breath, my head is filled with the wool and pale lights of breathlessness. Closer. Could his brother have arrived early?

They pause beside the door. There’s a clicking noise and lights flicker on in the room.

It’s small and white, a simple table and desk chair. One more step – one more step – I’m torn between paying attention to the person and taking in everything before me. Briefly I wish I had a bug with me. The table is covered in glass. Cylinders, spindly straw-like protuberances, beakers, and large quantities of the blue liquid from the vial on the kitchen table. Liters of it. Deep navy, dripping off the table and pooling on the floor, filling tubes and flasks so that where the light shines on them, everything they reflect on is cast in a deep blue light.

I can hear the person beside me shifting, the rustle of fabric as he turns. I can see a sliver of his face, the stubble around his jaw. It feels like an information overload, the room, the man – I know identical twins and that is no sibling. My left index finger twitches. There’s a metallic flicking noise, the sound of the safety being taken off a gun.

A large crash splinters the silence – I shake with surprise and press myself closer to the wall. The man – Mike – moves, turning on his heel and running back up the corridor. I wait for two seconds, feeling time push thickly on, before I move around the door and up the corridor into the kitchen. Mike isn’t there, and the door to the stairs swings open. Pie.

I run, tripping over the third step and banging my knee on the one above, reaching the second floor in a matter of moments. There’s a tap on my shoulder and I can feel my heart beating in my throat, swollen with fear, until I look around and see Pie staring at me. She jerks her head towards the living room. We move silently, every flicker of shadow presses in on me. Through the sliding glass doors, down the wall, I miss a hand-hold on the bricks and my fingers scrape against the surface, and then onto the street. And we run. Run, and don’t stop running until we reach our own front door. I push against it, fumbling with the key until it swings open. As soon as we get inside I lock the door behind me and press my forehead against the wood, breathing heavily. For a moment the air is filled with a thundering silence. Then I hear a sniff. I turn around. Pie is standing behind me, shaking.

‘Pie?’

I make to move forwards, but before I can get any closer she collides with me, pushing me back against the door, her arms around my neck. Her face is pressed into my collar; I can feel wet hot tears slipping down the front of my top. I open my mouth, trying to say something comforting, but end up simply hugging her back. Confusion and exhaustion leave me speechless. We stand there for several long moments, the morning sun pushing fingers of light into the room. ‘Pie?’ I say again, more gently this time. She takes a deep breath, and moves backwards, away from me. The loss of her warmth, the weight of her arms around me, leave me feeling somehow heavier than before. ‘Are you alright?’

She nods, not looking at me. I take a step towards her. She’s hugging herself now, still trembling slightly. ‘Do you want to go to bed?’

She doesn’t respond. Carefully, deliberately, I reach over and clasp one of her hands in my own. She doesn’t pull away, so I adjust my grip so it’s tighter, and lead her up the stairs. It’s when I see Pie slipping under the duvet covers without so much as changing into her pajamas that it strikes me something really isn’t right. I sit down beside her on the bed and gently touch her shoulder.

‘Pie, you’re ok. I’m ok. Nothing bad happened. We’re both safe.’

She looks over at me. Her eyes are red rimmed and her cheeks are flushed, it’s all I can do to stop myself from holding her again. ‘I know this was tricky, but we did it. It’s ok.’

‘Kim,’ she murmurs, ‘lie down. Are you tired?’

‘I am,’ I admit. ‘Are you?’

She nods, and then does the last thing I expect. She leans forward and pulls at the pillows that make up the barrier between us, removing each one and placing it on the floor. When she’s finished, she lies back down with a sigh. ‘Lie down,’ she says again. I pull up my half of the duvet and move under it, resting my head on the pillow, facing her. There’s a small part of me that thinks soon she’ll be able to tell me to do anything, and I’ll do it.

‘Hey, Kim?’

‘Yeah?’

She’s crying again, quietly. I can see the wetness glittering on her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.

‘Sorry for what?’

Pie doesn’t answer. I hear her take a deep, shuddering breath. Then I feel a hand, warm and soft, slip over my own.

We fall asleep like that, facing one another, our hands clasped under the duvet cover.