PART 2: “Get off my mat before you break a hip!” the MMA black belt sneered as his gym ERUPTED in laughter

“There were three of us,” Marcus said, and his voice was so low I had to read his lips as much as hear him.

 

“Not nine. Three.”

The warehouse lights hummed overhead. Somewhere behind me, I heard Tyler Marsh’s bare feet shift on the mat, but I couldn’t turn around. I couldn’t move at all.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

He reached into his jacket. Slow. Careful. The way men like us always moved when our hands went somewhere hidden.

He pulled out a photograph.

It was creased down the middle, soft at the edges from years of being carried. I recognized the grain of it immediately—the cheap field stock we  used to print operational stills on, back when everything was analog and deniable.

 

Three figures stood in front of a concrete wall. No faces visible. Just shoulders, posture, the way each of us held our hands.

“There was never a program with nine of us,” Marcus said.

“That was the cover. That was the version they gave the people who asked the wrong questions. Nine names, nine files, nine funerals, so nobody would go looking for the three who actually existed.”

My fingers closed around the edge of the photograph. The paper felt like skin.

“I read your death notice,” I said. “I read it in a room with no windows and one door and a man sitting across from me whose face I couldn’t describe to you now if my life depended on it.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “I wrote it.”

The words landed like a physical blow. I actually took a step back. One step, that was all. But every student left in the building saw it.

“Why?”

“Because they were going to kill you,” he said. “Because your file got flagged, and once your file got flagged, there was only one way out that didn’t end with you in a shallow grave in a country you’d never heard of.”

I stared at him.

“Faking my death was the only way to save me?”

“Faking my own,” he corrected. “If you were the one who was still alive, they would’ve kept coming. They would’ve burned the whole city down looking for you. But if you believed I was dead, if I was erased, you’d stop looking. You’d go quiet. Quiet people don’t get flagged twice.”

A long silence stretched between us.

“You let me grieve you,” I said, and my voice cracked on the second word. “For twenty years. I lit a candle for you every year on the date they gave me. I told my husband I’d lost a brother in the service. I sat in churches and I prayed for a man who was out there somewhere, alive, choosing to let me rot in that grief.”

Marcus’s jaw tightened. His eyes were wet.

“I know,” he said. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t know.”

“Then why now? Why this gym? Why tonight?”

He looked over my shoulder at the students, at Tyler, at Deja standing frozen by the front counter with her hand still resting on the binder she’d been holding.

“Because they found somebody else,” Marcus said.

My blood went cold.

“Who?”

“Them,” he said. “The people who flagged you. The people who run the gray room. They’re moving on the old files again. All of them. Anyone who was ever touched by the program is being located and”—he paused, searching for a word that wouldn’t be too much for the room—”being closed out.”

I looked down at the photograph in my hands.

“All of them?”

“All of them,” Marcus confirmed. “Which is exactly three people. You. Me. And one more.”

I looked up.

“There were only three,” I said slowly, “because two of us died in the field.”

“Two of us were reported dead in the field,” Marcus corrected. “Only one of us actually died.”

The warehouse spun. I reached out and grabbed the edge of a heavy bag just to keep myself steady. I could feel the coarse canvas under my fingers, the smell of leather and sweat and old chalk. I could hear Tyler whisper something to Deja. I could feel my own pulse in my throat.

“Who’s the third?” I asked. “Who’s still alive?”

Marcus looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked past me, at the front door of the gym, at the highway visible through the glass, at the parking lot where my car sat alone under a flickering streetlight.

“He’s the reason I came looking for you,” Marcus said. “He’s the reason I’ve been standing in the back row of this gym every Thursday for the last six weeks, waiting to see if you’d ever walk through that door.”

I went very still.

“Six weeks?”

“Six weeks,” he confirmed. “I found this place the same way you did. Saw the sign from the highway. Walked in. Realized by the second week that the woman who  used to run circles around me in the dust might be somewhere close by. And then today, when I saw you in that doorway with your old duffel bag, I knew.”

 

“Knew what?”

“I knew we were out of time.”

I let go of the heavy bag. My hand was shaking.

“Where is he?” I asked. “The third one.”

Marcus shook his head slowly.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s the problem.”

Deja stepped forward then, sensing that whatever was happening at the edge of her mat had moved past the point where she could pretend not to be involved.

“Do you two need a private room?” she asked. Her voice was controlled, professional, but I saw the way her eyes kept flicking toward the front door.

“The office is small but it locks.”

Marcus looked at me. I nodded.