Page 6 of Code Name: Scorpio

“International fugitive meets eye surgery patient. Stunning.”

The glasses were nearly opaque. Dark enough that she could barely make out her own reflection through the lenses. They made her look like she was either very famous or in some kind of medical crisis. These were the only ones dark enough to actually help, and while she would have loved to look like a normal person walking to the pharmacy on a Tuesday afternoon, that particular option wasn’t on the menu.

There was nothing normal about her in a crowd of people.

She took a fortifying breath and left her apartment, locking the door behind her. The walk was fine. Three blocks of afternoon light that the lenses turned to dim amber. She’d been making this trip every few weeks for nearly three years, and her body knew the route well enough that the reduced visibility didn’t matter. She knew where the curb dropped and where the sidewalk buckled near the oak on the corner.

The pharmacy was the problem.

The fluorescents were everywhere inside the building, brightening everything like a spotlight. But the lights weren’t the reason for the glasses.

The people were.

She’d chosen this time window because the pharmacy was usually empty. Today, it wasn’t.

Two other people were inside. Shit. Cassandra kept her glasses on and her eyes on the floor. The glasses helped. They blurred the details enough that her brain couldn’t get traction on the people around her, couldn’t start doing the thing it did when it had too much data to work with.

All she had to do was not look at anyone for too long, get her prescription, and leave.

She focused on the linoleum. On the rack of cough drops beside the register. On the scuffed baseboards along the far wall.

She didn’t mean to look at the man at the end of the counter reading the back of an allergy medication box. She was turning toward the prescription counter and he was just there, and her eyes stayed on him half a second too long.

Her brain locked on.

His cart held three items that had nothing to do with one another: children’s cough syrup, a heating pad, and a bottle of wine. The tan line on his left ring finger was about six weeks old.

His shirt was wrinkled on one side and pressed on the other, folded by someone who wasn’t him and hadn’t been around recently to do it again.

He had a sparkly unicorn sticker on the back of his shoulder that he didn’t know was there. The cough syrup he was studying was for a child between four and six, based on the dosage he’d picked, and he was reading the back of the box like someone who’d never had to buy it before because he’d never had to buy it before because⁠—

She was sweating. Her pulse was hammering in her ears, and she couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop noticing. The way he held the box. The scuff pattern on his shoes. The crease in his collar where he’d pulled the shirt on wrong. Every detail fed the next one, and every new detail pulled her eyes to another, and she couldn’t make it stop.

She ripped her gaze away and forced her eyes closed. Her hands were shaking. She kept them closed while she counted to ten.

When she opened them, she stared at the floor and did not look up again.

She found her way back to the pharmacist counter. “Picking up. Leuenberger.”

“Date of birth?”

“March ninth.” She stared at the pharmacist’s hands rather than her face. She was already feeling dizzy from her brain going into overdrive about the man. She couldn’t take a chance on the pharmacist.

The pharmacist turned to the shelf behind her and pulled a white bag. “Sumatriptan, thirty tablets. You have one refill remaining after this.”

One refill until Cassandra faked another prescription. “Thank you.”

She paid and took the bag, walking out with her head down. She just needed to make it the three blocks home. She made sure she didn’t look at anyone on the way. Once inside her apartment, she locked the door behind her, set the pharmacy bag on the counter, and stood there with her palms flat on the kitchen tile and her eyes closed, letting the quiet settle back over her.

A headache was already building behind her right eye, slow and heavy. The particular cruelty of picking up migraine medication in a place guaranteed to give her one was not lost on her.

Her brain was still spinning through the details about the man with the cart. Details she hadn’t asked for, assembling a story she didn’t want to know about a person she would never see again. She couldn’t make it stop. She could only wait for it to wind down on its own, like an engine that kept running after you turned the key.

It had barely ebbed at all when her phone rang forty minutes later. She’d been lying down on her bed, drifting with her arm draped over her eyes, trying not to take any of her migraine medicine.

Fallon.

She sat up and answered. “Hey, you. Been a while.”