Untouchable. Stephanie Doyle

revealed all at once. Her mortal mind was too fragile to take it in. She needed to leave. She needed to find someplace where she could let the information settle in her head and in her heart.

      The monastery. There she could clean herself. In the garden she could let the water rush over her body, taking away the filth she’d been exposed to. She would remember who she was—not what the computer had revealed but who she had become since her birth.

      Lilith started for the opening to the hut but stopped. The computer sat on her writing table, so out of place in the stark space she’d called home for these last ten years. She could still feel the heat it gave off. Or was what she was feeling something more sinister? Part of her wanted to destroy the computer and the tiny piece of metal inside it. But she knew she couldn’t. The information it contained was simply too important.

      Walking back to it, she removed the stick from the back of the computer and found the spider necklace still nestled inside the box she’d place on her table. She turned it over and slid open the back, returning the flash drive to its hiding place. Leaving the necklace wasn’t an option, but the thought of wearing it made her shudder.

      She had no choice.

      Lilith pulled the gold chain around her neck and fastened the catch in the back. Then she tucked the gold body inside her silk coverall where it rested against her skin, safe from another’s touch.

      Avoiding the greetings from the villagers and, more important, avoiding Sister Peter, who would have nothing but questions, she made her way up the steep hill to the monastery.

      Another young monk answered the summons at the door. Pema had recently been sent to the monastery by his family in Nepal. If the beads of sweat that habitually formed on his shaved head were any indication, he still hadn’t gotten used to the weighted heat.

      Lilith spoke in a dialect native to his land, one that she remembered from her childhood in Nepal, and he smiled. Thinking she had come for study, he pointed to where she knew Punab typically held his classes, but instead she made for the inner courtyard fashioned with water pumps and basins where the monks did their bathing as well as their laundry.

      Winding her way through the series of walkways, Lilith found the center of the building. The burst of color inside the garden was so comforting she could have wept. This was the place she came from. The place where she’d begun to learn who she was. Not that other place. Not some lab.

      Carefully she reached out and touched the delicate petals of the orchids that flourished under the brothers’ care. So much like her own skin, she thought. Soft and silklike with just a hint of dew. Sometimes others thought she glowed. It hadn’t been a curse as her father believed. It wasn’t a sickness like the nuns suggested.

      What had been done to her had been done on purpose. By Jackie.

      Frowning, Lilith let the flower fall from her hand and made her way deeper into the courtyard where she found a series of pumps. Taking a large clay bowl with a flat bottom that had been specifically designated for her use, she placed it under the pump and began to call up water from the well that resided under the brick building.

      In deference to her sex, she sought out the three-sided partition that the brothers had constructed for her. It allowed her privacy during her bath as well as prevented the monks from being tempted by her femininity should they stumble upon her. Once behind it she felt free to unwrap the bindings that encased her.

      Tarak winced. He felt the pinch in his thigh with every step he took and figured he was overdoing it, but he wouldn’t let himself stop. In a sick way, he was happy to feel the pain. It reminded him that he had a leg. His fault, he told himself. When he’d arrived at the monastery’s doorstep he hadn’t been paying attention to the nagging pain in his thigh. Only the one in his soul.

      Eventually the fever had overtaken him to the point where he’d known he was in trouble. Spending more time in the jungle than most, he’d seen what fever unchecked by medicine could do to a man. A merciless thief, it could rob a man of his strength, then his sanity, until finally it took his life.

      Lucky him, he’d been spared both his life and his sanity. Or had he?

      Images still haunted him from that night when the monks had come to his room. It seemed otherworldly. Surely a sign that he’d lost his mind. There had been two women with Punab. A plain-faced one, simple and forthright. She’d wiped his brow and told him to hold on—that someone was coming to take away the pain. He’d felt the fire in his body. The heat was focused most intensely where the bullet had ripped through the flesh of his upper thigh.

      He remembered lying in his sweat thinking that the heat was good. The pain was good. He deserved it. He’d earned it. Everyone else had died. But he had lived and for that he needed to suffer.

      He wanted to tell the woman in the rumpled white habit that he craved the pain. Because not only was it punishment, it was proof. Proof that he was alive. That he’d been smarter than the enemy who had betrayed him. There was satisfaction in that even though his men were dead.

      Where had it gone wrong?

      Tarak stopped in his wanderings. He reached down to massage the muscles around the wound, working his fingers deep into his leg to ease the cramps. When he looked up, the colors of the garden exploded before his eyes and he realized he’d made it from his room to the center-court orchid garden.

      He wanted to appreciate the beauty in front of him, but instead his mind kept working back to the question that had stayed with him every day since the incident.

      How had he failed?

      He could ignore the lingering questions. Accept what happened and move on. Tell himself that it was the job. The risk they all took. But he knew himself well enough to know he never would.

      Instead he let himself think back to the specifics of the mission.

      He took himself back to the compound outside of Monteria, Colombia. It wasn’t hard. The sweet scent of the orchids reminded him of another jungle on the other side of the ocean.

      Back there it had been darker and the stench almost rancid. The rain hadn’t just fallen on their heads, it had cascaded. But they all knew the job, and rain wasn’t something they let get in the way. Six soldiers. All contracted by the CIA. Tarak had been chosen to lead.

      Mistake number one, he thought grimly. He’d allowed the CIA to pick some of the team rather than do it himself. The soldier-of-fortune community was a relatively small one. In the years since he’d left MI-6 to work on his own as a freelance agent, he’d come to know most of the regular players. Those who did it for the money. Those who did it for the thrill. Those who wanted to serve but had been disenchanted by bureaucratic bullshit getting in the way of action. Like him.

      But that night there were two people the CIA told him to use. One he knew and considered a friend. The other a stranger, but not new to the game, he’d been told. Those two people were responsible for providing intelligence information. The rest of the unit was to engage the compound where it was suspected that a DEA agent was being held. Their mission had been to confirm that the hostage was alive and to extract him if possible.

      A task like that relied more on intel than it did on men with guns. That was why two had been chosen to gather and provide the information that the team would need.

      Tarak knew one of the two was a traitor.

      Unfortunately his first clue that the mission had gone to shit was when he heard shots being fired ahead of schedule. He hadn’t given the command to move forward but the explosives were suddenly triggered. A shower of gunfire over their heads had them all running for cover. The guerillas working for the drug lord were behind them in the jungle instead of at their posts inside the compound where they were supposed to be.

      Tarak had immediately called for a retreat but their communication had been compromised and all he’d heard was static.

      He’d found the bodies of Sheppard, O’Neill and Grace on his way out. All of them his men. It had been Grace, clinging to his last breath, that had cost Tarak the wound