Out of the Dark (Orphan X #4)

by Gregg Hurwitz

Envision someone else, someone better than you. Stronger. Smarter. Tougher. Then do what that guy would do.

‘Act like who you want to be,’ Evan tells the stale air of the hotel. He vows to leave his fear behind him in that room. Forever.

It wasn’t just a black program; it was full dark. You could stare right at it and comprehend nothing but an absence of light.

He’d kept the vast resources he had accrued as a black operator and the skills embedded in his muscle memory. But he’d also kept the bearings of his moral compass that had, despite the blood he’d spilled across six continents, stubbornly refused to be shattered.

‘Why are you chasing me?’ Evan asked. ‘Why are you running?’ the plainclothes officer said. ‘Because you’re chasing me.’

‘She never learned that you can’t ever please anyone by trying to please them.’

He didn’t understand the unspoken rules of intimacy, but he knew precisely at which angle to thrust a finger strike to dislodge someone’s eyeball.

They had made him who he was and then found their creation to be unacceptable.

‘If you accept life, you accept all its rich, awful complexities. Because if you think about it, what’s the alternative?’

He wondered if he could ever bring these two lives of his into alignment without destroying one or the other.

‘Can you pretend you’re not comprehensively impossible? Just for, like, a minute? Lie to me? Whisper sweet nothings?

He saw himself punching the mirror, spiderwebbing it into a thousand fragments as impossible to put together as his own past. He imagined the blood dripping from his knuckles, the wounds that would slow him, imperfections he could not afford.

‘Atlas carries the world on his shoulders,’ he said. ‘And I used to think about how miserable he must be. You know how the Greeks love suffering. But then I realized – he’s not suffering. He’s fortunate to shoulder a responsibility of that magnitude. It’s enough weight to make him useful, to give him self-respect. If he put down his load, he’d be meaningless.’

A single bullet had opened the floodgates. A war crime. Treason. A nation destroyed, four thousand dead, and a new chapter in American imperialism. The weight of it threatened to crush him.

Remorse spread through him, heated and seething. He tried to get his arms around it, wrestle it down, reshape it into something sharp and unforgiving, something he could weaponize.

He heard the man slide to a sitting position. Evan put his own shoulders to the wall and lowered himself to sit back-to-back with him. Two Orphans, separated by a single wall.