Nova Tok woke up in the trunk of a car, a car that reeked of garlic.

She swallowed the bile that rose in the back of her throat and tried to sweep the hair from her face, but duct tape wrapped around her wrists wouldn't allow it. The black bandana that gagged her mouth tasted and smelled like dirty scalp.

Her legs were tied, and she lay on them at awkward angles, but that was the least of her problems. Nova and her twin, Winn, had been raised in the Romanian circus, and were trained contortionists, kinkers if you were talking to circus people. She had grown up tangled and twisted.

Go back, she told herself. Calm. Eyes closed. Go back.

She closed her eyes and breathed, focusing on her surroundings, trying to get past the smells. She heard men laughing and singing, of all the absurdities. They sang that stupid song from the musical South Pacific, "Happy Talky Talky, Happy Talk. Talk about things you like to do."

She shut out the song now and tried to rise above the garlic and the stinky scalp, and took herself back in time to sort out this day.

Why the hell had somebody grabbed her and tossed her like picnic leftovers into the trunk of a car?

"I mean, really," she said out loud, realizing how dry her mouth was.

When she was honest with herself, and on occasion she was, Nova Tok was no more than a glorified messenger girl. Traveling the world on cargo planes, trains, and boats, she delivered packages, contents unknown to her, to clients she had never met and most likely would never see again.

Her company handled the secret messages of the wealthy and the powerful. Usually dressed in a mandarin-colored envelope, sometimes the package included a single page, yet whomever the sender and recipient were, this page was so important that sending it digitally would place people unseen in some sort of danger, expose them somehow. That kind of power and paranoia made room for jobs like Nova's.

She liked the work. People left her alone, she got to travel, she took long breaks at home in between deliveries. Boring on some counts, but the money was good. Show up, pick up, get to the airport, and go. Then come back. Right away. Repeat as necessary to pay the bills and be able to relax. There was something so artfully simple about it.

Today, she had landed in a typical cargo plane at Reagan International, home sweet home here in D.C. after a long trek with no beverage service from Bangkok, and she was most definitely looking forward to shower, drink, eat, sleep, in that order.

Now, she searched her memory.



Landed, walked the tarmac, no bags to claim. People hugging each other, making her feel left out as usual. To feel included, she had changed the phone settings and called Tommy, her best friend and assistant who made his living handling peoples' everyday lives while they made their livings.
Tommy probably had several women who thought the same of him as she did. Best friend, confidante, that lovely mix of gay and genuine that you just can't find in straight men or girlfriends.

They caught up, made plans for a movie and wine night. Tommy went to Nova's condo often while she was traveling, to clean and do laundry and sort through mail, but mostly to retrieve messages from her landline. Nova's mother refused to call her cell because she didn't want to interrupt "important business."

Tommy was recounting one of her mother's messages and she had thrown her head back to laugh...



Nova's head hit against the car's trunk. She breathed out and focused away from the singing men, the car going over a couple of speed bumps, the scalpy garlic smells.

She remembered now, slowly coming out of her fog. When she had been laughing with Tommy, there came a creepy feeling, that feeling you get when you just know someone is looking at you for more than a heartbeat. When looking becomes watching. She had shaken it off as jet lag and asked Tommy to order lunch.



"Just the usual at the Lucky Lunch, please?"

"Right," Tommy had said. "Triple Delight, no MSG, egg roll, hot mustard, coming right up. You want it in twenty minutes? Or are you stopping at home to shower first?"

"I'll go straight there. Thanks."

Then that creepy feeling had made her swivel her head around again as she said her goodbyes, and her eyes landed on a guy leaning up against the airport exit door, smoking a cigarette. He wore a suit.

And he was, most definitely, watching her.

She felt just a twinge of shame at her paranoia but ducked into the women's room just the same. Might as well pee.

She didn't even glance in the mirror. Gods knew there were smoky bags hanging under her eyes, her thick hair most likely a frizzy black mess, and who needed to look at that?

Out from the bathroom, and the guy wasn't there anymore.

See? She'd said to her inner victim. Nothing. Walk with purpose, she told herself. Stare straight ahead and walk. No running. Sometimes the jet lag was all her Crazy needed to come out and play.

Home was under a mile away, and with no bags except her backpack, she normally just walked from this airport. This time would be no different, she decided with a falsely confidant shrug.


And walk she did. Fast, past people outside of restaurants, enjoying late brunches and coffees. Music pouring out into the parks that surrounded her community's retail spaces. Children, dogs, everywhere.

But there he was again. In front of her, facing her.

What in the hell?

He walked toward her on the wrong side of the sidewalk and nodded to someone. Someone behind her, maybe? Or to her? Nova turned her head to see a man jerk his chin upward.

And that was when Nova Tok changed her mind. She started to run.



Now it seemed like a weird, slo-mo jet lag dream. Nova strained against the duct tape, tried to spit out the gag. Surely her contortionist training would help her out of this mess.

After breaking a new sweat, she stopped and forced herself to breathe again. She needed to collect her mental and physical energy for when the car stopped and the trunk finally opened. She remembered the chase, forcing herself to remember the details she would need for that moment.



Her mind had almost shut down, running away from the two of them. Surely not another rape attempt? Terror drenched her, streamed down her back and legs, and the rush of adrenaline made her realize that she was the prey once again, the rabbit in an open field with no holes in sight. To hell with that. To hell with whatever these two jerks wanted.

A narrow opening, an urban goat path, appeared on the right, and Nova veered into it. Running was never her favorite exercise, but she was driven by a terrible instinct, by sheer terror. The two buildings sandwiching the path were three feet apart, and their height blocked any hope of natural light.

The thugs behind her chattered away while she jackrabbited down a potential dead end. She couldn't make out what they said, but it poured anger into her already churning stew of emotions. She would not go down without a fight.

Nova's stomach turned as she realized she could smell garlic on one of the men's breath. Or maybe it was coming out of his pores. Her pursuers were that freaking close. Greasy dirty gross, she thought. No more fully formed sentences in her head. The inner alarms were deafening.

A brick on the ground made her trip, and she knew it was over. Her training in the past, in the circus, and her work in the martial arts studio might still come into play, though. She was rising from the ground when they finally came up on her, and both were panting like they hadn't run in decades, if ever.

Maybe they had overestimated their skills and underestimated hers. In any case, she would not make it easy, whatever these jerks had planned. Nova would not be going gentle into this night.

She reached out and clenched the first man's head under her locked fingers, forcing him to stare at the ground. The second guy reached out to grab her, but she kept Number One between them, breathing through her mouth the whole time to save herself from the garlic stench. If they ruined dinner for her, she was going to be really mad.

"Sometimes you lose, Miss Winn," said Garlic Guy.

What? Had he called her by her sister's name? Nova kicked up hard into his crotch right before raking her nails down his slack-jawed face. She looked up just in time to see the second guy's gun coming down to bash into her head. Nova grasped one last look at his ugly mug before the world went dark.



Now, she remembered that face, and decided to try a scream. You should always at least try a scream, she told herself. But the tape over the bandana kept her from getting any sound out. She stopped struggling, forcing herself to breathe and listen. They were up front, laughing, singing that damn song. Who the hell were these fools?

Had Garlic Guy really said Winn's name? Because if so, and they thought that Nova was Winn, then some thinking needed to happen. Meanwhile, breathe, listen. Go to a happy place. Okay, maybe just a not-so-scary place.

"So why do you think she was so easy to take down, anyway? She's supposed to be this macho chick, judo and crazy footwork, right?" Definitely not Garlic Guy talking, Nova surmised. She would know that voice, with or without the accompanying stench.

"I know, right? Vick was so bent on getting her back in one piece and was all, like, whoa, I don't know if you guys will both make it out of that alive, I don't know what she'll do to you, and HA! She was having one bad mother of a day, then, Danny Boy, our little Winn Dixie." From here, Garlic Guy slid into another off-key song about the land of Dixie.

"All I know is I'm glad she's not dead, glad we're not dead, glad we got her so early. Man, we could stop for a nice dinner, some fried chicken, some mac 'n cheese, you know what I'm sayin', and Vick wouldn't think we were runnin' late, right?" Danny Boy, if that was really his name, let out a resounding belch and Nova cringed. Blech.

"Nah. Let's just get our little bundle of Winn-Dex back where Mr. Vick can deal with her. I'm taking no chances on this one, seein' as how tough the boss thought it would be to bag her. She croaks back there? We're in big trouble, my friend. And if you popped her hard enough that she doesn't come around soon? I think he'll put you down like a horse with a bad leg."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll eat later. Off to see the Wizard."

These guys sounded like eighth graders, like walking hormones having a side conversation while playing hoops. And somehow, they thought she was Winn. None of this made sense if they first followed her from the airport.

Unless Winn was supposed to be at the airport at the same time.

Nova hadn't spoken with her twin in more than a month, but being a twin is different than being just a regular sibling. Even when months went by without Nova or Winn calling or emailing the other, they both knew they would cover for the other, no matter what.

Winn, though, would be way more difficult to cover than Nova would be.

The way Winn described her job, Nova got the picture that her twin was out there, for real, taking down bad guys like a comic strip heroine. Winn didn't talk about it much, but Nova had made it a little hobby to get a glass of wine into her sister and ply her with questions whenever she could.

From the sounds of it, Winn worked for some kind of government organization, and that was the word she'd always used, organization, that hunted down the murderers and rapists and thieves no one else could find. Lock 'em up Danno kind of job.

In her imagination, Nova pictured Winn cornering the bad guys all over the world, using her martial arts and her trapeze experience, and yes, even her knife skills to put evil behind bars forever.

The irony, Nova thought, once again pounding her feet against the trunk. Here she was, mostly a simple freaking courier, keeping her head down and minding her own damn business, following all the damn rules, and boom. She gets tossed like yesterday's salad, right into the damn boot.

The car stopped. The trunk opened. Nova was left staring into the eyes of Garlic Guy and Danny Boy.

And they looked just as ugly as they smelled.