Chapter 34 : The Near Collision
The service corridor was supposed to be empty.
Commander Delaney's household followed standard rotation schedules—I'd verified them through three different network sources before deciding to scout the property. Marthas in the kitchen until fourteen hundred. Handmaid on shopping escort until fifteen thirty. Commander at his administrative office until seventeen hundred. Wife at her weekly Wives' Circle meeting until sixteen hundred.
Clean window. Two hours of minimal staff presence. Perfect opportunity to verify whether Delaney's rumored resistance sympathies are real.
I slipped through the delivery entrance at fourteen twenty, wearing the generic maintenance coveralls Beth's network had acquired from a supply depot. Discovery had already confirmed the household's layout during three previous drive-bys—I knew the service corridor connected the kitchen to the private study, and I knew the study contained documents that would confirm or deny whether Delaney was someone I could approach.
The corridor was narrow. Dim. The kind of space designed for servants to move invisibly between the parts of a house that mattered.
I was halfway to the study door when I heard footsteps.
Not Martha footsteps—those were soft, practiced, trained to be unobtrusive. These were boots. Male boots. Moving with the careful efficiency of someone who knew they weren't supposed to be here either.
Guard? No—wrong timing, wrong entrance, wrong posture.
I pressed myself against the wall and reached for Discovery. The power responded immediately, painting the approaching figure with information I didn't want to receive.
Hidden purpose. Professional concealment. Institutional authority masked by apparent normalcy.
Eyes.
The figure rounded the corner and stopped.
Nick Blaine.
Two seconds of frozen recognition. His eyes found mine. My eyes found his. Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke. The silence stretched between us like a wire pulled too tight.
He's here for the same reason I am. Delaney. The Commander with resistance sympathies.
But Nick is Eyes. He's surveilling for the regime.
Unless he's surveilling for someone else.
The meta-knowledge churned through my mind—Nick's complicated loyalties, his eventual turn toward resistance, his role in June's story. But the show hadn't told me when that turn happened. Hadn't told me what Nick was doing right now, in this timeline, in this corridor, wearing the same expression of careful professionalism I was trying to project.
Nick moved first.
He nodded—a curt acknowledgment that could have meant anything or nothing—and continued down the corridor toward the private study. His pace didn't change. His posture didn't shift. He walked like a man who'd decided that encountering another operative in a secured household was simply a problem to be processed later.
I retreated through the kitchen.
The delivery entrance closed behind me with a soft click, and I was back in the autumn sunlight with my coveralls and my racing pulse and the knowledge that I'd just been seen by someone who could destroy everything I'd built.
Nick now knows I scout Commander households beyond my duty requirements.
I now know Nick surveils on Eyes business with the focus of a professional.
The spy-vs-spy dynamic just became operational reality.
---
The cigarette exchange happened the next morning.
I was at checkpoint seven, processing the morning's first wave of transit passes, when Nick's car pulled through the gate. Standard Waterford errand—he was driving without passengers, headed toward the administrative district on whatever business Fred required.
Our eyes met through the windshield.
He pulled to the side of the road, parked, and walked back toward my checkpoint with a cigarette pack in his hand.
"Light?"
The word was casual. Normal. The kind of thing Guardians exchanged during slow shifts when they needed an excuse to stand together for sixty seconds.
"Sure."
I pulled out my own lighter—a brass Zippo I'd found in Kessler's footlocker, one of the few personal items the original owner had possessed. Nick leaned in, cupping his hands around the flame, close enough that our conversation wouldn't carry to Peters at the adjacent station.
"Delaney's clean."
Three words. Delivered through a cloud of smoke. Nick's eyes stayed fixed on the lighter flame.
"How clean?"
"Eyes verified his loyalty last month. Whatever rumors you heard, they're wrong."
He's telling me the target I was scouting is a dead end.
He's also confirming that he noticed what I was doing yesterday.
I closed the lighter. Nick straightened, cigarette lit, face arranged in the pleasant blankness of two Guardians sharing a moment of rest.
"Good to know," I said.
"Thought you'd want to."
He walked back to his car without another word. I watched him drive away and catalogued the exchange in my mental files.
Nick just warned me off a target. Proactively. Without being asked.
That's not Eyes protocol. That's not surveillance behavior.
That's one operative helping another avoid a mistake.
But why?
The question didn't have an answer. Not yet. The show had never explained the details of Nick's intelligence work during this period—he'd been a background presence, a future ally, a romantic subplot waiting to happen. The specifics of his loyalties and operations during Season One remained unclear even to someone who'd watched every episode.
I know he eventually turns. I know he helps June. I know he's not loyal to Gilead.
But I don't know when that shift happens. Or whether it's already happened.
And I can't afford to assume.
The checkpoint queue resumed. I processed transit passes and stamped documentation and tried not to think about the cigarette smoke still clinging to my uniform jacket.
---
Evening patrol took me past the Waterford household at eighteen hundred.
The windows were warm with interior light. Somewhere inside, Serena was probably reading or arranging flowers or performing whatever tasks Wives used to fill the endless hours of their captivity. Nick's car was parked in the usual spot—the driver's quarters, separate from the main house.
He drives past my checkpoint every morning. I patrol past his residence every evening.
Two spies circling each other in a district too small for secrets.
Discovery pinged on something inside the house—the familiar cold sensation of concealed documents, probably Fred's office files. I'd mapped the Waterford household's hidden contents weeks ago, during my first security rotation. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.
Except Serena.
Except the conversation in the kitchen.
Except the mutual recognition that we're both performing roles we don't believe in.
I kept walking. The Waterford house faded behind me, and with it the complicated tangle of relationships and risks and possibilities that seemed to grow more complex every day.
Focus on the mission. Emily's exposure is coming. The crackdown will follow.
Everything else can wait.
Alma's dead-drop held the evening's intelligence when I checked it after patrol:
Emily/Ofglen has been making bold moves. Openly contacting suspected resistance members during shopping rotations. Speaking too freely with other Handmaids. Drawing attention.
The network estimates she has days before exposure. Maybe less.
What do you want us to do?
I read the message three times before burning it.
Emily's exposure is a fixed point. The show was clear about that—she gets caught, she gets punished, and the punishment triggers a cascade of events that eventually leads to her escape.
If I warn her, I might prevent the exposure. But preventing the exposure might prevent the escape.
Butterfly effects. Every intervention creates consequences I can't predict.
I wrote my reply in the careful hand I'd practiced:
Don't warn her. Position assets for the aftermath instead. When the crackdown hits, we need evacuation routes ready.
Trust the timeline.
The words felt wrong even as I wrote them. I was choosing not to save someone because saving her might prevent a better outcome I couldn't guarantee.
This is what the framework was supposed to handle. Cost-benefit analysis. Risk assessment.
But the framework doesn't account for watching someone walk toward a cliff because you think they'll survive the fall.
The brick settled back into place. I walked to the barracks with Emily's face in my mind—the actress's face from the show, overlaid with the real woman I'd seen in the market. The same person. The same story. The same tragedy unfolding on a schedule I'd memorized from a streaming service in another life.
Day 64. Network positioned. Emily exposure imminent.
And I chose not to warn her.
The choice sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't swallow.
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