"What did he tell you?" Cole glanced to Marshall sitting in the helicopter bay behind him. Even though the headsets amplified their speech, he could tell that Marshall was ignoring him on purpose. 

"What?" Marshall could only stare out the window as the helicopter flew higher and higher.  Cole smirked and turned his attention back to navigating the helicopter. 

The propellers of the robust machine cleared away a patch of the smoky veil to reveal another layer of grey fog underneath them. Even though they were flying high above the city limits and the main mist patterns, the smoke seemed to get higher and higher by the day. Nothing changed with the pollution's smoke.

But with the factories still pumping fumes, it was only a matter of time before the Earth became completely unbreathable. Cole shook his head at the thought. He couldn't wait to get out of here. 

"Marshall..." Cole looked back at her tight jaw and demeanor. He paused as he noticed her bandaging her bleeding ankle.

 Quickly, he took his headset off and switched the helicopter to autopilot. He crossed behind the pilot's seat and kneeled in front of Marshall, taking her ankle and examining it. He then put on a headset neighboring Marshall's. 

"What did Tate say?" Cole gave her an annoyed look and began to examine her ankle.

"It's classified." She finally looked at Cole. "You don't need to do that. I can tend to my own wounds." She took her ankle away from him, but he continued to kneel in front of her. 

"Right," Cole let out a disappointed sigh and rubbed his chin. 

The two sat in silence. The blades of the helicopter hummed. It filled the silence between the two. Marshall stared at Cole with her inquisitive eyes. They said, don't keep pushing, and Cole only squinted in reply. 

He took her ankle back into his hands and grabbed the medical kit she was using. He began to unwrap the gauze on her ankle so he could see the extent of the damage she had caused herself. Underneath the bloody mess was a cut stretching from her heel to the front of her calf. It was still bleeding, but was healing quickly with the cauterizing gel Marshall had applied to herself moments before. 

Cole bit his tongue and only shook his head, "We're supposed to be partners."

Marshall crossed her arms and avoided eye contact. Under her breath she replied, "Well Forum's not built like it used to be. Two minds have proven to be just as useless as one."

"Evander paired us up again. He thinks we're still useful working together."

"Putting two spies together only increases the chances of us getting caught," she huffed.

"We're not spies, Marshall."

"I don't care what we used to be. It's about what they made us to be. And now we're agents of Forum."

"But putting us together prevents injuries like this one." Cole put more gel on the wound and grabbed some sutures. "You'll need stitches."

"Please, I'm fine. It was just a window."

"You're acting reckless, Marshall."

"I'm not reckless, I'm..." She lost her words and bit the side of her lips. 

What was she? It gave her a thrill to be testing fate so boldly. She liked pushing people over the edge these days just to see if she could. It gave her a sense of recognition that she had never had before in her old life. People stepped on her too much. Sure, she was brilliant. She could think outside the box. Eventually she was put on recognizance missions, but the information she gathered was all passive. Her very presence became passive.

For the first time she was finally seen by the suspects she was using. She was respected and feared. She couldn't lose that feeling of finally being good at something. 

She swallowed. "I'm not reckless. I was testing him. I had to."

"Evander said he was dangerous and you didn't listen."

Marshall flinched as she felt a stinging sensation rise up her leg. She gritted her teeth as Cole tied of the last stich. "He recognized me."

Cole paused. "What?"

"I know the Commander said he wouldn't, but he did." Marshall gripped the edge of her seat.

Cole sat in silence as he wrapped new gauze around her wound. 

She sighed, "Even with the whole new look, he still recognized me... but we worked together for years. Of course he did. He'd have to be completely blind to forget me this soon."

Cole put Marshall's ankle down. "Ten years isn't soon." The silence between the two grew again. "What did he say?"

Marshall shrugged, "Nothing useful for us." She stood up and took off the headset. She grabbed the top of the railing for support. She winced as her ankle supported her full body weight. Cole took off his headset and escorted her to the co-pilot's seat in the cockpit. 

She sat down and began hitting buttons. She put a new headset on. Cole followed suit behind her. 

He took the controls back into his hands. He could feel the tension of the aircraft pulsing at his finger tips. He could tell they were moving into denser air. The machine had to work harder to move through the terrain. 

He scanned Marshall up and down, "So... are they attacking?"

Marshall answered with an icy stare forward, "I don't know."

"Marshall... They've been radio silent for months. This whole run was to see if Tate knew anything about Siphon's next big hit. If they get their hands on Forum's launch ship, there's no hope for any of us."

"I'm telling you he didn't give us anything. Just threats."

"What about if he had spoken-"

And for the first time in years she raised her voice, "I don't know, Cole!" She yelled from a seething anger writhing in her stomach. "I worked with him for years! I thought that maybe, just maybe, him seeing a familiar face in his monstrous state would provoke some sort of kinship. But I was wrong. He hates me! He hates Forum. And he hates what we did to his daughter. Which I still feel guilty about everyday."

"It wasn't our fault."

"Yes. It. Was."

"The fumes turned her. Not us."

"Right. But we worked on the so called technology that created the fumes in the first place. The factories. The Tellurium processing plants. We made innovation happen at the cost of souls. Our souls."

"Maybe there are no such thing as souls."

The air grew heavy. Cole felt his shoulders sink down. Some partnership.

"I mentioned Adelaide."

Cole let out a guttural sound of impatience, "Evander told you to specifically avoid that topic."

"I had to. It was a tactic to push him over the edge. I thought is would get him to talk."

"And instead is got you strangled."

"I didn't tell you he did that."

Cole could see the bruise starting to form under Marshall's collar. "You didn't have to."

Unlike Marshall, Cole was patient and hated the spotlight. He hated bullies and became good at reading people to avoid having to deal with them at all. 

When they were first paired together to take down Siphon he thought it was ludicrous that he was paired up with someone who always seemed to take the path of most resistance when completing operations. 

Marshall had a record at Forum. She was a brilliant scientist specializing in orbital mechanics who stretched the bounds of what was possible for space technology. She was the one who came up with all the ideas at the company that seemed to garner the most monetary value for the company. Space travel for passengers, how we could use satellites to clean up the atmosphere, how to make planes fly in smog that would usually render air space impossible to travel through. 

She was the reason humanity kept innovating. 

Her and Tate. Tate was the thinker on the ground. He was an environmental engineer. He was the person who had to approve all of Marshall's projects and he came up with the resources on how to make the innovation safe and sustainable. But it wasn't enough. 

Siphon got to Tate. And then Tate disowned Marshall. He ignored her ideas and blamed then as ego driven myths. And the company became two factions competing for the world's attention. Forum Labs versus Siphon. Space thinkers versus ground dwellers who still thought the Earth was salvageable. And that's when Cole met Marshall. Forum labs became a military operation just as much as it was a think tank. 

But the smog got worse as the conflict between the two powers grew. 

And then Adelaide died at the start of the war. Tate completely turned his back on world, and then the world stopped. It seemed liked a golden era had ended. 

And we've been in a stand still ever since.

Cole shook his head. Why was he recapping this in his mind? He didn't know anything about Marshall really, other than she was stuck in the past. Her heart wasn't made for conflict and that's why it tested the boundaries of it.

"You need to be careful, Marshall. If you keep pushing people's buttons when you don't know how to read them, you might not get lucky next time."

Marshall remained silent. She didn't need to be scolded anymore. 

"Marshall, you hear me?" Cole looked at her eyes. They seemed stormy. "I know you think you're a different person now than you were, and you are in some aspects... but you're still vulnerable when it comes to him. You need to forget him. He can't help us anymore."

"We can't leave him behind. He's still here."

"But he isn't a real person anymore." Cole's grip on the cyclic stick tightened. "He's living in delusions that aren't real, you know that. The smoke... his mind isn't all there anymore."

"But his power is still a real thing." Marshall finally looked into Cole's eyes. 

She wanted to win the war more than ever now.