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I was going to find out. It sounded like you were all done back there. I thought maybe I could look a little harder.”
    “Of course.” Yves sounded apologetic. He always sounded apologetic, Anika thought. He took his phone and held the small globe up in front of it.
    After he’d captured a few seconds of video, he looked down at the globe. “I have to keep it. I apologize. My superiors, they see that we have these assholes in custody. They’re happy. Everything has been tied up, no? But all physical evidence, it has to be tagged and stored in the appropriate place. I cannot let you keep it.”
    “I understand,” Anika said. She held up her phone and snapped several pictures of the globe before Yves could react. Better to ask forgiveness than permission here. “You both would have walked right by it and never known.”
    “I should make you delete those,” Yves said.
    “Try,” Anika told him.
    Yves smiled. “Don’t think you can lead an investigation of your own. Let us do our jobs, Anika. Tell us anything you stumble across. We will, of course, send everything we can share to your commanding officer.”
    “I promise you, I will not be causing you any trouble,” Anika lied. “I found it. I’m curious. You would be curious as well, yes?”
    Yves smiled. “You have your picture. You’ve earned at least that and probably more. And I promise you, I will keep you notified about anything we learn.”
    Right. Anika scratched her ear. “And once they’re behind bars, wherever they end up, how much time will you spend on seeing what else you can find out about them?”
    “Well, that is the problem, Ms. Duncan. Ce qui est UNPG? I answer you this way: What we are is understaffed. We suffer with old equipment from ten different agencies from around the world who gift us their old castoffs. Every year the Pole, it gets warmer, and there are more people up here, and I get more busy each month, not less. But I will not forget you.”
    Anika felt slightly guilty. “I’m sorry, Yves. It is a hard thing to stop thinking about.”
    He shrugged. “Come. The rest of your life, it is waiting.”
    She watched him climb into the jet.
    The rest of his life, she thought, hadn’t fired a rocket at him lately. “Yves?”
    He looked back down at her. “Yes?”
    “When that boy fired the RPG at me, I reached for the rifle and returned fire. I did not even think about it. Do you know where I got those instincts from?”
    “Not training for UNPG?” Yves guessed.
    “I used to be one of those kids with a gun you talked about. I ran away from Lagos. I dreamed I would pilot an airship, like the adventurers in the movies. But before anyone would let me fly, I sat in an open door of a gondola with a very large chain gun. I was fifteen. My job for two years was to make sure bush fighters were scared of us. I made sure of it. I don’t run away from a fight, Yves.”
    Yves spread his hands. “We already won the fight.”
    No. This was just a small battle of a larger war; Anika felt it in her gut. Something was going on. And maybe it was stupid to pursue it. But she felt slighted. She’d walked away from the rough life of a security contractor. She’d been little more than a mercenary pilot for so long, and the UNPG had been a chance to head in a new direction. And this violence snapping at her, it offended her. She wanted to turn around and kill it until she was sure it was never going to reach into the orderly world she’d made for herself here.
    Or, she wondered, maybe there was nowhere in the world you got to have that life, where you knew you were safe every morning when you woke up, and knew exactly what to expect. She’d lived that in Lagos, growing up. Then ran away from it all for excitement. And after a decade of excitement, she treasured her life here.
    Maybe, just maybe, mulling over all this kept her from having to think about Tom. Or his wife.
    She was going to have to go see Jenny at some point.
    Anika wasn’t sure