Chapter 13
BANDIT
The alarm sounds like a flat electronic scream tearing the dark open. I jerk up on the bed in yesterday's clothes before I know I'm awake.
The ceiling stutters. The light catches, dies, catches, throws the bolted room into strobe and back into black. Down the hall a second alarm answers in a different key, then a third, until the whole building is shrieking at itself out of tune.
The intercom comes on. An electronic woman's voice starts to say please remain … and chops off into static.
I get my feet under me and listen to the footsteps in the hall. People are running, but not toward anything. They bolt down the hall, stop, double back.
I try my door. It gives. I stand there with my hand on it and understand, all at once, what this is.
The phones that don't work past the gate. The signal this whole place is built to eat. Somebody's reached into the facility's nervous system and pulled. All the doors opened and the calm recorded voice can't finish a sentence.
Bones. He's coming or he's here, inside those walls.
For one clean breath, the corridor is empty and all mine. I could walk it. Out through the lobby with the fish, into the dark and the trees. I can run … but then I hear it, the cry …
It's not panic, it's worse. A man's voice, thin and lost. He repeats where, where like a child woken in a house that's changed shape around him.
I let go of the door and go toward the voice in the strobing corridor. Through the open doors I see an old woman with her hands pressed to her ears, a young man frozen staring at the ceiling, a shape sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth.
Those people are real patients. They're not sure they can trust their own minds. They can't tell if it's the world ending or just their part of it. A woman shoves past me with her arms full of charts paying no attention to the distress around her.
I find him at the corner.
He's an old man, eighty if he's a day, he's down leaning against the doorframe.
I'm guessing the dark caught him mid-step.
There's blood, a lot of it, sheeting down the side of his face, black in the strobe and then bright red when the light comes back.
He's pushing at it with both hands and only spreading it, eyes huge and gone.
I drop to my knees.
"Hey. I've got you." I get my hand flat against the cut, hard. Head wounds always bleed like it's the end of the world. "Look at me. There you go. It's a lot of blood and almost none of it matters, I promise. I do this all the time."
His eyes find my face. Hold.
"That's it. What's your name?"
"Walter." A whisper. "I can't … the lights …"
"I know. The lights are bad. You don't have to look at them, you look at me." I lean in so I'm all he can see, keep the pressure on, take his other hand. "You took a header into a door, that's all. Happens to the best of us. I'm not going anywhere."
And I'm not. The building screams, people stream past and shout over each other. For the first time since Kessler walked me into that little room I'm not afraid because I know exactly what I'm doing.
That's how he finds me.
I don't hear him over the alarms. I feel the light change, a body filling the corridor, blocking the strobe. I look up.
Bones.
Enormous in the doorway, cut over a dark shirt, a gun in one hand pointed at the floor, and his face … I can tell that he feared to find me broken, drugged, or gone.
"Bandit," he says. Just that.
"What took you so long," I tell him, and my voice cracks down the middle of it.
He drops to his haunches beside me and puts his hand over mine on Walter's head.
Angel and Bishop are right behind him.
"Darling's here," I say looking up at them … and just like that I no longer feel like the rescued one. I'm part of the rescue mission. "Long-term wing."
I'm already up, pointing back to the end of the hall. "Branch off the main hall."
"Lead," Bishop says.
So I do.
We abandon Walter who's already doing better and I take them down the hall. The keypad at the door is dead like everything else but Angel seems enraged. He puts a boot to it twice and it goes.
We fan out to find her room and Bishop is the one who finds her. He walks back in the hallway carrying her with ease.
Bishop gets to her first.
This man alone fills a doorway, he makes grown Bastards go quiet when he walks in but not today. Today, he folds all that height down onto one knee in front of a wheelchair and lays his scarred hand over Darling's two thin ones like they'd break.
"Hey, Darling.”
Her eyes swim, find him, hold. Something cuts up through the fog, the real her, surfacing one more time.
"Malachi." She reaches up and pats the black ink climbing his throat, twice, like she's making sure he's still in there. "You let your collar get filthy."
The sound he makes isn't quite a laugh.
"Wick's boys came," she says out loud.
And then her gaze swings to me and sharpens. "This one found me. She's one of ours now. You hear me."
"We hear you," Bishop says, rough.
He lifts her out of the chair himself. Doesn't hand her off to anyone. Carries her toward the doors like she weighs nothing, and at the threshold, he stops, just for a breath. He lets her see the sky before he takes her home.
“Let's get out of here."
Bones and I are right behind them.
In the lobby the fish are still moving, slow and untroubled in their lit tank while the world they live in comes down around them. A door at the far end of the admin hall is swinging, and through it, for one strobing instant, I see the back of a coat … it looks like Kessler.
Bones follows my eyes. His jaw sets.
"Let him go,” Bones says to Angel without slowing. "Tonight we get our people out."
"Revenge will come later," he answers looking so fierce I'm glad we're in the same team.
In turn, we push through the glass doors there's three dark trucks waiting for us in the dark. Bones helps me climb into one and shut the door.
"I'm taking you home," he says. I know he means the club. I'm happy he is.