The Fallout #2
"He was a predator." I said it slowly. "He manipulated me.
He lied to me. He put me in danger and he didn't care.
" I picked up the chip and turned it over in my fingers.
"But he was also a pawn. He was caught in something bigger than he was.
The CIA and the KGB built the KESTREL network together.
They made him the controller. And when he became a liability, they cut him loose. "
Harding didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The television cut to a commercial for a car dealership in Tucson.
A man in a cowboy hat was shouting about zero-percent financing.
I watched him wave his arms and point at a row of pickup trucks, and I felt something shift in my chest. Not relief.
Not closure. Something smaller and harder and more private.
I had been carrying Julian's secrets for fifteen days before I knew they existed.
I had been running from them for weeks after that.
And now they were on the news, and the men who had built the machine that killed him were being led out of buildings with their faces turned away from the cameras, and I was sitting in a safe house in the desert with a chip in my hand and nothing left to run from.
"I thought I knew him," I said.
Harding looked at me.
"On the ship. I thought I knew him. I thought he was kind. I thought he was lonely, like me. I thought we were the same." I set the chip down on the blanket. "He was never any of those things. He was a man with a job to do, and I was the job."
"That doesn't mean what you felt wasn't real."
"It means it was built on a lie."
"Yes," he said. "It was."
I stood up and walked to the door. The wood was hot under my hand.
I pushed it open and stepped outside, and the desert heat hit me like a wall.
The sky was a pale, washed blue, and the mesquite bushes were casting long shadows across the sand.
The car that had brought me here was gone. The road was empty in both directions.
I heard Harding come up behind me. He stopped in the doorway.
"You should eat something," he said.
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since yesterday."
I turned. He was leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. The cut above his eyebrow was healing clean. It would leave a scar.
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Because I've been watching the house for two days."
I stared at him.
"I got out of the alley," he said. "It took longer than I wanted.
By the time I made it to the rail yard, you were gone.
Sarah Jackson's contact found me. She told me where you were.
I drove down yesterday morning and I've been keeping watch ever since.
" He paused. "I wanted to make sure you were safe before I came in. "
"You've been out here the whole time."
"I slept in the car."
I didn't know what to say to that. I stood in the doorway with the desert at my back and the man who had saved my life in front of me, and the silence between us was the kind of silence that holds more than words can carry.
"Thank you," I said finally.
He nodded.
I walked back inside. The television was still playing, but the news had moved on to weather. A cold front was coming down from the north. Temperatures would drop into the seventies by the weekend. The newsreader smiled and pointed at a map, and I reached over and turned the set off.
The room went quiet. Just the wind outside and the creak of the metal roof expanding in the heat.
"What do we do now?" I asked.
Harding walked to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it standing up, looking out the window at the mountains.
"We wait," he said. "A few more days. Let the purges finish. Let the agencies stabilize. Then we figure out what comes next."
"Together?"
He turned. The glass was still in his hand. "Do you want it to be together?"
I thought about Julian. About the ship. About the dinners and the whispered promises and the way he'd looked at me across the table like I was the only person in the room.
I thought about how much of it had been a performance and how much of it might have been real, and I realized I would never know.
The man who could answer that question was dead in a hotel room in Copenhagen, and the truth had died with him.
But Harding was still here. Tired and scarred and disavowed, standing in a safe house in the middle of nowhere, asking me a question he had no reason to ask and every reason to fear the answer to.
"I don't know," I said. "But I don't want to be alone."
He set the glass down on the counter.
"Neither do I," he said.
The wind picked up outside, rattling the corrugated metal of the roof, and somewhere in the distance a bird called out once and then went silent.
I sat back down on the cot and picked up the data chip and held it in my palm, feeling its weight, its smallness, the improbable density of everything it contained.
Harding sat down in the chair by the door and closed his eyes.
The square of light on the floor had moved almost to the wall now. In another hour it would be gone entirely, and the room would settle into the long, slow cool of the desert afternoon. I watched it creep across the concrete, inch by inch, and I let myself breathe.