CHAPTER 10 #2
"The sweatshirt suits you. I would like to know where you got it."
Luca, eating beans, mouth full: "Workshop, Cade. Same as everything else. She was cold."
Adrian does not look up. One corner of his mouth lifts, holds a beat past where vanity would have dropped it, and settles. He has just laughed; he has spent it and pocketed it before anyone but me thought to look.
Marcus gives a small bow over his bowl — a quarter-inclination of the head that means I have been told what I needed to know, and I am choosing not to make it cost you — and eats his beans.
He turns the silver lighter once where it sits by his plate, a half-rotation, thumb on the dent in the lid, which is how I know he is doing arithmetic, not algebra.
"I have not had any complaints about the workshop's hospitality," he says, light, to no one in particular. "Cleanest accommodations in the bunker."
Adrian eats. The prosthetic forks beans with Mk-IX precision. Luca's eyes go to it for the half-second he gives it once a meal; then away.
It is the most peaceful lunch I have had since the night my mother died.
When I push my chair back to clear my bowl, Marcus says, "Stay sitting. I am going. I want to keep my talents sharp."
He clears all four bowls and whistles, soft and off-tune on purpose, while he does it.
Adrian, low, eyes on his coffee: "He is showing off for you."
"I know."
"He is also doing the dishes, which he has not done since the year before last. Senna's runner came up at oh-six-thirty with a sealed slip; he has been reading it between the second and third plate. Eat the rest of your beans."
I eat the rest of my beans.
---
The Trace antechamber smells of wet concrete and stale beer, and Senna Ortiz is on the inside of the steel-faced door before I am all the way through it.
She is as Marcus described her once — light brown hair pulled back hard, sharp brown eyes, no jewelry, a jacket cut for a knife on the inside. She does not embrace me. She nods.
"Quinn."
"Ortiz."
Marcus, beside me, gone motionless the way he does when he is taking in every word, a breath mint from the white pill-case shifting once between his molars. "Talk."
She talks fast. She is not a woman who wastes a corridor.
"Tarn has personally escalated OPHRA. Yesterday afternoon.
Triple field teams across Sectors 3, 5, 6, 7 — three operators per sweep, two sweeps overlapping at the seam.
Ivor Kade is now on permanent corridor duty in the Sector-1 wing.
Tarn has put his gun on his own floor. That tells us he thinks the next breach comes from the inside.
He is not wrong. He just does not know it is coming from a thirty-four-year-old man he reported dead three years ago and a twenty-six-year-old woman he killed the mother of. "
The corridor goes very quiet. Marcus's hand stays out of his pocket.
My own hand finds the mother-of-pearl knife in my left back pocket, closes once around the worn ridge of the spine, and lets go — and I let the fist unspool against my thigh, knuckle by knuckle, which is the thing I do now instead of the other thing.
"The Trace is sustainable maybe seven more days. After that the cordon tightens and the next sweep finds something it can use. I am pulling cash and shifting two runners by tomorrow night. By day six we are dark on the upstairs phones."
Marcus says, "Standing Order Four."
"I know."
"Lose it. Do not defend it."
"I know."
Marcus puts his right hand flat on the doorframe and looks at the floor for two seconds.
The throat-scar catches the corridor's low lamp — a thin pale seam from a year I do not yet have the data for.
When he looks back up, his face has gone smooth and given me nothing, and by now I read that nothing for what it is: he is feeling something and refusing to perform it.
"Thank you, Senna. Off the books. I will not forget."
"You will. " Dry. "It is how I prefer to be remembered."
She turns to me. The sharp brown eyes flick to the chain riding above my collar — she catches it in a half-second — and her mouth tightens at the corner and does not comment.
"Quinn. I am glad you got here. I am sorry it was at this price. Stay alive."
"I will try."
"Try harder. The bar was a building. The men you have are not. Stay alive."
She turns and goes through the door, and the cobalt floor-strip pulses on at the seam where she passed.
"She likes you," Marcus says.
"She told me to try harder."
"That is how she likes people."
He puts his hand on the corridor wall — not on me — and pushes off, and we walk back along the under-block corridor to the blast door.
Halfway down the corridor the cuff at my left wrist — the slim band of my own Sector-7 build — gives one short low buzz, the kind a passive scan-blip leaves when it has only grazed the outer cone of the bunker's spoof field. I do not break stride. I do not say it. I file it.
He does not touch the pocket the entire walk. He walks like a man keeping count for someone else.
---
In the Ops Room at seven the cold-blue light is on at full and Adrian is at the planning table with his hands flat on the concrete and his shoulders set the way I have not yet seen them set inside this building. Marcus is in the chair beside him. I am at the doorway.
Marcus says it cleanly. Tarn personally. Triple teams. Kade permanent corridor. Seven days. Standing Order Four. He sets the lighter to the rim of the table and clicks the lid open and shut, once — giving Adrian the last beat by sound — and the room holds.
Adrian takes it without moving. Not the slack of a man taking a blow — the loaded kind, every surplus motion stripped off so the whole of him can stand behind the one task of hearing it. He nods. He looks at me.
"Quinn. The Trace is gone in seven days. Are you prepared to be the cause of the death of a bar?"
The honesty of the question is the kindness of it. He has not asked me to apologize. He has asked me to look.
I look.