CHAPTER 15 #3
Marcus is in and out, quiet, ambient. Fresh clothes on the hook. A tin cup of water that Luca hands to me; I drink the whole thing in three swallows. Marcus brings more. I drink it.
"Bunkroom D is ready. Or the Common Room couch."
"Couch."
He is gone, light footstep across the upper level.
Luca washes my hair. The platinum-bleach lock has come out from behind his ear into his eyes; he leaves it there because he is using both hands for me. His cuffs are soaked through.
"Eliza."
I open my eyes.
"Bonita. " Then he stops. Flushes. "I am — sorry. That was for another day. Jesus. Forgive me."
"Don't apologize."
"That was for another day."
"You can have today."
He puts his forehead against the side of the basin beside my cheek. He breathes out shaky and says nothing else.
Marcus assists. The cotton is warm because he has held it against the heater. They have done this choreography in their heads separately, for me, and the weight of being carried by two men's prior planning settles over my shoulders like a coat I did not buy and did not refuse.
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The Common Room is in low amber. The east-wall window-screen shows the rooftop feed, light snow falling across the ridge of the building across the way.
Marcus has built a nest on the larger couch: blanket folded at the back, two pillows wedged into the corner, wool throw at the foot.
A small white plate with three crackers and a slice of cheese — of course.
I sit. Luca to my left. I lean into him; his shoulder fits the side of my head. Marcus to my right, tucking the throw across my knees, then putting his palm, flat, warm, dry, on top of my hand.
The mother-of-pearl knife is still in the left back pocket of the trousers on the workshop chair.
I have walked from the workshop to the bath to the Common Room without it.
By my own body's clock, I am the most recently unarmed twenty-six-year-old woman alive.
The strangeness of it is a small high note above the chest. I file it for tomorrow.
For now, my head is on Luca's shoulder and my right hand is in Marcus's left and I am breathing slow.
Luca's heart-rate is in the high seventies through the cotton at his collar. Marcus's pulse, where my fingers rest against his wrist, runs slower than I expect, fully calm, the way a fixer goes calm only after the deal is closed.
The room reorganizes itself in my head. Marcus, before he turns the lamp.
The corridor door does not make a sound when Adrian opens it, so I notice Adrian instead.
He has come from the upper watch, prosthetic at his side, coat still on his shoulders, a wet spot at the right one where snow has melted through, the cold corridor blue still clinging to him as he crosses the threshold into the warm amber of the room.
He is on his way to Bunkroom A. He has stopped instead.
He clears the sightlines first the way he always does, exits, then hands, then faces, and only when the line comes up empty does he let himself see what is actually in front of him.
Luca with my head on his shoulder. Marcus with my hand in his.
The throw, the water, the crackers, Marcus's slate cuff turned back flat at his wrist. He goes still, not the absence of motion, but the held kind, the discipline of a man choosing not to move.
Then he nods once.
It is the tactical nod — the one Marcus gets across an Ops Room when the sweep has come up clean — but he holds it a half-beat past the operational length, and in this room that half-beat is the other nod entirely.
He shrugs out of the coat, crosses to the armchair across from the couch, the one Marcus likes, and sits.
He does not say a word. Prosthetic laid flat along the arm of the chair, the titanium ring on his left thumb turning a slow quarter-revolution and stopping once, the worn-smooth worry of it, and then his hand goes quiet.
He takes in the three of us, takes in the window-screen, and reaches for nothing. He stays.
The clock above the kitchenette reads midnight in thin white digits. The bunker hums. Across the low table Adrian breathes slow, the muscle beside his mouth shifting once and giving nothing.
I look at him over the rim of the throw.
He has sat down. He has stayed. The thought arrives whole, in my own voice, with the cadence of an entry into a log.
The bitter tea is still on the workshop bench in the dark, three rooms back, the most recent thing I have walked away from and not gone back for.
Then, behind Adrian's shoulder, the window-screen throws a flicker that is not snow: a narrow band of static along the lower edge, there and gone, the wrong color, the kind of seam a clean feed does not split on its own.
Half a second after it, underneath my left sleeve, the cuff answers with a single soft pulse at the lowest scan-warning threshold.
My breath shortens by a count without my permission.
My free hand has already drifted to the edge of the throw, looking for a pocket that is three rooms away on a chair, looking for the knife that is not on me. Both things are the same thing, and the same thing is out there.
I keep my head on Luca's shoulder. I keep my hand in Marcus's. I let none of it reach my face. Tomorrow. I tell them tomorrow.