CHAPTER 22 #3
I cannot speak for a second. My left hand has curled against the table edge without my asking it to, and I press it flat instead, spread the fingers wide on the cold steel and hold them there, so the grip does not show him what the words have done to me.
"Then together."
"Together."
Adrian, dry: "If you two are about to make a religion of this, do it after we have rehearsed the corridor."
"Yes," Luca says, the smile coming and going in the same breath. "Rehearsing the corridor."
We rehearse for four hours. I walk Adrian's geometry — the steps from corridor C's elbow to the office door, the paces to the desk, the holster pull, the way I will step left to clear Luca's packet if I discharge before he activates.
We rehearse Marcus's count — one, two, three — into my earpiece, his voice a metronome my body learns to answer in adjustments of foot and shoulder I will not have to think about tomorrow.
By six we begin the bunker inventory.
The bunker has been ours so long that I have stopped seeing the things in it as things — but Adrian is moving through every room with two duffel packs, putting in only what we cannot afford to lose.
The drive. The decryption authority key.
Luca's spare prosthetic components. Two photographs from his bunkroom — his mother, the cybernetic dog.
Adrian's two Latin books. Marcus's three pre-Network novels wrapped in linen. The Mk-Vs, one rifle, a field-kit.
A clean change of clothes for each. The St. Eligius medallion stays at my throat where it has been since Day 9; the chip in my bra-strap stays where it has always been; my mother's old archives go into the second pack — the small mortal things we are bringing.
The rest stays. The couches. Marcus's rug. The kitchenette. The window-screen. The workbench. The blast door.
"Standing Order Four," Marcus says, watching Adrian set the second pack on the table. "We have lost the Trace. We are preparing to lose the bunker. We do not defend either; we extract."
"We extract."
"We do not lose the bunker," Luca says, quiet. "We are not losing the bunker."
Adrian's mouth does the brief, parchment-dry thing it does instead of laughing, there and gone before it commits to being anything: "We are not planning to lose the bunker. We are prepared. There is a difference."
Luca puts his palm on the table edge and presses, the way he presses on a thing when he is making a vow without saying it. The smudge of solder grease at his temple has not been wiped since the server farm; he does not feel it.
At eight the four of us are in the Common Room. Nobody is eating. Nobody is reading. Adrian is at one end of the long couch, prosthetic along the back, the titanium ring on his left thumb tapping the leather once and going still. Luca is on the rug at my feet, shoulder against my shin.
Marcus is in the chair opposite, lighter on the table between us where he has set it down deliberately, squared to the edge — a thing he has decided not to need tonight, put out of his own reach to prove he can leave it there.
The window-screen shows the rooftop above us. Snow is falling again, light. The sensor mast at our roof is collecting fresh sift on top of yesterday's. Snow on the bunker's mast. Mine, in the small thin sense in which a thing has ever been mine.
Adrian leans forward, his eyes finding mine across the low table.
"Eliza."
"Adrian."
"Tomorrow we go."
"Tomorrow we go."
He does not move closer and he does not touch me — the Common Room is twelve feet across and we are at opposite ends of the couch — but his voice goes low and brief and final, the way it goes when he is making a thing into a vow because he is not going to repeat it.
"Tonight is ours."
I do not say anything for a long count. Marcus has gone as motionless as the lighter on the table. Luca's shoulder against my shin is very still. Adrian holds my eyes and does not let them go.
It is a sentence about a length of time and a possession — eight hours and the four of us as a unit — and the room widens around it for a beat the way a room widens when somebody opens a door.
"Yes," I say. "It is."
Marcus exhales, slow, almost a laugh, and the right eyebrow finally moves — the one thing it does for the people he means it with.
Luca's hand finds my ankle and stays. Adrian leans back, and the prosthetic warms against the couch as the orange comes up through the matte black for half a second and settles.
Nobody gets up yet. The screen shows snow on the mast, blue then white then blue on the four-second cycle, and for once nothing outside it is coming for us — the cold light on that roof is only weather, only ours, and my left iris finds the cobalt reflection on the dark glass and holds there because for one whole minute there is nothing in the building to listen for.
At nine I stand. I go down the spiral, back up, through the corridor, and stop at the workshop doorway.
Wren has told Marcus on the corded line that she will come up at nine thirty to bathe me in the medic bay basin with autoclave-warm water — you are an athlete tomorrow, she says; eat, bathe, sleep, in that order. Marcus has agreed. I have agreed. The workshop comes after.
For one minute I stand and look.
The workbench is clean steel, blankets folded on the lower shelf with pillows on top — the four pillows from the four cots, stacked like an offering.
The hoist is locked back against the ceiling; Adrian has folded it out of the room's center.
The clean-bench is under a drop-cloth. Only the low amber floor strip is on, and Luca's tools are laid out in the order he keeps them, because he wants the room to look like itself when I come in.
The two emergency packs are at the workshop doorway, not by the spiral — Adrian moved them while I was upstairs; he wants them at the corridor mouth where we go down at four.
They are scattered slightly, the way packs get scattered when opened and re-shut three times for inventory: straps loose on one, flap tucked under on the other, a folded blanket between them.
Adrian will tighten the straps at three before the wake. He is a man who tightens straps.
Tonight is ours. Adrian said it. I have one night with three men I love, and the cold seated thing I have carried up onto that apex roof and back down again — carried, if I am honest, for twelve years before there was a roof to carry it onto — goes loose at the joints of me and turns, for the first time, warm.
My hand does not go to the wrist this time. I unclench the fist — clenched before the thought to clench it had finished — and let it open slowly into the warm air, and let my arm hang loose at my side.
I go to find Wren.