CHAPTER 27
Eliza
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The blast door hisses closed behind us.
It is the first sound I am sure of after the Mk-VII goes quiet in my left hand and the cold sun crawls down through the manhole onto our jackets — pneumatic, low, definite, a long exhale of metal closing on metal, the bunker accepting that we are inside, that the corridor is outside, that the harbor wall four kilometres south can hold its breath through the rest of the morning without me.
The seal is the sentence I have been waiting twelve years to hear.
My pulse runs at one-twelve. My left hand will not open. The Mk-VII is still hot at the grip, only the heat is leaking up out of my palm now and not down out of the firing, and the word inside arrives under my sternum as a small warm weight that has finally found its floor.
Adrian goes ahead of me through the corridor into the antechamber.
His prosthetic hangs dark at his right side.
The brushed-bronze lattice that has been my private weather report for twenty-one days is gone — no warm tell, no cool tell, only a heavy unlit thing at the end of his arm.
He carries it like a tool that belongs in a workshop, not a body.
He clears the antechamber corners by reflex, checking the exits of a room he built himself, and only when the sightlines are accounted for does the dead arm get to be a dead arm.
Then he turns the half-degree that means the work of the room is finished and the only thing left in it worth his eyes is me.
"Quinn. " Soft. Then, softer — the threshold he crossed ten days ago, gone again because he is exhausted: "Eliza."
"Vale. " I cannot make my mouth do the first name yet. Twelve years and four months of stopped sending are still in my throat behind it. "I'm walking."
"You're walking."
Luca is behind me, his right hand light on the small of my back, the loupe ring cold through the jumpsuit.
The cut above his left eye is bleeding a thin steady line into his eyebrow.
He is murmuring in Spanish I do not quite catch — vamos, querida, casi — casi — and he says casi twice, the way a man counts down the last second of a process.
Marcus is not here. Marcus has been on the corded line in his office for seven hours, voice in our ears.
His last words on the line went Heard. Stand by.
Extraction green, which is not what he wants to say, and I know, because I have learned what he sounds like when he is not saying the thing he wants to say.
The antechamber floor strip cycles from amber to cobalt — Luca's perimeter status going to safe. My body does not yet believe in safe. My knees decide it believes just enough to bend.
"Sit. " Adrian.
"I'm fine."
"Sit, Quinn."
I sit. The cold concrete bench takes my weight without opinion. The Mk-VII is still in my left hand. My right hand has the mother-of-pearl folding knife — when did I take it out of my back pocket; I do not remember reaching for it; my hand has its own diary.
Adrian crouches, his good knee on the floor, his human hand reaching for mine. He does not touch the Mk-VII. He waits.
"It's hot," I say, of the pistol.
"It will cool."
"I — I don't know if I should give it to you."
"Either is fine. We can carry it in together."
I do not say it, here, in the antechamber, with my mouth tasting of metallic adrenaline — but my left hand, which has refused to open for the bunker or for Adrian or for the seal I waited twelve years to hear, opens for this.
One finger off the grip. Then the next. Then the next, until the Mk-VII sits loose in my palm and the only thing I am still gripping is the fact of him crouched in front of me, waiting and not reaching.
He takes the pistol by the barrel rather than the grip — handling it like something that can still bite, kept well clear of the trigger — and sets it on the bench with the muzzle to the wall.
"Renner."
"Vale."
"Eye. Wren."
"Downstairs."
I am being walked. I am moving on my own feet, but Luca's palm is at my back and Adrian's good arm at my opposite shoulder, and the corridor goes by at the pace they have decided is mine.
The cobalt strip pulses slow under our boots.
The slow tick I have lived inside for three weeks — one, two, three — is gone.
The prosthetic is dark. The bunker has lost its watch.
The medic bay light is on. Wren — blond, pale, scrubbed — has been here since thirteen hundred, pre-staged: autoclave warm, surgical lamp on, four suture kits already on the steel tray. She greets me with her face, a small nod of I see you.
"Right forearm. Show me."
I roll the sleeve up. The forearm fabric has a six-inch tear I do not remember acquiring.
Under it, a thin shallow gash from elbow to mid-forearm.
Wren cleans it with cold antiseptic — iodine and pine — runs a finger down each edge, and dresses it with steri-strips and a long gauze pad. "You are lucky."
"I am alive. " Not the same thing. We both let it stand.
She moves to Luca on the exam table, sweatshirt off, undershirt stained black at the shoulder. She raises his face with one finger under his chin. "Four-zero nylon."
"I would prefer six-zero, please."
"Four-zero. Your eyebrow will not be a line."
"Marcus will tease me."
"Marcus will love you anyway."
I file it.
The hatch from the upper corridor opens.
Marcus comes down the steel ladder in a slate button-down no longer fully buttoned, the throat scar white under his jaw in the autoclave's reflected light.
He has the lighter going in his hand at the wrong rhythm — two seconds open-shut instead of three.
He has counted the bay before his foot leaves the last rung: who is bleeding, who is upright, where I am.
When his pale green eyes land on me on the bench, the lid of the lighter snaps shut mid-cycle and stays shut, and the careful flatness he has held in his face since before dawn finally gives, the right brow climbing a fraction it has not been allowed all morning.
The morning's unfinished question has been answered between heartbeats. He pockets the lighter.
"Darling. " He says it to the doorway frame because he cannot yet say it to me. "Darling."
The word lands different. He uses darling on everyone — the point being that it means nothing — but the way he says it just now is the way a man uses a word because the real word would knock him over.
"Marcus. " I do not call him Cade.
Wren ties off Luca's eighth stitch. Marcus takes the table without arguing.
She pulls his shirt up. The right ribs are an ugly purple-black plate from the lower edge of his pec to his floating rib — a sympathetic-explosion bruise from when a probe on the bunker perimeter tripped a sensor charge in the antechamber and threw him into the wall, standing the whole strike at the corded line because he refused all morning to sit.
She palpates. He winces silent. "No break.
Hairline at most. You'll bruise green for two weeks.
Don't lift over five kilos. Don't laugh. "
"What about cry."
"You are entitled."
His pale green eyes come up to me over her shoulder. He is on the rim of it. He puts a hand out to me, palm up, and I cross the four steps and put my hand in his. The small white scar at the back of his hand from the rival eight years ago is under my thumb. He squeezes once.
"You came back."
"I came back."
"You came back, Eliza."
The third saying is the one I cannot answer; I nod into his collarbone, careful of the ribs.
He puts his good arm around me, his hand into my hair, a long quiet breath against the top of my head.
In the doorway, Adrian catches the reflection of us in the autoclave's polished steel — he lets the mirror hand him the shape of what is behind him before he turns his eyes on it directly — and the muscle by his mouth shifts toward warmth for a beat and does not quite arrive.
"Upstairs," Luca says beside him. "Bath."
The bath is hot. I have been in cold water since the rooftop of Day 1.
Luca, of course Luca, has been running the spray two minutes to get to true heat before I am in the room.
He has set my charcoal sweatshirt and soft pants on the shelf.
Adrian's titanium ring sits in a small dish on the counter; I took it off in the manhole and gave it to Luca to carry for the last block, and he set it there when we came in.
The mother-of-pearl knife sits beside the ring. The knife I will pick up tomorrow, at dawn, the way I always meant to.
I shower until the water at my feet has gone from rust-pink to faint coral to clear.
I cry once into the heat of the spray — sixty seconds; my mother's face in the wall-crawl, looking up because she knew I was above her; I am still receiving, Mama — and then I am done.
I towel. I dress. The St. Eligius medallion stays at my throat; I have worn it through everything; I am not taking it off.
I take Adrian's titanium ring out of the dish and slide it back onto my left thumb where it has lived since he pressed it into my hand on strike morning — the manhole and the last block are the only minutes it has been off me, and the work is finished now; it goes back on, and it is not coming off again.
Marcus is in the kitchenette putting water on for tea.
He presses a wrinkle out of the slate shirt with the flat of his hand, twice, slow, before he reaches for the kettle.
Adrian is on one of the olive canvas couches, charcoal shirt unbuttoned at the throat, sleeves at the elbow, prosthetic dark at his right side.
He has put his good arm along the couch back the way he always does when there is room for me.
Luca is on the rug at the foot of the couch, sweatshirt back on, stitches black against the pale of his skin. He has his portable rig in his lap — one last sweep — his right thumb tapping a finger-Morse count against the casing each time a clean packet comes home.
The east-wall window-screen is on.
I had not noticed.