13. Ronan
RONAN
Aroute you've heard in your own voice holds better.
Her brother taught me that, along with most of the other things that have kept me alive, and if there was a night his method was going to be load-tested it was the one before this one.
I spent it in the dark of the west room telling the story out loud, alone, start to finish, twice — no ceiling I trusted, no audience but the walls.
A rehearsal for a review board that had already voted.
I ran the route until the words came out in order and the order stopped costing me my legs.
Then morning came and I took her up to the roof, because I had learned in the dark that I could not say this under anything but sky. It needed somewhere the words could go after I said them, other than into the rooms she slept in.
Cold up there, the real January cold tourists never believe in, mountains white to the west, the Strip below burned down like candles after a party.
She sat wrapped to the chin in a blanket with her hands around a cup, and she did not say whenever you're ready, or take your time, or any of the sentences people use to handle each other.
She said: "Start with his boots on the ground. Tell me what you saw."
So I stood at the rail with my back to the drop, where I could keep her face in view, and took what that cost as part of the debt.
"A river valley," I said. "I won't name it.
Our last rotation. A protection tasking — guarding a man nobody liked so he could talk to men nobody trusted.
One road in along the terraces, one wadi track below.
The night we moved him out, the terraces had been swept twice and the wadi hadn't.
Intelligence liked the terraces. The numbers liked the terraces.
" The steam off nothing tore sideways in the wind.
"I was senior. Route selection was mine.
I put us on the terraces, and I put Danny on point. "
"Because he was the best," she said. Not a question.
"You put your best man first through the dark.
It's doctrine and it's arithmetic, and I'd give the arithmetic anything it asked to have that call back.
Four hundred meters in, a terrace wall let go.
Command-detonated. He was standing on the trigger man's math, not mine — I know that in the daylight.
That night I only knew the flash, and the weight of the sound, and contact from the grove on the high side. Eleven minutes of it."
Her eyes never left me. Ward blue, dry, level. Taking it whole.
"I got to him inside a minute. The charge had taken him at the hip and the ribs, and I ran the numbers all eleven — pressure here, line there, bird is forty out, hold, hold.
He talked the whole time. That's not in any report and you should have it: your brother ran his own casualty like it was somebody else's.
Called targets. Corrected my dressing. Complained about my bedside manner.
During the exfil a man came over the wall with a knife, and that's this—" I touched the line from jaw to collarbone "—and I don't remember getting it.
He watched my blind side out of the half of him that still worked, and he called the man coming, and that call is why I lived to carry him to the LZ. It took the last of what he had."
The wind moved between us. Somewhere below, the city changed shifts.
"He asked for a cigarette. He didn't smoke — it was a bit, an old bit, a movie he loved, and I patted my kit like an idiot while he laughed at me with the sound gone out of it.
Then his head was on my knees. He said, "Kowalski still owes me an ace.
You'll square it." And then he pulled me down close, and he said — word for word, Josephine, on his blood: "Keep her out of all this. '"
She had gone very still inside the blanket.
"I said, "I promise." It was the last thing of mine he heard. And the last thing of his—" and the voice I had ordered to hold went to gravel after all, on one syllable "—the last word your brother said was "Josie." Not to me. Past me. Like you were standing at my shoulder."
She made one sound, small, immediately governed. Her chin came up. I finished it, because if I stopped I would never restart.
"I flew home beside him. I carried him. And at the graveside there was a girl of nineteen with his eyes, and I did the translation every man does with a dying sentence — I made it mean the thing that punished me hardest, because the punishment was the only thing that fit the crime.
Keep her clear of this — keep her clear of Ronan Vane.
So I built the perimeter and manned it for six years and called the distance devotion.
" The whole sky sat on the roof with us.
"Six Januaries I wrote you a letter on the anniversary and burned it in a steel sink, because a letter is contact and contact was breach.
I want that entered too — not for credit.
So you know the wall had a door in it the whole time, and I stood guard on it from the inside. "
Her jaw was tight now, her eyes bright and level. I finished it.
"You asked for the sentence word for word because you bet I'd been quoting it the way it hurt most. Collect your bet. You've had the verdict from the day I found you on the 215: the wrong man walked off that terrace. It should have been me."
The words went out over the rail and the city took them, indifferent, the way it takes everything.
Josephine set down her coffee. She came out of the blanket into the cold like it wasn't there, crossed the deck, and stood in front of me — small, steady, close — and reached up and took my face in both of her hands, the scar under her left palm, everything I hadn't said under her right.
"Ronan Vane," she said. "Look at me. I'm going to grade your translation."