Chapter 19 #2
He took the correction and put his initials where she pointed. Cooperation is easy for him now that every private road is closed. I’ll find out what it’s worth the first time he decides a piece of paper is standing between him and saving me.
Aris asked for me at two, in the infirmary office, to rewrite the plan that had been made for me while I was unconscious.
Leah came because I wanted her there. June brought the compound forms. We went through what medication stays in the house, what backup is stored outside it, what symptoms mean a call, which cleaners and which air I can’t be near, and how transport works if the main gate fails again.
Aris offered rather than ordered, which I noticed and didn’t thank him for. A battery nebulizer for outages. An air monitor. A sealed backup case at Leah’s. A small purifier for the clubhouse kitchen if I ever bake in it again.
“Price the battery unit and the monitor,” I said. “No purifier until the ventilation report is finished. The monitor doesn’t send readings anywhere. If it talks to a phone, I don’t want it in my house.”
June wrote that no officer could change a route or assign an escort on account of my lungs unless I asked for it or lost the ability to say so.
“If you can’t speak, we use what’s written here,” Aris said. “Nobody invents anything because they’re frightened.”
“Put that above the signature line.”
Fifty minutes. My plan, my words, my signature at the bottom of it.
Colin found me in the clubhouse kitchen a little before four with a clipboard held against his chest like a man carrying something he’d rather have dropped. He’d been assigned to the shelving repairs. He has nothing to do with my health.
“Ryder asked me to price battery units and check whether the west route has power access for a treatment stop,” he said.
“He said don’t call your clinic and don’t change anything until you approve it.
But June told us no route work starts unless you ask for it, so.
” He turned the clipboard around. “So I brought it to you.”
Three prices. Two proposed storage locations. A list of prospects who know the service gate. A route map along the county road with treatment stops marked in his handwriting. Across the top, in block capitals: EDEN CHOOSES. Underneath it he had already chosen the options, the people, and the roads.
I carried it into the yard. Ryder was at the equipment shelter with Jax, looking at damage on two bikes. He saw the clipboard in my hand and sent Jax off, and Jax went as far as the clubhouse steps and no farther, where he could hear all of it.
“Who told you,” I said.
“The purchasing list.”
“Say the rest.”
“Aris’s recommendation went to the compound purchasing list at two forty because it involves club money and the office has to book it.
I’m still on that list. I’ve been on it for nine years as an officer.
” He kept his hands at his sides. “Nobody told me anything, Eden. It came to me because the system still thinks I’m somebody who buys things here. ”
That was worse than a leak. A leak I could have punished. I had spent a morning shutting every door a man could walk through and there had been a distribution list sitting under the whole compound the entire time, doing what it was built to do, at two forty in the afternoon.
“And your first thought was a map.”
“My first thought was that if the battery unit doesn’t last the west route, there’s no power between here and the county hospital.” He didn’t reach for the clipboard. “That’s not permission. I treated gathering information as if it wasn’t interference. It’s interference.”
“You put my body in a task order for a man who’s supposed to be fixing shelves. You put my name across the top in capital letters like it was a courtesy.” I took the knife out of my pocket, opened it with my thumb, and laid it across the map, over his route line. “Colin is done. What else.”
“I don’t contact vendors. I don’t map stops. I don’t ask Aris, Leah, or June what you chose.” He took the pen off the clip and drew a line through every name on the page, and then through his own at the bottom. “Which of them do you want me to price, if any?”
“None. Not one thing, through you, ever.” The question made me angrier than the map had, because it proved he was capable of asking first and hadn’t. “Leah prices the nebulizer. June finds the monitor. Aris says whether either is worth the money. The club receives no readings from my house.”
“Understood.”
“I didn’t ask for your understanding. I told you what happens.” I closed the knife. “You signed nine pages this morning and you didn’t make it to dinner.”
“I stopped before anything was bought.”
“Because Colin came to me.”
“Yes. I should have come to you before I said one word to him.”
“You should have waited until I asked for you.” I put the knife back in my pocket. “You don’t get praise for stopping after I catch you. You get another chance not to do it. If you do it again I take something else, and it won’t be tires.”
“All right.”
“What did I say about agreeing like you’re approving the punishment?”
He looked at the clipboard. “That the locks will handle it.”
“Good. Let the paperwork handle this one.”
June was in the infirmary office when I got back. I put the clipboard on the desk in front of her and asked her to pull the purchasing list.
It ran to fourteen names. Officers, the compound office, June, the property manager, two men who handle bulk orders for the kitchen and the shop. Ryder’s name was ninth, sitting between Jax and the manager, printed on a distribution page that had never once had to think about whether it was safe.
“Strike him,” I said.
June took a ruler to it, ruled a line through the name, initialed the margin, dated it, and wrote AMENDED AT RESIDENT REQUEST across the header. Then she made three copies, sent one to the office, one to Mia, and put the original in my hands.
“Anything with my name, my body, my house, or my equipment on it doesn’t go to a list he’s on,” I said. “Not the amount, not the vendor, not the delivery date. If the office can’t do that, the office doesn’t handle it and I’ll pay for the whole thing myself.”
“It can do it.” June wrote that down too. “Vendor contact comes through me. He gets a figure through Mia and nothing else. No itemization, no shipping notice, no address.”
Aris looked at Ryder’s map for a while before he said anything, and I gave him credit for not defending the parts of it that were medically sensible.
“The battery unit reaches the county hospital from either gate,” he said. “A power stop adds time and puts you inside a building nobody has assessed. I wouldn’t have recommended these.”
“He didn’t ask you.”
“He asked Colin. Colin brought it to you before it reached me.”
Ryder had reached for it out of fear. The difference was that Colin didn’t hide it, Jax stayed close enough to see him stop, June had a ruler, and Bear’s policy let me take the whole thing into a courtroom if the club failed.
His restraint isn’t what protected me. The people around him refusing to treat his order as louder than mine is what protected me, and that had to be built, and I built it on a Monday.
Two days later Leah ordered the nebulizer and the monitor. Mia sent Ryder one figure with no line items under a no-interest, no-access agreement, and I let him pay it, because he made the expense and he can carry it.
The boxes came to the compound office on Thursday. Colin carried them across the yard, one at a time, and set them inside Leah’s front room, and Leah signed his sheet and shut the door.
I watched from my kitchen window with my hands in a bowl of dough, the first I’d made in three weeks, cool and slack and needing another ten minutes.
Ryder crossed the yard behind Colin on his way to the shelter with a coil of fence wire over one shoulder.
He didn’t look at the boxes and he didn’t look at my house.
He had no idea what was in them, where they’d been put, or what either of them cost, and he’d paid for both.
The amended list is in the fire box with the burner and the ring, folded once, June’s initials in the margin.