Chapter 10
The day I shot the doe, we’d been in the woods for hours, just Nora and I, walking in silence, waiting. We found a spot near a brook and lay on our bellies, the gun in my arms. I looked through the sight. First there was a squirrel, jumpy and watchful. “Don’t waste the ammo,” Nora told me.
A while later a brown bunny. “Not worth scaring off everything else,” she advised.
Finally, as the sun was dipping low in the sky and an owl started hooting somewhere off in the distance, the doe moved quietly into my sight, stopped to drink at the stream.
“Now,” said Nora. I took a breath and squeezed the trigger. I hit the doe right beneath her twitching ears. She fell heavily to the ground.
“Go finish her,” Nora said, and I rose, approached the animal. She stared up at me, body still, only her eyes moving. I knelt beside her and put my hand on her warm, tawny back. With my knife, I slit her throat.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, the words hollow and faint. I lay my head on her. I felt her last shuddering breath. Something in me died with her.
“Good job, kid,” said Nora when I rose. She reached over to wipe my tears. “Everything dies.”
“But not everything kills.”
She offered an assenting nod. Maybe there was a flicker of emotion on her lined face, but it was gone as quickly as it came. “Anything that survives in this world will have to, one way or another.”
Now, many years later, we all sit at the small kitchen table, Julian, Nora, and I. We’ve each laid down our arms, though I imagine the house is surrounded. Nora didn’t come alone. She knew about the safe house, about Julian.
Nora sighs and shifts in her seat. I see her as if for the first time.
She’s bony, skin sagging, eyes tired. Her steel gray hair is as smooth and unmoving as a helmet, and I wonder if it’s a wig.
She’s ageless somehow—might be fifty, might be seventy.
Her thick makeup is like a mask. I think of all the masks she’s worn for me—savior, mother, teacher, friend—and wonder if any of those variations was the real woman.
“You two were always my favorites,” she says. “You know that.”
Julian lets out a little laugh that’s more like a cough.
“You contracted Julian to kill me,” I say. “What do you do to the people you don’t like?” As if I don’t know the answer to that.
She lifts her palms, rolls her eyes. “I gave you another chance. Sent you back to the job you flubbed. But again, with the kid. I asked Drake to finish the job if you couldn’t when I realized Julian had no intention of hurting you.
You both disobeyed me. That told me you’d passed your expiration dates. Everyone has one in this business.”
“What about you?” asks Julian. “Maybe you’re past yours.”
“Maybe so,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “I am tired.”
He tells her about the journals, puts another thumb drive down on the table in front of him. I have mine in my pocket. She looks at it; then her gaze shifts back and forth between us.
“What do you want?” she asks wearily, as if we’re misbehaving students in the principal’s office.
“We just want our freedom,” he says. “A chance at a life together. You’ll never hear from us again. We’ll take all of this to our graves.”
She scoffs. “And how long do you think you can live without it? The excitement, the glamour, the sense of living outside the arbitrary rules that hold this corrupt society together.”
“We’ll manage,” says Julian. Under the table he takes my hand. I squeeze tight.
“Did you really think this would work?” She holds up the drive. “Do you imagine that I didn’t know about your journals, your flimsy insurance policy? Your lawyer friend, the one who’s supposed to send them to the FBI if anything happens to you? He’s already dead.”
Julian doesn’t react, his expression unreadable.
“Nora,” I say. “Just let us go.”
She looks down at the table, then back up at us.
“I’m sorry, kids,” she says. And for a second it seems like she really is. There’s a sadness I haven’t seen before, and something clenches inside. I’m the child who doesn’t want to let her rescuer down. “But that’s not the way this works.”
Nora rises and heads toward the door, leaving the drive as if she couldn’t care less about it, taking her weapon from the kitchen counter. I dive for my gun, but she’s gone before I reach it.
That’s when the first explosion detonates, and the front windows blow in spraying glass and sound, the cold from outside.
Julian grabs me as a second explosion hits us from behind, knocking us both down.
My ears are ringing, the world stuttering as Julian pulls me to my feet and we run out into the night and into the woods as bullets spit behind us, tearing up the ground.
Looking back, I see that the house is already on fire.
We run through the frigid darkness, breath coming in clouds. There are voices behind us. They’re getting louder, closer.
This is how it ends.