Chapter 17 #2
He stares at me. The bag is open between us. His knuckles are white around a shirt he hasn't let go of.
"This is the only address Max has," I say.
Quiet. Steady. The voice I use when Zero is on the edge and the edge is real.
"If he's looking for us—when he's looking for us—this is where he comes.
If we're gone, if we've scattered, if you're in a parking lot somewhere and Atlas is at the office and I'm at a hotel—he won’t know where to find us.
He comes home to an empty house and a stepfather who just hit him and no brothers. "
Zero's hand tightens on the shirt.
"We stay," I say. "We stay and we wait and when he shows up—because he will show up, Zero, he wrote us love letters, he is coming back. Or we’ll hunt him down if we have to, but if he finds us first—we are here. All three of us. In this house. Where he left us."
The silence stretches. I can see him running it. The math. The cost.
He drops the shirt into the bag. Doesn't unpack. Doesn't zip it. Leaves it open on the bed like a held breath.
"If I see him, If I see…" Zero’s voice trails off. Low. Meaning Richard. "If I see his face today, Bane. I will put him through a wall."
"Then don't see him. Stay up here. I'll bring you food."
"I'm not a dog you're crating."
"No, you're my brother and I'm keeping you out of a felony. Sit down. Stay."
He almost smiles. Almost. The ghost of it, the reflex, before the weight of the morning crushes it back down.
He sits on the edge of the bed. Next to the open bag.
I leave before either of us says something that makes this harder.
∞∞∞
It's past one in the afternoon. We've been calling all morning.
Max. Voicemail. Again. Voicemail. Atlas texts. No answer. I text. Nothing. Zero texts once—I don't ask what it says—and gets nothing back. Margot. Straight to voicemail every time. Her phone is off or she's sending us there on purpose. Atlas tries Wren. Nothing.
The bond pulls southeast. Steady. Hurting. Alive. That's all it gives us.
Atlas stopped calling an hour ago. He put both hands over his face, held them there, and then walked into his office and shut the door.
He's been on the phone since—not about Max.
Business calls. I can hear his voice through the door.
Steady. Professional. Like nothing's wrong. That's how I know everything is.
Zero hasn't moved. I've brought him coffee twice. Both mugs cold. His letter is smoothed flat on the nightstand—he pressed the wrinkles out with his hand at some point, careful, like the paper was something that could bruise.
"Eat something," I said the last time I went up.
He didn't answer.
"Zero."
"I can feel him." Quiet. Not looking at me. "I can feel him and he's scared, Bane. He's scared and someone is making him feel small and I am sitting in this fucking room—"
"I know."
"—doing nothing—"
"I know."
He picked up the cold coffee. Drank it in one swallow. Set it down. That was the most I was going to get.
I sit in the library. The couch where he sat in my lap and picked at my shirt button and kneaded the back of my neck while I talked about Hawkins and trucks and Pittsburgh. The couch where I said I love you on an exhale and he ran.
The letter is in my back pocket. I take it out. Read it again.
I should have stayed. I should have said it back.
I fold it. Put it back.
Read it again twenty minutes later.
I love you, Bane. I love you the way you love—steady, certain, without asking for anything back.
Again.
You told me once that you're not going anywhere. That you've got me. That's the order.
Here's mine: I've got you too.
I file it next to the cell. Next to the beach house. Next to every night he's come looking for me in this room. He put it on paper because his mouth wouldn't make the shape of it.
Writers do the hardest things with a pen.
Atlas finds me past two. Stands in the doorway the way Max stands in the doorway—the same lean, the same one-shoulder rest against the frame.
"Anything?" I ask.
"Nothing. But my contact at the Seventh just called."
I sit up.
"Something's happening at the facility. Federal vehicles mobilizing. State police coordinating with a judge in the Eastern District. They're moving on a warrant."
"A warrant for what?"
"The facility, Bane. The whole thing. Somebody filed a report. A victim statement. This morning, early. The detective—Hwang—has been sitting on a state-level case for months waiting for a witness willing to go on record."
The room goes very quiet.
Atlas watches me arrive at it.
"Max," I say.
"Max."
I stand. The letter crinkles in my back pocket. My hands are shaking and I don't try to stop them.
"He went to the police." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "That's where he is. That's what the letters were. He was saying goodbye in case—in case it went wrong, in case they didn't believe him, in case Kline's people—"
"Bane."
"He walked into a police station and told them everything. About the facility. About what was done to him. He used himself as the—"
"I know." Atlas. Quiet. "I know what he did."
"Your guy at the scene. Does he have eyes?"
"He's got a camera. He's streaming to my phone."
We go to Atlas's office. Zero is already there. I don't know how he knew—the bond, maybe, or the sound of Atlas's footsteps going past his door with a different weight than they'd carried all morning. He's standing behind the desk, arms crossed, jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
Atlas sets his phone on the desk. The screen shows a shaky feed—a parking lot, concrete buildings, vehicles staging.
Federal jackets. State police cruisers. Unmarked sedans.
The building I have spent months staring at in photographs, the building I walked into to get Max, the building that has been sitting only miles from here holding people in cells while the world went on without them.
We watch.
The teams move. The doors go in. We can't hear anything—the camera is too far back, positioned across the road in a parked car—but we can see. Officers flooding through the entrance. Vehicles repositioning. A perimeter going up.
Then nothing.
The feed holds on the building. The parking lot.
The perimeter officers standing with their hands on their belts, waiting.
A helicopter appears overhead at some point—news or police, I can't tell.
The building just sits there. Concrete and glass and whatever is happening inside it that we can't see.
Zero hasn't moved. Arms crossed. Eyes locked on the screen.
Atlas is on his phone. Not the one streaming—his other one. Texting his contact, trying to get information. He sets it down. Picks it up. Sets it down.
I stand behind the desk with my arms braced on the back of the chair and I watch a building I once walked into with sedatives in my blood and zip ties on my wrists and I wait.
Five minutes. Ten. The feed shakes—the guy in the car adjusting his grip, maybe. The image blurs and refocuses. The building hasn't changed. The perimeter hasn't moved. Nothing is coming out of that door.
"What's taking so long?" Zero. Through his teeth.
Nobody answers.
Fifteen minutes. Atlas's phone buzzes. He reads. His face gives nothing.
"What?" I ask.
"They're clearing floor by floor. There's a sublevel. They're bringing in a second team for the lower section."
The sublevel. I know the sublevel. I was in the sublevel.
The cells are in the sublevel—the ones with the locks that cycle click-hiss at three in the morning, the ones with the cots and the fluorescent lights that never turn off.
Max was in one of those cells. Wren was in the one next to him. Nine people are in them right now.
Twenty minutes. The helicopter circles. An ambulance pulls into the lot—then a second one. They park near the entrance and the EMTs get out and stand by their rigs and wait. Waiting for people to bring out.
"Ambulances," Zero says. Flat.
"That's standard," Atlas says. "Doesn't mean—"
"I know what it means."
Twenty-five minutes. The feed shakes again. I realize the guy filming is nervous too. His hand isn't steady. The image drifts left, corrects, drifts.
I think about Max in a police station somewhere south of here.
Sitting in a chair. Telling a stranger what happened in that building.
Every detail. The things he told me in the dark with his face against my neck.
The things he hasn't told anyone. He's saying them out loud, right now, in a room he walked into on purpose, so that what we're watching on this phone screen could happen.
Thirty minutes. Atlas's phone buzzes again.
"They've reached the sublevel."
Zero's jaw jumps.
Thirty-five. Forty. The longest forty minutes of my life, and I spent two days in that building, and I spent six hours pacing a hallway waiting for Max to come home, and none of it was as long as watching a shaky phone feed of a concrete building and waiting for the door to open.
Then the door opens.
The first victim comes out in a blanket. Small. Blinking. Shielding their eyes from the daylight with one hand while an officer guides them by the elbow. Then another. Then two more together, leaning on each other. Then one on a stretcher—conscious, turning their head away from the sun.
Nine names on a list I've been reading for months.
Nine people I've been tracking and planning for and losing sleep over, nine people Max pressed his face into my collarbone about and said I think about the others, the ones we left, all the time—and they're coming out. Into daylight. Into the parking lot. Into the world that forgot about them.
Zero uncrosses his arms. One hand comes up to his mouth.
Atlas picks up his phone. His hand is steady. His eyes are not.
"Kline?" I ask.