Chapter 12
brOOKLYN
He said it again.
It wasn’t the reason I came. It was the excuse I needed to let myself do the thing I’d been too buried in duty to do.
And Brooklyn sat on her own floor, wrapped in her grandmother’s blanket, wrung out past any defenses, and did the thing she never did.
She let herself consider it.
What if it was true?
That was the terrifying part.
Not the words.
Anyone could say words. Her whole life was people who said words.
The terrifying part was that she believed him, and couldn’t put the believing anywhere, because the door was gone.
So the belief just sat there under her ribs, raw and enormous, with nowhere to hide.
She ran the numbers, because that was the order she did things in even now.
The cuff shut all night, on purpose, so he couldn’t cheat—which she couldn’t check, and which he’d told her she couldn’t check, instead of letting her think she could.
The refusal to lie when she’d handed him the easy exit.
The soft true things with no hook, on the worst night of her year, when she’d have believed nothing and forgiven less.
Nobody plays a long game like that.
Nobody wagers by sitting silent on a floor while their mark cries, or by turning down the win when she offered it to him free.
The math came back the way the flat stabilization curve had, clean and undeniable and hers: the man was telling the truth.
Which left only the actual terror.
Not is it real.
Underneath that.
The bottom thing, the one she’d cried about on the floor an hour ago.
If it’s real, then I have to reach back.
And if I reach back? It can be taken. Everything bright gets taken.
“I can’t decide this tonight,” she said. Her voice was scraped to nothing. “I decide everything. It’s the only thing I know how to do, decide fast and be right the first time because there’s no second chance. And I can’t. Not tonight. I’m empty. I’ve got nothing to decide with.”
“Then don’t.” Falkin got up off the floor, slow, giving her all the room in the world.
“I told you. Nothing has to change tonight. I’ll be at the talks in the morning, and the chair will still be the right one, and you don’t have to say a single word to me you don’t want to.
” The corner of his mouth moved, and it undid something in her, the smallness of it, the mercy.
“Get some sleep, Brooklyn. Be not-fine. You’ve earned it. ”
He let himself out.
She sat on the floor a while longer, and for the first time in her adult life, she did not immediately begin rebuilding the wall.
She did not sleep much.
She lay in the dark and did the opposite of putting it away.
She took it all out and looked at it.
Then, deliberately, she set it to one side, because for once there was a bigger thing on the bench.
The freight lane.
The chair.
The corridor he’d walked past and not stopped, because what she’d wanted mattered more than what he’d wanted.
A man on her floor with the cuff shut all the way, blinding himself so he couldn’t cheat.
You were never the prize. You were the whole point.
And she thought about her own two broken templates: the father who left and the mother who was never really there.
She’d built her whole careful self on the certainty that those were the only two kinds of people.
The safest thing was to be neither. The one who stayed and was useful and never needed a thing back.
You can’t be abandoned by someone you never let all the way in.
Falkin fit neither template. He’d shown up, and he was planning to keep showing up.
Which was exactly why he’d been unsettling her since the day he counted her slides.
You can wait for it to go wrong, she told herself, in the flat honest voice she used for the true things at three in the morning.
You can do that. You’re extremely good at that.
You can be useful and safe and correct forever and never once get left, because you never once let anyone close enough to leave.
Or.
Her comm chimed the bright three-note tone.
She was up and across the room before the second note finished, the way she always was.
Jenny’s face bloomed on the screen mid-yawn. A wash of purple behind her, the wrong-shade sky going gold at the edges with a sunrise a galaxy away.
“I know it’s the middle of your night,” Jenny said, “I did the math wrong, I always do the math wrong, I can call ba—Brooke.” She stopped.
She’d always been able to read Brooklyn-fine from Brooklyn-no-I’m-fine, the only person alive who could.
“What happened. What’s wrong. Who do I have to have Karuk quietly disappear. ”
And Brooklyn, who put everything away, who a few hours ago couldn’t have said any of this to a living soul… told her.
Her mother.
The account.
Danny finding it in a bank ledger.
And then, because she’d started and couldn’t find the door to stop, the rest.
The match.
The bet.
The floor.
The white walls.
Jenny listened.
When Brooklyn finished, Mr. Fluffikins wandered into frame and sat, tail curling, regarding the camera with ancient telepathic judgment.
“Okay,” Jenny said. “First. Your mother is a disaster and we’ll deal with the account—I mean it, Karuk’s people have resources and Danny is my problem now too, so it’s off the pile, done.
” She said it so briskly that Brooklyn’s shoulders came down half an inch, the first time they’d dropped in days.
“Second. Can I tell you the thing nobody told me?”
“That’s what you’re about to do regardless.”
“Correct.” Jenny leaned in. “When Karuk—when it got real, I did the exact thing you’re doing. Sat up all night doing the math on whether it was safe. I ran the numbers on love, which is the single dumbest thing a person can do, and you know what I figured out?”
She held up Mr. Fluffikins, who accepted it with dignity, and petted his head. “The math doesn’t work. It never works. There’s no run where it comes back safe. That’s not a bug. You don’t get to be sure first. You just get to decide it’s worth it anyway and jump, and find out on the way down.”
She shifted and her voice went soft. “You spent your whole life making sure nobody could ever leave you by never letting anybody close. And it worked, Brooke. Nobody left. But nobody stayed either. You’ve been alone the safe way.”
Mr. Fluffikins leaped out of her arms. She glanced at him for a second, before turning back to the screen.
“This guy turned his own head off so he couldn’t cheat, sat on your floor, and was no help at all on your worst night.
Do you know how rare no help at all is? That’s a man who wants you to have it lighter for no reason. ”
For no reason. The exact words. The thing she’d cried about, that nobody had ever once…
“Mr. F wants to add something,” Jenny said, tilting her head to listen. “He says the tall cold one made the sad-warm smell go quiet—which I’m translating as Mr. Fluffikins telling you Falkin’s safe, and the cat’s never wrong about people, he called Cher a full month before—”
“Jenny.” Brooklyn’s eyes were wet and she was, absurdly, almost laughing. “You’re doing the thing where you push me and pretend you’re not.”
“Am I?” Jenny said, radiant and innocent and full circle. Exactly the way she’d once gotten Brooklyn to let her all the way in, over centrifuges, before Brooklyn noticed it was happening. “Weird. Go to sleep, Brooke. Or don’t.”
The screen went dark.
Brooklyn sat in the quiet for a long moment.
Then she got up, and washed her face, and did not build the wall.
She went to find him instead.
He opened the door on the first chime.
He was still in the under-layer of his armor, the blue-and-gold plate set aside.
Had he not slept either? It didn’t look like it.
When he saw her his whole face did the thing.
Not surprise, exactly.
Something more careful than that. The look of a man who has trained himself very hard not to hope out loud.
“Brooklyn.”
“I did the math,” she said. Her voice only shook a little.
“On whether it’s safe. It doesn’t come back safe.
There’s no run where it does.” She swallowed.
“So I’m not going to be safe. I’m going to do the other thing.
The reaching-back thing. And I’m not doing it because I’m sure—I’m not sure of anything, I’m terrified, this is the least calculated thing I’ve ever done and I want to do it anyway.
” A breath. “That’s a yes. In case the shape of it wasn’t clear.
I’m giving you a very badly organized yes. ”
Something loosened behind his eyes.
“But it comes with a term,” she said, before he could speak, because she was still herself. A yes without a spec was how you got hurt. “One. Non-negotiable. You won’t lie to me to make me comfortable—fine. I’m holding you to the reverse too.”
She looked up at him, steady, the centrifuge voice with something bright under it.
“You don’t get to manage me. Ever. The cuff, the reading, knowing what I feel before I do—you never use it to steer me toward the thing that’s easier for you.
If you feel me heading somewhere you don’t like, you tell me.
Out loud. You put it on the table and let me decide with my eyes open, the way you did last night.
No quiet efficient fixing the outcome and never showing me the seam. ”
He stayed still, letting her words sink in.
“That’s the deal. I can’t be with someone who reads me if I don’t know when he’s reading me. Agree to it, out loud, or the yes doesn’t count.”
“Agreed,” Falkin said, without a half-second’s pause. “Out loud. Every time. You’ll always know when I feel you.”
Then, because it was true and she had asked for true: “I held the wager back for a week because I calculated you wouldn’t believe me yet. That was managing you. It’s the thing you’re asking me never to do, and I’d already done it.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Yes,” she said. “It was.”
“It won’t be again.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I’ll be inefficient about it.”
She heard the word land, her word handed back, and felt the last thing in her come unlatched.