Chapter 30
Grace
The gate comes up out of the trees before I’m ready for it. On the mountain, choosing this was simple. I stood on a slope with the wind in my face and told the man I’ve been sleeping with to bring me here so I could help, and I meant every word.
The words are still true. It’s my body that’s gone soft on them. Somewhere in the last stretch of road, I started twisting my hands in my lap, and my mouth has dried out. The closer the wire fence gets, the more I shrink in on myself.
Decker doesn’t say anything. He watched me go quiet a few miles back and left it alone.
The guard at the gate leans down to the window, opens his mouth for the standard line, and sees me. Recognition crosses his face, and then his expression goes flat. He steps back and speaks into his radio with his eyes on me the whole time.
My magic rises on its own. That’s what it’s for. Slip the attention off, be a shadow in his memory, be nobody. It would be so easy, and for a second I want it so badly my skin prickles.
I push it away.
I came here to be seen. That was the whole point.
Nobody tells you how vulnerable being seen makes you feel.
The gate rolls, and we drive through, and Jericho is waiting in the yard.
He’s a wall of a man on a normal day. Today he’s a wall between us and the two guards trailing him, and he uses it. He opens my door himself, which no one has ever done in this place, and says, “Walk with me,” in the voice that ends discussions.
The guards fall back. Decker comes around the truck and walks on the other side of me, close.
Jericho doesn’t speak until we’re moving. Then, low, without turning his head: “For the record. I never bought it.”
My throat closes. I keep walking.
“I’ve been in your shoes,” he says. “I know how it feels.” A pause. “You’ve got people on your side in this building. More than it’s going to look like today.”
That’s all. He doesn’t ask a single question about where I’ve been, and he doesn’t tell me it will be all right.
Both of those things are why I’ve always trusted him.
He walks us to the main doors, nods once to Decker, and peels off toward the ops wing as if this were a normal escort on a normal day.
The doors close behind us, and the building goes quiet.
I spent months making myself invisible in these corridors.
It turns out I’m not the only one who can vanish.
The tech who steps back into a doorway he’d just come out of.
The two women whose conversation dies at ten feet and restarts at twenty, in lower voices.
The man from the comms room who stares too long, and the woman beside him who won’t look at all.
I can read every one of them, and I would give a year of my life to be invisible again.
I keep my chin level and my hands loose and I walk.
Decker has changed since the gate.
I can’t name how at first. Then I can. In the den he filled the space and let it be.
In here, he’s wound tight. He walks half a step closer than the corridor needs.
When we pass an open door, he’s somehow between me and it without ever seeming to move.
At the corner by the briefing room, he stops us for no reason I can see, waits a breath, and moves on.
His face is flat, but his eyes never stop working the hallway. Doors, corners, vents.
He doesn’t trust this place. That’s what I tell myself at first. It doesn’t quite cover it—there’s something under the caution.
And then someone shrieks my name.
“Grace!”
Kaylin comes down the corridor at a dead run, past a guard who puts a hand up and then thinks better of losing it, and hits me at full speed.
Her arms go around my neck. She’s so small that catching her is a whole-body job, and I hold her, and for a second the corridor and every eye in it stops existing.
“You’re okay,” she says into my shoulder. “You’re okay, you’re okay. I told them. I told everyone they were idiots.”
“Kaylin—”
“Idiots.” She says it louder, for the corridor’s benefit, and I feel more than see the guard behind her wince. Then she pulls back to arm’s length and looks at me properly, and something crosses her face. A pause. A small tilt of the head.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” She’s still looking. “You’re different.”
“I’ve been sleeping in a cave.”
“That’s not it.” Her nose wrinkles, and for a heartbeat she’s somewhere else with it, working on something.
Then she lets it go the way she lets things go, all at once, and squeezes my hands.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re back. Come find me when they’re done doing whatever this is.
” Her eyes flick to the guards, to Decker, back to me.
She doesn’t ask about him either. She just leans forward, kisses my cheek, and lets the guard herd her off, complaining the whole way.
The warmth of her stays on me for half a corridor. Then the tension dissolves it.
Viktor is standing behind his desk when they bring us in.
“Grace.” He nods to the chair across from him. “Sit if you want. This won’t take long.”
I sit. Decker doesn’t. He takes up a spot to my right, against the wall where he can see the door, and Viktor notes it without comment.
“You’re here under my roof and under my protection,” Viktor says.
“I want that said plainly, because nothing else you hear today is going to sound like it.” He rests his fingertips on the desk.
“On paper, nothing has changed. The council has its decision. They still believe the contents of the intel file. Inside this building, you are a suspect I brought in, not a woman I cleared. People will believe that, and I need them to. You know why.”
I do know why. I heard it on a cold slope this morning. It’s different, hearing it in this room, in his level voice, with the yard outside the window where I used to push a cart and be nobody.
“So here is what your protection looks like. A room in the secure wing. Someone on your corridor at all hours. You don’t move through this building without an escort, you don’t touch a phone, and you don’t answer questions from anyone whose name I haven’t given you.
Meals come to you, or you’re walked to them.
” He watches me take each one. “None of that means I doubt you. All of it is theater, and the audience is one person. But you’ll be the one it affects most, so I won’t hide that from you. ”
“When do I start?” My voice comes out firm. “The work. The reason I’m here.”
“When Vanya is ready for you. Soon.” Something that isn’t quite approval moves through his face. “She doesn’t waste time, and neither, I suspect, do you.”
“And my sister—”
“Is a thread I am pulling as quietly as I can. That doesn’t change today. It doesn’t change because you’re inside these walls.” He straightens. “Quarters are arranged. Secure wing for you. Decker, the contractors’ block. Marek will walk you both—”
“No.”
One word from the wall. Not loud. The room changes shape around it anyway.
Viktor looks at him a moment. “A word, Decker.” And to me, unhurried, as if nothing has happened: “Marek will take you as far as the anteroom.”
The escort walks me out, and the door shuts, and I stand in the anteroom with a stranger at my shoulder and a wall of glass with slat blinds between me and the office.
The blinds are half open. I don’t get sound.
All I can see is Decker’s back, his feet planted the way they plant when he’s decided about something, and Viktor on the other side of the desk, not moving at all.
Decker’s jaw works. Viktor says something short.
Decker’s hand opens and closes at his side, once.
It’s over in under a minute. Whatever it was, he’s not happy about it. It hasn’t taken me long to learn to speak “bear.”
He comes out tense and doesn’t explain, and I don’t ask in front of the escort. We walk.
The route to the secure wing crosses a corner of the yard, and a man is standing near the east wall, watching us come.
I know what he is before I know who he is.
It’s in the size of him, and in the way he isn’t in a hurry about anything.
Older, silver threaded through thick brown hair, hands like slabs.
When he pushes off the wall and comes toward us, his tread is big and unhurried and familiar, and then I place it. It’s Decker’s walk. Another bear.
Beside me, Decker slows.
The old bear looks at me first. It’s the only look I’ve gotten all day with no suspicion behind it. He takes me in top to bottom, unhurried, and his nostrils move once. Something in his face shifts.
“Huh,” he says.
Decker has gone rigid beside me. Not the gate-tension. Something else.
“Torbjorn.”
“Decker.” The old bear’s eyes travel between us once, there and back, and whatever he finds seems to settle a question. He gives me a nod, grave and oddly courtly. “Ma’am.”
Then, to Decker, mild: “Come find me before I head north. You’ll have questions.” A beat. “Bears do, the first time.”
He moves off toward the ops wing with no hurry in his stride, and Decker watches him go with his jaw set and says nothing at all.
“Who was that?”
“Bear clan elder.” That’s the whole answer I get.
Something passed between them. I stood a foot away and felt it go by, and I couldn’t read a word of it.
The secure wing is a corridor I’ve never had clearance to enter—doors spaced wide, and quiet. He shouldn’t be allowed down it at all, I suspect, but nobody has the nerve to say so.
My room is small and clean. A bed, a chair, a window with wire in the glass, my old duffel from the communal lodgings already sitting on the blanket. Someone packed my things after they searched them. I try not to think about whose hands.
Decker goes through the room in about eight seconds. Window latch. The gap under the bed. The vent. He does it the way other men breathe, and when he’s done, some of the tension eases out of him. Not all.
“Marek stays at the end of the corridor,” he says. “Viktor’s pick. He’s solid.”
“And you’re in the contractors’ block.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what that was. In the office. You argued about it.”
He doesn’t answer, which is an answer. There’s a charge coming off him that has nowhere to go, and I want to put my hands flat on his chest, but I’m aware of the open door and the man at the end of the corridor, and so is he. The space between us has rules in it now. We both feel them arrive.
“Lock it behind me,” he says.
“Decker.”
He stops in the doorway.
“This morning I sensed that there’s more.” I keep my voice down and my eyes on him. “I didn’t push, because we had a mountain to get off. We’re off it.”
He glances down the corridor, and for a second I think I’m going to get it, whatever it is, right here in a doorway in the secure wing.
“Not in this building,” he says. “Not tonight.”
Then he’s gone, and his footsteps fade down the corridor. I lock the door like he told me to and stand with my hand on the bolt.
Through the wire-glass window, later, I watch the yard lights come on.
I see him once, crossing the open ground toward the contractors’ block.
He doesn’t walk like a man going to bed.
He walks the fence line first. All of it.
Then the block swallows him, and I get into a bed that doesn’t smell like anything at all.
I lie there missing a stone cave, because it was a home.
The building settles around me with the low hum of activity it’s always had. Strange, after days of water and wind outside. Somewhere down the corridor, Marek shifts his weight, and my ears have gotten good enough to hear it.
That’s how I catch the other sound, deep in the night. A tread in the corridor, too heavy for Marek, too even to be anyone in a hurry. It comes down the hall, and it stops outside my door.
I sit up in the dark.
The bolt is a foot from my hand. I don’t reach for it. I wait, listening to him breathe on the other side of two inches of wood, close enough that the pull under my ribs wakes up and leans toward him.
Decker.
He doesn’t knock.
The tread moves on, and the corridor goes quiet. I sit there in a locked room in the building that convicted me, with his scent still in my hair and him still out there walking the halls.
Tomorrow I start earning my name back.
Tonight I can’t stop wondering what he’s guarding me from that he won’t say out loud.