Chapter 3 #2
"His last minutes," Luka said. "Not the reason.
I've stopped believing there's a reason I could carry.
Just—" His voice did the low slow thing and he let it.
"Was he afraid. At the end. That's the one I can't stop.
Whether he was afraid, and whether he was alone, and whether it was—" He couldn't say quick. "I need to know if he was afraid."
Raskov put his fork down. He was quiet for so long that Luka thought he'd struck the wall again, the sealed door, and something in him started to bank up toward violence at the thought of being refused this, of all things.
"He was afraid for about four seconds," Raskov said.
"When he understood. Everyone is; it's the body, it's not the man.
And then he stopped being afraid, and I've thought about why for two years, and the closest I can come is that he decided something.
I watched him decide it. He looked at me and something went out of his face — the fear went out — and what came instead wasn't peace, I won't lie to you and call it peace, but it wasn't fear either.
He wasn't alone. I was there. I know that's the worst possible comfort, the man who— I know.
But he wasn't alone, and he wasn't afraid at the end, and it was fast. Those three are true.
I'll swear them on anything you want and they still won't be enough, and you'll still want to put me in the water for them, and you'd be right to. "
"Did he say anything." Luka hadn't meant to ask it; it came up out of the deepest, youngest part of him. "At the end. Was there — anything he wanted said. To anyone."
And there it was. The wall. Luka watched it come down behind the dark eyes, watched the man he'd spent the night learning go still in the particular way that meant a door had shut, and understood he'd walked right up to the edge of the thing Raskov wouldn't give, and been turned back.
"That's the part I keep," Raskov said quietly. "I told you. It's the only thing I have that's mine."
"It's my brother."
"Yes." No apology in it, and no cruelty either.
Just the flat unbearable fact. "And it's the last of him, and I won't spend it — not to make you hate me less, not to make you hate me more.
If I ever give it to you, it won't be to get anything.
That's the only way it's worth what it is.
You'll have to trust that or not, and I know to the ounce how little reason I've given you to trust anything out of my mouth. "
Luka put his hand over his mouth.
He did it before he knew he was doing it, the way you clamp a hand over a wound, and he held it there and breathed through his fingers and made no sound, because he would not, not in front of this man, not again.
But the relief was terrible — almost worse than the grief had been — two years of the very worst thing draining out of him and leaving behind only the ordinary bottomless fact that his brother was dead, and had died with a stranger's eyes on him for the last thing he'd ever see.
Luka had wanted that stranger dead for knowing.
He still did. He also, now, could not have said what he wouldn't give to sit in a room with the last living memory of Dato's face.
Luka sat with it.
It landed in him like ballast going into a flooded compartment, heavy, settling, changing the way the whole vessel sat in the water.
Two years of imagining his little brother afraid and alone and screaming into that cold concrete, two years of the not-knowing gnawing a hole that a grave couldn't fill — and here was the man who'd been there, the only man who could ever answer it, telling him he wasn't afraid, he wasn't alone, it was fast, and telling it plainly, without softening it into a lie Luka could catch him in, and refusing, even now, to make himself anything but the villain of it.
"Why do you keep doing that," Luka said.
His voice had gone rough. "Every time. I give you an inch to make yourself smaller and you spit on it.
You could tell me it was clean and I couldn't have stopped it and you were just the hand — you could make me hate whoever gave the order instead of you, it's right there, and you won't take it. "
"Because it was my hand." Raskov looked at him, and for once the stillness wasn't armor; it was just exhaustion, the bottom of a man.
"Arkady gave the order. Arkady's dead; someone put him in the ground four months ago and I'm glad, and it changes nothing, because I'm the one who walked into that yard.
A knife doesn't get to blame the hand. I spent my whole life being the knife and telling myself it meant I wasn't the hand, and it was a lie, and I'm done telling it.
That's all I've got left that's mine — not telling the lie.
You can have my life whenever you decide to take it. You can't have that."
The heater ticked. The tide turned.
And Luka, who had built a whole self around the certainty that the hand was the thing to hate, that finding the hand and ending it would close the hole and let him sleep — Luka felt the certainty crack.
Not the grief. Not the love. Those were bedrock; those would outlast him.
But the certainty that this was simple, that there was a monster at the end of the road and killing it would fix the shape of the world — that cracked, right down the middle, the way he'd watched Raskov's stillness crack in the yard, and through the crack Luka could see the thing he'd been refusing to look at since the man said Dato like it hurt: that the hand had grieved too.
That the hand had carried it two years. That the hand was, God help them both, a person, and had been a person the whole time, and Luka had needed him not to be.
"I hate you," Luka said. It came out without heat, almost wondering, a man testing whether a line still held. "I've hated you for two years. It's the only thing that got me out of bed."
"I know." Raskov's mouth did the shape that wasn't a smile. "Hold onto it. It's truer than anything I can give you."
***
Luka hadn't slept in any real way in longer than he could count.
Not since the yard, obviously — thirty-odd hours now, cut open and running on the flat bright battery a body finds in a crisis — but not really for two years, not the way a man is supposed to, down under the surface where the repairs get done.
He'd slept in ninety-minute pieces with the light on.
He'd slept at the stone once, in the rain, and woken sick.
And now the crisis battery was running down, the way it always did, the way he'd watched it run down in divers who'd been too long in bad water and didn't know they were about to make a fatal, stupid mistake, and he knew the signs in himself because he knew them in everyone, and the sign right now was that the cabin kept going soft at the edges and his own hands looked far away.
"Sleep," Raskov said, watching him. Of course he was watching him. The man never stopped watching anything.
"No."
"You're going to fall over. You've been driving and stitching and hauling a boat since last night with a knife wound in your arm, and you're no good to yourself like this, and if the finder does what I don't think he can do and finds us tonight, one of us needs to not be hallucinating.
" Raskov set his back against the hull, deliberate, and put his hands loose and open on his knees, palms up, the most defenseless a dangerous man could make himself. "I'll keep the watch."