Chapter 8 #2
One of us gets to, Pavel thought, and did not know, could not have known, that he was thinking a thing another man had said in another cold place at the end of another hunt, a man whose life Pavel had once held in his own gunsight and let walk — did not know he'd inherited the words the way you inherit an illness, down the family line, son to son, the terrible arithmetic the house bred into all of them: one of us gets to, and it's you, and I make it worth the price by being the one who doesn't.
He'd let Timo walk, once, in a room, with a gun in his hand and an order to kill and the whole world telling him to.
He understood now, at last, on the dock, exactly what Timo had felt lowering that gun.
It wasn't nothing. It was this. It was the strange terrible lightness of choosing, once, cleanly, who lived — and finding that it was the only free thing the house had never managed to take.
They could make you kill. They could make you find.
They could make you sit eight hours in a cold car and feel nothing.
They could not, it turned out, make you unwilling to trade the whole of yourself for one specific person's morning.
That was the crack in the machine. Timo had found it in a room with a gun.
Pavel had found it on a slip with a body he wouldn't put in the water.
And here it was a third time, on a dock, and Pavel stepped through it the way you step off a boat into cold water you've finally stopped being afraid of.
***
"Pavel."
Luka's voice, wrecked, from the fish house door.
He'd dragged himself up. Of course he had.
He stood in the doorway with his broken arm cradled against his chest and his face grey and streaming and his whole body a single word of refusal, and behind him Irakli had gotten as far as his hands and knees against the gutting table and was watching, silent, an animal too hurt to do anything but see.
"Stay there," Pavel said. He didn't turn — the finder had him now, a hand on the cuffs, the gun up — but he pitched his voice back over his shoulder, flat, hard, the voice that had made men obey their whole lives.
"Don't move, Luka. He'll shoot you and he'll be right to, you're the variable now, and I'm not going to watch that. Stay in the door."
"Let him go." Luka wasn't talking to Pavel.
He'd turned his sea-green eyes on the boy with the gun, and his voice had gone down to the almost-gentle place, the dangerous place, except there was no danger left in him to back it, just a broken man in a doorway.
"Whatever they're paying you. I've got a boat, I've got money, I've got — take me instead, take me too, take me and let him — " His voice kept snagging on the words, a man who'd never had the words, reaching for them now when they mattered most and finding his hands empty the way they always were.
"Please. I've never once in my life asked anybody for anything. I'm asking. Don't take him."
"Luka. Stop." And Pavel did turn now, cuffed, the gun tracking him, turned so he could look at the man one more time, and he put everything he had left into keeping his voice level, because a level voice was the last useful thing he owned and he was going to spend it on this.
"Listen to me. This is the part where you do the thing your brother asked.
Not me — him. Dato. He spent his last breath asking you to let it go and live, and you couldn't, for two years you couldn't, and now here it is, the moment, the actual moment where you either do it or you don't. Let it go.
Live. Get your cousin off the floor and get out the land side and live, both of you, and let that be the thing Dato bought with the worst day of your life. "
"I'm not—" Luka's voice broke completely. "I'm not doing it again. I'm not standing in a doorway while someone I— I already did that. I did that to Dato, I wasn't there, I'm not doing it to—"
"You were never going to be able to save Dato.
You know that now. He told you himself, through me — it wasn't your fault, this is just the world.
" Pavel's own eyes were wet and he let them be; there was no reason left to hide anything.
"But you can save the thing he actually asked you to save, which was you.
That's the one you were always meant to carry out of that yard.
Not revenge. Not me. You. He knew you'd try to trade your life for the wrong things.
He was trying to stop you. Let him stop you, Luka. Let your brother win one."
Luka was shaking his head, slow, helpless, tears cutting the grey grime on his face. "You don't get to do this," he said. "You don't get to give me the merciful thing. I said that to you. In the yard. Word for word — you don't get to give me anything else."
"I know. I stole your line." Pavel's mouth did the shape that wasn't a smile. "It was true when you said it and it's true now, and neither of us gets to mean it, because the merciful thing is the only thing either of us has ever had to give anyone."
The grey light lay on the water. The boy with the gun waited, patient, a professional letting a condemned man have his words because words cost nothing and made a man walk quieter to the boat.
"One of us gets to," Pavel said, softer now, just for Luka, and the words came up out of him from somewhere older than himself and he didn't question where.
"That's how it works, in the end. One of us gets to.
It was always going to be you. It was you the second Dato said your name instead of his own with the last air in his body.
So take it. Make it worth the price." He almost smiled.
"Learn to breathe in the cold. You said you'd teach me.
Teach yourself instead, and think about me sometimes, when you go down where it's quiet. "
For a moment Luka couldn't speak at all. Then, wrecked, barely: "I learned to love the deep because it was the one place the grief left me alone. You're the first thing up here that ever did that. Don't make me go back down to find the quiet."
It was the most words Pavel had ever heard the man string together, and each one cost him, and Pavel took them and folded them small and put them somewhere the boy with the gun couldn't reach — to have on the boat. To have at the end.
"Then stay up here," Pavel said. "And breathe. That's all I'm asking. It's all he asked."
And he turned back to the water, and the boat, and the boy, and gave the finder his shoulder the way you give a man the ground he wants, and started to walk.
***
He got three steps.