Chapter 37
Three hours out of Longyearbyen, Cara still couldn't get warm.
She had her own coat, and Reagan's parka over it, and a wool blanket from the plane's kit over that, and a thermos Nomad's, coffee going cold between her hands because she kept forgetting it was there.
The shaking had stopped somewhere over the mainland coast. The cold hadn't.
It had moved in below the muscle. She was beginning to believe it meant to stay.
The cabin was quiet the way a field hospital is quiet.
Reagan slept sitting up, arms crossed, surfacing every twenty minutes to check Skye's dressing and Cara's color without appearing to wake.
Sophie slept on David's shoulder. Owen sat across the aisle, wrapped to the chin, wearing the weight of a man who knew others had suffered to keep alive.
Gabe's shoulder rested against hers. He hadn't asked how she was in three hours. He just kept it there, taking her temperature through it.
Wade was up front in the copilot's seat, trading half-sentences with Nomad.
From behind, the two of them could have been brothers. Same slab shoulders. Same gray bristle. Same way of sitting absolutely still inside a moving machine.
Nomad had met them at the airfield with the engines already running. He'd watched the whole battered lot of them come up the stairs and asked exactly one question: Anybody following? Wade had said not yet. Nomad had said good enough and put them in the air.
Tom had his laptop open. His face had gone carefully blank, which on Tom was the same as shouting.
Nomad unbuckled himself and slapped Wade on the shoulder hard enough to draw a grunt. “We’re on auto. Need to stretch my legs. Don’t touch anything.”
As the man wound his way through the small but plush cabin, he eyed Tom. "Son, relax. You're going to wear out the internet."
Tom's hands came off the keys like the keyboard had heated up. "I was just—"
"Running me." Nomad winked at Cara. Up close the resemblance got stranger: Wade's build, Wade's economy, a face weathered in some other climate entirely. "Find anything good?"
"No, actually." Tom looked at the screen, then at him. Saying the rest seemed to cost him. "You’re a ghost. No service record. No licenses, no property, no tax history. There's a fishing boat registered to a man your size in 1989, but he's been dead since 1994." A beat. "You don't exist."
"Good to hear." Nomad grinned. "That took some doing."
"People don't just—"
"Tom," Wade said, from the front. Not sharp. Just final.
"It's a fair question," Nomad said mildly.
"You're carrying something worth killing for.
You ought to know whose plane it's on. Your boy Wade, here, has pulled me out of a couple situations I had no business walking away from.
I've pulled him out of three." He headed to the back of the jet. "Not that it matters."
In the cockpit, Wade huffed. “It totally matters. Always will.”
Cara watched the man go with a professional's appreciation. She had spent her whole life learning how to be somebody else. This man had managed the harder, quieter trick of being nobody at all.
She remembered the thermos and tried the coffee. Stone cold. She drank it anyway, and the bitter little shock of it brought the cabin back up around her — the engine drone, the antiseptic smell of Reagan's med kit as she worked on Skye, changing bandages, the quiet nobody was enjoying.
Three hours in the air and not one of them had said the math out loud, so finally it was Owen who did. "Somebody tell me the truth about what we just accomplished."
"Owen," Reagan said, not opening her eyes.
A tired scowl darkened his normally placid features. "I mean it. What did we even do?"
“Nothing good.” Tom closed the laptop. "We confirmed the validity of the list for Neptune. Cartwright flew her team north on a maybe. She's flying home on a certainty."
"She knows the book is real," Gabe said quietly. "She knows the one man who can read it, by face and by name. And she knows we'll die protecting him, which prices him better than we ever could."
Owen tapped a finger to his lips. "So we're worse off." He stared down at his blanketed hands. "Fifty-three people at risk, and what's standing between them and Neptune is that I haven't been caught yet. I'm not even good at not being caught. I'm just well-guarded."
"You're alive," Wade said from the front. "Start there."
The drone of the engines filled the silence. Outside, the light lay along the cloud tops, gold and sourceless, a sun that would not rise and would not set.
Skye was watching it. She'd said nothing since takeoff, propped against the window with her wound and her thoughts.
Not searching, for once. Cara knew Skye's searching face, the cold patient sorting that had gone through every word Ray ever said to her, twice, on the island, and come up empty.
This wasn't that. This was just a woman looking at light.
"He used to make me repeat things," Skye said.
Nobody moved. Reagan's eyes opened.
"Years ago. A handoff went bad. Doesn't matter where.
Ray drove me eleven hours and didn't say one word until the state line.
Then he stopped at a truck stop, ordered two kinds of pie, and taught me a protocol.
Made a game of it. Every time the waitress left, I gave it back word-perfect or he ate my slice.
" Her reflection almost smiled in the glass.
"I asked what it was for. He said, you'll know when you need it. "
"A cipher," Tom said carefully.
"No." Skye turned from the window. "A door.
A way to reach a channel he trusted — clean, outside every agency he didn't, which was all of them.
And a way to prove an order came from him, so the door would open.
" She looked at them, one face at a time.
"It's how you move them. The network. All fifty-three at once.
He built a way to collapse the whole map and redraw it, and he didn't put it in the book. " A breath. "He put it in me."
"Skye." Cara kept her voice level. "On the island, you said there was nothing."
"On the island I was tearing up floorboards." She said it without defensiveness, a finding at an inquest. "He knew I would. He built it to stay under the floor until I stopped." Her jaw moved once. "He knew me."
It took Cara a moment to recognize what was moving in her own chest. It was her trade, waking up.
They tried running a con on Neptune — the list is destroyed, stop hunting — but the mark hadn't bought it. You couldn’t sell a mark the same lie twice.
She'd known that at nineteen. She just hadn't seen the other move until now.
She sat straight up, energy zinging through her frozen form.
"We've been playing this wrong. We tried to make the list worthless to them.
That game's dead. Cartwright's already priced it.
" She set the cold thermos down. "So we make it worthless for real.
Move every alias, every route, every safe address, until the book Owen carries is a map of fifty-three people who aren't there anymore.
Let them steal it. Let them decode every line. "
"Make it worthless for real," Gabe said, trying its weight.
"We have the book." Reagan brightened. "Why not move them ourselves?"
"Because a move that holds isn't a drive to a new town," Cara said. "It's a birth certificate that stands up. A lease, a job, a history with no seams. Tom can build those." She let it sit. "But not fifty-three. Not quickly enough before Cartwright finds them."
"And these people don't know us," Wade said. "Stranger knocks on a witness's door, says Neptune found you, come quick." He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Skye sagged back against the leather seat. "Ray trained us to run from moves like that. These people will move when Ray’s network tells them to move. Nothing else pulls that trigger."
"Also Cartwright's people are watching us," Tom said. "Fifty-three house calls is a hand-drawn map."
She looked down the cabin at all of them — the wounded, the erased, the well-guarded — and for the first time since the water closed over her head, felt the cold give back half a degree.
This part she knew how to do. "The door is the play.
It's the only play; we just proved we can't do this ourselves.
But you don't walk into a meet you haven't cased.
So we work it like a con. We get home. Skye gives us every word of that protocol.
Then we put a name and a face on whoever's behind Ray's door before they ever learn we exist."
"And until then?" Owen's voice was low. "The fifty-three just wait?"
"They've stayed alive this long on Ray's work." It cost her something to say the rest, and she said it anyway. "They can hold a few more days. A blind knock loses all of them at once."
Nobody liked it, but nobody argued it.