19. Isla
ISLA
Two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty minutes.
The number looked manageable when it was part of Ezra’s operation model. Six hours after Theon leaves for Atlanta, it becomes an act of hostility.
I try to work. I map Site Nine’s environmental systems, marking the controls the team must preserve and the points where surveillance can be interrupted without affecting the clean rooms. I verify Theon’s inventory without moving anything, because reorganizing another chemist’s laboratory during his absence is not affection.
It is sabotage with good intentions. I update degradation models that do not require updating.
None of it helps.
I check the time. I listen for footsteps that cannot arrive yet. I touch the mark on my throat and feel my chest tighten.
This is ridiculous. I am twenty-four years old. I survived nearly two decades inside facilities designed to make survival conditional on obedience. Forty-eight hours should not be able to dismantle me.
But I have never had anyone to wait for.
That is what I failed to account for. Theon’s absence does not feel like the ordinary absence of a person in another room. It feels unfinished. Every sound in the corridor demands inspection because it might be him, although I know it cannot be.
I am staring at the same page in the common level when Raphael stops beside my chair.
“Come on,” he says.
“Where?”
“Kitchen.” He is already walking. “You ate half a piece of toast this morning.”
So he noticed one concrete thing. Not everything. Not my heart rate, my thoughts, or the seventeen ambush scenarios currently circling my head. Half a piece of toast.
I follow him.
He takes vegetables from the refrigerator and places a cutting board in front of me. “Dice those. Small enough to cook evenly.”
The repetition helps. Or it would if my pieces did not range from laboratory precision to structural debris.
“Terrible,” I mutter.
“Distracted.” Raphael sets a second knife on the board and demonstrates the grip with his own hand. “Curl your fingertips. Guide with the knuckle. Do not rush.”
I copy him. The next pieces improve.
“Now tell me what you’re worried about,” he says.
The knife pauses against the board.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” The confession escapes before I can contain it. “Caring about someone. Having someone to lose. I spent eighteen years learning not to want anything, and now I want too much. I don’t know what to do with the fear attached to it.”
Raphael heats oil in a pan. “You do not have to turn every feeling into a procedure.”
“That sounds irresponsible.”
“To you, probably.” He adds garlic. “Your nervous system learned that absence precedes harm. Now someone matters enough for his absence to frighten you. It is understandable. It is also exhausting.”
“And counterproductive.”
“Yes.”
“You are not making a persuasive case for attachment.”
“I’m feeding you, not selling you anything.”
Despite myself, I laugh.
He tips the vegetables into the pan. They hiss against the oil, and the kitchen fills with garlic and herbs.
“How do you live with it?” I ask. “All of you. How do you care about people and still function when they are in danger?”
He considers before answering.
“Badly, some days. Nikolai checks that Jenna is breathing when she sleeps. Damon counts time in Darius’s voice when they are separated on an operation. We prepare for what can go wrong, then try not to punish the people we love for frightening us.”
“Does that work?”
“Not consistently.”
That is more comforting than false certainty would have been.
“You keep your body functional,” he continues. “You eat. You sleep if you can. You give your hands a task while there is nothing useful to do. When information arrives, you deal with what happened instead of everything you imagined.”
We finish cooking in companionable silence. He teaches me when to add salt and makes me taste the sauce before altering it. By the time we sit down, my hands are steady.
“This is good,” I say.
“I know.”
“Your humility is moving.”
“Eat all of it.”
The order is warm enough that I obey.
Jenna finds me later with Theon’s chemistry notes open on my lap and no memory of reading them.
She lowers herself onto Henrietta beside me, one hand braced beneath her stomach. “Waiting is awful.”
“Raphael already gave me the prepared speech.”
“Raphael gives excellent speeches. He also gets to remain busy sewing people back together when things go wrong.” She takes the notes from my hands and closes them. “The rest of us pace.”
“You pace?”
“I used to. Now Nikolai has made everyone terrified I’ll encounter an unsecured rug, so I sit aggressively.”
I smile, but it fades quickly. “How do you stand it when he leaves?”
“I hate it. I know the plan, memorize the abort conditions, and remind myself that silence means radio silence—not death.” Her gaze settles on me. “Then I hate it some more.”
“That is almost exactly what Raphael said.”
“We share notes.”
She tells me three stories about operations that went wrong.
Not legends in which everyone behaves brilliantly.
Real failures: a vehicle that would not start, a cover identity ruined by a misspelled surname, Nikolai trapped for forty minutes in a hotel laundry room while Darius impersonated housekeeping over the radio.
Every story ends with them coming home because they adapted.
It helps. Not enough, but measurably.
The second day is harder.
The access team—Theon, Damon, and Darius—is already in position. Ezra remains in the Archive, receiving nothing because the plan requires silence until the Atlanta system is cloned or the mission aborts.
At fourteen hundred, I have run the same route model eighteen times without changing the result.
Lucien appears beside my workstation.
“Come with me,” he says.
He takes me to a small room behind the residential level. One lamp. Two cushions. No equipment to check and no screen offering false work.
“I don’t know how to meditate,” I tell him.
“Neither do I.” He lowers himself to the floor. “I know how to sit still.”
I sit opposite him.
He does not tell me what to feel or how to breathe. He simply stays. At first, the silence makes every thought louder. Atlanta. Guns. Alarms. Theon bleeding in a corridor while I sit half a country away.
I let each image arrive without building the next one for it.
Gradually, my breathing slows to Lucien’s rhythm.
“Better?” he asks when we stand.
“Not fixed.”
“I didn’t ask if it was fixed.”
“Then yes.”
He walks me back toward the common level.
“Caring makes fear unavoidable,” he says. “Stillness only stops the fear from choosing what you do next.”
That sentence stays with me.
The message arrives at two in the morning, six hours before Theon’s planned return.
I am in his bed, awake beneath sheets that smell more faintly of him with every hour, when my tablet chimes.
ATLANTA ACCESS COMPLETE. ARCHIVE CLONED. PERSISTENT CHANNEL ACTIVE. MANUFACTURING UNDISTURBED. NO IDENTITIES COMPROMISED. ALL PERSONNEL MOBILE. THREE NONCRITICAL INJURIES. ETA 0800.
Three noncritical injuries.
There are three people on the access team.
I read the message four times. They are alive. They are coming home. Theon is injured, although the word noncritical covers too much territory to be useful.
I reach the medical bay two minutes later.
Raphael is already there, reading the restricted injury summary on his terminal. Of course he received it too. This is his work, not mine.
“Darius has an injured left shoulder,” he says. “Damon took a blow to the face. Theon has a controlled laceration across the back of his left shoulder. No loss of consciousness. No gunshot wounds. Stable vitals.”
Air enters my lungs again.
“What can I do?”
He looks at me, then points to a cabinet. “Check the seals and expiration dates on the external-wound packs. Do not open them. Then stock water and food for when they arrive.”
It is not medically necessary. It is a task he can safely give me.
I do it twice.
At five, Raphael takes the checklist from my hands. “Shower. Breakfast. Clean clothes. They do not need you exhausted when they arrive.”
This time, I understand the instruction well enough to follow it.
At seven fifty-two, the communications board updates: decontamination at the landing site has taken longer than planned. Revised arrival, eight forty-five.
At eight forty-four, I am standing inside the medical-bay door.
At eight forty-five, the elevator opens.
Darius emerges first with his left arm in a field sling, talking rapidly enough to prove that pain has not improved his personality. Damon follows with a dark bruise across one cheekbone. Theon comes last.
His shirt is torn at the left shoulder. A field dressing is strapped across his upper back, clean except for a rust-colored stain at one edge. He is tired, dirty, and moving carefully.
Alive.
His eyes find mine.
I start toward him, remember the injury, and stop before I collide with his chest. Theon closes the remaining distance himself. His uninjured arm locks around my waist and pulls me against his right side.
He kisses me once, hard and brief.
“Missed you,” he says against my mouth. “Missed you, baby girl.”
“You’re hurt.”
“A piece of access housing objected to being removed.”
“The access housing won?”
“Temporarily.”
His hand slides into my hair, and his gaze moves over my face as though verifying every feature.
“Did you sleep in my bed?”
“Every night.”
“Good girl.”
“I would hate to interrupt,” Darius says, “but my shoulder and I are pursuing a formal separation.”
Raphael steps into the corridor. One look is enough to set him moving.
“Darius, imaging. Damon, neurological check and ice. Theon, treatment bay two.”
“The dressing is holding.”
“A fact for which you will be rewarded by keeping your blood inside your body. Move.”
Theon moves.
Raphael removes the field dressing, irrigates the wound, and examines it under direct light. The cut runs along the back of Theon’s shoulder, jagged but clear of the joint. It is deeper than I want it to be and less dangerous than my imagination made it.
“You can stay at his right side,” Raphael tells me. “Do not touch the sterile field.”
He injects local anesthetic and waits for it to take effect before he begins closing the wound. I hold Theon’s right hand and talk.
I tell him about Site Nine’s environmental controls, the two assumptions Ezra corrected, the meal Raphael taught me to cook, and Jenna’s story about Nikolai in the laundry room.
“You finished the Site Nine map,” Theon says.
“The environmental layer. Access confidence is still below threshold.”
Pride warms his tired face. “My thorough girl.”
Raphael places the final stitch and covers the wound with a clean dressing.
“No lifting with the left arm. No overhead reach or pulling for seventy-two hours. Keep this dry until tomorrow, and come back sooner if the wound bleeds, opens, reddens, or becomes hot.” He fixes Theon with a level stare.
“That includes stopping whatever activity caused the problem. I am not issuing separate instructions for your sex life.”
Theon looks at me.
I look back.
Raphael closes his eyes briefly. “Use the uninjured arm. Do not be stupid.”
“Your confidence in me is touching,” Theon says.
“My confidence is in Isla.”
When Raphael releases him, we return to Theon’s quarters at a pace that does not pull his stitches.
“You need to wash,” I tell him. “But the dressing stays dry.”
“Bossy.”
“Alive.”
I sit him beside the basin and wash his hair with his head tipped back, keeping the water away from his shoulder. Then I use a warm cloth to wipe the sweat, adhesive residue, and grime from his skin. It is intimate without needing to become sex. He closes his eyes and lets me care for him.
“I thought about you,” he says. “At every decision point.”
“Raphael said returning to me was part of your objective.”
“It was the condition underneath the others. Get the records. Leave the medicine moving. Bring my brothers home.” His good hand settles at my hip. “Come back to you.”
That answer matters more because he does not pretend the rest was meaningless.
We lie down with his injured shoulder supported and me curled against his right side. His arm closes around me.
For the first time since he left, my body begins to stand down.
“I cannot do that regularly,” I say against his chest. “My cardiovascular system objects.”
“You can.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It does not become easy. You get better at keeping the fear from making decisions for you.”
Lucien’s lesson in Theon’s voice.
“And I’m supposed to trust that you’ll always come back?”
“No.” His honesty makes me lift my head. “There is no always in field work. Trust that I plan around returning. Trust that my brothers will drag me out if my plan fails. Trust that I know I have something to lose now.”
I press my palm to his chest and feel the steady impact of his heart.
“Show me you’re here,” I whisper.
He does.
He stays on his back with the injured shoulder supported and uses his mouth and his uninjured hand.
No frantic claiming. No attempt to prove that pain cannot touch him.
He watches me, listens, and brings me apart slowly enough that every time I drift toward Atlanta, his voice pulls me back into the room.
Afterward, I settle beside him without disturbing the dressing. My fingers find the chemical structures inked across his chest.
“I want to learn these,” I say. “Your cipher. I want to be able to read it.”
“It is not a pleasant curriculum.”
“I don’t care. I want the formulas, the scars, the nightmares, the way you take your tea. All of it.”
He catches my hand and kisses the center of my palm. “All of it may take a while.”
“Good.” I return my cheek to his chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Outside, Chicago continues without us. Inside, the floor is warm beneath the bed, and Theon’s breathing lengthens toward sleep.
Home is still a word with more meanings than I know how to hold.
But with his hand resting around my wrist, I stop treating it like a theory.