Chapter 5
Chapter five
Daron
The road is shit and I do not care.
The road is shit, the suspension is shit, the gravel is loose under the back tires every time I drop a gear, and I do not fucking care because Thaw is breathing in the cargo box behind me and the world is a different world than it was at sundown.
I drop another gear. The engine drags. Fine.
Let it drag. We are not in a hurry now. We are off the access road, we are forty minutes deep into the secondary network, the searchlight is miles behind us and the searchlight does not know which direction we went and the searchlight is not going to find us tonight.
I have run this exfil in my head a hundred times for two years and the run never went this clean.
The run always had something in it. A guard.
A dog. A radio. A second team. Something.
The run never went truck to truck to road to dark to gone.
I am driving away from a Syndicate facility with my brother in the back. I am driving away from a Syndicate facility with my brother.
Fuck.
I hit the wheel with the heel of my hand. Once. Just to do something with the energy. The cab is too small to hold what is in me and I cannot pull over and run the energy off, so I hit the wheel, and it does about ten percent of what I need it to do.
He's alive.
He is alive and he was standing in that corridor.
I keep coming back to that. Two years of running the math on what condition he would be in if we got him out — best case strapped to a gurney, worst case unrecognizable, every plan we built had a stretcher in it, every cache had a sedation kit, we drove a truck up here with a cell in it because the version of him that was likely to come out was the version that could not come down a mountain in human shape — and what came out of that cell was Thaw.
Thaw the way Thaw looks. Tall. Steady. Gold eyes working the corridor like he had never left it.
Dropping orders in the alpha-voice the way he used to drop them at the kitchen table when we were teenagers.
"Dean. North door. Hold it."
Like it had been a week.
Like he had not been gone for two years.
I check the mirror. I cannot see her. The partition is closed and the mirror won't show her to me. I check anyway. I have been checking it for hours. Every few seconds.
She is back there.
That is the other thing I am not going to be able to do anything with for a while.
We have a mate.
I keep waiting for it to feel real. It just keeps sitting there on top of being true. I am thirty-one years old and a woman I have never met in my life looked at me through a gap in some bars in a Syndicate corridor and my chest did the thing my pack told me could happen.
I saw her hair first. Dark red and tangled, the only bright thing in the corridor.
Then I saw her face.
I have not been able to stop seeing her face.
She is fucking gorgeous. She was standing behind Crull with the alarm light strobing across her cheekbones and her jaw set. Brave. She was brave in that corridor. A Syndicate facility coming apart at the seams and she kept her feet under her.
Now there is a thread in my chest that points at her, and the thread does not have an off-switch.
I am going to try not to think about the thread. I know I am going to fail. I am going to try anyway.
I am going to drive the truck.
The trees lean in. The gravel gets worse. The headlights stay off.
She made a sound a minute ago.
A sleepy sound. Through the partition. Just a little catch of breath. She is sleeping in the back and the bond is happy about it and I am happy about it and Dean is happy about it.
I check the mirror because some part of my brain refuses to trust that the situation is the situation. The situation is that we got our brother and we got the female and we got Crull and Harek and Fen.
Two years.
Two years of operations and the night went clean.
I cannot get over it.
I am not going to be over it for a while.
I check the mirror.
The partition slides open.
Dean slides through headfirst, barely fitting. He pulls the partition closed behind him.
He looks at me. I look at him.
He says, "Fuck. Fuck, Daron."
"I know."
He laughs. Just once, a short surprised bark. I almost laugh too but the laugh gets stuck on something and turns into a long breath out instead.
"Tell me he was standing," Dean says. "Tell me I saw what I think I saw."
"He was standing all the way up. In the corridor. Dropping orders like it was a Tuesday."
"He gave me a position. I did not think. I just went. The second he said north door my whole body remembered."
"Yeah. I had not heard that voice in two years and the second I heard it my legs did what my legs used to do."
Dean shakes his head, slow.
"How does he look," Dean says. "Your read."
"You saw him."
"I want your read."
"My read is he looks better than he should. He looks way better than he should. Whatever they did to him in there, he did not let it take all of him. Some of him got through."
"How much?"
"Most of him. I think most of him. I will know better when I have ten minutes with him at the safehouse. But what I saw in the corridor was Thaw."
"Dean."
"Yeah."
"Can you believe we have a mate?"
"No."
"Did you see her face?"
"Yes."
"She is fucking beautiful."
"I can’t stop smiling."
"She was standing there in the middle of all of it and she did not flinch."
"I know."
"She was brave, Dean. She was scared and she was brave anyway. Did you see her eyes?"
"About got lost in them. I had to leave to stay focused."
"What are the odds?"
"The odds are the odds. I do not care about the odds. The odds happened."
"Fuck."
He is grinning. I am grinning. Two grown men in a truck cab feeling like the impossible just fucking happened. Twice.
"How are we doing this," I say.
"Slow. She has four mates already, Daron. We are doing what we have always done. Steady. Useful. The thread will tell us when, and we do not pull on it before it does."
"I am not pulling."
"You are checking the mirror every other second."
"I know."
"Daron."
"What?"
"Stop checking the mirror."
"Fuck off."
He laughs.
"What about Fen?"
The grin goes off his face.
"You saw him," I say.
"Crull carried him out. Crull is back there with him now. He woke up and has been pacing since we hit the gravel, he is going to be a fucking situation when we stop."
"Is he —"
"He's alive, Daron. He is in worse shape than Thaw and he is going to take longer. But he is in there. Crull's got him and he is not going to lose him in the back of this truck."
I look at him. He is leaning forward with his elbow on his knee and the heel of his hand against his eye and his other hand on the dash and he is breathing in the way he breathes when he is not crying because he has decided not to cry. Dean does not cry.
The Syndicate is going to come.
I know that the way I know weather. They will count what is missing. They will figure out who took it. They will come.
The thought should sit heavy. It doesn't.
For two years the word has been survive. Survive the pickup. Survive the transport. Survive another day.
Tonight the word is different. Tonight she is asleep in the back of the truck. Tomorrow she is going to wake up in a safehouse.
Anything that comes between her and that bed is going to come through me first. The Syndicate has not figured that out yet. They are going to.
Tonight Thaw is out. Crull is out. Harek is out. Fen is alive. Dean is beside me.
Tonight the Syndicate is the one who has to come looking.
They are going to lose.
"Dean."
"Yeah."
"They're going to lose."
He is quiet for a second. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me. The same face. The same brother.
"Yeah," he says. "They are."