24. Luka #2
So we built it. Grig and Dmitri would take the water, two boats, dark, killing their engines off the last channel marker and coming the rest of the way on the current.
Stefan would run our eyes from the operations room and ride Harper's shoulder through the network we had taken tonight, because Voronin's own cameras at the terminal still answered to a node that now belonged to us, a piece of beautiful luck we did not deserve and would not waste.
Three teams would feel out the landward fence.
I would go in the front, because the front was where Voronin would be watching for the ghost, and the ghost needed to give him something to watch.
And here was the place where the man I used to be went to war with the man I had become.
"You stay here," I said to Harper. The words came out before I had decided to keep them. "You run the cameras with Stefan. You are worth more to Dani as the eyes than as a body in the open."
She stood up from the chair. She did not raise her voice. She did her worst thing, which was to be calm.
"You don't believe that," she said. "You're scared.
I get to be the reason you're scared, that's fair, I am terrified for you too.
But you're about to make a decision out of the scared part, and you taught me what that part of you costs.
The scared part never keeps anyone safe.
It just decides for them, and removes itself, and calls the leaving love.
That is how you end up handing the people you love to the very thing you were trying to keep them from. "
It landed where she meant it to. I felt it go in.
"He will use you against me," I said. Low, just for her, though the room could hear and I no longer cared.
"That is the entire design. He took Dani to get you in that building so that when he has you, he has me, because he knows now that I would burn the harbor to the waterline to get you out.
You walking in is not courage. It is me handing him the only weapon that works on me. "
"Or," she said, and stepped close, and put her hand flat on my sternum the way she had the night I told her who I was, "it is me refusing to spend the rest of my life being kept in a safe room while the people I love die on the other side of a wall I'm not allowed to cross.
I have done the safe-room version, Luka.
Foster placement after foster placement, behind a door someone else locked for my own good.
It is not safety. It is just a smaller way to disappear. "
I had given her the network. I had given her control of the whole machine, set above my own hand, because I had finally understood that holding a person and keeping a person are not the same act, that the first is love and the second is just fear with better manners.
I had believed all of that in the calm of an ordinary night.
Now I had to believe it with Dani on a floor and Voronin's hand already on the lever, and I found that belief is not a thing you arrive at once.
It is a thing you choose again every time it costs more than the last time.
This was costing more than anything ever had.
I made myself look at the truth instead of the fear.
The truth was that she was the best mind in the building and the only one Voronin's cameras now obeyed.
The truth was that she would never forgive being benched, and that a Harper who had been put in a box to keep her safe was already half gone, the bright thing in her dimmed by exactly the gesture I would tell myself was love.
The truth was that she would rather die fighting through the front of that warehouse than live one more year behind a door locked for her own good.
I was not unafraid. I want that on the record. My hands wanted to cuff her to the table. The boy under the stairs was screaming at me to lock every door in the world. I was afraid in a way I had not let myself be since I was twelve and the kitchen went quiet.
And I chose her anyway. Not because the fear lied. Because I trusted her more than I trusted the fear.
"All right," I said.
She blinked. She had armed herself for a longer fight. "All right?"
"You come. You are on the network and on me, in that order, and if Stefan tells you to fall back you fall back without a debate, because in the field a half second of arguing is how people end up on floors." I turned to the table. "She is in. Build her into the approach."
Dmitri looked at me for a beat too long, and then he nodded, because he had known me twenty years and he understood what it had just cost to say it. Grig, in my ear, made a low sound that might have been approval. Nikolai said nothing at all, which from Nikolai was a blessing with both hands.
We geared up in the bay where the cars idled, breath fogging in the cold off the harbor, the sky out east beginning to give up its black for a bruised gray that meant we were out of night.
By the time the water went pewter at the edges, the boats were loaded and the lead teams had checked in and the old terminal sat on Stefan's screen like a tooth ready to be pulled.
Harper stood beside the car in a vest that swallowed her, hair pulled back, her face doing the thing I loved most and feared most, that quick fierce focus that reached the answer before the rest of us saw the question, and dared the world to keep up.
She was not pretending to be calm. She had passed all the way through fear and out the far side into purpose, which is a harder and braver country than calm.
"Comms check," Stefan said in our ears. "Eyes are up.
I have the terminal. I count six bodies in the main floor and one in the office above, and a heat signature in the northwest corner that does not move.
That is your friend, Harper. She is alive.
Her heart rate is high and steady. She is angry, which is on brand. "
Harper let out a breath that shook on the way out, and then steadied, and then was iron.
"Then let's go get her," she said, "and bring the whole place down on the man who put her there."
I looked at her one more time, this woman who had walked into my locked life and taught the locks to open.
Everything I had changed across the worst and best weeks of my life came down to the next ten seconds, to whether I could put a weapon in her hand and walk her toward a man who wanted us both dead, and trust her to stand at my shoulder instead of needing her hidden behind a wall where I could pretend I had kept her.
I handed her an earpiece, and then, after a breath I felt in my teeth, a weapon. "Stay behind me." "Not a chance," she said. We went.