CHAPTER 19 #3
Against the rim of his glass, soft, not looking at me, he says it.
"Eliza."
The first time he has used my first name in this room; the first time without a darling on either side. The sound drops into a pile in my chest that had been building under the floor of my noticing. The pile does not topple. It only grows warmer.
"Eliza. I have told you about my father.
I am going to ask you to do something for me.
" He sets his glass down without looking and goes very still, the way he goes only when he has quit pricing the room and turned the whole of that arithmetic onto me.
"I am going to ask you to take me to your mother's flat.
Tomorrow. With Renner and Vale. The four of us. "
He looks up. His thumb finds the little white pill-case on the desk corner and turns it a quarter rotation and sets it down again unopened — the broker's worry-bead, a thing to do with the hand so the face stays empty.
He has gone very still, the particular stillness of a man who has put a question on the table and is refusing to crowd it.
I look at the bottle, at the empty glass in my hand, at the dark line of corridor light under his door — Luca's light, on, two rooms over, the hum of the bunker carrying the engineer's wakefulness through the walls.
"Yes," I say. The whiskey is still in my throat, the taste a smoke I can lean against. "Marcus. Yes."
For the length of a sentence and a half his composure had been a held thing; now the right eyebrow loosens — not a lift, only the permission to lift — and his hand leaves the pill-case at last and lies open on the concrete.
"The four of us. Thank you."
"Thank me when I have walked you up the stairs. The back stairs. The second flight is rotten."
"We will go up the back stairs. I will walk behind you. I will look at the rotten stair when you tell me."
I set the empty glass on the low table; it makes a quiet sound against the concrete.
The whiskey heat sits against my sternum, the second pour holding, the burn now a slow rolled coal.
Two fingers come to the inside of my left wrist before I notice I have moved them; he notices; he lets me have my reflex and does not turn it into a sentence.
The whiskey burn at the back of my throat is the only warm thing in the room, and it is warm enough.
Marcus reaches across the space between us and sets his palm flat on the table next to my empty glass, looking at it there as though he is learning a new placement in a room he has not yet known he is furnishing.
"Sleep tonight."
"Cade."
"Sleep."
On my way out I pause by the lamp. The lighter sits between his glass and the bottle, antique silver, engraving softened by eleven years of his thumb.
I weigh it once on my palm and set it back without flicking it.
He watches me do it the way he watches everything I do — nothing moving in his face at all except the left half of his mouth, which chooses not to smile.
"Eliza. " Very low, behind me as I reach the door.
I stop with my hand on the frame and do not turn around.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
I close the door behind me. The burn stays in the back of my throat down the corridor and past Luca's open workshop door, where his head lifts at the sound of my step, chestnut hair falling past his ear, and he makes the smallest gesture across the room — open palm to the rosewood bench, a wordless I see you, querida. I give him a half nod and keep walking.
The St. Eligius medallion at my throat has warmed against my skin under the layered shirts; I have not taken it off since he traded it to me on the server-farm stair.
Down the spiral stair to Bunkroom D, where Adrian's charcoal shirt is still warm from my body and the cot is still made the way I left it.
I sit on the edge. The mother-of-pearl folding knife presses its small ridge against my left back pocket, a familiar weight I had stopped noticing and am noticing again.
I curl my right hand around the knuckles of my left and feel my own heartbeat under both.
The pile of stones in my chest has grown one heavier, and the chest has not given.
Tomorrow the four of us will climb a flight of rotten stairs to a kitchen where I watched my mother die for forty-two minutes, and Marcus is going to walk into that room because he has decided he will, the same way he set a coin in the drain at his father's back door.
He is the most ungentle, most attentive man I have ever met, and what I feel at the breastbone, separate from the whiskey, I do not name.
The bunker hums its single unbroken note.
Then my wrist-cuff warms against the silver-wire tattoo — the smallest pulse of a scan-warning blip, longer tonight than the brush I logged three days ago, a heat the manufacturer calibrated to mean something has looked at you and looked away.
It is closer than it was. I hold my forearm still and let it pass and do not reach for the knife.
I will tell the men in the morning, after coffee, before we climb.
I let the whiskey sit.