CHAPTER 27 #2
He put his back to the north face beside her and set his good shoulder against the granite.
His left arm hung slower than the right; the shell fabric was wet with a wet that was not the storm.
Mara did not look at the wound. She looked at his eyes, which were storm-grey and level, and she read the low band on the wrist sensor.
The band was warm and going hot.
“Five point one is coming,” Mara said, reading the low band on the wrist sensor. “Ten seconds. Hold on to me.”
“I’ve got you,” Elias said.
He put his good arm around the back of her ribs and pulled her in.
The RAID was between them. The recorder was between her hand and his jacket.
His left arm came up slow, taped-blood and slow, and lay across her shoulders like a weight he was choosing to carry.
His mouth was an inch above hers. She could feel the breath he was not spending on words.
She could feel her own count going quiet.
The main shock fired.
Five point one hit the granite the way a truck hits a bridge — not up and down, sideways, a shear that ran the length of the overlook and made the rock shout under their boots.
Mara held. Elias held. The ropes of snow that had not already fallen fell now, straight down the north face, in white silence swallowed by wind.
Somewhere below them, on the visible route, Cross was running.
The near-kiss lived on his mouth an inch from hers and the shockwave took it before it landed.
She felt his breath first, then the pull of the ground; the ground won by a heartbeat.
His mouth stayed where it was and did not close the last inch.
He did not use the shaking as an excuse to take a mouth she had not offered.
“I’m counting your breathing,” she said, into his jacket, while the granite shook. “Not the ground.”
“Then keep counting,” he said.
She kept counting.
The five-point-one ran out of energy in eleven seconds.
The wrist sensor went from red back into orange and stayed.
The wind stayed at forty knots. Somewhere on the visible route, Cross’s polished shoes were finding purchase on a rock that had just shifted a centimeter under everything he had planned.
The rotor sound came in on top of the wind.
“The bird is on the deck a mile out,” Elias called over comms.
Mara lifted her head. Down along the visible route, on a bench of flat rock a mile off through the storm, a matte grey helicopter was setting down on skids.
It was not one of theirs. It was not a Bell.
It was Halberd’s. She saw a small figure in a suit, cut in half by the wind, cross the last twenty meters of open granite and scramble at the door.
“He is inside it, Elias,” Mara said. “He is inside it.”
Elias slid the HK416 off his good shoulder. He set the buttstock into the meat of his shoulder that was not bleeding. He put his cheek to the rifle and read the wind at forty knots and the range at a mile and the drop of the rotor as the helicopter began to lift.
“Take the shot,” Reyn said as the helicopter lifted.
Elias did not answer Reyn over comms. He answered the ledger.
“For the ledger,” Elias said, and he took it.
The rifle spoke once. Mara felt it against the granite through her own boots — a small clean strike, right-handed, one round, no follow-up.
A mile off, in the storm, the tail rotor of the helicopter came apart.
The main rotor kept turning for a second and a half, long enough for the aircraft to yaw sideways and for the pilot’s instinct to save the airframe by putting it down onto rock instead of into the valley.
The helicopter fell six feet onto the bench of granite it had lifted off, and stayed there, and did not burn.
She watched a piece of the tail assembly cartwheel once into the snow and lie still.
The rotor slowed. The storm ate the sound of it before the sound reached her.
Somewhere in the wire, Havlin was already calling federal marshals with a set of GPS coordinates and Katya Wren’s cover paperwork sitting under them like a table.
“Federal marshals are eight minutes out, boss,” Havlin called through comms.
“Mara, are you clear of the wind side, is your arm holding,” Elias said, low, off the comm.
“I am clear. The recorder is still running,” she said.
Cross was inside the helicopter. Cross was alive. Cross was going to be arrested at nightfall on Elias Ward’s ground and no other ground, and the tape was going to be the first thing a federal grand jury heard about the Whitcomb Fault.
Mara let her hand fall. The recorder was still on.
She checked the light. She had him. She had every word of the hospital speech and the small revision of his mouth after Nathan and the moment his hand had not been still.
She had the tape and she had the archive on her chest and she had Nathan’s Seiko still ticking on her left wrist above the bandage line.
Elias set the rifle down against the rock and put his good hand at the back of her neck and looked at her once, the way he had never looked at her in a room with paperwork in it.
His left shoulder was black-wet under her hand.
She could feel him counting the range to the helicopter and the range to the federal marshals and the range to a place to sit down.
She did not close the last inch of his mouth to hers. He did not close it to her.
This was the wrong ground for it. This was the wrong count of his breaths.
His blood was on his sleeve and Cross’s voice was on her tape and the wind was still at forty knots at her back.
The mouth would keep. She had learned that grief and want could both keep, if you counted them and put them down carefully.
She turned her face into the meat of his good shoulder for one second and then lifted it again.
Below them, on the bench of granite a mile off, a suited figure was scrabbling at the fuselage door of a downed aircraft while a federal marshal’s SUV she could not yet see was already turning off the county road onto Afterlight’s access.
Above them, the storm went on being weather.
The wrist sensor went from orange down into yellow.
The Whitcomb, having done what the Whitcomb was going to do, went quiet.
The rotor cut, and the helicopter fell a mile off, and Elias turned his taped-blood left shoulder into the wind, and Mara heard herself say Nathan’s name once, out loud, for the ground to hear.