CHAPTER 28
Elias
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He counted the steps down from The Notch in blocks of a hundred. Three miles on foot. His left arm was heavier than it had been an hour ago and moving the count off it kept it moving.
The wind had died along the ridge but the storm was still on the western peaks, low and grey, the last of it dragging east. His boots skidded once on wet granite and Mara’s hand steadied him at the elbow. He let her. He did not say anything about it.
Reyn’s voice came through the earpiece, level and cold and pleased in the way Reyn was pleased, which was not visibly at all.
“Federal marshals on the pad at Bridgeport. Cross loaded. They’ll clear our airspace inside the hour.”
He measured his lines of sight down the trail as he walked.
Old habit, hard to shake, worth keeping.
Cover on the left in the scrub oaks. Open on the right where the granite dropped away for a hundred feet to the talus and then again for another hundred to the switchback below.
Nothing moved that shouldn’t. Nothing had a barrel.
Nothing had breath. The compound dogs would be on him within a mile.
He wanted them to be. He wanted a warm animal to press its head into his good hand and take that job off him for the night.
Mara said nothing for the first mile. He liked her for that.
She could have been talking. She could have been counting the way he knew she counted when she was afraid.
Instead she walked beside him and watched the trail and kept her taped left forearm turned inward under her jacket sleeve.
The stitches held. Havlin had said they would.
At the half-mile mark he stopped once and made her stop with him. He looked at her. She looked back. The ankle was long healed, and she’d have told him, so he asked with his eyes about the forearm, and she turned it once, palm up under the sleeve, and shook her head. It was fine. It was holding.
They kept walking.
By the time they came off the switchback and onto the compound approach the storm had cleared off the summit and the first stars were showing in a hard black gap between the last of the cloud.
Two of the Afterlight floods threw pale light across the gravel.
Reyn was on the ramp with the medical bag, and the silver front tooth caught the light every time he moved his jaw.
“Med-bay,” Reyn said. “Havlin’s counting the seconds.”
“I know where it is. Let her count them.”
He put his right hand at her spine and moved her toward the door first. She let him. She always let him move her through a door first when he had a wall to put between the outside world and her back. He counted the four stone steps up to the compound door and did not miss any.
The medical bay was warm and smelled of alcohol and the coffee Havlin drank when she was nervous. Havlin was in her operator’s fatigues, blonde in a French braid over one shoulder, freckled across the nose, sleeves pushed up. She had the shears in her hand before he cleared the doorway.
“On the table,” she said. “Jacket off, left side first.”
He sat on the paper-covered exam table. Mara took the counter beside it, hip on the granite, left sleeve rolled once, canonical, stitched forearm on her knee.
He could see the ladder of small clean sutures along the seam where the glass had opened her.
Havlin had done clean work then and would do clean work again tonight.
He worked the right sleeve of his jacket down himself.
The left he did not fight. Havlin cut the left sleeve up the seam to the shoulder and peeled the jacket away, and then the shirt underneath, and set both on the counter.
Blood on both. Less than he had been carrying weight-for.
She swabbed the graze once and it burned honest and clean.
“Hold still,” Havlin said, taping the shoulder. “This is the last time I patch you this year, I want that on record.”
“Noted,” Elias said.
Six inches. Flesh. The round had run the muscle and gone on and taken nothing with it that could not be walked around.
He had known it at The Notch and he knew it now.
He watched Mara watch him and he did not look away.
Her jaw was set. Her hand on the counter’s edge was steady.
She had counted him bleeding at forty yards and she had come back down the face after him without slipping, and she was not going to let the med-bay be the place where she stopped being steady.
Havlin taped the graze clean, laid gauze, taped over the gauze in three careful strips, then wrapped the whole shoulder in one clean pass.
She pulled a fresh shirt from the shelf behind her — his, from the stack Reyn kept there for exactly this — and held it while he pushed his right arm through and then eased his left in after.
The tape pulled once. He did not flinch that she could see.
Reyn stepped into the doorway. He did not come inside. The silver front tooth caught the light once and did not catch it again.
“You did good, boss,” Reyn said.
Elias nodded. He said nothing back. Reyn had known him seven years and did not need it. Reyn tapped the doorframe twice with two knuckles — his signature — and stepped back into the corridor.
Havlin was on her tablet now, reading numbers off the wire. Her braid caught on her shoulder and she flicked it back with her wrist.
“Federal custody at twenty-one seventeen,” Havlin said. “Confirmed.”
He looked at the wall clock. Seventeen minutes past nine, plus another eighteen minutes since. Cross had been in cuffs on the marshals’ aircraft for over half an hour. He was on his way to a room he would not walk out of, and no one was shooting at anyone Elias loved.
“Drop receipt is stamped,” Havlin said. “Katya has it.”
“Full seven terabytes to the federal drop?”
“Full seven terabytes. Chain of custody on the RAID is on the desk in ops. Strap coiled beside it. Timestamp on the drop is twenty-one fourteen. Three minutes before Cross went to the marshals. Court-clean.”
He let out the breath he had been carrying up the ridge and down the ridge and through the door.
He had no word for it, and refused the first one his mind offered.
He named it instead a completed operation.
The naming did not matter to his body. His body slackened one careful notch and did not slacken again.
Havlin turned to Mara without moving her feet. “Let me see the forearm, please.”
Mara held it out. Havlin pressed once along the stitch line, pressed again a knuckle lower, looked up.
“Holding. I will pull them Monday.”
He looked between them. Two women who had worked together across a compromised radio and a corridor breach and a firefight on a granite face.
Havlin had never once addressed Mara as anything but her name.
He liked Havlin for that. He liked Mara for the way she took the answer without needing to name it a scene.
He slid off the table. Left arm heavy. He tested the shoulder inside the sleeve of the fresh shirt. Weight yes. Range limited. He would not need range tonight. He would need presence.
“Main room, then sleep,” he said to Havlin. “Everything else can wait until morning.”
“Reyn laid the fire before he went out to meet you on the ramp.”
“He knows what he’s doing. He knew it before I did.”
“He knew before all of us. Sleep, Major.”
The main room was oak-floored and dim and the great stone fireplace at the north wall waited with kindling laid in the grate the way Reyn always laid it — short cross, long parallel over, one square of fatwood at the base.
Elias struck a match one-handed on the granite hearth and let the flame take the fatwood.
Mara knelt beside him with two split logs against her knees, held them until the kindling caught, then set them the way his eyes moved.
She stood, favoring her left forearm the way he was favoring his left shoulder, and they looked at each other and did not smile.
Two people walking a little crooked, matched.
He walked her to the low couch under the west window and set her down on it with his good hand at her back.
The fire caught proper hold behind them and threw yellow across the oak floor and up the western wall to where his rifle rack was and past it.
His eyes stayed on her feet under the blanket. The rack could keep for morning.
Water. She had not asked. He filled a glass at the kitchen tap and brought it to her. She took it without looking up because she had known he was going to bring it and had known she was going to take it. She drank half of it in one long swallow.
There was a wool blanket folded over the arm of the couch. He shook it out one-handed and laid it across her legs and drew the edge down over her feet. The Seiko slid an inch on her left wrist as she moved her hand.
He sat down beside her. He did not put an arm around her yet. He had one call to make first and it belonged to her too, so he did it in front of her.
He took his tablet off the low table and opened the encrypted line to Katya Wren. She picked up on the second ring. He did not waste the ring or her time.
“Cross in federal custody at twenty-one seventeen. Full seven terabytes to the federal drop at twenty-one fourteen. Mara is on my couch and she is fine. Thank you for the paperwork you did today and for the two years of paperwork you did before today.”
A short silence on the line. Then Katya, dry as her briefs were dry.
“That was three sentences, Elias.”
“It was.”
“I will do three back. You are welcome. The evidentiary chain is clean and the filings will hold. Now sleep, before I file for that too.”
He hung up. He set the tablet face down on the table so its light would not be in the room. He looked at Mara. She was watching him over the rim of the water glass, and her eyes were wet, and not spilling, and not going to spill.
He tipped his chin at the glass door. The east terrace. She nodded. He went and opened it for her and she came through under his good arm and out into the cold.
The east terrace opened off the main room through a single glass door.
The storm had cleared off the summits and the wind that had been climbing since Wednesday was down to nothing.
The last cloud dragged east across the valley and behind it the stars were coming out one at a time.
The helipad was empty. Cross’s marshals had lifted from Bridgeport a mile below and were somewhere north over the Whitcomb ridge by now, running the Nyx man toward a federal cell.
He stood at the terrace rail with Mara beside him.
He measured the ridge line in cover — the granite lip north, the scrub oak south, the compound’s own walls behind them — and then he stopped measuring, because the operation was over and the reflex was a coat he did not need on tonight.
He put his right hand on the rail. He turned his head to her.
“I’m walking out of the field,” Elias said, on the terrace. “Permanent. I want you to know before I know.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She did not say what most people would have said. She was Mara. She was going to ask him first what he wanted.
He said it before she could.
“I want you to tell me what you want. For yourself. For me. For the firm. In whatever order you want to give it.”
She turned so her back was to the rail and her stitched forearm was under the sleeve and Nathan’s Seiko on her left wrist caught the terrace light on the scuffed black bezel. She was thinking. He waited. He had time now. He had not had time in six years and he had it tonight and he liked having it.
“I want you home,” Mara said. “I want the work I do to be work I chose. I want us to be able to talk about a Tuesday morning without checking a display first.”
He nodded. He did not interrupt.
“You do what you love,” she said. “I’ll do what I love. We’ll pick a house on ground that’s talking to us.”
He turned it once in his head. A house. Not this house.
This house was a compound and he had built it to fight from.
He wanted a house he could not fight from.
He wanted a house that would not be defended because it would not need defending.
He wanted a house on ground that was talking to her, the way she meant it, because she read the ground the way he read a room.
“That’s the house I want,” Elias said.
“Then that’s the house,” she said.
He nodded once. He did not fix anything. She had not asked him to fix anything. She had asked him to listen, and he had, and now she had told him, and now he knew.
He did the thing next.
He lifted his taped left arm slowly — weight, range limited, functional — and put it around her shoulders and drew her in against him under it.
She came. She fit under it. Her head rested at the joint of his neck and shoulder on the good side and he could feel the Seiko cool at her wrist through his shirt where her hand had come up to lie against his chest.
The sky opened another notch and the second-magnitude stars came in behind the first. Below the terrace the diesel generator ran once, checked the load, and shut itself down.
Grid was up. Solar array was banked. The compound breathed the long slow breath of a building that no longer needed to hold anything.
He listened for anything the ridge might tell him and heard only wind moving low through the scrub oak, and one owl a mile out, and Mara’s own breath under his arm evening out toward sleep.
He did not say what he felt. He did what he felt.
He held her under the taped arm and he did not move it and he did not say the word out loud, because the word was in the arm, and in the terrace, and in the empty helipad, and in the three sentences he had said to Katya, and in the water glass on the low table inside, and in the blanket over her feet.
He kept the taped arm around her shoulders while the stars came out. The word marriage stayed unspoken between them, and that suited them both.