CHAPTER 20 #2
That was the part I couldn't say out loud.
The flying was the lie I'd tell if anyone asked; the truth was the leaving.
The hangar behind me had a roof and a generator and a door that groaned shut like a closing argument, and people inside it who'd bleed for me, and somehow in four impossible days it had become the thing I'd spent thirty-two years convincing myself I didn't need and couldn't survive having.
A home. And I was walking out of it, possibly to die, definitely toward a coven, while my foot refused to find the step.
"Counsel."
Julian, at my left shoulder, not touching.
He'd left his father's watch in his pocket, unwound, and I knew without looking that he hadn't set it this morning — a small enormous thing whose shape I was still learning.
He held up the forged transit papers and fanned them once, like a man showing a winning hand he hadn't needed to cheat for.
"I have run far worse cargo through far worse weather than this, in aircraft held together with prayer and tax fraud, and I have yet to set a single one down where it didn't belong.
The route's clean to the crossing. The marshal on the far end owes me a favor he very much wants to discharge.
" His pale eyes held mine, ironic and gentle at once.
"You're not cargo, darling. You're the whole reason for the trip.
So you can imagine how careful I intend to be. "
"Reassuring," I said, "if I trusted any man who used the word discharge about a federal marshal."
"You don't have to trust the man," Omar said, on my right, the paper map already out and folded to the leg of the chase, his thumb resting on its furred white creases like it was something with a pulse.
He smelled like warm asphalt and citrus and, under it, faintly, the iron of Wren's blood he hadn't gotten all the way off either.
"Trust the route. Paper doesn't lose signal, counselor.
I've got the whole line drawn, where we go up and where we come down and every wrong road we don't take.
" He looked at me, and the joke he usually keeps loaded didn't fire; he let me see the true thing under it instead.
"I planned the way home before I planned the way out.
I always do. We are coming back to this exact patch of bad tarmac.
I drew it. It's already true. All your foot has to do is the first step. "
And Grant didn't talk me onto the plane, because Grant doesn't talk anyone anywhere.
He came to stand square in front of me, big enough to block the dark, his flat gray eyes doing the thing they do — counting the apron, the props, the treeline, the exits, three of which were lies.
He didn't offer to lift me. He'd known better since a rain-slick overlook two days and a whole lifetime ago.
"I'm not going to carry you," he said, plain as a man reading a range card.
"You told me you'd bill me hourly, and I believe you, and I can't afford you.
" The corner of his mouth, the one that almost never moves, moved.
"But I'll go up first. You put your hand on my back, and it isn't to hold you up, it's just so you know exactly where the wall is, if you need one.
" He turned and set his boot on the step and waited, not looking back.
"Your choice, sweetheart. Always your choice.
The plane doesn't leave till you say it does. "
Three of them ringed around me in the cold, and not one of them reached to drag me through the door. They had built me a railing out of their own bodies and then stepped back to let me decide whether to lean on it.
I put my hand flat on Grant's back. The banked heat of him came through the leather of his cut, the slab of muscle, the steadiness, all of it holding still under my palm — there to be found, exactly where he'd promised the wall would be.
And I climbed the steps myself.
---
The cabin was cramped and red-lit, all cold metal benches and webbing, a machine that had never pretended to be comfortable.
I took the seat by the porthole — I don't know why, my hands certainly didn't want me looking out of it — and Omar dropped into the webbing across from me while Grant settled beside me, his bulk a bulwark on the aisle side, and Julian went forward to fly, because of course Julian flew.
Julian moves everything. Julian would move us through the dark the way he moved everything the system wanted to disappear.
Then the props spun up.
The spool-up whine started low and climbed, and kept climbing, a thin rising scream that came up through the deck and the bench and the bones of my jaw until I felt it in my back teeth, in the old pinned clavicle, in the fillings — a sound that traveled through the skeleton more than the ears, that turned fear from an emotion into a frequency the airframe and I were both vibrating at.
My fingers found Ruth's pen in my twist and didn't take it out, just held the cool steel of it like a hand in mine.
Across from me Omar started humming, tuneless and low under the engines, the thing he does when he's tracking or scared, and the strange part was how it helped, that thread of warm human nonsense laid over the machine's rising shriek.
"You with me?" Grant said, low, beside my ear. Not are you okay — he'd never insult me with are you okay. A capacity check, the same one he'd use breaching a door. "Color?"
I understood, distantly, that he was handing me the architecture they'd built for the other kind of overwhelm and trusting me to use it for this one too, that the word was just as real up here, that if I'd said red the plane would have stopped dead on the threshold of the runway and no one in this cabin would have made it cost me a thing.
"Green," I said. My voice came out steadier than I'd earned. "Just talk about something. Anything. Counsel."
"Three exits," Grant said, dead serious. "The door we came in. The hatch over Vance's empty head. And the porthole, which is a lie, so don't take it. " The laugh came up out of me ragged and real.
"I have no notes," I said. "Strike that. I want the transcript to reflect that counsel has no notes whatsoever."
The turboprop heaved itself forward, gathering the cracked runway under it in long bone-shaking jolts, and then the jolts smoothed into something worse, the floating wrongness of a thing that has left the earth, and the whine settled into a steady punishing drone, and we were up.
I looked out the porthole. I shouldn't have. I did anyway.
I pressed two fingers to the cold porthole glass, the way you'd touch a name carved into a stone.
"We'll see it again," Omar said quietly, watching my face instead of the window. "Three flashes when we come back. Cady warms the lights. " The hum threaded under his voice. "I drew it in ink, counselor. Pencil's for plans, because plans change. But home I do in ink."
The amber was gone. There was only the dark now, and the engines, and the three of them, and a cloned drive in my jacket and a coven somewhere ahead of us across a border, and a clock counting down to a vote that would decide whether forty packs got to keep being free or got handed over like furniture in a merger I'd refused to sign.
Get the ledger. Win the vote. Come home to the amber light and the chess game nobody finishes and the percolator and all four flights landing safe. That was the brief, the whole brief, and I'd read every clause of it, and for once in my life I wanted to sign every line.
I took my hand off the glass. Grant's shoulder was warm against mine, the wall right where he'd said it would be. Omar hummed. Up front, Julian flew us steady through the climbing dark, his father's watch unwound in his pocket, no longer counting anyone's borrowed time.
I'd spent my whole life refusing to be carried, and now here I was, thirty thousand feet up, being carried anyway, toward the only fight that had ever felt like mine. Ruth, I thought, I finally found a clause I want to sign.