23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
J essica
Freya begged to come, even though she has to wait outside. She's brought a bag full of notebooks, pens, sticky notes, highlighters, and enough snacks for a siege.
"You know I don't actually get to bring you into the archive."
"I know. I'll be outside, reading, with a drink ready for when you come out."
"Freya."
"Just being in the Council library will be amazing."
There's a driver, and Cassel in front — she runs my detail now that Corvin's still on crutches — and a second car ahead of us with two more people in it. Everything about the last three days has been somebody signing something.
The route was approved Monday. The departure time changed twice and I only found out this morning.
Outside about six people at the academy, nobody knows where I am today.
Cassel briefed me twice: I do what she says, immediately, no discussion.
If we stop somewhere unplanned I stay in the car.
If she says get out, I get out and go where she points and I don't look back to see whether she's following.
I agreed to all of it. Cheerfully, even.
Because in under an hour I'm going to sit at a table and read something my family wrote. Somebody's actual handwriting. A person who put a pen down two hundred years ago and never once imagined today would happen.
"Where do you want to start?" Freya asks.
"I don't know."
"You've had three weeks."
"I've made a list nine times and I keep tearing it up." I watch the fields go past. "The girl, obviously. Whatever's there about her. But that's the end of it. I keep thinking I should start earlier, before any of it, when they were just a family that was fine."
Freya considers this.
"Household accounts," she says.
"Sorry?"
"If you want to know what they were actually like. Nobody glamorizes in an accounts book." She shrugs. "You learn more about people from what they bought than from what they wrote about themselves."
The archive sits an hour outside a town I've never heard of, up a long private road with beech trees down one side.
We clear the first checkpoint at twenty past eight — a barrier, a hut, and a man who takes four minutes over Cassel's paperwork, then mine, then Freya's. Then another mile and a half to the inner gate, where you leave the vehicles.
We're maybe a third of a mile short of it when the car in front slows.
"What's this?" Cassel says.
There's a van across the road. Not blocking it — sitting at an angle just past a bend, hazards going, back doors open, two men in safety vests doing something to the shoulder.
A folding sign on the pavement says the road's closed for work and points traffic left, onto the service track that runs around the back of the perimeter.
The lead car has stopped. Somebody's got a window down.
"Fine," I say. "So we go around."
"Mm," Cassel says, and picks up the radio.
"Control, this is Cassel. We're on the approach road with a works vehicle and a closure. Do you have anything on that?"
Nothing.
She says it again, word for word, and I watch her face while she waits, and her face doesn't change at all, and that's how I know.
"Both of you. Seatbelts off. Now."
Freya gets hers off. I get mine off.
"When I say — out the left side, through the trees, downhill and left again toward the gate. You do not stop and you do not come back."
"Cassel—"
"Miss Miller, do not talk to me."
She's out of the car. She gets two steps.
I don't see what hits her. I hear it, a flat crack off the trees, and Cassel goes sideways into the open door and slides down it.
Then the windshield of the car in front comes apart.
The next twenty seconds are extremely loud and I have very little of them.
The driver's shouting. Freya's got the door on our side open.
There's somebody moving in the trees on the right and somebody coming up behind the van, and the two men in the vests are shooting.
I get a hand into the back of Cassel's coat and drag her into the gap between the car and the ditch, because she's still moving and I'm not leaving her in the open, and something goes into the fender eight inches from my head with a noise like a hammer.
"Jessica." Freya's flat on her front behind the rear wheel. "The trees on the left are clear."
"You're sure?"
"There's nobody on that side. They're all right and behind."
Which is the point. They've left us one direction and it goes away from the gate.
"No. That's where they want us."
"Then what—"
The driver of the lead car makes it out, gets a few steps, and goes down.
Rounds into both cars. One into Cassel. One into a driver. Nothing anywhere near me, and the one that hit the fender was low and behind.
They're not shooting at me. They're steering me.
"Freya. How fast can you get to that gate?"
"Not fast enough."
"How fast if nobody's looking at you?"
She stares at me.
"You are not—"
"Get ready."
I put my hand flat against my sternum and shift.
It's fast now. The road comes up at me in smells — cut grass, diesel, blood, gun oil, beech bark, Freya — and I'm out of the ditch on four legs before anybody's finished turning around.
Somebody in the trees says something urgent.
I go straight at the van. Not the men — the van, because it's the only cover on this road and there are two of them behind it.
I hit the back corner at a dead run and it goes over with a noise like a building coming down, and one of them doesn't get clear.
The other does. He's fast. He gets about six feet before I put him in the ditch.
Then the road's open, and I turn, and Freya is already running.
Low, along the ditch, up the right-hand side — the side they're all on — because every one of them is currently face-down in gravel and nobody is looking at a woman in a green coat.
Go girl.
Go, go, go.
I head up the road to meet the two in the beeches, because I'd rather they were dealing with me.
Voss has spent a year yelling at me about my back end, so I don't hit the treeline flat out. I lose the speed before the trees and come in through the gap at the bottom of the slope instead of forcing two trunks that are closer together than my hips.
The first one has a rifle up and never gets to use it, because he's braced for something huge and slow. I am not slow. He goes down under me and I'm not gentle about it.
The second drops his rifle and goes for his belt instead, and I'm on him before his hand gets there. His forearm ends up in my mouth.
I could take it off.
I let go and put him into a tree instead.
Somebody on the road shouts one word.
Then the net comes off the roof of the second van.
They fire it — it doesn't get thrown, it comes out of a tube with weights on the corners and opens about fifteen feet up and drops across my shoulders and my back and half my hindquarters. Same mesh. Same dark toothed lengths braided through it.
It's bigger than the last one. They went back and built a bigger one.
Two of them are already on the lines.
In the pines I pulled straight against it and the teeth went in, and it took Torres coming out of a ditch to give me any slack.
This time I go sideways, shoulder down, driving across the slope with everything I have — and both men are set against a pull that never comes, and both of them go off their feet.
One lets go. The other doesn't, and I drag him thirty feet before he changes his mind.
Something opens along my flank. I don't care.
I get my front end clear, drop my head, and pull until it tears at the corner where the mesh meets the weight. It comes off me in two pieces.
Somebody says, "Second."
An instruction, and nobody sounds surprised.
The first dart goes into my chest. It goes in, and a second later I turn hard and it tears back out, and I don't know whether that means I got all of it or none of it.
The second gets me in the flank, and that one stays.
I take the man who fired it. He's reloading at the front wheel of the second van and he doesn't get it done.
Then I go up the road.
Freya's clear. Cassel's behind a car. The gate is uphill and open and there's nobody between me and it.
The beeches go past like fence posts. Something goes into the road surface to my left and I don't care, because the barrier is right there and there's a man in the hut standing up—
And the road ahead is full of vehicles.
Two of them, nose to nose across the pavement between the trunks and the ditch. They weren't there on the way in. They've come out of a field entrance in the last minute and there are men getting out of both, and behind them there's another net.
They expected me to run for the gate.
I don't stop. I go left, down into the ditch and up the far bank into the field, because there's nothing out there but grass and I can run.
I get maybe forty-five yards.
Then my back end stops working. No pain, no warning — the message goes out and nothing arrives, and I go down at speed and slide through wet grass on my shoulder.
I get up. I make thirty feet and go down again, harder.
This time I don't get up.
They come through the grass behind me and they aren't hurrying.
Somebody says, "Again."
The third one goes into my shoulder.
The smells go first. One second there's grass and diesel and blood, and then there's nothing at all. Then the voices stretch out and start arriving from further away than the men are.
A loop comes over my head.
My mouth closes on a hand without me deciding anything, and I feel bone go, and somebody swears and drags him backwards.
That's the last thing my body does for me.
Another loop. Then a third, from a direction I can't turn toward, and the tension comes on and my head goes down into the grass and stays there.
Something heavy and soft comes over the top of me and the light goes green.
I push. One front leg still works. I make about six inches.
Above me, muffled, "How much has she had?"
"Three."
"Give her the fourth."
It goes into my neck.
After that my body stops arguing.
Wet grass. Green light. My own breathing, very loud. My mouth full of something warm that isn't mine.
Boots come through the grass and stop by my head. Somebody crouches. Two fingers press into the side of my neck and stay there a while.
"She's down."
Somebody further off. "Alive?"
The fingers move an inch and press again.
"Yes."
Freya got out.
Somebody starts counting to three, and the ground moves, and the green light shifts, and I can't hold on to any of it.