CHAPTER 17
Ana
◆
The cold came in the night, and by seven in the morning the sky over West Twenty-Second Street was the hard bright blue that makes a city look survivable.
It was a lying sort of light. I had not stood under any weather since they took me, so the blue arrived second-hand off a screen on the wall, and I looked at it the way you look at a photograph of a place somebody has promised you.
Matteo worked in the utility closet with the door propped open and a hard case standing at his feet.
The air in there was scorching transformer varnish laid over the flat rubber of the washer door seal, and it sat at the back of my throat and would not go down.
He was not setting anything alight. He was wiping the drives and then killing the machines that had held them, which he told me was the only fire worth setting in a building you mean to leave standing.
“Say that again in the order you would say it to a lawyer,” I said.
“Everything that matters goes into this case and the case travels with us,” he said. “The machines will not start again for anybody, including us. The door seals itself behind the last man out and stays that way until somebody brings a saw to it.”
“And what happens to the rooms after that?”
“They are only rooms after that.”
“Give me the sentence I could say under oath,” I said. “The one that stays true whether or not the person hearing it believes me.”
He worked a screw out of a bracket with his thumbnail before he answered.
“There is nothing left in this building that belongs to you,” he said. “You can carry that anywhere you like and it will hold.”
I walked the corridor once while they finished, because I wanted to be present when the place stopped.
Eleven rooms, and I had learned every one of them the way you learn a hospital at night.
Then something went out behind me and the long room dropped to its emergency lighting, and the vault quit being anywhere that a person had lived.
It became a location that had been closed.
I had put that distinction into other people’s filings for years without ever once having to stand inside it.
Cassian came down from the mantrap end with his coat already on. He stopped where the corridor widened and set his weight and did not move again.
“Everybody hears this once,” he said. “We move in two vehicles and I drive the lead. Rian takes the second with Ana in it and does not leave her side at any point. Luca calls the turns from the front and Matteo carries the case and the channel. If one vehicle stops moving, the other keeps going until I say a different thing.”
“You have told me what happens if a vehicle stops,” I said. “Tell me what happens if I am the reason it stops.”
“Then Rian carries you to the other one and we go.”
“And if it is Rian who cannot walk?”
“Then Luca has you and Matteo drives,” he said. “Somebody always has you. That is the entire point of a second vehicle.”
Luca came out of the comms room with somebody else’s pen behind his ear. He had not carried his own since the day he left it on a desk downtown on purpose, and he had never explained that to me, and I had stopped expecting him to.
“Seven days,” he said. “I would like that sitting on the dashboard of both cars where everybody can see it, all the way north.”
“Tell me the distance,” I said. “I would like to be carrying one true number when I get into a car.”
“Ninety-one miles north,” Cassian said. “A stone house on eleven acres, and nobody has ever taken you there, which is the entire reason we are going to use it.”
“And the man who has been parked on this garage since the flag went up?”
“He watches the ramp and he follows whatever comes out of it,” Cassian said. “That is his method, and today we make it expensive for him.”
Nobody had explained the phone that rang. I did not ask a second time in front of all four of them, because asking twice in a corridor is how you teach a room that you can be managed.
Rian was standing at the elevator when I got there and he did not greet me at all.
He took my hand, turned it palm up, put something into it and closed my fingers over it before I could look at what it was.
Steel, worn thin along one edge, on a black cord that had been knotted and knotted again.
Saint Michael with his heel down on the thing he had come for, and the face of him almost rubbed away.
“It was my mother’s and it is going where you are going,” he said.
I had a whole sentence built and it came apart in my mouth before I could give it air.
“You do not get to hand me a thing like this on a morning like this one,” I said.
“I do, and I have, and you can give it back to me at the house.”
I put the cord over my head. It went down beside the bootlace with the gray key on it, and the two of them lay against my sternum, cold and then not cold.
The garage was two levels under the street and colder than the morning waiting above it. Cold rubber, standing water, painted concrete gritty enough to take the skin off a palm. The gate motor ran its dry ratchet and the wire came up in front of us, and the ramp filled with that blue.
I did not look back at the building.
“You did not look back,” Luca said from the front seat. “Everybody looks back. I have watched people look back at rooms they hated.”
“There is nothing behind me that I did not carry out in my own pockets,” I said.
That was the last long thing I said for a while, and I had not decided any of it. The city came apart in pieces. Then the bridge. Then trees, and a sky doing nothing at all.
Rian drove with his wrist over the top of the wheel. Matteo sat beside me in the back with the case between his boots and both hands on the lid. Luca named every turn before we reached it, and none of the turns were the direct way, and none of them went twice in the same direction.
“Right at the second set of lights and then left before the church,” Luca said. “Drive it like a man who is late for nothing at all.”
Matteo tipped his chin at the case without lifting his hands off it. “Ask me what is in here.”
“What is in the case?”
“Sixty-one shells, and every name that ever signed for one of them.”
Rian pressed the button at his collar. “Kestrel Six, confirm the bridge camera for me,” he said.
The pause had a shape to it. Then Sasha, level as a table. “The bridge camera is up and it is clean in both directions.”
She did not say the call sign back to him. Nobody in the car remarked on that, and I understood that silence was all any of them had.
“You have had that in your fist since the corridor,” Rian said to the mirror. “You have not said a word about it and you are not going to, are you.”
I looked out of the window instead. He let me keep it. He had done the same thing to me once from the other side of it, and I had hated him for it then, and I did not say that either.
The road narrowed at the eleventh mile after the bridge. One lane. Orange barrels taped end to end down the middle. A yellow roller parked in the closed lane with nobody up in the seat.
Cassian went through the gap first. Then the roller moved.
It came off its brakes and put itself across the lane behind him. A van closed the road behind us. Rian said a word I will not write down here. Matteo’s hand came onto my shoulder and pushed me down and forward.
“Stay in that seat and keep low and do not open a door for anybody,” Rian said. “Matteo has you and the case both. Luca, get Kane on the channel and tell him to keep driving.”
“He is already gone,” Luca said. “He will run the loop and come back around behind them, which is the only useful thing anybody can do right now.”
A man walked up the line of barrels on my side. Unhurried. Hands out where we could see them. Bloodless pale, a shaved head, no lashes worth the name, and not a tall man.
He stopped level with the glass and looked in at me. His eyes were nearly no color at all. He smiled the way a man smiles at a receptionist he has met before.
“Turn the engines off and this stays professional for everybody in it,” he said. The voice came through the door soft and German at the edges. “Nobody in this car needs to be carried out of it. I have three men with me and not one of them wants to work today.”
“Talk to me and not to her,” Rian said. “She does not make decisions on a road, and you knew that before you got out of the van.”
Kranz took that as weather.
“Ms. Verdugo, you are the only person here that I am paid to move,” he said. “The rest of this is expense that somebody else will have to justify. Open your own door and I will not put a hand on you at all.”
I have sat in rooms with men who threaten. He did not threaten. That was the part I could not get past.
Rian went out of the driver’s door. Matteo took my collar and put me out of the right-hand side, into the closed lane, and then there was asphalt under me and nothing on it but paint and a stopped roller.
The closed lane was flat. There was nothing to be behind. A man came off the roller at a walk and then stopped walking.
Rian crossed in front of me. He was still turning when the sound arrived.
The round tore high through the outside of his left upper arm and exited behind the shoulder line. I saw his coat jump. He kept going forward anyway and put all of his weight into the man and put him down on the road.
The one from the barrels got a hand on my wrist. Big hand. Thumb across the inside of it.
I turned into the thumb. Badly, and late, and I did it anyway. My arm came out of his hand and the heel of it caught his mouth on the way past.
Then he was gone backwards and I was on my knees beside Rian. What Rian had been holding lay on the road by my knee. I left it there on purpose.
The van was already reversing off the shoulder. The barrel line had gone quiet.
Luca had Rian under the good arm. Matteo had the case in one hand and the other pressed on the wound. The driver’s door stood open and there was nobody left for it.
So I got in.