Chapter Three #2
“She confirmed it,” I say to the windshield. “He doesn't come to school much. He knows I'm here, or he will the moment someone tells him.”
“He already knows,” Carnage says without any particular urgency, like he's commenting on the weather. “Halo flagged movement from two of his men near the east gate this afternoon. They clocked your arrival and doubled back.”
I let that settle in my chest. The fear of it, the inevitability of it, the strange and shameful relief of knowing that at least the waiting is over.
“Then it starts now,” I say.
“It started the second you got out of the car this morning.” He glances across at me. “How are you holding up?”
Not are you okay, that's a question that demands a lie. How are you holding up is different. It leaves room for the complicated answer.
“I don't know yet,” I tell him honestly. “Ask me again in a week when I've either made progress or gotten myself killed.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. But something.
He pulls off the road and parks on a gravel shoulder that overlooks the edge of town, showing just the lights of Stormsend scattered below us in the dark like something spilled. He cuts the engine and we sit there looking at it.
“You know the plan has holes,” he says after a while.
“I know.”
“Kellar's contact is still unconfirmed. We don't know how Steven is receiving intel. If there's a leak anywhere near our operation—”
“I know, Carn.” I turn to look at him. “I know every way this can go wrong.
I've been lying awake running through them since before I even met Tatum and the others.” I pause.
“What I don't know is whether I'm capable of seeing it through when the moment actually comes. When it's real and not hypothetical.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Those pale eyes, so steady they feel almost unsettling when they're fixed on you with full attention.
“I think you already have your answer to that question,” he says.
“How?”
“Because you came back.” He says it simply, like it ends the argument.
“Not many people who went through what you went through would come back to the place it happened and try to dismantle it.
They'd run. They'd bury it. They'd find a quiet corner of the world and pretend the other version of themselves never existed.” He tilts his head slightly.
“You walked back into his town with nothing but a plan you half made up and a name people here already hate.
That's not the behavior of someone who doesn't have what it takes.
That's the behavior of someone who's already decided.”
I stare at him.
“How do you do that?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“Say the exact right thing without it sounding like you practiced it.”
He huffs a short breath, the closest thing to a laugh I've heard from him. “I have a lot of practice saying uncomfortable truths. My brothers think it's a character flaw.”
I smile despite everything. “It's not.”
The silence comes back, but it's softer this time. I lean my head against the headrest and look out at the lights below us, and for the first time since I stepped out of this car this morning I let the tension in my shoulders sit down somewhere instead of coiling tighter.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“You can ask. I reserve the right not to answer.”
“Why did you actually say yes? When Tatum asked.” I feel him go still beside me.
“You told me in the car it was because my father is getting sloppy and drawing too much attention.
I believe that. But I don't think that's the whole reason a man like you drives across the country with his brothers for a girl he doesn’t really know.”
A beat. Two.
When he speaks, his voice is even. Measured. The voice of someone deciding exactly how much to give away.
“I had someone once who needed exactly this and there was nobody around to do it.” He keeps his eyes on the lights below. “Nobody who could or nobody who chose to. I'm still not sure which. Doesn't change the outcome.”
I don't ask who. I don't need to. I understand in the way you understand things that haven't been spelled out, that this is the weight he carries the way I carry mine, quietly, without putting it down.
“I'm sorry,” I say.
He nods once. Accepts it. Then reaches across and taps my knee twice, brisk, matter-of-fact, the way you'd signal time to move, then starts the engine.
“Come on. Pope will have eaten by now but Halo's been waiting for dinner.”
I almost laugh. It almost sounds normal.
As we pull back onto the road, I let the decision settle into me the way decisions do when they stop being choices and start just being true.
I trust him. Not because I have no other option. Not because he's useful, though he is. But because he told me something real in a car park in the dark with nothing to gain from it. Because when I said I didn't know how I was holding up, he didn't rush to fix it.
Because he said it started the second you got out of the car, and what he meant was you've been doing it all along.
In this war I'm fighting, with cracked armor and a plan held together with spite, that might be the most valuable thing I have.