Chapter 29
ROGUE
Proof of life shows up the next night, right on schedule.
It comes the way everything from this man comes, without fuss and without a fingerprint.
Kade brings it to me in the operations room, a plain envelope, unsealed, nothing written on the front.
No note about where it came from. No demand clipped to it.
Just the envelope, passed hand to hand at the south dock by a kid who didn't know what he was carrying and was gone before Kade could ask where he came from.
"You want me to stay?" Kade asks.
"No."
He reads my face, nods, and goes. Closes the door behind him without being told, which I'll remember to thank him for later. Right now I've got an envelope in my hand and a room that's suddenly too quiet.
I sit.
For a second, I don't open it. I just hold it, lighter than it has any right to be for something that's going to rearrange a person's entire life. Funny how that works. The things that wreck you never weigh anything.
Then I open it.
Inside is a photograph. Just one, with no staging and no flourish.
Somebody held up a camera and took a picture of a man sitting in a chair against a blank wall, and that's all.
But the man in the chair is older than the man I've seen in Vi's files.
Thinner. Gray where the file photos were still dark.
There are lines on his face that weren't there in the campaign posters from back when Rothwell still had a mayor and the mayor still had a city.
He's holding something in his lap, angled up toward the lens on purpose, and I can tell it's meant to be read by one person and one person only.
And that person is not me.
That's the part that gets me, sitting there alone under the ugly fluorescent lights of the ops room.
I can look at this photo all night and all I'll ever see is a tired old man in a chair.
I can't tell if it's really him. I don't have the years for it, I haven’t witnessed the closeness of a father and daughter when it’s only the two of them.
I wasn't there for any of that. Whatever's in this picture that proves it's Renner, I'm not the one who can verify it.
She is.
And that's the whole problem in one envelope, isn't it. This is the one thing Vi’s wanted since before I knew her name, and I can't even confirm it's real. I can only carry it to her and watch what it does to her face when she does.
I give myself sixty seconds with that. I count them, more or less, because if I don't put a limit around it, I'll sit here all night considering all options, and that helps no one.
I think about the first night I met Vi. Mouthy, terrified, walking into the Hunt like she had something to prove and no idea what it was going to cost her. After a few weeks of watching her learn this place, she decided, eyes open, to stay. Not that we would have let her leave, anyway.
I think about the way she keeps her father's case notes obsessively squared away even when the rest of her room looks like a crime scene. The papers that ended up under her ass that afternoon we messed around, and didn't even slow her down.
She built her whole life around the chance that this picture exists.
And now it does, and I'm the one holding it, and there's no version of the next ten minutes where I get to make this easy for her.
Sixty seconds is up.
I slide the photo back in the envelope, stand, and go find her.