Chapter 35
ROGUE
You can tell a lot about a person by how they move toward the thing they're most afraid of.
Some people drag their feet. Some barrel in fast so they don't have time to lose their nerve.
Vi does neither. She walks toward her father this morning the way you'd walk to your own execution if you'd decided to do it with your chin up—steady and deliberate, with every step bringing you closer to either absolute joy or devastating heartache.
I keep my eyes on her and my mind on the exits. Both. Always both.
Rothwell at first light is its own kind of ghost. There’s a shuttered bank, a movie house with half its marquee letters gone, a greasy spoon where the stools still face a griddle nobody's fired up in years.
Storefronts with the names ripped off, the occasional light burning in an upper window where somebody's still hanging on out of stubbornness or because they've got nowhere to go.
Armen takes point, a half block ahead, moving like a man out for a walk who happens to assess every doorway he passes.
Sting trails us by ten yards, hands loose, head on a swivel, that flat stillness of his turned all the way up.
And I stay with Vi, close enough to put a hand on her if it comes to that, far enough not to crowd her because she woke up this morning already somewhere else, quiet and pulled in tight.
Mara wanted to come. Vi told her no, and meant it, and Mara, who never met an argument she didn't want to win, looked at Vi's face and nodded. Some things you don't bring a friend into. You bring soldiers.
That's us this morning. Soldiers.
"You good?" I ask her, low, once we clear the open stretch by the old transit plaza.
"No," she says. "But keep walking."
So I keep walking.
The address the spy gave us sits on the far north edge, deeper in a part of the city I don't know at all, which I don't love.
There's comfort in knowing your ground, like where the sightlines are, which alleys dead-end, and where a man could stand for hours without being noticed.
Out here, I've got none of that. Out here, I'm sizing it up cold, building by building, and every angle comes back sounding alarm bells.
Too many windows. Too many doors with backs I can't see. Nowhere I'd choose to make a stand.
Because here's what worries me, even today, even with Vi about to walk into the biggest moment of her life.
Somebody handed us this location. The spy traded it to us, clean and easy, and walked away whistling.
And I still don't know who he was, where he came from, or where he went.
I've thought about him a hundred times, including the way he stood, the level chin, his observant sweep pattern, and it’s always left me feeling on high alert.
He gave us what we wanted and disappeared, and in my experience, when a thing comes that easy, it's because you're not seeing the price tag yet.
If it seems too good to be true… my dad used to say.
But I don’t share any of this with Vi. Today, she gets to want one thing without me dragging a threat across it.
But I keep my mind on the exits.
The building, when we reach it, is nothing.
That's the smart part. Four stories, narrow, the kind of place your eye glances right over. There’s a defunct accountant's office on the ground floor, paper still taped in the windows, the upper floors dark.
If you were going to make a man disappear and keep him alive, you'd pick this.
Boring. Forgettable. A non-event. I'd have picked it myself.
Armen drifts back to us at the corner, and the three of us stop in a doorway across the street. For a second, nobody says anything. We just look at it. The place where, if the spy didn't lie, Vi's father is alive and breathing.
"Top floor," Armen says quietly. "One way up that we know about. Could be a second."
"There's always a second," I say.
"Sting takes the street," Armen says. "You and me go up with her."
Sting nods once. He doesn't ask to come in.
He understands the same as I do, that somebody capable has to own the outside, and there's nobody I'd rather have between us and the rest of the world than the quietest man I know. He peels off toward the corner with the best line on both approaches and folds himself into the scenery like he’s been there all along.
Then it's the three of us, the street, and the door.
I look at Vi.
She's gone very still, staring up at the dark windows of the top floor like she can see through the brick.
Her hands are jammed in her jacket pockets, and her jaw is set.
Her eyes are bright and dry, holding back a flood by pure force of will, the same way she held it together when I gave her the photo of her dad.
Only a few months ago, she'd have never made it this far.
Then, she didn't know which end of the Rot was which.
I watched this woman go from confrontational and angry to this, to standing in an exposed street at dawn, scared out of her mind, walking in anyway.
I don't have a word for what that does to me. I've stopped trying to find one.
"Hey," I say.
She tears her eyes off the window and looks at me.
"Whatever's up there," I tell her, "you’re not going in alone. You go in front and we hold the back. But you're not alone. You hear me?"
For a second her composure wavers, just a hairline, just for me, and then she gets it back, and nods.
"Okay," she says. "Okay."
Armen pulls the street door. It isn't even locked, which tells me somebody up there is expecting company. I can't tell if that's a good sign or a bad one.
The stairwell is dim and smells like dust and old paper and, faintly, like coffee. Does that mean somebody’s awake up there? Because that would mean this shit is real, and that in about ninety seconds, Vi may lay eyes on the man she buried years ago.
She takes the first step.