41. Luna
LUNA
Iwas planning to walk into the deadliest night of my life when the second line turned pink.
The duel was three days out, and I was building the one thing in the world that could kill a god, which is a great deal of pressure to hang on a woman who couldn't keep down a saltine.
I'd been telling myself it was stress, and stress is a wonderful liar.
Stress explained the exhaustion that had nothing to do with the hours I kept.
It explained the way food had turned into a series of personal betrayals, coffee first and hardest, coffee that had never once let me down.
It explained the fact that I'd cried at a car insurance commercial, and then at Kirill teaching Nai Nai a card game he was very clearly losing on purpose, and then, mortifyingly, at nothing at all, alone in a stairwell, for four unbroken minutes.
Stress explained every piece of it, right up until it didn't.
I spent the days in the war room building the only weapon that could unmask Oracle without turning me into him.
Danny sat at my right hand for most of it, which is exactly where he'd sat when I was nineteen and couldn't make a script run, and having him back in that chair was its own medicine and its own quiet ache, because four years is a long time for a seat to stay empty.
"Walk me through the governor again," he said, meaning the fail-safe, because my brother reads my code the way other brothers read a sister's face.
"It's a conscience," I said. "HELIX can strip the mask off anyone on the network. That's the whole horror of the thing. So I wired it so that it can't. It fires at one target, named out loud, confirmed twice, and the instant anyone tries to aim it at a crowd, it eats itself instead of firing."
"Oracle would never build that."
"Oracle is the reason I have to. He made a machine that unmasks the hunted and auctions them to the people hunting them.
If I win this by building the same machine and pointing it at his face, he wins even while he loses, because the tool outlives us both and whoever picks it up next won't have a conscience bolted to the trigger.
" I saved the build. "So I'm not making his weapon and aiming it at him.
I'm making the opposite of him, and aiming that. "
Danny was quiet for a moment. "Say that at the funeral," he said. "Mine, ideally. That's a hell of a eulogy."
"You're not dying. You're being my second."
"I'm being your second," he agreed, and the joke went out of his voice.
"Which means I read his hands while you play him, and I'm the one who says the word if it turns.
So you should know where I stand before we get there.
If it ever comes down to you or the machine, little moon, I'm choosing you.
I'll burn HELIX to slag before I let that man make you finish it for real. "
"That's my line."
"I taught you the line. I get to keep a copy."
He bumped his shoulder into mine, careful, like he was still learning how much of him was allowed to touch the world again, and we went back to work, and for a little while the war felt survivable because the empty chair wasn't empty.
We tested the conscience at two in the morning.
I fed HELIX a fat, easy target, a whole directory of hidden people, exactly the harvest Oracle had built his empire on, and I gave it every reason in its code to fire.
It sat there. It refused me like a good dog refusing a poisoned steak, checking the name, failing to hear it confirmed, quietly declining to become the worst thing it was capable of being.
"He really never saw you coming," Danny said, watching the most dangerous tool ever written choose not to be a massacre. "A girl who builds the off switch first."
Bex found me in the compound kitchen at some indefensible hour, hunched over a mug of ginger tea I'd made because my body had filed a formal grievance against every better option.
"You look like a Victorian ghost," Bex said, hopping up to sit on the counter.
"A haunted, nauseous Victorian ghost who's scheduled to duel a wizard.
What's wrong with you? And don't say the war.
The war is going great. You have a boyfriend and a brother and a body count. This is a different flavor of doom."
"I'm just tired, Bex. Everybody's tired."
"No." She tipped her head and started working the exact math I'd been refusing to do for two weeks, because Bex has never in her life met a conclusion she was scared to say out loud.
"You cried at a commercial for cars. You're off coffee, and you'd marry coffee if it asked.
You threw up yesterday and blamed the shrimp, except nobody else touched the shrimp and nobody else got sick.
" She ticked it off on her fingers with theatrical cruelty.
"So you're either dying, or you're pregnant, Luna, and you don't have time to die. "
The mug stopped halfway to my mouth.
"Oh my God," Bex breathed, delighted and appalled in equal measure, watching my face do the thing a face does when a stranger reads out loud the file you've refused to open.
"Oh my God, you didn't know. You genuinely did not know until this precise second.
That is the most you event in recorded history.
You out-coded a literal god, but you couldn't count to a late period. It's poetry."
"Bex."
"I'm only saying, for a certified genius, the blind spot is really something."
"Bex. I have a duel in three days. I can't fit this in my head right now. There's no room. There's genuinely no room."
She heard it then, the real fear sitting under the joke, and my theatrical roommate did the one gracefully human thing in her whole repertoire, which is that she got quiet, and she got kind.
"Okay," she said, softer. "Okay. Right now it's a maybe.
It's a maybe on a stick you haven't even used yet.
Here's what happens. I go to the machine at the gas station that nobody in this paranoid fortress has to sign a log for.
I bring you back the answer in a box. You look at it when you're ready and not one second sooner, and, Luna, whatever it turns out to say, you're not alone in a stairwell anymore.
That part of your life is over. I ended it. You're welcome."
I did not cry. I want that entered into the record. I had a very controlled encounter with some moisture that I attribute entirely to the ginger.
Nai Nai pressed a bowl of plain congee into my hands the next morning without my asking, the kind you make for a person whose stomach has declared war on them, and she held my eyes a beat too long, and she said nothing at all.
I understood that the oldest woman in the compound had done the same arithmetic Bex had and simply decided to feed me instead of announce me.
I ate the congee. It stayed down. It was the first thing in a week that had.
Pavel found me on the roof that night, because he always knows where I go when I've gotten too big for a room.
He didn't ask what was wrong. He learned early that asking me a direct question is the fastest way to a locked door.
He just came and stood beside me and let the city do the talking, and I stood there with a secret roughly the size of an entire person sitting under my ribs, and I didn't tell him.
He was about to step into a room with the man who once put a price on him, and there is no way to say "I might be pregnant" that doesn't change how a man fights.
"You're somewhere else," he said eventually.
"I'm doing math," I said, which was true.
I was doing the worst arithmetic I'd ever run.
It came to two lines on a stick I hadn't found the nerve to use, and two of us walking into a duel, and maybe, if the box said what my own body had already been trying to tell me for two weeks, a third small thing that had never once agreed to stand inside the blast radius of any of this.
"Anything I can carry?"
"Not yet," I said. "Soon. After. I promise you after."
He took that the way he takes anything he's afraid to drop, careful and silent, and he didn't push, and I loved him so much in that second that it scared me worse than Oracle ever had.
I almost told him then. The words got as far as my teeth.
But he would have gone very still, and then he would have quietly moved the whole war around to guard two of us instead of one, and that small recalibration might be the exact thing that got him killed.
So I swallowed a person's worth of news and let him keep believing I was only frightened of the ordinary apocalypse.
The box sat in the bottom of my bag for a day and a half, quiet and heavy, like a small thing that had not yet decided whether to go off.
I took the test the night before the duel, in the little bathroom off the war room, with the door locked and the tap running so nobody would hear me being afraid, because I have unmasked killers and stared down a god and I could not, it turned out, watch three minutes tick past on a plastic stick without my hands going unsteady.
I laid it face down on the edge of the sink.
I set a timer, because of course I did. I am exactly who I am.
Then I sat on the lip of the tub in the most dangerous week of my whole life and waited on a different kind of news, smaller and quieter and far more permanent than anything Oracle could ever do to me.
When the timer went off, I turned the stick over.
Two lines.
Not one. Two. Pink and clear and absolutely certain, the way HELIX is certain, the way Pavel's aim never misses, the way not one other thing in my whole spinning life had managed to be.
I was going to walk into that night tomorrow. And I wasn't walking in alone, and I wasn't walking in as two. I was walking in as three, and exactly one of us had signed up for any of it.
I sat on the edge of that tub with the stick in my hand and a war on the calendar and my entire impossible family asleep or scheming somewhere down the hall, and I did the only thing there is to do with a truth that enormous and that quiet.
I laid my free hand flat over the place I'd caught myself covering for weeks without understanding why, and I made the smallest and most gigantic promise I'd ever made.
Not tonight, I told it. Tonight I'm scared, and I don't get to be your mother yet.
But I'm going to go win you a whole world to be born into, and then I'm going to tell your father, and he's going to be so unbearably calm about it that I will have to marry him out of pure spite.
Just give me this one. Give me one more dark, and I will hand you every single morning that comes after it.
It came down to two lines, on the eve of the worst night of my life.
I turned off the tap, folded the future into my pocket, and went back down the hall to finish building the weapon that would buy it.