Chapter 30
STING
We don’t talk on the walk back, where we’re in standard formation with me in front, Rogue behind, Vi and Mara between us. The residential section opens up around us and the population thickens. The Rot becomes the Rot again, familiar, controlled, and manageable, and I wait to feel relieved.
But I don’t.
What I feel instead, now that the adrenaline is fading and immediate danger is past, is anger.
Not the cold, calibrated version I usually operate with, nor the measured response I deploy when someone crosses a line and needs to be informed of the consequences.
This is something else. Hotter. Less structured.
Erupting from a part of me I didn’t have access to before I held Vi’s face in a dark corridor with her blood on my thumb.
We get to the Skylight Room and close the door. Rogue finds the first aid kit, a real one, not the scavenged collection of bandages the work hub keeps, and hands it to me without a word. Mara sits against the far wall, knees up, breathing slowing. She watches me with wary eyes. She should.
Vi sits on the edge of the couch, the bag of documents on her lap. She hasn’t let go of it since I found her in the corridor. Blood has dried in a line down the left side of her face, cracking where the skin moves. She looks exhausted but alert, and entirely unrepentant.
I kneel in front of her, open the kit, and take out antiseptic and gauze and clean the wound.
I was right, that the cut is shallow and does not need stitches.
I dab antiseptic along the edge and Vi winces but doesn’t pull away.
I press gauze over it, tape the edges, the whole thing taking maybe two minutes.
Then I sit back on my heels and look at her.
“The section you were in has no reliable exits,” I say.
My voice is controlled, which is deliberate and Vi knows it because she’s heard me like this before.
“If the route you took in was blocked, your only alternative was a maintenance passage that runs through a structurally compromised section of the second floor. The ceiling in that passage has partially collapsed. If you’d been forced through there, one or both of you would have caught falling debris. ”
Vi’s eyes are on mine. She doesn’t interrupt.
“The people who occupy that territory don’t operate under any authority. If the group you ran into had been larger, or better organized, or more interested in what you were carrying than in whatever scared them off, you would not have walked out.”
I hear my own voice, steady and precise. Every word is correct and every word is a wound I’m inflicting on myself as much as her because I’m not describing hypotheticals. I’m describing the scenarios I ran in my head while I walked to No Man’s Land not knowing if Vi was dead or alive.
“You have no combat experience, no knowledge of the Rot’s layout beyond what you’ve seen. And Mara, Mara’s been here a matter of days, and you took her into an area that experienced Rotters avoid. If something had happened to her, that’s on you. If something had happened to you—”
I stop.
Because the end of that sentence isn’t clinical.
The end of that sentence is if something had happened to you, I don’t know what I would have done, and I can’t bring myself to say that.
Not in this room. Not with Rogue leaning against the wall pretending to examine the first aid kit.
Not with Mara watching from the floor with those wide, careful eyes.
Vi waits. She can feel the unfinished sentence. She can see it sitting in the air between us, the words I won’t say.
“If something had happened to me,” she says, finishing it for me, “what?”
I hold her gaze. “Don’t do that again,” I say. Which is not an answer, but fuck it.
Vi looks at me, her exhaustion still there, as well as the dried blood beneath the gauze, and the bag of papers on her lap. But underneath all that, she sees me and reads what’s behind my scolding.
She sees I’m not angry she went. She sees I’m terrified she came back hurt.
“I’m not going to apologize,” Vi says. “The documents are real. They matter. And no one was going to get them for me.”
She’s right. That’s the part I can’t argue with.
No one was going to get them for her because I said no.
As a result, Armen worked around me, Rogue took his cues from the room, and the only person willing to walk into that section of the Rot and risk her safety for her dead father’s truth was Vi herself.
And Mara.
“You’re right,” I say.
Vi blinks. Whatever she was braced for, it wasn’t that.
“No one was going to get them for you. That’s partly on me.”
Rogue’s hand stills on the first aid kit and Mara’s eyes move between us.
“Next time,” I say, not looking at her, “I go with you.”
I leave the room before she can respond, before I can see her face, and before the thing I’m feeling gets any closer to the surface than it already is.