30. Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
Sulla
She told me she knows. Then she walked away. I’m trying to process the revelation in all its dimensions.
Then the PA crackles, “All contestants to the staging area.” I have to go be a person.
There are only five teams left. We’re paired at the briefing.
I stand six inches from her while Mac outlines the forty-eight-hour escape and evasion: hunter force will pursue, coordinates of the extraction point through thirty miles of Highland terrain.
Reid takes notes. Her hand is controlled. Her face is blank.
She won’t look at me.
I understand that. I deserve it. I stare at the map and pretend I’m absorbing information instead of watching her profile and thinking, last night she said she loved me. Last night she said it carefully, like she wanted to make sure I knew it before whatever came next.
I should have told her about my past then. I used the cameras as an excuse.
I had a thousand chances. I took none of them.
We start moving at 0600. She sets a brutal pace. Ten feet ahead, shoulders rigid, not looking back. I match her speed without comment.
Three hours in, she stops at a stream crossing to check the map. I come up beside her, not too close. We look at the terrain together without speaking.
“Easiest crossing is fifty meters upstream,” I say.
“I see it.”
“Harder ground on the far bank but better concealment.”
“Agreed.”
We cross. She goes first. I follow. When we reach the far bank, she’s already moving again, not waiting to see if I made it.
She knows I made it. She was listening.
That’s something. I don’t know what. But something.
Around hour four, I try.
“Reid.”
She doesn’t slow. “Not now.”
“Okay.”
We keep walking.
Hour six we stop for nutrition. She hands me my rations without being asked. I take them without comment.
When we’re done, she sits on a rock and drinks water and looks at the hills without glancing at me.
“I’m not going to blow the challenge,” she says finally. “Whatever else is happening. I’m not doing that.”
“I know.”
“I worked too hard to throw it.”
“I know.”
She looks at me for the first time all day. It’s not warm and it’s not hate. It’s something harder than both—it’s assessment. She’s trying to figure out what she’s dealing with. Who she’s dealing with.
I hold very still under that look.
“Tell me one thing,” she says. “One true thing. Not an explanation. Not a justification. Just one true thing.”
I think about it carefully. She deserves careful.
“I was afraid if you knew, you would look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”
Silence.
“That’s honest,” she says.
“Yes.”
“It’s also cowardice.”
“Yes.”
She stands. “Let’s move.”
HOURS 6–12
We’re making progress, but Reid’s tactical decisions are slightly off—not badly, just by degrees. Inefficient angles. Slightly exposed ridge lines. She’s running on professional autopilot while most of her attention is elsewhere.
I follow her choices without comment for two more hours.
Then she starts toward a downstream crossing that adds three miles and puts us in open ground for twenty minutes.
“That route gives us exposure,” I say. Not an argument. Just the fact.
“I know the tradeoffs.”
“Do you want me to—”
“I said I know.” Sharp. Then, after a beat, “I’m choosing it anyway. There’s a visual marker downstream I want to use for navigation. Worth the exposure.”
I hadn’t considered that. She’s thinking things through; she’s just not sharing her reasoning. Because she doesn’t want to be partners right now. She wants to be alone, and this is as close as she can get.
I nod. We go downstream.
Twenty minutes later, voices. Hunter force, close. Too close. We’re almost to the tree line but not quite.
Reid is already low and moving. So am I. We reach cover with maybe ten seconds to spare, lying flat in the undergrowth, barely breathing.
The patrol passes. Four people, methodical grid sweep. Professional. They don’t see us.
When they’re gone, we stay down for three full minutes. Training.
Then Reid rises to her knees and checks the map. Her hands are completely still.
“Visual marker’s ahead,” she says quietly. “Justified the exposure.”
“Yes.”
She looks at me sideways. Something flickers. “You didn’t argue when I took the downstream route.”
“You knew the tradeoffs.”
“You didn’t agree with it.”
“I don’t have to agree with every call. You’re a good navigator. I trust your judgment.”
The word lands in the space between us. Trust. She hears it. But she doesn’t respond. Just stands and moves.
HOURS 12–24 / 1800-0600
We move through the afternoon in near-silence. The rhythm of it becomes its own kind of communication: she points, I follow; I signal, she adjusts. The partnership works even while the relationship is wreckage.
Around hour eighteen we stop to eat. Emergency rations, grim and functional. We sit on opposite sides of a fallen log. Enough distance that neither of us has to manage the proximity.
We eat without looking at each other. The forest is loud with wind.
Then she says, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? When you knew I was getting serious.”
“I kept thinking I’d tell you after. When there were no cameras. When I could explain it properly.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Even in the bothy. You knew what we were doing. You knew what it meant. And you still didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t.”
She’s quiet. Then, “I think that’s what I can’t get past. Not what you were. What you were I can — “ She stops. “I’m trying to. But the bothy. You made love to me knowing I didn’t have the full picture. And that—” Her voice cracks, just once. “That makes me feel like a fool.”
“You’re not a fool. You fell in love with accurate information about who I am now. I kept information from you about who I was. That’s on me, not you.”
“That’s a pretty distinction.”
“It’s a true one.”
A bird calls somewhere distant. Neither of us fills the space after it.
“I keep thinking about Cassius,” she says.
Her voice has gone flat and careful, the voice she uses when she’s making herself say something hard.
“Sweet-faced Cassius. He woke up in a new world with no idea who he was because of you. Years of not knowing his family, his past. You took that from him.”
“I know.”
“Do you actually know? Or do you just live with it? Because he doesn’t get to just live with it. He lost the choice.”
“I sit alone at meals because he and the others can’t stand to be near me. I live on the edge of a place called Second Chance because some of what I did doesn’t deserve a second chance. I know.”
She looks at me. Full eye contact for the first time since this morning. “How do you live with that?”
“Badly. And then less badly. And then badly again.” I hold her gaze. “There's no clean answer. I chose to break people because it was easier than being broken. I know that's what I did. I don't have a better explanation.”
“That's not good enough.”
“I know. But it's the truth.”
She looks away.
“I hate what I was,” I say quietly. “Not as penance. Just as fact. The boy I was deserved better than what he became."
She finishes her ration bar, saying nothing.
Eventually she stands. “We should keep moving. Need to find defensible cover before dark.”
“Yeah.”
We move.
We find a cave as darkness falls. Small, good sightlines, natural concealment at the entrance. Reid clears it with tactical efficiency—habit, muscle memory, the part of her that keeps functioning when everything else is shutting down.
She sets up her sleeping position on one side. I take the other. The space between us is approximately the same four feet we've maintained all competition. Right now it feels much larger.
I take first watch. She sleeps—or tries to. Her breathing never quite evens out the way it does in genuine sleep. She's lying in the dark processing. I let her.
Around hour twenty, she speaks into the darkness.
"The man in the bothy. The one who said mea lux against my skin. Who looked at me like I was something worth looking at. Is he real or did I invent him?"
"He's real."
"He's also the man who beat gladiators for decades."
"Yes."
"I hate that. I really hate that. It would be so much cleaner if you were just one thing."
"I know."
"I loved you," she says. Past tense. Each word deliberate.
"I know."
"Past tense."
"I heard it."
The darkness between us changes weight. Not grief. Not hope. Something older than either.
"Do you love me?"
Not past tense. Present. She used the present tense and I don't know if she meant to, or if she's testing something, or if she already knows the answer and needs to hear it anyway.
"Yes."
She doesn't respond. Doesn't move. Just lies there in the dark with that.
"I hate that too," she says finally.
Then she rolls over. Her back to me now. I watch her shoulder rise and fall.
Eventually—0300, maybe—her breathing evens out into real sleep. The deep, exhausted kind that comes when the body overrules the mind.
I sit in the dark and let myself look at her.
She fell asleep angry and heartbroken and she still trusted me to watch. That's not nothing. I don't know what it is. But it's not nothing.
I loved you. Past tense.
There's nothing to do with it. No argument to make, no case to present, no bridge to run across. Just the cave and the dark and her breathing and the word loved repeating in my chest like water finding the same groove in stone.
She trusted me to watch.
I watch.