17. Too Close #3
"Only by not being herself. Only by doing the one thing she can't predict either, because she'd have to surprise her own instincts. And Nolan." He pauses. "A person can only surprise their own instincts by doing the thing those instincts are screaming at them not to do."
The take is no longer a matter of whether. It's a matter of when, and the when is close, and the only way out of the box is the one move I'd throw my body in front of to stop.
The dark kitchen holds me a long minute after the line goes dead, and I listen to her breathe in the next room. She's asleep because she trusts the wall I put between her and the road.
She doesn't know that somewhere a machine is running the same loop I run every night. The difference is only in the purpose. I learned her to keep her alive. It learned her to close a door.
Nolan, The Pull
Eli comes to the hold at first light and asks me the thing he's never once asked out loud, though it's been sitting behind his eyes every time he looked at the two of us.
“Can you make the hard call on her wall.” Not unkind.
Eli is never unkind. He lays it flat, because he's never once hidden his logic even when it cuts.
“If it comes down to her life or the two of you, can you make the call that keeps her breathing and loses the rest. Or has the love made that call a thing you can't make.”
The lie is the thing that gets her killed, and he'd know it for a lie anyway, so he gets the truth. "I can't make it clean. I won't pretend to you that I can. And I'm not standin' down either, Colonel."
"I know both those things." He's quiet a moment.
"Here's what's coming, and you should hear it from me and not from a filing.
The paper above me is going to force it.
You fight it, you stay on her wall compromised, and compromised is the thing they're counting on.
You step down, the wall stays clean, and the man I put on it is Harlan. "
“Rattler.” I know the name. Underwater demolition, an instructor now, calm as a held breath. A good man. Not her man.
"A good man," Eli says, reading the same page.
"Uncompromised. Everything the order asks for and nothing the two of you have.
It's a real choice, Travis, and it's coming, and there's no version of it that doesn't cost you.
" He stands. "Don't answer it now. Answer it when it's in front of you. Just know it's in front of you soon."
We hold the impossible question between us in the gray light, neither of us with an answer that doesn't cost. The axe is out there on the horizon now, and it has changed its nature. It's no longer a thing that falls on me. It's a thing I may have to bring down with my own hand.
After the door closes behind him I stand a while with it. Charles told me there would be a version where the honorable thing and the safe thing point different ways, and now Eli has drawn me the map of it.
Fight and stay compromised, and be the weak point they built the whole thing around.
Or step off clean and hand her to a good man who doesn't love her, which is the one thing the order was ever asking for.
Both roads have her on them somewhere far ahead, and I can't see which one gets her to the far side alive.
Twenty years have stood me at a lot of hard forks. Not one of them ran every road through the middle of my own chest.
Nolan, She Walks Out Alone
She's gone at 0400, and I know it before I'm fully awake, the way you know a room has changed temperature.
The bed is cold on her side. The pen is on the pillow where her head was, and the pen never leaves her. I'm off the mattress before thought, and the locator turns up dead on the nightstand, pried open, the battery beside it in a neat deliberate line.
She cut it herself. She sat in the dark and cut the one thread that lets me find her. She did it clean and quiet in the one hour I finally slept, because she knew I'd never have let her, because letting her was never a thing I'd do.
The note is under the pen. Her hand, steady, the analyst's block letters.
Don't follow. You're the one they want to pull the trigger on, not me. The take is built to make you come, and the second you come they've got you both. I can be traded. You can't. Stay off the road. That's how you keep me alive. I love you. That's why I'm doing it this way and not yours. M.
The room holds me there, a dead locator in one hand and her note in the other, and the shape of what she's done comes clear. She has taken the order's own logic, the thing that says the love is the danger, and turned it into a reason to walk into the dark alone.
She has used my love as the exact lever the Deputy used, protecting me by leaving me. And she's left me the pen, because she knows I'll need something to bring her to my voice with when the time comes, and because leaving it is her way of saying she means to be found.
The road is out there in the dark, and she's on it, and every instinct in twenty years of standing on walls is screaming at me to move. The note says the moving is what kills her. I've never in my life been asked to hold still to keep someone alive, and it's the hardest order I've ever been handed.
It didn't come from Eli. It came from her.