23. The Peak #2
And Loretta at the edge of the board with her arms crossed, close enough to Harlan's read to correct it and keeping her mouth shut, because it isn't her operation and she knows exactly whose it is.
What she does say, every time the tactics threaten to bury it, is the true thing, which keeps us honest about what we're actually spending and who we're actually spending it on.
Voss stands in the middle of it with me, and we make the hard call together, the call the order swore a man in love could never make clean. We don't stand down, and we don't trade her voice for the hostages, because a trade with this machine is a grave for all three of them on a slower clock.
We keep the plan, and we bend everything toward reaching Ruth and Spencer before the nine days run. We do it knowing it might not work, knowing the cost of holding could be the very people we're trying to save.
"Say it back to me," she asks, low, just to me, in the middle of the war room. "Tell me we're right. Because I am about to gamble my mother on it and I need to hear you say we're right."
"We're right on this," I say, and I take her face in both of my hands.
"A trade keeps her breathin' tonight but owned till the day she dies.
This here keeps her breathin' and free, if we can just get to her, and we are fixin' to get to her, yeah.
I ain't gonna lie to you none about the odds we're lookin' at.
But I'd sooner run these odds right along with you than take his certainty and spend the rest of our born days knowin' we bought it with your voice.
We hold the line. Together. All the way down to the riverbed if it comes to that, no. "
She nods, and something passes between us, the thing we didn't get to finish on the runway, held now not as heat but as a reason. A thing waiting on the far side of this. A thing to get back to.
Nolan, What It Costs
The cost comes due at 0455, the way it always comes due, in a voice on a phone and a picture on a screen, and it's worse than I let myself expect.
The Deputy sends proof of life, because he wants the not-knowing to end and the deciding to begin. Ruth Voss in a chair in a bare room, frightened and small and confused, an old woman who doesn't understand why she's where she is.
And Spencer beside her, a man who went into the dark years ago to survive and came back up into the light for exactly long enough to help, now paying the price he always knew the light would cost. Two people on that screen for one reason, which is that they're loved by the woman standing next to me.
I make myself look at it, because she's looking at it, and I won't let her look alone. The whole weight of the thing this run has been driving toward since the first night comes down on us at once.
This is the bill. The cost of loving her in a world that has learned to use the people she loves as handles. The exact thing Charles warned me about, the thing the order was built to prevent, the very cost the machine has been reaching for since 0651.
And I don't regret it. That's the thing that surprises me, standing in the worst hour of the whole run.
The truth I said in Charles's office holds even here, at the bottom.
She's worth this. She's worth the fight this costs.
I'd choose her again, on this exact runway, with this exact bill on the screen, and the choosing is the one thing the machine can't take from either of us, no matter how many people it puts in that bare room.
Beside me, Voss doesn't look away from the screen either.
She takes her share of the weight and doesn't try to hand it to me or hide from it.
I watch her carry it the way she's carried everything since the alley, straight-backed, eyes open, the analyst and the daughter and the woman I love all holding the same terrible picture at once.
We stand there and bear it together, and the bearing-it-together is the only mercy the hour offers. We take it, because it's the one thing the Deputy didn't think to steal.
Nolan, The Bottom
By 0520 the board is as black as I've ever seen a board, and I've seen some black ones.
They have her mother. They have Spencer.
The testimony window is down to hours of usable margin against a nine-day clock that's bleeding out faster than we can plan.
Every hour we spend trying to locate two hidden hostages is an hour we aren't spending getting Voss to a stand she now might refuse to reach while the people she loves are in that room.
The Deputy has built the perfect trap, and he built it out of her love, the same material Eli's order tried to forbid. For one cold hour it looks like the order was right all along.
Voss stands beside me at the window of the hold, watching the dark go gray at the edges, her mother's frightened face still burned on the back of both our eyes.
She isn't crying. She's somewhere past that, in the place where the analyst and the daughter and the woman who chose the plan all have to live in the same body at once and none of them can find the road out.
My arm goes around her and she leans into me. We stand there together at the bottom of it, two people who reached for each other on a runway an hour ago and got the whole weight of the world brought down between them instead.
"He is going to call at dawn," she says, quiet, certain. "And he is going to offer the trade one more time. My silence for my mother and Spencer. And this time it will not be a temptation, Travis. This time it will be the only thing left on the board that keeps them breathing."
She turns her face up to me, and her eyes are dry and terrible and clear.
"I don't know if I'm strong enough to say no to that.
I said no to it for me. I don't know if I can say no to it for her.
And if I say yes, he wins everything, and I lose you the way I was always going to lose you, because the woman who takes that deal is not the woman you followed onto a runway.
Tell me how to be strong enough. Tell me, because I have got until dawn and I do not have it in me yet. "