“For it to what?” I prompt.
She shakes her head.
I look at her in the shadowed corridor of the maze, the canvas walls close and the outside world muffled to its low hum. I see for the first time, past thedefiance and the sharpness and the impeccable competence, the actual person inside all of that.
She’s not angry at the world. I thought she was angry, and she is, but that’s not the base note. The anger is a response to something that happened, something real that she’s not telling us, that is chasing her.
The base note is she wanted to stay somewhere, and couldn’t, and had to become someone who moves instead.
“Okay,” I say.
She looks at me like she expected pushback.
“Okay,” I repeat. “I won’t be too nice.”
The breath she lets out is not quite relief. Something quieter. Like a door closing that was open in a draft, just settling.
“Good,” she says.
“I reserve the right to continue being exactly as annoying as I have been,” I add.
The side of her mouth shifts.
“That,” I say, pointing at her face, “is what I came here for.”
“You came here for help with your banner.”
“I came here for that,” I confirm. “The rest is just excellent planning.”
She shakes her head, and the smile is still there. I look at it like I looked at the trophy on the shelf, as something real and true, with a history I don’t entirely know yet, and sixty years of no one thinking to ask for it.
I’m asking.
Whatever she’s carrying, whatever is behind her, whatever it is that’s put that exhaustion in her posture, it’s real, and it’s serious. I’m starting to form a position on it that the rest of the pack needs to hear.
But right now she’s standing in the maze in the morning light and she’s smiling, and she’s showing it to me on purpose. I’m filing this one somewhere I don’t lose things.
“Come on,” she says, and turns toward the gap in the canvas, toward the exit route she found and kept for herself.
I follow her out.
I think I might follow her no matter where she goes.
We stop just outside the maze, in a small little pocket which is empty at this hour. She is looking at me with the expression she had in the dead end. The pre-decision look with that little gleam of mischief making it sparkle.
“Lola,” I start.
“Don’t start talking and ruin this moment.”
“I’m not talking—”
“Jack.” She takes one step toward me in the narrow space. The step closes most of the distance. She is very close and the partial bond is running at a frequency that is making my entire nervous system extremely opinionated about the next five minutes. “I know what I want.”
“I know you know what you want,” I say. “Youalways know what you want. That’s one of the things I find—”
“Then stop talking,” she says.
“I need to say something first.”
