She doesn’t ask where. She sits on the bed, pulls her boots on, and puts her hand in mine. No questions, no hesitation. A month ago, she wouldn’t have walked ten feet with me without knowing every step of the plan. Now she just takes my hand and stands.
I take her out past Marek, who studies the far wall like it’s new, and then it’s the two of us moving through a building I don’t trust, at an hour when the corridors are down to night lighting. I keep her on my left, against the wall, and take the long way—past the dead offices, away from the dining hall where there’s still noise and light spilling out the propped door.
At the side exit, voices.
Two of them, just outside, close. Smoke drifting in through the gap. I stop her with a hand, and we stand in the dark against the cold block wall, her back to my chest, my arm across her collarbones, both of us breathing slow while two techs finish complaining about a duty roster ten feet away. Her heart pounds hard under my arm. Not fear. I can smell the difference now, and the difference isn’t helping me think.
The voices move off. We cross the open ground between the buildings in the dark, not running, because running draws the eye, and then my key is in the door at the end of the contractors’ block, and we’re inside, and it’s done.
My room is nobody’s home. A bed, a chair, my gear in the corner, a lamp. It’s never smelled like anything but gun oil and me. She changes that just by standing in it.
She looks around, taking it in. “This is it?”
“I don’t need much.”
“One bag.” She shakes her head slowly. “You own a mountain and one bag.”
“I own a mountain and one bag, and there’s an empty room on both sides of this one.” I lock the door. “Nobody sleeps in this half of the block.”
She turns and finds me watching her, and her chin comes up. “Why does that matter?”
“Because you’re not going to be quiet.”
Color rises up her throat. She holds my eyes anyway. “Bold of you, bear.”
“We’ll see.”
But I don’t reach for her yet, and she doesn’t reach for me. For a minute, we just stand in the lamplight. I run my eyes over her face, over features that feel like they’re etched into my brain.
“Speak to me,” I tell her.
Her shoulders drop, some of the tension leaving her. “How do you know?”
“It’s written all over you.” I reach out and stroke a fingertip down her cheek. “Tell me what happened today.”
“I told them everything,” she says. “About Serenity. Today, with Vanya. I told them everything I remembered, and she took notes. I’m pretty sure it was useful information, because she seemed…satisfied.” She exhales a sharp, frustrated breath. “Not that you can tell with that woman. She’s not an open book.”
“But you’re not pleased about it.”
She shakes her head. “I gave them everything I have, and then she told me I don’t get to know anything about what they’re planning. Not how close. Not what it meant. I hand it over, and the door shuts, and I’m supposed to just—” Her hands come up and stop. “She said it’s so I don’t accidentally give anything away to the wrong person. But it makes me feel so helpless. How doI do anything to help Serenity if they won’t tell me how I can help?”
“You are helping,” I say. “That part’s real. Hold onto that.”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you first.” She looks up at me. “You’re the only one in this building who’d understand me. I didn’t want to say it to anyone else. I don’t want to keep anything from you at all. That’s the strange part. My whole life I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut. With you I just want it all out where you can see it.”
I don’t say anything. How could I when anything I say would be colored by a lie?
She’s standing in my room handing me all of herself, and I’m not doing the same. I keep it off my face.
Tonight is for the other thing.
I reach out and take her face in my hands, and I kiss her the way there was never room to in a stairwell. Slow. Nothing to outrun. Her breath changes against my mouth, and her hands come up my chest. When she pulls back, her eyes have gone dark and a little unsure.
“You’re different tonight,” she says. “I can’t work out how.”
I know how. I’m not going to tell her that either, not tonight, but I know it now, and it steadies my hands instead of shaking them.
I take my time. I start with her shirt. The top button, then the next, working down, my knuckles brushing her stomach as I go. I push the shirt back off her shoulders. It slides down her arms, and she lets it fall, as I unhook her bra and toss it aside.
