A lie. A small, useless one, and that’s what makes this worse than I first suspected — Rayner doesn’t bother lying to me about things that don’t mean anything, which means this one means something.
I could push, but I’ve got the time for exactly none of it and the Vestry is counting down behind my ribs. So it’ll have to wait.
“Head out.”
They’re behind me before I clear the door.
We move. Out through the gallery, down the back ways — the route that runs under everything, the one most of Teth has forgotten and I’ve never let myself forget, because tonight is exactly the kind of night you reach the Vestry without being seen arriving.
I set the pace. Fast enough to make fifteen minutes, even enough that four men walk in looking like they were never afraid.
The look is half the work, and I build it into them on the way down, one corridor at a time.
They let me.
In that room the look is the only thing that’ll be ours to keep.
The stairs take us deeper below the surface and keep curving, swallowing their own ends in the dark. The unit stays close at my backwithout being told. That part I never have to manage. Whatever else is wrong with these men, they know how to fall in behind me, and there are nights that’s the only thing holding me up.
“It’s Erik,” Gunnar says, three flights down. He can’t hold quiet on a staircase any more than he can hold it anywhere else. “Three years of nothing, and the one night I actually sleep, he surfaces. Has to be him.”
“You don’t know that,” Brock says.
“It’s Erik until it isn’t. That’s probability.”
“That’s not probability.”
“It’s mine.”
I let them run. It costs nothing and it keeps their minds busy, and a unit that’s talking is a unit that hasn’t started bracing for the worst yet. I’ll take every moment of that I can give them.
“Maybe they finally remembered he exists,” Gunnar says, a flight later. “Dug his file out from under a rock. Oh, right. We had a fifth.”
Nobody laughs.
The Vestry let three years pass on one of ours. Most of Teth wrote Erik off before any of us were anywhere close to ready. They filed him under lost because lost is tidy and a man still out there is a question nobody wanted to keep answering.
I never filed him anywhere.
I still set his place.
Not one of these men has ever told me to stop, which is its own kind of loyalty.
“Or he’s dead,” Gunnar says, quieter now.
“No.” Brock, flat and certain. “I don’t believe that.”
We take the rest of the stairs down in silence.
The whole way, Rayner hasn’t said a word.
That’s not strange by itself — he’s the quiet one, the still water the rest of us make noise around. But he’s not still like he usually is. Something happened between lights out and the call. I drop back a step to put us shoulder to shoulder, low enough it stays between us.
“Where are you?”
He comes back from a long way off. “Here.”
“You sure about that.”
