Page 147 of Final Drive

“Nobody told me there was a plan.”

“You’re in the plan.”

His whole face changes. “I’m in it?”

Cameron is still standing by the door. “Am I in it?”

Beckett looks at him. “You’re an unscheduled addition to the plan.”

Zane takes the second cup. Beckett keeps the third. Cameron ends up with the bottle and doesn’t comment on the fact that there isn’t a fourth cup, and I watch Beckett decide not to apologize for failing to anticipate him.

I drink mine too fast. It’s a mistake immediately, but it also makes me laugh for the first time in about six hours.

“Let’s hear it.”

“The plan,” Beckett says, “is that you don’t decide anything until morning.”

“That’s not a plan. That’s a premise.”

“The plan is in the details, and the details are proprietary.”

“Is it written down?” Zane asks.

“It’s in my head.”

“So no.”

“It’s a rich internal document, Hollis.”

Cameron sets the bottle beside the pretzels and moves to the wall by the window, arms crossed. That’s where he’ll stay until somebody gives him a reason not to. Watch, catalogue, wait. He’s spent this whole spring being the last one to arrive at almost everything, and he’s never once seemed bothered by it.

I look at the three of them: Beckett standing over me with his cup, Zane cross-legged beside me with chocolate on his thumb, Cameron in the dark part of the room already knowing there’s something under all of this that Beckett hasn’t accounted for.

“Yesterday I went to pieces in a boat.”

Beckett’s expression barely changes, but something behind it does. “I know.”

“Eight bonds hit at once and I couldn’t see. That’s not a small thing we can ignore because it was a nice day.”

“I know,” he says again. “Which is why I asked Tyler.”

Zane’s head snaps up. “You asked Tyler?”

“I asked Tyler a physiology question.”

“You asked Tyler how many of you I can have at once.”

“I asked a hypothetical.”

“He gave you a spreadsheet.”

“He gave me a tab.” Beckett is entirely unashamed. “It’s a very good tab. Bond load isn’t strictly headcount. It’s proximity, intensity, and how recent the pair bond is, which is why eight of us screaming at you through a race at two thousand meters is different from three of us in a hotel room where nobody is screaming at all. Two he called negligible. Three he called conservative. Four he called a research question, and I told him nobody asked him for four.”

I stare at him. “You had a whole conversation.”

“We had a very short conversation, and then he emailed me. He emails, Reese. He’s been in that room emailing for two hours.”

I put my face in my hands. It comes out as a laugh at first, then another one, and suddenly I’m laughing hard enough that I can’t breathe. Except it isn’t funny anymore, and I know it before any of them do.