Page 37 of Ghost’s Awakening

"Your concern's on the record." Hawk let a beat pass, and there was no mockery anywhere in him, which somehow made it worse. "The thread is real. It's why Ghost will never be inside that building on his own again, and why the plan gets built to account for it. Anything else?"

Mateo's arms uncrossed at the wall. Crossed again. He didn't speak.

"Hands, then. First vote. The circuit comes down."

Thirty-four hands. Even mine. Even Mateo's.

"Second vote. The plan goes through Caleb."

Hands went up around that table like a wave coming down it. Tank. Blade. Irish, slower, watching me while he did it. Trenza, high and steady. Reaper. All down the line, hand after hand after hand.

I kept mine on the table.

Across the room, against the side wall, Mateo kept his down too. Hawk's eyes found him.

"Mateo. You're a no. The table hears reasons if you've got them."

The kid's jaw worked. He looked at Caleb, and at me, and at the floor. "I don't have one that makes sense out loud." His shoulders pulled in. "It just sits wrong. That's all I've got."

"Then it sits wrong on the record." Hawk didn't push. He turned last to me, and he didn't ask, because everybody in that room already had my reasons, they'd arrived at two hundred words a minute with my ears on fire behind them.

"Thirty-two for, two against. Motion carries." Hawk's knuckles came down on the wood once, our whole gavel. Then his eyes went to the door. "Caleb. The table's voted to ask. So I'm asking."

Caleb came off the wall by an inch. He looked down the length of the table, all those faces, all that leather, and his voice came out the way it had come out of him in the ring five nights ago, flat and clear and pitched to carry.

"I was going back into that pit whether you voted or not. He knows where my brother sleeps." He let that land. "The only thing tonight changes is that now I walk in with thirty people at my back instead of none." His eyes crossed the room and hit mine, held for half a second, and moved off. "I'm in."

"Then Church is done. Planning starts tomorrow, seven sharp, this room." Hawk swept the table one last time. "Nine days. We use every one of them."

Chairs scraped. The room came apart into noise and motion, and I sat there with my hand still flat on the table where my no vote had lived, and watched Caleb push off the wall and walk out the door without looking at me again.

He was waiting in the corridor.

Well. Waiting is the wrong word. He was standing in the corridor in the way a wall stands in a corridor, and the brothers filing out of Church took one read of his face and found other routes to the common room. I came out last and he fell into step beside me and neither of us said anything until the hallway emptied.

"Thirty-two to two." His voice stayed level, which from Caleb was a warning sign I'd learned by day three. "You told me this morning he'd pay in blood. First chance anyone gives you to make that real, and your hand stays on the table."

"It's not about⁠—"

"You went into that pit alone with no comms five nights ago." He stopped walking. Turned. The corridor light sat hard on the healing cut through his eyebrow. "That was fine. That was a regular Tuesday for you. But I go in with thirty-four people building the ground under me, and that's the plan you can't vote for."

"That's different."

"How?" One word, dropped flat between us like a dumbbell.

And there it was. The question with the true answer standing right behind it, and the true answer was enormous and had my name on it and I could no more say it in that corridor than I could lift the building. So my mouth, which never once in my life has run out of words, produced nothing at all.

Caleb watched me not answer. Something shifted in his face, and it wasn't anger anymore, it was worse, it was disappointment adding me up.

"That's what I thought." He stepped past me. "Tell Hawk I'll be at planning at seven."

I stood in the empty corridor for a long time, listening to his footsteps go, and my brain, my endless, roaring, twelve-channel brain, had absolutely nothing to offer.

Sleep and I gave up on each other around one in the morning.

I'd run it every way a thing can be run. Ceiling. Left side. Right side. Ceiling again. Every time I closed my eyes the projector kicked on and played the same footage, Caleb walking through a steel door into a building full of Gravedigger's men, the door swinging shut, the chains going on, and me on the outside with my one thread already pulled. My heart would spike, my knee would start going under the blanket, and I'd be awake again, staring at a dark ceiling with my head roaring like a casino floor.

So I did what I always do when the noise wins. I got up to go throw it at something heavy.