Page 9 of The Final Cut

His reply comes almost immediately.

Nash

Keep her inside the waiting room.

I look through the glass panel in the door. Reva’s eyes are open, fixed on nothing.

I type back.

Ever

She’s not the thing I’m worried about keeping inside.

The message shows delivered. Nash doesn’t answer.

He is downstairs handling police, hospital administration, the two uniforms who followed the ambulance, and whatever story needs to be built fast enough to keep Reva out of an interrogation room. He looked at my hands when he got here, saw the tablet, the network map, the footage queue, and gave me one order.

Figure out what the fuck went wrong.

I turn at the vending machines and start the twenty-two steps back.

The last clear image from the pin is burned into the back of my eyes.

The ballroom had been gold, all chandelier light and masks and old money pretending rot has manners. Reva’s signal held through the first dance. Through Delia pulling her toward the side hall. Through Nash telling her two minutes. Through the corridor shift where the audio bent under interference and came back thin.

Then the terrace. A guard in front of her.

Cal appearing out of nowhere like a man stepping straight through an old ghost story.

The gun lifting.

The shot.

I had been in the van with Shiloh, two blocks off, where we were told to stay because someone had to watch the perimeter, someone had to monitor comms, someone had to make sure Reva did not disappear from the feed.

I knew something would happen.

I knew it in the tightness under my ribs, in the static that chewed at the signal, in the way the chapel camera went dark six seconds before Delia pulled Reva toward the terrace doors. I told them. I said the feed was compromised. I said Deacon wasn’t with her, as planned. I said we should move.

Nash told us to hold position; Isabel was in the ballroom. It was fine.

I waited.

On the screen, Reva fell.

The guard stood over her.

The barrel pointed down.

For one second the whole world narrowed to her face tilted up toward a gun, her green dress spread around her, Cal bleeding beside her. Shiloh swore so violently the driver slammed the brakes. I was already out of the van before it stopped, tablet in one hand, gun in the other, my lungs too small and the distance too long.

The shot on the feed came before we made the gate.

Then another.

Then another.

Reva fired twice after the first miss. Her hands shook around Cal’s gun, but she adjusted. She aimed. She survived. That should make me proud. It does, somewhere underneath the part of me still back in the van, watching her die in three different futures before she manages to live in this one.