Page 9 of Rust of Control

Caleb’s name was the first thing in the cold place. There were others now. There would be one more by the end of this if they were not fast, and her name was Davya, and she was sixteen, and her phone had gone dark at the on-ramp toward the bridge.

Nate put it back behind its door. He had practice. He came back into the kitchen and the conversation as though he had never left either, and only Marcus, watching him over the reading glasses, seemed to register that he had been somewhere else.

It was past noon the next day when Marcus found him alone in the yard.

Nate had the hood of Jack’s truck up and half the engine spread on a tarp in the gravel, working through a service it did not especially need, because his hands worked better when they had something to do and his head worked better when his hands were busy, and Marcus came out with two mugs of coffee and handed one over and did not say anything for a while. That was Marcus’s way of asking. He put a silence down in front of you and let you decide whether to fill it.

Nate wiped his hands on a rag. “I’m good,” he said.

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were going to.”

“I was going to drink my coffee.” Marcus looked out at the river, grey and moving, a barge pushing upstream against it. “But since you bring it up. You’ve been somewhere else since the night you brought the singer in. You’re here for the work, I can see that, you’re sharp on the work. But you are also somewhere else.”

Nate drank the coffee. It bought him a second, and he used the second, and what he came up with was not a lie and not the truth. “It’s not the work.”

“I know it’s not the work.”

“Then you know enough.”

Marcus turned and looked at him. He had a way of looking that came from thirty years of watching people lie to juries, a flat patient attention that did not push and did not need to, because it could outwait anything. Nate held it. He had learned to hold it from Marcus himself, which Marcus knew, which was almost funny.

“All right,” Marcus said finally. He let it go the way he let everything go, completely, without a hook left in it for later. “But whatever it is that’s weighing you down, you don’t have to carry it alone. That’s the whole point of the house. You built half of it. You know that better than anybody who lives in it.” He took a sip. “That’s all. The singer seems like a good kid.”

“He is,” Nate said, before he could decide whether to.

Marcus heard it. Of course he heard it. But he only nodded, and looked back at the river. He let the weight of all of it stand there in the cold between them without naming any of it, and Nate was grateful in a way that closed his throat for a second, because being let alone with a thing was its own kind of being helped.

They drank the coffee. The barge worked its way up the grey water. Somewhere across it, on the other side of a line on a map, there was a girl who had been somebody’s whole world on Monday and a runaway report by Wednesday, and there was a closed condo eleven floors up where a different soft kid with a big voice was learning the shape of his cage again, and Nate stood in the cold yard between the two of them and could not yet reach either one.

He went back to the engine when Marcus went inside.

He worked until his hands were black to the wrist and the light started to go, and he did not check his phone, because checking it was a hand reaching in, and the only thing he could give Jude tonight was the one thing nobody had ever given Jude: room. He took the engine down further than the job needed and put it back together right, because a thing worth doing was worth finishing, and he wiped the tools down and racked them, and went inside to a house with one empty room in it, and a case with a clock on it, and he let both of those be true at once, and did not sleep.

Chapter 5

Nobody had made him go back. That was the part he could not explain to the version of himself that had packed the bag. He had done it once, on his own feet, and then he was simply here again, and the door he had walked back through had closed so quietly behind him that he could almost believe it had never opened.

Jude woke on the eleventh floor with Rand’s arm heavy across him and the city white and cold through the glass, and for one merciful second he did not remember. Then he did. The duffel was unpacked. His meds were back in the bathroom cabinet, his laptop back on the desk, the hard drive back in its drawer, fifteen months of work returned to the apartment it had nearly left. He had done that himself last night, quietly, while Rand slept, because leaving it packed felt like a lie he was telling a man who was watching him for lies.

He lay still and let Rand’s arm stay where it was. Moving woke him, and a Rand woken before he chose to wake was a Rand who started the day owed something.

Three days at the safehouse had been a country with different weather.. He turned the memory over once, pressing on it the way he pressed a bruise to see if it still hurt, and put it away, because he was here now and the rules here were different and the worst thing he could do to himself was carry the safehouse rules into this house.

His phone was on the nightstand, face-down where he had left it. He had read Nate’s reply once, in the bathroom, with the door locked.

No clock on it. He had read it four times and then made himself stop, because every time he read it the wanting came up in him so hard he was afraid Rand would see it on his face at breakfast, and that was somehing he could not afford. Nate was being kind. Nate was always kind. Kindness was not a door. It was a window. He had spent his life at windows, looking at an outside he was never going to be let into.

Rand stirred. His arm tightened, and then his voice came warm and thick against the back of Jude’s neck. “Morning, baby.”

“Morning,” Jude said.

It started fine. It always started fine.

It was the coffee that turned it.

Jude made it the way Rand liked it and brought it to him at the kitchen island, and Rand took a sip and set it down and looked at it, and Jude felt the temperature of the room change before a word was said, the way he always felt it, a barometric drop he had no name for and no defense against.