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“That eases my mind.” His eyes met Eve’s a moment, and he sighed again. Then he looked at Roarke. “I could use some water, as it happens.”
“I’ll get it. You stay just where you are.”
“I frightened him,” Summerset told Eve when they were alone. “It’s difficult to see weakness in the one who raised you.”
“Understood, but—”
“And you worry him. You look, Lieutenant, as brutally tired and heavy as I feel. And what can he do for us, he asks himself, when one he loves above all else must use one he cares for as a child for a parent? Why, snarl at them both, of course.”
He smiled a little.
She could feel herself teetering on some rocky edge, knowing that if she leaned too far one way she’d crumble. No choice then, she thought, no choice but to lean the other way, and hold on.
“I’m sorry, but time’s so narrow. I can’t wait to move to the next step.”
“Understood.” He echoed her. “I would like to go home. The boy has that right. I would very much like to go home. We could save each other time by doing this here and now. Is that possible?”
“Yeah, I just figured you’d want to get away.”
“You never get away, do you?”
Roarke came back with two tubes of water.
“Hush, boy,” Summerset muttered as Roarke started to speak. “I’m about to give the lieutenant my statement, as we’ve agreed to do so right here.”
Eve sat across the aisle. “I have eyes, but I need to know what yours saw.” She engaged her recorder, read in the salient data.
“Tell me what you remember.”
“We were nearly to the doors, Ivanna and I, nearly outside. It was a diverse, celebratory evening. The crowd—I believe they must have sold out tonight, so we were hemmed in by the crowd at first. But . . .”
When Summerset rubbed at his temple, Roarke pulled out a small case, took out a blocker.
“Take it.” At Summerset’s cool stare, Roarke’s jaw set, but he added, “Please.”
“Thank you.” Summerset cracked the tube, took the pill, sipped the water. “I think, yes, I think I was about to lead Ivanna through the doors when I saw someone fall to the ground—a belly wound, I could see that, too. There were screams as someone else fell—a head wound. Then panic. People running, shoving. I pulled Ivanna aside, worked back until I could get her clear. She argued, but she understood there wasn’t time. She promised she’d go backstage, to Mavis. We’d visited before the concert, and I was confident she’d make her way. Everyone else was trying to get out.”
“The one who went down first. Describe him.”
“Middle thirties, I would think, blond hair. Caucasian. He had a black topcoat, open, and I’d seen the blood spread. By the time I was able to get outside to him, he was gone. Two more strikes—one in each leg. I heard the screams, and the cars—brakes squealing. Even as I moved to try to help a woman who’d been knocked to the ground, I saw another struck by a car as she ran into the street. And then I . . .”
“What next?”
“For a moment, longer, I fear, I was in another place, another time. In London, during another strike, during the Urbans. The same sounds, smells, the same terrible fear and rush. Bodies on the ground, bleeding, wounded calling for help, the weeping and the desperation to escape.”
He stared at the tube of water for a moment, then drank from it. “I froze, you see, just froze between that time and this, and did nothing. I stood there, just stood there. Then someone shoved me, and I fell. I fell beside the body of a woman who was beyond help. Nothing to do for her, nothing at all, and I came back to myself, to the moment. There was a boy, barely twenty, if that, I’d say, knocked senseless. Someone trampled right over him, stepped on his hand. I heard the bones crack. I did what I could for him until the medicals began to arrive.”
He paused, drank again. “People were still falling, but the medicals, the police rushed in. I called out that I was a medic, and one of them threw me a kit. So we did what we could do, just like on any battlefield. I don’t know how long—minutes, hours—then you came, you and my boy here. The worst was over quickly then, you saw to that. I tended more outside, then inside. And here we are.”
Eve waited a beat. “The woman you were working on when we came?”
“Stabilized, enough, I think. They took her once she was stable enough. They said at least a dozen dead. How many? Do you know?”
“Sixteen DOS, and two more who didn’t make it. So, eighteen. There would have been more if you hadn’t been here, if you hadn’t helped.”
“Eighteen.” Summerset lowered his head, stared at the water in his hand. “We couldn’t save the eighteen, so we look to you to make them matter, to find them justice.”
“They matter. So do the wounded. I’ll get you their names, the living and the dead.”
