“Okay.” Her voice is too bright. “So we knew this was a possibility. We stir the waters, sometimes the shark rolls belly up and says hello, right? No biggie.”
“Stop it,” I say.
She blinks up at me. “Stop what?”
“Making jokes when you’re shaking.”
“I am not—”
“Look at your hands, Tally” I cut in.
She looks down. Her fingers are tapping a wild rhythm against her thighs, the rest of her body so controlled she hadn’t noticed. When she does, she shoves her hands under her legs like she’s trapping them.
Cotton watches from the couch, mug cradled against her chest. Her face says the same thing I’m thinking.
We don’t like this.
“You don’t answer him,” I say. “Not yet. Maybe not at all.”
Her eyes flash, that spark I’m starting to recognize—danger, impact inthree, two—
“Okay, but hear me out,” she says. “I am not a lamp you unplug when a storm rolls in. He’s already here. He already knows I’m watching. Ignoring him doesn’t make that less true.”
“My job is not to make things less true,” I say. “My job is to keep you breathing.”
“Yeah, I noticed the whole ‘breathing’ thing,” she says. “I’m a fan. But my job—”
“You don’t have a job in this,” I cut in. “You are the person we’re protecting.”
She stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Cotton chokes quietly on her coffee.
I drag a hand over my face. “Of course it is.”
“I havetwojobs,” Tallulah says, ticking them off on her fingers. “One, use my ridiculous squirrel brain to connect dots other people don’t see. Two, not die. You’re here to help with the second, but you don’t get to veto the first.”
She’s five feet nothing, wearing a hoodie with a coffee stain and socks with tiny pixel cats, and I have the unnerving realization that I’m more afraid of losing this argument than I have been walking into actual gunfire.
“You can collect your data without talking to him,” I say. “We let him monologue, we don’t have to feed it. You don’t have to step right into the center of his crosshairs just because he whistled.”
“He tapped on my window last night,” she snaps. “We passed ‘center of the crosshairs’ hours ago. The only control I have nowis whether I stand here and stare back, or sit in the dark and wait.”
Her eyes are huge and dark and furious. There’s fear under there, sure, but it’s woven through every other thing she feels—anger, stubbornness, that relentless drive todosomething.
I know exactly how it feels. I’ve just spent a decade learning to chain it.
“Compromise,” Cotton says gently. “Before you two end up killing each other.”
We both look at her. I’d forgotten she was there for a minute.
“At least wait until Jack gets here,” she says. “Let the grown-ups be in the room together when we decide how far this goes.”
“Iama grown-up,” Tallulah mutters.
“Sure, baby,” Cotton says. “Just the very small, very determined baby raccoon kind of adult with a few master’s degrees.”
Tallulah snorts, her shoulders easing a fraction.
