“Yes,” he said. “I would. But c’mon—it doesn’t matter, does it? You can’t tell me this is some passing fling. He’s on a perfectly safe plane ride home, and you’re so worried about him, you’re up at three in the morning.”
The world rearranged itself around her as she acknowledged the truth of this. She didn’t simply like him. At some point she’d sprinted far beyond that emotion.
“You’re right,” she said. “But it makes me feel better to have your approval anyway.”
The next four hours, Willi sat with her, earning major brownie points by plying her with actual brownies. Then—finally—the door opened and Hartgrave stumbled in.
She threw her arms around him, careful to avoid skin. He pressed her closer.
Willi cleared his throat. “When will we practice?”
“Come by after lunch,” Hartgrave said, voice froggy with exhaustion.
“Okay. Good night—ah, morning.”
When the door closed behind Willi, Hartgrave took her hand—without ill effect—and walked with her to the side-by-side beds.
“Why did it take so long?” she asked. “Did your autodidact refuse to believe in magic?”
He sighed. “She believed, all right. She could see she’d hit on a sure way to protect herself from the neighborhood bad guys, and she didn’t want to hear anything to the contrary.”
“What did you do?”
“I eventually convinced her.”
He raised his free hand in the direction of the chandelier, which obligingly powered down, throwing the room into darkness.
Without letting go of his other hand, she settled against the pillows. “It’s a very good thing, what you’re doing.”
He sighed again, saying nothing. It must be hard for him not to think of the autodidacts who couldn’t be persuaded. The situations where he had to go home withoutsuccess, then watch from Ashburn as the green dot blinked out because the person it represented was dead.
Which reminded her: How had he avoided becoming a dot (or whatever its equivalent was) on the Organization’s tracking system?
He didn’t seem to be near sleep. He was rubbing circles on her palm in an absentminded fashion. She turned over to look at him, a dark shape in the shadows to her still-adjusting eyes.
“Hartgrave?”
“Mm?”
“You never told me how you steered clear of the Organization before you found Bernie and this room.”
The circles on her palm stopped.
“Their tracking system is relatively recent,” he said. “Before, their only options were fanning out randomly to look for tell-tale auras and finding the occasional online boaster.”
“Oh. They would miss a lot of people that way, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. Bitterly.
“Was Willi’s wife—that is, did the system come online before ... ?”
This time, his “yes” was barely a whisper.
She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“Not as much as”—he shifted in the bed, turning toward her—“as Willi is, I assure you.”
Easy to recall the way the man had looked that evening, reliving his wife’s death while Hartgrave tried to save another self-taught convincer. She’d never lost a loved one to anything but old age and could only imaginethe heartache. What if it had been her parents instead of his wife? What if it had been Hartgrave?
