"Depends how long you can keep them busy."
I read the positions. Count the devices. "Three hours. After that they'll figure out the tunnel."
"Three hours is enough."
"Jenna." She looks at me. "Northwest approach. Radio me if anything moves. You're the only reason we'll see it coming from that side."
She holds my gaze and then nods, and I watch her melt back into the treeline with the particular silence Old Hawk spent two years teaching her, and feel a complicated kind of gratitude for it.
Dutch looks at me.
Neither of us says the thing we're both thinking, which is that this is dangerous and we both know it and we're doing it anyway.
He kisses me instead, hard and fast, his hand at the back of my head, and I grab his collar and kiss him back just as hard.
"Don't get shot," I say.
"Same." He touches my face once. Quick. Then he's gone.
I find my first position and get to work.
Three hours is the longest I can remember since the Iron Wolves.
I take out the sound devices one by one. Without them the directed clusters fall apart, zombies wandering without purpose, and the raiders have to scramble. I work Red River's defenders by radio, shoring up weak points, keeping the south perimeter from collapsing. I don't think about the tunnel. Don't track Dutch's position. If I start doing that I'll make mistakes and mistakes here are measured in people.
The raiders break just before hour three.
They pull back in order, which means they'll regroup, which means whoever is behind this isn't done. But they're gone. Red River is standing.
Dutch gets thirty-two people out through the tunnel. Mostly children. Elderly. Wounded.
We lose eight.
I find him with the dead.
Not doing anything. Just sitting with them, which is something I understand completely. Someone should stay. Someone should know they were here.
I sit down in the dirt beside him.
We don't say anything for a long time. Around us Red River starts the slow work of continuing — people finding each other, counting who's left, doing what you do after. Jenna moves through the wounded with a field kit, quiet and precise, her hands steady. I watch her and feel Lisa's absence alongside something that isn't grief.
"Thirty-two," Dutch says.
"Eight."
"Avery."
"I know the math." I do. I know it and I believe it and it doesn't fix the eight. "I know."
The sun drops toward the treeline. The light goes gold, which feels wrong and also completely right. The world doesn't stop being beautiful because people died in it. I used to hate that.
I've been carrying something for ten days. Since the battle, since the gravesites at Clearwater, since I woke up with his arm around me and couldn't make myself tell him to leave. I've been carrying it and I'm tired of the weight.
"I forgive you," I say.
Dutch goes still.
I look at him. His face has gone carefully neutral, the way it does when he's working hard to hold something. "I forgive you."
