"But you didn't know that."
"No. I didn't." He turns to face me. "I played the odds and I was wrong. The people I went to save didn't need saving. The people I abandoned survived without me. And I've spent three years trying to live with that."
"Has it worked?"
"No. Nothing works. You just keep moving and hope eventually the weight gets easier to carry."
I know that feeling. Know it intimately.
"Lisa was the hardest," I hear myself say. "She'd run back to the medical building for her insulin. If she'd been thirty seconds faster, she'd have made it inside before I gave the order."
"Thirty seconds."
"Thirty seconds. Sometimes I lie awake calculating all the ways she could have lived. If I'd waited longer to seal the gates. If I'd sent someone to find her. If I'd done anything except stand there and watch her die."
"You'd have lost more people if you'd waited."
"Maybe. Probably. But I'd have lost different people. And sometimes—" I stop, breathe, force myself to continue. "Sometimes I think I'd trade all forty of the ones I saved if I could just see Lisa walk through those gates."
"That's not how it works."
"I know. That's what makes it so goddamn hard."
We stand in silence as the moon tracks across the sky. Two people who made impossible choices and have to live with the consequences.
"I don't forgive you," I say finally. "I'm not sure I can."
"I know."
"But I understand. That's different." I look at him. "You made a choice with incomplete information and people died. So did I. We're both still here, trying to do better."
"Is that enough?"
"It has to be. Because the alternative is lying down and dying, and I refuse to give the apocalypse that satisfaction."
"We should get some sleep," he says. "Tomorrow's going to be brutal."
"Yeah."
Neither of us moves. The moment stretches, weighted with everything we've said and everything we haven't.
Then I do something I don't expect. I reach out and touch his hand. Just briefly. Just enough to sayI see you.
His fingers curl around mine for a moment. Warm. Strong. Then he lets go.
"Get some rest, Avery."
"You too, Dutch."
I don't sleep. I spend the hours until dawn checking and rechecking our preparations, running scenarios in my head.
When the sun rises, I'm ready.
When Old Hawk's crew hits at dawn, exactly as Dutch predicted, we hit back.
four
Dutch
