The physician had been clear. The clavicle would heal. The shoulder would require surgery and then careful rehabilitation and then would be functional. The person was going to be all right.
He stood in the car park and breathed and thought about the difference that made.
He had been managing, for sixteen hours, the weight of operational necessity running concurrent with something that was not operational. The weight of holding both — the focused competence that the situation required and the thing underneath it that had been present since the borrowed flat and the clinic and the ambulance — was not something he would have predicted his capacity to sustain.
He had sustained it.
It was, he found, the correct order of operations.
He fixed on the sky.
The light was arriving.
He got in the car.
"You were standing outside," Tav said, without opening his eyes.
"Yes."
"For four minutes."
"I didn't count."
"I did," Tav said.
Alistair watched him. At the person who counted the minutes he was standing in a car park, from behind closed eyes, with a fractured clavicle.
"Are you ready to go?" Alistair said.
"I've been ready for four minutes," Tav said.
Alistair started the engine.
"The coast is four hours north," he said.
"I know," Tav said.
"And then we stop."
"Yes."
"Actually stop."
"Yes."
• • •
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The fake ambulance had been Lucien's idea.
Tav did not need an ambulance. The physician's assessment was clear: the fracture was stabilized, the wound was controlled, the journey north was survivable and indeed recommended as soon as possible.
What the physician had not said, and what Lucien had very quietly arranged, was that the ambulance provided the advantage of a vehicle in which both Tav and Alistair could be horizontal without anyone at any checkpoint asking questions about a man in a sling with a significant quantity of dried blood on his jacket.
Practicality, rather than sentiment.
Although.
