After, when Remy is being moved inside and the compound is beginning to exhale, Jesslyn is still on her knees in the dirt. She looks down at her hands, both of them, turning them over, the blood drying in the creases of her palms.
I crouch beside her.
"You okay?" I ask.
She looks at her hands. Then at me.
"Yes." Steady voice. Always steady. "Is she going to be alright?"
"Stitch will take care of her."
She nods and looks back at her hands.
"I've never done that before," she says.
"I know."
"My hands moved before I thought about it."
"That's what happens when someone needs something." I stay crouched beside her. The compound noise moves around us. "Some people freeze. Some people move. You moved."
She looks at me in the compound light. There’s dirt on her knees. Blood on her hands. The same clear eyes that looked up at me from behind the truck with no panic in them at all.
Something in my chest does something I have no language for.
I stand. Offer her my hand.
She takes it, and I pull her up. We stand in the lot in the aftermath of everything that just happened, and I don't let go of her hand for a moment that is longer than it needs to be.
Then I do. Because Recon is calling my name. The debrief is starting, the night is long, and the work is not done.
I look at her one more time before I go.
She's already looking at me.
Chapter 9
Jesslyn
Remy is in the infirmary when I go to check on her.
It’s long after midnight, and the compound is still running on the exhausted adrenaline of people who have been through something and haven't come down from it yet.
Stitch has been working on her for a while. The bullet missed the femoral artery by a margin he describes as adequate, which from Stitch means it was close enough that he's still running on cortisol himself.
I stand in the doorway and look at her.
She's propped up in the infirmary cot, leg bandaged, a cup of something Stitch made her drink on the table beside her. She looks smaller than she looked in the common room, which is the thing about people who take up a lot of space. When something knocks them down, you see how much of that space was posture and how much was earned.
She sees me in the doorway. She doesn't look away. Instead, she holds my gaze for a long moment with eyes that are flat from pain and medication and the specific exhaustion of a body that's been through trauma, and then she nods. Once. Short.
I nod back.
That's the whole conversation, and it's enough. Something has shifted between us. We both know it, and neither of us needs to put language to it. I came out of the dark and kept pressure on a wound that would have killed her. I didn't hesitate doing it, and Remy has been in this world long enough to understand what that means.
I go back to the common room.
The compound is running hot on adrenaline and exhaustion.
