I stay there for a long time afterward, water running down the glass around me like rain. The release doesn't bring peace. It brings a hollow, echoing emptiness that tastes like shame.
Jesus. What the hell is wrong with me?
She is the woman who built the system that put a virus into my daughter's bloodstream. She is the architect of the worst thing that has ever happened to Lily. And yet, I just spent ten minutes mentally violating the woman I'm supposed to be holding for justice.
The realization hits like acid in my gut. I hate that part of myself. I hate the way it sharpens every memory of her. The wet shine of her hair, the steady look in her eyes, the way she stood there like she'd already accepted whatever sentence I chose to hand down.
I turn the water off. The silence that follows is deafening. Hollow.
I dry myself with clinical, aggressive efficiency, rubbing the towel over my skin until it's raw. Clean gray sweats. Black T-shirt. A few passes over my hair. By the time I finish, the reflection staring back at me in the mirror is the mask everyone else expects.
The father. The sentinel. The man who protects the people inside this bunker.
I scrub a hand down my face once more and open the door. My pulse has finally slowed, the adrenaline purged into a cold, steady stone in my stomach. But the emptiness sitting under my ribs remains.
And somewhere down the hallway, behind a locked door and several feet of reinforced concrete, Stratton is still breathing. Which means this war inside my own head is far from over.
I have to be pure for Lily. I have to be the hero she thinks I am. But as I walk toward the living area, I feel the ghost of Stratton's skin under my hands, a haunting reminder that I am much closer to the monster than I ever wanted to admit.
The transition from the dark intensity of my room to the warmth of the living area is stark. The tactical hum of the bunker is replaced by the low, frustrating murmur of a homeschool lesson gone wrong. My father is sitting at the dining table, a math workbook open between him and Lily.
"Look at the numbers again, Lily-bug." My father taps the open page, his gesture patient, but the exhaustion underneath is palpable. "Seven plus five. We just did this one. Count the marks again."
Lily is staring at the page, her lower lip trembling. Her curls are messy, a testament to how many times she's run her hands through them in frustration. Next to her, a pile of scratch paper is covered in erratic tally marks that don't seem to lead anywhere.
"I can't see them, Papa." Lily ducks her head, her small shoulders trembling as her voice breaks. "They just … They jump around. I'm stupid."
"You're not stupid," I say, my voice sharper than I intended as I step into the room.
Lily jumps, her eyes wide as she looks at me. I feel the guilt twist in my gut. I want to be the patient one, but every time I see her struggle with these simple additions, something in me bristles. I spent years calculating trajectories and windage in my head under fire; I don't understand why her brain hits a wall at the number twelve.
"She's tired." My father leans back. He looks at me, his eyes searching mine. He's trying to be stoic, to be the rock he's always been, but the cracks are showing. "We've been at this for an hour. The numbers aren't making sense to her tonight."
I walk over and look at the page. "It's just basic carries, Lily. Look. Put the one above the tens column. If you don't carry the one, the whole answer is wrong."
"I did!" she wails, shoving the book away with a sudden, violent frustration. "But then the one gets lost! It hides! I hate math. I'm bad at it, and I don't want to do it anymore. I'm just bad!"
The familiar heat of impatience rises. It's not her. It's at the unfairness of it. The chemo, the radiation, the poison Meridian put in her … It stole the ease of her mind.
"You have to do it, Lily. You don't go to school, so this is the work. Sit back down and try one more."
"Colt, leave it." My mother appears from the kitchen, a bowl of steaming soup in one hand and a stack of napkins in the other. She shoots me a warning look: the one that says back off. She's very intuitive. Her gaze flicks from me to the door that leads back toward the safe room, then back to my face.
She knows. She knows the air in the house has changed because of who is behind that door. "Her brain needs a break. Math is hard when you've been fighting for your life for two years. Let it go."
I want to argue. I want to tell her that the world won't wait for her brain to catch up, but then tears well up in Lily's eyes, andI deflate. I'm trying to protect her from a global conspiracy, and I'm losing a war against first-grade arithmetic.
"Fine," I mutter, rubbing the back of my neck. "Break time. Go get your dinosaur."
Lily is out of that chair in a heartbeat, lunging for her purple stegosaurus on the sofa. The rest of the guys are already settling into their "off-duty" roles, which mostly looks like a group of lethal mercenaries behaving like unruly teenagers.
"Hey, munchkin." Brass leans over the back of the sofa, his massive arms making the furniture look like a dollhouse. "Since you're done being a scholar, help us out. Torque thinks Jurassic Park is a good movie for a six-year-old. I keep telling him it's a bit much."
Lily looks at Torque with absolute, six-year-old condescension. "That's not real, Uncle Torque. Those monsters are scary, and they eat people. They're not dinosaurs, they're—they're monsters. We don't do scary dinosaurs. We do The Land Before Time."
"It's a classic," Torque defends, holding up his hands. "High stakes. High tension. It's basically a tactical extraction mission with raptors. It's got educational value."
"Littlefoot is better." Lily hugs her purple stegosaurus to her chest. "He has a mission. He has to find the Great Valley. And the Sharp-Tooth is scary, but Littlefoot has friends."
