The silence was—and this was the thing about Viktor’s silences, the reason they were difficult in a way that his speech was not, his silences simply were—too cool for my liking.
“My father,” I started.
He turned.
“He wasn’t just… he was in debt to people who ran the kind of games that are designed to be unwinnable. He knew that eventually. He didn’t stop. But the knowing and the stopping were,” I looked at my coffee, “a long time apart, and in between he lost everything, and the people who ran the games got richer and more comfortable and didn’t… they didn’t account for him. What happened to him. He wasn’t a person in their accounting. He was a number that had stopped being useful.”
Viktor was listening with his whole body. I had noticed this before—that he listened physically, not just with his attention but with his orientation, the angle of him toward the source of what he was receiving.
“I’ve been angry about that for four years,” I said. “I’ve been looking for a place to put the anger where it would—do something. Where it would be productive rather than just—” I searched for the word— “just mine.”
“That’s a reasonable thing to want,” he said.
“Yes.” I held the cup.
Viktor looked at me for a moment. Then he put his arm around me—the same way he had in the desert dark under the stars, without announcement, the simple movement of an arm finding its position—and I felt the weight of it across my shoulders and the warmth of him along my side, and I did not move away.
He pressed his mouth to my forehead.
The gesture was normal and quiet. It was not a lover’s gesture or a strategic one. It was the gesture of someone who had heard something they understood was not easy to say.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “we have time.”
We have time.
I closed my eyes.
The secondary phone was on the stone beside me, face down, its sent message already incorporated by people forty minutes away in one direction or another, being combined with other information, being used in ways I could not control.
I was standing between two worlds, and I had spent four days telling myself the standing was strategic, that managing both was the intelligent response to an impossible situation, that partial information and careful calibration and time—time which Viktor had just said we had—would eventually resolve the impossible into the manageable.
The cold desert morning said otherwise.
The cold desert morning said: You sent a message this morning from a stone step while the man who said he would burn the city before letting anyone use you was asleep inside.
I opened my eyes.
I thought about what choosing meant, in each direction, for each person in the blast radius—Elena, Isla, Viktor, the version of myself that had stood at a graveside in Henderson four years ago and felt the grief organize itself into the anger that had brought me here.
I thought about the step I was sitting on, the arm around me, and the forehead kiss.
I thought about my father, who had sat at tables the house had built and told himself the distinguishing factor was him.
I had to choose.
And whichever way I chose, someone was going to bleed.
Chapter Sixteen
Viktor
The reports had been on my desk for six hours before I identified what was wrong with them.
Not the content—the content was accurate, compiled by people I trusted to compile accurately, the data clean, and the sourcing sound. What was wrong was the pattern. The pattern the data made when you stopped reading it line by line and looked at it as a whole, the way you look at something in peripheral vision to see what direct attention obscures.
The reception attack had been too clean.
I had been telling myself this since the night itself, in the partial way of someone who has reached a conclusion and is giving it time before writing it down because writing it down makes it permanent. The breach points had been coordinated to the second of the security system’s loss of visual. Three separate teams, independent entry, convergent target—that kind of coordination required rehearsal, which required time. It required someone who had known the event configuration in advance and had been feeding that configuration to people with the capability to act on it.
