My hands are in my lap and they're perfectly still.
Nobody looks at them.
Amara's face hasn't moved, but her jaw's working at the sides.
"How'd you get out?" Razor asks, his voice sounding like he swallowed razor blades.
"I waited."
"For what?"
"For them to make a mistake." I bring my eyes up. "Nine years. They made a lot of small ones and I let every single one go by, and then they made a big one and I took it."
"That's it," Razor says. "You waited."
"That's it."
"Nine years, or ten, or whatever amount."
"Yes."
He sits back and doesn't say anything else. I don't know what's on his face. Faces don't tell you anything. Hands tell you.
Amara gets off the desk. "Dante."
He comes off that wall for the first time in twenty minutes, and she says something to him low, three or four words, and he goes.
She comes back and stays standing.
"Say the rest," she says.
"That's the rest."
"No." She's looking at me. "You've told me about a building. You walked miles in a jacket that doesn't fit to tell me about a building. Say the rest."
The heater cuts off.
And now there's nothing to do.
I sit on a president's couch in a room with three people in it and a fourth one gone, and there's nothing in my hands, and nobody's talking, and I've got no chart to read and nothing to count.
Finn's breathing behind me.
That's what's left when everything else stops.
Forty feet of office and I can hear him and it's the same.
It's the same rhythm it was in a bed in Sierra Vista when I was twenty-two years old with my hand flat on his back, and my whole body knows it, my body knew it before I did, my body has known it since the gate.
I could turn my head about nine inches.
Nine inches and I'd be looking at him.
I look at the desk.
Somewhere in the building a door opens and there's a woman's voice and a man's, and the woman's laughing.
"There were eleven women in that hall when I walked out," I say.
