I waited. But still it didn't come. Sera and Maude were discussing some probabilities of something, but it was almost like their voices were at a distance.
My hands were still. My skin was calm. My heart rate was settling into something almost normal just mere minutes after I arrived home.
I should have been relieved. Any rational person would have been relieved. The mission worked, the children were safe, and for the first time I wasn't paying for it with hours of physical misery.
But relief wasn't what I felt. What I felt was a hollow behind my sternum, tight and getting tighter. The sensation of reaching for something that was supposed to be there and closing my hand around nothing.
I knew why the missions hurt. I'd always known. The pain did something for me, served a purpose I'd never had to examine because it had never been absent long enough to miss. Now it was absent, and the thing it had been covering was right there, exposed, the way a wound looks when you peel back the bandage too soon.
I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Naomi had died. Everyone knew that part. The operation, the ambush, the fact that I'd been there. That was the clean version. The version that explained why I lived underground and everyone thought I never left.
But her death wasn't the whole story. It had never been the whole story, at least not when it came to me and what I did to bring Kindt down.
The missions saved children. That was true. That would always be true.
But standing in my control room with steady hands and fading hives, I couldn't hide behind that anymore. Because tonight the saving had happened and my suffering hadn't happened. I should feel relief at that. Thankful.
But what I felt wascheated.
I dropped into my chair and stared at the dark monitor in front of me and let that word settle.Cheated.I felt cheated because the mission hadn't hurt me enough. What kind of man felt cheated by the absence of his own pain?
The kind who'd been using that pain for his own purposes.
Eighteen months. Every mission, every drive through the dark, every set of hives and tremors and self-administered stitches. I'd told myself it was the cost for saving lives. The unavoidable price of doing something good despite a body that fought me every step.
What if the pain wasn't the cost?
What if the pain was the reason?
I hadn't been enduring the pain. I'd beenseekingit. Choosing the hardest targets, the longest drives, the operations most likely to break me. Not despite what they did to me.
Because of it.
The Ghost wasn't just a man saving children. The Ghost was punishment, and I'd built him that way on purpose, and I'dnever once had to see it clearly because the pain itself had always been there to keep me from looking.
And now the pain was gone, and somehow I missed it. If that wasn’t the most fucked up thing in the known universe, I didn’t know what was.
"Travis?"
I'd been sitting at the desk with my back to her, one hand flat on the surface, staring at a monitor I wasn't seeing.
"I've been thinking about the comms setup too," she said. "If we hardened the encryption on the secondary channel, I could run parallel data feeds during the operation. That way, if something shifts in the corridor traffic while you're in the field, I'd catch it live instead of after. It’ll make things much easier.”
Easier.
That was the problem.
Every improvement she made, every system she refined, every minute she spent in my ear on comms made the missions easier. Made the hives fade faster. Made the tremors stop sooner. Made the pain smaller.
I deserved the pain.
"Sera, this isn't working."
The room changed. I could feel it in the quality of the silence, in the way the air seemed to lose pressure, as if the sentence had punctured something.
"What? I thought everything went great tonight.”
