Page 40 of Make Them Pay

“Yeah.”

“When this is over. That conversation you mentioned. The one that doesn’t involve any of this.”

“Yeah.”

“I want it. I want it to be long. I want it to be about everything we haven’t said. And I want it to happen somewhere with actual food and a real bed and a door that doesn’t have a padlock on it.”

The image settles in my chest like something warm and solid and permanent. A room with real food. A real bed. A door that’s there for privacy instead of security. The kind of room where two people can finally say the things that concrete floors and metal walls and ticking clocks and one stolen kiss in a storage unit have been getting in the way of.

“I want that too,” I say.

She holds my gaze for three full seconds. Then she turns back to the screen and runs the system one more time. I turn back to the communication gear and test the channel one more time.

We work side by side. The physical gap between us is still measured in inches, but the distance that actually mattered—the one I’ve been maintaining for years—is gone. It left the moment I kissed her in this room and it hasn’t come back. I’ve stopped trying to rebuild it. The wall was always temporary, and the foundation it stood on was never strong enough to hold.

Eight hours.

In eight hours Knight’ll cut a fence line. BRAVO squad’ll lock down the perimeter. I’ll go down a stairwell into an underground facility. Enley’ll run the tech side from two hundred yards away. And somewhere inside that building, in cells and holding rooms, six people I grew up with are waiting for someone to come.

We’re coming.

All of us. The misfits and the professionals. The shy one and the hacker. The brother and the sister and the soldier and the friends who started in a basement with borrowed equipment and a dead girl’s photograph on the wall and turned their grief into something that saves people.

We’re coming. And Serafina isn’t ready.

Nobody ever is.

17

Enley

The clock until the breach counts down. Knight’s gone.

He left twenty minutes ago to meet Sawyer and the BRAVO squad at the staging warehouse. Their exit was the same as every other time: silent, efficient, a shadow swallowed by the dark. He shook Render’s hand. He looked at me and said, “See you on the other side.” Then he was gone and the storage unit shrank to its smallest version. Two people. Two laptops. One cot. One sleeping bag on a hard floor. And the hours counting down to something that can’t be uncounted.

I run the system one more time. Not because it needs it. Because my hands need something to do and the alternative is sitting still with everything inside my head, and right now that landscape is one I don’t want to walk through alone.

Render’s at the table doing the same thing with the communication gear. Testing the channel for the fourth time. Checking the signal strength. Making sure all nine of us will stay connected during the breach. His movements are precise but there’s an edge to them that wasn’t there yesterday. A tightness in his shoulders. A way he holds his jaw that I’ve learned means his mind is running scenarios he doesn’t like the endings of.

“Stop testing the comms,” I say.

“Stop testing the system.”

We look at each other. The mutual recognition of two people doing the same useless thing for the same reason is so clear it’s almost funny. Almost. Nothing is actually funny right now. The air in the storage unit has the dense weight of a room where something is about to happen and both people in it know it and neither of them can say it because saying it makes it real and real is something that can be lost.

He sets down the gear. I close the laptop. The silence that fills the space between us is different from every silence that came before. This silence is clean. Stripped of every pretense. The silence of two people who have run out of things to hide behind.

“Are you afraid?” I ask.

“No.” He says it immediately. Then he stops, and reconsiders his answer. The version of him that answers on reflex is the operator. The one who just paused is someone else. “I’m not afraid of the facility. I’m not afraid of the guards or the stairwell or the breach. I’ve done this before. Not this exactly. But close enough that the mechanics don’t scare me.”

“But.”

“But I’ve never done it with someone outside the building who I can’t stop thinking about. The scenarios I keep running aren’t about what happens inside. They’re about the hours between now and when I walk through that fence and you’re standing at the mobile terminal two hundred yards away and I can’t see you. Can’t reach you. Can’t do anything except trust the plan and the channel and the two hundred yards of empty ground between us.”

The admission is so stripped of his usual control that it feels like seeing a room with all the furniture removed. Just walls and floor and the truth underneath everything he normally puts in it.

“I’ll be on the radio,” I say. “You’ll hear me the whole time.”