Page 129 of The Dangerous Dance

"Viktor is going to ask you about me," he says.

"Yes."

"What will you tell him."

"That you're exactly what his file says you are. Dangerous, principled, and convinced he has the situation managed." I pause. "He'll find the last part reassuring."

"Good." He looks at the ceiling. "The intervals. Every twelve hours."

"Every twelve hours. Morning and evening. If I'm in a position where I can't initiate, I'll send a single character on the burner — anything — to indicate I'm alive but constrained. Nothing means something's wrong."

"Nothing means I come in," he says.

"Yes."

He nods.

I sit up. I look at the go-bag.

"I need to finish packing," I say.

He sits up too. He doesn't leave. He watches me finish packing with the expression of someone who has decided that watching is the thing he can do right now and is doing it completely.

When the bag is packed I set it by the door.

I turn around.

He is still on the bed, looking at me with the specific quality I've been cataloguing since a warehouse floor — the one that stopped being the structural assessment and started being something else and which I have, in the unlabeled section, given a name.

"Come here," he says.

I cross the room.

He takes my face in both hands the way he does — the care of it, the specific care — and he looks at me with everything that doesn't have a clean word.

"Two weeks," he says.

"Two weeks," I say.

He presses his forehead against mine.

We stay like that for a moment.

Then I step back.

Ailish is at the house when I come downstairs.

She's in the sitting room with her coat on and a cup of tea and the expression of someone who was told and has been sitting with it and has arrived at a position. She looks at me when I come through the door with the go-bag and she stands.

"He told you," I say.

"He called me earlier," she says. "While you were—" She pauses. "While you were upstairs."

I look at her.

She looks at the go-bag. Then at me. "How long."

"Two weeks maximum."