Page 153 of The Dangerous Dance

The city moves.

She looks at me for a long moment with the expression that has been in the unlabeled section and isn't anymore, and I watch her face do the thing it does when she's decided something — the specific quality of a person who has run the calculation and arrived at the answer and is done with the running.

"That's very direct," she says.

"I say true things directly. You told me that."

"I did."

"Well," I say.

She looks at me.

"Yes," she says. Simply. The same weight as the receiver handed over in a warehouse, as please said from the floor of a safehouse, as I love you in a car at night going home through a city that didn't care she arrived.

Yes.

I take her face in both hands the way I do — the care of it, the specific care — and I kiss her on a pavement in a city that has, regardless of what it cares about, become the place where this happened.

When we separate she stays close.

"The Vore first," she says.

"The Vore first," I agree.

"And then."

"And then whatever comes after that. Together."

She nods.

We walk.

The city moves around us, indifferent and continuous, and we are in it together, which is the only thing that has ever made the indifference manageable.

Liam

EPILOGUE

The Vore comes apart in a week.

Not cleanly — nothing in this life dismantles cleanly — but completely, which is the thing that matters. The simultaneous approach happens on a Thursday in January, coordinated across three Brooklyn locations and the Antwerp shell and a Moscow account that Nadia's contact helped us access in a way that left nothing functional behind. Viktor is taken in the first wave, which is the Irish wave, which is where I positioned us specifically.

Nadia was in the room when we planned it.

She was in the room for all of it.

Declan tells her she's one of them on a Wednesday afternoon in the compound kitchen.

He does it the way he does everything — directly, without theater, sitting across from her at the table with coffee between them and the specific quality of someone who has decided to say a thing and is saying it. I am not there for it. He told me afterward, briefly, that he'd said what needed saying and that she'd received it the way she receives most things, which is without performing the reception.

He said she almost smiled.

He said he understood, after that, why I'd been cataloguing the almost-smile for two months.

I told him I hadn't been cataloguing anything.

He told me I was a terrible liar.