Page 27 of The Dangerous Dance

"It looks like me not being able to continue making the choices I've been making." He meets my eyes briefly. "You understand what I mean."

I understand. He means the patience he's been extending — not handing me over, not calling it in, not doing what his operational situation clearly requires — has a limit. Defined by external pressure, not by him. He's telling me this as a warning. He's also telling me, underneath, that the pressure is the threat and not his own inclination. I file that in the unlabeled section. I keep walking.

"You put a tracker on me," I say.

He doesn't react. "You already knew that."

"I've known since the second day." I look at the bread in my bag, the sourdough I bought for the ordinary Saturday normalcy of it. "I found it during the fight. I moved it to my coat lining before I left the warehouse."

"I know," he says. "I figured it out when my man reported you'd shaken him. You were free-operating the whole time."

"Yes."

We stop at the edge of the market, where the stalls end and the park opens out into bare-limbed winter — melancholy or peaceful depending on what you bring to it. A dog runs past with a ball in its mouth, a child in pursuit, and we both watch. Neither of us sees much uncomplicated joy in our work. We recognize it when it shows up.

"You need to be careful," I say. "What they have planned — it's not just supply routes. There's a scope to it that you haven't seen yet." I say this before I've decided to say it, which is becoming a pattern with him that I'm not managing as well as I'd like. "I'm not telling you the specifics. But I'm telling you that what you're seeing is the surface."

He looks at me. "Why."

It's the right question. It is exactly the right question and I don't have an answer that isn't also an admission, so I look at the bare trees and the dog and the child and the ordinary Saturday morning of it and I say: "Because you told me you're trying to choose differently. And I find I'd prefer you stayed alive long enough to see how that goes."

The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. He's looking at me the way he looks at everything, mapping the weight-bearing parts. I let him look. I've already said it. I can't take it back. I'm not sure I want to.

"What you said about Rina," I say, when the silence has gone on long enough. "In the studio. I need you to know — I know your history because they briefed me on your history. That's how I knew you'd let me go." I pause. "But the way you talked about it. That wasn't in any briefing."

"No," he says. "It wouldn't be."

"It's real."

"Yes."

I nod. "Okay." I pick up my bag. Dara will be finished with Gerald by now, and looking for me with the expression she uses when she's been looking for a while and has opinions about it. "You have a tracker on me. I have been using it against you. We're even." I look at him. "Don't put another one on me."

"And if I need to find you."

"Then you'll need to be better about it than you have been." I start walking. "Or you could just come to the market on Saturday mornings. I'm always here."

I say it without looking back. I hear nothing behind me that tells me how he takes it, which is fine. I don't need to know how he takes it.

I find Dara near the honey stall with two jars and an expression that has several questions in it that she is deciding whether to ask.

"Don't," I say.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

She falls into step beside me. We walk out of the market and back toward the apartment and she is quiet for almost a full block before she says: "Gerald says the buckwheat this season is exceptional."

"Then we'll get the buckwheat," I say.

"I already did."

"Good."

We walk. The city moves around us. I think about bare trees and dogs with balls and a man at the edge of a farmers market on a Saturday morning holding a loaf of rye he's never going to eat. I think about what it means to prefer someone stayed alive.

I think about it for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, and at no point do I arrive at a conclusion I'm comfortable with, so I set it in the unlabeled section with the rest of it and go to the ballet studio and work on my hip until Petya tells me that's enough for today.