Page 68 of Rogue’s Mark

ROGUE

Vi comes back a few minutes later, steadier, eyes still a little red. She looks at her father, then at me, and I can tell she already knows what we're about to say.

"Mr. Renner." Armen's voice is even, not unkind. "This has probably already occurred to you, but you can't stay here. Somebody had this address. Somebody you've never met knew exactly where to find you, and we don't know who else they told. This place isn't safe anymore, if it ever was."

Renner nods. He's already there. He's been a careful man too long to argue with the obvious. "I know."

"We keep places for just this sort of thing," Armen says. "Off anyone's map, for when somebody needs to vanish. We can have you in one within the hour. But we go now, and we go quiet."

It moves fast after that, the way these things do when the people know their jobs. Renner packs in under five minutes, which tells me everything about how he's lived—one bag, always ready, nothing he can't leave behind.

Vi watches him pack and says nothing. She crossed a ruined city to find this man. Now she's standing in his doorway while he gets ready to disappear, and even though it's different this time, even though he's alive and she knows it, I don't think that deep inside she can tell the difference yet. She just knows her father is leaving.

We take him out the back, the same careful way we came. Sting meets us at the bottom of the stairs, having held the street the whole time, and it's the first time he and Renner are truly face-to-face.

I watch that, too. He looks at Renner the way he looks at a thing he hasn't decided about yet, and then he says, flat and quiet, "She looked for you for years. Damn near died doing it. Got herself into the Hunt because she had nowhere else to go."

Renner holds his gaze. "I know that."

"Do you?" It's not really a question. Sting lets it sit there a second, then turns and heads out without another word. That's Sting telling a former mayor he hasn't earned his trust yet.

Renner takes it without flinching. I'll give him that. He doesn't explain himself. He just absorbs it, like a man who's decided he's going to be answering for his choices for a long time.

The safe place is a twenty-minute walk, a unit above a shut-down print shop that Armen keeps for this kind of thing. Clean, stocked, only one way in. Renner stands in the middle of it and looks around, and for the first time, I see how tired he really is.

Then comes the goodbye. I turn and watch the door, giving Vi the only privacy this place can offer.

I don't hear most of what they say. I don't try. But I see her hug him, hard, the way you hold something you're not done being afraid of losing. I see him say something into her hair. I see her nod against his chest and pull back, wipe her face, and square her shoulders.

"This isn't like before," she says, loud enough that I catch it. "I'm going to know where you are. We're going to talk. This is not you disappearing on me again."

"No," her father says. "It isn't. You have my word, and this time you get to hold me to it."

She nods one more time. Then she walks to me and the guys, and she doesn't look back, because I think if she looks back she won't be able to leave, and she knows it.

44

ROGUE

We get back to the Rot and it's like we never left. Nobody looks up, their priorities being the next supply run and whose turn it is at the hub. Never thought I’d say this, but the predictability feels good.

Mara's waiting. Of course she is. She's on Vi the second we're inside, arms around her, and Vi finally lets go of the grief she's been holding, into her oldest friend's shoulder.

And over Vi's head, I catch something I wasn't looking for.

Kade's hanging back by the wall watching Mara hold Vi with a look on his face he doesn't know he's wearing. And when Mara glances up and finds him there, something passes between the two of them, quick, quiet, gone like it never happened.

Interesting. I keep it to myself and say nothing, because that's their business and because I've got my own stuff to deal with.

Later, when the building's gone quiet and Vi's still, she finds me in my room. She stands in the doorway and looks at me for a long moment. I know that look. She's reading my face the way I taught her to read everyone's, and she's finding something there I usually don't let anybody see.

A day ago, I'd have shut it down. Made a joke. Turned her around and given her something else to think about.

I don't this time.

I let her look, let her see me, the long day we’ve had, and the thing that came loose in my chest while I watched her get her father back. Years of armor have been chipped at over the last few hours, and now I’m practically naked with nowhere to hide.

"You disappeared on me today," she says. "You checked out somewhere back in that room and you never really came back."