Page 23 of Rust of Control

And that, of all things, was what cracked it. The algebra. Easton let out a breath that was half a laugh and put his hand over his eyes for a second, one big hand, and when he took it away the hardness had not gone but something had loosened behind it.

"You read me the word problems out loud," Nate said, because they were here now, in the old country, and it could be said. "Every night that whole year. You never once made me feel like the dumb one for needing it. I was a seventeen-year-old who couldn't read a paragraph straight and you acted like it was the most normal thing in the world to sit with me till I could. I never paid that back. I'm not sure a person can." He turned the coffee cup a quarter-turn on the table, the way Easton had moved the honey bun. "Loving your brother right is the closest I've got."

Easton was quiet. The yard outside the window had a man in it walking the fence line, small in the distance, doing his own time.

"Does he know," Easton said. "That you came up here to ask me?"

"I didn't come to ask you." Nate met his eyes. "I came to tell you. I'd have done it either way, because it's mine to do. But I'd rather do it with you on my side than not, and I think you know the difference between those two, because you taught it to me." A beat. "He knows I came. He said to tell you you're an idiot if you give me a hard time."

Easton laughed for real then, short and surprised, and rubbed the heel of his hand under one eye, fast, like he could get there before Nate saw.

"That's him," Easton said. "That's exactly him." He shook his head. "Little brother sends his blessing through the convict. God."

"So?"

"So." Easton looked at him, and the last of the hardness went somewhere it could be put down, and what was left was just a man who loved two people and could not get to either of them with his own hands. "You don't need my blessing. You said so and you're right, it's yours to do. But you've got it. For whatever it's worth coming out of a place like this. You've got it. Be good to him. Be the kind that asks." His voice thickened. "Be the opposite of every other set of hands he's known, including, apparently, the ones I trusted, so don't make me regret the math."

"I won't."

"You already lied to me once for five years."

"I won't lie to you again," Nate said. "That one I can promise and keep."

They had twenty minutes left, and Easton spent the first five of them eating the honey bun and asking real questions, the small ones, the ones a brother asks: was Jude sleeping, was he writing, had he eaten anything green this decade, was the dog at the house good to him. Nate answered all of them. It was the easiest five minutes he'd spent in the room in years.

Then Easton set the wrapper down and his face changed, and he leaned in a degree, and his voice dropped under the hum of the machines.

"There's a thing you should know," Easton said. "About Rand. I didn't put it together till you walked in here and said his name out loud." He glanced once at the guard, a habit, not a fear. "There's a guy two tiers up from me. In for moving people. Not drugs. People. Young ones, across the bridge." He let that sit. "He runs his mouth the way guys do when they think they're untouchable. And a few weeks back he was bragging about a feeder on the outside. A music guy. Somebody who finds them the soft ones at the all-ages shows and softens them up and points them at the van, and gets paid in a way that keeps him liked by people he owes." Easton's jaw was tight. "I didn't think anything of it. Music guy. Detroit's full of them. But you said Rand's name and his band plays those rooms, and the feeder this guy was bragging about, he called him by a tag. Said they call him the drummer."

The cold place opened, all the way, no crack about it.

Nate kept his face still. Years of keeping his face still in this room, six years of keeping it still in worse ones, and he spent all of it now, because the thing he had refused to let touch in the kitchen was sitting on the bolted table in front of him with a name on it, and the name was Rand, and the boxes were one box now and had always been one box, and there was a soft kid an hour south with a big voice who had no idea that the man who beat him was the same machine that ate Caleb.

"The drummer," Nate said.

"You know something," Easton said, reading him, because he always could. "Your face just did the thing."

"I know enough to find out the rest." Nate's voice came out level. He spent the last of the level on it. "Easton. This is the thing you can't do from in here. So I'm going to do it. I'm going to get him all the way free, not just out of the apartment, free, and I'm going to keep him that way. And I'm going to take apart whatever Rand is part of, down to the studs."

Easton looked at him a long moment, and what was in his face was the thing Nate had driven an hour and ten to be allowed to see: not the hardness, not the grief, but a brother handing the one thing he loved most across a bolted table to a man he had finally decided to trust with it.

"Then I guess it's good," Easton said quietly, "that I taught you how to do the hard problems."

The guard called time.

Nate stood. He put his hand flat on the table, the most contact the room allowed, and Easton put his over it for the half-second before the guard's attention came around, his father's hand over Nate's, warm and certain and gone too soon.

"First Saturday," Easton said. "Bring the honey bun. And Nate." He was being walked back now, half-turned. "Tell him I said yes. He'll know what it means."

Nate did not know what it meant. He drove the hour and ten back south with it sitting in him anyway, that and the name on the table, and somewhere around the second exit he understood that he was driving back toward a man he was now allowed to love and a case that had just put its hand around that man's throat, and that the two were the same drive.

He had told himself, for a week, that the boxes had to stay separate. That had been the lie. He did not get to keep it anymore.

He drove south, both hands on the wheel, toward the house with the light on.

Chapter 12

Kit came to the house on a Thursday with a folder under his arm and the look of a man who had not slept.