PART 11:

It felt like something that had happened to someone adjacent to her rather than to her directly. She understood that this was shock doing what shock did and she let it because the alternative was feeling the full weight of the last 6 hours all at once and she needed to be functional. You should have that looked at.

She said his eye later. It’s bleeding into your eye. He reached up and pressed the back of his hand against it without looking away from the window. Left a dark smear. Your hands? He said I know. They drove. The highway unspooled ahead of them, wet and flat and orange lit for the first hour, then darker as the city thinned, and the suburbs thinned, and the land started reasserting itself.

The flatness of the Midwest at night with its scattered lights and its long distances between them. She fell asleep somewhere in Iowa without intending to, and woke to a gas station in a different quality of dark, and Luchiano outside the vehicle, standing with his back to her on the phone. She got out. The air was cold and clean and smelled like nothing that had happened tonight.

She went inside and bought water and something wrapped in plastic that was theoretically food and brought two bottles back out. He was off the phone. She held one out. He took it. Tanner’s team is 6 hours out. He said arrival at the compound 0630. What time is it? 2:40. Then we have 4 hours on them. if we push.

He opened the water and drank half of it in one motion. Pierce’s plane landed in Casper 40 minutes ago. He’s on the road to the compound. She thought about that. He has a 2-hour head start at the compound. What’s in the archive room? If he burns it, he won’t burn it immediately. Luchiano capped the water. He doesn’t know we’re coming.

He thinks he neutralized me tonight by running. He thinks the FBI has the drive, and the drive is enough to make him want to disappear. But he’ll want to preserve the archive because it has his own insurance in it, information on the people he’s been working with. That’s his leverage. He won’t destroy it until he understands the full scope of what’s moving toward him.

And he doesn’t understand that yet. Not yet. She looked up at the sky. The cloud cover had broken somewhere in the last hour, and there were stars, which she hadn’t seen in months. 14 months of city living and the city’s particular refusal to let you see anything above it. What was your brother like?” she said.

She didn’t know she was going to ask it until she did. Luchiano was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned against the car and looked up at the same piece of sky. “Terrible at mornings,” he said. Could eat an extraordinary amount and never show it. He had this laugh. It was too loud for every room he was ever in. He never cared. a pause.

He wanted out of the life. He’d been trying to find an exit for 2 years before he went to the FBI. I didn’t know. I thought he was restless. I thought he needed more responsibility. Another pause. I gave him more responsibility. She didn’t say anything. He came to them because he thought it was the only door. Luchiano said he couldn’t come to me because I would have I would have tried to find another way and kept him inside doing it.

He knew that. So, he found his own door. He was trying to take care of himself. Yes. You can’t be angry at him for that. I’m not. He looked back down from the sky. I’m angry at everything else. They got back in the car. The last 3 hours of the drive went fast in the way that only happens when something is waiting at the end of it and your body knows it and doesn’t waste energy on the interval.

She stayed awake. Luchiano drove the final stretch himself, the other man having traded off somewhere in Nebraska, and she watched his hands on the wheel, steady, which he’d expected, but also something else. A quality of intentionality in the small corrections, the way he held the road without fighting it.

The compound came up at 0519. She saw it first as light, a scatter of it against the dark mass of the mountain behind it, man-made and therefore wrong colored against the pre-dawn. The road had turned to gravel 40 minutes ago, and the last 8 mi had been switchbacks and pine and the kind of dark that cities didn’t produce. The elevation had changed the temperature, and her palms achd in the cold.

Luciano stopped the car a/4 mile out and cut the lights. Two vehicles behind them did the same. He turned to her. You stay in the car. No, Rowan. I’m the only one who can identify which archive room and where the documentation is organized within it. I’ve seen Pierce’s filing system. I know how he thinks about categorization.

She met his eyes. You need me in there, and we both know it. That’s why you let me come. His jaw set. You also need me available for Tanner’s proceedings, she said. which means you have a strategic incentive to keep me functional. I have other reasons, he said. She stopped. He said it without particular emphasis, just a flat statement delivered in the same voice he used for operational facts, but it landed differently than operational facts, and they both knew that, too.

She held his gaze for a moment. Then, let’s both come back, she said. They went in on foot. Six men total, including Luciano and Rowan in the dark sneakers that were still slightly too large, and her dress from last night that was never designed for mountain terrain in pre-dawn cold. She moved anyway. She focused on the ground in front of her and the back of Luciano’s jacket and breathing through her nose, steady, the way she’d learned in the half marathon.

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