Down the slope
1758 Words
CASPIAN
The bond goes quiet in a way that isn’t silence.
Silence is the absence of something. This is different — a compression, the way a room feels when too many people have been breathing in it, the air used up and dense and wrong. She’s not unconscious. I would know unconscious. I have the architecture of her particular way of being alive mapped well enough by now to recognize its absence, and this isn’t that. This is something more deliberate. She is still in there, doing whatever Farah does when she goes to the quiet place behind her eyes and starts taking inventory.
The knowing doesn’t make the compression easier to breathe around.
I stop at the ridge because Marcus has stopped, which means he has found something, and Marcus stops for two reasons: terrain that will kill you if you go through it wrong, or information worth delivering. I’ve worked with him long enough to read the set of his shoulders from twenty feet in the dark, and those are not the shoulders of imminent terrain.
“What,” I say.
“Four, maybe five.” He doesn’t look away from whatever he’s reading in the shadows below the ridge. “And a structure. Permanent, or near enough — they’ve been here at least a season.”
I don’t ask how he knows. Marcus reads land use the way some people read text, some old fluency I’ve never fully understood but have had enough reason to trust that I’ve stopped interrogating it. “Defensive?”
“The approach is.” He does look at me now. “Someone thought about this.”
Someone did. That’s the part that has been sitting with me since the gallery, since the specific quality of the planning that had been evident in how they’d moved through the space — not opportunists, not hired hands working from a sketch. People who had known she’d be there. People who had known the shape of the evening with enough precision to fold themselves into its margins.
I had known she’d be there because she had told me. Which means either someone had access to that conversation, or they’d arrived at the same information through a different path, and neither option is particularly comfortable to sit with.
“Entry points,” I say.
Marcus turns back to his reading of the darkness. He has a quality of stillness that I’ve never fully managed, the kind that isn’t discipline but nature, some fundamental orientation toward patience that I have had to construct brick by careful brick over years and which still, under sufficient provocation, develops structural failures.
Provocation like this, for instance.
“East. On the far side of the structure there’s a drainage cut, goes down the slope — they’ve built into the hillside, which means that wall is a foundation wall, which means it’s not watched the way the face is.” He pauses. “Probably.”
“Probably.”
“Do you want me to tell you it’s certain.”
“I want you to tell me she’s on the other side of that wall.”
He is quiet for a moment in the particular way that means he’s thinking about what I’ve said rather than what I’ve asked. Marcus often answers the question underneath the question, which I find valuable in every circumstance except the ones where I am not ready to hear it.
“Cormac,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to anyway.” He looks at me with the level attention of someone who has seen me in enough varying states of functional and otherwise to have calibrated his honesty to the appropriate register. “The bond you’re describing. That’s not — I’ve worked with bonded pairs before, not this, not your particular version of this, but I’ve been close enough to know that what you’re describing is not the usual range of it.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean that you can feel her.”
I look at the structure below the ridge. There are lights at two points — fire, real fire, which is deliberate choice in weather this cold, which means they expected to be here long enough that warmth was worth the visibility cost. People who expected to wait. People who had built in time.
The bond sits behind my sternum in the compressed way it has been sitting for the last quarter hour, and I am aware of it the way I am aware of my own heartbeat, which is to say almost always and most acutely when something is wrong.
“It means we’re past the point where either of us gets to pretend it’s something small,” I say.
Marcus absorbs this without comment, which is his version of acknowledgment.
“The drainage cut,” I say.
“South face, along the cut, there’s maybe eight feet of approach that isn’t sightline-visible from the main entry. If they have anyone watching east, which they might not — the terrain is steep enough that it reads as natural barrier.”
“It would read as natural barrier to someone who hadn’t thought about drainage.”
“Yes.”
“You thought about drainage.”
“Someone has to.”
I check the knife at my wrist, the one at my ankle, the weight distribution that has become so habitual it functions like a sixth sense, the body knowing before the mind does when something is off-balance. Nothing is off-balance. I am entirely, precisely balanced for a thing I have not yet decided whether to call retrieval or something else, a word with a harder edge that I’m not ready to use in front of the version of myself that would prefer this to remain uncomplicated.
“How long for you to reach the drainage cut from the east approach,” I say.
“Twelve minutes if I’m not in a hurry.”
“Don’t be in a hurry.”
He gives me the look that means he finds my phrasing euphemistic but is choosing not to press it. “And you.”
I look at the structure. At the fire visible through what is probably a gap in whatever passes for a window. At the four or five shapes that Marcus has already accounted for and found position on in the particular intuitive geometry he does without appearing to work at.
The bond compresses and then, almost immediately, shifts — a directional adjustment, something small, north-northwest now rather than due north, which means she’s moving again, which means she’s still vertical, which means whatever happened in the last several minutes has not changed her immediate situation in the ways I’d been cataloguing as possible.
I breathe through the knowing of this and hold the relief at arm’s length because relief is not, at this moment, a resource I can afford to spend.
“I’ll come in through the face,” I say.
Marcus looks at me for three seconds with the expression of someone doing math. “That’s the watched side.”
“Yes.”
“So you want to come in through the watched side.”
“I want them watching the watched side.”
Another three seconds. “You want to come in through the watched side specifically to be seen.”
“I want to come in through the watched side,” I say, “because in twelve minutes, when you’re in position at the drainage cut, I want every person in that structure thinking about what is coming through the front and not about what is coming through the back.”
Marcus looks at me for one more beat, the assessment fully calculated now, the conclusion reached. “That’s not a plan,” he says. “That’s a distraction with a person-shaped object.”
“I’m aware.”
“The distraction in question is you.”
“Also aware.”
“And you’re comfortable with that.”
I look at the structure below the ridge. At the firelight. At the place where the drainage cut resolves in the dark along the south face, barely a seam in the slope, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it or if you hadn’t had twenty years of learning to look for the things that look like nothing.
The bond is north-northwest and moving and warm enough that I can feel her thinking.
I am going to put myself between her and whoever is in that structure and I am going to do it through the front door, which is not, as Marcus correctly identifies, a plan so much as a statement of intent delivered at close range.
“Twelve minutes,” I say.
Marcus looks at me for one more moment with the expression that, in anyone else, would resolve into an argument or a question or the particular vocalization of concern that people use when they don’t want to say they’re worried because they think that naming it gives it weight.
Marcus doesn’t say any of that. He has worked with me for long enough to know that certain things are past the point where input changes them.
“Twelve minutes,” he says, and goes.
I stand on the ridge for thirty seconds after he disappears into the dark, which is twenty-five seconds longer than I need to confirm he’s clear and five seconds of doing the thing I have been carefully not doing since the gallery, which is letting myself feel the full weight of this particular situation without the insulation of action to stand behind.
She is on the other side of that structure.
She is cold and hurt and has been doing, I am certain, the specific Farah version of managing an impossible situation, the quiet methodical inventory of variables that I have watched her do in a dozen different contexts and which is somehow both the most reassuring and the most gutting thing about her — that her response to extremity is to get more precise, to narrow down, to find the smallest available leverage and apply it with everything she has.
She has been doing that, in the dark, in the cold, with people’s hands on her.
I push the five seconds away and start down the slope toward the fire.
In twelve minutes, the drainage cut.
I intend to be a sufficiently interesting problem before then.
- Writer
