Chapter 25 — The Race Against Time
1499 Words
I heard him before I felt anything.
My name. Over and over. His voice doing the thing it only did when there was nothing left to manage... raw and open and frightened in a way that had no performance in it at all.
Then the cold.
Stone floor under my back. The weight of his arms around me kept me from sliding all the way down. The dead air of the room in the rock. The bare bulbs swing slightly above.
I couldn't answer.
My jaw was still locked. My chest was still locked. The gray had pulled back enough that I could see the ceiling but not enough that I could do anything about any of it.
The black lines on my wrist were still moving.
I knew what they were.
Grade four synthetic. I had learned that name in a ballroom from a man with dead eyes and a ruined voice who had told me it shut your lungs down and the fire came after to cover what the chemical had already done.
My mother had died like this.
And I was going to die like this too if someone didn't do something very fast.
Varek was already moving.
I felt it more than I saw it... the shift of him, the decision happening in his body before it happened anywhere else, the sound of him getting up and crossing the room and taking the stairs three at a time.
His voice from somewhere above.
"Tor!"
The word came out of him like something being torn loose.
Then Tor in the doorway. Taking the room in one second. Crossing to us without being told. His hands under my arms.
Varek said five words.
"Nightshade synthetic. The blade was coated."
Tor looked at my wrist. At the lines. At my face.
He didn't ask questions. He never asked questions.
The medical room was too bright.
I closed my eyes against the lights and cold clean air came through a mask and my lungs grabbed at it and the gray pulled back a little more.
Better. Not enough. But better.
Aris's voice. Thin and tired. "Grade four. Sir I don't... we don't carry the counter agent. Nobody carries it. If I guess the binding compound wrong the antidote will"
"Who makes it," Varek said.
His voice was the flattest I had ever heard. Past calm. On the other side of something where feelings had stopped being useful and he was operating on something else entirely.
"Syris uses a chemist," Aris said. "Underground. Sector Four. Calls himself Kael. He keeps the old formulas. He's the only one"
I didn't hear the rest.
Because Varek was already gone.
Boots. Door. Stairs. And then nothing. Just the lights and the mask and Aris's careful hands and Tor standing against the wall watching my face like watching it was the only useful thing he could do.
"How long," I said.
The mask made the words strange. Muffled.
Tor looked at the clock. "Forty minutes," he said. "Maybe less."
Forty minutes.
Stared at the ceiling.
Forty minutes for Varek to get from the estate on the mountain to Sector Four at the bottom of it and find one underground chemist and come back. In the dark. After the night we had just had.
I thought about what I knew about him.
About a man who ran thirty-eight minutes on a bleeding leg through the night city because I was flatlining on a table. About a man who sat in a plastic chair for three days. About a man who pressed his thumb against my pulse point over and over not because it was useful but because it was the only thing he could do from where he was standing.
He would make it.
Or he wouldn't.
And there was nothing I could do about either of those things.
So I breathed.
Small and careful and deliberate. In. Out. The oxygen from the mask filled my chest in slow careful amounts. Counting them. One. Two. Three. My brain needed something and numbers were what I had.
The black lines on my wrist had stopped spreading outward.
That was something.
Aris worked around me. Checking things. Adjusting the mask. His hands were gentle in the specific way of someone who was frightened but had decided that the person on the table shouldn't have to deal with their fear on top of everything else.
Tor said quietly at some point... "He's in the city."
Didn't ask how he knew.
Just kept counting breaths.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
The lights did something strange at some point. Got too bright. The wrong kind of bright. Aris noticed immediately and said something sharp and Tor crossed to the door and then...
Boots.
Fast and uneven. Not Varek's normal sound... even and certain and steady. This was faster than that and slightly off. One step heavier than the other. He had been running and something had happened to his leg.
The door opened.
He came through it.
He looked terrible. No coat. His shirt was dark in a way that had multiple explanations and none of them were good. His leg moving wrong. A cut above his eye bleeding thin and ignored.
In his right hand a small glass vial.
Pale yellow. Thick. Almost nothing. The only thing standing between me and the floor of a basement in Sector Four where my mother had died in a fire that wasn't electrical.
He crossed the room without stopping and handed it to Aris.
One word.
"Now."
Aris broke the top. Draw the liquid into a needle. His hands were shaking but his aim wasn't.
Varek came to the table.
Standing beside me looking at my face.
I looked at him.
At the cut. At the shirt. At the leg he was putting less weight on than the other.
"How bad," I said through the mask.
"Fine," he said.
"Varek"
"Fine enough," he said.
Aris pressed the needle in.
Cold traveling up my arm. Sharp and chemical and completely foreign. My body is trying to work out what to do with something it had never encountered before.
The monitor beside the table made a long flat sound.
Varek's hand found mine on the table.
He gripped it.
Both his hands around my one hand. The grip of a man who has decided he is not letting go of this thing regardless of what the next few seconds decide about it.
One second.
Two.
Three.
My chest moved.
Small. A breath that happened before I decided to take it. Then another. Then my fingers uncurled against the table slowly. The knuckles releasing. The held thing letting go.
The black lines on my wrist began to fade.
Slowly at first. Then faster. Pulling back from the edges. Lighter. Lighter. Just the normal color of veins under skin.
I breathed.
In. Out. Real air. Full.
I closed my eyes.
Varek's hands were still around mine.
He hadn't moved. Still at the side of the table with both hands around my one hand and his head down between his shoulders and he was just there. Holding on. The way he had been holding on for weeks across basements and gunfights and needles and courtyard stones and plastic chairs.
After a while I turned my head and looked at him.
"You made it," I said.
He looked up.
His face was tired and open and completely real. The version of him that had no walls left because he had used them all up getting here.
"Yes," he said.
"Your leg," I said.
"Later," he said.
"Varek"
"Later," he said. Quiet. Certain. Not moving.
I looked at the clock.
Thirty-six minutes.
He had made it in thirty-six minutes.
I looked back at him.
"He shouldn't have been able to do that," I said. "The blade. In your most private room. He coated it and walked out and we didn't know." I held his gaze. "We can't let that happen again."
"No," he said.
"Which means we stop waiting," I said. "We take back the ports. We go after the board members. We will finish this." I paused. "Together. All the way."
The room was quiet.
Aris had stepped back. Tor was by the door. The monitor makes its steady small sounds.
Varek looked at me for a long time.
At the fading marks on my wrist. At my hand still inside his.
"Sleep first," he said.
"And then," I said.
"And then we finish it," he said. Like a fact. Something that had already been decided and just needed saying out loud.
He said it simply. The way he said things when he meant them completely.
I closed my eyes.
His hands stayed around mine.
I slept.
The room kept its quiet around him. Aris moved to the far corner. Tor stayed at the door. The monitor ticked on. Varek didn't move from the chair beside the table. Didn't speak. Didn't let go.
Just stayed.
The way he always stayed.
- Writer
