Chapter 10
1065 Words
Marcus looked smaller in daylight.
I saw that first. The east room had one overhead light and no windows, and in the hours since Raze had locked him in here the particular confidence that had always been the most consistent thing about him had settled into something quieter. He was sitting when I came in. When he saw me, he stood. Old reflex — Marcus had always had good manners.
I shut the door after me.
"No Raze," he said.
"No Raze."
He read that. Filed it somewhere. "And Silas?"
"Just us," I said.
I took the chair out of the corner and placed it in front of him and sat down. He remained standing for a while, after which he sat on the end of the cot. The room was smoky and stale, and it was peculiar that it smelled of the same cologne that he had been wearing for two years, the worst thing to notice and the most difficult to forget.
I let the silence run.
Marcus never liked to be silent. One of the first things I'd learned about him was that he filled it; he couldn't help it. It was a word, it was a question, it was a sound—something small and purposeful so that you'd remember that he was still there. Once I thought this was a warm day. Now I knew what it was. The man who had to take control of a room couldn't stand a room that wasn't reacting.
He lasted forty seconds.
"You read the folder," he said.
"Some of it."
"Then you know more than you did yesterday."
"I know the shape of it," I said. "I'm here for the rest."
He looked at me with something that wasn't quite respect and wasn't quite its opposite. "You're not going to threaten me."
"No."
"No gun this time."
"I don't need it."
That landed. I watched it land. He examined his hands and then turned his gaze to me. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything you didn't tell Raze," I said. "He's already had his version of this conversation. I want mine."
A muscle moved in his jaw. "They're not different conversations."
"They are," I said. “Raze wants operational intelligence, names, and timelines and access points.” I held his gaze. "I want to know why my father trusted you."
There was a change in his countenance. Subtle—like the shift you noticed after you had been learning someone's tells for two years across a dinner table, in the dark, when that question came at them too close to something real.
"He didn't," Marcus said. "Trust me. Not fully."
"But he let you in."
He let you in," he said. "I came with you."
I sat with that.
"He knew what I was," Marcus continued. His voice had dropped, the operational flatness from the cellar gone. This was another thing under it. "Not the specifics. But the shape of it. Your father was very good at reading shapes."
"And he let you stay with me anyway."
"He was watching." Marcus studied the wall. "I think he was using me to understand what they wanted. As long as I was close to you and reporting nothing, they had no reason to move. It bought him time."
The chill in my chest, from the debrief room, sharpened.
"He was running you," I said.
"I think so. Yes." A short exhale. "I didn't know that until after. Until I started comparing timelines and realized every piece of intelligence I'd sent back had been just enough to keep them patient and not enough to give them anything real."
"...When they became impatient.
"They moved without telling me." His jaw tightened. "That wasn't the arrangement. I was supposed to be informed. I was supposed to have—" He stopped.
"Time," I said. “You should have had time to say something to him.”
He didn't answer. That was its own answer.
I eyed him for a while. Two years. Drinking coffee by the crackling fire in the morning, sitting in a crowd on quiet Sundays, and his hand on my back in rooms where people asked me what I was. It is all built. Everything is a means of my closeness and my father's, through me.
But below that, he didn't have a calculation for it.
"Was it just him you didn't want dead?" I said. "Or was it me, too?"
The silence this time was his.
"Marcus."
"Don't ask me that," he said. Quiet. Almost careful.
"I'm asking."
He looked at me directly for the first time since I'd sat down. The calculation was gone. What was underneath it was worse—not because it was ugly but because it wasn't. "You know the answer to that."
I did. That's the issue. I had known it in the cellar when he said it was real, and I had known it sitting across from Silas this morning, and I knew it now, sitting in a concrete room with a man who had betrayed my father and loved me anyway, and the complexity of it sat in my chest like something with edges.
"The name Silas mentioned," I said. "You know him."
Back to operational. I saw Marcus get back on his feet. "Yes."
"How directly?"
"Directly enough," he paused. "Whatever access your father kept from him—he won't stop until he has it or until someone removes him from the equation."
"That's not your problem anymore."
"No," he said. "It's yours."
I stood. Carried the chair and put it back in the corner. I stopped by the door, placing my hand on the door frame, and I didn't turn around.
"What you said in the cellar," I said. "About it being real."
He was quiet.
"I needed you to know that I heard it," I said. "It doesn't change anything. But I heard it."
I walked out.
Raze was standing in the hallway. Of course he was.
He didn't say he'd been listening. He didn't have to. I walked past him without stopping and he fell into step beside me and neither of us spoke, and the thing that had passed between Marcus and me sat in the hallway behind us getting smaller, and the thing between Raze and me walked with us down the corridor and didn't get smaller at all.
- Writer
