The Night Is Mine

Chapter 26

26

“Good question.” Emily considered it as well as her muddled brain would allow. One was the best friend she’d ever had and the first man she’d ever loved, or at least suffered a multi-year crush over. The other was a man who had married Katherine Matthews, by choice. A flashy, self-aggrandizing, social success. He’d made himself the most powerful man on the planet, with the help of a hundred million or so voters. Also the man who, through his orders to others, had sent her on each mission she’d flown over the past year.

The divide was too great. She’d known the first man better than anyone alive, perhaps better than he knew himself. The other one she didn’t know at all. She shoved herself higher on the starchy hospital pillows.

“Nope. You pick your cards and you play ’em.” Most of the words came out right. Her body finally found the proper rudder control and the room stopped whirling around inside her head.

“Harsh, Squirt. You were always harsh with your rules. No gray areas.”

“I’m the warrior, you’re the politician. I live in the black and white. I survive there. You excel in the gray areas of negotiation and compromise and trickery I could never see.”

See? Oh crap, the drugs were definitely wearing off.

“I guess I could cut Sneaker Boy a little slack. This once, for old times’ sake.” And a distraction.

“Gee, that’s big of you.”

“Yea, I shnow.” Okay, the drugs weren’t all gone. Probably just as well or she’d be screaming her head off in panic right about now. She felt the bed sag again as he settled once more, this time closer to her feet. He began playing with her toes through the thin hospital sheet.

“Why do I do what I do?” No way was her head clear enough to explain something she didn’t understand. Or maybe that would help. She shoved herself the rest of the way to sitting upright. The rudder control held, no more spins.

“Right.” He wiggled her toes, first in decreasing sizes, then in increasing ones. Her extremities sent no complaints.

“Okay, past history. You were gone. Off to whatever Ivy League, Mister Too-smart-for-his-own-good sort of place you went.” And Mister Way-too-old-and-too-nice-to-be-hers.

That’s one thing she knew about herself, she wasn’t nice. How else had she survived all those years of climbing through the male military structure? She’d torn into enough newbies who’d questioned her skills to know she could be a flaming, sneaky, bad-tempered b***h when cornered. She simply hid it well in public.

“I’d already jumped a grade when you left. I ground through my four years and vowed I’d never waste that much time again. Did West Point in three. Fourth year was all independent study. No one in high school or at the Point had any use for an underaged, underdeveloped punk.”

“That sure changed.”

“What? The underaged part?” Leave it to Peter to work in a smooth compliment like that without the usual male bravado or staring at her chest, not that there was much to stare at despite all her years of wishing and finally acceptance. Though maybe he was. She couldn’t tell. And leave it to her drugged-out brain not to leave a decent compliment alone. Or she could say, “Thanks,” and move on.

“Right, you doofus. You’re old.”

“You’re older.”

“True. Back to school.”

It wasn’t the way the Peter she knew had ever talked about her. To her. Too little, too late.

“Being one of the few people to ever crank out the Point in three years kinda set me up for the rules. I liked the structure. I liked knowing where the game was and that I was a player in it. A good player. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’m proud of my flying, of my fl—”

Her throat closed on her. The drugs let go of her brain all at once, and reality crash-landed front and center. The one thing she was most proud of. The one thing she did right in this world—really right. And she needed perfect vision to get there.

Peter’s hand clamped around her foot, hard. Held it tight. Anchored her in time and place. That was real! The pain of his grip was real.

She focused on that for all she was worth.

“The doctors said they had to wait at least twenty-four more hours.” His voice changed. Now it rang with certainty. “There are enough anti-inflammatories in you to fix the worst hangover a bull elephant ever suffered from too much jungle juice the night before.”

He’d become the Commander in Chief who was all business. This was the other Peter, the man in charge. She might not know him, but she liked him. Someone strong enough to take care of you when all around you was darkness—literally.

“I brought in the best radiant-light weapons team the Army has and their top medicos. Right now they’re resimulating the flash based on all available data and weapon characteristics. The best eye doctor in the country and the top neurosurgeon the Mayo Clinic could offer spent an hour with you while you were out, then half a day poking through your MRIs.”

He didn’t ease up on her foot. It was starting to hurt, but she wasn’t going to say anything that might make him let go—or stop telling her what she most needed to hear.

“A press-corps hack was doing standard film-clip shots on the White House lawn. He bungled the byline completely, wrong station and messed up his own name, but his cameraman shot first-class footage. Didn’t miss a single second of your flight. The flight controllers I brought over from the Marine squad to inspect the footage said the flying was beyond anything they’d ever seen. Sent it down to SOAR at Fort Campbell who agreed they wouldn’t want to try to repeat that particular flight.”

He’d mobilized half the country on her behalf.

“The hack wanted to broadcast the film first. The guy behind the lens gave it straight to the Secret Service right there on the grounds. I have to call the station manager about not firing his butt for that. He caught the burst on film so we have a good idea of the range and energy output. For comparison, we found another Bell 430 side window from the same production week. We had it flown down from Boston. Identical piece of plexiglass, or as near as it gets. They’re firing the weapon through it in order to estimate the amount of radiant energy that reached you.”

Peter had mobilized the entire country on behalf of her eyes.

“They give you better than odds-on of seeing again. They give you a fair chance of no effect once the swelling goes down. Not great, but fair. I’ve talked to a team of doctors working on eye transplants. Not ready for at least another decade, if ever, but I’ve learned that corneal transplants are common and easy. Well, easy for these guys. You wouldn’t want me to try doing it. But they insist your corneas aren’t scarred.”

She focused on breathing. Slow, steady, deep, she told herself. Felt as if she were breathing more at rabbit speed.

“So, we leave the bandages on until tomorrow. They offered to drug you out if it was too upsetting.” He eased his hold on her foot and returned to playing with her toes.

“But…” she prompted.

He kept his silence.

“Sneaker Boy, what did you say and who did you say it to?”

His fingers stopped on her toes. She could feel his grin, right through his fingertips and her toes. It must have been something wicked to see.

“I told them they had no idea who they were messing with and that if they wanted to still have fingers to practice surgery with by tomorrow morning, they had best not mention you being weak about anything. Not around you, and definitely not around me.”

“And…” There was more, though she could feel the heat rising to her face from the first part. Hopefully there were enough bandages to hide it.

“I, um, bet them a grand each that you’d be flying within the week. I didn’t give them a lot of choice on the bet, either. Every now and then, there are advantages to being the leader of the most powerful fighting force on the planet.”