Reject Me Once,Alpha.

The Weight Of Altitude

Chapter Eight: The Weight of Altitude

The plane leaves at ten forty-seven.

Not a commercial flight. A private terminal on the south side of O’Hare where the waiting area has actual chairs instead of rows of attached seating and the woman at the single desk greets Damien by name without looking up from her screen. The kind of infrastructure that exists for people who have decided that queues are something that happens to other people.

I have packed one bag. Everything I brought fits in it because I have been traveling light for six years, not as a philosophy but as a habit formed by the practical reality of a life that requires the ability to leave a place quickly and without visible evidence of having been there.

Colm walks beside me through the terminal.

We have not spoken much since the corridor. There is a particular silence between people who knew each other during a different chapter of their lives and are now standing in the overlap between that chapter and this one, not quite sure which version of themselves to use. I am not the girl who sat across from him at Sunday card games. He is not the man who taught her what a bluff looks like from the outside.

But we are not strangers either.

That is its own complicated thing.

“He talked about you,” Colm says.

I keep walking. “When.”

“At the end. The last few months.” He pauses, adjusting the strap of his bag. “He would not talk about most of it. What he knew, what he was holding, what he was afraid of. But he talked about you.”

“What did he say.”

Colm is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means he is deciding how much of the truth serves the person asking for it.

“He said you were the best thing he had done,” Colm says. “And that he was sorry he had taught you to be so good at not needing people, because it had made you very effective and very alone and he did not know how to undo the second one without breaking the first.”

I do not respond to that.

I file it in the drawer where I keep the things I am not ready to examine and I keep walking and I focus on the door at the end of the terminal and the plane beyond it and the seven hours of Atlantic between here and whatever London is going to ask of me.

The plane is small enough to be fast and large enough to not feel like a favor. Four seats in the main cabin, a narrow table between two of them, indirect lighting that someone chose carefully because it does not give anyone the fluorescent pallor of a person who has not slept enough.

I take the seat by the window.

Colm settles across the aisle with his eyes already closing before we have left the ground. He is the kind of man who sleeps when he can because experience has taught him that the opportunities are irregular and should not be wasted.

Damien sits across the table from me.

I look out the window at the ground crew moving below us, the small efficient movements of people doing a job they have done enough times that it requires no particular attention. The plane begins to move.

Neither of us speaks until we are airborne and the lights of Chicago have arranged themselves into their night geometry below, the grid of it, the lake a black absence at the edge of all that light.

“You should eat something,” Damien says.

“I am fine.”

“You have had water and approximately four hours of sleep since you arrived.”

I look at him. “Are you monitoring my water intake.”

“The kitchen log shows the suite consumed two bottles overnight.” He pauses. “I am not monitoring you. I am noting that you are running on very little and we are going to need you functional when we land.”

We are going to need you. Not I need you. The careful grammar of a man who has thought about how his words land.

“What is in the unit,” I say.

He looks at me steadily. “I do not know the specifics.”

“What do you know.”

“I know your father spent fifteen years collecting evidence of something that the people who had him watched would very much prefer did not exist. I know the evidence implicates people in positions that make them very difficult to touch through any conventional means.” He pauses. “And I know that whatever form it is in, it is the kind of thing that only has value if it reaches the right people intact.”

“Who are the right people.”

“That is the question your father died without answering.”

I look back out the window. The grid of the city is gone now, replaced by the dark of open country below and the darker dark of sky above and the specific nowhere of altitude, the place where you are between things and the ground has not yet decided what it is going to be.

“He could have told me,” I say. Not angry. Just factual, the way you state a thing that is true and painful and not going to change. “Any of the times he saw me in those last months. Any Sunday. Any phone call. He could have said Vera, there is something you need to know.”

“Yes,” Colm says from across the aisle, and I realize he has not been sleeping at all.

I wait.

“He could have,” Colm continues, eyes still closed. “He chose not to because he believed that if you did not know, you could not be used to find it. The moment you knew, you became a target.” He opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling. “He was trying to keep you outside the radius of it for as long as possible.”

“He miscalculated,” I say.

“He knew that was possible. It was in the letter.”

I had read the letter twice in the room downstairs. I had not read the last page because the last page had my name at the top in cursive and I had not been able to do it in a room that was not mine with a man I do not trust standing on the other side of a door that was not fully closed.

The last page is still inside the folder.

The folder is in my bag.

I reach down. Pull it out. Set it on the table.

Damien looks at it and then looks at me and does not say anything, which is the right thing to do.

I open to the last page.

My father’s cursive. The careful inherited precision of it.

You will be angry with me for the silence and you will be right to be. I have no defense that would satisfy you and I am not going to offer one. What I will say is this: I have left everything in a place you can reach and I have left the key with the one person I trust to make sure you find it. Not because I think you cannot find it yourself. Because I want you to know, when you get there, that you did not have to do it alone.

You have spent a long time doing things alone. I know whose fault that is.

The unit is forty-one. The code is the date you won your first argument with me. You remember it. You have always remembered every argument you have won.

I almost smile.

I do not. But almost.

Whatever is inside changes things, Vera. Not just the people it touches, which is many, but the thing itself, the shape of what you have been trained to believe about how the world is organized and who is allowed to do what inside it. Be ready for that.

And then do what you always do.

Burn it down properly.

I close the folder.

I sit with it in my lap and the dark outside the window and the low hum of the engines doing their patient mechanical work.

Across the table Damien is watching me with the expression I am beginning to understand is not calculation. It is something more careful than that. The expression of a man who is trying very hard not to intrude on something private and is finding it difficult because the private thing is happening directly in front of him and he cannot look away.

“He wrote well,” Damien says finally. Quietly.

“He was a precise man,” I say.

“I know.” A pause. “I liked him. I want you to know that. Whatever happened between him and me the night before the ceremony, whatever he asked of me, I want you to know that I liked him and I was sorry when he died.”

I look at Damien across the narrow table.

In seven hours we will land in London. In some number of hours after that I will stand in front of a storage unit with my father’s code in my hands and I will open the door and I will find out what he decided was worth his life.

Right now we are in the nowhere of altitude.

Right now none of it has happened yet.

“Tell me,” I say. “The night before the ceremony. Tell me everything he said.”

Damien is quiet for a moment.

Then he begins.