Chapter 38| Terms

Chapter 38: Chapter 38| Terms

Kira looked at her. Something moved in her expression. The specific quality of someone being impressed without wanting to show it. "No," she said. "The field runs continuously. Independent power supply, separate from the facility’s main grid. Taking it down requires physical access to the hardware." She paused. "Which is what the floor plan is for."

Damian looked at the map. Then at the floor plan in his inner pocket. Then at Kira across the table.

She had two years of internal Nexarion access. Eren had thirty years of external intelligence. Sable had fourteen months of archive depth. His mother had six months of interior mapping from inside a space she was barely allowed to occupy.

Four people building the same picture from four different angles for a combined total of over forty five years.

He looked at the table and felt the shape of it settle around him the way things settled when they finally had enough pieces to see what they were looking at.

"We can’t move on it yet," he said.

"No," Kira said. "Not yet." She held his gaze. "But we can be ready to move when you are."

The afternoon had thinned toward evening while they were talking. The light through the main room window had shifted from the flat grey of midday to the specific amber that preceded dark, and the street below had changed its character from daytime foot traffic to the quieter movement of people heading home.

Sable closed three files simultaneously and set her tablet down and rolled her neck once with the sound of someone who had been sitting in the same position for too long.

Kira looked at the window. Then at Damian. Then at Sable. Something passed across her face, a quick calculation, a decision reached and acted on immediately, the movement of someone who had spent two years inside an organization that ran on operational awareness and had absorbed its better qualities while rejecting its worse ones.

She stood up.

"I’m going to check the building perimeter," she said. "Do a sweep of the lot. Make sure we weren’t followed in." She picked up her jacket from the back of the chair. "I’ll be back in forty minutes."

She looked at neither of them specifically when she said it and left.

The door clicked shut behind Kira and the unit held its quiet.

Not the uncomfortable quiet of an empty space. The specific quiet of a space that had just contracted from three people to two and was finding its new shape around them. Damian sat at the table and looked at the map still open on Kira’s tablet and let the afternoon’s information settle into the place where information went when there was too much of it to process immediately.

Damian looked at Sable.

[Flux: 61%]

The window was closing. He could feel it in the specific way his body registered the drain when the Milk Memory bonus started thinning at its edges. The floor that had been holding his reserves higher than baseline beginning to lose its grip.

Sable was already looking at him.

She closed her tablet.

Sable sat across from him for a while doing the same thing. He could tell by the quality of her stillness, not working stillness, thinking stillness, the difference visible in the set of her shoulders and the fact that she just closed her tablet.

Then she stood up.

"Right," she said, to no one in particular. She looked around the unit with the expression of someone taking inventory of a space they’d just decided to inhabit rather than just occupy. "We’re alone." She looked at him briefly. A glance that carried something in it she didn’t elaborate on. "And I don’t know about you but the last few days have been..." She stopped. Looked for the word and apparently decided no single word was adequate. "A lot."

"Yes," he said.

She moved to the kitchen and filled a glass of water and drank half of it standing at the counter and looked out the small kitchen window at the building opposite. He watched her the way he watched things that were in his immediate orbit. Without making it obvious, just present and attentive.

"Eren," she said. "Kira. Your mother’s ring. The floor plan." She set the glass down. "In the space of twenty four hours the shape of everything changed." She turned to look at him. "Are you alright?"

The question landed the same way it had landed when Zara asked it in the Thai restaurant. Simple. Direct. Assuming the answer might matter.

"I’m just processing things," he replied.

"That’s not what I asked," she said.

He looked at the table. "No," he said. "I’m not alright. I will be." He paused. "It’s a lot to carry."

She looked at him for a moment with the directness she always looked at him with and then she nodded once. The nod of someone who had received an honest answer and recognized it as such and didn’t need to do anything further with it except acknowledge it.

"Come on," she said. She moved toward the smaller rooms. "I’m going to have a bath. The stress of the past few days is sitting in my shoulders and I intend to do something about it."

He looked at the map on the table.

"I’ll go after," he said.

She stopped in the doorway of the bathroom and turned and looked at him with an expression that had something in it he hadn’t seen on her face before. A specific quality of ease, warm and direct, the expression of someone who had stopped managing the distance between what they felt and what they showed.

"We’re partners," she said. "Bonded by something neither of us has a clean word for. We’ve been through an escape, a facility, three weeks of survival, four days of training, and a six hour drive to an old man’s cottage and back." She tilted her head slightly. "Bathing together shouldn’t be an issue."