Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
26
Enley
The nightmares come on the third night at the lake cabin.
I should've expected them. The body keeps score. It holds on to every image the mind pushes aside because there's no room for it in the middle of a crisis. Then, when the danger finally eases, it presents the bill at three in the morning with all the subtlety of a fire alarm.
The first nightmare is the warehouse. When Render rescued me. He moved through in less than half a minute, putting down three men with the cold efficiency of someone checking items off a list. In the dream I'm watching from above, like a camera on the ceiling, and every detail is sharp. The way the first guard's knees give out. The flash of the knife under the fluorescent lights. The sound the third man makes when he goes over the railing.
I wake with my heart racing and Render's arm solid around my waist. Moonlight from the lake comes through the window in a soft silver wash. He doesn't stir. The fever and the ten days of almost no sleep have finally caught up with him, and for the first time since I've known him he sleeps deeply enough that my sudden waking doesn't pull him out of it.
I lie still and count my heartbeats the way I did in the container. Not because I need to. Because the habit is still there, running in the background like old code that never got deleted.
The second nightmare comes about an hour later. This one is the facility. The stairwell. I'm not watching from above this time. I'm in it. The radio’s in my ear and I can hear everything: gunfire, boots on concrete, Diaz calling positions, Knight's breathing. But in the dream the sounds are wrong. Too loud. Too close. And when Render's voice comes through saying he’s got Poe, it doesn't stop. It keeps describing what's in the lower corridors with a clinical detail I never had during the real operation.
In the dream I'm not behind the shed. I'm in the corridor. And what I see there are the things that happened in the rooms Poe still doesn't talk about. The chair with the chains. The drain in the floor. The tools on the table that Serafina’s men used with the patience of men getting paid by the hour.
I wake again. Render's arm is still around me. The moonlight hasn't moved. My face is wet.
This time I get up.
The cabin is small enough that getting up means walking five steps to the kitchen counter. I pour water from the jug Sawyer stocked and drink it standing at the window, looking out at the lake. At this hour the water is black glass reflecting a sky full of stars the city never lets you see. Beautiful. Completely indifferent.
I've been part of violence now.
Not the distant kind you read about or watch on a screen. The kind that happens in rooms you're connected to by a radio. The kind where you hear the shots and know that each one is a decision someone made about another person's right to keep existing. And the person making that decision is someone you love. The love doesn't make the decision smaller. It makes it heavier.
Render killed people in that warehouse to save me. He would've killed in the facility if the operation had required it. He carries a weapon the way most people carry a phone, with the quiet, constant awareness that it might be needed at any moment.
I've accepted this about him. I accepted it the first night in the cabin when I set my conditions and chose to stay. I accepted it in the storage unit when he loaded magazines at the table with the calm precision of someone doing routine maintenance. I accepted it during the breach when his voice in my ear described the extraction with the controlled calm of a man who moves through violence the way I move through code.
But understanding something in your head and living with it in your chest are two different things. The understanding came the moment I realized who Render is and what the crew does. The living-with-it part is happening now, at four in the morning, in a cabin by a lake, while the man who killed for me sleeps in a bed I just left because the dreams he doesn't know about are showing me what that killing looked like from angles I was never supposed to see.
I don't regret any of it. That's the part that sits heaviest. I don't wish he'd been gentler in the warehouse. I don't wish the facility breach had been bloodless. Different choices would've meant Poe in a cell longer, the crew in chains longer, Serafina free longer. The violence was the cost, and the cost was worth paying.