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And then it isn’t quiet anymore.

It happens everywhere at once—that’s the thing the movies get wrong, the thing nobody can prepare you for. Not a door kicked in and a hush and a hero. All four sides of the building open like something splitting along a seam, and the sound arrives a half-second behind the muzzle flash, and I understand in my back teeth that I have heard gunfire exactly once before in my life and that once did not teach me a thing. This is a wall. A physical wall of noise that presses on my eardrums and my sternum and the soft new nothing behind my navel.

“Stay,” Lebedev says, already halfway out his door, already gone.

I last forty-five seconds. I counted, because counting is the only thing my brain will still reliably do. Forty-five seconds of watching the doorway swallow men I’ve eaten dinner beside, of gripping the seatbelt like it’s a railing on a ship that’s already going down, of telling myself the words you would only be in the way, you would only be a liability, the smartest thing you can do for him is nothing—and every one of those words is true, and not one of them can compete with the other thing, the thing that doesn’t deal in true.

It’s my fault he’s in there. The chip rode in on my neck. The bait wore my face. And I am carrying the only part of him that would be left if this goes the way it goes, and I will not explain to that person someday that I sat in a car.

My hand is on the door before I’ve finished deciding. It’s always my hands that decide, lately. They’ve gotten so much braver than the rest of me.

Inside, bedlam has broken loose.

I am a person who organizes the world. I teach children that life is a set of legible systems—inputs and outputs, cause and effect, a reaction you can balance on both sides of an arrow. Inside the compound there is no arrow. There is only too much, all of it at once, none of it in order. Strobing light. The chemical reek of cordite that coats the back of my throat. A man on the floor I don’t look at twice because looking would cost me something I can’t spare. Concrete that throws every sound back doubled so I can’t tell which roar is fury and which is pain and which is a name being shouted. I press myself flat to a wall and the wall is shuddering, actually shuddering, and my brilliant cataloguing brain—my one good trick, the thing that’s kept me upright through all of this—gives up. Just hands in its resignation. There’s too much data and not enough Meera, and the part of me that wants to survive screams that this was the stupidest thing I have ever done.

I don’t go back.

I go deeper, because somewhere in this building is the man I’m here for, and deeper is the only direction that’s toward him.

I push down a corridor where the gunfire has already moved through, past a doorway, around a corner my feet choose without me—

And there’s my father.

Ray. Standing in the spill of a fallen work light, and the relief that hits me is so total and so stupid it nearly takes my knees, because for one whole second my brain hands me the only story it has a shape for: they took him too. He’s a prisoner. He’s hurt. He’s my dad, and he’s here, and he’s in danger, and everything I am goes toward him the way it’s gone toward every wounded thing my whole life.

“Dad—” I’m already crossing to him, my hands already reaching, already running over his shoulders, his chest, looking for the red, looking for where it hurts. The vet’s daughter. The good girl. The kid who still, after everything, after every graduation he missed and every birthday he didn’t call, would run toward him. “Are you hit, where are you—”

His arm comes around my throat.

It’s not a hug. My body knows before my mind will let it, the way it knew on a sidewalk in Roslindale with curry leaking onto the concrete. He spins me, and my back slams into his chest, and he hauls me up against him and turns us both to face the corridor I came down, where shapes are pouring through the smoke. A shield. I am a shield. And the cold circle that presses into my temple is the muzzle of his gun, still warm, and I understand—all at once, the way you understand the answer to a problem you’ve been staring at for an hour, the way the last piece drops and the whole picture is just suddenly, horribly there—

He’s why.

Not a victim of this. The cause of it. The leaks, the bait, the chip under my skin, the auction, the glass pods, the hands I’ll never be able to unfeel, three weeks of being a thing that reported its own position—all of it runs back up the line to the man holding me, the man whose blood is in my eyes, whose name is on me, who taught me to ride a bike and then disappeared and let me grieve him slow over twenty years like a kindness.

I lost him once already. I made my peace. I did the work.

And here he is, taking him from me a second time, with a gun against my head and his heartbeat slamming against my spine, and the thing that wrecks me isn’t the barrel and it isn’t the fear. It’s that some small, idiot, ten-year-old part of me still came running when she saw his face.

I hate it. I hate that it breaks my heart. I hate that of all the things to do, with men dying around me and his weapon at my temple and his arm crushing my windpipe, I cannot stop the tears—they come hot and humiliating and completely beyond my command, sheeting down my face, dropping off my jaw onto the arm that holds me.

“Easy,” my father murmurs against my hair, like he used to when I was small and couldn’t sleep. “Easy now, Meer. Nobody has to get hurt.”

And I cry harder, because we both know that was never true.

Chapter 23 - Leonid

Iosif’s face swims out of the dark above me, and the first thing out of his mouth is, “You look like shit, bratan,” and the second is a blade already sawing through the ties at my wrists, and I have never loved him more in my whole sorry life.

“Took you long enough,” I croak. My voice is gravel and copper. Somewhere in the last however-many hours I screamed enough to sand my throat down to nothing, and I don’t remember a second of it, which is its own small mercy.

“Traffic.” He gets the last loop and my arms come free, and they’re not arms anymore—they’re two dead slabs of meat that used to take my orders, gone to pins and fire as the blood remembers how to find them. I’d have pitched face-first into the filth if he didn’t catch me by the shoulder and haul me up against the pipe I’ve been married to all night.

He takes stock of me fast, the way we’re all trained to, eyes flicking over the ribs, the eye, the wet mess of my mouth. Whatever he tallies, he keeps off his face. That tells me how bad it is better than a mirror would.

“Can you stand?”

I can’t. I’m going to. That’s the whole trick to all of it, and I learned it tonight in the dark, one held breath at a time: the body is a democracy and the will is a dictator, and on a long enough night the dictator always wins. Around us the building is a living roar—gunfire stacking on gunfire, the flat percussive cough of breaching charges, men shouting in the two languages of my whole life—and every note of it is the sweetest sound I’ve heard in years. Because it’s them. My brothers, in this building, exactly when I told a dead man they’d come, exactly because they are mine and I am theirs and that is the one law in my world that has never once broken.