Down the Rabbit Hole part 14
As the loud, clanging gunshot rings out again, Elena gives me a sympathetic look and leans in a little closer to me. I gingerly take my hands away from my ears, but when she speaks I still can’t hear her through the earplugs. I reach up and start to take them out but she gives me a look and smacks my hand back down, and then she is tucking my hair back behind my ear and fiddling with the plugs. She presses down gently and the earplugs slip in a tiny bit further and then I truly can’t hear; I guess I just hadn’t inserted them all the way. I flash her a grin and a thumbs-up and she smiles at me a little indulgently. My eyes linger on her a little longer while she crosses her arms again, leans up against the painted brick wall of the firing range.
Ahead of us in the central stall, the robot and the tall, slim man with the joysticked control box are looking for more targets. The robot is holding the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen, one-handed no less, and though the shells it spits out with each trigger-pull have got to be the size of Coke cans – okay, maybe not that big, maybe about the size of a mediumish pill-bottle – it handles the recoil without any strain at all.
Down further the overhead rack whines and sends a dinner-plate sized target whizzing across the line again. The robot’s head tracks it for a moment before with a single swift and precise motion it flicks the barrel of the gun to the left and pulls the trigger. I wince again, less from the sound of it now, thanks to Elena’s help, and more due to the resonating shockwave of it throbbing in my chest.
The man with the joystick toggles something on it and the robot racks the bolt of the rifle, tilts it skyward to check the chamber, and then ejects the massive magazine and puts it on the table before it.
“As you can see,” the man says, looking around at us, “this new model of armature skeleton is the most advanced yet. We’ve put absolutely everything into this bad boy,” he grins, slapping the chest plate of the robot; it doesn’t react. “Gyroscopic stabilizers, redundant systems in practically every area, newest cyborgnetic processors, the works.”
“You said you were from Europe, right?” Ellis asks, and the man nods.
“That’s correct. This is going to be a bit of a joint venture. As I mentioned before, I’m Max Euler, one of the scientists from Anodyne Berlin’s robotics department. We reached out to the administration here,” he says, nodding to Makado, “when we felt that the skeleton was in the final phases of testing and could really do with an…extremely adverse environment to put it through its paces. Then, when we discovered that you were facing a certain…difficulty retrieving an artifact, well, everything seemed serendipitous.”
“You don’t sound very German,” I observe. A few heads twist around to look at me and I can see Makado hide a smile. Euler doesn’t miss a beat, though.
“I actually learned English in America,” he tells me. “That’s why I don’t have an accent when I speak it. Deep-immersion in a culture is the best way to learn, I believe. Now, do we have any other questions about myself or the armature or has its performance spoken for itself?”
To be fair, the thing’s performance was very impressive. Over the past couple of hours we watched him demonstrate its speed, its agility, its coordination…everything that would interest the men and women on the team with ex-military backgrounds, which, from what I gathered from the past couple of days, was the majority. I think only Crookshank and another man I had met only briefly before he’d disappeared again, a short, sinewy, compact individual who introduced himself with a wide, flashing grin as Klaus, just Klaus, weren’t. Well, possibly Elena, actually. Is the Coast Guard part of the military? I don’t know. I think so but I’m not certain. I should ask her if I ever manage to get her alone again.
Alone. That’s a laugh. These past couple of days in the barracks have been a decidedly different experience than what I’m used to. I’m not a particularly shy person and I’m confident enough that I’ve never had any real reservations about my body, but the absolute lack of privacy is something I’ve never really experienced before. I got used to it quickly enough, changing in front of everybody. The first time I was motivated mainly because I knew for certain that if I made a big deal of it I’d be taken even less seriously. Aww, look at the little baby, wants us to turn around while she puts a new shirt on? How cute! She thinks we’ve never seen a pair of tits before!
I guess if I want to psychoanalyze myself I could ask why I want to fit in so badly with these people, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? Being the outsider aches, and even if you can fox-and-grapes yourself into believing that it’s okay because you’re “better” than them, you’re always going to know how much bull that is, somewhere deep down.
As far as becoming part of a team goes, you can either have it built in or have it be something you build up. If I came here and I was a male ex-Marine or even something like a paramedic, or perhaps even a lineman (power line lineman, not football lineman), I’d be much more easily accepted. Not that I think the fact that I’m a woman really has much to do with it; it’s about experiences. What the hell does a reporter know about Real World Things, like how to build a fire or pitch a tent or hide food where a bear can’t get it? Or how to fire a gun, splint an injured leg?
I know how to do some of those things, to be fair. But I don’t have the credentials. Instead I have to build it up, I have to be willing to learn, I have to put in work without complaining, I have to play ball no matter what. Challenging an institution, even a little one like a team like this, is impossible until you get inside of it. You say something like, ‘uh, I think I’d prefer to have all of you not stare at my tits while I change my shirt’ and boom, all the goodwill you’ve built up is gone. You have to play ball, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
“Roan?” Makado asks again, sidling up to me while Euler prattles on about something else up in front. I take another look at him and the robot and flick my eyes over to Makado.
“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. What’s up?”
“I want to show you the recording equipment we’ve got for you.”
We slip out of the firing range and head down the hallway, Makado’s heeled footsteps echoing off the tight corridor ceiling. She’s wearing her hair down today, with a broad headband resting high up on her forehead to keep those unruly curls in line. “Makado,” I say after a moment, “can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“How dangerous is this going to be?”
She stops, turns and looks at me. Her lopsided gaze is calculating. “Very, I’d imagine,” she says eventually.
“Mm.”
“Why, are you having second thoughts?”
“No,” I tell her, “not particularly. I just wanted to – mentally prepare myself.”
“You know,” she says after a moment, “I was pretty certain you were going to chicken out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I assumed, you know, throw you to the wolves for a day or two in the barracks with the team, you’d get scared enough to realize this is a bad idea.”
“They’ve been decent to me, actually.”
“As they would have been to anybody,” she smiles, guiding us around a corner. “But I think you might find that my, and apparently your, definition of ‘decent’ might not match with that of a lot of other twenty-something female reporters.”
“If I quit, who’d work the camera?”
“It’s a camera,” Makado laughs. “How hard can it be?”
“Show me the camera and I’ll tell you.”
She shows me the camera and then blushes after a moment. “Christ,” she says. “Stop laughing, it’s a camera.”
“This is what you’re going to use? Where’d you get this, Walmart?”
“Look, our budget isn’t –“
“How much did this cost? A hundred bucks?”
Makado looks at me for a moment. “Eighty,” she says finally. I knead the bridge of my nose.
“I literally have a four hundred dollar camera in my bag back in the barracks that could take better video than this,” I say, “and that’s my backup SLR.”
“SLR?” Makado frowns. I wave it away.
“It’s a kind of camera. Mine’s digital, it can take stills or video. I have…I think three or four memory cards left? So probably about 60 hours of video, I’d guess. More if you’re okay with thirty frames per second instead of sixty. What’s the video going to be used for?”
“It’s classified,” Makado says. “I can’t –“
“Do you want good video or not?”
She rolls her eyes at me. “Look, I really can’t tell you. We just want you to record the operation, that’s all. You don’t need to give it an edge or a slant or an angle or anything, just record it.”
“Mm,” I grunt. “Alright, that’s fair. What’s the deal with the crystal? Why is it so important?”
“Don’t press your luck. This camera you have, how fragile is it?”
I laugh. “About as fragile as this one, relatively,” I point. “Maybe a little more. If it breaks down there I’ll want an assurance that you’ll replace it.”
“If it’s in the budget.”
“A personal assurance, for my personal camera,” I elaborate. She looks at me dubiously.
“You want me to buy you a new camera with my own money?”
“If it breaks.”
“When did this turn into a negotiation?” she asks. Her voice is exasperated but I can tell that she wants to smile. “Fine. How about this? If you break your camera but the footage is usable, I’ll get you a new one. No footage, no camera.”
“Alright.”
“And you’re taking this one as well, as a backup.”
“Fine. I’ll need to get my charger, though.”
“For the batteries? You don’t have it with you?”
“If you recall, I thought I was just going to be coming in and then leaving the same night. I didn’t plan on getting caught up in this adventure of yours. My charger’s back at my motel room in town.”
“Guess we’d better go get it, then.”
And then Makado is putting her arm around my shoulder and ushering me out of the dingy storage closet, and then out of the building entirely.
* * *
“You know,” I say as the little Volkswagen powers down the main road and out the gate, Makado giving a cheery wave to the guard in the gatehouse as she passes, “this really isn’t the sort of car I was expecting you’d drive.”
She laughs. “You and everybody else. See, this actually used to be my aunt’s car. She won the lottery, bought herself a new car, gave me this one, and I was like, ‘hey, what the hell, free car, might as well use it’ and from there it grew on me.”
“It’s so tiny.”
“If you turn that into a crack about my height, you’re walking back to the Flesh Pit.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I laugh. “Although you are kind of fulfilling the stereotype by being so touchy about it.”
“That’s it –“
“I’m joking.”
“I know,” she says, flashing me a quick grin.
The world outside is like a bright warm hug. I realized as soon as Makado lead me out of the squat, evil-looking concrete Security building that for the last three days in the barracks I had been suffering from a myopia of purpose; I’d done little more than work out in the gym, hang out with Elena, and play wallflower, listening to the team laugh and joke and riff off each other. If I were to close my eyes, here in the car, with the top down, trailing my hand in the breeze, I’d be asleep in five minutes.
“You look peaceful,” Makado observes, and I crack an eye open, fix her with what I hope is a sardonic gaze.
“Do I not normally look peaceful?”
“Well, considering I’ve known you for about four days now, and about half of those we were both wondering if I was going to have to send you to federal prison, I’d say that generally you haven’t looked very peaceful.”
“Fair point.”
We drive on in silence for a little longer. “You know,” she says, “there’s no shame in backing out.”
“If you didn’t want me to go you shouldn’t have offered,” I tell her. “It’s too late now.”
“If you want the truth, I did it more for Peter than for you.”
“That’s bullshit,” I tell her. She looks at me a little uncertainly.
“He likes you, you know,” she tells me.
I look over at Makado, really look at her. I look at the lines of the tendons in her neck, loose and ropy but ready to spring into life and brace at a moment’s notice. I look at her cheeks and her eye and her lips, at the way she grips the wheel loosely in one hand, the other hand draped over the edge of the rolled-down window. She glances over, catches me staring. “Have you told him yet?”
I let out a little burst of mirthless laughter. “I haven’t even been able to tell my dad yet.”
“Why not?”
“Why haven’t I told my dad or why haven’t I told Pete?”
“I meant Pete.”
I roll the words around on my tongue for a long, long time before I finally say them. “Because Pete might like me, but he still loves you.”
Makado lets out a breath like I’d punched her, and I look over at her incredulously. “Oh, come on,” I say. “You couldn’t tell? Have you seen the way he looks at you?”
“I don’t –“
“I don’t know what happened between the two of you, not exactly, but I know for a fact that he still has feelings for you.”
“I thought you and him…”
“Let’s just say I’m probably not going to be interested in men for a while,” I say. “Maybe for the rest of my life,” I add with a hollow laugh.
“That isn’t funny,” Makado says quickly. “And what do you – oh.”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Hell, if I were in her position I wouldn’t know what to say about it.
It feels good to tell someone.
“Are you scared?” she asks, glancing over again.
“It doesn’t feel real yet,” I tell her. “I got the letter with the results about a week ago. They wanted me to come back in and ‘discuss my options’ but there aren’t any. Once I get sick I’ll be scared, I imagine.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You probably don’t want sympathy, but…”
“The only thing I don’t want is someone treating me differently, that’s all. Maybe I’m dying but this is going to be a long slow goodbye. And right now I still feel fine,” I say, wondering if I really believe it.
“I was meaning to tell you,” Makado says after a moment. “I think I can get you some ballast.”
I look at her sharply; she keeps her head still, eye on the road. “You’re serious?” I ask after a moment.
“Dead serious.”
“How?”
“The suits the team wears, the locator is in the helmet. At the end of the first day, you guys will make camp right near a ballast bulb. You do the math.”
I think about that for a moment, then shrug.
“Seems easy enough. Would it even help me?”
“It might. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Isn’t it worth a shot?”
“Sure. But what if…I don’t know, what are the side effects?”
Makado laughs. “Well, undiluted ballast…you’ll get really fucking horny. You’ll probably want to drink it right there so you don’t have to worry about hiding a fucking bottle of it from everyone. And it’s going to taste really, really gross.”
“I meant more like physiological stuff.”
“As far as I know it’s mildly addictive but nobody ever figured out if it was actually chemically addictive or if it was a mental thing. Like, the difference between coffee and cigarettes being addictive.”
“Speaking of,” I say. “You smoke?”
“I don’t.”
“Good,” I tell her. “Nasty habit.”
“Okay, miss two-packs-a-day.”
“Ouch. Low blow.”
“Did you always smoke that much?”
She pulls back onto the main road and then turns onto the side street that leads down to the motel. By daylight Gumption looks even sadder than at night. Fewer shadows to hide the cracks.
“No,” I tell her. “I used to smoke about a pack a week or so.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “When you found out you said ‘fuck it’ and started going all in?”
“Seemed like the thing to do,” I say. “I like nicotine, just not a fan of smoking, necessarily. Too concerned about my lungs’ wellbeing.”
“Right,” she agrees. “Alright, we’re here.”
The warm, dry air has sucked all the life out of me. “Alright,” I say, not opening my eyes. “The charger is on the nightstand, you can just run up and get it…”
“Go and get your damn charger.”
I groan, pop the door, stagger out of the low-slung Beetle. “Question for you,” I say, leaning back in.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you personally taking the time to drive me around?”
Makado laughs. “Do you know how busy I am as the Head of Security?”
“Very, I’d imagine.”
“I’m not busy at all. Place runs itself unless there’s an emergency. I do about two hours of phone calls and emails per night sitting in my quarters in my pajamas, rest of the time I just hang around and pretend to do something, anything, that justifies my salary.”
I can’t help but smile at her. “Glad I could give you something to do, then.”
“Go get your charger,” she repeats, reclining the seat backwards. She unclips her seat belt and shuts her eyes. “I’ll be right here.”
* * *
I can tell someone’s been in the room the minute I walk in. I’d left the do not disturb sign on the handle, they’ve taken it off, left it on the floor right in front of the door. I stare; then there is a soft, subtle sound from inside the room and I take a step back, reach behind me for the door handle.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Erica Walken tells me, stepping out from the bathroom. She has in her hand a small revolver, held about waist-high, barrel pointed unwaveringly at me.
It isn’t much to look at, that little gun, the barrel glinting in the low, warm light cast by the lamp over on the bedside table. The inside of the barrel seems like it must be the blackest, darkest, heaviest thing I’ve ever seen, and it draws my eyes to it like it were a singularity. Forget movies, forget books, if you have a gun pointed at you there’s no way to be cool, no way to just quip out a one-liner like in a movie. I an feel my hands shaking at my sides and if I don’t get a grip on myself my legs are going to follow suit. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to at least try a one-liner. When’s the next time I’ll get the chance?
“Put the gun down,” I tell her. My voice almost trembles but I lock it down.
“No,” she says. “Did you come alone?”
“Y-yes. What the hell do you want?”
“You’ve been a hard woman to track down for the last couple of days. Sit down.”
She jerks the gun at the armchair in the corner and I move slowly to it, my back prickling with the knowledge that she’s still holding the gun on me, and sit.
She stares at me for a moment longer. “Are you working for the Company?” she asks me, and something in the way she says it, in the way she’s looking at me, makes me think that this is a capital-letter Very Important Question.
“The Containment Corporation?” I ask, trying hard to keep my voice innocent. She waves an irritated hand.
“The Containment Corp, Anodyne, whoever. You know what I mean.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then why the hell are you back?” she growls. “I know you went with Peter, even though I told you not to, and when you and he disappeared I knew they must have caught you. What the hell are you doing back here?”
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” I snarl back at her. She tosses her head, looks down her nose at me.
“Looking for answers,” she says. “I have a right to know –“
“Lady, I don’t know who you think you are but if you think I’m going to overlook the fact that you broke into my motel room –“
“Answer the question,” she tells me. She moves her thumb and draws the hammer on the revolver back and it locks into place with an ominous click.
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not working for them.”
She stares at me for a long while and I stare back at her, keep my face carefully blasé. “Alright,” she says quietly. “What happened? Why haven’t I been able to get in touch with Peter? When my boy heard the alarms he tried to get out of the Pit. He told me that the ditch had been filled in with concrete, he was trapped in there.”
“Your boy?”
She waves her hand impatiently. “The young man who went in there with you. Marcus.”
“Oh. I didn’t know they’d filled in the ditch,” I say softly.
“Well, they did. He can’t get out.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back in the Pit, of course. He wouldn’t have lasted a day out there on the surface, he’d have been caught in an instant. What happened to Peter? Why can’t I get him on the phone?”
I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words carefully.
“They caught Peter,” I tell her. “I don’t know what happened to him. I only just managed to get away.”
Her eyes narrow. “Bullshit,” she says, the word sounding out of place in her small, elegant mouth. “You’re working for them.”
I can see her knuckles whiten on the grip of the pistol. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
“I can get him out,” I say quickly. “Marcus, I mean.”
“How?” she asks.
Yes, Roan, how? the little voice asks somewhere from the back of my head, and I close my eyes. “They made me a deal,” I say slowly. Maybe it’s pathetic but I feel a little better not being able to see the gun. “I’m going into the Pit. Tomorrow or the next day. I can find him, get him out of there.”
“And turn him right in to the Company?” she snorts. “Fat chance.”
“If you shoot me,” I say with sudden confidence, “you’re never going to see him again. He’s going to die down there and you won’t be able to get him back.”
Erica’s mouth is a tight line. Her eyes are like chips of obsidian. “He’s down there for a reason,” she tells me. “Tell me about this operation they’re pulling. Have they found one of the crystals?” she asks.
My mouth drops open. “You know about those?”
“So that’s a yes?”
I snap my mouth shut. She leans forward, and the muzzle of the revolver snuffles forward. I have to stop myself from cringing back into the chair. If she were to pull the trigger, at this range the bullet would -
“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out,” she says, “if you don’t tell me what you know.”
“Okay,” I say, frantic now, “okay, Jesus Christ, fine, they found a crystal! Is that what you want to know so bad? Yes, they found one. They’re going down to get it and I’m going with. Fuck!”
“Do you know the route?”
“No! Look, I don’t know what the hell you want or what you’re planning, but -”
“Focus,” she says. “They have a crystal. You’re certain? You saw footage of it?”
“Yes,” I say.
Erica blows a breath out. She looks very tired suddenly; she leans back against the counter and the gun finally wavers away from me. “Alright,” she says softly. “It looks like I –“
“Roan? You okay in there?” someone calls from outside the hotel room, and Erica and I both jump. She hurls to her feet, giving me a murderous glare.
“You bitch,” she says. “You brought her with you? I should -“
“Roan, who are you talking to?”
Erica looks as though she doesn’t know what to do. She glances back at the door and then down at me. I can see her start to say something, but before she can get the words out, there is the soft snap of a card fitting into the lock and then the handle turns. My panicked eyes turn to Erica and I can see her raising the gun, mid-snarl. “Hide the gun!” I hiss urgently, and she stares at me for a frozen moment before the door opens all the way and Makado, holding a pistol of her own, a slim black automatic, peeks around the corner. Our eyes meet but she can’t see Erica, the woman is around the corner from her.
Erica is staring at me and I flick my eyes back to her; she hasn’t put the gun away and I try to implore her to with a look, but she’s having none of it. She moves to the wall and the floor creaks. Makado’s aim shifts up and over to the corner as Erica flattens herself against the wall, revolver extended ahead of her, head-height.
I feel as though I’m going to pass out but I know I have to do something, and finally after my anguished nerves have been screaming at me to move, to flex my muscles and move, goddam it, I rise lurchingly, a sudden motion that seems in immediate retrospect to have been a very bad idea. Makado’s gun wavers for a moment but Erica swings around almost immediately and starts to get a bead on me. Makado rushes forward and bursts around the corner, knocking me to the floor in the process. I land hard and lay there for a moment, then I roll over. I see Makado on the ground, Erica on her knees, the two of them struggling over the revolver, Erica trying desperately to stuff her finger back into the trigger guard. I snap out a kick and catch her in the side and she whoops out a breath and lets the gun go for a moment. Makado jerks it away from Erica and I finally, finally see the outline of Makado’s pistol, discarded on the floor right in front of me, blending in with the dark carpet.
Before I can snatch it up Erica bolts to her feet, stepping on Makado’s forearm in the process, a yelp boiling out of Mak’s mouth as she wrenches her arm out from beneath Erica’s shoe, but Erica is already sprinting out the door, slamming it behind her. “Mak,” I say urgently, trying to hand her the gun, but Mak sees it and freezes, and then her eye flicks up to mine, wide and scared, and then I realize I’m pointing it right at her. “Shit,” I say, jerking the barrel away from her. “I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry –“
She reaches out, grabs it and takes it from my nerveless hands. “Grip first,” she says, and then clambers to her feet and rushes out the door after Erica.
By the time I manage to get to my feet and stagger out of the room after her, Roan is there leaning up against the balcony, revolver and pistol both slung away into one pocket or holster or other, watching the big black car roar out of the parking lot fast enough to leave twin streaks of black rubber in its wake.
“You okay?” I ask, breathless still, and Makado glances over, eye wide and limpid.
“Yeah. You?”
“I think so.”
She blows a breath out, inclines her head forward until her forehead rests on the cool metal bar of the balcony. I think about it for a moment before I do it, but then I reach over and gently lay my hand on her back, and I feel her stiffen and then relax. She has a terrible knot of muscle just above her shoulderblade and I work at it with my fingers, run my thumb over it in slow, firm strokes. “That’s nice,” she murmurs after a moment.
“You’re pretty tense,” I observe.
“Well, we both almost died, so…”
“How did you get in?”
“Oh, I made a copy of your keycard when we took your stuff the other night,” she says. “Might have come in handy later.”
“Good thing you did.”
“Never know when you’ll need something like that. We got lucky.”
“Peter told me that Erica’s with the cult,” I say, and Makado nods.
“Yeah,” she says. “What the hell was eating her, did she tell you? She can be a bit of a loose cannon but I’ve never seen her pull a fucking gun on anyone.”
“I don’t know,” I frown. “She - she knew about the crystal somehow, she was asking me if I’d seen it, if we were going down to get it.”
“Ah,” Makado says lightly, “that would do it.”
She does smell like peaches, I realize suddenly, standing this close to her. Her back feels very warm beneath her thin shirt, and her skin has a muscley firmness to it that my fingertips find appealing.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I ask her. Her eye flickers open; I can see her glowering at me from beneath the crook of her arm.
“Mind your own business,” she says.
“This is all about the crystal, isn’t it,” I say thoughtfully. “It was just bad timing, our coming in when we did. You thought we were after it.”
She looks at me bleakly. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t know what to think so I made the call. Beginning to think it was a bad one.”
“Why can’t you tell –“
“Because you don’t need to know!” she snaps. “Because some things are supposed to stay secret.”
I take my hand off of her back. She shuts her eye. “I suppose now you’re going to be mad at me,” she offers, and I blow out a sigh, look out across the parking lot. I can see heat distortion off in the distance, out across the plains beyond the town limits, and in the distance I can see the electric fence.
“I’m not mad at you,” I say so softly that she has to ask me to repeat myself. I look down at her and give her a faint smile. “I’m not mad at you. I’m not – I’m not mad at anything, I guess, not the Pit, not the Corporation, not anything. I wish Rey didn’t have to die but if this crystal is so damn important then what else could you have done? He’d have thrown himself down that elevator shaft if you’d let him. Probably wouldn’t have done any damage, but -”
“A couple of years ago,” Makado says, straightening up, hands on her hips, twisting her back left and right, coaxing a deep crack from her spine like something heavy slotting into place, “we had someone get in with a bomb. He was schizophrenic. Convinced that the Pit was going to swallow the world whole. He sprinted for the orifice and if we didn’t put him down he would have dropped that bomb down there and it would have wrecked the gantry, would have hurt the Pit like fuck, maybe even gotten another choke response out of it. As it was it cracked the fuck out of the concrete exclusion plate, we had to put in a new one.”
I can see ghosts swimming in her eye when she looks at me. “I can’t let that happen again. Even if it’s, fuck, ten times less severe than 2007, there’s eight guys down there in that control room in the monitoring station at all times who are counting on me not to let something like that happen.”
“You did the right thing, then,” I tell her, wondering if I’m lying.
“I – what?”
“You did the right thing,” I repeat. “I don’t know if I would have done anything different if I was in the same position, because you’re right, you can’t risk it. You don’t know what Rey wanted to do, you don’t know who he was or whatever he was carrying. You made the call. As long as you make a decision you’re doing something right, even if it turns out to be the wrong decision. The wrong decision is better than no decision.”
Makado nods after a moment. “Yeah,” she says. She’s looking out in the same direction I am but I can tell from the way she’s staring off across the dusty plains that whatever she sees out there lives mostly inside her head.
“Now, to be fair, I don’t know how I’d live with myself afterwards, but in the moment I’d still make the same call.”
Her eye flicks over to me and then her lips split in a slow lazy smile. “Well aren’t you just a ray of fucking sunshine.”
I grin back, nod to the car. “You’re really not going to call the cops on her?”
“What’s the damn point? She’ll be out of the county by now. Tell you what, do you know her phone number?”
I start to say I don’t, but then I think about it and lead Makado back into the motel room, fiddle with the room phone until I can find a call history. “There,” I say, pointing to one entry. “That’s her. She called me about three days ago, before I came to the Pit. Told me not to go.”
Makado nods, takes her phone out, punches the number in. It rings and rings and then goes to voicemail. “Erica,” she says, once the tinny beep sounds, “this is Makado Veret. Look, I’m not calling the cops on you. I know you probably don’t believe me but as far as I’m concerned this is no harm no foul, alright?”
Her eyes meet mine. “We know about your guy in the Pit. Roan told me you were asking questions about the crystal. I’m only going to warn you once. Whatever you’re planning, call it off.”
Makado’s eye flickers over to me, then away again. I can see her throat bob as she swallows, then she continues. “You probably can’t reach him by phone but if you do get ahold of him, tell him to head to the main gullet and up to the monitoring station. I can’t promise immunity but I’d rather get him out of there alive than dead, and I swear to you I will try to get him off property without any federal charges. Call it good faith. But if you pull the shit you just pulled again,” she says, her voice cooling so quickly I can practically hear the snap, “or if you try to interfere with my operation, you’re going to be coming back out in a bodybag. Oh, and I have your gun. Call me back.” She rattles off her number and then hangs up, blows a breath out.
“Think she’ll call you?”
“Maybe,” Makado shrugs. She reaches into her pocket, pulls the revolver out, examines it. “Free gun, though, if she doesn’t.”
“I don’t think that’s how that works.”
“That was a joke,” she explains, and when I start giggling I can’t suppress it even though as far as jokes go that was fairly lame, but I realize that it’s just all the adrenaline from the fight flooding out of me belatedly in one long relieved flow and even as Makado cuffs me playfully behind the ears and tells me it wasn’t that funny, I manage to make her smile, and I suppose that ought to be enough.
When we get back, charger and a couple of extra half-full SD cards tucked carefully into my pocket, Elena is the only one who noticed that I’d been gone for long, but when she asks where I’ve been, rolling over on her stomach to peer at me from her messy cot, I just shrug. “Out,” I tell her, and content myself with a mysterious smile while she shakes her head and returns to her magazine, muttering something about fucking admin under her breath, but it’s with a crooked smile that I know is meant for me, and when I flop onto the cot next to her nobody gives me a second glance and I feel, for just a moment, like I am starting to belong.
Continue with Part 15
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