What I Am

06:12 a.m. The Colombian jungle. Day three.

The helicopter came over at dawn, low enough to shake the leaves.

Vega had her hand over Roman's mouth before she knew she'd moved. They lay flat under the buttress root, wrapped in a groundsheet she had spent twenty minutes dirtying with mud and rotten bark, and she watched a slice of sky between the vines turn from gray to white to the dull flat black of a rotor disc.

It passed. The noise went with it, down the valley, thumping like a heart that belonged to someone else.

She counted to sixty. Then to ninety, because she was a cautious woman.

"Ours?" she breathed.

Roman peeled her fingers off his face, gently, one at a time. "Ours would have fired a flare. Silas is sentimental about flares."

"So it's the other kind."

"It is the kind that was not painted gray." He lay with his eyes on the canopy. "It was a Bell. Civilian livery. Searching in a grid, east to west. They will do the next ridge by nine."

"You got all that from the sound?"

"I got it from the shadow. You were not looking."

"I was busy being a rock."

"You were an excellent rock."

She took her hand off the groundsheet. It had left a print of mud on his collar. She decided, with great dignity, not to mention it.

…

They did not move that day.

It was her call, and she made it badly, with her jaw set, because every instinct she owned said go. But he was gray again, and the shoulder had stiffened overnight, and the leg under its filthy bandage had started to weep a thin yellow fluid that she did not like at all. Walking would have killed him. Hiding might keep him alive another twenty-four hours.

So she moved them a hundred yards, into a hollow beneath a fallen trunk, and screened the mouth with palm fronds, and for nine hours they lay in a green twilight and tried not to be found.

At noon she cleaned the wound. At one she found a stream and filled the bottles. At two she sat down beside him with the last energy bar, broke it in half, and handed him the bigger piece.

"No," said Roman.

"Yes."

"You are the one who is walking."

"I'm the one who's arguing. It burns more calories."

He took the bar. He looked at it for a while, as if it might contain instructions.

"Vega," he said. "I told you that I would tell you."

She stopped chewing.

"You don't have to do it now."

"If not now, I think I will find a reason not to." A dry breath, almost a laugh. "I am very good at finding reasons. I have built an empire out of them."

"Okay," said Vega.

She put down the bar. She folded her hands in her lap, the way her father used to, when someone was about to tell him something he would have to carry.

"Okay. Go."

…

"There was a foundry," said Roman.

He said it to the ceiling of the hollow, in a voice with no color in it at all.

"In Newark. Steel. Closed in nineteen ninety-one, when I was a year old, and left to rot beside the rail yard. It had a chimney you could see from the turnpike. There were thirty families living in the sheds around it by the time I was seven. Squatters. People nobody was counting."

"Your family?"

"I did not have one. I had a woman who collected a state check for me, and a basement." He turned the energy bar over in his fingers. "The basement was under a laundromat on Ferry Street. There were four of us down there. Two sisters, who did not last. A boy named Tomas who went to the army. And Eli."

The name landed softly. He had said it as if setting down a glass.

"He was two years younger than me. Small. He had a cowlick that stood up at the back like a feather, and no matter what we did to it, it stood up. He talked all the time. I mean all the time. He talked in his sleep." A pause. "I used to lie awake in that basement and think that if I could only turn him off for one hour, I would be a happy man."

"And then?"

"And then I could not turn him off, and I discovered that I was not happy anyway."

Vega said nothing. It was the one thing she was good at.

"When I was twelve, a man came to the basement for the rent. The woman was out. He was drunk. Eli was ten, and mouthy, and said something about the man's mother." He lifted his left hand and looked at it. "The man had a box cutter. It opened Eli from the ribs to the hip. Not deep. Long. I held the edges together with my hands and sent Tomas for the kitchen drawer."

A kitchen knife, she thought. A needle, a stitch. In the fever, he had said it, and she had put it together, and here it was.

"I did not have a doctor. I had a darning needle and fishing line and a bottle of whiskey that I poured on both of us. I did thirty-one stitches. He did not cry once. He talked the entire time. He told me about a dog he wanted. He told me I had very warm hands." Roman's mouth moved. "I have thought about that for twenty-two years. Warm hands."

"And the man with the box cutter?"

"He did not come back."

"Did you—"

"No," said Roman. "That was Tomas. I only held the door." A faint sardonic breath. "I have found that most of my life has consisted of holding doors for other people. It is a gift. It is also a very good way to end up responsible for everything that goes through."

…

The light shifted through the fronds. Somewhere above them a bird said something rude and flew away.

"The foundry," Vega prompted gently. "You said that was where it started."

"Yes. At fifteen I began to work for a man named Harlan Voss, who bought scrap from the closed mills and sold it to people who did not ask what it had been. Shell casings, mostly. Then the shells. Then whatever was in them." He closed his eyes. "I was good at it. Not because I was clever. Because I was calm. Men would come into the shed with a pistol out, and I would offer them tea, and they would put it away. I never understood why. I only noticed that the calm worked, and I kept using it."

"Voss taught you."

"Voss taught me that a broker is paid for what he refuses to carry. The price of an honest man in a dishonest trade is that everyone wants him to be in the room." He opened his eyes again. "By nineteen I had an office above the laundromat. By twenty-one I owned the building. I called the business the Foundry because I could not think of a better word for the place where things go in one shape and come out another."

"And Eli?"

The silence ran on a long time.

"Eli wanted in," said Roman.

…

"I said no."

His voice had not changed. But the hand on the energy bar had gone white.

"I said no a great many times. He was seventeen, and I was nineteen, and I had no intention of letting him come anywhere near it. I sent him to school. I paid for a tutor. I bought him a car, an old one, a nineteen-seventy Challenger that I found rusting in a yard in Elizabeth, and I told him that if he stayed clean for a year, we would rebuild the engine together." A pause. "He kept it under a tarp in the garage. He talked to it."

"The one at Blackthorn."

"The one at Blackthorn." He did not look at her. "He wanted to prove himself. He heard that Harlan Voss's people were short a driver, and he went to the meet without telling me. I found out at ten at night. I found out because a man on the phone told me that my brother was parked on Doremus Avenue with a trunk full of something he did not understand."

"You told him not to drive."

"I called his cell. He answered. He was laughing. I said, Eli, listen to me. Do not move the car. Do not turn the key. I said it three times." His voice was almost inaudible. "He said, Rome, it's fine, I know the way."

The jungle waited.

"It was not an accident," said Roman. "The brakes had been cut. Not by Voss. By someone who wanted Voss to think it was Voss. It took me eleven years to learn whose crew it was. Do you know how it works, when you are looking for a man like that? You find him by the people who profit from the silence."

"Who?"

"I am not ready to say." He met her eyes at last. "I will tell you when I have the proof. I have been wrong about this before. I do not intend to be wrong in front of you."

"Roman, you were nineteen."

"I was old enough to hold the door."

"You were a kid."

"I was his," said Roman, and the word cracked down the middle. "He had no one else. I told him not to drive, and I did not go and take the keys. I stayed on the phone. I said it again, politely, like a man declining a drink. And he was seventeen, and he loved me, and he drove."

Vega moved before she had decided to.

She knelt up in the narrow hollow, and put her arms around his shoulders, careful of the wound, careful of the ribs, and pulled his head down onto her collarbone. He was rigid. She could feel it, every muscle clenched, a body that did not know what to do with being held.

"Breathe," she said.

"I am breathing."

"Breathe out."

A long, shaky exhale. Then another. Then something that was not quite a sound, a small dry catch in the throat, and the rigid shoulders under her arms let go, one inch at a time.

She held him for a long time.

She did not say it wasn't your fault. It was the kind of sentence people say so they can stop listening. Instead, she said the only true thing she had.

"I'm here."

…

It was dusk before he spoke again.

"Now you."

"Me?"

"I have given you what I am. It is only fair." A faint crooked ghost of his old irony. "I have read your file. It is sparse. I would like the rest."

"My file's a lie, mostly."

"Then I would like the lie and the rest."

She laughed. It surprised her. She lay on her back in the dim hollow with her head not quite touching his shoulder, and she looked up at the green, and she thought: I have never told this to anyone.

"My dad was a colonel," she said. "Army Ordnance. Twenty-six years. He ran a depot in Georgia, and he kept the books like a priest keeps a confession. Everything counted. Everything signed."

"Callahan."

"Yeah." She did not flinch. "Eleven years ago somebody put two hundred rifle crates on the manifest that never existed. They turned up in Mexico. They turned up in a gunfight in Juárez that killed nine kids. And my dad's signature was on the paper." A pause. "It wasn't his hand. I knew his hand. I'd know it in the dark."

"Who pushed the paper?"

"I never found out. A lieutenant colonel testified. A broker named in the report, but the name was a dead end. By the time I figured out the dead end was deliberate, Dad had a rope in the garage."

Roman's breath stopped.

"I found him," she said. "I was twenty. I cut him down. I did the math on my knees on the floor, and I decided I would never be anywhere again that somebody could find me." She tilted her head. "That's the whole origin story. I got very good at leaving."

"You are the daughter of a man who counted," said Roman, slowly.

"Yes."

"And you count."

"Yes."

"Exits." He said it with a strange gentleness. "I thought you were afraid of the walls."

"I was. I am. I'm afraid of every wall I've ever built."

"And yet you stayed."

"I told you. I'm not leaving."

Something moved across his face then, something she could not name. It was not surprise. It was closer to recognition, like a man who has been hearing a note from a long way off and has just realized that it was a voice. He opened his mouth, and shut it, and she had the distinct impression that a very large thing had just changed direction.

"What?" said Vega.

"Nothing." He looked away. "A coincidence. I will think on it."

Liar, she thought. But it was a gentle word. She let it pass.

…

Night came down fast. The frogs started up. The helicopter did not return.

They lay side by side under the fallen trunk with a thin blanket between them and a thicker silence. He had turned onto his side to face her, with an effort that cost him a hiss. His eyes in the dark were the pale shine of a cat's.

"Vega," said Roman.

"Mm."

"I am about to do something unwise."

"Does it involve a plan?"

"It does not."

"Then I'm in."

She thought he'd laugh. He didn't. He lifted his right hand, slowly, slowly, giving her time, so much time that she had almost forgotten to be afraid of it, and he laid it against the side of her face. His palm was warm. His thumb moved along her cheekbone, exactly as it had in the morning light two days ago, in the rock.

"You said you wished to do it right," he said. "When you were free. When you could say no."

"I did."

"You are not free."

"I know."

"I am not asking for what I am owed. I am not asking for what I can take." His voice was a thread. "I am asking whether you would like me to stop."

She looked at him in the dark.

Fish swim in the deep ocean. Birds fly in the high sky.

There was a third thing she had never said out loud. And sometimes the water and the sky are the same color, if you stand in the right place.

"No," said Vega.

She moved the inch that was left.

It was not a grand kiss. It was clumsy, and dry, and tasted of dust and energy bar, and her ribs hurt, and so did his. His hand trembled against her jaw. For a second neither of them seemed to know the grammar. Then the trembling stopped, and he made a small low sound in his throat, and the kiss changed, deepened, became slow and certain and unmistakably, ridiculously tender.

When she drew back, they were both breathing too fast.

"Well," said Roman. His forehead rested against hers. "That was unwise."

"Very."

"I would like to do it again."

"Later." She was smiling. She couldn't help it. "You're running a fever."

"I am not."

"You're running a small one."

"It is entirely your fault."

"I accept full responsibility." She laid her head on his good shoulder, and felt the arm come round her, and held very still while it settled. "Sleep. I've got the watch."

"Vega."

"What?"

"Thank you for the lie. And the rest."

"Go to sleep, Roman."

He did, finally, with his hand in her hair and his breath slow against her temple. She lay awake a while longer, listening to the dark.

It occurred to her, drifting at the edge of sleep, that the helicopter had flown a perfect grid over this valley, east to west, as though it had known exactly which ridge to start from.

That wasn't a search pattern.

That was a map.

Someone had told them where the plane would go down.