The Long Way Home

5:52 a.m. Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Eighteen months later.

The playa at dawn was the flattest, whitest, quietest place on earth, and she was about to ruin it.

Vega sat behind the wheel of the Charger with the window down and the engine rumbling softly, watching a silver light climb the mountains. The lakebed ran away in front of her in a dead-level sheet of cracked white clay, twelve miles across and perfectly empty, with a pale haze of alkali hanging over the horizon like breath on a mirror. No road. No fence. No tree. Nothing but the sky, wide as a church, going from gray to rose to gold.

Beside her, twenty feet to the left, a second engine growled.

She turned her head.

The Challenger sat in the early light like something carved. Dark blue, deep as a bruise, with a black vinyl roof and a chrome grille that had been polished by hand for the better part of three weeks. The paint was original. They had found a man in Ohio who still mixed it. The windshield was new. The tires were fat and black and honest. And behind the wheel, in a gray T-shirt and a pair of cracked leather gloves, with his sleeves pushed above the elbow and his hair standing up in the wind, sat a man who looked about as dangerous as a golden retriever.

He had his window down. He caught her eye. He lifted two fingers from the wheel in a courteous salute.

"You are going to lose," he called.

"I'm going to what?"

"Lose. I wished to say it in advance. For the record."

"You're driving a forty-six-year-old muscle car with a four-hundred-forty."

"It is a four-ten stroker," said Roman. "I have been very particular about the distinction."

"You rebuilt it with a manual."

"I enjoy a manual."

"It's got no power steering."

"It is character."

"It's got a bumper sticker." She leaned out and squinted. "Is that— it says I BRAKE FOR PANCAKES."

"Doreen gave it to me."

"You're going to lose to a woman in a Hellcat, and you're going to do it with a bumper sticker."

"I have never in my life," said Roman, "felt more secure."

She laughed. It rose in the clear cold air and was swallowed by the empty miles. The sun came over the mountains in a single liquid sheet, and the whole playa blazed up around them, white and gold and enormous, and she felt it on her face like a hand.

Eighteen months, she thought.

It was hard to believe. It felt like eighteen years, and eighteen minutes. She had counted them, once, out of habit, in a hotel bathroom in Zurich, and had been surprised to discover she'd forgotten to count.

At the far end of the course, a quarter mile off, a figure in a red shirt stood on the roof of a pickup truck with a bedsheet in both hands.

"Ready?" said Roman.

"Don't you cry if you lose."

"I shall do my utmost."

"That's a hedge."

"It is the best I can offer in good conscience."

The red-shirted figure raised the sheet.

Mateo, twenty-three years old, six foot five, in his second year of an apprenticeship at a shop in Reno, had been waiting for this moment for six weeks. He stood on the cab with his feet braced and his face shining and the whole of his soul in his arms, and brought the sheet down in a great white sweep.

They went.

…

It was the best two minutes of her life.

The Charger hit the playa like a thrown spear. The ground was hard as concrete and smooth as glass, and the engine's bellow rolled out over it in a wall of sound, and the speedometer swept from zero to a hundred in the time it took to blink. Dust boiled behind her. The world narrowed to a thin white line and a thin blue one, her hands, the wheel, a pulse in her fingertips. She was grinning so hard that her face ached.

She glanced left.

The Challenger was there.

It ran alongside her like a shadow, its flank six feet from hers, dark and low and snarling. She could hear it. She could hear the stroker, a rough, rolling, brutal baritone, so different from the Hellcat's scream, a sound with mud in it and age and love. She saw the tires bite the clay. She saw the dust plume off his wheels. And she saw his face through the window, intent and joyful and absolutely relaxed, his eyes fixed on the horizon, one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift, and his mouth moving.

He was singing.

She could not hear the words. She did not need to. She had seen that rhythm before, on a marble floor in Las Vegas, in the voice of a man in a white suit. It was a slow, dusty, rolling thing, a song that belonged on a road at night, with the windows open and the radio loud.

Something by Springsteen.

Her eyes stung.

She did not lift her foot. She would never have insulted him. She dropped the Charger into fifth and let it run, and the two cars tore down the white sheet of the desert side by side, black and blue, matched wheel for wheel at a hundred and forty miles an hour, and for one long, impossible moment it was as though there were only the two of them left in the world.

He edged ahead.

It was the barest margin, six inches, a nose. She felt it, and saw it, and understood, and a bright, fierce, ridiculous pride rose in her chest like a flame. He had found something. He'd gone to some place she couldn't reach, some deep dark well of patience, and drawn up something that wasn't speed, but was nearly its cousin.

Go, she thought. Go, go, go. You beautiful idiot.

The sheet fell at the far end of the course.

The Challenger crossed the line a half-length in front.

…

"I let you win," said Vega.

"You did not."

"I did. I eased off. I felt sorry for you."

"You did not ease off." Roman leaned against the blue fender with his arms folded and a smear of alkali dust on his cheek. He had taken off his gloves. His hair was a ruin. He looked eighteen. "You ran at a hundred and forty-one. I watched the needle. You would not have let me pass for any reason in the world."

"I might have."

"You would not. You are far too proud."

"I'm not proud."

"You are the proudest person I have ever met."

"I'm competitive."

"It is the same thing, but with better PR." He smiled. It spread over his whole face, slow and helpless and young. "I won."

"You won."

"I won fair and square."

"By a nose."

"A half-length."

"A nose," said Vega, and burst out laughing, and flung herself at him, and he caught her in both arms and swung her off her feet. They went round once, twice, in the dust, in the golden light, with her boots kicking and his head thrown back, and the playa spun around them in a wheel of white.

Mateo came running across the flats, shrieking.

"Did you see?" he yelled. "Did you see? Oh my God! That was— I've never— Mr. Ashcombe, you passed her on the inside!"

"I did."

"With a stroker!"

"With a stroker."

"Miss Callahan, you took the Hellcat to a hundred and forty-one and you didn't even smoke!"

"I'm aware."

"I'm going to cry."

"You're allowed," said Vega, still in Roman's arms.

He cried.

He sat down on the clay, quite suddenly, with his long legs sprawled out in front of him, and put his big hands over his face, and sobbed with pure delight. Roman set her down. They stood side by side looking at him, in the bright morning, and Roman took out a handkerchief and held it out without a word.

"I think we broke him," said Vega.

"I think we made him."

"That's worse."

"It is considerably more expensive," said Roman. "I am told that he intends to ask for a raise."

…

The ranch lay forty miles south of the playa, on a long shelf of high desert below a range of red mountains.

It had belonged to a rancher called Hobbs, who had died with no children and left it to a nephew in Phoenix, who had never seen it. They'd bought it in March. It was eleven hundred acres of sage and rabbitbrush and cracked alkaline flat, with a creek, a cottonwood grove, a big white house with a deep porch, and a barn that smelled of hay and horses and a hundred years of rain. It had no cameras. It had no walls. It had a long gravel road with a gate that had never once been locked, because the key was lost, and nobody had gone looking.

They had come out in April, the two of them, with a truck and a duffel.

They'd meant it for a month.

We can still manage the Foundry from here, Roman had said. With a good phone line.

Of course.

Silas can handle the day-to-day.

Absolutely.

It need not be forever.

Never.

That had been sixteen months ago.

It was funny how it happened. There had been no decision. No announcement. Roman had simply stopped going into the city on Mondays, and then on Thursdays. Vega had handed off the Pacific routes to a sharp young woman in Oakland. Silas had taken the corner office, with a leather chair and a very large window and a nameplate that said *CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER,* which he said he found ostentatious and which he had polished every morning. The board met monthly. The auditor frightened everyone. The Foundry, to the astonishment of its enemies, did not collapse. It grew quietly, and prospered, and was legal, and was boring, and was, for the first time in thirty years, entirely under control.

They had kept their seats on the board. They'd kept their phones.

They had stopped being afraid.

…

"Eradicate," said a small, clear, gleeful voice.

Vega, coming up the porch steps with a mug of coffee in one hand and a dusty glove in the other, stopped dead.

It was a little after eleven. The sun was high. A warm dry wind rattled the cottonwoods in the yard and set the chimes on the porch tinkling, and under the biggest tree, on a square of blanket, sat a six-year-old girl in a yellow raincoat and a cowboy hat, with a row of dolls laid out in front of her on a sheet. Behind her, in a canvas chair, with a cup of tea at his elbow and a newspaper folded on his knee, sat Silas Bourke.

"No negotiation," said Bianca.

"Correct," said Silas.

"No retrieval."

"Correct."

"Only eradication."

"Excellent." Silas nodded gravely. "Now. The next principle. The teddy bear has taken your crayons. What do you do?"

"I ask him nicely."

"And?"

"If he doesn't give them back, I ask him again."

"And if he does not give them back a second time?"

"I don't repeat a request twice," said Bianca, in a flat, perfect, chilling little voice that raised the hair on Vega's arms. "I eradicate him."

"Very good."

"With a spoon."

"With a spoon, if necessary. It is a versatile tool."

Vega set down the coffee.

"Silas."

He looked round. His face was composed and mild and entirely without guilt. "Good morning."

"What are you teaching her?"

"Corporate governance."

"You're teaching a six-year-old to eradicate."

"I am teaching her to negotiate, in the context of an established house rule." He folded the newspaper. "It is a family tradition."

"It's a policy."

"It is a motto."

"It's not a motto. Roman got it from the Foundry, Silas, it's a policy, it was a threat, it's not for dolls—"

"I'm not playing," said Bianca. "I'm in a negotiation. The doll with the pink hair stole my gum."

"Did she?"

"She says she didn't."

"And what's your leverage?"

"I know where she sleeps," said Bianca.

Vega sat down on the porch step and put her face in her hands.

"The principal called," said a voice behind her.

She looked up. Roman had come out of the screen door with a dish towel over his shoulder and an expression of severe, long-suffering patience. He had been making breakfast. He wore a gray apron with a smear of egg on it and a pair of jeans with a hole at one knee, and he looked like the world's tallest and gloomiest dad.

"Which principal?"

"Of the school in Winnemucca."

"What did she say?"

"She said that a boy in the first grade has been informed by Miss Ferris that if he does not return a pencil case, he will be eradicated."

"Oh my God."

"She asked whether this was a form of bullying."

"What did you say?"

"I said that it was a form of management." He sighed. "I was not believed."

"Silas!"

"I fail to see the difficulty," said Silas, with dignity. "The boy returned the pencil case."

"He's six!"

"And now he is a reliable colleague." Silas reached for his tea. "It is the first lesson of leadership, Callahan. Reputation precedes action."

"Reputation— she's a child."

"She is an exceptionally gifted child." He glanced affectionately at Bianca, who was lecturing a doll about the Geneva Convention. "I am teaching her to protect herself."

"From what?"

"I do not know," said Silas. "But I shall not be here forever. I should like her to be ready."

The porch went quiet.

Vega lowered her hands.

He sat there in the dappled shade, in his canvas chair, with his cane propped against the arm and the wind stirring the gray at his temples, and he looked at the child under the tree with an expression she had never seen on his face. It was not sentiment. It was something far more austere and far more tender. It was the look of a man who has spent his whole life learning how to keep people alive, and has finally been handed one to keep.

"Silas," she said gently.

"Yes?"

"Teach her the other half too."

"Which half?"

"The one about the spoon. You use it for soup, mostly."

A pause.

"Hm," said Silas. "A fair point."

"And the rest of it. The thing you taught me. You walk beside."

"Ah."

"Teach her that."

"I shall." He sipped his tea. "I shall teach her both. It is a long education."

Bianca looked up.

"Can I eradicate Uncle Silas?" she asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because he's family," said Vega.

The little girl considered this. She turned the word over in her small serious face, with the cowboy hat sliding down over one eye, and then she nodded, firmly, and went back to her dolls.

"Okay," she said. "He's on the safe list."

…

They ate outside that night.

Someone had dragged the long kitchen table into the yard. Someone else had strung lights along the porch, a hundred little yellow bulbs, and the cottonwoods glowed gold above the white cloth. A pot of pasta the size of a baby bath steamed in the center. Dante had made it. He stood at the head of the table with a wooden spoon in his fist and a smear of tomato on his forehead, a free man for four months, roaring directions at Mateo in an accent that grew thicker with every glass of red.

"More basil! More! You think the Neapolitans came all this way for a suggestion?"

"I'm putting it in!"

"Put it in with love!"

"I don't know how to put basil in with love!"

"You will learn," said Dante. "You are young."

They were all there. Reyes had flown in from New York with a case of wine, and he sat at the end of the table in shirtsleeves, laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes. Vane, in a cowboy hat two sizes too large, was explaining a tax shelter to a very patient horse. Mrs. Pell had come out for the week, and sat on a rocker on the porch with her feet on a stool, directing the evening like a general.

Juno was at the other end.

She had a ring on a silver chain around her neck. It was a plain heavy band of gunmetal, too large for any of her fingers, and she wore it tucked inside her shirt, and she touched it whenever she thought no one was looking. It had been made from the bullet that Silas had taken out of his ribs. He'd had it melted down in a shop in Reno in January. He had told no one. He had simply handed it to her over breakfast in a box, with an expression of the most extreme and terrible calm, and said, I believe that it is customary.

She had not answered yet.

She was going to. Everyone knew. She was simply taking her time, with a sly bright smile, enjoying every second of the longest and most delicious suspense of her life.

Vega sat in the middle, with her chin in her hand and her bare feet on the rung of her chair, and listened to it all.

It was loud. It was warm. It smelled of garlic and sage and woodsmoke. A guitar had materialized from somewhere, and Mateo was murdering a ballad. Bianca had fallen asleep under the table with her head on a dog. The stars were coming out, one by one, enormous and white, over a sky that went on forever.

A hand found hers under the cloth.

She did not look. She didn't need to. She knew the shape of those fingers, the long scarred knuckles and the dry warm palm, the way they curled round hers and held, not hard, not tight, simply there, like a promise that had never once needed to be said.

"What are you doing?" said Roman, softly.

"Counting."

"Counting what?"

"People."

"Ah." He turned his head. The porch lights lit one side of his face and left the other in shadow. "And how many?"

She looked down the table.

A man with a ring in a box. A girl with a chain round her neck. A hothead with a spoon, and a boy with a guitar, and a ring of laughing faces bright in the dark. A sleeping child, and a dog. A woman on a rocker. A cane propped against a chair.

"Eleven," said Vega.

"A good number."

"A great number."

She leaned her head on his shoulder.

She used to count exits. In every room, in every city, on every road she'd ever driven, she had counted them. Window. Door. Stair. Service lift. She had done it so long and so deeply that it was woven into the marrow of her, a second heartbeat, a prayer. It had kept her alive. She would never, she supposed, entirely stop.

But she looked round the long table, in the golden light, among the stars.

She looked at the gate, which was open, and at the road beyond it, which ran away white and clear under the moon toward every place in the world.

And she realized that there wasn't a single one of them she wanted.