Self-Sacrifice

Camille did not remember deciding to climb back.

Afterward, in the long blank hours of waiting, she would try to reconstruct it, the way people try to reconstruct a car accident, frame by frame, searching for the moment when something could have gone differently. There was no such moment. There was a man falling in red light, and there was the rung under her boot, and then there was no rung, and she was on her hands and knees on the boiler room floor, scrambling over cold concrete toward the place where he lay.

"Camille!" Cole's voice, from the tunnel, hoarse and far away. "Camille, no! Come back!"

She didn't hear him.

Julian lay on his side with one arm twisted under him. His balaclava had come half off, and the red lights played across his face, black and crimson, black and crimson, as the siren turned. His eyes were open. They were fixed on the ceiling. His lips were moving.

"Julian."

"Go." It was barely a breath. "Go... down."

"Shut up."

"Camille..."

"Shut up." She rolled him onto his back. Her hands found the wound by feel. It was high on the left side of his chest, below the collarbone, above the edge of the vest, a place where nothing stopped a bullet but flesh. The tactical jacket was soaked to the elbow. Warm. So warm. It ran over her fingers and down her wrists and dripped from her knuckles onto the floor in slow dark beads.

She had seen blood before. In the van. In the alley. On her own arm. She had never seen so much, and she had never in her life felt a body go slack beneath her hands.

Don't panic. Panic is not expected.

She tore the scarf from her neck, wadded it in a hard fat ball, and shoved it against the wound with both palms, and leaned all her weight on it. Julian's whole body arched. A sound came out of him, a raw choked grunt, and his hand shot up and closed on her wrist.

"Hurts," she whispered, "I know. I know. I'm sorry."

"...told you... down..."

"You told me behind you. You didn't say you were going to fall over." Her voice cracked. She hardly knew what she was saying. "You said stay behind you, and I'm behind you, I'm right here, so stay. Do you hear me? Stay!"

His fingers tightened. His eyes moved, slowly, from the ceiling to her face.

"Hey," said Julian, very faintly.

"Hey."

"You came back."

"Obviously I came back."

A crooked ghost of a smile touched his white mouth. "...Stubborn."

"You taught me."

"...I know."

Boots on the stairs. Voices in the corridor. The slam of a door. Somewhere close, a man was shouting a name, Kastellan, Kastellan, and it took a moment for her to understand that he was shouting it as an order, a command to others to find the man on the floor.

She seized Julian by the shoulders of his jacket.

"We're going," she said. "Now."

"Can't."

"You can."

"Leave me. Camille. Take... Rafael. Get out."

"Julian."

"Please."

"I'm not leaving you," Camille said, "so you can stop asking."

…

She had never been strong. She was a small woman, five-foot-five in her boots, with the hands of a craftsman and the shoulders of someone who carried a kit. But she discovered, in the red light, with a man's blood running through her fingers, that strength was a different thing from what she'd imagined. It was not muscle. It was the absolute, narrow, unreasoning refusal to put something down.

She got her arms under his.

She dragged.

He was a tall man. He weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, with the vest and the rifle. The concrete was rough. He left a long dark smear behind him as she hauled him across the boiler room floor, inch by inch, her heels scrabbling for purchase, her breath tearing in her throat. Every step the wound shifted under the scarf and he made that low raw sound, and every sound went through her like a knife, and she did not stop.

Three feet. Three more. Two.

The grate gaped, a black square in the floor. She got his shoulders to the lip. His head lolled back over the void.

"Cole!" she screamed. "COLE!"

And two big gloved hands reached up out of the dark and took him.

It was Cole's man, the one with the shaved head, whose name she had never learned. He caught Julian under the arms and lowered him down into the shaft with the terrible care of a pallbearer. Cole himself was at the bottom, braced, white-faced, his own rifle abandoned, catching the long limp body as it descended.

"Got him," Cole said hoarsely. "Got him. Come on, ma'am. Come on."

A shot rang out, high and flat, from the corridor. A bullet whined off the steel door and sang past her ear. Brick dust sprayed her cheek.

She went down the ladder so fast that she tore the skin off her palms.

…

The tunnel was a nightmare.

It was four hundred feet of black brick, and a man was bleeding to death in the middle of it.

Cole and the shaved-head man carried him between them in a sling made of a jacket. Behind them Rafael's wheelchair rattled and bounced over the frozen gravel, pushed by the third man, with the old man in it holding a flashlight in his good hand and shining it ahead with the steady fixed attention of a surgeon. Camille ran alongside, one hand on the scarf, keeping the pressure. Her palms were slick. Her whole forearm was red.

"Stay with me," she said. "Julian. Stay with me. Talk."

"What... about?"

"I don't care. Anything."

"...Pie."

She almost laughed. "What?"

"The diner. It was... terrible."

"It was awful."

"...You ate it."

"You ate it. I made you."

"Mm." His eyes were half closed. His face in the swinging beam was the color of old candle wax. "I should have... told you."

"Told me what?"

"At the... hospital. When you asked." His breath rattled. "Is it the job, or because I want to. I should have... said."

"Julian, save your strength."

"Because I wanted to."

The tunnel rang with the clatter of the chair.

"Not the job," he whispered. "Never... the job. From the first... day. In the alley. You said... I'm a daughter of Queens. You looked at me." A faint, bubbling cough. "I thought: that's the only person... who's ever seen me."

"Stop talking."

"I should have said."

"Julian—"

"I love you."

She stumbled. Her foot caught on a rail. She nearly fell, and Cole's arm shot out and steadied her without a word.

For a moment the whole tunnel seemed to fall silent. She could hear her own heartbeat. She could hear the slow dripping of water from the ceiling, and the faint, steady, terrible rhythm of a man's breath.

He said it.

She had waited for it for months. She had dreamed of it and dreaded it, and thought of ways to answer, cold ones and clever ones and kind. She had imagined it in a candlelit room or on a rooftop at dawn, spoken by a man in a tuxedo with the breeze in his hair.

She had never imagined it like this. In the dark, to the sound of a siren, with her hands full of his blood.

"Say it again," she said, in a voice she didn't recognize.

"I love... you."

"Say it when you wake up."

"Camille—"

"Say it when you wake up in a bed and you're annoyed at the nurses. Say it when you're furious about the eggs. Say it when you're eighty and complaining about the pie." Her tears ran down into her mouth, salt and iron. "You don't get to say it like a will. Do you hear me? You don't get to say it like a goodbye."

"I'm not..."

"Then stay."

A silence.

"Okay," Julian murmured.

"Okay?"

"I'll... try."

"Don't try. Do."

And she bent over him as they ran, with her mouth against his ear, and her whole heart came out of her in a stream of words she could never afterward remember, words she had kept locked up for months behind her teeth. I love you, I love you, you stubborn, impossible, cold-eyed bastard, I love you, don't you dare.

His eyes closed.

…

They came out of the culvert into a hush of falling snow.

Teague and Ruiz were waiting by the ridge with two black SUVs, engines running, headlights dark. When they saw what Cole carried, Ruiz swore and Teague ran, and in ten seconds the long limp body was in the back of the nearest vehicle, a medic's blanket under his head, and Camille was kneeling in the foot well with her hands still pressed to his chest.

Behind them, far down the slope, the depot was lit up like a Christmas tree. Floodlights wheeled across the snow. Men were shouting. A siren wailed in the valley, then another, and a line of headlights was beginning to crawl up the access road.

"Go," Marcus's voice said, on the radio. "Go, go, go. Raman's expecting you. Twelve miles."

"Where?" Camille asked.

"Middleburg." Teague slammed the door. "An old Army surgeon. She treats people who can't go to hospitals."

"Why can't—"

"Because the minute his name is on a hospital chart, Gray finds it." Teague's face in the dome light was grim and gray. "Because a federal agent with a bullet in him, fresh out of a Presidential facility, goes into a database, and an hour later there's a man in a white coat with a syringe. We do it quiet."

The SUV lurched forward. The snow flew past the windows in streaks of white.

In the second vehicle, behind them, Rafael Duarte rode in the back seat with a Kevlar vest over his hospital gown. He had not said a word since the tunnel. He sat very straight, holding Cole's coat around him with his one good hand, watching the lead car's taillights through the glass. His lips were moving. Cole, glancing over, could not hear what he was saying. But he thought it was the beginning of a prayer, in a language he did not speak.

…

In the foot well of the first SUV, Camille knelt with her palms on Julian's chest.

She could feel his heart. It was a faint, uneven flutter beneath the sodden scarf, quick and thin as a bird's. Every few seconds it skipped. Every time it skipped, she stopped breathing, until it started again.

His face was gray.

His lashes lay dark against his cheekbones. He looked, she thought, so young: a boy, almost, with a white scar through one eyebrow and snow melting in his hair.

Don't, she thought, to the heartbeat. To the night. To whatever indifferent god ran the road to Middleburg, Virginia. Don't you take him. You took everything else. You took my mother, and you nearly took Papa, and you took the life I had in Queens. I am not giving you this.

The snow went by. The tires hissed. The lights of the little roadside towns came and went like the beads of a slow rosary.

"Stay," she whispered. "Please, Julian. Please."

The pulse beneath her hands fluttered, faltered, and went on.

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when the car turned off the highway and bumped up a long gravel drive toward a white farmhouse in a field of snow. A light burned in the kitchen window. A tall woman in surgical scrubs stood on the porch with a rolling gurney, waiting, and her face, in the gray dawn, was calm.

"Bring him in," said Dr. Raman. "Quickly. Now."

They brought him in.

The door closed behind them. And Camille Duarte, with her hands still red to the wrists, stood in the hallway of a stranger's house at six in the morning, and found that she could no longer feel her legs.