Re: the townhouse
The girl sat down on the floor, and the boy sat down with her, his arms clasped around her shoulders. She wouldn’t stop talking. She talked about the red star, the solid red star with points that melted and writhed into seeking tentacles, the tentacles that plunged into your eyes to test recovery speeds and testosterone levels and pain tolerance. She talked about the kohl-rimmed eyes of doctors in desert operating theatres, shielding themselves from the sun as the sand whipped over the operating table, the subtle sounds of breathing machines and the murmured pleas for water when your tongue has been cut from your head, the quietest whisper.
She leaned her head against the boy’s shoulder, and she talked about the cool and filthy water of the Thames in 1974, when the winter chills the water, and the divers are searching for a body, and you must wait, deep down in the cold dark, with a mask on, and try to breathe as little as you can, listening to propellers the size of cars churn by just yards overhead. The water is as deep and dark as space, and they drive airplanes, not boats, through frigid nights in Northern France, where you are holding on tightly to the string of your parachute and trying hard not to die.
She talked, and she talked. Whatever she had brought Matt Devlin here to do, it hadn’t worked. She went quietly, still talking, and looked at Steve as if she knew him, knew she was talking, knew she couldn’t stop, and hated him, hated every moment, hated.
Matt was gone long before anyone else had the chance to arrive, just in case Steve had been followed. Freeing him from the chair revealed an ugly gash where the tracker had been, gone, discarded on a plastic tray in the corner of the room. He was twitching in a way he hadn’t in a very long time, almost nonverbal in a way he hadn’t been in years, but he was awake. He was alive, so he’d keep on going.
There wasn’t time to talk between waking up and Aegis’ arrival, but Matt wasted valuable time. He grabbed his friend by the back of the neck, pressing his forehead against his. “You came.” A promise, seventy years old, delivered on. Where was he, in his head, just then? “I knew you would come.”