Chapter 24:

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: BEFORE 

The briefing was in the small room.

Two others. A woman named Sera who stood the way people stood when the carrying had become how they stood. A man named Dov, maybe ten years older than Kaden, who looked at him once during the introductions with the expression of someone handed a tool they didn't select.

Kaden noted both and looked at the candle.

"Three locations," Elias said. "A school two kilometers north. A supermarket complex east. And a residential block — the Lahmu have been skirting it for two weeks without explanation." He paused. "That last one I want eyes on."

Dov asked three questions — practical, the questions of someone who had done this before. Sera asked none. Kaden waited and then said:

"The residential block. Nothing you can identify. But it's been holding."

"Yes."

"Against what."

"Scout-class, mostly. One confirmed mid-tier." Elias paused. "Without any Hymn we can account for."

The candle flame. Small and steady. The pull toward the residential block sitting in Kaden alongside the briefing, alongside the names of the three locations, alongside Dov's expression and Sera's silence.

"Sera handles any engagement," Elias said. "You observe."

The briefing was over. Sera at the door. Dov following. Kaden sat one more second with the candle and the residential block and then got up and went back into the hall.

He stood in the doorway.

Lia with Hamid and the full tin. Mia near the window with the water bottle. The younger priest near the side door with his face turned toward the floor. Rania with her legs out and her face at the angle that received the light. The child Sami doing the paper-folding in the corner. Alex in the middle of the hall — the warmth-generation, the half-second running in every exchange.

His mother at the supply table.

The thread.

He looked at all of it with the residential block sitting in him and tomorrow sitting in him and the pull outward sitting in him and felt the specific weight of every person in the hall the way he'd been learning to feel it — not cataloguing, not filing, just present to the weight of it, the accumulated gravity of sixty reasons for living going about their morning in the shelter that was about to become the place he brought people back to.

He went to his wall.

His mother found him before lunch.

She sat beside him and the thread was there and the briefing was still sitting in him and the mission was still sitting in him and she was quiet and he was quiet and the hall moved around them.

"Elias told me," she said.

"Yeah."

"When."

"Tomorrow. Early." He paused. "Two defenders."

She looked at Lia across the hall — Lia bringing Hamid something, the easy practiced motion of someone who had been doing a thing long enough that the doing had become the answer. Then back at her hands in her lap. "What do you need," she said.

Not be careful. The practical question. The one that assumed he'd already considered the others.

"I don't know yet," he said. "I think I need to go and find out."

She put her hand over his.

The weight of it. The warmth. The thread and him not reaching for it and the hall moving and the mission sitting underneath the weight of her hand and all of it present simultaneously without any of it canceling any other.

Lia appeared on his other side — just there, the way she was always just there — and looked at the hall with their mother's eyes and said: "Hamid asked if I'd be here tomorrow."

"What did you tell him," his mother said.

"Yes." She turned her phone over. "He nodded like it was important information."

The three of them sat. His mother's hand still on his. The hall in its morning patterns. The briefing sitting in Kaden and the residential block sitting in him and tomorrow sitting in him and none of it announced, just present underneath the quiet between the three of them.

His mother stood eventually and went back to the supply table and Lia stayed.

"Are you scared," she said.

He thought about it. The question deserved the thought. "Not the way I thought I'd be." He looked at his hands. "I keep thinking I'll get out there and find out I'm still — " He stopped.

Lia waited.

He didn't finish it.

She looked at Hamid with his tin. Then at Kaden. "You sat beside Rania," she said. "During the breach."

"Yeah."

"I saw you cross the hall." A pause. "Hamid eats because I sit beside him. I didn't know I could do that until I did it." She turned her phone over once. "Maybe it's like that."

He sat with that.

She got up and went back to Hamid without making it a moment and he let the thing she'd said sit in him alongside the residential block and tomorrow and the mission and all of it pressing in the same direction.

Mia was at the east wall when he got there.

Not because she'd planned to be — he could tell that, the specific quality of someone who has arrived somewhere without deciding to. She had the water bottle. She extended it without making it an offer and he drank and handed it back and they looked at the wall together.

The scar at the threshold. The thinness where the breach had been forced back. The mission pressing through it.

"Before," she said.

"Yeah."

She turned the bottle in her hands. "In the beginning. If someone had asked you."

He knew what he would have said. The house. The family. The comfortable life. The candle receiving it with total indifference.

"What would you say now," she said.

He looked at the scar. At the direction of everything in him that was pointing outward. "I don't know yet," he said. "But it's — moving. The not-knowing." He paused. "It used to just sit there."

Mia looked at him with the expression — the one that wasn't social warmth and wasn't tiredness. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I can see that."

They stood at the wall and the flood was loud and the cup was lower than the first week and it was still in her hands and the mission was in him and neither of them said anything else for a while and the saying nothing was enough.

Alex was at the wrong-facing window in the evening.

Not the center of the hall. The window that showed the street — the car with the door still hanging open, the debris of the ordinary world, the emptiness that had been there since Wednesday afternoon.

Kaden stood beside him.

They looked at the street.

"Tomorrow," Alex said.

"Yeah."

Alex looked at the car. At the open door. At something further down that Kaden couldn't make out in the evening light. "What do you think it's like."

"I don't know," Kaden said. "I haven't been since the beginning."

Silence. The half-second not running — no people to read, just the street, and streets apparently didn't have sequences Alex could predict.

"Bring something back," Alex said.

Kaden looked at him.

"Not a person." Alex kept his eyes on the street. "Something I haven't seen a version of in here."

Kaden thought about the four of clubs in Alex's jacket pocket. The three of diamonds still missing somewhere in the world.

"Okay," he said.

Alex went back to the hall. Kaden stood at the window alone and looked at the street and felt tomorrow coming the way tomorrow came — without ceremony, just the next thing arriving.

He was at his wall when the hall settled into night.

The button in his hand. He didn't remember taking it out.

The small dent. The two holes. The coat he would never know anything about.

One of four, he thought. The map only works if —

He didn't finish it.

The finishing was what came next.

He put the button in his pocket and sat inside the hall one more time — his mother near his father, Lia near Hamid, Mia near the window, the younger priest near the side door, Elena somewhere in the building, Rania with her hands where she could see them, Youssef with his son in Cedarville, the teenager with his loose hands, Dara with Sami, sixty people carrying what they were carrying, still here —

And tomorrow he would go.