Page 33 of Irish Oath
By the fourth morning I'd stopped pretending I would sleep past five.
It wasn't the bed. The bed was the best thing I'd slept in since I was a girl, deep and warm and piled with more blankets than one person needed, which was its own small kindness I hadn't decided what to do with yet. It was the old thing. The one that got me up in the gray of every new place before the new place could get up first. I don't survive on other people's schedules. I survive on my own, and mine started before the light.
So I got up. I dressed in the dark. And I did the thing I do in any building I mean to walk out of alive.
I walked it.
Not the way a guest walks a house. The other way. I went down the back stairs and counted them out of habit, fourteen, a turn, six more. I marked the doors that stuck and the ones that didn't. I found the window in the second pantry with the old latch, the one a determined person could work in under a minute, and I stood there with my hand on the cold glass and thought, there. That's one.
By the time the sky started going from black to the color of dishwater, I had four. Four ways into a house that called itselfa fortress. The pantry latch. A cellar hatch nobody had checked the hinge on since the Kennedy administration. A blind spot on the east lawn where two camera arcs didn't quite kiss. And the side door onto the headland, which was steel and keypadded and serious, and which someone kept propping a half inch with a folded bit of card so it wouldn't lock them out when they went to stand at the wall in the dark.
I knew who that last one was. I'd heard him go out two nights running. I didn't say anything about it. Some things I note and keep.
"You're up."
I didn't jump. It took work not to. Cormac had come into the back hall the way he came into everything, from a direction I wasn't watching, with no sound in front of him to announce it. He had a mug in one hand and the particular stillness of a man who'd also been awake for hours and hadn't told anyone either.
"So are you," I said.
"I'm always up." He looked at where my hand was, flat against the pantry window. "Find something?"
"Four somethings." I took my hand off the glass. "You want them, or do you want to pretend the house is airtight and let me keep them to myself?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. On Cormac that was practically applause.
"Show me," he said.
So I showed him. I walked him to all four the way he'd have walked me, no drama, one after the next, laying out why each one was a problem and how I'd use it if the house were mine to get into instead of mine to sleep in. He didn't interrupt. He didn't nod along to be polite, because Cormac didn't do anything to be polite. He just followed, and watched my hands when I pointed, and let the quiet do the work it did around him.
At the cellar hatch he crouched, ran a thumb along the hinge, and found the rust exactly where I'd told him it would be.
"Three days," he said. "You've been here three days and you found the hatch."
"Four."
"Four." He stood. He gave me the flat total attention he handed a thing when he'd decided it was worth the whole of his focus, which I was starting to understand he did not spend on much. "I found the hatch in a week. When I first did this house."
"You had a whole house to learn. I only had to break one."
"That's the answer of someone who's broken into places."
"That's the answer of someone who's had to get out of them."
He held that a second. Whatever he did with it happened somewhere I couldn't see, behind the face he kept like a closed door. Then he tipped his head toward the east lawn, the one direction I hadn't dragged him yet.
"Show me the blind spot. Then I'll fix all four before lunch, and you'll find me four more by Thursday, because you're that kind of trouble. I can already tell."
I should not have liked that. I marked that I liked it anyway, the way I was marking a lot of things about Cormac Harrington I didn't have a drawer for. I put it back where it couldn't get to my hands. Then I walked him out onto the wet grass to show him where his cameras lied.
The cold out there was clean and mean and smelled like the whole coast. I stood in the seam where the two arcs failed to meet and turned a slow circle inside the gap, the way I had the first time I felt it, and I watched him understand it in his body the way I'd understood it in mine. For a second we were just two people who saw the world in exits and angles, standing in the one place the machine couldn't watch, and neither of us said anything, and it wasn't uncomfortable.
Then he caught me watching him instead of the cameras, and I looked at the tree line like the tree line had asked me a question, and the back of my neck went warm for a reason that had nothing to do with the wind.
Get it together, I told myself. He's the wall. You've read the file. You know what he is.
The trouble was I'd started to suspect the file was thinner than the man.
Tiernan foundme at the kitchen table at noon with three of Cormac's four holes already patched, which meant Cormac had gone straight from the lawn to the work without a word, which was the most Cormac thing I could imagine.
