Page 63 of Travis
Chapter 16
Travis
The gate opened on approach, and I pulled through, and for the first time in eighteen months, the drive home hadn't been the worst part of the mission.
It had gone clean. The courier had deviated at mile six, and Sera had caught it before I did. Her voice in my earpiece, calm and precise: "He's not taking the turn. Frontage road, half a mile ahead. Cut through behind the grain elevator and you'll beat him there."
I'd made it with forty seconds to spare. Found two kids in the back of the van. Two boys, maybe six and eight. I’d dropped them in front of a twenty-four-hour urgent care. Same protocol, clean.
Without Sera's call, the whole thing would have been blown. I'd have been sitting at the wrong intercept point when the van went past. Even Maude with all her capabilities couldn’t replace the instinct Sera brought to the table. That instinct had saved two kids tonight.
But that wasn't what I kept coming back to as I cut the engine. What I kept coming back to was my body.
The hives were there, but muted. Pink instead of the angry red welts that usually lasted hours. I kept pushing up my sleeves at stoplights to confirm what my skin was telling me, because my skin had never told me this before.
The tremors were barely registering. A faint vibration in my fingers when I gripped the wheel, nothing like the full-body shaking that normally owned me from mile thirty until I was back underground with the door locked.
I flexed my hands on the steering wheel. Opened them. Closed them.
Steady.
That had never happened. And the only variable that was different? Sera.
All night, Sera's voice had been in my ear. Not just relaying data.Present. A human tether, steady and constant, giving my nervous system something to anchor to besides its own panic. The agoraphobia had still come, but it had hit a body that wasn't alone, and the difference was written across my skin in hives that were already fading even as I pulled into the garage.
"Your post-mission biometrics are notably improved," Maude said. "Across the board. I'd give you the numbers, but you'd just ignore them."
I parked and cut the engine. My body was running its post-mission inventory the way it always did, and the numbers kept coming back wrong. Wrong in the right direction. My ribs ached where the asshole courier had slammed me into the side of the van, but that was standard. Everything else was better than standard.
I should have felt good about that. But somehow I felt…off.
Sera was in the control room when I came through the door. On her feet before I was fully inside. She'd been on commsfor every minute of the mission, had heard the extraction, the urgent care drop, the drive home. She already knew the kids were safe. She already knew I was in one piece.
But knowing and seeing were different things, and the look on her face when I walked through the door was the look of a woman who hadn't fully believed any of it until I was standing in front of her.
“You’re okay.” Her breath left her body in a little sigh and she crossed the room toward me, arms already lifting for a hug.
"That route call," I said, stopping her short. "If you hadn't caught the deviation, we'd have lost them."
She halted her movement toward me. Let her arms drop. "I saw the speed change on the feed and cross-referenced it against the route options. The frontage road was the only logical alternative given his heading."
"It was the right call."
She nodded. Not modesty. Accuracy. "And next time, I think we should build in a third intercept option. A fallback position in case the deviation goes further than one alternate route. I was already running the numbers while you were in transit, and if we tier the positioning based on probability brackets instead of a single predicted route, your coverage area triples."
Next time. Tiered positioning. Probability brackets.She was building the next mission in her head, and the way she said it was easy. Natural. Like this was her life now.
I turned away from her and pulled off my jacket. I’d come straight here rather than go to the gear room like I always did.
Because I knew she’d be here. I’d deviated from my own system in order to see her first. That was fucking unacceptable.
The bruise where the van door had caught me lit up as I moved, and I welcomed the minor pain. It gave me somewhere to put my attention that wasn't her voice planning our future.
The missions had always cost me. Not in some abstract sense. In a concrete, physical, measurable one. Hives that covered my arms for hours. Tremors that made my hands useless. The accumulated damage of fighting people in the dark while my nervous system tried to shut me down.
That was the way it worked. Every time. The cost was the cost, and I'd never questioned whether it was right because I'd never needed to.
I stood by the desk and waited for the crash that always came after a mission. The full-system collapse that put me on the floor or in the pool or bent over the bathroom sink with my hands braced on cold porcelain. Eighteen months of missions, and the aftermath had never once failed to collect what it was owed.
