Page 73 of Travis
I didn't stop typing. "I'm aware of what time it is. I’m going out. There's a transport in the northern corridor. I’m going to hit it.”
“That’s not the type of transport you normally target. Plus, it will be daytime.”
“Yeah, well, I’m targeting it this time. And you always say I need more Vitamin D.” I grabbed a comms unit and placed it in my ear. I didn’t want to take a chance on Maude’s talking waking Sera up. “I’m going Maude.”
“This mission is ill-advised. You have not studied the route with the normal thoroughness we attempt. There are too many unknown variables. You have no back-up, and Sera won’t be on comms.”
“I planned and executed every mission solo before Sera got here,” I said. "Prep the mobile unit.”
Silence. Not the processing kind. The kind that meant she was choosing her next words and knew they wouldn't work but was going to say them anyway.
"She's upstairs in your bed." Maude's voice was quieter now. Not the dry clinical tone or the sardonic pushback I was used to. Something underneath both of those things that I'd never programmed, and she'd developed on her own. "She is going to wake up, and you are not going to be there. And she is not going to check the mission logs to figure out what happened. She's going to look at the empty side of the bed, and she's going to have all the information she needs."
"She'll understand."
"Yes. She will. That's the problem."
The control room hummed around me. Servers processing, feeds cycling, the low electrical pulse of a system I'd built to keep the world at a distance I could manage. Every piece of it designed by me, for me, calibrated to the precise specifications of a man who operated alone.
"Open the garage," I said.
The gear room was cold. It was always cold, a function of its position at the far end of the underground level where the ventilation ran hardest. I moved through the ritual on autopilot. Vest off the hook. Plates checked by feel, fingers along the edges. Straps buckled, left side first, then right.
I loaded the Glock. Magazine seated, spares in the vest pockets. My hands were steady. Completely, infuriatingly steady. No tremor in my fingers, no fine vibration running through my wrists. My body was rested and calm and my skin was clear, and I wanted the hives.
I wanted the tremors. I wanted the familiar suffering that told me I was doing something hard, paying something real, earning the right to exist in the space between the man I was and the man I should have been.
The garage was dark. I got in the car and started the engine and the gate opened ahead of me. The night air came through the window, and I waited for the hives to start. The familiar burn under my skin, the body's protest, the physical evidence that what I was doing cost me something.
They came late. Miles later than usual, and when they finally surfaced, they were mild. A faint prickling across my forearms that would have been invisible in decent light.
My body was still running on whatever Sera had given it. The calm she'd poured into my system through proximity and touch and the simple act of being present. Even now, driving awayfrom her, the effect lingered like warmth from a fire that had been banked but not extinguished.
Even that felt like betrayal. The punishment was supposed to work. The body was supposed to rebel. That was the contract. I suffered, and it was payment for existing.
I drove north on a highway I hadn't analyzed, toward a target I hadn't vetted, on a route I hadn't run through Sera's model. No partner on comms. No tiered intercept positioning. No fallback plan.
No voice in my ear telling me to come home.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew it was reckless and I knew it was selfish and I knew that Maude was right about every single thing she'd said. Sera was going to wake up in my bed and reach for me and find cold sheets, and she was going to understand, with the same precision she brought to every data set she'd ever touched, exactly what that meant.
I pressed the accelerator and the dark highway opened in front of me, and I drove into it alone because alone was what I deserved, and if some part of me knew that was broken thinking, the rest of me didn't care.
