Page 74 of Crosscurrent

She sighed. "I can't, Gabe. I don't know where my life is going yet. I'm not ready to say more than that."

"It's been four months." He heard the edge in his own voice, but he couldn't quite sand it down. "I'm not asking for your whole history. I'm asking for the table of contents. Haven't I earned that much?"

"It's not about earning." Then, quieter. "It's not about you."

"That's usually what people say when it is."

She stared out her window at the Coast Range going by. Whatever was happening on her face, she'd angled it where he couldn't read it — which, with Cara, was never an accident.

So that was the answer. Maybe the feelings that had hit him like a falling building had registered, on her side, as weather. He was fifteen years out of practice at this and apparently it showed.

Nothing more he could do about this, about the feelings, either his or hers.

So he drove harder, weaving in and out of traffic as if he was still running lights and siren. If he couldn’t think about Cara, he’d think about the road ahead. And Norway.

Skye's comlink clicked on. "The annoying package and I are safe and through security. He's at the bookstore, correcting their shelving of the fiction section. I'm getting a kale smoothie and a magazine."

The comlink clicked off. Gabe looked at Cara. Cara looked back at him.

The laugh came up out of both of them at the same moment.

Gasping for air, Cara wiped her eyes. "A kale smoothie."

He snorted. "You can’t make this stuff up."

“Just dropped off David and Sophie at the terminal,” Tom interjected. “Reagan and I’ll meet you all at the private terminal.”

“Copy that.” Wade responded before either Gabe or Cara. “I’m less than twenty minutes out. Lost my tail ten miles back. Save me a window seat.”

“Good luck, everyone,” Reagan added.

“We don’t need luck.” Wade responded. “Proverbs twenty-one. The horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord.”

Tom: “You comparing us to horses?”

“Depends,” Wade said. “Did you pack snacks?”

Cara smiled, shaking her head hard enough to send a silky wave of dark hair along the side of her face. Gabe breathed easier. This connection worked. He’d just have to figure out how not to want more. How not to push.

Two more exits to the airport now. It looked like they’d all make it onto their respective planes.

Nine time zones ahead, a conference hall at the top of the world was setting out name badges — one of them for a medieval historian carrying a notebook everyone wanted, with a team Neptune couldn't see. No badge in Gabe's pocket. No backup coming. Just these people, and whatever was waiting in the Arctic.

"Lord," he said, out loud, because some things deserved saying out loud. "Thank You. All of them, safe."

"Please, Lord, get us the rest of the way," Cara added quietly.

“Amen.” He took the exit.

The easy part was over.

27

Cara's watch said it was almost midnight. The sun disagreed.

The pale, yellow orb hung over the Longyearbyen Harbor, flat and shadowless, and her body, which had crossed nine time zones on a borrowed jet and should have been unconscious, kept reading the light as a reason to stay alert. Everyone said the Arctic summer did this. Knowing it didn't help. Some part of her brainstem was standing watch against a noon that never came.

They'd landed hours ago. The commercial party had landed hours before that and dispersed on contact, Owen into the conference hotel under his own gloriously real name, with Wade in the adjoining room behind a connecting door Reagan had requested weeks ago. David and Sophie took the room across the hall, checked in as exactly what they were: working journalists with credentials nobody had to forge. The private party took the guesthouse Reagan had booked under clean names, including Skye, who had argued for a room nearer Owen and been outvoted on the simple grounds that Neptune wanted her too.