“Yes,” he said.
“It’s that every morning I wake up and wonder if, that day, something good will finally come through. Something really good, that we could use to help the whole world. Why shouldn’t that happen? We’ve seen all kinds of things that could’ve hurt the whole world. And we’ve seen small-scale good things. Like the Medic. Any emergency room could do miracles with it, but you could only give it to one of them. And how would you explain where it came from? It’s always like that with the good ones. Did you ever hear of an entity called a Poker Chip?”
“No.”
“It’s bright red, about the size of a quarter. Not quite unique but very rare—only five of them have egressed over the years. You pick one up and it attaches itself to your skin by tendril extensions you can barely see. Scary at first, so we tested them on animals. It took a while to realize that their function is to slow down aging. They cut the speed to about one third, and they work on everything—bugs, mice, rats. So I guess if any five people really wanted to, they could wear them twenty-four/seven and outlive all their friends. Nice, right?”
She opened her eyes and met his.
“I have to believe,” she said, “that someday, something will come through that’s good on the scale of the world. Something we’d pop the champagne corks and break into tears over. Something history would pivot on. That thought gets me through all the rest of it.”
A silence passed. Not quite as awkward as before.
Paige looked down at her hands in her lap.
“I understand that there’s something you really, really cannot tell me,” she said. “And I understand that it has nothing to do with how you feel about me. Because I know how you feel about me. Yesterday morning, when I stepped out of Finn’s office onto that girder and saw you standing five feet away, it didn’t surprise me in the least. I hadn’t expected it—but when I saw you, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world that you’d be standing there. That you’d be there for me. So I know. And I understand . . . even if I don’t understand. That’s an ability the Breach trained into me a long time ago. Getting it without getting it. I get that whatever this is, it just is, and that you wish like hell it wasn’t.”
She looked at him again, and he held her stare.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
She managed something like a smile. He tried to return it. Then he sank into the couch again, eyes on the ceiling.
He heard her stand, and then she was there, climbing onto the couch, squeezing into the space between him and the backrest. Neither of them spoke. A second later they were pressed together as tightly as they could get, his mouth on her forehead, kissing it. Everything about her filling up his world, warm and soft and vulnerable and alive, her breath against his throat, her arms tense as she held on.
His sense of time was gone. This close to her, he could lose hours and not notice. That in itself was excruciating, because this little time was all they were ever going to get. He could already feel it going away.
He thought of what she’d said earlier, about seeing him on top of the office building in D.C. He thought of how close he’d come to not being there. A minute’s delay would’ve done it. The timing had actually been closer than that, even. He and Bethany had been maybe ten seconds from opening their own iris when Finn opened his. The gunfight—if it could be called that—wouldn’t have played out half as favorably without that turn of events. Without the element of surprise, there would’ve been real crossfire, and Paige would have been stuck without cover at the center of it. Her chances would’ve been close to zero.
He kissed her hairline. Held her tighter. Tried not to think of how it might’ve gone. Shit happened, that was all. Some of it had to be good.
He shut his eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.
Five seconds later he opened them again.
A thought had come to him. A memory. Sharp and insistent. Something that’d happened just after Finn opened the iris from his office. Paige had come out, but not right away. First Finn himself had come to the opening and stared out through it—Travis had stayed beyond his peripheral vision. Then the guy had ordered Paige out onto the beam. That part Travis remembered clearly. But there was something else. Something before that. Something Finn had whispered right at the beginning, seconds after stepping up to the iris. Travis had been just close enough to hear it. It’d escaped his notice at the time—there’d been more pressing things to focus on—and it hadn’t sounded like anything important.
Now he tried to call it back, because something told him it was important, after all.
What’d Finn said?
He thought about it.
Seconds passed.
He remembered.
“Holy shit,” Travis said.
Paige stirred in his arms, tilted her head back to meet his eyes.