Page 7 of Thorne
Forty minutes. The desert outside makes no sound. She shifts on the chair. Weight redistribution. Nothing I'd call discomfort except she's been in Phoenix's holding cell for days, and the chair is a folding camp chair with no padding. I watch her shift the way I watch everything: cataloging, filing, noting.
She settles. Goes still again.
She tries again an hour later to speak.
"I—"
"I said don't." I set the barrel down. Look at her directly for the first time since I pointed at the chair. "You don't speak unless I ask you a direct question. You don't make conversation. You have no rights in this tent. You have one purpose, and it isn't talking."
She holds my gaze. Nods once.
I go back to the weapon.
The desert light outside the canvas shifts—pre-dawn gray going pale, the specific quality of a Nevada morning that has no warmth in it yet. I've reassembled the Glock three times. My hands don't need to think about it. That's the problem.
When my hands don't need to think, everything else runs unchecked.
What Stratton said in the control tower. Lily was in the CHOP trial, which means she's carrying ML-273.
I don't know what that means. I've been running the math on what that means since the helicopter—since before thehelicopter. My blood went cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
There's a clock I can't see, running on a mechanism I don't understand, ticking toward an outcome I refuse to picture. Because the moment I picture it, I stop being functional. And I can't afford to stop being functional.
Lily needs me.
Everything else is noise.
As for Stratton, she's sitting six feet away.
Close enough that I'm aware of her without looking. The shift of fabric when she moves. The quiet cadence of her breathing. The particular kind of stillness she carries with her—controlled, deliberate, like she's decided long ago that fear is a luxury she can't afford.
I keep my attention on the Glock, once again in pieces on the table.
But awareness doesn't care where I put my eyes.
It lives lower. Deeper.
A tight, volatile pressure sits under my ribs.
Part of me wants to cross the space between us and wrap my hands around her throat—this time not stopping until that steady pulse finally breaks. Until the calm in her eyes disappears. Until the woman who helped build Phoenix is nothing but a solved problem.
That impulse makes perfect sense.
The other one doesn't.
The other one is quieter.
Meaner.
Insidious.
It looks at the same pulse under her skin and imagines something entirely different. My grip tightening not to end her, but to force that composure to fracture. To make her react. Totake control of every breath she pulls into her lungs and every thought that passes through her head.
The instinct is ugly. Primitive.
Possession instead of execution.
I shut the slide back onto the frame harder than necessary.
