Page 9 of Travis
Home. Underground. Walls on every side. Temperature controlled, light controlled, sound controlled. Every variableaccounted for. The relief hit so fast and so hard it was almost nauseous, a full-body release that left me sagging against the headrest with my eyes closed.
I let myself have ten seconds of it, but no more so that I didn’t have to deal with Maude lecturing me. Then I got out of the vehicle and went downstairs.
“Post-mission sweep,” I said, moving through the control room toward the monitors.
“Running. Perimeter integrity confirmed. No breaches detected, electronic or physical. All sensors nominal.” A beat. “You have fourteen queued notifications from while you had me silenced. Would you like me to?—”
“Threat board only. Anything flagged?”
“Nothing flagged on the threat board.”
“Then it can wait.”
“There is one notification that I think you should?—”
“I said it can wait, Maude. Give me the vitals.”
“Your blood pressure is one-forty-two over ninety-one. Heart rate is ninety-six and declining. Cortisol levels are elevated but trending downward. You have what appears to be soft-tissue trauma to your left rib cage, a laceration inside your mouth, and a contusion along your left jaw that is already changing color in a way I’d describe as creative.”
“So I’m not dying. Yay.” Even though it felt like it.
“Correct. Now, if I could just mention?—”
“Save it. I’m heading to the medical bay.”
I pulled the jacket off in the bathroom adjoining the med bay. Then the vest, which came away from the tape with a sound that made my vision white out for a second. I gripped the edge of the sink until it passed.
The mirror showed me what I expected. The left side of my torso was a topographic map of damage—the old bruising from last Tuesday, yellow green at the edges where it was healing,overlaid with the fresh impact where the man’s shoulder had driven into me. The new bruise was already rising, dark and hot, spreading across the ribs where the tape had shifted out of alignment. My jaw had a mark that would be purple by morning.
I rinsed the cut inside my cheek with salt water. Retaped the ribs with steady hands that wanted to shake and weren’t allowed to. Applied a cold pack and held it in place with a compression wrap.
“Your cortisol levels are still elevated,” Maude said. “And I have a notification that probably shouldn’t wait?—”
“Is it a threat?”
“It is not technically a threat, but?—”
“Then it waits.”
“Travis.”
“What.”
A pause. Longer than her usual dramatic pauses. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was annoyed.
“Nothing,” she said. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“Done.”
“I’m sure everything will be fine. You can just get to my data whenever it suits you.”
There was something in her tone I couldn’t identify and didn’t have the bandwidth to decode. I filed it under Maude being Maude, and that I was at fault because I continually never reprogrammed her, and finished taping.
The pool was through the east corridor past the gym I used at odd hours, and the storage room where I kept the tactical gear I was too tired to properly clean and stow right now.
Tomorrow. I’d break it all down tomorrow. Tonight I needed the water.
I needed it the way I always did after a mission—with a desperation that bordered on physical hunger. Every step down the east corridor was a step closer to the one place where mybody stopped fighting me. Thirty feet of warm water in the dark, no sound, no light, nothing but the stillness and the slow unwinding of a nervous system that had been at war with itself for hours.
I reached the door to the pool enclosure. Pushed it open.
The light was already on.
I stopped in the doorway. Every nerve I’d just spent an hour trying to quiet went live again, a full-system alarm that locked my joints and sent my hand to the Glock I kept mounted under the hallway shelf outside the pool door.
Someone was in my pool.
Maude was so fucking fired.
