Page 50 of Travis
“If they ever find out?—”
“What? I’ll lose my career?” Something flared in her face. “My career is a green badge and a cubicle and a supervisor whopats me on the head when I bring him intel that could save children’s lives. That’s not a career. That’s a waiting room.”
She held my eyes. “You’ve been doing this alone for eighteen months. No backup. No partner. No one watching your screens while you’re in the field. You come home and stitch yourself up in the dark and go back to your desk like it never happened.”
“It works.”
“It is killing you. Maude just told us your heart rate is twenty points higher than when you started. You’ve lost eleven pounds. You have scars that healed wrong because you wouldn’t let anyone help.” Her voice dropped. “I sat in your chair for two hours tonight not knowing if you were alive. I’m not doing that again.”
I looked at her. At the suture thread still on her fingers. Eyes red from hours of staring at screens. Every part of her aimed at me with the same precision she brought to her data.
“You’re not going in the field,” I said.
“We can discuss parameters later.”
“That’s not a parameter. It’s a condition.”
“Fine. But I’m on comms. I’m on screens. I’m part of the operation. Not sitting in the guest room wondering if tonight’s the night you don’t come back.”
The room settled. I looked at the screens, at the feeds cycling through corridors I’d been running alone for eighteen months. At the med kit open on the desk. At the shirt cut in pieces on the floor.
At Sera, standing in front of me in a room I’d built my life around, refusing to leave it.
“Okay,” I said.
She nodded once. Then she reached for a clean gauze pad and pressed it over the wound on my shoulder and taped it down with careful hands. The same hands that had held the needle. The same hands that had shaken and then steadied.
I let her.
For the first time in eighteen months, someone was taking care of the damage, and I didn’t want to stop her.
