Page 53 of Carry on Wayward Son

“We never got anything actionable off it,” Rios said. “Nothing identifiable about either of them.”

Madden moved the cursor to the second file and looked at me. I nodded.

The second video loaded.

Better quality than the first. Less grain, steadier hand. The light was dimmer, but somehow the image was clearer, which meant whoever took this one was better equipped. Or cared more about what they were documenting.

Metal walls. The curved interior of a ship’s hold, the kind of space that swallowed sound and kept it.

I felt the world drop out from under me.

Not literally. I was still in my chair, still at the Sutter House with Koa at my feet and everyone I’d been working with arranged around me. I was still here. But another part of me had gone somewhere else entirely, pulled back by the image on the screen with a force I hadn’t prepared for. Because I had thought the years and the distance and the work I’d done would be enough to let me watch old footage on a TV screen in a warm house and not go anywhere.

I was wrong.

The stink came first. Not actually present, but my memory supplied it with complete fidelity. Saltwater and diesel and the cold of metal walls that had been closed for a long time before they were opened for this. The darkness of the corners where the light from above didn’t reach. The way sound moved in a space like that, absorbed and returned in ways that made distance impossible to gauge.

The figure on the screen was bound and gagged, dark hair tangled around her face, wrists behind her, pressed into the corner of the hold with the compression of a body trying to make itself as small as possible. Fifteen years old. Terrified in a way that went beyond expression into something purely physical, the body’s own accounting of what was happening to it.

Someone in the room spoke. I registered the sound without processing the words.

The camera angle. Narrow. Cutting off the left side of the hold entirely, the far corner invisible, the width of the space impossible to determine from what was shown.

“—never got anything actionable off of this one, either.”

My own voice, from what felt like a very long way away.

“This wasn’t the first video.”

Koa’s weight drove hard into my leg. A hundred pounds of dog pressing against my calf with the focused urgency of an animal whose one job had just activated, and the pressure of it pulled me back up through the layers and into the room. The living room. The TV screen. Everyone looking at me.

“What?” I said.

The silence was careful. Held.

Jace murmured my name.

“How do you know that?” Willa’s voice was low and steady, as if she was holding something very tight. “How do you know it wasn’t the first one?”

I played back what I’d heard myself say. Heard it again. Felt the room around me, all of them present, all of them watching, and understood that there was no version of an answer that didn’t require the truth. Every other explanation would unravel in seconds. I had just told them something that had no source except the thing I hadn’t told them.

Koa pressed harder. I dropped my hand to his head and held on.

Jace said my name again, just that, just once, just enough.

“Because I was there.”

Twenty-Seven

JACE

Nobody spoke.

We just sat with what she’d said hanging in the air.

Because I was there.

I’d known she’d been through something. I’d known it from the first night on the beach, from the way she held herself, from the scars and the reflexes and the nightmare in the storm and the dozens of small things I’d been filing away without quite naming. I’d told myself it was the right call to respect what I didn’t know and wait for what she was willing to give me.