Take and Give

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Lee had adopted the soldier pose again, hands behind her back. She nodded to him. Gratitude? He nodded back. She stepped past them, head down, toward the tailgate.

  Austin hid his face in Violet’s soft golden hair. She could be dead now. One slip with the gun. One moment’s delay from Lee. One decision from that animal—wanting to know what killing felt like, wanting to see some blood. Violet’s blood. Spilled out of her until she was gone.

  It hadn’t happened. Wouldn’t. He wouldn’t allow it. He’d hold her for the rest of their lives, until their skin wrinkled and their hair turned gray.

  23

  The truck bed smelled like metal and sweat. Before Lee’s eyes could adjust to the dimness, a hand curled around her arm. She jerked backward and nearly fell off the tailgate.

  “Lee.”

  She skimmed her hands over the air and found his shoulder, then his arm. He’d been crawling forward on hands and knees, or one knee, more likely. His breaths labored.

  “Lie down,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “Marcus, you need to—”

  “Tell me.”

  She did, omitting the panic attack. Even without that detail, he asked three times if she and Violet were okay. He didn’t crawl back to the mattress until she’d finished the story. As he settled, a coughing spell racked him. They came more frequently now. A good sign where his prognosis was concerned, but the effort and pain drained him. Lee propped him forward with one arm, an easier position from which to expel the phlegm from his lungs. When he could draw a full breath, she eased him back to the pillows.

  For a minute, he could manage only a rasping “Thanks.” Then he met her eyes. “You’re right about the truck. We can’t drive it again. They’ll run the plates and put everything together.”

  “And you can’t walk.” As if any of them could walk to Texas.

  “I can make it for a while.”

  “Don’t. Please. I need—” Her voice splintered.

  “Lee?”

  “You can’t help me form a strategy if you won’t factor your condition into the scenario.”

  This silence was the new, jagged one. It sawed through the reserves she had left. She turned her head and pushed away from him. She clasped her hands together. Holding in.

  “I’ll discuss this with Austin and Violet and inform you of the plan.”

  Her feet hit the cement as he said, “Wait.”

  She turned back. “Yes?”

  The word wasn’t supposed to bite. But shock and the flashback had worn off, and now all the things she should have done pounded in her brain. Pull half the money out of the envelope and leave her bag in the truck. Drive after the man. Something. She could only move forward, though, not back, and if Marcus couldn’t be honest enough with himself to help her, then she had to do this without him.

  “Don’t …” he said.

  Don’t what? She waited, but he was quiet. What did Jason Mayweather do to your words? He’d never had many to begin with, but this … She pushed away everything but the present juggernaut and scooted back into the truck.

  “I don’t know what to do, Marcus. We have nothing.”

  “I know.” Another, different silence followed, not a wall but a cracked door. “How much is left?”

  Realistic focus on the physical plight. Exactly what she needed. “I believe Austin has around five hundred dollars.”

  He closed his eyes a moment.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The faster you can move, the better chance you have.”

  “You mean … go on without you?”

  “You won’t make it with me.”

  “That is the most absurd—”

  “When you had … resources …” He coughed. “I lowered them. Now you’ve got nothing. So I’ll put you in the red.”

  “Marcus, we all consume resources.”

  “But you each give things back.”

  A slow pressure built in her chest. She was going to scream at him. Instead, her words emerged on a whisper. “You idiot.”

  Confusion gathered between his eyes. “It’s the truth.”

  “What do you think I’m doing right now? Giving you an opportunity to contribute. Asking for strategy assistance from the man who coordinated the efforts of an entire resistance organization. Asking for … for …”

  For you to anchor me. As you always do.

  She drew her knees up. “Would you leave me?”

  He growled.

  “All right, that’s settled.”

  “Lee, I—” He coughed once, twice, couldn’t stop. His right arm pressed against his ribs. Lee held him forward again, and by the time this spell ended, he was limp in her arms. He moaned as she lowered him.

  “Shh,” she said. “Easy.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away.

  “Marcus?”

  No response. Not even a quiet thanks, his mantra for the last few days, which she noticed only in its absence. She leaned nearer, circled his wrist with her fingers, and Marcus jerked his arm.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  The silence shouted the answer. Marcus couldn’t do anything. It was an absurd overstatement, yet she knew his thoughts as if he spoke them. In fact, she should have seen long before now. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t sit upright. Until today, he couldn’t feed himself. Yet his own list wouldn’t stop there. She could imagine it written out in his block handwriting.

  Can’t drive. Can’t help. Can’t protect.

  And the rest of the list, unrolling like a scroll, because Marcus would be aware of every small thing his body was incapable of. He would hate every disability. No, more than that, he would be …

  “Marcus, look at me,” she said.

  He turned his head to face her, and even in the dimness, with the floodlight sneaking in the open tailgate, the flush in his cheeks was obvious. Yes, she should have known. She’d seen the same reaction so many times, but on a smaller scale. Attempting to treat lacerations on his own, until she made him promise to call her anytime he bled for longer than ten minutes. Fully using his hands while they healed from his latest work injury and ignoring pain any logical person would consider the body’s warning sign. Slicing the Constabulary tracker from his own back and intending to dress it himself (how, Lee still didn’t know) until Aubrey Weston intervened by calling her.

  But he couldn’t push through it now, this degree of physical incapacitation. Again she saw Austin standing over him, Marcus’s hunched posture in the tub. Humiliated. Ashamed.

  “You’re mending,” Lee said. “In time, you’ll be whole again.”

  His mouth quivered. “I don’t know.”

  “You will. But that’s irrelevant.”

  His stare was as loud as any words. It’s not irrelevant. It’s the whole point.

  “Listen to me. If you were in a coma right now, or you had lost your four limbs, or you were deaf and blind and wheelchair-bound—you would not cease to be yourself.”

  He stiffened against the pillows. Yeah, I would, Lee.

  “No,” she said. “You would be Marcus. And I would not leave you.”

  His hands curled. Lee grasped his wrist and sat for a while, letting his pulse beat against her fingers. Then she took a deep breath—I can do this—felt again his wet handprint on her back. She slid her fingers along his hand until he opened it. She nestled her hand inside his, and he gripped it like a man in the dark who’d been offered a guide into the light.

  24

  You wouldn’t expect a town like Vinita, Oklahoma, to be crawling with law enforcement. But on his first pass down Main Street, or whatever it was called, Austin passed three Constabulary squad cars in less than two miles. One was headed the o
ther direction. One made a left in front of him at a traffic light that didn’t give the agent the right of way. One sat in the parking lot of Edie’s BBQ Catfish. (Hopefully, those two weren’t served together.) Technically, the agents in those cars were still his colleagues, yet all three sightings quickened his pulse. As if he were a fugitive now. Well. Yeah.

  What had happened to his life in the last five days?

  At the sight of the first gray car with its green light bar, Violet’s face blanched and stayed that way. A low flame ignited inside Austin. She shouldn’t have to be afraid. Ever.

  He left his three charges at the first motel he spotted—a Super 8 that looked like it had been there at least several decades. His insides continued to simmer as he abandoned the truck in some woods near the locked gate of North Park. As he tossed the license plate into a drainage ditch. As he walked back to the Super 8.

  He walked east for a while, hit North Wilson, and made a left toward the motel. Most of the detached buildings were one story. Some of the weather-stained brick storefronts, with parallel parking the only visible option, had been built a little taller. On the whole, the town wasn’t rundown so much as frozen in time. Austin stripped off his jacket and carried it over his arm. How did it get so warm? They’d only driven two hours south, and it had to be sixty degrees here. At midnight.

  That, or the fury was an actual fire, pushing up his body temperature. A large part of him still harbored a white-hot desire to kill the guy that had held a gun to Violet’s neck.

  He ought to get hold of himself before he faced her again. He slowed his pace and reached in his mind for the green coat. It hung right there, on the wall peg in the mud room, in the house on Chestnut Lane, the house they’d brought Esther home to when she was born. Austin imagined shoving his arms into the sleeves. Weird thing about that memory—he could adapt it, somewhat. The coat was the same, but his arms weren’t stubby second-grader arms. He stayed in his adult body when he put on the coat, and it fit him just as well, like a garment from a fairy tale.

  His heartbeat slowed as he made another left, down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Two miles from the motel. A million from Texas, from the ability to reassemble his cell phone and let Esther and Olivia know he was okay and would be home … When?

  Once they made it over the border—because they had to, no if allowed—Violet might want to stay with Lee and Marcus. Letting Austin hold her once, under extreme stress, didn’t mean she was ready to let him back into her life. Much less follow him wherever he was going next, wherever that was.

  He sighed and picked up his stride. Better get back. He passed a Sunoco, a few family-style restaurants, and a one-story, brown brick church—First Paradiso Fellowship of Believers. Interesting. There didn’t seem to be a Second Paradiso. No wonder the names were getting rehashed, though. You could only invent so many synonyms for Happy Place.

  A car pulled closer, on his right, doing about fifteen miles an hour. It didn’t pass him. Odd. Behind him, a window rolled down with a mechanical whir.

  “You lost?”

  Austin swiveled to face the male voice, carefree with a hint of twang, and his stomach knotted. Constabulary.

  “Just walking.”

  “Kind of late for that.” The agent leaned out the window, and a flickering streetlight reflected on his bald head. “Not from around here, huh?”

  Well, that didn’t take long. “Michigan. Here visiting family.”

  “In Vinita?”

  Austin’s scalp prickled. None of this was a con-cop’s jurisdiction. The guy shouldn’t be asking. He shook his head and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, allowing curiosity to show but not alarm.

  “Shawnee. I’ve still got a few hours to drive, but I was getting tired.”

  “Scared of flying?”

  Okay, really, this guy had crossed the line. Austin shook his head and clamped his jaw. He had a whole story—sick relative, going to be spending a month or more—but he shouldn’t have to tell it. He’d threatened no one.

  “I’m not a terrorist.” Violet’s voice flashed through his head. She must feel this way all the time. As if her society was backing her into a jail cell for no tangible reason.

  The agent leaned a muscular arm in the window. “If you’re that wiped out, I’d expect you in bed by now.”

  He wasn’t a kid with a curfew, dang it. But he didn’t blink, didn’t pause. He quirked a self-deprecating smile. “Insomnia. Have to walk to help me unwind, if I’ve been driving too long.”

  “Two miles in one direction?”

  “Nah … wait, did I walk that far?”

  “If you’re at the Super 8, you sure did.”

  He gave a short laugh. “I must be more wired than I thought.”

  “Must be.”

  Distant traffic broke up the silence, along with a chattering group of teen girls emerging from the little movie theater across the street.

  “Are you a Christian?” the agent said.

  Austin froze. Technically, the question was perfectly legal. But Constabulary didn’t simply walk up to random pedestrians and ask without evidence. It would be like searching without a warrant. We can do that too. But they didn’t. That was the point.

  The man’s gaze drilled into him.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You seem nervous.”

  No flashing the badge. Invisibility was more important now than ever, and a twenty-two-year-old Constabulary agent might be as exceptional in Oklahoma as in Illinois. Plus, the longer he delayed, the more suspicious it would be if he did have to reveal his occupation.

  “I wouldn’t say nervous.” Somehow he sounded calm, even bored. “Wired, sure, like I said. Although I don’t think Constabulary agents in Michigan poll random people like this.”

  “Poll?” The agent laughed, thumped his palm on the window frame. “Michigan must be a wishy-washy state, just like I’ve heard. You get on back to your room and get some sleep now.”

  Austin nodded and resumed walking, his heartbeat like a double bass drum. The agent’s car coasted along behind him for a whole block before turning down another street. Austin broke into a jog. He had to warn all of them, as if it would change anything. He knew only one sure thing about Marcus Brenner. The man would have said yes to that last question.

  So would Violet.

  25

  “We can’t steal a car.”

  If Violet’s volume increased any further, Lee would have to remind her that hotel walls were essentially paper.

  Austin leaned against one of said walls and rolled a can of peanuts between his hands. “Sure we can, I just told you. I haven’t hot-wired anything since high school, but once you know how, you know how. I’m not going to blow up or—”

  “That’s not why we can’t.” Violet pulled her feet up to sit cross-legged at the foot of Marcus’s bed, the only bed. She swiveled to face him. “Come on, Marcus. You do the right thing, I know you do. From experience.”

  Marcus didn’t cringe away from Violet’s invasion of his space, simply studied her. “This isn’t the same.”

  The same as setting Violet free last summer, despite her status at the time as a Constabulary spy, because the alternative was kidnapping. Marcus was right. Their current situation robbed someone of an object, not a choice.

  “Close enough,” Violet said. “It’s doing something wrong to get what you want.”

  “We don’t want a car.” Austin juggled the peanut can back and forth, low in front of his body. “We need one.”

  “Good grief, Austin, you’re a cop.”

  “Theft isn’t my jurisdiction.”

  Violet marched into his space and took the can. “Are you serious?”

  “If we’re talking about what I should be doing according to the oath I took—you really don’t want to go there.”

  The
y stood too close, matching glares and wills, the silence a wick that sparked toward detonation. Lee uncurled from her position in the stuffed chair and set her feet on the floor. Business at hand. No more, no less.

  “All right,” she said. “We need a vehicle, and we don’t have the means to purchase one.”

  Austin shrugged. “I don’t understand why we’re still debating it.”

  Neither did she. If their method was democracy, Violet had already lost. Lee nodded to Austin. “Do it.”

  Violet stared at Marcus, who met her eyes but said nothing. After a moment, she turned her back to all of them, ducked her head, then squared her shoulders, and headed for the door.

  Austin pushed away from the wall. “Where’re you going?”

  Violet spoke without facing them. “The hallway. The vending machine, I don’t know. Look, I’m not going to pull a Khloe. Obviously, I’m coming with you, whether it’s in a stolen car or not. But I need to … think about this and talk to Jesus for a little bit.”

  Austin swiped a key card from the table and pressed it into her hand. The door shut after her with a quiet click.

  He tossed the peanut can in his hand and caught it. “She needs to stop talking about Jesus.”

  Marcus didn’t move from against his pillows, but his glare emanated heat across the room.

  “Jesus is legal,” Lee said.

  “Her version obviously isn’t if you listen to her talk about Him for more than thirty seconds.”

  “You have?”

  “A road trip means a lot of conversation, and she trusts me. But I think she’d say the same things to someone she didn’t trust. One more reason to get out of here, especially with Agent Baldy patrolling the streets.”

  Yes. Time to act. Lee pressed her palms to the arms of the chair. “Find the most dilapidated car you can and hotwire it.”

  “No.” Marcus flexed and stretched his good leg. “It might be uninsured and the only car they have. Find something newer.”

  “Am I doing this now?” Austin was already halfway to the door.

  “Better than broad daylight.”