Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Poe is happy Enley found someone he could trust. And he knows we love each other. He cares about us, and always jokes that if we have a kid we need to name it after him. I tell him constantly we can’t name a baby, ‘Asshole.’ Obviously I’m kidding. He’s one of my best friends, and since I started dating his sister… I feel like we’ve grown even closer.
The loft door opens. Juno comes in carrying a box of pastries from the bakery next to her apartment, and has been single-handedly keeping in business. She’s also carrying a baby car seat carrier. Arby, her daughter, is sound asleep under a pink blanket.
Arrow and Juno married last month right before Arby Kate Finn was born, and even though they’ve shared many sleepless nights, Arrow and Juno beam every time they talk about their daughter. They named her after Juno’s sister, Arby Kate. Which thank god they had a daughter and not a son because they planned on naming their son, Herbert Hoover Finn… which would have been ridiculous. I think they were joking, but thankfully we didn’t have to find out.
Juno sets the carrier and the box of pastries on the briefing table and announces, "These are for everyone, which means Gage gets two."
Gage materializes from somewhere. "I resent the implication that I’d take more than my share."
"You took four last Friday."
"I was carb-loading."
"For what?"
"For the emotional labor of working with Arrow."
Arrow, without looking up from his screen, extends one hand toward Gage in a gesture that somehow communicates both "give me a croissant" and "you're not wrong" simultaneously.
This is the loft. This is the crew. Pastries and bickering and the particular noise of people who love each other in the specific, abrasive, unconditional way that happens when you've bled together and eaten bad MREs together and sat around a table at a farmhouse and discovered that the thing you built out of grief is strong enough to hold the weight of joy.
Knight’s at his desk near the door. He's always near the door. But Lark is there today too, sitting in the chair beside him, working on something on her own laptop that isn't crew business. She started a security consulting firm with Orchid three months ago, leveraging Orchid's FBI connections and Lark's organizational skills into a legitimate business that advises companies on the kind of vulnerabilities that Lark knows about firsthand because she spent two weeks on the inside of one.
Knight's hand rests on the back of Lark's chair. Not on Lark. On the chair. The distinction matters because it's Knight, and Knight expresses affection through adjacency rather than contact.
Ozzy’s at the far workstation. There’s an orange skateboard stationed nearby. It’s either his or Salem’s. She’s been trying to teach everyone how to skate, but I always decline. I don’t need to break my legs. Ozzy’s gotten pretty good. Not as good as Salem, but he’s definitely better than anyone else in here.
I look around the room. The loft. The crew. This is my family. It’s where I’ve always been meant to be. Doing the work to bring the evil down.
Enley finishes the intercept configuration, and turns to me. The gold in her green eyes catches the corner light the way it's been catching light since the first morning in the cabin when I let myself look for three seconds and had to stop because three seconds was already too many.
I don't stop anymore. I look as long as I want. The distance has been retired permanently, replaced by a proximity that still surprises me in the small moments: her toothbrush next to mine in the apartment bathroom, her shoes by the door, the sound of her typing in the next room while I make coffee in the kitchen.
"The intercept is set," she says. "We'll have the first capture within the next tidal window. About six hours."
"Good work."
"I know." She says it the same way she said it in the cabin the first time I told her that.
I reach over and take her hand. In the loft. In front of the crew. In front of Poe, who sees and doesn't comment and takes a pastry from the box and walks back to the briefing table where Dean’s waiting with a case file that will become someone's rescue.
Enley's fingers close around mine. Warm. Steady. The hand that cracked encryption under fire and mapped criminal empires and held mine in the dark of a storage unit when the distance between us finally reached zero.
She squeezes once. I squeeze back.
Outside the loft windows, the city does what the city does: moves, builds, continues. Somewhere in it, people are in trouble. People are being hurt by systems that are designed to hurt them and protected by structures that are designed to protect the people doing the hurting. Somewhere in it, a sixteen-year-old is on a screen and a family is looking for her and the bureaucratic process for saving a life is slower than the process for destroying one.