Page 8 of The Company We Keep

It satisfied his curiosity. And so the lives lost in confusion and struggle and pain there on the shore a block from where he slept every night were worth it to him. He needed to know what was under the surface of those waves he waded into every day.

It did not matter that all of the beautiful treasures in the net died because he would hold them in his head forever, the answer to a riddle.

He fostered a deep cognitive dissonance in order to get what he wanted.

There was no other way for him to know.

Dust showedup on Carrow's radar a year before the two ever met.

He'd heard the name a few times, heard it surface when Nick talked shop with buddies and didn't think that Carrow was listening. Hewaslistening, of course. He never stopped. And Nick Short pledged fealty for power, which always made Carrow nervous.

Nick was unstable. But he was the bomb guy. It was kind of fitting.

"What d'you got on Dustin Wrenshall?" Nick asked a buddy who had shown up at their back booth one night in August — some guy from the east coast.

Leta was talking to Carrow at the time. They were within earshot of the conversation. Guests made Carrow nervous and his partner knew it — so when he'd cut his eyes at the stranger, Leta had known immediately that Carrow was no longer listening to her. She adjusted several long braids, sighed, and began to talk softer so that Carrow could eavesdrop.

"What do you want to know?" Nick's friend asked.

"What's his story? He’s from your neck of the woods — right? He putting together a crew or what?"

"Strictly freelance from what I understand, and no interest in starting a crew or joining," his friend said. "Why — you worried Carrow's in the market for a new ballistics man?"

Nick Short woresideburns like some extra on a 70s throwback television show and an expression on his face that suggested he was perpetually unimpressed. Dust would never meet him. It was integral that he replaced Short, and so as Dust trained, “Abe” quietly plotted the best way to eliminate him from Carrow’s crew.

Agents at AIIB — the American Investigation and Intelligence Bureau — didn’t mind the nickname. Over the last half of the century, "Abe" became a term that was thrown around with affection at the bureau. It became the type of word a criminal formed his mouth around with a unique kind of disgust.

Dust wanted to be FBI, but that was only because he didn't know much about AIIB as a kid. He grew up on “X-Files” reruns — andthat, he thought, was exactly what he wanted to do. Not the paranormal part — he understood that was the schlocky hook of the show — but the boots-on-the-ground, trench coat-clad investigations. He fixed his sights on Dana Scully early and the character became his model: serious, capable, methodical in her pursuit of justice.

His first Honors Biology fetal pig dissection in middle school told him that he’d never grow up to be a Scully, though, calmly making incisions in dead bodies and examining them like a crime scene. The stink of formaldehyde seemed to get into his pores and he tasted it, even at dinnertime, as he moved neat bits of food to his mouth.

Still — he’d do something in justice. That was clear.

By the age of 16, Dustin was structuring his life around a career in justice, trying to understand what would make him the most valuable agent candidate.

To catch a criminal, you should think like a criminal, or so theteenager thought. He started easily enough, learning how to pick locks. Lock picking expanded to safe cracking. Safe cracking became security testing. By 18, Dust would enter a room and catalog the vulnerable points automatically.

That's what people did in books, after all. They trained their brains to approach everything with a certain framework. And so that was what Dust did. He etched the lines into his consciousness until they were so deep he couldn't escape them.

(Truly, Dust could not turn it off. When his grandmother — his closest relative, the only person from his childhood who he felt had understood him — lay sucking her last breaths in a nursing home bed, Dust found himself distracted by the blind spots in the room's monitoring system. His memory of his last moments with her were imbued with this, and he hated himself even as he did it. He stroked her hand and told her that he loved her, that she was loved, that she could go and rest now. At the same time, he silently made a list of the exits, where he would position himself in the room in a hostage or sniper situation, and where the most defensible spot in the building would likely be based on what he'd seen of it.

He chose to make these things a part of himself — and although he never looked back, he sometimes regretted that every piece of his experience was run through this context.)

As an agent, Dust attempted relationships. It hadn't been uncommon for trainees in D.C. to hook up — and there were even successful marriages that sprung from the classrooms there.

Common Abe lore said that you either dated another agent — because they could understand you in a way that noone else could — or you dated someone dim and loving, who wouldn't resent your mental absence and the months of overtime and the way that you would marry them but always be deeply committed to your work. There was no in between. You dated someone from Abe, you dated someone dim, or you didn't date at all. Anything else presented a liability.

There was a brief time when he arrived for training when Dust thought perhaps he was asexual. There was something off-putting about suddenly being surrounded by people who were smarter than him after spending so very much time being the smartest man in the room.

He got over the big-fish-in-a-small-pond syndrome when he met Gordon: beautiful, whip-smart, and — maybe most importantly — just as ambitious as Dust.

Gordon had no time for romance, and Dust was just relieved to find that he was attracted to another human being. They crashed together without exclusivity, without dates. They kissed and fucked and compared test scores.

Dust thought they would be together forever. They simplyworked, after all — and both of their needs were being met. Why ask for anything more or seek anything different?

Gordon had broken it off sharp and unexpected.

"Why?" Dust had demanded.

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