Page 69 of The Hard Way

“It wasn’t planned, what I did,” he said suddenly. “During the escape, I mean. It’s just that we’d gotten really far. It had taken months of planning and loosening the joints of our cage. We had a helper on the outside, a ride. We had drugged the guards. It was our one and only chance.”

I stayed extra still as he spoke, outlining the plan. Explaining the unthinkable conditions, the way Mahfoud the Sadist was breaking the men that Odin had fought alongside. The way he’d been going further and further. The political conditions had evolved to where they could never be let free; Odin felt sure the clock was ticking. That Mahfoud was breaking them for sport. The punishments were getting more random. One of his men had killed himself by drinking drain cleaner, unable to bear going back in the hole.

“We were out of our cells, and we came upon a gate. This gate, it was new. Not in the blueprints we’d acquired. Not in the circuitry diagram. A new gate. Computerized. There was a code to it, and one guard had it. This man, he was one of the better guards, a family man, a man we didn’t want to hurt. But he wouldn’t tell us the code.”

He was silent a while, studying the view, all lime green and candy blue. He explained about the viciousness of the war. I didn’t know what war it was. Odin was from Morocco, but he had family in Algiers. I didn’t interrupt to ask. And really, war is war.

“This man, he knew he’d die if he told it. I had to make him tell. You can’t believe the ways I made him hurt. A few of my men wanted me to stop, but we were dead if I stopped. There was no good option. The things I did to this man to get us that code…it cut deep. It cut in a way you cannot understand.”

I brushed my fingers over the furrow in his brow.

“Even my men tried to stop me. But we had to go forward.”

“And you took the darkness into yourself. All into yourself.”

“Don’t make it sound heroic. It was at that moment I understood that I could leave myself. People who have near-death experiences often talk of leaving themselves, and glimpsing the beautiful place beyond. The light. The sense of oneness. Of connection.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“I left myself, too, but it was not beautiful. I pressed the blade into him, slowly, painfully, over and over. I know how to make a man hurt without killing him, Ice. I would die to keep you from knowing this kind of pain I inflicted on this man. With every cut, I cut myself off from my heart and life and little bit more as I looked into his brown eyes. One little broken vein toward the inside part. Wrinkles here.” He touched his face. Like the face of the dying man was inside his. “I met his gaze, I knew that he saw me leave. It was a terrible kind of intimacy, because he knew—he knew it all. Nobody will know me as he did just then. I became something other.”

I took his hand. “You’re not cut off from your heart now.”

He said nothing. Did he not believe it? I looked down at our hands. His large hand, olive-skinned, lighter on the knuckles and the scars. My hand, small and pale.

“I joined up with ZOX after that. They had many uses for a man like me.”

“You’re not that man anymore. That man in that escape.”

“I’m very much still that man.”

I guess he believed it. That he was still there. “You know what the one thing you didn’t tell me about that prison just now? You didn’t tell me what your men would’ve suffered if you’d turned back. If you hadn’t forced yourself to get the code from the guard. You sit there telling me this tale, making no excuses. You’re taking in the darkness for yourself even now. That’s a kind of love.”

“There’s no love in what I’m telling you.”

“Your men tried to stop you. But they would’ve been killed if they’d stayed. Being so far along in the escape. Right?”

He just shrugged.

“I think you wanted them to try and stop you,” I said. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. It bubbled up from his story. Or maybe from our connection. “I think that going dark like that was a gift that you gave to your men. I think you didn’t want to save just their bodies. I think you wanted to save their souls, too. You had to let them oppose you, even to hate you. It’s the only way they could be free.”

He shook his head.

I continued, stubbornly, “You wanted them to try and stop you. That’s how you saved their souls. So that they could live with clear hearts after the escape.”

He stared down at our gripped hands. His fingers flexed, and I wondered whether it was emotion flowing through. He wasn’t showing me his eyes, so it was hard to tell.

“You took the fall,” I added.

He said nothing for a long time. Then, “You make it sound noble. It wasn’t noble. And I’ve felt cold ever since. Cut off ever since. Except once in a while, with the four of us. When the four of us are together, I feel warm again. Connected again.” He looked up, and his expression was wild. “These past two years of us four together have been like a miracle. It’s been enough. It’s more than I imagined I’d have.”

“What are you saying?”

He brushed my hair back from my face. “I’ll bathe in his blood for you, that’s what. You’d never forgive yourself if your sister went to jail.”

“We still have options.”

“The more time we wait, the more dangerous things become.”

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