Chapter 125: Traffic

Stairs, it turns out, are a skill.

I made it out of my room and across the living area on legs that were re-sitting their licensing exams, one hand walking along the back of the sofa while the evening light came low and orange through the balcony glass.

[Why’d she remove the tape? I’ll ask her later...]

Then the staircase stood in front of me, and I stood in front of it, and we regarded each other like old rivals.

[One flight... I’ve cleared buildings that’s got tens of you...]

Three steps, excruciating steps up, and my mind flashed me that image of a kitchen along with long chestnut hair spilling down like a waterfall, and for a moment, everything was right in the world again.

[Careful... That particular stove is still hot.]

"You’re doing the face again..." Nia said from one step below me, her good hand hovering an inch off my back the entire climb without once touching it.

"What face?"

"The one where you knock on a door that was never there."

"...Shut up."

"Make me, big guy~"

The open corridor ran the upper floor with the living area falling away below the mezzanine rail, and Nora’s room sat off it exactly as its owner had left it, with the entire far wall given over to the station she’d built with the equipment I had left her, transceiver, tuner, battery bank, all of it ready on standby under the panoramic glass with the cable running up through the sealed vent toward that ten meter antenna I’d bolted to the roof.

This was Nora’s territory. Every dial labeled in her handwriting.

Nia dropped into the operator’s chair like she owned it, spun the dial two clicks, and checked the clock, while SR-25 leaned against the desk within reach of her good hand.

"Sit before you fall over, you’re swaying like a metronome."

I sat on Nora’s bed, and Tikki hopped up beside me, walked one full circle, and parked himself against my thigh with both ears already aimed at the speaker.

And for that last minute I just sat there with my heart going harder than the climb deserved, because everyone at the other end of this channel had read my little letter, had lived five days with it.

[Five days of letters and math... and the best I’ve got is "hey."]

"Home to West, home to West," Nia said into the mic, easy as breathing, and then she smiled at me sideways, because she had been sitting on this all day and I could see exactly how much she’d enjoyed the wait. "Guess who’s sitting up and ruining my evening~"

Static for one second, then two before-

"-Kzzzt- ...Nia? Is he- wait. Is he awake awake, or is this another ’his eyelid moved’ situation, because I built a whole day around the eyelid thing and I am not doing that again-"

"He’s awake, munchkin."

"PUT HIM ON!"

Nia held the mic out to me with her eyebrows up and the corner of her mouth unforgivable.

I took it, and I keyed it, and everything I had spent that last minute lining up fell straight out the bottom of my head.

"...H-hey, kid."

The speaker made a sound that had started life as my name and come apart halfway through into crying.

And then Nora arrived through the wreckage, at full speed, with no punctuation, every feeling she owned pouring out at once because hiding them has never once occurred to her in her entire life.

"You- oh my god, okay, I promised myself, I literally told everyone at dinner, I said when he wakes up I am going to be calm, I am going to be normal about it, and- your VOICE, Nikki, why is your voice like that, it sounds like a gravel driveway, Nia said you were breathing fine, you SAID he was breathing fine-"

"He’s fine, munchkin-"

"He sounds SIXTY!"

"That’s just his personality bleeding through-"

"I’m right here, you know..." I offered.

"DON’T." The word cracked straight down the middle, and she pushed on through it anyway, laughing and crying at the same time now with zero interest in choosing between the two. "Don’t you ’I’m right here’ me, you don’t get to sound casual, I have been sitting in front of this radio for five days listening to her say ’stable’ like that’s a whole sentence-"

Then a big hand clearly closed over the mic on their end, because the flood went distant, and a new voice came on, deep and unhurried, and spoke just two words.

"...You’re alive."

"Hey, Leo."

A pause went by that I could hear him standing inside.

"Good," he said.

Then came another pause, longer.

"That’s... Good."

And that was the whole speech, but those five words had five days of held breath packed inside them.

Then, from beside my thigh, chin up, aimed squarely at the mic:

"Mea."

And the other end of that channel reorganized itself in under a second.

"THAT’S HIM. Leo. Leo, get the book, it’s under the- yes. That one." Papers moved somewhere around seventy kilometers west. "Okay... Tikki. Say it again. Properly. For the record."

"Mea."

"...Full syllable," Nora reported. "Middle intact... Rasp confined to the end. That is a measurable improvement on day four, which reads, and I am quoting my own handwriting, ’sad squeak, everyone went quiet, Leo left the fire.’"

"I didn’t leave," Leo said from somewhere behind her.

"You went and checked the fence."

"...That’s different."

And it took me until right about there to work out what I was actually listening to.

"You’ve been logging his voice?" I couldn’t help asking.

"Every call." She said it like talking about the weather. "Twice a day, five days... Nia holds the mic up to him, and I write down whatever comes out for Kara to review... He was so quiet on day two, Nikki."

I looked at the small warm weight against my leg who had wrecked his throat screaming my name while I lay face-down in a doorway, and seventy kilometers west, a girl with a pen and a notebook had been waiting twice a day to find out whether it was coming back.

"He’s eating," I said, because it was the only good number I had on me. "Almost an whole rotisserie chicken today... Didn’t share a single bite."

"Log it," Nora ordered.

"I’m not writing that down," Leo said.

"LOG IT."

"...Fine."

The laugh that came through was wet at the edges and completely real, and it was the best sound of my day so far.

Then the mic changed hands on their end again, and this time the voice that took it was the one I’d been braced for since the stairs.

"You’re five days late."

My mouth answered before my brain filed the paperwork.

"...Traffic."

The silence that came back had a temperature.

"Traffic," Kara repeated, flat, and then the volume arrived all at once, five days of fear converting straight into anger now that its reason was finally gone, which is the exact order Kara’s fear has always traveled in. "TRAFFIC?! You organized your own funeral in three pages, in your STUPID tidy handwriting, and your opening move as a living man is TRAFFIC-"

"Kara-"

"I am not finished! Every night. Every single night I made everyone eat dinner like it was normal, and I-..."

Then a long sigh crossed seventy kilometers.

And when she came back, she came back quiet.

"...Symptoms. In order. Vision first, and don’t summarize."

"I can see clearly, but the eyes are bloodshot..."

"Hearing."

"Left ear’s ringing..." I answered like an honest-to-god patient.

"Headaches. And be honest, because Nia already told us about the blood, so there is no version of this where you minimize it, and I don’t find out by Thursday."

"Constant, low, background," I said, scratching my head. "It spikes if I even think about... the Revenant’s illusion and TK. So I don’t."

And so she began firing off questions, and I began answering until she was just short of asking how the little Nikki down there is feeling.

"Okay." I could hear her filing each answer somewhere labeled and alphabetized. "And you understand the only reason five days of sleep did anything at all is that you’d already injected stim before that fight... The blood you lost would have... Look, I will not touch the other thing, Nikki. As far as I understand, the Stims rebuild tissue, and whatever TK muscle you tore isn’t just tissue... otherwise we would’ve seen progress by now."

"It’s gonna take time."

"Good. Then here’s the schedule. One hour on this radio, then food, then sleep, and I’m timing all three... I’ll go discuss this with Mr. Norton."

"Yes, mommy..."

"Y-you-!"

Nora’s laughter detonated somewhere behind her, bright and completely unhelpful, while I sat on Nora’s bed grinning like an idiot with a wrecked face, watching the first genuinely good minute after all long while go by until the laughter thinned.

And for a good while, nobody said anything, the nothing of four people standing around one object in the middle of the conversation, all deciding not to be the one to touch it first.

Until Leo did.

"...We read the letter."