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Another photo, taken at night. Dim light from the hall. Other people in the room, their faces half-turned from the camera, blurred with shadows just like the Senator’s was.
And there’s my mother.
My mother.
Only a slim part of her face. Half of one eye, and the downturned corner of her mouth. Her hair. Someone’s hand on her shoulder, but the photo doesn’t show him. It shows part of her, leaving the room, and part of me, the rest hidden by a man bending down to speak to me. It shows me, and it shows my mother, not being able to speak to each other. If she could have turned around and gone to me, she would have. I know that. I know that.
My mother.
You’ll do him a favor, right?
For a moment, I’m back in that room, sitting on that bed, watching her disappear around the corner. I’m breathing in cheap cologne and swearing to myself that if I don’t think about it, if I don’t think at all, it will be over before I can miss her. If I glow at the man, it will be over, and I won’t have to miss her.
These pictures, together, tell a story. About knowing and not knowing. They’re drawing a purposeful line between me on that bed and the people in these tents. If the story about me gets out, then there will be an escalation. It will mean questions that people will want answers for, and it will mean people looking at me. It will mean people looking at Ares. Our whole family will be in the spotlight.
If the story about the people in the tents gets out, there will be another kind of escalation. The kind of foreign conflict that gets other countries involved. People will line up to take sides. What they might discover about me and what happened in Rathbek pales in comparison to what might happen on the ground in Morica when push comes to shove.
It can’t come to that, otherwise the people in those tents will be the ones to pay.
A loud tickticktick brings me back to the present. And Artemis’s hand on my arm.
“Apollo?” she says. It’s probably not the first time she’s said my name.
From outside my body, I turn the photos face down and pull out the last sheet of paper in the stack. Most of the sheet is blank. The typed words and coordinates take up very little space.
“Artemis,” I hear myself say. “I have to go.”
“There’s not a single chance in any version of hell that you’re going alone,” Artemis says. “I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t know where?—”
“Can we drive there?”
I put the papers on the center console and meet Artemis’s eyes. The shake in her voice is gone.
“No. We’d have to fly.”
“Then take us to the airfield.”
We go north. Same direction as the Senator’s airfield, but nothing in the world will get me on that plane. We’ll fly with our own pilot, who can be ready at a moment’s notice.
Private airport. Private airplane. Two suitcases with sets of our most important clothes, just in case. My dad and his siblings are weird about preparedness, although now I’m seeing the advantages. We’re on the plane. An attendant who seems preternaturally calm takes my instructions for the pilot and tells us to prepare for takeoff. And I don’t understand how—I keep jumping around in time, losing minutes, maybe longer, so I miss the part of the flight where we taxi down the runaway and take off—but we’re in the air above the ocean. My heart tick tock tick tock ticks, running out of time.
“I don’t know what to say,” I tell Artemis. “I don’t know how to explain this.”
It’s not right for her to get on a plane with me without knowing where we’re going, but I can see the logic in it. What other choice does she have? I should have fought for her to stay. Even if I had, wouldn’t we arrive at the same impasse? This is why I don’t leave the country. What if I couldn’t get back?
What if neither of us can get back now?
“Then don’t,” Artemis says, and drags me into the plane’s bedroom.
As soon as she closes the door behind us, the primitive part of my brain that wants to tell the pilot to run, to hide, to land anywhere but Mociar latches onto the dim lighting and the relative privacy and how little time we have, in the scheme of things. It seizes those facts with a ferocity that I can see reflected back at me in Artemis’s eyes.
She reaches out and squeezes my biceps just below the still-smarting cut, jolting the pain back into me again. It clears my head. If I only have hours with her, if I’m making a foolish, dangerous decision because someone—the Senator? How many other people?—if someone has a copy of the photos that have been folded twice and shoved into my bag, then that’s it. The photos are worse than the Rathbek deal. The photos are physical evidence of the rot. Artemis has seen them, but the light wasn’t good in the SUV. There’s plenty the photos don’t show. I can still keep it from her.
I can still have her now, before it’s too late.
I start with my mouth on her skin, tasting the night air that still clings to her and her sweet, warm mouth and the fluttering pulse at the side of her neck. It’s imperative that I get her naked, but I can’t rush it. I have to stop and kiss every inch of skin that’s revealed to me. The spot above her belly button. The curve of her hip. The perfect line of her thigh. All places I’ve seen before, because I’ve seen Artemis in a bikini more times than I can count, but all places I couldn’t touch, couldn’t let myself linger on. If I let myself stare, I’d have lost control and begged to be able to?—
