Page 109 of Crosscurrent

Cara’s phone buzzed. Clearly, so did the rest of the team’s. A text from Reagan.

Tom in surgery. Internal bleeding. A lot. Touch and go. Send prayers. And get here ASAP.

For a moment nobody said anything. Cara watched the words land on each of them in turn — Wade's jaw going hard, Owen closing his eyes, Skye reading it twice like she could argue with it. Touch and go. They had walked out of a gunfight that should have killed all of them, and the one of them who'd saved the rest was the one they might still lose.

"Then we don't stand here," Gabe said, low. It was the only thing left to do for Tom, and they all knew it. Get there. Be there. The rest was out of their hands and in better ones.

The sun was coming up over Petit Marais. Cole's people strung tape and then sat back, waiting for the coroner’s wagon to arrive. Out in the shallows the herons came back to their fishing as if nothing in the night had happened at all. None of it belonged to the team anymore.

"Take my unit." Cole pressed the keys into Gabe's hand before he could ask for them. "Two hours to the regional, less the way you'll drive it. I've got all this. Go be there when your boy wakes up."

They didn't wait around. Skye went in the back with her side packed tight and her color all wrong. Owen wedged himself in beside her to hold her upright. Wade took shotgun, rolling his window down and keeping his eyes on the treeline the whole way out to the highway. Gabe drove. Cara took the middle seat beside him and kept hold of his hand.

They had won. Ray Harney’s witnesses were safe. Owen and Skye were free to resume their lives, though in Skye’s case, Cara wasn’t sure what that was.

"Tell me Tom makes it," Cara said.

Gabe didn't lie to her. It was one of the ways she'd always known him. He only held on to her hand and drove them toward the morning, and the boy fighting for his life at the far end of it, the whole carload of them having won every single thing they came for, and unable, for the life of them, to feel it yet.

49

The hospital waiting room had bad coffee, worse chairs, and a television bolted to the wall playing a cooking show with no sound. Gabe had never in his life been so grateful for an ugly room.

Because they were all in it. Alive enough to hate the chairs. All of them except Tom.

He bowed his head, adding yet another prayer to the countless requests they’d all made to their Savior.

Tom was somewhere past a set of double doors with a surgical team and a chance. Hands on her knees, Reagan sat as close to those doors as a person could get without being through them, hunched forward in borrowed scrubs, watching them like she could hold back bad news by will alone. Cara had claimed the chair beside her an hour ago and hadn't moved.

The rest of them coped the only ways they knew how, which was to say badly, and out loud.

Owen had not stopped talking since they walked in. Somewhere around the second hour he'd landed on the thesis that what they had just lived through battling Neptune was, structurally, a medieval siege.

"The cabin is a keeper." He sketched a castle in the air with both hands. "Water on three sides, one causeway in. That's a motte-and-bailey, completely textbook. Cartwright had superior numbers and firepower, but she made the besieger's oldest mistake, which is that she came inside the walls. The moment she did that, she surrendered the advantage. Cara, what you ran was essentially a feigned parley. There are accounts of this at Antioch⁠—"

"Owen." Wade didn't open his eyes. "Buddy. Nobody at Antioch had a float plane. Or a cottonmouth."

"That is true," Owen said, delighted, and began a new paragraph.

Skye had been stitched up hours back, a row of staples in her side and an order to rest she'd received the way she received most orders, as a fine idea for other people. At the moment she was upside down against the far wall.

"You're going to pop every one of those," Reagan said, without turning around.

"They're excellent staples." Skye held the headstand a beat longer, came down easy, and returned to the meal she'd built out of three vending machines: a sleeve of crackers, a chocolate milk, and a bag of dill-pickle sunflower seeds she was eating one at a time, with the focus of a woman defusing a device. "Adrenaline crash. You burn the sugar or the sugar burns you." She held the bag out to Bennion. "Local delicacy."

Suzette Bennion, who had spent eight months in a swamp and the last day watching these people nearly die on her account, took one. Chewed. Considered. "I've had worse," she allowed.

Gabe watched it all from the doorway, a paper cup going cold in his hand, and understood that he was looking at the thing itself. Not the case. Not Cartwright. This. A room full of people too wired to sit and too grateful to leave, building jokes out of the worst night of their lives because the only other option was to feel the whole of it at once.

Eighteen months ago he'd had a badge, a desk, and a clean idea of his life’s purpose. He'd traded all of it for this. No authority, no backup he hadn't talked into the room himself, a found family that ran on caffeine and sugar and prayer and would, every one of them, have died on that dock tonight and not asked why first.

No way he’d trade this new life for anything. The certainty sat in him quiet and settled.

"Somebody has to call Diane," Cara announced. "And Piper."

Nobody jumped at it.

"And tell her what?" Wade’s voice was gentle, for Wade. "He's in surgery and we don't know yet? That's not a phone call. That's a heart attack from three thousand miles away."