Page 52 of Antihero

He tipped his chin down, a nonverbal inquiry: Are you okay? The question had to be asked but the words were too stupid to speak.

“It’s all different.” She looked around tentatively. “Everything is different. I don’t recognize where I am but of course I know where I am. I don’t understand what I am paying attention to now. What I’m … What I’m seeing.”

“There were five men at the station,” Evan said. “Four on the platform and one sitting on the stairs. Three in the first car, seven in the second, two in here not including me.”

Her mouth held slightly ajar. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.” Again he felt that X-ray stare, the sense of her taking a deeper inventory. “How…?”

“It’s how I see, too.”

Her youthful face looked weary, and in that weariness he could see premonitions of the older woman she’d one day become. “Camo paint,” she said. “Sniper black. Is that who you are?”

“It is part of who I was.”

“Evan,” she said, trying on his name. “Who are you now?”

“That. And more.”

“Who do you answer to?”

“No one.”

Her mouth set, lips pursed. “A man who answers to no one is very dangerous.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Is that why you came to find me? To go after … those who did this?”

“To help you. I didn’t know where you were. If you were still being held. All I had was the description of what happened given by the young woman who abandoned you.”

“Abandoned me?” Anca blinked at him as if he were inane. “Bless her. If she hadn’t remembered me, I wouldn’t have had your help. If your associate hadn’t tracked me down. If your friend hadn’t provided the helicopter to fly you here. So many people heeding the call. I wasn’t abandoned. I was found.”

Someone coughed and her head snapped over, the cord of the sternocleidomastoid muscle pronounced at the side of her neck. It took a moment for her shoulders to relax once more.

“You were found,” Evan said. “And now they must be found.”

“Whatever happens to them, it must be legitimate. It can’t come from a man who answers to no one.”

These were men who believed it their right to carry off an impaired woman, to drug her, to gratify themselves with her unconscious body, to bite and bruise and mark her skin, to bathe her violated flesh in chemicals to remove forensic traces. Who’d left her discarded with blood between her legs in an underground apartment with no money, no ID, mere shreds of clothing, and an eye nearly swollen shut. That had to be answered for in this life. It just had to.

Anca’s case and the inconclusive forensics would get plopped down on the bureaucratic conveyor belt with scant chance of progressing through a sluggish crime lab to an overtaxed detective bureau to an overburdened DA’s office.

“What is,” he asked, “the legitimate way to handle what happened to you?”

“That’s not for me to say. They will be judged before Someone Else.”

“They need to be judged here.”

“Vengeance is not mine to have. I refuse to give my heart to it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to,” she said.

“What they did to you—”

“What is it, your vengeance? Who’s it for? For you?”

“No.”