Page 55 of Rogue’s Mark

I start the way the guys taught me, without meaning to teach me. Corners first. The blank wall behind him, gray and featureless. His clothes, plain, nothing I recognize. The chair, the lighting, the angle. I work it like one of my father's documents, slow and methodical, and I hate that I'm good at it now, but I do it anyway.

Then I get to the thing in his lap.

I saw it the first second I held the photo and my brain skated right past it, too busy drowning. Now I make myself stop.

It's a paper boat.

A little folded paper boat, sitting in his lap, angled up toward the camera. The kind he used to make me out of whatever was handy—receipts, gum wrappers, the parking ticket he got the day he taught me to drive and laughed about for a week. He'd fold them on the spot, anywhere, and set them sailing in the gutter after it rained until they went soft and sank. Then we’d do it again.

To anyone else, it's a scrap of nothing in an old man's hands.

To me, it's a flare shot straight up into the dark sky.

He angled it at the lens on purpose. He chose it. He knew that whoever carried this picture out into the world, the only person alive who'd understand what it meant would be the kid he folded a hundred of these for. Nobody photographs a man with garbage in his lap by accident. My father put it there.

It's not a photo. It's a message.

I'm here, it says, in the only language the two of us share. Come find me.

Something cracks open in my chest, different from last night's grief. Quieter. Worse, almost, because it's specific. Last night, I cried because he was alive. Now, I'm sitting here shaking because he's reaching for me, deliberately, across however many years and however many miles, betting everything on the chance that I'd be the one to look.

I press my thumb against the little boat like I could lift it off the photo paper.

Then I make myself keep working, because hope is when you get sloppy.

I go over every other inch of the picture twice. The wall, the floor I can barely see, the seam of his sleeve, the shadows. I'm looking for the where. An address. A window. A landmark in a reflection, like in the movies. Anything that says which corner of the world he's folded himself into.

There's nothing.

Wherever my father is, this photograph is not going to tell me.

Which means somebody else knows where he is, somebody handed this to us and kept the rest, and somebody better tell me the whole goddamn story.

33

VI

It's barely morning when I shake Mara awake.

"Get up," I tell her. "We're going to talk to Rogue."

To her credit, she doesn't argue. She just looks at my face, reads whatever's written there, and finds her shoes.

The guys are in the ops room, all three of them, like they never went to bed, which knowing them, they probably didn't. Rogue's the first to look up when I come through the door with Mara on my heels and the photograph in my hand.

I don't bother with hello. "Where did this come from? All of it. Start to finish."

Rogue and Armen trade a look. I hate that look. It's the look that means how much do we tell her, and I am so far past being managed.

"Don't," I say. "Don't do the thing. I held it together last night so you wouldn't have to wonder if I could handle it. I handled it. Now talk."

Rogue nods, slow, and something in him settles, like he's been waiting for permission to stop softening it.

“To make the trade, I gave up where Fischer was hiding. They'd already sent the proof, that photo in your hand. Once we handed Fischer’s location, the spy gave us your dad’s and walked. That's the whole of it.”

The room goes quiet.

Nobody asked me to sign off on this. The guys made the call while I was on Mara's floor falling apart. My hands never touched the decision. They did it for me. So I can tell myself I'm clean all I want, but a man got handed to people who came for him in the dark, and somewhere at the bottom of this is me.