Page 84 of Captured By the Pakhan

I need to get to Ilya.

And that's the sentence, isn't it? That's the thing I've been walking around for four days and two and a half thousand miles.

Because whatever is in that drawer in California — and it is exactly what it is, and I have not talked myself out of one inch of it — the man who is currently hunting Claudio Danesi has no idea that Danesi is hunting him back with eleven people and a federal budget. He thinks he's chasing a bent AD. He's walking toward something with a wall in it.

He had your mother photographed on day two.

Yes. And he doesn't know what's about to happen to him.

I stand at a window, hold both of those, and cannot put either one down.

Logan comes back at half seven with Thai food and eats most of it, and I get through about four mouthfuls before I have to stop.

"You okay?"

"Long week."

"You've eaten about eleven grams of rice."

"I'm fine, Logan."

At half past nine I am on my knees on his bathroom floor being extremely comprehensively sick.

He's immediately outside the door, which is the worst thing he could do.

"Raven?"

"I'm fine."

"You are demonstrably not fine⁠—"

"Was the food bad? The chicken thing."

"I ate the chicken thing. I ate your chicken thing." A pause through the door. "You've been sleeping in a stairwell for four days, and you've eaten out of a church and a truck stop, so at a guess it's everything, and I'm going to get you water, and then you're going to go to bed."

And that's a reasonable explanation, and I take it, and I go to bed. I lie in the dark in his sister's t-shirt and hear my own voice say the reasonable explanation back to myself, and somewhere around one in the morning my brain quietly puts a different one on the table.

No.

Count.

I lie in the dark on Q Street, and I count.

I have never in my life been regular. That's the first thing I tell myself, and it's true — after the miscarriage things went strange and stayed strange. I have gone weeks before and thought nothing of it, and I have been sleeping in a shipping container and living on adrenaline and church lunches for forty-one hours.

Count anyway.

The last one was before the corridor. Before all of it, in New York, in a life that had a badge in it.

Which is — I have to do it twice, because the first time my brain refuses the arithmetic —

Fifty-one days.

I lie completely still in a stranger's bed with my hand flat on my own stomach.

Doctors told you twice. Two of them, four years apart, in two different offices, both using the word "unlikely" and one of them using "very." Scarring, they said. Damage, they said, in the sort of voice people use.

So it's stress. It's forty-one hours in a container and five weeks of the worst year of your life.