Page 37 of Takedown

"Kovac." He stopped. Looked at me straight, the general briefly visible through the sunshine. "Saturday's a hundred years old and you earned your spot in it and you're going to walk into that hall looking like the answer, not the question. Okay? This is what teammates are for. Also I need to tie the bow tie because it's the one thing my father ever taught me and I get so few chances." Beat. "Also-also, if you cry when I tie it, I'm telling everyone."

"I'm not gonna cry over a bow tie."

I did not cry over the bow tie. It was close, though. Standing in my cinderblock room in another man's beautiful tux, with a tailor's name inside the collar that even I recognized, with Miles working the silk at my throat with genuine care and Toby giving a running commentary through the telescope ("mars is in the frame, this feels significant"), it was closer than I'll ever tell either of them.

* * *

Formal hall by candlelight is a cathedral doing an impression of a dinner.

Two hundred candles, the portraits gone warm and alive-looking in the flicker, the long tables set with more forks than a family reunion — four, I counted for my father, four forks, wait till he hears — and the whole team scrubbed and strangled into black tie, unrecognizable, Kirby in a tux older than the bus, Halloran in a dinner jacket that fit him like it had been built during a previous administration and worn to every ceremony since, which it had.

And families. That was the part I hadn't braced for. Mothers in the doorway light. Fathers with programs. Grayson's father I recognized before anyone pointed him out, because I'd been drilling with his bone structure since October — taller than I expected, silver at the temples, standing in a knot of alumni with the stillness of a man other men arrange themselves around.

The ceremony itself is simple, which is why it works. No speeches to start. The room goes quiet, Halloran stands, and Kirby — Kirby, in his ancient tux, this is his part, has been his part for thirty years — carries in a stack of flat boxes like the crown jewels, and Halloran reads the starters weight by weight, and you walk up in front of the candles and the families and the portraits, and he hands you a box with a green singlet folded in tissue paper, and shakes your hand, and says something only you hear.

They went up one by one. Aleks, at 133, receiving his box with a bow of the head like a man accepting sentencing. Miles at 149, milking the walk, winking at somebody's grandmother, getting his laugh — and then turning at the handshake suddenly serious, because that's Miles, the sunshine parts so the real thing can land in the gap.

"One seventy-four," Halloran read. "Kovac."

Here's what I can tell you about the walk. It's forty feet. It took a season. It took eleven hours on a bus and four hundred dollars in an envelope and six a.m. and eight pounds and a letter with a performance clause in it, and I walked it in a borrowed tuxedo past two hundred candles with every step, and the room I couldn't see for the light held exactly one gaze I could feel — starboard side, third table, arriving on my skin like the fire had found me, the way it always did, the way it always would.

Halloran handed me the box. It weighed nothing. It weighed everything.

He shook my hand and leaned in half an inch, gravel gone low, the part only I'd hear:

"Your mother drove you to this," he said. "Whole way. Don't thank me, thank the Falcon."

I have no memory of walking back to my seat. Miles says I looked composed. Miles lies for the people he loves, it's one of his best features. I sat down with a box in my hands and the room swimming with candle flame and found the starboard gaze one more time — Grayson, at his table, beside his father, applauding with the rest, correct as a portrait —

except his eyes.

I'd catalogued eleven of his expressions by the bus trip and a twelfth in a hotel room, and this was the thirteenth and it wasn't hidden at all — that was the terrifying thing, the magnificent thing, he wasn't hiding it, in the one room on campus with his whole world watching he'd simply stopped, for three full seconds, performing — and what was on his face across all that candlelight was so plain, so entirely legible, so loud, that I looked away first.

Not because I didn't want it seen.

Because I did. And rule two was already coughing blood, and his father was seated eighteen inches to his left.

How did Halloran know about the Falcon, I thought, holding my box, staring at my four forks, pulse everywhere. I never told anyone but—

Him. I'd told him. At a diner. Rule three's first casualty, reporting for duty in Halloran's mouth six weeks later.

I didn't ask either of them, ever. There are questions you don't ask an oracle, and by then I understood we had two.

* * *

They found me at the coffee, afterward. Or rather: the room's currents delivered us, the way rooms like that deliver people, everything choreographed and nothing arranged.

"Dad." Grayson's voice with a new bolt tightened in it. "Danny Kovac. Danny — my father, Grayson Whitfield." No number. The numbers were for the Ledger. "Second," he added anyway, quietly, like a habit he was watching himself perform.

"Mr. Whitfield."

"Kovac." His grip was dry and exact and lasted the length of an appraisal. Up close, the resemblance was a trick of time — the same slate-green eyes, run twenty degrees colder; the bone structure with all the weather sanded off. "Strong weekend. Silver at the Garden State as a freshman is a serious result." A sip of coffee, unhurried; he had the family trick of making you wait inside his sentences. "The Cornell final was winnable, of course. Riding time is preparation, not talent. You'll want an answer for that ride before the wrestle-off. My son's top game has been the best in the room since he was fifteen."

Everything in it was true. That's what made it what it was. A compliment, a coaching note, a threat, and a property line, all in the same even voice, delivered with the warmth of a well-run bank — and beside him Grayson stood with his champagne at parade rest, correct, correct, correct, and I watched twenty years of his life happen in four sentences. The museum. The locks. I am fluent in a language in which I can say nothing. I'd known the words since the diner. Now I'd met the language's native country.

"He's right," I said. To the father, about the son, looking at neither of them longer than manners allowed. "Best top game I've ever felt. I've been under it every day since October. Working on my answer, sir."

A silence, one degree off standard.