Page 27 of Rust of Control

They ate with the crew that night.

The table ran on a weekday like it always did: Zain and Seth at one end with phones between their plates, the low back-and-forth of two men who couldn't fully leave the job even when they were home. Ghost ate with half his attention still on the wall in the back room, which had more faces than it'd had yesterday. Marcus had made the beans. Marcus always made the beans. It was one of the things Nate had come to count on without noticing, somewhere in the years, like the draft under the back door and the sound the third stair made and the table going quiet when one of them was carrying something real.

They were quiet now. Not the bad kind. Just the kind where everyone understood that one of their own was holding a weight and they were going to let him hold it until he was ready to set it down. That was how the crew worked. You didn't ask, and you didn't pretend you hadn't noticed, and you passed the beans.

Jude sat beside him and talked to Seth about a band Seth had seen the week before, ten minutes on the relative merits of a singer with a good voice and bad stage presence. Nate listened and ate Marcus's beans and let himself have that too. Jude's knee was warm against his under the table. Neither of them made anything of it. It just was.

The room was dark. Jude was already half-asleep by the time Nate settled beside him, breathing slow, one hand loose on the pillow between them. The ribs meant he couldn't lie flat, so he'd built himself an arrangement of pillows and slept in it every night. Nate had stopped noticing it was there, same as he'd stopped noticing all the things Jude had worked out for how to live in a body that hurt.

He watched the ceiling and let the day play back. Not reliving it, just accounting for it. His mother had counted her blessings before sleep; Nate had picked up the habit and never lost it, though she'd have had something to say about what his blessings looked like lately. The hot coffee. The storage unit, Jude pointing at boxes with a pen behind his ear. The shower, the steam, Jude's hands flat on his chest. The table, the beans, the ten minutes of Jude talking about stage presence with the easy warmth of someone who'd done it a hundred times, at a hundred tables, and meant it every time.

He had bought the day. He'd spent every hour of it.

And tomorrow he was going to have to answer Ghost.

He reached for his phone on the nightstand, screen brightness low, and read the three messages again. The first was a name. The second was an address on the Windsor side. The third was four words: we need to move.

He set the phone face-down on his chest. The small weight of it sat over the same spot where Jude had put both hands in the shower, flat over the heart, the same spot he'd found the night before with a glass of water still in reach. Nate had spent years keeping that want in a drawer. He'd opened it two nights running now. The thing inside hadn't been diminished at all by the waiting. It had only gotten truer.

Jude shifted, got a fistful of Nate's shirt in his sleep, and didn't wake.

Nate looked at the ceiling and thought about what he was going to have to say. Not to Ghost. To Jude. The man you were with is the thing we've been hunting. The kids at the parties. The money. The river. He'd say it plainly. He always did, with the hard ones. And Jude would hear it, and the ordinary morning Nate had been guarding would be the last one for a while. There'd be another one eventually. He believed that. But there was going to be a long hard stretch between here and it, and he was going to have to watch Jude go through it knowing he'd held the information for days.

He hadn't had a choice. The information wasn't his to act on alone. But knowing that wouldn't make it easier for Jude to hear, and it shouldn't.

Tomorrow could have all of it.

He put the phone back on the nightstand. Tonight he kept the watch.

Jude's hand tightened in his shirt, not waking, just holding on. Nate let himself be held without policing it, without the reflex to make himself smaller. He lay in the dark with the count of days running behind his eyes and a man's fist in his shirt and the far-off sound of the river, and he guarded the edge of the sleep he couldn't share, because standing watch at the border of someone else's rest was the only way he'd ever known how to love anybody.

In the morning he'd tell Jude. Enough to move.

Tonight he kept the watch.

Chapter 14

In the morning Nate poured two coffees and set one down in front of Jude and said, "The crew's been working a case and you should know what's going on."

Jude set his mug down. Nate had gone still, hands loose at his sides, nothing moving. Hard-news still. Jude had learned to read that in the past few weeks the same as he'd learned the layout of the house, the third stair, the boiler's schedule. He waited.

"Kids are going missing. Out of the scene." Nate watched him while he said it. "The all-ages rooms. The party circuit. The places you play."

The floor tilted. Not all the way out, not the full drop the panic took him to, but a half-inch give, the cold coming up through his feet. "Missing how?"

"Taken. Moved. We think across the river." He didn't soften it. "You should see it from the crew, not just from me. Ghost can show you what we know and what we're still working out. If you want. You don't have to."

Jude wanted it. He didn't want it at all. He went to see it, because the rooms were his rooms, and that made the wanting beside the point.

The back room had been an office once. It was a war room now. The thing Jude saw first, before the laptops, the maps, the corkboard, was the faces.

Seven of them on the board.

Ghost stood when Jude came in, which Jude would think about later, the small courtesy of a dangerous man rising for him. "You don't have to look long," Ghost said. "But I'm not going to pretend they're numbers for you. That's the one thing I won't do in this room."

He took Jude through them slowly. Davya first, sixteen, the one the news had given a week of attention before it moved on, because Davya had a mother who called the precinct every day and made herself impossible to file and forget. Then the other six. These were the ones that opened the cold all the way up in Jude's chest, because these were the ones nobody had made noise for.

Marisol, fifteen, in care, three placements in two years, reported by a group home that checked the box and moved on. A boy named Theo, seventeen, who'd aged most of the way out of anyone's obligation and into the gap where a kid stops being somebody's job. A girl called Pim who didn't have a last name anyone had written down the same twice. Two sisters, fourteen and fifteen, whose people were three states south and didn't know yet. A kid the file just called Junior, because that was all anyone at the shelter had ever gotten him to give.