Behind him, his lady, the love of his life, rolled onto her back and began to snore softly.
Love and sorrow rose and swirled in him, leaving him giddy and filled with tears. He was alive now. Now was the time that truly mattered . . . an odd concept for a precog, he supposed, but true. He couldn’t act, think, feel in the future or in the past. Only in this moment.
Was it terribly selfish of him to hold tight to this one secret? Probably. He had told one person about his recurring dream—his second-in-command in the Shadow Unit. But not Deb. Not his beautiful, wondrous Deb.
Twenty years ago Deb had asked him if he’d ever seen his own death. They’d just been dating then, but he’d known he would ask her to marry him. That hadn’t been precognition, but the soaring dream of his heart. He’d told her “no” back then, quite truthfully . . . but added that if he ever did, he would tell no one. Not even her. Ruben marveled that his younger self—so often wrong about so much—had been so nearly right about that.
He’d had the practical discussions with her. Given his heart attack, that had been necessary. But those discussions came with a large and lustrous “if.” He couldn’t take that “if” away from her, though he knew it was wrong.
Four times now he’d dreamed of pain, terrible pain, the kind that eats thoughts and strength and life. He never remembered much about the dream, but his body did. When he’d had the heart attack, its kinetic memory had awakened, telling him this was the pain he’d previewed in a dream.
He’d expected to die. He hadn’t.
He hadn’t stopped having the dream, either.
Any dream he had that often, through so many changes of course, meant the events it depicted were not to be stopped by any conceivable branchings in the possibilities. His dream always ended the same way: in cessation. Not darkness or some version of the fabled tunnel, but a blankness his waking mind couldn’t conjure or reconstruct.
Tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, his body would be crushed by pain. It would end. And Ruben would find out what lay on the other side of the small, dark door that everyone passes through alone.
He would miss her so much.
EIGHT
ON Sunday, Lily did not brood. Much. She called her parents because she was supposed to, and that was okay—she enjoyed talking to her dad—but it left her churned up. Ruben’s scenarios would have her family living under some weird military dictatorship a year from now.
If they lived.
Rule called Toby and she talked to him awhile, too. Math still sucked, but quadratic equations were kinda cool. Toby was being homeschooled by a retired teacher, but Isen’s cook/ housekeeper, Carl, was teaching him quadratic equations. Which sounded like math to Lily, but not, apparently, to Toby.
He still couldn’t decide on an instrument, but the oboe was okay, so he’d stick with it awhile. He and Johnny were going rock climbing—of course with an adult, and anyway Granddad wasn’t really mad about the other day, but Toby did not want to be stuck with a bodyguard all the time, so he’d agreed he wouldn’t do that anymore. And Dirty Harry was doing great. He’d established his territory in spite of the dogs that ran loose at Clanhome. He’d cowed several of them, but there was a German shepherd mix that gave him trouble. Or had until yesterday. Harry had figured out that the odd-smelling people he now lived with would back him up if the German shepherd gave him any trouble.
Being a cat, Harry had no issues about calling for backup. You used the tools available to you, right? He was pretty smug, Toby said.
Between phone calls, Lily cleaned while Rule did their laundry, a division of labor they’d settled on after a couple months. She was picky about cleaning—he didn’t seem to even see dust bunnies—and he was picky about his clothes. That was part vanity, part necessity due to that whole “public face of his people” thing, and also because of his nose. Even unscented detergents left a scent, he said, and he wanted his clothes to smell one way and hers to smell another because of how those scents mingled with their personal scents.
She’d asked him once if he could actually smell himself.
His eyebrows had shot up. “You mean you can’t?”
The rest of the day, Rule messed with his spreadsheets and financial wheelings and dealings while she studied up for the stupid damn committee hearing. They cooked supper together—salmon en papillote, which was a fancy way of saying you wrapped fish and vegetables and stuff in special paper and baked it.
When Rule first taught her how to make it, she was highly dubious. Surely paper in the oven wasn’t a good idea. Apparently parchment paper was different. It hadn’t caught on fire yet, anyway, and they fixed salmon en papillote pretty often.
She had a hard time getting to sleep that night, and when she finally did drift off, she didn’t sleep well. Bad dreams, though they evaporated when she woke up.
ON a scale of one to firing squad, Monday was a five. First Lily put in a couple hours drone work at Headquarters—limited duty meant sitting on her butt a lot—then she went to PT, which was probably good for her soul even if she wasn’t sure what it did for her body. Nettie had instructed Lily to continue her physical therapy while she was in D.C. and had given her the name of a therapist to use. Lily tried not to make Dr. Nettie Two Horses mad, so she grunted and groaned her way through the session.
Then there was the stupid damn committee hearing.
The first couple hours went about like she’d expected. The senators wanted to know everything about the collapse of the node and what led up to it. They had the right clearance, so she gave it to them straight—well, except for leaving out a few things, like the mate bond and the tickly passenger in her gut. Some of them didn’t believe her. Some did. Some even asked good questions.
The committee chair was Senator Bixton. He saved his pounce for the very end.
Bob Bixton must have watched Hal Holbrook do Mark Twain one time too many. He didn’t go so far as to wear a white suit—his was pale gray—but he had the mustache and red tie, and his thick white hair was just as wavy. He had a great sense of theater, too.
“Special Agent Yu,” he said, drawling her name and rank slowly as if they felt peculiar in his mouth. “I know I speak for my fellow committee members when I say we appreciate your traveling all the way across the country while you are, ah, recovering from an injury. You’ve been here about a week, I understand.”
“Yes, sir. Six days.”
“You came here with your, ah, fiancé.” He leaned heavily on the first syllable and mangled the last one: FEE-ansee. “Rule Turner.”
“Yes, sir. He testified, at your request, before another committee.”
“I do recall that,” he said dryly. “Now, you appear to have been wholly cooperative, answerin’ our questions most patiently. But it is true, is it not, that you were coached by your superior in Unit 12 prior to speakin’ with us?”
“No, sir.”
The bushy eyebrows flew up. “No? You were at Ruben Brooks’s home on Saturday night.”
“With about fifty others, yes, sir. It was a social occasion.”
“A social occasion. Yes, I believe it was, until the other forty-eight people left around eleven. You and Mr. Turner stayed on, however. Are you telling this committee that Mr. Brooks did not take advantage of that to suggest to you anything about how to approach your testimony today?”
“Yes, sir, I am. We did not discuss my testimony or this committee at all.”
“What did you discuss? For, ah . . .” He made a show of hunting through his papers before finding the one he sought. “For an hour and fifty-seven minutes.”