Every so often, he offers directions and I take them until the road peters out to nothing but a narrow dirt track. Too narrow for the truck.
“You’ll have to reverse back,” he says. “Park it somewhere less conspicuous.”
“Less conspicuous than the middle of nowhere?” I ask.
“Less conspicuous if people come looking,” he responds as I put the truck into reverse and lift my arm to hold onto his headrest so I can see better over my shoulder. I reverse it as far as an old abandoned house, parking it beside the derelict wall.
Yakob, moving slowly, manages to climb out without my help, giving me time to hunt around for some way of making the truck look like it’s been abandoned too. But once I see it in the light of dawn, I realize I don’t need to do anything, it’s already half eaten with rust.
The sun begins to rise ahead of us, breaking through the trees in streaks of honey-gold light as we begin to walk back up the track, scrubbing out the tire tracks as we go.
"What keeps you up?" I ask, scratching my boot over the dirt.
He's quiet long enough that I think he isn't going to answer, and I've almost talked myself into letting it go when he finally says, "There isn't anything to wake up for. Sleep is just time you lose."
It affects me more than I would expect it to. I think of every morning I've woken up in that too-big house full of people who love me, sun through the curtains, the smell of Ma's bread already climbing the stairs, and I've never once thought of sleep as something to survive rather than something to have. I don't know what to do with the fact that he has.
I don't say anything wise. I don't have anything wise to offer a man who just told me, without meaning to, that he's spent years without a single reason to want the sun to come up.
Instead I reach over and take his hand, the one not pressed to his side, and I lace our fingers together the way you'd anchor a boat.
"You have a reason now," I say. "I'm not letting you bleed to death after everything it took to get you off that beach. That would be an enormous waste of my very impressive rescue efforts."
"Extraction," he says, weaker than before, but the correction comes anyway, and I decide that's a good sign, that a man too far gone doesn't have the energy left to argue semantics.
"Extraction," I agree. "Fine. You extracted me. I'm reciprocating. That's just good manners."
His fingers tighten around mine, barely, the smallest pressure, and he doesn't say anything else for a long while as we follow the winding, narrowing path to wherever this safe house is.
Yakob
Every step feels like it’s taking one-hundred percent more energy than it should. I know we’re nearby when the trees thin out and the sun is high enough to cast light over what used to be a garden. Now it’s overgrown. The owners of the small farm are long gone. They were good people. But still, every step is a bargain with something outside of myself.
I should take my hand back.
It’s not like I haven’t been touched in the last twenty years. Doctors who didn't ask my name. Men who wanted me dead and got close enough to try. Handlers who shook my hand because the contract required the gesture. Iris’s mother. Every one of those touches had a purpose I could name and a price I could calculate.
This has no purpose. She gains nothing from it. It's just her hand around mine because she wants it there.
I don't have a category for that and I'm too tired to figure one out.
I leave my hand where it is.
"Is it much further?" She catches the change in my breathing without turning her head. She reads people the way I read situations. "You went somewhere for a while. I didn't love it."
"I'm fine."
"So you keep saying." She looks at me now, and there's a smudge of my blood dried along her jaw that she doesn't know about. Her eyes are her mother's eyes, green enough to be unsettling in the pale morning light. "I've decided it means something different in whatever language you learned first."
I turn my hand over with the intention of sliding it free. Reasonable. Practical. She needs both hands for whatever comes next, and I don't need to be held like something that might float away.
"You don't have to do this," I tell her. "Save your strength. If anyone comes, you run. You don't wait for me. You don't come back for me."
She listens to the whole thing with the expression of a woman waiting for a kettle to finish boiling.
"No," she says.
"Iris."