The PowWow

Rachel called me at two in the afternoon to tell me she'd put two uniforms on Mara's door for the next forty-eight hours, and that she was heading over herself after shift to see it with her own eyes instead of trusting it to a report. I remember being grateful for that in a distant, functional way, the way you're grateful for a seatbelt you've never needed. I did not know yet that I was about to need it.

She called back forty minutes later, and I knew from the first half-second of dead air before she spoke that this wasn't the same kind of call.

"Levi." Flat. Controlled. The voice she uses when controlled is the only thing standing between her and something else. "I'm at Mara's. Something's wrong with the — "

A sound behind her. Not a knock this time. Something heavier, faster, a door coming off something it shouldn't have come off.

"Rachel."

"Two of them." Her breathing had changed, gone tight and economical, the breathing of someone moving while they talk instead of standing still to do it. "Mara, get behind me — Levi, I need you to hear this, I need somebody to hear this happen in case I can't tell you after — "

"We're already moving." We were. Jacob had the Highlander's engine turning over before I'd gotten the second word out, and I don't remember standing up, only suddenly being in motion, phone now on speaker, the specific horror of trying to drive and listen and not drop either.

"They came through the door like it wasn't there." Rachel's voice again, still flat, still working, a cop narrating a scene even as she stood inside it, which I understood later was the only thing keeping her upright. "Mara's okay, Mara's behind me, I've got my weapon, I am not — "

A gunshot. Then another, close together, close enough to the phone that I flinched in the passenger seat like the sound had come from somewhere in the car with us.

"Rachel!"

"I hit one." Something had changed in her voice — not fear exactly, something worse, the sound of a person doing math in real time and not liking the answer. "It didn't — Levi, it didn't even slow down, it just kept — "

The line filled with noise I couldn't parse into words. A scrape. A short, high sound that might have been Mara. Rachel's voice, further from the phone now, saying something I couldn't make out, and then closer again, fast, urgent, the words tripping over each other in a way I had never once heard from her in eleven years of knowing her: "Levi, if you get this — "

The call ended. Not dropped. Ended, the specific dead silence of a connection someone else decided was over.

I have relived those four seconds more times than I am willing to admit to, turning them over trying to find the version where I said something that mattered, and there isn't one. There is only the four seconds, and then the phone in my hand going quiet, and Jacob taking a turn hard enough that I had to brace against the door.

We made Mara's building in under three minutes. I know because I looked at the clock the second the call ended and I looked at it again when Jacob threw the Highlander into park, and the number sits in my head now the way certain numbers do — not because it means anything by itself, but because it's the precise, measurable distance between the version of that afternoon where we got there in time and the one we actually got.

We saw the van pulling out of the lot as we came around the corner. Not fast, not screeching, nothing that looked like flight — it pulled out with the unhurried, obedient patience of a vehicle that had never once needed to hurry because nothing had ever caught it. I saw the side door still swinging on its hinge, not yet latched. I saw, for less than a full second, in the gap of that door before it swung shut on its own, two shapes on the floor of the van, one still, one not.

Jacob was already turning the wheel toward it. I don't know what either of us thought we were going to do — ram it, block it, will it into stopping through sheer force of not being willing to lose — but the gap closed the way gaps do when only one side of them is trying, and the van made the turn onto the avenue and was gone into traffic that did not know or care what had just been driven through it.

We sat there a second. Just a second. It felt considerably longer.

The lot was empty in the specific way Jeremiah's house had been empty, in the specific way the parking lot outside the hospital had been empty — no blood pooled on the concrete, no bodies, just the absence where two people had been a minute before, and a door with its lock mechanism torn clean out of the frame, hanging by one hinge like a tooth that hadn't quite finished coming out.

I found Rachel's phone on the ground eleven feet from the door. Not shattered. Not even scratched, as far as I could tell, just set down — or dropped in a way that looked, unbearably, almost gentle — screen still lit, our call log still open, my name still on it, the timer still frozen at four minutes and eleven seconds, because whoever had ended that call hadn't been in any hurry either.

I stood in that parking lot holding my fiancée's phone and did not say anything for what Jacob later told me was almost a full minute, and I believe him, because I don't remember any of it.

"They're isolating us," Jacob said finally. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the door, at the lock torn out of true, cataloging it the way he does everything, because cataloging was apparently the only verb either of us had left that still worked. "Roiya first. Then Jeremiah and Rebecca. Now Rachel and Mara together, in one motion, the way you'd tie off two ends of the same knot." He said it slowly, like each name cost him something to say out loud in that order. "This is not random. This has never once been random. Suriel did this to Roiya over two years, one inch at a time, until there was nobody left standing near her who wasn't already inside the circle he'd drawn." His voice didn't rise. I almost wished it had. "He is doing the same thing to us now. Except this time nobody has two years. This time it is days, and it is not persuasion, it is subtraction."

"We were forty seconds away," I said, because it was the only fact I had and I needed to say a fact out loud or I was going to say something else instead. "Maybe less."

"I know."

"Forty seconds, Jacob."

"I know." He finally looked at me, and there was nothing in his face I could soften for him, because there was nothing in mine either. "It would not have mattered if it had been four. Whatever came through that door came through it faster than either of us could have crossed that lot, and you know that, and I know that, and neither of us is going to feel better for having done the arithmetic."

We called it in. We gave a report that used words like coordinated and multiple suspects and vehicle, dark, no plate, because those were the words the report needed and they were also, somehow, none of the actual words for what had happened. A detective who wasn't Rachel took our statements in a parking lot that used to belong, for a few years now, to somebody who felt safe there. Two stretchers came out of the building too and then I remembered the uniforms. Dear lord.

I don't remember driving home. I remember being home, which is a different thing, sitting in a kitchen that had absorbed a lot of very bad nights over the years and had never once, as far as I knew, been asked to absorb one quite like this.

Jacob sat across from me with two untouched cups of coffee between us, because apparently making coffee was still a thing his hands knew how to do even when the rest of him had stopped believing it mattered.

"Naomi's fine," he said, at some point. "David's fine. I called. I check every hour now." He said it like a confession, which I suppose it was — an admission that he'd started needing the reassurance on a schedule, the way you check a wound you're afraid is worse than it looks.

"I don't blame you."

"I know you don't. That is not the part I'm confessing."

We sat with that.

"Say it," I said, eventually, because one of us was going to have to, and I was too tired to keep being the one who didn't.

Jacob looked at his coffee like it might have the sentence written on the surface of it.

"God will deliver them," he said.

He didn't say it like Jeremiah would have said it — not settled, not certain, not a doctrine recited because a man of God had spent forty years earning the right to recite it without his voice shaking. He said it the way you say something true that you are not sure, in this specific hour, that you actually believe all the way down, and are saying anyway, because saying it is the only form the belief has left to take tonight.

"God will deliver them," I said back, and mine came out no steadier than his had.

Neither of us asked the question sitting directly underneath that sentence, the one I could see on Jacob's face and assume he could see on mine — whether "deliver" still had a future tense we were allowed to trust, or whether some of the people we loved most in the world were, right now, in this specific hour, already past the point where delivering was going to mean anything except a body to grieve over instead of a face to hope for.

I didn't ask it. He didn't ask it. We drank coffee that had gone cold sometime in the last twenty minutes without either of us noticing, and outside the window the day kept insisting on turning into evening, indifferent, the way days do, to how much of a family had gone missing inside them.