The PowWow

Curtis had been quiet for almost twenty minutes, which for him is its own kind of alarming, and I finally looked up from the case file I hadn't actually been reading to find him not typing at all, just sitting there with his hands flat on the desk on either side of the keyboard, staring at nothing.

"You still with us," I said.

"I'm doing the math I told myself I wasn't going to do tonight." He didn't look up. "Four people. Missing between two and four days, depending which one you're counting. I keep running the numbers on how long a person can go without water before it stops being survivable, and I keep getting an answer I don't like, and I keep running it again anyway, like the math's going to change if I ask it enough times."

Jacob's chair scraped back so fast I flinched. "They are alive."

"I didn't say they weren't."

"You were doing the arithmetic that assumes otherwise." Jacob was standing now, and I recognized the particular stillness underneath the volume — not anger at Curtis, anger at the shape of the thought itself, like he could out-argue it if he just stood close enough. "Whatever is holding them wants them held. Not disposed of. You saw what I saw in that van, Levi. Say it."

I had been trying, with some success, not to think about the van. "One of them was still. One of them wasn't."

"One of them was moving," Jacob said, like the correction mattered, and it did. "Fighting the things holding her, or trying to. You do not waste effort restraining something you intend to be finished with in an hour. Suriel is many things. He has never once, in anything we have documented about him across every case this family has worked, been wasteful." He said it the way he says everything he actually believes, flat and total, no room left in it for a counterargument to move in. "This is capture. Every piece of evidence we have points at capture. He is collecting us for something, which means there is a reason to keep the collection intact, which means — " He stopped himself before I could ask why, on principle, the same way he'd stopped himself a dozen times this week rather than hand us a guess dressed up as a fact.

"Which means we still have time," Curtis finished for him, quietly, and Jacob let him finish it, which told me Jacob thought it was true and just hadn't wanted to be the one who said the reassuring version out loud.

Nobody spoke for a minute. Somewhere in that minute, without either of us deciding to, we ended up talking about Jeremiah's coffee mug, a third drunk and left on the counter, and how strange it was that a coffee mug could undo a grown man faster than a crime scene could.

"He would already have a verse," Jacob said, and his voice did something I hadn't heard it do all week, going thin at the edges. "Whatever this was, he would already have the reference memorized, and he would say it to us like it wasn't costing him anything to say, and I would believe him, because I always believed him." He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye, briefly, and I let him have the privacy of pretending I hadn't seen it. "I keep waiting to walk into a room and find him there with the answer already prepared. I don't think I've let myself understand yet that the room he's supposed to be in is empty."

"Rebecca kept every drawing we ever made her," I said, because somebody had to say something and that was the true thing sitting closest to the surface. "Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones, honestly. She told me once the bad ones were the ones a kid actually meant."

Jacob nodded, and that was as far as either of us could take Jeremiah and Rebecca that night, and I understood, without either of us saying it, that we were circling something else, the way you circle a door you already know what's behind and keep finding reasons to walk past instead of through.

"Rachel," I said, and then didn't say anything else for a while, because I discovered, sitting in that office with the words already out of my mouth, that I had not actually done this yet. Not really. I had done the version of grief that fits inside a moving vehicle, the four minutes and eleven seconds, the phone on the ground not shattered, the report with words like coordinated and no plate recovered. I had done the working version. I had not done the one where I let myself understand that the woman I am supposed to marry has been gone for two days and I do not know if she is frightened, or hurt, or being kept somewhere that has never once, in her life, let anyone find her before it was already too late.

It came up out of me sideways and ugly, the way it does when you've been holding a door shut with your whole body and something on the other side finally leans into it at full weight. I don't remember deciding to put my head down. I remember Jacob's hand between my shoulder blades, not saying anything, because there wasn't anything to say that would have been better than the hand.

"I keep working the case," I said, when I could. "I keep treating it like a case. Plates, vans, gas canisters. I have not once let myself just be a man whose fiancée is missing, because I think some part of me decided that if I stopped being useful I would stop being able to stand up."

"You're allowed to be both," Jacob said. "I am both. I have been both since the parking lot."

"How do you carry it?"

"Badly," he said, and there was something almost like a laugh in it, dry and short. "I carry it badly, and I keep carrying it anyway, because the alternative is putting it down, and I don't currently trust myself to pick it back up again once I did."

Curtis, to his credit, didn't try to fix either of us. He just kept his hands on the keyboard and let the room have its minute, and when he finally spoke it was quiet and level, aimed at the middle distance rather than either of us directly. "For what it's worth. I don't think either of you has stopped being useful for one single second this week. I think you've both been carrying this exact conversation the entire time and just hadn't set it down where I could see it yet."

I was still working out how to answer that when the door came off its hinges.

Not the way a door comes open. The way a door stops being a door — inward, all at once, no warning knock this time, no rhythm to brace against, just noise and splinters and then bodies, more than one, more than two, moving through the gap before the frame had finished settling.

"Five," Jacob said, already up, already between Curtis and the door, and I understood even as I was moving that he'd counted them in under a second, the same reflex that counts everything, because counting was the only kind of certainty he still trusted.

I want to say we fought well. I want to say there was a version of those next ninety seconds where two grown men who have spent a decade training for exactly this kind of night acquitted themselves with something resembling competence. What actually happened is closer to a flood than a fight — five bodies with no interest in pain and no need to breathe, moving with the same fixed, sighted purposefulness I'd watched at Mara's door, except this time there was no door to funnel them through, just an office with a whiteboard and eleven cases of markers and nowhere near enough room to use size the way Jacob usually uses it.

I put one through the filing cabinet hard enough to buckle the drawer and it was back on its feet before I'd finished turning around. Jacob had two of them at once, one arm locked around a throat that didn't need the air he was cutting off, using his whole weight the way he'd told Curtis he'd never had reason to test — spine, he was going for the spine, I saw him go for it — and it still wasn't enough, it held and it held and it did not stop, exactly the word Jacob had used in that office three nights before restraint did not stop it and here we were proving him right in real time with worse stakes attached.

They didn't want me. They didn't want Jacob. I understood that a half-second too late, the same half-second it took the fifth one to close on Curtis from the side none of us were covering, because we were both fighting for our lives against four of them and there was no fifth pair of hands to spare for the one who mattered.

"CURTIS."

I heard my own voice do something I don't have a name for. Jacob heard it too — I felt him try to turn, actually felt the two he was holding get an inch of ground back because some part of him diverted toward the sound of his own name torn in half — and in that inch, the two he had didn't escape, but they didn't need to. They only needed him distracted for as long as it took the door to finish its work.

Curtis didn't go quietly. I want that on the record, the way he'd have wanted it on the record himself, methodical even now — he got a hand on the corner of the desk and held it until the desk came with him, dragged half a foot before something let go, and he said my name once, not a scream, something worse, the flat, clear voice of a man cataloging his own situation even as it happened to him, the same voice he'd used on every case file for a decade, and then the gap between us closed the way the gap at Mara's building had closed, and there was nothing on the other side of it when it was done except an office that used to have four walls doing their job and a third chair, empty again, the way it had been empty for years before Curtis started using it.

We watched it happen. That's the part I don't think I'll get past. Not glimpsed too late, not arrived after, not a phone call with the sound of it instead of the sight — we were both looking directly at him when the last one took him through what used to be a door, close enough that I could have counted his eyelashes, and neither of us could close six feet of floor in time to matter.

The four that had been on us went still the second he was gone, all at once, the way a machine stops when the task is complete, and then they simply rushed out as they had come in, and I couldn't have told you the exact moment they left any more than I could tell you the exact moment grief becomes rage, because by then I was already moving toward the ruined doorway shouting a name into a parking lot that wasn't going to answer.

Jacob caught my arm before I made it outside. Not gently.

"There is nothing out there," he said. "I know. I want to run after it exactly as badly as you do. There is nothing out there to catch."

I stood in the wreckage of our own office, glass and marker caps and one overturned chair, and I understood, in a way I hadn't quite let myself understand about Rachel an hour before, that watching is its own particular wound, worse in some ways than absence, because absence at least leaves you the mercy of not having seen it.

"Fire," Jacob said, eventually, into the silence, and I looked at him because it wasn't where I expected the sentence to go.

"What?"

"You asked me what actually stops one of them. I told you I didn't know. I still don't know for certain. But I have been sitting with it since Mara's door, and I keep landing in the same place, and I think I finally understand why, instead of just believing it." He looked at the doorway that used to have a door in it, and something in his face had gone past grief into something harder and more settled, the specific quiet he gets when a decision has finished forming and stopped needing his permission. "Our God is a consuming fire, Levi. Hebrews says it plainly, not as a metaphor for wrath but as a description of what holiness actually does to what shouldn't still be standing in front of it. I don't think that's an accident, that the method sitting closest to what these things actually are is the one Scripture already used to describe Him. I think fire might be the only answer honest enough for what we're actually facing."

"It's also the one we already ruled out as too dangerous to use anywhere near the people we're trying to save," I said, because somebody had to hold both truths at once and I was the only one left standing to do it.

"I know," Jacob said. "I am not telling you I've solved it. I am telling you I think we finally know what we're aiming for, even if we haven't worked out yet how to aim it without burning down the very people we're trying to bring home."

We stood there a while longer, in an office that no longer had a door, with a chair that was, for the second time in as many weeks, occupied by no one, and I did not have it in me yet to ask the question underneath all of it — how many more chairs this family had left to lose before there was nobody remaining to sit in them.