Monday morning arrived the way Monday mornings did — without apology, without ceremony, just the alarm and the grey light and the city already going outside the window.
Indigo had not slept well since Friday.
She'd told Lucas about Ben Kowalski on Saturday morning over coffee at the kitchen table. She'd shown him the article and watched him read it and watched his face do the thing it did — the careful neutral quality of someone processing information they weren't showing a reaction to — and then he'd looked up and said they should call the police.
She'd thought about that.
The police knew about Jacob Cain. He was in their system — the Vicrock case, the official verdict of deceased pending body recovery, the five year old file that was technically still open because nobody had ever formally closed it. Calling the police meant reopening that conversation, meant being the woman who survived Kill Count calling to say the man who was officially probably dead was in New York and had killed a corner store worker for a camping axe. It meant being looked at again. It meant the careful handling and the particular attention and all the things she'd spent five years moving away from.
It also meant — and this was the part she sat with longest — telling someone official that Jacob Cain was alive. Which meant admitting that she hadn't finished it five years ago. That she'd pulled the trigger and thought it was enough and walked out of those woods and it hadn't been enough and she'd been wrong.
She'd told Lucas she'd think about it.
She was still thinking about it Monday morning on the subway, standing with her hand on the overhead rail, watching the dark tunnel walls go past.
Rebecca was already at her desk.
"Coffee's fresh," she said without looking up.
"You're a good person," Indigo said.
"I know." Rebecca looked up. Did the once over. "You look—"
"I know how I look."
"I was going to say better than Friday actually."
Indigo looked at her. "Really."
"You look like someone who has decided something," Rebecca said. "It's a different kind of tired to the other kind."
Indigo poured her coffee and sat down at her desk and thought about that. She supposed it was accurate. The paralysed quality of the weekend — the sitting still, the watching the door, the lying awake listening to Lucas breathe and the city outside — had resolved itself into something else by Sunday evening. Not a plan exactly. Just a direction. Just the decision that the thing she'd been doing since Friday, which was waiting for something to happen, was not something she was willing to keep doing.
She didn't know yet what the alternative was.
But she'd decided there was one.
"Hey," Rebecca said. "You okay? Actually okay, not fine okay."
Indigo looked at her across the partition. Rebecca was watching her with the particular attention she always had — the attention that saw things and didn't make a performance of seeing them.
"Not entirely," Indigo said. Which was as close to honest as she'd been with anyone since Friday.
Rebecca nodded. "Okay," she said. "I'm here."
"I know," Indigo said. "Thank you."
Rebecca went back to her screen. Indigo went back to hers. The office around them did its Monday morning thing — the gradual arrival of people, the low hum of computers, someone's phone ringing unanswered in the corner. The ordinary machinery of a place where people came to do a thing and went home again.
Indigo sat in the middle of it and felt the particular strangeness of ordinary things when you knew something ordinary people didn't. The way normal looked different from the inside of not normal. The way the fluorescent lights and the carpet and the unanswered phone all continued to exist with complete indifference to the fact that Jacob Cain was somewhere in this city with a camping axe and her address.
She opened her spreadsheet.
She entered six rows of data with complete accuracy.
She drank her coffee.
It happened at eleven forty three.
She knew the time because she'd looked at the clock on her screen approximately two minutes before it started — one of those random moments of time awareness that become significant afterward, the brain filing things it didn't know yet would matter.
She heard it before she understood it.
A sound from the direction of the lifts — not the usual sound of the lift arriving, not the doors opening and the professional murmur of people moving through the lobby area — something else. Something that didn't fit the frequency of an ordinary Monday morning in a logistics office on the fourteenth floor.
She looked up.
Through the glass partition that separated the main office from the reception area she could see the reception desk. Maria, the receptionist, was standing behind it — standing back from it, both hands raised slightly, her face doing something Indigo recognised before she'd consciously processed what she was seeing.
Fear. That was what was on Maria's face. The specific expression of someone whose body understood the situation before the mind had caught up.
Indigo was on her feet.
The man on the other side of the reception desk was wearing the jacket.
She could see it through two layers of glass — the main office partition and the reception area glass — and the distance flattened the detail but she knew it. She knew the dark canvas, the pale fur trim, the hood pulled up. She knew the way he stood. She knew the particular quality of the stillness.
The axe was in his right hand.
He was saying something to Maria. She couldn't hear it — two glass partitions and the distance — but she could see Maria's response, the backing up, the hands staying raised, the body doing the instinctive work of trying to make itself smaller.
"Rebecca," Indigo said.
Her voice came out completely flat. Rebecca looked up and Indigo nodded toward the reception area and watched Rebecca's face change.
Around them the office was beginning to register that something was wrong — heads coming up from screens, the particular change in atmosphere that preceded a crisis, people sensing it before they knew what it was.
"Everyone needs to get away from the windows," Indigo said. Louder. The voice she hadn't used in five years, the one that came from somewhere below her normal register, the one that had learned its authority in a forest in the dark. "Now. Away from the windows and the reception area. Get up and move to the back of the office."
People looked at her.
"Now," she said.
They moved.
Rebecca grabbed her bag without being told and went with them and as people streamed toward the back of the floor Indigo moved the other way — toward the reception area, toward the glass, toward the thing on the other side of it that had come fourteen floors up in a lift in broad daylight in the middle of a Monday morning because patience had its limits and apparently this was where his ended.
She got to the glass partition.
Maria had backed up against the far wall of the reception area, both hands still raised, her face the particular colour of someone running entirely on adrenaline.
The Woodsman was looking at the door that connected reception to the main office. The door that was — she checked, she couldn't help checking — closed. Not locked. The lock was on the inside and she was on the inside and all she had to do was get to it before—
He tried the handle.
She crossed the last ten feet to the door and hit it with her shoulder and felt the handle depress on the other side at the same moment her weight connected with the wood.
The door held.
For now.
She put both hands on the handle and held it down and leaned her whole body against the door and felt the pressure from the other side — steady, patient, not forcing, just testing. Just checking the resistance.
She could hear him breathing through the door.
Or she thought she could. Maybe that was her own breathing. Maybe that was her heart.
"Maria," she said, keeping her voice level. "Maria get out of reception. Use the fire exit. Go."
A pause. Then the sound of Maria moving, the fire exit alarm going off as the door opened, the particular sound of someone running down stairs.
Good.
Just her now on this side of the door.
The pressure from the other side increased slightly. Still not forcing. Just present. The way he was always just present.
Indigo held the handle and pressed herself against the door and looked through the glass panel set into it — narrow, reinforced, giving her a sliver of the reception area beyond.
He was right there.
The mask. The eye gaps. Looking directly at her through the glass panel with the same expression he always had which was no expression at all.
She looked back.
Five years collapsed into nothing. Every morning she'd woken up in New York and told herself it was over, it was done, she was safe — all of it gone, just this, just the two of them on opposite sides of a door on the fourteenth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan on a Monday morning.
His hand was on the handle on his other side.
She held hers.
The axe came up.
She threw herself back from the door as the blade went through the wood panel beside the handle — a single clean strike, the wood splitting, and then he reached through the hole and she could hear him feeling for the lock on her side and she grabbed the nearest thing — a chair, one of the waiting area chairs, chrome and upholstered, heavy enough — and drove it into the door, wedging it under the handle.
It wouldn't hold.
She knew it wouldn't hold. She knew the strength that was on the other side of that door and a chair was not going to hold it for long but long enough maybe, long enough for—
She looked toward the back of the office where her colleagues had gone and then at the fire exit door still swinging from Maria's exit and made the calculation in the time she had.
She ran for the fire exit.
Behind her the chair gave way.
She hit the fire exit door and took the stairs two at a time, the alarm still screaming, her hand on the rail, going down because up was a dead end and down was the street and the street was people and witnesses and the particular safety of the visible.
She heard the fire exit door open above her.
Footsteps on the stairs. Not fast. Not running. Just steady, measured, the familiar unhurried descent of something that didn't need to hurry.
Twelve floors. Eleven. Ten.
She was faster. She knew she was faster — she'd always been faster, it wasn't strength that had kept her alive in Vicrock it was speed and decision making and the willingness to keep going when her body wanted to stop.
She kept going.
She came out of the fire exit into the service alley at the back of the building and she ran.
Not away from the building — toward the street, toward the front, toward people and light and the particular visibility of a Monday lunchtime in midtown. She came around the corner and onto the pavement and kept moving, weaving through the foot traffic, putting bodies between herself and whatever was behind her.
She made it half a block before she stopped in the doorway of a pharmacy and looked back.
The service alley entrance. The building facade. The ordinary Monday street.
Nothing.
She stood in the pharmacy doorway with her chest heaving and her hands shaking and looked at the street and waited.
Nothing came out of the alley. Nobody moved against the flow of foot traffic. No dark jacket, no hood, no particular quality of stillness in the moving crowd.
Gone. The way he always went.
She stood there for a long moment.
Then she took her phone out and called Rebecca.
Rebecca picked up on the first ring. "Where are you—"
"I'm okay," Indigo said. "I'm outside. I'm okay. Is everyone—"
"Everyone's fine. We're in the car park. The police are here." A pause. "Indigo what was that. What just—"
"Is anyone hurt."
"No. Maria is shaken but she's okay. Nobody—" Rebecca's voice did something. "Indigo. What was that."
Indigo looked at the street. At the ordinary Monday midday crowd moving past her without looking, the city doing its thing, the particular indifference of a place too large to notice any one thing happening inside it.
"I need you to listen to me," she said. "And I need you to do exactly what I tell you."
"Okay," Rebecca said. Steady. Because Rebecca was steady, had always been steady, it was one of the things Indigo had filed away in year one when she'd decided Rebecca was someone worth trusting.
"Go home," Indigo said. "After the police are done, go straight home. Don't come back to the office today. Don't—" She stopped. Thought. "Don't go anywhere alone. Okay? Is there someone who can be with you tonight."
"My sister," Rebecca said slowly. "She's in Brooklyn. Indigo what is happening."
"I'll explain everything," Indigo said. "I promise. But right now I need you to go to your sister's and stay there and not be alone."
A long pause.
"Okay," Rebecca said.
"Thank you," Indigo said.
She hung up.
She stood in the pharmacy doorway and looked at the street and felt the particular weight of knowing something and not having stopped it and knowing that the knowing and the not stopping were going to cost something she couldn't calculate yet.
She called Lucas.
He picked up immediately. Like he'd been waiting.
"I know," he said before she could speak. "I saw it on the news. Are you okay."
"I'm okay," she said. "I'm outside."
"Come home," he said. "Right now. Come straight home."
She looked at the street one more time.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah I'm coming home."
She stepped out of the pharmacy doorway and started walking and behind her the Monday afternoon carried on and somewhere in the city Jacob Cain was walking too and the distance between them was whatever it was and shrinking.
She didn't find out about Rebecca until the next morning.
Lucas had been awake when she got home — pacing, which he never did, the particular restless energy of someone who had been sitting with something difficult and couldn't be still anymore. He'd held her for a long time in the hallway without saying anything and she'd let him and then they'd sat at the kitchen table and she'd told him everything. The corner store. Ben Kowalski. Seeing Jacob on the street. The office.
All of it.
He'd listened with his hands flat on the table and his face doing the careful neutral thing and when she finished he'd said "we should leave New York" and she'd said "I'm not running" and he'd said "Indigo" and she'd said "I'm not running Lucas" and they'd sat with that between them for a while.
She'd gone to bed eventually. She hadn't expected to sleep and she had, deeply, the sleep of a body that had spent its entire resource and needed to recover regardless of circumstances.
She woke at six to her phone going.
Not Lucas's ringtone. Not Rebecca's. A number she didn't recognise.
She answered it.
It was a detective. She knew it was a detective before he said it — the particular cadence, the careful neutral professional voice that she associated with the months after Vicrock when there had been a lot of those voices around her.
He told her his name. He told her he was calling about a Rebecca Ellison.
Indigo sat up in bed.
He said Rebecca's name and her address and he said the words last night and we're very sorry and Indigo stopped hearing the individual words and just heard the shape of them, the particular shape of what a detective's voice did when it was delivering this specific category of information.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
Lucas appeared in the doorway. He looked at her face.
She looked back at him.
"Thank you," she said into the phone, to the detective, because that was what you said. "Thank you for calling."
She hung up.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in her lap and the morning light coming through the gap in the curtains that she'd never fixed and Lucas standing in the doorway looking at her.
"Rebecca," she said.
He crossed the room and sat beside her and put his arm around her and she sat very still inside it.
She thought about Rebecca's coffee, always fresh. She thought about the once over every morning. She thought about okay, I'm here. She thought about telling her to go to her sister's, go somewhere safe, don't be alone — and Rebecca had said okay and had done it and it hadn't mattered, it hadn't been enough, because Jacob Cain had gotten to her anyway in her sister's building in Brooklyn because he had her address and apparently other addresses too, apparently he had everything, apparently whatever head start she'd thought she had counted for nothing.
She thought about that.
She thought about who had given him everything.
She sat very still.
"I'm so sorry," Lucas said into her hair.
She closed her eyes.
Something was happening underneath the grief. Something quiet and cold that she recognised and didn't push away this time. The thing that had kept her alive in a forest when she was seventeen. The thing that had looked at Jacob Cain across a clearing and pulled the trigger.
She let it come.
"I know," she said.
She opened her eyes.
She looked at the morning light coming through the gap in the curtains.
She was done waiting.