Gotcha

She saw the lights before she heard the sirens.

Blue and red strobing against the cloud cover, coming from the south, the particular light show of multiple units moving fast. She stopped on the road and watched them come and felt something in her chest loosen slightly — not relief exactly, not yet, but the beginning of the possibility of it.

Three cars. An ambulance behind them. They came around the bend in the road and their headlights found her and they stopped.

Doors opened.

The detective was in the second car. She recognised him before he spoke — the careful neutral face, the professional quality of someone who had learned to keep their reactions managed. He crossed the road to her and looked at her the way people looked at her when they were assessing damage and trying not to show that the assessment was concerning them.

"Ms Derby," he said.

"Detective," she said.

"You're hurt."

She looked down at herself. The smoke damage to her jacket, the scrapes from the undergrowth, the particular state of someone who had been in a burning forest for the better part of two hours. Her hands. She looked at her hands and then put them in her pockets.

"Some," she said again.

He nodded at the paramedic behind him and the paramedic came forward and she let them do what they needed to do — the torch in the eyes, the questions, the hands on her arms checking for things. She stood still and let it happen and looked past them at the orange sky above the forest.

Still burning.

"He's in the undergrowth east of the main path," she said to the detective, over the paramedic's shoulder. "Approximately three hundred meters north of the fence line." She paused. "He's not going to be a problem."

The detective looked at her for a moment.

"Okay," he said.

He turned and said something to the officers behind him and they moved — toward the fence, toward the gap, toward the forest. She watched them go and thought about them finding what she'd left in the undergrowth and felt nothing about that. Not satisfaction. Not horror. Just the particular absence of feeling that came after something that had taken everything to do.

The paramedic said something. She looked at her.

"Sorry," she said. "What."

"I need you to come sit in the ambulance," the paramedic said. "You've inhaled a lot of smoke and I need to check your oxygen levels."

"Okay," Indigo said.

She went and sat in the ambulance.

They kept her in hospital for two days.

The smoke inhalation was the main concern — her lungs had taken more than they should have and the particular quality of burning pine was not something respiratory systems thanked you for. There were also the scrapes and the bruising and something in her left wrist that turned out to be a small fracture she hadn't noticed acquiring, which said something about the night she'd had.

She lay in the hospital bed and looked at the ceiling and let her body do what it needed to do.

The detective came on the first day. He sat in the chair beside the bed with his notebook open and asked his questions in the careful measured way he had and she answered them the same way — straight through, no managing, just the facts in order and the truth underneath them. She'd been doing this for five years, in various configurations, and she knew how to do it now.

She told him about Lucas. About the messages on the phone, about what Lucas had told her in the kitchen, about the gunshot she'd heard from three blocks away. She watched the detective write it down and she felt the grief for Lucas arrive properly for the first time — not the complicated grief she'd been carrying since Friday, the grief that was tangled up with betrayal and confusion and the question of what had been real, but something simpler and sadder underneath all of that. A person she'd loved. A person who had been two things at once for three years and had chosen, at the end, to be one of them.

She thought about what that had cost him.

She thought about his father standing over him with a gun and she thought about the fact that Jacob Cain had killed his own son and she thought about what kind of person did that and whether the word person still applied.

She told the detective all of it.

He wrote it all down.

On the second day Max came.

She arrived in the afternoon with her paint-stained jacket and her eyes that were doing the thing eyes did when they'd been doing a lot of crying and not enough sleeping and she sat in the chair beside the bed and they looked at each other for a moment.

"Hey," Indigo said.

"Hey," Max said.

They sat with it for a while. The particular silence of two people who had lost the same person and were in different places with it and didn't need to pretend otherwise.

"She told me to come back," Indigo said eventually.

Max looked at her.

"When I left her apartment. She said come back." She looked at the ceiling. "She always said the right thing."

"Yeah," Max said. Her voice was rough. "She did."

They sat quietly again.

"I'm sorry," Indigo said. "I know that's—"

"Don't," Max said. Not unkindly. Just firmly. The tone of someone who had decided something about blame and wasn't going to revisit it. "She made her own choices. She always made her own choices. That was Anastasia."

Indigo looked at her.

"Yeah," she said. "It was."

Max stayed for two hours. They talked about Anastasia — not about how she died but about how she lived, which was the conversation that mattered. The small particular details of a person that only the people closest to them held. The way she made coffee too strong and never apologised for it. The way she woke up already cataloguing things, already running, her brain arriving at the day before the rest of her. The laugh that started slow and built. The hand over yours when you needed it. Just there. Just always there.

Indigo held all of it.

She filed it somewhere safe.

When Max left she hugged her at the door and Indigo let her and held on for a moment longer than she'd planned to.

"Come back to New York," Max said.

Indigo thought about that.

"Maybe," she said.

Her mum came on the second evening.

Kris Derby drove four hours and arrived at six pm and came into the room and looked at her daughter in the hospital bed and her face did the thing it did when she was feeling something large and had decided not to perform it.

"Hi Mum," Indigo said.

"Hi," her mum said.

She sat down and she took Indigo's hand — the right one, the one without the wrist brace — and she held it and she didn't say anything for a while and Indigo didn't either and that was exactly right.

Eventually her mum said "are you done now" and Indigo thought about it properly, the way she thought about things she needed to think about, and said "yes" and meant it.

Her mum nodded.

"Good," she said.

She stayed until visiting hours ended and then she said she'd be back in the morning and she'd drive Indigo home when they let her out and Indigo said okay and watched her go and thought about the kitchen at home and the radio on low and the morning light on the table and felt something she hadn't felt in a long time.

The possibility of ordinary.

Not the ordinary she'd been building in New York — the careful, constructed, deliberately anonymous ordinary of someone hiding in plain sight from a life they'd survived. Something realer than that. Something that acknowledged what had happened and what it had cost and kept going anyway.

She didn't know what that looked like yet.

She lay in the hospital bed and breathed and thought about it.

They discharged her on the morning of the third day.

She stood outside the hospital in the cold November air while her mum brought the car around and she looked at the sky — grey, ordinary, the particular flat light of a November morning in upstate New York — and she breathed it in.

Not burning. Just cold. Just air.

Her phone had been going since the news had broken — the Kill Count case reopened, Jacob Cain confirmed deceased, the survivor of the original Vicrock attack the primary witness. She'd turned the notifications off. She'd deal with all of that eventually. She'd been dealing with versions of it for five years and she knew the shape of it and she'd deal with this version too.

Not today.

Her mum pulled up in the same car she'd driven for ten years, the particular sound of it immediately and completely home, and Indigo got in and her mum looked at her once and then looked at the road and pulled out of the hospital car park.

They drove in silence for a while. The town going past and then the road opening up and the landscape changing, the particular geography of a long drive home.

"Indigo," her mum said.

"Yeah."

"You know why I named you that."

She looked at her mum. "Yeah Mum. You've told me."

"Tell me."

She looked out the window. At the sky and the road and the trees going past.

"Because indigo is the colour right at the edge of what the eye can see," she said. "Right at the edge of the visible spectrum. One step further and it becomes something the human eye can't even process."

"And," her mum said.

"Something right at the edge of remarkable," Indigo said.

Her mum nodded. Eyes on the road.

They drove.

She slept most of the way home.

Not the shallow unreliable sleep of the last week — properly, deeply, the sleep of someone whose body had finally received permission. She woke up when the car stopped and looked out the window at her mum's house, the particular familiarity of it, and felt something settle in her that had been unsettled for a very long time.

She got out of the car.

She stood on the pavement in front of the house and looked at it and breathed.

The front door. The window of the kitchen where the radio played in the mornings. The garden wall. Just a house. Just the house where she'd grown up and left and come back to in pieces over the years and which had always been here, unchanged and uncomplicated, just waiting.

Her mum came around the car and stood beside her.

"Come on," she said.

They went inside.

The kitchen smelled like it always smelled. The particular combination of it — the coffee, the particular cleaning product her mum had used for twenty years, the old wood of the table — arriving in her nose as home the way smells did, bypassing everything else and going straight to the thing underneath.

She sat down at the table.

Her mum put the kettle on. The radio came on with it — the specific low volume of a radio that had been set to the same station for years, some mid-morning programme she didn't know, just voices and occasional music, just the sound of the world carrying on.

She put her hands flat on the table.

She looked at them.

The scrapes were healing. The wrist brace was temporary. The smoke damage to her lungs would clear over weeks, the doctor had said. The body was good at this — at recovering, at returning to function, at doing the quiet work of repair in the background while everything else continued.

She looked at her hands and thought about everything they'd done and everything they'd held and she breathed.

In. Out.

Her mum put a cup of tea in front of her and sat down across the table and they sat together in the kitchen in the quiet house and the radio played something she didn't know and the morning light came through the window and lay across the table between them.

She thought about the clearing.

She thought about it the way she'd been thinking about it for five years — not the clearing as it was at the end, burning and terrible, but the clearing as it had been at the beginning. Six people in a circle, fire between them, the whole weekend ahead. Elizabeth's laugh. Nico's running commentary on everything. Addison sitting slightly apart with her phone. Anastasia watching. Jett's hand finding hers in the dark.

She thought about how that moment existed somewhere permanently. How it was real and had happened and nothing could reach back and take it.

She held onto that.

She thought about the bow.

She thought about standing in the burning clearing with one arrow and a man who had survived a bullet and a burning arrow in his face and five years of obsession carrying him past the point where normal thresholds applied. She thought about what she'd done and how she'd done it and the specific sound of the forest when it was over.

She thought about saying okay you win. Loud enough that he heard it. Loud enough that he came to it.

She thought about seeing him come through the smoke and the fire and raising what she'd found in the outer shed — the second bow, the one she'd found when she'd gone looking, the one that had been in better shape than the first, properly stored in the equipment locker she'd broken open with a rock while he was still moving through the burning north side of the site looking for her.

She thought about waiting.

She thought about saying gotcha.

She thought about the arrow going through the mask and Jacob Cain going down in the burning clearing and not getting up.

She sat at her mum's kitchen table and breathed and let all of it exist without looking away from any of it.

Then she picked up her tea.

Later that afternoon she went into the garden.

She sat on the wall — the same garden wall she'd sat on at Addison's seventh birthday party, the same wall where her mum had told her about her name while across the garden Elizabeth tried to get back on a pink bike. The wall was the same. The garden was slightly smaller than she remembered the way things always were.

She sat on it and looked at the garden and smoked a cigarette and thought about what came next.

Not in the large sense — not the shape of a life, not who she was going to be, not the long complicated process of whatever this became. Just the immediate next. The practical sequence of things. Talk to the detective again. Talk to the lawyers who had already called twice. Sleep properly. Eat properly. Let her lungs do their work.

Call Max.

She thought about New York. About whether she'd go back. She thought about the office and the apartment and the fire escape and the corner store on the block — Ben Kowalski's corner store, someone else behind the counter now, the sign above the door still there probably. She thought about the city and what it had been for her — the anonymity, the size, the particular relief of a place too large to look at you directly — and whether it was still that or whether it had become something else now.

She didn't know yet.

She'd figure it out.

She finished the cigarette and looked at the garden and thought about Elizabeth's house. The wall around it. The kitchen with the big table. Somewhere quiet.

She thought about that for a long time.

That evening her mum made dinner and they ate at the kitchen table and the radio played and outside the garden went dark and the ordinary November night settled around the house and Indigo sat in the middle of it and let it be ordinary.

After dinner her mum went to watch television and Indigo stayed at the table with her tea and her phone.

She looked at her phone for a long time.

She opened her contacts.

She scrolled through them slowly. The names of people — some of whom she'd spoken to in the last week and some of whom she hadn't spoken to in years and some of whom she would never speak to again. She scrolled past Rebecca. She scrolled past Lucas. She stopped at Anastasia — still there, the contact still sitting in her phone the way the dead stayed in phones for a while before you made the decision to remove them.

She looked at it.

Then she scrolled on.

She found the number she was looking for and she looked at it for a moment and then she pressed call.

It rang twice.

"Indigo." Max's voice. Rough still, raw still, but steady in the way Max was steady — the fundamental okayness of her underneath everything, the same quality Anastasia had always been drawn to.

"Hey," Indigo said.

"Hey."

A pause. Not uncomfortable. Just the pause of two people who were still finding the shape of what they were to each other without the person who had connected them.

"How are you doing," Indigo said.

"Honestly?" Max said. "Badly. But like. Getting through it."

"Yeah," Indigo said. "Me too."

They talked for an hour.

About Anastasia mostly — more of the small particular details, the ones Max had that Indigo didn't and the ones Indigo had that Max didn't. The specific collaborative archaeology of a person that only happened when the people who loved them talked to each other. Indigo held all of it. She filed it somewhere permanent.

When they hung up she sat at the kitchen table for a while longer.

She thought about New York.

She thought about the apartment that was still technically hers for another two months. She thought about the fire escape and the cigarettes and the gap in the curtains she'd never fixed. She thought about starting over in it — without Lucas, without Rebecca, just the city and herself and whoever she was going to be now.

She thought about somewhere quieter.

She thought about a wall around a garden.

She didn't decide anything. She just sat with the possibilities and let them exist side by side without collapsing them into a choice yet.

She had time.

For the first time in a very long time she had time.

She went to bed at ten.

She lay in her old bedroom in her mum's house — the room that had been hers at seventeen, repainted and refurnished since but still carrying the particular quality of a space that had known her at a specific point — and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about the first time she'd lain awake in this room after Vicrock. The particular quality of that ceiling at four in the morning, the city outside quiet in the way it only was at four, the world temporarily paused.

She thought about how long ago that was.

She thought about everything between then and now — New York, Lucas, Rebecca, Anastasia, Jacob Cain in a burning forest — and she held it all at arm's length for a moment and looked at the shape of it. The shape of a life that had been bent by something enormous and had found its way to a shape anyway, not the shape she'd have chosen but a shape, a real one, with people in it who had mattered and things she'd done that had cost her and things she'd survived that had cost her more.

She thought about coming back.

She thought about what Anastasia had said.

Come back.

She was back.

She was lying in her old room in her mum's house and the radio was off and the house was quiet and the garden was outside the window and she was alive and she was back and she didn't know yet what she was going to do with that.

But she was going to figure it out.

She closed her eyes.

Sleep came faster than she expected.

No forest. No fire. No footsteps in the dark.

Just the quiet of the house and the dark behind her eyes and the long road of whatever came next beginning somewhere ahead of her in the ordinary November morning that was coming whether she was ready for it or not.

She breathed.

In.

Out.

She slept.