Danton drove in circles for fifteen minutes before he was satisfied no one was following him.
"Idiots," he muttered at himself, which was fair, since the idiots in question were all him. He'd hit his own steering wheel twice since leaving the gun shop alley, which hadn't helped anything except his knuckles. "All six of us, and we still managed to tear the bags."
He pressed the heel of his hand against his jaw, trying to smooth out the marks the slaps had left. Elizabeth would notice. Elizabeth noticed everything.
Enough. He had what he needed. Twelve pistols, twenty-four magazines, distributed between six bodies. The plan didn't require more than that. The plan had never required more than that.
He pointed the van toward the hospital.
He'd moved her out of the ICU two days ago.
The savings were gone — conference money, research grants, the last of what they'd put aside over a decade of being careful. The ICU had taken it all, and then asked for more, and Danton had looked at the numbers and known that the conversation was coming whether he wanted it or not.
Elizabeth had made it easier than he deserved.
"I don't have much time left," she'd said, with the particular calm of someone who had been living with this knowledge long enough to make peace with it. "I don't want to spend what's left in the ICU. It's too quiet in there. No one talks. I can't see you." She'd reached for his hand. "Move me to a regular ward. You can sit with me. Bring me things. Sing if you want, though I'd rather you didn't."
He hadn't laughed. He'd wanted to.
Now he carried the snack bag upstairs, past the nursing station, to the room at the end of the third-floor corridor — and found the door already open, the television on, and a familiar figure in the chair beside Elizabeth's bed, frowning at the remote control with the focused confusion of a man who had never interacted with this particular model before.
"Oh, you're back." Jude looked up at him with visible relief. "Come quick — I can't figure out your channels. Your wife wants to watch the news and I've managed to find two shopping networks and what I think is a cooking program in Portuguese."
He wasn't entirely lying. The remote control was genuinely baffling to him.
Elizabeth was already smiling when Danton walked in.
She'd been talking for a while before Jude showed up — long enough that she'd worked through the early part of her story and arrived somewhere in the middle, at the part where things had already gone right and she was simply living inside them.
"He was just an ordinary bookworm," she'd told Jude, looking at the ceiling in the pleasant way people do when they're not really looking at the ceiling. "Biology. He loved it in a way I could never quite understand — not the career of it, just the subject. He did his doctorate and became a researcher and I thought: well, that makes sense. That's who he is."
"That's when you met?"
"Somewhere in there. Twelve, maybe thirteen years ago now." She turned her head on the pillow. "Is that a long time? I can never decide if it's a long time."
"Depends on the twelve years."
"Ours were good ones." She said it easily, without performance. "I wanted more of them. I'm not complaining about what I got — I got a good half of a life. I just wanted the second half too."
Jude had handed her the chocolate without making a production of it. "Special one. Try it."
She'd looked at it for a moment, then unwrapped it.
"I haven't had one of these since the ICU." She chewed carefully, with the focused appreciation of someone eating something they'd been denied for a while. "They didn't let me have anything in there. But here—" She glanced at the hallway with exaggerated caution. "Here I can sneak things."
"When you're home, just have Danton pick some up."
"If we meet again," she said, "I'll definitely buy more." She'd asked him to turn on the TV, and that was where things had stood when her husband walked in.
Danton's expression didn't change. But his eyes did.
Twice in one day. The calculation ran fast and sharp behind the stillness of his face. First the gun shop, now the hospital. He's in Elizabeth's room. He knows which ward she's in.
Did he follow me? Does he know what I did? Was he sent?
The possibilities arranged themselves in order of threat.
"Danton, you're back." Elizabeth's voice cut across all of it, warm and matter-of-fact. "Jude came to deliver snacks — I ran into him in the hallway and pulled him in. Practically had to extort the chocolates out of him."
"That's an overstatement," Jude said. "Business is business. I'm not in a hurry."
Danton handed over the remote, got the channel changed, and told Elizabeth he'd be back in a moment. He stepped into the corridor and waited until Jude followed.
"Are you actually here to deliver snacks," he said. Quietly, not aggressively.
"Hospitals order too. Why would I turn down a delivery?"
"Did you tell her about the gun shop?"
"No. Should I have?"
Danton studied his face. Jude returned the look with the open, slightly puzzled expression of someone who genuinely wasn't sure what the subtext was.
"Don't mention it," Danton said finally. "She'd worry."
"Understood."
They went back inside. Jude said his goodbyes, shook Danton's hand, and left.
The afternoon light had gone softer by the time Danton settled back into the chair beside Elizabeth's bed, apple in hand, paring knife moving in slow, careful spirals.
"Shouldn't you be at the lab this afternoon?"
"I slipped out early to come see you."
"You've been slipping out a lot lately." She looked at him with the expression she'd had for thirteen years — the one that knew him better than he gave it credit for. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I know." He set a piece of apple on the tray beside her. "Your situation is more important."
She reached up and touched his face. She'd been about to say something when the television changed her mind.
"— a fire broke out in a residential building this morning in the Whitmore district, spreading quickly through three upper floors before firefighters contained it. The blaze has been fully extinguished. At this time, no fatalities have been reported."
Danton kept peeling.
"Of note: multiple survivors — a young woman and several others — reported being evacuated from the burning floors almost instantaneously by what they described as a red lightning bolt. No individuals outside the building reported witnessing this phenomenon. Investigators suggest that oxygen deprivation during the fire may account for the shared hallucination."
Danton's knife paused.
Red lightning. He turned the phrase over carefully. Instantaneous evacuation. Multiple witnesses, consistent description, independently reported.
That's not a hallucination.
He resumed peeling. Said nothing.
Someone like me. Different ability, but the same origin, probably. They're smarter about it than Clyde was — he allowed himself a moment of distance from Clyde's choices — but they're out there.
He filed it away.
The broadcast moved to the next story.
"— in other news, Central City Police are investigating an attempted robbery at a firearms retailer in the downtown district this morning. The suspect or suspects entered the premises and—"
Danton set the apple down and did not reach for it again.
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