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His expression was unreadable, but his fingers curled around the edge of the blanket, covering his lap with white-knuckled intensity. I hadn’t seen him look at the box once since the debate began.
I turned back to Egret. “And what happens when we hand it over and Washington buries it? Or uses it for backdoor surveillance, turns it on their own people? What if we’re trading one tyranny for another?”
Egret pushed off the wall, walking toward us with slow, angry steps. “Then we keep the Soviets from having it first. That’s the job.”
My brows rose. “And after the job?”
“That’s someone else’s war.”
“No,” I said. “It won’t be.”
Farkas closed the lid of the box with a gentle thud. “I won’t give it to any single government. I won’t hand it over to the same men who drew lines through Europe like they were sketching on a map.”
“And what if we decide for you?” Egret asked, voice low.
Sparrow’s head snapped toward him.
“I’m serious,” he said. “What if we take it? Burn your notes, fake a story. They’ll believe whatever we report, so long as the machine’s in our hands.”
We didn’t have Farkas’s notes—they were somewhere in Budapest—but Egret walked an interesting line.
“You would lie about what I built?” Farkas whispered.
“Every day of the week,” Egret said.
Sparrow took a step closer to the box.
“Enough,” she said, not loud, but commanding. “We are not thugs. We did not come this far just to become the thing we are fighting against.”
I nodded.
And Thomas, at last, spoke.
“We don’t have to decide tonight.”
His voice was soft but carried like a judge’s gavel in the silence that followed.
“We get to Austria,” he said. “We cross that border first. Then we figure out what comes next—with clear heads and clean hands.”
No one argued.
Not even Egret.
57
Thomas
Leavingthebarnfeltlike peeling off armor.
The wood had become almost familiar. The dusty beams, the creak of the old hayloft ladder, even the smell of straw and mold—somehow, it all felt like safety. It was absurd, really. We’d slept on the floor, eaten cold rations, listened to rats scurry across the rafters. And yet, stepping through that wide slat of a door into the freezing dark was like being cast out of the last sanctuary we’d know.
The air was colder than it had any right to be, pressing tight against my skin and biting at every seam in my coat. The stars were cloaked in gauze-thick cloud, and the only light we had came from the faint shimmer of frost on the grass. Every step forward felt like breaking something sacred.
Will stayed by my side, his hand near my back but never quite touching unless I faltered. I didn’t want to lean on him, didn’t want to need to, but every jolt of pain in my shoulder, every crunch of my boots over half-frozen dirt, reminded me that my independence was an illusion.
We’d been walking maybe twenty minutes—slipping along fence lines and half-eroded livestock trails—when the first pair of headlights crested the hill behind us.
“Down,” Will hissed.