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July 2015 · AIIB Mission Month 13

“ H e could still come back.”

“Russell — don’t.”

“Why would he set up a blast that would kill him , too?”

“Maybe he thought he didn’t have a life with us anymore. If he thought it would help us… You know he would’ve done it. You know as well as I do.”

“He could still come back. ”

“This isn’t about Dust, is it? This is you and Short all over again —”

“It is about Dust, Leta. I’ve mourned my brother. This isn’t about him.”

“You’re just putting off the inevitable, thinking that way.”

“Fuck the inevitable. We don’t work under the inevitable. Everything we do is goddamned improbable, isn’t it?”

Carrow lingered there by the door to the room where Wayles and Leta had retired. He felt conflicted about eavesdropping but… Nobody seemed to be able to talk about Dust to him out in the open — not in the first hour there in the safehouse, not as the sun set and it seemed less and less likely that Dust would show up, and certainly not when they all re tired to their rooms in varying degrees of acceptance that Dust was truly gone.

He wanted to know what the other members of The Company were thinking and what they were feeling — and so if all he could get was a stolen conversation at 4 a.m. between his second in command and his tech man, then Carrow would take it.

The thought of Wayles holding out hope that Dust would still roll up on his motorcycle, against all odds and all signs to the contrary, evoked a whole spectrum of emotions in Carrow. He wanted to burst in and tell Wayles to give up hope and start mourning Dust — to start mourning the entire year they had spent together, the bonds they had forged and the friendship they had developed — before it was too late, before it would wound him further. At the same time, he wanted to hoist Wayles up, to embrace him, to confess, Yes, me too! I still have hope!

“If he’d made it out of that alive, he’d be here by now. Think about what you’re saying, Russell. He knows exactly where we would take the helicopter. If he’d survived that blast, he would’ve come straight here to meet us.”

Leta was right. Carrow knew she was.

“And if he didn’t come here? He paid his dues and he’s done with us. Back at Abe or ran off for good. We won’t see him again, and the faster you accept it, the easier it’s going to be.”

Carrow felt bent and broken. He retired to his room.

The next day was terrible . It was like a replay of the day after Short’s death.

No one wanted to talk shop. No one wanted to talk to Carrow .

Everyone was thinking about exactly the same thing, and nobody could bring themselves to say it out loud — not even Herron.

Dust was a traitor.

Dust died for us.

Dust loved us.

There was so much to doubt about the last year of their lives, but those three facts stood irrefutable.

Carrow ran through the circuit in his mind a thousand times. Did the second two statements somehow come together to eclipse the first? Did it matter that Dust had come to them under false pretenses if he had left this world simply because he loved them too much to see them get hurt? Or did Dust’s traitor status erase any good that his actions had done?

The weight of it was so heavy in Carrow’s mind that he looked for anything else to think about.

Of course there was the penthouse to consider — the whole future of The Company to ponder over.

It was mid-morning before Carrow registered the fact that he hadn’t changed his clothes since the day before. He was still covered in grime and grease and bloodspatter. He shuffled through the things in the safehouse closet, trying to find the least offensive garments. Everything was hopelessly strange, and he settled on soft shorts and a plain, ancient-looking t-shirt before heading to the bathroom attached to his suite.

There was something wrong with the showerhead in the old stall, and so he ran a bath.

Instantly, he was back in that bathroom with Dust in March.

The night was still fresh in his mind .

He hadn’t revisited it since the events of the day before. But now he understood — all of the pieces falling into place. Dust hadn’t been morose in the week after the bank job because Carrow had shot his Abe ally.

He had been terrified that AIIB was going to ruin his life with The Company.

It explained the next night, too. The strange questions. The suggestion that everything would be safer if Carrow could buy them new identities and a place to start over.

Those weren’t the desires of someone who planned to betray him. There was no cunning in it. That was the wish of someone who was running scared.

Dust had wanted a life with him. It was impossible to deny it.

Carrow let his body sag into the tub. He scrubbed his skin. His chest felt hollow.

Despite everything Dust had been and every lie he had told, the things he wanted for them had been real.

That’s why I watch the sun set — that’s why I had to kiss you that first day. We are not our pasts, and we can only live in the present. The choice we make today is all that matters.

They’d only had a year together.

The grief that flooded Carrow was overwhelming, suffocating. He couldn’t keep thinking about this. Dust had been a traitor — he had lied. What good did it do to forgive him now? It was easier to hate him. Anything else was liable to destroy Carrow.

He hardened his heart and didn’t stop scrubbing until his skin was angry and raw.

Leta scraped a meal of pasta together for dinner from the cans and boxes in the cupboard. No one had an appetite, and the five of them sat under the dim light in the dining room, pushing the pasta and sauce around on their plates like a band of pouting children.

There was no real reason for them to spend a second night at the safehouse. Police had probably dismantled their entire garage by now, but there was no chance they’d made it into the ruined penthouse.

Maybe they should’ve returned home that night to start sorting through the wreckage. There were bodies to deal with, discrete contractors to hire. There was so goddamned much to do back at the penthouse, and they had no protocol for how to deal with things when they’d been attacked in their own home. Nobody could bring themselves to talk about going back there, Carrow included.

He had spent the day alone, considering what to do. He’d come to his conclusion by noon, but couldn’t quite bring himself to form the words, to tell the others.

But there at the dinner table, he couldn’t continue to ignore the writing on the wall. He had to come clean.

“The Company is disbanding,” Carrow said, forcing finality into his voice. “I’ll pay out all of the shares of what you’ve earned with me. It’s enough for you to all start over wherever you want — buy new identities, maybe, and escape all of this. You’ll never have to work again, if you don’t want to.”

“What? ”

The first protest came from Leta, who slapped her fork down onto her plate with such force that she almost upended the dish onto the table.

“You’re shitting me, Carrow,” she said, sounding furious.

“This is the end. Emerson was right — at least in that regard. We’re broken.”

“ I’m not goddamn broken,” Vashvi cut in, sounding even angrier than Leta .

“I won’t see you hurt. I’m not doing this again.”

“You’re abandoning us, then?” Wayles asked.

“I cannot do this to you,” Carrow said. “You deserve better.”

“This is exactly what we deserve, boss,” Herron said, their voice even and steady. “This is what we signed up for. We knew the risks when we took the job.”

“You thought you did — but now you’re in the crosshairs of a cartel, and they know where you live. I can’t stop this and yesterday was proof that I can’t protect you. My judgment is... I let an Abe agent live with us , for christsakes.”

Leta tried to break back in, but he was on a roll.

“We’re disbanding, Leta. I’ll pay you as quickly as I can and we’ll go our separate ways.”

Leta’s hand found his under the table.

“I know you’re heartbroken, Ansel, but —”

“Heartbroken over a traitor?” Carrow said, his voice going high, betraying all of the emotions that he was fighting so hard to punch down. “No. He got what was coming to him —”

“You can’t possibly mean that,” Wayles protested.

Carrow drew his hand away from Leta’s and pushed away from the table. He couldn’t have this conversation. His decision was final.

“He died for you, Carrow,” Wayles called after him as he made his way to the back yard. “Call him a traitor if you want — it doesn’t change what he did for us.”

“It doesn’t change the last year,” Vashvi said, quieter. “I don’t care who Emerson said he was. He was Dust, to me.”

Carrow paced out into the night and closed the door behind him, shutting it louder than he’d intended.

What did it matter how they remembered Dust? Why did they feel the need to rail against him like that?

It was easier to tell himself that the only thing he lost in that blast was a traitor. He could keep the nightmares at bay, maybe, if he didn’t have to add Dustin Wrenshall to the list of people who had trusted him, who had died because of his stupidity.

Carrow lit a cigarette and stared into the dark.

Dust woke in a panic .

Something was very very wrong .

For starters, he wasn’t dead.

Apparently.

His chest ached, his head felt like it was filled with broken glass, and he couldn’t seem to move.

But he wasn’t dead.

The sound of sirens somewhere nearby sliced pain through his skull. He could smell smoke and something like gunpowder. Things started to come back.

Emerson. The cartel men.

After the men had broken through the reinforced garage door, Dust had drawn them back into the garage, trading gunfire with them as long as he could while he used one of the jeeps as a shield. So many of them had streamed into the space — a dozen, two dozen, it was impossible to count when he could only peek out at them for a second before disappearing again.

When he was out of bullets, he let them fall in towards his makeshift barricade in front of the elevator.

It had only taken a minute to set up the charges at the entrance to the garage and the concrete pilings within. He’d had more than enough explosives left over from the Lefebvre job the night before, still stashed in the back of the truck.

Dust didn’t have anyone or anything to pray to in the last moments that he sat behind the jeep. He held the makeshift detonator in his hand, and instead of praying, Dust thought of everyone he owed an apology.

I’m sorry, Mom and Dad.

I’m sorry, Leiby.

Leta, Vashvi, Wayles, Herron…

I’m so sorry, Ansel.

He squeezed his eyes shut. The world had erupted around him.

It made no sense , then, to find himself alive.

Maybe this is the afterlife, he thought.

But that made no sense either. The afterlife wouldn’t have sirens and what felt like several broken ribs.

As he came back to himself, Dust tried harder to move. He realized that he wasn’t paralyzed — just trapped. And if he pressed through his legs, he could actually move whatever was piled on top of him.

By the time he was shimmying out of the rubble, police and fire rescue staff were arriving. He must have only been out for a few minutes. The garage was a dark, smoldering wreck — the chaos so intense that it was difficult to even understand which direction he was facing. Or maybe that was the head injury talking. All he knew was that he wanted to go in the direction away from the cops.

Dust struggled to get his bearings. There was a jagged opening in the wall behind him. Was that the way into the rest of the garage, or the way that faced the street? He clutched his head, willing it to stop throbbing. Lights flashed as a fire truck arrived, and his feet started marching him in the opposite direction, towards the jagged opening. He only hoped that he wouldn’t find more devastation on the other side of the wall — that he could get out of the building .

Dust lost some time, then.

He woke up in a park . It was night. A full moon. Dust let himself drift back to sleep.

“Hey , come on.”

Someone had a hand on his back. Dust woke. His blood ran cold: a cop.

“I haven’t seen you here before, so I’m not taking you in,” the man said, sweat beaded on his forehead. “But you can’t stay here. There’s a day center up on Main — you go to this intersection right here and hang a left.”

The cop gestured to the stoplight close by. He recognized the intersection. He was still in the financial district.

“What time is it?”

“Just after 3. You head up there and they’ll tell you what shelters are admitting tonight, OK? But I can’t let you stay here.”

Nothing the man said made sense to him, but he knew better than to argue. The man helped him to his feet and he wobbled, wanting to vomit but knowing that he needed to simply go along with whatever the cop said and try not to be suspicious.

“Thank you,” Dust said. The cop nodded and walked on.

Dust walked as far as he could towards the intersection before he needed a break. His vision went funny and dark at the edges. It was very hot. He found a bench. He lost some more time.

When he came back , he was in the sunshine on a street he recognized as Main. At least he’d tried to follow the cop’s directions. He was sitting at a bus stop.

“Hey man, you OK?”

A kid had stopped and squatted in front of him, peering up at Dust where he sat.

“I’m good. Thank you. I just need the bus.”

“You’re bleeding, man — let me call someone.”

Dust took a deep breath, trying to process things. His hand found the gun in his waistband. There was nothing in it — he’d unloaded clip after clip at the cartel — but that made it no less intimidating. Weakly, he pulled it out of his waistband, just enough to flash it at the good Samaritan.

“Keep walking. I said I’m good.”

The kid disappeared without another word.

Dust needed to go east. That’s where The Company would’ve gone, if they made it out.

He didn’t know how much time he lost after that.

When he came back, he was on a bus and a woman was pressing something cool into his hand. It was dark outside.

“Here you go sir,” she said. She was young and serious looking. “You can clean up with this. Do you need something to drink?”

He looked down at his hand. She’d given him a baby wipe.

He laughed in spite of himself. It was all so absurd.

“What direction are we going?”

“Um, out to the suburbs. East towards San Laredo. Here,” she said, producing a water bottle. “You should take this even if you’re not thirsty. Do you want a mirror?”

Oh. She wanted him to clean himself up. That made sense — he must be a mess after the explosion. How did she know? He accepted the little mirror she held out, and started to scrub his face with the baby wipe.

When he was done, she took the dirty wipe back, stuffing it into her bag and accepting the mirror. He cracked the fresh bottle of water and drank it in one draw. He was feeling less and less like he was going to lose time again — and that, at least, was good.

“You know, they say online to just, like, give money if you can,” the woman said, watching him intently. “Like it’s paternalistic to just assume you know what somebody needs. I mean, I guess I should’ve offered that, first. I mean, most people ask for something if they need it but…”

“No offense, ma’am,” he said, meticulously forcing himself to form the words. “But what are you talking about?”

“Sorry — sorry! That was probably really offensive. Oh my God. I’m just, like, making assumptions. I’m just saying, I’ve never been in your position. I just want to, y’know, help if I can?”

“In my position?”

“You know… homeless? Sorry, maybe that’s offensive? Everyone is just a person — I don’t mean to be rude I just —”

He laughed hard at that and it made his head and chest ache at the same time. He couldn’t decide which broken, offending piece of himself to grab, and so he doubled over instead.

“I guess I am technically homeless,” he said, fighting the wave of nausea that came with the laugh. “Thank you for the water.”

“I mean, what I’m getting at is, do you need some money?”

He smiled and reached for his pocket. He wondered if his wallet had stayed on him during the blast. Somehow, it had. Of course it had — how else would he have paid for bus fare, he realized. He retrieved it and thumbed out a few hundreds .

“No, I don’t. But you were nice to the right person on the right bus,” he said, pressing the bills into her hand.

She stared at him dumbfounded. He slumped back into the seat, and waited for the next exit sign that would tell him how close he was to the eastern safehouse.

“Hey, you know, on second thought — you don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

Anything above a slow walk had Dust’s head pounding — and suddenly, as he tackled the four miles between the bus stop and the safehouse, it made a lot of sense that Dust hadn’t gotten very far in the 36 or so hours that he’d spent wandering Las Abras. At least he no longer felt like he was going to pass out.

But consciousness had its own problems. His ribs were aching, his head was aching, and at least a half dozen other ailments were making themselves known. Dust’s tailbone felt bruised, his wrist was swelling in a way that gave him pause, and one of his ankles was doing its damndest to roll and throw him down onto the gravel every 50 or so yards.

He was fucked if no one was at the safehouse. Beyond the fact that it would mean The Company probably hadn’t ever made it out of the penthouse, Dust had no way of getting into the house if he made it there and found it empty. It looked nondescript from the outside, but its defenses were shored up like goddamn Fort Knox.

Without a way in, without a phone, and faced with another four-mile hike back to the bus stop, Dust wasn’t sure what he’d do.

Everything was riding on them being there.

Well .

And even if they were there, he thought, what would happen to him?

Better to die by their hands than unconscious on some rural road.

At least he’d have some peace in knowing they had made it.

He rolled his ankle four more times before he saw the house on top of the hill.

There were lights on.

Without thinking about it, Dust broke into a sprint. There were lights on. Someone was inside. The Company had made it out alive. He’d bought them the time and they’d escaped.

His family was goddamned alive. Even with his entire future there hanging in the balance, with all of the questions and the horrible possibilities etching patterns that grew like fractals in his mind, at least his family was goddamned alive.

Lungs burning, Dust approached the house in a limping jog that grew more difficult with each step, bolts of hot pain cutting through his lungs, through his skull. From the lawn, he couldn’t see anyone through the windows. Maybe… Maybe he should go to the back and see who was there. Maybe this wasn’t a situation to walk into blindly. He caught his breath and forced himself to slow down.

He’d had his confirmation, the proof he needed to put at least some of his worries to rest. There was no reason to rush it now.

He circled around, making a wide loop to approach the house through the stand of trees at the back. The undergrowth caught at his half-shredded clothes. Dust tried and failed not to make what felt like an impossible racket out there in the dark on the large piece of land.

Finally, he came to a spot where he could approach the safehouse from the back. His eyes adjusted to the moonlight. There was a figure in the clearing .

Carrow.

The man was hunched on the porch steps, his head in his hands. A dot of light flared in front of his face and Dust realized he was smoking.

Carrow was the only one who could make a decision about him. His timing had been perfect. Let Carrow make the call now. He could make Dust disappear quietly out here in the dark — the rest of The Company would never have to know, if he didn’t want them to.

Yes, he thought. This is the right way to do it. This, at least, I can offer to him.

He stood in the darkness, catching his breath and watching Carrow. The man was dressed in basketball shorts and a t-shirt, and under any other circumstances, Dust would’ve laughed at the getup that was so out of character for him.

He gathered his thoughts. He went through the circuit again, preparing for his end, apologizing to those who deserved it.

Then, Dust stepped out of the stand of trees at the edge of the backyard.

“Hey, boss.”

Ansel Carrow peered out into the darkness. Dust took a few steps forward.

“No.” Carrow was moving in an instant.

Dust didn’t know if he should move towards him or away.

“ No,” Carrow repeated louder, even as he sprinted across the backyard.

Don’t let him call me Charlie — please don’t let him —

“Dust,” Carrow said, grabbing him hard, squeezing him, his ribs aching, his head throbbing. “It can’t be you. Dust .”

“It’s me, boss.”

Carrow drew back, holding him at arm’s length, running a hand through Dust’s hair and shaking his head .

And there he was: the man who had come to mean everything to Dust, the person who he knew now meant more than his whole life. Carrow was a ruthless man with a dark past and a wake of crime behind him, but he was also the man who had smiled sleepily at Dust every morning, who had shared his secrets with Dust and asked for nothing in return, who had squeezed his hand in the dim quiet of a sedan before they made the world explode into chaos together.

Carrow was his future, whether that meant a sprawling line of years where they’d add meaning to what they shared, or a merciful end here in his familiar hands.

“How the hell? Where have you — Fuck! Dust,” he said, pulling him close again. “How did you get here? How are you alive?”

“I took the bus. Then I walked. I got… really lucky, I guess.”

He hung slack in Carrow’s arms. None of this felt real. Carrow wasn’t smiling at him — but his eyes were glossy in the moonlight. He was blinking back tears.

“You’re happy to see me?”

“You motherfucker,” Carrow said, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the tears and finally smiling. “Yes, I’m happy to see you. You fucking asshole. You fucking liar. You don’t know what the last day was like, thinking you were gone —”

“I thought you were going to… I don’t know, I thought you might —”

Carrow’s eyebrows knit as he took deep breaths.

“You really thought I could? You thought that I could ever lay a hand on you with anything but love?”

Dust nodded, slowly.

“ Never .”

“Not even after everything?”

“ Never. I know how you came to us now,” Carrow said. “It doesn’t matter. You saved us. Everything that Emerson said —”

“It was all true,” Dust cut in. “Every bit of it. I came in to bring you down. I lied to you for a year, even after I knew you — even after I loved you. ”

“And here you are, Dust. You saved us.”

Dust fell against Carrow. He felt weak, exhausted, relieved, and in total disbelief.

“There is a home for you with us,” Carrow said. “No matter how we started — it’s not important.”

“I can stay?” Dust asked. His throat was tight with tears, his head pounding. He buried his face in Carrow’s neck, almost afraid of the answer.

He had been prepared for execution, and against all odds, he was finding absolution. Impossible grace.

“You’re my whole heart. You gave everything up for us. You have to stay,” Carrow said, holding him, babbling. “What would I be without you, Dust? What would The Company be?”

Wrapped in Carrow’s arms, it was almost possible to forget the chaos at their backs, the ruined place that they’d have to return to, the things they must face and what they must sort out. They’d made enemies of a federal bureau, of a powerful cartel. The ambush a day ago had proven that they weren’t invincible.

None of it mattered. They didn’t need to be invincible when they had each other — when they had their family by their sides.

He could come back. He could be a part of The Company again.

“They’ll take me back too?” Dust said. Carrow was holding him out at arm’s length again, assessing him, as if he still couldn’t believe that he was here, alive.

“In a heartbeat,” Carrow said, shaking his head in disbelief. “ Without a doubt. We have to — I have to call McBride, you’re a mess. They’re going to lose their goddamn minds! You’re here .”

“For as long as you’ll have me,” Dust said. “I’m here.”

“Forever, then. Until the end.”

His ribs protested, his head throbbed, and against it all, Dust couldn’t resist the urge to pull Carrow into a kiss. The man held him tight, steadying him, and they shared the profound pulse of relief, the ineffable understanding that they knew the worst truths about each other, and had still chosen love.