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April 2014 · AIIB Mission Month -2

L osing track of Nick Short during a heist was so familiar that Carrow didn't waste his time on it that day. It was like a weeks-old mosquito bite that never quite healed: annoying, but nothing to worry about.

"Where you at, Nick?" Vashvi asked through the comms system.

The question was piped straight into Carrow's ear, and he already knew where this was going. He stroked a hand through his hair and contemplated whether or not it was worth wasting the resources to find Nick in the chaos.

The Company was spread out over several blocks in an industrial neighborhood just outside Las Abras proper. They were on a retrieval mission — set to steal sensitive data that a rising political star needed to sabotage her rival’s campaign. It would’ve been a simple job if it didn’t involve blasting through several layers of armored doors in a basement storeroom that wasn’t supposed to exist.

The first blast had drawn curious cops, but hadn’t gotten them access to the vault.

Carrow waited near the score site in his sedan. Vashvi was set up on a roof with her wicked rifle to provide cover. Herron was stationed on a bike nearby, pulling the cops off for as long as they could. Wayles was tucked safely behind a console in The Company’s cargo van with Coffee, their hired driver, behind the wheel.

Carrow knew that Leta, somewhere miles away in her chopper, poised to receive the little USB drive and fly it to the drop point, would be sighing deeply at the fact that they'd lost Nick again.

Nick was supposed to be planting charges on their target building while Vi watched on through her scope. But something else had clearly caught his attention.

"His comm's gone dead. Just wait for the next detonation," Wayles said through the comms — and Carrow could hear the smile in the kid's accented words. It annoyed him that Nick disappeared during vital moments like these so often that it was becoming a running joke, but he'd never begrudge The Company the fact that they had fun doing what they did.

"I'll put eyes on him," Herron said.

"Don't divert," Carrow snapped quickly into his comm box.

"Won't," Herron said. "I'm headed to where he was anyway."

"And the cops?" Carrow asked, holding the edge of anger out of his voice.

"Are shooting into an empty building they think I'm in," Herron said. "They'll be there for a while."

"Vi, did Nick set the additional charges before you lost visuals?"

"At least two," she said quickly. "It'll be enough."

But we can't detonate until we have visuals again. She didn't need to make the statement, but he could hear the caution in her voice. She knew how mad this shit made him, and maybe knew, too, that he'd be sitting in the sleek black sedan and fantasizing about detonating anyway.

"So you're telling me we're at a standstill," Leta chimed in, deadpan. Her voice was strained over the sound of the chopper in the background, which blasted them all with a wall of noise every time she used the comms. Carrow made a mental note to ask Wayles if he could do something about that.

"Yes," Carrow said. "Yet again."

"I should go down and –"

Vashvi was interrupted by a blast that filled all of their earpieces with a noise beyond noise.

Time began to stretch for Carrow — because something had gone wrong, and that's what time tended to do when he was needed. The blast was much larger than what Short was supposed to be detonating. Carrow’s hands were putting the car into drive before he'd instructed them to do so. He could feel the phantom concussion pulse through the air from the blast, even though he knew that was impossible — he was too far away from where the charges had been set. It was just his imagination.

"Vi, you with us?" he asked, calm and completely aware that she may be gone.

There was dead air on the line. He knew that Herron would be rerouting back to her building. If it had been anyone else in danger, maybe, the heist could've continued moving forward — but not with Nick missing in action, and now Vi too. The overprotective Herron would be making a beeline for their sniper's position.

"I'm here," she said, finally.

"I'm two blocks away," Carrow said, skidding down an empty alley to approach the block from behind.

"Don't," she said. "I'm fine. Let me get my bearings. Herron, don't you come here. I don't know what's happened yet."

Herron didn't respond. They all knew Vi's words were useless to keep them away. They would be clamoring up on the roof faster than seemed possible. It always happened.

"Was that one of ours?" Leta asked.

"I don't know. It wasn't the target — looks like the building next to it."

"And Nick?" Wayles asked.

"I don't — Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, Carrow, get here ."

He'd been parking the sedan. He reversed and got back on course.

"What's up, Vashvi?" Herron asked.

"One block east. You'll see."

"What is it Vi?" Wayles cut in. "Coffee, come on." Carrow could hear the sounds of Wayles’ movement over the line, opening his sliding door to talk to the hired driver.

"Hold your position, Coffee. We need you to stand by, Wayles," Carrow said.

He arrived at the same time Herron did, both pulling up and facing each other.

"I've got you covered," Vashvi said, cool again, the panic washed out of her voice carefully. "You're clear, but I don't know about that blast — just be quick about it, boss."

There was no way they'd have been slow about it — because they'd found Nick Short.

He was spilling halfway through a window that had been busted out from the blast. The block in front of the building looked like the scene of a natural disaster, and Nick's body was askew in the way that Carrow saw sometimes in pictures taken after earthquakes. He'd lost his shirt somewhere in the chaos, exposing the crest of dark tattoos that spanned his torso, and his body was arranged in a way that was unnatural and angular .

Carrow was already thinking of him as a body. That was the only way he could move forward. He was glad that it was him and Herron on the ground — no one else needed to see this. Wayles would be screaming at Coffee, begging the driver to take them to the block.

"Leta, re-route. Eastern safe house. Get McBride on the line."

"Roger," Leta said.

"Someone tell me what the fuck is happening," Wayles growled into the comms, "before I shoot Coffee in the leg and hijack my own fucking van."

"Nick's hurt, buddy," Carrow said. "You and Coffee need to get to the house. Help McBride get set up."

He knew there would be a fight in the van, Wayles arguing that they should go see if they could help and Coffee refusing to disobey a direct order from his employer. Coffee was a good driver, and he was also an important babysitter when things like this happened.

Herron took a pulse without moving Nick.

This was not the first time either of them had dealt directly with carnage. Nick was on his way to being carrion, pulse or not. His left side was chewed to shit by shrapnel, his leg mangled and disgorging what looked like all of the blood in the man's body. His hand was simply gone — neatly severed in that odd way that disasters seemed to have. They could chew you up or slice you with a surgeon's clean precision. Or in Nick's case, both.

"Faint," Herron said, finally. "He's alive. We've got to get him in the car."

Nick was bigger than either one of them — taller than Carrow and heavier than Herron by far — and they found themselves soaked in his blood as they half-dragged him to the sedan. Herron abandoned their bike, slipping behind the driver's seat, knowing that Vi would ride the bike they left behind to safety and Carrow would want to be in the back seat with Nick.

"Ansel." The voice was smooth and faint in Carrow's ear. McBride. He retrieved the comms device.

"Vi, get on the ground and get going. Leta, I'm flipping over. Herron's still on the line."

He moved the dial to a private channel with the doctor. Wayles couldn't hear this.

"I need you to meet us at the house," he said, this time to McBride. Only Herron could overhear them, and he knew that as long as Vashvi wasn't involved, they wouldn't deviate from his orders. Herron already had them halfway to the highway. "It's Nick."

"Shot again?" she asked.

"Caught in his own blast," Carrow said, realizing as he said it that he didn’t know if that was true. "He's bleeding out."

"Bring him to me," she said, sharp. "I'm already set up for you here."

"The eastern house is closer — we have zero time on this," he said.

"I'm not going to be able to handle much if I'm mobile — you know that."

"You're not going to save him," he said. "You're going to make him comfortable — if he makes it there. And then we'll need you at the house for Wayles."

"What happened to Wayles?" she asked. He could hear her moving. Good. She'd be headed over without protest, then.

"He's going to need to be sedated," Carrow said. "He's not going to take it well."

"I'd imagine none of you are," McBride pointed out. He hadn't thought that far ahead.

"No," he said. "I'd imagine not."

A week later , the penthouse still felt like a tomb.

Leta did her best with Wayles. They all did. McBride had left them with several stashes of sedatives, fearing that Wayles would probably flush the bottle she'd given directly to him.

She'd been right. He started out hysterical, then furious. All of that manic energy that normally made him buoyant was channeled into raging at the rest of them — at Vashvi for losing sight of Nick, at Herron for not getting there faster, and at Leta for having the audacity to try and tell him that he'd get over this someday.

But most of his anger was saved for Carrow.

Carrow, who had put them on the stupid heist. Carrow, who had ordered Coffee to take him to the house instead of the scene of the blast. Carrow, who had paid McBride to sedate him against his will.

"You didn't let me say goodbye," he insisted when he came to, and again and again in the days that followed. "He was my brother and you didn't let me say goodbye."

Nick Short was not Wayles' blood brother. Their families weren't even from the same country. But what they'd shared was more than blood brothers did. Family by choice — an alliance that went to Wayles' core. And wouldn't that be worse, Carrow thought, than losing someone who was just a happenstance of biology?

No, he hadn't let Wayles say goodbye. McBride had sedated him before he was allowed to see Nick. Their demolitions expert died in the back of Carrow's black sedan on the way to the safehouse, but none of them would tell Wayles that. It wasn't a good death — sputtering and bleeding out on expensive leather seats while your boss kept his eyes on the road .

Together they crafted a better death for him — not for Nick's sake but for his brother's. Nick died in the safehouse and it was peaceful, Nick told them to take care of Russell Wayles, who he loved.

Leta, Vashvi, Herron, the doctor — they were all complicit in this lie. They wove their own versions of the narrative together. Vashvi remembered the last joke he told her. Leta recalled how peaceful he looked in the moments before he went. Herron talked about Nick's very last shiteating grin.

But he'd just been a corpse by the time they made it to the safehouse, to McBride. Their doctor became a coroner, and Nick's friends became co-conspirators and storytellers. McBride did her best to clean him up while Wayles sucked deep, unconscious breaths in the adjoining room with Coffee standing guard at the door. None of them cried just yet because they needed to get their stories straight before Wayles came to.

In a hasty meeting held in the kitchen at the dingy safehouse, Carrow told The Company that Nick was in too rough of shape to let Wayles even see his body, even after McBride had stitched him up and washed all of the blood off of him. He was too mangled — his body puffed strangely and the wrong hues all over.

Leta and Herron had agreed but Vashvi had let her tears flow then, calling them cruel, calling Carrow a "paternalistic bullshitter" and striding from the room, angry and embarrassed with herself for crying.

"I'll talk to her," Herron said gently before following her out.

Leta, Carrow, and McBride were left, all staring at fixed points so that they would not have to look at one another. Vashvi and Wayles hadn't lost a friend like this — not before Nick. The rest of them had .

Carrow had lost entire crews.

He knew that there was a perverse mercy in not letting Wayles say goodbye to his brother. It was better not to see the people you lost at all. He knew from rotten experience, from nightmares that still seized him, that the image of a corpse was like a solar eclipse. It blocked and burned all of your good memories of a person until all that there was in the weeks after they died was that wrecked corpse that, you eventually realized, had nothing to do with the person you had loved.

How would Herron be able to explain that to sweet Vashvi? How would Wayles believe that this was a mercy when he'd never had to live through anything like it before?

He steeled himself against it. It couldn't be his concern.

So in the week after they lost Nick, Carrow allowed himself to grow weary of Wayles' railing against him. He snapped at the kid as he tried to read Carrow the riot act. He met anger with anger. The alternative was too devastating: go soft with Wayles and he would go soft with all of them and the years of hardness would catch up to him all at once.

He made himself scarce, and on the night when Leta found him alone on the roof during the following week, he listened to her unburden herself. He listened to her recount how Wayles had nightmares, how he had to be coaxed and bargained with before he would take his sedatives, and how Leta worried that something essential was broken in him now.

How they may have to replace their security and tech specialist along with their ballistics man.

"No," Carrow said. Leta gave him a shocked look, as if he had slapped her. He never said no to her. "That's too much to lose. Wayles is our family."

She seemed to process this. Had she really interpreted his coldness as anything but necessary? Had she really thought that he would be open to letting someone from The Company go ?

The Company was not a thing you quit. You went the way Nick went — or you didn’t go at all.

Finally, she nodded. She worked it out. She agreed.

"Needed to hear you say it, I guess," she said, almost apologetic.

She stubbed her cigarette out on the railing, pocketed the butt, and embraced him. He was shocked and it took him a moment to go pliant in her arms. Leta smelled like Marlboros and bourbon and something summery he couldn't put his finger on.

She smelled like he remembered.

No one had touched him in so long. There was something hard and large in his chest suddenly, and he squeezed her once, tight, and let go. She stepped back, understanding what he meant by the touch, knowing that anything longer would be too much to bear, and then the moment was over and she walked to the door, leaving him alone on the penthouse roof once again.