Chapter 179 CLXXIX

Chapter 179 CLXXIX
Xavier's POV

The street was empty when I turned into it my headlights swept across the pavement and found her immediately, a small figure standing exactly where she had said she would be when she called me, in the pool of light beneath the street lamp, one hand holding the phone that had just been used to call me, the other arm wrapped around the rabbit.

I stopped the car and got out before it had fully settled. Aria was drenched the early morning drizzle that had been falling when I left the house had clearly been falling on her for however long she had been standing on this pavement.

Her hair was flat against her head and her pajama top, the one she had clearly not had time to change out of before everything happened, was soaked through, and the red coat that was always with her was dark with rain across the shoulders and sleeves.

She was shaking just standing in the light exactly where she had been told to stand, shaking with cold and something else that was not cold, waiting.

When she saw me come around the car she moved she crossed the pavement in four steps and hit my legs with the full momentum of a six-year-old who had been holding herself together by the thinnest thread and had just been given permission to stop.

I picked her up immediately, all of her, rain and rabbit and the phone she was still holding, and held her against my chest.

She was shaking so hard I could feel it through my coat.

"I've got you," I said. "I'm here I've got you."

She didn't cry she pressed her face into my neck and shook, and I felt the specific quality of it, not the shaking of someone who had given in to fear but the shaking of someone whose body was releasing what they had been holding tightly because they had needed to function and now they didn't have to anymore.

She had stayed calm she had followed instructions, she had called me and given me her location and stood in the light.

She was six years old.

"Aria," I said. 

"Are you hurt anywhere?"

"My hand," she said into my neck. Her voice was small and rough.

I adjusted her in my arms and looked at the hand that wasn't holding George. The palm was scraped, the skin broken in a way consistent with catching herself on a fall, dried blood at the edges, the wound itself small but visible.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Just cold."

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to put you in the car and we are going to get you warm."

I settled her in the back seat and turned the heating to the highest setting and reached into the back where I kept a blanket, the kind that lived in the car because Aria had a consistent history of falling asleep in vehicles and the blanket had become a necessary feature.

I wrapped it around her she looked at me with those eyes that were mine in shape and colour and her mother's in every quality of what they did when they were looking at something.

"Tell me what happened," I said. "Everything from the beginning."

She told me she told me about waking up and the cereal and Isabel's face when she was on the phone.

She told me about packing fast and going out the window, which she described with a specificity that told me she had understood every step of it even while it was happening. She told me about the fall, about her hand, about the car stopping.

When she got to Vanessa she slowed down.

"She had something," Aria said. "A gun but not a real gun it made a small sound."

"A tranquilizer gun," I said.

"Yes," Aria said. "I know what that is she shot Mama with it."

The word Mama came out of her without her noticing she had said it differently than she had said it before. Not the careful testing of a child trying a word to see if it fits just the word the natural one.

"And then?" I said.

"Mama told me to call you," Aria said.

"Before she fell she told me to call you and stay in the light. And then she fell and the woman and another man took her to the car."

"A man?" I said. "There was a man with Vanessa?"

"He was in the car," Aria said. 

"I didn't see his face properly he was the one who put Mama in the back seat. Vanessa got in and they drove away."

I noted this a second person. Vanessa had not acted alone.

"And you stood there," I said. "In the light. Until I came."

"Yes," she said. "That is what Mama said."

Her voice had a steadiness that was both exactly right for who she was and also something I found very difficult to sit with, because a six-year-old should not have to be that steady. 

A six-year-old should not have the experience of following emergency instructions from a parent being taken, should not have to learn what it felt like to stand alone on a pavement in the rain at four-thirty in the morning because the alternative was falling apart and she had been told what to do instead.

"You did exactly right," I said.

She looked at me then she looked at the window where the street was moving past as I drove.

"Is Mama going to be okay?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me with those eyes she was deciding whether to believe me, the same way she decided everything, with full application of whatever she had available to work with.

"You don't know yet," she said.

"No," I said. "But I'm going to find her."

She accepted that she was asleep before we reached the house, the way she fell asleep in cars, completely and without warning, the blanket pulled up, George in her arms, the shaking having subsided into the deep stillness of exhausted sleep.

I carried her inside she woke slightly when I changed her out of the wet pajamas and into the dry ones I found in her bag, enough to cooperate with the process and then immediately gone again, her body making the efficient decision that more sleep was the priority.

I covered her properly and stood in the doorway of the room for a moment the house was quiet.

I went to the kitchen and stood at the counter and made tea that I did not drink and looked at the wall and thought about what Aria had described.

Vanessa a tranquilizer gun a second person in the car. A planned operation executed in the time between when my phone had rung with Levi's warning and when Aria had called me.

Vanessa had not improvised that she had known Isabel would come out of that building. Which meant she had known that Levi's father was coming, which meant she had either coordinated with him or had her own source inside the building.

And the second person meant she had not acted alone, which meant this was not the action of someone driven to desperation. This was organized.