He's Daring Me

He's Daring Me
POV: Felix

The next three weeks were the most controlled and the most helpless I had ever been simultaneously.

I had more security around Selina than I had ever maintained around anyone, including myself. The property was a fortress in the functional sense, overlapping camera coverage, rotating guard rotations so that no pattern could be established and exploited, vehicles varying their routes, digital communications swept twice daily. Marco and Dante, my best locator, were working Martin's disappearance with everything they had.

They found nothing.

Not a trace, not a signal, not a sighting from any of the informant network that covered this city like a second skin. Martin had gone somewhere that wasn't in any of my maps, had made himself into a negative space, present only in what he sent rather than in anything he left by existing.

The gifts kept coming.

A book, a specific novel, one that Selina had mentioned once in my hearing, an offhand reference I hadn't even registered as information but Martin had apparently been listening from another room. Left in the mailbox of the property, which had a camera on it and a guard twenty feet away.

Nothing on the footage. The book simply appeared.

Then a watch. Mine, one of mine, a specific piece I had not seen since before the warehouse, before any of this began. Left on the kitchen windowsill of the property, which meant he had been inside, which meant he had breached the perimeter while we were in it and left a message and left again without triggering a single alarm.

I stood in the kitchen holding my own watch and felt something I hadn't felt since I was young and the world was larger than my ability to manage it.

Genuine fear.

Not for myself. I had made a kind of peace with the risks attached to my own life long ago, had decided they were the cost of the life I had chosen and had paid them without excessive drama. This was different. This was fear for someone else, specific and located, with a face and a voice and a particular way of looking at me that I had not earned but had been given anyway, provisionally, with conditions I intended to spend the foreseeable future meeting.

Selina had not broken.

That was the thing I kept returning to in the three weeks of doubled security and disappearing Martin and gifts that appeared in impossible places. She had not broken, had not retreated into the fear of it, had not become smaller or more fragile or more dependent than she was. She had become, if anything, more precisely herself, calm in the way that had nothing to do with the absence of fear and everything to do with what you did with fear once you acknowledged it.

She moved through the property with the unhurried attention of a woman who had decided she was not going to be managed by Martin's campaign even if she couldn't stop it yet. She talked to Amaya. She read. She came into the study some evenings and sat across from me and we talked about things that were not Martin, not the gifts, not the security, talked about real things, the kind of conversation we had never had in the time before all of this because the time before all of this had not been the right conditions for real things.

I was aware, in these conversations, of what I was doing and what I was not doing.

I was not pushing. I was not reconstructing the version of before that she had walked away from. I was not attempting to use proximity and crisis to manoeuvre her into a position she hadn't chosen.

I was just there. Consistently and without agenda. It was possibly the most disciplined thing I had done in my adult life.

"You're distracted," she said one evening.

I looked up from the document I wasn't reading. She was sitting across from me with a cup of tea, watching me with those clear eyes. "I'm thinking about Martin," I said.

"You're always thinking about Martin."

"He broke into this property and left my watch on the windowsill," I said. "I think about him a proportionate amount."

Something crossed her face that was almost humour. Not quite, but the territory adjacent to it. "Marco hasn't found anything?"

"Nothing. Dante neither." I set the document down. "He's better at disappearing than I am at finding. That's the honest assessment."

She was quiet for a moment. "He'll make a mistake eventually."

"Will he?"

"Everyone does." She looked at her tea. "He made one with me. He kept that notebook." She paused. "He's precise but he's not perfect. He cares about things, being remembered, being understood, leaving an impression. That's why he keeps sending the gifts. It's not just intimidation." She looked up. "He wants us to know how good he is. That's a vulnerability."

I looked at her.

"Arrogance," she said simply. "It's the only one he has, but it's there."

I thought about the watch on the windowsill. The impossible placement, the camera coverage, the guards. No one did that and left evidence unless some part of them wanted the evidence found, wanted the audience to understand the scale of what they had accomplished. Selina was right. Martin was performing, and performance required an audience, and audience required proximity, and proximity...

"He won't go far," I said slowly.

"No," she said. "I don't think he will."

I looked at her across the study, in the lamplight, in the third week of an impossible situation that she was handling with a steadiness I had no adequate language for, and I felt the thing I had been feeling for weeks and had not said because the time was not right and I had committed to not pushing and not manoeuvring.

I felt it and filed it and looked back at my document.

"Selina," I said.

"I know," she said quietly, before I said anything else.

I looked up.

She was looking at her tea. "I know," she said again. "I'm not there yet. I need you to know that I'm aware of it and I'm not there yet."

"Okay," I said.

"But I'm..." She stopped. Started again, which was unlike her in the specific way that it had been unlike me to start again in the corridor outside the bunker. "I'm not as far from there as I was."

I held that carefully, the way you hold something that matters enough to be broken by handling it wrong. "Okay," I said again.

She nodded and drank her tea.

The lamplight held us both in its ordinary circle and outside the property Martin was somewhere in the city watching and waiting and being brilliant about his own disappearance, and none of that had changed, and none of it had resolved.

But she was not as far from there as she had been.

It was, I thought, the best thing anyone had said to me in a very long time.

The note that came at the end of the third week was different from the others.

No pleasantries. No references to dinners or preferences or watches. One line, written
in the same careful hand:

The game isn't over. It's just changed shape. Enjoy the quiet.