Chapter 3: Rule Seven
The uplink is dead.
Not broken. You'd almost prefer broken. Ghost unlocks the case and powers it up and the screen comes on fine, the dish outside swivels and locks on fine, and every frequency it reaches for comes back as a solid white roar of static, like shouting into a waterfall.
"Jammer," you say, leaning over his shoulder. "That's broadband noise. Somebody's got a box out there."
"How close?"
"Close. A few kilometres at most. That kind of output, on batteries, in this cold? They're not sitting on it all day." You're already reaching for the screwdriver in your back pocket. "Which means it's portable, which means it's cheap, which means it's dumb."
He turns his head. The skull looks at you. "Dumb how?"
"Dumb like it blankets the band it was built to jam and nothing else. Your uplink's military. It's got a frequency-hopping mode somebody disabled because it eats power." You pop the back off the case. "Give me an hour and I'll turn it back on and teach it some new tricks."
He watches you work for maybe ten seconds. Then he stands up, and you hear him checking the rifle behind you, the clicks quick and practised and final.
"You're going out there," you say, without turning around.
"Two of them. Maybe three. Recon, or they'd have come through the window last night." He's pulling on the white smock. "If they've got a jammer, they've called it in. Somebody bigger's coming when the weather clears."
"So you're going to go find them in the dark."
"It's not dark. It's twilight."
"Simon."
He stops. You turn around on the floor among the uplink's guts and look up at him, a huge white shape in the doorway with a skull for a face, and you don't know what's on yours, but whatever it is makes him come back across the room and crouch in front of you.
"Bolt the door behind me," he says, low. "Don't open it for anybody who doesn't give you the word."
"What's the word?"
His eyes crinkle in the slit of the mask.
"Rule six," he says.
You don't know how long he's gone. You don't look at the clock. You look at the board in front of you and the tiny ribbon cables and the firmware menu you've hacked your way into on the uplink's little screen, and you keep your hands steady the way you've kept them steady through a hundred all-night audits, and you do not think about the white plateau and what's moving on it.
Fifty-one minutes in, the static breaks.
It doesn't fade; it shatters, all at once, into silence and then a hiss and then a voice, crackling and impossibly far away, saying, "...repeat, Bravo Six, do you copy, this is Bravo Zero One..."
You grab the handset. "Captain Price. It's me. It's not Ghost, it's me."
A beat of delay. "Well, bugger me. What happened to your signal, love?"
"Jammer. Somebody's sitting on us. Ghost's gone out to find them. They were at the window last night." Your voice cracks on the last word and you hate it. "I've got the uplink hopping. I don't know how long it'll hold."
"Good girl." Price's voice changes, quick and flat and all business. "Weather window opens at 2100. That's six hours. I'll have a bird to you at 2130 if I have to fly it myself. You tell Simon—"
Outside, somewhere far off, a gunshot.
Then another. Then a third, flatter, closer. Then nothing.
You sit very still with the handset in your hand and the wind rising and falling against the walls.
"Love?" says Price. "Talk to me."
"I'm here," you say. "I'm fine. I'll tell him."
You put the handset down. You stand up. You go and stand by the bolted door with the heavy kitchen knife from the drawer you fixed, and you wait, and you count your breaths, and you get to three hundred and eleven before somebody knocks.
Two knocks. Then a voice through the wood, rough and flat and out of breath.
"Rule six."
You get the bolt open on the second try.
He comes in on a gust of snow and shoves the door closed behind him. There's frost on the skull and in his eyelashes, and a spray of something dark across the white smock that isn't his, and he's carrying a small grey box with a stubby antenna and a smashed casing, which he drops on the floor at your feet like a cat bringing in a bird.
"Jammer," he says.
You don't hear the rest. You've dropped the knife and grabbed him and you've got your face pressed into the cold wet front of his smock, and his arms come around you hard, harder than they've ever held you, and he's breathing like he ran all the way back.
"Price says 2130," you say into his chest. "Six hours. Weather window."
"Good."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Are they?"
A pause. "They won't be coming back."
You stay like that a long time.
He's the one who pulls back. He holds you at arm's length, his gloved hands on your shoulders, and looks at you through the slit in the mask, and something is going on in his eyes that you've never seen there before.
"I want to do something," he says. "Just. Don't say anything. For a second."
You nod.
He pulls off his gloves and drops them. He reaches up, and unbuckles the hard half mask with the painted jaw, and sets it on the table. Then he hooks his fingers into the bottom of the black balaclava with the white skull, and he hesitates, just for a heartbeat, and then he pulls it off over his head.
It's light in the cabin. Not much, just the grey twilight from the window and the lamp you left on over the uplink, but enough.
He looks the way he felt in the dark, and nothing like it at all. Short fair hair, flattened and sticking up from the balaclava. Pale brown eyes, wary, the eye black smeared around them like bruises. The scar along his jaw, longer than you'd thought, white against his stubble. The small one under his eye. The nose, broken more than once, a little crooked to the left. A face that's been hit a lot and kept going. He's not handsome the way men in films are handsome. He's something else, something rough and worn and so specifically himself that your chest aches looking at him.
He's watching you look. He's holding absolutely still, the way he held still in the dark when you touched him.
"Your nose is crooked," you say.
"Told you not to say anything."
"It goes to the left. I couldn't tell in the dark which way it went."
"I know which way it goes."
"I like it." You step in close. You put your hands on his face, the way you did in the dark, and this time you can see him. "I like all of it. Simon. You look like you."
Something in his face breaks open. He turns his head and presses his mouth into your palm, eyes closed, and you feel him shake.
Then you kiss him, in the light, and he lets you see him while you do.
"Rule four," you say, a long while later, in the alcove, with the curtain open and the lamp on.
"Suspended," he says, pulling your sweater over your head. "For operational reasons."
"What operational reasons?"
He looks down at you, spread out on the sheepskins, and his pale eyes go dark. "I want to see you."
It's different in the light. Slower, somehow, for all the urgency of the last hour. He takes your clothes off one piece at a time and looks at each new bit of you like he's memorising it, and you do the same to him, unbuckling the plate carrier, peeling off the thermal, finally seeing the scars you traced blind: the bullet wound under his shoulder blade, the long seam around his forearm, the tattoo on his bicep that turns out to be a skull, of course it is, with something written under it too faded to read. You kiss it. He makes a sound like you've hurt him.
He lays you back and kisses down your body, unhurried, his eyes flicking up to your face every time you gasp. When he settles between your thighs, he holds your gaze the whole time he licks into you, and that's worse, that's so much worse than the dark: watching him watch you come apart, his scarred hands holding your thighs open, his eyes on your face as if it's the only thing in the world worth seeing. You come with your fingers in his short hair and his name breaking in your mouth, and he doesn't look away once.
"Want you," he says, rough, against your hip. "Like this. Let me see you."
"Yes," you say, reaching for him. "Yes, Simon, please."
He pushes into you slowly, braced over you, and this time you watch it hit him: his jaw going tight, his eyes falling half shut, the long shuddering breath. You put your hand on his face. He opens his eyes and looks at you and starts to move, deep and steady, and he doesn't stop looking. You hold his gaze until you can't, until it's too much and your head tips back into the sheepskins, and he drops his forehead to yours and says your name like it's the first sentence he ever learned, and you come together, tangled and gasping, with the lamp on and the curtain open and nothing, nothing left between you.
At 2125, you hear the rotors.
You're standing at the whiteboard. He's behind you, in the full kit again, the balaclava back on, though he's left the hard half mask off and it hangs from his vest. You've got a marker in your hand. You're looking at the list: the five rules in his square capitals, your rule six in your scrawl, and the sad little reindeer in the corner.
You uncap the marker. He takes it out of your hand before you can write anything.
He steps up to the board, and you watch him write, slowly, underneath the rest.
7. YOU STAY.
You look at it. Then you look at him. In the slit of the balaclava, his eyes are crinkled at the corners, and you know now exactly what his mouth is doing under there.
"Stay where?" you ask. "The safehouse is closing."
"With the task force. Laswell called Price. She wants an engineer who can turn off a jammer with a screwdriver and a bad attitude." He caps the marker and puts it back in the tray. "And with me. If you want."
"Is that an order? Rule five?"
"No," Ghost says quietly. "That one's a question."
The rotors are louder now, a deep thudding beat through the walls. On the uplink, Soap's voice cuts through the static, delighted, loud enough to hear across the room: "LT! Bird's two minutes out! Price says you've got a plus-one. Is it true? Has he smiled? Somebody tell me he's smiled—"
You take the marker back out of the tray. Under rule seven, in your scrawl, you write one word.
YES.
He reaches past you and turns the radio off.