Chapter 292: Christopher’s Watch

Half a day was a long time to spend tied to a chair.

Lucy’s wrists had gone from uncomfortable to numb somewhere around the third hour. Her back ached from the position. The chair itself was functional rather than anything else, the kind of utilitarian wooden thing that was designed to hold a person’s weight and had no further ambitions.

Christopher’s chair was better. He’d dragged it in from another room at some point before she’d fully come around, and he’d arranged it across from her. The small desk beside him was a nice touch, he’d brought that in too, she assumed while she was still out, and had his feet crossed on it now, boots propped up on the surface with the soles facing her clearly to piss her off even more.

He was reading.

An actual book. He’d been on it since he came here, and he’d barely moved in two hours except to occasionally turn a page or leave the room briefly, gone for ten minutes at most, always returning, always taking the same seat without getting bored.

He hadn’t spoken to her unprompted. Not once.

Lucy had initially taken the silence as a tactic, the quiet designed to press on a person until they filled it themselves. She’d outlasted it for two hours. Two hours of watching him read while her wrists went numb and the light moved across the floor and her mind cycled through the same calculations it had been running since they’d taken her.

Keith.

Was he alright?

Since she had been captured, would Callighan get rid of Keith?

She couldn’t afford to stay here. Every hour she spent tied to this chair was another hour of uncertainty about her brother and she was running out of the capacity to sit with that uncertainty politely.

“I’ve told you what I know,” she said. “There’s nothing you’re getting out of keeping me like this. Cut the ropes and let me go.”

Christopher turned a page.

“Whether you’re useful or not isn’t your call to make,” he said, eyes still on the book.

Lucy’s jaw tightened. “I won’t say a single thing that risks my brother. Not one word. So whatever you think you’re getting out of me—”

“You’re a decent older sister,” Christopher said, the same light tone, though he finally lowered the book slightly. “I’ll give you that. Reminds me of someone I know, actually.” He looked at her now, the pleasantness still present but with something sharper running under it. “The difference being that Rachel doesn’t order civilians killed. And she doesn’t work for someone who massacres communities for territory.”

The comparison landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, which she didn’t intend to show him. “You want to talk about who’s working with what? That man with the gray eyes.” She held his gaze, wanting him to hear this clearly. “He’s like Gaspar. I felt it. When he looked at me, something in that building shook, not from any weapon, not from anything human. I know what Gaspar feels like from fifteen feet away, and that man produced the same thing.” She let the words sit for a second. “So don’t lecture me about Callighan when you’re running alongside someone carrying the same thing that monster carries.”

Christopher looked at her for a moment.

“If your understanding of Ryan is that he’s Gaspar with a different face,” he said, “then yeah, it makes complete sense that you ended up where you are. Working for a man like Callighan, doing what you’ve been doing, convincing yourself it’s justified.” He tilted his head slightly. “You said you were a marine.”

Lucy stiffened.

“Was that a serious statement?” hH continued, the pleasantness thinning into something quieter and more direct. “Because the marines I know about, the real ones, the ones who actually stood for something, they wouldn’t have made it three weeks in Callighan’s setup before walking out or dying on principle. The fact that you’ve been there long enough to be doing his water work says something that your rank doesn’t cover.”

“You don’t know anything about me!” Lucy shouted out with a glare.

“Thank God for that,” Christopher said, with a brief, genuine-seeming smile. “I genuinely don’t want to. I don’t want your biography, I don’t want the backstory, I don’t want the version of events where everything you’ve done makes sense and Callighan’s group looks like the only available option.” He settled back in his chair and picked the book back up. “I’m here because someone has to make sure you don’t find a way out of those ropes and turn this place into a problem. That’s it. That’s the full extent of my interest in you.”

“I’ll tell you exactly what happens when my hands are free,” Lucy said, with a threatening glare. “You’ll find out very quickly.”

Christopher raised both hands in a display of exaggerated fright, the book held between two fingers. “Terrifying. I’m rethinking my entire life.”

She held his gaze with the same glare.

He lowered his hands, picked the book back up, and kept reading.

Lucy looked at the window again. The light had moved another degree.

She was working through the rope again, had been for the past hours, small and patient and invisible, the way they’d taught her to work anything with her hands when she couldn’t use her hands openly. The technique required time more than strength. She had time. What she didn’t have was the certainty that she’d get through it before something changed.

The door behind Christopher opened suddenly.

“How long are you planning on staying in here?”

Christopher turned his head and saw Rebecca.

“As long as it takes,” Christopher said. “Someone needs to be here who can actually handle it if she tries something.”

“You could rotate with someone else.” Rebecca stepped further into the room. “You don’t have to personally sit here for—”

“I’d rather it be me,” Christopher said, giving Lucy a cold gaze. “She’s smart and she’s trained. If we underestimate her and she slips out, we lose our only real angle for getting Mei back.” He paused. “So I’d rather it be me.”

Mei.

Hearing her name, Rebecca’s expression clouded a bit.

She stepped up beside Christopher’s chair and looked at Lucy carefully.

“Why are you doing this?” She asked.

Lucy said nothing.

It was a simple question, which was partly why it was difficult. Christopher’s comments she could deflect, he came at her with sharp edges and she knew how to meet sharp edges. But Rebecca was looking at her without tactics, without sarcasm.

She was young. That was the plain fact of it. Young in a way that the situation around her hadn’t fully finished erasing yet, something still intact behind the eyes that months of this world hadn’t managed to reach.

Lucy looked away.

“Don’t bother,” Christopher said to Rebecca, scoffing. “This is a woman who ran operations out of that hotel. She controlled Callighan’s Atlantic City territory. She knew what that meant and she did it anyway.” He glanced at Lucy. “Some people don’t need a reason that makes sense from the outside. They just like having power over something. Anything.”

Lucy gave him a look that could have stripped paint.

“Look. She’s not even arguing,” Christopher said, to no one particular.

“I’m not dignifying it,” Lucy said.

“Same result.”

She held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at the window.

“Untie me,” she said.

Christopher made a sound in his throat. “You have said that sentence eight times now. You understand I’m not keeping count because I’m planning to give in eventually, right?”

“I have needs,” Lucy said flatly.

Christopher opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

He sat with that for a second. Two seconds. The reality of it was fairly straightforward, she’d been tied to a chair for the better part of several hours, and whatever she was or wasn’t, the basic biological math was unambiguous.

Still Christopher was wary about what she could attempt.

“Christopher,” Rebecca called out with a frown.

“What are you doing here Rebecac? Shouldn’t you be with Rachel?” Christopher asked;

“I am nto a kid!” Rebecca glared at him.

“Alright, alright, my bad, please keep these gazes only to Ryan…I have seen enough from his perspective…”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he sighed.

“She needs to use the bathroom,” Rebecca said sternly wondering maybe if he didn’t understand.

“I know what she needs!” Christopher snapped.

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and waited.

Christopher exhaled through his nose, set the book down, and stood up. He drew the handgun from his hip and leveled it at Lucy.

“Rebecca,” he said, his eyes not leaving Lucy, “untie her hands. From behind first.”

Rebecca nodded, moving around the back of the chair. Lucy felt the knot give after a moment, not loosened, actually worked through.

The rope fell.

Lucy brought her arms forward slowly, her wrists stiff and bloodless at first.

“Let me be clear,” Christopher said, conversationally. “If you try anything between this chair and the bathroom and back again, anything, any version of anything I will shoot you. Not to kill, because you’re more useful breathing. But you’ll spend the next week wishing I had.”

“You’re a high school boy with a gun,” Lucy said, without looking at him. “You don’t scare me.”

Christopher smiled hearing that, very amused even.

“Try me,” he said clearly meaning his words.

Lucy looked at him.

The smile didn’t move. His grip didn’t tighten and his hand didn’t shake the slightest.

She’d met boys with guns before. She’d met frightened teenagers playing at authority and men who needed you afraid of them to feel secure and every variation of false threat in between. She was good at reading the difference.

This wasn’t any of those.

She thought about the gray-eyed one again. The trembling in the walls, the feeling in the room when he’d looked at her. She’d assumed it was the boy himself that was wrong, and she’d assumed these ones around him were the ordinary kind of teenager.

She was revising that.

Be it Ryan or Christopher, clearly they didn’t seem normal at all.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll be good.”

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