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In the end, she barely has to ask for the day off. Rembrandt puts on an old hoodie and some worn-out jeans and walks down to the beach, to where Cleon has been staring out at the water for most of the last 48 hours. Rembrandt stands next to her in the sand and tries to feel like she’s standing on solid ground. Cleon looks tired. They’re all tired, but under the bags beneath her eyes something has solidified in her. Like purpose, maybe, or a light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing’s solid in Rembrandt. Rembrandt feels like blowing away in the wind.
Rembrandt opens her mouth to try and explain what she needs, but before she can speak Cleon says, “Go.” She doesn’t look away from the water. Rembrandt goes.
The train rumbles beneath her feet. Rembrandt is so tired she could fall over, but she can’t sit still. The soles of her battered sneakers make little pat-pat-pat noises as her knee bounces past one stop, two stops, all the way back uptown.
She feels the cold of the wind on her face like it’s happening to someone else, watching her feet walk her back to that park, to that moment. There’s a hollow in her chest where the fire of regret has burned through. The park looks like a different planet in daylight. It’s empty. Ajax is gone. There’s no shining golden thread she can follow. There isn’t anything.
What the fuck does Rembrandt know about the upper west side? She’s alone, and she’s tired, and she doesn’t know what the fuck she thought she was going to accomplish by coming here. She slumps onto the bench, looks away from the deep scratches on the armrest. A gust of wind blows through and turns over the embers in her chest, remembering the thud of the pavement as she ran. Swan had stayed to watch. Mercy had stayed for Swan. And Rembrandt had run. She hadn’t even looked back.
Ajax used to chew her out for looking back. Back in the beginning, when she was a dumb kid stealing candy bars on the boardwalk. When I yell run, you fucking run, idiot. You don’t look back. I can’t do my job if I’ve got to save you from running into traffic, too.
She didn’t need to look back because Ajax could look out for herself, Ajax was a wall between Rembrandt and everything in the world that could possibly hurt her. Rembrandt learned to run on long summer nights with the smell of spray paint in her hair, built up faith in the sound of another pair of footsteps behind her like the salt crusted on the wood of the pier.
Ajax had screamed “Run!” and Rembrandt hadn’t even thought about it. She had launched herself off the bench, hit the ground running, and Cochise and Cowgirl could barely keep up. Rembrandt had run, and run, and hadn’t looked back, and hadn’t even thought to wonder if Ajax was behind her. Ajax was always behind her. Ajax was behind her all the way to the next subway station, down the stairs and jumping the turnstile and through the train doors, all the way until she bent over double and watched one, two, three Warriors follow after her. Watched, uncomprehending, as the doors closed, and the ghost of Ajax that had been following them evaporated in the fluorescent light. It had seemed impossible. It doesn’t seem any more likely now.
Rembrandt sits on the bench and tries to breathe. Closes her eyes and imagines the wood is still warm. Gets a splinter in her palm for her trouble. Tries to think of a step two to her plan, but keeps getting stuck on Ajax is gone, gone, gone.
She’s got her head between her knees when she registers the sound of leaves crunching beneath heavy boots. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a blur of purple, that’s the wrong color, calm down, shove her heart down from where it’s trying to leap out of her mouth, it’s not fucking her.
Rembrandt breathes in, breathes out, plants her hands on her knees and sits up. It’s the Hurricane woman, looking down at her with a single raised eyebrow, casual and relaxed like she owns the place. Fuck, does she own the place? Rembrandt thought she was safe, the Furies don’t make a fuss in the daytime, but had they looped back into Hurricane territory while they were running? Rembrandt could never keep it all straight, she made a shitty fucking scout, she wasn’t anything like Fox. God, Fox. One more breath to feel the pain, and then Rembrandt bites out, “What do you want?”
“Oh, nothin’,” the Hurricane drawls, “Just wondering why I heard that a lost little Warrior was headed uptown all alone. After the night y’all had I never thought I’d have the honor of seeing you again.”
Rembrandt squares her shoulders, wishes her incognito outfit was a little more imposing – or effective. “It’s not gang business,” she says, “Just leave me alone. I don’t want trouble.”
The other eyebrow goes up. “So this doesn’t have to do with the member of your crew you left behind with us?”
Rembrandt’s stomach drops. “What do you know about that?”
The Hurricane laughs. It’s not an unkind sound. “We got a police scanner. You think someone goes down like that and we don’t hear about it? Was the only thing on the radio for an hour.”
She shrugs, and then turns as if to leave. When Rembrandt doesn’t move, she looks back. “Get up.”
“What–”
“We’re going to the station,” she says, slowly, like Rembrandt is missing something obvious, “Unless your plan was to mope around here until the cops arrest you for loitering?”
Rembrandt scrambles to her feet. The Hurricane is already leaving. “Oh, thank you, um–”
“Yaya.”
“Thanks, Yaya. I’m Rembrandt.”
Yaya snorts. “Charmed, I’m sure. Keep up.”
Yaya walks like she’s got a personal record to beat. Rembrandt is forced into an awkward half-jog to keep up. “Hey, look, I’m sorry,” she huffs after a block or two, “I really didn’t want to bother y’all. I just need to make sure my friend is okay.”
Yaya’s stride never falters. “Y’all wouldn’t have been on the street if it wasn’t for us,” she says, matter-of-fact, “That night was gang business. The cops weren’t supposed to get involved.
Rembrandt can’t help but laugh. “They didn’t. Jus’ Ajax bein’ Ajax. Don’t feel sorry for her, she’d hate that.”
Yaya doesn’t look at her, but there’s a twinge of… something in her voice when she answers. “I walk these streets too. I see what she saw. It could have been me. It could have been any of us.”
Not me, Rembrandt thinks. She feels the thud of the asphalt under her feet like the sound of a far-off drum. It wouldn’t have been me.
Yaya leaves her on the corner next to the police precinct with a sharp nod. Rembrandt burrows deeper into her hoodie, wishes she had something warmer. Wishes the wind smelled like the sea. The door of the station makes a little jingling sound when she enters. It looks like any other office. There’s a receptionist chewing gum behind bulletproof glass. Rembrandt feels very small.
The receptionist pops her gum loudly. “Can I help you?” she asks, unfriendly.
Rembrandt wonders what she’s seeing. A street kid, probably. A nobody. She shuffles closer to the desk. “I’m lookin’ for someone,” she says.
The receptionist gives her an unimpressed aren’t we all kind of look. She waves her hand impatiently.
“She was arrested two nights ago. Her name is… Annaliese?” The receptionist raises a perfectly penciled eyebrow. The ground feels very far away. “Annaliese… Turner?”
Another pop of gum. “She’s my… cousin.”
The receptionist visibly does not believe her.
“Please, I –” What is she supposed to say? What will this woman believe? Rembrandt tries to summon some hidden reserve of strength or wit and finds nothing. What if that isn’t even Ajax’s name? She didn’t even think to ask Cleon what Ajax’s fucking name is. She can’t charm her way out of this. She’s not intimidating. She’s just some lost punk, and she’s alone, and she never should have let Cleon talk her into leaving Coney Island.
“Miss– ?” The receptionist tilts her head, irritation melting into bewilderment blending into concern.
The desk in front of her blurs. This is the moment where, when she tells the story, Cowgirl will clap her on the back and say, “Nice move!” But it’s not a move. She’s trying to speak, but her throat closes, and everything surges up at once. The receptionist sounds worried now, but Rembrandt is dissolving and she can’t claw her way back out. She’s breathing too fast, and she can’t get enough air into her lungs, and her bangs are sticking to her cheeks.
“Okay, okay!” the receptionist says, “Annaliese Turner, you just missed her, they charged her last night, took her to Metropolitan Correctional Center, down on Park Row, she’s still there, you can go see her – Christ!”
Rembrandt must look bad. The receptionist gets up from her desk and comes out through a door to her left, hovering at Rembrandt’s elbow. She pats her shoulder a little stiffly and offers her a packet of tissues. A sob shakes through her, from deep in her rib cage. Alive. Ajax is alive. Rembrandt forces herself to relax, breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Breathe, moron, I’m not gonna carry your ass home if you pass out, you gotta breathe with me. She lets out one last shuddering breath, gives herself one, two, three, and then she straightens up. She takes a tissue. “Thanks,” she mumbles, voice thick.
She pushes herself away from the desk and turns to the door, squaring her shoulders. From behind her the receptionist asks, “Are you gonna be alright?”
But Rembrandt is already moving, and she can’t stop now. “’m fine,” she mumbles, and pushes through the door.
Park Row is lower Manhattan. Rembrandt knows that much. She starts walking south. She’ll figure out the rest on the way down.
The wind keeps blowing her hood down. Her feet are starting to ache. She should stop and take the subway. The pavement thumps beneath her feet like a heartbeat. She can’t stop moving. Ajax’s heart was always so fucking loud. She could hear it in the darkness of the Warrior’s loft, six inches away sharing a fold-out couch, the rhythm of Ajax being alive. Ajax had always been so fucking alive. Rembrandt keeps wiping her eyes on her sleeve. Her cheeks are starting to sting. She’ll walk a little longer. Just until the hitch in her breath is gone.
Pass one block, two blocks, breathe in. Ajax’s heart is still beating somewhere in this city. They’re going to be alright. Breathe out. It’s starting to rain. She started on… 70th? Feet started to ache around 55th. Rembrandt raises her head and squints into the rain at the next crosswalk. 42nd. Her feet are starting to feel numb. Pull her hood back up, keep walking.
A car pulls up level with her three blocks later. She keeps her head down and waits for it to peel around the corner. It doesn’t. When the passenger window rolls down, she finally looks up. She stares at the driver in mute confusion for a second, trying to place him.
“Get in,” he huffs, and the gravel in his voice jogs her memory. The new chief Riff. Shock jumpstarts her system and she hurries to open the door to the backseat. There’s another Riff on the other side, who stares her up and down silently as she closes the door. The car pulls away from the curb. Feeling foolish, Rembrandt buckles her seatbelt.
“MCC,” Masai says without preamble.
“Oh, um, yeah,” Rembrandt answers.
They drive another block in silence, as Rembrandt tries to do the math of where they’re going. This isn’t Riff territory. Her sense of direction isn’t that bad. But they’re not headed back towards Riff turf either. Another three blocks, and the Riff in the backseat has glared her bouncing knee into submission. The nervous energy works its way up her spine and out of her mouth, instead.
“I was just–”
“Cleon called me,” Masai says.
Rembrandt has enough time to think oh God before he’s continuing. “Hurricanes said there was a little girl weeping down Columbus Avenue. You weren’t hard to find.”
And here she thought she and the Hurricanes were friends. Great to know every damn gang in the city knows where she is. She’s about to lose control of her tongue to pipe up again when Masai sighs. His eyes glance up to hers in the rearview mirror for a second and he looks tired. More tired than her. Even more tired than Cleon.
“I don’t know what the fuck peace looks like,” he says gruffly, “But I’m giving it a shot.”
They ride the rest of the way in silence. Rembrandt thinks about the Before, before it all went wrong, thinks about Masai calling the meeting to order before Cyrus made her big entrance. She thinks about how proud he looked. She thinks of Cleon, of Ajax turning to face the Furies, all fire. She knows the shape of that pride. She knows the kind of hole it leaves.
Masai leaves her on the steps of a massive concrete building with a little grunt of acknowledgement. Another gust of wind. Another breath in. Not much farther, now.
It’s not hard to make herself look small for the woman at the front desk. In the echoing tiled room, she feels about an inch and a half tall. The receptionist hands her a form to fill out and tells her to wait in a chair to the side. The exhaustion rises up in her the moment she sits down. The chair is shitty and the cushion is worn and thin but it’s better than a park bench, better than the subway. She’s so close, but there’s nothing to do but wait. The room spins around her, just a little, like a cradle rocking. She pulls her hood down over her eyes and lets herself drift.
An indeterminable morass of time later, a uniformed officer is standing in front of a heavy door, barking her name. He looks a few seconds from giving up and leaving her behind. Rembrandt shoots to her feet, still a little dizzy with the aftereffects of a truly god-awful nap. She manages to follow the officer, shaking her head to clear it of lingering fuzz, stumbling after him down a hallway and into another room with a row of chairs and a wall of glass and –
Ajax. Rembrandt nearly trips on the chair trying to sit down. She doesn’t remember crossing the room she just remembers that Ajax was too far away and then she wasn’t and then Rembrandt has both hands on the glass like she can push her way through and everything sounds like it’s underwater but she can hear someone saying, “Ajax, Ajax, Ajax, Ajax,” over and over like it’s the only thing keeping them from drowning.
Ajax is mouthing something, or saying something, but Rembrandt can’t hear her and the room is spinning or tilting or gravity has shifted because the only place to fall is through the glass and towards Ajax and why can’t Rembrandt hear her? She’s hurt, they hurt her, she’s got an ugly bruise over the left side of her jaw and a dozen smaller scratches and her wrist is in a brace, if Ajax broke her own wrist trying to get out of that handcuff Rembrandt is going to kill her– Ajax pounds on the glass, and Rembrandt knows her well enough that she can fill in the tone of her voice as she mouths “hey, dummy!” and gestures at – the phone. Right. Just like in the movies.
Rembrandt’s hands are shaking when she picks up the receiver and she can hear Ajax breathing on the other side, tinny and distorted but real and alive and here. She opens her mouth to say something coherent but her voice just breaks on, “Ajax.”
“I’m here,” she says immediately. “I’m right here.”
And she is, and she isn’t. She’s a voice on a telephone line and an image through glass, and she lines her fingers up with Rembrandt’s through the glass but it’s still just cold and smooth and hard.
“You didn’t call,” Rembrandt whispers.
“I –” Rembrandt hears Ajax’s voice give out, registers the fear and guilt on her face. This is all wrong. She found Ajax, everything is supposed to be alright. Ajax always makes everything alright.
“They told me I could have a phone call and I- I didn’t know who would pick up,” Ajax admits, “So I told them I didn’t want to call anyone.”
Didn’t know who would pick up. Ajax is staring at something a thousand yards past Rembrandt. Rembrandt wants to cry or shout at her, tell her I thought you were dead, for two days we all thought you were dead. She hadn’t let herself think it, but she lets the thought finally form in her mind now. She had thought Ajax was dead, but she hadn’t been able to make herself get up and find out for two days. And for two days Ajax has been alone, not knowing if the other Warriors made it home. She still doesn’t know.
“I’m alright,” Rembrandt says, “I made it home.”
She doesn’t want to say the next part, but it’s too late, because just in saying that Ajax already knows, and Rembrandt is watching the spark-in-dry-tinder of her knowing blaze through her in real time. “Fox. There was a cop, and she – she was protecting us, she tried to distract him, she fell, she–”
And Rembrandt watches from the other side of glass as the glacial cliff that is Ajax cleaves apart. They’d sat and watched a building be demolished one day, just the two of them, eating popcorn Rembrandt had stolen from her job. She remembers the noise the walls made when they fell, hears it now as Ajax collapses. She drops the phone to clutch at the back of her neck. And Rembrandt just watches, from the wrong side of the glass, and listens to the distant sound of Ajax sobbing, and wishes everything were different.
They sit there for a long time. Ajax seems to cry herself into exhaustion, and just lays there slumped against the table for a while. She eventually gathers her strength enough to pick up the phone and, predictably, say the worst thing possible.
“It should’ve been me,” she says, like Rembrandt knew she would, like Rembrandt has known she would since the moment Fox stepped off that train.
“No, Ajax –” Rembrandt tries, but Ajax isn’t done.
“What’s the fucking point of me if it wasn’t me,” Ajax asks, working herself back up to her comfort zone of incandescent rage, “We’re letting fucking kids die for us now? I should’ve been there. It should’ve been me.”
And Rembrandt can see it. She can see Ajax with her hand on Fox’s shoulder, stepping past her back onto the platform. Maybe Ajax would’ve even won. But Ajax had taken a bat to the knee in her fight with the Furies, had been leaning to the right when she walked over to that cop. Ajax was good, but she was tired, and when she was tired she lost her balance. Rembrandt can see that, too, Ajax on the back foot for just a moment, trying to get space, taking a step back and finding only air beneath her feet. Maybe she’d have won, or maybe Rembrandt would have been taking the train to the morgue.
Here, in this version of events, Rembrandt lets a selfish fire start up in the hollow of her chest. She lets herself be horribly grateful for Ajax’s stubbornness, her rage, that after everything she’s still here. Here, with just the two of them, Rembrandt lets herself be lost in the swell of relief that, out of everyone, Ajax is still here.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rembrandt lies, “We can’t change it now. I’m here. You’re here.”
That, at least, Ajax seems to hear. “Okay,” she says, “I’m here.”
They kick her out eventually. Another officer sticks his head in and clears his throat meaningfully at Ajax, whose shoulders tense up like she’s thinking about fighting for five more minutes. “Don’t,” Rembrandt says, and this time Ajax listens to her.
They say goodbye, Rembrandt says, “Don’t get your ass thrown in solitary, I’m coming back to visit,” and Ajax laughs, which isn’t an agreement to behave but is as good as Rembrandt’s gonna get.
When she emerges from the warren of concrete tunnels into the waning daylight, Mercy is waiting for her. She’s wearing a Warriors vest that Rembrandt recognizes from the patched tear in the shoulder as Swan’s, and she’s holding two umbrellas.
“You’re not supposed to wear that unless you’re on official business,” Rembrandt says while she accepts the umbrella.
Mercy grins. “I am on official business,” she says proudly. “First ever mission: make sure you get home safe.”
“I don’t need a fuckin’ babysitter,” Rembrandt complains as Mercy turns to lead her towards the subway.
Mercy just hums to herself as she walks. She’s walking taller already. Having a purpose is good for her. Rembrandt looks back over her shoulder at the harsh stone lines of the prison. Adjusts her grip on the umbrella. Breathe in, breathe out. “Okay, Mercy, wait up. I’m coming.”