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I hear Grace approaching before I see him—footsteps pounding sharply against concrete, then the rustle of rye, windblown dirt under wayward sky under shoes not made for running. Stratt’s soldiers are in close pursuit behind him, the doctors with the briefcase and the sedative. The stretcher will come later, a pale white shroud for when he has been rendered a docile thing.
But for now, the lamb flees, and the butcher chases him.
I track Grace’s path through the guttering stop-starts of the radio until I can track him with my vision, until he breaks away from the side of the nearest building into the open field, toward the solitary fence where I am waiting. There is no gate here, no promise of freedom that he might capture with the softness of his skin, only metal and barbed wire and a future already prepared to claim him. But Grace is not thinking. He is running himself ragged, a summer-swallow that has not yet realized it cannot fly far enough to escape this.
I hold my hands out in front of me as he nears my position. The way I might try and soothe a cornered animal, or negotiate with a target before I neutralize it.
Grace hasn’t seen me negotiating. All Grace has seen is me rolling my eyes on a hundred early mornings and still handing him a pack of Skittles and his creamy monstrosity of a coffee order without him asking. When he recognizes me, the first thing that comes over his face is relief, raw and naked enough that it guts me a little bit.
“Carl,” Grace cries out. His voice cracks on the name, high and out of breath from sprinting. “Carl, they’re—they’re coming after, they want to—you have to get me out of here, get them to stop, please please please—”
He’s stumbling over the syllables, over his fear and his untied shoelaces and the burnt-gold bed of grass seeds beneath. I understand that he has not yet understood, not fully, what is happening.
I could have predicted the plea, childish as it is. Eva probably did.
But Grace catches himself before he actually trips. Stops short a few feet away, where he hovers anxiously. His hand remains half-outstretched as though he’d meant to grab onto my arm for balance, but became too abruptly afraid to close the distance. As though his body already anticipates the betrayal that he doesn’t.
“It’s all right,” I say as calmly as I can, willing for him to believe it. I move forward through the stillness and reach out to take his wrist. Everything will be easier if I can be the one to secure him. “It’s all right, Grace. Just stay calm. We can still do this nicely.”
I can tell that it’s a mistake the second it leaves my lips. The light shifts in Grace’s eyes, refracted by a nauseous familiarity. I see the calculation playing out, that brilliant mind of his racing beyond my capacity to stop it, adding obligation and subtracting camaraderie until at last he can make sense of what I’m doing.
I see the moment where he realizes that I’m in on it. That I’m here to stand with Eva and not with him.
Grace reacts a hair faster than I’d anticipated. He jerks his hand back toward his chest, darting back before my fingers can brush his. If there is any emotion in his gaze, any response to the knife with which I have presented him, it’s disappeared under the cresting panic that sends it swinging over the fence and the field and the soldiers who have fanned out to pen him in.
Swinging back to me, and I don’t expect him to lunge forward instead of bolting.
My arms aren’t at my sides. My guard is lowered around him in a way I wasn’t conscious of until it was too late to do anything. There’s a sudden loss of weight, not a hit or a shove but fingers scrabbling where they shouldn’t be. My pulse spikes on instinct. My hand flies down to cover the holster clipped to my waist, but Grace has already pulled the gun free.
Adrenaline focuses my vision in an instant. Grace is staggering back on unsteady legs, raising the weapon in his grip—the safety is on but he’s fumbling for it, must know his basics already—his hands are trembling but that doesn’t mean much. Makes him more dangerous when it comes down to it.
But my mind catches up to the situation. The roar in my ears fades, taking with it that initial burst of animal-alertness. Grace is not going to kill someone. Grace is not going to shoot me. He’s a middle school science teacher. He gets sick on elevators when they stop too frequently and can’t even stand watching me swat at mosquitos idly.
I meet the eyes of one of the soldiers starting toward him. I shake my head subtly.
Grace makes an honest attempt at threatening me. That’s about all I can say for it. He sort of half-wobbles the barrel of the gun in my direction and keeps pulling it away automatically before it can get close to aiming anywhere risky.
“Y-you—” he stutters. He tries and fails again to point the firearm at me. His hands are shaking violently. “I, I—”
“Hey, Grace.” I spread my palms. My tone stays light, as though we’re still just two friends chatting. “What are you doing?”
Grace’s expression crumples with a sob of pure frustration. He lowers the gun, just barely managing to keep hold of it even though it looks like he wants to toss it to the ground entirely.
The rest of my tension dissipates along with the motion. But it shouldn’t have. I should have been smarter about it. A cornered dog will bite. A cornered human might do anything.
“I can’t,” Grace wails. “Please just, just… Carl, please. Don’t make me…”
I am too arrested by my own self-confidence. I don’t take him seriously.
“All right,” I say, “play time’s over. Give me the gun now. We both know you’re not going to do anything.”
I take a big, dumb step toward him.
I don’t know what Grace thinks I’m going to do. Take the weapon, for a start. Hold him down and stab him with a needle and not listen when he screams. Shoot him into space to die for all humanity. They’re all valid concerns, honestly.
But he scrambles away before any of that can happen. His eyes go huge and round and fear-stricken. His breath heaves into terror, the pure and visceral kind that strips all thought into irrationality.
“Don’t!” he shouts. “Don’t come any closer! I—I’ll do it!”
Before I can do or say anything, he pulls the gun up again. Not toward me, this time, and not toward anyone else for that matter. He knows what he is and isn’t capable of. I’m the one who doesn’t.
Grace jams the muzzle up against the soft underside of his own chin.
I stop in my tracks. My blood runs cold immediately.
“Grace.” My voice sounds off when it travels through my skull. A bullet could penetrate bone just as easily. “Take a deep breath. Think about what you’re doing.”
I inhale for show, exhale, tight and controlled and heavy. I can hear my own heart beating. The entire world seems to have come to a standstill for all that no one behind me is moving.
Grace wheezes for air, hyperventilating softly. A radio crackles to life over the hush. Someone calling for Eva’s input, presumably.
“You don’t want to hurt yourself,” I continue very carefully. Half a reminder, half a question. “That’s why you’re running.”
Grace cries harder in response. Tears slide fast down his cheeks and drip onto the gun as he presses it more sharply into his skin. Pain and panic are taking turns fighting their way out of his lungs and neither of them are pretty.
“I’m not going,” he gasps out. Whines a little bit. “I can’t, I c-can’t do it, I’m not—you can’t make me—”
“Dr. Grace.” Eva, finally. Over my own radio her tone is frigid. Under the ice lies a thin red line of disquiet. “You’re being unreasonable and you know it. Put the weapon down now. Don’t make this more difficult than it is.”
The command elicits nothing from Grace now except another tapering sob, muffled by metal and his own desperation.
Eva’s voice grows stronger. Harsher, and I don’t have the time to warn her off of it.
“Your life is going to end regardless,” she says with surgical precision. “Are you really such a coward that you’d rather kill yourself now than try and help a single other person before it happens?”
The accusation is true, which is what makes it so cutting. Grace lets out a loud, wordless wail of a noise as I stand there uselessly. He doesn’t need the truth right now, I think. He needs a nice, comforting lie that will make him bare his neck and lie down on the altar willingly.
I try to think of one, but I can’t. I can’t pretend that I want to be part of this any more than I have to be.
Grace’s legs buckle, sending him down onto his knees. I flinch reflexively, but the gun hasn’t gone off. He keeps clutching at it tightly.
“I-I don’t know,” he keens. “I d-don’t, I don’t—please don’t make me.”
Eva is silent. I swallow, steel myself to speak. There is no one else. And it’d be more of a disservice to act as though I could really spare myself from being guilty.
“Grace, come on,” I say. “I know you.” I watch him fold over his knees like a bundle of wires, log each spasm of his fingers like a countdown ticking. “I know you don’t want to do this.”
Search for the right words to snip. The right line to defuse him.
“Let’s just talk about this, all right? Put the gun down and we can talk. You’re good at talking. We can figure something else out. No one here wants you to do anything drastic.”
Grace hesitates, and I almost let myself hope for a minute. But then he shakes his head. Rejects me.
My mouth sours with the taste of failure, with the knowledge that he no longer trusts me. I deserve that, of course. But it doesn’t make it any easier to carry.
“Please just let me go,” Grace says. It comes out more coherent than before, but still wobbly. “There has to be someone else. It doesn’t have to be me.”
“You know we can’t do that,” Eva says. She’s composed herself while I was talking, switches tactics fluidly. It’s like we’re playing at good cop, bad cop, I think inanely. “You’re a good person, Dr. Grace. That’s why I chose you for this mission. I meant it when I said that I believed in you. I truly think that only you can do this.”
“No!” Grace keeps shaking his head. “This is crazy!”
“You know it has to be done.” Eva’s voice has softened almost imperceptibly. “Even if none of us want to do it. Think of all the lives you’ll be saving.”
Grace sinks infinitesimally lower into the grass, a fresh wave of tears bursting out of him.
Eva murmurs, “Think of the children. Please.”
It breaks him.
Grace grips the gun for another moment, clinging to it like a life raft set adrift in the middle of the ocean. Like it’s the last thing that could possibly save him, and it may well be. But then, at last, his fingers loosen. The weapon drops from his hands bonelessly.
I let out the breath I hadn’t noticed myself holding. But it doesn’t feel like a victory. He’s only traded one suicide for another, and all of us know it.
“I d-don’t want t-to die,” Grace moans, thick with salt and misery. “Don’t do it, please.”
Although he makes that final plea, all the fight has gone out of him. He’s lost. There’s nothing else here for him.
He stays hunched over his knees as I approach him, at first cautious, then more swiftly once I’ve kicked the gun into the distance. Eva doesn’t give any further orders, but the radio clipped to my belt keeps frizzling. She, too, is bearing witness.
The soldiers crowd in, sensing the ending. The doctors. The syringe. I bring Grace’s hands behind him and press him down as gently as I can, making sure he’ll stay compliant.
He doesn’t resist. His wrists are birdlike under my fingers. He’s just a teacher. He’s just a scientist. He’s just a guy who likes wearing stupid t-shirts and gets excited over new lab equipment and has to be scolded out of eating Twizzlers for breakfast.
He’s not made for violence, not made for oblation. But there are only so many tracks to stand on, and I can already hear the train coming.
“It’s gonna be all right,” I say again as the needle is pulled out, a glint of light like heaven reflecting off its surface. Grace shudders and shuts his eyes tight like a child at the doctor’s office. Like not seeing it will stop it from hurting him.
His glasses are getting all smudged up where the dirt bites into them. The weight of my knee in the small of his back is only just enough to keep him down, but he heaves for air as though he’s suffocating.
There have to be some better last words for him than this.
I flounder, lost for what could possibly make this less of a sentencing. Unfamiliar hands peel Grace’s raincoat away from his skin. Eva, worlds away, offers nothing.
It’s Grace who whimpers, nearly inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know who he’s apologizing to—whether it’s Eva and me for what he tried to do, or himself for failing.
I don’t get to ask. The syringe empties into his neck, and he stops moving.