Finch

Finch spent about an hour keeping watch, braced for action if Tyla took a turn for the worse,  but mostly Tyla just seemed exhausted. He was running on fumes himself. Eventually he gave up the pretense of standing guard, dragged a cushion down off the couch, and stretched out on the floor. He didn't try to fall asleep. He didn't try to stay awake, either. He just let whichever one wanted to win, win.

It was full daylight by the time he woke up.

"He's fine," Adin said before Finch had finished jerking upright to check on Tyla. "I woke him a few times through the night. His colour's better, the nausea's gone. He's just tired now." 

Malyn wasn't a big man, and Tyla was downright petite, but the couch was small enough that fitting the two of them had meant Tyla sprawled half across Malyn's chest. They were both asleep.

Finch rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Adin admitted. “Together we’re strong, though. Don’t forget that.”

“Not so strong that we don’t have to run away and hide to survive this thing.”

“Not all strength is about how good you are at punching things.”

Finch yawned. “I am very good at punching things, though.”

"Unfortunately, Katrina may have you beat in that regard. But she has her weaknesses. She's used to being the absolute, uncontested top of the food chain. She’s smart enough to be cautious, yes, but she’s still extremely arrogant.”

“I’d say my self esteem is kinda mediocre. Never knew that was a strength.”

“Self confidence and arrogance aren’t the same thing. Self confidence doesn’t rely on disregarding others.”

"This is too fucking philosophical for my sleepy boy mind." 

Adin offered him a soft smile. “Go back to sleep, Finch.”

"Yeah." Another yawn rolled through him before he'd finished lying back down. "I might just do that." 

Finch napped on and off throughout the day, and in the gaps between he put together a plan. Or the bones of one, anyway. Luther had a bus, and they needed to be gone, so they'd hitch a ride with him and climb off wherever the sunrise forced him to stop. A full night of driving could put enough road between you and a place that you could stay missing, given the right precautions. 

It was everything after that he was still fuzzy on. Finch had spent most of his childhood without a fixed roof over his head and he’d managed fine, so vanishing didn't scare him the way it might've scared someone else. Doing it with four other adults, while keeping a business running, was a different thing entirely. They'd need somewhere to live with none of their names attached to it. They'd need a way to keep the work going quietly, too, which was its own kind of problem when a couple of them were kinda recognisable.

But he didn't know how to do any of that, and it wasn't the kind of problem you could figure out just by laying on the floor and thinking hard at it. They didn’t exactly have time to prepare and research, though, so they’d probably just have to figure things out as they went.

By late afternoon they were all awake, and Tyla was up and moving around like nothing had happened to him at all. Whatever had been wrong with him seemed to have passed on its own—anxiety, maybe, or shock, or whatever you wanted to call it. The mind could do some pretty wild shit to the body when it felt like it. 

None of them had eaten all day. Life had handed them lemons, though—actual, literal lemons—so Adin had dug an old jar of sugar out of a cupboard and made lemonade. Finch had too much sitting on his mind to stomach much of anything anyway. 

Malyn lay in the middle of the living room on the rug, staring up at the ceiling. “Terrance is dead.”

“Terrance?” Finch asked.

“The spider that lived on our windowsill,” Tyla explained from where he sat on the couch, leant forward towards Malyn like he was braced for an action he hadn’t yet decided on.

"And our fridge is dead," Malyn added. "We only got it four months ago, and we all put in a little extra for the one with the ice maker, and now it's dead. And do you know what was in the fridge?" 

"A lot of things," Adin said. "We'd just had this week's groceries delivered." 

“That’s right,” Malyn said. “The mayor’s cake. We only finished half of it, and now it’s dead.”

“I’m just glad that you’re not dead,” Adin said. “That none of us are.”

Malyn rolled his head to look at Adin and offered him a smile. “Yeah. I’m being silly. But I feel like when things like this happen, there are just too many things to care about, and you can’t. You can’t give each thing the amount of sadness it deserves.”

Finch glanced out the window. The light had thinned to a flat grey. “It’s almost dark. We should go convince Luther to give us a ride. Shouldn’t be too hard considering how much he owes us.”

Malyn reached both arms up like a kid, and Finch hauled him to his feet without breaking stride on his way past. The four of them headed outside to the bus together. 

Shadow was the one who opened the bus door when they knocked, those washed-out pale blue eyes of his screwed half shut against the last of the daylight. 

“Luther awake?” Finch asked.

"He can be," Shadow said, and left the door open as he turned and headed back into the bus. Finch took that as permission to enter. 

Inside it was dim, curtains drawn against the dying light, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. Luther peered out from one of the bunks at the back, hair flat on one side from the pillow. 

"Is it night time already?"

Finch shrugged. “Close enough.”

“I’m glad I’m not actually relying on you to know when it’s safe to come out,” Luther said. “Come back here if you want to talk.”

They filed toward the back of the bus, where Finch, Malyn, and Tyla crowded onto the bunk across from Luther's. Adin's antlers made the low bunks a non-starter, so he stayed standing in the doorway. Shadow ducked past him to sit beside Luther. 

Luther seemed more concerned with smoothing his hair back into place than with any of them. "How can I help you?" 

“Your plan is to get far away from here so that Katrina can’t find you,” Finch said. “Correct?”

“That is what it boils down to, yes.”

"We'd like to go with you. Malyn can follow on the bike, and we'll stay wherever we end up at the end of the night." 

“That’s what you want to do?”

"She threatened Malyn. We're low on options." 

"I've been thinking about options too," Luther said. "Mostly for myself—but last night, some for you as well. I have a few ideas." 

“How many of them are self-serving?”

Luther tilted his head, considering. "One, at most. But life isn't a zero-sum game. Sometimes a thing benefits more than one person. Would you like to hear them?" 

“‘Like’ is a strong word. But go ahead.”

"The first is that I do as you've asked, and we travel together tonight. I owe you for everything you've done and everything that's happened. Though I think we both understand that with all of us vanishing and a predator on our trail, it's questionable whether I'll ever get the chance to repay that debt." 

“That was about what I was expecting at this point,” Finch said. “Are the others any better?”

“Maybe,” Luther said. “The second is that I give you my house to make up for the loss of yours.”

Finch leaned in close to Malyn and murmured, "Did he ever actually see our shit house before it burnt down?" 

“I won’t be back any time soon, and you’re homeless, so it makes sense,” Luther went on.

"Does he know we were renting?" Finch added, still to Malyn. 

"The issue, of course, is that Katrina very much has that house on her radar. If she wants to hurt you, she will find you there. And I have reason to take her at her word when she says she means to hurt someone." Luther paused. "There was something I left out of my story, Finch. When I asked you to take Shadow." 

“Of course there fucking was.”

"I wasn't trying to trick you. It's just… painful. I didn't think it was necessary to dig into those old wounds, but I think it's important you understand what you're dealing with." 

“Okay.”

"I had a family," Luther said. "A wife, two children. I fully intended to leave my wife for Katrina, but my children… no. My wife wouldn't have been able to support them on her own, and I did care for them." 

“How noble.”

“There’s nothing noble about the choices I made. I have no interest in defending them. I thought leaving my wife was all Katrina wanted, but when I told her I was going to visit my children after she turned me, she was unhappy to say the least. I didn’t take her seriously, though.”

“What happened?”

"I bought them gifts. My little boy—six years old, and barely speaking. He was always upset about something, but he loved toys, and we had never been a family that could afford many. For my little girl I bought dolls, dresses. I hoped she might like them if they were nice enough. I bought her books, too. I never did appreciate how clever she was. I was too busy being insecure that an eight-year-old girl was sharper than I was." Luther let out a long, slow breath. "Katrina beat me there."

Finch's mouth opened. Nothing useful came out of it. He shut it again. The bus had gone very quiet. "I'm sorry." 

“I’d rather not go into details and I can tell from the fact that you’re not insulting me right now that you have pieced together the gist of what happened. This is all to say that if she makes a threat, I suggest you believe it.”

"Yeah." Finch dragged a hand down his face. "I think we'll stick with skipping town, unless you've got something better." 

“I might, though it also involves skipping town,” Luther said. “Shadow and I intend to keep moving. It’s the safest way to keep her off our trails. You could travel with us.”

"The six of us, on one bus?" Finch's gaze cut around the cramped interior—the spartan bunks, the narrow aisle, the curtains taped closed with duct tape so that Luther wouldn’t fucking die. A single fart could gas the whole bus. "That sounds like a fucking nightmare." 

“I understand. It’s the safest option, but you wouldn’t be in the line of business you’re in if you always chose the safest option.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“To make my plan work, someone has to drive the bus during the day. Shadow can’t drive, and certainly not during the day, so I would have to hire somebody. Somebody trustworthy. That's not an easy position to fill, especially when getting at my money while staying off the radar isn’t an option. You try calling up a bank and telling them you need to withdraw all of your money late at night without drawing any attention to yourself. You also have the benefit of having a way to make money while travelling. A way you might introduce me to.”

“And what do we get?”

“Mostly just a lower chance of death.”

"Yeah. Maybe." Finch sighed. For just a moment his gaze caught on Shadow's—that pale blue steady on him, unreadable, or maybe just unreadable to him. He looked away. "I guess we'll go back inside and talk it over."