Numb.
What else could she be?
The train continued east. The drivers allowed the women to ride in the cabin with them, share their food. It was telling that AK had only provided enough to get them to the circle.
The two pairs left each other alone, despite the cramped conditions. It didn’t really matter, Amanda was somewhere unreachable anyway.
Steph shivered and sweated. Painkillers helped but never enough. Amanda stroked her hair and made the appropriate noises or at least her body did.
There was something akin to suspension in panic. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane, the world reduced to a tiny space a person could see both sides of, anxieties and problems circling but holding their distance. And as soon as it was over all that debris would start crashing to earth, flung out in every direction, the world would flood back in and only the person in the centre would still be spinning.
Until then? Numb.
She thought of Caleb, his face waiting for her whenever she closed her eyes or looked out to the horizon. Would the plan have worked if he had still been alive? The link diluted between the three of them? Would Reeves have been tricked so readily? Would she be able to forgive herself? Again, she’d taken from her best friend to get what she wanted and this time it had cost him everything.
They stopped at the nearest city with an airport.
Steph, feverish hot and fighting infection, she left at the hospital. The girl’s rucksack, she filled with roubles and everything else she would need to get home when she was well enough to travel.
As soon as the girl was in a wheelchair Amanda had headed straight for the airport, ignoring the shouts in Russian behind her.
Numb.
Flights were awkward. Too many connections. Not that she gave a shit. Her mind was on nothing but her daughter now, her little girl like north to a compass needle.
She didn’t dare sleep. She never woke feeling any better.
She didn’t eat. Food held no interest.
Numb.
There would be funerals to arrange when she got home. There’d be a house to sell. There’d be questions from the police to answer. As one of the few involved still alive, they might try to pin it on her but she doubted it.
The Indians had gone silent. Funny how mass murder made the gangsters disappear. Maybe they’d come back, maybe they wouldn’t. They’d get nothing from her.
Jamison was waiting for her at the airport. No sign of Michaela. Travellers hustled and bustled around him. After a week of vans and trains, modern civilisation was a miracle.
‘Is she OK?’ The first real words she’d uttered since she’d stabbed her son in the chest.
‘She’s adjusting,’ the old man replied, words too small to describe what the girl was going through.
She was at a nearby hotel. Or at least an approximation of her was. Even so, Amanda’s heart skipped a beat on seeing her, the bland room falling away.
For a moment, there was a burst of sunlight across her daughter’s face as Amanda stepped into the room. Amanda thought Michaela was going to run into her arms but just as quickly as the sunlight had come it was gone again. The girl froze.
There was something new to her daughter now. Something behind her eyes, something found or lost. There was no longer that innocence to her, that youthful invulnerability. In its place was something else, a soft edge hardened, sharpened and more like her mother’s.
Michaela could see it. For the first time, she saw her mother more clearly, saw a woman who would do anything for her, and understood what ‘anything’ would mean.
They watched each other. Watched for a long time. Neither noticed Jamison leave.
Amanda felt stripped, soul laid bare to her daughter for the first time in ways she’d hoped would never happen. Her daughter was seeing a woman who had lied, cheated and killed for her. Who had gone to the ends of the earth, betrayed friends and made unconscionable decisions to make it here to this hotel room.
Michaela tugged at the sleeves of her top, keeping them up to the palms of her hands. Amanda knew she was hiding the welts of her restraints underneath, similar to those that had been on her son’s wrists before she’d plunged a knife into his chest.
‘Does it hurt?’ Amanda heard herself ask.
The words broke in the air between them and in a moment they were embracing, tears running down both of their faces.
Amanda sighed. Michaela, at the very least, still smelled like her daughter and in holding her Amanda knew she’d succeeded. She’d not come back more like her father but more like herself. A woman who did what it takes to protect what’s hers. A woman who was also a monster. But a monster on her own terms.