Chapter Thirty — Resolution · Adam's Robe Book 1

Alborz Range, Iran — Present Day

The compulsion broke the way a held breath breaks, all at once and with no warning Leah could see coming — eleven men who had stood frozen for the better part of two minutes suddenly staggering half a step, weapons swinging loose in hands that had forgotten, briefly and completely, how to hold them with intention. Rostami had told her, in the handful of seconds before it happened, that he didn't believe the effect would outlast the command itself, not without the full weight of tomorrow's ceremony behind it — a hasty, unritual use, he'd said, borrowing power it had no proper occasion to spend, and power borrowed that way came with a shorter lease than power given the ceremony it was built for.

"You have perhaps ninety seconds before every man in this room remembers how to be afraid of you instead of obedient to me," Rostami said, already moving toward the chapel's rear wall, where a second door — narrow, unmarked, clearly older than the compound built up around it — stood half-hidden behind a stack of unused pews. "I would use them, if I were you."

"Come with us," Leah said, and heard, saying it, that some part of her had already understood, before he answered, exactly what his answer was going to be.

"No." He said it gently, the way he'd said everything since the wadi, and reached for the garment still settled across his shoulders with both hands, not to remove it but to draw it closer, the way a man gathers something he has decided, finally and completely, to carry alone. "Colonel Nassiri will recover his composure in considerably less than ninety seconds, and when he does, he will have to choose between arresting his own religious liaison in front of eleven witnesses or explaining to Tehran why the ceremony's central object has just demonstrated, conclusively, in front of a dozen soldiers, exactly what it is capable of doing to a man who was never meant to hold it alone. Neither of those conversations ends with this object staying in anyone's custody who currently has a claim on it. I intend to make sure of that myself, before either of you has to."

"Rostami—"

"Farhad," he said, correcting her the way he'd corrected Nassiri an hour ago, and something in his face, for just a moment, looked less like a cleric and more like a tired man considerably younger than his careful stillness usually let anyone see. "I have spent eighteen months believing I understood what I was in service to. I understood, ninety seconds ago, for the first time, what it would actually cost someone to be its custodian rather than its user — and I find, Dr. Sarkisian, that I would rather be the first thing than spend whatever years I have left as the second. There is a great deal of mountain out there that nobody built a garrison on. I intend to make certain nobody finds a reason to."

He was gone through the narrow door before Katz could finish crossing the room to stop him, and Leah understood, watching the door swing shut on an old, unlit passage that plainly predated every wall Nassiri's construction crews had raised around it, that some decisions were made in the specific window where argument had already stopped being able to reach them.

They ran, because there was nothing else left to do with the ninety seconds he'd bought them — out through the same gap in the fence they'd come in by, Cho's diversion still smoking faintly behind the generator shed, the compound's floodlights swinging in confused, uncoordinated arcs as men who had been frozen solid a minute ago tried to reconstruct, out loud, to each other, what exactly had just happened to them.

They heard the collapse from the ridge above the northern perimeter, twenty minutes later, a low, extended rumble that carried through the rock beneath their feet before it reached their ears — not an explosion, Katz said, listening to it with the specific stillness of a man cataloguing a sound against forty years of comparison, but a slope failure, the kind mountains this recently blasted and this recently rained on produced on their own, given the smallest provocation. A man moving fast enough, and deep enough into unstable ground, might not need to cause it deliberately. He might simply need to be standing in the one place it was always going to happen anyway, and choose not to be anywhere else when it did.

Nobody suggested going back to look. Leah understood, standing on that ridge in the gray hour before a mountain dawn that no longer had a ceremony scheduled beneath it, that this was its own kind of mercy — that Katz, who had spent forty-seven years unable to close a file because he had never been permitted to know what happened to Malko Yonan, was choosing, this time, not to make Erin Cho and Leah Sarkisian carry the same unanswered weight into their own old age. Some questions, he had told her once, in a hotel corridor in Tel Aviv that felt like it belonged to a different life now, were not actually questions. They were simply grief, dressed up as something that still had an answer coming.

Below them, the compound that had been built to hold four hundred witnesses to an investiture held, instead, considerable confusion — vehicles moving without clear orders, officers converging on a central hall with nothing in it, a colonel who would spend the coming days, Cho predicted grimly over a radio channel already crowded with Glilot and Langley both demanding a full accounting, discovering exactly how much authority a man loses the instant four hundred subordinates learn a ceremony they'd been summoned to witness simply isn't happening.

"It's not over," Cho said, once they'd put enough mountain between themselves and Yekta that the compound's floodlights had shrunk to a pale smear against the dark. "The war doesn't end because one ceremony didn't. Nassiri's superiors will want someone to blame, which means Nassiri himself is now considerably more vulnerable than he was twelve hours ago, and a wounded regime is not automatically a less dangerous one."

"No," Katz agreed. "But it is not un-strikeable anymore. It is not un-couppable. Whatever comes next for this war, it comes with the ordinary vulnerabilities every regime before this one has always had, and that is not nothing, Erin. That is, in fact, very nearly everything we came here to buy."

Leah walked the last kilometer to the extraction point in silence, turning over the specific, unresolved shape of what she was carrying out of that mountain instead of the object she'd once imagined she would — not the garment, not vindication, not even the relief she'd expected to feel. Just a name she would have to learn to say the way her mother said her aunt's, the way Katz still said Malko Yonan's, forty-seven years on: a person who had chosen, in the only moment he had left to choose anything, to disappear rather than be found, and who had left behind, for everyone who'd known him only briefly, the same permanently open question he had once watched an entire family learn to carry.

She understood, finally, walking down out of the Alborz range toward a border she still had to somehow recross alive, exactly what Karam Yonan had meant, handing her his grandmother's ledger in a Beirut apartment that felt now like it belonged to another woman's life. Some things were never actually about getting the object back. They were about deciding, generation after generation, who was willing to be the one who let it go instead.