The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: The Last Forty Seconds

I held the sandwich bag up to the strip lights.

The card sat in one corner, black and tiny, with a brown smear on the plastic.

"Peanut butter," Annalise said. "It was his lunch bag. He didn't even get me a clean one."

Snow was piling on her hood. She hadn't zipped the parka.

Behind her the charter pilot was already tying his wings down. Nobody was flying anywhere tonight.

"Inside," Warrick said. "Both of you."

"You can't make me," Annalise said.

Then she looked at him properly, and her chin shook.

"Sorry. That's what she says. I've been practicing it the whole way up."

"Practice inside," Warrick said, and she went.

Gussie met us in the cabin doorway with a headset already in her hands.

She put it on Annalise before Annalise had her boots off.

Switch on. Static up.

Annalise pulled one ear cup back. "What is this?"

"He knows your name," I said. "And we have a radio."

She looked at the base radio on the kitchen shelf, its little green light glowing.

Then she put the ear cup back and didn't take it off again for two days.

The cook brought stew over through the snow in a pot with a towel on the lid.

Annalise ate two bowls by the stove with the headset on, signaling for bread the way the kids had taught her in ten minutes.

She slept in my old room, under the hand-sewn quilt.

I knew because I looked in at one in the morning, and she was lying on her back with the headset still on, eyes open, holding the quilt up to her chin.

At two, Gussie set up at the kitchen table.

Her laptop. A card reader the size of a thumb. Three mugs of coffee in a row.

"Tell me exactly what you did," she said to Annalise, who had come out in Gussie's spare pajamas because she couldn't sleep either.

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