I asked Marcus a question I probably shouldn't ask and he answered a different question entirely, which told me more than the answer I was looking for.
It was the morning after the archive room. I was in his office with coffee and a question I had been forming since the power came back on the night before. I asked it directly because I don't do indirect.
"How did his parents actually die?" I said. "I've read the Node 7 documentation. I know the mechanism. What I don't know is what it was like for him. Who he was before."
Marcus held his coffee. He looked at me for a long moment.
"Why are you asking me?" he said.
"Because if I ask him, he'll answer and it will cost him something. I'm trying to understand before I ask him."
He was quiet. Then he said: "He was twenty-two. He had just finished a master's degree in applied mathematics. His father was a systems architect, his mother ran the academic program at a city university. They were a close family — three of them, no siblings, the kind of close that happens when a family has survived difficult things together." A pause. "He found out what happened to them the same way everyone finds out about accidents: a phone call, incomprehensible, in the middle of an afternoon."
"Except it wasn't an accident."
"No. He didn't know that for two years. The investigation was closed quickly. The official determination was driver error." Marcus looked at his desk. "He spent two years in the kind of grief that happens when something enormous and random takes everything from you at once. Then he started finding things. Inconsistencies in the accident report. Financial records that didn't add up. The ghost of a design where there should have been chaos."
"When did he know it was Elara?"
"He suspected for five years. He had proof for three." He looked at me steadily. "He has been in the same room with her, on multiple occasions, and given no indication that he knows anything. For three years."
I sat with this. "That's—"
"Discipline," Marcus said. "And the understanding that acting on anger rather than evidence would hand her exactly what she needed: grounds to discredit the case."
I looked at my coffee. "You're telling me this because you want me to understand what it has cost him to do this the right way."
"I'm telling you this," he said carefully, "because he has not allowed himself to be anything other than this case for eleven years. And you are the first thing in eleven years that appears to have reminded him he is other things too." He met my eyes. "I have watched him build something from grief that most people would not have survived. I would prefer — personally — that whatever is developing does not become another casualty of the investigation."
"You're asking me to be careful with him."
"I'm informing you of the landscape," he said. "What you do with that information is entirely your decision."
I left Marcus's office and walked the corridor to my own workspace. I sat down. I thought about a twenty-two-year-old in a bad year. I thought about eleven years of discipline in service of a case. I thought about what it must be like to share a room with the person who arranged your parents' death and show nothing.
I thought about his hands on my face in the dark and the way he pulled back when I pulled back, giving me exactly the room I needed, asking for nothing.
I opened the financial records. I worked.
At three in the afternoon he passed my open doorway without stopping and said, without looking in: "The witness in Zurich confirmed. She flies in next week."
"Good," I said, without looking up.
A pause. Then he continued down the corridor.
Demi texted me that evening: well?
I wrote back: complicated.
She wrote: worth it?
I looked at the message for a long time. Then I wrote: yes.
The question was not whether he was worth complicating things for. The question was whether I would let myself find out.