Night over Melbourne

ing: 94%. Someone had thrown a blanket over her. Someone had also taken the laptop's charging cable and plugged it into a generator, and I filed that away to thank them later.

Malia sat on a stack of crates in the corner, bare-armed, a field dressing wound tight around her forearm. She was staring at the heater's orange glow. She'd taken off her vest. For the first time since the night began, she looked like what she was, a twenty-six-year-old woman who had been awake for two days.

"You should sleep," I said.

"So should you."

"I'm not the one who climbed a radio tower."

"You're the one who fought on a roof for six hours."

"Fair." I sat beside her. The crate creaked. We stayed there a while, shoulder to shoulder, neither of us willing to be the first to talk.

"Ninety-four," she said eventually.

"Wren says another hour."

"What if it's worse than we think?"

"It is worse than we think. That's why he's fighting this hard." I turned my head. "But I'd rather know."

"Would you?" Her eyes came round to mine, tired and clear. "That's the thing nobody says. Sometimes I think I'd rather not. I think I'd rather leave it all in the file and walk away and never learn."

"But you won't."

"No." A thin smile. "I'm his daughter. I can't leave a problem alone either."

The heater ticked. Outside, a searchlight swept past the tent flap and slid back out again, leaving a shadow of a white line across her cheek.

"You were magnificent today," I said.

"Don't."

"I mean it. I've worked with generals who couldn't have done what you did on that dock."

"I wasn't magnificent." Her voice was very quiet. "I was cold. I used what he taught me against his own men. I watched them die in a channel I built. And the strange thing, Jarrah, the thing I can't stop thinking about, is that I enjoyed it. For a minute. The clean part of it. When everything lined up."

I thought about the sprinter in the documentary again, about how nobody tells you that being very good at something terrible is a kind of grief.

"It doesn't make you him," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because he never once checked his own position afterward." I put my hand over hers on the crate. "You shook for twenty minutes. I saw you. A man like your father doesn't shake. He goes home and has a drink and sleeps like a child."

She looked at my hand. Her fingers turned slowly under mine until our palms lay flat together.

"I didn't know you were watching."

"I'm always watching."

"That's a strange thing to admit."

"It's the truest thing I've said all week."

She let out a breath. It broke in the middle. "I'm so tired," she whispered, and leaned until her head rested against my shoulder, warm and heavy.

For a few seconds I didn't breathe. It's an odd thing, to spend your whole adult life training your body not to flinch, then be undone by the weight of one head against your collarbone. My arm came up on its own, found her back, drew her in. She fit against my ribs like she'd been measured for it. Her breath slowed. I felt her hair under my chin, damp, smelling faintly of smoke and rain.

I'd been with other women. None of them had done this to me. None of them had made me want to be careful.

"Jarrah."

"Mm."

"If this goes wrong tomorrow." She stopped. Started again. "If I don't come back from whatever's in that file. I want you to know I like"

"Don't," I said, rough. "Don't say it like a goodbye."

"I'm not saying goodbye."

"Then say it like a beginning."

She was quiet for so long I thought she'd fallen asleep. Then she tilted her face up, and I saw her eyes, wet and steady, and her mouth moved around the first word, and I knew I wasn't going to hear the rest tonight. She wasn't ready. Neither was I. But the thing between us didn't need to be said to be real. It lived in the way she kept her hand under mine. In the way I hadn't moved my arm.

"I'm not good at this," I said.

"I know."

"I'll get it wrong."

"Probably." Something like a laugh. "I will too."

"Then we'll get it wrong together."

She smiled, small and real, and I thought, This. Whatever else happens. I want to have had this.

I kissed her forehead, lightly, once. It wasn't a decision. My mouth just went there. She closed her eyes, and a long shudder ran through her, and she turned her face against my neck and stayed.

We sat like that while the heater ticked and the lantern guttered. At some point her breathing went slow and even, and her hand loosened in mine. I stayed absolutely still. Every muscle in my back ached. My legs had gone numb. I wouldn't have moved for a fortune.

"Boss." Pike's voice whispered from the tent flap. He didn't come in. He'd seen. "Divers. Port side, three hundred metres out. Two heat signatures under the pilings."

I closed my eyes for a heartbeat.

"Wake the dock crew," I said softly. "Quiet. No lights. And Pike. Don't wake her."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

I eased myself out from under her slowly, one inch at a time, and laid her down along the crates with my jacket folded under her head. She stirred and murmured something, and I held my breath. She settled. I put the blanket over her good arm. I stood there longer than I should have, looking at her face in the lantern light, the shadow of her lashes on her cheek, the cut across her cheekbone I'd touched that afternoon.

I swear to you, I thought, to no one. Whatever he did. Whatever he's still planning. He doesn't get to take this.

Outside the tent, the night was black and cold and alive. A searchlight crossed the harbour and lit the rain for one second, a curtain of white needles, and went on. I checked my rifle. I went out.

The divers were good. We nearly missed them. It was Duffy who spotted the bubbles, a faint silver trail breaking the surface between two pilings, and I got to the edge of the dock just as the first charge went into the water on a line. I dropped flat on the wet planks, sighted along the barrel, and put three rounds into the water on either side of the line. Something thrashed. A shape rolled up pale and limp. The other diver let go of the charge and fled.

Pike hauled the line in hand over hand. A sealed canister came dripping out of the dark, big as a thermos, with a timer on it. Eleven minutes left.

"He meant it," Pike said, panting. "Right under the main footing."

"Of course he did."

"Where does a man like that learn to hate his own daughter this much?"

I didn't answer. I looked at the timer and thought about the sleeping woman in the tent. I thought about what it means to love someone who shares blood with the person trying to murder you. And I thought, it isn't hate.

It was something much worse. It was ownership.

By four in the morning we'd fished three charges out of the harbour and disarmed them on the dock, and the sky over Melbourne had gone the colour of wet slate. The search boats dropped back. The tide pulled out. I walked back to the tent with my boots full of seawater and my whole body singing with exhaustion, and I stopped in the doorway.

She was awake.

She sat on the crates with my jacket around her shoulders, a mug of something steaming in her hands, her hair loose and messy and her eyes fixed on me. She didn't smile. She just watched me come in, like a woman memorising a house she was about to leave.

"You didn't wake me," she said.

"You needed the sleep."

"There were divers."

"There were."

"You went without me."

"I went to keep you out of it."

"Jarrah." Her voice was low. "I'm done being kept out of things."

I wanted to argue. I took a breath to do it. Then I saw what was in her face, not anger, not even hurt, but something steadier, harder, a decision already made. I let the breath go.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Next time I will wake you."

She nodded once. She put down the mug and crossed the tent and pressed her forehead against my chest, without a word, and I put my arms around her and thought, That's the second time tonight I've been a man who didn't know how to hold on and did it anyway.

Then Wren's laptop gave a long, soft chime from the corner.

We both turned. The screen had gone white. Letters scrolled across it in a thin black font, and in the middle, bold and unmistakable, a single line:

DECRYPTION COMPLETE: 100%.

Neither of us moved. Neither of us wanted to be the one to read it first.