2 Timothy 4:6-7
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
Nick is at the airlock at oh-seven-eleven on day four.
He has not slept. He has not eaten. He has showered, because the body did it on autopilot at some point between the chair and the airlock, and he has put on a fresh clean kit because the protocol is the only thing in this building that still works the way it is supposed to. The protocol does not know the trial is over. The protocol does its job.
The airlock cycles.
The air on the residence side smells of nothing. It has smelled of nothing for three weeks. Nick has stopped registering it as a smell and started registering it as the absence of one.
Through the observation port, Dylan is awake.
Not reading this morning. Not at the paperback he was working through yesterday. He is sitting at the small table with both hands wrapped around a mug, and he is looking at the door.
He is waiting for Nick.
Nick stands at the port for a count of three.
Then he opens the door.
—
Dylan looks up.
He does not move. He does not set the mug down. His face moves once — a half-degree shift — and after that his face does not move at all.
He has read it.
Nick stands inside the door in his full clean kit and tries to find a version of his voice and does not find one.
He does not have to.
"I need my phone."
Dylan says it quietly. The way you say something you have been rehearsing.
"I need to call some people."
Nick reaches into the pocket of the clean kit. The phone has been in there since intake — a Phase I subject's phone goes to the lead investigator and stays there until clearance, and there is no clearance, but Nick has carried it on him for three weeks anyway because Dylan asked him to. He sets it on the table next to the mug.
"Take your time."
Nick steps back through the airlock without saying anything else.
The door closes behind him.
—
He sits on the floor in the corridor with his back against the wall.
The fluorescents above him hum the way they did before they meant anything. He has been listening to them for four days now and he is not going to stop listening to them today. The corridor smells of recycled air and the faint chemistry of three weeks of nobody opening a door to the outside.
Dylan is calling Alex. Then Jackie. Then Karth. Then Adam. His siblings. His parents. Samir. Everyone he has not yet told that the trial did not work.
Nick does not move closer to the door.
The door stays closed for a long time.
—
A grad student appears at the far end of the corridor around oh-nine-hundred. Looking for him. Wants to know about the run schedule for the week.
Nick stands up off the floor and walks toward her and tells her to go home.
She starts to ask why.
He tells her to go home.
He tells her to tell the rest of the team to go home too. The lab is closed. The trial is on hold. He will email everyone tonight.
She looks at him. She has known him for two years. She nods. She leaves.
Nick sits back down on the floor.
—
The door opens at oh-ten-twenty-seven.
Dylan comes through to the corridor side. The phone is in one hand. His eyes are red. His face is steady. Nick understands without thinking about it.
Nick stands up off the floor.
Dylan hands him back the phone.
"I want my clothes back. I want my hat and I want to spar."
Nick takes the phone. He nods.
— — —
Dylan's personal effects have been in a sealed locker in the lab since intake. Nick has the key. He unlocks the locker and steps back and does not say anything.
Dylan takes his time.
He strips the orange scrubs without ceremony. Folds them. Sets them on the table where the mug was. He does not look at the scrubs after he sets them down.
He stands there in his shorts in the residence light for the count of a long breath.
Nick has not seen him this way in three weeks. He has seen him in three weeks of orange scrubs and three weeks of cuff readings and three weeks of a body kept inside the trial. The body under the scrubs is the body he has known for twenty-three years. The ink on it is the ink he has watched live on it across two decades, settled now, gone faintly grey at the oldest edges, the way ink goes when it has been on a man longer than it has been off him.
The right arm carries the gods.Fenrir, Mjolnir, the three-knot Valknut. The turtle shell lyre. The thunderbolt. Names Nick can list without trying because Dylan has listed them across a hundred conversations.
The left arm carries the stories. The mithril vein running through it, and on the vein the things Dylan has loved in print — the sword and the crown, the mark and the hallows, the masks, the pauldron of the blood angels, the oak leaf. .
The runes on the right calf run ankle to knee. Another stave runs the left. Nick has read both before. A third stave runs down the right ribcage — vertical, the runes following the line of the lower ribs. The ribs are showing more than they were three weeks ago. The body has been losing weight Dylan has not been talking about.
The back — the back Nick cannot see from this side but has seen on a thousand sparring afternoons — carries the bird with its wings out, the laurel around it, the three skulls, the lines of Invictus, the cat at the small of the back. The Latin across the shoulders. Natus ad vincendum, non ad requiem . Nick reads all of this in the count of one long breath.
Dylan reaches into the locker.
Dylan does not look at Nick while he dresses.
Nick does not look away.
—
The sparring room is at the end of the east corridor, past the imaging suite, behind a single unmarked door.
Nick had it built six years ago.
It has mats on the floor and a rack on one wall and a mirror on the opposite wall and nothing else. The rack has one of Dylan's longswords on it and Nick's saber and two wasters and a few other practice pieces. No clock. No windows. A door at the back that opens onto the lab's loading dock so a man can step outside between rounds.
It smells of dried sweat and oil. Nobody has been in it for three weeks.
Nick had it built because the human trials were going to require Dylan on site for a year, and Dylan needed somewhere to move once he was allowed to.The first time Dylan walked into it, six years ago, they had sparred for ninety minutes that afternoon. Nick can still feel the bruises he got then.
Both men walk in this morning without saying anything.
Dylan goes to the rack. Takes the longsword down. Nick takes the cavalry saber. The weapon he first started truly learning from the swordsmanship manual Dylan wrote and sent him.
They suit up.
Gambesons. Throat collars. The heavy gloves Dylan ordered out of Poland eight years ago because they look like the witch kings gauntlets. The fencing masks last — high-end shells with the clear polycarbonate face shields Dylan paid an obscene amount for the year they came out because he hated the way standard mesh blurred his opponent's eyes. The masks let them see each other's faces. The masks let them see each other's eyes. Dylan has always said it was the best way to spar — that if you cannot see what the other man is feeling, the bout is not really a bout, it is just two bodies hitting each other in costumes.
They face up at center mat.
They salute..
—
Dylan loads into Pflug.
Hands at the waist. Point forward and slightly up. Weight already on the lead foot, the spring already compressed. He has opened this way for as long as Nick has known him. It is the first thing he ever showed Nick about his fighting and the thing he has never had reason to change. The low guard that hides the launch. Nick has eaten the launch off this guard for fifteen years.
The thrust comes.
Passing step, full commit, the longsword's point going for the centerline. Nick voids it — slips left off the line, the saber high and tight, the thrust passing his chest by an inch.
This is where Dylan rides past.
The horseman's parry sweeps down and across, guarding the line the failed thrust just opened. The passing step's momentum carries Dylan past Nick's body and into the spin. Off the lead foot. One hundred and eighty degrees. The longsword coming up and around in the spin's arc, loading for the Zornhau—
A quarter beat late.
Nick reads it before it lands. The angle is correct, the line is correct, the cut is the cut Nick has parried for fifteen years — but the timing is off by the smallest amount, and the smallest amount is everything in a cut that has always lived on a speed Nick could not catch. Nick parries it without difficulty. Steel on steel — the saber's lighter note against the longsword's heavier one, the sound of mismatched weapons meeting that Nick has heard for fifteen years.
He is the same, Nick thinks. He is the same. He is going to be the same.
He is not the same.
Nick does not let his face show how devastating that thought is.
They reset.
—
Dylan launches again.
Same combo. He is doubling down because that is what he always does when something is not working — you do not give up Vor. You launch and you keep launching until the bout closes or you are dead.
The thrust comes with the audible exhale of a man putting his body behind it. The exhale is shorter than it should be. The breath is not the powerful exhale he lets out to power his moves.
This time the thrust is even slower.
And this time Nick does not let Dylan ride past.
He stays in.
He closes the distance instead of taking it. Voids the thrust at half-measure rather than full-measure, drives forward into Dylan's space, boots scuffing the mat. The longsword's two-handed grip suddenly becomes a problem because Dylan's inside hand is crowding his own body and there is no room for the spin. Dylan tries to reset to measure. Nick will not let him. Nick is in the in-fighting now — the half-measure beat-parry-cut cycle Dylan taught him.
Beat. Parry. Cut.
The cut lands. Saber on the gambeson at Dylan's flank. A real touch — the kind that would have split him open if these were live blades. Don't telegraph the hip. Don't telegraph the hip. There. Again. Don't telegraph the hip.
Dylan reads it the half-second before it lands — because he taught it to him — and goes to answer and Dylan's body is too slow. The saber comes through when it should have been batted aside and a counter thrown.
Through the clear shield of the mask, Nick sees Dylan acknowledge the touch.
A small nod. They keep going.
—
Dylan loads Pflug.
He launches again.
There is anger in the blade now. Not at Nick. At his body.
The thrust arrives slower than the second. The spin comes later than the first. The Zornhau comes down with the sloppiness of a man trying to make the body deliver speed it no longer has.
Nick rides the failed thrust and answers it. Saber to the high line. Dylan reads it and parries hard enough that Nick can feel the parry through the steel — angry, Dylan has always been quick to use anger as fuel, that has not changed in 23 years.
They reset.
Through the clear shield Nick reads Dylan's face. The discipline is fraying. The man inside the mask is frayed.
—
Dylan loads Pflug one more time.
Nick reads the load and reads the face behind the shield and knows.
The off-hand comes off the pommel as Dylan launches.
The one-handed thrust. The high-risk variant Dylan has thrown at him a few times across fifteen years, always to catch Nick off guard, always with the re-grip drilled to come on the failed reach so the spin-and-Zornhau could still ride past. The thrust that buys six or eight inches of reach an opponent does not see coming because the off-hand release tells him the wrong measure.
Nick has eaten this variant before.
The off-hand release is the tell.
Nick voids the thrust before the reach arrives. Slips left, drops the saber's point, takes the longsword on the saber's strong with a sharp upward roll of the wrist — and the one-handed grip cannot hold against the lever. The longsword rips out of Dylan's hand. The blade leaves Dylan and the saber is already coming back around on the return.
The cut lands on the gambeson at the collarbone.
A clean hit. Hard. Under any other circumstances it would be the touch that ends the bout with a good cut call. Under these it's wrong; it should never have landed.
The longsword hits the mat with a quiet thud his ears barely register.
Both men stand.
Dylan is breathing harder than he should be from five minutes of work.
Through the clear shield of the mask, Nick sees the light in Dylan's eyes gutter.
Not extinguish. Gutter. The way a candle goes when there is still wax left in it but the wick has burned too low.
"Ah."
A single syllable from under the mask.
Then Dylan straightens. The grin comes back across his face — slower than it should, slower than any time Nick has seen him grin in twenty-three years of friendship.
"Well, Nick. It seems you got a lot better. I'm no longer able to match you."
Nick says nothing.
He puts the saber back on the rack.
He picks up the longsword from the mat. The blade is cold under his glove. He puts it back on the rack next to the saber. He does not hand it to Dylan.
Dylan watches him do it.
Then Dylan turns and walks toward the door.
—
They strip out of the gear at the rack. Mask first, gloves second, gambeson last. Nobody helps anybody. Dylan moves slower than Nick getting the gambeson off. Neither of them looks at the other while they do it.
They walk back to the residence in silence.
Dylan sits at the table where the orange scrubs are still folded. The hat is still where he left it, brim down on the wood.
He picks it up.
It is a Wildhats. He had it made when he was twenty-nine. He has worn it almost every day of the over two decades since. He has six others he had made later but this is the one. Nick knows the hat the way he knows the Mjölnir. He has watched Dylan put it on a thousand times.
He has never watched Dylan put it on after losing a fight to him.
Dylan settles it on his head. Adjusts the brim with a thumb. Looks up at Nick across the table.
"Let's plan the trip."
— — —
"Half Dome. I want a view."
"You won't be able to make the cables in your state."
"I will. Because you are going to drive me to the trailhead at oh-four-hundred and we are going to start before the day gets hot. And I’ll climb them because I wont let my body tell me what I can and can’t do in the end."
"Okay."
"We leave tomorrow morning."
"Okay."
"Today I need to wrap a few things up. Tonight I sleep here one more time. The residence has been mine for three weeks. May as well be my last bed."
Nick nods.
Dylan goes through the rest of it the way he plans everything — short sentences, no decoration, a man giving directions to a driver. Water. Snacks for Nick. A flask for the summit. The whiskey — EH Taylor, Dylan’s favorite. Cigars in the jeep glove box. The Bowie on the belt for the climb because Dylan has not once went about his life without a knife on him and is not going to start today.
The plan takes twenty minutes to make.
The plan is mostly Dylan telling Nick what is going to happen.
Nick listens.
—
Dylan stands up to go to the bathroom around eleven-thirty.
He walks normally. Almost normally, Nick sees the way his leg almost gives out. Nick watches the way he sets his weight on the first step out of the chair and looks back at the table before Dylan reaches the door.
The bathroom door closes.
Nick stays at the table.
The water runs for a minute. Then it stops.
Behind the door there is a sound of quiet coughing. The sound of a man trying to hold down vomit. It happens once, and then there is silence, and then the toilet flushes and the water runs again and Dylan washes his hands.
Dylan comes out. His face is pale.
Nick does not look up from the table.
Dylan sits down across from him and picks up the mug he has not touched in two hours and takes a sip of cold coffee.
"What time are we leaving in the morning."
"Oh-three-thirty. We need to be on the trail by oh-five."
"Okay."
Third time.
— — —
The afternoon passes.
Dylan makes a few more calls. Short ones, this time. Loose ends. People he forgot to call the first round.
Nick goes back to the lab at fourteen-hundred to do the documentation he should have done at oh-four-twelve on day one and has not done since. He closes out the daily logs. He files the adverse-event record in the protocol binder. He drafts the IRB notification that will end the trial the moment it is sent and does not send it. He will send it after Yosemite. The trial gets to live until the patient does not.
He checks on the rats at fifteen-hundred.
Number Seventeen is in the wheel.
The treatment cohort is alive and is going to keep being alive and Nick stands at the observation window for a long while and thinks about the rats outliving everyone in this building. Outliving Dylan. Bloody rats outliving his friend.
Number Seventeen finishes on the wheel. Climbs down. Starts grooming.
Nick keeps walking.
—
He gets back to the residence at sixteen-hundred. Dylan is napping in the chair with the hat tipped down over his eyes. His Mjölnir is rising and falling with his breath. Nick stands at the door for a minute and watches it rise and fall and rise and fall and the bronze catches the light each time it crests.
He sits down across the table.
He waits.
He knows he cannot sleep.
—
The second vigil is at seventeen-thirty. Dylan in there longer this time. The sound is the same kind of sound but the duration is different. Nick at the table.
Dylan comes out and sits back down. They do not speak about it.
—
They eat at nineteen-hundred.
Nick has packed simple food — broth, some rice, a piece of bread. The things he knows Dylan can keep down at this point. Dylan eats slowly. He gets through about half of what is on the plate and stops.
"It's okay."
"I know."
They sit with the half-finished food between them for a while.
The residence has a small television in the corner. Neither of them has watched it in three weeks. Nick turns it on without thinking about it and turns it down and they look at it without seeing it for the next hour.
—
The third vigil is at twenty-thirty.
Longer than the first two. Nick listens this time. He cannot help it. The sound goes on for longer than a man should be able to empty his stomach and Nick stays in his chair and does not move and does not move and does not move and the sound stops and the water runs and Dylan comes out and sits back down.
Dylan looks at him across the table. Reaches across and puts his hand on Nick's shoulder for a count of two.
"You're a good friend, Nick."
"Don't."
Fourth time.
—
Dylan goes to bed at twenty-one hundred.
He takes the hat off and sets it on the small table next to the residence bed. He lies down on top of the covers in the practice clothes he sparred in this morning. He does not undress. Nick understands he probably doesn’t have the energy even as stubborn as he is.
Nick stays in the chair in the main room.
He does not sleep.
He listens.
—
The next vigil is somewhere around oh-one-hundred. Quieter than the others. Briefer. Dylan stumbling back to the bed without a word.
Nick stays in the chair.
At oh-three-hundred he is still in the chair and the residence clock is counting down to the wake time he has set for himself and the wake time is not necessary because he has not slept.
The night passes.
— — —
Oh-three-forty-five. Dylan is up.
The shower runs for an hour. Dylan in there alone. He washes himself. No matter how much he struggles to lift his arms Nick knows he will not surrender his dignity to ask for help with bathing..
Nick lays the clothes out on the chair while Dylan is in the shower.
Black jeans. The purple button-up. The leather jacket folded over the back of the chair. Three bronze rings —. A watch with a leather strap, the face scuffed from twenty years of being on a man who works with his hands. The hat at the top of the pile. The Bowie in its leather sheath at the bottom.
Dylan comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He looks at the chair then grins up at Nick.
"I always said a man should dress well until the day he dies."
Nick steps out into the main room and closes the bathroom door behind him.
Then the door opens.
Dylan is standing in the doorway of the bathroom in his clothes for the first time in three weeks.
He looks like himself.
He looks like the man who walked into this lab three weeks ago and let Nick close an airlock behind him. He looks like the man he was before Nick killed him.
He adjusts the brim with a thumb.
"Let's go."
—
They walk through the lab in silence.
Past the bench. Past the imaging suite. Past the sparring room with its unmarked door. Past the animal wing.
Dylan stops at the animal wing.
He looks through the observation window for a count Nick does not measure. Number Seventeen is asleep in the corner with her tail curled neatly around her. T They are alive. They are going to be alive longer than Dylan.
Dylan does not say anything, Nick hears a silent chuckle.
He keeps walking.
—
Out the front door of the lab. Into the parking lot.
The predawn is cold. The kind of October cold that gets into the leather jacket if a man stands still in it. The sky over the parking lot is going pale at one edge and the rest of it is still full dark. The air smells like air — outside air, the first Nick has breathed in three weeks. Pine somewhere upwind. The faint asphalt of a parking lot that has been the same parking lot for ten years.
The jeep is in its spot.
Dylan walks to the passenger side. Opens the door. Sets the hat in his lap as he sits down because the brim does not clear the roof line and he has been getting in and out of this jeep with this hat for a decade and a half and knows how to do it.
Nick gets in the driver's side.
He puts the key in the ignition.
He starts the jeep.
—
The jeep pulls out of the lot at oh-four-oh-two.
The lab disappears in the rearview at oh-four-oh-three.
They are on the highway by oh-four-twelve — the same time the panel came back four mornings ago — and the road is empty and the headlights are on the asphalt and the jeep is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Dylan sits in the passenger seat with the hat in his lap. He puts it back on once they are on the open road. He looks at the dark out the window for a long minute.
"Thanks for driving."
Nick keeps his eyes on the road.
[End Act 2]