Violin went with him, holding his slack hands in both of hers. He was rushed into surgery, and the doctors worked on him all night.

I got there hours later. The aftermath at the venue was titanic, and I was the center of a hell of a lot of suspicion and scrutiny, despite my credentials. It wasn’t until phones started ringing in the right hands and voices representing frightening levels of officialdom told them to leave me the hell alone that they did.

Bug made sure my name and face were erased from every news story. That must have pushed MindReader to its limits, but it wasn’t the first time I’d been edited out of a slice of history. Which was perfectly fine by me.

While I sat with Violin and Toys in the waiting room, I got two calls. The first was from Scott Wilson. He told me about the fight at the Pavilion. Bunny, Top, and Andrea were all in a Spokane hospital. They were alive, but each was badly banged up. Andrea had burns and lacerations from flying debris. He was in the best shape. Top had some damage to his lower back, but Church was flying in the top spine doctor in the world. No joke. Church has a lot of friends.

As for Bunny … he had a broken sternum, four broken ribs, a cracked collarbone, and three broken fingers. His fiancée, Lydia, who was once a shooter back in the DMS days, was flown in one of Church’s jets, and a nurse was along for company because Lydia was entering her third trimester.

But we lost Mia Kleeve. She’d gone down hard and taken out the last major lingering threat from the Relentless program. The word hero is bandied about too much. Football hero. Guitar hero. There are actual heroes, though. There’s no way to calculate how many lives her actions saved. I liked her and had planned to see about her getting a transfer to Havoc Team. Now … she would be a star on a wall at Phoenix House. Tales would be told, drinks raised. The public at large would never hear her name, never know how much intelligence and courage it took for her to stop that truck.

Those of us who understand the nature of that sacrifice, though? No, we wouldn’t ever forget.

I shared all this with Toys and Violin.

Toys merely grunted. He had stitches and bruises and looked like he’d been the star attraction at a muggers’ convention.

Then Church called me to say that Junie was flying in. That news came closer to breaking me than anything else. I had to go into the men’s room and just stand there for a while. I used a trash can to block the door.

When I came out, Toys was alone.

“They called her in,” he said.

“Harry…?”

Toys took a moment. “They used the phrase cautiously optimistic.”

“Shit.”

“Yes.”