It was a decision made under the particular kind of fear that only comes from watching consequences land on someone else because of choices you made. Malcolm did not offer her comfort dressed up as forgiveness because he sensed she would have seen through it immediately and trusted him less for the attempt. You should have told someone," he said instead plainly. And she nodded because she had told herself the same thing more nights than she could count. "I was afraid," she admitted.
So was I," he answered. And when she asked what exactly he had been afraid of, his answer came slower this time. Waited with years he rarely spoke about to anyone. "Of caring again," he said finally, after everything his marriage had cost him, and everything that had come apart in its wake. The warehouse went quiet around them in a way that had nothing to do with the sirens outside, and Viven moved closer to him without seeming to decide to do it consciously. the distance between them narrowing until there was hardly any left to close.
They never finished whatever might have happened next because a gunshot cracked through the corrugated wall behind them and Viven dropped to the concrete floor before either of them fully understood what had happened. Malcolm was on his knees beside her before the echo had even finished rolling through the warehouse, his hands moving over her shoulder and sighed in a frantic search for the wound, her name tearing out of him louder than he meant to let it. For one endless second, the world narrowed down to nothing but her face, and the blood he could feel but not yet locate, every other thought in his head burned away by a fear more total than anything he had felt jumping down onto those tracks hours earlier. It turned out once his hands finally found the source that the bullet had only grazed her upper arm. Painful and bleeding, but nowhere near as catastrophic as the sound of the shot had made it feel in that first terrible moment.
Malcolm tore a strip from his shirt and wrapped it tight enough to slow the bleeding. Then half carried her deeper into the railard, away from wherever the shot had come from, until they reached an old signal control building he remembered from years of service calls. The equipment inside was outdated, but not entirely dead. still tethered by an old line to the central network that ran the region's rail traffic. And Malcolm realized almost immediately that if he could get into that system, he could pull the original unaltered logs that would prove exactly who had tampered with the crossing signals that night. They worked side by side under the dim glow of a single emergency light.