Malcolm assumed for one brief and foolish moment that help had finally arrived to protect Viven from whoever had tried to kill her. That assumption lasted exactly as long as it took an officer to call his name through a bullhorn, followed immediately by an order to come out with his hands where they could be seen. The charge, shouted plainly enough for both of them to hear through the plywood, was sabotage of railway infrastructure and conspiracy to commit murder. Somewhere between the crash and this moment, Malcolm Vance had been transformed from a man who saved a stranger's life into the primary suspect for trying to end it. They ran before the officers could fully surround the building, slipping out through a service door Malcolm had used a hundred times during maintenance shifts and out into a maze of abandoned freight warehouses that bordered the old railard.
Viven kept pace despite her injured leg, refusing every offer he made to leave her behind and take his chances alone. And somewhere between the third warehouse and the fourth, Malcolm had a clean opportunity to disappear into the dark without her. He turned back instead, closing the gap between them without a word. And when she finally asked him why, his answer came out simple and unadorned in a way that told her he meant every word of it. "Because I don't leave people behind," he said.
"And something in the way he said it settled into her chest like a promise she had not known she was waiting to receive." They pressed on together through the warehouse district, ducking beneath loading bay doors and skirting the edges of pulled flood light thrown down from security lamps that had somehow survived years of neglect. Viven's leg had gone stiff and slow beneath her, forcing her to lean more of her weight against Malcolm's shoulder with every hundred yards, though she refused every time he asked to admit how much pain she was actually in. At one point, they crouched behind a rusted shipping container while a patrol car swept its light across the lot beyond, close enough that Malcolm could hear the radio chatter crackling from the dashboard, and he found himself holding his breath in a way he had not done even on the tracks earlier that night. It was strange, he thought, how fear worked differently depending on what exactly a person stood to lose. On the tracks, he had been afraid for a stranger. crouched behind that container, listening to Viven's ragged breathing beside him, he understood that the fear had become entirely personal now.
It was in the shelter of that fourth warehouse, crouched behind stacked pallets, with sirens circling somewhere in the distance, that Viven finally told him the whole truth about 7 years earlier. She had discovered Gideon's first attempt at embezzlement back then, smaller in scale, but no less deliberate, and had prepared to report it to the board before a colleague, who had helped her gather evidence, died in what was ruled conveniently and immediately. Onexidon. She had understood the message buried inside that ruling without anyone ever needing to say it aloud, and she had stayed silent for years afterward, terrified that speaking up again would only get someone else's family torn apart the way that colleagues had been. It was not cowardice, though she called it that herself in the telling.