Chapter 261: Her Husband Had Some Complaints

DOVE’S POV

The signal had failed twice overnight, and Dove was going to develop a personal grudge against the entire sky if it failed a third time.

She sat on the radio trailer’s narrow bench with Edrik beside her. Through the open door she could see their van, the diner’s grill, and a truck driver washing his hands over a bucket. Everybody else was having a morning. Dove was waiting to find out whether her husband still sounded like himself.

"Dove?" Thorne said through a rush of static. "Sweetheart, are you there?"

Her fingers tightened around the microphone. "I’m here. Don’t you dare disappear again."

"I wasn’t planning on it. The nurse might kill me, though. Apparently I’m difficult."

She laughed, and the laugh caught halfway out. Edrik took her free hand beneath the table, where nobody else could see how badly she needed it.

"You are difficult," she said. "You’re supposed to be difficult at me."

"I’m saving plenty for you."

Dove looked at the microphone because looking anywhere else might make her cry. She had spent days carrying the faint certainty that he was alive, but the bond hadn’t told her he could still make her laugh. It hadn’t given her his voice, or the way he made a threat sound like something she wanted to come home to.

"Did you eat?" she asked.

"Eggs, potatoes, and enough sausage that the nurse started hiding the tray."

"Good. Keep stealing it back."

"What did you have?"

She described the diner breakfast, including Edrik stealing her toast after insisting he wasn’t hungry. Beside her, Edrik leaned toward the microphone.

"She offered it."

"I offered you a bite," Dove said. "You ate the bite and its entire family."

Thorne laughed, then stopped sharply. The sound of his breath changed. Dove went quiet with him, every harmless thing falling out of her head.

"It’s the wound," he said before she could ask. "I’m sitting up. The nurse is here. I’m not pretending it doesn’t hurt."

She closed her eyes. That was what she needed, even if she hated hearing it. The truth, not a performance designed to keep her sweet and calm while something terrible happened somewhere she couldn’t reach.

"Tell me what they said."

He explained it simply. He was healing, but not ready for a long trip. They would watch him for another few days, then decide whether he could travel with proper support. Ash had stayed nearby. There were guards at the clinic, food in the kitchen, and people who knew how to care for a wound.

Dove repeated the important parts aloud so Edrik could hear them too. She didn’t need to understand every medical word. She needed to know Thorne wasn’t being left in a room with a bandage and somebody’s best wishes.

"The northern station is still the meeting place?" she asked.

"If the road stays open. Dad’s there with the generator and cooler. He sent word yesterday."

Dove let herself picture it: Thorne in a chair, his father complaining about something ordinary, Edrik leaning against the door while she made coffee. She wanted it so badly that for a second she could almost smell it.

"I’m bringing shirts," she said. "Not the ones we traded. Different ones. You’ll have to be impressed by my shopping."

"I’m always impressed by your shopping. Occasionally terrified."

Edrik rubbed his thumb across her knuckles. She leaned against him, listening while the operator checked the time and wrote down their next call window. Tomorrow evening, if the diner connection held. Another relay farther north if they had moved. Actual places and times, not a promise to somehow find each other in a ruined state.

She asked the operator for a scrap of paper and wrote the next call time herself. Thorne had a matching note at the clinic. It was such a small, boring thing to agree on, and she loved having something ordinary to expect from him tomorrow. Edrik held the paper flat while she wrote, his shoulder resting against hers.

Then Thorne told her about the man who had made the red shower over their street.

Dove sat straighter. "It was already red in the air. The earlier rain wasn’t."

"Ash noticed the edge of it from above. This man could cover a few streets. He was paid to frighten people during the attack."

"Well, congratulations to him. I was absolutely fucking frightened."

Her anger arrived hot and clean. Somebody had looked at an already broken world and decided what it really needed was more screaming. People had run into danger because the sky looked wrong. She had searched her men for blood while a gunman waited ahead.

"That doesn’t explain the other places," she said.

"No. They know it doesn’t."

Good. She wasn’t ready for somebody to announce that the whole nightmare was one idiot with a party trick. There were still reports from roads he had never reached, and nobody had explained what had happened to the water there.

The operator raised two fingers. Dove hated him for it, briefly and unfairly.

"I want your hand," she told Thorne before she could make it sound less needy. "I keep reaching for you when I wake up."

The radio hissed. Then his voice came back, lower.

"Keep reaching, wife. I’m coming back to fill the space."

She pressed the microphone against her chest for one moment, breathing around the ache. Edrik kissed the side of her head. He didn’t try to make her stop missing Thorne, and she loved him for that almost as much as she loved his hand holding hers.

When she lifted the microphone again, she asked Thorne to hand it to Ash.

Edrik’s thumb stopped, then moved once more. He watched her face without speaking.

"You don’t have to," Thorne said.

"I know. I want to."

There was movement at the other end, a low exchange she couldn’t make out, and then Ash said her name as though he’d been holding it between his teeth for days.

Dove looked at her joined hand with Edrik’s, took one breath, and said, "Don’t leave before I finish talking."