The laptop sat against my ribs like a second heartbeat.
Not heavy. That was the thing about objects that carried that much consequence — they never weighed what they should. A bullet weighed almost nothing. A signed order weighed nothing. The laptop weighed approximately 2.1 kilograms, which was standard for a field unit built to survive rough handling, and it felt like exactly that. 2.1 kilograms. No more.
I kept moving east.
The original plan — get the laptop, get out — had the satisfying simplicity of something that worked on paper and nowhere else. Getting out of China with no documentation, a compromised body and an object that multiple intelligence organizations were actively hunting was not a plan. It was a direction. Directions were fine in John Reese book, they kept you moving. But movement without structure was just expensive delay in the present situation and both minds know it.
So I needed three things :
Documents, route and Time, preferably enough to build both without being found.
John Reese's memory was useful here, more than I'd expected. Not because it contained a specific exit strategy — it didn't, couldn't, the CIA hadn't exactly provided its burned operatives with a courtesy evacuation — but because it contained something more durable than plans. It contained networks. The kind that didn't appear in any official record, that existed entirely in the gap between what intelligence services acknowledged and what they actually ran. People who moved things. People who asked nothing because asking questions had a specific and well-understood cost. People who could be reached through the right sequence of apparently unrelated contacts, like dialing a number that wasn't listed anywhere.
John Wattergate had read about these networks in books and found them fascinating in the abstract, while blackmarket had become hidden in plain sight and was common knowledge in his modern world.
John Reese had used them to disappear three times in the past decade.
There's a man in Baotou, the memory offered, unprompted, the way useful things surfaced now — not as recollection but as simple knowledge, already present, already mine. Goes by Liang. Moves workers across the Mongolian border. Doesn't ask about cargo.
Baotou. One hundred and thirty kilometers northwest. One days on foot through terrain that would not be kind to a compromised arm and no winter gear worth mentioning, or considerably faster with a vehicle, which meant a road, which meant exposure.
The calculus ran itself.
Road, both voices agreed, independently, simultaneously. The novelty of that had worn off somewhere around day two.
The vehicle presented itself with the particular convenience of things that aren't actually convenient at all.
A maintenance truck, Chinese municipal markings, parked at the edge of what had once apparently been intended as an industrial district before Ordos's ambitious urban planning had quietly collapsed into itself. Engine cold. Keys absent. The kind of vehicle that nobody drove outside of a city and nobody watched and nobody thought about, but again that's only in a city, would such a vehicule really suit me for a 3 hours ride ? Yes both of my minds seemed in synchro for once.
I spent eleven minutes watching it before I moved.
No one came. No light shifted in the windows of the surrounding buildingstwice, got the hood open without a sound, and had the ignition running in forty seconds through a method John Reese's hands knew without consulting me. John Wattergate filed a small, private note of appreciation for skills he had previously only seen performed by characters in television dramas, and then set that aside because the engine was running and the window for departure was measured in minutes now, not hours.
I drove north without lights until I was far enough from the missile site that lights became less conspicuous than their absence.
The drive gave me time I hadn't asked for and used anyway.
The road was empty in the specific way that roads in this part of China were empty at 4 a.m. in February — not abandoned, just unhurried, the occasional truck moving at the steady pace of someone who had nowhere particular to be by any particular time.
The laptop was secured under my seat, near enough that if i was followed by any vehicule i could grab it without a second tought and escape with it.
I drove and I thought, which had become more like two separate activities and less like one continuous process . The voice that had been John Wattergate and the voice that had been John Reese had stopped announcing themselves. They surfaced when they were useful and receded when they weren't, and the border between them was becoming harder to locate but I guess it should rassure me that I wasn't developping a Dissociative Identity Disorder.
What I kept returning to, in the spaces between watching the road and monitoring the mirrors, was not the laptop. Not the extraction. Not Decima or Kara or the careful sequence of future events I was now positioned somewhere inside like a foreign object in a wound.
What I kept returning to was simpler and less comfortable than any of that.
John Reese, in the show, had been broken by China. Not by the missile — the missile was almost incidental. He'd been broken by what came after. By Jessica. By arriving too late, or not at all, depending on how you read the silences in those scenes. By the specific grief of a man who had chosen the mission over the person and then watched the person die anyway, which meant the choosing had been for nothing, which meant something in him had decided, quietly and without announcement, that nothing was the correct amount to invest in anything going forward.
That was the man Harold Finch had found drinking himself toward a conclusion in a run-down bar years later. That was the architecture of John Reese — not the training, not the skills, not the coldness that made him effective — but the grief underneath all of it, load-bearing, invisible, keeping everything standing by holding the shape of an absence.
I had eight months.
Jessica Arndt was in a relationship with a man named Peter Arndt. She would die at his hands. And in the original timeline, John Reese would be unreachable — somewhere in china or the world, after all what was discussed in the show regarding this 8 months timeline did not appear — and Harold Finch would find her number too late, and that would be that.
Could I change it?
The question wasn't tactical. John Reese's memory had an opinion — don't operate on sentiment, sentiment gets people killed — and John Wattergate wasn't even sure if it was something he should do, after all why should he do something for someone unrelated to him ? It wasn't that he was selfish, even if he was it was his right but that he always thought that people should mind their own business and he didn't want to become one of the protagonist always saving the days only to be despised by their own people.