I scrabble for an explanation that will reassure him. “She left a message with you—that was for me. Jubilee will vouch for me.”
The silence draws out, and I force myself to hold still and bite down on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from speaking. Finally, he rumbles, “You can stay here, an’ I’ll check with Lee. But if you do cause trouble, and anyone ends up dead ’cause of you, I won’t pause ’fore I call in the troops.” With a sickening lurch of my stomach, I realize he recognizes me. Either from the night I took Jubilee, or from the footage of my face being circulated around the base. But he’s waiting—because of Jubilee. His voice drops as he folds his arms across his chest. “And if you hurt her, even a little, I won’t bother calling the proper authorities.”
“Yes, sir,” I say quietly. I wish I could promise Jubilee would be safe with me. But we’d both know I was making promises I can’t keep.
He studies me for a long moment, and I study him back: shaven head, tattoos all the way up his arms in foreign characters that look like art, twangy backwater accent just like some of the other off-worlders. He’s a mystery. I wonder what brought him here.
“Come on out front,” he says.
“Out front?”
“You think I’m leaving you here unsupervised?” He claps me on the shoulder, and my knees nearly give out. “You can come an’ polish some glasses right where I can see you.”
I need to stop, to think. I need time, I need quiet. Because if Jubilee wasn’t the one who shot my people, I need to know who did. But the bartender’s posture makes it clear that in this, I have absolutely no choice. I swallow. “Yes, sir.”
Heart pounding, I follow him out into the bar full of trodairí. He jabs a thumb at the bin of clean glasses under the bar, so I get to work—and keep my head down, praying my tan and my hair are enough to hide me behind the scuffed bar top. But no matter how I try to clear my head, to stay focused, all I can see is Jubilee’s stunned face, her heart in her eyes as she looked at me. My world has been torn apart and stitched back together too many times, and now I exist only as a tattered patchwork of myself—unable to think, unable to feel anything other than numbness.
It’s about an hour later when the door swings open, and I look up to find Jubilee there with Merendsen. She looks ragged in a way she hasn’t since the massacre, and my hands fall still on the glass I’m polishing. Merendsen barely glances my way before heading for a table full of trodairí, but Jubilee freezes for the tiniest instant when she sees me. There’s relief there—the raggedness was for me—and then it’s gone, replaced by anger. She starts to head for the bar, but Molly casually steps in between us and she stops, looking up at him. He shakes his head a fraction—not now—and after a long, burning moment of hesitation, she nods. She turns her back on me and slides in to sit beside Tarver Merendsen.
The trodairí vie to buy him drinks, and he plays them like he was born doing it. Despite the heavy dread in the air since the Fianna attacked and hostilities resumed, Merendsen eases them back into the world and has them laughing at his stories. Mostly at his own expense, though a couple are about a younger Jubilee. He spends a good twenty minutes on the time she hit her head hard enough that all she could taste for weeks was dead rat, making the table erupt into easy laughter. He’s good at this. You’d never know he was in her quarters an hour before, whispering the darkest of secrets.
Jubilee is different, though. Her laughter comes a second after theirs, never quite reaching her eyes. She lets Merendsen take over, take the lead, relieving her of any need for a response. She nurses her drink longer than they do. Her eyes fade in and out of focus, gaze growing distant, though it never shifts to seek me. How long is she going to leave me here, polishing glasses in a room full of people who want to kill me? Damn it.
But I can see the way her muscles are still coiled with that graceful readiness that’s hers alone, her body still tense. She’s reeling like I am, so shaken she can’t react. I want to go to her. I want to…I have no idea what I want to do.
As the night wears on, the other soldiers drift away until the only ones left at the table are Jubilee and her old captain. A few late drinkers line up along the bar, and Molly tallies the till as I clear up. Jubilee’s tracing a design into the spilled beer on their table, knotwork. It’s Irish. I wonder if she knows.