Something glints now behind the woman’s veiled expression, something new in her shiny eyes. She says nothing but cocks her head at him, almost involuntarily, as she absorbs his every word.
“Before you start spouting out the ‘I-would-never-do-anything-for-you’ and ‘who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-to-ask-me-anything’ … I want you to consider one thing.” He gives her a hard look. “I am in the position to make your life easier.” For a fleeting instant, a grin crosses his features. “Hell, a bullet is in the position to make your life easier … but still, I can help you.”
She stares at him. Waiting. Dark eyes blazing.
The Governor smiles at her. “I just don’t want you to lose sight of that.” He glances over his shoulder at the door. “Bruce!”
The rolling door jerks, and a gloved hand appears under the edge.
Bruce yanks the door up, letting in the cold, naked light of the corridor.
The big man holds an object that catches the light, the steel edge gleaming with an almost liquid radiance.
*
The woman on the floor fixes her gaze on the object in the black man’s hand.
The scabbard is missing, but the glorious sword—exposed in the dim light—calls out to the woman like a homing beacon. The style originally created for samurai in the fifteenth century, hand-forged today by only a handful of master swordsmiths, the katana sword is pure steel poetry. With its long blade as gracefully curved as a swan’s neck, and its handle grip wound with hand-beaded snakeskin, the weapon is both a work of art and a precision instrument of death.
The sight of the thing simultaneously stiffens the dark woman’s spine and sends gooseflesh down her arms and legs. And all at once, all of her rage, all of the searing agony between her legs, all of the white noise in her mind goes away … replaced by the innate need to get her hands around that perfectly balanced grip. The presence of the thing so transports her, so mesmerizes her, that she barely hears the voice of the monster continuing to jabber at her.
“I would like to give this to you,” he is saying. “I’m sure you’d like to have it.” His voice fades as the weapon grows more and more radiant to the woman—the shimmering crescent of steel a sliver of new moon eclipsing everything else in the cell, in the world, in the universe.
“You’re going to be fighting a man,” the monster explains, his voice fading into nothingness. “And to the crowd, well, you’re going to need to appear to have the advantage. People don’t like watching guys beat the shit out of girls.” A pause here. “I know … I don’t get it either. I guess if you’re coming at him with a sword, it’ll be okay for him to clip you a good one with a baseball bat.”
In the woman’s traumatized brain, the sword seems to almost be softly humming now, vibrating, gleaming so brightly in the gloomy enclosure it appears as though it has caught fire.
“In return, you get a full week of rest,” the monster is saying. “And food, and maybe even a chair or a bed, I’ll have to look into it.” The monster’s shadow looms over her now. “To be honest, our little relationship has been pretty exhausting. I need a break.” He looks at her with an obscene grin on his face. “This is okay because, well, I’m still totally pissed off about the ear. But I feel like I’ve gotten at least a little payback already.” A pause. “And well, the fella you’re fighting tonight could kill you.”
In the woman’s imagination, rays of celestial light seem to be flaring off the sword’s chiseled tip.
“And I don’t want you to kill this guy,” the monster continues. “That’s the little secret we don’t really tell people. Our little arena fights are more than a little staged. The danger with the biters is there—sure—but you’re really not supposed to hurt your opponent too much.”
The tinsel of light reflecting off the weapon seems to be reaching out to the woman on the floor now, the voice in her head promising her, whispering to her … be patient, just wait, patience.
“You don’t have to decide now,” the Governor says at last, giving Bruce a nod. They head for the door, the Governor muttering, “You got twenty minutes.”
*
Lilly looks for Austin in every corner of the town that day. She gets worried at one point—after talking to the Sterns—that he might have lit out on his own to go find a mythical marijuana farm not far from Woodbury.
Austin had talked about the place off and on, usually adopting the wistful tone of someone describing Xanadu, claiming he had heard rumors that some government medical program was farming weed for Pfizer in preparation for the legalization laws to roll out. Lilly was fixing to go after him—the infamous farm apparently lay just east of Barnesville, a short car ride from Woodbury, or a long day’s hike on foot—when, late that afternoon, she started noticing signs that he might very well be right under her nose.
Gus mentions to her at one point that the young man was seen around noon that day skulking through the wild thickets next to the railroad yard, searching for something, which made no sense to Lilly whatsoever. But since when did Austin Ballard’s movements make sense?
Later that day, after her sad encounter with Bob, Lilly was on her way home when she ran into Lydia Blackman, an aging dowager from Savannah who had gladly taken on the role of town gossip. According to Lydia, Austin was seen only an hour or so earlier, rummaging around the trash heap behind the storage warehouse on Main Street, rifling through buckets and oil drums. A few passersby made snarky comments about the young man “turning into a hobo” and “the next thing you know, he’ll be pushing a shopping cart down Woodbury road looking for tin cans.”