Roz made a grunting, displeased sound, then that clicking that signaled the dogs. They retreated, out of sight. Maybe back to camp without him. Andy, for now, didn’t care.
He sat beside Tia, still clutching her hand. The fingers twitched again in his. He couldn’t tell if this was an act of Tia’s will or some automatic response, unknown to her. He thought, for some reason, of the office tower where OLE headquarters was housed. How the building started to clear at 5:00, as all of the eager clock-watchers fled, the parents with children in daycare, the coworkers with the weekly pub trivia night. That pub—Andy knew it well. Once a month he had to don a shirt and tie and attend a day’s worth of meetings at the office tower, and his reward at the end of it, the only thing that dragged him through the handshaking and vigorous nodding, all of the assurances he had to offer to men in well-cut suits who talked of “traveler satisfaction quotients” and “extra-virtual entertainment experiences,” was the promise of a sweaty pint of ale at the Artillery Arms. Occasionally Tia joined him. One winter night, they’d taken a window seat, complained about the day’s many absurdities, and watched the lights in the building go out one by one, until only one—eleventh floor, third office from the right—remained.
“I think we should wait him out,” Tia said. “As long as it takes. We go home when he does.”
“Or she,” Andy said.
“Or she,” Tia agreed. She raised her empty glass until the bartender spotted her, smiled broadly. Held up two fingers.
“Man, Tia, I don’t need another. Beth’s going to be climbing the walls if I’m not home soon.”
“Blame me,” Tia said. “Thad and Berry are at Thad’s mother’s tonight. I’m having another beer.”
He’d wondered, nursing his third pint, watching the last lit window in the tower, if that was a hint. An invitation. He didn’t really think it was, but he thought that Tia had maybe known he’d parse her words this way—that there was, for her, the faintest illicit thrill in imagining the course his thoughts had taken. Instead of feeling manipulated, he felt tenderly toward her, and very warm and cozy in this dark wood and gilt pub, and he thought, Don’t go out, light. Don’t go out.
In another twenty minutes it did.
Now, her hand stiffened in his, then went slack. But the shallow breaths kept going: Hih. Hih. Hih. She must have been here for hours. One light going out. Then another. The brain, he thought he remembered, continued for a long time to function normally. She’d be thinking of Berry and Thad. Maybe, as he held her hand, she wished with all her being that she could snatch it out of his grasp, pick up the near-at-hand gun, and put his lights out. He couldn’t blame her.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. He added in a rush, “I know how it looked. How it seemed. I know why you did what you did. But I want you to know your life was never in danger.” He wasn’t sure this was true, but he continued, anyway. “I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you, Tia.” Why was he telling her this? Stealing what might have been her only reassurance—that she had no choice? “I just don’t want you to think I’d have done that to you. That I’m that sort of person.”
Well, there it was.
“And . . . I’ll make sure Berry has everything she needs. That she wants for nothing.” An even bigger lie. With what? Ruby City’s largesse?
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. He looked into her eyes, hoping to see—forgiveness? Absolution? They watered again, blinked. Another set of twin tears ran toward her chin.
“Can you close your eyes?” he asked her. He thumbed the safety on his gun back off. “If you can, you might want to close them.”
Thirteen
There were three body-shapes laid across the smooth plank floors of Town Hall.
“I wanted you to see for yourself,” June said. “I wanted you to know what she did, and I wanted you to know what we didn’t do.” She sighed and motioned to Andy. “Show them Leeda and Miles first.”
He hunched down and peeled back the muslin covering the first body-shape, then the second, making neat rolls of the material down to the figures’ waists. The arms were slim, smooth-skinned. The boy’s were tanned, thatched with curly dark hair. The girl’s were milky-pale and freckled. A spill of light brown hair had been brushed neatly around the girl’s shoulders. The head above that spill of hair was a chin and lips and a beak of nose with a red wet crater opening above the nose. The boy still had a visible eye. Open. Edie couldn’t make out the color from here.
She remembered them both from the barbecue by the river. The girl had offered to hold Edie’s beer while she went through the line for food. She had slung her gun over her back to extend a free hand. “I can get that for you,” she’d said.
“Jesus Christ, cover them up,” Lee Flannigan said.
Andy looked up at June. She dropped her chin in acknowledgment, and he rolled the muslin back up.
“Andy found the young woman from your group this morning, several kilometers east of here. He and another of our group tracked her with trained dogs. The dogs first landed on what turned out to be the contents of her ejected Stamp. Then they found her. She was—well, you should tell it, Andy.”
“Paralyzed,” he said hoarsely. “Propped up against a tree and breathing, but that’s it.”
“Shreve’s,” June said, as if this wasn’t already clear. “I warn you that there’s a gunshot wound. Andy didn’t want her to suffer.”
Edie waited for the sarcastic, doubting retort to that—from Lee, or even Jesse—but no one spoke.
Andy hunched down at Tia’s side and rolled the cloth sideways this time, so that most of her body was exposed. Her head had rolled to the side, so that the bullet’s exit wound was mostly hidden from sight. Andy slid his fingers gently under the body’s shoulder and arm and tipped it in the same direction, turning it so that the body was slumped three-quarters of the way to prone, hips hovering awkwardly in space. Edie could see now that Tia’s microsuit, which was blood-soaked, had been cleanly cut down the middle of the back. Andy folded these flaps open, revealing the ragged deep wound they’d seen in the video on that first day of boot camp, saucer-sized, positioned almost exactly between the shoulder blades. Bone—her spine, it must be—winked from the churned red meat.
Andy stayed hunched, with his back to them, for a strangely long time. Edie realized he was crying.
“So that’s that,” June said flatly. “Three dead. For nothing.”
“Four dead,” said Lee. “Your girl shot Mickey.”
“Mickey was going to have a goddamn hole in his neck just like that in another six or ten hours,” Andy said roughly. He repositioned Tia’s microsuit, rolled her flat, and covered the body again with the muslin. “We did him a kindness. Just like I did Tia.”