Sink or Swim

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/14753099.

Rating: Mature
Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category: Gen
Fandom: Team Fortress 2
Character: Pyro (Team Fortress 2), Engineer (Team Fortress 2), Scout (Team
Fortress 2)
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Series: Part 4 of there is a season
Stats: Published: 2018-05-25 Completed: 2021-01-21 Words: 178,557
Chapters: 49/49

Sink or Swim
by Pemm

Summary

[BOOK IV: SPRING]

When the embers fade, look to the ashes. Remember what they were. Where there was once
life, there can be life again, if you will only seek it.

Notes

Sequel to Sparkler, Cryoablation, and Hold Your Fire.

Part IV of There Is A Season.

 1: Decommissioned

PROLOGUE

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

—T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.

The stack of paper in her hands was pleasantly thick and heavy, and Pyro had nearly dropped it
when Miss Pauling leaned across the desk and handed it to her. She recovered, mostly, and leaned
back in the stiff and squeaky chair to get a better look at it. Something was written on the front,
typed in heavy black ink. Pyro considered this as she glanced around the tiny, tightly packed office
she had been called into.

“You remember that I can’t read, right?” she said.

“Yes,” said Miss Pauling, as crisp as ever, and folded her hands neatly onto the desk. Her nails
were each an immaculate purple. “I’m required to serve you that, but I can read it to you if you’d
like. Otherwise I had just planned to give you the overview.”

“Oh,” Pyro said, leafing through it. It looked incredibly boring, whatever it was. Every page was
laden with dense, impenetrable gibberish, and the only images she could find were the Builder’s
League United logo. When she let the papers fall flat again, she had already lost interest. It was
likely more garbage about company policy and contracts she barely remembered signing. Her gaze,
instead, flit out the window just behind Pauling’s narrow chair, where a bird had just perched on a
stack of crates in a sunny gap between the shadows of the building. It was yellow, a bright spot in
the drab February landscape, and to Pyro’s eye looked very relieved to have found somewhere to
stand that wasn’t covered in frost.

Birdwatching, Pyro had discovered over the last four and a half months, was a thing that took a
particular kind of person to do. Scout had gotten bored and left ten minutes into the first time he’d
tried it, which was only to be expected. Truth be told, Pyro didn’t find it particularly engaging
herself. She kept at it for two reasons: firstly, according to the ragged field guide she had procured
(and which she had gotten Esau to read to her), eastern kingbirds could be found here in New
Mexico—and secondly because there really wasn’t a whole lot else to do when you were under
lock and key, except sit in one place and wait for birds to fly by.

Perhaps lock and key was exaggerating things, but still.

“So,” said Pauling, and Pyro turned her attention away from the bird, which wasn’t a kingbird
anyway. “I hope you know you’ve always been an asset to this team, Pyro.”

“Even when I needed to be babysat?” Pyro said dryly.

“Any effort expended was worth the result,” Pauling said with her professional smile. “There were
certainly some unforeseen hiccups, but I don’t regret recommending you for the team.”

Unforeseen hiccups. Pyro allowed herself a wry smirk at the phrasing, which lived right up until
Pauling continued, “With that said, I really am sorry to have to tell you that this is a severance
packet.”

The words hung in the air for several seconds, like lingering smoke. It took that long and perhaps a
bit longer for Pyro to put real meaning to the words. When she did, she could not stop herself from
looking down at the folder again. The heavy black ink was still nothing more but shapes on the
page to her, but now she knew what they meant. Now she knew their intention.

“You’re firing me?”

This time, Pauling’s response was not quite as brisk. “That’s more or less what’s happening. I’m
sorry.”

“Why?”

It was complicated, Pauling explained over the next twenty minutes. It had a lot to do with her and
Scout abandoning their mission in Minnesota the year prior and consorting with Esau, which did
not make sense to Pyro, especially given that they had brought Dell back alive at the end of it all.
Sort of. His body was alive, anyway. Wasn’t that what the last four and a half months had been
about, detaining the three of them for investigation? Hadn’t BLU pretty much come to the
conclusion that she and Scout hadn’t done anything harmful to the company? Pauling conceded
this, just before launching into a half-dozen other crimes Pyro hadn’t been aware she was guilty of,
along with a few she was. All those times she and Scout had gotten into physical fights, for
instance, and when Pauling had caught her looking at the folders in Mannworks.

“And, well,” Pauling finished, “we might have been able to overlook all that—heaven knows
Medic’s just as bad—but as we were researching all of this, it came to light that your signatures on
the contracts aren’t all valid.”

For a good few seconds, Pyro very seriously considered getting up and leaving. Instead she chewed
her lip and said, as evenly as possible, “What does that mean?”

“Well, you signed them all with an ‘X’. That would have been fine, and it was for most of them,
but for the signature to be binding someone has to witness it.” Those immaculate purple nails
drummed the desk. “Four of your contracts have no evidence of witness. You’ve technically never
been accounted for as a contracted mercenary like the others. You’ve been on the books as a risk
consultant.”

The irony of this skipped lightly over Pyro’s head on its way out the door. She was busy turning
things over in her mind. Fired. Severance. No longer part of BLU.

“I did try to get you reinstated, but,” Pauling went on, “it’s been decided that we don’t particularly
need additional mercenaries at this time. Or consultants.”

Fired.
“Do you have any more questions?”

“Where’s Shep?”

The air was crisp, still, and carried on it a taste that was sharp and refreshing in Pyro’s mouth, even
while her breath turned to smoke in the cold. It felt good on her face as she picked her way across
the fenced yard, a slog of mud, gravel, and ice. This was one of the very few outdoors places she
and Scout had been allowed into unsupervised since November, and she knew the safest spots to
put her feet better than she strictly would have liked. At the other end of the yard, with ears red
from the cold and a baseball and glove in his hands, Scout himself stood squinting at her. For some
unfathomable reason, he was wearing shorts. “I dunno, he’s your dog,” he said.

Pyro folded her arms across her chest and came to a halt in front of him. “Thanks. Helpful. Have
you at least seen him?”

“Not since yesterday.” He shifted his weight onto his back foot and pitched the ball with a snap of
his wrist. It shot across the yard with pinpoint accuracy, hitting the center of a crude target drawn
on a grocery bag and falling to join a host of other baseballs that had collected against the dented
fence. “You checked the dining hall?”

“No, but he doesn’t really like it there.”

“What kinda dog doesn’t like food?”

“He’s scared of the cook.”

“Smart dog,” Scout said with a grin. “Dunno. Help me pick this crap up and I’ll help look.”

This seemed reasonable to Pyro. A few minutes later, with Scout’s baseball things deposited in a
filthy milk crate that lived in the yard, the two of them were yet again meandering without much
aim through the BLU headquarters. When Pyro first arrived, she had found it overwhelmingly
large. This ceased to be the case, about two weeks later, after she’d learned the layout of the place,
and after two months it became downright cramped. Now, four months in—four months of BLU
keeping her and Scout for “investigation”—all she could ever think about the place was how it was
overstuffed with people and frequently smelled of things Pyro did not want to inquire about. It
would be such a relief to get out, she thought to herself again, and wondered if she should tell Scout
about her conversation with Pauling.

Shep, the dog, was not in her room. This was technically where he was supposed to be at all times
if Pyro wasn’t supervising him. That had been a pretty key caveat of allowing her to have someone
bring him to her during her confinement, and had been thrown out the window almost immediately.
The big German shepherd was mostly well-behaved and very much liked people, and with nothing
much else to do Pyro had taken to properly training him. Or trying to, at least. This was another
thing she was not very good at, but she hoped Shep would forgive her for that.

Shep was not in the dining hall, as predicted, nor was he in Scout’s room or sleeping on the couch
in the break room. “Esau might have him,” Pyro mused aloud as they slipped past a trio of men in
jumpsuits carting yet another pallet of crates to God-only-knew.

Scout made a vague noise. “Thought Esau didn’t like dogs.”

Pyro shrugged. “Dell did. Shep doesn’t know the difference.”

“I guess not,” Scout said.

Pyro did not particularly like Esau’s room. Her room was better, and so was Scout’s, both located
around the middle of the building complex. They both looked out on something that could almost
be described as a courtyard. When they had first arrived the courtyard had been so stuffed with
construction equipment and unmarked crates you couldn’t see the ground, along with unsecured
weaponry lying about at random because in Pyro’s experience no one in the company had ever
heard of weapons safety. As the months passed, these had slowly begun to disappear. Now the
courtyard played host to nothing but half of a rusting tractor sitting on four large, badly-damaged
crates that Scout swore made noises and moved at night.

Despite the improbably threat of ghosts or captive cryptids, it was still better than Esau’s room.
Pyro’s room was, luxuriously, larger than a closet. Pyro had also never had guards posted outside
her door, either. At least those were gone these days. Esau, on the other hand, was squirreled away
in what had to have been a room once used as storage for something toxic, because she got a
headache from the latent chemical smell any time she went in there. (Esau claimed he had gotten
used to it.) At least it had a window, she supposed as she and Scout rounded the corner into the tiny
hall that lead to it, and saw that today his door was open. Scout got there first, peering inside and
rapping his knuckles on the metal frame. “Hey, Esau, you got a dog in there?” he said as Pyro
caught up with him. She looked in as well, and as always was met with mostly darkness.

Esau had the following: one bunk (rusted), one folding chair (rusted), and one cardboard dresser
(not rusted, but not for lack of trying). He had a very small, dusty window that had been painted
shut, and a single bare lightbulb that squatted like a terribly large spider on the ceiling, and gave up
about as much light as one. Right now he also had one very big German shepherd sitting at his feet
from where he was reclined and reading on the bunk, whose ears jumped forward as he caught
sight of Pyro.

“Hey, boy,” Pyro said to the dog as he materialized in front of her, stepping on her toes with his
massive paws and thumping his tail against Scout’s thigh. Scout leaned back for all of about two
seconds before he crouched and started ruffling Shep’s fur with both hands. This had the desired
effect of causing Shep to completely forget about his owner, and the less desired one of devoting
all his attention to saturating Scout’s nostrils with his tongue.

With Scout sputtering as he was assaulted, Pyro squeezed herself past both of them to meet Esau as
he got to his feet and limped over. “Good afternoon,” he said in the unaccented tone she was still
not entirely used to hearing out of Dell’s mouth. “He’s been hanging on me a good bit, today.”

“Looks like Scout will trade you,” Pyro said. “Did he behave?”

“Oh, mostly. You can certainly say he listens to me. I suppose he was very obedient for Dell, too.”

“Yeah,” said Pyro, and remembered the green smell of cotton plants in late spring.

“April, hey, get ’im off me!”

Shep’s attack had succeeded, and he had Scout almost flat on his back while the dog whuffed and
snuffled him. Pyro did not fully register that Scout was addressing her at first; she seldom did when
he used her name. He was, in fact, the only person who used her name at all. “April—!”

She whistled, one long low note. Shep stopped at once and turned to look at her, ears up like
satellites. A hand motion and a heel later, and he dropped his hindquarters onto the cement by her
boots. She ruffled the fur on his head, and said, “So I just got fired.”

Pyro thought this would be a rather dramatic announcement. She had come up with some pretty
good things to say to the questions she expected her ex-teammates would have. So when Scout
said, “Oh, you too?” it really did take the wind out of her sails.

“What?” she said, running through something like thirty reasons BLU would never fire Scout.
“You can’t be fired.”

“Free country.”

“Why would they fire you?”

Scout got to his feet and shrugged. “Whole lotta reasons, apparently, but mostly ’cuz they don’t
need a scout no more.” His nose wrinkled. “Guess they got RED Spy for recon, or something like
that, Miss P said.”

Pyro found she was having difficulty coming to terms with this. If she was fired, sure, she was
surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. But Scout? “I guess if we’re not fighting RED anymore,” she
said carefully, “then it makes sense they would get rid of people…”

“I believe the place is folding,” said Esau. There was a simultaneous twisting of necks for Pyro and
Scout to better stare at him. “Haven’t you noticed?” he said. “It’s half as busy as it was when we
arrived. I’ve heard talk about selling all sorts of the equipment, their company shares, that sort of
thing. There’s fewer and fewer people around. I expect that the money dried up.”

Pyro had not noticed. Pyro was also not very observant of these sorts of things. It still felt like a
surprise, even given Esau’s apparent confidence in the matter. “But it’s BLU,” Pyro said. Esau
shrugged. “No, it’s BLU! They paid all of us this insane money for years, why would it dry up?”

“Do you know how BLU makes its money?”

“Well—” Pyro hesitated. “No.”

Esau said nothing more, just lifted one eyebrow as he looked at her. This took Pyro’s mind off the
topic at hand entirely. It was a very Dell thing for him to do. Esau mostly seemed to do Dell things
just around the time she had started to forget he had ever been someone else.

Scout dragged her back into it with as much grace as he usually had. “I mean it don’t make much
of a difference either way, does it?” he said, drumming his fingers on his hip. “We’re both canned,
that’s that.”

“Yeah,” said Pyro, and scrubbed her fingers through her shaggy hair to get it out of her eyes. “Well.
Damn. Okay.”

This seemed to sum the conversation up.

 2: Adrift
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

The two of them—Pyro and Scout both—were to leave BLU’s premises in a week. Pyro was
packed and ready to go by the first evening, and had very little idea of what she was going to do for
the next seven days. Scout was all packed too, which left him dangerously bored. Mostly that
meant he did the thing where he would talk the ear off of anything that held still for longer than ten
seconds, and he mostly did it at Pyro because she had gotten used to the degree of half-listening
that was required to make him content. (His preferred victim was Pauling, but Pauling was
generally too busy.) This was what he was doing on the second evening, while Pyro was outside,
trying to teach the dog to open doors with the help of a rope on the handle. To make things slightly
more aggravating, he paced habitually when he talked, which was constantly taking him just in and
out of Pyro’s field of view. Much like the rest of Scout, this was both distracting and annoying—
but tolerable.

“Damn, but I can’t friggin’ wait to get home, right? S’just I am straight up dying out here, y’know,
April? Sheesh, I mean it’s okay I guess, it’s real pretty at night and all, don’t get any stars in
Boston really. But you don’t got any people neither! Been six months since I saw my folks, all the
bars around here suck, we got a curfew even when we do get to leave—”

Shep picked the door rope up in his mouth and then immediately dropped it. He looked at Pyro
expectantly, with a single wave of his tail.

“—and between you and me, right, I think all them pencil-pushers BLU’s got running around here
don’t like us or somethin’, you know? You seen the way they look at us? Jealous, I’m tellin’ you, I
mean I would be if I had to sit around in a lab coat and use a calculator all day while a real cool
hotshot guy who’s probably also a movie star was runnin’ around getting all the ladies. Haha, bet
they wouldn’t be so jealous if it was like Sniper or Soldier, yeah? Wonder what they’re up to.”

Shep did not get a treat for picking the rope up. This was, to his doggy brain, a violation of the
agreement he and his owner had come to a few days ago, when even sniffing the rope would net
him a reward. The tail wagging stopped. He nosed the rope again, keeping one eye on where Pyro
sat cross-legged on a stump, clicker in one hand and treats in the other.

“Man! Least those jokers coulda done was, I dunno, visit or something, right? They gotta know
we’re here, we ain’t been doin’ missions. Shit, you think they been doin’ missions without us? I
guess it wouldn’t be their fault, if they was—”

Shep appeared to decide this exercise was no longer worth it. When no treat manifested, nor did
Pyro get up a third time to try to coax him into doing what she wanted, he gave a snort that could
be described with accuracy as “derisive” and lay down on the half-frozen ground.

Pyro considered this, and interrupted Scout mid-ramble. “Do you think they’ll let Esau go, too?”

“Huh? I dunno. Maybe? What else would they do with him?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t been very good to him so far.”

“They said he isn’t a spy or anything.”

“That doesn’t mean they’ve been good to him,” Pyro said, getting up. “His room is still a hole.
Maybe I’ll ask Pauling.”

“Oh, hey, yeah, I can do it!” Scout said, brightening immediately. “She’ll tell me, bet you.”

The enthusiasm with which he said this was typical when it came to Pauling, but something about
the certainty of it made her cock one eyebrow. “Pauling doesn’t tell anyone anything.”

“She’d tell me. We’re a thing.”

“You’re not.”

“Are too!” he countered. “Asked her out this morning, now we ain’t coworkers. And she said yes.”

The weight of this did not fully hit Pyro at first. It had to pick up speed. When it finally connected
it may as well have been one of Scout’s baseballs. “She said yes?” she said, incredulous, not
registering Shep trotting over to investigate her fallen hand. “To you. Bullshit.”

“Ask her yourself,” Scout said breezily, though Pyro caught the way a scowl pulled at his face.
“Only reason she never did before is because of, Iddaknow, coworker something something. We’re
a capital-T Thing. I’ll go and ask her about Esau, she’ll be straight with me.”

Pyro snorted, and didn’t try to stop Shep as he nosed his way into her treat-filled hand.

The days ticked by. Pyro busied herself with making sure she hadn’t left anything anywhere, with
making sure her documents were all in order (to the best of her ability—difficult, when you
couldn’t read). She had to get a new state license with her actual name. She also had to deal with
the fact that she was spending a good deal more time mulling over her situation than she was
strictly accustomed to. She had to figure out transportation back to Arizona, and what, if anything,
she wanted to do about contacting her ex-teammates. It seemed a shame to disappear without
saying anything. It seemed like something the old Pyro would have done.

And she had to figure out what to do with her folder, the one she had seen by accident before the
Mannworks incident and the one that Scout had stolen from Dell’s hideout in the Chippewa forest.
It had been sitting under her mattress ever since he had given it to her, untouched. Thinking about
it felt dangerous, as if BLU might be able to read her mind and realize she had it. They had been
evaluating her for espionage; possession of stolen documents would not have cast her in a good
light.

Of course Scout would come back with news about Esau right before they were due to leave, on
the very evening before their 5AM expulsion time. Functioning as intended. “Talked to Florence,”
he said, hopping up to sit on the table where she was cleaning her flare gun for the hundredth time,
in the flickering light of the mostly-empty dining hall.

“Who?”

“Miss Pauling.”

Pyro gave the barrel of the flare gun a very hard look. “Her name is Florence?”

“Yeah, so?”
“Just … not what I expected.” Scout made an impatient gesture and she shook herself. “Never
mind. You asked about Esau?”

“Yeah, sure I did.” He paused, like he’d forgotten what he meant to say. He so rarely spoke with
intent that this happened frequently when he did, Pyro had found. “So, like, I did get some stuff
outta her, right. She said she still couldn’t tell me everything, something about, I dunno, NDAs and
uh… confidentiality breaches and stuff? But she said they’re gonna make sure he’s taken care of.”

Pyro sat up, putting the gun down. “Okay, great. What’s that mean?”

“Whaddya mean, what’s it mean?”

“What does ‘taken care of’ mean?” she said, drumming her fingers on the table. “Spy would say
things were ‘taken care of’ all the time and that usually meant they were dead. Didn’t she tell you
anything else?”

“They ain’t gonna kill him, she said they were gonna … how’d she say it. They’re gonna place him
somewhere they can keep an eye on him, ain’t gonna be that different from what happened with us
already. Just he kinda, Engie I mean, he did kinda go turncoat.”

The dining hall was a nice enough place, as BLU’s facilities went. It was fairly large, with high
ceilings and lots of round tables with tops in various degrees of distress. On the other side of it a
few engineers and scientists, distinguishable by their white-and-blue lab coats emblazoned with
BLU’s logo, loitered with a six-pack. On impulse, suddenly uncomfortable for a reason she could
not discern, Pyro stole a glance at them. They were not watching her, but she could not shake the
feeling that someone was. She wondered if this room had hidden cameras. She would not put it
past BLU. Ever since returning, speaking about what had happened with Engineer had put her on
edge. “So did RED spy,” she said eventually, as Scout followed her gaze toward the scientists.
“He’s the reason Dell left in the first place. They didn’t detain him for anything.”

“Hold up, no, he did that on account of Grey threatening to murder my ma if he didn’t,” Scout shot
back, and when she looked at him again he was bristling. “And once he made sure she was safe he
went straight to Florence, Pauling I mean, he went straight to her and told her everything that was
up. That ain’t what Engineer did.” He turned more fully to face her, face now set. “Engineer joined
Grey. Engineer killed Spy.”

Now it was Pyro’s turn to bristle, and she did, hunching over her gun and fixing Scout with a glare.
She thought about calling him a biased asshole, but in the past this had proven to not be a very
useful tactic. Instead: “I don’t want to have this argument again.”

“You kinda went and started it up, though, didn’t ya?” Scout said tersely. “I know you got all that
weird shit about Engie, I know Esau ain’t Engie either, but it don’t change what happened, it don’t
change what he did—”

“I’m not having this argument again.”

Scout let her cut him off, and did not start again. They matched glares a few seconds longer, and
then he closed his eyes and sat back to rub at one. “Fine. Okay. Yeah. Doesn’t matter with what
we’re talking about. That’s all I know, she just said BLU’s gonna put him somewhere and they’re
gonna watch him.”

Slowly, Pyro relaxed. She fidgeted with the disassembled flare gun, trying to stem the tide of her
temper. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks. For asking, I mean.”
“Yeah. Yeah, no problem.” He gave her something resembling a smile. “He’ll be fine, don’t worry
about it.”

Strictly speaking, Scout telling you “not to worry” about something could be translated to
“definitely worry.” This was why Pyro found herself creeping through the halls that night, well
after the rest of the activity in the base had gone dark and hyper-aware of the cameras. When she
had left her room she supposed she had been entertaining some idea about maybe trying to hunt
down Pauling herself and convincing her into providing a more satisfying explanation. She realized
this was not just a bad idea, but an incredibly stupid one, and decided to go and speak to Esau
instead.

Esau was a good man, she had decided about a month and a half into their detainment at BLU. He
was not Dell, but a good man all the same: courteous, polite, thoughtful. Odd in a way that made
sense to her, and she supposed it was due to the shared exposure to the dispenser. They were the
only two people in the world to know what it was like.

Well. That was not strictly true. Pyro herself was only half of that equation. The truer parallel was
between Esau and Alice, or so she thought. When Alice was present—when she was running the
show, piloting Pyro’s body around and talking in her voice—things were always a little fuzzy and
hard to remember afterward. But she did know Alice spent a lot of time with Esau these days. It
was something she was a little afraid to question. Likewise, she was a little afraid to question Alice
herself. Alice still seemed to show up whenever she liked, or whenever Pyro was too upset, which
was thankfully infrequent now. But Alice’s presence was still a mystery to her.

Pyro had been run through a whole gauntlet of doctors and psychiatrists in the last few months,
largely with no result. Esau had as well, to the same end. The tests showed very little. No fixes
were offered. And she had started to wonder what she would do if one was ever provided. And
what Esau would do. Curing herself at this point felt a little like it might be murder. For Esau, it
would be suicide.

So for now, as ever, Alice had free rein. And as she so frequently did, she managed to crop up at
extremely inopportune moments.

Knock knock knock.

Esau’s door was big and heavy and made of metal, and it hurt Alice’s knuckles to rap on it. She
was determined, though. Pyro had gone away, but Alice remembered what she had meant to do.
Alice didn’t have a job, so she tried to help Pyro do hers, because when Pyro was gone she couldn’t
do her job at all. Alice wasn’t usually good at it, but Esau told her that it was the thought that
counted.

Knock knock knock, a little quieter. Pyro had been trying to be quiet, because … Alice wasn’t sure.
Maybe she was in trouble. Or could get in trouble, like when Alice was trying to sneak sweets out
of the cupboard in the kitchens at night. You had to be sneaky.

Esau’s door was big and heavy and when it eased open it made an angry croaking noise like a
metal toad, and a short black shape stood in the gap. It was Esau-shaped, and all dark because the
only light in the room was from the tiny old window where the moon peeked in to say hello. “Is
that you, Pyro?” said Esau’s voice.
“No,” Alice said, because it wasn’t.

“Ah,” Esau said. “Hello, Alice. It’s pretty late, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. Can I come in? Pyro wanted to talk to you but she isn’t here, I think.”

“I suppose you had better.”

In she went. Esau shut the door behind her, quietly, and at first Alice just stood in the middle of the
room peering around at the shapes in the darkness. When Esau tugged on the pull-cord on the
ceiling light she flinched, rubbing at her eyes until they adjusted. There was the sound of
something heavy settling slowly down on a creaky and irritable mattress. “Well,” said Esau. “Do
you remember what Pyro wanted with me?”

“Yes. She wanted to ask if you knew what BLU is going to do with you after we’re gone.”

Alice opened her eyes again, blinking in the harsh light. She had never been in Esau’s room after
dark before, and the way the naked bulb cast everything in deep shadows and bleached colors made
her feel like she was perhaps having the problem where she saw things that weren’t there really.
But then, maybe it was just the light. “She’s worried,” Alice added, matter-of-factly.

“Pyro’s worried about me.” Esau repeated, with a shadow of a smile on his face. “Imagine that.
But I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea what their plans for me are.”

“Oh,” Alice said, and bit her lower lip. Pyro wouldn’t like that. “Well, she talked to Scout, and
Scout talked to Miss Pauling, and Miss Pauling said they were going to put you somewhere else so
that they could watch you, I think.”

This time Esau didn’t reply right away. Alice watched him, waiting, and wondering why it always
seemed to take people so long to say things sometimes. He had even done that as a robot. “I see,”
Esau said, and after a moment’s thought gestured for her to come and sit next to him on the bed.
The mattress squalled angrily as she did, her hands fidgeting in her lap. “Pyro didn’t know where
exactly, did she?”

“No. I don’t think so. I think she wanted to tell you that, mostly.”

Esau nodded. “I guess you two are headed back to Arizona, then.”

“Pyro is. Scout lives in Boston.”

“I meant you, Alice.”

“Oh,” Alice said, blinking at him. “I guess so.”

“Are you alright with that?”

Alice considered this. People did not usually ask for her opinion on things. “I want to go home,”
she said eventually. “So that’s okay. But I won’t get to see everyone anymore, I think. The team.”
A frown pulled at her face. “I don’t like that. I’ll miss them.”

Another nod. Alice felt a pat on her shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll be able to see them again, if you
like.”

“Will I be able to see you, Esau?”

Esau exhaled like a machine shutting down. “I don’t know.”

Chapter End Notes

It's been a bit of a long wait, but I'm trying to get my feet back under me here. :)
 3: Anchors Aweigh

March, in Arizona.

March in Arizona held to it a particular kind of beauty: a muted wash of brown and wintergreen,
patchy white snow melting over the red rocks. Spring had worked its way up from the ground, as if
creeping in from secret places in the warm earth, and the Costa’s hummingbirds flickered and
pulsed like shooting stars through the space between the leaves of the hidden citrus trees. The
citrus trees were beginning already to bloom, filling the air with the someday-promise of fruit. At
the house of one April Kingbird, surrounded by empty scrubland and desert for miles, the
wildflowers had already burst into full dress. They carpeted the earth with swathes of blue and
purple and gold, like the canvas of a drunken painter, soaking up the sun as it remembered how to
burn.

Already the flowers were half-trampled, some stamped down by temperamental rainstorms and still
more by scuffed combat boots. Even now stem after stem was crushed underfoot as a large dog
came trotting out of the copse of acacia trees that thought it owned the place. Their claim to the
territory now came in the form of bright, pale petals that clung to the dog’s black-and-tan fur,
nestled in jealously among the burrs and odd tick. Once the dog stopped and shook himself, and
the acacias’ stake on his hide flew away in a burst of orange and gold.

Soon gravel crunched under the dog’s paws, and Shep swerved in his beeline path to avoid the
rusty green truck sitting in the driveway. It lived there, mostly, even though there was a double-
wide garage in front of it. The garage housed things that Shep did not particularly care for. These
were things that made loud noises and lots of sparks, and big metal contraptions that drooled
smoke and oil. Today, it was even more of a minefield than usual. Screws and bolts littered the
floor and scrap metal rested in precarious, ponderous stacks in every corner, . A mountain of dusty,
broken bricks squatted in the center of it all like a stone god. There, the devout attending the deity,
Pyro knelt by the pile. She picked up brick after brick, examining each one. Those found worthy
were set aside, and the rest were tossed into a worn wooden crate.

Shep was not a stealthy animal. He stepped on plywood boards and kicked aside stray rocks as he
ambled into the garage, and Pyro turned just in time for him to bury his nose into her exposed
armpit. This was the usual greeting, and so he was unbothered by the way she squawked at the
cold and wet and toppled sideways. He snuffled her hand as she tried to push him off, licked it, and
paused as he got a mouthful of brick dust.

Still flat on the ground, Pyro ruffled Shep’s ears, the bricks forgotten. His tail thumped the floor,
which was also covered in brick dust. “What happened to you?” she asked him. “You used to be a
guard dog.”

Shep, of course, said nothing. Pyro shook her head, examining her hand where some of his burrs
had clung to it. “Come on,” she told him, getting to her feet. “I’m hungry. Let’s find dinner.”

Dinner at Pyro’s house generally consisted of things like something out of a tin, or sandwiches, or
anything she could heat up in that ridiculously expensive microwave that her poor impulse control
had procured for her. (The second ridicuously expensive microwave. The first had met a terrible
fate at her own hands when she tried to heat up a tin of soup before opening it.) There were
frequent stretches where she would eat nothing but cornflakes for three days straight, and this was
only a bad thing because it meant she ran out of both milk and cornflakes too fast. Pyro could not
cook. Sometimes she would try, though; ever the surprise homemaker, Demoman had taught her a
number of recipes. Or, had tried. A lot of them had been things that required mutton and had names
she couldn’t remember. Someone named Julia Child was involved. Mostly, though, Pyro thought
that Shep had the right idea: someone else feeding him kibble at regular intervals.

All this is to say she was having instant oatmeal yet again, correctly seasoned with brown sugar
and maple syrup and not much else. As was his wont, Shep sat and stared at her the whole time.
“You wouldn’t like it,” she told him yet again. “And it’s bad for you.”

Shep barked at her, tail wagging furiously. She met his stare a while longer, eating in silence, until
he gave the doggy equivalent of a defeated sigh and lay down. Victorious, she let her gaze creep
around her sparse kitchen, over her disarray of dishes and cluttered counters until they came to stop
on one thing: the unassuming, unused telephone. It had rung exactly twice in the last few months
since her return home, one call from Demoman to see how she was settling in, and another for
some kind of survey. She had hung up on that one.

But as she finished her meal she crossed over to it, and dug through the drawer beneath. There was
not much in it to dig through. Its contents consisted of a taped-together folder with the word
KINGBIRD in a heavy typeface printed on it, and half obscuring that was a note taped to the front.
The note contained a string of numbers, and as Pyro dialed them into the phone for the first time,
she felt a stab of anxiety. That was to be expected, she guessed as the line rang. It rang for a long
time, until it didn’t.

“Owens residence.”

“Uh, good,” Pyro said, fumbling over her words. She didn’t recognize the voice. “Can I talk to
Scout?”

“Mm, we don’t got any Scotts here, man, wrong number.”

“No, I meant—Jeremiah. Is Jeremiah there? Can I talk to him?”

“Oh, sure then, sure. Who’s calling?”

“Tell him it’s Pyro.”

The voice left her in silence as it went to find Scout. Pyro leaned against the counter and drummed
her fingers against her arm, wondering how stupid of an idea this was. Possibly she was not
supposed to be contacting her teammates, or ex-teammates. This seemed like something TFI would
have mandated. Someone would have told her that, though. Right?

The speaker rustled in her ear as if in answer. “Pyro!”

“Uh—yeah, yeah.” Pyro was quickly learning she did not really remember how you did phones.
“Hey, Scout.”

“Was thinking you’d forgotten about me, damn, what’s up? How ya been?”

“I mean, fine, thanks. Um, you?”

“Real good,” Scout said, and his cheerfulness seeped through the wires. “Real good over here, it’s
been great being back and all, I always miss Boston when I ain’t there. It’s in my blood and all that,
y’know, born and bred. Hey, I figured you wouldn’t ever actually call me.”

“I didn’t know if I would,” Pyro confessed. “I was kind of hoping you could do me a favor, though.
Are you still in touch with Pauling?”

“Well, hey, yeah, I mean I can try. We’re still together and all.” She distinctly detected a certain
preening in his voice as he said it. “Whatcha after?”

“Could you find out where Esau wound up? And if I could go see him?”

“Oh,” Scout said, and she could not read his tone. “Well … I can try, anyway. Dunno if she’ll tell
me. Yeah, though, sure. I’ll see what I can find out. What else you been up to?”

“Nothing much, I guess. Trying to find something else to do.”

Scout laughed. “Yeah, tell me about it, before it always seemed like I was scrambling to fit
everything in before BLU pulled me back. Now I dunno what it is I was in such a hurry about.”

“You’re always in a hurry.”

“Hey, you can still make jokes!” He laughed again, and perhaps it was infectious, because Pyro
found an awkward laugh edging its way out of her too. “What are you doing, though? Ain’t you
out in Arizona?”

They talked for a while, which surprised Pyro, if she was being truthful. It had seemed likely to her
that given time and distance Scout would have reverted to his old opinions of her, or at the very
least would started giving his forgiveness a second thought. Yet here they were, chatting like old
friends. Pyro had little to tell him, but Scout more than made up for it: he had as much to say as
ever about his home, his family, his brothers’ latest exploits. He had just finished telling her about
a fight involving a banjo and a rubber band ball he had gotten into the week before that had her
biting her cheek raw to keep from laughing when she heard muffled shouting from his end of the
line. “Ah, crap,” he said lightly, and it sounded like he turned away from the phone a moment. “I
gotta run, promised my sister I’d help her move. I’ll letcha know if I find anything out.”

“Thanks, Scout.”

“No sweat. Take it easy.”

Pyro supposed that, because it was Scout, she would get an answer within a day. At it happened,
the phone did not ring until almost a week later, when she was elbow-deep in trying to fix her
kitchen sink. She managed to not trip on a pipe and break her neck as she scrambled for the phone,
but it was a near thing.

“Took me longer than I figured,” Scout said after saying hello. “Florence was kinda cagey about
the whole thing. I got it though, he’s in Kansas. Told her I wanted to send him a letter, so I guess
maybe I better do that.”

“Kansas? What’s in Kansas?”

“Dunno, that’s just where BLU put him, I guess.”

Kansas didn’t make a lot of sense. Pyro studied the dismantled sink hardware on her floor as she
digested this, puzzling through it. “Okay,” she said at last. “Did you get an address?”

“354 Primrose Walk, in Belfast,” said Scout. “Hey, maybe keep it on the down-low you’re going
over there, yeah? Miss P, she didn’t seem too keen on telling me where he was. I dunno if I was
supposed to tell you.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, cool. Let me know how he’s doing, yeah?”

Pyro promised, and hung up.

It would not occur to her until several hours later that she should have asked for a phone number to
Esau’s new place, but when she tried calling Scout again he didn’t pick up. And she was already
packed, and Shep was already running around her legs excitedly, knowing when a trip was on the
horizon. So much for that. But it was Esau, and Esau had never turned down a visit.

Pyro had a truck, now, which she was still mostly nervous about driving, but as long as she was
careful it wasn’t too dangerous. Alice knew how to pull over if she found herself at the wheel. And
Kansas was a long drive, but she found it preferable to flying. The real difficulty, though, was
navigating. A long stretch of relative peace at BLU and a lot of practice had given her more
headway in reliably parsing the hieroglyphics she was now faced with daily, but it was still a tricky
thing. She had bought a road atlas before leaving, one of those huge ones that came as a book and
had all of America in its pages, and just looking at the thing gave her a headache with all its tiny
lines and text. But she had found Arizona, and she had found Kansas, and all things told it didn’t
really seem that far. All she had to do was follow the road.

Between her own unease driving and the siren call of a number of roadside attractions, each one
more of a bust than the last, it was a full three days before she rolled into Belfast (and this time was
confident that it was, indeed, Belfast). Roll in she did, though, at the end of a highway whose exit
was shaded by tall hickory trees just starting to come into bloom. She rolled down the window and
Shep instantly stuck his head out of it, tongue waving to the wind. The whole place had a pleasant
air to it. It reminded her of Bee Cave, Texas, and that was something of a comfort. Of course Esau
would settle here.

A convenience store was her first stop, to use the bathroom and ask for directions. And to buy a lot
of candy. She was already tearing a bag of licorice open as the clerk squinted down at the address,
pushing his graying hair out of his eyes. “354 Primrose?” he said in a careful voice. “Yeah, take
the main road out there, Lincoln, and head down it until you see the big brick building. Can’t miss
it. You, ah, got family there?”

“A friend.”

The old man nodded slowly. “Best of luck.”

Down Lincoln seemed easy enough, and a big brick building couldn’t be too hard to find. Pyro
drummed her fingers against the steering wheel as she tried to pick it out in the distance, but the
flowering trees were too thick.

She wasn’t trying that hard, anyway. Something about the way the clerk had talked after he’d
given the address back to her was gnawing at her. He’d been a delicate-looking man, but he’d
seemed even more careful and delicate as he rang her up for her licorice and the gas in her truck.
Maybe she’d just gotten oversensitive about people changing their attitudes suddenly. That was
one of those things she thought she maybe should work on.

The trees began to part. Traffic was slim, and she pulled forward with a now-clear view to the
massive shape that rose up to blot out the skyline. The building was a titan, easily on par with some
of the factories she had fought in with BLU, and the sleek lines and stark architecture reminded her
of machinery. It stood on its hill like a warden.

Slowly—as if unsure if the structure itself might not attack—Pyro eased the truck up the long,
winding driveway. It opened into a tiny parking lot almost empty of cars, with scraggly bushes
lining the pavement. Was it an apartment building? It didn’t really look like one, and she hadn’t
seen any others like it. Why was Esau here?

She pulled the truck into a parking spot. Shep looked at her expectantly, and she met his gaze,
finding some solace in it. Something kept her from turning it off right away, but a moment’s
irritation with her discomfort took care of that. The engine died, and she got out of the car, and
nearly shut the door on Shep’s tail as he bounded out after her. “Hey!”

Shep paid her no mind. He went straight for the grass, nose to the ground and tail wagging before
he oriented himself by a bush and lifted a leg. Rolling her eyes, Pyro followed.

His business done, Shep occupied himself again with the important task of sniffing. Pyro did not
intervene. They’d both been stuck in the car for hours, after all. The dog gamboled along and she
ambled after slowly, and it was in this way that she noticed the sign. It was a stout wooden thing
stuck about halfway up the yard and surrounded by a collection of stunted and leafless bushes.
Shep stuck his face in among these as she rounded the side of it to examine the front, where a
single word in faded black paint greeted her. A few seconds of study revealed it to her:
LACEWOOD.

The name of the building, she supposed. She wet her lips and glanced back out over the town.
There was a kind of divide between it and this place, she thought, but she could not place what it
was.

Presently, though, she called Shep back and got him into the car again. Experience had taught her
that bringing dogs into strange buildings did not always end well. He slung himself in the back of
the cab and lay down, and with that, she made for the door that faced the lot.

It was heavy, and it squealed as it opened. Before her was what looked like a long and windowless
hallway, with sickly lights and cracked linoleum tile. A series of lockers lined the walls, uniformly
pale green and worn down. There was a smell here, noxious and chemical, that she could not
place. It reminded her of Medic’s infirmaries. She chewed her lip a moment, and let the door fall
closed behind her. It banged shut.

There was nowhere else to go but forward. Forward she went.

The long hallway felt even longer than it looked, but at the end of it she found another, shorter
hallway. This one at least had windows, looking out into a small and badly-kept garden. Even now,
in spring, only one small sapling was blooming. There was a bird on it, too, and she slowed to get a
better look at it as it bobbed through the branches. It was brown and yellow, with a V-shaped patch
of black on its throat, and a narrow, pointed beak it was busy preening itself with. A meadowlark.

“Hello?”

Pyro flinched. Looking down the hall again she discovered she was no longer alone: a young
woman with blonde hair and white skin was hovering in the doorway and giving her an uncertain
look. She was clad in a knee-length blue dress with a white collar and a squarish white cap. This
Pyro recognized immediately—but could not place from where. “Hi,” Pyro said. “Do you, uh. Live
here?”

“Oh, no,” the woman said, putting her hands up. “No, I’m just an employee. Are you here
visiting?”

“I guess so. I’m looking for Esau Conagher?”

To Pyro’s surprise, the woman’s expression became one of relief. “Oh! That’s good to hear, he’s
never gotten a visitor. Are you his wife?”

Pyro’s own bark of laughter caught her by surprise. By the looks of it, it caught the woman off
guard too. “No. No, I’m a friend.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the woman. “I just assumed—well, that’s neither here nor there. I guess
you came in the back door. If you’ll just come around front with me, I can check you in and show
you his room.”

“Sure,” Pyro said. As the woman turned to head in the other direction, Pyro glanced out the
window again. The meadowlark was gone.

The woman, who said her name was Lisa, led Pyro through another network of tunnels, and the
further they got the more unsettled Pyro became. The antiseptic smell got worse until it became
something foul, something stale. That passed quick enough, only to be masked by a cloud of
cigarette smoke from two other women they passed. They were dressed like Lisa, leaning in a
doorway, and one was examining a clipboard. The sight stirred Pyro’s memory again, though to
what end she did not know, and the bad feeling only got worse.

By the time they reached what must have been the correct entrance, Pyro wanted to just walk right
out of it. The back of her neck prickled at her and seemed to pull toward the thick double doors at
the end of the wide stone foyer. But instead she signed the paper in the ragged binder on the front
desk, as Lisa directed her, and then she was led up two flights of stairs.

The first thing Pyro heard, as they ascended, was what sounded like muffled shouting. It got louder
as they scaled the stairs, soon to be joined by the rhythmic banging of something being pounded
against metal. When Lisa opened the door at the top of the second flight, it revealed a long, stout
hall riddled with more doors on either side, and each door had a small square window set in it. Pyro
thought she could hear someone weeping, faintly.

She cleared her throat, finally asking the question she had found on the way up the stairs. “You’re
a nurse, right? And this is a hospital.”

Ahead of her, Lisa had stopped in front of a door, and was unlocking it. She paused to give Pyro a
puzzled look, and Pyro tried again. “I guess I’m confused,” she said. “Somebody told me Esau was
living here. Did he get hurt?”

“Oh,” Lisa said, her eyes widening. “I’m so sorry, I … assumed you knew he wasn’t well. He does
live here. This is the Lacewood Lunatic Asylum.”
 4: Man Overboard

In the long silence that followed, Lisa finished unlocking the door. The banging sound and the
shouting and the crying all seemed to grow louder in Pyro’s ears in the small space of time Lisa’s
pale fingers took with the keys, fussing and fighting for her attention like children. “He's awake,”
Lisa said quietly, and slipped inside. “Mr. Conagher? You have a visitor.”

Why is the door locked, Pyro wanted to ask. She did not ask it. She did not hear anybody answer
Lisa. The floorboards sighed as she stepped into the room.

The first thing that struck her was how white it was. The walls were white, the bedding was white,
the cheap curtains framing the window were white. Even the rickety desk in the corner had a
patchy white paint job. It made the tiny room feel twice as large as it was, and made the figure
sitting in the lone chair by the window look twice as small. The only thing in the room that was not
white were the thin bars that framed the window.

Lisa stood to one side, as if waiting. In his chair, Esau had not moved. “Mr. Conagher?” Lisa said
again as Pyro gingerly approached.

She got an acknowledgement, but it was a long time in coming. “Esau,” he said. From what Pyro
could tell he was staring fixedly out the window, out over the road she had driven down. “Just
Esau.”

“You have a visitor, Esau,” Lisa said patiently.

“Conagher’s quite dead.”

Lisa went on, “April Kingbird. Do you remember her?”

Esau at last lifted his head, first to look at Lisa, and then at Pyro. She had to suppress a grimace.
His face was drawn and pale, his jaw bristling with unchecked hair. His right hand, the one she
knew was missing, seemed to be flesh again, and it was uncanny after having gotten used to the
metal one. Something about his eyes was wrong. Pyro had to try not to stare as he looked long at
her. “Yes,” he said at last, and ponderously. “I believe I do. But you’ll have to remind me why.”

“Work,” Pyro said, and felt her nails digging into her palms. With staggering effort, she loosened
her fists. “We used to work together.”

Esau blinked and shook his head. “Work,” he repeated, looking out the window again.

Once, Pyro’s instinct to cut and run had been impeccable. It always came at the right moment, and
it had saved her life time and again, on the field and in the streets. Now it was screaming at her,
telling her to drive off, to not look back. This was a dead person, it told her, this is dangerous, this
is wrong, this is not how things should be. “What happened to him?” she said to Lisa, in a voice
low enough that she hoped Esau would not hear. “He wasn't like this a few months ago.”

When Lisa hesitated, she cut a look her way. Her guide had a sorrowful, pitying sort of expression,
shaking it only when she became aware of Pyro’s eyes. “We weren’t really told,” she said.
“Something about trauma, I think. He’s much clearer to speak to without his medication, but the
doctor worries his condition will worsen without it. I’m so sorry, I had thought you would know.”
She dropped her voice. “Do you know about his ... machine thing? He had this whole unbelievable
story he told us on intake.”
Pyro could hazard a guess. She did not; she had no reason to make Lisa think she was any crazier
than she came off as. When Pyro failed to answer Lisa turned and busied herself with tidying up
the room. It was a fruitless exercise, given that it was all but spotless. Even the bed was made. It
gave Pyro time, though, time to feel the stale conditioned air around her and the way the walls
seemed to lean inward to keep her low to the ground. Dell was a man of endless prairie sky and oil
fields. Esau was a thing of the unchecked forest, metal animated to life. Neither could survive here.

“Could we have a couple of minutes?” she asked, finally, unable to stand Lisa’s puttering. “I want
to talk to him.”

“Of course. I'll be just outside.”

Lisa left, and the door creaked shut after her. Pyro watched it for a second, just to be sure, before
she scrambled to Esau’s side. The urgency came upon her like a crashing wave; she practically
dropped to her knees in her haste. “Esau,” she said. “Esau, it's me. It's Pyro. Do you remember me?
—Do you remember?”

Esau grimaced, his gaze still set out the window. He pulled away, slowly, raising a hand between
them. “Not so close. Not so close, you'll fog my video.”

“Jesus, Esau, what happened? What—”

“Did you say Pyro?” he answered, blinking as he lowered his hand. “I know her. I know Pyro.
She’s here?”

Pyro said nothing. Her stomach churned, turning over on itself more and more the longer she
looked at him. He looked so much older. Empty, the way the mechanical hound had been, there at
the end. “I’m Pyro,” she said. “Esau. Look at me.”

Esau looked at her. His eyes lingered on her face, on her scars. She had a face no one could forget.
Esau would have to remember. He looked at her for years now, millenia, eons maybe, as though
his eyes were the wrong end of a telescope.

And he smiled, finally, as recognition lit up his blue eyes. “No one tol’ me you were coming,” he
said. Pyro noticed for the first time his words were slurring together. “It’s so good to see you,
Alice.”

All the breath went out of Pyro in one long, shaky sigh. It vanished into the dusty vents to be
sterilized, recirculated. She stared down at him, at his tired smile. “Yeah,” she said.

“How are you?”

“I’m … I’m fine. I got your address from Scout. Do you remember Scout?”

“Of course. Is he here?”

“No, just me. He said he'll send you a letter, though,” said Pyro. Esau nodded, and Pyro looked out
the window just so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “So,” she soon said, “this is what BLU meant
by ‘taking care of you.’”

The fact he answered this was a shock. “Not what I, ah. Not what I had thought, either. But I don't
know. Perhaps they're right.”

“Right? Right about what?”

“Was … pointed out to me a few months ago that it’s odd to be telling others your first proper
memory is of directing a horde of robots with your mind,” Esau said. “Hardta argue with that. So
much of what I remember is impossible.”

“Yeah, well, that’s life with BLU for you,” she said dryly. “I killed Soldier my first day on the job
and Dell just showed me the respawn room.”

“There’s more, I think,” Esau said faintly. “I think there’s more. ‘Nother reason, reasons. Pauling
said …”

Pauling. Pyro felt her face crunch into a snarl at the name. “Can you just—can you tell me how
you got here? Do you remember that?”

The door to Lacewood Lunatic Asylum banged shut behind her and for a fraction of a second Pyro
had the presence of mind to feel a little bad about her behavior. It was one thing to get upset. It was
another to walk out on Esau in the middle of his eighth tangent and all but corner the nurse outside
of the door, promising hellfire if she didn’t get a straight answer from someone.

Pyro had been asked to leave. This was almost certainly the wisest course of action for everyone
involved. Especially for Pyro.

Traffic rolled down the sleepy street across from her and down the hill as she stalked in circles on
the front walk, feeling her outrage boil and churn. She didn’t know what she had expected. She had
wanted to see Esau, to see Dell even if Dell wasn’t there anymore. She had wanted to see him in a
house of his own and maybe with a terrifying project tucked away in the attic that she would
discover by accident. She would have even been happy to see him with a boring picket fence and a
boring job and nice, boring woman on his arm, as unbelievable as that would have been to her.

And then this.

She could feel the headache starting to throb in her temples and pressed her fingers against them
with a long, low sigh. Losing it on the asylum’s front lawn would do no one any favors.

Back at the truck, Shep was barking at a squirrel that had meandered out through the untamed
brush of the back lot. He startled when she threw open the door and slammed it shut again, and in
true canine fashion did not take a hint. “Get off me,” she snapped at him when he tried to climb
into her lap, and with a shove that was harder than she meant it to be he all but fell into the
passenger side again. She made a point of not looking at him as she twisted over her shoulder to
back up the truck.

Frankly someone should have given her an award for managing to find her way to a motel and
getting the dog and all her shit into the room, between the way her head was throbbing and the way
all her blood had turned to gasoline, an imminent fire roaring in her veins. How was this the best
thing to be done with the Engineer, to stick him somewhere dark and hopeless and keep him full of
pills? It wasn’t, Pyro concluded, again, as she kicked Shep out of the bathroom and stripped down
to shower. It wasn’t the best thing for Esau, but apparently it was the best TF Industries could
come up with. Apparently it was the best thing for TFI.

The thought rode her, immune to the weak spray of the water, set to the hottest setting she could
stand. She washed off the grime that came with sitting and driving, the sense of debasement that
had lived in the asylum with its cramped walls and aluminum smell and its humans left in barred
rooms. She had hoped she could wash off the anger, that she might step back and see all this again
in clarity.

Instead the cramped silver tiles simply took the heat of the water and magnified it and used it to set
her gasoline blood aflame.

Pyro all but tore the curtain down when she climbed out, and the steam in the room might as well
have come from her. She ripped a towel down from the racks and scrubbed at her hair hard enough
to hurt, and when she hurled it down on the counter, her reflection was watching her. “Fuck off,”
she told it.

“You’re supposed to be nice to me,” the reflection said back, petulant.

It was enough to catch her off guard, for a moment. It was a voice she knew, a cadence: her own,
of course, and not. Whether or not it really was Alice in the looking-glass, it only made her angrier.
“Fucking parasite,” she told maybe-Alice, and turned away from the mirror.

Shep was on the bed when she emerged, dressed and hair pulled back into its now-customary
ponytail. He watched her like he was not sure she would not try to eat him, and it was possible she
would have. She was starving, she realized, and none of the many take-out places whose numbers
she had written down back in Arizona could help her now.

By the time she had called down to the front desk to ask for somewhere to get pizza, and called the
pizza place, and actually had the pizza in front of her on the wobbly table, it was nearly dark. Her
head still ached, and the fury still burned in her, though she had managed to build a firebreak
around it. Better to keep it alive, keep it hungry, a source of power, not a force of mindless
destruction.

Pyro ate. She put out Shep’s food and threw him the crusts, too, as an apology. The pizza was too
salty and had too much sauce and not enough cheese, but she ate it: it was fuel for the fire, and she
needed everything she could get.

The instant she wiped the last of the grease off her hands and onto her jeans she was up again,
rifling through her suitcase. In it she found the sketchbook that she and Alice shared, and the
crayons that Alice did not share, but she was going to need the different colors. Scout may have
shown her the basics of mapping, but all the legends and symbols he used worked much better for
her if they were in different colors.

She would have to get back into the asylum again, she thought grimly as she outlined the
approximate dimensions of the brick building on the hill. She had only seen a few halls and the
second floor, and she would need more information if she was going to break Esau out.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Alice, and Pyro stopped in her work only long enough to
look up at where her other half was sitting on the opposite side of the table. No one was really
there, of course, but by now Pyro was getting used to it, to sometimes seeing Alice in her BLU
flameproof suit, in corners, in crowds. Speaking to her, sometimes. Pyro never responded.

“I really don’t,” Alice said.

Pyro looked back down, and felt the anger burn.

Pyro was angry. Not her, the other Pyro. April. April was the Alice that wasn’t Alice, the Pyro that
wasn’t Pyro. Or was Pyro. The first one. Once Alice had heard April tell Esau that she, April, was
the real Pyro, and he had gotten real mad at her for that, and after that April had switched to saying
she, April, was the first Pyro. That was a thing Alice liked about Esau. He always made sure April
was nice to her.

April did not always remember to do that, like right now. Actually, April mostly ignored her when
she had something to say, but especially when she was upset about something. And right now she
was upset, really upset, but to be honest Alice thought she was right to be upset. Alice was upset
too.

“Burning it down won’t help, though,” Alice said after a while, after watching April work on the
map she was drawing. Alice liked burning things, it was one of her favorite things to do, but even
she knew burning down things with people still inside them wasn’t a good thing. It had taken both
of them a long time to learn that, even though April liked to pretend she had always known. “April?
Burning it down won’t help.”

The crayon snapped in their hand. April swore under their breath and dropped it and got a different
color from the box. Alice wanted to frown and she did and that was easy because April was already
scowling. It wasn’t fair that April got to break her crayons. It wasn’t fair that Esau was stuck
somewhere in some room not being himself. Alice knew about not being yourself. Esau already
wasn’t himself, because he was supposed to be in the metal dog, and Dell was supposed to be
where Esau was. It was all not fair.

“You drew too many rooms,” Alice said eventually, as April scanned the second floor. “There’s
six on the left but seven on the right.”

“Shut up!” April yelled.

In the surprised silence that followed, the radiator kicked on.

April did not speak to Alice. Alice was pretty sure that April still didn’t really like her, that she just
accepted the fact they were bound together. She made allowances for Alice, she bought her
crayons and had a special room in their house just for her with all of the things she liked. But she
never spoke to her. “You drew too many rooms, though,” Alice said, after the radiator had been
droning along for a few seconds.

April put down the crayon. She sat back in the chair and rubbed at their eyes, pushing against them
until Alice saw the fireworks against the black. Alice could feel how mad she still was, a storm on
the ocean, all wind and thunder and waves pounding against the cliffs. “You can’t burn it down,”
Alice said.

April said, “I’m not going to burn it down.”

“You put on the map where all the best places to start the fires would be.”

“I’m not going to burn it down.”

Alice did not think she believed her. Alice thought maybe April was so upset that she was going to
burn it down even knowing that the Fire would eat up everything inside, Lisa and the people in the
rooms who screamed and cried and banged on the walls, and the little garden in the center of the
building. Alice did not say this. Esau had told her sometimes it was a good idea to not say
everything you were thinking. Instead she said, “What are we going to do?”

A big long sigh dragged out of their chest. April did not answer; she got up, fishing through their
pocket for her cigarettes and lighter. Alice did not smoke, but it was okay that April did. It felt
okay when April did it. Alice still remembered Dell trying to make her smoke back in the cold
place, and that was a memory she did not like. April lit up and went to the window over the
radiator and looked out between the curtains.

Outside there was a parking lot and the truck and a street with no cars on it. The sun was almost all
the way gone and its last few fingers lay outstretched over the winter-empty tree that sat alone in
its dirt square in the middle of the lot. April liked to look for birds in the trees. Alice liked to count
things on them. There were no birds tonight, but there were tiny green buds all along the tree’s
branches, more than she count, and Alice thought that was good.

“I’m getting him out,” April said around the cigarette, and pushed some damp hair that had fallen
out of the ponytail up around their ear. “I’ll figure something out.”

“You forgot to draw the bars on his windows. What are we going to do?”

“I’ll make a distraction.”

“A fire.”

“Fire is a distraction,” April said, and this time she was the one who sounded petulant. “Set a fire
outside, get Esau out while everyone’s busy.”

Alice thought about this. She thought about it while April smoked, trying to see it. She was not
very good at things like this, and that made her not sure about talking about them, but Esau had
told her once she shouldn’t be afraid to speak her mind. “You’re as much a person as the rest of
us,” he had told her, there in the back of BLU’s big, big building, where they had been watching
the ranging ring-billed gulls squabble with the gadwall ducks that lived in the artificial pond BLU
had. “It takes you a little more time to figure things out, but that doesn’t mean your opinions are
worth less.”

“Pyro wishes I wasn’t here.”

Esau sighed. “I think Pyro is scared of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Well. I think Pyro is scared of the idea of you.” He leaned forward against the guard rail that
separated the concrete dock from the water. “She likes to be in control. She went for a long time not
having any. You know that.”

Alice had thought about this. She had tried to feel April underneath the part of her that was herself,
because she was pretty sure that April sometimes knew what was happening even when it was
Alice that was doing things. “Pyro thinks I don’t make good decisions.” She wet her lips. “I don’t
think I know enough about stuff to make good ones all the time.”

“None of us do, Alice.” One of the ducks had begun flapping vigorously on the pond, its breast
puffed up, as a gull shrieked at it. “Pyro knows all about bad decisions.”

April, Alice decided there in the hotel, as the last of the cigarette burned down to nothing in their
mouth, was about to make a bad decision. “I can steal the key to his room off the nurse,” April was
saying, either to Alice or to Shep or just to herself, “and take him out the back way—maybe the
front. If the fire department gets there before I can get him out, they’ll pull into that back lot. If
we’re fast and we do it at night we can use the, um. The. The darkness …”

Their voice trailed off. They pushed off from the window and the radiator and turned, and found
the ashtray on the table, where they pushed the butt of the cigarette into the salt-and-pepper grime.
Shep, on the bed, beat his tail against the mattress as they made their way toward the bedside table
and its tiny orange lamp and its chunky brown phone.

Alice picked up the phone. She did not need to look up the number, because she was good at
remembering things like numbers. Underneath, somewhere in the space behind her eyes, she could
feel April’s anger and fear, like little moths batting around inside her. Alice dropped down onto the
bed, where the dog crawled up to lick her hand, and listened to the phone ring.

It picked up on the fifth buzz. “Owens residence,” said a sleepy voice. “Roger speakin’.”

“Hi. Is Jeremiah there?”

“Sure, who’s callin’?”

“Tell him it’s Alice.”

 5: All Hands on Deck

“I don’t guess,” Pyro said to Shep the next day, slowly and groggily from where she was tangled in
the thin sheets, “that you can tell me what she said.”

Shep cocked his head to the side.

Morning leaned into the room like a fussing mother. It poked at Pyro’s sensitive eyes and worried
at her tired body, as if to say get up, get up. It cast the early light over the shabby carpet and the
pale walls, glimmering through the curtains to make them look like a sundress made from flour
sacks. Pyro stared up at the ceiling and tried to dredge up what had happened while she had been
shoved into the proverbial closet.

Alice had decided she did not like what Pyro was planning. That much was easy to divine, because
she could remember the old rush of panic as her body did things she had not told it to do. The New
England drawl of an Owens boy rattling through the phone was a definite piece of the puzzle, and
from there it was no great guess that Alice had called Scout for some kind of help.

What form that help might take was Pyro’s newest problem.

The fury of the evening before had faded. She made a vague pass at rekindling it, and though she
felt the same surge of indignity as before, it was reined and blinkered now. The worst part of this
was knowing Alice had probably done her a favor. Pyro had been considering enacting her plan
that very night. Even then she had known it was a bad idea.

Mostly, though, she was hungry.

She let Shep outside and watched him investigate the splitting concrete as she picked at a sad and
bruised banana. She combed her hair out and put it up again, and changed into clothes she hadn’t
slept in. Shep came galloping back at her whistle, and then she picked up the phone. As nice as it
had been to find out that talking to Scout again was Okay, she was already getting sick of the
frequency.

He did not, of course, pick up. No one picked up. Pyro allowed herself a groan and dropped the
phone back onto its cradle.

She felt groggy; hungover, even, just a bit, which wasn’t altogether uncommon after Alice decided
she needed to have a say. It was one of those things the doctors at BLU had lots of questions about.
She had seen one weekly for a time when she and Scout were under lockdown, and she had to
answer a lot of questions like “how many times did the secondary personality successfully assert
control” and “rate your consciousness during secondary assertion on a scale of one to ten.” It was
one of the only times Pyro had found herself feeling protective of her other half. Calling her
a secondary personality felt wrong.

Annoyed, Pyro stared at the phone as if to intimidate it. When this did not work, she decided to go
for a run.

Shep knew when it was time to run. He darted about her legs as she pulled her boots on and
pocketed her keys, and would scarcely stay put for the leash. But once she hit the pavement he was
a good companion, happy to keep the pace. He kept her level, in check, and she kept him from
bolting into traffic.

Running was one of those things she had rolled her eyes at, back before everything, and after all of
the everything had happened she did not know what she thought of it. In the months before the
Chippewa National Forest, the only routine runner she had known was Scout; and beyond that, too,
was the knowledge that she was already an expert at running in the metaphorical sense. Making it
literal was a thought that sent warning shivers down her spine. What if she just kept running and
never stopped?

And yet there she was, again, keeping a steady rhythm as one foot went down in front of the other.
She ran. She was one of those people who did running, now, apparently, and she was surprised to
find that it was easy. It was another thing she could probably chalk up to BLU, where she had run
daily, in a chemsuit, no less. That was to say nothing of the flamethrower, and her oxygen tank, and
her axe, and her shotgun. She had run around with all of those things and always felt strangely
light, now, when she ran without them.

It was a curious feeling, running without anything burdening her.

She ran all the way to Lincoln and Primrose, and when she got there she supposed she had done it
intentionally. At her side Shep loped to a stop, tongue lolling. Pyro let her eyes slide from the
bristling brick to the panting German shepherd, and back again.

At least she had thought to make herself look presentable, she thought as she shook out the leash
and climbed the hill to the front door.

It took some fast talking to keep the male nurse behind the desk from outright ejecting her on sight.
Pyro was not a fast talker, and had to do her best impression of the good parts of Scout, which was
a terrible idea and in the end worked about as well as one might expect. “I’m really sorry,” she said
one more time, hoping her annoyance that she was being kept from Esau would somehow read as
sincerity. “It blindsided me and I lost my temper. This used to be his dog and I thought it might
help him to see him.”

It was a lucky thing that the nurse turned out to be a dog lover, and that Shep was a well-behaved
dog.

In no uncertain terms, Pyro was informed that at the first sign of trouble she would be removed
from the premises. She had to sign the guest registry again, and at the very least was glad she
could recognize her own signature above the line she signed on. Shep was not allowed further into
the building, but he could be in the garden, and it was there that they brought Esau out to see them.

In truth Pyro had half-expected him to be wearing shackles. That seemed like the only thing he was
allowed to have these past few months, first at TFI and now at Lacewood, things that fettered him
and hobbled him. Guards at the door, pills for the brain. He was not shackled, it turned out, though
he was accompanied by another nurse who Pyro was told would be present throughout the
meeting, at least within earshot. So much for talking about an escape plan.

But today he seemed to move a little easier. It was still early, about nine in the morning, for Pyro
had become an early riser at some point, and to her eye she thought he was more animated, more
alive. The slow, discomfiting thing from yesterday had vanished. “Pyro,” he said warmly as he
came up to her. She was seated at the circular bench that surrounded the young cottonwood that
grew up in the middle of the garden, and she got to her feet to meet him. She held out her hand; he
took it, and then he pulled her into a hug. “God,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

Shocked, a little, Pyro slowly returned the hug as Shep traipsed around their legs, sniffing Esau
eagerly. And then, gladly: “You, too.”

They sat down at the bench, under the cottonwood, and spoke. Pyro asked all the same questions
she had asked yesterday, best she could ask them with the nurse able to hear her, and this time Esau
answered. Yes, TFI had institutionalized him; no, he hadn’t been consulted; they had wormed his
consent out of him with careful words and lies of omission, and probably more than one forged
document. “Really kind of thought I could trust Miss Pauling a bit more than that, to be honest with
you,” he sighed at last. “But I guess her loyalties are elsewhere.”

“Screw her,” Pyro said, sneering. “I think she would kill all of us if she was told to. Did I tell you
—” and here she had to drop her voice, casting a glance toward the nurse, who was watching but
trying to look like she wasn’t, “—that before everything started with the machines, I found her
digging up Dell’s grave?”

“You did not,” Esau said. He paused and looked down at himself, as if checking to see that he was
not suddenly covered in grave soil. “What did she find?”

“I don’t know. Not you, I’m pretty sure. I got the impression that if I pressed it she would shoot
me.”

“That’s Pauling,” Esau said with a nod.

“Scout’s dating her now. Did you know that?”

“Oh, of course. I don’t think there was a soul in that building who didn’t hear about it.”

Pyro could not argue with that. “That’s how I found out where you were—they’re still together, I
guess, and he got her to tell him the address.”

Esau leaned on his knees and studied the worn paving-stones under his feet. It was such a relief to
see him himself again; even his clothing seemed much unchanged from the loose plaid button-
down and faded denim she was used to. “You seem better today,” she said.

“Hm?”

“More … aware.”

“Ah,” Esau said, and looked out at where Shep had jogged over to the nurse and was doing a
wonderful job of distracting her. He dropped his voice. “Do you know, skipping the pills will do
that.”

Pyro’s eyes cut back to him, sharp and interested. “Not for long, mind you,” he continued.
“Skipping them longer than a day isn’t much fun, worse than taking them.” He grimaced. “The
withdrawals are terrible. But I wanted to be sure I could talk to you.”

“That makes sense. What happened to your hand?” She gestured to it, to his right hand that looked
whole and flesh. “Did TFI … I don’t know, fix it?”

“This?” Esau said, following her gaze. “You could say that.”

He did not say more on the matter, and for a minute or so they sat in the cool spring air with their
own thoughts. Pyro’s tumbled through her like an avalanche, one after the other, all racing to hit
the bottom first. Finally, one did.

“I want to get you out of here.”

There. She’d said it. Just saying it was fine; just saying it wasn’t going to ruin anything. Words did
not start fires, not real ones.
But Esau did not answer, and she worried she’d said the wrong thing. “You don’t need to be here,”
she went on, talking fast and low and stealing glances at the nurse. “You’re not crazy, Esau. TFI
stuck you here so they wouldn’t have to deal with you, so they wouldn’t have to dump more
resources into trying to fix you or whatever, I’m sure of it.”

This, for some reason, made him laugh. But he did not tell her she was wrong. Instead he just asked
her where she was staying, and if it was nice.

He asked her about a lot of things, and despite the roiling undercurrent of emotions that washed
over her, it was nice to be asked. Even if Esau was not Dell, seeing his face was a comfort. Talking
to him soothed the anger and worry, and she told him about her custom-built home in Arizona with
its nine fireplaces and four chimneys and state-of-the-art fireproofing. She told him about how
she’d been flirting with the idea of getting into metalwork sculpture, not because she thought she
was any kind of artist but because she had a lot of scrap and a lot of welding tools and a lot of free
time. He asked after Alice, and with only a moment of hesitation she told him about her, too: how
she seemed to be just a little more put together every time she presented herself, how she seemed to
understand just a little more. “The same otherwise?” he asked, just after the nurse told them Pyro
would have to go soon.

“Mostly,” Pyro said.

The first thing Pyro did when she got back to the motel, some two hours after she had left it, was
try Scout again, and again it did not pick up. What the hell was his family so busy with that none of
them were around? Didn’t he have a ridiculous amount of brothers? Were they all asleep?

Instead she ate her fast food lunch, watching something on the television called Mr. Rogers’
Neighborhood. She did not have a television at her house, nor did she particularly want one; the
radio suited her fine. But the man on the screen with his yellow sweater and soft voice was nice
enough to listen to, she thought, and she left it on.

It was clearly a show for children—and it niggled at her the way it always did, when she realized
she was doing something a child might—but it didn’t bother her enough to do anything about it.
The show was one of those morality types of things she remembered vaguely from her own
childhood some thirty-ish years ago, and there were puppets and talks about feelings. There were
quite a few feelings, because apparently the man’s pet fish had died. Pyro watched all this with
certain sense of detachment, and switched the television off in the middle of the man singing a
gentle song.

She found herself at her suitcase, picking at the zipper. Then, annoyed with herself, she tugged it
open and pulled out the thing she’d been thinking about ever since the fish on the screen had been
declared dead. It was, of course, the manila folder. By now she could even read the big stark letters
that said KINGBIRD on the front of it, rather than simply knowing that’s what they meant.

Her folder.

Her life was in here, in slivers and pieces. In newspaper clippings and police reports and one very
large court document. Scout had told her when he’d handed it to her, all the way back in
November, that when he’d skimmed it he thought it had bits of her history going all the way back
through her life, anything BLU could scare up. He hadn’t said more, hadn’t pried further than that
first look to determine what it was, and Pyro—

Pyro had been afraid to read it.

Even free of BLU’s seemingly omniscient gaze, she always seemed to find some excuse to not look
at the thing. She was too tired to struggle through parsing the words, or she was too annoyed about
something else and didn’t want to risk falling into Alice if the folder contained some kind of panic-
inducing revelation. They were all perfectly good reasons, but under them all she saw the true face
of it: fear.

Fear about what, she wondered to herself as she flipped blindly through the pages again. She
remembered most of her childhood, most of the time. She supposed there was the matter of her
fugue state, after Tobias and before Dell, and whatever terrible acts she had committed then,
though she thought she knew most of those too. As ever, her hands stopped when she reached the
photo of herself and her brother from that long-ago day in the park. There was something new on it
now, carefully outlined in her handwriting in the margins under each face: APRIL, beneath the
solemn-looking girl peering into the camera. And under the other:

“Curtis,” she said, almost under her breath, once more.

She wished she could remember using her brother’s name while he was alive.

She had looked through the folder enough to find that. It had been in an obituary, clipped from a
worn newspaper, and there had been no pictures. Just a stiff little piece of text about a Mary-Beth
Cadotte and a Jean Stanley Kingbird and how their car had gone off a North Dakota bridge in a
summer storm, taking their son, Curtis Youngtree Kingbird, with them. The only thing about her
was a single line at the end: Mr. Kingbird and Ms. Cadotte are survived by a daughter, April
Dominique Kingbird, and—

The clipping ended at and. The first time Pyro had managed to read this she had stood up and gone
outside and built a fire, and she had sat and smoked and stared into it for a very long time.

She was afraid to read it, the folder.

Her reverie over the book of her life was interrupted by Shep, who was very interested in what she
was doing. She rubbed his neck and pushed him off to tuck away the folder, instead grabbing her
drink from the side table and dropping down at the sagging table where her haphazard blueprints
still lay open. To her mild frustration, she could not help but admit she was a little glad Alice had
intervened.

Eventually, reluctantly, she said aloud: “Alice?”

Around her the motel room was as quiet and dingy as it had been all day. Early-afternoon light
watched her through the window. Pyro chewed her lip and picked up the broken yellow crayon that
still lay on the table. “I know you can hear me,” she said, and felt inescapably moronic as she
looked around the room. “Alice?”

No one was there.

A weariness crawled into her. She kicked off her boots and collapsed onto the bed, into a patch of
sun, telling herself that she’d get up again in a moment. She’d figure out what was to be done about
Esau. She told herself that right up until she fell asleep.
It was the beating on the door that woke her, of course, because it was unbelievably loud. Pyro
jolted out of her sleep in a moment, spiraling in that particular kind of disorientation that comes
with being woken very quickly and expected to be among the living. She struggled out of bed and
across to the door before she knew she was awake, opening it against the chain that held it locked.

There was a man in the darkness, silhouetted by a high March moon.

Her neck prickled, and she squinted down at the figure. Shep bumped against her calf, ears up and
stiff-legged. Only for a moment, though. He relaxed and began to wag his tail as he tried to push
through the gap in the door.

“Is that you, Pyro?” said the man, and Pyro’s jaw fell open in surprise.

“Esau?”

“The very same.”

She jammed her finger against the track of the chain lock in her haste to get him inside. Shep had
to be quieted twice from barking. And then he was there, in her motel room, in the flesh: Esau. She
looked at him for a long time, rubbing the sore place on her finger, because that was all the proof
she really had that this wasn’t some kind of dream, some hallucination. As she watched he heaved a
great sigh and settled down at the foot of the bed, looking down at the dog as he set his chin on the
man’s knee. “How?” was all she managed to get out.

Esau laughed. “That place wasn’t built to contain something like me.”

“What?”

He lifted his right hand, the one she had wondered about just hours before. Now he slid his left
under his sleeve and tugged on something, and before Pyro’s eyes he seemed to peel back the very
flesh. It bent and folded, like rubber, and underneath gleamed oil-black metal. “You asked about
this,” he said, and the gears and joints twisted under the prosthetic that covered it. “They let me
keep it, and gave me this to keep it secret. And it was a good thing to be sure. Those bars over the
window needed a little more encouragement than I would have been able to otherwise offer.”

“Oh,” Pyro said, and sat down heavily in the chair.

The last twenty-four hours had been a blur of anger and desperate planning, of a need to save Esau,
and yet here he was, all on his own, with no help from her. She rubbed at her eyes. “Could you
have gotten out whenever you wanted?”

“I could have. But where would I have gone?” he said, shrugging. “I have the clothes on my back
and not much else. I expect the moment they realize I’m gone, they’ll contact Pauling, and that
would have been the end of it. I couldn’t have gotten far on my own.”

“But now I’m here,” said Pyro.

Esau grinned. “Now you’re here.”

 Act I

“Don't look back, and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their
attention.”

—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn.

 6: Full Steam Ahead

The country raced by the truck like a great yellow animal, its grassy coat shuddering in the
tailwind. It dashed under the old wooden barns with their faded red paint and snaked around
blossoming oaks, keeping pace with every mile Pyro’s teal Chevy trundled. Overhead the sky was
a towering empty thing, unbound by clouds as it raked the atmosphere, and settled in it like a jewel
or an eye or a brand was the sun, standing sentry over the vacant highway. The truck’s windows
were down, had been down for a hundred miles now, and the wind skipped through Pyro’s black
hair and Shep’s brown fur and over Esau’s bald head on its way through the cab, taking the music
that was blaring along on the radio with it.

It was the best drive Pyro could remember.

Her things were slung in the truck bed, and on Esau’s lap was spread the road atlas, and for the
past hour they had been making fun of the radio jockey’s nasally drone. They had gotten on the
highway not thirty minutes after Esau’s arrival at Pyro’s motel, for he was right about one thing:
TFI would be informed, and TFI would not take to it kindly. The first few hours of driving had
been surreal and a little grim as they picked a direction and drove—for returning to Pyro’s home
seemed unwise. She had driven in silence through the small hours of the morning, with Esau asleep
on the passenger side of the bench and Shep making nervous sounds in the middle of it at her side,
and wondered what this turn in her life would bring down on her.

But then the sun had come up, revealing a beautiful morning over Kansas’ back roads. Esau awoke
and they got breakfast at a tiny diner that looked out over an old orchard, where the branches were
still barren but reached toward the blue sky in search of the promise of spring. Then they were on
the road again, and Esau had been relaxed and happy, if a little hard to understand at times: going
off the medication made his thoughts disjointed, difficult to follow. And they had not, for now,
spoken about what would happen next. Here in the truck, with the endless stripe of highway
unfurling before them, it was easy to think perhaps they would never have to speak on it.

“There’s something called the world’s biggest ball of twine on here, south a bit,” Esau was saying,
his fingers tracing over the network of lines that made up the atlas. “The things people will do.”

“How far south?” said Pyro, grinning.

“Maybe an hour, second exit.”

“Should we go see the world’s biggest ball of twine?”

“I cannot imagine what we’d do once we had,” Esau said good-naturedly, closing the atlas. “I want
to thank you, anyway, Pyro.” He paused. “Is that what you’d like to be called, still? Not April?”

Pyro shifted in her seat. “I … don’t know, I guess. Pyro feels more like my name. But, I mean—it’s
not really a name. I’ve said it to some people by accident back home.” She rolled her eyes. “That
got some reactions.”

“It’s no trouble to me, either way.”

“I guess I don’t care, really.”

With a nod, Esau began to turn the handle on his side of the cab, rolling up the window. “Pyro,
then. It does me good to know you still cared enough to come and check on me.”
You and Dell, Pyro corrected him silently. “What was I supposed to do?” she said as lightly as she
could. “Decide everything was probably fine and not bother? You’re, I mean. I’m your friend.
Yours and Dell’s.”

There was a long silence after that. “Well,” Esau said, presently, “it’s good to hear that. Do you
think you would be able to tell me more about Dell?”

This made her hesitate, and at first she only fiddled with the cruise control. “I’ve told you before.”

“Only once,” said Esau. “Right at the start, when we’d teleported out of that bunker. And my
memories of that day are fuzzy at best.”

Pyro did not have the clearest picture of that day herself, and she hadn’t spent most of it controlling
a giant robot from a mile underground. “Okay,” she said at last, tapping her fingers on the steering
wheel. “I can try. What do you want to know?”

“What sort of man was he?”

For some reason, this was not the first question Pyro had expected to field. “Um,” she said, and
stalled. She had gone out of her way to avoid thinking much about Dell since his supposed death,
to the point that it dawned on her shortly after Esau’s appearance that she had not even mourned
him after he’d allegedly died. But this was perhaps a symptom of her personality, more than
anything else. That, or somehow she had known the thing in the casket was not really him.

As luck would have it, Shep chose that moment to stick his nose in her ear. She batted him away,
and he flopped down with his head and front paws in her lap. There was, somewhere, a deity
laughing about this dog today and this dog the first day Pyro had met him. “Dell was … the first
time I met him, probably anybody else would have shot me. He almost did, he would have been
right to. He had his gun on me and everything, he sicced Shep on me. But instead he decided to
feed me.”

“Charitable, you’d say, then?” asked Esau.

“I guess so?” she said, and laughed. “I was a charity case, anyway. I’m trying to remember. He
surprised me a lot. He had this garage, and I guess it was his workshop. He had his sentry guns and
dispensers and things in there. That’s where everything started to happen with me, I guess.” Her
brow furrowed, a trench amid the scars. “I ended up in there and the sentry shot me …”

“And then the dispenser?”

Pyro nodded.

A quiet settled over them, like it had crept in from the empty countryside. The truck rattled, and
between them the dog gave a little sigh. Pyro said, “There was something in the garage, like this
secret door. It led into this basement, and I guess—I guess that’s where everything might’ve started
with you, too,” she said, surprised at the truth of this. “RED’s spy turned up. He wanted something
from Dell, I think, that was in that basement.”

“The immortality machine.”

Pyro’s head snapped around so fast it was a wonder it didn’t cause a thunderclap.

“That was a misnomer, actually,” Esau was murmuring, tapping his chin. “Life-extending machine
would have been a better name. Immortality is one of those words that doesn’t quite—”
“Esau!”

“Hm?”

“Dell was building an immortality machine?”

“Oh,” Esau said, “I guess you wouldn’t have known about all of that.”

“No, I did not,” Pyro said, and forced herself to look at the road again, just long enough to make
sure she wasn’t going to veer off of it. “Jesus. I always wondered why the spy was down there
torturing him over it. That’s—that’s a pretty big deal. Did it work? Wait, so—so do you remember
he was building that?”

“I do,” said Esau.

In front of them, a lone cloud, faint against the stark blue of the sky, passed over the sun. Pyro felt
the question rising, a question she hated; a question she knew too well, for she had been asked it
too many times herself. She asked it anyway, as the cloud melted under the burning light. “What
else do you remember?”

If the question bothered Esau, he did not show it. He made a contemplative humming sound and
adjusted in his seat as he thought. “Mostly just small things,” he said. “Nothing very interesting or
useful.”

“An immortality machine is pretty damn interesting.”

“I guess that’s true,” he laughed. “That was work for BLU, if I remember.”

“Not for Dell?” Pyro slid him another glance. “He didn’t want to be immortal?”

Esau shook his head. “That I don’t know. I remember bits and pieces of his surroundings. Nothing
about him.”

“Oh,” Pyro said.

He went on like that for a time, sketching a picture of what his recollection formed for her. He
remembered the house and the garage, sort of, and some of the stores in Bee Cave, Texas. He
remembered his old green truck, and Pyro felt a bit stupid when she realized that was probably the
reason she had bought a green truck herself. He told her about his old job, the one before BLU,
when he’d worked in the Spraberry Trend trying to coax oil from the stubborn shale. “In Midland
you could see the fires,” he said. “We’d have to burn off the gas that came up from the rocks, and
it would burn until dawn. If you looked east a little after sunset you’d think the sun was about to
come up again.”

“Wow.”

“You would have loved it,” he said, and there was something strange in his voice. “You could
have watched them burn all night.”

There was no one at this rest stop, which Pyro preferred. She had about gotten used to the stares
her face and skin attracted, but that didn’t mean she liked dealing with them.
It was a run-down old place, with faded brick and a single tree that towered over the empty parking
lot with its cracked pavement and weathered paint. From where she leaned against the building in a
patch of sun, smoking, she watched Shep investigate every bush and weed. Somewhere the smell
of still water ebbed in on the wind.

Esau was yet inside, and she was glad for some time to herself. She had not spent so long in the
exclusive company of another person in months, possibly not since the forest with Scout. And
while Esau was much better company than Scout had been at the time, it was still a lot to adjust to.

When Esau came out again with a wet paper towel pressed to his face, she pushed off the brick
expectantly. He lifted a hand, rubbing at his eyes. “Take your time,” he said, and sounded groggier
than before. “The withdrawals are kicking in.”

“Oh. The medication?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be, but it’ll take a few, uh.” He paused, frowning down at the sidewalk. “Days. I’ll be in the
car. Need to not be moving for a bit, I think.”

Pyro watched him go. The nerves were creeping up on her again, in the silence, and knowing Esau
would be out of commission for a while made it worse. TFI had two modes, she’d come to learn:
utterly incompetent and dangerously efficient. She could guess which one Esau’s escape would be
met with.

The sound her boots made on the pavement as she started a slow circle around the building was
something of a comfort, a grounding sound that reminded her of where she was. Her legs took her
on a path that removed Esau and the truck and the highway from her sight for a time, and perhaps
that was what she needed. She watched her feet, one steady step after another, and focused only on
the cigarette that burned down between her lips.

When the shadow fell over her boots she paused, curious at the square shape of it. There in front of
her, perched in its booth like a blocky parrot, was the payphone. The sight alone was frustrating,
knowing that it would be good to get Scout updated on whatever Alice had said. Who knew what
she had asked of him?

Well. Alice did, most likely.

Faced with the choice of talking to Alice or talking to Scout, Pyro sighed and fished a dime from
her pocket. The phone clattered and rang and then picked up.

“Owens residence,” said a voice she had never heard before. It was higher and older and a little
more tired, but still carried some bounce to it.

“Hi. Is Jeremiah there?”

“Jeremiah? Oh no, sweetheart,” said the voice with its Boston drawl, friendly, “he’s gone again,
always runnin’, that one. Can I take a message for ya? Who’s this?”

“My name’s April. I don’t—”

“Oh!” said the voice that Pyro was now quite sure must have been Scout’s mother. “Yeah, the girl
from work, sure!”
“Um, yeah. Look—”

“Listen, honey, it’s real nice you’re always callin’, I’m just so glad Jeremy’s keepin’ in touch with
his old team. I gotta tell you, though, if you got ulterior motives-like, he’s got himself a girlfriend
now—”

“Right, I know, that’s not—”

“—real sweet girl, too, real polite, a little weird maybe but God save us, ain’t we all, though—”

Scout and Tobias had both gotten their penchant for talking altogether too quickly from the same
source, evidently. Pyro sagged against the booth and surrendered to the chatter.

It took her ten minutes to extricate herself from the call, because hanging up on the woman both
felt a little mean and Pyro could not help her curiosity about how the Owens family was doing all
these years later. Scout’s mother was happy to tell her. Her name was Gladys, and she worked as a
radio jockey for an FM station, and she was seeing just the nicest gentleman from out of the
country named Giordano (“holy shit,” Pyro had said under her breath when she realized who this
was), and all the boys were so busy these days that she was just bored out of her mind, and
wouldn’t April like to come see them for dinner some time because any friend of Jeremiah’s was a
friend of the family? “That’s, um, that’s really nice of you, I’ll think about it,” Pyro said a bit
desperately at this last part, while a sort of existential terror lurched down into her at the thought of
ever returning to Boston, and another, worse one at the thought of seeing Tobias’ other survived-
bys. “Could you just let Jeremiah know I called? And that me and Esau are headed west on I-70.”

“You got it, darlin’, soon as he’s back, it’s just that him and Gio are—”

“Great, thanks, bye,” Pyro said all in a rush, and hung up. She backed away from the phone as she
did, as if afraid it might ring itself off the hook to try and get her to pick it up again. “Wow,” she
muttered aloud, and turned to head back for the truck.

Esau did not move as she hauled herself into the cab, Shep in tow, and pulled the door shut behind
her. He was boneless in the passenger seat, but his fingers were gnarled up in the legs of his jeans,
the only tensed part of him. “You okay?” Pyro asked tentatively.

“Dizzy,” he answered, and would say no more. Pyro put the truck in reverse and sent them back out
on the highway.

The sun hung overhead, and Pyro kept the truck well below the speed limit, for Esau looked more
than once like he might be sick when she took a turn too quickly. There was no talking, now, just
the silence of the road; the silence colored by new tires on old asphalt, the thrum of the engine, the
quiet sounds of talk radio that drifted through the cab at too low a volume to comprehend as
anything more than tone and inflection. Shep had laid down in Esau’s lap this time, his hind paws
digging into Pyro’s thigh, and Esau’s left hand bunched in his fur. They passed roadside diners and
other rest stops and exits, but Pyro stayed on the road, hoping that somewhere along its empty back
they would find whatever it was they were looking for.
 7: SOS

Esau finally did get sick, at around four in the afternoon, shortly after their late lunch and after
they’d crossed into Colorado. Pyro pulled over to let him throw up in the scrubby bushes and steep
rock on the side of the road. When he came back he was red-faced and sweating, and Pyro had to
threaten to leave him there if he didn’t drink the water she handed him. He was sick again five
minutes later, and Pyro decided it was time to stop for the day.

Another half-hour saw them off the road down a long and winding dirt path dotted here and there
with a utility pole or an old billboard, tucked away among other long and winding dirt paths, the
purpose of which Pyro could not divine. Once she saw an RV on the side of the road, and some old
instinct told her to keep going, until it was well out of sight. She only thought to question it after
she had parked the truck; another vestige of the life that had earned her those scars.

“There’s stuff for dinner,” she told Esau after he had sat down hard against the back tire of the
truck, hand against his eye like he had done for the last hour. “Granola bars, mostly, I guess.”

“I’m not hungry,” Esau said, “but thank you.”

“Okay. I’m going to make a fire.”

She did just that. She scrounged up twigs and leaf litter and a few larger branches from a dead
bush, and rocks to circle it, and went and found the folding shovel in among her things. (This was
one of the items she carried with her, now, after Soldier had threatened her with a court-martial for
failing to do so. She had been surprised to find they were as useful as he said they were.) It was a
little hard to scratch a fire pit out of the hard-packed dirt here, but she managed, and after that it
was nothing to get the kindling to catch.

Pyro didn’t know how she felt about fire, these days, Fire with a capital “F.” She had three
different permanent fire pits on her property, and nine fireplaces inside (and she had really had to
sell the foreman on that when she had her house built), and they all saw regular use, because no
matter what else about her changed or was forgotten or stripped away and rebuilt, she would
always be caught by the flame. It was a part of her that was strange and unique, a primitive part of
her that had to be collared and trained lest it eat her alive. Once—more than once—it almost had.
But these days it felt quieter, as if it had eaten its fill, and only wanted a snack now and then.

The fire shuddered and rippled and gorged itself on chokecherry branches. It was not smokeless,
the damp left in the ground and underbrush from the receding winter ensured that, but it was a still
night and the smoke was not so bad.

Eventually, Esau trudged over and sat across from her, squinting at the fire. They ate, and it got
considerably colder as the sun dripped down through the distant mountains. Eventually Pyro
smothered the fire. “You take the cab,” she told Esau. “I’ll sleep in the truck bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me, I’ve slept on worse.”

“Alright,” Esau said, drowsily, and vanished into the cab. He was clearly in no state to be arguing.
She would pick up a sleeping bag at the next town they stopped in, she decided as she rolled her
extra clothes into a pillow and coaxed Shep into laying down by her legs. Halfway through the
night she scrounged out the blanket stuffed into the emergency kit that the car salesman had
insisted she buy along with the truck. This she slung over where the spare tire was mounted to the
inside of the truck bed, forming a sort of lean-to that at least blocked out some of the wind. It took
time, but eventually she fell asleep.

The long night passed, the scrubby dirt around them singing with early insects and the sky offering
the occasional bird call. Pyro heard none of this. She heard nothing until late the next morning,
when Esau came around and tried to get into the cooler of food without waking her. “Good
morning, Pyro,” he said as she blinked at him. “Did you do alright out here?”

“It’s fine,” she said with a yawn, pushing herself up. She rolled her shoulders and tried to get her
coat to sit right on her body again. “You look better.”

“Do I?” Esau said. “I don’t feel it. I don’t know how long the symptoms will last. Hopefully not
long.”

She watched him dig through the cooler, herself debating on the virtues of a cigarette this early and
before eating. Shep was loping around out in the bush, utterly invested in whatever he was sniffing.
Something had been on the tip of Pyro’s tongue as she looked back toward Esau, and it stopped
there as something caught her eye.

In the moment she had absolutely no idea what to make of it. At first she thought it was a new sort
of hallucination, but something niggled at her as she watched it, telling her she should know what it
was. That it was important. It seemed strange, for how important could a little bead of red light
dancing over the side of Esau’s forehead be?

In the end it was not her that reacted. It was not her that pitched her body forward with a strangled
cry of warning, throwing herself at Esau, sending them both tumbling to the ground. That was
Alice, and Pyro simply stared at Esau’s startled face as the report of a rifle rang out and the sniper
bullet buried itself in the bed of her truck with a loud ping!

“Get up! Hide!” she heard Alice command, and then they were both pressed against the tires, each
of them behind one. Suddenly she was herself again, gasping, her heart clawing at her ribs. “Holy
shit,” she breathed, staring at the grass where for just an instant the sniper’s bead flickered in front
of them. “That—that didn’t take long, did it?”

“I suppose we should have expected it,” Esau said grimly, himself staring at the bead’s last
location. “Mercenaries, after all.”

Something about the way he said this struck her in a way she did not like, but now was hardly the
time. Instead she tried to relax, to breathe. To think. “Do you think it’s ours or RED’s?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“If it’s ours I might be able to talk to him,” Pyro said, trying to think, to think. “Sniper’s—I think
we were friends.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know!” she burst out. “We used to play cards together! He gave me his old camera!”

“He kills people for money, Pyro,” Esau said.

“So did I!”

“No,” said Esau, “I mean he kills people. What you did, what you all did for BLU, that’s its own
kind of monstrous, but it’s different. I read enough of Gray’s data. Whichever man that is, TFI
wasn’t his first go at assassination. And even if he was BLU, he’s not going to let feelings get in
the way of a job.”

The thing that twisted itself up in Pyro’s expression was beyond her as she looked at him. It ate at
her, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say.

They sat there. The sniper bead did not float over the truck again, and Pyro wondered where on
earth he was even shooting from; she didn’t dare to look. For a time she watched Shep, anxious that
the sniper might shoot him in an attempt to draw them out, but the bead never appeared, even when
he came running up to Pyro, oblivious of the danger and covered in burrs and seed pods. She
grabbed him by the collar and all but dragged him into her lap, trying to keep her heart out of her
throat.

“What are we going to do?” she said eventually. “We’re pinned.”

Esau was staring at the dirt. “I’m sure that they want me more than they want you.”

“Shut up, that’s not an option.”

“Then what is it that you suggest?”

“I’m thinking,” she snapped, and God, she was trying, she really was. The extent of her experience
with the enemy sniper was largely limited to lucky sneak attacks, or waking up in respawn with no
idea of what had killed her. Even then, there had always been enough cover to survive a while, and
alternate routes to take. Here there was nothing: just empty, treeless land and a single truck to hide
behind.

Esau was studying the fire pit, when she next looked at him. It was between them and a bit ahead,
just outside of the truck’s shadow. “What about that?” he asked. “Smoke? Could we use it as
cover?”

“I … maybe,” Pyro said, her thoughts switching gears to something she could actually solve. “If I
can get enough green sticks in it, plants that are still alive. I don’t know if it would make enough to
do anything for long.”

“Could it last long enough to get us into the truck?”

It was as good a plan as any. Pyro, at the front tire, twisted enough to open the cab door and shove
Shep inside before she set to pulling up all the green grass she could find, and Esau too, staying as
close to the truck’s protective body as they could. It was not much, and she had picked up most of
the sticks nearby the night before. “There’s not enough fuel, is there?” Esau said.

Pyro stared at the little pile. She twisted to look up at the truck bed behind Esau’s head. “The spare
tire will get us all the smoke we need,” she said. “If we can get it. It’s bolted in. I think there’s a
wrench in the cab somewhere—what are you doing?” She stiffened as Esau started to get to his
feet. “Esau!”

“I can get it,” he said.

“You’re the one he’s shooting at!”

“I can get it,” he repeated, and swung himself over the side of the truck bed. An instant later
another rifle report cracked the air, clipping through the side of the bed.
Cursing, Pyro scrambled to the back tire. She could actually see Esau through the hole the bullet
had left, flat on his side and flush with the wall on the far side of the bed, stripping the rubber
prosthetic off his right hand. The metal hand Dell had installed on his own body gleamed in the
morning sunlight, and then was taken up in shadow as Esau fixed the steel fingers around the bolt
that held the tire to the bed.

Another shot, and this time there was no metal ting of the bullet hitting the bed, but she heard Esau
swear. In the silence that followed she heard the high hiss of air escaping the spare tire; the sniper
had blown it out.

Then came the hydraulic whirr of Esau’s hand as he tapped something on the metal cuff that
capped his wrist, making the whole hand tense and tighten and twist. The bolt groaned under the
pressure, and then lurched free. “I’m going to throw it to you,” Esau called to her, grabbing the
spare as it fell from the mount. “Okay?”

“Okay. Alright. Stay there.”

The tire came flying over the side, and as it hung in the air another bullet slammed into it. If it was
not deflated already, it surely was now, and it was a good thing that it was not their intention to
drive on it. The tire hit the dirt and she scrambled for it, pulling out one of the three lighters in her
pocket. And she saw now that in fact the sniper had done them a favor: the neat holes punched in
the tire were the perfect spot to put kindling. She shoved in the twigs and dead leaves and ripped
the rubber open as much as she could manage with only her hands, and then she set it on fire.

It was slow. She had burned tires before, long, long ago, and this one was no different from what
she remembered. Smoke wafted up from the inside of the tire for tense minutes before the flame
began to lick out from the holes, and every horrible second she expected to hear the sniper’s shot
again. “Pyro?” came Esau’s voice.

“It’s going. It’s going.”

It was the slowest fire she had ever started. She was sure the horizon would catch fire in the sunset
before the tire did, that the sniper would get bored and simply walk over to shoot them. She looked
up only once, where she could see Shep circling anxiously in the cab through the window. Then
the wind changed and a great puff of black smoke caught her in the face; the tire was aflame.
“Okay!” she called to Esau. “Hold on to something!”

“What’re you—”

She kicked the tire, hard, sending it and its pillar of black spinning under the truck and out past the
far wheel well. The smoke buffeted and harrumphed, the fire guttered, then rose. Pyro waited until
she could see the dark smog coiling up past the roof of the cab before she moved, and then—she
was in the truck.

Shep crowded her at once and she had to shove at him to get the keys rattling in her hand to fit the
engine. The gearshift squealed, the tires lurched forward, and the mud sprayed behind them as the
truck tore off.

Dimly she heard Esau shout, but he was still in the rear-view mirror, clinging to the tire mount. The
engine screamed. The truck groaned on its axels as she twisted it into a sharp turn, toward their
tracks from the night before. The dirt leapt up by the front tire, accompanied by another crack of
the rifle. To her left she saw one of the empty billboards they had passed on their way in, and
parked at its base, an old 4x4 truck that had not been there last night.
Another bang and this time the truck shook and began to grind as its front left tire exploded. Pyro
grit her teeth, swerving, sweating, blind to everything except the distant line of the highway. 50
MPH, the speedometer read, trying its best to account for the blown tire, 60, 65, 75—

Something fell from the billboard. In a panic she turned to look, and failed to see what it was that in
the next moment sent the truck jumping up, careening sideways in the air, and finally, falling
heavy on its left side in the dirt with the crunch of twisting steel.

Something huge pressed down on her chest. Pyro jolted, gasping, and felt the blood run down her
face.

She ached. Her mind raced and sparked, unsteady and nervous, trying to gather all the pieces back
together that the blow to her skull had shattered apart. The truck. Colorado. Driving. The sniper.

Shep stepped on her face with his big hind paw. She sputtered, shoving at him; she was still in the
truck, which now lay on its driver’s-side door. Shep had little where else to stand, and that was the
thing compressing her chest. “Get off,” she wheezed, which did not help her at all, and wondered
how quickly the sniper would get her here. She could not see the billboard from her angle.

The engine shuddered. As she tried to shift herself she kicked the gas pedal and it roared, scaring
both the dog and herself. By some miracle the windshield was neither cracked from the crash nor
from a bullet. She felt exposed as she hauled herself upright, a sitting duck, and wished to God
she’d had the foresight to bring any kind of weapon at all.

The passenger side door, above her, swung open.

Pyro froze, still half-crouched against the roof of the truck. Maybe it was Esau, she thought crazily,
maybe he’d pulled off some insane stunt and saved them. Maybe it would be the ghost and all of
this was just some hallucination.

Maybe she would be able to ask the sniper not to shoot her dog, at the very least.

A face peered down at her, the very last face in the world she had expected to see. Its owner
swiped at his nose and cracked a slightly hysterical laugh. “Holy shit,” said Scout, “whole field
full’a nothin’ and you still manage to find the one pothole?”

She stared at him. “Oh, hey, you got Shep here too!” Scout said, and at the sound of his name the
dog’s ears perked up. “Hey, boy, c’mere, these morons tryin’ to get you killed too?”

Shep could not see her hallucinations. More than once, at home, Pyro had used him as a kind of
litmus test for what was and was not real. Shep jumped up on his hind legs, sniffing at Scout’s
extended hand, and Pyro felt the tension wind out of her like a slackening rope. “How,” she started,
and then realized Scout’s hand was reaching toward her.

It was so good to see him, she thought dimly as she took it.

He helped her up out of the cab, talking the whole time, as ever. “Looks like you got your face cut
up pretty good, figure we got somethin’ for that, an’ Esau’s got an ankle twisted I think from that
whole demolition derby you was doin’, he went flying, honestly was kinda funny. Probably you
should go and put out that fire over there, too, I don’t wanna do it, it’s real wet and I think it’ll
maybe rain but still don’t want another big fire, huh? That dog better be okay, I’ll kill ‘im another
time if he hurt Shep too, there’s shootin’ folks and then there’s shootin’ dogs, and it’s not even like
he’s a junkyard dog or nothing—”

Pyro’s feet hit solid ground, and the rest of her followed shortly after. She was shaking, she
realized as she touched a hand to where blood was indeed pouring from a cut on her scarred
temple. Scout’s hand was on her shoulder, steadying her. He looked as though he would launch
into more chatter, but then something beyond her field of vision caught his attention. “Hey, stay
here, alright?” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “Be right back. Yo, yeah, I’m comin’!”

Off he jogged.

Pyro sat there for another minute, gathering herself. To one side she saw a deep depression in the
earth, with a smear of tire tracks pouring into it: that was what she must have hit. She pulled herself
up, eventually, finding handholds in the heated metal of the truck’s underside. Soon she found
herself leaning against it, looking past the truck, where three figures trudged toward her. “You’ve
got to be kidding,” she said softly, watching Scout and another man helping a limping Esau toward
the truck.

She went around to meet them. She looked all around as she did, half-afraid of the sniper, though
her former teammates seemed unworried. Scout was chattering to Esau, and the man she did not
recognize gave her a brief nod as their eyes met. He had dark and clean-cut hair, shaded with gray
around the temples, and a haze of five’o’clock shadow around his jaw. He wore a clean white dress
shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and dark slacks, with fine shoes sullied by the mud. His nose was
sharp, and his eyes sharper. Familiar, even—

“RED spy,” she said, and the man looked amused.

“I had wondered if I would need to introduce myself,” he said. “It is good to see your faculties are
in order, Miss Kingbird.”

Pyro found she had nothing to say to this. Dazed, she followed the three men to the truck, where
Scout let Esau hold onto him as he carefully sat down on the ground. “Okay,” she said, finally
finding the words she wanted. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Hey, yeah, you’re welcome,” Scout said, rolling his eyes. He looked different, Pyro now saw: he
had gotten a haircut under his omnipresent brown hat, and he was wearing clothing she’d never
seen before, nice jeans, a flattering jacket, and the rattiest, dirtiest running shoes she had ever laid
eyes on.

She tried again. “No, just—I’m glad you’re here, I’m so—unbelievably glad, but how? And the,
the sniper—what happened?”

“Before that,” Esau cut in, and he sounded terse and unhappy (understandable, Pyro thought with a
note of guilt) “I’d like it if you all could tip this truck back over. I need somewhere to sit properly.”

“Very well,” said the spy. “April. Are you fit to aid us? You are bleeding.”

“Um—yeah. I think it’s just a cut. Careful, though, the dog’s in there…”

Between the three of them, flipping the truck back onto its wheels was the work of minutes. It
sagged on its popped tire, and for a split second Pyro wondered where the spare was before
realizing it was indeed still sputtering smoke out some three hundred feet back, and she jogged out
to go smother it. By the time she returned the other two had gotten Esau situated in the truck bed;
Scout had his hands in Shep’s fur, while the spy was examining the holes in the steel. “I can’t
believe you guys are here,” Pyro said as she returned, and this time even she could hear the awe in
her voice. “Tell me everything.”

Scout puffed up exactly like a particularly skinny rooster. “Well—”

“You are the easiest person to track I have ever seen in my life,” the spy said, and Scout rolled his
eyes again.

“Yeah, I mean, he ain’t wrong, but the phone call in the middle of the night was a big tip-off too.”
Scout got to his feet, brushing dog hair off his hands. “Alice and all, she was kinda hysterical.
Talkin’ about Esau being in, what, crazy person jail? Said you were gonna burn the place down,
like, and then RED was up to some crazy stuff I guess accordin’ to Spy here, so I figure, better fly
down and see what’s up.”

“You flew to Kansas?” Pyro said, a little stunned.

“And found an empty motel room, and an asylum searching the whole town,” said the spy. “I was
pleased to see you had the good sense to leave immediately. I have little doubt that your ex-
employer would have found a way to separate the two of you for the rest of your natural lives, had
they caught you in town. As it is,” and he made a careless gesture, “they now seek only to cut your
lives short.”

“Right, yeah, so, so they put out an assignment to everybody on RED, sounds like,” Scout said.
“Bounty, uh, on both’a you.”

Pyro could not help it; her gaze automatically trained itself on the RED spy, who snorted. “Please,”
he said. “Not only would I have been forced to live with Jeremiah’s moaning for the rest of time,
but I am not some trained hound to be set upon whomever my master wishes. I consider our grudge
long settled, anyway, and I have no quarrel with Esau.”

Somewhere in all of this, Pyro had situated herself on the back of the truck, next to Esau, using a
handkerchief the spy had offered her to press against her wound. “So we’re being hunted,” she
said, studying the ground. “I guess I expected that. How did you find us?”

“Oh, simple,” the spy said, and this with a smirk. He reached into his pocket and produced
something small that glinted in the weak sun. “The tracking device they planted on your friend’s
prosthetic hand. Never fear—it is now pointing them to somewhere in Nebraska.”

Pyro wanted to kick herself. Of course there would be something like that. The spy tucked it away,
continuing. “I expect in another day or so, had you survived the sniper, that others of the RED team
would have converged on you. But to that end it was simply a matter of reaching you first.”

“Which we did, ‘course we did,” Scout said, leaning over and smacking her on the back. “Not
gonna let TFI an’ the Administrator an’ whoever come screw you guys.”

Despite everything, she smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “Really. I thought we were dead.”

“Nah. We’re the BLU team! Ain’t nothin’ can kill us.”
All of Pyro’s supplies had gone flying during their escape, and were spread haphazardly across the
muddy landscape. For one panicky minute, she thought the bag with her folder was lost. Scout
found it in a ditch, and she decided she would make a copy of everything in it the next instant they
were anywhere near one of those Xerox machines.

It was during this retrieval that she caught Scout up on everything that had happened: Esau in the
asylum, the medication, Alice’s worried phone call. “It’s good she called,” Pyro confessed as she
hunted for the lid to the cooler. “I was so angry I was about to do something stupid.”

“Stupid like burn the place down?”

His tone of voice was not lost on her, and she did not look at him. They had still never spoken
about their history, in all the months after Chippewa National Forest. The friendship that had
grown between them still at times felt like it sat on the shaky foundation of Tobias’ death, like any
talk too intense, too heated, might bring it crashing down. Scout still did not like to talk of fire, of
burning buildings, of fireworks. “Maybe,” she allowed, and both of them were quiet, waiting for
the threatening fuse of the topic to fizzle.

“Well, anyway,” Scout said, bright again, “sorry we didn’t get here soon enough to help out
beforehand. Spy figured their sniper’d get here first, he was in the area I guess, but we didn’t know
if he was ahead of us or behind us.”

“I’m just glad you were here at all.” She paused. “I tried calling you yesterday. Your mom
answered.”

And again at this Scout was quiet. “She talk your ear off?” he said eventually, and there was a kind
of forced casualness to it.

“Is the spy’s name really Giordano?”

This got her a laugh, a real one, and then once more things were okay. For the moment.

Upon their return to the truck, Pyro could see the spy leaning against the driver’s door, peering
through open window and talking to Esau, who was looking indeterminably straight ahead.
Another pang of guilt struck her: she should have known TFI would send the mercenaries; should
have known they’d have a means to track them; should have known how dangerous this would be,
defying the company’s wishes. And then she’d thrown Esau off the back of a truck.

As they drew close, the spy pushed off from the cab, his mouth a flat line. “You may wish to
discuss our presence with your escapee, April,” he said. “He is not so enthusiastic as one might
have thought.”

“What?” Pyro said, dropping her belongings onto the truck bed. “Why?”

“I would not surmise to put words in his mouth. Regardless, this truck shall go nowhere in its
current state, but I imagine between us we shall be able to fit it with a new tire. Tell him he shall
have to tolerate us a while longer. Jeremiah?” He fixed Scout with a meaningful look.

“Huh? Oh, uh, sure, yeah. Back in a sec, Pyro.”

Off they went. Pyro watched them go, delaying; but soon enough she opened the truck door and
slid into the cab.

There sat Esau, slouched against the stiff bench back with his fingers laced together behind his
head, his eyes closed. Pyro shut the door behind her and contemplated what to say. Eventually she
settled on, “Scout said you sprained your ankle.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’ll heal. I already limp on that leg anyway.”

And then nothing. Pyro busied herself with scrubbing at a bloodstain she found on the lip of the
driver’s window, where she must have struck her head during the flip. Looking out of it, she saw
Scout and the spy—just Spy now, she supposed, without another spy to confuse him with—
occupied with prying one of the wheels off the old 4x4 beneath the billboard. It must have
belonged to the sniper. She supposed she had expected him to have a camper, like BLU’s sniper.
Behind that she could now see a small white car, a four-door Pontiac; that must have been what
their rescuers arrived in.

“They killed him, you realize,” said Esau. Pyro looked at him, and nodded. “Really killed. Not kill-
and-come-back. What do you think about that?”

“I mean … he was trying to kill us.” Her laugh was weak in her lungs. “Kind of kill-or-be-killed
situation.”

The tenor of his voice was something flinty; something steel. It made Pyro uncomfortable, like she
was a child who had been caught at something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. “I guess that is
one way to look at it.”

“I should have realized TFI would send the other mercs,” she said, trying to reroute the
conversation. “I should have been more careful.”

Esau shook his head. “It’s alright. Now we know what the score is, and we can make a better
plan.”

“Spy probably has three already.”

Esau’s eyes cut to her. Recognition flashed through her, just for an instant, as it was Dell’s
hounded expression she registered. Then it was simply Esau once more. “I’m sure that he does. I
would like to know the extent of them before we agree to anything.”

“I mean, sure. Me too.”

Esau worried his lip with his teeth, chewing, a certain anxious energy to the motion. Pyro thought
he would answer, and waited for it, all the air around them still as it listened. But the words never
arrived.

“Our options are relatively limited at this time,” Spy said, brushing dirt that Pyro could not see off
his pants. This struck her as slightly ridiculous, being that she was currently covered in mud. The
RED sniper was now just a body, and they couldn’t just leave the body lying where it had fallen
from the billboard after Spy stabbed it. So she and Scout were digging a shallow grave, trading off
with her folding shovel. Esau seemed to want no part of their discussion; he was still in the truck,
though she had carefully pulled it around by the 4x4 and the white Pontiac to shield the gravesite
while it was dug. She threw another shovelful of dirt out of the hole. “Given that we have far fewer
resources than our opponents, and that we are fewer in number,” Spy went on.

“Yeah, great, so, what’s that mean?” Scout said from where he was perched on the trunk of the
Pontiac. “We got, lemme see, seven other dudes on our tail, right? They ain’t so tough if they just
show up one at a time, it don’t sound like they’re real coordinated.”

“Five, actually,” Spy said. “The RED scout and the RED pyro are no longer employed.”

“Red and Clarence?” Pyro said, looking up at Spy. “Are they okay? Clarence—his arm?”

“They survived,” Spy said, and she felt a curious sense of relief. “They escaped the machines in the
forest before you and Jeremiah went on your little adventure. Unfortunately, they were not able to
get Clarence to one of our medics before the window for restoring his arm closed.”

“Dammit, for real? I liked that guy, what, so RED just kicked him off for losin’ the arm?”

“My understanding is that he and the RED pyro left of their own accord,” Spy said. “The two of
them were, after all, a couple. I imagine Kit—the pyro, I believe you knew them as ‘Red’—wished
to help him through it as much as they were able.”

Pyro returned to digging. She had wondered more than once about she and Scout’s opposites,
having not seen them again after they separated in the forest, and guilt tugged at her whenever she
did. Even knowing she had, perhaps, saved Clarence’s life by cauterizing his arm, she could not
bury the way Red had looked at her after, after they had been forced to hold him down as he
screamed and as Pyro seared his flesh closed. She remembered, mostly, her own words thrown
back in her face. She wondered if she would ever get the chance to fix it. Maybe after this was
over.

“Alright, well,” Scout was saying as she tried to focus on the work, “so five. That’s what, uhh, a
soldier, that creepy engineer they got, demoman, medic, heavy? Figure their medic ain’t too much
of a threat on his own, anyway.”

“What, exactly, is our goal?” came Esau’s voice, where he was now watching them through the
open window in the truck. “Are we planning on just driving around the country, hoping a bunch of
hired assassins don’t catch up?”

“You got a better plan, robo?”

“He’s got a point,” Pyro said, climbing out of the half-dug grave. She was sore and covered in
sweat, not to mention bruises from the crash. She held out the shovel to Scout, and he took it and
hopped down into the hole. “Spy? Do you know why they want him dead?”

“I imagine whatever part of you is still Dell has a great deal of information they would prefer you
did not, Esau,” Spy said coolly. “That aside, I have heard some noise that it has something to do
with what occurred at Coldfront; particularly with restoring Pyro to her senses.”

“Wait,” said Pyro, “really? What kind of noise?”

“That I do not know. However,” and Spy fixed his pointed gaze on her, “I have begun to believe
that the events surrounding your mental schism have lately become of great interest to TFI. Dell
Conagher’s, as well.”

“Mental schi—what, me and Alice? Why? I mean, how come they didn’t stick me in an asylum?”
Spy shrugged. Pyro shook herself, trying to wrap her head around the information.
“That doesn’t change my question,” said Esau. “I’m not interested in going back to an asylum I
don’t belong in, nor in dying.”

“Well yeah no, obviously, ain’t none of us wants that,” Scout said. “I dunno, I dunno what the thing
to do here is, like, I don’t think we can hide really even with the tracker taken care of. They got—
like, between Florence, Miss Pauling I mean, and Spy, like—” He puffed his breath into his cheeks
and then let it out, eyebrows high. “Like I knew TFI and Mann Co. and all that had their noses in a
whole lot of everything but wow, they got eyes everywhere. I dunno, man. I think we should go
find the old team.”

“The rest of BLU?” Pyro said.

“Yeah! Yeah, like, damn, man, we worked with ‘em for years, we fought with ‘em and died and
lived together and we were great! I never thought I’d miss hearin’ Soldier screamin’ at me, but I
do, can you believe that?” He waved the shovel in the air as if in pantomime. “That dude is gonna
live forever just ‘cause I ain’t gonna be able to get his yellin’ outta my head an’ I’m gonna be stuck
with him rattlin’ around in there ‘til hell freezes over. I bet they’d help if we can track them down.”

“I don’t know if the answer to mercenaries is more mercenaries,” Esau said, stiff.

Scout squinted up at him. “Yeah, okay, but like I said, you got a better plan?”
 8: Run Aground

Pyro’s truck could fit three (or two and one dog); the white Pontiac that Scout had rented could
seat all four of them, as well as Shep, relatively comfortably. There was some debate about what to
do, as Pyro was reluctant to give up her truck, and Spy insisted that splitting up was unwise. There
was a brief suggestion that they simply stick Scout and the dog in the bed of the pickup, which
Scout had been enthusiastic about. It was pointed out that the sniper’s 4x4 would have even more
room, but then again, it might be recognizable to the other members of RED. In the end it was
agreed that sticking together was the safer option. Pyro loaded up everything from the truck into
the Pontiac’s trunk, and then, at one in the gray afternoon, they were off down the highway, her
truck sitting lonely in the mud behind them.

Spy knew where everyone on BLU was, apparently. “It is my business to know things, just as it is
your business to know minutiae of fire on a truly horrifying scale,” he had said, shaking out Pyro’s
road atlas from where he sat in the passenger seat. Pyro, tired from the digging and from sleeping
in a truck bed and from being shot at, continued to slump against the door in the back of the car
and rolled her eyes. From her lap, Shep licked her hand, insistently and intently, as though by
licking it he could perhaps solve some great mystery. Their closest potential ally, according to Spy,
was in fact their own Sniper, in Utah.

“What’s he doin’ in Utah, though?” Scout asked as he sped the car along. The speed limit was
definitely more of a suggestion to him. “I ain’t ever been to Utah, I think.”

“That I do not know,” Spy said. “But he has been there for some time.”

He was somewhere in the far western end of Utah, and as they were in the far eastern end of
Colorado, it would be another few days of travel. The first day of it felt strange and careful, all of
them stuffed into a car with no real understanding of how to exist in such a small space for so
many hours together. It was a different thing entirely from the time Pyro had spent driving with
Esau. Even the air in the car was new, run ragged with Scout’s constant chatting, Spy’s pinpointed
remarks, Esau’s silence. Pyro found herself talking just to dig the silence out, like it was some kind
of weed she could get rid of if only she tried hard enough. Perhaps that was what Scout felt like all
the time, and why he was incapable of staying quiet for long.

They did not stop the whole way, not for longer than to make use of some lonely gas station’s
restroom or for Esau to again be sick as the medication clawed its way out of him. The cut on
Pyro’s head throbbed every time she thought about asking to stop, as if her own heart was trying to
remind her of her brush with death, of the importance of staying in motion; instead she let herself
fall asleep, soothed by the rhythm of the road. Once they stopped at a diner long enough to get
some real food down, and then Scout swapped driving duty with Pyro because he was having
trouble concentrating on the road as night fell. He curled up in the back seat with his hand against
Shep’s chest and went to sleep like he slept in cars all the time. Esau, too, drifted off soon enough,
and Pyro hoped it was some respite for him. “I had not anticipated his dislike of us,” Spy observed
quietly, as a light, cold rain began to thrum against the windshield.

“Esau? Me neither.”

“Did he tell you why?”

Pyro shook her head. “I didn’t get a lot out of him. He wasn’t like that, when we were being held
together.”
“Ah, yes. Jeremiah has told me about that.”

“Are you two friends now?”

Spy glanced back at Scout. “I am not sure if that is the term I would use. You could say there is
perhaps a bit more respect. He has accepted that I make his mother happy.”

The stretch of road ahead of them was long and steady and did not need her. Pyro let her eyes
wander over to Spy, analytic, inasmuch as she could be. “Is there anything to that rumor you’re his
dad?” she asked, and Spy chuckled and said nothing. “You love not answering questions, don’t
you?”

“I find it keeps things interesting.”

They talked for a time, and that too was strange. Pyro had never anticipated talking to the RED spy
for any length of time, not about anything she did not absolutely need to speak to him about. A part
of her still bristled at the idea of him, the part of her that had seen him in a garage in Texas and had
dragged a rake down a flight of stairs to beat him with. And yet here he was, and here she was, and
they talked about their lives and what had become of them after the war. Spy no longer plunged
knives into the backs of men, nor wore the mask as a matter of course. (This Pyro was deeply
curious about, and asked many questions of. She got few answers.) Instead he was—and this
shocked her—flirting with investigative journalism. “More as a hobby than anything, you
understand,” he told her, running a hand through his hair. “My editor is a loud, dreadful swine of a
man. But I find it useful to be someone new for a time, and I have never been a journalist.”

“Have you gotten anything published?”

“Good heavens, no. I’m a terrible writer. I do interviews.” Something about this was unbelievably
funny to her, and Spy seemed amused at her laughter.

The conversation, eventually, meandered back to the car, and its occupants, and what was to be
done about their situation. “I think what Esau doesn’t like,” Pyro said, after having chewed on it
for some time now, “is that you killed the sniper.”

“Hm,” said Spy. “I do find that curious.”

“He seems to not like the fact that there’s … you know, killing.”

“Then he is an unfortunate man, to be in a car with three mercenaries.”

“Have you killed people?” she asked suddenly. “Outside of work, I mean.”

“Of course. Nearly everyone on the team has. Yourself included, if I recall,” he said, and Pyro
sighed. “Manslaughter is still murder.”

“I know. I know.”

“Jeremiah has not. I have always found that interesting. He came close, more than once, from what
I understand. He was a violent person, growing up.”

In the rear-view mirror, Pyro could see Scout. He lay slack in the back seat, face distorted by
where it was smudged against the seat belt. He did not look like he could hurt anyone just then,
even knowing what she knew. “He told me a story once. About something with one of his
brothers.”
“Liam?”

“Yeah, that one.”

Spy hummed. “I know only the barest details of that event. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me
—it is not your story. I know his mother thinks he still carries that wound, inside him.”

Pyro did not know what to say to this. Instead she said, after another few minutes, “I still don’t
know if it was Esau that killed our spy or not.”

And here there was another long silence. When Pyro risked a glimpse at the man beside her he had
his hand on his chin, hawk’s eyes peering off into the rain-dark sunset. The quiet felt like ants in
her clothing, crawling, crawling. “He said a different model did it,” she went on. “But I only ever
saw one.”

“One, and one man controlling it.”

“I don’t know if he’s lying or if he just doesn’t remember. Or if he’s telling the truth.”

“Have you asked him?”

“No.”

“I suppose we will find out soon enough,” Spy murmured, and would say no more.

Utah came upon them in hills and greater hills. It came to them in the red dust of the earth
sputtering across the road, dancing hysterically, in whorls and in whirlwinds. The highway ebbed
through its growing mountains like a stream, cut through the Mars-colored rock. As Pyro drove she
could see snow on the higher peaks, last vestiges of February aching in the warming air.

“Why’s Snipes still in the U.S. anyhow?” Scout asked on that third day as they wound around the
fingers of the earth, catching at the empty sky. “Figured he went back to the Outback or wherever
between stuff. There even been any jobs since me an’ April got canned?”

“The BLU team is still on the continent,” Spy said. He was in the back seat now, directly next to
Scout in the middle, for he had decided he would rather deal with Scout than get dog hair on his
person. Esau was in the passenger seat. It was less likely to make him ill, though the symptoms
were slowly wearing off. “There have been no jobs, to my knowledge, save that last excursion Miss
Pauling attended to. I am uncertain as to why TFI is keeping them in reserve.”

“Oooh, Spy’s ‘uncertain’.”

“Yes, and you cried like a baby when your little girlfriend left you alone for a week.”

“I did not!”

“Would you two shut up?” Esau said, and Pyro bit back a sigh. Maybe she should have let Scout
drive. It might have kept the bickering to a minimum. “Giordano. Where are we headed after we
get to Firton?”

“I shall have to take over the route. I have paid a visit to Mr. Mundy only once since he relocated
here, and he moves frequently.”

“You’re sure he’ll be here?” said Esau.

“I am.”

Pyro thought about asking why, and elected to not bother. She was tired; she had slept in the
moving car for two days, and it smelled like sweat and dog. She did not imagine Sniper had much
in the way of additional comfort, but at least they could perhaps stop with him for a time. It would
be nice to talk to him again, maybe see what he’d been knitting. She had lost the instant camera he
had given her, back at Mannworks, but after everything was all over she had started trying to
import one from Australia. So far she had only been sent boxes with koalas inside. The zoo down
in Phoenix was getting sick of taking them from her.

The terror of the lot in Colorado had faded behind them somewhere along the state line, and the
mood in the car had improved somewhat when they were not assaulted by red-clad mercenaries
again. When they reached Firton, the definition of a one-horse town tucked away between a
yawning scrubland and a waterfall that Pyro pointedly did not look at, they stopped and ate lunch
at an actual diner (paying in cash; Spy had been strict about this).

Pyro gorged herself on fried chicken and onion rings and regretted it at once when the next leg of
their journey sent them up the winding slopes of the surrounding hills. It seemed to take longer
than it did, the careful crawl up the mountain, and Pyro found herself reminded of the trip down
another in the frigid clime of Alaska, to Miut. The snow that gathered closer and closer together the
higher they got only added to the illusion. She thought of eggnog and sitting on the couch with
Heavy, surprised at the revelation that she had gotten drunk. Her eyes fell on the men in the car,
one by one, and when she looked away she did not know what the feeling that roiled in her gut
meant. She did not much like to think about Alaska.

They went uphill and then downhill again, off-road into a narrow valley that bristled with angry
little bushes and jagged rocks. Unwelcoming, in a word, and it did seem like a place Sniper would
plant himself outside of a job. They rolled the Pontiac across a tiny stream where at one point they
thought they would have to get out and push, and once a lone mountain goat wandered out into the
dirt path and would not be moved no matter how much Shep and Scout barked at it. Pyro ended up
physically taking it by the horns and dragging it off, only for it to headbutt her onto her ass before
bounding away. Everyone, even Esau, thought this was tremendously funny, and Pyro herself had
to laugh, too.

They were forced to walk the last of the way (and Pyro still did not know how on earth Spy knew
where he was going) when the terrain became too rough and dense for their little urban car. As
Pyro was debating on whether or not to bring Shep—better not to leave him alone, she decided—
Spy said, “Esau, I suggest you stay here for the present.”

Everyone looked first at him, and then at Esau, who had just taken hold of the car door to shut it.
“Why is that?” he said, his voice cooler than the valley air.

“Call it a hunch. Whatever our aim with the BLU sniper, we may be more successful without your
presence, at least at first.”

Esau looked out over the red countryside, the back of his hand pressed to his mouth. “I’d like an
explanation of that before I agree to it.”

“That is a fair thing to want,” Spy said. “But I would recommend instead that you trust me.”
“I don’t think I can go off that alone.”

“Spy usually knows about this stuff,” Scout cut in. Pyro caught his eye, and he shrugged. “I mean
like, uh, negotiations and stuff, I guess. I dunno. If he says stay—”

“I will not,” Esau said, and shut the door with a bang.

Scout and Spy both looked at her, as if she was supposed to do something, or as though she could
convince him to change his mind. She raised her eyebrows and leashed Shep.

And they were off, picking through the mud and underbrush. As if to prove the mercenaries’ point,
Esau stuck closer to Pyro than the rest, though not too close. Whenever she looked down to be sure
of her footing she caught sight of her hands, and wondered if Esau could somehow see the blood on
them.

The sprain had more or less gone away, but Esau still limped. He had limped the whole time they
had been locked down in BLU together, always favoring the same leg. There was nothing wrong
with it, as far as the on-call medical staff could tell. The worst thing that was wrong with his body
was the nerves of his right arm, damaged from the hack job Dell had done replacing his own hand.
Pauling had once called it psychosomatic, and it was a word Pyro thought she had read somewhere
long ago but had to ask about what it meant. “It means I’m doing it to myself,” Esau had answered
her. “My chassis’s leg was damaged when that creature came at us in the caves. That is where it
came from, I believe.”

“Like … your brain thinks your real leg was injured, so it makes you limp?” Pyro asked, and Esau
had nodded. Pyro was very tired of how brains handled things.

The stars were over them, now, as dusk flooded its way through the twilight sky. The valley
opened up, and the sound of water caught at Pyro’s ears: there was another stream weaving
through the earth here, serpentine, probably fed from that waterfall back at the town. She had
gotten better about water, she really had, on the whole. It still made her nervous if she wasn’t
careful, or if she was already having a bad day. But the stream sailed on regardless of her, and
where it bent around a cluster of barren trees she could see it: the old and run-down camper.

She heard babbling, and for a moment truly thought it was the brook. It was Scout. “Aw, man!
Friggin’ Sniper, I am real lookin’ forward to seein’ the team again, guys, feel like we shoulda
brought beer or somethin’. He is gonna be so surprised.”

“I guarantee you he has noticed us already,” Spy said, but he said it lightly, like he was looking
forward to the reunion too. Pyro wondered why; he had spent most of his time stabbing Sniper in
the back for the years they had fought in the Gravel Wars. Never mind about Esau, it seemed a
good deal more likely to her that the RED spy would be the one Sniper had no interest in talking to.

The camper, as they came up to it, was exactly the same as she remembered: weary-looking but
painstakingly maintained, even with the little bobblehead figure on the dashboard visible through
the windshield. There were no lights that she could see within the narrow windows of the vehicle.
“Is he even here?” Pyro said.

“Sure, just not where you bloody lot can sneak up on him,” said a voice at her side, and Pyro nearly
collided with a bush. Sniper, tall as ever, peered over his nose and gave her a wry smirk from
where he had seemed to appear from nothing, a lanky shadow emerging from the trees. “Real botch
job, too, if that’s what you were aiming for, but I imagine it wasn’t. What’s all this about, then?”
Spy had been correct. Sniper had apparently noticed their car making its way down the valley
nearly half an hour ago. Pyro had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d be able to learn it
was them from that distance; of course he still had his rifle scopes. “I’m glad you weren’t shooting
at us, then,” Pyro told him, and he did that soft chuckle he made when something truly amused
him. It really was good to see him again. They were friends. She was sure of it. “I’ve been shot at
by snipers enough for a lifetime.”

Sniper had a camp; he preferred outdoor cooking, he said. It was small and it had a tiny fire that
had been snuffed already, and Pyro had to control the urge to ask to reignite it. She was spared
being obvious when Sniper said, “Come on then, missy, let’s have it. Need light to see by.”

She had not thought that road trips would involve so many fires, and she was glad of it. She was
glad, too, when Scout filled in the silence as she set about hunting suitable kindling, demanding to
know everything Sniper had been up to in their absence. Shep trotted alongside her; Esau, too,
joined her. “I don’t like this,” he said to her, under his breath.

Pyro knew this. He had been very obvious about it for the entire trip. She thought it was not the
best thing to point out. “It’s just Sniper,” she said, and then, “Do you remember him at all?”

“Nothing of Dell’s.”

“Sniper’s a good guy.” He gave her a look she could not read, but she didn’t think it was a good
one. She chose to ignore it, pawing through a pile of stones for anything dry. “I’m sure he’ll help
us.”

The fire was up again in another few minutes, with Pyro on her knees before it. The tension that
had lodged itself between all her bones in the aftermath of the attack started to smoke itself out,
leaving her content to stay there on the ground by it as the party settled themselves. Her own
nerves notwithstanding, she could feel the unspoken questions in the air around her. They had not
yet made their case to Sniper, and he had not yet asked their purpose. Scout had created a buffer,
sort of, with his constant stream of talk, and as the fire renewed itself Pyro joined in, eager to hear
about what Sniper had been up to. “Not much, truth be told,” he said easily, dropping back into a
folding lawn chair that had been parked in front of the fire. “Got a few contracts on the side here
and there, easy stuff. Having more trouble keeping sharp than anything else, really.”

At her side, where she had wound up on a fallen log next to him, Pyro could feel Esau bristle at the
explanation. She jumped to change the subject. “Still knitting?”

“Sure, keeps the hands busy. And the needles make a right proper weapon in a pinch.”

Pyro winced at this, at the way Esau scraped bark off the log, and changed the subject again.

Sniper had little in the way of food to offer, but there was fresh pronghorn jerky, which was
shockingly good. He seemed pleased enough to listen to Scout and Pyro catch him up on what
they’d been up to, and taken with Shep. They spent most of an hour on this, as Pyro fed more twigs
and sticks into the fire, and shivered at the cold.

All things, though, have their end. “Well then,” Sniper said, at last, “I’m sure you’re after
something. No reason to look me up, otherwise.”

He looked at her as he said it. Pyro locked up, trying to find the words among the fire. “We’re, uh.
RED’s hunting us. Esau, and me.” She glanced back at her companions. “And Scout and Spy, too,
now, I guess—”

“The RED spy, you mean.”

Pyro sighed, leaning on her knees. “Yeah.”

She told him what had happened, the short version, as she understood it. The lockdown, the
asylum, the other sniper. “We’re trying to figure out what to do,” she finished. “Asking the team
was all we could come up with.”

Sniper had been quiet through all of this, had pulled out what for all the world looked like a chunk
of antler and a flat piece of rock and begun working them together with his hands as she spoke. It
was an arrowhead, she realized about halfway through, and of course Sniper would make his own
arrowheads. There was a joke in there somewhere, that he was making the arrowheads while she
was the Indian. “Is that it?” he asked her when she had stopped.

“I guess so, yeah.”

He nodded, not looking up. “Answer’s no.”

“What?” Pyro said, in the same moment Scout cut in with, “Wait, ferreal?”

“Sorry you came all the way out here for it, but no.”

“Why?” Scout demanded. Dumbfounded, Pyro looked to Spy. He was smoking, watching quietly,
as if this was the answer he had expected. “Like, you ain’t even got any competition now, their
sniper’s dead an’ we got the only Spy—”

“That’s why.”

Pyro felt her face contort, caught somewhere between confusion and betrayal. “Because it won’t be
hard enough for you?”

“No,” said Sniper, looking straight at her. His voice was as cold as she’d ever heard it. “Because
this friend of yours, Engineer or Esau or whatever it is you like, killed Spy. Our Spy. Or did you
forget?”

It took her a long while to find her tongue, and by the time she did, the moment had passed.

She looked instead at Esau, and found that everyone else—save Sniper—was looking at him too.
He had gotten to his feet somewhere in the conversation and stood stiff against the tree he had
chosen to lean against, arms folded across his chest, a barrier between himself and the mercenaries.
He was not looking at them. He was looking at Sniper. “I did no such thing.”

“You can lie to yourself and the rest of these poor bastards all you like, mate. Don’t change the
facts.”

“I did not kill him!” Esau snapped. “That was your man, your Engineer, your Dell Conagher. I’m
not like you, any of you. My hands are clean.”

The fire crackled. Somewhere an insect tore open the quiet of the evening. Pyro felt something
prickle at her, something cold and dangerous; Scout sat bolt upright, both trembling with energy
and motionless; and Spy observed it all with his specific brand of dispassion.

Sniper stood. It seemed a long process, the unfolding of his limbs, the getting to his feet. It was
dark now, and the most of him Pyro could see was what the fire edged into warm color as he took a
few slow steps across the dirt to where Esau stood. He was fully head and shoulders taller than
man he looked down at. She had to strain to hear him when he spoke. “I’ve thought about you,
y’know, truckie. Lotta time to think. Things I’d do if ever I did get you on your own. You’re right
lucky you didn’t show up here by yourself.”

“Get away from me.”

Sniper leaned closer. “I got a front-row view of what that pretty little toy of yours did to him, do
you know? Way out there in the tower, through my scope, where I couldn’t do a damn thing.
Watched you snap his sternum, crush his lungs and heart. I checked, later. He was only five and a
half meters from the respawn field. Five and a half meters, and he’d still be alive.”

“I told you to get back,” Esau snarled, and shoved him.

Sniper grabbed him, even as Scout jumped to his feet and Pyro was halfway up herself. Spy did not
move. There was a flash of something in Sniper’s hand, the arrowhead, glinting in perilous beauty
mere inches from Esau’s face.

She had never seen Sniper angry, Pyro realized, as her old teammate’s gaze flashed toward them.
Not angry like this, not angry like it had been rotting him from the inside, patient like Sniper was
patient. Sniper was a professional. Sniper did not let his emotions color his decisions.

Pyro did not know who this man was.

“You’d best get going, Pyro,” he said, when he noticed she was staring at him. “I won’t squeal on
you, should TFI come knocking. But if this man’s within a hundred miles of me in the morning I’ll
kill him myself.”

The car was silent.

Spy drove. Esau sat in the passenger side, and Pyro and Scout and Shep shared the back seat. The
dog was sprawled out across the two of them, his head in Pyro’s lap, and he kept looking at her
with big, soft eyes she could barely see in the dark. They had been driving, in silence, for an hour.

“Did you do it?” Pyro said, suddenly. Her face was pressed to the cold glass of the window, eyes
fixed on the yellow paint that edged the highway. “Did you kill Spy?”

“I told you no,” Esau said.

Pyro wanted to ask if he was sure. She supposed it didn’t really matter.

“I ain’t ever seen Sniper pissed like that,” Scout said, a little later. “That—I mean, it was kinda
scary, even. Wasn’t it? Just … I didn’t even like Spy, not really, but I … I dunno. I didn’t ever want
him dead. I thought Sniper didn’t like him that much either.”

“I suppose you would have been young enough to not be paying attention,” Spy said, the first
words he had spoken since they had reached the camper. “And you, April, I imagine were busy
with your own matters. But this is why I suggested Esau stay behind. The BLU spy was the
Sniper’s lover.”
“Oh,” said Pyro.

No one said anything else for the rest of the night.

 9: Rudderless

“The next-closest member of your intrepid band,” said Spy, examining the atlas with the practiced
air of a navigator, “is Heavy.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Pyro.

“Mm. The RED medic is closer still.”

The car flew over the state line, I-80N rushing past the wooden cutout of Idaho that welcomed
them in with its painted green letters. They had stopped for gas and convenience store food and not
much else since their outset from Sniper’s camp, for it was not a question of if his threat were
empty or not. It was only a question of how far was far enough before they ceased being worth his
effort. Pyro felt her sleeplessness sitting in her eyelids, too heavy, like a hawk on a clothesline. The
sun crept upward through the hazed-over mountains, staining the purple atmosphere with fire
colors. In the reflection of the window, there on the passenger side of the car, she could see Spy’s
watch tick to 6:37.

“You figure he’s after us too?” Scout said. His animation was gone, sapped away by long hours of
driving. “Dude never came off as a psycho like our Medic did.”

“I should be quite surprised if he were,” Spy said. “I know the man well. If he can avoid further
engagement with TFI, he will do so.”

Pyro cast her eyes over Esau, in the back seat at last. He sat with his chin propped on his hand, his
jaw dark from days without a razor. Shep had fallen asleep on him, ever faithful to the man he still
believed to be his real master. She could not see his face, and was a little surprised when he spoke.
“Pyro and I were interviewed by him more than once, when we were being kept by TFI,” he said,
and Pyro nodded in assent even though no one could see her doing so. “He always seemed fine
enough. Like a real doctor.”

“He asked a lot of weird questions though,” Pyro said. “He kept wanting to know if I had any
sisters or kids, or if I knew anyone crazy before I joined the team. Crazier than me, I mean.”

“Alright, well,” Scout said. A yawn interrupted him. “If he is looking for us, probably he’s out
lookin’ for us somewhere else. If he ain’t, then probably he ain’t gonna be a problem. How far out
is Heavy?”

“North, in the panhandle. He, too, has chosen to reside in the wilderness, but my understanding is
that he has the good sense to dwell in a cabin.”

“He got any secret lovers we don’t know about?” Scout said, and Pyro could hear the frustration
tinging his voice.

“An estranged wife, in Borovsk, Russia.”

“Guess that’s okay. Probably won’t go killin’ us over it, anyway.”

“Why Idaho?” Pyro asked, and Spy told her he was not sure.

There had been some degree of hope in the car, from Colorado to Utah. Sniper’s fury had burned
that out of them, unexpected and flaring and hard to look at. Esau had been all but silent until his
comment about the RED medic ever since. Pyro wanted to talk to him; she did not know how to go
about it. And she did not want to talk to him in front of Scout and Spy, certain now that his distaste
for them would make him impossible to talk to.

She would not find the time the whole while they made for the place Spy indicated on the map,
outside a town called Hardpoint. Sleeping schedules were destroyed, insufferable personal habits
were called out. The car was a nucleus of misery. Esau continued to snub any attempts at
friendliness from anyone other than Pyro. At this rate they would kill one another before RED’s
mercenaries could get to them. The only one in the car who was the least bit content was Shep.

Miraculously, they made it. They rolled up the gravel path off the highway at around three o’ clock
the second day. Pyro was in the passenger seat this time, trying and failing to sleep. Larches and
pines dominated the landscape here, strangely free of the snow that had been present in Utah,
though the ground cover was all death-yellow. It was palpably different from the Chippewa, but it
made Pyro nervous either way. She had not really been able to look at forests the same, since
November.

The car crunched to a stop. Before them nestled a genuine log cabin, small and comfortable-
looking. At Pyro’s side, Scout killed the engine. “Alright,” he said, sagging. “So, what, we just go
knock on the door?”

“Let me do it,” Pyro said.

“What, by yourself?”

“Yeah.” She felt the eyes of the others on her, but could not shake the feeling that this was the
correct approach. “I’ll talk to him.”

No one objected. Scout shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Good luck.”

She slid out of the car, and the alpine air caressed her skin. Her ears had popped on the way up
here, and the cabin itself was on a hill: she could see the whole landscape dropping away around
her, an endless field of evergreen interrupted by scaly patches of rock or the occasional pond. The
sky was a broad milk puddle, and it had drowned the sun. A distant wild cry slipped through the
air, and she looked to see a jagged arrow of white geese with black wing-tips shooting their way
through the emptiness.

Pyro rolled her shoulders, pushed back her hair, and took herself to the door of the cabin.

She knocked twice before realizing there was a doorbell, and then she was so busy being confused
by the act of putting a doorbell on something so far away from civilization that she forgot to ring it.
She heard the slow footsteps approaching the door anyway, and stepped back.

There was no forgetting the Heavy, once you knew him. He was too large, too unique, a genius in
his own right under the faltering and broken English. There were few things that made Pyro feel
safe: fire, sometimes, and her mask, once. Heavy, once she’d gotten to know him—once he’d taken
it upon himself to listen to her, to be the first soul she had ever told her story—Heavy was the first
time being around a person made her feel safe. Pyro could not help the tentative smile that
bloomed on her face when she saw the unmistakable silhouette in the door frame. “Mikhail. Hey.”

“I do not believe this,” said the vast man in front of her, and slowly pulled the glasses from the
bridge of his Roman nose. He wore a gray sweater, cable-knit, with flannel bottoms and slippers
that made his feet look tiny. His eyes, small in his face, pored over her, and Pyro’s smile started to
slip as doubt rushed in.
Then a smile of his own burst out on Heavy’s lips, and his laugh was more like a triumphant shout
as he threw his arms wide. “It is little Pyro!” he said, and before she knew what was happening
Pyro had been grabbed and lifted bodily in the air. She thought her spine might snap with the hug.
“Come all this way to see Heavy, she has!”

“Oh my God, Heavy, I can’t breathe,” she laughed, pounding a fist on his shoulder to be put down.
He obliged, but left his huge hands on her shoulders, beaming. She returned it. “You look good,”
she said.

Heavy scoffed. “I look like lazy man who has not changed from pajamas yet. Come in, come in!
Tell me what it is Pyro is doing, this far in north.”

She followed him into the relative warmth of the cabin, made to seem warmer by the brightness of
the cedar walls. It had a high and vaulted ceiling that stood over a large open area, this lined with
bookshelves, with maps and framed newspapers written in the Cyrillic alphabet. There was a little
kitchen tucked in one corner, a sprawling desk littered in open books and scattered papers, and—of
course—Sasha the minigun, laid carefully on a chest of drawers of all different sizes. A real skin
rug (though the skin of what she was not sure) blanketed the floor before them in coarse brown fur
as Heavy dropped down onto a titanic overstuffed sofa that faced a beautiful stone fireplace. He
gestured for her to do the same, and she did. “Next time you must call Heavy first,” he said, leaning
on his knees. “Ah! I am almost out of my best drinks. We must go down the mountain, to the town,
to celebrate. I have so much I want to ask.”

“I wish I could,” Pyro said, putting her hands up. “I wish this was a regular visit. It’s not. I’m—in
trouble.”

For the second time that week she relayed what had happened, what the stakes had become. She
pointed out the window, where if one leaned far enough you could see the white Pontiac and its
occupants. “We’re trying to get help from the team,” she finished. “I don’t know how good an idea
it is anymore. We tried Sniper, he won’t help.”

“Because of Spy,” Heavy said, the first thing to leave his lips in all her explanation.

Pyro wondered if everyone but herself and Scout had known. “Yeah.”

In front of her Heavy rumbled, contemplative. “This is why Pyro comes to me, alone, in case I also
have grudge.”

“That’s about the size of it.” She exhaled, sinking back into the chair. “Will you help us?”

“I will meet this man,” Heavy said. “Engineer, I am angry with him. He is cruel to Heavy’s friend
the Pyro, he abandons his team, he kills Heavy’s teammate Spy. But this man, Esau, I do not know
him. Bring him in. I will meet him.”

The large open area felt a bit more cramped, with five people wedged inside. (Shep was not
allowed in—to Pyro’s great surprise, Heavy had been clearly uncomfortable when the dog pulled
against his leash to sniff him, and asked that he stay on the porch.) It did not escape Pyro’s notice
that Esau did not sit down, instead only leaning against the armrest of the couch nearest her seat.

But neither he nor the RED spy were Heavy’s first priority. “Scout,” he said, as he passed him on
his way to the kitchen. “My little friend. You have been practicing?”

“What?” Scout said. His eyes grew wide for a moment before cutting urgently around the room,
looking anywhere but at the rest of them. “I uh—dunno what you’re talkin’ about, big guy. Sorry.”

“Come. Is no need to be shy.”

“Later, man,” he pleaded.

Pyro would have been lying to say she was not instantly, desperately curious. But Heavy chuckled.
“Okay. ‘Man.’ Later. But, now,” he said as he pulled down a strange-looking bronze-colored
object from a cupboard, easily twice the size of her head. It was squarish and it had four legs and a
handle on each side, and what looked like a spigot sticking from the front. On top sat a sort of pipe.
“We drink tea. Is Russian tradition.”

Esau piped up. “I don’t know if—”

“We. Drink. Tea,” Heavy said, and there was simply no room for argument. Esau grimaced, but did
not object further. Heavy continued: “Pyro, come. I have delight to show you. Stay, the rest of you.
Soon we speak.”

A minute later, having followed Heavy outside, Pyro watched with interest as he set the metal
square down on its spindly legs on the ground. “I will get the water,” he said with an air of gravity.
“Pyro must find pine cones.”

“Pine cones?”

“Yes. They must be dry, and not too big. This size.” He held out his hand, measuring a space
around the size of a golf ball with his thumb and forefinger. “Five, maybe ten. Dry wood, too, the
little pieces. Go now.”

Mystified, Pyro obeyed. It wasn’t like it was hard; all around them was nothing but evergreen trees,
and it took little time to gather what had been asked of her. When she returned she found Heavy
with a bucket, pouring water into the box, which she now saw had a removable lid, and a hollow
pipe on the inside. “Good,” he said when she showed him the pine cones. “Put them in the pipe.
Then, Pyro must do what she does best.”

It took her a second. “Oh—burn them?”

“Of course.”

“What are we doing?” she asked, fishing out a book of matches she’d grabbed from the diner in
Utah. She lit two and dropped them in, and another look at the contraption answered her own
question. “Boiling water? Wait, for the tea?”

Heavy nodded, and replaced the lid over the reservoir of the box, leaving the pipe free to smoke
upward into the clear air. “This is the way we drink tea in Russia,” he said gravely. “This is the
samovar.”

“Samovar,” she repeated, trying the foreign word with a slow tongue.

“It is honored guest at the table,” Heavy continued. “We shall drink together, all of us from the
samovar. It will sing when it is ready. I will listen. Pyro will go back inside, and make sure Pyro’s
friends have not touched my things.”
Once again, Pyro obeyed. Nothing, of course, had been touched; none of them were that stupid.

Well—maybe that was going too far.

“This is foolish,” was the first thing she heard upon returning to the cabin. Esau’s voice, low, hard.
She made a point to close the door softly, listening. “He’s only an hour away. What good is your
Heavy going to be, even if he does side with us? Do you intend to shove him into that car, too?”

“Look, we ain’t even talked to him yet, an’ that ain’t even the question here.” Scout, of course.
“Your big idea? That is straight stupid, screws-for-brains, are you tryin’ to get us all killed?”

“At least my idea has an end goal. You could do with learning to think ahead.”

“What’s your idea?” Pyro said, stepping in among them.

All three of them looked at her. By now she was used to the irritation on Scout’s face; the
indignant expression on Esau’s was newer, but one she was fast adapting to. Spy alone seemed
unperturbed, only careful and evaluating. “Esau believes our current aim is a fruitless endeavor,” he
said, when the other two failed to answer. “He suggests we seek out the RED medic.”

“You don’t need to go and give me that look, too,” Esau muttered when Pyro finally processed the
information.

“No,” she said, picking her way through the debris of the suggestion. “No, I get it. You do, too,
right?”

Spy, whom she had addressed, gave a single nod. Next to him, Scout thwapped the armrest. “Okay,
what, do I not get to be in the loop here?”

“RED medic is why I changed back,” said Pyro. “In Coldfront. His technology was different from
ours, and it fixed me somehow. I mean, mostly. Esau? That’s what you want?”

Esau was pacing in his stuttering gait, stalking the room like an animal in a cage. His head was
down, focused on the whorls in the wooden floor. Pyro did her level best to keep her face
expressionless, like the wrong word would spook him. How was it, she wondered, that he seemed
more like a man in the hound’s body, and more like a hound here and now?

If she could just wait, she thought the answer she sought would come. She felt like she should be
lighter on her toes, like the crunch of a twig would scare Esau-as-animal away. If that were the
case, she would never know. The front door creaked and then slammed, an undertone to Heavy’s
thudding footsteps. “Now,” he said grandly, holding the samovar up by its handles, “we drink tea.”

Pyro did not know the last time she had drunk tea. She had a fuzzy recollection of one of the bases
running out of coffee on a particularly long mission, which led to a great deal of arguing until
someone found a box of black tea and everyone got enough of an IV drip of caffeine to fight off the
cravings and headaches.

Now she had a shabby mug with a cartoon cactus on it, a mug she recognized as having once lived
in the Hydro base. Heavy had placed a teapot on top of the samovar at some point, and the liquid
that had flowed from its spout into their mugs was deep, dark brown; he called it zavarka. He
instructed them all in the use of the brewer, to add as much or as little boiled water as they liked to
the little bit of concentrated tea in their cups. Then, with a swiftness Pyro had a hard time linking to
Heavy there had been jams and sugar and even scones laid out on the small card table he had
produced to set the samovar on. The card table, and by extension the samovar, was now inarguably
the centerpiece of the room.

Spy alone seemed like he knew what he was doing, and Pyro had little doubt he was familiar with
the art of the Russian tea ceremony. He thanked Heavy graciously, and ground his heel into
Scout’s foot until he followed suit. Esau—who still refused to sit down—grudgingly took the tea
that was offered to him. He held it like it was a vial of cyanide.

To her surprise, Heavy did not press them for the details of their trip, or ask them about TF
Industries, or follow any thread of conversation about what she thought was actually of immediate
importance. He wanted to know about what they thought about the Idaho forest, and if it would
snow again. He asked about Spy’s impressions of Boston, and to Pyro’s sort of wicked delight,
clarified his previous question to Scout: at some point Heavy had found out he could sing, and
apparently well. “You must practice this,” he said once more, adding more tea to his own glass
mug. “It is a beautiful thing, to be one who is singing. It brings us close to the soul.”

“C’mon, man, it’s nothin’, it’s just somethin’ my ma used to make me do in church.”

“You went to church?” Pyro said, using her mug to hide her grin.

“I go to church, you heathen. Yeah, laugh it up.”

“You will join the choir,” Heavy said, so matter-of-fact it was easy to forget it wasn’t his decision.
“You must practice, Scout. You sing too beautifully.”

Scout rolled his eyes, chomping down on another scone, and looked a little like maybe he was
pleased with the praise. Spy, who had worn a knowing smirk through all of this, cut in. “I would
never have guessed. I shall have to ask your mother about this.”

“Go to hell, Spy.”

“As I do not attend Mass, perhaps you will get your wish.”

This was the next hour, these small conversations, driven by Heavy. Had it been anyone else, Pyro
would have called it small talk. Heavy seemed to use it like a scalpel, and she was sure that he, like
her, noticed that not once in any of the subjects he broached did Esau give voice to his opinion.
When he at last turned his attention to Esau alone, she sat up a bit straighter, a little anxious, a little
protective.

“Esau,” he said gravely. “Introductions have missed us. You maybe know I am Heavy Weapons
guy. I am also Mikhail. Here, I do not use my family name.”

“Then it would seem we have that in common,” Esau said stiffly. He stood by the window, a dark
silhouette against the clear sky, his tea long since cold. “It’s Esau. Just Esau.”

“From where is this name?”

“What does it matter?”

Heavy shrugged, a roll of his shoulders that reminded Pyro of earthquakes. “It is idle question.
Answer, do not, is fine either way. I ask another. Do you like to read?”
This, clearly, was not the question Esau had expected to be asked. Pyro read his surprised silence,
the way his arms slackened. It was the kind of question she wished she had thought to ask him
herself. “I … yes. I do.”

“Very good!” Heavy said, clapping a hand on his knee. “Many years I have spent with books.
Always good companions. What does Esau like to read?”

“Well,” Esau started, but then the words seemed to stall in his mouth. Pyro didn’t notice, thinking
back to the winter, trying to remember what she had seen him read. Newspapers, mostly. She
seemed to remember him once borrowing a book from Miss Pauling. This was in stark contrast to
the uncannily sharp memories she had of Dell’s shelves, stuffed with high-level technological
nonfiction, historical books, even a few science fiction titles.

Esau, though, failed to answer. When she looked at him again she could see him staring down at
his untouched tea with his brow creased. “Well, you know,” he said with a kind of helplessness,
and looked back out the window. “Whatever’s around.”

Heavy asked him about hobbies. About what he thought of the Vietnam War, and if he had heard
about the D.B. Cooper hijacking. Esau said very little. He responded with a great deal of things
that were merely facts, Pyro finally identified, and few opinions.

Dark fell, finally, swift in the high mountains. The tea had been exhausted, for Pyro had been taken
with the smoky taste of it (“This is the gift of the zavarka,” Heavy said) and Spy and Heavy had
done away with the rest. “I see the way the little men’s eyelids fall,” Heavy said as the
conversation lulled, after Esau excused himself to the outhouse and did not return. “You drove
without stopping. You must rest now. Heavy Weapons guy will keep you safe.”

“God, if it means I don’t gotta sleep in a car seat I’ll do whatever you want, Heavy,” Scout said
with an enormous yawn. “I guess we can figure out what it is we’re doin’ in the morning, huh?”

“Indeed,” said Spy. “You are most gracious, Mikhail.” He said something in Russian, and Heavy
responded in kind. Pyro thought about asking for a translation, and decided it wasn’t important.
Instead, as the three men began to discuss sleeping arrangements, she slipped outside.

The sky had kept the clouds close even as the day departed, leaving the hilltop black with evening.
Pyro had to stand on the porch and wait for her eyes to adjust. Shep was gone, was the first thing
she noticed, leash and all. With Esau, the most likely scenario. She called the dog’s name in the
darkness, once, twice, and then Esau’s. There was no answer.

Inevitably, she entertained the idea that Esau had gotten killed, that another RED had caught up to
them. But Spy had been confident they were safe, at least for another day or so, and the odds were
much higher that Esau had simply walked out of earshot. They seemed equally high that he had
heard her and was choosing not to answer, which gnawed at her.

“Pyro,” said a voice behind her, and when Heavy closed the door behind her she schooled her face
into something neutral. “Esau is not here?”

“I think he went on a walk.”

“Ah,” Heavy said, looking out over the evergreens.

“Well, you’ve met him now,” Pyro said, after long ticking moments. She could not really see the
look on Heavy’s face in the dark. “What do you think?”

“I think he is missing something,” Heavy said, in a solemn sort of way. At Pyro’s perturbed silence
he went on. “I do not know what. I think, maybe, he is not a man.”

“What does that mean?”

“I am not sure. Just that there is something else that is supposed to be there, in a man, but Esau
does not have it.” He tapped his chin with one finger, gazing off into the limitless black of the
northern night. “Talking to him. It is like you hit a bell, but it does not ring.”
 10: The Devil and the Deep

The next day, Scout informed Pyro that she snored and should consider knocking that shit off.
Sleepy, greasy, and hungry, Pyro flipped him the bird as he passed her a mug of coffee. To add
insult to injury, he looked like he’d slept well on Heavy’s something-skin rug. Pyro had not slept
well. Pyro had fussed and fidgeted in bed, thinking about Esau’s sideways answers, about empty
bells. She had thought of rolling cotton fields and the scream of a hockey stadium turning to ash;
about being alive, and yet not being anyone, and what it did to you. She had not fallen asleep until
well after Esau finally returned to the house, silently taking up residence in the armchair.

But she wasn’t about to tell Scout that. She rolled her eyes as he stuck his tongue out at her, and
drank the coffee gratefully.

The morning stood bright and sharp by the cabin, and the clear mountain air made all the trees look
more real. The sky had cast off its white coat for a radiant blue. Pyro peered out the window by the
kitchen nook’s table, hopeful of seeing more geese, but there were none. “Is Heavy up?” she asked
Scout. She had passed a sleeping Esau on her way to the there, and had been surprised to find Spy
still unconscious as well. Scout shrugged.

“If he is, I ain’t seen him.” Scout was drawing something. This was another nervous habit of his,
and to her surprise he was decent at it. Scout had, on the whole, really proved to be decent at quite
a few things: cartography, running, apparently singing, and the obligatory beating-people-to-death.
She supposed that was why he had been hired in the first place, bar the singing part. Or not. She
didn’t know why BLU hired people.

She watched him doodle for a minute or two, the Pontiac they’d driven here in, by the looks of it.
She got up and found her own luggage, dragged it back to the table, and kicked it open. Dirty
clothes spilled out—she would have to ask Heavy how he washed his clothes out here—-and she
poked and prodded through them until she found the sketchbook. “Hey,” said Scout, surprised.
“You still drawing?”

“Sort of. Not really. It’s mostly blueprints.” She flipped through it, pausing on something that was
definitely not blueprints. “Alice draws.”

“Always did,” Scout said, and shrugged when Pyro looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Saw
it a lot back before Alaska, I mean. Engie would get you—her, I mean—crayons and stuff. What’s
that?”

He jabbed his pen at another page that had fallen open. Pyro’s eyes fell upon it and her lip curled.
“I have a bunch of scrap metal at home. Broken tractors, stuff like that. I was thinking about trying
to make something out of it. That’s supposed to be Shep.”

“Lemme see that. Oh so, what, like sculpting? Welding a bunch of scrap together? Hey, yeah, I see
him now, he’s got his paw up like he does sometimes.” He nodded his approval, sliding the
sketchbook back. “Cool. Hey, uh, is that what I think it is?”

This time he jabbed the pen down and at her luggage. Specifically, at the manila folder sticking out
of one corner, under a pair of her jeans. “Yeah.”

“You read it yet?”

“Bits and pieces. I found out my family’s names.” He perked up the way Shep did when she said
the word treat. “My brother was named Curtis,” she offered.

“Curtis,” Scout said, trying the name out. The vowels were shaped by his New England accent,
stretched out. “It’s a good name. I like it.”

Anything further was left unsaid as they both noticed Esau’s appearance at the table. “Good
morning,” he said, and Pyro thought he sounded perhaps a bit less stiff than before. “Sleep
alright?”

Scout shrugged; Pyro nodded automatically, uninterested in talking about it. Esau shifted his
weight, looking shorter than usual in the baggy clothes they had stopped to get for him from a
thrift store in Boise. He had evidently found a razor somewhere in the cabin, for his jaw was clean-
shaven again, and the hairs that had tried to assert themselves on his scalp were gone as well. Pyro
had forgotten what he looked like cleaned up, and it put her more at ease. “That’s good,” he said
absently. “I was hoping you’d come on a walk with me, Pyro.”

“Oh,” Pyro said. “Sure. Let me get my shoes.”

A handful of things really stuck out to Pyro about that fateful May she had stumbled haggardly into
Dell Conagher’s property. Sometimes she dreamed about them. The day she tried to light his house
on fire was the key subject, usually: feeling her palms itching so badly with the need to burn that
she thought she would scrape them off from scratching; the gnawing, clawing knowledge that there
was something wrong with Shark, her only means of defense. The ever-present feeling of being
hunted, that something was going to come down on her if she stayed still too long. The first two
were not things anyone else could understand, not really. The third was happening again, now.

The past trickled through her mind as she walked side-by-side with Esau down a worn foot path
that meandered along the eastern side of the hill. Neither of them spoke. She would not exactly call
the silence companionable, more like tongue-tied, and it stayed that way for twenty minutes.

“It’s April first today,” Esau said, after the path led them in among the trees. “What do you think
about that?”

“I think I’m tired.”

Esau laughed at that, softly, like creaking metal. “It’s your first one with your name back.”

“April Fool’s,” she said. “I’m the fool.” She had always been the fool. She was a fool even now,
watching her thoughts wrap around every minute movement Esau made, like she had for the whole
trip, tangling over him like thread. Each strand was like the lines in a spider’s web, or maybe a
tripwire: she waited for him to do things that were Dell-things, not Esau-things. It happened,
sometimes, but it happened so infrequently that it blindsided her every time, and made her look
even harder.

“You’re no fool,” Esau said.

“No, I definitely am. Did you want to talk to me about something?”

“I was rather hoping,” Esau said, “to talk to Alice. But I am aware it’s not something you can
switch to and from on command.”
Pyro was silent, her hands in her pockets, eyes on the rugged ground. “I can probably find her,” she
said, in the end, though doing seemed to put a sickly pressure somewhere in her throat. “If you give
me a bit.”

“I don’t mean to ask you to do anything you don’t want to.”

“It’s fine. She’d be happy to see you.”

“One of the three people who are,” Esau said.

Pyro did not know what to say to this. Instead she craned her head back, picking through the dense
green branches that toothed the sky. Her bird book had said certain kingbirds could be found in
Idaho, a fact she remembered by virtue of reading and rereading the kingbird entries until doing so
was more memory than anything else. But maybe the book had said they only arrived in the
summer. A flash of yellow through a gnarled old cedar seemed serendipitous, but instead of the
gray head and flycatcher’s beak of a kingbird she saw a boisterous shock of orange above coal-
colored wings, like a living match. A western tanager.

“You want to know why I’m a fool?” Pyro asked. He limped through a patch of thistle and waited
for her to tell him. “I keep waiting for you to go surprise! Dell was here all along!” Abruptly her
tongue felt too big for her mouth. She spat, but it didn’t help. “That’s why. I don’t know. I can
usually find Alice, if I look for her. God knows I had to do it enough for all those doctors at BLU. I
keep thinking you should be able to find Dell.”

He was studying the ground. “I don’t know if that is entirely fair of you.”

“It’s not,” she admitted carelessly.

They tramped on in silence.

“If he were here,” Esau said, with measured words, “what would you say to him?”

This was something that occupied Pyro’s nights more frequently than sleep, sometimes. No one
else knew this, because the fact of it made her feel more than a little stupid. Yet for all the time she
had put into thinking about it she was still not sure what the answer was. “I guess,” she said, and
kicked at an early dandelion, “I guess I’d ask him what happened to make you.”

This was not the whole shape of her sleepless thoughts, but there was enough reality to it to make it
ring true. A day ago she would have told him more, but now Heavy’s estimation of the man at her
side lingered between them.

She was not sure when she had begun to trust Heavy more than Esau.

Esau looked like he was going to ask a question. Pyro had stopped and knelt to adjust the
dandelion, which she suddenly felt bad about kicking. She smoothed its rumbled head, which only
made it more rumpled, but in a charming sort of way. Its jagged-tooth leaves were pleasant under
her rough fingers. Esau opened his mouth and there came an explosion.

They both jumped, looking behind them, where the sound had come from. A gaggle of mountain
birds shot out of the trees, screaming alarm, the tanager among them.

“That came from the house,” Esau said.

They ran.
Esau limped. More than once he snapped at her to leave him to his limping and go; more than once
she ignored him. More than once she considered picking him up and carrying him, confident that
she could. It was only the fact they had not traveled far from the cabin that stopped her.

Before anything, Pyro smelled the smoke. It was this that finally made her leave Esau at a flat run,
cursing and bolting up the slick yellow grass. Thick gray smoke met her arrival, with gasping
flames buried in it, and for a moment she stood, trying to make sense of the scene in front of her.
Something huge, something twisted, white metal blown outward and scorched black. Scout was
there, and Heavy, both of them fighting to open the flaming remains of the Pontiac.

Pyro reached them just as Heavy ripped the driver’s side door open, all but tearing it off its
weakened hinges. She heard Scout’s voice rattling beside her as he wormed his way to where the
dashboard had burst outward to pin the limp body of Spy to the driver’s seat. Blood poured from
his mouth, from his ears, from the yawning holes in his legs and hip. His clothes were aflame. With
a cry like a trapped animal Scout broke the barely-attached seat belt off, freeing Spy, and began to
haul him out. Pyro forced herself in, using her jacket to smother the flame until she wasn’t, until
Heavy had lifted the man like he was straw and rushed him to the porch. He was still alive, she
realized with a shock of relief, as she watched Spy arch in agony in Heavy’s arms.

Someone caught her sleeve. Scout. His eyes were wild, urgent. “We gotta put the damn car out!”

She turned on her heel. “Heavy! Fire extinguisher!”

“Fire extinguisher?” Scout snapped, his grip on her tightening as Heavy finished laying Spy down
and rushed into the cabin. Thank goodness. She wouldn’t have to improvise. “There’s a well right
over there—”

“No water,” Pyro said. “Not on this. The gas is already on fire, the water could spread it. Go and
help Spy.”

“But—”

“Who’s the expert?” she snarled.

Without another word, Scout darted to the porch.

Esau arrived at the same time Heavy reached her with the extinguisher. It was smaller than she
would have liked, but it would have to do. “What happened?” Esau said to Heavy breathlessly,
while Pyro began to unload the extinguisher on the flaming, ruined car. “We heard an explosion.”

“Yes,” Heavy said, grim. “This is because car exploded.”

“How?”

“I do not know for certain. But I am sure it was not accident.”

“RED demoman. Gotta be.”

No one disagreed with Scout, though not entirely because he was right that it could be no one else
but the RED demolitions expert. Spy had passed out, for example, lying flat on Heavy’s couch.
Heavy was cleaning his shotgun, studious and mechanical, and Esau watched him with tension
embedded in his frame. Pyro stared at the fire in the fireplace, and wished they’d gotten at least one
more night of peace. At her side lay Shep, dragged in without input from Heavy. Her hand was
knotted tight around his collar.

“I will find this man,” said Heavy. He had been the Heavy that Pyro remembered from that first
job at Teufort ever since the bombing: stoic, mountain-silent, terrifying. This was the first time he
had spoken since the fire had gone out. He did something to the shotgun and it banged. “He is
coward, creating trap. He comes to Heavy’s mountain and hides like child. I will find this man. I
will kill this man.”

Pyro’s eyes could not help but slide across the room to Esau when he said this. Esau did not speak.
She wondered if there was a difference to him, between a single sniper bullet to the head, and the
ugly, indiscriminate maiming of the car bomb.

Spy was stable, or as stable as he could be. He was not at any immediate risk of dying, at least.
Heavy had evidently picked up some tricks from Medic, and Scout knew basic first-aid, and of
course Pyro had the burns covered. They were second-degree burns, mostly on his legs, and if
treated properly would not really scar. Properly, though, was the key word. Heavy had a first-aid
kit, but it was not something intended to fix more than scrapes and bruises. They’d had to dig
shrapnel out of the soft parts of Spy’s body, peel melted rubber off of his skin. Pyro had been
forced to stop halfway through it, remembering Tobias.

“We have to take him to a hospital,” Scout said.

“Right,” said Pyro, her lips a thin line on her face, “so the demo can bomb the hospital.”

He wheeled around from where he was pacing by the door. “Well frickin’ what do you suggest,
then?” Up went his hands, punctuation marks. “Keep him here? Let him get sepsis too, or, or what,
sit around here until the demo bombs the house? It’s a demoman, guys, newsflash, bombs are
gonna happen either way! Ain’t like we can leave now, even, ‘cause we sure ain’t drivin’ the car!”

“Stop freaking out,” she said. “You’re not helping.”

“Hey, you know what, fuck you, April—”

“Why was Spy in the car, anyway?” Pyro said, the outburst running off her like shunted steam.
“The bomb wasn’t for him. Obviously it wasn’t for him.”

Scout let his hands drop to his sides. He sagged. “He was gonna go to town,” he said. “Get some
supplies. I guess it went off when the car turned on.”

“We could walk to town and get a doctor,” she said, fixing her gaze on the flames again. “Bring
them back here.”

Heavy finished reassembling the shotgun. Pyro heard the soft metal clacking of the bullets slipping
into it, a sound she’d heard a thousand times before. Scout growled. “Heavy, man, you can’t just
go waltzin’ out there and expect this dude to come and let you shoot him.”

In the corner of her eye, Pyro saw the predatory stare Heavy fixed upon Scout. “I do not expect
that.”
“Yeah but—”

“You underestimate Heavy,” he rumbled, low thunder across the valley, and left. The cabin door
shut with barely a click behind him.

The argument continued without him, Scout and Pyro talking circles around one another. Starts and
stops, round and round, for the better part of the next hour, while Esau looked out the window and
let them do it. Scout’s frustration and nerves thickened the air into its own atmosphere, and in turn
she poured her own into the fire. She and Scout had not fought—not really fought—since that last
struggle where she had held him down in the flames. She supposed she was not surprised he
reacted badly when she got to her feet to put another log on the fire. “Dammit, April, leave the
goddamn fire alone and look at me!”

“No.”

Anything else Scout might have said was lost under the distant crack of a shotgun.

Esau sighed, and walked out of the cabin.

The great Russian had come back, alone and intact, singing softly to himself in his native tongue.
From the porch, Pyro lifted a hand in greeting. Heavy merely jerked his chin, once, in reply. He
would not answer her questions, and there was no evidence of a fight on him. All he said was,
“Heavy takes care of his friends,” and asked if he could borrow her shovel.

She could tell Scout the problem was solved now, she thought as Heavy disappeared back into the
trees. They could probably take Spy to a hospital, if only for a quick visit, for they would have to
leave again now. Spy was the one who knew where the rest of BLU was. Hopefully he would be
able to tell them where to go when he woke up. Hopefully he would wake up.

Pyro sighed, and dug the fingers of her right hand into the palm of her left, into the white lines.
They would have to get a new car. That was fine, they could buy one of those, or she had a
suspicion that Scout probably knew how to hot-wire one if it came to that. They would have to find
out if Heavy was coming, and get a big enough car to fit him, if he was.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Scout coming out onto the porch, where he slung himself down to
sit on the steps and looked at the decimated car like he wanted to murder it. “It’s done,” she told
him.

“Heavy?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. Esau’ll love that.” Scout knocked his hands against the wooden steps. “Like he needs any
more reasons to get all holier-than-thou on us.”

She was spared from having to respond to this when Esau appeared, walking slowly in from
around the right side of the house. If he noticed them he did not indicate it. Instead he circled the
Pontiac’s charred remains with his hands in his pockets. He did this twice, slower the second time,
and then redirected himself toward the porch.
He stopped a few feet from them, looking up at their faces. His face was perfectly neutral when he
said, “We are taking Giordano to see the RED medic.”

Pyro’s eyebrows shot up. Scout actually jumped upright. “The hell we are.”

“The medic is in Spokane. That’s just over an hour away.” He said each word with perfect
enunciation, bitten-off and emotionless. “As you said, it is likely he is not one of the ones hunting
us. He has the ability, technology, and knowledge to help Giordano, and they were once on the
same team. We may even be able to get some information out of him. If he will not help, Spokane
at least has better medical facilities than Hardpoint.” His apathetic tone did not change when he
added, “Or you two can simply put the thumbscrews to him.”

It was hard to argue with logic like that.

 11: Any Port in a Storm

Their new car was, in fact, two new cars. One was a stubby brown Toyota, with a boxy shape that
put Pyro in the mind of military jeeps. The other was a Ford Bronco in powder blue, just as boxy
and a good deal more tired-looking. The Bronco they had bought from its owner, who seemed
happy to not ask any questions. The Toyota was just Scout proving that he did, in fact, know how
to hot-wire. He felt a little bad about stealing it, though, so they left a paper sack with several
thousand dollars inside for the owner. There was talk of trying to buy a gun; given that Hardpoint
consisted primarily of a hardware store and a grocery store, and both of them sold guns, this was
accomplished in short order. Scout—who had been sent in alone, because Pyro was already
drawing looks, and Heavy’s accent and broken English marked him firmly as Not From Around
Here, and Esau would have nothing to do with it—Scout returned after twenty minutes with a pistol
for himself and a shotgun for Pyro. She was not altogether certain why he had picked the shotgun
for her, except that she had used one on BLU sometimes, but a weapon was a weapon.

Esau would not touch the only-technically-stolen car, and so that left him and Pyro to drive the
Bronco. As Pyro could not read the atlas, she drove, and Esau directed her. This was how they
found themselves on the road to Spokane at two in the afternoon, with Heavy, Scout, and Spy
behind them. The Bronco had a camper shell over its bed, one of the small ones that made it look
like it wasn’t actually a pickup truck, and Shep had been happy to hop into it along with their few
things. This left Esau and Pyro seated in close proximity with no buffer between them, and she
wasn’t sure if she liked it, this time.

“So,” she said, after about ten minutes of the highway humming along under them. “RED medic.”

Esau grunted.

“I kind of,” Pyro said, and stopped. The air in the cab felt dangerous, smoggy. She started again
anyway. “I would have thought he would be the last person you’d be interested in seeing.”

“Because he brought you back,” Esau said, finishing her thought. “It isn’t suicide, if that’s your
concern.”

A little of the tension that had taken up residence in Pyro’s nerves eased out of her. “Well,” she
said, “Good.”

“Take this exit.”

She did. “You keep saying Dell isn’t there. That there isn’t anything to bring back. Did you—did
they try it on you at BLU? The medigun that fixed me? I talked to RED medic a lot there, but I
never saw it.”

“They did not,” said Esau.

“Do you want to bring him back now?” Pyro asked. “I thought you didn’t … like him.”

“I don’t think it matters,” Esau said, and did not clarify what he meant.

Before them, Idaho’s clear sky gave way to gray clouds, less friendly than those from yesterday.
Washington state felt closed-off to her, as if it had seen them coming and was trying to pretend it
was not home in the hopes they would go away. It got no more welcoming over the next forty-five
minutes, as the squat skyline of Spokane rose up in front of them and the traffic thickened.
“Alright,” she ground out, tired again, always tired, “Where’s the medic?”
It occurred to both of them at the same time that the RED medic’s exact location had never been
established, and so they had to get the attention of the Toyota and pull over. Spy was stretched out
in the back seat, and by Scout’s account had been deathly silent for most of the trip. “I mean, don’t
think he’s gonna keel over on our way there at least,” he said under his breath to her as Esau and
Heavy looked at the map. “I dunno. Not used to seein’ the guy messed up like this, I guess.”

Pyro made a sympathetic noise, and wondered when she had become the kind of person who made
sympathetic noises. “We’re almost there.”

The RED medic lived in a very fine house in a very fine part of town, past an open iron gate
painted steel blue. From what Pyro could glean, he apparently worked in a hospital somewhere in
the city, and seemed to have simply settled down. This sounded very unlikely to her, but then, she
was basing her assumptions entirely off of the BLU medic, their Medic. Their Medic was probably
as certifiable as she was, but got away with it because he was not a scar-faced brown woman, and
because he was mildly more subtle about his unhingedness. Also, the fact that the RED medic was
employed suggested he still had his medical license, which the BLU medic absolutely did not. She
knew this because the entire team knew this, because Medic thought it was extremely funny to
remind them of it.

“How come there’s peacocks in the front yard?” she asked Esau as the extravagant birds scattered
into the even more extravagant landscaping when the Bronco rolled up the drive. He shrugged.
Pyro watched the peacocks disappear behind lush, tropical-looking bushes she could not name, but
very much looked like they should not be surviving in Washington. It occurred to her that she—and
Scout, and Heavy and Spy and all the rest—had the means to live like this, with a driveway that
wound through painstakingly arranged trees and topiary sculptures, up to an enormous house with a
five-car garage and peacocks strutting around it for no apparent reason. It had just never occurred
to her that anyone on either team would.

In front of her, the Toyota’s engine died, and she made the Bronco follow suit. Heavy and Scout
emerged onto the drive as she cracked a window for Shep, blinking in the pale light. “This is
ridiculous,” Scout said, and he was not talking about the property.

“Whatever,” Pyro said, too tired to argue further about the relative risks of approaching a member
of RED. “How are we doing this? Just walk up and bang on the door? Do we even know he’s
home?”

“Banging on the door is how we find out,” Scout said, and without further preamble stalked up the
front walk.

He was tight and wound, and when the flash of blue and black and scars in the corner of her vision
said, “I think he’s worried about Spy,” Pyro supposed she was not surprised to find Alice had
decided to join them. Pyro did not, of course, answer. Talking to her before had been a mistake.
Talking to her in front of the mercs would be a bigger one.

Scout’s method of banging on the door was very literal: he slammed his fist on it insistently, like
the door-to-door salesmen that kept mysteriously showing up on Pyro’s property, and then he
jammed his thumb against the doorbell enough times to annoy even her. She could hear the faint
string of chimes from the cars. “Fun drive?” she asked Heavy, who cracked his neck to one side
and sighed. “How’s Spy doing?”
“Poor,” he said. “Breathing, but poor. The medics, I think having them has made us soft. Not used
to pain, anymore. Not pain like this.”

The banging resumed. “Hey, Oktoberfest, open the hell up! We got a patient!”

There was a part of Pyro that had been relatively sure that the door would not open, or it would
open and the RED medic would have a gun in his hands, or it would open and Miss Pauling, far
more dangerous than anyone else on the RED team, would be behind it. When the door did, in fact,
open and no immediate blood was spilled, it was a surprise. When it opened to show a young
woman, really just a teenager, peering birdlike through the screen door, it was a shock. “Can I help
you?” she said. Even Scout was speechless for a few seconds.

“Yeah, uh,” he said, fumbling. “Yeah, yeah, uh, we’re lookin’ for—um—”

“Dr. Henri Kitzis,” Esau supplied.

Scout threw him an utterly disbelieving look, but to his credit, recovered remarkably. “Yeah, right,
Kitzis, Dr. Kitzis. We, we got someone real hurt in the car.”

The girl’s face was pretty even when she was frowning. From where Pyro stood she could see most
of her through the screen door: she was wearing a charcoal pencil skirt and a mint-green sweater,
and her long brown hair swooped back into a bun at her neck. Her nose leapt out from the rest of
her face, like it was trying to get the world before the world could get it. “There’s an emergency
room if you go down the road. How hurt do you mean?” She pushed her way out past Scout, and
paused for a moment to take stock of the rest of them: Heavy’s bulk, Pyro’s scars, the piercing way
Esau watched her. Unbothered by any of it, she strode to the Toyota and peered into the window.
“Oh my God. What happened to him? Why are you here? Go to a hospital!”

“Miss, we’re quite sorry to bother you,” Esau said, and to Pyro’s surprise she thought she heard an
echo of the old Southern drawl in his voice. “But this man is a former coworker of Dr. Kitzis. Most
of us are, in a manner of speaking. We were hoping to keep a degree of discretion, which a hospital
does not lend itself to.”

The girl blew out her breath, and pressed two fingers to the side of her nose, still looking down at
Spy’s mangled form. “Could we at least speak to him?” Esau added.

“All right,” the girl said, finally. “I think he’s asleep, but I’ll go and get him. You had better not be
lying.”

Esau smiled at her, the first smile Pyro could remember seeing from him since Colorado. “Thank
you, miss … ?”

“Char,” she said, and marched back into the house.

Dr. Henri Kitzis’s house was just as unnecessary as his yard. The foyer (for of course it had a
foyer) lounged out in front of them, unbothered by their presence, like a great cat. It was done up in
lion-golds that gleamed in the wide windows and a muted checkerboard tile underfoot. There was,
in fact, a chandelier. After Char had allowed them inside and told them in no uncertain terms to
wait there, Scout declared he hated it the moment she was out of earshot. “Rich people crap,” he
muttered, leaning against an abstract statue that Pyro thought was meant to suggest a dolphin. “All
flaunting how fancy they are, noses all in the air, like their shit don’t stink.”

“Scout, we’re all rich people,” Pyro said.

“There’s having money and then there’s bein’ rich.”

There was probably something to that, but Pyro did not follow the line of thought. Instead she
looked at Heavy when he said, ponderously, “I did not know RED doctor had little girl.”

“We settling on that?” Scout said, huffing. “That’s his kid? Not, like, a trophy wife or a mail-order
bride or something?”

“I know respect is not in your vocabulary, Scout,” Esau said, “so shut up.”

The raw look of genuine hurt that came over Scout’s face was so unexpected that Pyro almost said
something. But then it was gone, and she did not dare.

Heavy continued, “I also did not know RED doctor was Jewish.” He said it conversationally, a
simple observation. When the entire group looked at him questioningly, he leaned out of the front
door, gesturing to a small wooden box affixed to the right door frame. Pyro had not seen it going in,
for it was up high and compared to the rest of the house’s opulence, unassuming. It was not,
however, plain, for now as she leaned past Heavy to look she could see the intricate carving etched
into its three sides, describing ornate knot-work and beautiful patterns. She liked it better than the
rest of the house. “The mezuzah,” Heavy said. “My advisor, in college, was Jewish. She put it at
the door. It is an important thing to them, I think.”

“What is it?” Pyro asked, but then there were steps echoing through the golden foyer: one set brisk,
the other slow.

Char trotted toward them. Char seemed a person who did not know how to move leisurely, and she
looked the four of them over with the disdain that could only be mustered by a teenage girl. “Here
they are, dad,” she said. And then, confused: “Dad?”

For the RED medic had stopped at the bottom step, leaning heavily on the railing. His hair was
smudged from sleep, and his clothing was not what Pyro expected given the mansion, plain things,
cotton things. A pair of oversized thin-rimmed glasses perched on his face. He very much looked
like he did not belong here in this house. Moreover, he was staring straight at them with a tight,
empty expression. “Char,” he began, each syllable as sharp and delicate as glass, “Gehe in den
Schutzraum.”

“What?” Char said, already looking over her shoulder at him. “The—the panic room, why? Dad
—”

“Now, Charlotte!” he bayed. Char was frozen for an instant, and her eyes darted from her father to
the BLUs at the door. Her footsteps clattered off the yellow walls as she darted back up the stairs.

It could be said that the RED medic relaxed in the same way it could be said that spitting on a fire
put it out. His breath seemed to tremble in his long nose; Pyro suddenly saw the resemblance.
“Four of you,” he said at last, still leaning on the railing. “So many for one old man. Please. I will
do whatever it is you wish if you swear to not hurt Charlotte.”

The stillness in the foyer was absolute, not even disturbed by Dr. Henri Kitzis’s fearful breathing.
It took Scout and his usual blunt trauma approach to shatter it. “What the hell are you talkin’
about, man?” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Look, we got the RED spy in the car
and he’s maybe dyin’. Can you fix him or not?”
It took a bit more coaxing than that to put Kitzis (as Pyro had begun to think of him, for it was just
easier that way in her head) at ease. Heavy had to actually bring Spy in from the car for him to
even come down off the last step of the stairs. “What caused this?” he demanded, even as he
hurried them through the house and into an endlessly long dining room that looked like it had
never been used.

“Your demo,” Scout snapped back. “Car bomb.”

“Good heavens. Yes. That would do it. Put him there, sir, is he conscious? Giordano?” Kitzis
leaned over the ornate white dining table that Heavy had placed Spy onto. He prodded one of the
few places where Spy did not have an outright injury. “Awaken. Medic is here now.”

“So you are,” Spy said, his voice thick and gurgling. “Splendid. Do me a favor and kill me.”

“Not this time, old friend. I would ask you where it hurts, but I suspect that the answer is
‘everywhere.’”

Spy grunted, exhausted from his lone answer. Kitzis sighed, moving his examination further down.
“This should have been much worse,” he murmured, peeling up the BLUs’ hasty bandages.
“Demoman does not leave survivors. Something in the detonation must have failed, or the car
protected him. Or God. You were very lucky.”

“Can you fix him or not?” Scout said again, and this time it was Heavy who elbowed him. An
elbow from Heavy was roughly equivalent to a punch from Pyro, or at the very least a good shove,
and Scout nearly fell on his ass. “Quit it! Look, Kittens, whatever your name is, just pop out your
damn medic gun and heal him!”

“Yes, yes,” Kitzis said, distant. “I must fetch it. I will be a few minutes. Try not to let him pass
out.”

He hurried away, reminding Pyro of nothing so much as a mouse. “I like him,” said her voice, but
she had not said it. Everyone’s eyes fixed on her, and Pyro supposed she was unsurprised when
Alice shook herself and stretched and said, “Hi, Esau. Hi everyone. Will Spy be okay now?”
 12: Lifeboat

After Kitzis had decided they weren’t going to hurt him and after he had used the big medigun on
Spy, he had gone and found Char and brought her back. Char had been very mad, but in a way that
reminded Alice of the way Shep got mad at strangers: protective and worried. “Who the hell are
you?” Char had demanded as soon as she returned and as soon as her father was out of earshot.
“Start talking.”

“Don’t say that in front of Scout,” Alice heard April say wryly, though she did not see April. No
one looked at her, so April must have just said it to her. So Alice said it, to let April have a say.
Now everyone did look at her, and Esau coughed into his elbow but it was actually a laugh.

“Shut up, tin can,” Scout said. He did not say it the way Esau had told him to shut up earlier. That
maybe was because Spy was now sitting upright on the big table, after letting Kitzis’s white gloves
poke at him. Kitzis had gone to put the medigun back.

Char stomped one foot and it made a really big noise. She was wearing heavy black boots, which
she hadn’t been before, and they looked like the kinds of boots Dell had used to call tooth-kickers.
“Okay, fine,” she said, pointing at Alice. “You talk, then.”

Alice blinked. Automatically, she looked to Esau, who nodded. “Oh,” she said. “Umm. We’re the
BLU team. Your dad was on the RED team and we used to fight a lot. I guess that’s why he was
scared. But we don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Nothing scares my dad,” Char said. “RED team? Fight? What does that mean? My father is a
doctor.”

Alice shrugged. “He was pretty scared.”

“They are from the Job,” said Kitzis as he reappeared around the corner, putting a hand on Char’s
shoulder. Alice could hear the capital J in the word, the same way sometimes there was a capital F
in Fire when April thought about it. “It is fine now, my dear.”

“Oh,” said Char, still glaring at the five of them, like this did not make it fine at all.

Kitzis slipped past her, returning to where Spy was testing his limbs after the medibeam had fixed
them, and started asking him a lot of questions. Alice watched until Esau touched her forearm,
gesturing her away from the table. “I’m glad to see you,” he said, smiling. “I wasn’t expecting
you.”

“Hi, Esau. I just wanted to say I liked Kitzis. I’m glad to see you too.”

“Good. That’s good,” and Esau gave a little huff, like he was relieved about something. “This has
worked out pretty well so far. Can you stay around for a while?”

“I’m always here.”

“Do you know what I mean, though?”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I don’t think Pyro will mind. Or, well, not too much.”

From the table, Spy was saying, “Your fussing is appreciated but unnecessary, Medic,” and Alice
turned to look. “I am groggy, nothing more sinister.”
“Henri,” Kitzis corrected him, quietly. “Henri while we are here, please. I should still like to keep
you overnight for observation. My trials in using the medigun on injuries that have been open for
longer than a few minutes have been limited. There may be side effects.”

“I am fine,” Spy said, batting his hands away. “Get me off of this table, man.”

Kitzis obliged, with Heavy’s help, both of them offering Spy their arms to let him descend from the
table. It was a good thing, too, because his legs gave out from under him as soon as he put weight
on them. Heavy caught him like he was a kitten, and after a few seconds he was able to stand on
his own again. “Much better,” Spy said, and sighed as he examined his clothing. The wounds had
been so extensive that they had been forced to strip him to tend them, back at the cabin, and given
the resulting mess he had been redressed in some of Scout’s clothing, to spare his own from the
weeping injuries. This meant he was in baggy basketball shorts and a thin white tee, both of them
stained with blood. “I have never felt so ugly,” he declared. “Tell me you remembered to bring my
clothing.”

Scout departed to fetch it, and under Kitzis’s instruction, Alice helped Spy walk in a few circles.
“Thank you,” he said, and then under his breath, “I suppose Esau got his way in the end, hm?”
Alice did not know what to say to this. She just looked at him until he made a sound in his throat
and left the topic alone.

Scout returned with the clothes; Char was sent with Spy to show him somewhere he could change
in privacy. This left only the BLUs and the lone RED once again, and he looked terribly small and
nervous. He was not like Medic at all, Alice decided. “I, too, got the memo that we were to be on
the hunt for you,” Kitzis finally said, well after Char was out of earshot. “I did not imagine I would
actually encounter you. Especially given that I had made a point not to look for you.”

“We were hoping you might be willing to aid us,” Esau said, stepping forward. “Further, that is.
We already owe you for Giordano.”

Kitzis made a dismissive gesture. “He is an old, old friend. I am glad to help him.”

“We’re still grateful,” said Esau. “That said, we’re actively being hunted by your teammates. If
there’s any information you would be willing to share …”

He stopped there to let the question linger. Sighing, Kitzis adjusted his glasses. “I see,” he said.
“The mere fact you are here … I had hoped Charlotte would never meet anyone involved with our
work. But, what’s done is done, and dinner is soon. Come, I hate this dining room. We shall eat,
and then talk.”

The Kitzis mansion was beautiful every step of the way, but Alice thought the room Kitzis
eventually led them to was the best one. It felt more real, more lived-in. Once it looked like it had
probably been a sitting room, and the biggest pieces of furniture there suggested so: a broad-
shouldered couch made of leather, a severe and stiff mahogany coffee table. Both were now
covered in ragged and beautiful detritus that suggested someone actually worked and breathed and
existed in this room. There was a forgotten pink sock on the coffee table. A colorful blanket slid
halfway off the couch, and the sheer curtains were drawn back to let the late-afternoon sun eyeball
the crowded additions to the room: a tiny old desk, a bookshelf that no one had told it was meant to
be holding books and instead held tchotchkes and framed photographs and empty plates. There
stood, in one corner, a huge iron bird cage. In the bird cage was a badly taxidermied parrot, and it
was wearing a badly-made sombrero. Alice wanted to pet it.

Despite the crampedness of the room, there was space enough for all of them, even Heavy, who
dominated the broad-shouldered couch. Char hopped into a seat that looked more like a saucer
than a chair, pulling off her tooth-kicker boots and curling her legs under her, while Kitzis more
reservedly took up residence in an armchair that managed to look older than he was. Despite the
fact that he was across the room from Char’s saucer, Alice could not help but see the two of them
as satellites: caught in one another’s gravity, gladly swinging around together in a chaotic harmony.

The rest of them found seats where they could. Alice sat on the floor, because it was a nice sort of
floor with a fuzzy shag carpet. Spy stood, an unlit cigarette between his fingers and pacing
whenever he remembered to do so, and Scout threw himself down on a bean bag chair with a
satisfying thud. Esau sat down next to Heavy.

“I suppose introductions are in order,” Kitzis said as everyone adjusted themselves to their liking.
“Though you do all know me, I suppose. You have me at a disadvantage.”

“Dad, oh my God,” said Char. “Hi. I’m Charlotte. Don’t call me Charlotte. Dad’s Henri.”

“Jeremiah,” said Scout, and at his cue everyone else sounded off like dominoes: Mikhail,
Giordano, Esau. Char looked pointedly at Alice.

What do I say? Alice wondered, and heard April answer, “Just tell her your name.”

“I’m Alice,” said Alice, and then, “Sometimes I’m not, because April is here instead. We’re both
called Pyro.”

Char squinted at her. Kitzis said, “You are—”

“Let me finish,” Alice said, picking at the shag carpet. “You’ll know when April’s here. We talk
different. She can explain it better.”

Char got that look on her face that Alice knew meant she wanted to ask a question. But all she said
was, “Sure.”

“Was that good?” Alice said softly, so only April could hear.

Yeah. Good enough.

Alice smiled and looked down at her hands.

Kitzis employed a chef, and the chef was evidently used to both Kitzis and Char eating in the
sitting room. Dinner arrived in the form of simple spaghetti, fresh pasta marinating in a rich, meaty
sauce, with garlic bread and newly-grated cheese. Spy said some words
like bolognese and confit and Kitzis answered with I suppose and old favorite. Kitzis was not like
his house.

After the dinner, coffee appeared, and this was another thing that seemed to be a regular happening
in the Kitzis household. Scout dumped sugar into hers and passed it to her, and asked her how ya
doin’ and Alice said pretty good. She knew he was mostly asking about April, but that was okay.
April seemed okay, and she seemed to appreciate being asked after.

It was halfway through the coffee that Kitzis cleared his throat. “Char,” he said, not looking at her,
“do you have homework?”
“I’m not leaving,” Char said. “And yes.”

“Honey.”

“I want to know what’s going on.” She surveyed the mercenaries over her coffee. “I’m not an
infant.”

“You are not,” Kitzis agreed. “And you are not involved in this conversation.”

“Dad!”

The mousy Kitzis seemed to fizzle away, to recede under the flinty expression Alice remembered
from hunting down the RED medic time and again, to break a front line, to disrupt a foothold. To
kill him, she knew now. It was the grim look of a man who knew what was coming. “Please, go
outside. I will not ask a second time.”

Father and daughter stared one another down. Alice watched and tried to look like she was not, but
it was too interesting. They seemed to have an entire conversation in the span of a few seconds, a
language of eyebrows and nostril flaring and unspoken things.

Char got to her feet, grabbed her empty spaghetti plate and full coffee cup, and stalked out of the
room.

The moment she was gone, Kitzis sagged, like he had survived a great battle. “She is a forceful
young woman,” he said, removing his glasses. “I don’t know what’s to be done about her.”

From where he sat on the couch, Esau leaned toward Alice. “Maybe you could go with her,” he
said as she looked up at him. “Keep her occupied?”

Kitzis’s mouth slanted. “I do not know if that is …”

“Alice is safe,” Esau said calmly, and Alice did not miss the look that passed between Heavy and
Scout. “You’ve interviewed her; you know that. If nothing else, she can make sure Char won’t
eavesdrop. Besides, I’m sure Shep would like to get out of the truck.”

“Do you like dogs?” Alice asked Char, and she shrugged.

“I don’t dislike them.”

Alice hummed at this, looking at where Shep was gleefully barking at a peacock that had parked
itself in a tree. “I like dogs.”

As it turned out, the back half of the Kitzis property was even larger than the front. There was a
vast and beautiful veranda, looking out over an artfully sculpted garden, full of young trees and
towering flowers. In the distance there were what looked like a small barn and a paddock, and in
the paddock was a horse. A gazebo set upon faded old brick overlooked a lush koi pond nearby.

From where she could do nothing about it whatsoever, Pyro watched Shep start to dig in the yard.
Alice did not stop him, but neither did Char, so it must have been alright. It was possible she could
have gotten Alice to do something about it, which was a new development. Talking to her still felt
dangerous. But it seemed like a logical next step in whatever it was they had together. It was
probably even a good thing, not to be cut off entirely when Alice took the reins.

“Esau used to be a dog,” Alice said aloud. Pyro wanted to slap her palm to her forehead.

Char was in her field of view, though with her back to her, looking out over the grandiose yard.
“You say a lot of weird things.”

“They’re true things,” said Alice.

“If you say so.”

“He wasn’t a dog like Shep, though. He was a robot dog.”

This time Char looked back at her with an expression like shards of glass. “A robot. Your friend
used to be a robot dog.”

Somewhere over her, Pyro felt Alice try to find an answer that would satisfy Char. “I guess our job
was weird.”

Char stormed out of the veranda. Alice lingered where she stood, trying to figure out what to do.
Esau had told her to stick with Char, though, and so she darted after. “I like your house,” she said as
she caught up, having to trot to keep up with the teenager.

Char was making for the gazebo, focused on it like there was nothing else in the world. As they
passed Shep joined them, tail high and wagging at the prospect of exploring somewhere new. Char
stomped through a bed of hairgrass and unbloomed lupine, smacked a standing wind chime made
up of delicate metal scrolls, and crashed through the resulting song to rise up the gazebo’s wooden
steps with the music. Here she turned to Alice and declared, “It isn’t our house. It is a house, and
we live in it.”

“Huh?”

“It’s just a lot of garbage and fancy stuff nobody needs. I don’t know why dad bought it. It’s not
like there’s anyone in Spokane to impress.” Char dropped down onto one of the benches built into
the gazebo. “We used to live in New Hampshire,” she said, like this was a very important fact
about her.

Alice hummed at this. At the bottom of the gazebo’s steps, she ran her hand down the wood of the
railing and Pyro felt how smooth and new the silver-blue paint on it was. “I used to live in Boston.”

“Hmph. You could have visited.”

“I didn’t know,” Alice said, heartbreakingly earnest. Alice was always earnest. “I would have if I’d
known.”

“Did you get those scars from the job?”

“What job?”

Char flapped her hands impatiently. “The job. My dad’s job.”

“Oh,” said Alice, “no. I got them when someone tried to kill me. That was before I got the job.”
She paused to consider, ignorant of Char’s flabbergasted stare. “That was before there were two of
us.”

“What does that mean?”

Here again Alice hesitated, and Pyro got the distinct impression it was because she did not want to
speak on Pyro’s behalf. Somewhere, she thought she appreciated this. “There used to just be April,”
Alice said eventually, “and then some things happened and now I’m here too.”

The groan Char delivered at this was impressive in both volume and duration. “That
doesn’t explain anything. Wait, so, if April was first, does that make you her split personality?”

“No,” said Alice, puzzled. “I’m just me.”

“Is one of you evil or something?”

Pyro wanted to laugh at this. “April thinks that’s funny,” Alice said. “No, though. At least I don’t
think so.”

“Okay,” said Char, “then can I meet April?”

“Probably,” said Alice. “Not right now. Right now I’m here and I don’t know when April will be
here. I don’t know how to give it back.”

Char seemed to have run out of the energy for questions, and sat morosely watching Shep examine
the koi pond. Alice joined him, kneeling at the side of the water. It was small enough and still
enough that it did not bother Pyro, though she would not have slipped her fingers into the water to
let the swarming, calico-colored fish mouth them. “I’m sorry you don’t like your house,” Alice
said.

“I like it enough,” Char said, mostly lost in the dark that now drew close. “I guess. He bought it
because he wants me to be happy.”

“That’s good,” Alice said. “He sounds like a good dad.”

“He really is.”

“I don’t have any parents. April’s are dead.”

Sure, she may as well throw that out there. It seemed sort of ill-advised to say to a child, but it
wasn’t like Pyro cared if anyone knew. “Really?” Char asked, leaning far enough into the light that
Pyro could see her eyes glittering.

“Yeah. They drowned.”

“Is being an orphan hard?”

There was silence as Alice puzzled through this. Pyro could feel her pawing for the information,
big and clumsy, like a bear in a dumpster. “I think that’s an April question.”

“Oh,” Char said, unhappily. “That’s too bad, then. I have a couple of April questions.”

“About being an orphan?

“Yes.”

“Why?” asked Alice.

“Dad’s dying.”
 13: Trim Sails

When Alice returned, well after dark and with a silent Char that slipped away to her bedroom, Pyro
had hoped it would be to good news. That Kitzis was reasonable, and that not pinning him to the
wall and forcing him to help them was the right choice. She did not particularly want to do that.
Kitzis seemed nice, but chiefly she would have felt very bad for Char.

She would not, however, find out the results of the meeting that night. An exhaustion took over the
part of her that was not Alice, dragging her down into something that was not sleep. The fatigue of
her brain being two people at once, perhaps. Pyro slipped back behind the looking-glass just as
Alice stepped back into the sitting room.

When she awoke, it was sudden and all at once, and for a moment she panicked, because all the
light had changed and she could smell something burning. There was a clatter, and just as Pyro
realized the burning smell was toast, she also realized that Alice had just knocked over a glass of
orange juice. In a small mercy, the glass was almost entirely empty. It must be breakfast in the
Kitzis home; somewhere, though an open window, a bird was singing. Goldfinch, Pyro thought.

“Sorry,” Alice said.

“It is fine,” said a voice that was tired, but not because of Alice. Kitzis sat at her side, and in a
discovery that immediately made Pyro bristle, was holding her left arm with one hand, and his
other was examining the left side of her neck. His square fingers carefully made their way over the
scar that spilled down from her face with clinical and probing motions. “These are,” he said with a
quiet awe, “among the worst scars I’ve ever seen. I have been curious about them ever since I first
saw them. Were you unable to get treatment?”

Pyro could not remember the last time anyone other than herself had touched her scars, and she
hated it.

“I was homeless,” Alice said. “I mean, April was. So nobody found her until a while after. Sepsis,”
she added, a word that felt too big for Alice’s simple vocabulary. “She was in the hospital for
months.”

“Incredible,” Kitzis murmured. “She must have had quite the will to live.”

Sometimes I think that’s all I have, thought Pyro.

“You had better stop,” came Alice’s voice again. “I don’t mind, but April woke up and she wants
to punch you.”

Kitzis withdrew as if he had been rapped on the knuckles with a ruler. It mollified Pyro, but only
just. “Thank you for letting me examine them,” he said, very proper, at the same time Scout
appeared in the room. To Kitzis Alice made a vague noise of dismissal, and waved at Scout, who
grunted. He wrenched open the enormous fridge in what Pyro was finding to be a kitchen that
trended closer to just “nice,” as opposed to “heedlessly decadent.” Kitzis sighed. “Will your
companions be arriving soon?”

“What? Yeah, sure,” said Scout.

“I will take my leave, then. Please let me know when you have come to an accord.”

Kitzis faded somewhere into his house, and in short order Scout threw himself down at the round
white table Alice sat at. He had ashy smudges under his eyes. “I hope you and me are on the same
page about this,” he said to Alice, ripping off the top of a yogurt tub. “There’s gotta be other
ways.”

Pyro realized she had not been around for the first part of this conversation. “I don’t know,” said
Alice. “I don’t like it.”

“If one dude has it figured out we can find more ways to fix it,” Scout said in a manner that
suggested he thought his words might be made of tissue paper. To divert attention from this, he
savagely stabbed his spoon into the yogurt.

Esau and Heavy filed into the room just a few minutes later. There was a general silence, tempered
with the soft sounds of people preparing food and drink. Of all of them, only Esau looked truly
awake. He had been in high spirits ever since arriving here, Pyro thought as they settled around the
table.

“Very well,” Esau said first, setting his coffee down. He was clean-shaven and bright-eyed, in a
way that made everyone else at the table look woefully unprepared. “Giordano said he wouldn’t be
joining us either way, so we’ll have to come to an agreement on our own. I believe he deserves to
sleep in as it is, after yesterday. Given that there’s four of us, hopefully there won’t be an even split
of opinions.”

Alice was about to say something when Heavy interrupted, gently. “Baby Pyro will be voting?”

Esau’s pleasant expression flickered. “Her name is Alice. And yes, she will be voting. She has
every right to vote.”

“Is this good idea?”

Scout said, “Heavy, man, drop it. She’s fine,” and Heavy leaned back in his seat.

Embarrassment spread through Pyro under Heavy’s doubtful gaze. Alice seemed unbothered.
“Five,” she said. The whole table looked at her. “There’s five. Four plus one. April is here too.”

Whatever opening argument Esau had planned slid inelegantly off the table. “She’s here?”

Alice nodded. “Hold on, wait,” said Scout, squinting at her. “What’s that mean?”

Pyro felt Alice stop, reaching for the explanation. Pyro supplied it.

“She says she can hear and see everything I do. I can hear her when she says things, mostly.”

“Well that ain’t creepy,” Scout muttered.

Esau looked perturbed. “I see,” he said at last. “This is new, isn’t it?”

Alice nodded. “Things are changing again. With us.”

For reasons Alice probably could not grasp, an uneasy quiet struck the table. It only lasted until
Esau remembered to speak. “Alright, then. Does Pyro know what we’re talking about?”

“No.”

“If I address her, will she hear me?”

“I think so?”
He nodded. “Pyro. We talked with Kitzis, and he’s agreed to grant me use of his medigun, in
exchange for something. He’d like us to procure one of Dell’s life-extending machines for him. So
what we’re voting on is going back to the bunker in the Chippewa Forest. Gray Mann had one of
those machines, and given he died there, it seems like the most likely place we’ll be able to acquire
one.”

There was a silence, and Pyro wished everyone would stop looking at her. At them. She struggled
for questions against the quiet pressure of Alice’s listening. There were too many to pass along.
“She says okay,” Alice relayed, for it was as much as Pyro could offer up right now.

“Is that a vote?” asked Esau.

“No,” said Alice. “But I don’t want to go.”

“Yeah, cuz you ain’t stupid,” Scout said, and Pyro felt Alice’s rush of satisfaction at this statement.
“Look, there’s gotta be other ways that do not, y’know, involve us going to Minnesota to let a big
friggin’ monster take a chomp out of us.”

“TFI surveyed the entire place after the fire,” Esau said smoothly. “There was no sign of that—
thing.”

Thing. That was about as good a description as any, Pyro thought, her mind muzzy just
remembering the creature she and Scout and Esau had come to refer to as the devil. Elephant-sized,
eel-faced, with pale pink humanoid hands and glowing red eyes, the devil had chased them through
the forest; had ripped the arm off of the RED scout with its jaws. It had followed them
underground, through the mines, and driven her and Scout across the reservoir, only to vanish like
a nightmare.

“Whatever it is it may have moved on,” Esau continued. “And anyway: forewarned is forearmed.”

“Yeah,” said Scout, “and Clarence don’t got an arm no more.”

Esau ignored him.

“I don’t want to go back,” Alice insisted. “I don’t like that thing. I don’t want it to hurt anyone
else.”

Esau’s clever eyes landed on her. “And what does Pyro think?”

Pyro felt Alice’s mouth slant, but she was listening. “She … wants to know if doing this will really
bring Dell back.”

“Well,” Esau said, “in theory.”

Pyro felt something surge in her. Dell, back. Dell, alive. It was like something had struck her in the
stomach, like each day she had gone not truly acknowledging that he was supposed to be dead had
unleashed its power on her all at once. There was no other option, then.

We have to go.

“No, we don’t,” said Alice, sharply.

We have to.

“No, we don’t!”
It came to Pyro that Alice had said both of these aloud, and that she was not looking at any of the
others but at a spot just to her left, at where another Pyro was standing with her arms crossed. This
new marvel phased her only a moment. If it gets Dell back, we do it, she thought, and the
apparition of herself said to Alice’s grit teeth, “If it gets Dell back, we do it.”

Alice curled her nails into her palms and Pyro felt the sting. “You don’t get to decide everything.”

At the table, Scout whispered, “Is she—is she havin’ an argument with herself?”

“Neither do you,” the hallucinatory Pyro said. “That’s why we’re voting. You’re scared, fine, I
understand. I don’t like it either. But it’s Dell.”

“I believe she is,” said Esau.

Alice drew back into the chair, heedless of the stares of the men. She was quiet under the
imperious stare of the hallucination, frightening and untouchable, and Pyro suddenly wondered if
that was how Alice saw her.

Alice said to her, sullenly: “This is about Tobias, isn’t it?”

“What?” said Scout.

Pyro did not hear him. At the very name something in her had stuttered. “Don’t be stupid,” she
snapped. “We’re talking about Dell.”

“You couldn’t save Tobias,” Alice said, like the saying of it was a weapon, and in that moment
Pyro was not sure which of them was Alice and which of them was April, which of them had the
reins of this warped body, which of them had found the thought and said it aloud. “So you have to
save Dell.”

The silence in the kitchen was interrupted only by the sweet song of a goldfinch through the
window.

Alice blinked, and the other Pyro was gone. Within, Pyro felt like something had stabbed her.
Alice drew a long, haggard breath and turned in her seat, looking at her lap.

“April votes that we go.”

It was a short talk after that. Esau wanted to go; Scout did not, though he said it very quietly and
distantly after the Pyros’ outburst. Thus it fell on Heavy to break the tie.

Heavy had remained silent throughout all of this, watching. Pyro had forgotten he was there. She
was reminded when he shifted in his seat, making the little chair wail its protests. “What do you
think, then, Mikhail?” said Esau.

“I think,” said Heavy, “that it is poor to vote, and do only what the winners like. I think we are
team, and this is not what a team does. I would like everyone, all of us, to be happy with decision.
But this decision is not for Heavy alone.” He cracked his neck, peering down at Alice as if he were
trying to see Pyro inside of her. “So, Heavy will vote. I vote that we go.”

Alice’s expression seemed to get ensnared in the words. It was stuck, caught, struggling, heedless
of Pyro’s refrain of thank you, Heavy, thank you, thank you underneath. In the end she cast her
eyes down at the table.

Scout flicked a fork and said nothing. Esau straightened, visibly pleased.

Dell, Pyro thought, I’ll bring you back.

There was a lot to do before they left for Minnesota. The drive was well over twenty hours, and
that was assuming they did not stop to sleep again. They had to get road food and Esau wanted
clothing that actually fit, and Scout said the Toyota had made some weird noises on the way up and
he didn’t want it to break down on the side of the road, so they had to find a mechanic. Between
the planning and the actual doing of things, plus the sheer act of navigating the Kitzis home, it was
almost lunch time when someone realized Spy was still not up. “Wouldja go get him, Alice?”
Scout asked her, stuffing things Char handed him from the fridge into a new blue cooler. “Lazy
ass.”

Alice had been doing very little. No one had really given her a job. Mostly she had been outside
with Shep, ignoring April. April had, surprising both of them, but April most of all, tried to make
her feel better. Heavy would be along this time, she reminded Alice, and they would have weapons,
and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise if the devil appeared. April was surprised of how afraid of
the devil Alice was. This was because Alice tried very hard to not think about it, and had been
doing a marvelous job up until today.

Alice did not want to listen to April.

“Alice?” Scout said, because Alice had just stared at him from where she was perched on the
counter with a soda in her hands.

“Oh,” Alice said, and went.

The men had been split across two rooms, and Alice and Shep had been given their own. The trail
back up to those rooms was winding and slithered, but Alice found it. The door that Spy and Scout
had occupied was closed, and she knocked. “Spy?”

No answer. Alice knocked again, and opened the door.

It was a nice room, of course. Everything in the Kitzis home was unbelievably nice, so nice that
neither of its occupants seemed to know what to do about it. “Spy, it’s time to get up,” Alice said
when she spotted him on the mattress, the blanket slowly rising and falling with his breath. When
this did not work either, she went and shook his shoulder. He did not rouse. This was annoying.
“Spy!”

No answer. None when she pinched him, flicked his ear, not even when she experimentally pressed
his nostrils closed. The breath simply fluttered through his mouth in shallow tides.

It occurred to Alice that this might be very bad.

“I told him there could be side effects,” Kitzis said sadly, in his small voice.

It had taken Kitzis four minutes to officially declare Spy had fallen into a coma, all told, after Alice
had run downstairs to tell the others he would not wake up. “I do not have the instruments here to
evaluate him,” he said to the four BLUs and Char, all of them crowded into the room where Spy
had been sleeping and now did something that looked like sleeping but wasn’t. “I will have to
acquire them.”

“That’s real convenient timing, huh?” Scout snarled. “I ain’t buyin’ your act, Dr. Tenderheart, we
show up here with RED after our asses lookin’ for help and the next day Spy’s in a coma? How do
we even know you didn’t put him in it yourself?”

Kitzis made a defeated sound. “I fully understand your paranoia. I can only ask you to trust me.”
He stepped away from Spy’s limp body, fussing with the stethoscope he pulled from his neck.
“Please, believe me when I say that our bargain is far more important to me than anything TFI
would be willing to offer.”

A derisive sound leached out from between Scout’s teeth, but he did not object.

“Are we leaving him here?” Alice wondered.

“No,” said Scout, at the same time that Esau said, “We’ll have to.”

Scout whirled on him, and for a second Alice felt a flash of the old fear that April once held for
him. There was nothing in his eyes. Esau regarded him from beneath a tired look and a raised
eyebrow. “You,” Scout started, and then seemed to get stuck.

“Do you really think he would be better off with us in the forest than here with a doctor?” Esau
said.

“Oh, like you got any idea—”

“Do you guys always argue like this?” said Char, and every eye in the room trained on her. Arms
folded over her chest, she shrugged. “So much for team spirit.”

“He wasn’t ever on a team,” Scout said, jerking a thumb at Esau.

Esau had put his right hand to his jaw, rubbing prosthetic knuckles against the fresh shave.
“Jeremiah. You’re a grown man. You can do whatever you like. I believe it would be in the best
interests of everyone for you to come along, because you are absolutely the best choice for getting
us where we need to be as fast as we need to be there. But if you feel like you need to watch out for
Giordano, then I can’t stop you.”

“No,” said Heavy. “Spy must be fixed, but we cannot wait, and team must not be separated further.
Scout must come.”

“I don’t need you tellin’ me what to do, fat man.”

Heavy rumbled dangerously, like the wind-up roar of his minigun. Alice smelled a fight, and she
did not want her friends to fight. Especially not when she was already fighting with Pyro. “No
name calling!” she said snappishly, waving her hands. “Spy will be okay here by himself, so we
should go. I want to go already so we can be done and come back.” She looked away, arms
crossed, and tried to ignore the adamant pressure somewhere behind her. It did not work until she
said it. “And April wants Dell back. So let’s just go.”

The three men looked her way; Scout was aflame. Heavy reminded her of the silence after a heavy
snowfall. And Esau watched her in a way she did not understand, because it was like the way Dell
used to watch people from behind his goggles, so you could see nothing of his eyes.
 14: At Loggerheads

It was a long drive. It was especially a long drive when the part of you that controlled your body
was doing her absolute damnedest to pretend she couldn’t hear you. This was almost more
aggravating than not being able to communicate at all. Before this new witchery Pyro had been
able to turn her brain off and absorb what was happening, secure in the knowledge there was
nothing she could do about it.

And it was an even longer drive when the person driving the car was frightened of the part of you
that controlled your body.

Alice could not drive, and Scout had discovered he got carsick if he was not driving in the most
recent leg of their journey. If Heavy and Scout were left alone together for too long there was likely
to be blood. It was in this way that Pyro found herself riding shotgun in the Toyota with none other
than Heavy.

If the brief trip back to his cabin home was anything to go by, this was going to be an unpleasant
road trip, and so far Alice was showing no signs of receding. Sometimes Pyro could tell when she
was waning, and to be fair, a long and boring road trip seemed like ideal conditions. Alice tended
to tuck herself away when nothing much was happening. She could only hope that, literally, Alice
would get bored and leave.

Besides, Pyro wanted a cigarette.

At the cabin, Heavy did a quick sweep of the area (no signs of further RED activity, which was a
good sign that they had not been followed to Spokane), tossed half his wardrobe into a cardboard
box, and as an afterthought, grabbed what looked like a collection of cassette tapes from a drawer.
The car did not have a cassette player, so he grabbed that, too: an ugly black box with plastic teeth
on one end, like a toy piano. “What is it?” said Alice as they set off after the blue Bronco.

Heavy eyed her from the driver’s seat as she picked the player up. Pyro could practically hear the
words on his tongue: don’t touch that, or at the very least be careful with that. This was the usual
refrain when Alice began investigating someone’s things, on the team. But instead he said, “It is a
music player. This will be a very long drive, and I do not like American radio.”

“How come?”

“Too repetitive. Talk shows are boring. Also, radio music seems always to be about love. Love is
very good, but it is all Americans sing about. There is more to life.”

Pyro wondered if Alice knew what repetitive meant, and then wondered if she herself had ever
noticed that most of the songs on the radio were about love. “What are these, then?” said Alice.

“Ah, these,” said Heavy, plucking a plastic rectangle from the haphazard collection of them resting
in the back seat, where Shep regarded them as a distinct threat to his ability to sprawl anywhere he
liked. “These are Russian composers. Prokofiev. Tchaikovsky, Balakirev! These are music, little
Alice. I will show you.”

Thus it was that the first three hours of their drive to Minnesota was given over to the throaty
voices and powerful swells of Russian classical music. It was loud, even through the tiny speaker
of the cassette player, and only made louder by Heavy’s enthusiastic humming or outright singing
along, unabashed by an audience. Heavy sang on the field once in a while, this Pyro knew; it was
impossible to ignore his booming voice over the howl of his gun when he was on a roll. But this
was something else again.

She was glad to find she very much enjoyed it.

Even Alice seemed to be interested. She went through the collection of little plastic boxes,
snapping them open to get at the liner notes inside and look at them. The majority of them were, of
course, in Russian. But—because they were predictable, Alice and April both—their eyes were
snagged immediately when one of the buried cassette boxes was discovered to have a great burst of
flame printed on the front, and over it, a painting of a woman in elaborate red makeup. There letters
Pyro recognized vaguely as English on the front, but she could not piece them together today.

“Russia’s Greatest Ballet,” said Alice as she scanned the letters, and pronounced “ballet” the way
it looked.

What! Since when can you read!

Pyro wanted to shake her.

Heavy took a little longer to realize it. “You can read this?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You have learned to read again?”

Alice considered this. “I guess so. I can read. April can’t. Can we listen to this one?”

Any further questions Heavy had about Alice’s sudden literacy vanished the face of her interest.
“Yes, yes! This is Stravinsky. This is the ballet—ah. Heavy should have known little Pyros would
find The Firebird.”

Still stuck on the fact that Alice could read and she could not, it took Pyro a bit longer to realize
Alice had popped out the tape of someone whose name was a Swiss army knife of sharp Cyrillic
characters and replaced it with Stravinsky’s. She pressed play. The car was filled with the low
sway of horns and strings, ominous, prickling.

“This is the beginning,” Heavy was saying. “On stage, you would see him, Ivan the hunter,
trespassing in the land of Koschei, the Deathless. It is a garden in Buyan, I think, the disappearing
island.”

As the music played Heavy transcribed it for them, translated it from sounds to story. He had seen
the ballet performed in a place that to Pyro sounded like a sneeze, with his three sisters. He told
them about how it was an amalgam of folk tales, a kind of ode to myth. “Ivan catches the Firebird,
and she gives him one of her magic feathers so he will set her free. Under Koschei’s spell there are
thirteen princesses, captives …”

The noble hero, of course, fell in love with a princess; the immortal magician, of course, took
umbrage, summoning monsters to destroy Ivan. The Firebird, summoned, set the wicked creatures
to dancing, and then to sleep, and from there showed Ivan the egg (Alice: “Why an egg?” Heavy:
“This is the story. Shh.”) that held Koschei’s soul and rendered him the title of Deathless.

It was an impossibility for Pyro not to think of their own quest, and the irony did not escape her:
seeking immortality, guarded by a monster, in a vanishing island.

Now that they were going, the reality of the situation had begun to get its teeth in her. She did not
regret her vote—with the irresistible promise of Dell’s life at hand, she would have walked there by
herself—but, too, she could not fully wash out the memory of a single flaming eye in the dark.

“Alice,” she said, and dimly became aware that she heard her own voice as if it had come from
behind her body, which meant she had not really said it. Around her, Alice seemed to grow armor
plating, closing herself, protecting. “Alice. It’ll be okay.”

Alice said nothing.

Over the nothing, the cassette player made an unpleasant grinding noise, and the music abruptly
stopped. Heavy said something in Russian that sounded like a swear word, and hurriedly instructed
Alice to stop the tape. She did, and she was suited to the fiddly, careful work of disentangling the
tape from the inner workings as Heavy instructed her.

Pyro said: “Do you want … can you let me take over? Can you step back? I can handle this, I’m
the one who wants this. You don’t have to do it.”

Nothing.

The drive had been fun for the first day. Then a tire had blown on the Bronco, and they had been
near a town anyway, and Scout looked thoroughly likely to strangle Esau if he had to ride with him
much further. They got a motel, and set off again early.

It was still Alice and Heavy, which Alice was okay with, because she liked Heavy. She did not
think Heavy liked her very much, but maybe she was wrong about that, because Heavy seemed to
be okay in the car with the tapes and the Russian music and the singing very loudly. Maybe it was
because she didn’t have a gun. Well, she had a gun, but it was in the very back of the car with
Heavy’s shotgun. Technically it was April’s gun. Possession got a little blurry, with how the Pyros
worked. But Alice could have shot it too.

“It’s probably because you don’t have a flamethrower,” April supplied from the back seat, and
Alice ignored her. “Heavy’s not scared of guns. I think fire bothers him.”

Alice was not talking to April. Moreover, she was beginning to understand why April did not talk
to her. It was not very nice, to have someone you could not walk away from offering you their
opinion over your shoulder.

Rather quicker than she would have thought, with the amount of tapes Heavy brought, they ran out
of new music. This did not bother Heavy, because he simply put in one they had already listened
to, and Alice had not listened closely enough to be able to tell. Once in a while they would stop to
stretch and find a restroom, but mostly to let Shep find his own restroom. Heavy would frown at
the dog as he did dog things. Alice would do Alice things, like walk in circles around the truck and
play with a lighter and hope that Spy was okay, and would not talk to April. She was just as good
at not talking as April was, as it turned out.

“If you’d let me take over you wouldn’t have to be here for this,” April said again on the fourth
and final day of driving. Really, very little had happened in the way of talking after the first day.
Alice and Heavy had wandered off into their own thoughts and once in a while they would talk
about a weird thing they drove by or something. Once Heavy had asked her if April could still hear
him, and Alice had gotten very straight-mouthed and shrugged and looked out the window. Behind
her, next to Shep and buried in the cassette tapes, and very aware of exactly what Heavy had asked,
April had made a frustrated snort. “Alice,” she said again now, “look, what do you want me to
say?”

But Alice hadn’t said anything, and the next time she looked in the back seat April was gone.

Alice did not know how to give control back to April, anyway.

The Chippewa National Forest came upon them gradually. Montana’s Ponderosa pines had given
way to North Dakota’s ash and elm trees, and from there the white-barked aspens began to
infiltrate as they crossed into Minnesota. They reminded Alice of sparklers, or maybe dandelion
clocks: a long narrow trunk that abruptly exploded into a spray of branches and budding leaves at
the end. The yellow she remembered from the fall was gone. These were spring trees, with lizard-
green on their minds. And then the aspens were only trees among more trees, different trees, for
through a circuitous route of back roads and private property (“Trespassing,” April had said wryly
when she’d realized) they had broken into the forest.

According to Scout, they were giving their original path as wide a berth as possible, heading further
around the south edge. This was both to hopefully avoid the territory of the devil, as well as the
mining town of Kewaunee, which could very well be populated again by now. The best means of
getting into the bunker would be the teleporter that had gotten them out of it. “If the place still ain’t
full of water, I mean,” he said when they had hidden the cars out of sight, smacking his map with
the back of his hand. It was raining, which did not bother Alice, though she felt April’s unhappy
prickling in the back of her mind. “I know Engie’s teleporters, they could spit you out into water
but couldn’t figure out you were there if the entrances were underwater. So we don’t wanna
teleport in there and find out it’s all underwater and then not be able to get back out.”

“I don’t want anyone else to drown,” Alice said immediately.

“I imagine the water will still be there,” Esau said. He was wearing a hunter-orange jacket that
Alice thought looked very silly on him. “The bunker was built inside the reservoir specifically to
make it difficult return to once the failsafe was blown.”

“TFI did not go there after?” questioned Heavy.

“Spy said no,” Scout said. “Same reason, I think, the water.”

Their Russian made a contemplative sound. “We must succeed where large and rich company has
failed.”

“Yeah, it’ll be fine. We got smart guy over here.” Scout jabbed a finger at Esau. “He’ll figure it
out.”

It was true that Esau had retained much of Dell’s titanic intelligence, and it was also true that he
had not been consulted regarding the investigation that April had vaguely heard about while under
lock and key. All of this was true. He still furrowed his brow as Scout said it. “Yes,” he said, and
nothing more.

Do you get a weird feeling about Esau, too? came April’s voice. She was nowhere to be seen.
“No,” Alice hissed under her breath.

Scout noticed. “What?”

“Nothing.”
This was all.

The walk began, and it was a fine day for it even with the rain. It was warm for the month of April,
and though mud clung to the ground it was not too thick to pass through. By Scout’s estimation,
based off his own recollection and information he’d gleaned during their months-long stretch at
BLU, the hike there from the road would take about two hours. At some point in the trip there
Esau had acquired a cane for his limp, and it seemed to help his speed. Heavy carried their supplies
like they weighed nothing.

It was only about thirty minutes in that the foliage thinned out all around them, like it was afraid of
something. Alice recognized it at once for what it was: the aftermath of a fire.

“I thought,” said Esau as they passed through scorched trunks that thronged with bright new
growth, crushing young and healthy grass underfoot, “that it would be much worse.”

“There was a fire here, yes?” Heavy asked, pausing to examine where the bark had split on one tree
from the heat. It reached for him with pale green fingers. “A very big one?”

“I started it,” Alice volunteered. “Well, April started it.”

Wow, thanks.

“By accident, I mean,” Alice corrected. “There were robots.”

“Robots and a monster,” Scout muttered.

In truth Alice was surprised as well at the forest’s renewal in the face of the inferno, though part of
her thought maybe that was April, because April had most of the facts and specifics about fire. It
had not been a controlled burn. There had been nothing controlled about the fire at all. She
supposed firefighters must have arrived at some point to deal with it, because otherwise the entire
forest would have been decimated. She felt April’s shock of unease at the revelation, and another
tide of it thinking about whether or not any of them had died.

Alice did not particularly see why she was bothered. “I don’t like firefighters,” she said under her
breath as they carried on.

“That doesn’t mean they should die,” April countered. She was walking parallel with Alice,
several yards away, but she did not need to raise her voice to be heard. “I was raised by a
firefighter.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t care, do you?” April said, but there was more of a dawning realization in her voice than
any accusation. “I didn’t used to care and I always wondered what changed. Like on the bus. With
Tobias, even, when it happened. Everyone I must have killed before I met Dell. But now I care and
you don’t.”

Alice turned this remark over and felt like Shep with a cat toy. She did not know what she was
supposed to do with it. She shrugged. “I’d care if I knew them,” she said.
April asked, “What are we?”

But then Scout jumped on a wet log and immediately fell off of it again, and April was gone.
 15: Davy Jones' Locker

In her head, Pyro had dubbed the tragic little building that existed outside of the bunker’s external
teleporter as simply “Dell’s cabin,” because she did not know what else to call it. It was a cabin,
after all, that was inarguable. It was fairly clear that Dell had been living there, at some point,
though by the state of decay of the food in the cabin at the time, he had not done so for a while.

There was also the matter of the human hand Scout had found in the icebox, which Pyro had later
learned was, in fact, the hand of one Gray Mann.

Pyro did not know Gray Mann, except as the name of the person who had gathered an army of
robots and unleashed them on TFI. She had not been privileged with the information of exactly
why this was. She did know that the person who had funded the Builders’ League United was
called Blutarch Mann, and that the head of operations for RED was a Redmond Mann, and
presumably they were all related, due to them all being Manns and them all having the same stupid
color-coordinated names. She also knew Gray Mann was—according to Pauling—the decaying
and one-handed corpse that Alice had found in the bunker.

One more thing: Pyro knew it was Gray Mann who had convinced Dell to leave BLU, and
presumably to design and build the robots.

Pyro was very pleased that Gray Mann was dead.

Dell’s cabin was in no better condition for having been ransacked by TFI, and then being left
untended for the winter. The roof sagged. The door barely hung on by its hinges, and wild plants,
for the fire had never come this far, suffocated the foundations. The huge satellite dish she had
forgotten about was now a grimy bowl of dead leaves, and, thank goodness, the huge teleporter
pad was still there too, intact, if filthy. All of this was to be expected.

What was not expected was the large, hand-painted wooden sign stuck in the underbrush outside
the door that read:

NO ROBOTS!

And:

UNLESS YOU ARE A ROBOT THAT IS BRINGING ME CIGARS!

And:

IN WHICH CASE I WILL HAVE CIGARS, AND YOU WILL BE DEAD!

Everyone read the sign, except Pyro.

Alice relayed it to Pyro, who swore.

“You have gotta be kidding me,” said Scout.

“DEATH FROM ABOVE!”

Out of all of the targets standing by the cabin, it was Heavy who was suddenly cloaked in shadow,
and Heavy who received two boots directly to the middle of his back. Even his bulk was no match
for two hundred pounds of falling man.
Pyro heard a long-suffering sort of sigh from Esau, and a disbelieving laugh from Scout. Shep
barked. Alice barely heard them, she was so excited. “Soldier!”

Heavy may not have been a match for the BLU Soldier plummeting from the sky, but neither was
Soldier—one Mr. Jane Doe—a match for Alice dragging him off of Heavy and hugging him. “Let
go of me, you filthy tin can!” he bellowed, his omnipresent dented helmet low over his eyes. He
had, at some point, stuffed some dead grass into the straps. The rest of him was dressed as if he had
never left the BLU team: a periwinkle blue military coat, brown cargo pants, and meticulously
laced black boots. “I will not suffer robot impersonators on my property! You don’t even smell like
oil! You are a terrible impersonation!”

“That’s on account’a we ain’t robots, Soldj’,” Scout said dryly, loping over and smacking a hand
on Soldier’s shoulder with an incredulous grin. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I should crush your tiny head inside the helmet,” grumbled Heavy as Esau helped him to his feet.
“What Scout says. Why is Soldier here?”

Soldier, still locked in Alice’s bear hug, reached around and pushed his helmet up from his eyes.
He squinted at the three men, and then grabbed Alice by the shoulders and held her at arm’s
length. He had grown an enormous beard, and there were multiple things that did not belong inside
a beard stuck in it. Pyro could see, among other miscellanea, a matchbook, a dandelion, an
unbelievably small pencil, and what was possibly a live bee. Then she thought the beard was
parting to reveal some new horror, but it was just Soldier’s enormous smile. “Why didn’t you
ladies say it was you?” he demanded, shaking Alice bodily. “My God! Reinforcements at last!”

The next few minutes were a busy mess of Soldier stomping around the neglected cabin, ignoring
the group’s questions and swiping at things with a shovel he produced from his belt. The things
being swiped at included bushes, his own sign, a shockingly fearless chipmunk, and Esau. “Do not
think for an instant I will not cram this shovel so deep up your ass you will be mistaken for a
popsicle, Benedict Arnold,” he said, leaning far enough into Esau’s face he might have toppled.
“This platoon does not tolerate turncoats! One wrong move—”

“Leave him alone, Soldier,” Alice protested, grabbing Soldier by the arm. Esau brushed himself
off, scowling. “What are you doing here?”

It appeared to finally dawn on Soldier that he was being spoken to. “Glad you asked, son,” he said
smartly, the glowering expression he had given Esau morphing into a sly smile. “I am performing
reconnaissance!”

Scout snorted. “Reconnaissance for what?”

“That is top secret information!”

Heavy grabbed Soldier by the collar in much the same way one would grab a kitten by the scruff.
“We do not have time for this. We are here to get into secret robot bunker and steal from it. Do you
know how to do this?”

“What, that place?” Soldier said, fruitlessly trying to pry Heavy’s fingers from himself. “Sure. The
teleporter works fine.”

“How do you know that?” said Esau, still scowling.

“I have been living there!”

As one, Alice and the rest looked at the rundown house and its rundown sign. Soldier followed
their gaze and scoffed. “That place is a dump! Also, a bear lives there now.”

“A bear,” echoed Heavy.

“Yes! She is a terrible neighbor, but she pays the rent on time and she can sing ‘What’s New
Pussycat’ like you wouldn’t believe.” He finally got the last of Heavy’s fingers off of his coat.
Squaring his shoulders, he jabbed a finger toward the teleporter pad. “Come on, men! To the base!
I left the stove on!”

If the current state of the bunker was Soldier’s estimation of somewhere livable, Pyro was very
afraid to see the cabin, which he had called a dump.

The teleporter had worked, which was alarming enough. Pyro had been fairly sure it wouldn’t
actually be possible to get back into the bunker. The more alarming thing, it turned out, was the
bunker itself. Pyro had been most-of-the-way gone during that excursion the first time, and
remembered only flashes of it. Water pouring through the portholes, the discovery of Dell in the
chair, the rancid smell of a dead body left to rot. But she did not think it had been stuffed to the
metaphorical gills with … this.

This being every rocket launcher Soldier had ever owned, every shotgun, every scrap of American
flag. The air carried both the bloody reek of unchecked rust and the musty scent of unwashed
socks. Unbelievably, he had acquired a collection of pizza boxes in the middle of the forest. Metal
things she recognized as bits of robots could be found hanging from shelves or mounted on the
walls, like trophies. Every door in the place, Pyro saw as Alice and the rest walked through the
water-damaged halls, was thrown open and full of either garbage or memorabilia, and the two were
possibly interchangeable. Among them, now and then, she could see something that looked out of
place among the detritus: a machine, a tool, a somehow-surviving blueprint. “How the hell did you
get all the water out?” Scout said, equal parts awed and disbelieving.

“The bear helped,” Soldier said carelessly, and kicked open a door.

The “living there” part of Soldier’s prior statement made slightly more sense in the light of this
room. It was one Pyro had not seen before, and looked as if it might once have been a war room.
Now it was simply a large open space with a ragged cot and a camping stove, which was, in fact,
turned on. Naturally, Alice wandered toward it and crouched down to watch the tiny licks of blue
flame that ate at the warped copper bottom of a pot of water that was debating the virtues of
boiling.

“Sit down, boys,” Soldier said in a jovial fashion, pointing at an array of cardboard boxes arranged
to resemble a couch. No one sat, except Alice, who dropped from crouch to crossed legs, leaning
on her knees with her chin in her hands. “Stealing from robots, eh? I like it! What are we stealing?”

“You seen a body around here?” Scout said, from where he was poking around a nook in the wall
whose sticks and dried grasses and a single white egg suggested it was home to a live chicken. The
chicken—Clarisse, Pyro remembered with sudden amusement, the hen Soldier had mysteriously
acquired in Alaska—was nowhere to be seen. “Or I guess maybe it wouldn’t be on the body. Does
anybody know what this thing looks like?”

“A parasite,” Esau said, and everyone, except Alice, looked at him. He pretended not to notice.
“It’s a unit that attaches between the shoulder blades and extends down the spine. I imagine that it
will have gore on it.”

No one asked him how he knew this, and he did not explain.

“I guess we should start looking, then,” said Pyro, and everyone looked at her. For a moment she
thought she must have missed out on something Alice had said, but then she noticed that her idle
impulse to turn down the stove had resulted in her hand dialing the propane supply down to zero.

“Welcome back,” Esau said.

No one got a straight answer out of Soldier about why he was here, or how he had gotten here, or
how on earth he had emptied an entire reservoir out of the bunker. When pressed, he seemed to
heavily imply that sentient bread was involved, and no one wanted to interpret this.

There were not a great many rooms in the bunker, but Soldier had somehow managed to stuff most
of them with trash. It resembled a hoarder’s house more than the eerie head of operations it had
once been. It was this trash that the other three were going through, and the room had not been
large enough to permit the addition of Pyro. For her part, she was going through the halls.
Remarkably, all the lights still worked. She knew Alice remembered these halls, and to her they
were merely impressions: brown blood smeared on the metal walls, unmoving robots on the
ground. The horrific smell of a body that had been dead for some time. “Do you know where to
look?” she asked herself softly.

Alice was still not speaking to her, but Pyro could still get an idea of her thoughts, if she pushed
deep enough: a latent anxiety she wasn’t used to finding in Alice, and a jumble of recollections.
And—

Pyro supposed she had known Alice was looking for something that was not the immortality
machine; Alice was unconcerned with immortality. Alice was concerned with the boxy black-and-
blue shape that filled the doorway of what had once been the bunker’s server room. The shape was
all angles and rust, now, its four-foot height diminished from one unnaturally angled leg buckling
under it. Pyro touched its serrated back and found it cold.

“Mechanical hound,” she said.

The metal dog did not hear her. It did not sleep, nor did it live. It was a relic, a corpse. Esau’s old
body remained here, frozen, still looking out over the control center where Dell, or Esau, had sat,
still unaware that it had been looking at its own soul.

“That’s where Esau’s supposed to be,” Alice said softly.

Alice sat in the control center, in the exact reclined pose they had found Dell in. Pyro let the sight
wash over her and discarded any meaning from it: memories and hallucinations muddling, mixing.
“Esau was never in there.”

“But it’s where he’s supposed to be,” Alice insisted. Her heart was not in it.

Even so, it struck Pyro that she preferred the Esau in the robot to the Esau in Dell.
“The body was in there,” Alice said, and pointed to a door that hung open in the wall.

Struggling past the empty machine, Pyro followed Alice’s finger. The closet, for it was a closet,
held more of Soldier’s garbage, but considerably less. Remnants of dissolved paper clung to tape
stuck to the ruined walls. The standing workbench was discolored and warped with water damage.
There was another door, a smaller door, a broom closet, and in the broom closet was almost a body.

It was still a body, Pyro supposed; it was just that it did not look like one. It looked like something
from one of her nightmares, a parody of the human form. The skin was all but sloughed. It was
bloated with water. Pyro had a strong stomach. Pyro only looked at it for a few seconds before
closing the door again.

Alice was gone when she stepped out of the closet, but she had traded her presence for Esau’s.
Esau examining Esau, Pyro thought wryly, watching Dell’s body—human and real and alive—run
its hands over the metal dog from where he stood in the hall.

“Do you remember the change?” Pyro called to him.

Esau startled. He drew his hands away, like he had been caught at something, but his eyes did not
leave the inert machine. “No,” he said. “I recall you beginning to disconnect Conagher’s body, and
then being outside, in it.”

Pyro joined him, now on the opposite side of the chassis. The body separated them, and she put her
hands around the metal cage of the dog’s face, the exoskeleton that protected the indicator lights
and its hidden microphones and secret cameras. Experimentally, she pulled. She was thoroughly
shocked when something in the machine thunked dangerously, and then the whole head gave way.
It was enormously heavy, and she nearly dropped it. “Oh wow,” she said, carefully lowering the
head assembly to the ground. “Esau, come look at this.”

The dog opened to her, revealing chrome ribs, nitrile lungs, rusting organs. She peered inside as
Esau squeezed through, finding a lighter and illuminating the shadowed cavity. She wanted to ask
if Dell built this, and something told her not to.

Esau looked. He studied it with a certain air of disbelief, the way Pyro studied her body when she
was not the one controlling it.

“That,” said Esau, gesturing at something inside of the chassis, “is a black box.” The thing he was
indicating was very clearly bright orange. Pyro pointed this out, and Esau shook his head. “No, like
in an airplane. It’s a voice recorder.”

“I was going to take a break for a few minutes anyway,” Esau had said to Pyro, after Heavy and
Soldier wrenched the black box out of its chassis, where it was secured through a combination of
rusted screws and sheer stubbornness. “Just to get some fresh air. Come with me?”

She did. The teleporter hummed its familiar hum as they rematerialized in the forest, where the
light had begun to change. It had become a cool day, a gray day, and there were no shadows
anywhere. The brightest thing in the forest was the orange box in Esau’s hands, and he held it like
it was an artifact. Shep had been immediately interested in it, as well as the chassis itself. This
amused Pyro. German shepherd and mechanical hound. Like with like.
Shep did not, however, enjoy the teleporter. He scampered off of it the instant they returned, off to
scout out new territory. Pyro checked her shotgun, just on the off chance there really was a bear in
the cabin. “Can we take a look at that?” she asked once satisfied, nodding to the box.

“I figured that we would,” Esau said as he produced a bedraggled wrench from a pocket. It was
clearly from the bunker, as bits of rust flaked off in his hand as he did. “Do you know, I didn’t
realize my chassis had one of these.”

“What do you think is on it?”

“My logs, I would presume.”

As they talked they had followed after Shep, drifting over to the forgotten satellite and dropping
down in a patch of the least-muddy grass. Pyro considered this as Esau took an experimental twist
at a bolt. “Logs about what? You said it was a voice recorder?”

“I was always logging data.” The wrench made a terrific screeching sound as it fought with the
bolt. “Weather patterns, tracking movements, self-diagnostic, that sort of thing. I thought it was all
filed electronically, but maybe it was verbalized somewhere in the transmission process.”

“You don’t know?”

Esau gave her a look that said come on. “I didn’t build it. That’s my best guess. I would also
suppose there is a distinct possibility that Dell may have recorded something on it.”

This was relevant to Pyro’s interests. She focused on the box again, more keenly than before. “Like
what?”

“I don’t know. It could be anything.”

“Do you think it’s likely? That it’s him, I mean?”

“It could be anything,” Esau said again.

This line of conversation, if followed, would turn into a fight. Instead Pyro turned her head, casting
her gaze out over the colorless afternoon. Her eyes landed on Shep, the most animated thing she
could find. At least, he would have been if he was moving. Instead he was standing stock-still, ears
forward, staring unerringly into the trees from the north of the house. Pyro called to him, and his
tail jerked sideways once, but he did not move. He had probably seen a squirrel.

Pyro redirected her attention to the recorder, which Esau was having no luck opening. “This is
really stuck,” he said, and dropped the wrench to rub at the socket of his arm. Pyro considered the
fact that she had a very clear memory of Dell bodily picking her up in a fireman’s carry and hauling
her across a field when she was too concussed to walk. The clarity was due to the utter outrage she
had felt at the time. Part of her was still a little outraged. Esau had not exactly decayed, but it had
been clear since his rescue that his strength had faded.

“Can I try?” she asked, and he passed wrench and box over to her. She found at once that
regardless of Esau’s current ability, the box would not have yielded anyway. “Sheesh. Could we
break it open? Maybe—”

“Do you hear that?” Esau said.

Pyro froze, stilled by the caution in Esau’s voice. She listened.

“No,” she said.

“It’s faint,” he said in a quiet voice, looking around. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Esau rubbed at first one ear and then the other, and shook his head. “No? Maybe I’m imagining it.
I get those, once in a while. Hearing things.”

Pyro nodded, but her eyes had stopped on the dog. Shep was still pointed north, his legs stiff, his
hackles raised, his ears straining to listen.
 16: Here Be Dragons

“Are we sure this thing is even here?” Pyro said on the third evening, late in the afternoon, as she
kicked through yet another pile of water-damaged refuse. “Like, what if TFI found it and picked it
up?”

Morale was low, and Pyro had decided she hated the bunker. Even drained of water it felt
perpetually wet, and she kept having flashes of recollection of the place slowly drowning. It made
her skin crawl, and more than once she had been forced to slip outside in the middle of a search to
prevent Alice from stepping in to take over. She was not sure what Alice would do, given the reins
again. The rest of the team was not much better off, save Soldier, who seemed to only have the
vaguest idea that they were even there. He spent most of his time in the server room, and refused to
tell anyone what he was doing in there. Esau’s chassis functioned fairly well as a blockade.

Today, a pipe the size of a fire hydrant had snapped off amid the rummaging and nearly fallen on
Scout’s head. He was already not thrilled with being here. The pipe incident had not improved the
situation. “You were the one that wanted to come,” he sniped at her from where he was sulking in
one corner. The room they were investigating today was a tangle of broken robots and
miscellaneous shelving and things that probably would have been used to build and supply the
server room, and was one of the few that would allow all five of them in at once. This included
Soldier, who was merrily shoveling through the sodden remains of tubing and strange machines
Pyro could not divine the purpose of.

“I just don’t want to stay in one place for too long,” Pyro shot back. “This is the last room we’ve
checked. What’s the plan if it’s not here?”

Scout eyed her doubtfully before turning his gaze on Heavy and Esau. Heavy was still
meticulously searching through a stack of disintegrating cardboard boxes, while Esau was
overseeing Soldier. The silence in answer to her question held long enough for Soldier to pipe up.
“What are we looking for, anyway?” he said cheerfully, and any lingering frustration in the room
recentered directly onto him.

“We told you the very first day,” said Esau, folding his arms across his chest. “A small machine—
fist-sized, sort of triangular. Would have wires and smaller bits coming off of it, like a—”

“Oh, that thing?” Soldier said, pushing his helmet up over his eyes. “You should have said so! I
know where that is. Come on!”

Scout loudly slapped his palm over his eyes.

It was roughly nine-twenty in the evening, and well into darkness. Pyro had never seen this forest
in darkness, not really; the last time she had been here, a fire had ensured that the light was never
quite gone. Instead, in early spring, she could see the fierce burning of the stars through the
unburdened trees. It was not enough light to see by, but for the few seconds that her vision adjusted
after they had teleported back out of the bunker, it felt like she and the stars were the only things in
the world, even with her shotgun in one hand and Shep’s leash in the other. Then Scout turned on
their flashlight, and the stark, accusing glower of the trees reminded her of where she was.
Soldier—his helmet now once more well over his eyes—set straight off, toward the cabin. The rest
of them exchanged skeptical looks. This was common, in Soldier’s company. Much of what he did
was worth being skeptical of, like his insistence that he had once had a wizard for a roommate, or
his habit of lecturing everyone around him on the writings of Sun Tzu when for quite a long time
no one had even been sure if he could read. His claim that he knew where the immortality machine
was slotted neatly under this heading. But here they were anyway, and after him they went.

Soldier marched smartly past his own signs and shouldered the cabin door open. Here he paused, to
let them catch up, and to let Scout illuminate the interior with the flashlight. Peering in over their
shoulders and keeping Shep tightly to heel, it seemed to Pyro that the place had gone to seed in
much the same way the bunker had. Everything within had been overturned or shattered, but there
was a strangely clean scent to it, different from the outside in a way she could not place.

In the middle of it all, unmistakably, was the hulking shape of a sleeping bear.

Scout cut the flashlight immediately. “Dude,” he hissed to Soldier, even as Heavy grabbed him
once more by the collar to keep him from ambling in. “Okay, fine, you were right about the bear,
but we don’t gotta go near it.”

“If you are going to be a Frenchman about doing your duty, we do not need you in our platoon,”
Soldier answered, and wriggled out of his coat. Heavy grunted and grabbed at him again, missing.
In an uncannily easy motion Soldier relieved Scout of the flashlight. Muttering, he made an about-
face and went straight for the bear. Pyro, the only one with a gun worth pointing at a bear at hand,
swore and put Shep’s leash in Scout’s grip before pushing past the men to chase Soldier down.
“Hey,” she said, grabbing at his shoulder, and froze as the bear groaned and stirred. She dropped
her voice. “What are you going to do?”

Wordlessly, he pointed the flashlight at the bear. The harsh glow illuminated its shoulder, or what
Pyro thought was its shoulder. It was difficult to tell, between the mass of black fur and the large,
ugly wound. A ragged oval of its skin had been torn out, revealing the marbled red of muscle
beneath. Practically shoved in the middle of it she could see, just as Esau had described, an almost
insectoid piece of machinery that pulsed a gentle yellow light through a narrow window in its side.
Wires and leg-like appendages sunk into the wound. The sight so surprised her that she did not
realize Soldier had continued forward until he was almost on top of the bear.

“Evenin’, Sal,” he said gruffly, crouching down by the creature. He reached out and patted its side,
and at once Pyro found herself fumbling for her gun as the bear grumbled again.

“What are you doing?” she hissed at him, and Soldier shook his head and pointed at the machine.
“Yeah, I see that! Why is it in the bear?”

“She was injured in the line of duty,” he said gravely. “Some Commie came running a few days
after I made land, and Sal gave it what-for. Almost gave her life for her country! I felt terrible,
taking that honor from her, but I still needed help getting down to the bunker.”

Pyro wondered, briefly, what reality looked like for Soldier, and how different it was from her
own. “So! I found this doohickey and it fixed me right up from dislocating my own fingers to
intimidate the enemy! Figured it could do the same for Sal, and here she is!” He patted the bear
again, and Pyro’s finger tensed on the safety catch.

“Get away from that damn thing,” Esau said, terse and low, even as Heavy carefully made his way
over to Pyro. “For God’s sake. That is the thing we’re looking for, though. How are we going to get
it out of there?”
“How’d he get it in?” Scout said. “He seriously just shove it in there? It works like that?”

Pyro flicked the safety off the gun, feeling only moderately better with Heavy at her side. The man
beside her might have been bear-sized, and Soldier’s bear seemed relatively small for a bear, but
she was still certain it could knock any one of their heads off if it decided to. “What do we do?” she
asked Heavy, but before he could answer Soldier tucked the flashlight into his breast pocket,
leaned over the sleeping bear, and grabbed the machine embedded in it with both hands.

Several things happened at once. Everyone shouted at Soldier. Pyro jammed her thumb against the
gun, making her drop it. Heavy leapt forward with startling grace, seizing him around the middle
and dragging him backwards. A grating, heart-stopping roar ripped through the cabin Soldier
ripped the machine out.

The bear whipped around and lunged, coming within inches of Soldier’s arm. Heavy flung him out
of the way as the bear staggered to one side, then shook itself and rose to its hind legs. A strange
bellowing, chuckling sound rose up in the dark as the bear raised its paws over its head, focused on
Heavy.

Pyro fumbled for the shotgun. Behind her she heard Scout holler and Esau curse, both immediately
drowned out by another roar from the bear. From the ground Soldier had fallen flat on his ass, the
light only halfway illuminating the face-off between man and beast.

The two squared up against one another, Heavy growling something in Russian and the bear
continuing its low chuckle of a warning. Heavy feinted at it, and the bear snarled, lunging—not at
Heavy, but past him. With startling speed it bolted straight for the door, toward Scout and Esau,
who scattered, and Shep, who barked excitedly before he was yanked backwards. Pyro stared after
it in shock as galloped away and melted into the darkness.

“You scared her!” Soldier said, disapproving. Heavy dropped his arms, crossed to him, and cuffed
him square across the face.

With the machine retrieved and the bear dealt with, their job was done. Mostly done; as Esau
immediately pointed out, they would have to thoroughly de-bear the immortality machine to ensure
it was sanitary for use on a human. But this could be done in a place with soap.

Preparations were made to leave the next day, and the night passed. Soldier had declared he was
not coming, due to his top-secret mission. This was just as well. No one particularly wanted him
and his specific brand of reality along, though she did hear Esau interrogating him about how
exactly he had gotten the machine to work on the bear, or if it had indeed been working at all.
Soldier was incensed. “Of course it worked!” he said. “You didn’t see her before! She was all in
shreds. All kinds of ripped up! A lick away from making the greatest sacrifice a bear can make for
her country!”

“But how did you make it work?”

“What’s to know? I just stuck it in there.”

Esau went to bed muttering, and no one asked Soldier any further questions.

Pyro awoke early in the sleeping bag she had settled on Soldier’s cardboard-box couch, which was
uncomfortable in a different way from the floor but at least had some give. She did not have a
watch, but some internal clock and her own latent sleepiness told her it was well before she needed
to be up. Shep, though, had sprung awake the moment he heard movement, and now stood as close
to her as he could crowd with hopeful eyes and a bannering tail. “Outside?” she said groggily, and
he turned in a circle.

When the teleporter spun down, silver dawn light greeted her among light rain. It had been raining
for days. Shep hopped off the platform to acquaint himself with his new favorite tree, but Pyro
lingered. She remembered this light, this sort of mist, though it had been of a different color back in
October. Very few of her memories of this forest were ones she liked to visit, but the beauty that
dwelled in the branches was one of them.

She stepped down to follow Shep, feeling the weight of her gun bump against her arms. The effort
of grabbing it without waking anyone on her way out had nearly persuaded her to leave it behind,
but the thought of the bear coming back had changed her mind. She was suddenly very glad for its
heft when Shep stopped what he was doing and looked north.

“Shep?” she said. His ears pricked and once more he flicked his tail in acknowledgement of her
voice, but she was not what he was listening to. Pyro circled, the better to see his face, and found
him steadily looking into the woods, whiskers prominent and reaching as his muzzle quivered. He
barked, once, half a bark really, experimental and warning.

He was looking north.

Pyro listened. She strained her ears and held her breath, but she could not hear anything but the
chattering of birds and the faraway rustle of wind. In the corner of her eye she could see the
teleporter and its promise of safety.

Shep looked north.

“Shep,” she said again, and Shep finally looked at her. “Find it.”

Once, somewhere, maybe in the Pennsylvania firehouse or in a book or in the curious mouth of
someone well-meaning, Pyro had learned that apparently Indians were supposed to be able to walk
in perfect silence. She had her doubts about this, first because it sounded like one of those magical
things Indians were supposed to be able to do just because they were Indians, and second because
Pyro had been hopelessly unstealthy for most of her life. It was thinly possible that due to being an
orphan, and then being raised by an array of different white people, Pyro had simply not learned
this skill, but she had her doubts about this as well.

No, Pyro had learned to walk silently because of Sniper.

Toe to heel. Ensure there’s nothing under your foot before you put your weight down. She
remembered his lessons with odd clarity: the quiet summer sounds of the Badlands, his corrections
and observations on her technique even with his back turned, the satisfaction of having learned
something useful when she finally managed to sneak up on him a week later, and nearly got run
through with a kukri for her trouble.

Toe to heel, she followed Shep. The dog needed no instruction in silence, picking his way through
the muddy underbrush with the ease of a hundred generations of working dog. He forged through
the grass and the fallen logs and the scattered little green plants with single-minded purpose. Pyro
was not a great trainer, but she was not the one who had trained Shep how to do this. That had been
Dell; it was one of those things she wanted to ask him about. When he came back. If.

Before them, the earth dipped, becoming a ponderous slope. It was thick with young trees and wet
grass, not obviously perilous but considering becoming so. There would be no getting down this
quietly, but Shep had already begun his descent, and so Pyro followed.

She listened as they went, trying and failing to hear whatever it was Shep heard. She wondered if it
was the same thing Esau had heard, or if it had just been very strange timing, and decided it didn’t
really matter.

Trees blocked her view, until they didn’t.

Shep twitched his ears, ceasing in his approach. He looked up at Pyro, seeking confirmation that
he had done a good job, but she did not see.

At the bottom of the slope, the ground rose up again into a similar hill, covered in similar trunks.
Similar logs and grasses and little green plants covered it in similar patterns, none of it remarkable.

In among them, its pinkish-grayish chest caved open by an ancient stump that burst through its side
like some titanic weapon, lay the devil.

It looked peaceful. It looked like it was sleeping, until it lifted its head and fixed her with a one-
eyed stare. Its lone red eye burned in the morning haze, and Shep barked, scrabbling forward to put
himself between master and monster. Pyro grabbed him by the collar, but there was no need. The
devil did not move again, only stayed as it had been, head lifting, staring in one spot. Even when
she dragged Shep to the more fortified position of a large rock jutting out of the earth, it continued
to focus on the place where they had been. She held her breath, pressing Shep’s face against her to
keep him from barking, and waited.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen, even after she had counted out two minutes and
Shep was pulling against her hand to free his head.

The devil did not move.

She had a marvelous angle of it from here, now that it was still and now that she was not running
in fear of her life. Tangled in the mud she could see its long fingers, and undisturbed by the motion
of its neck leaf litter still rested in heavy layers on its prone body. Something about the scene was
uncanny beyond the fact she was looking at a nightmare impaled on a stump. It took her a moment
to find it.

There was no blood.

The edges of the wound on both sides was clean, despite the ragged puncture. There was no gore
on the protruding end of the wood.

The devil opened its jaws in an unhurried way, its eye still fixed on where she had once stood, and
did nothing more.

A strange, high whine reached her ears. At first she thought it was Shep, but no, he was tilting his
head this way and that at the sound. All in a thunderclap, Pyro realized: the devil was screaming, or
trying. The devil’s scream was among the worst noises she had ever heard, like metal scraping
down glass, and more than one nightmare had featured it prominently. This was not that scream;
this was a strange, wobbly, warped thing, and it stopped abruptly with an audible clunk and an
unpleasant grinding noise.

The unbloodied wound had made her suspicious, but it was this, the unreal sound suddenly
matched with the same sound the cassette player in Heavy’s car had made, that turned her
suspicion into belief.

“There ain’t no way that thing was a robot. We saw robots!”

Scout, of course, was going to be Scout about Pyro’s report of what she had found in the woods.
There was the initial what-were-you-thinkings, the why-were-you-outs, the are-you-okays, the last
of which were sort of a surprise and sort of pleasant. “It’s a machine,” Pyro said again, rifling
through her backpack. “It’s a different kind of machine, but it’s still a machine.”

“It’s a monster,” she heard Alice say in a small and distressed voice. “I don’t want to see it again.
I’m scared.”

The group had organized outside of Dell’s cabin after Pyro’s return to prepare for their departure,
all of them lightly shocked at how easy their task had ended up being. The immortality machine
was now carefully tucked away in a steel briefcase someone had found in the bunker, carried by
Heavy. At the word “machine,” of course, all eyes turned to the ex-Engineer. Esau shrugged. “I
don’t know anything about it, as I said.”

“Perhaps Gray made this,” said Heavy.

“Maybe it has a black box, too,” said Pyro, pulling out what she was looking for: a small container
of butane, intended for refilling Zippo lighters. She frowned at it. It would not be enough to make
her job easier. “Anyway, I’m going to burn it.”

“Pyro!”

This came from Esau, but the sentiment was clearly reflected in Scout and Heavy’s faces. “You
don’t have to come with me,” she said.

“That, that ain’t the damn problem!” Scout said, jumping to his feet from where he had been sitting
on the wooden steps. “Shit! Not for nothin’, April, seriously, but it ain’t even been six months
since you burned the other half of the forest!”

It was tedious, to always and forever be explaining herself. “The whole forest is wet right now,”
she said. “It’s been raining for days and the sun hasn’t dried anything out yet. It’s all mud around
the devil. And,” she added, drawing herself up, “I know what I’m doing.”

This was an advantage in knowing everything there was to know about fire: no one felt prepared to
dispute her.

Scout lifted his hands and dropped them again. “Alright,” he said finally. “Alright, fine, okay. I
guess killin’ it’s better than leavin’ it. I ain’t goin’, though. Seen enough of that bastard to last me
forever.”

Pyro checked with the others. “I do not wish to see this thing,” was all Heavy said on the matter,
and as the devil was not blatantly Communist, Soldier was not interested in its death. Esau looked
skyward.

“I suppose that I will come,” he said, and that was that.

This time it was Pyro who led the way to the devil, a relatively straight shot from the house but a
good ways off. Shep, a fire hazard, was left behind. It was slower going with Esau and his cane and
the mud, and slower still once they reached the slope. It occurred to Pyro to offer him her arm, and
he took it, and it was strange and discomfiting. They gladly separated at the bottom, and even if it
had been something Pyro wished to dwell on—she didn’t—it was washed from her mind by the
ineffable sight of the devil.

At some point, it had lowered its head again, back into the mud. The two humans stood before it in
a quiet and uneasy awe. How small they were before it; how simply it could have destroyed them;
how strange to see it brought low. It did not look at them again.

Close, now, and watching, Pyro could see a regular shuddering under its skin. It was not the pattern
of breathing, or of a heartbeat. It whirred. Again the words came to her, lifted from a book she
could no longer read:

The mechanical hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live.

Pyro sighed, and set about the business of killing what could not die.

Shovel in hand, she circled the thing, clearing anything dry (there was little), anything worth saving
(there was a great deal). With the trees still bereft of leaves, the chance of the fire catching hold of
hanging foliage was lesser. She thought of her old house, in Boston—her fire-trap bomb of a shed
—and wondered how she could have ever become so careless.

“Please,” said a small voice. “I don’t like this. I want to leave.”

Alice was hiding behind a tree. Pyro spared her a glance, and looked then toward Esau, where he
sat on a stump and frowned. “If you hear me talking, it’s to Alice,” she called to him; then,
ignoring the way his frown twisted into a grimace, went on, “It’s going to be fine.”

“It’s not,” Alice insisted. She looked strangely tiny in her bulky suit. “It’s going to get mad and eat
us. I don’t like this, I don’t like robots, I’m scared.”

There was, Pyro decided, little point in trying to comfort someone who did not want to be
comforted. She tried anyway. “It’s broken,” she said in her best impression of a calming voice. It
was the voice she had used when a coyote got at Shep, and she had to coax him out from under the
house. Perhaps it would work here. “See? It’s just a machine, and it’s broken. There’s no reason to
be scared.”

As she said it, Pyro realized that it was true. The devil was frightful, in the way that the idea of
finding a bear in the cabin had been frightful. And yet she did not fear it. What was there to fear,
when she had lived through hell thrice over—the hell of her own mind, the hell of Jeremiah
Owens, the hell of learning how to live again—why be afraid when she had come out the other side
each time?

“It doesn’t have to be scary,” she told Alice, and herself.

When the devil burned, it burned dirty. The air reeked with scalded metal and boiling rubber. The
smoke was black and it curled and coiled and writhed in agony, as if the devil, who could feel no
pain, instead gave vent to the idea of pain. Pyro did not let herself sit and watch, did not let herself
fall into the Fire. Instead she kept a steady perimeter, minding the spreading flames, ensuring the
forest would not burn again. She would not let it happen again. Not here. Not now.

At the end of it, after the fire had gone out, and the whirring under the devil’s skin had ceased,
Esau got to his feet. He approached the creature, circling it like she had circled it. He prodded the
smoldering pieces of its body with his cane, as if doubtful they were real. It seemed to Pyro that he
was looking for something, like he was convinced something he needed was in there, but he never
found it.
 Act II

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I
have ever known.”

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

 17: Press-Ganged

The return trip was easier, at least for Pyro. It was definitely easier for Scout, who had been
unsubtle in his desire not to drive with Esau as his passenger again. “And anyway I wanna catch up
for real,” he said, jostling Pyro as she loaded her things and her dog into the back of the Bronco. “I
am tired of all this TFI crap, you know?”

She knew, and thus the drive back across the northern states was light and easy. The rain relented
as soon as they left Minnesota, and the whole first day was an exercise in lazy conversation,
circling around on in-jokes formed through months of joint company, and Scout proving his mettle
as an enthusiastic, if easily distracted, storyteller. In a way, Pyro had already become acquainted
with his remaining brothers while on the base. It felt now like she was hearing about old friends.
This thought was met with mixed emotions, and Scout observed on the second day, “You got real
quiet.”

“Huh? Oh.”

It was a gleaming sort of morning. The sky burned a jeweled blue, and the thickening traffic
hummed around them on US-2 E. The car seethed with heat, and the air conditioning blustered
only warm air; their words were whipped out of the cracked windows as soon they left their
mouths. Scout’s hat was tipped with the brim to the side, blocking the reflection of the sun in the
side mirror, and with one hand he fidgeted with his brother’s ever-present dog tags, around his
neck on their thick chain. “You thinkin’ about him?”

The word him took on the weight it did when it only meant one person.

“Yeah,” Pyro said.

“He woulda been twenty-nine this year,” Scout said, his breath drifting out of him. “He was
twenty-four. When it happened.” His brow quirked in thought. “How old are you?”

Pyro hesitated. “I don’t know. Around thirty?”

“Folder ain’t got a birthday?”

This concept baffled Pyro in its simplicity. “Probably. I haven’t found it yet.”

“Toby’s is August third.” Scout yawned. “Mine was last week, so you owe me a present.”

“I’ll get you Miss Pauling’s number,” Pyro said, yawning herself, and Scout laughed.

“Hey,” he said a few minutes later, rolling up the window so he could be heard. “After all this. I
mean, assumin’ we’re still alive. I want you to come meet my family.” The absurdity of this was so
great that all Pyro could do was bark a laugh. “I mean it, April.”

“That’s a weird way to tell Pauling you’re breaking up with her.”

Scout grunted. “Oh, like she’s gonna pick me over TFI. I figured we were through the minute I left
to come help you out, on account of probably she’s got orders to kill me now. That ain’t what I
mean, anyway, it ain’t like that.”

“I don’t,” Pyro said, and felt the words collapse. Brow furrowed, she tried to pick them back up. “I
don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He laughed. “Believe me, I’ve thought this through every direction. I want you to meet them.”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“Yeah, well, that don’t mean it’s a better idea not to do it.” The road ahead was clear, and he cut
his gaze toward her. Grim determination. “I don’t mean tell them who you are or what happened.
That, I don’t think that’s a good idea neither. Just meet them.”

“Why?” Pyro asked.

“I just think you should.”

Pyro agreed to nothing that day, nor the next, and Scout did not press the issue. He had lapsed into
a story about his sister’s new apartment and her new husband instead, and the stress of the
proposition flickered out the window. Slowly, Pyro lowered herself back into the easy camaraderie
of this strange friendship.

Spokane came upon them both quick and slow, for Scout made the hours go swiftly, and the heat
drew them out long past their natural lifespans. When the city skyline came again into view, Pyro
found herself a little disappointed. It was silly—it was unlikely the long drives would be over after
this—but it had been nice to pretend her life was normal for a few days, that she was just on a trip
with a friend.

When they pulled into the long drive of the Kitzis household, April’s old sense to cut-and-run
crackled to life. She could not place why, exactly. The mansion looked normal, inasmuch as a
mansion could. Lights were on, and peacocks strutted over the grass. The car that apparently
belonged to the chef was in the drive. She shook her head as the trucks sighed and stopped.
Paranoia.

Esau led the way, no worse for the wear from his drive with Heavy; she wondered if they had
talked. Thinking back, too, she wondered what it was about Esau that had driven Scout spitting
mad to ride with him. She would have to ask him later.

With Heavy at hand, and the metal briefcase containing their cargo nearby, Esau rang the doorbell.
“If you all don’t mind, I’d like to talk with Kitzis privately when I get the chance,” he told them as
they waited for the door to be answered. “I have a few questions of a medical nature.” No one
minded. “Much obliged,” he said, and Pyro was again struck by the very Dellian nature of the
choice of words. She was puzzling with this when Esau tried the door again.

“Perhaps they are outside, in back?” Heavy said, when Esau rang the bell a third time.

Pyro ceased puzzling. The paranoia screamed into focus.

She jostled past Esau, tugging open the screen door and shouldering her way inside. It was
unlocked, and she got only two steps in before freezing. “Get the guns,” she said.

Esau tried to follow her. “What? Pyro—”

He stopped when his eyes fell on the trail of blood that led from the foyer and around the corner.
“Get the guns,” he repeated to the others.

The blood was still wet and still red. It was not still warm. The mercenaries conferred.

“TFI?” asked Scout in a hushed tone.

Pyro nodded; Heavy put up a hand. “Likely. We do not know this for sure. It could also be robbers;
Kitzis is very rich, and flaunts it.”

“We’ve all watched Kitzis stab people to death before,” Pyro said. “I don’t think it’s robbers.”

“Whatever, just, TFI with a chance of robbers,” Scout said, checking his pistol for the third time. “I
ain’t gotta remind nobody we don’t respawn. Okay. Shit. We find the doctor and the kid and get
out? And Spy. Yo, Esau, you’re the driver. Keep the engine hot.”

Esau nodded, disappearing into the Toyota; he paused at the Bronco to grab Shep. A terse silence
fell over the BLU team. “Alright,” Scout said at last. “God, I hope that ain’t the kid’s blood. I’ll
lead.”

The golden foyer did not seem to notice the blood, nor the mercenaries, its chandelier glimmering
heedlessly as the three of them made their careful way along it. The blood, splattered every few
feet, sometimes disturbed by footprints, weaved an unsteady path along the broad hall that Pyro
recalled as leading to the sitting room and kitchen, among other ornate doors and broad rooms
empty of any human touch. She adjusted her grip on the shotgun, ensuring the muzzle was pointed
down. The last thing that needed to happen was someone accidentally shooting Char, and Pyro was
well aware she had an itchy trigger finger.

The blood took them to neither the kitchen nor the sitting room, but somewhere Pyro had not yet
been; from what she could glimpse of the room from the end of the line, it seemed like a bathroom.
Scout glanced back to the two of them, and then stepped around the corner, gun raised.

He studied what he found, and lowered it again. He disappeared into the bathroom, and when Pyro
edged forward to look herself, she found him over a body, lying face-down on the tile. With a foot,
he nudged it; it did not move.

“It’s the chef,” he said. “He’s dead. Gunshot, there—someone got him in the thigh and then I think
maybe found him in here, finished him off.”

A peculiar mix of relief and guilt washed over Pyro; thank God it was not Kitzis. How
uncomfortable she felt to be glad for the death of another. Underneath, she could sense Alice’s
indifference, and tried to block it out. “Now what?” she asked.

“Keep looking, I guess.”

Searching the vast house was an exercise in patience and adrenaline, tension, cramped fingers
clutching onto guns. It was made worse by the fact that they found nothing. “Kidnapping?” Pyro
wondered aloud as they traversed the second floor.

“Both of them?” said Heavy.

“Both’a you shut up,” Scout said in a hurried whisper, throwing out his hand. Ahead of them, in
the hall and somewhere by the stoic bookshelf built into the wall, came a heavy click and a hissing
sound. Scout leveled his pistol.

The bookshelf swung open, toward them, blocking their view of the hall. “Don’t shoot,” called a
voice, and Scout swore and lowered his gun as the RED spy appeared in the gap between the secret
door and the wall. “Please tell me you intercepted them,” Spy said, and he looked exhausted.

Pyro started to ask who he meant, but she was cut off by a clatter of boots and another face forcing
its way into view. Char, bedraggled and wide-eyed, looked them over, and bit her lip before asking,
“Where’s my dad?”

Kitzis was gone.

Kitzis had been, more accurately, taken. “For questioning, I believe,” Spy said grimly as he made
use of Pyro’s lighter for a cigarette. If she did not know any better she would have thought his
hands were shaking. “About you two.”

He gestured to where Pyro and Esau now sat on the stairs. They had moved to the foyer after a
thorough sweep of the house, just in case; but no. Kitzis was gone. And so now Pyro and Esau sat,
and Scout paced, and Heavy leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest. Char stood
propped up by the stair rail, clutching tea that Heavy had made for her, deathly silent in the wake
of her father’s disappearance.

Spy relayed the events as he knew them. He had awoken the day before, apparently no worse for
the wear beyond hunger. Not an hour before the BLUs’ arrival the door had been answered by the
chef—also the personal security, according to Spy—who had been determined nonessential by the
people at the door.

“RED team?” Pyro asked, and Spy shook his head.

“Miss Pauling?” Scout followed.

The fact that Spy did not reply was answer enough. “In case it helps,” Spy said, surprisingly
kindly, “the chef drew first blood. And I do not believe Pauling would harm Kitzis beyond the
superficial, if her instructions were to merely to bring him in.”

Scout had fixed his gaze firmly on the chandelier.

The rest of it was laid out plainly. Kitzis realized what was happening; Spy had taken Char and
hidden in the panic room; and Kitzis, it seemed, had been taken into custody.

It was impossible not to look at Char, once the story was given. She was still silent, still rigid,
staring into her tea as if she expected to read the future from it. Pyro glanced at Heavy, and then at
Esau, the unspoken question lingering in the air.

Scout, as ever, was the one to put it to words. “Great,” he said. “Awesome. Totally cool. What do
we do with the kid?”

“I have a name,” Char said, with more than a hint of shrill hysteria. Pyro could not blame her.
“What are they going to do with him? Is he going to be okay?”

“He should be fine,” Spy said, and sounded more certain than it seemed he could be. “I know your
father very well, and I know you are his first priority. He will do everything he can to ensure your
safety.”

“That is not what I asked!” Char snapped, every inch of her furious. Her face was brilliant red, eyes
screwed up and jaw set. Fighting back tears, Pyro realized. “I asked if he is going to be okay!”

Spy regarded her with something strange in his face. It took Pyro a long while to recognize it as
compassion. “I believe he will be,” he said, not exactly gentle, but not heartless, either. “I will not,
however, lie to you. There is a chance he could be killed. But killing him would be an act of
pettiness uncharacteristic of our employer in light of his usefulness, and so I believe that so long as
he cooperates he is safe.” Here he straightened himself, looking at the other mercenaries, and Esau.
“However, we now find ourselves with an additional party member.”

Heavy scowled. “This is too dangerous.”

“I agree entirely,” said Spy. “But leaving Miss Kitzis here invites them to use her as a means of
controlling him. Moreover, I myself have already guaranteed her safety to Henri, and I do not
intend to renege on that promise.”

Char was crying, now. She stood stiffly over her untouched tea. It was Heavy who pushed himself
off from the wall, carefully taking the tea from her. “Come, moy dorogoy,” he said gently, ushering
her up the stairs. “Mikhail will help you pack.”

Six people, two cars. Heavy and Spy and Char in the Toyota, Pyro and Scout and Esau in the
Bronco, dog and luggage tucked in the back. No destination had been decided on. They were
simply going.

From where Pyro sat in the driver’s seat, she could see Char looking out the window as Spokane
got further and further away.

They drove for three hours before taking up in a motel just south of a place called Othello. It was
agreed that their next step would be determined in the morning, and as the only other woman
present, Pyro found herself sharing a room with Char. This was very strange. This was another one
of those things Pyro forgot about, with normal people, and how things got split down the sexes.
Not that the mercs cared one way or the other about that fact of her, and not that she’d ever cared
herself; but it came to Pyro as she helped the men unload the cars that she hoped no one thought
she was going to be doing anything motherly at Char. She was pretty sure they knew better than
that, but the concern still made her chew her lip. Her last example of a mother had been June, the
firefighter, and everyone had seen how that turned out. Was June still alive, even? Disowned or
not, that seemed like something worth checking on. Pyro filed this thought away into the stack of
things to do if she didn’t get killed first.

At last she concluded this divvying of the rooms was more for Char’s benefit than her own, and as
Char had just finished having what was likely the worst day of her life, Pyro supposed she could
handle it.

It was a double room, a little cramped, and smelled too heavily of vanilla, which Pyro enjoyed.
Char took over the bathroom without a word. About half an hour later she came out, wet-haired and
red-eyed, and said in a hollow voice, “I think I used all the hot water.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Pyro, from where she had been digging for change to finally make use
of the washing machines down the row of motel doors. A thought occured to her, of the last time
she had shared a hotel room with a woman: back in Bee Cave, Miss Pauling had nearly broken
Shep’s neck in a knee-jerk defense upon being woken. Probably Char would not be able to do this.
It seemed worth asking anyway. “Are you alright with having the dog in here with us? He’ll stay
with me, but I can have the others take him if you aren’t.”

Char shook her head. “No, that’s … it’s fine. Are you … are you April?”

Pyro went through the several steps of unraveling she required when someone asked her this
question. I’m Pyro. Most of the people I talk to in Arizona think my name’s Emily because I had to
tell them something that was a real name. I guess I am April. I guess my middle name is
Dominique and I think that might not even be a real name, or else it’s French and I’m going to
have to ask Spy to make sure. I guess you mean “are you not Alice.”

“Yeah,” Pyro said, looking back to her makeshift laundry basket, made of a huge sleep shirt with
the holes knotted together. “Sorry you had to meet Alice first. That was … it was bad timing.”

Char laughed in a way that was not a laugh. “You two do talk differently. I’ve never met anyone
that—God, I’m so tired, I know better than to pry—”

“It’s alright,” Pyro said, and decided that it was. She crammed the last of her dusty, sweaty clothing
into the shirt and looked Char over. “I’m going to wash these and then I can, uh. I don’t know.
Answer questions, or whatever, if you want.”

Pyro went. She fought with the washing machine, which was fickle and aggravating in the way
only a washing machine foreign to you can be, took Shep out for the last time for the night, and
then locked the motel door behind her. For good measure, she wedged the rubber doorstop under it
too. The window wouldn’t stand up to anyone who wanted to get in, but that was why Pyro had
taken the bed nearest it.

Char was dressed and looked very small on the other bed. She was wearing raggedy, cut-off sweats
and a paint-spattered tee that made it very easy to forget she lived in a mansion, and she was
clearing moping. Well. Upset. Moping seemed like very much the wrong word in light of the
situation. Either way, Pyro felt troublingly out of her element; she could not remember the last time
she had interacted with a teenager. This seemed more like Scout’s thing, or Heavy’s. Hell, any of
the others probably would have had a better idea of what to do here, even Esau.

Oh well. Pyro threw herself down on the bed and took comfort in the cool press of the scratchy
pillowcase against her scars. The mattress dipped—Shep hopping up next to her—and Pyro raised
her hands in the air before dropping them. “So, uh,” she started, eyes on the ceiling, “what do you
want to know?”

Char grabbed onto the question like it was the only thing keeping her upright, and maybe it was.
“How are there two of you? Is it, um, what’s it called. Dissociative-type hysterical neurosis?”

Oh, right. Char was a doctor’s daughter. Pyro hesitated. “I’ve heard that phrase tossed around,” she
said. “I don’t think there’s a name for it, exactly, what I have. Not one I’ve been told.”

“Are there only two of you?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have there been?”

Pyro had answered all of these questions, and more, and worse, at the behest of BLU. It was
somehow less tiresome to answer them for a sixteen-year-old girl, one who wasn’t making mm-
hm noises and jotting things down on a notepad as they spoke. “I guess a little over a year. She
didn’t start going by Alice until around November.”

There were more questions, basic questions: how do you switch? Can you control it? What is it
like? Do you fight over who’s the one doing things, or does each of you do specific things? Pyro
answered all of this, as best she could. Sometimes the answers were unclear even to her. It occurred
to Pyro that at no point did Char ask the question most people were interested in: how did this
happen?

And then Char trailed off, lying prostrate on the mattress and staring at the ceiling herself. Perhaps
the interrogation was over. It had been a long day for everyone, and Pyro was not looking forward
to getting back in the car tomorrow. It felt like it had been months since she’d stayed in the same
zip code longer than a few hours; the Chippewa, wild and untamed, hadn’t counted.

Char sighed and said, “Do you want to play truth or dare?”

Pyro levered herself up on one elbow, squinting across the dimly lit room. “What?”

“Do you want to play truth or dare?” Char repeated, not looking at her.

“I … don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a game,” Char said impatiently. “You pick ‘truth’ or ‘dare’ and then you either answer a
question truthfully or you have to do a dare. Everyone at my school plays.”

Briefly, Pyro considered pointing out that she did not go to Char’s school. She thought better of it.
“Okay, sure.”

“So truth or dare?”

“Dare, I guess.”

“Light something on fire.” Char twisted her head around to look at Pyro pointedly. “That’s why
you’re ‘both called Pyro’, right?”

Something about the way she made this statement, challenging and knowing and daring her more
to deny it than to do it, made Pyro grin. It would seem not a lot got past Char Kitzis.

So Pyro got to her feet and found the ash tray, which she dumped out. Sketchbook paper was clean,
but boring. The glossy-printed brochures stuffed in the desk would probably smell. Briefly she
considered the Bible that almost was almost certain to exist in the bedside drawer, but decided she
did not quite feel up to inviting the wrath of God on top of her other problems. In the end, she went
with the sketchbook. “Not much of a dare,” she said offhandedly, dropping a match in with the
paper and letting it burn.

But it had peeled Char off the bed, bringing her to observe the flame. Pyro followed suit, and felt
the tension of the day start to melt. She was a knot of unease and questions and doubts. She was
going to need to build another fire soon, one she could watch. “I pick dare,” Char said.
Oh. Right. Pyro scrambled for something appropriate. “Stand on your head.”

Another of those withering teenage glances. “I don’t know how to do that. I failed gymnastics.”

“Here, I’ll help.”

Pyro made an attempt. Char made an attempt. It was chaotic and dreadful and Pyro stepped on
Char’s hand, and at some point one of them began laughing, and it spread to the other, and then
Char so fully lost her balance that she fell directly into Pyro, who fell directly into the bed. Then it
was just two of them, two young women, sitting on the old sticky carpet; laughing.

When Pyro heaved a sigh and dropped back against the side of the bed, her mouth stayed lilted in a
smile. “Okay, my turn now? Truth.”

Char, curled on her side with her arms tucked to her chest, closed her eyes. Her laughter had
stopped rather sooner than Pyro’s, for reasons that were obvious even to Pyro. “You sure?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Her eyes stayed closed. “How much of what’s in my dad’s journals about you is true?”

It was as though Char had lit a match, and the match had sucked all of the oxygen out of the room.
The ease that Pyro had been settling into disintegrated, leaving her falling, falling, falling. “His …
what?”

“My dad. I found his journals, in the panic room.” She cracked an eye. “We were in there for three
and a half hours. I read them all. I’m a very fast reader.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They were in this pidgin language we use. Just us, I mean. Dad’s always been worried about, I
don’t know. Intercepted communications. You showed up in one about halfway through.” As she
spoke, Char’s voice had softened. She was again a child.

“I don’t know about any journals,” Pyro said, and tried to keep the urgency from bubbling up in
her throat, from thrashing out around her suddenly dry tongue. “I didn’t—I never worked with your
father. I actively worked against your father most of the time.”

“Yeah,” Char said, “I kind of got that impression.”

“I can’t answer the question unless I know what they say.”

Char sighed. She got to her feet, trudged to her little blue suitcase, and dug through it. Pyro felt
every hair still left on her neck stand on end when the girl turned to her with a worn and leather-
bound book in her hand. “Buckle up, then, April.”
 18: Rock the Boat

September 2, 1969.

I have, once again, been asked by the Administrator to perform the impossible. As the
impossible now happens daily, I was not initially worried; and yet the events that
surround me continue to confound.

I have long suspected our every action on the bases are monitored, ever since the
formation of the teams, long after my hire date. This suspicion seems to me to be now
confirmed, as I was shown footage of Subject 3 (BLU) in what I believe to be her
personal bedroom within the “Granary” base. I have been assured I am not monitored,
which is a bold lie even by TFI’s standards … there is a reason I write these journals
only where I am certain I will go unobserved.

The footage depicted Subject 3 exhibiting what resembled genuine dissociated

personalities—switching between modes of speech, markedly separate body language,
et cetera. Remarkably, she seemed to be in conversation with herself. I was able to
observe what I believe were two distinct personalities: one infantile and petulant, and
the other, combative, but coherent. As she was alone and seemed unaware she was
being recorded, I am inclined to believe there was no pretense in her actions. As a
member of RED, my interactions with the Subject 3 have been limited to the usual
murder and blood-spilling, and I was informed of her history so as to make more
accurate observations. It would seem she has at some point committed such self-injury
as to permanently damage her psyche, rendering her as like a child.

I have been told that this is owed to an unsupervised and extended exposure to one of
the BLU team’s experimental medi-beams. As the BLU team is considered the
experimental group, TFI has made no attempts to reverse this. Now it would seem that
the Administrator has taken an interest in Subject 3 after this footage was recorded.

And so that brings me to the impossible: I have been asked to monitor a person with
whom I am not permitted contact with, and moreover, to diagnose her. To what end, I
do not know; but like all of the impossible things around me, I have little choice but to
accept them …

May 14, 1970.

I have grown excessively tired of Subject 3 in the last several months. She is a
challenge to watch, and her interactions with Subject 6 (BLU)—indeed, with the rest
of her team!—move me to pity. To date, my observations have been limited to
fieldwork and what recorded footage I am permitted to view. Her original outburst,
wherein she argued either with herself or with some hallucination only she could
perceive, has not been repeated. Once in a great while I observe her seeming to return
to the more “normal” personality, and each time she makes the same few requests of
Subject 6.
 I say all this, but the information I have been given regarding her is scant. I am
informed she had a troubled past, but they will not tell me how troubled, nor the nature
of said trouble. Moreover, as ever, I have been granted next to nothing in terms of why
I have been set to this task.

Still, I persist.

May 30, 1970.

Finally, something! Giordano has come to me with the information that he too has
been exposed to that same experimental medi-beam, and has been experiencing mild
visual hallucinations ever since. Given the nature of his position I did not, indeed
could not, ask how his exposure had come about, but as he is a very old and very dear
friend I trust it was for the best. Examining him is not so rich a vein as questioning
Subject 3 or even 6 would be, but it pushes me in the right direction.

After some discussion with him, and reviewing the notes I have on 3, I may have the
beginnings of a theory.

July 8, 1970.

As these things go, it arrived quickly. I was provided with a sample of the
experimental medi-beam and several tests on mice later, I have determined that it in
some way fragments the neurological processes that govern sight and hearing … it
disrupts them, causing the mind to believe there is less before it than there should be,
and therefore generating whatever it thinks is missing. I am brought to mind of the
recent work of Dr. John Todd.

This does not explain what caused Subject 3 to manifest a new identity, and indeed it
may be wholly unrelated. The next step is to manufacture and test a treatment for this
curious new syndrome.

September 17, 1970.

The science behind the medi-beams is something of a mystery even to me. They knit
flesh back together, mending bones, provided it has not already healed, flying in the
face of modern medicine. Indeed, it is such a fantastic technology that I wonder why it
has not been deployed the world over. But I am one man, and the minds behind this
wonder are cloaked in the shadow of TF Industries.

The case of Subject 3 is unique in that it is the first time in my work with these
marvelous machines that I have heard of them affecting more than the physical body.
In my further tests with mice, and later, with chimpanzees, I came to see that it
 “cracks” the mind. Not only does it make way for the subject to see and hear what is
not there, but it makes it vulnerable. It is this that I think must have befallen Subject 3,
having taken into account the troubled circumstances of her past. (This I finally came
to learn at my insistence to young Miss Pauling—3, you poor woman!)

I now surmise it is some combination of these “cracks” and the pain life often inflicts
that gave rise to the childlike personality that now reigns her. It is as though she has
looked into a cracked mirror and plucked only one shard to represent the whole
reflection, unable to bear what the rest of the glass shows. I cannot test this … while
one could cause a chimpanzee to go mad with fear, to what end? For despite my work I
am a gentle man.

As for the second identity Subject 3 has acquired, I can liken it only to hysterical
neurosis, dissociative type. I understand it to be a thing most often acquired from
childhood; too, I have heard of success in re-integrating the new personality with the
whole, allowing the patient a normal life. And such a new personality 3 has. I can only
hope the application of my treatment will allow for the fusion to take its course.

But, tomorrow: I shall at last put my treatment to the test on Giordano, my poor,
patient friend.

October 30, 1970.

Again the Administrator causes me to question my presence here. I do not understand

this; the BLU team is the experimental group, yes. Surely this does not warrant
cruelty. The treatment works; Giordano is again in his right mind; I hold a cure in my
hands and am told I may not render it unto Subject 3, who suffers. It is enough to drive
a man to drink.

I have at least settled upon a name for this phenomena, in the event I should ever get
to write upon it—not that any journal would believe me. I look again to Dr. John Todd,
and his “Alice-in-Wonderland” syndrome. To me it seems this affliction shares many
of the same roots, and so I have begun to call it looking-glass syndrome.

It is now ever more a mystery to me, and ever more frustrating, as to why my
employer put me to this task if she has no interest in the result.

November 28, 1970.

Giordano came to me today and requested the use of my medi-gun, off the field. I said
no, knowing full well the extent of the consequences that could befall me should such
a trespass come to light. Giordano explained, then, that through certain channels he
had arranged a means by which the medi-gun could be used to alleviate Subject 3. I
asked him to tell me no more, and begged him to have the utmost discretion. The less
known, the less danger—to myself, and to my dearest Charlotte.
December 18, 1970.

Giordano tells me it is done. Subject 3 is herself again; indeed there is no immediate

sign of the child-personality remaining at all. A blessing from G-d, perhaps, that she
should be spared further discomfort.

There is little doubt that the Administrator will immediately suspect me.

I hope I have done the right thing.

Pyro could not read. Alice was not there to read for her. And, anyway, neither of them could read
the mix of German and Yiddish that the journal was written in. Thus it fell to Char to go through
the relevant entries, slowly translating. It was well past midnight when she put the journal down.

To Pyro, it seemed as though someone had reached into her, neatly plucking out things she had
held as fact, as certainties, and blowing them away like so much dust. She tried desperately to wet
her lips, like that would make the dust stick to her.

“Is it true?” Char prompted.

She thought she should say yes. The answer was yes, she thought; factually, as much as she was
aware, the journal was true. The dates lined up. The information, what pieces she recognized,
matched. The right answer was yes.

What she said instead was, “We were an experimental group?”

From where she now sat cross-legged on the bed, slouched in a nest of pillows, Char blew out her
breath. “Apparently?”

“What—what does that mean? The Administrator was interested in me? Experimental group
for what?”

She didn’t have to look at Char to know she did not have the answer. It was not a question for Char,
anyway.

Cracks in a mirror.

It was as though Pyro could feel the cracks, now, lightning lines of division and shock along her
brain, patched over with—what? The journal hadn’t said. The scientific analysis, the medical fact
of her reality. Cracks in a mirror. Looking-glass, Alice in Wonderland. The irony, the fact she and
Scout and Kitzis had all come to the same metaphor for her joke of a life—

“You aren’t going to go back to being Alice, are you?” Char said, and she sounded weary—wary.
“Like, right now? Because, just, I’m really tired and I don’t really know how to talk to her. Is that
why she’s called Alice? Because of the looking-glass syndrome?”

“I don’t know,” Pyro said. “I don’t know anything.”

 19: Home Port

It finally snowed. The Washington sky had been thinking about it all week, testing the air and the
temperature and the relative humidity. It was around five in the morning on that April 12th when it
gathered up all its frozen vapors and started Nature’s meticulous work of forming each snowflake
before sending them rippling down to the sleepy world below, gray in the slow morning light.

None of the mercenaries, except for Heavy, had been prepared for snow, and Char was only by
virtue of Heavy insisting she bring a coat. Char and Heavy seemed to have become fast friends,
Pyro noticed in the twenty-four-hour diner they grabbed a quick breakfast at the next morning.
Good; and better it be him than Pyro, who was reasonably sure that at times she was not qualified
to take care of herself, let alone another human. And that was without Alice being taken into
account.

Surreptitiously, Pyro glanced around for Alice, and found her nowhere. This surprised her, because
Alice most frequently came when Pyro had failed to sleep. Pyro had not gotten to sleep until
around four in the morning, and the alarm had gone off at seven. Pyro was likely going to be
useless for the whole day, though she told herself she would have plenty of time to sleep in the car.
This was technically true. She would, indeed, have plenty of time to sleep. She was nearly certain
she would not take advantage of it.

Scout noticed. “You look dead, April,” he said in a complimentary fashion as he shoveled
hashbrowns into his mouth. “What, Char snore?”

Char made an offended noise. “Hey, screw you!”

“Ladies, please,” murmured Spy, to a muted chuckle from Heavy. “Kingbird may sleep during our
ride.”

There was a low discussion over the greasy-spoon food, one Pyro did little participating in, for she
felt dead as well as looked it. It seemed that Heavy and Esau had caught Spy up on their findings in
the forest, immortality machine and black box and Solider; likewise Spy informed them that Kitzis
was concerned he might lapse into another coma, and as such he would not be driving. “This of
course leads us to the question of where we are driving to,” he finished, absently sipping at his
black coffee and wrinkling his nose at it. “Ugh. Dreadful.”

“Could we maybe go find Demo?” Scout said. “Ain’t a lot of team left, just him and Medic. Uh,
and not for nothin’, but maybe we better oughta leave Medic alone, on account of him being
crazy.”

“TFI will be expecting this,” came Heavy’s rolling voice. “That we reassemble team. The doctor
will tell them if they do not already know. Is obvious.”

“I agree with Mikhail,” said Esau, who sounded like he had not slept either. He was worrying the
black box, which Heavy had finally managed to wrench open to reveal a digital recorder they could
not interface with here. According to him, they would need a speaker and a power source, a battery.
“We can’t get predictable. Even if they call the RED team off us, they can get more killers.”

Spy put his dreadful coffee down with a quiet tap. “At present, Miss Kitzis is my utmost priority. I
would first like to get her to a safe house where I can guarantee her protection.”

There was a general susurration of agreement from everyone except Pyro. It was not that Pyro did
not agree; it was that she was thinking too hard to remember to say so. Instead: “I think we should
go to Bee Cave.”

Scout squinted at her. “Bee Cave, what?”

There was a lull in which Pyro was presumably meant to explain herself. She did not. She was
looking out the window, and half-watching Esau’s reflection in it, pretending she did not see him
watching her very closely in turn. Spy fulfilled her duty for her. “Bee Cave, Texas,” he said, still
holding his terrible coffee. “Engineer’s home.”

Scout did not so much make an “O” shape with his mouth as his mouth did its best impression of a
sagging tire. “Why is this?” Heavy asked.

“Yes,” said Esau, “why?”

“The—that black box.” She tried to scrape her thoughts together. She’d had them a moment ago. “I
want to hear what’s on it. And I don’t—it’s all burned down. There’s nothing left, Dell or Gray or
whoever faked his death. There’s no reason they’d look for us there, Char would be safe enough
until you found somewhere better.” Pyro pushed her hand through her hair. “I, I don’t know. There
might be something there that would let us listen to it.”

She could hear it in her own voice, the thread of disorientation. She did not think it was a
convincing argument. A sweep of the reflections in the window told her that her companions
agreed. Well; that was fine. Better that someone have sense, because it was never going to be Pyro.

“I’m going to Bee Cave,” she said, leaning her head against the glass. “And I’m taking the black
box. You can come or don’t. I hope you will, Esau. But I’m going to Bee Cave either way.”

The thing was that Pyro really would have gone to Bee Cave on her own. She really would have,
even if it meant taking a bus, or hitchhiking, or walking, if it came to that. She did not know where
Bee Cave was from here, exactly, but that was fine. She would have just had to get to Texas, and
on the highway that went between Phoenix, Arizona to Austin, Texas. She knew her way from
there, to Bee Cave.

She really would have done it, even knowing how bad an idea it was to break off from the safety of
the other mercenaries. It just as well that some of them agreed to come with her.

Spy and Char (and the immortality machine) would not be accompanying her, and Pyro thought
that was probably a good idea. Neither would Spy tell her where he intended to take her, which was
a Spy sort of thing to do. And as Kitzis had forbidden Spy from driving in the event of another
unexpected side-effect, Heavy was to go with him. It was agreed that the two mercenaries would
meet Pyro, Scout, and Esau in Bee Cave once they were done, assuming nothing drove them off,
and failing that, they would rendezvous in nearby San Antonio; further than Austin, but a less
obvious meeting spot. “There is a bowling alley there by the name of Star Strike,” Spy said, “and
the proprietor owes me a debt.” He would not elaborate on what the debt was, nor why a bowling
alley owner owed him it.

Breakfast taken, and paid for, and an excessively large tip left by Scout once he overheard one of
the cooks talking to their waitress and how her ex was refusing to help pay for her daughter’s
medical bills—after all this, they finally made their way out into the early-morning light. It was
dim and pale, white with new snow that tried and failed to cling to every surface, and the fog
suggested the diner was the only thing in the world left that was real. It was a thought that stuck
with Pyro even as they made the short drive back to the motel. Perhaps none of this was real;
perhaps it was all just an elaborate production put on by her own mind. Perhaps she was still a
member of BLU, perhaps all these people really were here, but none of what she thought was
happening was the truth.

She was silent all the way there.

The motel at least felt solid. The air smelled like the cigarette she’d smoked that morning and like
the musty burnt-dust the radiator reeked of. The carpet was obnoxiously orange, and Shep was
obnoxiously present, pawing at her, thumping her leg with his wagging tail, utterly betrayed to
have been left alone and fully forgiving now that she had returned. Pyro was just herding him to
the door when Char said, “Hey, April?”

Pyro looked up, startled to find Char there. Char had been there the whole time, but Pyro had sort
of shunted that out of her mind. Char was standing behind her, looking remarkably put together for
a kid whose life had just been blown apart, in fresh clothes and with her hair up in a neat loop. An
awkward sort of recognition of her own self-absorption scrabbled down the back of her thoughts.
Once Pyro had been that kid, suddenly alone in the world, suddenly thrust into something she
could not understand.

—are survived by a daughter, April Dominique Kingbird, and—

“What?” Pyro said, winced at her own tone, and then corrected, “Um. What is it?”

Now Char looked like she hadn’t thought she’d get this far in the conversation. “I just wanted to
say—I mean, with the journal. Last night. Are you okay?”

It was so far from what Pyro expected to hear that she did not know what to say. The silence was
long enough that Char shifted her weight from foot to foot and smoothed out her skirt to keep from
looking at her. “I didn’t know you didn’t know about the stuff in the journals. It seems like
everyone else here—you all seem to know so much more about what’s happening and I just
assumed.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t really know all that much about mental disorders. So I
hope I didn’t make anything worse for you.”

Finally, Pyro drew back from the door, much to Shep’s dismay, and turned. “No, just,” Pyro
started. Well, she didn’t know what to say either, it turned out. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. It was … it
surprised me. There’s, there were always a lot of secrets on BLU. There still are, I guess. Anyway,
just—look, I don’t know if anyone else has said it, I want to make sure someone says it. I’m really
sorry our showing up sent everything sideways the way it did.”

Because it was easy, going to Kitzis when they had thought it would be only him. It was easy to
forget there could be other people to put in the crossfire.

“It’s … well, it’s not okay,” Char said, eyes on the floor again, now. “I hate this. I hate you guys a
little bit for showing up. But I talked to Giordano, and he says he thinks it’ll be okay. And you’re
not the only one to say that. Mikhail did, too, yesterday.”

Of course Heavy would. Pyro nodded, relieved. “Good. That’s good. Heavy—Mikhail’s a good
guy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s nice. I’m going to give you the journal, okay?”
“What?”

“I don’t think I should keep it. It’s not about me, anyway. I know you can’t read it, but I woke up
before you did and I tried to write down a translation of the parts about you.” As she spoke she had
begun digging into her suitcase, and now again produced the leather journal. This time Pyro could
see several pieces of paper sticking out of it as Char crossed to her and held it out. “Anyway, like,
what am I going to do with it?” Char said with an attempt at a laugh. “Write a book report?”

Pyro smiled, or at least she tried. And she took the book, thumbing through it gently. Kitzis had
sprawling, disorderly handwriting, evident even in a language and a script she could not
understand, and it nearly looked like scribbles next to Char’s tight, neat lettering. “I’ll give it
back,” Pyro said. “Once all this is over. I’ll come give it back to your father.”

Char laughed again, hollower than before. “Sure. I’ll look for you. Tell Alice I say goodbye, too,
okay?”

“I will.”

Pyro never wanted to ride in a car again. It was only four hours into the thirty-hour drive getting to
Bee Cave would take, and she had decided this. Perhaps she would get a bike, or a horse. Maybe a
private jet. She could probably afford one of those.

It was only four hours into the thirty-hour drive, and as she was driving, she had yet to get any
additional sleep. The small of her back ached, her shoulders felt stiff, and her eyes kept sliding off
the road. Next to her, Scout was asleep, using his seat belt as a pillow; behind her, Esau sat in
driver’s side back seat. Shep occupied most of her field of vision whenever she looked back,
panting and watching the country fly by. The car had been quiet for much of this, each of them to
their own preoccupations. Pyro was just beginning to entertain the thought of asking Esau to take
over driving when his voice interrupted her tired thoughts. “May I ask you a question, Pyro?”

“Mmn? Sure.”

Another marker mile flew by. Traffic was light, and snow fell lighter still, just the barest kiss of
snowflakes to the windshield that melted as soon as they made contact. The sky was yet gray, the
road grayer still, and Pyro felt grayest of all.

Esau said, “What is it about Dell Conagher that causes the immense feelings you have for him?”

The question was so carefully crafted that Pyro nearly thought it was meant to make her drive off
the road. “Sorry?” she said, trying and failing to crane her neck back enough to see Esau.
“The what I have for him?”

A displeased sort of noise happened behind her. “Perhaps I misspoke. My inquiry is about the
nature of your relationship with Dell.”

If the first question hadn’t woken Pyro up, this one certainly did. “We didn’t have a relationship.”

“That is not what I meant,” Esau said, sounding frustrated. “Not an intimate relationship. I know
that. But, Pyro—you said it yourself, this morning. You would be making this drive by yourself if
no one had agreed to come with you.”
“That doesn’t—”

“You’re taking a considerable risk by going back to Bee Cave. I know you know they’ll be
watching it.” This shut Pyro up. She set her jaw, staring ahead at the road. “You’re driving across
the country to visit the ruins of his home. You went back to the Chippewa despite the devil to find
a way to restore him. I know … Pyro. I know it wasn’t just me you were hoping to see, when you
came.” His voice was gentler than she often heard it. “Don’t mistake my meaning. We are friends.
But …”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

Esau sighed. “Maybe I don’t either. You’re doing a great deal for his sake, is all.”

Another mile marker.

And then another.

Pyro said, “I don’t know.”

Her eyes threaded through the car, though what she sought she could not find, nor would she have
known it if she had. Scout slept, ignorant to the conversation. She could just glimpse Esau in the
rear-view mirror, but she could not bear to look at him, and at who he was not. “I don’t know,” she
said again, more desperately, like someone had taken offense to the answer. “He … saved me. I all
but killed myself and he saved me. Twice, even, because I don’t think I was going to live that much
longer when he found me the first time—no, fuck, three times. With the sentry. He should have
shot me! He should have shot me and he didn’t and I still don’t understand why. I had a
flamethrower pointed at his face and I was going to burn his house down for no reason at all. And I
just—and then he disappeared. Why didn’t he shoot me? Why did he keep trying to save me?”

The words came out all in a torrent, a flood of them, an emptying. She felt hollow after she’d said
it, light-headed. She wet her lips. “Esau? Do you know why?”

Quiet, for a long time. And then just a voice, just someone who wasn’t Dell, just words in her ear.

“No, Pyro. I’m sorry.”

 20: Stowaway

Alice had lived in Bee Cave, Texas. Pyro had not. Sort of. It was still kind of unclear to Pyro
exactly who she had been, after Teufort and before Alaska. But in the debriefing Miss Pauling had
given her after Dell vanished into the blizzard, Pyro learned that Dell had taken her back home
with him between missions, since she was in no state to find housing on her own. This bothered
Pyro. Alice did not have an opinion.

It might have been Alice that lived in Bee Cave, but it had been Pyro who chose to travel there the
previous year, just days after the Coldfront mission. BLU had set her up with an apartment in Las
Cruces while she figured out how to piece her life back together. The apartment did not allow dogs.
This was unfortunate for the apartment. She had promised Dell that she would take care of Shep,
and no rental agreement (especially one she had not actually read) was going to stop her.

First, though, she had to find Shep. She was two hours away from her destination when it dawned
on her she was not actually sure what Dell did with the dog when he was away, but that wasn’t
going to stop her either. She scraped her hopeless brain for pieces of information, any recollection
of where Shep might have been left. She came up empty, and when she gave up, the new green
truck she had bought to make the journey had at last made its way into Bee Cave.

She remembered almost none of the town, which was not a surprise, since Alice had been the one
living there, and at the time Alice had been more like a vague suggestion of a person than the
actual individual she had since become. There were bits Pyro remembered from before Teufort,
when she had wandered down the road from Austin with gas mask and flamethrower in hand, just
looking for something to burn. She wasn’t sure where the hockey stadium that had fed that need
was now or if its remains were even still there, four years later. The thing that most surprised her,
though, was just how small Bee Cave was, now that she was paying attention to it. It was a wide
spot on the road, with all of about fifty people in it. There was simply nothing there.

The other surprise—though it shouldn’t have been one, with her dark skin and burned face—was
that people recognized her.

Pyro had stopped first at a convenience store, looking for gasoline and something to eat. A tiny old
man asked her about Dell, and she answered by dropping her purchase and all but running out of
the store. On her way out, someone across the street stopped in the middle of their conversation
and looked at her for a long time before frowning and going back to what they were doing. After
that, back in her truck, her map led her up Dell’s long dirt driveway, comparing it to the first time
she had done so. She could not remember the exact events before Dell and his dog had come
investigating her attempts to set his house aflame, just a shotgun close enough for any hit to be a
kill, and her flamethrower breaking, and her breaking down after it. She remembered the cotton
fields, though barely a few days into February, there was no cotton now.

Pyro had knocked on Dell’s door, because she was nothing if not an idiot. He’d dropped off the
face of the earth after Alaska, and the thought that she might find him here when all of BLU’s non-
mercenary resources were digging for him was ludicrous. She knocked anyway. When no one
answered, she circled the house, just looking at it, wondering what would happen if she tried
setting fire to it this time. She only stopped when she came to the Spanish oak that hung over the
property, sleepy looking in the chill of late winter.

She was debating an encore performance of her attempt to break into Dell’s garage when motion in
the corner of her eye made her freeze. It took a long, hard look to calm her down, because Texas
felt a lot like New Mexico, and in New Mexico things moving in the corner of her eye often meant
someone was about to try and kill her.

It was not, however, a RED mercenary. This person had short, neat hair coiffed in its tight zigzag
curls under a tattered trucker’s hat. She had comically large glasses balanced on a button nose, the
frames bright white against her black skin. The rest of her suggested a particularly enthusiastic and
flexible scarecrow. She waved vigorously in Pyro’s direction once more. “Hey! TNT! Over here!”
the woman called. When an uncertain sweep of the area exposed no one else who could be the
addressee, Pyro pointed at herself. The woman threw her hands up in exaggerated exasperation.
“What! Yes, you! Girl, get over here!”

The woman didn’t seem angry, at least. Unlike Pyro’s last encounter with a stranger in this place,
neither a gun nor a dog were present. Pyro hesitated before jogging across the drive to where the
woman was bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Uh, hi,” Pyro said, slowing to a walk as she closed
the distance. “It must have looked like I was trespassing, but Dell—”

“What are you talking about, kid?” the woman said. “C’mere, you, it’s been months!”

This was how Pyro ended up in a very tight hug from a perfect stranger, who now babbled away in
her ear. “Damn, Dynamite, and here I thought I wouldn’t ever see you again! What’s it been, six
months? Longer, I think! I got so much to show you, my little cousin’s gone and built this whole
tree house since you been gone, and—”

“Hey,” Pyro said, disentangling herself and trying to look suitably apologetic. “I’m sorry, but I
don’t know who you are.”

This shut the woman up. Her eyebrows lifted off to somewhere under the brim of her hat, and she
tugged down her glasses to better look Pyro over. “Mmm. No, you’re TNT, alright. You telling me
you’ve gone and forgotten about Ginger?” To Pyro’s discomfort, she looked wounded. “Gosh, girl,
thought we were better friends than all that.”

“No, no, wait—it’s … I’ve been having some problems remembering things for the last couple of
months.” Strictly speaking, this was not a lie. “Like, a lot of things. I guess you know me? You’re
—it’s Ginger?” Ginger nodded, regarding Pyro like she wasn’t sure if she was lying or not. This
was a look Pyro had started to get used to. “Okay, Ginger. There was … it’s complicated. I had a
kind of accident—”

“Now, wait up. Conagher ain’t here with you?” This seemed to have just dawned on Ginger, who
stood on her toes and peered over Pyro’s shoulder at the locked house. “I guess maybe that does
sound like something’s up, huh? Sugar, are you okay?” She put the tip of one of the glasses’ arms
between her teeth and chewed on it. “You do seem different, don’tcha? Aw, you better come with
me. We’ll get this figured. And Shep’ll be just out of his mind to see you.”

Pyro perked up at once. “You have Shep?”

Ginger had scoffed. “Now I know you’re telling the truth,” she had said as she took Pyro by the
arm and firmly started to march her toward a small house across the field where the cotton would
grow. “I always take care of Shep when Conagher goes to work!”

So it was that Pyro met Ginger Gonzalez, who was possibly the chattiest woman in the world, but
in the way that you didn’t mind it so much because she always had something interesting to say.
(“Not like Scout,” Pyro said upon relating this story as they rolled down the highway, and Scout
offered to get out of the car and have a fistfight with her right there on the shoulder.) Remarkably,
they had even become friends after that. Ginger took Pyro’s quirks in stride, including her complete
change in personality, and Ginger proved impossible to dislike.
When Pyro had carefully explained that she had kind of lost track of Dell, and maybe Ginger could
give her a call in the event he ever came back home, and here was her number, and maybe she
could hang on to Shep for a little longer—? Ginger was all too glad to help. “Towed my car out of
a ditch three separate times, Conagher did,” she had told Pyro cheerfully over dinner that first
night. “Now, but you. I think if you want to avoid trouble—well, maybe you oughta consider not
hanging around, y’hear?” Pyro questioned this, and Ginger snorted. “You are not popular, girl. You
creeped a lot of people out, and you ain’t white, besides. Indian, which might be worse around
here.”

“Okay,” said Pyro, “but I’m going to be looking around anyway.”

Ginger shook her head, but she laughed as she did. “You’re just as stubborn as ever.”

So there was a stretch of about a month where Pyro just … kept coming back to Bee Cave. It was
for more reasons than just looking for Dell, she told herself; she needed to practice highway
driving. She could afford to stretch out the time Shep got to live on sprawling Texas land, and
Ginger had certainly not said no to the extra money Pyro gave her for the dog’s food and board.

Dell, of course, had never been there when she came back.

It was on April 13, 1971, that Ginger had called Pyro all in a panic, babbling that Dell’s house had
burned down and a body was found in the wreckage. Pyro had been asleep, due to the fact that it
was five in the morning. Within three minutes of the call, she had been pulling on her boots,
throwing clothes into a cardboard box in lieu of a backpack, and breaking the speed limit. A day
and a half later Ginger had met her on her front step with a hug and a kiss on the cheek that Pyro
supposed were meant to be comforting. “Girl, now you take that dog and you go,” Ginger said in a
sharp, hushed voice. Shep danced at their heels, licking eagerly at Pyro’s hands, utterly ignorant of
the destruction of his master’s home. “You don’t want to get tangled up in this. There’s already
folk whispering it was you. You’ve got to know how it looks to them.”

“I wasn’t even here!”

“But you’re here now, TNT. I mean it. You come back later, I’ll show you where he’s buried,
everything, you can say goodbye, I swear, but you stick around now when things are fresh and—
oh, honey, I just don’t want you to risk it.”

It was not just because Pyro was quite sure she could handle herself that she stayed. She had no
doubt at all that she could manage a few hicks if they came at her. And it wasn’t even that she’d
stayed because she’d been told not to, though if she was honest with herself, that might have been
part of it. Part of her did not even believe it had been Dell’s body in that fire, but more than
anything she couldn’t stand the thought of Dell’s funeral going by and not at least seeing it from a
distance. So she’d skulked around the far edges of the cemetery, waiting for the ceremony to be
over so she could go and sit by the grave and wonder what the hell to do next.

This was what Pyro was thinking about as she eased the Bronco to a stop in Ginger’s driveway
next to Ginger’s bright white sedan, over a year later. The funeral, and the people who had
recognized her, and how strange it all was to be here again. Bee Cave was so improbably small,
such an insignificant speck on the country’s face. In the last month she had driven through so many
other towns just like it, identical in their isolation, in their meaninglessness to a stranger. It was odd
to think it was in a town like this that the course of her entire life had changed.
The last time Pyro had been to Bee Cave was on April 15, 1971, though she did not know this. If
she had, she would have put some kind of stock in the knowledge that the Bronco rolled into town
and onto the Gonzales’ driveway on April 15, 1972. But as it was, she could not read the calendar
she and Scout were ushered past when Ginger insisted they stay for dinner, and this knowledge
escaped her.

Then there was chili in front of her, and Pyro did not know what to do about it. Ultimately, she
settled for eating it. Ginger’s husband made genuine five-star five-alarm chili and was terribly
proud of it, so this decision was agreeable to all involved.

It seemed like Scout made the same choice because he was absolutely demolishing his bowl. Esau
was not there. Esau, now occupying Dell’s body, had not wanted to meet a neighbor Dell had
known, nor did his companions think it was a good idea. No one wanted to explain why he wasn’t
dead after all or why he was not acting like himself. So it was just Scout and Pyro and Shep, the
last of whom was off rolling around ecstatically with the Gonzalezs’ little white terrier.

Their arrival had surprised Ginger, and Pyro explained she had lost their number. She felt a little
bad for the lie, but mostly she kept getting distracted by Alice’s recurring urge to go and play with
the terrier. That was something to note, she thought, given Alice had been utterly silent since the
devil burned. “We won’t bother you for long,” Pyro had said after Ginger’s customary hug, while
Ginger was threatening to shake Scout’s wrist off. “But I was wondering if maybe you’d heard
anything more about how Dell’s house burned down.”

Ginger’s attention peeled off of Scout and adhered itself to her at once. “More how?”

“He told us about something he left on his property once, and we think it would have survived the
fire. So we’re looking for it.”

Now Pyro was sitting around a four-person table with three other people, with chili and black beans
and cornbread and pepperjack cheese galore. A slightly hysterical part of her, the one that had been
cooped up in a car for four days with two men and a dog and moving at breakneck speed
whenever she’d been driving it, couldn’t help but cast Ginger and her husband as parents, with
Scout and herself as children. Just a normal family eating a normal dinner. The fact that Ginger was
definitely younger than her was meaningless; she was married, therefore, she played the mother.
Her husband was named River, and he seemed nice, he would probably make a good dad. Scout
would be a nightmare of a brother. Pyro would be a worse nightmare of a sister. They would
definitely deserve each other.

Pyro ate chili.

“… just don’t know,” Ginger was saying in her sweet Southern drawl. “Conagher did a lot of
machine work but he always seemed so careful, the accident was such a shock. Sweet man. You
knew him too, Jeremiah? You worked with him?”

Scout gulped down his mouthful. “Yeah, uh, friend of mine too, really, met him a couple years ago
in ’67. Didn’t hear about what happened ’til it was all over, y’know, figured I’d come pay my
respects if nothing else. April’s got the big plan, I’m just here for lifting stuff and lookin’ good.”

Pyro snorted. “I can lift stuff better than your skinny ass ever could.”

“Can’t either.”
“I could lift you.” Pyro took a bite of cornbread as if to punctuate this. “The ‘looking good’ part is
up for debate too.”

“Hey, screw you,” Scout said with a grin.

The Gonzalezs did not have any clues regarding a secret lockbox on Dell’s property, which was
just as well, since Pyro had made it up. But now they had a good pretense to be digging around.
“Nobody ever comes ’round these parts,” Ginger assured them as she picked up plates. “No fear,
darlin’s, you poke around all you want. But I want to see it if you find it!”

Promises were made. Requests that the pair of them stay the night or even just for coffee were
politely declined. Pyro said that she would visit again soon, and hoped she would be alive long
enough to do so. They rounded up Shep, accidentally woke a sleeping Esau in the truck, and made
for Austin, which was exciting to everyone after their long stint down from Washington. Austin
was home to well over two hundred fifty thousand people and stood scarcely twenty minutes from
Bee Cave. As loathe as Pyro was to drive any more that night, the fact was that a hotel was a much
more appealing prospect than sleeping in the car yet again. And Austin had hotels.

They got a corner suite, a double. There was a television and a phone, and their window
overlooked a small grove of yellow pines. Scout immediately laid claim to the entirety of one of
the beds, citing the fact that he had been sharing mattresses or sleeping in cars for the last two
weeks while Pyro frequently got her own bed for no reason other than she had breasts. He was
trying to get Esau to have opinions about the baseball game he’d found on channel eight when Pyro
slipped into the bathroom, which turned out to be so clean and white and large that it made her
want to just climb into the rack of fluffy, folded towels and never emerge. Instead she took a real,
actual bath, with bubbles and everything. It was the first true moment of calm she had managed to
find since Kitzis had been taken.

“This place is really nice. How come we don’t always stay in places like this?”

Pyro did not bother opening her eyes. Alice was not really anywhere in the room, so letting her
cracked-mirror brain try to figure out where to put her was a useless endeavor anyway. “Because,”
she said, after deciding that answering Alice would be better than not, “most of the time when
we’re done driving for the night, the best thing we can find is a rat-trap.” Despite herself, she
opened an eye anyway.

Alice sat leaning on the side of the tub, her arms folded over the edge and her chin resting on them.
She was watching the water. Pyro wondered if she should bother feeling exposed to her own
alternate personality. It was Alice’s body too, nothing she wasn’t familiar with. “What do you
remember about Bee Cave?” asked Pyro.

“Umm. I dunno.”

“Come on.”

“It was always hot. Ginger’s nice. Her dog is named Doggie. Once I got stung by a bee but it
wasn’t in a cave.”

On impulse, Pyro splashed her knee through the water, sending a wave where Alice only looked
like she was sitting. Alice did her the courtesy of wincing anyway. “Are we talking again now?”

She wasn’t expecting the haughty look Alice fixed her with. “I’ve been talking to you forever, and
you never talked back.”
“I … I know, yeah. I didn’t know what to do back then.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

“What?” Pyro said, incredulous, but Alice’s face was fixed in an expectant pout. “No.”

“Say you’re sorry,” Alice repeated. “You’re bad at doing that.”

“This is ridiculous,” Pyro said, and sunk deeper into the water.

Alice maybe should have been a little bit nicer, because the water seemed to swallow April up. At
least, she was not sure where April had gone after her chastisement, because now it was just Alice
in the bathtub. This was a little startling. April had never gone away because of Alice like that
before.

But it was just Alice, and so Alice had to manage. She peeled herself out of the bath and dried and
dressed and made faces in the mirror for a few minutes. She toweled her hair one last time and
stepped out.

The bathroom was cozy and warm and welcoming, and she did not expect to be met with icy
tension when she stepped out of it. The television still blared a baseball game, but now Scout sat in
the prim and overstuffed armchair like someone had flung him there, a mess of prickling limbs and
high shoulders as he watched the screen. Shep was nowhere to be seen. Esau was nowhere to be
found. “Scout?” Alice said.

“What?”

“Umm.” She inched out of the bathroom, peering around, as if Esau might suddenly jump out at
her. He did not. It would have been a very un-Esau thing to do. “Where’s Esau?”

“Took a walk.”

“With Shep?”

“Yeah. You Alice?”

“Uh-huh.” She picked at a scab she had discovered on her elbow while dressing. “Are you mad?”

Scout stirred, finally, reeling his arms back in where they belonged. “What? No. Well, I mean, no,
yes, yeah, but not, like, at you or nothing.”

No matter what anyone said about her intelligence, Alice was capable of adding two and two.
“You’re mad at Esau,” she said. “How come?”

He groaned. “I dunno. I don’t—I know you like him, Alice, I don’t wanna tear into him if it’s
gonna get you upset.”

“Oh,” she said, and found a spot to sit on one of the beds amid the scattered suitcases. “What did
he do, though?”

The TV shut itself up when he found the remote and muted it. He thumbed at the buttons as he
mulled over his answer, and he looked very un-Scout-like. Alice watched him closely, curious. It
was rare to see Scout sullen like this and had been so even when they were shut up together at
BLU, where he had reason to be sullen. It was almost rarer for Alice and Scout to be alone
together. “He’s just pissed off that we’re here,” he said at last. “Like, you know, he didn’t want to
come back to where Engineer lived. He’s not anything like he was back at BLU, he just seems
angry all the time now. I dunno. It’s not like I knew the guy, really, I guess.”

“Everyone’s mad at him,” Alice said. “You and April, and Heavy doesn’t like him either.”

Scout winced. “I ain’t mad exactly. I dunno. Hey, though, did something happen that made April
bail?”

“Umm. It was me, maybe. I told her she should apologize to me and she said ‘this is ridiculous’
and then she was gone.”

The television blipped off with a fuzzy hum as Scout’s thumb found the power button. “Don’t
sound too bad,” he said. “Like, she ain’t going off the deep end again, right?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you, like, the good version of going off the deep end?” At her blank stare, he made a vague
gesture that did not aid her in understanding. “Because like, it used to be you’d show up whenever
April didn’t want to deal with whatever was happening. Like how you showed up at the bunker,
last fall. Now you’re just showing up whenever, though.”

Something about the way he put this made Alice wrinkle her nose. She could almost figure out
why it bothered her, she could just see the shape of it, but the answer never came. “I dunno,” she
said. “Maybe. I told you I don’t know how it is when you’re one person but two people.”

“Sure,” he said, and let it go. “I’m dyin’ in here, it’s too stuffy. I’m gonna go for a walk too, if you
wanna come.”

“Okay,” said Alice.

It was around the third time they walked past a cluster of long-haired guys outside of bars that
Scout commented to Alice, “Man, Soldier would lose it if we brought him here.” She laughed into
her ice cream, smearing it around half her mouth, and Scout seemed pleased with the reaction.

They ambled now around the streets surrounding their hotel, which burbled and hiccupped with
activity at the late hour. It was nice being somewhere with more people for a while; their last
stopover in a real city had been in Spokane, and they had only been passing through. Alice liked
cities. They were busy and alive, and there was always something going on, something to notice.
This particular street was propped up by pawn shops and payday loan businesses, punctuated by
the occasional oasis of a lounging retail store. Bars sprouted like mushrooms, Day-Glo signs
blazing in the early dark, growing out from towering old buildings with skeletal, forgotten doors
and broken windows. “This is the kind of place I would have stayed for a while,” Alice said,
pausing next to one such building with an exceptionally forgotten door and exceptionally broken
windows. “Before I met Dell.”

She went back to her ice cream as Scout cast an eye over the structure, which was considering
toppling onto them at any minute. “Yeah? Because you were homeless, right?”

“Uh-huh. Or I mean, April would have stayed here. I wasn’t her yet. She wasn’t me—before we
were us.” Alice grimaced and stuck her thumb against the roof of her mouth to do battle with a
blooming ice cream headache. “It’s confusing. I remember most of the same things, but I didn’t do
them. I would have done them different. At least, I think I would have.”

“Is it hard being, like … geez, I don’t even know what to call you guys. You got a name for how
you are?”

“I dunno. April called me a parasite once. Scout, is it bad I’m still here?”

He looked taken aback, and a little hunted, there on the hazy sidewalk lit by neon glows and
passing headlights. The remains of his own ice cream were still clutched in his hand, just a soggy
cone with the good stuff licked out. “Uh,” he said, and peered up again at the scowling building.
“Shoot. I don’t think I’m the one that can answer that for you.”

“It’s just that nobody likes me,” she said, following his gaze. “Except Esau. But nobody seems to
like Esau now either. I guess it’s because we’re both parasites.”

“You ain’t a parasite,” Scout said. “Esau—I dunno about Esau.”

“If Esau’s one, I am too,” Alice said. “We’re the same.”

Cars drifted by. A muddied pool of people shuffled past them. Alice shivered as the ice cream
worked its way through her and wondered what April was doing, and about parasites. She knew a
little about parasites, all things gleaned from what April knew about them: tapeworms and lice and
cuckoo birds. She knew about how they were undesirable, and took and took and never gave, and
more often than not left their hosts miserable or sick or dead. Dell was probably dead, Esau kept
telling them. April was often miserable, Alice thought, and between her damage and many traumas
it would be easy to call her sick.

Alice was also pretty sure all the ways of fixing a parasite generally meant the parasite ended up
dead.

Scout said, “You know, nobody ever wants their baby brother around neither.”

It took a moment for Alice to realize she had been spoken to, lost in herself. “They don’t?”

“Hell no they don’t,” he said, and laughed. “Especially not when their baby brother’s a
motormouth tagalong that keeps ruining shit for the rest of them. I am telling you, took me years to
get any of ’em besides Toby to not throw rocks at me any time I went by.”

Alice’s eyes widened. “They threw rocks at you?”

“Not for real, I mean—well, no, sometimes for real, but only sometimes,” he said, all easy
confidence once more, the Scout she was used to. “Now I’m the hotshot, though, handsomer than
all of them put together and richer, I go home and everybody wants to hang out with me. You can
take that to the bank.”

He had begun walking again as he spoke, and Alice fell into step beside him. They went on in the
half-quiet of the evening that way until they passed another gaggle of bar patrons, one of whom
being a very drunk woman who saw Alice’s face and became deeply distressed. She was tall and
had wild, dyed hair and an eyelid that drooped, and she grabbed at Alice as they passed. “Oh
honey, oh,” she said, pawing at her shoulder, “your face, baby girl, oh no, oh no …”
Alice tried to tug away, but the hold became more insistent. The woman’s friends gawked, though
at their friend or her scars was anyone’s guess. “Let go,” she said, leaning back again.

The woman leaned with her and managed to succeed in looking even sadder. “My boyfriend,
honey, his daddy’s a plastic surgeon, he’s so nice, he’s such a sweetie, he could fix your poor face,
what happened? To your face? Oh no,” she added again, contemplatively, as Scout grabbed her
wrist and yanked it off Alice’s shoulder. “Huh?”

“She said let go,” Scout said.

The woman squinted at him, a tiny bit of her tongue sticking out of her mouth. “You’re her
boyfriend,” she said at last, sounding pleased that she had cracked the riddle. Scout pulled a terrible
face. “Not boyfriend? You her brother? Big brother? Aw, no, was that rude? I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean nothing by it—”

“Come on, Carly,” said one of the drunk woman’s friends, and pulled her away.

Scout muttered something and Alice let herself be hustled down the sidewalk and into the glow of
a twenty-four-hour convenience store. “Geez. There’s being drunk and then there’s being so drunk
you grab people on the street to tell ’em to get surgery, sheesh.”

“It’s okay,” Alice said. “She was nice about it. Thanks, though.” And then, having considered the
woman’s incorrect guess: “I wish you were my brother. I miss having a brother.”

For the second time that evening, Scout was startled into silence. He fiddled with his hat and tossed
his soggy ice cream cone into a trash can and ultimately settled into leaning against the glass of the
drug store. A sign cut off by his back declared he was discounted, a bargain. “I’m pretty lousy at
being a brother,” he said.

Alice shrugged. “My real brother’s dead, so he’s pretty lousy at it too.”

This got the kind of laugh made by someone who knew they shouldn’t be laughing, and he bowed
his head, knuckles pressed to a wryly grinning mouth. “Aw, geez,” he said. “Curtis, right? D’you
… you called him your brother. Not April’s.”

“I think,” Alice said, brow furrowing, “I think maybe I remember him a little better. Or I just think
about him more. He was nice. He was always really nice to me even though he was lots older.
Once,” she said, her face lighting up, “he took me to the movies and got me all the candy I could
eat. I think about that day a lot.”

Scout nodded, the slow, ongoing sort of nod that accompanied consideration. “He sounds like he
was better at it than most of my brothers,” he said. “He sounds like … hell. You know what, I think
I saw a movie theater a couple streets back. You wanna go see if anything’s playing?”

The moment Alice stepped away again coincided with the opening of the hotel room door, and
Pyro blinked in the dimness. Scout squeezed past her and turned on the lamp; when he turned again
and looked her over, at the way she peered owlishly around the room, he said, “Oh, hey. You
back?”

“Yeah,” Pyro said, upon deciding Esau and Shep were still not here. This was troubling: it meant
they had been gone for the length of the walk and the movie and the loitering out front of the hotel,
where Scout and Alice had talked for a good forty-five minutes about childhood memories. Even
Pyro had not remembered some of the things Alice spoke of, not until she did so, and she was a
little afraid of what that meant. “Wait, how’d you know it’s me?”

Scout shrugged, starting to pull his backpack of clothes open, apparently changing for bed. “You
hold yourself different,” was all he said. When no more came, Pyro kicked off her boots and
wandered back into the bathroom with her own stack of sleep clothes.

The mirror confronted her. She examined herself, once, trying to figure out what Scout had meant,
before turning her back on it.

When she came back out, Scout had once more claimed his spot on the armchair and turned to the
television, now playing something she did not recognize, some old cartoon. “Well,” she said,
dropping down on the bed that sat closest to him, “the movie wasn’t exactly Alice’s thing, but I
liked it.”

He tilted his head back enough to eye her and kind of smiled. “Yeah? You were there?”

“Mostly. I’m not sure why I left, but”—and she hesitated, looking down at her socked feet—“I’m
glad you guys got to hang out.”

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

“I’m glad you treated her better than I do.”

As soon as she said it, she felt it suck the easy mood from the room. She couldn’t bring herself to
be bothered. “I feel bad about it,” she went on, still considering her tired white socks and the holes
they were developing. “Calling her a parasite.”

Scout flipped the channel and found a commercial, and then another. “I guess I think you oughta
tell her that,” he said eventually. “I can’t do anything for your conscience, you know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Okay. Cool. Good.” He scratched at his throat, watching the excitable man on the television try to
convince his unseen audience on the virtues of his product. “Be nice to my little sister.”

It was warm and foggy and Pyro couldn’t see further than where the Bronco was parked by the
road. The six a.m. sun was nowhere to be found. The only thing that knew they were there was the
bevy of sleepy mourning doves, roosted in the Spanish oak that had survived the fire on Dell
Conagher’s property.

It had been a hell of a fire, too. Pyro had wrestled with herself before, the fact she wished she had
been there to see it, because that was simply who she was and would always be. It was easier now,
knowing the body that had been burned inside it was not Dell’s. Hopefully whatever was buried in
his grave had never been alive to begin with.

“So he faked his death, obviously,” Scout was saying, as they picked their way through the
blackened remains of Dell’s house. It was hard going, for a good portion of the second floor had
caved in, and this was to say nothing of the roof. The ground floor was an obstacle course of
broken timber and unidentifiable scorched material, and it came to Pyro that somehow she had
never spent any time in a place after it had burned. The after had never been important, for that
was later, and Pyro lived firmly in now.

Pyro lived a little less firmly in now, these days. As she looked through what she thought to be the
remains of the kitchen, she even found that she was currently in the time of then, or perhaps before.
She was unfamiliar with both, but maybe she could make their acquaintance, maybe with Alice’s
help. That might be a good idea. She thought she might be able to see Dell’s white-and-blue
kitchen under the knapped and charred surfaces of the ruin in front of her, if she stayed long
enough and tried hard enough.

“Of course he faked his death,” came Esau’s voice, thready and irritable. He had come back late
last night, with a speaker and wires and a nine-volt battery for the black box, and a very tired Shep.
They had all agreed to listen to the black box later. Rather, Pyro had agreed, uncertain if listening
to it would be a good idea in her exhausted state. Esau would have listened to it right then and there
but delayed for her sake, and Scout had loudly declared he didn’t care and didn’t want to hear what
was on it at all. “I should have faked mine,” Esau went on. “He thought to get ahead of the very
mess we’re in. What is it we’re even looking for? This is a ruin, Pyro.”

It was hard to deny that. “I don’t know,” Pyro admitted. “Burning his house down seems like he
was trying to hide something. I guess I’m looking for that.”

“Something you think the police and TFI haven’t already found, hm?”

“Quit being a dick, Esau, okay,” Scout snapped, leaning back and aiming a kick at a miserable-
looking table that was half on its side and blocking his path. “April’s got instincts about this kind
of shit. About Engie, anyway. Saved your ass. I woulda left you to drown in the bunker if she
hadn’t said something.”

Esau grunted in answer and said he was going to go and look at the garage. That seemed like a
better place to search for things, so she followed him, with Scout trailing after. She knew as a
matter of fact that there was already one buried secret under it.

It turned out that the secret basement was no longer secret, though. The first thing that drew Pyro’s
eye as they made their way into the garage, as blasted a ruin as the house, was the tower of
unburned debris that covered a section of the floor. Drawing closer proved that it was, in fact, the
aftermath of a hole being jackhammered into the concrete, straight down into the basement, a black
wound bored into the scorched body. Through the dim light of the absent sun, all she could tell was
that the basement had been emptied.

Even without the basement, the garage held just as much to be dug through. Pyro found a mostly
intact shovel and made good time with that, Scout was off in a far corner kicking his way through
fallen shelving, and even Esau was dutifully prying his way through things, having stripped the
prosthetic skin off his false hand to spare it tearing. It was quiet, repetitive work, and Pyro was
glad for the silence. It did not last as long as she would have liked. A yelp and a curse in the
direction of Scout broke the calm. He had managed to cut a bloody stripe all along his palm from a
collapsed piece of metal. “Do you need help?” Pyro asked when he showed it to her, but he waved
her off.

“No, it ain’t serious, just it hurts like a bastard is all. We got first aid in the car, still, yeah? I’ll just,
I’m gonna go clean it up, maybe take ten minutes, I hate this, I hate being right here. Maybe I’ll go
say hi to Ginger and them, I wanna get out of the fog. I hate looking at all this burned stuff.”
In a very swift series of realizations, it struck Pyro that she had asked Scout to dig through a
burned-out ruin, which had to be difficult for him specifically, and for the sake of someone she
didn’t think he necessarily liked or even trusted. He had done it all without a word of complaint
until now. This flew so thoroughly in the face of her understanding of Jeremiah Owens that rather
than return to work, she stared at his back until he disappeared into the truck’s cab. It did not seem
possible that this was the man who had wanted to kill her less than a year ago for her role in his
brother’s death, yet there he went.

“Are you alright?” came Esau’s voice as she watched Scout lope off toward the truck, and Pyro
squared her shoulders.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She rolled her new revelation around in her head, feeling it thud and squelch.
“Are you alright?”

Esau’s brows quirked, and he looked off the opposite way Scout had gone, out into a patch of
young trees that crowded the horizon over the open prairie. “I’m fine enough. Thank you for
asking.”

The terrible feeling that she was being extraordinarily selfish sunk neatly between her shoulder
blades. “Let’s take a break too,” she said, and then, hoping to smooth out the crease between
Esau’s eyebrows, “We could go and listen to the black box.”

That worked. That even got a fraction of a smile and a bob of the head, and then they were headed
to the truck themselves.

While Esau pulled things from the back of the Bronco, Pyro checked on Scout, who told her to quit
being such a mother hen. “I might head back out to Austin real quick,” he said. “The kit’s about
used up and probably we shouldn’t be going around with an empty one. Oughta let Shep out of the
room too.”

“Sure,” said Pyro. She was going to have to thank him later for all this, but not now, and probably
not in the company of Esau. She was going to have to thank all of them, really, if she lived through
this. She owed them all.

There was nowhere by the truck to sit, and Scout repeated that he did not want to hear the black
box. The two of them instead took the materials and sat under the Spanish oak, still host to the
mourning doves. The birds watched the humans with quiet wariness, but reluctant to give up their
perch, they only burbled and cooed as they shifted among themselves.

“I tested it last night,” Esau said, brighter than she had seen him in some time. “So it does work. A
lot of what I remember as the chassis is a little fuzzy. I’m hopeful this will clear it up.”

Pyro nodded and did not say what she was hoping to hear.

There was a burst of static from the little contraption as Esau plugged the system together and a
mechanical sigh from the black box. Then came a crackle and a hum, and a voice, thin with the
tiny speaker.

“… just as well you’re taking me longer than expected, you fool thing, woulda sent you out with a
busted balance array—ah, shoot! That’s the damn matrix gone, ain’t it?”

The voice, the drawl, the long vowels. Pyro physically leaned back, dropping on her hands as her
eyes grew wide. Esau froze, but she was not concerned with him. Her entire world now revolved
around that speaker.
It was Dell. It was inarguably, unmistakably Dell Jacob Conagher’s voice, muttering to himself,
and to something he was working on. Pyro sat, transfixed, and listened to the steady tone and
rolling Texan accent. Esau said something, and she had to wait for a break in the words from the
speaker to process what it was. “This started a lot earlier than I anticipated,” he had said.

“What?”

Esau gestured to the speaker. “He was building me.” Then, wincing at his own mistake, “It. The
chassis.”

“Do you remember any of this?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Let’s keep listening,” Pyro said, as if they were going to do anything else.

If Esau disagreed, he said nothing. They listened to Dell talk about absolutely nothing of interest,
complain about the weather, complain about his working conditions. If it had been anyone else
speaking, Pyro would have spaced out in the first three minutes. The recording seemed to skip
through long silences, and so they heard a week pass for the ex-BLU Engineer, and then a month,
and months. “Leaves turning,” Dell said, finally. “Be getting cold, soon.”

Pyro had no idea how long they had been sitting there. At least half an hour, she thought. Her back
ached and at some point she had ripped up most of the grass around where she sat. The mourning
doves were gone, and she had not noticed their leaving. The truck was absent too, and Scout with it,
probably gone back to Austin like he’d said. That was fine. For a little while, finally, everything
was fine.

Something moved, and it took her longer than it should have to realize that the something was
Esau. He’d gotten to his feet, hands in pockets, turned away from her and looking out over the
remains of Dell’s abandoned life. The recording was still going, but now it was a stretch of sounds
of a machine being worked on, and so Pyro was able to say, “Hey,” around her dry tongue. “Hey,
uh. Do you want to take a break? Go back to looking?”

Esau said nothing. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, running a hand over his head,
and his brow furrowed. “Esau?” Pyro said.

He turned to look at her, eyebrows lifting. He opened his mouth, and failed to find whatever he’d
meant to say, and grimaced. He shook himself.

“No,” he said, a little distantly. “Well, no. Don’t see the point, I guess. I don’t rightly know what it
is y’all are looking to find, really. I got rid of anything important before I burned the place.”

Pyro’s jaw fell open, then shut, and then she was biting the back of her hand, staring, rigid, maybe
starting to shake. The man across from her gave a soft and sheepish laugh, and met her eyes.

“Hey, Smoky,” said Dell Conagher. “Been a while.”

Gift art by @that-hoopy-frood
 21: Across the Bow

Pyro could count the number of times she had cried in her life on one hand. Really cried, broken
down and gotten snot-nosed and puffy-eyed. Right after she’d been pulled from the river that took
her family was the first one she could remember; her first night in her new foster home, realizing
her parents and brother were truly gone; after June sent her packing for burning down the hardware
store, saying she never wanted to see her again. And just a year ago, in a dark and chilly hallway in
Alaska, surrounded by men she was lucky to count as her friends and allies. Those were tears of
gratitude, of shock, of knowing she was being given something she didn’t deserve.

Pyro had never cried from joy before, but she was going to have to add that one to the list. The
tears that streamed down her face as Dell crossed to her were not stopping any time soon.

“Oh my God,” she said, even as Dell came to a stop in front of her and put up his hands like he
thought she could currently process whatever the motion meant. “Dell. Dell? Engineer?”

“Guess that’s so,” he said, and looked just as surprised to be saying it. “You don’t—oh, April.
There, now.”

For Pyro had given up and grabbed him in an embrace, unable to think of a single other act to
express the rush of emotion screaming through her. She was still crying, sniffling, fully aware how
out of character all of this was for her and not caring. Dell seemed to come to terms with it quicker
than she did, and his arms settled around her with care.

When she finally pushed back again, her grin stretched so broad across her face that it hurt. A
hundred questions fought their way up her throat, but the first one to make it out was this: “You
called me April?”

His apologetic smile turned to one of self-consciousness. “Oh, uh, yeah. Guess I did. It’s still Pyro,
ain’t it?”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t care, Dell, but how—how did you know my name?”

“Oh,” he said, “kinda I’ve been along for the ride for a while now.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Make it stick, huh?” he said, and then Pyro was crying again.

There was a second hug, and a moment of Pyro viciously scrubbing the tears from her face. Then
came the questions, a battery of them fired off like rockets, too fast to be answered. Dell shook his
head and knelt to turn off the black box that still reeled off a memory of his voice. “I’ll tell you
whatever it is I can,” he said. “I don’t know how long I can be here.”

He jerked his head to the side and started walking, moving up the perimeter of the drive. Pyro
scrambled after, trying to get control of her words back. It was rough going, and there was a stretch
of silence where she just kept looking at Dell, because she couldn’t believe it. Had she forgotten
that he held himself differently than Esau? When he moved it was relaxed, careless. He did not
limp. Was this what Scout had meant the night before, when Alice left? “Is this what it felt like for
you?” she said, pawing at her eyes again. “When I came back?”

He blew out his breath long and low, eyebrows hiked. “Lord, probably. Guess that might make us
even.”
“Maybe,” Pyro said, and did not believe that either. “You’ve been along for the ride? You know
what’s been happening?”

“The gist of it.”

He told her what he knew. It seemed like his memory started up again around the time she and
Scout had left the BLU headquarters and covered broad strokes of what had happened since then.
Not every detail was accounted for, but it was something, and more than Pyro would have hoped.
Even with that good news, a wash of discomfort struck her at the thought that he might have
overheard the question Esau had asked her in the car. She did not ask if he had, and he did not
mention it.

“Reckon it was being here, and the recording besides,” he was saying now. “So I guess maybe you
did find whatever it was you were looking for, coming here, huh?”

“Scout’s never going to believe this,” she said, and laughed. It died quickly, and at the same time
her feet slowed to a halt. She only realized she had stopped by the way Dell paused and looked
back at her. “You were here the whole time,” she said.

“I mean,” said Dell, “in a manner of speaking.”

“No, that’s not—Esau kept saying he couldn’t tell if you were there or not. Sometimes he said he
thought you were—gone.”

The air of quiet calm that Dell so naturally cultivated melted off him the way the fog was melting
around them. “Did he, now,” he said. “Yeah, I guess he would.”

“Did he not know?”

“Oh, he knew, alright. Don’t think he cared for the fact I wasn’t.”

Each word was leaden. A chill leached into her even in the warming air. “What?” she said. “That
can’t be right. We went back to the Chippewa forest. To get something, to get someone to bring
you back. He wanted to go.”

“Yes, I expect he did,” said Dell. “That I remember, come to think of it. If that doctor of yours
thought he could bring me back, Esau thought he’d probably be able to get rid of me for good too.
And he was getting real tired of making sure I didn’t get back out.”

A wind uncurled over the prairie grass, the renewing cotton plants, casting freshly churned ash out
from Dell’s old home. It tugged at the clothes Esau had put on Dell’s body that morning and
rippled through Pyro’s hair. It could not shift the thing Dell had said, lying now between them like
a dead animal, rank and repulsive. Pyro swallowed.

“Oh,” she said.

That oh had been the cork keeping her contained. As soon as she had said it the anger churned and
boiled up through her, filmy and clinging to every part of her like sea-foam. It was not even
entirely hers, for under it she could feel Alice’s own anger, an outrage and a hurt at the very idea
Dell would accuse Esau of such a thing. It was a puddle compared to the surging tide of Pyro’s
fury, her rage at this new truth: that Dell had been at her side all along, and kept from her.

All this happened in silence. It was in that silence that Dell cleared his throat. “If you don’t believe
me,” he said.
Pyro shook her head.

“I’ve lied to you before. I know. If you don’t—”

“No,” she said. “I trust you.”

Silence.

“Why?” he said, spreading his hands. “Believe me, I’m glad—more glad than I can say, truly, but
Pyro, April, what I did—I wouldn’t blame you if—”

“I don’t care about that,” she said. “I trust you.”

“April.”

“The last time I saw you,” she said, squaring herself and almost laughing as she realized she had
forgotten this—had forgotten even to recount it to Esau there in the car, days ago, “the last time I
saw you was in that bunker, right after we got you out of that suit that controlled the chassis. It was
filling up with water, and we didn’t have any way out except a teleporter we couldn’t make work,
except you did. You made it work and you got us out. The last time I saw you, you saved my life. I
trust you.”

Dell let his hands fall at his sides, watching her with an intensity she had forgotten he was capable
of.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“I think,” Pyro said, another twenty minutes later, “that part of me thought if I could just talk to
you again, everything would fix itself.”

“Nope,” Dell said, sounding calm for a man who had something inside him with active intent to
end his life. “Just bringing more problems around for you.”

Pyro snorted. “Scout’s not going to believe this,” she said again, because she kept circling back to
that for some reason. Part of her wanted confirmation that this was real, that it was happening. “I
wish he’d hurry up and get back.”

Dell hummed in response. They had found themselves sitting again under the oak, just talking.
Pyro wanted to know everything, but she had stuck to more casual questions. Do you feel alright?
Does BLU know you’re still here? Do you remember getting us out of the bunker? He was fine,
thank you kindly; they did not, best of his knowledge; afraid not.

Pyro left alone the questions like did you know what you were leaving us for? and was it really you
who killed Spy?

“Where is Scout?” Dell asked, peering around. It was a glowing day now, the fog banished in the
late morning, and Scout was still very absent. This was a good question. Surely driving to Austin
and back, with the fetching of a new first-aid kit and letting the dog out in-between, wouldn’t take
nearly the time that had passed. “I’ve got to tell you,” Dell added, “seeing you and him be anything
like friends is just beyond me.”
“Do you know what happened?”

“Only thirdhand. That one’s mostly Esau.”

She wondered if this was what it was like to listen to her talk about Alice, and the strange, wobbly
way they existed around one another. She almost said this, but before she could, the billow of dust
became apparent on the far horizon of the road.

Straightening up, Pyro squinted at it. “That’s a car, right?” she said, shading her eyes from the sun.
“It’s really going, too. Is that our truck?”

“My eyes ain’t what they used to be,” he said, and Pyro got to her feet and took a few steps toward
the road.

It was a car, and it screamed down the gravel, going even faster than Pyro had thought. Unease
laced its way between her vertebrae as it came roaring toward them, but then—yes, it was the
Bronco. It cleared the distance between them in a matter of seconds and lurched a hard turn onto
Dell’s driveway that sent rocks spinning into the air. The engine snarled under the hood as it roared
to a halt, but Scout paid it no mind as he threw the Bronco into park and came falling out of the
driver’s side. “Hey!” he hollered with his arms over his head, as if there was any way they could
have failed to see him. “We gotta go, get in, c’mon!”

The unease sunk down into the pit of Pyro’s stomach to settle there, heavy and cold. She glanced
back at Dell, who gathered up the black box and its accoutrements, and ran after her as she jogged
to the car. “Scout?” she said, hauling open the passenger-side door. “What’s the matter?”

He was grinning as he yanked the driver’s door shut again, but not in a way that made her feel any
more comfortable. “Hi, yeah, hey,” he said, all his words tumbling out of the cab onto her. “Get
Esau and get in, okay, whatever you do don’t say nothing to her yet.”

This struck Pyro as an absolutely batshit thing to say. “What?”

“Just get in!”

Pyro got in, and found Shep in the passenger seat; she banished him to the floor. A moment later
Dell followed, hauling himself into the back seat. Pyro looked back at him, trying to figure out
whether it was more or less wise to alert Scout to who was now accompanying them, but something
behind Dell’s seat made her freeze. Every bad feeling she’d had since she’d noticed the dust cloud
in the distance coalesced into a single phrase: “Oh, shit.”

On the floor of the truck bed, just visible between the back seats and unable to steady herself
against the motion of the vehicle as Scout threw it into reverse, a bound and gagged Miss Pauling
winced as she smacked her head against the side of the truck.

The problem was that the corner suite of the hotel was on the side that did not face the street and
was, moreover, conveniently shielded from view by a large grove of trees. Someone breaking in
should have been a given. It was sheer luck that Scout walked in on Miss Pauling just as she was
planting another bug in their things.

There had been a talk, Scout said, which escalated into a debate for about point-five seconds before
morphing into a full-scale fight. Not an argument, a fight, and Scout had a slash in his side that
would have very much changed the course of the day had it been a few inches to the left. Pauling,
however, had been stripped of her gun and her syringes of questionable liquids and her blocky
cellular phone, thanks to the fact that Scout knew both that she always carried these things with her
and exactly where she kept them on her person. As Scout was a survivor first and her boyfriend
second and a gentleman maybe fourth or fifth at best, she had also been bereft of the second,
smaller gun she kept tucked under her dress and a tiny, wickedly sharp folding knife that was
stowed in her bra.

Then, apologizing profusely, he had tied her up with the roll of duct tape Esau had left behind and
snuck her and all the luggage into the car. There was one thing all of the mercenaries knew about
Miss Pauling: you could not leave her alone and expect her to remain where you had left her, no
matter how much duct tape you used.

The ride was deathly silent. Once or twice Pyro heard Pauling sigh or grunt or groan, but even
Scout was quiet after telling them what had happened. It took a lot to quiet Scout, to rattle him into
silence. Scout was not merely rattled, but thoroughly shaken.

They could not go back to the hotel, or to Ginger’s, or anywhere that anyone might conceivably
think to look for them. What they did do was get on the highway and drive in a random direction,
doubling back several times, all eyes watching for some kind of sign they were being tailed. Miss
Pauling usually worked alone. Usually.

“I think it’s clear,” Pyro said eventually, having watched the rearview mirror and nothing else for a
solid twenty minutes.

Scout sagged back into his seat.

They pulled off the highway, down a dusty back road of an exit that ambled around telephone lines
and hay fields. Scout tucked the Bronco in between a gray-wood sign advertising property for sale
and a stand of Mexican buckeyes in flower, all browns and grays until you reached the defiant
shock of purple-pink that crowned the branches. The three of them filed out of the car, though no
one took their eyes off Pauling in the back for long.

“What the hell,” started Pyro.

Scout rubbed at his eyes. “Uh-huh.”

“What do we do with her?”

“I don’t know. I mean, what can we do?”

This was the question. They now had a hostage. At the very least, they had more or less acquired
TFI’s right hand, for Miss Pauling’s official title as “personal assistant” to the Administrator
covered only a very limited scope of what the tiny woman with the black hair and purple wardrobe
did. Pyro had mostly just heard whispers from the team: Pauling had tapped someone to come with
her to steal something from Area 51. Pauling could only stay for a few minutes; she had a flight to
catch to the Pentagon, and someone there was unfortunately going to have an embolism. Pauling
was annoyed with the team again, because in stealing the intelligence she’d sent them after, they’d
left six witnesses that she was going to have to take care of personally. Florence Pauling was five
feet and four inches (three and a half, really) of meticulous, unapologetic death, and having her
caught was not unlike catching a crocodile by the jaws. Eventually they would have to let her go,
and when they did, someone was probably going to lose an arm.
“You got any ideas, metalhead?” Scout said, looking to Dell, and Dell was looking at Pyro—
looking to be told what to do, she realized with a cold shock. She didn’t know what to do. She’d
never known what to do.

“Uh,” she said, and dropped her voice. “Scout. That’s not Esau.” Given the events of his day, it
was unsurprising that he just gave her a bleary, uncomprehending blink. “It’s Dell, Scout.
Engineer.”

“It’s friggin’ what?” Scout said, surprise overtaking his face. “You serious? Just up and back?”

“Not quite so easy,” Dell said, and Pyro got to watch the impact of that accent bowl Scout over too.
“I don’t figure I’ve got terribly long. It’s—well. Hello, Scout.”

“Uh, yeah, hi, man,” Scout said, shoving his hands in his pockets. He cast a glance over his
shoulder, toward the truck. “That is just real bad timing. Crap. Okay, uh, mm. I don’t figure we
oughta let her know you’re back, I think that might be pretty bad. I dunno. I couldn’t get anything
outta her, really, just—sounds like TFI wants Esau back real bad, dude, guess they’ve changed their
minds on the murdering part, but you don’t wanna push that, trust me. Like, if Pauling herself is
here? They are not screwing around anymore.”

Dell nodded. “I can keep my mouth shut.”

“You better, yeah, getting all Texan on us is gonna blow your cover real quick.”

“I guess we should talk to her,” Pyro said with a grimace. “See what she knows.”

Scout huffed a laugh. “Yeah, right, great. Only Florence’s linked up with TFI and that crazy lady,
whatsit, the Administrator, she’s in way deeper than I ever figured, she’s practically—I dunno if
there’s anything we could say to put Flor on our side.”

“Aren’t you her boyfriend?”

“Yeah, but she married her job first.” He grinned bleakly at his own joke. “You don’t get it, April,
I ain’t nothing to her compared to the Administrator. Figured that one out pretty quick.”

“Then what do we do?” Pyro said.

“Can’t let her go,” Scout said, pulling his hat off and scrubbing his hand through his hair. His eyes
darted everywhere except toward the truck. “Can’t, can not. Guess we should talk to her, yeah.
Don’t figure we’ll learn anything, but maybe we can find out what she knows about us. God. Wish
Spy was here, he knows about this shit. Interrogations.”

Pyro knew about interrogations, but only from what she’d seen in films and heard about on the
radio. She had a vague idea that they required a dark concrete room with a chair in the middle of it,
and a bare light bulb over the chair. Torture implements might have been involved.

The interrogation of Miss Pauling, by contrast, involved the back of the pale blue Bronco being
hauled open and Scout apologizing again to his tiny girlfriend as he yanked the duct tape off her
mouth. It was set in the late morning of a pleasant Texas countryside, cloaked by trees. The only
sort of thing they had in the way of a torture implement was maybe the nine-volt battery and
Pyro’s lighters. They were not very good interrogators. “Thank you,” Pauling said grimly, after
taking a huge gasp through her mouth once the tape was off. She wiggled her fingers where they
were completely bound in what could most accurately be called duct-tape mittens. “I don’t suppose
I get to have my hands back, Jeremiah?”

“Nope, sorry, babe,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the side of the
truck. “Real bad date, I know, but we gotta go over what is and is not okay in the sense of pointing
guns at me for future reference.”

“I know,” said Pauling with a defeated sigh. “But you did force my hand.”

“Quit flirting,” Pyro snapped, leaning forward into the trunk. “Pauling. I want to throw you in a
ditch and light the ditch on fire. What the hell does TFI want?”

“You already have a very dramatic presentation of gross stress reaction from the first time you did
that, Pyro,” Pauling said. “With the hardship that one gave you, I think you would have a hard time
with a repeat performance on a helpless target.”

“Try me,” Pyro snarled, and Scout grabbed her by the shoulder. “Scout—”

“You ain’t allowed to burn another of my people, April,” Scout said quietly, and any other threat
Pyro might have made suffered a sudden and brutal death.

Pauling managed to push herself to a sitting position. She could not possibly be any kind of
comfortable, completely trussed up with tape, but all the same she seemed unbothered. Her hair
was askew in its chignon, her glasses were wildly crooked, her stockings were more runs than
fabric. To complete the picture, she had a black eye—Pyro could not conceive of Scout punching
her in the face, so she was quite curious about the origins of that. Yet all of this and Pauling still
gave off an air like she had intended to be here, and the most frightening thing was that it was
possible this was the truth. “I have a question,” she said now, straightening herself as best she could
and addressing Scout. “You didn’t answer me in the hotel.”

“Flor—”

“I want an answer,” said Pauling. “Why are you doing this, Jeremy? I know you think they’re your
friends. That doesn’t mean you throw away your life for them.”

Every part of Pyro that was capable of bristling did so, even as a sick wash of guilt guttered through
her. She looked at Dell so she would not have to look at Scout. He was leaning against the far side
of the truck, watching the road for anyone driving by. His forehead was an embossed pattern of
worry. “Yeah, well,” Scout said, “it don’t mean I sit around and watch them get killed either. Flor,
they sent a sniper.”

“Yes, and it was a terrible idea. Clearly it was a terrible idea, because that sniper is dead now, and
you cannot imagine how much paperwork that was.”

“We ain’t talking about paperwork.”

“No. You’re right. We’re talking about you, and why I found the watch I gave you in a dumpster
outside of Providence—”

“—on account’a you put a tracking device in it—”

“Yes! I did! Because I knew as soon as the order went out you might do something like this.
Jeremy, I thought I was going to find your arm in there. I thought maybe Spy had chopped you up
and deposited you in clever little hiding spots all across Rhode Island. You cannot imagine how
much I did not want to do that scavenger hunt!”

“Florence.”

“The RED team was told to use extreme prejudice. Do you know what that means? It means ‘kill
everyone you run into even a little related to the targets’!”

“Florence,” Scout said again, hooking his hands against the top of the truck and leaning in, toward
her. He was steady and calm and matching her gaze evenly. Pyro was again struck by the thought
that she didn’t really know Scout at all. “Yeah, I know all that. I figured it, even, since that bomb
that got Spy sure didn’t care who it nailed. Kinda confirmed it when you came at me with the knife
and all.”

“I am doing my job,” said Pauling. “You know that.”

“Where in your job description does it say ‘kill your boyfriend if he gets in the way’?” Pyro said,
venom in her voice. “Aren’t you a secretary? A personal assistant? What the hell are you?”

“My job,” Pauling said, “is to do anything the Administrator tells me to do. And I’m very, very
good at my job.”

The Administrator. The mysterious voice on the speakers that had directed them all for four years,
given out assignments, appeared, once, on a grainy black-and-white TV to lambaste the entire team
for a particularly egregious failure. Pyro’s memory of this was fuzzy. She dimly recalled a severe
woman with severe features and severe hair, black shot with the white of advanced age. Pyro did
not care for what she remembered. “Your job being somebody’s dog—”

“Pyro,” Scout snapped, not looking at her, “go take a walk.”

Pyro snarled again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” said Pauling. “I’d like you to stay right here where I can see you, Pyro. And Jeremy, I
swear to you, I am not trying to be cruel. But you are actually, genuinely throwing your life away
by helping these two, and I don’t have any idea why you’re doing it. I was happy for you when you
and Pyro came back from the woods and weren’t trying to kill each other anymore. I really was!
But Esau is a traitor, and Pyro is the definition of a serial killer. And I know I don’t need to remind
you who that started with.” Pauling leaned forward, toward Scout, entirely focused on him. “If you
keep this up, if you stay on their side? I am going to be ordered to get rid of you, and I’m going to
have to do my job, Jeremiah, please.”

“And you’d just do that,” Pyro cut in again. “You’d just murder him because a voice on a speaker
told you to.”

Pauling turned all of her attention on her, even as Scout rubbed at his face in frustration. Her eyes
were dark and bright in equal measure, intelligent and calculating. She pinned Pyro to the frame of
the truck with them. When she spoke, her words were calm and precise. “At least the voice that
tells me to do things is real.”

Pyro met her gaze. Then she drew back her arm in a swift, single movement and shot it forward,
smashing her knuckles neatly into Miss Pauling’s nose.
This is a quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain: “If you don't like the weather in New England
now, just wait a few minutes.”

Esau had said something similar to them in the morning, in something of a better mood, when Pyro
mentioned she needed to check the forecast. He’d been jovial about it, and substituted Texas for
New England, and then asked her something about the black box. She forgot to check the forecast
after that, and as she found the morning fog pleasant, she had decided the weather would probably
be fine.

Pyro had spent enough time in Texas that she should have known better. Nursing the bloody nose
she had gotten from Pauling’s retaliatory headbutt, she told herself as much. Rain was starting to
thrum down, and that was exactly the last thing she needed.

Also, Scout was yelling at her.

“—going wild and shit, hitting someone tied up, April, I know you ain’t consider yourself a lady or
whatever but seriously—”

She had definitely broken Miss Pauling’s glasses, and she had possibly broken Miss Pauling’s nose.
Scout had leapt between the two of them as Dell grabbed her, and it was a good thing he’d thought
to restrain her arms, because Pyro would have kept on swinging. Dell dragged Pyro around the car
until she let herself become deadweight. “You gonna keep trying to hit that young lady if I let you
go?” he said, strained with the sudden effort of keeping her upright.

“No.”

“You gonna try and hit me, then?”

A grunt. Dell sighed and let her drop. Her knuckles hurt. She had not punched anyone in a while.
Her nose hurt too, and it was dripping blood down her upper lip. “That ain’t any way to convince
her you aren’t dangerous, you know,” he said.

Pyro could not bring herself to be mad at Dell. She tried, but it wouldn’t come. She wiped her hand
on the grass to rid it of blood. “She was asking for it,” she said.

“She was, kinda,” Dell admitted, and at least someone here was on her side. “Even so.”

He offered her his hand. She took it, and together they got her to her feet just in time for Scout to
come stalking toward them. “I’m not going to apologize to her,” she had said as he closed in.

“Since when do you apologize,” he had answered. That was when the rain started, and the yelling
was hot on its heels.

“What do you want me to do?” she broke in after he and the rain had been going for a minute or so.
“Christ, Scout! Fine! I shouldn’t have punched her. I’m not sorry about it, I guess since I’m a serial
killer.” She had not realized how much the words smarted until she recalled them, and her
shoulders hunched. Rain ran down her cheeks, collecting in the grooves of her scars. She braced
herself for a fight. If she couldn’t fight Pauling, she could fight Scout, and she wanted a fight, she
was realizing. A fight would keep her from focusing on the rain. “I’m apparently a serial killer, but
at least I’m sorry about being that! At least I don’t kill people anymore. Your girlfriend is worse
and you know it. She stabbed you!” She flung a hand toward the truck, indicative. “She told you
herself she would kill you if the Administrator told her to!”
Pyro wanted a fight. She did not want the way Scout’s shoulders sagged and the fight washed right
out of him with the raindrops. “Yeah,” he said. “I know she did.”

“You know, so what the fuck? You—” The rain, the rain, it came down harder and harder. Every
drop felt like an insect bite. “God! Both of you. You and Tobias both.” She laughed and it was
mean and she already knew she had crossed a line by the way his eyes narrowed and good, maybe
that would get her the fight she wanted. “Just, shitty taste in women, Scout. Both of you.”

He bristled, like she knew he would. She was sneering and she knew it looked uglier on her face
than on anyone else’s. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet because Miss Pauling could
probably have driven Pyro’s nasal bones into her brain if she’d really wanted to. Pyro wanted
a fight.

But Scout straightened up, took a breath, and said, “Think what you want. I ain’t picking sides
between you and her. Go … go take a walk, take Dell with you. I’ll talk to her.”

And he turned away, taking her fight with him.

“Fuck you!” Pyro yelled at his back, and paced off in the other direction. Behind her, Dell sighed
and followed.

She rounded the stand of buckeyes and kicked her way through a patch of scrappy little prairie
plants. They spat water at her as she did, and it took all of her willpower not to recoil. She pushed
through the scrubs, through the boiling anger, through the rain. The rain.

“It’s him, right?” she said, whirling on Dell. “He can’t—she just shows up here and wants to either
kill us or drag us back to TFI, which is probably worse, who knows what they would do. And
Scout’s just, oh, it’s just Florence, she’s just doing her job! God! I know I’m crazy, but God!”

Dell waited as she ranted, watched her stomp on weedy little flowers that made the mistake of
being in her path. The ground turned to mud under her, and she hated that almost as much as she
hated the rain, the rain, the rain. When she looked at him, she couldn’t tell what was on his face.

“I think Scout’s in an unenviable position,” he said at last.

“This is stupid. We can’t—I don’t even know what to do next, Dell! We’re just … we’re running
all over the country like idiots, like we can escape TFI and Pauling and whatever the hell else.
Esau wants to kill you and I still spend half my time as Alice, maybe she’ll want to kill me next.
Fuck. What are we doing? What do we do?”

“Wish I knew,” he sighed. “Truly. Best I figure, maybe we drop Pauling off somewhere and
hightail it quick as we can, meet back up with the others. I’d say leave the country”—and he
laughed—“if I thought it’d do any good.”

“Then there’s no answer,” Pyro said.

Rain dripped down her nose and mixed with the blood that was beginning to finally stem. It ran
along her lips, past her chin, and plummeted to the mud.

Pyro said, “There’s no winning this, is there?”

“I think,” said Dell, “we should try and find out exactly why Miss Pauling’s been sent to get us.”

Drip, drip.
“But this is hopeless.”

“C’mon, now. That ain’t no way to talk.”

“This is hopeless,” Pyro said. “We might as well just sit down and let Pauling put bags over our
heads.”

Something touched her arm, and she tried to jerk away, but it was only Dell. He had taken hold of
her sleeve. “Now you listen here,” he said, catching her eyes, waiting until he was sure he had the
whole of her attention before going on. “I’m going to go ahead and sound like an old fool, because
I don’t know how long I’ll get to be here, and I don’t know when—if—I’ll ever get to talk to you
again after Esau comes back. But my God, girl, don’t you go giving up. You are the strangest
damn person I’ve ever met, but you’re just maybe the strongest, too. I ain’t ever seen somebody
with a will to go on like you’ve got, April. Don’t you dare go giving up now.”

Pyro thought of a million reasons he was wrong in the space of a few seconds, staring at him there
in the rain. The dispenser. Fleeing Boston. Refusing to so much as approach Scout until she’d been
forced to it. The dispenser, the hallucinations, the rain.

It seemed to Pyro that Dell’s eyes were glowing the same electric blue as the lights on Esau’s old
chassis.

“Okay,” said Pyro. “Okay. I … I won’t.”

“Swear it?”

Pyro swallowed.

“I swear.”
 22: Capsize

They stood there in the rain, looking at each other. In the back of her head Pyro could feel Alice
stirring, drawing closer to the surface. But on the outside it was only Pyro and Dell and the rain
and, a few dozen yards away, Scout talking to Pauling. Dell let go of her arm and cleared his throat.
“Good,” he said. “Good. Then let’s go talk to Miss Pauling.”

He turned, watching her to ensure she followed, and follow she did. The rain was worsening,
making her hair feel limp and heavy, like a dead thing draped over her head. The sound of it filled
her ears, and it was all she could hear, until she heard her name.

“… got to understand about April, Flor, she don’t—she don’t got anybody. Like, seriously, I think
she’s got me and Esau. She had Dell. She’s got that dog, I guess she’s got Heavy. That’s it, for her.
No family, I ain’t ever heard her talk about friends from off the team, really. She called me for
help. I had to go.”

Pyro felt like she had been talked about and around so often in the last year that the very idea that it
was still happening made her want to be ill.

“You have Dell,” Dell said quietly. She wished the saying of it helped. “You still think we should
keep quiet about me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

“Well, I’ll follow your lead.”

Great. That was a great idea. Pyro tripped on a rock and almost landed in the mud. She was a
fantastic leader. She let Dell steady her as she regained her feet and the rain crawled over her.

“I’m not going to hit anyone,” Pyro said as they approached, her palms up and hands open to
Scout’s misgiving look. “I’m just getting in the car.”

Neither Scout nor Pauling said anything; Scout was sitting at Pauling’s side with his arm slung
around her shoulders, and Pauling was still very much tied up. At least Scout had this much sense.
Pyro hauled herself into the truck, into the back seat, and Shep at once came to her side. She buried
her wet face into the fur of his shoulder for a few seconds, trying to calm a heart that was beating
far too quickly. “Okay,” she said at last, muffled by the dog. “Pauling. What exactly are you here
for?”

“Retrieval,” said Pauling.

“Not killing us.”

“No. Killing you is now a last resort.”

“Great. Why are we being retrieved?”

Pauling hesitated. “The Administrator is … interested in you.”

“In me and Esau?”

“Yes. Well. Mostly Esau. But we want you to come too, Pyro.”

“Why is she interested in us?”

Silence again, which meant Pyro could hear the rain. The passenger-side door opened and shut as
Dell ducked into the front seat, seeking shelter. “Can you tell us anything?” Scout prompted.

“She’s interested in the fact you both acquired dual personalities,” said Pauling. “The fact that Pyro
isn’t an isolated incident, so it’s apparently repeatable. We’re calling it looking-glass syndrome,
internally.”

Pyro shut her eyes. Pauling was not the person she wanted to talk to about that. “Why is she more
interested in Esau than me?”

“That’s classified. I mean, technically all of this is classified, but that’s more classified.”

“Fine,” said Pyro. “You had us held on the base for months. I got asked a lot of questions about
Alice, and then you let me go. Why’s it all changed now?”

Nothing. Scout leaned into Pauling and said something in her ear. Pauling’s shoulders drooped in a
way that did not suit her. “The situation has changed,” Pauling said. “We were … we thought we
could continue the line of research without you, but it’s not working out. The Administrator wanted
you two eliminated before you left, you know.”

The rain still crowded in around them, getting heavier, but the air in the truck seemed to escape out
between the raindrops.

“I talked her out of it,” Pauling added, helpfully. “Because, well, you know to keep your mouth
shut, Pyro. And Alice isn’t much of a threat. Esau’s more of a problem.” She cleared her throat.
“That’s why we institutionalized him, so we knew where he was. I really didn’t want to kill either
of you, I didn’t. I like you guys.”

Pyro found this statement overwhelmingly suspect, but she was having a hard time concentrating
on it. She was wet and getting cold. She was having a hard time concentrating on anything.

“Hey,” Pauling said, after determining that no one else had anything to say. “What time is it?”

“Around three,” Scout said, immediately. He shook himself and blew his breath out his nose,
slipping off the truck’s bed. “And we need to go.”

“Go where?” said Dell.

“Dunno. As far away as possible. If Pauling doesn’t check in with the Administrator every four
hours on high-level stuff like this, they figure she got caught and they send in RED to go find her.”

Returning to Austin was out of the question, and their planned rendezvous in San Antonio was now
too great a risk. So they were driving north, with no plan in mind except to put Texas behind them
as fast as possible. Of all the states to need to exit quickly, of course they would be in Texas.
Nothing was ever easy if Pyro was involved, she had decided long ago. She was, after all, bad luck.

The rain had gotten worse.

“I can’t hardly drive in this, guys,” Scout said, fiddling again with the windshield wiper. Ten
minutes ago the rubber stripped off of one of the wipers, making it barely more than a piece of
plastic that waved eagerly at Scout’s face. “What is this, is this like a monsoon?”

“Monsoons are usually tropical,” said Dell, and Pyro could hear the control it took to keep his
accent restrained. What a strange thing, that the line between him and Esau was so effortlessly
drawn by the way they pronounced their vowels. “But it’s the rainy season, this far south, and the
weather can get real nasty real fast. We’re in hill country too. Could be floods. We should pull
over.”

“What, on the side of the road? I was figuring we could at least go ’til we hit somewhere with
people.”

“I don’t think we should go anywhere with too many people,” said Dell. “At least not this close to
Austin. We’ve been going … north, right? Where’s that map?”

The map was found and passed along, and Dell shook it out, peering carefully down at the
minuscule roads and abstracted cities. “There—yeah, we passed Lakeway a while ago. There’s the
Colorado River. Keep north, Scout, stay on FM 620. I think I know a place we can hole up until
this storm passes.”

“Okay. April, hey, you hanging in there?”

Pyro, still hunched over Shep in the back seat, laughed in a way that hurt her throat.

They kept north, and rain slammed the Bronco, scrabbling at the cracks and gaps in the truck’s
body in its efforts to reach them. The prairie grass and thickets of weeds that owned the highway’s
edges bent in the rising wind to drown in growing puddles. The sound of the tires changed. Pyro
made the mistake of glancing out the window. They were on a bridge, stretching out over a river
with a surface like oil. The face of it churned and mired with the gushing rain.

The truck wavered in its lane and leapt toward the narrow railing that was the only thing keeping
them from the river.

She had not eaten breakfast, and so when she hunched over to the side of the seat and retched, there
was at least nothing to bring up. In the hundred hours that passed between when she started and
when she stopped, there was some kind of fuss in the car. Someone was saying her name. Names.
She didn’t know. The truck was steady in its lane, though she was sure a moment ago it had been
halfway through the railing. She looked at the river. There was something sinking in the water, but
then they were off the bridge, and a rising nest of trees sheltered it from view.

“April!” Dell said.

“Yeah,” she said through her foul-tasting mouth. “Mm. Ff … fine. S’fine. ’m alright. I need a
napkin.”

Someone handed her a napkin, and she cleaned up what she could. Shep wanted to sniff the napkin,
he couldn’t have it, that was gross. Dell gave her more napkins and she put the gross napkins in the
clean ones and Dell was asking her something. The gross napkins needed to go somewhere. She
told him this.

“Listen to what I’m saying,” he said in a harried voice. “I asked if you need us to stop.”

They couldn’t stop. They had to keep going. It was just rain. She was fine.

Dell said something to Scout, who said something back, but Pyro didn’t know what it was.
“You’re not fine,” said Alice, who was sitting beside her, on Shep’s other side. Pyro wondered
how long she had been there. “We’re not fine, April.”

“I’m fine,” Pyro said.

“Tell Scout to pull into the next place that’s dry.”

“I don’t. Don’t need to stop. It’s fine.”

The road turned and she could see the river again and the oily darkness and the something in the
water and it was the green car, still sinking, always sinking, headlights being swallowed up by the
water, the people inside panicking and falling and drowning and dead.

“I’m taking over,” said Alice.

“No!” snapped Pyro, and everyone in the car lurched. “Don’t, don’t you dare!”

She could see the whale-eyed look Pauling was giving her from the truck bed behind her and her
nest of suitcases from the corner of her vision. “Scout,” Dell said softly. “I don’t know how to
handle her like this.”

“Mm. Yeah. That a road up there? I’m taking that road, we’re pulling over.”

“Don’t let Alice take over,” Pyro said, but the words barely made it past her throat. Her pulse
thrummed in her ears, too hard, wet and insistent and just like the rain. “Don’t. She’ll make it
worse. Don’t let her.”

“I’m not afraid of water like you are,” Alice said. “Let me help.”

“No!”

They went rumbling down a dirt road that was now more of a mud road, through sodden
underbrush and sagging trees. They passed a tiny cemetery, hardly bigger than the truck, and
wound their way around a handful of what might have once been building foundations, years ago.
“Found ourselves a ghost town,” said someone. “There’s what we need, that place looks intact.”
The someone sounded worried. They were right to be worried. They were all going to drown. “Pull
over there, Scout, we’ll get everyone inside.”

Out the window Pyro could see where they were going. There was an old white building crawling
toward them, all flaking paint and exposed, weathered wood. There was a sign outside it that would
have been illegible even if Pyro were literate. It was all pathetic and forgotten and stood alone and
ignorant of the rain that pounded against its windows, a stone’s throw from the river. Scout put the
truck into park flush with its door, and there was a hushed conference between the two men that
Pyro was not privy to, because she had doubled over and covered her head with both hands.

“Pyro,” Miss Pauling hissed. “Pyro, we’re stopping. We’re getting out of the rain. You need to
calm down.”

Pyro did not hear her, or if she did, she heard it from very far away, very faint, garbled by water.

Then the door pulled open and the rain was upon her. Pyro shrieked as the wind cackled and batted
at her, blowing water in her face. She tried to jerk away from it, but something was dragging at her,
had caught her by her shirt, something huge and wet and she was going to drown, she was going to
drown, drown. She shot out a booted foot and it met solidly with the doorframe and someone
swore, someone said damn it all, April, and the rain seized her and pulled her out of the car.
Then she was somewhere else.

It was warm and nothing was touching her except the hard floor she sat on, and the wind battered
the windows, screaming in rage at her escape. Every inch of her was soaked. If she had looked, she
would have seen that so were the rest of them, right down to Shep, who stopped in the middle of
the benches that cluttered the big empty room and shook the water off. Some of it struck her and
she sat limp.

“What the hell is happening to her?” someone said.

“It’s the rain. The water. She’s got a phobia.”

Pyro shifted and it sent water streaming down her back. She wailed, hoarse and terrified, and
started stripping off the wet things: shirt, boots, socks. It was only Alice’s aggressive objection that
kept her wearing anything at all, barely decent in a sports bra and her jeans. She flung the rest to
the ground and then she was up, pacing, seeing nothing of the three people that stared at her. She
did not hear their conversation.

“Jeremy, untie me.”

Scout, himself pacing as well, looked to where Miss Pauling had been deposited in the remains of a
school desk. “I can’t.”

Pauling groaned, for the first time trying to fight her bonds. “You certainly can and you should.
Pyro is not going to come down from this gently, and I am the person in this room she likes the
least.”

Scout grimaced, following her gaze to where Pyro was stalking in a tiny, hysterical circle. “She just
needs a minute. Maybe a couple of minutes. Worst-case scenario, she flips over to Alice—”

“That is not the worst-case scenario.”

“Look, I dragged her through a reservoir, I know she doesn’t like water—”

Pauling jerked her head around to him, fixing him to silence mid-sentence. “Look. My job? Was
also to know absolutely everything about you guys. I followed Pyro around for months before we
hired her, I compiled our knowledge base on her. Did you notice what made her throw up?” Dell
and Scout exchanged uneasy glances. “It was the bridge, because her family drowned when their
car slid off a bridge in a rainstorm. She was five. So now that’s coloring everything else happening
to her right now, and that’s without all the other stress she’s obviously been under. You know she
has these—breakdowns. Alice is our best-case scenario right now.”

Dell said, “Then what is our worst-case scenario?”

“I don’t know,” said Miss Pauling, “but I don’t want to be tied up if it happens.”

She was wet, she was cold, she was wet, she was wet.

Rain battered the old building. It might have been a schoolhouse, once. Maybe a church. There
were stairs near the back, leading up to a second story, maybe it had been a two-room schoolhouse.
It didn’t matter. It was nothing now, nothing except maybe a tomb, maybe a crypt. She would die
here, in the rain, in sight of the river. Pyro had always thought she would die in water. The rest of
her family had.

Shep was there. Scout, Esau. Not Esau. Dell. Miss Pauling, whose first name was Florence. She
didn’t know what they were doing. Maybe they weren’t there. Maybe this was another dream. She
always drowned in her dreams.

She kept wanting to go to the window, because the only thing worse than knowing it was raining
was knowing it was raining and not being sure of exactly what the rain was doing, but if she went
to the window she would be closer to the rain. It might get her. She thought maybe someone had
said something about a flood in the car. That seemed probable. That seemed like her luck. She was
bad luck.

“Please,” Pauling was saying. “You both know what she can do when she feels cornered.”

She could see the river through the window, and she was at the window now, leaning on the sill,
wide-eyed. She could barely see it through the rain. How long had it been raining? Forever?

“Flor, babe, we aren’t gonna corner her, we aren’t gonna let her get to you.”

“Then tie her up,” Pauling said, and her voice wavered. “Something. Please.”

“No,” said Dell, gruff. “We’re not tying any more people up. Scout, give those here.”

He took the keys from Scout’s hands and took hold of Pauling’s arm, sawing through the mess of
duct tape. Scout’s protests went ignored. “She’s right,” Dell said. The tape came free and Pauling
ripped the rest away, rubbing at her wrists. “April’s dangerous on a good day, and I ain’t ever seen
her quite like this.”

“I can protect Pauling, there’s two of us, man, we can handle her—”

“Scout, I have watched that woman beat men twice your size to death, and I am not in any
condition to be fighting,” said Dell. “I do hope you don’t make me regret this, Miss Pauling. I
always did like you. It’s a right shame things have to be this way.”

“You’re not Esau, are you?” said Pauling, and Dell shook his head.

Pyro heard none of this. Her knuckles were white, her fingers hurt where they gripped the
windowsill, she couldn’t tell how high the river was. Maybe it would flood. It couldn’t flood. It
was going to flood. Alice was screaming at her but she couldn’t hear it.

“April, hey,” said a voice beside her. She didn’t look. It was just Scout, anyway, if he was real.
“Hey, can you hear me?”

“It’s raining.”

“Um, yeah, it, it sure is. Hey, what if you came away from the window? So you ain’t looking at
the rain no more? You wanna dry off? I think we got a towel in the car, I could go get it, I could
get you some dry clothes.”

“There’s headlights in there.”

Had she looked, had she had the mind to look, she would have seen the uncomfortable thing
crawling across Scout’s face, the dawn of the understanding that they occupied different realities
and he had no way of crossing into hers, no way of bringing her back to his. “Oh,” he said in a thin
sort of way.

There was the river and the rain and her.

“Scout,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“The river’s flooding.” Because she could see it now, could see the waters rising, churning out over
the banks, running up the sides and over the grass and toward the building, chuckling muddily,
hungry, hungry. “It’s flooding. Scout, it’s all flooding.”

“It’s what?” Scout said. “It’s—no it’s not, it’s hardly risen at all. It’s gonna be fine. Hey. Look, you
better—”

His hand closed on her shoulder and it was not a hand but a claw, not her shoulder but her throat,
where she was soft and vulnerable and weak and it was going to hold her there, hold her down, let
the water come laughing up the steps and drown her.

She ripped away and lashed out, struck, felt warmth. There was the pained yelp that came with
someone’s skin splitting. She couldn’t stay, she had to get out of the way of the water, to higher
ground. Stairs. She bolted.

Noise, yelling, a name, names. The rattling thunder of old stairs under urgent feet, there was
something in her way, something white and solid but not solid enough if she slammed her shoulder
into it, a bang and a splintering. The wail of old wood, protesting its weakness as she skittered
across it into the middle of the room. Old chairs, old tables, old school desks, the warped green
expanse of a chalkboard on one wall. Windows. Rain, louder here, rain, rain through an open
window, water, no, no!

“April!” came the bellowing voice, the agonizing boom of a second set of shoes on first the stairs
and then the second-story floor. “Quit freaking out and listen to me!”

Scout, again, a flash of recognition. A vague idea that she was having a problem. The rain. Nothing
was real, nothing mattered, she was going to drown.

She had turned and didn’t know when or why or how. Scout, there, soaked like she was, clutching
a bloody set of red lines across his face. She was not sure if he had a face or if he was just those red
lines. “April,” he said, and oh, that was her. “April, you gotta—you gotta come back downstairs,
okay? It’s just raining, it’s just some weather, it’s not gonna hurt you. I—we won’t let it hurt you,
alright? You’re safe. We’ve got you.”

She stared at him. Keened when he stepped closer, slithering further back against the table she had
somehow found herself against. His exasperated groan rattled around the room until it fell out that
open window. “April. Pyro. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

He closed the distance, slow and with his hands up. He got taller with every step and Pyro was
forgetting how to breathe, which was just drowning on dry land. And then he was there in front of
her, wavering. “Look, hey,” he said. His hands pressed against each side of her head, over her ears,
and suddenly the rain was far away. Her entire body locked.

“You aren’t gonna drown, okay? Nobody here’s gonna let you get hurt, you’re okay.”

She looked up at him, at his tall, tall body, his long face that wasn’t his.
She saw him wince and glance up with knit brows as water dripped through a crack in the ceiling
and splattered on his forehead, rolling down his face, shattering it into so much bone and gore.

She screamed.

Below, Dell and Miss Pauling would hear the sounds of a struggle, the feral noises of a creature in
terror, Scout’s hoarse shouting. And then the shatter of glass.

Later, Pyro would not remember what happened. She would not remember the force with which
she sent Scout out of the second-story window, nor his pitched yowl of surprise and pain, nor of
the way he grabbed at anything at all to save himself and found only her. He seized her forearm
and her hair, and unable to drop these things from herself, Pyro went right out the window along
with him.

What she would remember was the shriek under her as she landed on top of him, and the wet crack
of her leg as it folded between them.

For a few seconds there was a merciful darkness. But then the rain came, as the rain ever came,
and drummed her awake to not only the horrors of the water, not only the crystalline agony of the
way her ankle was twisted in entirely the wrong direction, but to the wet, muddy thing under her.

It was heavy and dark and soaked, longer than she was tall. Her legs draped over it at an angle that
hurt to look at. It looked, almost, like it was curled up on itself. It had a shoulder, bony and jutting
upward, and it didn’t move when she dragged herself off of it. It had a face.

Oh, she thought.

She had been here before.

“Scout,” she croaked. Something familiar and suffocating and electric stretched its black wings out
in her chest as it awoke. Not revulsion—not fear. Something else, though not the something else it
had once been.

She had done this before.

“Scout,” she said again, and knew it wouldn’t help.

Numb, and quiet, and shaking, she stared at the thing that could not possibly be Scout.

But this was not to be a repeat performance. She would not be allowed to sit and stare and feel her
mind curl up and tuck itself away, because Miss Pauling came stampeding past her like a freight
train, throwing herself down in the mud beside the thing. Miss Pauling was moving too fast for
Pyro to really process, triaging, checking for a pulse, rattling off demands and instructions
and Dell, get her inside!

Strong arms wrapped themselves under her, hoisting her up in a fireman’s carry, and this wasn’t
right, the timing was all wrong, things were happening out of order. Her leg shifted badly and she
shrilled with agony as everything started to move again.

She was outside, and then she was inside, though not inside the schoolhouse. She did not realize
she had been stuffed into the back of the Bronco until she was already there, and only really came
to the conclusion that this was strange when a dripping-wet Shep was shoved into the seat beside
her. Then the driver’s door opened and the man who had put both of them there slid behind the
wheel, and the truck roared to life.

Pyro had a perfect view of where she had landed as the truck rolled through the grass. She had a
perfect view of Miss Pauling, with a limp Scout in her arms, staring in disbelief at the truck as it
executed a three-point turn and careened toward the highway. Pyro watched until Pauling and
Scout and the schoolhouse and the cemetery and the river had disappeared, and for a long time
after, too.

The rain poured.

“Where are we going?” someone said in a scratchy, frail voice, pitched with pain. It did not seem
like her voice, though she was quite sure she was the one who had said it. “Dell?”

The driver answered. His words were thin and low and hollow and empty of any local color.

“I think you’ll find that Dell isn’t here.”

 23: Scuttled

The truck raced across the highway, and Pyro wished she could sleep.

Pyro did not sleep. She would have loved to sleep, or at least to pass out, but both were held from
her. This was due to several factors, including, but not limited to: the fact that she was still in a state
of panic; that Dell was gone, and Esau the murderous had replaced him; she was relatively certain
her ankle was broken; Shep kept licking her face; Dell was gone; Esau was driving much too fast;
she kept remembering the look on Pauling’s face as they had driven away; the back seat was
terribly uncomfortable; Dell was gone.

When she had returned to the land of the living there had been something hard and cool tangled in
her fingers. It took a long time for her to look at it, just as it had taken a long time for her to be a
person again, a human instead of a shaking bundle of terror in human form. When she did look it
took longer still to process what it was, because it was unbelievable. She almost laughed, but it
strangled itself in her throat on its way up. How many times, she wondered, was she going to end
up with Tobias Owens’s dog tags in her possession? They must have come free of Scout’s neck
during the fall.

Scout.

“I killed Scout,” she said aloud, once. An hour later, or ten minutes, or seven years. One of those.
But it wasn’t raining anymore.

“Yes, you did,” Esau said. “And if we’re lucky, Pauling will have damn well drowned. It’s less
than they both deserve.”

The machine that ran all of Pyro’s higher functions, already sputtering and sparking and
waterlogged, abruptly shut down.

She did not sleep, but neither was she awake.

The clock on the wall said 8:03.

This, first, was what Pyro was aware of, because the clock happened to also be exactly where her
eyes were pointed. This is not to say she was looking at it. Pyro was not looking at anything.

The air had a strange sort of smell. It smoky in the way that cigarette smoke made things, clinging
to ceilings and furniture over an extended period. A stale reek. The whole place smelled unaired,
like it had seen too many people in too short a time. It sank through Pyro’s nostrils into her bones
and her nerves, claustrophobic.

“Are you asleep?” someone said.

“Nn,” she said.

“Good. Eat this.”

Now she was holding something. She was not sure how this had happened, but it was warm and
soft and it covered the stale cigarette stench. It told her about melting cheese and toasted bread and
grilled meat. Her eyes pointed down at it. A cheeseburger.

It was warm and soft and smelled good and she did not eat it, just held it. She became passingly
aware that she had hands and those were the things holding the cheeseburger. This was mysterious.
She had forgotten she had hands. She had forgotten her hands had skin and nerves and that was
why she could feel the gentle warmth radiating from the paper packaging.

A tentative, curious inventory revealed she also had arms, and shoulders, and a chest that rose and
fell slightly less often than she strictly thought was the right frequency. She had a stomach that felt
like it was sewn into itself, and legs, ankles, feet. Now learning that she had eyes, she could look
again. She looked down at her feet, and felt vaguely unsurprised to see a white cast swallowing up
most of her right foot. The fact she was unsurprised was the more interesting part of this.

“And drink this,” added the voice, uncharitably. One of her hands was holding something cool and
damp now. It was heavy. She dropped it. “God damn it, Pyro.”

It was the damp on her hands, the spreading, cold wet on her leg, that dragged her all the way back
into her body. She coughed and shuddered and took a huge gasp, staring down at where a fallen to-
go cup of ice water was pooling out over a thin blue carpet. A man with no hair threw a towel
down on top of it, stepping on it to absorb the water. “What are you doing?” she asked, though it
came out closer to watter y’doin?

“Cleaning up your mess,” said the man, whose name was not Dell.

“Oh,” she said. “Thanks.”

The man who was not Dell snorted and left with the wet towel. Somewhere between his exit and
when he returned, Pyro drifted back out of the world.

The clock on the wall said 8:02, which seemed odd, until Pyro became aware that there was
sunlight where there had been none before. It languished there over the threadbare sheets covering
her, limp and pale. It was a hopeless sort of light.

But she was warm, and she was dry for the first time in her life. Confused at both these facts and
the seemingly inarguable discovery that she was alive, she shifted and found something else warm
pressed up against her. A groping hand landed on it after a few aborted attempts, and met with the
prickly-soft heat of fur. She felt more than heard the rhythmic thumping that followed, and did not
place that it was Shep’s wagging tail until Shep had crawled up by her side with pinned ears and
began insistently licking anything he could reach. As this was most of her face, Shep accomplished
what might have otherwise been impossible: waking Pyro up.

Groaning, she tried and failed to push him away. His breath stank in the way a dog’s breath does,
which felt like more of a surprise than it should have been. Learning this was an inoperable tactic,
she instead pushed her face under his chin, into the tan fur of his neck, where at most his tongue
could reach her ear. And it was nice, to wrap her arms around him, to feel something solid and real
and alive.

“Good morning,” said a voice that suggested it thought there was nothing good about this
particular morning whatsoever.

Pyro’s thoughts moved sluggishly, like mud pooling into a hole. She decided it was weird for Shep
to have suddenly learned how to talk, until she remembered she was not alone. It was this
realization that sent a cold shock down the length of her spine, and the muddy waters cleared.

If she pushed herself up on one elbow, she could keep her face out of Shep’s range. If she lifted her
head and shook her gnarled, knotted hair aside, she could look over the apathetic squalor of another
anonymous motel room. If she forced her body to obey her, she could meet Esau’s eyes from where
they watched her over the top of a ragged newspaper.

“Morning,” she said, less as a greeting and more as a statement.

“How’s the foot?”

“The what?”

“Your ankle, Pyro. You shattered it. The doctor said you were lucky that’s all you shattered.”

“Oh,” said Pyro. “Doctor?”

As she said it she thought she could remember. A haze, a smear of events, nurses, a waiting room,
an exchange of a great deal of money to be hurried along into a cast. “Right,” she said, before Esau
could answer. “Doctor. Um. It hurts.”

“There are pain pills by the bed.”

So there were. Pyro looked at them and decided the effort was not worth it. She’d been in worse
pain. “Where are we?”

“The panhandle. Not sure of the city. Are you hungry? You need to eat something.”

She was not hungry. This turned out to not be a compelling enough argument to keep Esau from
pressing a granola bar and water into her hands after she sat up, and this time she managed to keep
hold of both. She took another quiet inventory of herself as she forced down the bland oats and
sugar; she felt the kind of grimy that came with being rained on and being left to dry, with too-long
car trips and too much sun. With sleeping in her clothes. A glance down informed her that at some
point a shirt had been reintroduced to her torso, and this seemed wise. Peering under the blankets
added the information that her jeans had been replaced by, of all things, a skirt.

She ate, and by now her foot had joined the rest of her consciousness, and this led her to reconsider
her position on the painkillers. She downed two and gulped the rest of the water before sagging
back into the bed, all of her energy sapped.

Esau went back to his newspaper.

Eventually, she peeled the covers off. There was a crutch by the bed, and it took longer than it
should have for Pyro to realize it was for her. She needed it, too, she nearly fell as she pried herself
off the mattress. On her way Esau cast a wary eye over her. “Bathroom?”

“Yeah. Shower.”

“Take this.” He handed her a plastic bag and a wide rubber band. “Put it over your foot. Don’t get
the cast wet.”
Pyro had the distinct feeling she was being pranked as she took it, but offered no objection.

It was another cramped bathroom hazed yellow by years of use. It was another foggy,
questionably-caulked tub with a grungy-looking showerhead, and Pyro marveled at her own idiocy,
that showers were fine but rain was not. You controlled a shower, was what it was. The shower
was subject to your own whims, and most of the time a shower was hot and pleasant. This shower
ran out of hot water after about five minutes, and she sat there staring at the white tiles and
shivering.

The ambient temperature of the air was a welcome bluster of warmth, comparatively. The towels
were fluffier and whiter than she would have expected, and felt good against her cold-battered skin.
Overhead the bathroom exhaust fan droned away.

She peeled the plastic bag off her left foot and examined the cast. The painkillers had kicked in,
which was possibly why she had sat in the cold shower for so long, and the pain in her ankle was
now a dull throb. She had a kind of idea the doctor had been very worried about the ankle. X-rays
and scans had been mentioned, possibly surgery. She thought, maybe, that there had kind of been a
terse argument when Esau made the correct statement that they did not have time for that, and the
doctor pointed out that Pyro was nonverbal, and he did not have anything resembling a power of
attorney from Esau for her.

This had been taken care of by several thousand of Pyro’s dollars.

So she had a shattered ankle and a cast and probably somewhere her money was paying off
medical school bills. All things considered, a broken ankle was doing pretty well for having fallen
out of a second-story window.

Scout was dead. Her stomach did something interesting and probably not physically possible. She
sank down on the dingy tile of the bathroom, unable to stand even with the crutch.

The clock on the wall said 9:12.

Getting dressed was an exercise in humiliation. Pyro had forgotten to bring fresh clothes into the
bathroom with her, and so had to ask Esau to bring her suitcase to her, tucked behind the door with
a towel. He left it by the door at her request, only she hadn’t counted on how difficult it would be
doing something as simple as picking up a suitcase while contending with a broken foot and one
hand trying to keep the towel up and her head pounding. She came very close to falling more than
once before she just let the towel drop and yanked the suitcase inside, shutting the door with a
bang. Then she was sitting on the bathroom floor, again, with the ugly brown suitcase waiting
expectantly for her to do something. She was going to have to figure out how to get dressed. It
didn’t seem like it should be one of those things that was hard. She’d only broken her ankle. Her
boxer-briefs complained a bit at the size of the cast, and lifting her arms above her head to put on
her shirt made her dizzy. But then she discovered she couldn’t get the cast through the leg hole of
her only other pair of jeans, leaving her swearing and fighting to stretch the stubborn denim and
ultimately giving up.

She thought about putting the skirt back on, despite the impracticality of skirts in the face of her
entire life. This would have been the wiser choice. It was a nice, new skirt, dark blue and shin-
length, and she had no idea where on earth it would have come from. She also thought about
crying, just because it seemed like an appropriate response.

Her eyes drifted back to the suitcase and one of its bulging pockets.

In a refreshing change of pace, this part was easy. She did not need her foot to put an inch of water
in the tub, as a safety measure, nor to fish out the slim Ronson Varaflame lighter. The exhaust fan
was already on, and this wouldn’t smoke that badly anyway.

It did, of course, smoke badly enough that Esau shouldered the door open to find her burning the
jeans. She scarcely spared him a glance, monitoring the rate of the flame. “Pyro, what the hell?”

“I’m making shorts.”

“I have scissors!”

“I have fire,” she mumbled, and doused the burning legs in the water.

The fire, however small, cleared out the rest of her brain. It scalded the impurities away, the debris
left over from the rain and Miss Pauling and what had happened to Scout. It did not remove them; it
just made them easier to look at.

In her new shorts, Pyro hobbled her way out of the room to smoke. Her stomach garbled a warning,
which went ignored. It was getting on near lunch, but she was uncertain if she would ever have an
appetite again. So: the cigarette.

The Bronco was parked just outside the room, and she dropped down onto its hood, hauling her
crutch up next to her so it couldn’t fall. It was hot, but not yet hot enough that the metal was
uncomfortable to sit on, and while this would very likely change in an hour she would take what
she could get. Pyro lit her cigarette and allowed herself to rejoin the world around her.

All motel parking lots share DNA. Whether this is something attributable to corporate
machinations or a shared unconscious or a joke of the universe may be debatable. Pyro looked out
over a motel parking lot just like the dozen other motel parking lots she had seen in the last month,
with its anonymous pavement and faded yellow lines and some poor soul’s valiant attempt at
landscaping in a flowerbed set near the motel office’s door. Two or three other cars sat quietly, all
a respectful distance from one another. This motel was off the main road, but somewhere behind
the right-angle of the building she could hear the sound of traffic.

Sitting there, it was easy to pretend there was nothing different about her presence in this particular
motel parking lot. It was easy to think: Spy’s probably gone to do something extremely illegal in
the name of acquiring information, but he might bring back those stupid corn nut things we like.
Esau’s probably taking Shep for a walk. I could put my hair down but Heavy might tell me it
reminds him of his sister again and I don’t have any idea what that means. I should figure out
where I left that tin can and burn some of the wood chips from that planter over there, while
everyone’s gone. Scout’s off getting things from the convenience store. He’ll be back in a minute,
and he’d better have my candy. I should tell him I’ll go meet his family, if he really wants. I’ll go, if
it’ll make him feel better. I’ll go.

Pyro could feel the pressure behind her eyes, waiting to escape, another cry ready and waiting. Not
only for Scout’s sake, either. These were tears that had gone unshed too long, tears that had not
been there for Dell, for Tobias, for the loss of her own mind and for the knowledge that the man
she had fled with from an asylum in Kansas had been planning murder from the very beginning.

Pyro smoked.

When Esau emerged from the motel, he stood in the shadow of the second-floor stairs. He was
wearing a polo and slacks and they didn’t look right on him. He’d gotten reading glasses from
somewhere and that didn’t look right either. Pyro picked at the burned hem of her shorts as they
looked at one another.

“Now what?” she asked.

 24: Flotsam and Jetsam

April was sad.

Maybe that was an understatement, Alice thought, as April stared out the window at the rolling
countryside. She corrected it:

April was really sad.

Alice was sad, too, but kind of she knew that April was sadder. This made sense. Scout was dead.
Dell was gone. Her foot was broken. All of these things meant more to April than to Alice, even if
Alice was quite sad about them.

There was a lot to be sad about.

But on the plus side, the car was less cramped.

Because her foot was broken, April was not allowed to drive. Privately, Alice was of the opinion
she could probably drive, but Esau had been very clear that she was not to. It was possible this was
due to the fear of another meltdown.

Alice had some opinions about the meltdown.

“You should have let me have the body,” she said to April again as the truck wound north and
west. There was a vague idea that they were headed to Canada. “Everything would have been okay.
I could have handled it.”

April was in the passenger seat and staring out the window. For the last thirty minutes she had
been fidgeting with the dog tags that were now around her neck. She did not respond. This time at
least it was not to be mean, Alice was pretty sure. She could tell she was being listened to. It was
just that April was too sad to answer.

“Next time let me do it, okay? April?”

“Whatever,” April breathed. “Like there’s going to be a next time.”

“What was that?” said Esau, and April shook her head, and said it was nothing.

April had not said a whole lot to Esau since everything happened. Alice was a little unhappy about
this, but by the same token she knew why. Apparently, Esau wanted to get rid of Dell, forever.
Alice did not understand this. She could not imagine wanting to get rid of April, to be alone in their
body forever and ever. What if she needed to do something she couldn’t do, but April could have?
Who would she talk to? April may have been scared of her, but at least they had each other. Plus,
April had been there first. It seemed mean.

Alice had not thought of Esau as a mean person. And she had meant what she had said to April in
the woods: she would care if Dell were dead. She knew him.

There had not, as yet, been any discussion of this revelation, about Esau wanting Dell out of the
way, because April was not sure if Esau knew that April knew. Alice could tell there was a fear
that if Esau knew that April knew, Esau would become hostile, and April was very much at a
disadvantage between the broken foot and the being sad. Esau had left Scout and Miss Pauling
behind in the rain in the ghost town. Alice had kind of an idea that April did not think she knew
who Esau really was anymore, or if indeed she had ever known.

Practically speaking, this meant the drives now felt much longer, and much more uncomfortable.
The radio was always on, even if it was just static. April slept a lot, which meant Alice slept a lot,
but at least it got through the day faster. Someone at some point had said she might be able to get
the cast off in a month, and Alice remembered April’s reflexive doubt that she would be alive in a
month, no matter what Kitzis or Dell thought of her will to live. A will to live wasn’t much in the
face of being hunted by the kind of company that TFI was, or traveling with someone like Esau.

The good news, if indeed there was any to be had, was that it appeared they were not being
followed. Leaving Miss Pauling in the lurch was probably the biggest wrench they could have
thrown in the gears of the machine that was after them, and it had given them a precious few days’
head start. April needed this, was Alice’s private opinion. She was very sad, and she needed some
peace and quiet. Moreover, she needed someone to be nice to her. Esau wasn’t being very nice to
her, and the world hadn’t been very nice to her on the whole. Miss Pauling had not been nice to her.
Scout had been nice to her and Dell had been nice to her, but both of them were gone now. So it
was just Alice left, and even though she was still kind of mad at April for being rude and for
dragging her to the forest and making her see the devil again, and even though April still hadn’t
apologized—

By the same token that Alice did not want to be alone, Alice imagined April did not want to be
alone, either.

The first step was getting her attention, which was just as hard as ever, but for a different reason. It
took Alice a little while to realize that April was a new kind of sad. This was not the sadness of
finding a hurt baby raccoon on BLU’s grounds and failing to nurse it back to health. It was not the
sadness of noticing her face in a reflection without expecting it and wishing the scars were not
there. Alice was not even sure it was sadness, come to think of it; it was more like a darkness. And
for the first few days, Alice’s job was simply getting through that darkness, in hopes of finding
April inside of it. It was not that April was ignoring her, but that she did not care enough to hear
anyone at all.

On the day she succeeded it was cool and brisk and they were somewhere in Colorado again. This
time Esau had found a boarding house with two empty rooms, giving them both some much-needed
space. It was a sweet-looking house, rolling up to it, a stout little bungalow with white clapboard
and hedged with stacked stones as fencing. It did not have a lawn so much as it had a luxuriously
overgrown garden in front, with as many weeds as domestic plants: it stood thick with colorful
strokes of irises and tulips amid crowding stalks of proud thistle and shy yellow dyer’s woad. The
only sign anyone minded the yard was the neat, weaving stone paths that led up from the street and
down from the detatched garage, and this was clearly kept meticulously clear from invading flora.

Alice had not been paying attention when they were welcomed in by the owner, and did not find
herself bubbling back up to consciousness until well after Esau had taken Shep and said he was
going to go get the truck looked at, and April had established herself in what was, for a little while,
her own room. It was a strange room, by Alice’s measure, all pale lace and neat blonde wood. The
bed had no fewer than seven decorative pillows on it, and the trim little desk tucked in a corner was
framed by photographs of freshly caught fish and streetside markets, all clearly from another
country. There was a skinny little bookshelf that hosted an array of potpourri and decorative
seashells, and only a few books. Here there was a different sense of unbelonging, and Alice could
tell April was uncertain if she liked it. The hotels had been anonymous and devoid of personality;
this had color, but very clearly color added by someone unfamiliar. It felt a little like trespassing.

April?
April was on the bed. Her door was shut, locked, the curtains drawn. The bed was too soft, and it
bowed in the middle; April liked a harder mattress. But she was awake, even though she lay on her
back with her arm over her eyes. “Mm.”

“Hi,” Alice said, and suddenly found it was her own arm over her own eyes. She tugged it off, a
little startled. The change had felt instantaneous, as if April had just been waiting for an excuse to
slip away. She could feel her withdrawing even now. “Wait, April!”

And there April was, sitting at the desk. Her back was to Alice. Alice thought it was awfully
convenient that they could both be there at the same time. It made talking so much easier. “What?”
said April, stock-still, staring at a photo of a strange, blunt-nosed fish with green fins, half the size
of the grinning dark man who held it.

Alice sat up, kicking her feet as she thought. She wanted to be nice. “How are you feeling?”

It took so long for April to answer that Alice worried she had gone away and left her not-body
behind. “I’m not, I think,” April said. “Feeling.”

“Yeah,” Alice said sympathetically, because she already knew that much. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry
about Scout.”

No answer. Maybe she should try to not talk about Scout yet.

“I’m tired,” April said. “You can run things. I don’t want to be here.”

“I want you to be here,” Alice said, and slid off the bed. “So you can’t go away yet, okay? I want
to do something.”

April’s head did not turn so much as it sort of slid to the side and April happened to look her way.
“Alice …”

“Stay,” Alice insisted, tugging the suitcase open. It was ragged now, compared to the start of their
journey, banged-up and scratched and with two stickers Scout had slapped onto it, one from a
banana he’d been eating and one from a convenience store’s souvenir section. The latter had made
April roll her eyes when she saw it, to Scout’s great amusement: a prismatic rectangle in red and
gold and blue, with an illustration of two identical long-haired women smirking at the viewer. The
eye-rolling was because neither woman was clothed.

“What’s it say?” she had asked.

“Gemini!”

“Gemini.”

“Yeah! Like the zodiac? Miss Pauling is real into horoscopes so I read all about ‘em, Gemini is the
twins. Y’know, like, because it’s you and Alice. Because there’s two of you? I think the ladies in
the picture are hotter than you, though. Sorry.”

April had snorted and smacked his shoulder, but she left the sticker on.

It was easy to find what Alice was looking for, given that April was religious about checking it
was safe every time she went to her suitcase. The folder was perhaps a little worse for wear, its
edges a little dirtier and more crinkled, but what it held inside was safe.

Again she felt April trying to pull away. “Stay,” she commanded, grabbing the folder and holding it
up to show to the April that wasn’t really there. “I’m going to read this, so you have to stay to listen
to what it says.”

This, at last, roused her. “You’re what?”

Sometimes it was very hard for the people around her to grasp simple concepts, Alice thought. “I
can read. You can’t. You want to read this, so I’ll read it for you.”

“I … why, though?”

“Because it’s a nice thing to do,” Alice said, “and you’re sad.”

The April in the chair was gone. Alice lowered the folder, worried she had vanished; but no, she
could feel her there, lingering, a second presence. A shadow of a fish beneath the water.

“Okay?” asked Alice.

Okay.

Satisfied, Alice dropped down into the chair April had been at. The folder opened at her touch.

There had been a time where Pyro was reading a book a week. There had been very little else to do
in Pennsylvania, under June’s roof, for a teenager with no money. This tapered off, as she got older
and found other ways to occupy her time. But up until Tobias, she’d always at least had one or two
library books knocking around, waiting for her time.

Pyro had not read a book in four years. It had been a special kind of devastating, being confronted
in Coldfront with the gibberish copy of Fahrenheit 451 and being told it was in English. She
relived it weeks later, back in New Mexico, when she had perked up in interest at the sight of a
small library cart of books on a shady sidewalk, outside a storefront. One had been in her hands
before she realized she could no more read it than she could read one of Medic’s scientific papers.
In German.

All this is to say that when Pyro, lingering in the back of their now-shared consciousness, weary of
everything, yearning for the empty bliss of sleep—when Pyro heard Alice begin to read aloud from
the first document in the folder, it was a strange sort of bittersweet. It wasn’t fair that Alice got to
be the one who could read. It made her want to be angry again, to lash out and punish this
haphazard shell of a person inhabiting her body.

That want died immediately, once she remembered that Alice was doing this to be kind. To be nice,
because no one was being nice to Pyro.

It was a special kind of devastating, realizing that her fractured psyche had determined that she was
so alone and so friendless that only her alternate personality could be trusted to be nice to her.

This took work, it turned out. Pyro had to keep her mind from wandering, and Alice had to stop
once to go and find a glass of water to keep her mouth wet. She had to read aloud, or else the
information was only a scramble of thoughts and images and feelings bumping against Pyro’s
consciousness. There was a certain amount of collaboration necessary, because Alice’s inclination
was to read absolutely everything, and not everything needed to be read, like every notice marking
the information herein was classified. But the work got less, and Alice got more confident, and
Pyro learned to school herself and listen.

It was a strange, muddy sort of euphoria, being excited about something again.

The thing about reading the folder was that it was very thick, and not everything in it made sense.
More than a few of the things inside it seemed to be written in some kind of shorthand or cipher,
which troubled Pyro. There was a distinct possibility that Alice simply could not read it, but when
she sounded out the words they truly did seem like gibberish. About half of the documents within
were subject to this, and moreover, they were hand-written. As Alice sorted out things that were
obviously unreadable from things that could be read, Pyro considered this. BLU had observed her
for some time before hiring her, Miss Pauling had said, years ago. They had followed her,
apparently, on the whole path she had burned through the United States. It seemed likely to Pyro
that these notes were related. But then again, what did she know?

Little. And littler still, she was finding.

The first interesting thing Alice discovered was a complete transcript of Pyro’s arson trial from
when she was seventeen, which took up fully half of the folder. It was too much to bother reading,
but Alice flipped through it anyway, curious. At Pyro’s request, Alice found a pen and took down
the name of the lawyer, a Deb Bechdel. She really had been a very good lawyer, and probably the
only sympathetic adult Pyro had ever met regarding her pyromania at the time. In the continually
slimming probability that she lived through this, that was another person she would like to check in
on.

After the transcript the folder became more haphazard. There were copies of a lot of single pages
that seemed to be the last page of a larger document, with labels that had a lot of numbers and
letters in them, and they all had the words “the undersigned” and a big sloppy X scrawled on them.
Her contract agreements. Pyro wondered what exactly she had agreed to in them. After these came
a number of photocopies of what appeared to be health records and doctors’ notes. Some of them
were dated as far back as 1956, and Pyro was pretty sure there was something called a breach of
confidentiality involved with that. Here she found her birthday, just like Scout had suggested: June
20th, 1940. She was thirty-one years old.

Next was a stack of newspaper clippings, and picking through them, Alice told her they were all
about fires. Textile mills, bus stops. Black Ice Stadium fire kills twenty-three.

Pyro had Alice put that stack down afterward.

But a kind of electric energy was shot through her now, even with the murky value of the folder’s
information. At her urging Alice clumsily got to her feet and with the crutch under one arm
hobbled over to the narrow bookshelf and its minuscule collection of books. Alice sounded out the
titles, and Pyro was not even interested in any of them, all books about homemaking and local
history, but there was a sheer glee of knowing she could pick up a book and not struggle to make
out its name, even if it was through the filter of Alice.

It whipped up a storm in her, a wave, and she latched onto it for lack of anything else to be happy
about it. And when Alice turned and her eyes fell upon Kitzis’ journal, tucked away in the suitcase,
well.

Neither of them had any hope of translating the doctor’s bilingual notes, but there was Char’s
translation, tucked away in a pocket in the back cover. But in her haste to pull them out, Alice lost
her balance on the crutch. Both it and Alice toppled to the ground, and it was sheer good fortune
that she didn’t land on the broken ankle, though Pyro could feel the dull pain as if through
anesthetic. The book, however, went flying. It knocked hard against the desk and fell to the ground
like a dead bird, the wings of its pages spread and twisted. Pyro found herself feeling a little bad for
it, as Alice picked herself back up and grabbed it by one cover.

It was this motion that peeled what had appeared to be the back of the journal away from itself.
Alice paused, squinting at it. “Umm. There’s something in here.”

What?

“More paper.”

Of course there was more paper, Pyro thought a little irately. It was a journal. But the feeling fell
away as Alice tugged the stuck page away from the true back and revealed a folded sheet of thin
brown napkin, dense with handwriting.

“It is more paper,” Alice said, defensively, sensing her annoyance. A certain sheepishness crept
over Pyro.

Yeah. You were right.

“It’s in English. Should I read it?”

Pyro was game, curious about what Kitzis would have found important enough that he would write
it so tightly and carefully on a napkin, and then stuffed it in a hidden journal, but still write in
English. Alice sat back against the bed, cleared her throat, and began to read.

My private notes on the goings-on of TFI have always been clandestine as necessity, but the level
to which I have been forbidden from recording any of what I have learned most recently from the
two BLU subjects makes me think I have been found out. Regardless, I sally on. And I think I
should be a poor doctor if I let myself be intimidated out of proper documentation.

I have been interviewing Subject 3 and Subject 6, as well as their alternate personalities, whom I
shall call 3-A and 6-E respectively, for the past three months, at Helen’s—the Administrator’s—
request. I should correct this; primarily I have been interviewing Subject 3, 3-A, and 6-E, as
Subject 6’s original personality appears to have become dormant. This was all of great surprise to
me, to learn that Subject 6 was presenting many of the same symptoms as Subject 3 prior to her
recovery. Apparently 6 was exposed to the experimental Elysium compound under circumstances
similar to Subject 3’s, at around the same time, but it did not take hold until several years later.

This of course brings me to Subject 8 (BLU), and 8-E. Working with them has given me great
understanding in the nature of this malady, how it causes its host to imprint on a certain stimulus.
The sharpness of their split, the clarity and accuracy of the second personality to its source, exists
in stark contrast to the muddier results of 3 and 6. As one often must, I have been forced to work
backwards.

As 6-E is the more lucid of the two uncontrolled alters, I focused on them first. The story they told
me matched up with their previous reports, and of particular notice was their repeated statements
that they would have preferred to remain “in” the robotic chassis; at times they speak as though
they truly are a machine. This suggests Subject 6’s imprinting occurred during such a time where
they were in the vicinity of the chassis itself. In a way I feel sorry for 6-E. They will never be able
to become what they believe themself to be.

Of course, I then moved on to try and trace the source of 3-A. This proved considerably more
difficult, in part because 3-A is childish and rather stupid and difficult to understand at times—
difficult to work with, too, when the mood takes them. This made me think that if 6-E is Subject
6’s approximation of a machine, perhaps 3-A is Subject 3’s approximation of a child, or of a mad
person. This line of questioning, however, proved fruitless, due largely to the fact that 3-A indeed
seems to be either a child or a mad person. Questioning Subject 3 herself was an exercise in futility
as well. Perhaps 3 had based 3-A off of a daughter or the memory of a sister, I thought; but by her
account 3 had no family at all, and she outright laughed at me when asked about offspring. When
asked if there was anyone of particular importance in her life prior to joining BLU, she cited an
adoptive mother, but her description of this woman was nothing like 3-A. Perhaps 3-A’s disjointed
personality is the result of Subject 3 attempting to cobble together a person from nothing. It is
unfortunate she could not have chosen someone more their intellectual equal to mirror, for she
strikes me as very intelligent, and 3-A is a chore.

All this said, it was speaking with 3 that gave me my strongest lead. She recounted being under
prolonged, great stress just before her ultimate exposure to the Elysium compound, and indeed, her
use of it was in search of relief. I could not get any answer on Subject 6’s state of mind before the
rise of 6-E, but I believe 3’s account has given me my answer. I have already determined that
looking-glass syndrome creates vulnerabilities in the patient’s mind. With Subject 3, the trauma
that gave rise to 3-A happened slowly, over a long period of time, and my understanding is that
even before the exposure she was under considerable duress. In Subject 8, 8-E’s appearance was
evidently the result of intense, short-term exposure to negative stimuli. One may assume it is this
difference that gives us the stark contrast between 3-A’s muddled mind, and 8-E’s pinpoint
competency, even taking into account Subject 8’s existing familiarity with 8-E’s source.

As ever, it is all grist for the mill. I shall soon return to my studies of Subject 8 and 8-E, in
preparation for the main event: Project Gemini.

April was quiet for a long time after Alice got done reading and that was good, because Alice
didn’t really think she wanted to talk.

Alice had been listening, when Char translated her father’s journal for them. For her it had been a
kind of vague interest, because she didn’t think she was quite the person Pyro had been before she
had been fixed. It hadn’t bothered her, and it was interesting to listen to someone else talk about
what had happened, because sometimes Alice didn’t think she understood it all the way herself.
But now—

April was there again. April was sitting next to her, against the bed. April did not have a broken
foot. “Hey,” she said.

Alice grunted, and carefully re-folded the napkin, tucking it back into the journal. April seemed to
watch her, and plucked at the carpet. Dimly, Alice could feel the shape of her thoughts. They were
mostly about the journal, mostly about what Project Gemini could be and how odd it was that she
had a sticker by the same name, about who Subject 8 was. These were not the shape of Alice’s
thoughts.

“Am I 3-A?” she asked.

Pyro startled. “I think so.”

“So Kitzis thinks I’m stupid.”

Slowly, carefully, April’s thoughts re-formed, and now they were Alice-shaped. “You’re not
stupid,” April said.

“Kitzis said I’m stupid. Kitzis is a doctor.”

“That’s not—”

“Did you make me stupid on purpose?”

The question took April aback. Alice could feel it, the surprise and guilt sticking like insects to the
back of a mind that was not hers, a mind that had created her mind, plain as she could see it on the
not-April’s face.

The quiet in the room was interrupted by Alice, sniffling.

“I didn’t make you,” April said, bending like flowers in a storm. “I don’t know where you came
from. But you’re—”

“I am stupid. I never know what the others are talking about, I can’t ever keep up. I know you think
I’m stupid,” she snapped, as the not-April opened her mouth to answer. “No one ever wants me
around, except Esau, and Esau scares me now. Everyone only ever wants to talk to you.” Her face
was wet, now, and she did nothing to dry it. “No one likes me and it’s not even my fault. It isn’t
fair.”

“I’m sorry,” April said, as real and regretful as the rain.

Alice was a mess, now, a clog of snot and tears and tiny little gurgling sobs. Her foot hurt and her
eyes would hurt from crying later, and she wanted to be home, because at least there no one would
make her feel unwanted except for April.

“Listen,” said April. “You’re not—maybe you’re not as smart as, like, Dell or Kitzis. Neither am I.
But you’re not stupid, you … look, you saved Esau from the sniper, right? You realized what it
was before I did. And you kept me from lighting the asylum on fire and called Scout for help, and
you knew that I should have let you take over in the storm. You’re not stupid, Alice. You know
things and you have good ideas. It’s not your fault that I don’t listen.”

“Are you scared of me?”

The non sequitur gave April pause, puzzling through how to respond. And then, reluctantly: “I’m
scared of a lot of things.”

Alice sniffled again, pawing at her reddened eyes. “That’s not what I asked.”

“Well,” April said, “I was, for a while. I was scared I’d get stuck like I was before Alaska again.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Yeah, I know. Now I know. Just—it’s scary having something that can take control away from
you.”

“I don’t mean to,” Alice whispered. “I don’t mean to be scary. Do you think Dell is scared, too?”
The flutter of April’s fear was palpable against her, swift and small and running, like a mouse
under a blanket. “Yeah,” April said. “I think he’s probably terrified.”

There was some comfort, in this, in a black and inky way. But there was pain, too, and fear of her
own, and Alice began crying again.

But April was still talking to her, now, soft as spring showers, gentle in a way that April was never
gentle. “Hey, hey. I know. I know, I’m scared for him too. Come on; try not to cry. I’m sorry about
before. I’m here. We’re both here.”
 25: True Colors

Breakfast at the boarding house was an interesting affair. The house was run by a neat little
middle-aged woman, one Sunny Riccardi, who was approximately square-shaped and wielded a
broom like it was a sword. She loved to talk, though not in the way Scout loved to talk or even in
the way Ginger loved to talk. Sunny could pin you to the wall with one of her monologues, and did
not hesitate to do so. Escape was impossible, in the same way one could not help but fall asleep on
a warm and droning afternoon with nothing to worry about. Sunny had lived on hippie communes
and worked in Navy machine shops, and she had broken a beer bottle over a policeman’s head in
the Stonewall Riots, which she cited as one of her proudest moments. Another resident of the
boarding house, who was tall and angular and named Carter, and who Pyro had been startled to
realize was a woman, smiled warmly when that story came up. “Sunny did a lot more than just
that, that night,” she’d said in a deep, honeyed voice, and would say no more.

This was all right, Pyro thought. She liked hearing about people who had lives that sounded as
interesting as her own, and even better when those lives seemed less plagued by misfortune.

But: breakfast. Sunny was in charge of breakfast, and even sticking your nose into the kitchen
while she was going was grounds for being corralled into helping. Pyro learned this her first
morning there, after Alice had been sufficiently soothed and spent the rest of the evening reading a
book about dogs that had been on the shelf. There was a desperate attempt to explain to Sunny that
Pyro had once blown up a microwave and mostly lived off of cereal, which had only resulted in
Pyro being put on the duty of shelling hard-boiled eggs. She could, at least, do this much. It was
nice to be doing something productive. And she got to listen to Sunny’s stories about the time she
had lived in Japan, after the second World War, and what that had been like.

There were five other boarders at the house, not counting Carter, who was evidently a permanent
resident. Pyro did not pay any particular attention to them, just because there seemed to be no
point. She would be leaving tomorrow anyway; she would have been leaving today, only the
Bronco had apparently come very close to breaking a timing belt and needed to be kept for the day.
Esau was displeased about this. Pyro had made a point of not speaking to Esau, because he
suddenly felt like someone she needed to tip-toe around, and a shock of nausea threatened to fell
her any time she remembered what he had said about Miss Pauling in the car.

But there were five other boarders, and with herself and Esau and Carter and Sunny, that made for
nine people at the breakfast table, and an awful kind of nostalgia crept into her as pleasant,
meaningless conversation was made over piles of bacon and ginger scones and the hard-boiled
eggs Pyro had shelled. Nine of them. There had been nine mercenaries on BLU, though she had
never sat and eaten with the full team while in her right mind, while Scout hadn’t been craving her
blood. Nine.

She was pulled from this train of thought by Sunny’s squarish voice. “April, wasn’t it?” she said as
she plucked a saltshaker shaped like a duck from the table.

Pyro tried not to flinch. “Oh, uh. Yeah.”

“You’ll have to excuse me for asking a foolish question. Are you a Native American? It’s just that
I once had a friend,” and she paused mid-sentence, as she often did, and began tapping the duck
over her oatmeal. “I once had a friend who was Native American, and you look so much like her.
It’s those eyes of yours.”

Privately, Pyro was fairly sure that her scars precluded her from looking like anyone. She was also
so used to hearing the term Indian instead of Native American that she almost said no. “Yeah. I
mean. Yes, yeah, I am,” and it was a hunted sort of answer. People who asked her that sort of
question usually did it as an excuse to say something less innocent. Sunny, though, nodded.

“What tribe?”

It occurred to Pyro only after she had already done it that laughter was perhaps not the best answer
to that question. “Well, I,” she started, fumbling. She could tell Esau was watching her and that
made everything worse. “I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not … I didn’t really keep in touch with
all of that. That stuff.”

This was, of course, largely due to the fact that the people that had known those sorts of details had
gone and drowned in the river, but this seemed like something you shouldn’t say at breakfast.

“Oh!” said Sunny, not unkindly. “You’ll have to pardon me. I was only curious. My friend—her
name was Adrienne—she was Cherokee. She invited me to a powwow once, one they’d let white
folk come and see what they were all about, and the dancing was so beautiful …”

Pyro listened politely, excusing herself when the conversation meandered away from the topic of
culture. Esau said nothing to her as she went. Sunny’s question followed her, though, like a cat
weaving at her heels, sort of a nuisance but of no ultimate consequence. She did her best to step
over it or to shoo it away, but it kept darting underfoot. Even if she did nothing with the
information, it would have been nice to know her background. It would have been nice to know
anything more about her family.

The thought tripped lightly after her as she returned to her room, slipping in before she could close
the door. Then it curled itself up on the bed beside her and made itself at home, purring too loudly
to be ignored, too innocent to be shoved off the mattress. And finally she sighed and said, “Alice?”

There were no words, per se, but she felt the uncanny flicker of the other mind.

“Would you come do some more reading?

For her service, Alice demanded she be paid in candy. This was fine; there was a corner store just
down the street from Sunny’s house, and even with her foot it was a trip Pyro could make on her
own. It would be good to do something under her own power anyway. Negotiations included a full
bag of lemon drops, two candy necklaces, a box of Hot Tamales, and a jawbreaker, though Pyro
was uncertain why this level of detail needed to be observed. She could buy the entire candy
section.

Payment, though, would be delivered after services were rendered. Thus came another evening of
sitting at the desk, picking through a stranger’s observations of her life. This was, for a moment,
actually less interesting to Pyro than the fact that during Alice’s demands the transition between
them had sort of happened without either of them noticing. Pyro had been the one speaking at the
start of it, and Alice by the end, and it was unclear to them both where the switch had taken place.

In the folder were more medical records, and a log by Miss Pauling making note of the fact that
Pyro had been in town for Dell’s faux funeral. Pyro thought this was an absurd question; Ginger
had called her the instant she had heard that Dell’s house had burned down. But she supposed
Pauling didn’t know that. This in itself was a comforting thought, because it meant that TFI was
not, in fact, all-knowing.

The rest of the folder was a record of times Pyro had stayed on a BLU base or at the headquarters
during her time of employment. She thought this was it, and was squaring with the sense of curious
disappointment that nothing else life-altering was in the folder—nothing else on the scale of the
photo of her and her brother, or the names of her family—when Alice flipped to the second-to-last
page. Here she found a photocopy of the torn-out obituary, ripped in the same place as the original
copy, but this one had writing on it.

“Gus Cadotte, Maude Cadotte,” Alice read aloud, drawing a finger from the circle around April
Dominique Kingbird and, along the line that lead to a bracket around the two names. “13 Sussex
Tee, Sheridan, WY.” She paused. “April?”

Cadotte? thought Pyro, suddenly dizzy. Cadotte—that was my mom’s last name.

“Uh-huh,” Alice confirmed, her finger sliding up to the name Mary-Beth Cadotte.

Are those my grandparents?

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “But I think that would make sense.”

“I want to go to Wyoming,” said Pyro.

The morning of their departure from Sunny Riccardi’s boarding house was early and mythic-
looking, with a low fog rolling over the ground that waited to be burned away by the promise of an
unseasonably hot sun. From where he had just sat down behind the wheel, Esau looked straight
ahead, out over the broad, cozy street that held the boarding house. The street stood picturesque,
full of comfortable old cars and pleasantly dented mailboxes and flowers that beamed up at the
burgeoning sun. It seemed to ignore Esau’s stare, which was a flattened, dead thing; this street did
not care for unsightly roadkill. “And why on earth do you want to go to Wyoming?”

These were almost the first words they had spoken to one another since taking up at the boarding
house. On this, their first real morning in each other’s company since Pyro had managed to sort of
patch herself back together, it was going just as poorly as Pyro had anticipated. “Because I read my
folder,” she said from where she sat in the passenger seat. “Well, Alice read it to me. And I think I
have grandparents there.”

To Esau’s credit, he was sufficiently surprised. “Really?” he said, the first thing out of his mouth in
days that did not sound like an admonishment. “That’s … well, that would be wonderful, if you’re
right.”

“I have an address,” she said, quietly tucking away the relief that Esau had not immediately told
her to shut up. “It’s in somewhere called Sheridan. It’s on our way if we’re going to Canada, it’s
almost on the northern state border. I looked it up.”

“You’re sure they’re still alive?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can check. There wasn’t a
date or a phone number or anything, just the address.”
“We could call directory assistance,” Esau said, glancing up and down the street as if it would
provide him with something to convince Pyro with. “4-1-1. Sunny had a phone.”

The very idea of this made Pyro’s skin crawl. “God, what, and just drop that bomb on them over
the phone? If they’re still alive that probably would kill them. ‘Hi, I’m your long-lost
granddaughter, and also half my face is scars, and I’m insane, by the way, plus: there’s another
person in my head’?”

“And showing up on their doorstep is preferable?”

“Well,” Pyro said, “at least that way they don’t have any expectations.”

Esau shook his head and started the car. “I’d want to be told in advance. Clear up my plans. But if
that’s what you want,” he said.

“Really?”

“We might as well do one good thing on this godforsaken trip.”

There would be no reclaiming the camaraderie of their first ride out of Kansas. That memory now
felt so distant that Pyro thought she may have dreamed it, hallucinated it. This almost would have
been better, because that way at least Pyro wouldn’t have known how much worse everything had
gotten. But at least, for now, the trepidation and excitement and further trepidation at the thought
of meeting family she had not even known she’d had overrode the discomfort of riding in silence
with Esau.

Less silence, anyway. “I think they’re my mother’s family,” she told him as they wound northward.
“Same last name. Cadotte.”

“Is that French?”

“I … don’t know,” Pyro said. “Maybe?”

“French-Canadian, perhaps,” Esau mused. “I suppose that you can ask them.”

“I feel like I’d know if I was French-Canadian.”

Esau snorted. “If you’re sure about that,” he said, and Pyro felt the same sharp jab Scout must have
felt when Esau had told him to shut up in Kitzis’s house. It was like having a chair pulled out from
under you. She said no more after that.

They carried on northward, and by Esau’s estimation they would reach Sheridan early the next
day. This meant another full day with Esau, and now that she was not in a stupor, now that she had
been run off of the topic of her mysterious grandparents, Pyro was not altogether certain how she
would get through it.

The problem of Esau seemed to have gotten very much greater over the last two days, and it was
this she focused on. She thought she could mark it with Alice telling her she was afraid of Esau
now. Alice was far and away Esau’s favorite person, and always had been; Pyro had once
attributed it to their being two sides of the same psychosis. Perhaps this was so, but in the last
twenty-four hours the dark thought had come to her that perhaps Esau preferred Alice because she
was easier to convince of things. More malleable. Either way, if Alice of all people was scared of
him now, that was a development to take careful note of.

Perhaps she could not yet face the facts of Scout’s death, but she could move forward in other
ways. It had come to her that ignoring a conversation that needed to be had never once turned out
in her favor.

“I want to talk about what you did,” she said late that afternoon, bolstered by a surprisingly good
dinner on the south side of Wyoming. She had opted to sit in the back seat on their return, better
able to stretch out her leg, and to take comfort in Shep’s natural inclination to sit on her whenever
possible. “In Texas.”

She could not see his face, neither from her angle nor from the rear-view mirror. “Perhaps you
would clarify.”

Pyro had not realized the threads of her temper were worn so thin until they twisted apart. “Don’t
be coy,” she said, glaring at the back of his head. “You grabbed me and drove off. I don’t
remember a lot of the details but I’m pretty fucking sure you didn’t even stop to check on Scout.
You saw an out,” she said, and felt a cold shock of familiarity, “and you ran.”

“I took the course of action that seemed most probable to keep us safe.”

“Probable! Stop talking like a robot!”

“I should be a robot,” Esau snapped. “I am not like you. I am not like Alice, either. The first thing I
remember is sending a fleet of machines to kill your damnable band of mercenaries. I thought in
code and in mathematics. But here I am, stuck as something I did not ask for, the same as you.
Don’t you dare tell me how to talk.”

“I’ll do whatever the hell I want,” Pyro said, her grip on Shep’s collar tightening. “And I want to
know why you left Scout behind.”

“I panicked. Is that what you want to hear? One moment I was at Conagher’s property, and in the
next I was outside in a rainstorm, and I saw Pauling, and I panicked.”

“You lost time?”

“Yes,” Esau said. “Which is something you’re rather famous for, if I recall.”

She ignored the sting. “Fine. And anyway you saw Pauling and Scout,” she said. “The first thing
she did was pick him up. I remember that much.”

“Yes, I did. I saw what looked like a man with a broken back. There’s no respawn here, no miracle
cures, do you remember that as well? So, yes, Pyro. I picked you up before you killed anyone else,
including yourself, and drove.”

The words were like a spear, planted neatly between her ribs. She stuttered in her breath around it.
“We could have taken them both with us. Pauling wasn’t in any condition to stop us, Scout was
her boyfriend. She would have put this shit on hold for that.”

“Pyro,” Esau said, and her name crackled and turned to ash in his mouth. “Sometimes I think
you’re still as stupid as they say you were in Alaska. Pauling is no different from that sniper. She is
as much a mercenary as any of you were, Scout or no. Pauling would like to put us—what was it
you said? She’d like to put sacks over both our heads.”
A long stretch of road went by, painted a slowly darkening purple.

“You’re not the one I said that to,” Pyro said, after taking what seemed like an eon to put the right
words together.

In the silence that followed she pushed herself as far forward as she could manage, until she could
finally see Esau’s expressionless face in the mirror. “You said the next thing you remembered was
being out in the rain,” she said. “You said you lost that time. That you don’t know what happened.”

Nothing.

“Esau. Esau, you bastard. Look at me.”

Nothing.

“Did you know?” she asked. “It was just you for months. You said it was just you, swore it up and
down, even. You said Dell was dead. Did you really think that? Or was that a lie too?”

Nothing.
 26: Safe Harbor

Alice thought that taking a bus in the middle of the night while Esau slept was a bad idea. She
made a lot of good points about this, like that Pyro would have a hard time getting her suitcase and
her gun and Shep’s leash onto a bus with a broken foot. She would be an easy target to track if Esau
wanted to track her, Alice reasoned, and easier still for TFI. Most of all, Esau still had Dell.

Pyro had been making an active effort to listen more closely to Alice’s opinions. This was the only
reason she was still there, because as ever, her instincts told her to run. Those instincts never got
any further than the act, the running. Inevitably, following them, she would run right off a cliff.
She had to figure out how to stop doing that, and Alice seemed as close to a guard rail as anything
else.

Silence closed in over the three of them the rest of the night and all the next morning, and the
bitter, righteous part of Pyro liked to think Esau did not dare speak to her right now. She seethed
with anger, boiling with it just under the surface, where it waited to leap out at the first disturbance.
Wherever she went doors slammed and gravel jumped and Shep flattened his ears and lowered his
tail. She wanted a fight, like before. She was starting to think she was a person who needed to fight.

But Esau would not fight her, and whether this was from a deserved sense of shame or an
indifferent superiority, the end result was the same. Her fury leaked out of the car like an oil trail
behind them as they pulled into Sheridan, lying long and low in the snow-dipped mountains, and
onto the main drag. It was busier than Pyro had expected for a tiny northern town, hours away
from anywhere of import. It held a wide four-lane street that cut straight through sturdy brick
buildings and insistent bright signs calling promises of hotels and coffees, the cut-out letters
crusted with snow. There wasn’t a single traffic light the whole way.

Esau broke the silence in the end, for a practical question. She hated how he was practical. “What
is the plan, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should figure that out.”

“Fuck off.”

She wanted him to snap at her, to roll his eyes, to do something. It wasn’t that he needed to earn her
wrath, he’d already done that, but she hated this in-between state where she was livid and he was
acting like he’d done nothing worth getting mad about.

Esau said, “Then we’ll get a room somewhere and figure it out from there.”

That was what they did. The room somewhere was in a hotel along that main strip of road, right
next to a tiny barber shop with green trim, which was more interesting than the anonymous brown
building they were put up in. Pyro made a loud and obvious point of requesting two rooms, as she
had the night before.

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask for them to be on opposite sides of the building,” Esau said as they
went up the stairs, their luggage in his hands as Pyro struggled with the combination of the crutch
and the steps. His voice was mild and empty, without so much as the memory of annoyance.

“Fuck you.”
“We aren’t going to get anywhere if you won’t speak to me.”

“Why the hell should we get anywhere?” Pyro said, banging open the door to the stairwell. “We’re
going in goddamn circles. I don’t even know why I thought this was a good idea.”

“Because you don’t know when to give up,” Esau said, and there it was, that snarl of irritation
lingering behind the words. Pyro curled her lip. “You haven’t slept and you haven’t eaten. Go to
bed and I’ll figure out where your grandparents—”

“No, you won’t,” Pyro said, snatching her bag from his hands. The blue of his eyes darted over her,
cool and bottomless and blank. “I will.”

“Because you can read now, I suppose.”

But Pyro had already unlocked her hotel room, and the door crunched shut behind her.

The truth was that Pyro had not, in fact, slept, or not as much as she should have. She had gotten a
scant three hours in the motel room before a nightmare threw her back to reality, sweating and
frozen to the sheets. This one had not even had the decency to be her usual fare but instead left its
impression in the shape of irrevocable failure, the disapproving and frightened aura of people with
faces like hers, but unburned. Shep had been there, trying to herd her from some danger, until he
turned into Esau’s chassis. The chassis pinned her to a tree by her leg and chewed it apart with
woodchipper teeth, and she only woke up once it had let go.

Shep darted anxiously around her feet as she beat her way through the hotel room, kicking off her
one shoe, tearing out her hairclip, scraping furiously at her face with a wet complimentary
washcloth as though that might scrub away the scars. She hurled herself into bed and thought once
more about crying, but whatever secret well the tears had come from had since gone dry. Even
Alice seemed to be gone for the present, leaving her alone but for Shep. He nosed her hand where
it sprawled off the mattress. She clucked at him and he was a puppy again, all limbs and eagerness,
clambering up to shove himself against her. He did not like to be held too tightly, but he would
allow her to wrap her arms around him and bury her face against his neck, and it was in this way
that she dozed.

If she dreamed, the dreams were not enough to startle her awake. She woke once when Shep pulled
away to curl up elsewhere, and again when there came a soft rap on her door. The visitor, and who
the visitor had to be, might as well have been cold water for how violent and unforgiving a wake-
up call it was. Pyro waited, knotting herself tighter into the blanket and hoping it would leave.

Knock knock knock.

“Go away,” she said into her wrist.

Knock knock knock, it came a third time.

She rattled off a string of curses and ripped herself out of bed, fumbling loudly for the crutch. Her
approach to the door was loud and angry and she hoped Esau could hear it, was already regretting
bothering her. He would regret it in a moment anyway, if he wasn’t. “What?” she barked as she
flung the door open.

To her pleasure, the man in front of her did indeed lean backward as if blown off-course by her
fury. He rubbed at his bald head, looking down at the carpet. “Sorry,” he said, gently. “I guess
maybe I shoulda realized I’d be waking you, huh?”

It was a lucky thing Pyro had the crutch, because she might have collapsed at the sound of Dell’s
voice again.

Pyro had never especially wanted to know how it was for people who had to deal with her split
personalities. It was bad enough she had to know how it was having them. It did not make
witnessing the split between Dell and Esau much better, knowing how it worked in the
background. Mostly it made her self-conscious. Was it this strange for other people to have to get
used to a whole new set of mannerisms, a new vocabulary? Even the way Dell carried himself was
different to Esau, who was stiff and aware of every inch of his body and limped. Dell did not limp.
Dell held himself like he was trying to relearn how you rode a bike, and it was coming, but slowly.
He cricked his neck as Pyro let him in, stopping inside the threshold. Pyro looked him up and
down, doubtful and dizzy with sudden wakefulness. “Dell,” she said in a groggy croak, just to have
the confirmation.

“For now.”

“Okay. You can sit down.”

“No,” Dell said, and drifted back against the wall like a balloon forgetting how to float. “No, I’d
better stay near the door, just in case. You don’t want him in here, and I don’t blame you.” Pyro
mirrored him, folding her hands into her pockets, and nodded. He cast his eyes up and down her,
taking in her tangled, loose hair, her weary face and downturned gaze, the burned-end shorts that
ended abruptly before a sock and a cast. “I’ve got to say,” he said, not unkindly, “you do look
rough.”

She barked a laugh, though it rattled out as more of a wheeze. “Yeah,” she said, shaking her head.
“God, yeah. I mean. What can you do?”

Looking up at him she could tell there was more there, more that he wanted to say, but did not, and
for this she found no fault. What could you do? What was there to say that wasn’t obvious? But he
was here, at least for a moment, and she was glad of that. “How did you get out?” she asked.

This time he chuckled. “I broke out,” he said, and for the first time in a while smugness wrote itself
on his face. “Guessing that Bee Cave busted the seal, in a manner of speaking. He’s having a
harder time keeping me down. Could still get me down, I imagine, but it’s not as easy as it was.”

Relief swept over Pyro like a cool breeze. “Oh, thank God. That’s—I didn’t know if you—”

“I know.”

“Something good, finally. Need that, after all my shit ruining everything.”

“You stop that,” he said. “We’ve got it hard enough right now without you jumping on the pile
yourself. Say—here, dog, c’mere.” This to Shep, peering around the corner that led into the small
entryway of the hotel room. His tail wagged a single time, but he did not go closer. Dell huffed
another laugh. “Guess he’s taken to you.”

“No. Well, yes, but it’s just that Esau kicked him the last time he got close.”

A crust of ice formed over Dell’s face, heavying him, making him look cold and bitter as he
processed the information. Pyro did not bother feeling bad about telling him, because it was not a
lie, only an exaggeration; Esau had kicked in Shep’s direction, intending to get him to move, but
misjudged his distance. At least that was how he told it. But he had very much kicked the dog
either way. It was another thing Pyro had added to her fury.

“I feel like,” Pyro said, lingering over the words before stopping. She did not want to look at Dell,
even if he was not Esau, so she looked out over the hotel, through the window to the department
store across the street, into the funhouse-mirror reflection of herself in the tiny television screen
that sat opposite the bed. Wildly, she wished Alice was here; Alice as her own person, an Alice
that Dell could see. Someone to help her. “I feel like we should do something while you’re still
here but I don’t know what.”

She hated the words as soon as she’d said them, hated the second layer of meaning beneath
them. While you’re still here. While Esau lets you be here.

If Dell noticed, he let it go by unremarked. “Yeah,” he said, shaking out his shoulders as he dared
to venture a few steps further in. Shep backed away as he did, and the wounded look on Dell’s face
hurt about as much as Pyro’s ankle. “I know what you mean.”

“Come on,” she said, suddenly itching to be out of the stifling hotel room. She grabbed Shep’s
leash from where she had thrown it on a hook in the closet. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Sheridan was not a wide spot on the road, but it liked to pretend. Neighborhoods started only two
blocks from main street, an orderly collection of tidy little houses with wild yards. This was a town
dedicated to the wilderness that spun out around it. Pyro counted no fewer than three cow skulls
serving as garden decor, and a whole host of RVs and boats sitting in long driveways, like
monoliths. The air shivered with the glaze of snow, and the space of skin between the top of her
cast and bottom of her shorts grew bright and prickly against the cold.

Shep had never been trained to walk nicely on a leash. “Spent most of his life running around my
land,” Dell told her as she held firm against the dog’s yanking. “He was maybe a year old when I
got him. Never saw him as a puppy. Must be, what, eight now?”

Pyro nodded, but Shep’s age and history seemed like the stupidest thing possible they could be
spending their time on here and now. When a rabbit burst forth from one of the garden beds and
Shep nearly toppled her leaping after it, her frustration hit critical mass. “Don’t touch me!” she
said, voice flaring as Dell put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Please,” she added, contrite,
when said hand curled away. “Sorry. It startles me.”

“Not to worry,” he said mildly, and the hand disappeared back into his pocket as if in penance.

“I don’t want to talk about Shep.”

“What do you want talk about?”

Pyro knew exactly what she wanted to talk about, with Dell, here in the chilly neighborhood of
rural Wyoming. “I don’t know,” she said. “Well. No. That’s a lie. We’re here to see if my
grandparents are living here.”

“Grandparents,” Dell echoed. “Yes, I do remember you saying that.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“How do you mean?”

Words were such clumsy things, and she always seemed to cut herself on them whenever she had to
use them near anything important. “I’m pretty sure they don’t know I’m alive. I don’t even know if
they’d want to see me.”

They rounded a bend, looping into a cul-de-sac. A towering lilac bush met them, in early bloom
despite the snow, and Dell paused to carefully snap a wand of blue blossoms free. “You’re their
family, April.”

“So?”

He tilted his head a few degrees, regarding her, all of her. A wash of self-consciousness coursed
through her. She was not particularly sure why Dell would want to see her, either. She was
objectively unpleasant to look at. “I guess I don’t understand why you’d think that wouldn’t matter
to them.”

It was much easier to focus on Shep than on the way Dell looked at her. “My mom was their kid,”
Pyro started, trying to get a handle on the thing she needed to explain to him without slicing herself
open. “I was her kid. As far as I know, I’ve never met them, I don’t remember them at all. I don’t
know if they even liked my mom. I don’t have any reason to think they’ll like me. Why would they
care about me just because I’m related to them? Even if they did, they’d stop once they knew …
look. Everything Miss Pauling said about me was right. Everything you’ve ever said about me was
right.”

Pyro thought there was a sad rush of wind through the trees, until she realized her hair, still long
and loose around her shoulders, was not moving. It was Dell, sighing. “I hate to know you think
that,” he said. “I said horrible things to you, did horrible things.”

“Yeah, well,” Pyro said, and kicked a rock. “Maybe I deserved some of them.”

“You’re not nearly as bad as you think you are.”

“I don’t know if I’m bad. I just know I’m not good.”

“All that means,” said Dell, “is you’re no different from the rest of humanity.”

It seemed like there was no winning answer to this, which confounded Pyro into silence. They went
on, weaving through the sleepy streets, until they came to the wide gambol of a park. There was a
playground here, with children trussed up in puffy winter gear, and a beautiful silver hound with
stiff legs and a long tail running wild in the muddy yellow grass. It ambled up to Shep as soon as it
noticed him, and the grave business of sniffing one another was approached. Then it dropped its
front legs to press its chest to the ground, an invitation, and Shep danced at the end of his leash.
Pyro shook her head at them, and unclipped the lead from his collar.

The two dogs darted away, instant friends. The silver hound charged up to a bench with Shep in
tow, and as Pyro looked up she saw the young blonde sitting on it, sketchbook in hand, first ruffle
the hound’s ears and then raise her hand in greeting to them. Pyro mirrored the motion without
really thinking about it.

“I don’t,” she said, and had to pause lest she trip over the tremor that rolled through her before the
words as she said them again, “know what to do.” At her side, she almost thought she could hear
Dell ticking, like clockwork. It was a different sound to the mechanical silence that followed Esau.
It was not that Dell wore his thoughts on his sleeve, far from it. It was just that he didn’t go out of
his way to hide them, either. “I feel … I feel like everything I know has fallen apart, and it’s my
fault.”
As she said it the terror took her that she would be met with platitudes, told she was blameless. She
had never been innocent in her life. But Dell said, “Ain’t all your fault. I sure didn’t help.”

“I helped get you there, though,” she said. “BLU Spy’s dead, and that was my idea that got him
killed. So that’s his and Sniper’s lives ruined. The RED sniper and demo came after us and now
they’re gone. The RED scout, his arm … that wasn’t my fault, I guess, but I had to really hurt him
to stop the bleeding. RED Spy got blown up, and that could have been Heavy, I don’t
know what we would have done if it were Heavy. Kitzis and Char … and …”

“Scout,” Dell said, before she could say and you.

Pyro said nothing.

“That’s a lot to carry.”

“Yeah,” she said, again.

“Needn’t carry it all by yourself.”

At this she felt she might crumple, disintegrate like the leftover leaves under their feet. “It’s my
fault, though.”

“I think,” Dell said, “that’s an oversimplification.”

There was a pine cone by her feet. She shifted her weight to the crutch and put her foot over it,
slowly adding pressure until it shattered under her boot. It gave her no relief, and she set her jaw.
“I’m bad luck,” she said. “I’m worse than that. I’m bad luck and I just … make bad decisions.
Everywhere I go, I hurt people. I just end up alone. And I’m selfish, because I keep doing it,” she
said. “That’s the worst part. Like, my grandparents. I’m scared shitless of hurting them too. But I
still want to meet them, in case I’m wrong. I don’t want to be this alone anymore.”

There was a long silence that Pyro didn’t realize she would be frightened of until it happened. It
slipped into her, cold and raw, and she wished Shep would come back so she could bury her hands
in his fur, and had a reason not to look Dell in the face. She looked instead at the pine cone she had
destroyed, lying in a hundred pieces by her foot.

“Say something,” she said.

Far away, Shep lost his footing as he chased the silver dog.

Dell said, “Why is it that you need me to say something?”

It was a gentle question, almost asked of himself, but Pyro heard it anyway. It was worse than the
silence. She opened her mouth to protest when he shook his head, almost smiling. “Why is it—why
is it that I know it’s me that you need some kind of answer from?”

“I don’t know,” said Pyro.

“Why did you risk life and limb on my account, why did I spend so long trying to get you back to
normal? Why didn’t we give up on each other? We had every reason to. There’s something—
something sticking us together that we can’t get away from, you and me, and damned if I know
what it is. Why us two, out of everyone?”

“I don’t know,” Pyro said. “I was kind of hoping to ask you that.”
“Damn it, April,” he said, and laughed, not a mean laugh or a wry one, but a real, baffled laugh. “I
don’t know. I keep thinking—half the time I’m sorry we met, just because I was the worst thing to
ever happen to you.”

Now she laughed herself, a scalding bark of a laugh, shocked out of her. “No.”

“Oh, yes, I was. You got mixed up in TFI with my help, you got sick from my machine, now
you’re a fugitive from the scariest damn people I’ve ever seen, and that’s on my account too. That
ain’t even half of it. I treated you like dirt so many times, after your accident, you just ask Alice. I
bet she remembers.”

“That’s bullshit. You saved my life—”

“I ruined your life!”

Outbursts were unbecoming of Dell, and uncharacteristic besides. It startled Pyro into silence,
staring at him, at the way he now looked at her with desperation. She had never seen desperation
on his face before. And he laughed again, empty this time, pushing the heel of his hand to his
forehead as he dropped his gaze. “Sometimes it’s all I can damn think about these days, how I
ruined your life,” he said through a humorless grin. “I don’t know what it is. Everything else, it’s
behind me, I put it behind me the minute I burned my house down, except you. I can’t seem to get
away from you, nor you me. I don’t know what in the hell to do about it. I ruined your life. How
you can ask forgiveness for something like that?”

Snow was starting to fall. A snowflake brushed its way over Pyro’s unscarred cheek as she watched
him, settling and melting on her skin.

“You saved my life,” Pyro said again, softly.

Dell shook his head.

For a long time they stayed like that, standing in bewildered silence, watching the dogs play. The
snow picked up, heavy but gentle, pressing down on them until Pyro’s black hair held
constellations and Dell had acquired a dusting of white over both shoulders.

“I don’t mind,” Pyro said, eventually. “That we’re stuck together.”

“No?” said Dell.

“No.”

“Well, then,” he answered. “I wish I knew what to tell you, April, about your grandparents, about
your luck.” He swiped at his nose, red with the chilly air. “But I guess if we are stuck like we seem
to be, I can at least tell you that you aren’t alone.”

Despite everything, despite the looming threat of Esau’s return and the thought of having to face
him again, Pyro would have happily stayed with Dell until he was stolen away. But Dell shook his
head as they returned to the hotel. “I’ve got something I got to take care of while I’m here,” he told
her, and would not elaborate. “I’ll come find you, if I’m still around after.”
There was that awful word again, Pyro thought. While.

But to Dell she said, “Okay,” and let him walk down the hall back to his own room.

Evening drew near, ushering in a vigil of lamp-lighted windows all down Main Street. Pyro’s room
was no exception, glowing with the reluctant yellow of a bulb divested of any enthusiasm about its
job. While Shep flopped at her feet, worn out from his play with the silver dog at the park, she
contemplated her next move.

“Alice?” she called, and waited, but Alice did not come. She wrestled with the foreign concept of
being disappointed Alice was not there before digging out her sketchbook, inspired by the girl at
the park with her own.

She was not an artist. She was not even close to an artist. But she had a good eye for shape and
measurements and space. Blueprints, designing the three-dimensional in the two-dimensional, had
always come easily to her. And that was enough for what she wanted to do; she wanted the
distraction, to refocus away from their conversation at the park. Some part of it still lingered too
close to the surface, too large and intense to be looked at directly.

Her pen scratched out lines, scribbled through them again, fought with the toothy paper until it beat
a form out of it. It wasn’t much of a form. She knew what it was until she didn’t, until it became
something else, to her surprise. She didn’t like it; she turned the page and tried again, but this too
seemed to morph under her hand in spite of what she had set out to draw. She scribbled it out, tried
again—tried again, scribbled that too. Frustrated and trying to ignore the pounding in the back of
her head that told her she needed to sleep, she stared at the mass of lines.

For a moment they were not lines. They were limbs, and flames, and grass crushed by a fallen
body, and mud from a rising river.

Then they were lines again, and when she blinked her face was suddenly wet. Some of the wet
rolled off her face and splattered the paper. Annoyed, she scrubbed at the page with the heel of her
hand and succeeded only in smudging the ink, even more and more disobedient tears escaped to
find their way down her cheeks.

She had drowned with the rest of her family, she thought as her face grew soaked and her breath
turned into the untamed gasp of a storm wind. The water had just gone everywhere except her
lungs, sloshing around her to drive her mad for another twenty-five years, only now enough holes
had finally been torn into her to let it out.

Pyro could no longer count the amount of times she had broken down and cried in her life on one
hand.

Shep came to her eventually, good dog that he was. She let him nose her tears and lay his head in
her lap, working the secret magic on her that exists only between dogs and the heartbroken. His
ignorance of all her sins was only another hole in her side, but the downpour exhausted itself
before him. Pyro was left with a damp, sticky feeling and bloodshot eyes. When the knock at the
door came she was too tired to hide the evidence.

The man entered. Pyro looked at him warily, and tried to sort out how much time had passed.
“Which one are you?”

“Dell,” he said, and she could tell, now. It was in the way he shifted his weight and looked
embarrassed to have found her undone. “I, ah. I’d thought I’d ask what you wanted to do about
dinner.” She could tell each word was carefully selected, his choices colored by the way his eyes
darted first over her and then over anything that was not her. “Shoot. I guess it would be a real
asinine thing to ask if you’re okay.”

The laugh she gave turned the air ugly, and then the flood burst through again. Dell gave off the
impression of a spooked horse. Instead of galloping for safety, though, he eased down next to her
on the bed. “Shoot,” he said again, and lifted his hand, the left one, flesh and blood. Pyro
mindlessly tracked its trajectory, marked how it changed course in midair to land between Shep’s
ears instead of on her arm.

He did her the courtesy of silence as she fought her way through the second tide, and was kind
enough to not startle when she seized his hand like his pulse could pull her to shore. He closed his
fingers around hers, and there they were, the lighthouse and the ocean.

The first act of kindness Dell had ever offered Pyro was not shooting her. The second was a plate
of cold chicken pulled out from the fridge and left in the grass beside her on a hot May evening. It
seemed to Pyro, the next morning, as she started on what was left of the pie he had acquired for her
along with dinner, that Dell’s means of handling fragility was to try and feed it.

The pie was rhubarb and strawberry and had been heartbreakingly pretty in the box it came in,
pretty in the way that spoke of generational recipes and family-owned businesses, not yet too large
to have to spend time thinking about just how long it took to get each weave of the latticed top just
right. Its golden crust beamed even in the sad light of the hotel, and the freshly dolloped scoop of
whipped cream called to her irresistibly. Pyro set herself to thinking about how lovely it had been
to look at as she picked at the unsightly carnage it had become. Now it was a mess of crumbs and
smeared red filling and the unpalatable skin that formed over the scant remains of whipped cream.
It was easier to think about that than what she had to do today.

But she wouldn’t have to do it alone.

“You’re sure this isn’t a trick?” she said.

Pyro had parked herself in the bloom of sunlight that nested by the window, curled cross-legged in
an armchair that looked like it was thinking about giving up and going to live the rest of its life in
an English pasture somewhere. From where he was examining a map of the town, purchased from
the toy-sized gift shop in the hotel, Dell glanced up at her. She met his gaze for a fraction of a
second before returning to her pie. He kept looking at her as though he were afraid she would start
crying again. Pyro was afraid that if she kept looking at him looking at her like she would start
crying again, she would, in fact, start crying again.

So: pie.

“It’s not,” he said, and at least sounded reasonably confident.

Pyro grunted. “Wow. Great. Really nice of him. Can he hear me?”

“I don’t know. I’d assume yes. But it’s not a trick,” Dell said, circling a spot on the map.

“What’s it like for you?” Pyro asked, eager to change the subject. She was still pretty sure it was a
trick: Dell had told her not twenty minutes ago that he had arranged with Esau to be the one to
accompany Pyro to her grandparents’, if she wanted. Which she did, badly, if only to have him
there to ensure she wouldn’t flee. It felt too good to be true, which meant that it must be. She was
still working on what Esau was getting out of the deal. Dell would not say. “Talking to him, I
mean. I hear Alice in my ear. Sometimes I see her. She looks like me, but in the BLU suit.”

Dell’s brow creased. “He’s a ring of lights.”

“What?”

“Six lights in a hexagon shape. I don’t know how else to explain it, I’m afraid.”

Pyro tried and failed to visualize this. Did the lights just float somewhere in space? Were they
overlaid in one spot on his vision, like a cataract? What else did Dell see that was different from
the way she saw?

“Oh,” was all she ended up saying.

“Your family,” he went on, and something like a shudder went through her at the very phrase,
“looks like they’re a little on the edge of town. A cul-de-sac. Won’t take more than ten minutes to
get to.”

“Oh,” she said again.

Dell leaned back in his chair, arm spilling over the back of it. She could tell he was watching her.
With resolve, she downed more pie. “When do you want to go?”

The words never and right now battled in her mouth.

“I’m going to shower first,” she compromised.

Never and right now were still fighting under her tongue even as she emerged in fresh clothing,
toweling her hair. In other firsts, she found herself wondering if the clothes were nice enough. If
she should wear her hair up or down. If she should make a conscious effort not to swear. If she
should make a conscious effort to be as little like herself as possible.

“You look like you’re about to burst,” Dell observed while she threw the towel down on the desk.

“Can you blame me?”

“Nope,” he said. “Figure I’d be worse, if it were me. You wanna get coffee first, anything?”

Pyro shook her head. “Let’s just go.”

They went.

With Shep in the back and Dell driving, Pyro stared out the window as Main Street became
neighborhoods and then tiny suburbs. They eased up a long hill and snaked through quiet rows of
houses that Pyro thought were watching her. If she hadn’t been hidden away in a car that might
have been a fair assessment. Most of the places they had traveled to had been decidedly white.
Sheridan—despite, according to the map, being only an hour from both Crow and Cheyenne
reservation boundaries—came off as having never heard of a brown person in its life. It seemed
laughable to think she might have family here.

The truck came to a gentle stop outside of 13 Sussex Tee.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said, and unbuckled her seat belt.
“Hey,” said Dell, leaning on the steering wheel. “You’re gonna be alright.”

Pyro thought this was bullshit. But it was Dell, and so part of her believed him anyway.

“God,” she said, “I really don’t want to do this.”

And she opened the car door.

Not for the first time, Dell Conagher pressed the heel of his left hand to his temple, trying to soothe
the pounding headache. Asprin wasn’t touching it. The thrum of his own blood seemed to help, for
some reason. Looking at the ring of lights, six perfect circles arranged in a hexagon that was
always just in the corner of his eye, made it worse.

“Don’t need babysitting,” he murmured to the air.

I am interested. I don’t believe she will go through with it.

“You really don’t know her, do you?”

Better than you.

The accuracy of the statement stung.

April Kingbird, crutch and all, crossed the street. She walked differently now, that was the first
thing Dell had noticed. It wasn’t the cast, for she had done it on his return in Bee Cave as well.
There were three of her in his head, now, with three different walks. The arsonist hunched over her
vital organs, like she expected to be stabbed at any moment. The BLU Pyro had no economy of
motion, and little awareness of her surroundings.

April Kingbird walked like she was going to war.

Even hobbled by crutch and cast, he could see it in her, and he wondered when it had happened. He
didn’t know where he had been when she had learned to throw her shoulders back and lift her head.
Far away, he hoped, for her sake.

A cold nose pressed itself into his elbow, and he reached back to ruffle Shep’s neck. His eyes were
still on April as she made her way along the walk, up a sleepy drive with a grand old boat mounted
on cinderblocks to one side of it. Bushes of shy mock-orange glazed with snow crowded her as she
passed by them, reaching out to touch her dark hair with a hundred white petals, and white-dusted
beds of chipped red mountain rock softened in her wake. He watched as she hesitated at the porch
steps, her hand sliding along a worn guard-rail.

“C’mon, girl,” Dell said, under his breath.

Our agreement does not change if she loses her nerve.

“Shut it. I know. Leave me alone for half a minute, willya?”

Up the steps, across four feet of porch, to stop in front of the tidy brown brick and its stately green
door. Gingerly, as if afraid she might shatter the very foundations, she leaned her crutch against the
wall. A patient bronze doorbell waited as she considered it, and for just a moment Dell saw the
arsonist again, how she curled in on herself to protect a soft underbelly. “Come on,” he said again.
“You can do it.”

It was as if she had heard him, though Dell did not flatter himself. April did not need anyone’s
help, and certainly not his. So it was under her own power that she straightened her back and again
lifted her head, strands of loose hair spilling down from where she had clipped it up so it could not
disguise her face. Her last mask, abandoned.

In a smooth, decisive motion, she rang the doorbell.

Later, Dell hoped, he would have this strange morning to remember her by, more than the arsonist
bleeding out in his garage, more than the half-hearted heat of her palm as they said a hazy goodbye
at four in the morning somewhere in Alaska. More even than her disbelieving stare and jagged
smile as she clawed tears from her eyes in the ruins of his home. He hoped he would remember the
sudden baying of a dog at the sound of the bell, and the way the light caught on the silver hair of
the tall Native woman who answered the door. From his post in the car he could hear nothing, but
he could imagine it:

Are you Maude Cadotte?

Did you have a daughter named Mary-Beth?

I think I’m your granddaughter.

Dell Conagher would never know what was said, and he did not need to know. All he needed was
the way the old woman had to grab at the door frame to steady herself. The way she tucked her
hand under April’s chin, peering down at her—taller than her, surely the source of April’s own
height—and how she pressed her knuckles to her mouth before throwing her arms around April’s
shoulders, sagging from the weight of her fear. Even with how she was half-enveloped in Maude
Cadotte, Dell could still see that weight tumble from her to shatter on the porch as she leaned
forward to return the embrace.

“There she goes,” he told Shep softly. “There she goes. Thank God.”
 27: Smooth Sailing
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Pyro did not know these people.

She did not know the smell of the brick house, or the shoes by the door. She did not know the fat
beagle that regarded her with suspicion, baying with excitement, nor the high ceilings, nor the
proud sets of antlers that stood guard over the living room. She did not know the skinny man
Maude summoned from the back yard, who had long hair and no beard and walked as though his
body was punishing him for something. He had a cigarette between his knobbed knuckles, and
spoke with a quaver that lived somewhere inside him. “I’ll be damned,” he said in a thin, leathery
voice, before Pyro could be introduced. “I knew it. I dreamed it, Maude, didn’t I?”

Pyro had questions about this, but they faded in the face of the reality she was trying to swallow.
The reality of Gus Cadotte’s terse c’mere as she was pulled into another hug. “I knew it,” he’d said.
“I always knew it, honey.”

That had been yesterday.

Today shone. Today glimmered in the way things do after a terrible storm. It glowed in the simple
yellow light of the little kitchen, in the weird potpourri and tiny moccasins in the bathroom, in how
Shep got stuck in the dog door that had never admitted anything larger than the fat beagle. Dell
helped Pyro pull him free after breakfast that next day, while they were both stuffed with pancakes
and orange juice and sausage. “Damn dog,” Dell said from the backyard, half affection and half
annoyance, trying to coax Shep into putting his front legs back through the door while Pyro held
his rear half still. She could hear him, though not see him, as Shep’s bulk prevented this. “Here,
give him a tug.”

Pyro did. Shep shuffled his legs and scratched her bare calf. “Ow. Maybe we should push him
forward.”

“I guess so. Will his hips fit?”

“Have you seen how round Peggy is? He’ll fit. I don’t know how he got stuck in the first place.”

Dell pulled; Pyro pushed. With a yipe! and a scramble that momentarily saw his tail half-stuck in
Pyro’s mouth, he popped through, letting the flap saw wildly back and forth. She caught Dell in
flashes and freeze-frames through it, laughing, watching Shep bolt as far away from the door as
possible. Then she saw all of him as he caught the door and lifted it up to look at her through it. “Is
it what you wanted?” he asked, smiling.

“I don’t know what I wanted,” Pyro said, grinning, even as she tried to scrub a stray dog hair from
her mouth. It felt like she had been grinning ever since the Cadottes had brought her inside,
insisting she bring her friend and her dog in with her. Even the hard questions, the how did you find
us? and where did you end up? and was there anything we could have done? couldn’t shake it
loose, though more than a few tears had come free with them. She was not sure how she felt about
all the tears, lately. “But I’ll take it. I’ll definitely take it.”

“What are you doing on the floor?” asked Maude, leaning into the kitchen, and Pyro explained
about Shep as Dell got up and slipped back inside to join them. She laughed at the story, peering
out the window at where Shep and Peggy, the beagle, dueled over who the yard was going to smell
like. “I guess he just thought he could slip right through there. I was going to make another cup of
coffee. Do either of you want any?” Pyro did, while Dell passed, and he excused himself to leave
Pyro and her grandmother alone.

Her grandmother.

“I keep thinking I’m going to wake up,” Pyro said after the coffee, as she twisted on the sink to
wash the handful of dishes in it. It was all so unbelievably domestic. So normal. It felt fragile and
even as she was ensnared by it she was so frightened it would shatter. “Find out it was another
dream.”

“Don’t you go washing those, you’re our guest,” Maude chastised gently, but Pyro huffed and
reached for the soap. “I’m glad you won’t be waking up from this one. Do you dream often?”

“More than I’d like. Not as much as I used to. I used to get a lot of nightmares.”

“Your dad had nightmares, too,” Maude said, off-hand, and it reeled Pyro. This had already
happened several times, her grandparents dropping facts about her parents that made her have to
stop and catch her breath just to keep pace with the idea of knowing anything about her family at
all. Your mother loved the mountains, she’d go up there with Gus any time she got the chance.
Your father played guitar. They met when Jean came by the old rez to help a friend move, and she
was just so in love with how he sang.

Her parents had never been real people, not to her, not after the funeral. They were footnotes.
Shadows she barely recalled the shape of. Now she had to build the shadows back into humans.

“Is Mr. Dell your boyfriend, April?” Maude asked.

Pyro barely managed to keep from laughing. “No, no. He’s a friend.”

“Ah,” Maude said, nodding. “A friend is better than a boyfriend, anyway, you ask me. But it’s too
bad. He seems very kind.”

A ring of six blue lights flashed through Pyro’s vision, and dread danced down between her bones.
“He is,” she said, and moved on to drying the dishes. “Maude—”

“Grandmother,” Maude said, and plucked the dishcloth from her hand to replace it with a newly
refilled coffee mug. “Only if you want, though,” she said, kindly.

“Grandmother,” Pyro repeated, the word huge and unwieldy in her mouth.

“Or nookoo.”

“Nookoo?”

“That is how you say it in Ojibwe.”

“Nookoo,” Pyro said again, and found she preferred the shape of it. It took her a few seconds to
piece the context clues together after that. “Ojibwe? Is that a tribe?—are we Ojibwe?” And then,
rapidly backpedaling at the strange look on Maude’s face, “I didn’t ever … I didn’t know—”

“No, April, this is not your fault,” Maude said with knit brows, and her hands came down to rest
firm on Pyro’s shoulders. “This was never your fault, you were only a baby. Even if you did know,
you would have lost it. They would have taken it from you.”
“You thought any how you’ll tell them about Alice?” Dell said, adding further proof to Pyro’s
growing suspicion that since his return he was able to read her mind.

They were once more in the car, once more on the road, only this time it was just another short
jaunt from hotel to home. The Cadottes had insisted that Pyro, and by extension Dell, stay with
them, and so they were making the trip back with all their things in the car. Rather, all of Pyro’s
things, and Alice’s things, and Dell’s and Esau’s and Shep’s and Miss Pauling’s and Scout’s. They
were going to have to do something with the excess, but Pyro had geared herself to dealing with
that just yet. For the first time since Bee Cave it felt like she had space to breathe.

“A little,” Pyro said. “I asked her to try not to come out until I’ve had a chance to explain it. I’ve
never had to explain it before. Everyone who’s needed to know has just … known.”

“What about Ginger?”

Pyro shook her head. “Ginger knew me as … fuck, I need, like, a third name for whatever was
happening before Alaska. Whoever. Alice says that wasn’t her. I think we both remember being
that person.”

“You both got your own names, now,” Dell said. He seemed to make a point of not making eye
contact with her as he did. “Could just call that person ‘Pyro’.”

“Maybe,” Pyro said. “I don’t know. They already know I’ve seen some shit, obviously.” She
tapped at her left cheek as she said it, indicating. “They don’t need the exact details, just, you
know. Hey, sometimes I’m someone else.”

Dell made an affirming sort of noise, clicking on the turn signal.

“I guess we should tell them about Esau, too,” she said.

Dell made no noise at this.

Instead, after they had begun trundling up the hill, he said, “Say, I saw a real nice park when I was
out yesterday. Think it had some fire pits. What d’you say we take Shep down there after dinner,
have a little bonfire?”

Pyro grimaced at the suggestion, shocking herself with the reaction. “I don’t really want them to
see me around fire yet. I haven’t told them about the pyromania.”

“Actually,” said Dell, gearing the car into park outside of the Cadotte home, “I was thinking it’d
just be you and me.”

“Oh. Sure, okay.”

Hauling everything inside took two trips between them. Pyro debated bringing her gun in briefly,
decided this was the worst possible idea she could choose to do, and instead carefully checked that
the weapon was unloaded. She hid it under one of Scout’s jackets in the back of the truck, and
resolved she would figure out if her grandparents needed to know about it or not later.

She hoped there would be a later.

Then they were back in the tidy home again, and any other thought Pyro might have had was swept
out by Maude hustling them onto the couch to spread open a photo album on Pyro’s lap. The album
itself was pleasant in Pyro’s hands, particularly the red fabric cover with its plush padding, and she
opened it without really thinking about what exactly was going to be under it. Gus—nimishoo,
Maude had said was the right thing for Pyro to call him if she liked, grandfather—eased himself
down on Pyro’s left, with Maude on her right, and Dell leaning over with respectful interest from
the arm rest. “That,” Gus said, jabbing a careworn finger at a mud-colored photo on the front page,
“is your mother.”

Pyro was reasonably sure this was impossible. The person he had indicated was no older than
fifteen, eyeing the camera from atop a blanket spread under the unfurling branches of blurry trees.
She wore the kind of leather-and-beadwork clothes Pyro had only ever actually seen in movies
where cowboys were the main characters, and a pensive look that Pyro thought she recognized
from the mirror. “Her name was Ginoozheikwe. Pike Woman.”

Pyro said, “Not Mary-Beth?”

“Both,” said Gus, chin jutting forth. “And she had more, besides, other names, secret names. No
one ever has only one name.”

“Oh,” Pyro said, surprised by the wonder in her own voice.

There were not many photos in the album—the Cadottes had been born poor, grown up poor, and
stayed poor for a long time, and privileges like a camera went unhad for many years—but for every
photo there seemed to be ten stories. Pyro thought she only caught half of each one, caught the way
she was between listening and watching her new family tell them, sprinkled with a complex tongue
she did not have a hope of learning. It only meant she would have to ask to be told them again, in
that hopeful later. The thought bubbled up in her like a wellspring.

Then Shep and Peggy the beagle got in a heated discussion about the food bowls, and the spell was
broken, for the time being. Peggy was banished to the yard and Dell volunteered to take Shep for a
walk, leaving Pyro and her family alone together, and more impossible secrets were revealed about
her heritage; how her family had once come from the Great Lakes near Ontario; how the name
Cadotte was taken from a distant French-Candian great-uncle, a fur trader; the quiet, irritable way
the sprawling Ojibwe peoples were herded onto reservations by the government. The Cadottes
themselves had wound up so far from their homeland due to some kind of relocation act from the
fifties that promised money, and had the fortune to actually receive the financial aid and good jobs
dangled in front of them for doing so. This was, according to Maude, vanishingly rare. “They
wanted to erase us,” said Gus in his gruff voice. He had a plain, raw way of speaking. Pyro very
much admired it. “Called us the ‘Indian problem.’ Well, but here we are, talking to you. Erase that.
We shouldn’t’ve left, though. We shouldn’t have left.”

It was so much at once, but Pyro held onto it as much as she could.

The day trickled by, long and slow, and the sun peeled the remains of the snow from the earth.
Lunch was fish, salmon that Gus himself had caught not a week before Pyro’s appearance. Pyro
was asked how she had hurt her foot, and struggled for an answer.

“I don’t want to lie to either of you,” she said eventually. “I don’t want to upset you, either. But
I’ve been in and out of a lot of trouble the last couple of years and I’ve been trying to figure out
how to tell you about it.”

“There isn’t anything,” Gus said, looking at his plate, “you could tell us that would make us love
you any less.”
When Gus had begun talking, a kind of a pithy response began forming itself in Pyro’s head. When
he finished, she just had a lump in her throat. She caught Dell’s quiet smile in the corner of her eye
as she tried to gulp it down. “But you just met me. You don’t know me.”

“Yes, we do,” said Maude. “You’re ours. That’s enough, April.”

Dell’s quiet smile persisted all through the rest of the day, to the point that Pyro would have been
annoyed with him under any other circumstances. But these particular circumstances were
particularly extraordinary, so she forgave him for it. She kind of thought she would forgive him for
a lot of things at this point, even though he seemed to think she shouldn’t.

“You’ll have to help me figure out how to tell them about me,” Pyro said to him after dinner, after
Gus had stepped outside to smoke and Maude had bustled the dishes off the table to wash them.
(Pyro was banned from washing further dishes, not because she had done anything bad to the
dishes, but because Maude wanted her to feel taken care of. This was a marvel.) “I seriously have
no idea.”

Dell bobbed his head, but his eyes were trained out the glass of the front door. “Getting on toward
dark,” he said. “What do you say we grab some wood and kindling and head for the park?”

This was probably the only thing that could have uprooted Pyro from that house. She stuck her
head in the kitchen and informed Nookoo that she and Dell were going for a drive and would be
back in a little while; Dell decided Shep ought to stay here after all, given the fire. When Pyro
pointed out to him that the dog had a very healthy respect for fire, he just shook his head. “Call it a
feeling,” he said.

“Alright,” she said. “I’m going to grab something and I’ll meet you in the car.”

He disappeared out the door and Pyro ambled down the two half-sets of stairs that curled down
into the comfortable basement. Pyro’s room was upstairs, across from the master and next to a
bathroom, while Dell had been lodged down here, but she had not yet pulled her suitcase upstairs.
Privately she kind of thought Dell might have gotten the better deal. The basement felt as lived-in
as the rest of the house, with its built-in shelves studded with books and photos and little pieces of
pottery shaped like animals.

Partially she had come downstairs to look at it again. But she’d also left her favorite hair clip down
here and she didn’t want her hair down for a bonfire.

The little animals watched her as she gathered her hair back in a still-unpracticed motion. She had
mostly worn ponytails when her hair was long enough to do so, but as her hair had grown back out
after Alaska she had been inspired by Pauling’s chignons. It was a little more complicated to get
them right, but she liked how she looked with her hair looped at the bottom and the end of it
clipped to the back of her head. Liking anything about how she looked was so rare an event that
she thought it was worth cultivating.

Pulling her hair up, she noticed hers was not the only luggage that had been opened. This would not
have been unusual if it were only Dell-slash-Esau’s bag, but instead it was Scout’s duffel. Pyro had
not felt anything like ready enough to go through Scout’s things yet, lest she find another lighter,
another set of dog tags, some new memento to ruin her life. Her grandparents did not seem like the
sorts to go through bags. That left Dell.

Or Esau.

With one foot she nudged the duffel further open, and found only clothes. Something flashed as she
pushed further: a switchblade. She did not remember Scout having a switchblade, but she did
remember Scout having a nasty cut from Miss Pauling. It must have been hers.

“Not now,” came Alice’s voice, real and sharp in her ear, a warning. It overlaid the sense of shame,
of guilt, that came gurgling up from Pyro’s bones as she looked at the blade. “Not now, April.
Dell’s waiting.”

Dell was waiting.

Outside, she felt better still. It was coming near May now, and warm air had rolled down from the
mountains, from something Gus had called the “holler.” Pyro did not have the slightest idea what a
holler was. She had been under the impression it was the act of yelling. It was something else she
would have to ask about.

Her crutch eased her down the porch steps and onto the path, and she let her fingers enmesh with
the white flowers that bobbed at her while she went. At the turn of the path she could see the
Bronco, idling quietly and looking comically small next to Gus’s boat. At the wheel, with his hands
behind his head and his eyes shut, sat Dell.

She wondered, again, what would have become of her without Dell Conagher.

The Bronco’s door creaked and the crutch thudded as it was tossed into the back, and when Dell
offered her a hand to help pull her into the truck, she took it.

They were off, down the hill. It was too cold to leave the windows down, but they did anyway, for
the air was fresh and beginning to smell of summer. They got wood and kindling and lighter fluid
from a convenience store, as Pyro had used all of hers up on the devil. The wood was a mix of oak
and hickory and Pyro could feel the old itch in her palms as she turned it over and over, imagining
how it would look when the flame took hold. “Burning the devil sucked,” she said to Dell as they
drove, letting herself rabbit on about fire in a way she had not in some time. “It was all rubber and
metal. It stank, I don’t know if you remember that.”

“I’m surprised it was still in motion at all,” Dell said. “It held up remarkably well for a movie
prop.”

“Jesus, Dell. Did you build that?”

“I had some input on the internals,” he said with a thoughtful frown, focused on the road. “How it
would move. Not the final software. I got the body from some film production, some movie that
had failed. Just wanted it to look scary. It was meant to keep people away from the bunker.”

“Esau said he didn’t know what it was,” said Pyro, picking at the bark.

“I imagine that he didn’t. I didn’t know it would actually hunt anything.”

There was such a hell of a lot they needed to talk about.

The sun lounged on the horizon as they pulled to a stop at the park, this one different from the one
where Shep had made friends with the silver hound. It was bare in the way things are bare in the
month of April, thinking about returning to life with scouting shoots of green from the ground and
the branches, but still soggy with melted snow. This park had no playground, no children. Pyro
only saw a single dog-walker in the distance, and she barely saw this, because she had already seen
the fire pit.

It was nothing to write home about, as fire pits went. It was a ring of rocks and concrete on a dirt
patch, stacked up on top of one another. Two old logs, wet and black with the melt, waited nearby
as seating. Pyro had already put the devil, Esau, TFI, Scout, all of them out of her mind, scrambling
out of the car with the wood in hand. She was making checks, calculating things. The pit was wet
from the snow, but the kindling was dry and wouldn’t mind. There was no wind, and hickory
didn’t smoke all that badly. This much wood would probably last an hour. She wished they’d
brought more wood. She wished she hadn’t gone so long since her last good fire.

Dell watched her clear out the old ash and get the fire going, his windbreaker thrown down on the
log for a dry place to sit. She was not sure how she felt about having an audience. It was not that
she were a stranger to building fires in front of other people, but usually they didn’t sit and watch
her like Dell was doing now. She pushed it aside and returned to the kindling, focusing all of
herself on the fire, the Fire. It welcomed her, the only constant she could have ever called her own,
and even that was a lie, because the Fire belonged to no one. Once it had begun to swirl and turn in
the fire pit, once she had dropped in the wood and the lighter fluid, she let herself fall back on her
ass to the dirt and hooked her arms over her knees. It danced over the kindling, blazing everything
else out of her mind.

“Is it what you wanted?” Dell said, and this time he was not asking her about her grandparents.

She stayed like that at first, chin tucked to knees tucked to chest. The Fire blinkered her to the park,
to Dell. It was slow, finding an answer. “I want this to be over,” she said. “I love being here,
talking to them, but it’s all ruined knowing we’re going to have to leave to get TFI off our back
again. I can’t have TFI coming after them. Spy had to hide Char, and Kitzis wasn’t even the one
who was in trouble. Maybe,” and saying it felt the way peeling melted rubber off of Spy’s skin had
felt, “we shouldn’t have come.”

“No, no,” Dell said. He pushed off the log, cracked his back with a grimace, and then came to
settle on the other side of the fire pit. Now he was part of her blinkered world. In a way, he’d
always been. “This is good. I think this is just about the best thing that could have happened.”

Her laugh was ugly and sad and tasted like salt water. “The best thing that could have happened
was Pauling not finding us and Scout not being dead and Esau not trying to kill you. It would have
been TFI giving up—”

“I’m leaving in the morning.”

The words thudded like lead into the dirt between them. The flames guttered, and her dazzled sight
only just made out Dell’s country-blue eyes across the scalded stones. “What?” she said, with
another wobbly laugh that was actually something else. “You can’t leave again.”

His gaze was down in the mud. “I am.”

“What the fuck?” she said, and something broke in the fire pit. Something broke in her. “No.
What? Why?”

Dell said nothing.

The broken thing was rattling in her now, knocking other things loose, big things, structurally
important things. “You’re just going to fuck off again?” she asked. “Is this what you do now, you
 just screw off to God-knows-where the minute you think I don’t—” Her voice telescoped in on
itself. She made angry, ugly noises until she shook it free again. “You can’t do this again, you
bastard. I needed you after Alaska and you weren’t there. Don’t you dare do this to me again.”

“April,” and his voice heaved, thick with weariness, “you didn’t need me.”

“Don’t tell me what I needed or not, you bastard!” The way her voice splintered unsteadied her,
even as she scrambled to her feet. She thought she might fall into the flames. “I needed help! You
were the only one who could have possibly helped me! And you just, you left, because—why?
You thought you ruined my life? I ruined my own life. You were the closest thing I had to starting
to fix it.”

“And yet here you are,” he said. “Case in point. You didn’t need me there.”

“But I wanted you there,” she said, and didn’t expect the way her voice cracked.

When he looked at her again she did not know what she had wanted from his expression. She kind
of thought he didn’t, either, with the way his mouth had gone sort of wrong and his brow tangled
up in a net of lines. His eyes, though. He stared at her with those wide blue eyes, all the prairie in
them.

“I want you here,” she said. “Why are you leaving me again?”

Now he was not staring at her. Before he had been, she was quite sure. Now he was staring through
her, his expression no longer an abstract concept. It was a sharp metal thing with evenly spaced
rivets and sharp, welded edges.

“Because he’s coming with me,” said Esau.

Chapter End Notes

Sensitivity reading on this chapter provided by @FanXyBaeBae on Twitter.

 28: Down with the Ship

“No,” said Pyro.

“Absolutely not,” said Pyro.

“Fuck you,” said Pyro.

Smoke blustered in her eyes, up her nose, trying to drive her back from the fire, a warning. Don’t
get too close. Don’t get too close. Stay back.

“I won’t let you,” said Pyro.

Esau did not laugh. It took him not laughing to realize she had wanted him to, had wanted him to
make himself out to be a villain, the Bondian antagonist stroking a robotic cat. But even his voice
was gentle. Kind, or Esau’s nearest approximation. “You cannot stop me.”

So she laughed instead. “Oh, yeah? You think I can’t?”

“Pyro. I would leave Dell here with you, if I could.” And there it was, that curl in his voice,
souring. “I would love to be away from him. But that is not where we find ourselves.”

“And where the hell are you going?”

“I am going,” Esau said, “back to TFI. I want what they know. I want their help.” He got up, stiff,
and it was maddening how differently he moved from Dell, now that she had been with Dell long
enough to see it. He moved like he didn’t know how his joints and muscles were meant to work, or
how to use them. “This is not a hostage situation, Pyro. Dell agreed to this.”

Pyro laughed again, angry and explosive. “I don’t believe you.”

“You may believe or not believe. It does not change the truth. But if you recall Pauling said she had
come to retrieve me and you.”

In the corner of her eye she could see Alice, cowering in Esau’s shadow.

“Because I am going willingly,” Esau continued, “they have agreed to leave you alone.”

“No,” Pyro said.

“I’ll have it in writing, tomorrow, when they come to pick me up. They will never trouble you
again. You can stop running. You can stay here with your family and never worry for their safety.”

“I want to talk to Dell.”

This, finally, interrupted his monologue. In sunlight, perhaps the thing his expression morphed into
would have been resignation. Before the fire, it was just another mockery. “No.”

“You—”

“Dell and I made an agreement. My part of the deal was to not interfere while you met your
family.”

The deal. Pyro had forgotten about the deal. Bile lurched up her throat.
“Dell’s part—” Esau said.

“—was to let you go back to TFI.”

“Yes,” said Esau. “To keep you safe.”

“To let you kill him.”

Sparks not from the fire oozed down her vision. The only things she could see were the fire, Esau,
Alice, all the rest of the world drowned in black smoke. She could hear every thud of her pulse as
it screamed along through her body.

The fire, Esau, Alice.

No, not Alice.

“Esau, please,” said her voice, but not her tone. “Don’t do this. Esau, please, it’s Alice, I wanna
talk. I want to talk about this. Please don’t do this.”

The last thing Pyro saw before the smoke pulled her down entirely was Esau finally remembering
how to use his face, and using it for sorrow.

When Pyro awoke, she was crying. Again. This was peculiar. It wasn’t the crashing sobs Dell had
discovered her in, just sniffling and a constant stream of tears. She tried to shift her arms to wipe
her face. It didn’t work.

Oh, she thought.

This explained why she had been crying, because it had not been her. It explained why she was
wedged in the back of the Bronco with shaking shoulders and her knees pressed to her chest, her
curled fists pressed against her temples as if it would stem the tide. Alice was crying. Alice was
also staring opposite herself with unseeing eyes, and as she looked Pyro supposed it made sense
that Alice’s version of Pyro was now sitting there. She didn’t look as imperious as Pyro
remembered. Just tired, and empty.

“I guess you didn’t talk him out of it,” Pyro said.

This observation welled up a new and not at all improved series of sniffles from Alice.

Pyro said, “Christ,” and the hallucination squeezed her eyes shut. “What do we do now?”

Alice wiped her nose on her wrist. “You can’t ask me that,” she hiccuped. “I don’t know. I don’t
ever know because I don’t know anything. I’m supposed to ask you that.”

“I don’t know either, though.”

“Then neither of us know,” said Alice, despairing, “and Dell’s really going to die.”

The world went dark again.

When Pyro awoke this time, it was to a faceful of fur. She sputtered and sneezed and drew back,
and Shep twisted, instantly awake and instantly tail-wagging. He shoved his nose in her face and
she pushed his head away, and they compromised by her letting him lick her hand.

She was in her bedroom. Her guest bedroom, upstairs, across from the master bedroom and kitty-
corner to the bathroom. The walls were white and had old paintings on them, for Maude had once
been a painter. Cheap and lacy curtains were shuttered over the window that overlooked the
neighbors’ back garden. A gold-colored railing, also cheap, surrounded the bed on its back and
sides, where it was pushed up lengthwise against the wall, and the mattress was a thousand years
old and it sagged terribly. A stack of old suitcases meditated in one corner, next to a quiet desk
littered in forgotten mail. Everything smelled like potpourri.

Someone had brought her suitcase up here, because it was neatly laid out on the ground.

Her eyes felt sticky, like someone had glued the lashes together. Considering the fact that the
lashes had been almost entirely burned from her left eye this was a remarkable accomplishment.
She remembered first that she was miserable about something, and then she remembered what she
was miserable about.

It now seemed certain she would be miserable for the rest of her life.

There was an old alarm clock on the bedside table that occupied the corner between the closet and
the mattress, pushed halfway off the table by the rotund lamp it had been meant to hold. It was
accurate, or mostly so. Its hands read 7AM.

If Esau had given her a time for his departure, she did not remember it. A cold shock clawed at her
and she nearly kicked Shep getting out of bed. She was in pajamas that Alice must have changed
into, gray sweats and a barely surviving tee. It was good she was decent, because she would not
have bothered changing if she wasn’t.

Mercifully, her grandparents were not immediately evident in the living room that lay at the base of
the stairs. She jolted down the basement steps as fast as she could, crutchless and holding onto the
hand rail for dear life. “Dell?” she called.

The pike watched her.

“In here,” came Dell’s voice, in Dell’s accent.

She all but threw herself into the guest room, stopping in the doorway, a hand on either side of the
door frame. Like she could keep him from going that way. And there he was, real as anything,
quietly stowing things into his suitcase. “You can’t do this,” she blurted.

Dell sighed.

“You can’t let him do this,” she said again, like he just hadn’t understood the first time and if she
said it again he would go oh, yes, of course you’re right, let me just unpack.

“There’s nothing I can do now,” he said.

“Fucking! Of course there is!”

“What, then?”
The way he looked at her was the final nail in the coffin, because it was with hope. He was looking
to her for an answer. For some solution he hadn’t seen. For help.

Helplessly, she looked back.

The hope buried itself quietly in his eyes, and he went back to packing.

Pyro’s ankle throbbed, angry with her treatment of it. She ignored it, almost fell between the two
steps it took her to reach the guest bed, and dropped down onto the mattress.

Time crawled away from them, stretching out, dragging Pyro through the past. Dell cutting his
hand open to show her how the dispenser worked and how he had saved her from certain death,
Dell asking her to come with him as he fled BLU to spare her Scout’s wrath, Dell clumsily
activating a biometrically locked teleporter to keep her from drowning. And, now, Dell going to his
own doom. For her.

“Why?” she said. “Why are you trying to save me again?”

“You deserve a chance at happiness,” said Dell. “A real one. That’s all.”

There was a car outside.

It was sleek and black and carried the distinct air of death. It would have carried this air even
without its present errand; one got the impression multiple murders had been carried out either in or
by it.

Since this was a TFI-owned car, both were probably true.

The sleek black car looked wholly out of place in the sleepy Sheridan neighborhood. It threatened.
The mock-orange flowers hid their faces from it. The sun-bleached cattle skulls that watched over
the cul-de-sac rolled ghostly memories of eyes in terror. Even the wind had shut itself up once it
noticed the car. The car was too black, too sleek, and it gulped down the magic of the place,
infernal and starved.

Dell was going to get in that car.

Pyro had a dim memory of being told that it had been arranged for the Cadottes to be away when
the car arrived. They would be away for several hours, giving Pyro the time she would need to
come up with an excuse for Dell’s absence. When asked how he had even gotten in touch with TFI,
Pyro had been given a sheepish nod toward Scout’s duffel, where apparently Miss Pauling’s
cellular phone had once been hidden. It was not there now.

They were out in the driveway, next to the boat and the Bronco and the black car, and Dell had his
suitcase in his hand. Pyro was still in her pajamas. She didn’t see a reason to change. Shep was
leashed at her side. They stood there, in silence, rotting in the last seconds of their time together.

Dell said, “If I can get ahold of you, I will.”

“I wish you had shot me,” Pyro said. She had said this to him before, in Alaska, a year ago now, in
anger and betrayal and terror. Now she said it with exhaustion, finality. Regret. “If you had just
shot me, none of this would have ever happened.”

“It wouldn’t have,” Dell agreed. “And your grandparents would have always wondered what
happened to their granddaughter.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’ll figure it out. I’m sure you will. You always do.”

The driver looked at them with impatience.

“Dell,” Pyro said, in the same moment that Dell said, “I’m glad we met, April.”

Then he was gone. Not his body, still rooted to the spot on the drive, suitcase in hand. But Dell
was gone. Esau shook himself and looked at her, clinical, distant.

Pyro had been waiting for him. She lurched forward, dropping Shep’s leash, grabbing him by his
collar with both hands. There was a thud as she drove him back against the car. Her ankle
screeched at her. Shep barked, alarmed. “If I ever see you again—”

“I promise that you will not,” Esau said thinly. “Hands off, mercenary.”

Pyro spat on him. His lip curled and he wiped it from his cheek with his false hand, and wiped that
on her shirt. “You really are a paragon, aren’t you?” he said. “To think that Dell regards you so
highly speaks magnitudes of his judge of character.”

“Fuck you. I could stop you. I could still stop you even now. I should stop you.”

“I’ll give you some advice, girl,” Esau said, and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around her
wrist. She heard the faintest mechanical clunk before the metal that the prosthetic hid engaged
hidden joints and secret hydraulics, and the sudden force it bit down on her with made her gasp
with pain. “Do you remember that pretty speech that Dell gave you, in Bee Cave? About not giving
up, and all of that?” He squeezed tighter and Pyro had to shut her eyes to keep them from rolling
back in her head. “I’ll give you another. A shorter one. Just this. Know when you’re beaten. Know
when to quit.”

He pushed her away and she staggered, put her weight on the shattered ankle, fell badly. The drive
skinned her palms, embedding gravel and dirt in the scarred lines. She stared up at Esau, at the way
he looked distastefully at his right hand and then began to peel the skin from it. There was no
blood, no gore, no sign of pain, and yet the violence of it made Pyro ill. She recoiled when he
threw the rubber hand at her feet, his steel prosthetic glinting in the sun.

“Goodbye, Pyro,” said Esau, and got into the sleek black car.
 Act III

If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad.
Not everyone has had a friend.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.

 29: Dead in the Water

Sunlight pooled through the skinny window to swirl across the floor, broken up by the unfurled
new leaves of the box elder that hovered outside the clinic. Pyro stared at a bird in its branches, a
smudge of white and brown, trying to figure out what it was. Somewhere else, where she wasn’t
paying attention, the Cadotte family doctor—a stern white woman with premature gray hair and
earrings shaped like little red crabs—shook her head again. “It was a very bad break, April. It’s
remarkable that it healed as well as it did. You said you fell out a window?”

The bird was a blackpoll warbler, Pyro thought.

She sat in one of the private patient rooms, an examination room, stiff and beige and low-ceilinged.
She sat on the exam table, perched on the edge. Across from her Dr. Zepeda was in a large rolling
chair, to the side of a desk filled with anatomical models. None of this particularly mattered.
Nothing particularly mattered.

“Yeah,” Pyro said.

“And the limping is persistent?”

“It’s worse in the evening.”

“That’s common. You’ve been on the leg all day, you’ve worn out the muscles.”

Slow, sticky, Pyro pulled her gaze away from the warbler. “Is it going to get better?”

“It’s hard to say,” Zepeda said. “It might, with time, but it might get worse. You might be able to
correct it with surgery, but that has as much of a risk of worsening it.” She swiveled in her chair,
plucking some brochures from between a model of a human digestive tract and a bisected lung. “A
cane would help. I have numbers for a few manufacturers here.”

The image of herself with a cane was almost absurd enough to drag Pyro back into reality. In this
reality a month and a half had passed, and the trees had sprung to life, and she had a limp that
would not go away.

Almost, but not quite.

She supposed she said thank you. She supposed she left the clinic and got into the Bronco that felt
big and empty when you were by yourself. The brochures found themselves in the passenger seat,
along with half a dozen other forgotten things: fast-food bags, receipts, drained water bottles, all of
them banding together to try and fail to form a person in the empty space there. She supposed she
drove back to 13 Sussex Tee and parked the Bronco and went inside, where Peggy the beagle
scrambled over her in excitement and Shep, who had already been sitting by the door and peering
out the window directly beside it, thumped his tail.

“What did the doctor say?” asked Gus, from where he sat in the big green armchair, newspaper in
hand.

“That I should get a cane,” said Pyro, and limped to the table where a pack of cigarettes waited for
her. She wrestled one free and found a lighter in her pocket. She stared at them, like she was trying
to remember what they were for. It was a Bic lighter. At one point that had been important
knowledge to her. “I’m supposed to smoke outside, right?”
“That’s right,” Gus said, and did not remind Pyro that he had told her this yesterday as well.

Then Pyro was sitting on the back porch’s steps, where you could look out over the neat yard. If
she looked back through the sliding-glass door she knew she would find Gus watching her.

Pyro supposed her grandparents were worried about her.

There had been an unexpected change of plans, Pyro had told them after the black car had vanished
down the hill a month and a half ago. Dell had to go at once. Neither statement was a lie. Oh, that’s
too bad, her grandparents said.

“Yeah,” Pyro said, and had not spoken of him since.

Peggy was there on the back porch too, laid out sideways with her back pressed up against Pyro’s
thigh and her legs sticking straight out from her body. Peggy had taken quite handily to Pyro,
mainly because Pyro had no compunctions about giving her scraps. The scraps had increased
lately, due to Pyro’s dwindling appetite and the desire to not see the sad look on Maude’s face
when she did not eat. In this way Peggy had decided Pyro was her new best friend, which was fine.
Pyro was all out of friends, so she might as well have Peggy.

She pulled the cigarette from to her mouth and was unpleasantly surprised to find it had burned
down to the filter. She would have to go inside and pretend she didn’t know Gus was watching her
if she wanted another. Instead she ruffled Peggy’s ears and got up to wander the perimeter of the
yard. It was a nice yard, with a few big, old trees, bordered with more of that red mountain rock
from the front garden. The grass was green where it wasn’t yellow from the dogs’ contributions,
and the far corner boasted a stout raised bed stuffed with canes of young raspberry bushes on a
weathered trellis. Maude had said at one point that they needed to be pruned. Pyro marveled at the
thought that someone she was related to knew their way around things like plants, things that grew
and were green and made the world better for their presence.

There were no raspberries yet. There would not be until summer, and Pyro did not know if she
would still be here by that time. Her grandparents had said she was welcome to stay as long as she
liked, but every passing day felt like she was adding another can of diesel, another propane tank,
another box of fireworks to the inevitable disaster she would cause. She would have to leave soon,
she thought as she drew her hand over the tiny leaves the canes had put out. A flash of yellow
caught her eye at the base of two canes tangled up against one another: a toothy patch of green
stubbornly burrowing up through the mulched bed, with three lion-colored heads glaring at her.
She crouched down to glare back. Looking now she could see the dandelions were everywhere in
the raised bed, hidden by the bases of the canes, tucked in corners and peeking out from under the
mulch.

“Those things are immortal,” said Gus Cadotte’s voice. He had come up behind her, silently. Pyro
wondered if in some other version of her life she had learned to walk in silence from her
grandfather, instead of from Sniper. “Every year, they come back.”

“They’re pretty.”

“Yes. A good plant to have.”

She cut him a skeptical look. “They’re weeds.”

“Why do you think they’re weeds?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I always heard. They’re spiky and grow everywhere and don’t care
what you wanted to put there instead.”

Gus nodded, and bent down to pluck one from the mulch. “Did you know you can eat them?”

“I think so.”

“You can eat the whole thing, if you cook it right. Turn the roots into tea. Has all sorts of things it
help with: heartburn, swelling, stomach problems. Such a good plant, and it grows everywhere, no
matter what anyone thinks. It’s a gift from the earth.”

He gave it to her, and she twisted it between her fingers.

“You are terribly sad,” he said.

Milky white sap bled into her palm. The dandelion’s petals were soft and comforting to her
fingertips. “Can dandelions fix that, too?” she asked.

“I’ll find out how to make them do it, if that’s what you want,” he said, and put an arm around her.

It came out in bits and in pieces, Pyro’s story. Whenever she both had the stomach to tell it, and
whenever her grandparents seemed like they could manage to hear it.

Bits and pieces. Rarely in any kind of order. She told them about June first, her semi-adoptive
warden of the Pennsylvanian fire house, who was less a mother and more an incidental owner to a
wild animal. Pyro made her first mistake in telling them the part where June had beaten her ass
weekly for a while in an attempt to teach her to defend herself. It had never bothered Pyro—it had
worked, after all, and it seemed likely she would not be alive today if June had held back—but her
grandparents were equal parts horrified and enraged.

She tred more carefully after that. Heavy was the next part of her history to come forth, though she
called him Mikhail. Heavy was easy to talk about as long as you left out the parts about his gun,
Sasha, and how she had personally seen him actually rip people limb from limb. Heavy knew
about singing and foreign card games and Russian opera, and those were all things you could tell
your grandparents about.

Alice came next, and Pyro would have liked input on that one.

“Give it back!” Pyro demanded the instant she realized after lunch one day that she was no longer
in control. “I haven’t told them about you yet!”

At least she had been in the bathroom when it happened. No one was there to see Alice hiss back,
“I don’t know how to!”

“Then go upstairs and hide!”

“You said you’d go on a walk with Nookoo!”

“Tell her you don’t feel good,” Pyro said. “I don’t want it to come out like this.”

Alice huffed, staring into the mirror. Through her eyes Pyro could see herself, terse and hunched
behind Alice. She felt it before Alice said it, the inevitability of it. “No. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna
tell them.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!”

But Alice had already pulled open the door and marched back into the living room, calling for
Pyro’s grandparents.

Her grandparents were shocked. That was never a question. But Alice left Pyro shocked as well as
she explained how they were a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde, only not evil, and how there had been an
accident at Pyro’s old job and now sometimes if Pyro got too afraid or stressed or sometimes for no
reason at all she would go away and Alice would be there instead.

“We weren’t sure how to tell you,” Alice finished, stroking Shep’s head where he lay on the couch.
“I hope you’re not mad.”

“And your name is Alice?” Gus said, the first thing to leave his mouth since Alice began.

“Uh-huh.”

“You sure don’t sound like April,” he said, chewing his thumbnail. “You talk different. I’ll be
damned.”

“You protect her, then,” Maude added. “When she’s scared or upset—you help. Is that right?”

This was enough of a surprise to both Pyro and Alice that knew what to say. “I guess so,” Alice
said meekly. “I try to. I’m not very good at it.”

“You’re her guardian,” Maude said, and smiled, even through the tears beading in the corners of
her eyes. “Well, that’s just fine then, isn’t it?”

It was possible that the sheer surprise of their acceptance was what brought Pyro back in front, and
she winced visibly at the sharpness of the transition. “Shit,” she said with a wheeze, grabbing at the
chair. “Oh, God. That’s not how I wanted you guys to meet,” she said and Gus laughed, and Maude
took her hand.

It wasn’t her biggest secret, but it was up there. Most of the other things the Cadottes asked her
after that seemed like nothing. She could futz around the specifics of BLU, she could relate little
stories from her past, cleaned-up versions, she could embellish things just a tiny bit for their sakes.
None of it was an outright lie. She couldn’t bear the thought of lying to them.

On the night Maude took her out for ice cream and an easy walk and asked her what had really
happened to Dell, she did not have any idea what to say. She held out in silence for a long while,
fussing with the damp ice cream wrapper in her hand, until Maude asked, “Did he do something to
you?”

“No!” Pyro burst out. “No, no. He didn’t. He, just. It’s … it’s complicated. It’s not stuff I think I
can talk about.”

Oh, well that was the wrong thing to say, going off the way her grandmother’s brows creased.
“Our job,” she tried again, helplessly. “It had to do with our job.”

“Your security job.” Maude bit her lip. “The one where you got Alice.”

“Yeah. Yes. It was … it was more than just security. It was a lot of—this is going to sound so
stupid. We worked with this, with all sorts of top-secret things every day. Experimental things. It
was dangerous. I … lost people. I don’t know how deep it went. I—I quit. I’m out of it now, for
good, I hope. But Dell … Dell went back to it, they made him go back. He went back and now he’s
gone and I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.”

At some point, while she spoke, arms had closed around her. She and Maude stood on the sidewalk
in a hazy western sunset, and Pyro was glad there was someone there to hold her up.

On the morning when Alice woke up first, she could tell it was going to be a bad day. Rain
slammed the windows, for one thing, and it was just barely after dawn, and the two dogs barking
their heads off downstairs—which had awoken her—made her nervous. Alice liked dogs, but not
so much when they were barking. An assortment of angry canines and a few near-miss bites during
her time as a vagrant had ensured that.

April’s. April’s time as a vagrant.

To add to it, she could not find April. She wasn’t gone-gone, Alice could tell she was still there
somewhere behind the glass wall. But she didn’t want to come out, and did a good impression of
deafness whenever Alice called out to her. It was the third time this had happened this week,
because April kept deciding she did not want to deal with anything and made Alice do it instead.
This meant that Alice spent a lot of boring hours alone in her room until April came back, because
she did not really know if she wanted to face April’s grandparents again. They seemed nice, yes,
but to April. They had been nice to Alice the one time she had met them, but she was not thick. The
only people who had ever wanted her around were Esau and Scout. Now Esau was gone and Scout
was dead.

But eventually her hunger nudged her off the mattress. When she stomped downstairs the dogs quit
their barking to swarm her with wagging tails and insistent noses. She ruffled Shep’s ears and
poked Peggy with her bare foot, and watched a rain-wet Gus digging through the closet by the
front door. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said in his wavery old voice once he noticed her.

Alice chewed her lip. “Um, hi,” she said. “I’m not April, though. Sorry.”

Gus glanced her over. Alice looked very closely at the dogs, waiting for judgement. Instead he
nodded and tugged the door back open. “Well, I’m going out on the boat,” he said. “You want to
come?”

“In the rain?”

“Fish biting,” Gus said, and tugged on his jacket.

Alice considered this. On the one hand, she did not know if taking April anywhere near a body of
water in a rainstorm would make something terrible happen. On the other, she was kind of annoyed
with April, and April was missing in action anyway. And then Gus added, “Thought I’d get donuts
on the way,” which made Alice’s mind up for her.

The dogs were not invited, so it was just Alice that watched as Gus hooked the boat to the back of
his truck, and just Alice who piled into the passenger seat when he motioned for her to do so. She
was fussing with her seatbelt when Gus said, “So you’re Alice, is that right?”

“Yes.”
“Did something scare April, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice, because she didn’t. “I woke up and she wasn’t there, I don’t know.
Maybe it was the rain. I don’t know how it works really.”

The seat belt snapped shut over her lap and she dropped back into the seat with arms folded over
her chest. Next he would ask her when April would be back, and she would say she didn’t know,
and then maybe neither of them would have to say anything. At least not until she got a donut.

Gus said, “What do you think of all this?”

That was not the question he was supposed to ask. “About … what?”

He shrugged. “Being here, meeting me and your grandmother.”

“Oh,” Alice said. “I … don’t know. It’s nice for April.” She kicked out her feet, slouching in the
passenger seat. “She’s happy. I mean, she’s not, but she’s happy about you guys.”

Gus’s head bobbed in a nod, and it reminded Alice of a wild turkey April had seen in the back yard
one day. “What about you, though?”

That was not the question he was supposed to ask.

“I like it here,” she said after some consideration. “I like you guys too. I didn’t know if you would
like me. Most people don’t want me around, since it makes April go away. Is Maude really my
grandmother too?”

Gus put on his turn signal at a four-way stop, waiting for the two other cars who had beaten him to
the intersection to go ahead. He said nothing until he had pulled the truck forward and into a long,
sloping turn. “If you’d like that,” he said. “You’re part of April, as I understand it. That makes you
part of the family.”

“I don’t know if I am,” Alice said. “I don’t know what I am. Neither does she. Once,” and this time
she felt a little bad saying it, like she was tattling, “once she called me a parasite. But I think she’s
sorry about that now.”

“Hmm,” Gus said, and nothing more.

In another twenty minutes Alice had a donut in her hand and three more in her stomach, and Gus
looked a little concerned about it. But he was more concerned with getting the boat into the water,
something Alice watched with interest as he launched it down the ramp from the trailer and
skillfully pulled it near the dock. The rain had let up some and pattered pleasantly onto her coat
hood and the life jacket Gus had her put on as soon as they got near the water. Part of her was
watching; the other part was looking for April, because if she was so deep she didn’t have an
opinion on the lake and the rain, that might be worrying.

She need not have worried. As soon as she stepped onto the rain-slick edge of the boat, Gus
keeping her steady, such a bolt of panic ripped through her that she thought it was her own. She
must have lurched with it, for Gus grabbed her by the shirt and all but dumped her into the boat’s
seats to keep her from falling. Alice sat upright, blinking. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Gus, puzzled.

“Not you,” she said, putting up a hand, and listened.

The only thing she could find was April’s stark, blind terror, worse than she had ever felt it.
“April,” she said softly. “April, it’s fine. It’s just water. It’s okay, it’s safe. We’re not going to fall
in. Calm down. I’m here.”

It took a long time, long enough that Alice began to get sore and she could vaguely tell that Gus
was trying to get her attention. But eventually something shifted. It was not that April became less
afraid so much as she allowed Alice to herd the fear into something managable. It took a long, long
time, Alice thought, until she finally lifted her head and heaved a huge sigh.

“Okay,” she said.

Gus watched her, rain in his long silver-shot hair and sitting in the wrinkles of his face. “Okay,” he
repeated.

“April’s better,” she said, and wrung out her hair. “Well, not better, but better enough. We can go.
She doesn’t like water,” she added, when this did not seem to assuage all of Gus’s concern.
“Because of how my family died.”

It came off her tongue so naturally that she did not notice it until Gus’s eyebrows quirked. “Her
family,” she corrected, hasty.

“Your family, too,” Gus said, and launched the boat.

Alice had never been on a boat, for the obvious reason that April had never been on a boat. It
made sense that she had never been on a boat, but now that Alice was on one she thought April
was missing out. The gentle motion of the water, the white-noise hum of the motor and the lovely
stillness when Gus shut it off out in the middle of the empty lake, the infinite series of ripples on
the surface as rain plinked down and down. Even the sky overhead, gray and stormy as it was, lent
a sense of peace to the scene.

Gus put a fishing pole in her hands and showed her how to bait and cast and reel. Alice thought this
was great fun, and reeled in her fishless line several times for the joy of it. She was just casting
again when the thought came to her (whether it was hers or April’s, she was not certain) that this
was the kind of thing that made her seem stupid to other people. She stopped at once, casting an
uneasy eye over Gus. But he was humming to himself, looking out over the water, and when he
noticed her watching him he smiled at her. “What is it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Alice, because she didn’t. She dropped her eyes to the water, where the bright
white of her fishing bobber flashed against the surface. “It’s hard not knowing what you are.”

“Yes,” said Gus, nodding. “Most people don’t know. Some never find out.”

Alice wrinkled her brow. “Most people are just people.”

“Does April know what she is?”

“Uh …”

Part of her kind of expected Gus to fill in the blank, but he did not. He just waited, watching her.
Alice’s cheeks grew hot. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “She thinks she’s bad luck.”

At this Gus made a curious sort of sound, scratching at his throat. The rain was petering out, but a
few drops still shivered down his jaw and vanished under his shirt collar. “Really?” he said.
“That’s strange. She seems very lucky, to me.”
“What’s that mean?”

Gus did not answer at once, his attention drawn by his bobber fidgeting in the water. This
development drew Alice’s eye as well, and they both watched intently as the unseen fish
investigated the bait. It twitched one more time, and Alice held her breath, but the bite never came.

Gus exhaled and relaxed, his grip on the rod loosening. “So it goes,” he said.

“What did you mean, she’s lucky?” Alice asked.

“Well,” Gus said. “She is alive, for one thing. Out of everyone in that car, she survived. And then,
being an orphan—Alice, we were so afraid for her when we couldn’t find her. Being Indian in
these times is dangerous, and so much more dangerous if you are a little girl away from your
people. But she survived.”

“Maybe,” she said, reluctant. “We got burned. We were homeless for a long time. She was, I mean,
I wasn’t there yet, I just remember things. And we keep—people around me—her, us, I, I don’t
know—”

“You lived through all of it and survived,” Gus said, placid as the lake now that the rain had
stopped. “You, or she, or both of you, found us, against all the odds. And,” he added, looking at her
at last, “April has you. That seems very lucky.”

Alice laughed aloud, a sad laugh that hurt her chest. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“No?” He began to reel in his line again, dragging it slowly through the water. “I have a terrible
fear of needles. I feel sick just thinking about getting a shot, but now I am old and I have to get
them to stay healthy. I would count myself very lucky if I had a protector, someone who was
always there to calm me down and help me through it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Isn’t that what you did for her when you got in the boat?”

The rain had lifted, though the clouds remained dark overhead, grumbling along quietly over the
still waters. Alice tilted her head back and looked up at them, not knowing what to say.

On the morning that Alice told her she had gone fishing with Gus, Pyro outright laughed at her. It
wasn’t exactly that she didn’t believe her, but the idea of her body being anywhere near a boat was
absurd. And she didn’t remember it anyway. She would barely remember being told, later: it was
on that day she looked up and discovered she was somewhere in the foothills of the Bighorns, her
car almost out of sight and fire in her hands.

The treeless country around her was engulfed in low grass and fenced in by hills that played at
being mountains, blue and snow-capped. The sky scalded her, endless, cloudless. She had snapped
back into life near what was surely once someone’s home, though there were no signs of life there
now; just an old yellow farmhouse, bordered by dirt roads and fallow fields. A rusting green
driveway gate pushed up against her back as she felt the warning bite of a flame; a match in her
hand, the fire rushing down its length to kiss her fingers. This was shaken out and dropped, and she
stuck her fingers in her mouth to soothe the pain. Something like two hundred feet away she could
see the blue matchbox frame of the Bronco patiently awaiting her return.

The old farmhouse would be perfect for burning.

“There you are,” said Alice, who was sitting on the gate, above and behind her. Pyro could not see
her, but knew that was where she would be, if she looked. “Hi.”

“I can’t believe you’re the one watching out for me,” Pyro said.

“Yeah,” Alice agreed. “Are you going to stop doing this?”

This, being flaking out and wandering off. This, being flirting with danger. This, because the last
time she had done this sort of thing, she had ended up burning her way across half of America, and
lost half her face to a fire, and lost half her mind to BLU.

Pyro said, “I would if I could.”

“Okay, but, I don’t think you’re trying very hard.”

Pyro twisted her head around and sure enough, there was Alice, perched on the fence with a lot
more grace than Pyro herself possessed. She was wearing a green dress. “Maybe,” she said. “Can
you stop me?”

“I dunno.”

“Try, next time.”

“Okay. You were supposed to be home three hours ago.”

“Shit,” Pyro said, and scrambled upright.

She picked her way through the forgotten field, slowed by her uncooperative ankle. It wasn’t that
the limp hurt, exactly, it was that her leg below the knee just couldn’t seem to remember how to
work all the time anymore. Once or twice she had managed a run, though the pain had definitely
kicked in after that. She missed running. That was a funny enough thought that she laughed at it, in
the same way she laughed at everything now: empty and uncomfortable and a little cruel.

The Bronco didn’t mind her, or the way the mess in the passenger seat was still building. It had
spread into the back now. She kept telling herself she would clean it. It was one of those stupid
mundane things she was clinging to, having a messy car and knowing it should be cleaned and
putting off cleaning it for no real reason. That was a thing normal people did. The Bronco sighed
under her weight as she got in, like it was satisfied to have her back. And there Alice was, again,
somehow in the passenger seat despite all the garbage. “I could drive,” she offered. “I like driving.”

Pyro, both hands on the steering wheel, back flush with the driver’s seat back, stared straight ahead
at the winding dirt road. Hopefully she could find her way back. Hopefully she hadn’t driven too
far. “You can drive?”

“You can drive, so I can drive.”

Pyro’s eyes slid over to her, a titanic effort. “You can read, but I can’t read.”

Alice shrugged, and then it was Alice’s hands on the wheel, and Alice’s back flush with the
driver’s seat back. Alice knew the way home.

At least someone was looking out for her, even if it was Alice. Someone needed to be, because
Pyro could feel what was coming. It loomed in the back of her mind like a storm. These excursions,
the wider and wider loops away from the lighthouse of the Cadotte home, were merely practice,
preparation to use the already-packed suitcase that was hidden under her bed. Pyro wondered if
being a roaming lunatic would be any easier when any ATM she cared to use would spit out
thousands of dollars at her touch. Maybe being a roaming lunatic was just called being eccentric
when you had money.

There were other things she had to consider, like Shep. She was pretty sure Shep would stay. He
would be happier here, with a yard and another dog and a window to wait for his master by. And
there was the question of the Cadottes, and how much she truly did not want to alienate them, but
then—that was inevitable. That was just part of being April Kingbird, alienating people, or killing
them, and she would rather have the Cadottes alienated than dead. It wasn’t even that she wanted to
leave. It was just that she had to.

“You’re really gonna do it?” Alice asked, privy to her thoughts.

I don’t know.

Aren’t you going to stop me?

“You would go anyway,” Alice said, sad. “I don’t wanna go. I don’t want you to go and be crazy
and alone again.”

I won’t be alone. I’ll have you.

Alice laughed, in the same way she laughed at everything now: empty and uncomfortable and a
little heartbroken.

There was a car in front of the house.

It was not, as Pyro had sometimes fantasized, a sleek black car that smelled like premeditated
murder. It was not a boxy, tired Toyota. It was a shiny little muscle car, bright yellow, a Porsche.
There should not have been a bright yellow Porsche in front of her grandparents’ house.

Alice had handed the reins back about halfway home, letting Pyro get used to being a person again.
Pyro was not ready to be a person again, but so it went. The Porsche was parked carelessly in the
street, and Pyro tried to peer inside as she trundled past it to turn into the drive, but the windows
were tinted.

Tinted windows on a bright yellow Porsche in front of her grandparents’ house was what made the
cautious curiosity dripping over her turn to a cold hand squeezing her lungs.

She threw the Bronco into the driveway and came blazing out of it, approximating a run to the front
door, only to cut back halfway there and dig the shotgun out from the garbage in the Bronco’s
trunk. Every second spent digging for its rounds from under the accumulated filth sent her pulse
ratcheting louder and louder in her ears. The shells trembled against one another as she loaded it
and flipped the safety off. Alice was going off in the back of her head, be careful be careful it
might not be them it might not be TFI please don’t shoot anyone if you don’t have to be
careful. Pyro did not bother shutting the back of the Bronco before galloping up to the house.
Every muscle in her pulled taut, icy and dizzying. She stood in front of the door with a much
different kind of fear swerving through her than she had a month and a half ago. It was Alice’s
pleading that kept the shotgun pointed down as she opened it.

Peggy’s traditional baying did not greet her. Shep was not at the window. Her grandparents were
not in the living room, nor the kitchen. No one upstairs, no one downstairs.

A flash of movement outside caught her eye, but whatever it was disappeared behind the drawn
blinds. The sliding glass door to the back yard was cracked open. Her grip around the gun
tightened. Alice chanted.

be careful be careful be careful

Pyro pulled on the glass door. It eased open with its quiet, comforting scrape.

On the porch, on the old deck chairs, sitting side by side, her grandparents looked up at her and
smiled. Peggy came bolting from the far side of the lawn. Shep’s ears perked and his tail thudded
on the wood, but he did not move from where he was sitting with his head on a lap made up of
runner’s muscles and expensive jeans. The hands that were stroking his face stilled, just as Pyro
stilled, staring at the hands’ owner.

“Dude,” said Jeremiah Owens, “you were supposed to be back three hours ago.”
 30: First Mate

It was a beautiful day. Where the country had been cloudless, the sky had unfurled its banks of
white over the Cadotte home, casting pleasant cover over the back yard. There was a smell of
freshly-mown grass on a faint wind, and somewhere lingered the distant drone of the mower
responsible. In the big maple that dominated half of the back yard, a northern shrike made its
buzzing, cicadian song. The sun melted over Pyro, casting Scout’s shadow across her as he got to
his feet. Pyro ignited.

“Really?” she snarled, and the shotgun leapt upright in her hands to point square at the man’s chest.
It had been so long since she had handled a gun. Somewhere far away, she heard her grandparents
say something. “You picked Scout’s face to show up here in? Bad fucking idea.”

The man’s eyes had gone wide, and he immediately put his hands up. He started to speak, but she
thumped the muzzle of the gun against his chest, pushing him backward. Her grandparents spoke
again, urgent, alarmed. Pyro said, “Gus, Maude, get inside.”

Gus said, “Wait just a damn minute, April—”

“Get the FUCK inside!”

Her voice was a boom, a gunshot itself. Her mind raced ahead of her, trying to figure out the ploy.
It could be Spy, but there was no reason he wouldn’t show up as himself—it could just as easily be
someone new with the disguise kit technology.

Her grandparents did not move, and Pyro was so unbelievably sorry they might have to watch her
kill someone.

“Hey, hey there,” said the man, his words all stretched and sculpted into that East Coast accent.
“April, look, I ain’t got any weapons.”

“Drop the disguise,” she said. “Drop it, or I blow your heart out your back and we can find out who
you really are that way.”

It was almost a perfect Scout, was the thing, down from the hat he always wore to the way he
carried himself. This was the worst part of it, how it was not quite perfect, because this was a Scout
that seemed a little taller, a little more filled-out. More a man and less a boy. His eyebrows even
jumped in the way Scout’s always had when he thought something was funny. “Okay, alright, you
think I’m a spy.”

Her lip curled. “I said drop the disguise.”

“There’s no disguise,” he said, in the soothing way you might talk to a frightened animal. “There’s
no disguise, so I can’t drop it, but I can spycheck myself, yeah? Okay? I’ve got a lighter, in my left
pocket. You wanna take it out for me?”

In the corner of her eye, Pyro could see Maude’s hands over her mouth. Gus had hold of her arm,
gripping it tightly. She could not think about that. She could not think about them, she could not
for an instant take her mind off of the man, because he would know and he would strike and she
would lose the only advantage she had. “Hands on your head,” she growled, and when he obeyed
she reached into his pocket.

Just as promised, it was a lighter. A Zippo, new and plain and unengraved. “There you go,” he
said, stock-still. “Okay, how do you wanna do—alright, well, sure then.” She had already flicked it
open and started it up, shoving it by his face. The flame hovered dangerously under his shaved jaw,
threatened his earlobe, then his nostrils. He held perfectly still, and all the while, there was none of
the tell-tale visual ripple that would betray the technology of the disguise kit. Pyro’s hand was
shaking as she snapped the lighter back shut.

“What, then?” she growled. “Did they update the kit? Make it immune to fire?”

“Seriously, I get why you’re spooked, but I’m not a spy.”

“You’re either a spy or you’re a dead man,” she said, “and I’ve seen enough dead men showing up
to talk to me to know you’re not that.”

Tobias, almost without exception, appeared to her as he had appeared upon his death. Sometimes it
was as vivid and hideous as it had been on the night of his death, while other times it was just a
smear of blood and flame around the vicinity of his face, the suggestion of mutilation. She had
been expecting to hallucinate Scout sooner rather than later. She would have thought this to be the
most likely explanation, except Scout should have appeared as he had on that day in Texas:
drowned with the rain, caked in mud, his shoulder twisted unnaturally and bloody scratches from
her own nails on his face. Not this sun-drenched thing, in clean new clothes and dirty sneakers.
And Shep had gone to him. Shep could not see the things she saw.

Now he sighed, biting his lip. “Shit,” he said, and for an instant she thought he was about to relent,
to prove her right. “Okay, hey, I got an idea, alright? Look, I’m gonna turn around, that good with
you?”

She did not say anything, but neither did she stop him as he did exactly what he said, slowly turning
to put his back to her. “I’m gonna take off my shirt,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m tryin’ to prove I ain’t a spy. Can I take it off?”

She relented, though the gun stayed trained on him. He lifted his hands to the back of his shirt,
grabbing it by the collar, and pulling it over his head in one smooth motion. “Okay,” he said, the
shirt still bundled in his hands. “Alright, you see it?”

Pyro did see it, because it was impossible not to see. It was a swath of twisted skin that chewed up
the top left corner of his back, over much of his shoulder blade and part of his spine. It was not
nearly so ugly as her own scars, and lighter, but this burn had the unmistakable pattern of a cotton-
weave shirt imprinted on it.

Her head was pounding. She could hear Alice chattering, but none of it was making it up to the
part of her that could understand. Instead Pyro stared at the man’s back, at the scar, exactly where
she had pushed Scout down into the fire and held him there one cold October night in a burning
forest.

“Touch it, if you want,” he said, peering over his shoulder to look at her. “It ain’t spy stuff and it
isn’t makeup neither.”

She lifted her hand from the gun’s grip and pressed the flat of her palm, paler than the rest of her,
paler still on the sparkler scars scored across it, against the unmistakable tissue of Scout’s
impossibly-healed burn.

“But,” she said in a voice that splintered, “I killed you.”

A grin pulled at his face. “What? No you didn’t. You threw me out a window, it wasn’t even that
high.”

“But I—Esau said that you—”

This last was whispered, and he did not seem to hear it as he turned, as she let him carefully point
the shotgun down to the ground and pull his shirt back on. He still looked different, still almost-
Scout, but Scout nonetheless; still Jeremiah, but with something else new and bright gleaming
through the almost-Jeremiah parts of him, like flame.

“If you put the gun down we can just punch each other until somebody says uncle and figure out
who’s right that way,” he said, and Pyro stuttered and dropped the gun to grab him by the shirt, to
drop her forehead against him, stunned to speechlessness by the sheer reality of him.

“I hate you,” she said thickly, even as he slung an arm around her shoulder and squeezed it
comfortingly. “You bastard. I thought I’d killed you.”

“Nah, c’mon. We’re the BLU team, remember? Ain’t nothin’ can kill us.”

There were some things that needed to be explained to the Cadottes. Chief among them was the
fact that Pyro had pointed a shotgun at the nice young man who had come calling, all but
hysterical. Gus had gotten to his feet and grabbed the shotgun as soon as it became apparent Pyro
was no longer going to bite anyone’s head off for disobeying her, and Maude gingerly ushered the
two young people inside to sit on the couch. Shep followed them, unbothered by the fuss, and
promptly hopped up beside them to fawn over Scout.

“I’m going to make some tea,” Maude said, more than a little pale, and disappeared into the
kitchen. Gus, meanwhile, examined the shotgun before putting the safety back on and unloading it.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“Idaho,” Scout said, before realizing that was not what he meant and looking to Pyro instead.

Pyro sat boneless on the couch, head tilted over its back and staring at the stuccoed ceiling. “Um.
Idaho. Yeah. It’s been in the back of the truck.”

“Since you got here?”

“Uh-huh.”

Gus whistled, low, and pocketed the shells. “You know,” he said, sitting down in his armchair and
laying the gun over his lap, “I don’t think I really believed you, when you said your job was
dangerous.”

She made a vague gesture with her hands, uncertain what it was meant to convey. “Sorry,” she said,
jerking upright. “God. I’m sorry, I scared the hell out of you. I really thought …”

“Apologize to gookoomis,” Gus said gruffly, your grandmother. “I don’t think she ever wanted to
see you pointing a gun at someone. I know I didn’t.”

Pyro did her best to vanish into the cracks of the sofa. “Don’t go too hard on her,” Scout said, like
they were not talking about the fact his life had just been threatened. “Honest, she had a good
reason to be suspicious.”

“A good reason to point a shotgun at you.”

“Believe me,” Scout said, grinning, “it ain’t the worst thing either of us has ever done to each
other.”

Gus gave a long, drawn-out exhale, studying Scout as if trying to divine the extent of what he
meant. “I don’t think I like your job,” he said at last, as Maude returned to the living room with a
tray of tea and little chipped mugs. “The more I hear about it, the less I like it.”

“I’m sorry,” Pyro said again, as Maude settled down on the couch at her side. “I’m really sorry. I
thought you were in danger.”

Maude gave her a weak little smile that had Pyro considering the pros and cons of burying herself
in the raspberry patch outside. But Maude reached over and squeezed her knee before pressing a
cup into her hands. “We’re okay,” she said. “I’m just glad no one was hurt.”

It seemed very likely that Pyro’s feelings were being spared, but she sank into the couch against
Maude’s side anyway.

There was soon another mug in Scout’s hands, and he was polite about it and sipped at it even
though Pyro could tell already he could not stand the taste of it. He had been that way about the tea
at Heavy’s, too, even though the two flavors were worlds apart; the zavarka had been smoky and
thick, with a sort of body to it, while this was something called mashkiigobag, Labrador tea. It
tasted floral and a little bitter, mixed with leaves from the raspberry bushes in Maude’s personal
flair, with just a hint of brown sugar (or four spoonfuls of it, if Pyro got her way). It had taken Pyro
a few tries to enjoy it, and given Scout’s affection for the stickiest, purplest kinds of soda, it was
unsurprising that he did not care for the stuff. But he drank it anyway.

Pyro drank her tea in silence as her teammate chatted with her grandparents; about what, she could
not seem to focus on. She kept revisiting her patchy, rain-glazed memories of that schoolhouse,
searching for any sign that she could have found that Scout was still alive. None came forward.

Her thoughts scattered like frightened birds when Scout jostled her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, and
she shook back to the present to realize Maude and Gus were gone. “Yo. You alright?”

She wet her lips. “No,” she said presently, “but I’m better than I have been.”

“Yeah? Your folks said they were gettin’ worried.” He looked her over, and she wondered what
she looked like to him. “C’mon, let’s go somewhere. I need to talk to you.”

Pyro tried not to go on long walks if she could help it, with her ankle. She explained this to Scout
without really thinking about it, as they stepped out of the front door. He paused and asked her to
walk for him and she did, demonstrating the slight but visible limp to her gait. “Catch that from
Esau?” he said wryly.

“Shattered my ankle when we went out the window.”

He winced. “Shit. I got busted up pretty good too, but nothin’ permanent like that. Sorry.”

Sorry doesn’t do anything, she thought, and then paused as she examined the impulse.

“Thanks,” she said instead, and felt better for it. “I’m just … God, Scout, I’m so glad you’re alive.”

He laughed at this, an outright cackle, and sauntered past her. “Yeah, right? Isn’t that the weirdest
shit? I’m glad you found some family. Speaking of Esau, where is the guy?”

“Gone,” was all Pyro could bring herself to say.

Scout paused from where he had begun unlocking the Porsche, peering at her over the top of it. She
braced herself for the interrogation, but all he did was nod. “C’mon, gimpy, I’ll drive.”

Scout’s Porsche, sunshine yellow, tinted windows and all (“The glare kills me, man, I figured that
out after all the driving we was doing, plus it looks cool as hell.”) purred to life once they were
inside. It smelled of real leather and something Scout called Tiger Balm, a unique but not
altogether unpleasant scent. Pyro pulled on her seat belt, and Scout pulled silently away from
Sussex Tee.

They cruised for a while like that, where only the Porsche hummed pleasantly to itself. The world
looked different from behind the tinted glass, muted and distant. It was quieter than her Bronco by
leagues. It left Pyro with the impression, as Scout put them on one of the back highways that strode
east and would eventually loop the town, that they were the only two people in the world.

It was this impression that drew her attention to the fidgety thrum of Scout tapping at the steering
wheel, fast and full of nervous energy. Looking at him here she saw him again as if for the first
time, more of himself, the almost-Scout that defied her memory of a boy and then a monster and
then a boy again. Yet here he was, only a man. Of course he was only a man. “What happened?”
Pyro said, before she could think better of it.

The fidgeting stilled. He had not been fidgeting at her grandparents’ house, which was notable in
that it had been one of those things that had seemed un-Scout about him. His eyes were fixed on
the road, and Pyro got the distinct impression he was unsure how to answer her. She tried to clarify,
to make it easier for him. “Dell switched back to Esau and that’s why he left. I couldn’t exactly
stop him—”

“Oh, no, yeah, I figured that was all him,” he said, and went back to fussing with the lip of the
leather that wrapped the steering wheel. “I was outta it, obviously I was outta it, but I pieced
together what happened.”

“Did Pauling tell you?” she asked, and then, more reservedly: “Where is Pauling?”

An ugly chuckle leached out of Scout as he leaned the car into the frontage road that would circle
them back around Sheridan. “Yeah, she did,” he said. “And the … the ‘where’ is kinda why I’m
here. I need your help.”
 31: Sailor Take Warning

In Texas, rain pounded down on a small and forgotten schoolhouse, spilling into its newly-broken
window.

“Jaybird,” said a voice, soft and close and bringing with it a whole world of pain that blotted out
anything else for a few seconds. Something shook Jeremiah’s shoulder and it was followed by a
frail little keen that could not have possibly come from him. “Oh, shoot. J, blue jay, wake up.
Come on. I need you awake.”

Ma only ever called him jaybird when he was real sick or in real deep shit. He wondered which one
it was. He kind of thought that maybe it was both? Maybe both.

He was real cold.

“Mmn,” he got out, and gagged as something foul asserted itself on his tongue. He tried scraping at
it with his teeth and that only worsened it, and attempting to raise a hand to do it properly was
followed directly by the shrieking pain of what he faintly recognized as a dislocated shoulder.

Just always what you gotta say is, right, J, when you get real messed up like that, just say: you
should see the other guy!

“Did we win?” he said, all in a haze, because if he hurt this bad, they must be fresh off a match.

“Oh, Jeremiah,” said a voice that was not his mother’s. A hand on his forehead, warm, almost hot.
He wanted to lean into it, but the warning of further pain if he did stopped him. There was a
dawning numbness in his side, and that didn’t seem good. “Shoot,” the voice said again. “Fuck. I
could strangle her. I knew something like this would happen.”

“Flor?” he said. Florence wasn’t supposed to be here, she wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the
field when they were fighting. It was one thing to have her leading a mission somewhere outside of
respawn, but on the field everyone was crazy. Immortality made you crazy. All of these thoughts
churned upward in a fashion that dangerously resembled vomit. Instead he choked out an eloquent,
“Wha?”

He heard shuffling, the sound of wet fabric on wet wood. Wet, wet, wet. That was why he was so
cold, or he thought so. He was wet. Maybe he fell in the canal. Something smoothed its way over
his eyes, washing away something else caked over his eyelids; suddenly he could see.

He could see Florence Pauling, leaning over him in a way he had only ever dreamed about. If this
were another day, he might have taken the dizziness spiraling over him as excitement. Mostly he
was confused. “Can you hear me?” she said.

“Mm. Mm-hm. Yyyeah. C’n hear you.”

“Do you know where you are?”

He blinked at her, unable to so much as see past her face. It was Florence asking, so he had to
come up with what she wanted to hear, he had to find the right answer. He tried. “South,” he said at
first, hesitating. “Texas? I ... aw. God. Texas, and ...”

He would have preferred to stay dizzy, because just for an instant everything seemed very clear.
“You gotta kill me?” he said.
“No,” she said firmly, pushing his muddied hair from his face. “I am not going to kill you. I am
doing my best to save you, I’ll have you know. Pyro, on the other hand, took a run at it.” She
looked unhappy. He hated to see her unhappy, it made him all anxious and knotted up inside.
Vague, smudgy, he tried to lift a hand to her face and seethed his breath through his teeth when his
body punished him for the motion. The numb part of him spread.

“Pyro,” he said. “April. Oh.”

He remembered that now. It would be hard to forget, because April had looked like a demon,
cornered, all bared teeth and wild eyes and smoldered skin. He remembered the sound of shattering
glass. He remembered thinking you’ve gotta be kidding.

“M’glad you aren’t gonna kill me, babe,” he said, and that was the end of his tenure as a conscious
person. His body made the executive decision to close up shop and try back later.

In the jumbled way of memory, he would not remember most of that exchange. He would
remember instead waking up at one point and seeing the way the drenched black skirt she wore
wrinkled and bunched against her legs while she was at his side. It reminded him of the last time
they had been together, before Austin, before Texas—this had been Massachusetts, on Manchester-
by-the-Sea’s Singing Beach.

Singing Beach did not sing so much as it squeaked when you walked on it, something to do with
the type of sand and how it sat together. It was novel enough for Jeremiah to take Florence a train
ride and a short walk out to it. The weather was unseasonably warm for late March, and they
walked along the shoreline, him barefoot and her in delicate little sandals, hand in hand. “I’ve
never been to the beach, actually,” Florence told him as they went, and he paused in admiring her
done-up hair and floaty white skirt, and the way her choker sat perfectly on her throat. She never
dressed like this at work, and he didn’t exactly think she dressed like that for him. He was more
than aware, though, that he might be the only person who got to see her in clothes that were silly
and pretty and would absolutely show a bloodstain. That Florence would wear something that
could not easily hide gore on an outing with him told him a great deal.

“Yeah?” Jeremiah said, nudging a piece of driftwood out of their way with his toes. “Most of my
brothers worked on the docks for at least a little while. I was out there all the time, more or less
grew up halfway aquatic. If you look real close next time I got my shirt off you can see gills.”

She laughed at him, and at the risk of sounding like one of his mother’s tired dime romance novels
her laugh was like a bell, clear and ringing. “Can you swim, then?”

“Can I swim! ‘Course I can swim, I’m great at swimming. Coulda maybe gone out for it, except I
was way better at running. Can you not swim? I could teach you.”

“I can dog-paddle,” she said pleasantly. “I like it here. It’s quiet.”

As she said it a wave trundled up to them, chortling. It left something behind on its departure,
something green and glinting. Jeremiah had seen enough beachcombing debris to last a lifetime
and scarcely took notice. But Florence made a delighted little sound he never would have expected
from her and let go of his hand to trot ahead and kneel. It was most of a bottle, Jeremiah saw as she
carefully picked it up, a tiny glass bottle missing about half of one side. “Look at this,” she said,
tugging him down after her once he reached her side again. “It’s so pretty! What makes it look like
that?”

“What, all frosted? Means it’s been in the ocean for a while, water starts messing it up. Usually you
don’t see ones all intact like that, though, just bits and pieces. It’s a nice find.”

“I’m keeping it,” Florence said firmly, like someone would try to keep her from doing so, just as
another wave came in and soaked her skirt. She yelped with the cold and leapt upright, hustling
away from the water as Jeremiah laughed and watched the wet fabric cling to her legs.

This was what he would remember.

“Jeremiah?” said Florence, and for as much as he liked hearing his name on her lips he kind of
wished she wouldn’t wake him up for it. He’d only just fallen asleep, he thought. Later he would
find out that night had passed, and most of the next day. Despite apparently being awake for
chunks of it, Jeremiah found he had little recollection, which might have been for the best.

“Mm,” was the sound he made. There was a vague idea that he ought to say something, but as
much as he worked at his mouth, it didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Cold

cold

He was cold.

“Stay with me,” she said, and one way or another he noticed her nails curling into his upper arm.
“Our ride is here.”

“What’s that on his side?” said a new voice. From where he was very much laid out on the
schoolhouse floor still, Jeremiah’s face wrinkled as he tried to puzzle out who the owner was. He
thought he knew it. He almost thought it was April, but it couldn’t be April, because that would
have led to a hell of a lot more fuss. “Is that wood? Good lord. We shouldn’t even be moving him,
but I guess we’ve got to.”

The new voice said, “Jeremiah, right?” and someone was crouching beside him; they had tinted
skin and curly hair and a mess of freckles. Like someone had blown pepper into their face, and it
stuck. He squinted at them. “You really look bad, honey,” the person said.

“Red?” he said, finally dredging up who this was.

The RED pyro smiled. “Hey, but he remembers me, though. It’s Kit now, actually.”

“Kit,” he mumbled. “Okay. Good. S’less confusing. Red the RED. Stupid.”

Kit laughed and told him they were going to pick him up and take him to the car. Jeremiah could
not have stopped them even if he were inclined to. Then he was in quite a lot more pain, suddenly
scooped up from the ground, and the cold coursing through him became lightning. A pained shriek
raked at the low roof of the schoolhouse.

His next salient memory would be from inside a car rumbling along. He was limp in the back seat,
his head in Florence’s lap. Pauling’s lap. She had told him she preferred to be just Pauling when it
was around the other mercenaries. Everybody had so many different names.

“Where are we going?” he asked, and it came out closer to whrweg’wn? Then the car jolted over a
pothole and he seized up in pain, heedless of the way Pauling’s fingers curled into his arm. “Flor?
Mmn. Kit. Kit’s, Red’s here, where’s Clarence?” In his mind they were a matched set.

“Heya,” called another voice, and blearily following it Jeremiah found a sandy-haired version of
himself watching him from the passenger seat. The match of their faces and builds would have
been more uncanny if not for the empty sleeve of his left arm, knotted off at the shoulder. “We’re
the rescue mission. You fell out a damn window, man, you know that?”

“Oh. Uh, uh-huh.”

Pauling started talking then, smoothing his hair over in a way she’d never done before. He was
cold

pretty cold

like, really, pretty damn cold, honestly

he wondered if Tobias had been this cold.

Everything was bright. He hated how bright it was, it reminded him of all the days headed out to
fight in the New Mexico bases, sunlight scalding his eyes the minute he left the heat-choked safety
of the industrial BLU buildings.

The suffocating heat was not here, though. For a moment he wished that it was, to drive away how
cold cold cold he was, until he realized he was not cold. Not as cold, anyway. A lot of him could
be described as pleasantly warm, or just numb again. Numb was not cold. His head in particular felt
numb, though in a different way, more in a way that suggested maybe his head was strapped down
and the blood had stopped happening in it? Circulation? That was probably wrong. He couldn’t see
anything that would be doing that, anyway.

What he could see were ceiling tiles, musty-looking and yellowed with age. A slow inventory of
his senses told him he could hear a soft, regular beeping noise from somewhere to his left, and
there was the sharp smell of antiseptic lingering in what part of his nose was not crusted and
clogged with snot. Directly in front of him was, miraculously, the rest of his body, tucked into a
large bed with guard rails. He assumed it was his body anyway. The shape was right, but as it was
all under blankets, there was really no way to be sure. From what he could see, a sort of gown in a
truly unfortunate green covered most of his person, and under it he could just glimpse broad
swathes of gauze that enveloped his chest. Something was taped to the inside of his left elbow, a
tube leading up to a bag hung on a standing rod, patiently dripping something clear into him. His
shoulder, which he vaguely thought had been dislocated, seemed to be back in its proper place.
And some of the numbness was wearing off, such that he now he could feel a faint throbbing in his
side that told him it was probably supposed to be hurting like a bastard.

A hospital, then.

Around him, the room was uninspired: yellow and curtained and with all of the bland
accouterments a hospital room required. He could see a bag left on a wall-length bench that
hunched by the window, suggesting somehow had been here at some point. It was pretty and
decorative, made with a fabric full of elegant little floral patterns. Not something Florence would
have carried, he decided.

A minor racket in the adjoining bathroom caught his attention. A tap shut off, and the door
squeaked open. “Oh,” said Kit-not-Red, “hi.”

“Hi,” Jeremiah said, and winced at the effort it took to unstick his jaws for that single syllable. The
embarrassing truth was that it fully whited out his vision for a few seconds. When it came back to
him, Kit had manifested in the wheeze of a chair beside the hospital bed. “What, what’s the time?”

“Around lunch time,” Kit said. “You’ve been here for about twelve hours? And asleep for at least
half of that. How are you feeling?” He grunted, wiggling his fingers. Kit nodded, their brown eyes
sweeping over the ignoble wreck of him. “I get you,” they said. “But, good news: you should be
fine. I think they’re going to keep you for another day or so, but you’re not, um. Critical, anymore.”
They leaned forward, onto the railing of the bed, and reached out to pat the back of his hand in a
motherly way. “You’ll be right as rain.”

That managed to get through the fog of whatever was keeping the pain in his side from crippling
him. He gave an ironic laugh, and the pain reared up anyway, angry with him for trying to use
damaged muscles. “Better’n rain, I hope,” he said, groaning. “Rain’s what got us into the damn
mess, frickin’, April and the rain, what’s it. April, April showers, right? Drip, drip, drop.”

“Miss Pauling told us what happened,” said Kit. “Your pyro, right? Poor Blue?”

“Mmn,” said Jeremiah, all his energy spirited away by that one outburst. His eyes landed back on
Kit. “Why’re you here? Keepin’ … makin’ sure I don’t do nothin’ stupid?”

The sympathetic smile they gave him was answer enough. “Sort of,” they said. “Nominally—”

“Were tryin’ to kill us,” he said, suddenly doubtful. His head was spinning, foggy. “You were.
RED was. Snipers and demos, all, huntin’ us, blew up Spy. Your spy. Giordano. Pauling said she’d
maybe have to kill me if we didn’t listen, guess I maybe didn’t listen good enough. Got pillows
right here. You gonna smother me?”

Kit did not answer. They had gone very still. Jeremiah said, “M’sorry we had to kill ‘em. Your
guys. Didn’t wanna.”

A knock on the door ended the conversation. The nurse that bustled in smiled vaguely to both of
them as she checked Jeremiah’s chart, hummed to herself, and then did something with the cluster
of machines that seemed to be doing the thankless job of making sure Jeremiah’s heart wasn’t
giving out. Jeremiah was asked if he would like something to eat, and to be truthful, by the time
she left again, he wasn’t sure if he’d said yes or not. Hunger was a foreign concept. He was even
glazing over what he had just said to Kit. It seemed unlikely that Kit was going to smother him. He
was also beginning to think that maybe he shouldn’t have told them about killing the other REDs,
but it was too late for that.

While the nurse had been there, Kit had retreated to the bench on the wall and pulled an old book
from the bag he had noticed. This was the sort of thing people did when they did not want to talk to
you anymore. Jeremiah was familiar with the strategy, having been on the receiving end of it many
times. That was okay. So long as Kit wasn’t going to smother him.

He would never be sure how much more time passed after that, because he started counting the
ceiling tiles and kept getting stuck around sixteen and having to start over. He might have fallen
asleep during it, maybe a few times. The next thing he was aware of was that the light had
changed, and the chair next to him was occupied again.

“Jeremiah?” said Florence.

Once, in lockdown at BLU, Alice had taken over from April for a full week, and Jeremiah had kind
of made himself scarce. He felt a little bad over it, now. But during that week he had talked to Esau
whenever Esau wasn’t hanging around Alice, and Esau had told him he was worried about her,
because she had been hallucinating for most of that week. “Hallucinating what?” he’d asked, after a
long internal debate, because he was not sure he wanted to know if Alice saw the ghost of his dead
brother, too.

“It’s almost like she is caught in a loop,” Esau said. It was the dead of winter, and Esau’s miserable
little room was freezing. Jeremiah had found him halfway through nailing a sheet of metal against
the window, the space between it and the glass stuffed with old company-issue clothes, just as
insulation. Jeremiah, with a good four inches on Esau, took the hammer that had just been offered
to him and began to line up the topmost nails. “She acts the same things out over and over.
Yesterday she did it for an hour.”

“Geez,” said Jeremiah. “Like, what, though? What’s she do?”

“She kept getting in an argument with someone called Sister Bella, about whether or not she had
started a fight with someone named Gary.” Esau sat back on his neatly-made bed, turning his
attention to his false right hand, as he often did when otherwise idle. “It was the same thing every
time, as if she had a script. She would go into that sort of library, on the north side of the complex,
sit down in front of a table, and start talking. She would say the same thing each time. It always
started with ‘I know Sarah said I punched Gary and I did, but it’s because he was being mean to the
duck.’”

“A duck?”

“She would get really stuck on the duck,” Esau said, sounding puzzled. “I did not know what to
make of it. I tried to snap her out of it, a few times, but she always went right back.”

Jeremiah had thought about this for a while after, and when Alice gave way to April again, he
asked her about it. “I think,” she said, hesitantly, “I think it was a memory. I remember Sister Bella,
and I remember Gary---he was this mean little shit at the orphanage, and I always thought Bella
had it out for me.” She had shook her head. “I didn’t really want to listen to the old bitch yell the
same thing at me for three hours, though.”

“She was there?”

“I saw her. Or, I mean ... Alice did. I didn’t recognize her the first time, so I was really confused. I
should have known she wasn’t real, though, she was too big.” Jeremiah had squinted at her, and
asked what she meant. April made a helpless gesture. “Big isn’t right. Too much, there was too
much of her. Almost like she was too real?”

Too real was how Jeremiah would have described Florence, sitting there in the chair beside him
with the curtain-filtered sunlight painting a halo around her back. It was like someone had turned
up all the colors on her: the inky black of her hair, the jade green of her eyes like the bottle she had
found on the beach, the shadowy bruises on her face from April’s punch. Her chignon was just a
vague suggestion, and the glasses on her nose had tape wrapped around the bridge. She was
wearing a new top, with a pink plastic tag still sticking out of the armpit, and anywhere you cared
to look she seemed to have at least one bandage stuck to her. The ring of purple under each eye was
decidedly not makeup. She was, in a word, a mess.

And she was still here.

“Fuck, you’re pretty,” he blurted.

The laugh she gave was strained and cracked and nothing like the bell tones he remembered from
the Singing Beach. He hadn’t meant to make her laugh, and something about the way she did it
made him feel guilty. “You’ve been hanging around Pyro too long,” she said with a watery kind of
smile. “You must be seeing things.”

“That, I don’t think that’s how it works, is it?” he said, but even as he said it he was reaching
toward her, just to confirm he could touch her. That was another thing he’d seen April do,
sometimes; he’d been on the receiving end of it once, when she’d reached out and grabbed his shirt
sleeve and frowned at it as if she hadn’t expected to be able to. For him, though, the motion just
pulled at the IV taped to his elbow. She met him halfway, before he could rip it out, and his eyes
lingered on the chipped purple polish on her fingernails. Her skin was warm and smooth, like the
stones of a hearth. “Don’t scare me like that, sayin’, seein’ things, shit. I thought you were gone, is
what I meant,” he said by way of explanation. This did a poor job of explaining how the the
thoughts of fuck, you’re pretty and I thought you were gone were connected, on the outside, but he
didn’t think he was up to the mental gymnastics it would require to express how any sight of her
right now was one for sore eyes.

“A few times I thought you were, too,” she said, and the pressure of her fingers on his tightened.
He could count the times she had done that gesture on one hand, and more than one of them had
involved booze and the lowering of both their guards. She laughed again, and it was worse this
time. “God! You really did scare me. I think you took a year off my life for every hour you were
unconscious.”

Jeremiah was not up to calculating exactly how many years that was, but he thought it was
probably on the far end of twenty, and that sent a new wave of guilt through him. “Sorry,” he said,
slumping more in her direction with what strength he could muster. “M’sorry, Flor, I ain’t—”

“No. Stop that.” She shook her head, and then went perfectly still as she reached up and neatly
brushed aside a tear that had escaped her bottle-green eyes with the motion. Its sisters remained in
place, a threat, but stubbornly unshed. Nothing about her voice betrayed their presence as she went
on. “You don’t get to be sorry, it isn’t your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have made you
understand how serious this all is and I didn’t and you went and helped Pyro anyway. I should have
made you understand. I failed you on that.”

He didn’t like the twist of her inflection as she said it, the weight she leaned into the
word failed; didn’t like that somehow his decision to help April was now somehow Florence’s
responsibility. Equally, he did not know what to do about it. The surge of alertness that had come
with Florence’s presence had undone the careful work of whatever drug was in his system, turning
the numbness in his side into a broad swath of stitched-together fire. This was to say nothing of the
rest of him; he could feel where broken glass had shredded his back, where Florence had sliced him
in the hotel room, where the muscles of his shoulder had been stretched past capacity. He was even
pretty sure he could feel the precise spot where his brain had struck his skull. Even so, it might
have been worth it, if only because he thought that now when he looked at Florence he felt like he
was actually seeing her.

Florence Pauling looked ragged and tired and, as she slumped in the natty old chair with her fingers
wrapped around his wrist, defeated. Defeated was a word that had no place near Florence, but here
it was, staring him in the face and daring him to deny it. Every second he spent watching her made
him see a new scratch, a new knot in her hair, new evidence of what he’d put her through.

“I hate this mission,” she said softly, her eyes fixed on her lap. “I think this is going to be the last
mission I ever do, and I’m failing at it, too.”

“Last?” he said, a crazed sort of hope bubbling up far too quickly. “You, you’re gonna quit?”

The way she looked at him then made those fragile laughs seem warm by comparison. “No,” she
said, almost puzzled. “Jeremy, I … there’s not going to be any job left after this. After I bring those
two in, it’s the last thing the Administrator’s asking me to do, or almost the last. TFI is—it’s
folding, couldn’t you tell? It’s all going away.”

“Good,” Jeremiah said automatically, and immediately wished he could take it back when her face
crumpled. “Wait, Flor, honey—”

“I told you I didn’t explain this to you,” she said, pressing her free hand to her face with a smile
that was a smile in name only. “You don’t get it, and how could you, I’ve never told you. The
Administrator—” Jeremiah grimaced. “—J, don’t do that, please don’t do that to me.”

“She creeps me out.”

“The Administrator and the Administrator’s work is all that I have,” she said. “TFI is my entire
world, do you understand? And it’s ending. It’s all falling apart and I don’t know what’s going to
happen to me.”

“Hey, no. No, no, that ain’t true, that’s not …”

But she had nailed him to the bed with her eyes, glass-sharp and brimming with a pain he hadn’t
known she was capable of holding.

Florence wouldn’t talk any more about TFI after that, though as Jeremiah became less dependent
on the morphine the more he pried. He had another three days in the hospital to kill, after all, but
Florence was uncrackable.

Florence and the REDs took it in shifts to stay with him. Jeremiah suspected this was less to keep
him company and more to ensure no one tried breaking him out. Florence had told him he would
be allowed to go home. He was still trying to sort out how he felt about this, after everything. He
put the question to Clarence on the second day. “How was it when you got sent home?”

Clarence, who had been fiddling with a jigsaw puzzle acquired from the hospital gift shop, did a
very good job of looking like the question had not caught him off-guard. They had spoken little
today, having used up all their conversation topics the night before. It was weird that Clarence was
here again. Jeremiah thought he would have been relieved by Kit by now. “Uh,” he said, and
snapped one piece of cardboard into another. “Last year, you mean, I guess?”

“Yeah.”

“Different from whatever’s happening with you,” he said, with a sort of forced casualness. “I lost
my arm, man.”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah, that’s, that’s different, sorry. Not thinking. Morphine.”

“Whatever,” Clarence said, a little easier now.

The morphine continued talking. “You ever talk to TFI about, like, a prosthetic? Like a good one?
Our guy, Engineer, our Engineer—nutcase straight up cut off his hand and put a new one on. Built
it, all metal. Bet your Engie could, too.”

This did not receive an immediate answer as Clarence used his lone hand to rifle through the pile of
puzzle pieces. “No,” he said eventually.

“What, how come?”

“I don’t want a metal arm, come on.” Cardboard snapped into cardboard. “Look like even more of
a freak.”

The morphine puzzled over this. “You’d, wait. You’d rather have no arm than a fake one that
worked the same?”

“I don’t know, man,” Clarence said, dropping the next puzzle piece he’d grabbed. “And you ain’t
exactly who I want to be talking about it with, okay? Kinda never wanted to see any of you guys
again after it happened. Just wanted to get on with being alive.”

The outburst was enough to drive the morphine back, leaving just Jeremiah to deal with the fallout.
“Oh,” he said, fidgeting with a loose button on the hospital quilt. “Sure. Yeah, sure. Sorry.”

“Anyway,” Clarence said, “what the hell were you even doing? Didn’t get the whole story out of
Miss Pauling, just that some of you BLUs went rogue. What was it, like, that Pyro of yours you
were helping?”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t you the one told me you couldn’t trust her?”

Jeremiah approximated a shrug. “Changed my mind.”

“No shit, dude, doubled back so hard you got TFI mad at you for it. What, she your girlfriend
now?”

The very thought made Jeremiah’s face twist up unpleasantly. “No, hell no. Just friends. I’m with
Miss Pauling now, anyway, I ain’t interested in nobody else.”

Clarence leaned back in his chair and cocked one eyebrow at him. “Think you maybe oughta tell
her that much, then? Miss Pauling?”

“The hell does that mean?”

“I dunno, man, she’s your girlfriend. All I know is Kit’s out buying ice cream for her right now, on
account of how last night she got real drunk and started crying about how she was messing up
everything and was gonna lose the only things she cared about. One of them being you.”

The very idea of Pauling drinking more than a single cocktail over the course of an entire evening
was so utterly foreign that Jeremiah’s brain hit it like a speed bump and went spinning off into a
ditch. “What?” he protested. “She, no way. C’mon, man, things are already rough enough.”

“Ain’t lying,” Clarence said. “Why do you think it’s me here again instead of Kit? They wanted to
kick your ass.”

“Why?”

Clarence snorted. “Because you sure came off sounding like a lousy excuse for a boyfriend.”

Clarence’s assessment of him haunted Jeremiah for the rest of his hospital stay. What was worse
was how every chance to redeem his name seemed to slip through his fingers. Kit treated him no
differently than before despite Clarence’s comment, which so disconcerted Jeremiah that he did not
know how to even ask them about the alleged breakdown. Pauling, meanwhile, managed to busy
herself so thoroughly whenever she was in his presence that he never even found an opening.

Maybe he really was a lousy boyfriend. The thought wormed its way into his head and took up
residence, robbing him of sleep and appetite. He had been a lousy son and a lousy brother for most
of his life, after all.

At the end of the three days, he was packed into the passenger side of a silver sedan with new,
unbloodied clothes and the things two people would need for a drive from Texas to Massachusetts.
Kit and Clarence had bid farewell and climbed into their truck to make the drive back to their home
in New Mexico, which explained why they had been the ones sent to get them: they were closest.
Jeremiah watched them roll out of sight into the Austin traffic before he twisted gingerly in his seat
to face Florence, who was examining a map. “Hey,” he said, trying to pick out the right words
before just letting them loose. He took enough time in doing so that she put the map down and eyed
him curiously. She looked put together once more, now. Her bruises were covered with a thin
patch job of makeup, her glasses’ frames repaired, her hair again in its no-fuss chignon. “Don’t
take me home,” he said. “Take me to the Administrator.”

“Jeremy,” Florence said, carefully, “did you take one of those pills the nurse gave you or two?
You’re only supposed to take one.”

“I ain’t taken anything,” Jeremiah said, which was true, because he was in a hell of a lot of pain at
the moment. The last thing he wanted was his request to be brushed off because he was doped up
on painkillers. “And I’m not kidding. Take me to her.”

She stared at him. “Why on earth do you want to do that?”

“Because I want to help you,” he said. “Listen, Flor, seriously? I hate this. I hate all this chasing,
shooting, running crap, I hate that I had to fight you for a knife in a friggin’ hotel room. I want it to
be over. April and Esau, they’re both spooked as hell, they won’t go near you. But maybe, maybe
if I go and I talk to the Administrator—maybe I can be, like, a middle man. A go-between. They
trust me, they’ll at least listen to me.”

“I don’t think—”

“And I want to help you,” he carried on, and despite the shock of pain that rattled through him with
the motion he reached out and touched her arm. “Babe, I went and I helped April, I did everything I
could. I wanna help you too. You ain’t gonna lose everything after TFI finishes up with whatever
the hell it’s about, okay? You got me. You ain’t gonna lose me.”

Pauling’s wide green eyes never once looked away.

“Are you sure about this?” Florence asked again.

The silver sedan wound down a broad and snaky box canyon somewhere in New Mexico. The path
Florence had taken to bring them to TF Industries’ headquarters curled over on itself and doubled
back and shuddered, as if trying to shake off all comers. They had driven for twelve hours,
stopping only once, and Jeremiah marveled both at her stamina and the certainty with which she
followed her path. Even he was uncertain if he could have mapped it from memory, a skill he
normally prided himself on.

Around them, the canyon rose up, its staggered walls rinsed red and orange and gold. Stubborn
grasses and the occasional bush interrupted the warmth to peer over their precarious homes at the
stone and dirt track the sedan had crawled through. Here, at the end of it, Jeremiah had to duck his
head to see the whole of the building through the windshield: an imperious gray building, bristling
with satellite dishes, radio towers, empty of windows. It took him a long time to figure out what
made him most uncomfortable about it. “There ain’t no signs,” he said. “Not even a ‘keep out,’
‘trespassers will be shot,’ kinda sign. I ain’t never seen a place BLU owned that wasn’t lousy with
signs.”

“BLU doesn’t own it,” Florence said, and pulled the key from the ignition. The sedan sagged to
silence under them. “BLU is a shell company. You knew that, right?”

Jeremiah continued to squint out at the building. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, yeah, figures. You said
this was HQ. TFI, and all. Right? Yeah.”

“Did you hear my first question?”

He had been trying to pretend he had not. “I’m sure, babe.”

Florence leaned back in her seat, fidgeting with her keys. Jeremiah let his eyes steal over her,
watching the way she studied her lap. She had such intensity in her eyes, sea green, bottle green.
Jeremiah had learned almost at once that all the things Florence could not seem to say with her
voice she instead said with her eyes. Once he had been telling his mother about her, and he had said
something about her eyes, and Gladys Owens had given a soft laugh and told him that Giordano
talked about her own eyes like that sometimes. This had pissed him off immensely, to be compared
to Giordano; in the same heartbeat he had been sent reeling into a state of fluster, knowing now
exactly how much Giordano really did love his mother.

“I can turn around,” Florence said.

“How come you’re so spooked?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and pulled off her glasses to rub at her eyes. “I wish I knew. It just—I’d
feel better if I knew you were safe at home.”

“I’m with you,” he said, offering her a grin. “Way safer than home. You saw how Sidney drives.”

She laughed, a little, and pocketed the keys.

The air conditioning in the car was exceptional, and made it all the worse when Jeremiah
shouldered open the car door and was met with a blast of heat. The only saving grace was that they
had parked in the shade. He pulled himself out of the car, slowly enough that Florence had time to
hop out on her own side and hurry to his, to help him up. “There’s dispensers inside,” she said as
he bit his lip at the soreness of his complaining body. “So we can fix you up, at least.”

“Yeah? Beats six weeks’ bed rest. See, already not so bad I came, huh?”

She gave him the laugh he was looking for, though it was frail and distracted and tapered off
sooner than he wanted. She had looked up as she closed the door behind him, toward the metal
snarl of the headquarters, and gone quite still. Jeremiah followed her gaze, and if she had not been
holding him up, he would have fallen.

The BLU spy had just walked out of the building.

He picked his way through the dirt toward them in an easy and straight-legged stride, identical to
the Spy in Jeremiah’s memory, dressed in blue pinstripe and balaclava. A foreign cigarette
smoldered in his gloved fingers. The distance from car to building was far enough that Jeremiah
had the time both to gawk and turn to look at Florence, only Florence was Miss Pauling again,
collected and calm and with no indication of concern. “Flor,” he said, slowly and delicately, “I
don’t like cussing in front of ladies, and all, but what the fuck?”

She did not answer.

The BLU spy stopped in front of them, and Jeremiah had to reevaluate his recollection of the man.
In the months that had passed since his death—alleged death, apparently—his mental picture of
Spy had fuzzed and fritzed and become just a recolored version of Giordano, though the two of
them had always been the hardest to tell apart between the teams with the masks and all. “Miss
Pauling,” he said in a voice that seemed wrong, as used to Giordano’s as he had become. “And
Scout. You’re looking better than usual.”

Well, he was still an asshole.

“Go to hell,” Jeremiah said, cautiously, and made the conscious decision not to point out that the
man in front of him was supposed to be dead. Was dead. Jeremiah had watched him die. Jeremiah
had visited his remains in the medics’ makeshift morgue at Mannworks, just to hammer home the
fact that it had really happened, because death had become such a joke to him with respawn. Spy’s
body had been frigid and pale, the blood settling in the lowest parts of his veins with no heartbeat
to move it. Jeremiah had pulled back the sheet draped over him to study the shattered bone and
pulped organs. Then he had gone to find Demoman, to see if he wanted to go blow something up,
because something big and loud and violent seemed like the only immediate way to push the sight
out of his mind.

Spy’s lips quirked in a wry and patronizing smile that he definitely recognized. “Ç’est un vrai
plaisir de vous revoir,” he said. “I am loathe to contaminate myself, but I shall make an exception
for your sake, Miss Pauling. Scout, give me your arm.”

Jeremiah’s protests fell on deaf ears, as did Pauling’s. He was summarily hoisted onto Spy’s
support, and it was only a sharp reminder from the hole in his side that kept him from yanking
away. This close Jeremiah could smell the cigarette smoke on him. It was enough to make him
cough, and when he looked up from it he caught Spy peering down at him curiously, and a new
discomfort ebbed through him, though he could not place the reason. It worried at him as Spy all
but marched him toward the door of the building, trailing after Pauling. Pauling, as ever, remained
unperturbed. “I didn’t realize you would still be here,” she said as they reached the door and she
pressed her hand to some sort of scanner hidden under a metal shade beside it. “Does she need you
for something?”
“No,” Spy said. “Not as such. I have forgotten much, so I have not rejoined the field yet.”

The door beeped and slid open with a cold hiss.

“Has Kieran been helping?” Pauling said, and Jeremiah caught the slight frown that pulled at her
face as she stepped inside. It was distracting; he was trying to remember where he knew the name
Kieran from, having sworn he had heard it somewhere before. It was too unusual a name to have
heard by accident, he thought.

He was distracted again by their surroundings when Spy tugged him along, into the building. The
air was cooler here, in a small mercy, but it was about the only comfort the complex had to offer. It
seemed too large for its exterior, with huge hallways branching out from this main foyer in multiple
directions. It was as metallic inside as it was out, everything anonymous and rigid. The walls were
empty of anything but an occasional door or a window that overlooked claustrophobic rooms,
except for the regularly-spaced speakers he recognized from doing BLU’s work.

“He is trying,” said Spy. His eyes flickered over Jeremiah, and at their proximity something about
them put him on edge. “Perhaps not in present company.”

“Scout’s here to talk to the Administrator about our two runaways,” Pauling said briskly. “But first
I want to get him fixed up.”

“I will mind him. You would be best served by checking in with her at once, I believe. Something
has come up.” He paused mid-stride, stumbling Jeremiah; he lost his footing and smacked straight
into Pauling. “Oh, honestly,” came Spy’s irritable mumble, and his other hand shot out to her waist
to keep her from falling. “Do try to keep yourself together a few minutes longer, won’t you?”

Jeremiah hissed something that went unacknowledged as Pauling steadied herself. “It’s fine, Spy,
leave him be,” she said, sighing. “Okay. Yes. You’re right, I should check in with her. Thank you
for your help. Would you take him to the infirmary?”

Spy murmured his assent, again keeping Jeremiah upright. Pauling turned and sighed and
smoothed out her shirt. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” she said to Jeremiah, and just for a moment she
was Florence again as she reached up and touched his cheek. “We’ll figure out what’s going on. I
don’t know what’s happening anymore, but we’ll figure it out. See you soon.”

“Yeah, babe. Bye.”

She smiled, and to his delight, she pressed a short kiss to his lips. Then she was off, hurrying down
the narrow hallway. Jeremiah did not realize Spy was watching him until she was gone. “Whaddya
staring at, Frenchie?” he said snappishly. “Let a guy say bye to his girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend,” Spy echoed, and to Jeremiah’s surprise there was no mockery in the word. “I see.
Come along.”

Jeremiah growled in discomfort as he was all but dragged deeper into the complex, at a much faster
clip than he thought necessary. In less than a minute he was pulled into what looked less like an
infirmary and more like a repurposed closet, with a single bed and chair and a host of tables
containing arcane-looking equipment. He was dropped unceremoniously into the chair and Spy
turned to hoist what looked like half of a medigun onto a rolling steel table. He pushed it to
Jeremiah’s side, flicked it on, and then crossed to the door and locked it. “Hey,” Jeremiah said,
alarmed even through healing hum of the medibeam that immediately began to knit his wounds.
“The hell are you doing?”
“Hush,” said Spy, and produced something from within his suit jacket. An electro-sapper,
Jeremiah recognized, one of the unique devices the spies used to disable sentry guns and robots and
all manner of electrical equipment. He crossed the room again, pushed aside a forgotten potted tree
in one corner, and with a neat, quick gesture applied the sapper to a camera Jeremiah would have
never noticed. There was a short sputter as the red light on it went dark. “There,” Spy said, turning
to Jeremiah just as he was realizing he was suddenly in a locked and unmonitored room with
someone who was supposed to be dead. “Now. Scout, you must listen to me, you must do as I tell
you.”

“What the hell?” Jeremiah shot back, leaning back in his chair as Spy came to a stop front of him.
“What’s all this shit? Who even—how the hell are you even alive, man? I watched you die.”

A cold smile wrapped itself in Spy’s mouth. “I assure you,” he said, “I am very much dead.
Consider me a ghost, and this a warning from beyond the grave. That beam should have you back
to health in five minutes.” He reached into his coat again, and this time produced a small ring of
keys. Pauling’s keys, Jeremiah realized with an unpleasant jolt. “The moment you are able, you
must leave, and you must go to ground. Make yourself impossible to find.”

Spy held the keys out to him. He did not take them. “What the hell?” he said again, discomfort
prickling all down his neck. “No, no way, I’m here to talk to the Administrator about Pyro and
Engie, figure something out. Why?”

“It may be the only thing sparing Miss Pauling’s life.”

Jeremiah gaped at him. The words were so unexpected that at first his brain objected to them in
their entirety, casting them aside to focus on something else instead. It settled on what had been
nagging him since Spy’s appearance, clicking into place. “Your eyes ain’t the right color,” he
blurted, and winced as Spy grabbed his hand.

“Listen, boy,” he said, and pressed the keys into his palm. “You will take that car and you will
drive. As long as you are here, she is not safe. I intend to protect her as much as I can, but my job
will be made infinitely more difficult if you are here.”

“But—”

“Do you love her?”

Spy asked it with such ferocity, such force, that all Jeremiah could do was go still.

“Do you?” Spy demanded.

Jeremiah looked down at the keys Spy held to his hand, and wrapped his fingers around them.

In another five minutes, he was tearing out of the box canyon, scraping his memory for the
quickest route back to the highway.
 32: Before the Storm

“What the fuck?” Pyro said.

The Porsche wheeled around in the field again. Rather than pull over when he became agitated by
the telling of his story, Scout simply went faster, until Pyro finally told him to at least get off the
highway. A vast dirt paddock long empty of horses was his lot of choice. Pyro’s gut was starting to
twist with all the spinning, but this was the least of her concerns.

“He didn’t tell you why?” she went on, leaning forward in the passenger seat to try and catch
Scout’s eye. “And you just left?”

“I know how it sounds,” he said. His gaze never left whatever unseen path he spurred the Porsche
along. “Seriously, I’ve been losing sleep over it ever since, not knowing. But, like—Spy, RED Spy
I mean, Gio—I caught up with him at that bowling alley in Texas like we said we would—I dunno
if he knows something I don’t or what, but he vanished my whole family after I told him, to keep
‘em safe. Like, I don’t even know where they are.”

The white paddock fence smeared against the glowering Wyoming landscape. The Porsche
rumbled and complained, unhappy to be off its native pavement. “Shit,” said Pyro.

Scout laughed and it bounced around the car like a hornet. “Yeah. Yep. From what he’s been able
to figure it sounds like Pauling’s still at the headquarters, hasn’t left. I dunno about our Spy.
Giordano don’t know either, you shoulda seen his face when I told him.”

Pyro pulled at her seat belt. It occurred to her that if she turned around she would see Alice in the
back seat. “So,” she said, and braced her feet against the floorboard as the car leapt over a small
hill, and Scout sent it fishtailing to the side to avoid the rapidly oncoming fence. “What do you
need from me?”

For the first time since he had turned into the paddock, Pyro felt Scout lean on the brakes. The
speedometer ticked lower and lower until it was rumbling along at a sedate thirty miles per hour,
and he finally peeled his eyes from the windshield. “You’ll help?” he said.

Pyro snorted. “I’m not going to leave my little brother in the lurch.” She stopped at once, then
laughed again, lighter. At Scout’s curious glance, she threw her thumb over her shoulder, to the
empty back seat. “Just something Alice said.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘he’s not your little brother, he’s my big brother.’ So you’ve got two psychos in the
family now. Good luck.”

“Well,” Scout said, smiling again for the first time since they had gotten into the Porsche, “guess I
can always use more family.”

It was easy to say that she would help in the car, in the middle of nowhere, miles from any real
consequence. But when they pulled back up beside the Cadotte home new doubt reared up in her.
It burst through her like some breaching animal as she laid eyes on the front porch and saw Gus
and Peggy sitting there, her family, her family’s dog, her family, her family.

“I figured I’d get, like, a hotel,” Scout said.

“Maude would crucify me if I let you,” Pyro said, the words feeling vague on her tongue.
“Especially after I almost shot you. Also, I don’t want to talk to them about why I almost shot you.
They’re going to ask.”

“Man, lemme tell you sometime about the freak-out I once had on this guy my mom’s renting to.
You think that was bad, Henry was full-on talking about getting me in a ward.”

He said it with lightness, looking for a laugh, and she let him have it. As she shifted to open the
door she felt something move under her collar, and stopped cold. “Oh, shit,” she said, and reached
behind her neck to unhook the chain that kept Tobias Owens’s dog tags secure there. “I managed
to wind up with these again,” she said, holding them out to a baffled Scout.

“God,” he said, and lifted his hand to take them. “I didn’t—I’ve been so messed up the last month I
didn’t even notice they were gone.”

His fingers outstretched over her own, but lingered. She lifted her hand to press them up against
his, but as soon as they connected he pulled back. “Hey,” he said, shaking his head. “Hey, you
know what, you keep them.”

Pyro sputtered. “Shut up.”

“No, for real. What is this, like, the third time you’ve given them back to me?” He shook his head
again, face incredulous, sad, amused.

“Fourth,” Pyro said, looking down at them. “Teufort was the first time, I think. But you wouldn’t
remember that—I made sure of it.”

The tags and their chain weighed little, but over the next few seconds they grew heavier and
heavier, until her wrist ached with the staggering burden of them. Then all that weight was
scattered like dust when Scout knocked his hand against her fingers, closing them over the tags.
“Yeah,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt. “You keep them. I figure they wouldn’t keep ending up
with you unless he wanted you to have them.”

He was out of the car before she could say anything else.

The chain, warmed from her body, slid around her fingers. She stared down at it, at the blackened
words she could not read.

When she emerged from the Porsche, the chain once more hidden under the collar of her shirt,
Scout had jogged over to the house and struck up conversation with Gus, like nothing had
happened. She limped over and heard snatches of what they said, mostly about where they’d gone,
if they’d eaten. Maude was barbecuing for dinner.

More thoughtful than Pyro would have ever given him credit for, Scout’s first act upon getting
inside was to offer to help cook, and then to aggressively offer to help cook when Maude tried to
tell him he was a guest. With his typical braggadocio he styled himself a genius at barbecue and at
all the associated sides, corn, beans, he himself the trusted confidant of his mother’s award-
winning sauce. Pyro went and laid face-down on the couch.

In hindsight, she probably should have done it up in her room. The couch was in the living room,
neutral territory. Gus sidled up next to her, telling her to get her damn legs out of the way so he
could sit down; she did, and he pulled them onto his lap. “So,” he said, easing slowly back into the
cushions as he patted her calf. “What kind of job has you threatening to shoot a man, and then half
an hour get in a car with him?”

“The same kind of job that gave me Alice,” Pyro said into the pillow. “I told you I don’t think
talking about it is smart.”

“Well, that’s the damn thing, kid. I haven’t ever been smart. I don’t think I can start to imagine the
kind of life you’ve lived.”

“You don’t want to.”

He sighed, and the guilt piled on Pyro’s back like snow. Then he turned on the radio that sat at the
couch’s side, and they listened to the local news.

Scout was not nearly the chef he proclaimed himself to be, but his contribution of cole slaw was
better than Pyro anticipated. Once again he ran the conversation at dinner, which was fine. Pyro
had about a total of ten words in her for the whole meal. She even considered pulling Alice out just
so she wouldn’t have to deal with any of it, but Alice seemed to be missing in action, and it wasn’t
really fair to her anyway.

About an hour after dinner Scout declared he needed to catch up with Shep and leashed him up for
a walk, leaving a distraught Peggy leaping back and forth at the front door as they ambled down
the cul-de-sac. Pyro excused herself to her room, and of course now Alice sat on the bed waiting
for her, humming to herself. Had she been real, Pyro would have once more ended up with her legs
in someone’s lap as she threw herself down on the sagging mattress.

“You were going to leave anyway,” Alice pointed out.

“I don’t know,” Pyro said, “why I’m not allowed to just sit with my own thoughts instead of having
a hallucination tell me what they are.”

“Because you’re crazy,” Alice said.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I just got here!”

“I know,” Alice sighed.

It rained all the next day. Not a storm, barely even a drizzle. Just clouds upon clouds, and a
constant rolling slope of sprinkling water that came in and out like the tide. The strangest part was
that Pyro was out in it anyway.

She had gone out to smoke, and even with the occasional spat of raindrops found it pleasant enough
to stay out. It was not enough to send her over the edge again. Besides, no one was out here.

So Pyro smoked, leaning against the deck railing, and tried not to think. She tried right up until the
glass door to the house slid open behind her, and the tell-tale jangle of metal told her Shep was
trotting up behind her. “April, honey,” came Maude’s voice. “Aren’t you cold?”

“No,” Pyro said, shifting only enough to look back at her grandmother over her shoulder.

“Do you want some tea?”

“Oh. Sure.”

The door slid shut again. Shep shoved his nose into her hand, looking for anything of interest and
finding nothing, then went loping down the steps to find something to mark. It scarcely seemed
like a minute passed before the door behind her opened once more and the careful, stiff footsteps
echoed over the old deck. Maude pressed a faded old mug full of Labrador tea into Pyro’s hands
and leaned against the railing herself. “We don’t talk enough,” she said, smiling.

“I’m not very good at it,” Pyro said.

“Oh, neither am I. I’d talk to Peggy all day before I’d talk to most other people.” This brought out a
laugh in Pyro, which seemed to be what Maude had been looking for. “I’d like to talk to you
more,” she went on. “You’re about the only family we’ve got left, hon. I’ve got a sister, out in
Iowa, and you have some cousins in Canada—but that’s not the same.”

Pyro shut her eyes.

“Nookoo,” she said, “how do you know when you’re beaten?”

The pressure of Maude’s surprise pushed against her.

“It’s just,” she said. “I don’t think I know when to quit things. I don’t think I know when to stop.
Even when I think I’ve given up on something it always seems like I end right back up in it.”

Something warm and soft and leathered came to rest on her hand, and this had happened often
enough before to tell her it was Maude’s palm. Pyro went on, hurriedly, like if Maude said
something it would wash away whatever it was Pyro was trying to get to, “And someone once told
me that was good, that I should hang on to that, like it didn’t scar up my face or give me Alice. I—
God, sometimes I think the only thing I know how to do is keep going, even when I shouldn’t. I
just keep getting up and I think it’s going to kill me.”

Maude had kept her hand on Pyro’s through her whole winding monologue. It stayed there now,
though Maude shifted to put her cup down and put her arm around Pyro’s shoulders.

“Jeremiah asked me to come with him,” Pyro said. “Someone he loves is in trouble. He asked me
to help.”

“Honey,” Maude said, “oh, honey.”

A sharp kip-kip-kip from above them startled Pyro into opening her eyes. She looked up and
caught her breath, transfixed at the sight of a little gray-and-yellow bird in one of the aspens that
towered over the yard. It paid her no attention, puffing up its chest and twittering again, kip-kip-
twwwt-kip!

A western kingbird.

“What kind of trouble?” Maude asked.

“The kind that kills you, if it gets you,” Pyro said softly, under the insistent song of the kingbird.
“He came to help me when I called him. I might be dead if he hadn’t. I have to go, Nookoo.”

Maude Cadotte was a quiet woman. She was thoughtful, she packed whole paragraphs into single
sentences, using words with more precision than Pyro ever could. There was an entire book
between the letters when she asked, “When will you come back?”

“As soon as I can,” Pyro said.

It was another grumbling, sour sort of day when Pyro again found herself standing in the Cadotte
driveway to say goodbye. The sun kept trying to paw its way through the clouds and could not
quite make its way through, strong enough only to dapple patches of old concrete now and then.
Once it shone powerfully in Gus’s hair, highlighting a scar beneath the scraggly gray Pyro had
never noticed before. Somehow this was the only thing she could think about, standing there,
watching Scout check and double-check things in the Porsche: that she had never noticed it before.

“I gave you my car keys, right?” she said, and Maude nodded. “You guys can drive it. I promise
there’s no more guns in it.”

“We’ll keep it in good shape for you,” said Gus. “So this is about your job, is it?”

Of course they had figured out it was about her job. An old coworker showing up, pulling a gun on
him, being asked for help, the vague implication that she was about to go and do something she
might not return from. “Yeah,” she said. “Shep likes that bigger kind of kibble, if you can find it. I
left some money for you guys in the kitchen.” These two thoughts were easy to link together, to
assume the money was simply for buying Shep’s food, maybe vet bills if something happened.
Alice had helped her with the note she left with the money, reading it aloud to see how it sounded
in another voice. Pyro wasn’t sure how to explain the fact she had left ten thousand dollars and
instructions on how to get the rest of it from the bank if she did not return within a year. It seemed
like the only sensible thing to do. She would have no use for the absurd amount of money TFI had
paid her if she was dead. It was nice to have someone to leave it to.

Scout signaled to her that everything was good, and slipped into the driver’s seat. Behind the
Cadottes, through the little window to the side of the front door, both Peggy and Shep watching
them anxiously. “Shep used to be Dell’s dog,” she said, which was both useless information and
felt absolutely vital to convey. “He gave him to me the first time he left, this wasn’t the first time
he’s left. God, there’s so much I haven’t told you. I don’t know if I could have told you. You
wouldn’t believe me.”

The weight of Tobias’s dog tags was, somehow, heavier than they had when she had believed
Scout to be dead, heavier than they had been when she tried to give them back to him. She would
tell her grandparents everything when she got back, she decided. They already knew she was crazy,
they already knew she lived some kind of impossible life. Perhaps they would think she was lying.
That would be okay, so long as she got to tell them. “April,” Maude began.

“I don’t want to leave,” Pyro said. “A month isn’t enough time.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Maude said. “Honey, there’ll be more time.” She stepped forward as she said
it, and Pyro let herself be pulled into a overwhelming hug. “You said it yourself. You don’t quit.
You won’t quit now, and you’ll come back to us.”

Pyro had never wanted to return anywhere. Nothing in her life had ever meant anything like that,
she thought, not in the way the Cadotte home now did. When June Wagner threw her out of the
house she had just left; nothing could have possessed her to return to Boston. Even Dell’s home in
Bee Cave had been a venture made out of desperation, nothing more. But Sheridan—what
Sheridan held—the thought of never coming back to Sheridan terrified her in a way she could not
find the words for. “I don’t want to leave,” she said again.

“You can leave,” Gus said. “We’ll be with you anyway. Here. Your friend, he showed me
something he said was important to the two of you, gave me an idea. Here.”

Maude stepped back, one arm still around Pyro’s shoulders, as Gus fished out a little box from his
pocket and held it out to Pyro. It was butter yellow and just the size of her palm, with a green
ribbon spiraling off the top. Pyro took it, and gently tugged the lid off.

The sun flustered out from the clouds again, spilling carelessly over the three of them. It glinted off
the Porsche and Maude’s earrings, and off the flawless silver of the Zippo lighter nestled in a bed
of cotton inside the box. Pyro could not tear her eyes away from it, dumbfounded. Slowly, she
picked through the neat, careful lines etched into its surface. “Is … Isaiah?” she said, and felt
herself sag further against Maude. “Isaiah 43:2. I don’t …”

There was a little card inside, underneath, which Pyro noticed only when Gus carefully plucked it
out and read the handwritten blue ink. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,” he
said, “and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through
the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

He put the card back as something started howling through Pyro, something alien, something alive
and beautiful and sorrowful and joyous. “Called three pastors, trying to think of the right verse. I
don’t know from the Bible, but I thought that was a good one.”

“There, now,” Maude said, because Pyro had lost the fight against the wild thing inside her and
begun to weep. “April, giigoons. We’ll be here. You’ll come back.”

Gus converged on them as well, and Pyro became enclosed on all sides by arms and warmth, the
smell of Gus’s tobacco, Maude’s soap. They held her up until Pyro could do it herself again.

“I love you,” she said through the pounding behind her eyes. “I’ll come back. I love you.”

“We love you too, sweetie,” Maude said, and kissed her temple.
 33: Dead Man's Float

“We got Spy and Heavy for sure,” Scout said, ticking off both names on his fingers. He did a good
job steering with just his knees, but it made April nervous anyway. “They got ahold of Demo, he’s
on board, Medic too. They even went back to the Chippewa to try and get Soldier but he wasn’t
there no more. So that’s, uhh, six with you and me?”

“No Sniper?” was all she thought to ask.

“Can’t find him,” Scout said. He put his hands back on the wheel in time to guide the Porsche
along a broad curve along a mountain. They were once more headed south, cutting down through
the unfurling rocks of Wyoming and Colorado on their way back to New Mexico. “Dunno if he’d
want to help, anyway, after all that shit with Esau. Not sure if we’re, what’s it called. Guilty by
association.”

“What about BLU Spy?”

“Well,” said Scout, “there’s the part where we all were pretty sure he was dead up until about a
month ago, so we ain’t sure about that neither. But he told me he was going to try and keep an eye
on Pauling. So, I mean. If he’s anywhere I guess he’s with her. Or I guess maybe Sniper could be
with him?”

“I think I should be less surprised he’s alive,” Pyro said. “Did I tell you what happened with the
RED spy and me before I joined the team?”

She had not, and did so now: the attack in Dell’s secret basement, the bullet in Giordano’s head, the
crematorium she and Dell had built. Her shock in seeing the man alive again at Teufort. She
fidgeted with her new lighter all the while, rubbing her thumb over the smooth lines of the
engraving. “Sure, I mean, yeah,” said Scout when she finished. “Like … I dunno. I guess it’s
possible, I dunno what’s possible anymore, working for BLU got me all screwed up on reality.
Just! Wouldn’t, out of everybody, wouldn’t Sniper have known if he weren’t dead?”

Pyro didn’t know.

It was a question she put aside over the miles. Scout instead caught her up with what he had been
up to in the time since they had seen one another, which largely amounted to finding the RED spy
and figuring out what the hell to do from there. And running. “Lots of running,” he said as they
wheeled gently down another slope. “Part of why it took so long to get back to you, didn’t want
nobody following me. And also because I didn’t have a clue where you were, Spy didn’t know
neither, nobody knew. He was looking for you all over, California, Canada, I think he was in
Australia once.”

“What? Why those places?”

“He followed the fires. Anywhere there was a big fire, he checked it out, asked if anybody had seen
you.” Scout laughed, wry. “And here you were just having a good time with your grandma and
grandpa. Shows what we knew.”

“Another month, you might have been right,” she said, and leaned her head against the window. He
cast what he must have hoped was a casual glance her way, but even in the reflection of the glass
she could read the trepidation on his face. “Dell came back again, when we got here. He was here
for a while. I guess he made a deal with Esau, but the deal ended with Esau going back to TFI.”
“Going back?”

“I think Esau’s trying to figure out how to get rid of him for good.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t
… that was hard. And you know me. When things get hard I run.”

“Not really,” Scout said, and as Pyro did not have any idea how to answer this she let it stand. After
nearly five minutes he continued, “Anymore, I mean. I mean! Yeah. Before, you did run a lot. But
not anymore.”

“I don’t need you to make me feel better.”

“What, how am I wrong? You got Esau out of crazy jail, you stayed with me when we thought I
was dying, you, y’know, you owned up to me about Toby. I told you to run, after you did that, and
you didn’t. April, I gave you all sorts of reasons to run after that, you never did. It wasn’t even you
that ran during the storm.”

“I don’t really want to talk about this,” said Pyro.

“You think I do? I’d love to forget all this shit, seriously. But it ain’t ever going away. Best we can
do is talk about it.” He smacked a hand on the steering wheel. “You and me, we’re stuck together.
Sis.”

The mountain leaned over them.

“Well,” Pyro said, “Alice thinks you’re right, so I guess I’m outnumbered.”

“You bet I’m right.”

“Can we talk about it later, though? After we get Pauling?”

“Now you’re running away,” Scout said, chastising, but there was no venom in it.

Colorado was different, now, in mid-May. Everything had burst into rich color, vibrant and new.
Wildflowers in elegant white and snickering purple bobbed at them as the Porsche purred past. The
birds had exploded in number, and April counted handfuls of fat white nuthatches and chickadees
stuffed amid the trees like nuts, scolding the magpies. Once, at a rest stop, she watched a scrub jay
land on the pavement mere feet from her and come bobbing boldly up, clearly looking for a
handout. She tossed it some peanuts from her trail mix and within seconds three more appeared,
screeching and fighting for the biggest pieces.

It was nearly four in the afternoon, two days later, when they came to a stop in the gravel drive of a
modest little home tucked just off the highway. Pyro counted four other cars already there. “This is
our base, I guess,” Scout said, killing the engine and pulling off the hideous wrap-around
sunglasses he had picked up at a gas station. “That’s Spy’s car, the black one, ‘course it’s black,
probably from like Spain or something. The one with the plate that says ‘boom’ is Demo’s, and
that jalopy over there’s Medic, I dunno what the hell he’s driving that death trap for.” He paused,
peering at an unassuming white convertible. “I dunno whose that is. Heavy, maybe?”

Pyro was not terribly interested in which car was which. Even in the looming face of the danger
that awaited them an eagerness had overtaken her. “They’re all in there?” she said as she hustled
out of the car. “I missed them. Let’s go.”

The house was unassuming, though quite large. A sign stuck in the weed-riddled flower bed by the
building declared that Compost Happens. As Scout led her in she was hit with the distinct smell of
stale cigarette smoke, the kind that came with someone smoking in the same place for many years.
“Yo, guys, I’m back,” Scout called, just as something shut the door behind them.

Pyro, standing behind him in the narrow hallway, startled and whirled. There was a kind of alcove
to the left of the door with a window, though the shades were drawn. When you opened the front
door, it hid the alcove. This explained, of course, why she did not see Demoman where he was
sitting within, either before or after their entrance. “Oh my God!” she said, beaming as the man got
to his feet. “Demo! Hi!”

Demoman, or Tavish DeGroot, as Pyro remembered just slightly too late to address him by, shot
her grin right back at her, the wrinkles it formed in his face softened by the black of his skin. It was
so wide a smile it made the eye-patch over his left eye scrunch slightly, and as they grabbed one
another in an embrace she could smell fresh mint on his breath. “Lass,” he said fondly, his Scotts
accent rolling around his tongue, “damn good to see y’! Damn good. Look at you, then, hair’s got
long. A fair look on you.”

Pyro laughed, a little self-conscious. “Thanks,” she said. “Shit, speaking of hair, I didn’t know you
had that much. Have you always had that much?” she went on, reaching up and flicking a lazily
bobbing twist of black curls that sprang up from his scalp. More burst all over his head, like the
smoke from one of his bombs.“You always wear that skullcap.”

“Been neglecting it,” he said, then stepped sideways to neatly fix Scout in a headlock. He yelled
and twisted as Demo ground his knuckles into the top of his head before darting free and socking
him in the shoulder. “Ha! Feisty as ever. My God, but you filled out, didn’t you? Be a proper
challenge of an arm wrestle now.”

“Yeah, yeah, nice to see you too, cyclops,” Scout grumbled. “Where’s the guys?”

The guys were, as it turned out, scattered through what proved to be not only a large house but a
shockingly large house. It took several rounds of yelling and Demo firing a snub-nosed little pistol
out of the window twice to actually gather all of the mercenaries, but gather they did, gravitating
toward the vast living room that dominated the house. It was sparsely decorated and smelled of
disuse but for some patches of disturbed dust, and places in the plastic-sheeted furniture where the
plastic had been sat upon. With Demo found, Pyro had expected only Medic, Heavy, and the RED
spy, but to once more confound her expectations it was Soldier who came charging in first. “Where
is the enemy?!” he bellowed, utterly unchanged from the day she had seen him in the forest, right
down to his boots.

“Where the hell did you come from?” said a bewildered Scout, even as Soldier decided they were
friendlies and began vigorously shaking both their hands at once. He did attempt to blind them
between the brightness of his grin and the smoke from the cigar stuck between his teeth, but Pyro
could forgive him that. “Is that your car out there? Can you drive?”

“No!” Soldier said, proudly.

The other three men had found their way in as Soldier did his thing, and Pyro’s gaze were first
drawn to Medic, who had perched birdlike on the corner of a couch. The instinct was apparently
mutual, for Medic was watching her too, and she was not sure she had want the reminder as to just
how different the RED and BLU medics were. Her Medic, whose real name had Ludwig in it
somewhere, was possessed of greedy little eyes and a sharp, too-interested expression, especially
when he looked at her. His interest in her was only as a medical oddity, but somehow that did not
make it much better. “Hi, Medic,” she offered him in greeting, and he gave her an amicable-enough
jerk of his chin in acknowledgement.

Heavy, who now stood against the wall with folded arms and framed between a photo of a very
white Jesus and a very faded bouquet, did not smile when their eyes met. But he did nod, slowly,
somehow communicating with only that motion the fact he was happy to see her, happy she was
safe. Spy too was unchanged, still immaculate as he met Pyro with a cigarette in his hands. “Our
second-most unpredictable member returns to us,” he said. “What is that? Are you limping?”

“Yeah. I do that now.”

“I would be happy to take a look at it,” Medic interjected at once. “Our ambusher, limping? This
will not do.”

“Sure,” Pyro said, taking a seat and sticking her foot out. “But I think it’s already set.”

Medic converged on her, making several comments about the state of her health that she did not
really think he was qualified to make. Demo dropped down beside her and stole her attention
otherwise as Medic hemmed and hawed, and during all of this Scout had reconvened with Spy. The
two of them lingered in a doorway, Scout with his arm propping him up against the frame, Spy
leaning against the other side. They spoke in not exactly hushed tones, but low enough that Pyro
could not pick out what they said. Soldier had vanished, which terrified her. Heavy remained by
the wall.

It was shortly after Medic admitted with no small frustration that there was little he could do for
her leg—the mediguns did nothing against an injury already healed, and he did not have his at hand
anyway—that the room fell just quiet enough for Pyro to catch the next thing out of Scout’s mouth.
It helped, too, that it was louder. “He’s here?”

“Inasmuch as anyone can be anywhere,” Spy said, and sounded unbothered.

“Who?” Pyro said, at the same time that Scout said “Where?” and a fraction of a second later
Soldier came swaggering back into the room through another door with none other than the BLU
spy in his wake.

The BLU spy looked almost like she remembered him. Almost, and she could not place it. Scout
had told her he thought his eyes were the wrong color; Pyro could not have told you the color of
the BLU spy’s eyes with a gun to her head. And she could not exactly say what she thought was
wrong about him, apart from the fact she, too, was pretty damn sure he was meant to be dead. She
blinked, and saw Alice directly in the BLU spy’s face, watching him with hawk-like fervor.

Not right, she was muttering, both where Pyro saw her standing and in the back of her own head,
somehow, not right, he’s not right, why isn’t he right?

“Alice,” she said too softly for anyone else to hear, but Alice ignored her.

So did everyone else. This was due in part to the fact that Scout had all but jumped him. Alice was
gone. “Okay,” Scout said, throwing his hands up, and seemed to grind to a halt. “Okay,” he tried
again, “somebody wanna tell me how the fuck this guy’s alive?”

The BLU spy gave a shadow of a chuckle and the RED spy—Giordano, Pyro relabeled him at
once, unwilling to do the mental gymnastics required to specify which spy was which—snorted. “If
you can get that information from him we’d all be appreciative,” he said. “It is as much a mystery
to us as to you.”

He’s wrong! April. April! Why is he wrong? I think he’s too tall, is that why? No, ugh! Scout said
his eyes are wrong but I don’t know what his eyes are supposed to be like …

“Just wait,” Pyro whispered, herself getting up to examine Spy up close.

He seemed utterly unbothered by the scrutiny, and offered a gloved hand to Pyro as she drew near.
“Madamoiselle,” he addressed her, which would have made her roll her eyes if the situation had
been anything else. “Our very own seer of the impossible. How apt you should be here at last.”

“He sure talks like Spy,” she said, eyeing the proffered hand.

Take the hand! I want to see if that’s what’s wrong. Reluctantly, she did. Take the glove off, Alice
said, which Pyro did not. Instead she let Spy have his hand back after a brief squeeze of the fingers,
and shoved her own into her pockets, squinting at him.

“So,” she said instead, “I mean. It’s good to see you.”

“I had hoped Scout would be able to retrieve you,” he said, and if Pyro had not already been
unnerved this statement ensured it. “You and I shall need to speak, though not now.”

Apparently no one had anticipated this from him, for every eye in the place landed squarely on
Pyro, fixing her in place like spears. She tried not to squirm. “Oh. Uh, okay.”

“But I am sure you are all simply agog to learn what I know,” he said, peering over his nose at her.
This sent Alice on another ricocheting search through their memories, trying to find out if he had
ever done that before, because it was so maddeningly familiar. “Allow me to gather my thoughts,
and I will explain over dinner.”

The rest of the team agreed this was acceptable, and with no other recourse Scout and Pyro simply
had to unload their things from the Porsche and deal with it. As the last to arrive—Scout had
technically been there first—Pyro would be camping out in the basement; the ranch home was
large but not so large as to have beds for all eight of them, and the couch was already occupied by
Spy. (She was informed that Spy had been unusually accepting of this indignity.) She dumped her
suitcase in a room that resembled a study and figured out where the bathroom was, and then she
was hauled off by Demo and Heavy to catch up.

“Grandparents!” Demo said gleefully when she filled them in on where Scout had found her.
“That’s splendid, girl, splendid!”

“Yeah,” Pyro admitted, rolling a rock under her boot. The three of them had set up in the garage,
shaded from the high desert sun and sat in sagging lawn chairs. The garage door stood open, giving
them a view mostly of the sizzling air over the cars. “They’re Indian, like me. They don’t live on a
reservation or anything, though.” She was fast finding she had absolutely no concept of how to
describe the Cadottes to her friends, just as she had no idea how to describe the BLU mercenaries
to the Cadottes. “They’re great people,” was all she came up with in the end, and it seemed to be
enough.

Demo filled the space she left open with tales of what he had been up to, which seemed to involve a
high-speed chase in Mardis Gras, several voodoo priests, something he called the Mothman, and
ultimately his entrance into sobriety, which Pyro found the least believable. Demo was renowned
for his taste for whiskey, though Pyro had only ever seen him actually drinking on the field. “Aye,”
he agreed, wagging a finger at her. “You’d be right. It’s a right bastard thing to do, too, going dry.
But me dear mum passed away last year and it finally seemed the bottle would come for me if I
didn’t do somethin’ about it. Now I go to meetings.” He said meetings with a blast of his own
accent, stripping the G right off the end and peaking the emphasis somewhere around the second
E, and some good-natured derision for color. “But ‘tis all fine enough, fine enough.”

“More vodka for me,” Heavy intoned, and chuckled to himself at the lone stink-eye Demo shot at
him. “It is good you do this thing. Heavy, he has been with the little girl Kitzis.”

“Char?” Pyro asked, perking up. “She’s okay, right?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, putting up a hand. “The doctor, too, he is fine, all of them fine. But she does
not go home yet, he says. Not until this is over. So, I have been watching over her. She is very
intelligent girl, very difficult. There are many questions that Heavy cannot answer.”

His meaning dropped on her not unlike a brick. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I thought it was over when
Esau went to TFI.”

“Dr. Kitzis does not seem to think so,” Heavy said.

“Then what does ‘over’ mean?” Pyro asked, getting to her feet to make a limping pace along the
boundary of the garage’s shade. “Damn it, guys, I thought there would be fewer questions by now.”

Demo laughed, and Heavy said, “This is how we know you are young,” with a private sort of
smirk.

“I’m thirty-one,” Pyro said indignantly, “and I turn thirty-two next month. I’m not all that young.”

“You know this now?” Heavy said, interested again, and so the next half-hour was the rest of the
strange developments in Pyro’s life: her new relationship with Alice, the shards and shadows of her
past she had found in the folder, her birthday among them. It was nice, being able to share things
about herself: things that were innocent and frivolous, like her birthday.

“Hey,” she said as she ran out of things to say, after Demo had taken a story about Gus nearly
busting his femur on a flight of stairs and spinning it into a tale of his own about the time his late
mother had almost done the same, and somehow leaving both Pyro and even Heavy close to tears
with laughter afterward. “Hey, after—this, whatever this is. After we get Pauling back. Let me
know where you’re going. I don’t want to lose touch again. I’d love you guys to meet my
grandparents, someday, too.”

“Damned right,” Demo said, and Heavy smiled.

Somehow, the job of dinner had fallen to Soldier, because no one had been supervising him. This
meant when Pyro shuffled in and fell into the only available seat she could find, a bar stool with no
bar to go with it, the plate she was handed displayed an unsettling combination of raisins floating in
lime gelatin, and some kind of unsettlingly pale casserole with stringy, dark green beans that
dripped a brown sauce. The worst part of this was that it tasted excellent.

With eight of them stuffed into the kitchen, which was not nearly as large as the living room—
there was a dining room, too, but Heavy’s enormous gun was currently sitting dismantled all over
its table—Pyro was once again reminded of how things had been only a year ago. At some point it
had become an unspoken fact that the team did dinner as a unit, long before Pyro had returned to
her right mind. Most of her memories of these meals were sitting as far away from Scout as
possible, trying not to look at the empty ninth chair someone would inevitably shove into a corner.
She had learned to cook for these dinners, often under Sniper’s hand. She rarely put that skill to any
use, after the Chippewa, for it seemed like a waste to go to all that trouble just for one person, but it
was nice to know she had it.

The room was mostly the sounds of eating, the clatter of silverware on chipped plates. It was not
much distraction from the fact that Pyro could still feel Alice in the back of her head, fixated on
trying to figure out what was wrong with Spy. Pyro slipped through these little noises, looking at
Spy, who leaning against one wall scrutinizing his jello with some disdain. “Do you know where
Sniper is?” she asked.

“With absolute precision,” Spy said, without looking up.

“Oh,” she said. “Why isn’t he here?”

There was a long pause where Pyro almost repeated herself, thinking Spy hadn’t heard her. Then he
shook himself, blinked down at his plate, and gave a distinctly un-Spy-like sigh. He leaned to one
side and slid the plate onto a corner of the counter Pyro was seated by and she was struck by how
gangly he was, and that she was not sure if Spy had ever been that gangly. Alice had started back
up again in the back of her head, howling for Pyro to figure out why he was wrong.

Spy, though, saved them both the trouble. “Same reason Spy is,” he said, and Pyro had always
known he was an incredible mimic, but this did nothing to save her from the startle that was
Sniper’s voice, note for note, coming from his mouth. She was still dwelling on this when he
reached up and pulled the balaclava from his head.

“Damn me,” she heard Demo say, and “What the shit?” from Scout, and even an intrigued noise
from Giordano and Medic each. Heavy narrowed his eyes. Pyro made no sound at all, distracted in
part by the triumphant crowing from Alice halfway in her ear. The other part of her was distracted
by Soldier sallying up to the unmasked man and clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder.

“Sniper!” he said, pleased and not surprised in the slightest that the man before them was,
unmistakably, Sniper. “Welcome back!”

“Did you know?” Scout barked.

Soldier scoffed at him. “Come on! It was obvious!”

In hindsight, it was, or almost was, Pyro thought. Sniper-as-Spy held and conducted himself so
differently from Sniper-as-Sniper that it had completely disguised the things that of course marked
him as Sniper to her now: the elongated face, the jowly cheeks, even his height. The mask and
clothing were to blame for this, too, but now she could see it all. I knew it, Alice was saying,
smug, I knew it.

Pyro was not paying attention. Something was clicking together in her head, watching the way
Sniper seemed to piece himself together and glanced down at his own clothing with something like
resignation. “You’re like Dell,” she said abruptly, wonderingly, and slid off her stool to take a step
toward him. “You’ve got looking-glass syndrome. You’re like me.”

Scout ratcheted off into something, but Sniper shook Soldier off him and stuffed the balaclava into
his pocket. “Always thought you were sharp, Pyro,” he said, the drawling Australian accent worlds
apart from the vaguely European one he had been affecting before. “Got it in one. Wish
he’d told me he planned to throw me back out.”

“Well,” Giordano said, half to himself, “this is a most exciting development.”

Pyro drew closer, disbelieving. She said, “Are you Subject 8?”

“And how d’you know about that?” Sniper said, peering down at her, and then shook his head.
“No matter. S’right. I expect you’ll want to know how it happened.”
 34: Hook, Line, and Sinker

It had been a gloomy day when he had received the call, which was to say it was a normal day. The
last several weeks had been gloomy, miserable weather where Sniper had parked his camper there
in Utah, which in the middle of spring was proving to not be nearly as nice as he remembered it. It
was a shame. He had hoped he would be able to distract himself out here.

He received the call on a cell phone, which was a strange thing for him to have. He had always
gotten by quite well on pay phones, especially in the United States, where they were more or less
as common as trees. When BLU wanted him, they usually left a message with the clerk of the hotel
Sniper had a perpetual empty room booked at precisely for that reason. But Miss Pauling had
presented it to him before he took off that last time from BLU’s headquarters. “We’ll have a special
job for you in a few weeks,” she said, brisk and friendly-but-not-too-friendly, like she always was.
“So we’d like to keep track of you.”

Sniper made a point of not mentioning the fact he was quite sure they could manage to track him
anywhere he went if they decided to, and politely thanked her.

The call came just as Sniper was trying to pull breakfast together in the form of a can of
unseasoned beans, the carcass of a pigeon that had somehow trapped itself in a panicky state in his
camper that morning, and a handful of tortilla chips he had fried himself. It was of course Miss
Pauling, asking him in a friendly-but-not-too-friendly manner if he could please come to the TF
Industries headquarters within the next two days, and that he could find instructions to get there on
a homing pigeon that should have arrived by now. Sniper considered this as he stared around the
accumulated filth of his camper, in a much worse state than it had ever been in his life.
Theoretically, the map from the pigeon might have landed somewhere in the mess.

“Don’t s’pose you need the pigeon back?” he asked her.

In the way of BLU and TFI, he had been given an arcane and unexplained designation, the second
after the anonymous title of Sniper. He was now also Subject 8.

It was just some tests, Miss Pauling assured him after he had arrived at the prickly metal building
tucked away in a box canyon somewhere in New Mexico. Just something for a project they were
working on. She was very cavalier about it as she took him to a claustrophobic little room with one
chair and no windows, and seemed wholly unbothered when Sniper failed to ask her any questions.
Sniper did not ask a lot of questions in general, and fewer, these days. She left him with a clipboard
and a stack of papers on the clipboard and a mint-green pen that blotted terribly. Intake papers, for
the doctors, she said, and vanished.

The intake papers started well enough. Name. Age. Height. Weight. The sort of thing you would
expect. The forms got uncomfortable quickly.

Within the last six months, have you experienced increased levels of stress or distress?

Have you taken part in any form of self-medication?

Have you received any form of grief counseling?

Have you engaged in self-destructive habits, or considered suicide?

Sniper left the forms untouched. It wasn’t like it mattered, he reasoned; TFI wasn’t going to let
something like consent get in its way. He knew the beast well enough for that.

After a while a gummy-looking little man came and took the papers. He tried to insist they needed
signing in a gummy-sounding little voice. He went away again when Sniper snorted at him.

Whatever the RED medic's name was, Sniper hadn't expected something like Henri Kitzis. He had
come hobbling in on a cane a good twenty minutes after the gummy man went away, looking
rather worse than he had the last time Sniper had seen him working in tandem with the BLU medic
on the field and against the robots. The cane was certainly new. He introduced himself very
formally, like Sniper might have cared who he was. He asked questions Sniper didn’t particularly
want to answer about his health, but did anyway. He at least had something resembling a bedside
manner; he had this over BLU’s medic.

Sniper would suppose, later, that he had figured on Kitzis telling him exactly what the tests were
about. By the same token, he would also realize that would have only made sense if this were not
TFI, which told no one anything unless it had to, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. Instead all
that Kitzis ended up doing in the end was turning and leaning on his cane, observing Sniper as if
seeing him for the first time. Kitzis looked very much older than he had a moment ago, and to
Sniper’s abrupt consternation, reminded him of his own aging father. “Are you sure you want to do
this?” he asked, and all of his businesslike address was gone.

Sniper made the vast effort of meeting Kitzis’s eyes. The question milled slowly through him
before being cast aside.

“Might as well,” he said. “It’s something to do, isn’t it?”

It was called Elysium.

When Sniper had joined the team, his teammates had taken him for something of a hick. He had
not minded this. Being underestimated could open a lot of doors. And maybe he was a hick, a little,
raised in the rural bits of Australia. It was just that hick didn’t mean ignorant. Sniper read Tolstoy.
Sniper knew just enough Russian that Heavy had been the first man on the team he had befriended,
quite by accident, when he’d noticed Heavy reading Doctor Zhivago and asked him what he
thought of it. Heavy was thoroughly shocked and delighted to learn there had been a period in
Sniper’s life wherein he had given consideration to going to school for philosophy, or perhaps
ancient history.

All this is to say Sniper knew quite well what Elysium was: the Greek concept of the afterlife,
reserved for heroes and gods and the gods’ chosen. The Elysian Fields were a sort of heaven,
blessing its populace with a carefree and happy life.

The fact someone had named a chemical after it was suspicious.

“This ain’t going to do nothing permanent, I hope?” he asked Kitzis the next day. Once more he
found himself in the bare little room, though the stiff, sad chair had been removed and in its place
was an ancient oversized armchair that looked very lost. Next to the armchair was a metal cart, and
mounted on the cart was what might have started life as a medigun. Now it was rather compacted
down and had a great deal more wires and things coming off of it, leading away to a series of
things under the cart he could not begin to guess at the purpose of. Apparently the Elysium would
be coming out of that, and would be doing so for the next two hours. Kitzis had offered to put a
sedative in it as well, allowing Sniper to sleep through it. He had accepted. Sniper did not sleep
much anymore.

“This compound may disrupt your REM cycle,” was all Kitzis said to his question, though. “You
should not dream.”

“Excellent,” said Sniper.

Sniper dreamed.

In his dream he was walking along a cliff that dipped away into dizzying clouds. He was on a
plateau, comfortable, confident. He knew his footing here, he knew the shape of the landscape,
every angle of the cliff. He had been here before: this was his own memory of the Tibetan Plateau,
the Roof of the World, intermixed with his recollection of western American mesas and the dry
Outback and his parents’ own farmhouse. He knew his place. He would not fall.

Emil was there.

Emil lay in the middle of the plateau, half-naked, baking his cool, light skin in the sun that blasted
down from the unshielded sky. He was like a cat, Sniper had always joked. He’d find anywhere
with a patch of sunlight and curl up in it. He was on the beach towel Sniper recognized from their
first trip together, to Rome, Emil’s birthplace. It was blue and hideous and had flamingos on it.
Emil’s younger sister had given it to him as a joke, years back, and his greatest secret was that he
adored it.

A hawk shrieked from somewhere below the cliff.

“Ky,” Emil said, to where Sniper now lay at his side. “Have you brought any tea?”

“Sure. That Egyptian stuff. Just what you like.”

“Ah, darling,” said Emil, and slid his hand along Sniper’s stubbled jaw.

When Sniper woke up it was to an overwhelming wave of nausea. For a moment it was knocked
out of him by the sense of cold that rushed through his flesh. Then he simply felt both sick and
cold.

Kitzis was there. Kitzis was fussing with the cart. He seemed far away, though he certainly could
not be more than a few feet from the couch. “Hello,” he said, once he noticed Sniper had roused.
“Can you hear me?”

“Yyyeah,” Sniper slurred. “Yeah. Hell.”

“Heart rate normal, blood pressure normal. How are you feeling?”

“Cold,” Sniper muttered. “Cold.”

High places had always been his refuge. Even as a child, he would clamber up to the roof whenever
he wanted to be alone, or the highest tree he could find. Sniper had broken several bones from
falling, though that hadn’t happened in any meaningful sense since he was a teenager. As an adult
he still spent much of his time in high places, even off a job. If he wasn’t at least thirty feet off the
ground he always felt slightly out of sorts.

He only dreamed of high places when something was wrong.

He had been given a room, not a bedroom so much as a closet someone had stuck a cot in. Sniper
could sleep anywhere, but he had a special hatred for cots, always somehow harder than any other
place he cared to sleep. Even so, after Kitzis saw him back to the room, he collapsed on it anyway.
Despite having slept through the administration of the Elysium, he was exhausted. He fell asleep in
moments.

Sniper dreamed of the moon.

He finally mustered up the interest to ask Kitzis what the testing was for the next day, feeling
groggy and unrested. “Or is it one of those double-blind trials where I don’t get to know?”

Kitzis seemed distracted. He was consulting a clipboard with as much attention as he might give to
a small and annoying dog underfoot as he adjusted things on the Elysium cart. “Something like
that,” he said in his neat, clipped accent. “I’m afraid I cannot give you much in the way of details.
It would compromise the tests.”

“Don’t want that.”

“No,” Kitzis said blearily, and flicked on the beam. “If you need anything, let me know.”

Then Kitzis was gone, and Sniper was somewhere else.

Emil had cards in his hands. This was right, to Sniper’s mind; he was very good at cards, better
than Sniper. He could do tricks with them, all sorts of sleight of hand. He said they were practice,
simple misdirections to keep him sharp. Sniper knew this deck, too, because it was the same one
Emil had taught him to play bridge with. Sniper liked bridge. It was thoughtful and had a learning
curve, and he liked something he could get his teeth into.

The dense little collection of buildings at the Teufort base ambled on below them, far, far below.
They were in the old watchtower, where Sniper had spent a great deal of his time in that base;
where Sniper had spent more time than he should have watching Emil through his scope in the
beginning, debating what he thought of the man. They had never played cards there before. The
tower swayed in an unfelt wind, and Emil had planted himself right in the only square of sun that
crept under the roof.

You should do something, said a voice in Sniper’s ear.

“I fold,” said Emil, in his dusty voice.

Tell him. Tell him now. Let him know.

But Sniper heard himself say, “Is that the jam?” and was handed a pot of orange marmalade, like
his mum used to make. It turned to strawberry mead in his mouth, rich, thick. Sniper began to
drown in it.

“Subject 8?” Kitzis said. “8. Sniper? You are shaking.”

Waking hurt.

Sniper looked at his hands and found he was trembling. The couch he was spread out on felt
impossibly deep, like it was sucking him in, like he would never get up again. “I feel fine,” he lied.
“Got a blanket?”

Kitzis got him a blanket. It did not help.

All his days were empty. Wake, eat, wait around to see if there would be testing or questions or
nothing, eat again. Try to sleep. Usually fail. It wasn’t much different from how his life had been
going after Mannworks, anyway. The primary change was there was something he actually looked
forward to now, where before there had been nothing. The dreams had given him a purpose, even
if that purpose was just to try to be asleep as much as possible.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, acknowledged but otherwise left alone, he was quite aware
that his ongoing disinterest in life was both to be expected—given the circumstances—and
dangerous. Mostly dangerous, in the way he was refusing to fight back.

His room was always cold.

There was now a blanket at the end of the couch, a fat, pleasant-looking one. Sniper regarded it
dimly as he settled himself on the pillows, eager for Kitzis to get on with this round of whatever
was being pumped into him. He had not dreamed for the last two tests, and not gotten more than
four hours of sleep between them. When Kitzis told him he would be under for six hours this time,
his heart did something complicated in his chest.

Then he was under again.

This was a memory, Sniper realized almost before he realized he was asleep. It was one of those
memories Sniper had buried, after Mannworks. It was a memory of Emil caught in the shock of
light at sunset, where orange threaded through far-off evergreen branches to wonderingly touch his
unmasked face for the first time. He had not been Emil to Sniper then, only Spy, and he
remembered the gray peppering his hair despite his age, and the wobbly twist of his deformed right
ear. This was somewhere in a Canadian province Sniper had long since forgotten the name of,
hollowed away in the mountains. There was some kind of job that required them, but that was
tomorrow. Tonight there was Spy and the sunset.

Spy said, not for the first time, “You’re a dreadful cook.” He was eating Sniper’s frybread. “Too
mechanical. Cooking is the richest of the arts, and you approach it like a child’s paint-by-
numbers.”

Sniper was eating his own, caked in butter and powdered sugar. “Tastes good, though, don’t it?”

“Shockingly so,” said Spy, mock-despairing. “I love it.”

Spy did not say things like this, and yet he had. Sniper remembered this clearly. It had flushed him
with pride and delight.

“Your name is Kieran,” Spy said, and Sniper nodded. “An Irish name, isn’t it?”

“Mum always wanted to see Ireland.”

“It is a beautiful country. I am named Emil.”

“Emil,” Kieran said. It was like he had been given a delicate jewel to hold.

He could feel the last of the sunlight on Emil, now, for he had skipped ahead to the chapter of time
that had their hands on one another, him loosening Emil’s tie, the rough burn of stubble against
stubble as he neared the bare skin of his face for the first time. Other people had taken Kieran’s
clothes off before, but Emil did it like the act was something holy.

Now the light that spilled over them was new and pale and shy. Morning spied on them entangled
together. “God!” said Kieran. “Your feet are iceblocks!”

“And you are a furnace,” Emil murmured, nosing closer against him. Kieran tolerated it, because it
was Emil, because he was a furnace, he ran hot, like the Australian sun had bled into him and
stayed there. He could take it, Emil’s cooler body against his. It was a salve. He remembered it
was a salve.

Only now the cold seemed to be creeping out of Emil and into him. This was not part of the
memory. Kieran shuddered with the cold and tried to bundle the blanket tighter around them. He
couldn’t seem to get Emil close enough, he was always just a little too far away. The cold
whispered through him like a poison.

“You make me think of Death,” said Emil.

“Don’t quote Whitman at me, you fruit,” said Kieran, and woke up.
Get up. Eat. Test. Eat again. Go to bed.

“Have you been experiencing anything unusual?” asked Kitzis at some point, somewhere between
the dream where Sniper had been in an airplane and the dream where he had been falling.

“Unusual how?”

“Anything that you would mark as out of the ordinary,” Kitzis said. “Hearing things, gaps in your
memory, new sensations?”

That morning, Sniper had watched a hawk vomit its organs out before eating them again.

“Not really,” he said.

“They are doing something to you,” said Emil in his ear. He was behind Kieran, arms around him,
chin digging into shoulder. “My beloved. They will ruin you.”

They were on top of a building. They were on top of the Mannworks building, Kieran knew, in the
way one knows these things in a dream, though the building was much too high. There was no sun,
and Emil was deathly cold. He pressed against Kieran for warmth. “Tesoro mio. I am not worth
this.”

“You aren’t here.”

“No,” said Emil, and Kieran felt the cold kiss of his balisong knife playing against his stomach. It
did not draw blood. “I suppose I am not.”

Kieran pulled away and Emil let him, and then they were both at the edge of the building, looking
down. There was nothing at all below.

Sniper hated being awake. He hated the questions, he hated Kitzis, he hated Miss Pauling, he hated
this wretched building, and most of all he hated himself.

“Your temperature has dropped by two degrees,” Kitzis told him after the Mannworks dream. “Is
this normal?”

Sniper shrugged, a colossal effort.

“Hm. Have you experienced any other changes since the tests began? Anything at all?”

“Been dreaming,” Sniper said, too tired to give much thought to the wisdom of what he was
saying. “About him. Only him.”

“Him?”

“Emil,” Sniper said, “BLU spy.”

This seemed to give Kitzis pause. Sniper wondered in a vague sort of way how much he knew,
whether he cared if he did know. With a staggering lack of self-preservation, and with more than a
shade of looking for a fight, Sniper offered, “He was my partner.”

“I see,” Kitzis said in a withdrawn sort of way. Sniper watched him with dulled eyes, curious in a
detached sort of way whether he would find disgust or polite avoidance in his next response. But
Kitzis only said, “I’m very sorry. I lost my wife a few years ago.”

Sniper could think of nothing to say.

He was cold all the time now. Stick five blankets on him, stick him in a fire, still cold. And he was
seeing things now, he could tell, because he knew Bigfoot wasn’t real and yet Bigfoot had come
out of the kitchen yesterday and offered him some coffee.

The coffee was good, anyway.

“This is the stuff Pyro got into, then,” Sniper said, because everyone knew Pyro’s story by now.
“Am I going to be waltzing off into La-La Land soon?”

Kitzis looked unperturbed. “Ideally not.”

“That’s what it is, though.”

Sniper had gone back around on Kitzis. He still hated him, but only in the dull and vague way he
hated everything, and when he thought about it he actually didn’t hate him, not really. Kitzis had
managed to walk that line between not pitying Sniper and his loss and not being indifferent about
it, either, and this made him tolerable. Kitzis glanced back at the door to the testing room, crossed
to shut it, and returned to regard Sniper over where he sat on the couch with his elbows on his
knees. “Yes,” he admitted. “The same. But the hope is to avoid the degree of dissociation she
experienced, and instead induce its other primary effect.”

His slow mind took a while to follow this. “Another version of me.”

“Another personality.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I cannot tell you.”

The Roof of the World.

The air was thin here, so high from the ground. The edge of the plateau plunged away into nothing,
like it had in his very first dream: there was no ground waiting below. There was nothing at all
waiting below.

Kieran was at the highest point, a ridge that rose up over the plateau, somehow able to look down
over the far edge of the cliff. The sun poured over them, scalding. Emil stood at his side. “Ah,” he
said, rueful. “I do not know what will happen to us, Ky.”

“Who says anything should happen?” said Kieran.

“You do not understand,” Emil murmured.

Tell him, said the voice in Kieran’s ear. In case he’s right. Tell him now.

“I love you,” Kieran told him, but Emil was gone.

Kitzis was not there when he awoke. Well; this was untrue. Kitzis was there, but he was
unconscious on the floor, bleeding from the nose, drooling. Sniper peered down at him, doubtful
that he was real. But he got to his feet, shivered violently, and loped off to find someone to tell.

As it turned out, it very much was real, and Sniper would later learn Kitzis had suffered some kind
of seizure. There was a terrible fuss, because the medibeams did not seem to work to fix him.
Sniper watched most of it happen as the gummy man and a few other people he had seen around
the building in the last few weeks hurry Kitzis outside to where a helicopter was suddenly waiting
for him. He felt rather sorry to see him go. He rather hoped he would be alright. Kitzis had told him
he had a daughter, and it seemed a shame for her to be left alone in the world.

A week passed. Kitzis did not return. Sniper was allowed to leave, and went right back to Utah,
where soon he would be rooted out by Pyro and her companions.

After he’d been called back once more, Pauling would tell him—looking harassed and out-of-sorts
and overworked—that Kitzis had apparently developed some sort of disease of the brain, and that it
was killing him, so he would probably not be back. She said it in the matter-of-fact way she usually
talked about people dying, though she looked startled when Sniper commented that it was a shame
about the daughter. “Oh,” she said, looking more human now, “I had forgotten about her. Gosh.
No, that really is a shame.”

“Wasn’t these tests did it, was it?”

“No, I think this was something genetic? I only skimmed the files I stole from the hospital. It’s not
contagious or anything. I saw scans of his brain, it looks like a sponge, have you ever heard of
anything like that?”

Sniper had not, and did not particularly care to. In truth he did not particularly care to do anything
but sleep these days, chasing fruitlessly after the dreams that had left him since the testing had been
put on hold. Regular sleep, on the rare chance he could get it, never brought Emil back to him.
“These tests, then,” he said to Pauling as she fussed with a large suitcase that may or may not have
contained a corpse. “Are they done?”

“Tests? Oh. For Project Gemini? Nearly, but there’s a little bit left, I think? I don’t really know
anything about it, it was all RED Medic’s thing.” She paused, thinking, as Sniper studied a slowly-
growing stain on the bottom of the suitcase and debated over if it was blood. “I’ll ask the
Administrator and let you know.”

This was fine, and was done with shocking swiftness. Pauling got back to him only two hours later,
letting him know things would resume with a substitute the next day.

Sniper supposed he had been expecting the gummy little man, or maybe Pauling. Possibly even the
BLU medic, or even just one of the handful of people that scuttled around the TFI headquarters
doing things he could not begin to guess at.

He was not expecting the Administrator herself.

Sniper had never seen the Administrator in person. At most he had seen her pointed and glowering
face on the black-and-white televisions she sometimes had waiting for them at the bases, generally
to impress upon the importance of this or that particular facet of a mission. She was more of a
voice than a real creature in his head, just a chain-smoker’s growl, as much part of the battlefields
as the ground. And he did not recognize her, at first. He had not realized she was quite so old. He
had not expected the wheelchair.

She was wheeled into the testing room by none other than the gummy little man, smoking silently,
looking herself like a piece of paper someone had crumpled and then tried to smooth out. Her black
hair had a good deal more white in it than he seemed to recall, and the bags beneath her eyes might
have been wells. She was wheeled to a stop between Sniper and the cart, where she made an
impatient gesture at the man, who hurried out of the room and shut it behind him. Slowly and with
improbable ease, she got to her feet. “Dr. Kitzis failed to deliver his report on your most recent
session,” she said in a voice that was both sharper and creakier in real life, without the hum of
wires between them, “due to his inconvenient need to have a seizure. Tell me your progress.”

Sniper, lying in his customary sprawl on the couch, regarded her from under his hat. He really
would have preferred Kitzis.

The Administrator asked more questions than Kitzis ever did. Sniper’s vague hate for everything,
which had been pacified by his dreams, came roaring back into focus with its laser sight straight on
her. She wanted to know about the hallucinations, and who he’d been talking to when he’d been
talking to nothing. The Administrator had cameras everywhere on the bases. Sniper supposed it
was foolish of him to have not realized she would have just as many here at the core of her
operations.

He told her as little as possible, out of principle. This surprised him, that he was being intractable
out of annoyance; he had thought he was rather more impartial than that. But it was true that he
still had acquired the opinion that there was not much left to life for him, and so he might as well
be another inconvenience to this piercing old woman.

The tests themselves did not resume in their original form. Instead he was interviewed heavily for
two days by the Administrator, who sensed his unhelpfulness. At the end of it she made a bored,
impatient sound that was like sandpaper on cement. “Fine,” she said, sinking back into the
wheelchair. She could only stand for a few minutes at a stretch, and more than once he had caught
her wobbling before she made it back to the chair. “Tomorrow we will begin the final phase.”

“And that is?”

“You’ll find out.”

When Sniper awoke, it was different from all the other times. In part this was because he had gone
to sleep on his cot, and waking, came to the conclusion very quickly that he was no longer there. In
part it was because he came awake slowly and distantly, with the kind of disorientation that he had
learned came with a drugged sleep. In part, it was because he was strapped down.

“Finally,” said the crackling voice of the Administrator.

Sniper tugged at the restraints that held him to the chair and found them immobile. He was not in
the testing room. He was in some kind of auditorium. There was a massive television screen
embedded in the wall in front of him, and below it was the Administrator, in her chair, smoking her
eternally-present cigarette. “Well then,” he got out, garbled, his tongue feeling fat and fuzzy in his
mouth. “What’s this? Playing at A Clockwork Orange, are we?”

For the first time, the Administrator’s thin lips quirked in a smile, as if this very much amused her.
Sniper felt the first shock of real fear edge through him.

“What is this?” he tried again, as the lights dimmed at some unseen signal.

The Administrator said nothing, and the screen flickered to life.

Sniper had thought he was made of stronger stuff.

He’d started screaming to be released at one point, screaming over the horrific audio that
overpowered everything else in the room. He twisted and clawed at his restraints to no avail. He
had closed his eyes almost at once, as soon as he realized what he was looking at. He had seen
Emil’s death once already. He revisited it too often. Yet here it was again, larger than life, grainy,
zoomed-in video footage of that fucking monstrous machine crushing the man he loved.

The Administrator had calmly walked over and held his eyes open.

The video kept playing, looping. Details Sniper’s memory had mercifully wiped away returned in
gory and vivid color. Occasionally there was intercut footage of Emil’s decimated corpse, clips of
his voice over top. These were worse than the footage of his death, or so Sniper thought, until the
video returned to playing and Sniper wished it would go back to the peace of the already-dead.

It went on forever. The rest of the world sank away, leaving him once more on a precipice, once
more high above everything else. He fancied himself again on the cliff in his dream, alone but for
the horrific repetition; and when he stepped off of the edge at last, into the endless nothing below,
even that finally slipped away.

“Sniper?” said a voice.

There was pressure on his shoulder. It touched something that felt bruised, or at the very least
unbelievably sore and stiff. He leaned away from it, lifting a hand to brush it away. “Do not touch
me, please.”

The person over him paused. It was Miss Pauling. “Sorry,” she said, and actually looked it. “The
treatment is over. I’m here to take you back to your room.”

He grimaced. “Is there very much more to this test?”

“A little, I think,” Pauling said carefully. “Are you okay? I heard screaming. More screaming than
normal, when the Administrator gets someone alone, I mean.”

He shook himself, sagging against the couch he at some point had been placed on. He could taste
blood in his mouth, old blood, and licked at it experimentally. There was a kind of pressure in the
back of his head. “I have been much worse, Miss Pauling.” She hesitated. Pauling was not the sort
to hesitate. “What is it?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s just that you’ve gone from an Australian accent to a European one.”

“Italian,” said Emil, examining the long, lanky body he was somewhat sure was both his and not
his. He recognized it, anyway. “I was born in Rome. You know this, do you not? You seem to
know everything else about us mercenaries.”

“Oh,” Pauling said hastily, “of course.”

 35: Batten Down the Hatches

When Sniper had begun, he’d looked comical in Spy’s clothing: overdressed to say the least, and
messy, in the way he slouched and took up twice as much room as his body seemed capable of
doing. Now at the close of it, Pyro could only see the exhaustion that his wrinkled, dust-kissed suit
did its best to hide.

Alice? she thought, reaching for her, and felt a strange relief when she found a piece of Alice that
reminded her of a small flame. Pyro had not meant to leave her post at the body’s helm, but when it
got to its feet without her input, it seemed right to let Alice continue.

“Why’d you get so mad at Esau?”

It was Heavy’s reaction that caught Pyro’s attention, moreso than the way the rest of the
mercenaries turned to her (all save Scout, who did not move). Everyone looked at Alice, but Heavy
was the only one whose face creased and cratered. “What does Esau have to do with this?” he said.

Alice’s hands were curled into fists. Her shoulders had taken up residence somewhere around her
ears. The little flame that Pyro had met with blustered and roared, bowled Pyro over with its fury.
“A lot!” Alice said, stomping her foot. The air of the BLU team changed once more, the entire
room noticing someone new in the conversation. Pyro could practically smell it, the sharp scent of
trepidation and discomfort. “You wanted to kill him but you’re just like him! And me!”

Giordano said Alice’s name, low, like one might address an unpredictable animal. “Let her talk,”
Pyro snapped. The fact it came out of her mouth, in her voice, startled her as much as it startled the
rest of the men. It startled Alice, too, but by now the flame had grown too large to stifle.

Sniper’s exhaustion regarded her from under his eyebrows. “Tell me,” Alice said.

“Didn’t know,” he said. “What it was like, being this way. Didn’t believe it, really.”

A sound like a snapping bone interrupted Alice’s fury. Pyro didn’t notice the words inside it until
Scout repeated himself. “What’s this got to do with Miss Pauling? I mean—okay, all this, this
personality flipping shit, fine. What’s it got to do with her? Why’d you—Spy—you told me I had
to leave her there.”

“You think what they did to me was bad?” Sniper said. “They only had footage to push me over
the edge with. Think what it would do to your girlfriend if she had to sit and watch you tortured to
death.”

His words hung over the room, a nonsense phrase to Pyro at first. Heavy seemed to put meaning to
them before the others. “The old woman,” he said, carefully, “she intends to do this to Miss
Pauling?”

“Sure,” Sniper said, and looked tired. “It’s her last shot. Project Gemini.”

This was as meaningless to Pyro has it had been before. Scout, at least, seemed as confused as her,
but they seemed to be the only two in the room with that problem. “Guys?” Scout said.

“Perhaps I can explain,” Medic said, sounding entirely too smug about this fact. “Surely by now
you have realized the two teams were not fighting over those pathetic little bases all this time,
not really. Oh, or perhaps not?” he added, as Scout and Pyro (who abruptly found herself at the
fore again, Alice absent but for her prickling resentment) gave each other bewildered looks. Medic
chuckled. “Yes, well, I suppose you two were quite obsessed with one another instead. Or …
otherwise incapacitated.”

Pyro made an irritable gesture at him.

“But!” said Medic, making a grand and unnecessary flourish with his hand. His fingers were
spindly and knobby with knuckles like tree burls, rough in a way that seemed unsuited to a doctor
but very suited to Medic’s particular brand of doctoring. “It has always been an excuse, the
fighting. The real work was the technology—the medibeams, respawn, and of course those
immortality machines Engineer did such a poor job keeping secret. The real work has always been
finding a cure for death. Ambitious,” Medic finished, his face becoming droll, “if unimaginative.
But, Sniper, I too am unfamiliar with this Project Gemini. Do go on.”

Sniper shrugged. “Spy looked into it. Best we can figure, Administrator’s given up on keeping
herself alive, so she’s going for the next best thing. If she can have part of my brain decided that
it’s Spy, why can’t she make Pauling’s decide it’s her?”

“Which,” Giordano said, contemplative, “explains her interest in Esau. Esau suppressing the
original Engineer—the second personality dominating the first. I have little doubt the
Administrator wishes to share the spotlight, in a manner of speaking.”

“I gotta,” Scout said abruptly, “I’m gonna go take a walk.”

The conversation continued after Scout left the room, but for as much as Pyro wanted to be part of
it, she couldn’t focus. She left herself not long after.

Alice’s anger kept grabbing at her, though she did not think Alice meant for it to. It was simply so
large that it was hard to avoid. This was new, too, having Alice angry. It was a cold anger now,
acidic and distant. She was puzzling over this as she passed the little window alcove she had
discovered Demoman in. Motion caught her eye; and of course it was Scout in the driver’s seat of
his Porsche.

Panic jolted her, but before she could act on it she saw Scout thump his fist against the dashboard
and throw the door open, stalking around to the rear of the car. It was angled in such a way that
Pyro could see inside it as he popped the trunk, and in this way learned the engine was back there,
rather than in the hood. He leaned over it, glaring, and once more slammed his hand against the
yellow frame with a curse loud enough she heard most of it through the window. He made for one
of the other vehicles, pulling open the unlocked cab on the one he had mentioned was Demo’s and
starting to fuss around under the steering wheel.

Pyro was outside in a second. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she called to him as she passed the
still-popped trunk. She did not know a great deal about cars, but she had learned enough to figure
out why Scout had behaved the way he did: someone had removed the spark plugs. “Seriously,
Scout.”

She had watched him do this once before, hot-wiring the stolen Toyota in Idaho. He just grunted at
her as she came to a stop next to him. “Did you do it?” he said, fixing her with a piercing stare.

“No. But I’m glad someone did.”

“Screw you.”

She leaned against the truck, watching him again now, hands in her pockets and weighing all the
things rolling around in her thoughts. “You were going to go without us?” she said eventually.

“Obviously.”

“Without me, even?”

He said nothing, staring up at the wires and metal of the car with a determined grimace. “Probably
not a great idea,” she said, and tried to sound gentle about it.

Scout sneered at his work. “Oh yeah, right, ‘cuz you’re the friggin’ queen of good ideas.”

“No,” she said, “just I’ve had enough bad ones that I know one when I see it.”

“Y’know what, fuck you,” he burst out, skidding out from under the steering wheel to glare at her.
“Fuck you, April, you don’t—you ain’t ever—you don’t get it.”

Pyro knew precisely what he meant, and narrowed her eyes. “Get what?” she said as he took to his
feet. “Losing someone? I’m pretty familiar with that.”

“I ain’t lost her yet!” he returned, voice raised and tremulous. “That’s what I mean! She’s—she’s
there and she’s in danger, and we’re just sittin’ here and I—I—I can’t lose her,” he said, and leaned
heavy against the open car door. All the fight went out of him in an instant, so fast it actually
scared her, like he might physically collapse without the support of it. “Not like this. I’d rather let
her kill me than know I let something like that happen to her, something I coulda stopped, I can’t
do it again. I can’t.”

Oh, Pyro thought.

She mimicked him without quite thinking about it, slouching back against the truck like it had
acquired its own gravity and threatened to pull her down right along with Scout. Around them the
warm spring of New Mexico meandered its path through them, between them. “I guess,” she said,
and stopped, because this was not a conversation she knew how to have. “I wish I knew what to
say.”

Scout scoffed and pulled his hat low over his eyes.

“I don’t know what it’s like,” she admitted then, shrugging. “I was too young when I lost my
people. I barely remember it, or them. Scout—”

“Jeremiah,” he mumbled. “Jeremy. J. I hate hearing you call me Scout. Just makes me think of how
bad everything is.”

“Jeremiah,” she said, more taken aback than she would like to admit. It derailed her, badly. “Why
didn’t you say so?”

“I dunno. I dunno if I knew until right now. I hate this, I hate this whole job, everything about it,
everything that happened, I’m—I feel so beat, you know?” There was a thread through his voice, a
fault line, something that threatened to crumble him away into nothing. She was put in mind of that
night with Char, with the looming horror that she, of all people, might be expected to comfort the
girl in her moment of need. “Can’t go, gotta wait, gotta hold on until we’ve got a plan, sit around
doing jack shit, meanwhile I don’t even know if she’s alive. It’s like Roger all over again—you
remember, I told you, he got in that car wreck right before we did our woods vacation. It’s like
Roger all over again except no one was trying to murder him, it was just an accident. Toby, even he
was an accident. If, if they’re right, the old bitch wants Flor dead, worse than dead, and all I can do
is sit here in the desert and wait.”

He looked young and small and thin there against the open door of Demo’s car. His hands had
come up to hold his own face, his shoulders were bowed, he threatened to vanish under his own
fear. He looked so small, and there was nothing Pyro could say.

So she said nothing. She slipped over beside him there in the shadow of his grief. Her arm as she
wrapped it around his shoulders could not be much comfort, not from her. It might be worse than
cold comfort, she reminded herself firmly, it might somehow be actively dangerous, in the way that
danger and destruction seemed to follow her and devour those around her. But she did it anyway.

She felt him stiffen under it, shift to peer dumbfounded at her between the gates of his fingers. It
dried up her tongue, turned her self-conscious and embarrassed, but she stayed. For a long time he
looked at her like that, tired and wary and afraid in a way she had only seen him once before, and
even that had been different, for his fear for Miss Pauling laid differently on him than his fear for
his own life had all those months ago in the forest. He let his breath rattle out of him in a sigh, and
he sank again, but this time into her, to take the little comfort she could offer.

“We’re going to do everything we can,” she said at last. “Everything, J.”

“Yeah,” he said, and pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. “I know.”

There were plans to be made, Pyro learned once she got Scout safely back into the house. Spy and
Sniper both cautioned against rushing in blindly, and resources had to be gathered, some from a
nearby town, which would require driving. Someone had mentioned walkie-talkies, which seemed
useful. Pyro left them to it and felt rather useless between her limp and her lack of any helpful
knowledge about their destination. At most she could tell them a little about Esau, but she was well
beyond thinking she could predict anything about the man. She left Scout under Giordano’s
watchful eye (and in the shadow of a looming conversation between the two of them, she thought
as she departed) and wandered the large house. She was on her own entirely, Alice still sequestered
behind her anger. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, she arrived at the study where she had
dropped her things.

It was a close, tidy space, with brown shiplap walls and a large armchair she imagined she could
probably fall asleep in without too much trouble. Floating shelves on the walls held dried flowers
and dusty books with smudged spines, and a very large spider web with a very small spider in its
center dominated one corner. Sitting neatly in another corner was a lovingly crafted writing desk,
complete with elegant drawers and arched legs, all in a dark espresso wood. A mismatching chair
with a threadworn cushion stood beneath it. Someone’s glasses lay forgotten beneath a dusty lamp,
amid two half-melted candles, each bigger around than Pyro would have been able to grasp one-
handed. It was of course these that drew her to the desk, pulling out the chair and fishing around for
the Zippo her grandparents had given her.

“You will not be burned,” she muttered as she lit both candles and shut off the overhead light,
remembering part of what Gus had read to her, and shook her head.

For a time she sat there, just her and the tiny flames. This was a terrible place for candles. No
windows, no real exit for the smoke save for a ventilation duct that the spider’s web seemed to be
at war with. If you forgot about them burning down here and something happened, something
knocked them over, the fire they held would gleefully devour the wood, the shiplap, the whole
room before moving on to the rest of the house. The only hope would be that the door was shut, to
suffocate the flame.

Watching them—for she could not help but do so—she returned to her old fidget with the Zippo,
clapping it open and shut, rubbing her thumb over the engraved letters. Eventually she put it down
on the desk, face-up, and fished the dog tags out from beneath her shirt. The chain was unhooked
and re-hooked once free of her neck, and this too she put down on the table. The metal of the two
objects glinted and twinkled in the candlelight, one new and pristine, the other worn, burned, but
still intact.

Pyro shook her head again and dug out her sketchbook from her suitcase.

She did not really know what she was doing until she was doing it, after leafing through the
haphazardly filled pages, full of aborted half-starts and scratched out tries. Part of her thought
maybe she would write something down, something for her grandparents, but the thought
exhausted her. When she came to the last page with anything on it she looked at it for a time, just
looked, examining what she had put there and marveling at it a bit and wondering what on earth
she had been thinking, and if perhaps she could get there again somehow.

Digging out a pencil, she tried.

Later, it would be Demo who came and found her, asleep over the desk, head in her arms over a
spread of paper dense with lines both careful and experimental. He woke her gently, telling her it
was time to go, and they went.
 36: Battle Stations

Someone had obtained a van, large and white and able to fit seven men and one pyromaniac, plus
all related paraphernalia: the minigun and other assorted firearms. Pyro’s shotgun was in there
somewhere.

“It is simple enough,” Spy was saying, which was jarring as he had been Sniper just a moment ago.
“The Administrator likely expects us, and has countermeasures in place, but I saw to several of
these before I left. The primary complicating factor is the sheer size of the compound—even
Sniper and I do not know the extent of its dimensions. But I do know there exists a central
command that ought to give us live camera feeds of the entire facility. It is simply a question of
finding that room.”

This set off Pyro’s bullshit detector like a siren. Nothing was ever that simple, and especially not
when TFI was involved. But Scout was scrunched up in his seat like he was trying to get lost
between the cushions, so she said nothing.

The trip between the safe house and the TFI headquarters was a matter of three hours, and the
clocks had all read three in the morning when they’d left. As the shortest person in the vehicle, this
left Pyro shoved in the back seat, with Scout wedged between her and Giordano. It was a strange
reprisal of their time on the road together, and just made Esau’s absence more palpable.

Pyro let her gaze slant out the window, heavily tinted and sucking the color from the already dark
landscape of New Mexico before dawn. The only light she could find was the moon and stars,
brilliant and daring over the cloudless badlands, a sight she remembered both through her own eyes
and the eyes of whoever she had been before Alaska. It was a sight that defied forgetting, defied
memory, insistent and present. It was a comfort, in its way. Distant mesas and buttes stood like
sentries before ever-further mountains that she could barely make out in the darkness, while sparse
crowds of prairie grass and hardy little bushes ambled along as the van rolled down the road. She
wanted to stop, to look at them again; she wanted to ask Gus and Maude if they knew any of them,
what sorts of things you could do with this plant, that shrub.

“We go to face a substantial threat,” Giordano said just under his breath, simple and even and
lacking in his usual brand of condescension. It was meant only for her and for Scout. “If you are
fearful, you should not be ashamed.”

It was an interesting choice of words, Pyro thought, fearful, full of fear. Afraid of—what? Death,
maybe, but death had become so toothless a threat for so long a time that even now it seemed hard
to be afraid of. The concept now sat limp and rotting in her mind, a corpse in its own right. Death
without resurrection. It wasn’t so much the dying—she had died plenty of times, now, all of them
had—it was the stopping, the no-longer of eternity. The not coming back.

“How did you do it?” she asked him. “In—in Dell’s garage, in the basement. He shot you in the
head. We burned the body. Or did I—?”

From the corner of her eye she caught Scout’s sideways glance of curiosity, drawing its way over
her before finding Giordano. Giordano chuckled. “Imagine it? No, no. That corpse was quite real,
and quite me.”

“You spies are just immortal, huh?” Scout said in a sandpaper voice.

From an interior pocket, Giordano produced something small and round and bright. He turned it
over in his hand before handing it out to Pyro, who reached for it—his fingers closed over it as
soon as she did. “Do not—” he said, gaze steady upon her, “do not—open it.” Pyro nodded, and
Giordano unfurled his hand.

It was a pocket watch. When she pulled out her Zippo and cracked it alight the watch’s gold
contours glimmered in the flame. Elegantly embossed lines on the front suggested a form she took
a moment to decipher. “A hummingbird?”

“My personal flourish,” Giordano said. He cracked the window at his side and lit a cigarette, a
second glow in the darkness. “No reason but vanity.”

“Why can’t I open it?”

“Because it would kill you instantly.” The burning tip of the cigarette bobbed as he spoke. “It
delivers a massive charge to the heart that causes a fatal arrhythmia, and a catastrophic failure to
brain functions.”

“And?”

“For you? That would be the end of it.” He held his hand out once more, and Pyro carefully placed
the watch back in his palm. “The watch is tuned only to me.” He smiled in the dark. “I would
respawn.”

“You got portable respawn?” Scout said, keen interest in his voice. “You wanted to share that with
the class or what?”

“I try not to tip my hand,” Giordano said, “unless absolutely necessary. And it would do the rest of
you no good—as I mentioned, it will only respawn myself.” He did something small and careful
with his hands, and the watch swung open, its trigger apparently untouched. “It is a flawed
respawn. It manages to overcome the short-term memory loss, but at the cost of the long-term.
When I used it at Mr. Conagher’s residence, Pyro, I later found myself unable to recall my
mother’s face. To this day I still have difficulty retaining it, photos or no.” The watch snapped shut
and vanished back into his pocket, and for a time Pyro looked at the place it had disappeared to.
“Each time it is used, I lose more.”

The van rumbled along the road.

“Hey,” Pyro said, finally. “If something—happens. Have someone tell my grandparents. Okay?”

“Nothing’s gonna happen,” said Scout, until she turned her head and looked at him. He did not look
back, but eventually he craned back his neck and eyed the tired gray fabric of the roof. “But okay.”

Everywhere else it was dawn. Shy sunlight crept out over the dusty horizon, licking at the red rock
that slouched over the landscape. A prairie falcon hunched over an explosion of feathers pulled
from what had once been an ash-throated flycatcher. It mantled its wings and shook itself, bracing
for the coming heat.

The light crawled and yawned and ebbed over the highest points, the flat places. It forgot
altogether to slip into the cracks and slots between the rocks. When the white van that held the
BLU team came to a halt outside the box canyon containing the TF Industries headquarters, the
canyon walls held only shadow.

In silence they slipped from the van, each of them terse and full of private thoughts. Pyro came last,
rubbing at her eyes and thinking of Wyoming. There would be no more Wyoming, perhaps, and
she held its blue mountains and the raspberry canes of her family’s garden in her mind as long as
she could. She let them go only when Giordano and Spy nodded to one another and melted into
invisibility, off to scout the building. It was almost funny, how Scout would not be allowed to
fulfill his namesake duty so soon after rejecting the very name: it had been agreed he was too close
to the situation. Instead he was off on the far edge of the dirt road, fussing inexpertly with the
cigarette he had borrowed from Giordano. Scout never smoked, and the sight made Pyro’s skin
crawl.

She turned her attention to the building just so she wouldn’t have to look at Scout. The building
was almost as bad. It made the very canyon feel small, and indeed she was not even sure how the
canyon even held it all. She had a kind of idea that the structure reached back into the walls, built
into the canyon itself, and surely it had underground levels. Its shape bothered her, somehow, and
eventually she came to the idea that it expanded through all the canyon systems, all the cliffs and
sheer drops they had fought and died upon, like the veins of some monolithic entity. The thought
made her draw closer to the van and its known, finite dimensions. In the back of her mind she felt
the stirring of Alice’s own fear.

“Alice,” she said, too softly for anyone else to hear. “Talk to me.”

Instead of words, or a hallucination, Alice sent back a flurry of—something. It made Pyro drop
against the van’s side in surprise, trying to decipher it. The fear was still there, and the resentment
for Sniper. She had to stir it away like dust to get at what it covered. Alice’s voice rose up in her
ears like a flock of frightened birds. “I want to go home.”

“I know. I do too.”

“No,” Alice said. “I—I want to go home, only I don’t know where home is for me. April, what if
something bad happens?”

Alice sat with her back to one of the van’s wheels, hunched in on herself. Her hands covered her
head, her forehead on her knees. “It might,” Pyro said.

“I’m scared.”

“Yeah.”

When she sat down at Alice’s side, she was not sure what she had intended to do. Alice was not
there; there was only so much she could do to comfort her, this creature she shared her body with.
But Alice was a hallucination, and Pyro knew about those. It was easy to reach out and stop her
hand just where Alice’s knee would have been, and she almost felt the warmth of skin through
worn-down jeans.

Alice’s hair spilled down over her face when she turned her head to look at her. Pyro had blue eyes,
but Alice’s were the same cobalt color of a flame near its hottest point. “I wish Esau were here,”
she mumbled. A surge of guilt that did not belong to her flashed through Pyro’s chest, and Pyro
tried to catch it, to find what she was supposed to say.

“I know you do,” was what she settled on, letting her hand drop back down to the red dirt. Bits of it
stuck to her palms, finding a place to rest in the cracks and crevasses. “It’s okay. I get it. I wish
Dell were here.”
“Everyone keeps going away. Dell and then Scout and Miss Pauling and then Dell again, and Esau,
and—and us. We went away from the Cadottes.” Alice’s eyes widened at her own revelation.
“We’re the next ones to go away.”

It was a testament to the completeness of the hallucination that Alice flinched when Pyro thumped
her hand on the van in her haste to turn on her. “No,” she said, loud as she dared in the presence of
the others. “We’re not. Okay? We’ve made it this far, we’ve survived everything life’s ever thrown
at us. Kitzis saw it—our will to live. If there’s nothing else we’re good at it’s surviving, and we’re
going to make sure everyone else does, too. Okay?”

Alice had never looked so much like a child to her as she did in that moment, curled against the
truck, fearful, lost. For an absurd moment Pyro wondered if this was what she had looked like to
June, and if it was she knew now why she had taken her in. “But,” Alice said.

“We’re in this together,” said Pyro. “Not because you’re a parasite. Because we’re sisters.”

Alice sniffled, wiping at her face. But she nodded, and tried to smile.

They waited, and the sun remembered the canyon’s edges, peering doubtfully down at the
assembled creatures. It glimpsed Pyro and the way her hands went tirelessly between the Zippo
and the dog tags. Alice had faded back out, though it could not have seen her even if she remained.
It squinted as Demoman crossed to Pyro and asked her things about Scout, about Dell and Esau.
When he left to approach Scout directly, Heavy came to her instead, and in the way of Heavy they
spoke little, only existing in one another’s presence.

When Giordano came striding out of thin air and nodded to them, no further words were
exchanged. They collected their weapons and radio transmitters from the van, and Pyro did her best
to not let Scout catch her looking at him. He seemed no better for his talk with Demoman, but at
least he had gotten rid of the cigarette.

At the door Spy joined them. Cold air leapt from the building as if trying to warm itself, and almost
at once Pyro detected the uncanny buzz of the greenish fluorescent lights that lined the ceiling. She
felt transported back to the sanatorium Esau had been left in, though the halls here were wider and
sparser. Every few yards another door or strange, towering piece of equipment interrupted the gray
walls, everything dark, everything silent.

“This way,” Spy said, and they went. Two minutes of careful, brisk walking, then five, and Pyro
did not see another soul. It was eventually Heavy who asked if they should expect to meet anyone
else at all, and Sniper answered: “Dunno. Seems not, now. Was other people here, a week back,
but might be they’re all gone now.”

Pyro kept finding both herself and her teammates peering into any interior windows they passed,
both wanting and not wanting to see another face. None ever appeared. Their footsteps seemed to
grow louder and louder, and the only other sound was the dull drone of unseen ventilation systems.
Once she saw a fly hanging lazily in the air ahead of them before lighting on what looked for all
the world like one of the same speakers she was used to seeing on the bases, from which the
Administrator would call out information about the fighting, or chastise their performance. Now
that she had noticed it, she kept seeing others like it, at regular intervals along the walls. She did
not see any cameras, and knowing the entire facility was being recorded, this was somehow worse.
It was a relief when they finally stopped at yet another anonymous door, lacking any indication of
what stood behind it save for more wear on its handle than any of the others. “Here,” said Spy,
back again now and the door swinging silently open under his hand, “this is the monitoring room.”

The few rooms Pyro had managed to glance into on their way there had been small and cramped.
They had all looked the same, with the same greenish lighting and the same forgettable pieces of
industrial, mass-produced furniture. Some had bookshelves and file cabinets, or desks with
uncomfortable-looking chairs, or lines of huge computers blinking and flashing in silence.

The monitoring room might have been transplanted from another country. The smell of
innumerable past cigarettes struck her first, like a cloud of stale tobacco smoke. Beyond that the
room stood huge and blue-gray and had a darkness to it that felt like a physical weight on Pyro’s
tensed shoulders. Burning out of it darkness came a wall of light: dozens upon dozens of glowing
television screens, scores of them, all stacked in rows and columns and showing grainy, black-and-
white footage, some of them bigger than Pyro herself. In front of this was a curved station that
recalled a switchboard, riddled with sockets and wires and buttons. In the center, like an idol, a
microphone rose out of the metal before an arch-backed swiveling chair, and to one side of the mic
stood a very full ashtray.

No one was here.

“This’d be it, I suppose,” Demo said, and he squinted distrustfully at the corners of the room. “All
right. Best start watching telly, then.”

Even with eight of them, checking every monitor was a daunting task. The sheer number of screens
made the process confusing, never mind the fact that some of them seemed to cycle through
different cameras. After a minute or so of trying to determine the best way to divide the work they
gave up and fell to everyone looking at as many screens as they could. (Dell would have known
how to split this up, Pyro thought, and was careful not to say it.)

It was hard to parse what she was seeing. A few of them niggled at her for a time until she realized
they were bases they had fought on, just from a different angle than she was used to seeing them;
quite a few were from the BLU headquarters, and she realized with surprise that some were from
what had to have been RED’s equivalent. Scattered, intermittent, were the screens they were
actually looking for, the ones that overlooked this building. It should have been easy, given they
were looking for movement and people amid a great deal of motionless footage, but the work it
took to find them was overwhelming. Pyro felt her eyes beginning to strain and water after only a
few minutes.

It was Scout who finally snarled and punted the chair halfway across the room with one kick.
“This ain’t getting us nowhere,” he said, though he turned back to the monitors and fixed his eyes
right back upon them. “There’s too many, half of ‘em keep flipping around. If this shit’s so secret
why would there be a camera wherever they are anyway?”

There was a low murmur between the men. Giordano took up residence at Scout’s side, by the
switchboard, and began to examine it. “Too true,” he said eventually. “If we cannot determine their
location from here, we must cover as much ground as possible and search. Let us assemble teams
of two.”

“Seems a damn fine way to get lost,” Demo said.

“Nonsense,” Giordano said, beginning to tinker with the switches and lights. “From here I have
eyes on everything, and means of communication should the radios fail. This is a simple enough
system, I have worked similar ones. One of you shall stay here to watch the door, and the other six
shall search.”

More glances were exchanged, raised eyebrows, quirked mouths. Scout growled. “What, anybody
got a better idea?”

No one did.

This was how Pyro found herself walking abreast with Scout down another long, gray hallway.
Demo and Soldier had paired off, and Heavy and Sniper (and Spy), with Medic staying behind with
Giordano. So of course it was Pyro and Scout together. She supposed it was always going to be.

“You’re going too fast for me,” she called to him after he once more got a good ten feet ahead of
her, trying to keep the frustration from her voice. “My leg—”

“Sorry,” he said, a pair of bitten-off syllables, and stopped dead in the hall with his back still to her.
Pyro wished she had bought the damn cane before coming. She thought about using the shotgun as
one, but that seemed unwise at best. As soon as she caught up he was off again.

Overheard, another of the seemingly infinite speakers hummed to life. “Do not separate
yourselves,” came Giordano’s voice, thin and tinny with the intercom. It echoed in the empty hall.
“We are spread thin enough as it is.”

“You gonna tell us where to go or not?” barked Scout into his radio, but got no answer. He was left
glowering at the first speaker he found, a good five yards away, forcing himself to slow down to
allow Pyro to keep pace.

They stayed that way another five minutes, picking turns at random when presented with choices.
The doors they passed were all locked, like before, and the few they could see into were dark. Pyro
was reminded of their flight through the mines, just slower, and worse. How was it worse being
here than being chased by a killer machine?

Machines weren’t capable of maliciousness, she thought; and then corrected herself. Most
machines.

“I’ve found something curious,” came Giordano’s voice again at long last, as they finally came
upon a change in their scenery. The hall widened here before dipping into the earth in the form of
stairs, perhaps half a flight, and then opening out into a larger space emptying into several other
halls. A different horizontal stripe of color went down each, here two blue, here four black, here
three yellow and so on, with no obvious indicator of their significance. “The second from the
right,” said Giordano.

“Second from the right,” Pyro said into her radio. “The blue one?”

“If that is the one with two lines, yes. I cannot tell the color.”

“The hell does ‘curious’ mean, man?” Scout said into his own. “We ain’t got time for screwing
around.”

“I am well aware. This is not a lark. I am having difficulty determining the exact nature of what I
am seeing—I think perhaps the camera has been moved. But I can see a double stripe like that in
front of you through a window.”

Pyro asked, “What are you seeing?”

“Movement,” said Giordano.

Scout was gone almost before Pyro could follow Giordano’s meaning. This time she did not try to
slow him down, just hurried after best she could. The wall made an acceptable crutch.

They weaved down turns and further turns, stopping to try every door and check every window.
There were new sights here, rooms filled with humming computers and high-ceilinged laboratories
stuffed with equipment Pyro could not begin to understand the nature of. Aside from a still-
spinning fan in one, they saw nothing. They had just passed what looked like an empty observation
deck peering out over nothing when the intercom rattled to life again. “Stop,” Giordano called.
“That is the one, you’ve passed it.”

Pyro tried the handle, under the vague hope that the glowing red light next to its keypad was just
for show. “It’s locked,” she reported back, stepping aside to let Scout fight with it. “Any bright
ideas?”

Before she had finished saying it, Giordano cut in. “We seem to have hit the limits of the radios.
Your transmission is not coming through. Is it locked?—what are you waiting for? Break it open.”

“With what?” Pyro said despite herself, just before Scout grabbed the shotgun from her hands and
aimed it at the door’s hinges. The blast made her jump, and then shriek with pain as something
lodged itself square into her arm. She barely had time to cover her face before Scout, apparently
indifferent to the amount of shrapnel the first shot had created, blew out the other two hinges. If he
heard her yelling as she staggered away, now with tiny pieces of wood and metal biting into her
skin, he made no sign of it. Through it she heard Giordano’s equally startled and too-late warning.
The door thudded to the ground, and she looked up to see Scout holding the gun back out to her. He
was bleeding profusely from his face and arms where shrapnel had caught him. A wicked looking
cut stood out especially on his cheekbone, dangerously close to his eye. “Jesus Christ, J!”

“Come on,” he said, shoving the gun against her chest and taking out his pistol. He stepped into the
empty room, and Pyro followed, hoping the growing dark spot in the side of his now torn shirt was
superficial.

From the inside, the locked room looked like nothing special. The observation deck stretched out
further than she had thought, and from their spot near the door she could see that whatever it
overlooked was larger and deeper than she first guessed. The air felt stale and quiet and strangely
cold, like they had stepped outside. The intercom crackled to life. “I certainly hope you did not
require the element of surprise here,” Giordano said dryly. “I believe the movement is coming
from whatever is beyond the guard rail. Go and look.”

Pyro tried her radio again—“Can you still not hear us?”—and received no answer. Ahead of her
Scout had already begun a slow approach toward the guard rail. She followed, and hesitated when
he came to a stop at the edge. Finally she joined him and peered down.

Below was a wound in what Pyro now realized was the red rock of the canyon walls, scooped and
torn from the earth in a jagged circle. It was a huge man-made cavern, unlit save for a handful of
pinprick blue lights near the edges. The light from the hallway they had come from spilled over the
guard rail and plummeted into nothingness. Pyro squinted down at it, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
“I can’t see shit,” Scout said.

Pyro opened her mouth to respond when motion caught her eye. Tucked away in one corner of the
cavern was a tacked-on stairway that zigzagged down the wall, beginning as a door in the rock and
unfurling at its bottom end by something large and circular that began to glow as she looked at it. It
dwarfed the stairs, a flat platform that could easily hold at least ten people. Beneath its surface,
something was beginning to spin, picking up speed.
“That’s one of those big teleporters,” Scout said just as Pyro realized what she was looking at.
“Like at the bunker.”

The glow grew brighter and the whirling mechanism beneath it grew faster, and they watched,
awaiting whatever the teleporter would produce. But nothing came. Eventually, its light began to
fade, and the mechanisms slowed. It went still entirely after some thirty seconds, and another thirty
after that, it began to spin up again.

“That’s what he was seeing?” Scout said, disgusted, but in the strengthening light of the
teleporter’s next attempt Pyro’s gaze wandered over its surroundings. Her hands, gripping the
guard rail, went white-knuckle. Scout must have noticed. “What?”

“Look,” Pyro said carefully. “To its left. When the light’s brightest. Do you see what I see?”

Scout looked. He cursed, softly.

She could see more clearly now, between the teleporter’s dim light and her own eyes adjusting to
their surroundings. The blackness at the gorge’s bottom began to form shapes and patterns, dense
with visual information. It was still hard to parse, but the low light of the teleporter highlighting its
nearest edge now left no room for mistaking the army of inactive robots standing in endless ranks
below them as anything else.

“We should,” Pyro said, after they had looked at the uncountable machines for what seemed like a
long time, “tell Giordano.”

They backtracked. The hallway with the blue stripes had been long and quiet, and now it seemed to
have grown longer and quieter since their discovery of the machines. Pyro was trying to stem the
bleeding on the cut in her arm, marinating in a mix of irritation and trepidation. She thought she
should ask Scout his opinion of the machine army—why was it here? Had the machines been
TFI’s all along? What were they supposed to do about it?

Instead she asked, “Why the hell did you shoot the hinges? I’m spitting up shrapnel.”

He cut her a sour look. “Didn’t see you doing nothing about it.”

“I didn’t get the chance because you took the gun out of my hands.”

“And I got it open, and ain’t nobody dead, what are you even bitching for? Like we ain’t spent
weeks and months and years with shrapnel up our asses fighting for BLU? Walk too close to Demo
and you get somebody’s teeth embedded in your face.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what the hell do you mean?”

“I mean—” She cut herself off, wincing as her nails pressed too hard into the cut. “Fuck. I don’t
know, Scout—Jeremiah—”

“We don’t got time,” he said, only this time it was not angry, not annoyed. Just far-away. The look
on his face was the same one that she had seen on her own in the glassy reflection of a Washington
diner as she realized she had no recourse but to go to Bee Cave. “I had to.”

Pyro had no answer.

They went on in silence, Pyro doing her best on her bum leg, Scout finding enough patience from
somewhere to keep pace with her. The corridor felt like a throat they were sliding down, even
though on its loosely incline. For a while Pyro could not place what was bothering her about it, and
eventually chalked it up to going along it the opposite way, until—“Was it always this dark?”

She said this as they came back to the little artery of a hub room, with its paint-veined
passageways. These too had changed. There were doors where there had been none before,
blocking off all but a hall with four thin green stripes running down it. She and Scout exchanged
glances, and he lifted his radio to his mouth. “Gio, you there?”

No answer.

Scout shook the radio, as if that would help, and Pyro tried her own as well. Neither effort awarded
them with a response. “So, well,” Scout said after a moment. “Obviously something’s changed.”

One of the countless speakers mounted on the walls hissed to life. Pyro let her shoulders sag in
relief, until they jumped up again in surprise. Beside her, she heard Scout’s breath catch.

“Scout?” said the new voice, young and feminine and a little haggard. “Pyro? Is that you?”

It was Miss Pauling’s voice.

“Flor!” Scout cried out, looking around wildly, as if he expected her to appear. “Florence! You can
see us? Babe, where are you?”

“Are you talking?” said Pauling. “I can’t hear you, these speakers don’t have microphones. I think
—oh! I know where you are. If you keep following the green line I think you’ll get to me.” Her
voice was thin and electric through the speakers. “How did you get in?—I guess you can’t tell
me.”

“C’mon, let’s go, let’s go,” Scout said, picking up into a trot that Pyro hurried to try and match.
Pauling’s voice carried on: “I’m so glad to see you, I can’t believe it. I’m kind of locked in and to
tell you the truth I would like to get out. I don’t have anything to pick the lock with.”

This hall seemed no different from any of the others, save that it lacked any doors or windows at
all. Every few feet another burning white light would flare into being ahead of them. It washed out
any detail Pyro could have hoped to pick out about their surroundings, except for the hard-edged
shadows the omnipresent speakers threw down the walls. “The Administrator’s gone,” Pauling was
saying. “She’s been gone for a few hours, I am not sure where she’s gone exactly. She locked me
in here, but I got some of the computers turned on. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s happening
but I haven’t seen anything until you two. Take this left—keep following the lines,” she added as
the hallway at long last split itself.

Scout’s trot had managed to cool down into a brisk walk, which Pyro could keep up with a little
better. She had chalked his grim expression down to determination until he spoke, very quietly.
“The videos in the room we left Gio in—he said were all black and white, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Pyro said. “So?”

Scout shook his head an infinitesimal amount and said nothing.

Further down, further in, with Scout getting just a little faster every time Pauling directed them
another way. She led them through something that resembled an inert factory, through a forgotten
lab, through a bank of telephone switchboards, all of them emptied of people. Pyro wondered what
all of it had been for, what grand design the Administrator had in mind with this place. By the time
they turned a final corner with a string of doors, Pyro was gritting her teeth against shooting pain in
her leg as it protested her treatment of it. She nearly toppled into Scout as she stopped behind him.

“I can’t see you from where you are,” Pauling said. “I’m going to come and knock on the door I’m
behind.”

Her voice fizzled out.

A few seconds later came a knock on the third door down the hall. “Guys?” came Pauling’s voice,
this time muffled by wood and distance. “Can you hear me?”

Scout lurched toward it. By the time Pyro caught up with him he was twisting the handle to no
avail. “Don’t fucking shoot it again,” she said, but he ignored her, yelling to Pauling to get away
from the door, that he was going to kick it in. She flinched each time his heel connected with the
door, and harder when it finally burst inward.

Several things happened at once. Scout staggered back and found his footing, and all but leapt
forward as a shadow appeared within the wedge of warm light that spilled forth from the doorway.

“Scout!” said Miss Pauling, haggard-looking and with her hair askew, glasses crooked and still
scotch-taped in the middle where Pyro had bent them when she punched her. Around her was a
room that stood at odds with the rest of the facility, all warm, dusky light that fast faded into deep
shadow. The ceiling was either too high to see or made up of a darkness that suggested so.

Pyro let her gun loosen in her grip. She started forward, until she was stopped by Scout taking hold
of her shoulder. When she looked up at him he was not looking at her—of course he wasn’t—he
was looking at Pauling.

“Flor,” he said, in a queer kind of voice. Pyro heard relief in it, but it was lined with something
else, something she had heard in him outside the safe house as he fought with both her and a car
engine. “Babe. You okay?”

“Well, I’m not bleeding anywhere,” Pauling said, checking herself over as if to confirm this.
“Shaken, I suppose. I’m so glad to see you, come here.”

It was unlike Scout to hesitate. Pyro watched him do so now, one of his feet twisting slightly on the
ground as if it could not decide if it wanted to move forward. But he did, in the end, first walking
and then breaking into a half-jog until he came to a stop in front of her. Pyro had expected to see a
reunion, an embrace, perhaps. All Scout did was lift his hand and cup Pauling’s cheek. “God,” he
said softly, “I knew we shoulda got here sooner.”

He grabbed Pauling by the shoulder, his knee thrusting upward straight for her stomach. Pyro
yelled something but in the same moment Pauling twisted sideways, grabbing the wrist of the hand
touching her and using her momentum to throw Scout off-balance. As suddenly as if it had
materialized there something small and silver and shining was in her other hand, until it stopped
being in her hand and started being in Scout’s shoulder. He snarled in pain and Pyro shouted,
running forward. She barely made it past the door when something jerked her head back by the
hair, so sudden and surprising that she squeezed the shotgun’s trigger: by some miracle it went off
harmlessly into the air. “Stay still,” said a voice in her ear, tired and perfect in its enunciation.
Something hard and cold wrapped itself around her throat. “God help me, Pyro, I do not want to
kill you. Drop the gun and put your hands up.”

“You bastard,” she said. “You fucking bastard—”

The mechanical hand around her neck tightened. “Please, Pyro.”

She obeyed. The shotgun clattered as it hit the ground.

In front of her Scout had torn the knife out of himself and stood brandishing it, trembling and taut
but still. Pyro only saw why as Pauling took a step back, Scout’s own pistol in her hands and
trained on him. “Florence,” Scout said, and took a step forward. “Sweetheart, please—”

Even as he said it he swung the knife; it glanced off Pauling’s fingers as the air burst and shattered
with the report of the pistol. Scout dropped. Pyro lurched forward in Esau’s grip, only to choke as
he dragged her back. “That hurt,” said Pauling, and shot him again.

The whole room stood still.

Pauling lowered the pistol. She looked over her bleeding hand and clucked in disdain. The gun was
tucked into the waist of her black skirt and she knelt to pick up the knife, wiping the blade off on
Scout’s back before she crossed neatly to where Pyro stood in helpless fury. “Well,” she said, and
to Pyro’s ear sounded distant and bored, “I had thought that would go a bit smoother. Perhaps my
acting skills require practice.”

“Didn’t fool me,” Scout said, and Pyro jolted as she realized he was still alive. His voice frayed on
its way out of him. He tried to say more, but it turned into bloody coughing.

The woman in front of her made a low, derisive sort of sound as she picked up the shotgun. “An
unfortunate development, that’s all,” she said, and peered up at Pyro with something between
disdain and pity.

It shook Pyro to rage, and it took the whole of her will to keep herself in place even with Esau’s
hand locked around her throat. “Where is she?” she said, and felt her nails dig trenches into her
palms. “Where’s the Administrator?”

“It’s Helen, actually,” said the woman opposite her. “And I’m standing in front of you. Try to keep
up.”
 37: Walk the Plank

Scout lay bleeding out on the floor.

Somewhere, distantly, Pyro could feel Alice panicking. Pyro was not. A calm had settled over her,
leaving her still save for the ripples of her breath. She stared down the woman in front of her, the
woman who was Miss Pauling no longer.

Scout lay bleeding out on the floor.

“You did it already,” Pyro said, the words squeezing out through Esau’s grip on her throat. “Project
Gemini.”

“Very good,” said the woman who called herself Helen, a slow and triumphant smile edging onto
her face. “Yes. It is done. Mostly done, anyway. Esau, check her for any other weaponry.”

The metal hand unwrapped itself from her neck. Pyro gulped down air, twisting her head far
enough to catch Esau’s eye as he pulled away to frisk her. He would not look at her. “What’s
mostly done mean?” she said, fixing on Helen again. She thought she could see it now, the same
sorts of things that gave Esau away as not-Dell: how Helen held herself like she was made of
blades or of glass, the elegant confidence that Pauling did not have, the way she seemed able to
look down on Pyro even with the fact that Pyro had almost six inches on her.

“She’s clear,” Esau said. “Ma’am, there’s no purpose in—”

“Mr. Esau, I assure you, I do not require further input from you,” said Helen.

“Where’s the real Administrator?” Pyro said.

A slow smile grew on Helen’s face, like blood from a wound. “What an interesting question,” she
said, her gaze moving between Pyro and Esau. “It makes a lot of assumptions about the word
‘real,’ don’t you think? Tell me, Miss Kingbird, what is your understanding of what is ‘real’? I
seem to recall several reports suggesting you, personally, had difficulty with the concept. I would
like your thoughts on the matter.”

“Don’t fuck around with me,” Pyro sneered, and made as if to step forward. All it took was a nod
from Helen and Esau grabbed at her again. She was ready for it and twisted away, following the
motion with a vicious blow to his face. The flesh of her knuckles split, knocking against teeth. Esau
staggered. “And you!” she said, grabbing him by the collar, “you piece of shit—”

“She’s dead,” Esau said in a wheeze. “The Administrator. She made Miss Pauling kill her.”

Helen laughed, an unsettling sound out of Pauling’s mouth. Pauling didn’t laugh, not that Pyro had
ever heard. “I did not make Miss Pauling do anything. I asked. She complied.”

“She wouldn’t,” Scout cut in, trying to push himself up from the red stain pooling under him. “She
wouldn’ta, you’re lying. Flor idolizes that old bitch, f-fuckin’ God only knows why—”

As soon as he had begun to move again, Helen crossed to him. Now she aimed a sharp kick at his
throat, throwing him back down with a horrific gagging sound. Pyro made a noise like a rabid dog,
lunging only to be stopped when Helen raised the shotgun. “Would it kill either of you to be civil?”
she asked, any humor skinned out of her voice. “Violence has its place, but it did not need to be
here. You haven’t even listened to what I have to say.”
Pyro spat at her feet.

Helen rolled her eyes, turning and beckoning to Esau. He followed her with hunched shoulders and
still avoiding Pyro’s eyes, over to one of the patches of shadows that swallowed up the room. This
one hid another switchboard and chair before it, now that her eyes adjusted. Helen sat, the shotgun
on her lap. “Miss Pauling didn’t smoke,” she said, fishing out a cigarette from a box sitting on the
switchboard and producing a lighter from beside it. “A trait I always found somewhat charmingly
stubborn of her. God knows she was stressed enough to benefit from it. Let me paint you a picture,
Miss Kingbird—a picture of a future.”

Scout lay bleeding out on the floor. Pyro tried to ungrit her teeth and slowly made her way to his
side, watching the pair opposite them all the while to ensure she would be allowed to. Helen made
no move. Esau stood at her side, stiff and withdrawn.

“Imagine this,” Helen said. “No more running, no more mercenary work. No more clumsy,
accidental murders. No more fighting tooth and nail just to hold yourself together. A distinct lack
of death surrounding the people you care about.”

Scout’s breathing came shallow and fast. Pyro touched his shoulder and got no response. His hat
had fallen from his head, and she picked it up, feeling the sweat in the band and seeing the places
where the fabric stretched over the brim had split open. “April,” he muttered, and the word alone
seemed to take the wind out of him. When she felt his hand it was too cold.

“You’d like it.” Helen tapped ash from her cigarette. “I seem to recall you have some trouble with
that, keeping the people around you alive. Tobias Owens, as an example.”

Pyro dropped the hat. “Don’t you fucking talk about him.”

Another laugh, wry and amused. “I have something to show you,” Helen said, and produced
something from around her neck and held it between her thumb and first two fingers, something
round and shining, just smaller than the size of her palm. “Come here.”

Pyro stayed on the ground, watching the blood creep away from Scout.

“Come along,” Helen said, lifting an eyebrow. “The future waits for no one.”

Slowly, Pyro obeyed.

On her approach she did her best not to focus on Esau, who had seemed nervous before and now
was worse. She did not like the idea of a nervous Esau; she was not sure what he was capable of.
But he did not have a gun in his lap. She crossed the dark room to where Helen sat wih crossed
knees and her cigarette burning ruefully over the side of her chair. She held what Pyro first took to
be a disk or a large coin. On further examination she caught sight of the seam along its edge, and a
small chain hanging from the top. “A locket,” Pyro said, glancing up at Helen with a creased brow.
“So?”

“Indeed,” Helen said. She smiled. “Esau? Why don’t you tell Miss Kingbird about the locket?”

Pyro’s eyes flashed to Esau. The sight of him stirred Alice again, a cold and urgent weight in the
back of her head, and she said something but Pyro could not spare the attention to listen. He shifted
his weight from foot to foot, fussing with his clothing, some kind of jumpsuit, an anonymous,
mass-produced thing that fit him poorly. His right hand shone with the motion. For a moment Pyro
thought he might defy Helen; but he too came to the realization that he was not the one with the
shotgun. “The locket,” he said, and at least had the nerve to look at Pyro as he said it, “is
engineered to remove one of the personalities caused by our condition. It’s … proven technology.”

The only thing in her head at first was the fact he had chosen the word engineered, and what he had
meant by it. It shook away like fog and she found what was under it to be ugly and deadening.

“Proven technology,” she said, every syllable like sand in her mouth. Esau looked away.

“Don’t look so dreadfully morose,” said Helen, pressing the cigarette back against her lips as she
let the locket fall against her breastbone. “Dell isn’t gone. He has been, several times, and so has
Esau, of course. But they’re both still alive now, in whatever sense of the word you like. It’s
marvelous what having a few backup respawn tapes can do for the scientific process. Simple
enough, really—use the locket, interview the survivor, then kill them and reload a respawn point
from before the procedure. Repeat, ideally several dozen times. Neither of them remember, of
course, because for them it hasn’t happened. Isn’t that right, Esau?”

Esau said nothing. From behind Pyro, instead, Scout wheezed. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t let her—on
Florence—”

“Tragic,” Helen said, dripping with sarcasm. “Such loyalty, but to the wrong woman. He was my
second choice, you know, but I see now he’s got his heart too set on Miss Pauling to be of any use.
Esau was my first, but it turns out he’s not nearly as intelligent as Mr. Conagher, and Mr. Conagher
has no interest in working with me. So that leaves you.”

“What?” said Pyro.

“You have many admirable qualities, Miss Kingbird. Many of the same ones that drew me to Miss
Pauling.” Helen lay out a hand and began ticking off the fingers. “Loyalty,” she said. “Cleverness.
Determination. The last several months have certainly proven that. A willingness to get your hands
dirty—and my sources tell me you’ve even begun to learn to read again. You have a remarkable
ability to bounce back from even the worst of circumstances. And to be honest, I’ve always
preferred for my assistants to be women.”

For several seconds the only sound in the room was Scout’s bloodied breathing. Pyro’s eyes fell on
the burning point of Helen’s cigarette, watching it smolder gently in the frail half-light that
glimmered down from somewhere overhead.

“Me,” she said, when her vision had begun to burn from the glower of the cigarette. “Be your
assistant.”

“Of course, I would make it worth your while,” Helen went on. “Esau tells me you’ve found your
family. I can ensure they prosper. I know where in this building the medical technology is, and
how to get it to Jeremiah quickly enough to ensure his survival. I can even offer you the use of the
locket, if you wish.”

“I—I don’t want to use it,” said Pyro. She couldn’t remember what it was like anymore, being the
only person in her own head, living without that other consciousness just at arm’s reach. The
thought frightened her. Alice said something. “I don’t want to be cured.”

Helen laughed again. “Good heavens. I didn’t say you had to use it on yourself.”

She turned her head as she said it, waving a hand in the direction of Esau. Pyro followed the
motion to see the culmination of Esau’s nervousness, the way he had taken a step back, the way his
shoulders had become a wall of tension. “Now hold on,” he said, and Pyro caught the thread of fear
in his voice. “That was not part of the deal. We had a deal.”
“The situation has changed, I’m afraid,” Helen said. “And you’ve outlived your usefulness. No
heroics, please,” she added, lifting the shotgun from her lap as Esau tried to move further away. He
froze.

Helen got to her feet, and with the gun’s muzzle gestured for him to move away, between Scout
and Pyro. “That’s better,” Helen said, smiling. “What do you say? Hasn’t the point of this entire
affair been to ensure Mr. Conagher’s safety?”

Alice said something.

Pyro could not see her, could barely hear her. She was like a buzzing insect in her ear, coming and
going, and whatever she was saying seemed like it was important but Pyro could scarcely pick out
the meaning of the sounds. In the corner of her vision stood Esau, the traitor, the parasite, and he
watched her with a fear he was right to have.

“Well, Miss Kingbird?” said Helen.

The sound of her boots closing the distance between the two of them made dusty echoes in the
room. Pyro wet her lips and listened to Alice’s urgent, unintelligible chatter. She thought of Tobias,
of Scout, of Dell.“The locket,” she said. “How does it work?”

Helen smiled. “You may be familiar with a certain object belonging to the RED spy,” she said.
“His is a pocketwatch, and served as the prototype. The locket is the key to Gemini. It wouldn’t do
for me to have Miss Pauling trying to reassert herself, you understand—that’s why Esau was so
interesting at first, until it became clear that Mr. Conagher was not gone after all.”

“But how does it work?”

“It is the culmination,” said Helen, “of the work. It combines respawn and the memory loss
inherent to that process. And it is selective. Did you know there’s a marked change in the brain that
delineates the minds in a subject with looking-glass syndrome? This clever little thing can pick one
or the other and cut it out, clean as a scalpel.”

“And it would get rid of Esau?”

In answer, Helen twisted something on the top of the locket. Pyro heard a faint click. “Now it will.”

“Okay,” Pyro said. She swallowed, shifting her weight and planting her feet. “Okay,” she said
again, and punched Helen squarely in the nose.

Helen’s startled cry mixed with Esau’s shout, and Pyro heard none of it with the thud of her blood
and Alice in her ears. She grabbed at Helen’s arm and missed, Helen lurching away, the shotgun
swinging upward, and she grabbed for the muzzle instead in desperation. The gun boomed and
buckshot snapped into her side and Pyro screamed, and it bellowed again and a chunk of flesh
ceased to exist in her thigh. Blood burst over the floor like fireworks. With shaking hands she
found her grip again and tore the shotgun away, flipping it to point it at Helen’s legs.

Alice said something. She pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked, empty.

“Ah,” said Helen, “that’s lucky,” and kneed her in the gut.

Pyro dropped, the gun clattering out of her hands. A second blow followed and she gagged on
something trying to flee her stomach, but with her hands free she caught hold of Helen’s clothing,
dragging her down, blindly swinging when she rolled Helen onto her back. All she could focus on
was the howling pain in her side and the bloody drool falling from her own mouth and the way the
dog tags around her neck swung wildly in the space between her and Helen. Her knuckles were
already split from Esau’s teeth and now they were worse, the skin sliced apart by Helen’s shattered
glasses, by the knife she had managed to draw again. Pyro saw the glint of it before it came down
and fumbled to stop it, catching it by the blade inches from her neck. She couldn’t hear anything
anymore, though she thought Helen was saying something, she thought Esau might have been
shouting. Blood ran down her wrist and dripped onto Helen’s blouse.

Alice said something, clear as a bell.

“No,” Pyro said.

Pyro tore the knife away, but she was too weak to hold it; it clattered onto the concrete, skittering a
few feet away. She grabbed at Helen’s neck, and did not quite make it. Helen had gotten her legs
under her and drove her knees into Pyro’s stomach, Something tore away as Pyro was flung aside.

April, said Alice. April, you did enough. Give it to me.

No, Pyro tried to say, and coughed up blood.

Please. I know what to do.

Pyro closed her eyes.

Alice opened hers.

Pain washed through her. She gasped with it, trembling. Blood soaked her clothing. Everything was
too bright. She lay on her side, her hair blotting part of her vision. A few feet away Helen struggled
to rise.

Alice tried to rise, too. Her legs gave out, once, twice. Everything hurt, everything was agony, it
had been so long since she had hurt this bad. She tried again. This time something caught her
before she fell, keeping her upright. She couldn’t see, she pawed blindly at her face to remove the
hair, the blood. But she heard him, and she would know him anywhere.

“Esau,” she said, around a tongue that felt too big for her mouth. “Hi, Esau.”

“Alice?” he said in a voice that creaked, a voice that strained. “This isn’t—I didn’t want this—”

“I know,” she said, trying to steady herself against him. She could only use one hand. The other
was clamped shut around the thing April had gotten hold of. That was a lot of blood on his shirt,
and it was hers, probably. “Esau, it’s okay. Okay?”

He said something, he sounded like rocks in a rock tumbler, she couldn’t tell what he was saying.
She shook her head and clumsily patted his chest. “It’s okay,” she said again. “It’s really okay. But
you have to take care of them for me. All three of them, April and Jeremiah, and Dell. Because,
because we’re not parasites. We’re protectors. We have to take care of them. But you have to do it
now.”
“Alice, what—”

“It’ll be okay, I promise,” she said. “But you have to trust me. You have to promise, too.”

Esau’s voice was weak, but she heard him. “I—I promise.”

“Okay,” she mumbled, smiling, and pulled away.

She turned. Helen had gotten to her hands and knees, crawling toward the immortality machine. It
took every ounce of strength, of determination, of will to survive that Alice could find to walk her
broken body the few feet between them, but she did it, and when her legs gave out they did it
beside Helen. “What are you doing?” Helen snarled as Alice shouldered her onto her side, grabbing
at her hands. “Let go of me, you wretch—”

“You’re the real parasite,” Alice told her, and pushed the locket April had ripped from her neck
back into her fingers. Helen stared down at it stupidly, and by the time she realized what it was,
Alice had already grabbed her hands and forced her to pull the locket open.

Alice heard a shriek, and the thundering sound of her own heart beating far, far too fast, and then
nothing at all.
 38: Deep Water

She could hear water running.

Pipes, maybe. Pipes in the walls.

The pipes had to be in the walls, because Pyro had seen no pipes on their way into the complex.
She was still in the TF Industries complex. The green light, the bare walls, the omnipresent
cameras, they were all there. The last thing she remembered was blood and blood and blood, on the
ground, on her clothes, spurting out of her.

Pyro looked down at her clean clothes and puzzled over them.

The word respawn came to her. She nodded to herself, puzzle pieces clicking together. That made
more sense. She had died and respawned. This happened all the time.

Alice had done … something.

If she had respawned, then wherever she had been was probably missing her. She wasn’t sure
where that had been, but it seemed important. She needed to get back.

The hallways stretched long and empty and branched every which way as she made her way down
them. The rest of the team was here, somewhere. Giordano could probably see her. She hoped he
would call out to her. It was lonely, walking, but she did not run; she was only somewhat sure of
where she was headed, and running would backfire on her if she went the wrong way.

She walked, and walked, and eventually the speakers did crackle. She looked up at them, eager for
a friendly voice.

“This—t-this thing on?”

She had not expected Scout’s voice, but it was a good sign. She stopped in her tracks. “No, no, hey,
keep going,” Scout said, urgent. “Don’t quit now, you gotta keep going.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, patting her pockets for her radio. It was gone. She must have lost it in the
respawn. Talking to Scout would be fruitless, then, so she just gave the camera an exaggerated
shrug and obeyed.

When she turned back toward her path, there was a door.

She opened it and light flooded forward, catching her up in its rays. Heat skated over her exposed
arms and face, a humid wind breathing over her hair. It stung her eyes and she had to close them
until it faded to something tolerable, sudden tears pricking at the edges of her vision.

The walls still reared upward, concrete and safety glass peering into blurry offices, but within the
perfect square of the room lay neat rows of scrubby green-brown plants, growing from the dirt
ground. Pyro’s brow creased in confusion.

Alice had done something.

The plants were dense and close and caught at her jeans as she pushed through them. They went up
to her stomach and left gentle scratches on her hands. It was much harder to be certain of her
footing than it looked like it would be, and more than once she put her boot down on something
she would have sworn was alive. Whenever she checked, she never found anything. It was too
warm here, and though she looked she could not find the source of the heat, nor of the wind that
had brushed at her. There were no vents, no fans, and the dim lights that peered down at her from
overhead gave up no heat. She knew these plants, she realized after she had gotten about halfway
through the wall-to-wall field. It was on the tip of her tongue what they were, they would burn so
well—

The far end of the field-room approached her, offering another hall, free of the plants. Pyro shook
herself free of them and set down it. The red lines the plants had left on her hands itched, and she
scratched idly at them as she picked up her pace. Even if respawn was on, everyone was still in
danger. There was that robot army she and Scout had discovered to be worried about, they would
have to do something about that after they had taken care of—

Of—

It was on the tip of her tongue.

She worried at it, trying to remember. It was important that she remember. She had been doing so
much better with her memory, too. What was it? There had been blood and a fight and Scout was
hurt and someone had shot her with her own gun.

The speakers crackled. “Pyro,” said the voice, thin and bored. “What on earth are you waiting
for?”

“Giordano?”

“Good heavens,” said the voice, “I know I am dead, but it has not been that long.”

Spy. But—where—?

“There is no time,” said Spy. “You must continue. Do not stop moving.”

She called to him again, but received no answer. Perturbed, she hesitated only a moment before
continuing on.

This hall stretched on forever, or did a good impression of it. It got darker the further she went,
until at last she pulled out the lighter Gus had given her and flicked it on. That had stayed with her.
It would not light.

She stopped in the hall, which now felt bigger and emptier and even more infinite, both hands
around the stubborn Zippo. The starter bit at her calloused thumb as she tried and tried, click, click,
click, getting only sparks and never fire. Cold sweat clung to her neck. She could hear water
running, somewhere, deeper than the walls.

Alice had done

Alice

The lighter burst into flame.

She stood in place, uncertain. The little light made all the hall even darker now, unnaturally dark.
She was the only thing in the world, she thought; just Pyro, and the Fire, and nothing else. Like it
had always been.

Maybe that was okay, she thought, though the thought pressed against her like the darkness itself
had grown solid. Maybe it was okay to just be here in the dark, by herself, where she couldn’t hurt
anyone. She could stay like this. She could stay. She felt so tired all of a sudden, after all, and she
wasn’t quite sure where she had been headed, or why it had been so urgent. Sometimes she thought
she could see shadows on the walls, when they got close, dancing images thrown by the lighter.
They made shapes and forms, things she recognized, things she almost recognized. Pyro watched
them, dizzy and tired, and did not move.

It was dark, and warm, and calm. The mines under the Chippewa Forest were a strange place for
the TFI hallway to connect to, but they were both dark, mysterious, full of danger. Pyro was not
entirely sure when the hallway had changed. It had been a while. She had not moved, of that she
was sure. It was comfortable here, and though once or twice she thought she had heard someone
calling her, she had never been able to determine where it was coming from. The calling hadn’t
happened for a long time, though.

Just Pyro and the Fire, quiet and still.

“Get moving!”

The roar of rushing water hit her at the same time something pushed her. Pyro stumbled and nearly
fell, burning herself on the lighter. She cursed and fumbled it shut, turning to see what the dark had
spat out at her.

It was a woman, with dark hair, with square shoulders, with a strong jaw. Pyro thought it was
someone else, first, but she was wrong. “You,” she said, startled. She could still hear the water, but
it was nowhere to be seen.

“Yes, you snot,” said June Wagner. She was exactly as huge and intimidating as Pyro remembered
her, a brick house of a woman, dressed in her firefighting gear. She pushed Pyro again, snorting
when Pyro protested. “Quit pissing around and move.”

“No,” Pyro protested, clutching at her lighter. The sense of warmth and peace she had sunken into
was slipping away. She wanted it back. She wanted to go with it. “No! What the fuck are you
doing here?”

“I’m doing what you’re apparently too much of an idiot to do for yourself,” said June. “I can’t
believe you made me come all the way down here just to drag your sorry brown ass back out. Get
going before I slug your teeth down your throat.”

“Try it,” Pyro said, and then yelped in protest when June grabbed her by the hair and started
hauling her down the tunnel.

The light had come back again, little lights evenly spaced on either side of the hall. Pyro saw them
blurry through tears of pain, and the yanking only stopped when Pyro dug her nails into June’s
wrist. “I’m coming! Let go!”

June scoffed, but did so. Pyro hastened to keep a pace acceptable to her taskmaster. “Where are we
going?” she said.

“There, obviously,” said June, and pointed ahead, where the tunnel abruptly stopped at a stone
wall.
“But,” Pyro said, and June was gone.

It was a stone wall. Pyro stood before it, every ounce of her feeling too heavy to keep upright. It
was gritty and cold under her hand when she touched it. Yet as she did she could still hear it, the
water, calling for her to follow beyond it. She pushed, and the wall pushed back. Harder, then, and
the stone sighed and melted away, eroding to nothing.

The mines broke open into a wide ridge. The acrid air scraped at her lungs all the way to the
ridge’s edge, and she stopped to watch the way the flames ravaged the Chippewa National Forest,
miles below. In miniature, she saw trees crack and burst as a movie monster pursued a ramshackle
party of six, she saw a man on the edge of death in a toy-sized town, she saw a mechanical hound
move unerringly forward, toward a her that was somewhere else. It kept moving even when the
portholes in the sky opened and began to gush in water to put out the flame.

She fled down the opposite ridge and the water chased her, and the water was the devil and the
hound both. They drove her ahead, their prey, until she heard her name being called, saw the
crevice in the side of the dry riverbed and the promise of safety. It urged her forward until she
vanished into the crack. The water and the devil and the hound slammed into the passageway,
screaming, and all was black.

Pyro took a breath and the wind hit her like a slap in the face. It struck the air right out of her,
leaching it from her mouth and nostrils even as it froze her insides. She drew her arms across her
body to try and keep the warmth in even as snow settled heavy on her shoulders.

She knew where she was. In some ways, this Alaskan landscape was her birthplace.

There was no flameproof suit now, no flamethrower or shotgun, but she saw the glimmer of
artificial lights in the fading sun even through the blizzard that scored the air. She trudged toward
it. All around her she could hear still the sounds of fighting, the day-in-day-out mundanity of the
war between RED and BLU. Each time she looked for its source she thought she saw motion in the
distance, but she could not divert from her path. The footsteps in the snow ahead of her had already
been made, and he was waiting for her where they stopped.

Scout, of course. He lay stiff in the snow, a collapsed heap turning the churned snow around him
livid red. Before Pyro’s eyes he shifted, a body broken from falling off the Teufort watchtower or
out a schoolhouse window, a whimpering, sweating mess with a burn that wept pus and smoke, a
gore-riddled corpse with Pyro’s own axe stuck in his jaw bone. Pyro leapt forward to help him, put
him out of his misery, anything, but the winter defied her. Each step she pushed through the thick
snow only seemed to take him further away until he was gone, buried under the white.

There were hands on her shoulders, firm and confident. There was a voice, a friend’s, telling her
she was wanted. When she turned, all she saw were the headlights of a stolen car vanishing into the
blizzard, rolling down a road made of a frozen river.

She followed it, car and river both. With all the snow there ought to have been tire tracks. There
were none. Instead she found cigarette butts, the charred bodies of used-up fireworks. The little
town at the bottom of the valley waited.

When she reached it all the snow had melted, and the river had become a stream of water in a
gutter, all of it replaced with the crisp air of a New England town in autumn glory. She heard first
the yelling, and then the rubbery sound of tires tearing up pavement. A green bike shot past her,
the girl on it pedaling as fast as her short legs could take her; hot behind her were another girl and a
boy, both white, both yelling, on one bicycle. The boy drove; balanced on the pegs sticking out of
the back wheel, the girl brandished a stick. Behind them was a second boy on a bike of his own,
bigger than the rest, with muddy hair and ruddy cheeks.

Pyro watched the runaway try to fishtail around a lamp post. She spilled over instead, an explosion
of black braids and wheeling legs, and the bike bucked her onto the pavement. She scarcely got a
chance to scramble to her hands and knees before the other three children were upon her. Then the
beating started.

Every bruise the runaway took reappeared on Pyro’s skin. It was the first time she had ever been
trounced, and though now she sort of knew some of the viciousness had come because she was not
like them, she still regarded every purple-yellow-green mark with a kind of acceptance.
She had stolen that bike, and she got a good three months of use out of it before it was taken back.

When the children had finished, they took the runaway’s bike and rode away, pleased with
themselves and their defeat of the outsider. The runaway lay in a ball on the ground, bloody-nosed
and scraped and sick, unaware of how Pyro came and crouched at her side. Later, Pyro knew, she
would throw up on June’s carpet, and she would get her ass kicked for that. But that part of the
story seemed to slip away. Instead the runaway got to her feet, again, and June snorted. “If you’re
gonna get hit,” she said, “at least make sure you’re getting hit so you can hit them back harder.”

The words came from Pyro’s mouth, and when she looked down at her body she saw white fists
raised, June’s paint-stained jeans, her steel-toed work boots. “You’re too fast,” the runaway
whined, and Pyro swung at her again. Down the runaway went, and again, knocked down each
time but with a little less ease every time she came back up. Pyro went in with a left hook. The
runaway ducked it and slammed forward with a headbutt to her solar plexus.

Then Pyro was the runaway again, fifteen years old and sore and startled, and June was flat on her
ass in the cracked driveway. Woman and girl stared at one another, and June wiped some spit from
her lips. “That’s what I’m talking about,” June said, nodding. “We’ll see you giving those fucking
goons hell yet. Don’t ever let anybody tell you you’re too dumb to learn, brat.”

The runaway gave her a clumsy smile, unused to the motion, to the specific flexing of mouth and
lips to form that shape. Pyro remembered that smile, how hard-won it was. An appropriate prize
for the first praise June had ever given her.

Then the hardware store was burning for the second time, and the runaway knew without a doubt
June was going to make sure she paid hell for it. Everything was on fire, the cash register, the
ceiling tiles, the plastic bins all the products for sale were in, and the runaway fumbled her way out
into the back lot to gasp for clean air. There wasn’t any. Everything was on fire, and she fell to the
ground to stare up at the inferno.

Smog clawed at her face. Pyro went to wave it away, flinching when her hand struck plastic. The
gas mask clung to her skin and she reeled, caught off-balance by the fact her vision was arguing
with itself: one lens was intact, the other, broken.

Smoke poured into the air, around her, because she was in the air, too. It was all burning, far away,
far below, but she could see it all in exacting detail. A bookstore, all its windows blown out and
blazing with the eager tinder of its paper and glue, half its wares strewn out among the street; the
skeletal remains of a factory haunted by the stench of a thousand-thousand yards of burned fabric;
the black-and-orange light show of a pine forest being eaten alive. A vast hockey stadium gagged
smoke. And amid it all, making the rest of the carnage look toy-sized by comparison, the single
glowing light of a trash can fire in an old salvage yard.

She was above it, and she was within it, rail-thin, wearing shoes made almost wholly of duct tape.
The mask and Shark lay stowed under a forgotten school bus as she ate stolen drug store food. Pyro
watched herself from above, felt her hands as she pawed crumbs from her mouth and scratched at
sunburns on her cheeks, both of them smooth and undamaged.

The men came out of the darkness like the vermin they were, the men she knew had been
following her but that she thought she had shaken off. They wanted money the first time, she had
none, then they wanted trouble, she had plenty. She’d broken the nose of one and the hand of the
other and they shouldn’t have been here, not here, not now, when Shark was so far out of reach.
The arsonist growled like the cornered animal she was.

Pyro watched herself be outnumbered, watched herself be still more than either of the bastards had
anticipated. She got the knife out of the hand of one of them and half slit his throat, but she never
saw where the other came from, never had the chance to defend herself when her own fire was
kicked over and her face was shoved down into it. Her own screams drowned out the howl of the
places she had destroyed.

Sepsis, the doctor told her in her bed in the burn ward, as kindly as you can tell someone they are
almost certainly going to die. Infected burn. Blood poisoning. Waited too long to get treatment,
nothing more they could do but wait. He was sorry. Was there anything she wanted them to do if
she passed? Anyone she wanted them to inform?

The arsonist laughed at him and passed out.

High above her, Pyro hung in the air, in the smoke, and watched it all burn.

Everything was on fire, and then it was not, because it was raining.

Pyro flinched, though the rain was not so bad. It drizzled half-heartedly, dampening the overgrown
yard with its scorched black patches. The air smelled a little like sulfur. She could hear the gurgle
of the water as it swirled down hidden grates and drains along the road. From inside the forgotten
house she had found upon her arrival in Boston and thusly made her own, the girl with the singed
eyebrows regarded the yard with suspicion. She did not look at Pyro, standing by the haphazard
fence, and Pyro was not looking at her; she was looking at the shed.

The shed stood madcap, as much an abstract art form as anything brush ever put to paper. Despite
the distance and the black clouds of smoke overhead she could see inside with perfect clarity,
count every tank of propane and stack of seasoned firewood. She could see the half-finished body
of a flamethrower on a makeshift workbench.

Blow it up now, Pyro wanted to tell the girl at the window, the girl who was so sure that she was
too smart and too careful to ever let the Fire get the better of her. Blow it up before it happens, or
fix the walls, or leave and never come back—something, anything, anything!

But she said nothing, and she watched it all happen. The bricks, the bus, the impound lot where
Tobias asked her what the fire was about.

The Fourth of July.

There was nothing she could do. There was nothing she could have ever done, she thought now,
watching the bewildered way the girl stood vigil over the mutilated body, like she didn’t know
what the right way to behave was. She hadn’t known. She was just a burned-out wick of a person
then, Pyro knew now, too far removed from humanity to ever understand it. It moved her to pity.

Tobias was there.

He stood at her side, wearing clothes she remembered Scout wearing, looking older than the
twenty-four he was meant to be. A big brother, alive, well.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he answered.

She thought there was something she should be asking. Pyro struggled with it for a time, and
touched the dog tags still around her neck, and wondered what Alice had done.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked. “Out there?”

There was a cigarette in his hand. He held out his other, questioningly, and she found her lighter
and passed it to him. He lit up and took a drag, and sighed as he handed it back. “Nothing good.”

“I don’t remember what happened. I know I’m dreaming, but I—I thought if you knew you were
dreaming, you could make it do what you want.”

Tobias gave her a curious look. “You think this is a dream?”

“What?” said Pyro, and woke up.

The smell of Arizona spring drenched the air, and Pyro looked around her bedroom.

Nothing had changed; a moment later, she wondered why she thought anything would have
changed. There was no reason for it. It was just another day. She sat up, and from the foot of her
bed Shep began to thud his tail against the wall. He hopped down to snuffle at her as she got to her
feet and began to dress. Like always, he stuck to her heels as she went to pick out breakfast, and
like always, he bolted out the dog door as soon as she put on her boots.

She had never been to Arizona before moving here, and she thought it was a shame. The only
benefit was that it kept surprising her. While it was hot and dry and occasionally full of scorpions,
sometimes too she would step outside and find an unbroken field of blooming life, sprays of purple
and green and gold painting the landscape in impressionistic style. Even the cacti had shaken out
their flowers, greeting her with quiet beauty.

She put her hair up, whistled to Shep, and started to run.

It was too early for the sun to have yet begun baking the earth, and the air lay soft in her lungs as
she found her pace. Pyro had never meditated, was only vaguely aware of the concept, but the way
her mind settled when she was putting one foot before the other was as close as she might ever get
to it without a flame before her.

The desert watched her, moving steady through its graces. Little animals darted unseen when she
got too close, and insects buzzed their curiosity in her ear, only to be outpaced. She ran in even,
easy strides, listening to her own breathing and the sounds of her body.
She almost didn’t see the hole until it was too late. It leapt from the underbrush, dark and huge,
something she could have driven her truck into. Pyro barely skidded to a stop before hitting its
edge, heart banging sudden panic against her ribs. Shep stopped, too, and at once began sniffing
the edge of the hole. She grabbed at his collar to pull him away.

The hole waited. She kneeled, staring in disbelief at it. It was huge, and she had run this path a
dozen times before. Had she simply run past it all this time? It looked like a well, bricked into the
earth, but it had neither walls nor anything to draw up water with, and was far too large for any
well she had ever seen besides. It was that sheer size that baffled her. It was so deep that she could
not hope to see the bottom. She cast around for a rock and found one, dropped it in, and listened.

Nothing.

Shep kept investigating the edge, nudging her with his hefty shape and making her nervous about
losing her footing. Every time she scooted backwards he seemed to find a way to thwap her with
his tail or step on her in the right spot to make her move closer to the hole. Finally she grabbed a
stick from the ground and threw it behind her, and on cue he went sailing after.

Left with the hole, she looked back down the cavernous shaft. Her eyes tried to adjust to its inky
depths and failed. Perhaps it was one of those sink holes that opened up without warning, or maybe
there had been some drilling done here before she moved in. This did not explain the bricks,
though. She weighed and discard each option in turn, none of them satisfactory, absently noting the
sound of Shep’s heavy paws trotting back toward her. Why was there a hole? What the hell was it
doing here? She needed to leave it, to go back to the house and get some fencing. Make sure
nothing ever went down it.

Something pushed her.

She shrieked in surprise and fear as the hole lurched closer, bracing herself anywhere she could.
The push shoved the breath from her and she gulped at the air, frozen. At the side of her head she
was suddenly aware of Shep’s familiar breath, and his paws digging into her back.

“Please, Smoky,” he said, in a voice that belonged to someone else. “You swore you wouldn’t give
up.”

She was falling.

The speed ripped the breath from her as she watched the mouth of the hole grow smaller and
smaller overhead, shrinking until it was no larger than a rabbit hole. Below was darkness, and
below the darkness was a single pinpoint of light.

She fell, and someone else fell with her.

The person falling was her, was not her. Pyro knew her. Did not know her. She did not wear the
heavy asbestos suit from BLU, nor the thrift store clothing Pyro herself dressed in. She wore a
simple green dress that the wind seemed to have forgotten, cinched at the waist, and she was
barefoot. “April,” she called through the air, lamenting. “You promised.”

“What is this?” Pyro called back, wheeling wildly in the air, her heart in her throat. “What did I
promise? Alice, what’s going on?”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “I tried. I tried my best. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

“Alice!”
Alice reached out her hand, and Pyro looked at the white lines that crossed the palm. She took it,
and nails dug straight down to the bone. “It’s okay,” Alice said. “I promise it’ll be okay.”

Pyro stood at the river’s edge. The water lapped at her feet, shy and penitent. Past the water’s edge
was a door, standing high on a green island, and between her and it—neck-deep in the water, and
sinking—was Alice.

She watched as the woman who was her, was not her, had always and never been her, began to
drown. She watched until the waters were calm.

The water shivered as she waded in. She walked in up to her chest and it embraced her like an old
friend. She leaned forward, into it, and began to swim.

Ahead, the door opened.

 39: Buoyed

A clean, bright smell was the first thing she knew about. For a little while this was all; her eyes
would not open. Her ears would not hear. She was not sure she had limbs. She was not sure who
she was. What she was.

It was a familiar smell. It stung her nose, and it made her ache with phantom pain, because she
only ever smelled it when she hurt. It reminded her of her body as it pushed its way into her mouth
and throat, down, down into her lungs, where it stretched out to enjoy itself. She felt her chest
twitch, once, then again. When something came to rest on her stomach it seemed unimaginably
heavy. She coughed.

There came a loud sound, a big sound. She couldn’t understand what it was or where it came from.
The heavy thing on her stomach moved, crushing her shoulder. The sound was a voice, she thought
as it carried on, because it was carrying on.

“Hey!” it screamed again. “Get your sorry fuckin’ ass over here, she’s breathing!”

More sounds, big sounds, they hurt her pounding head. She tried to shift away from them, but the
most she could muster was a groan.

She heard her name.

With what little strength she could find, she opened her eyes.

She could see nothing at first, just blurred light, fuzzy shadows. She closed them again and
whimpered, and when this did not make her feel better she opened them once more. The shapes
were still there. “What,” she said, the word garbled on her dry tongue.

“Shit,” said the voice from before, and she heard the metallic screech of something heavy being
pushed over something rough. This miserable sensation hauled her back from the bounds of
unconsciousness and thrust her pitilessly into waking.

Someone hovered above her.

“Scout,” she said.

“Jesus Christ,” said Scout, who was very alive. As Pyro struggled with the merciless truth of being
awake, she tried to remember why this was surprising. It didn’t quite come to her, just that she was
pretty sure he shouldn’t be. He hauled her up from her comfortable position of being horizontal on
the ground and, of all things, hugged her, which was so much more surprising that it knocked any
other thoughts out of her.

There was a bang somewhere off to the side, but as Pyro was still mostly not in control of her body
there was relatively little she could do to investigate it. Instead she sat limp with her face in Scout’s
shoulder. He was warm and it was because of this that she discovered how cold she was. “Scout,”
she mumbled. “We have to … did I pass out?”

“Pass out?” he repeated. “Pass out? April—”

Something grabbed her again, hauling her to one side, out of the security of Scout’s arms. Her head
spun with the motion. When her eyes stilled a person had dropped to his knees at her side, his
hands on her shoulders. One of his hands was wrong, warped and misshapen. She stared into his
face for a few long seconds before some buried instinct whispered careful in her ear.

“You,” she said, garbled. “You. Which one are you?”

“It’s me,” said Dell, in a voice so thick with emotion she almost couldn’t understand him. “My
God. It’s me, April.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why are you crying?”

He laughed, eyes squeezing shut and sending the tears that had been beading at the corners
cascading down his face. Pyro looked to Scout, seeking some kind of explanation, but he was
laughing too. “What’s so funny?” she said, at last gathering enough strength to look around at the
dark little room. Her surroundings were illuminated only by the soft glow of a blue beam, ebbing
serenely out from a medigun lying at her side. Between it and her sat an enormous puddle of blood.
“Oh, God,” she muttered, taking stock of her clothing and the dark stains now drenching it. “Is this
mine?”

“You were doing a pretty good impression of a horror movie,” Scout said, sitting back to give her
space. Dell did her no such favor, which she did not mind. “Shit, I know I been saying nothing can
kill BLU team, but that took the cake.”

“I’m fine,” Pyro said to Dell, who was still looking at her like she was something very mysterious
and awe-inducing. She did not mind this either, but she did find it strange. She tried to lift her arm
but stopped and winced as something made itself known in her side. Looking down was met with
the sight of her shirt hiked well up her ribs, the hem of it caught on something that glowed gold.
“Dell, what … ?”

“Guys,” cut in a high, pretty voice, as a door Pyro had not noticed swung open to spill light over
them. There was a massive hole where the knob should have been. “Guys, I found the others,
they’re on their way, and Medic—oh,” said Miss Pauling, in Miss Pauling’s voice, stopping short
as she stared at Pyro. Pyro stared back. Pauling did not have her glasses. “Oh my God! You’re
alive!”

Pyro let herself slump against Dell in surrender to her confusion as Pauling hurried to join the trio.
She looked immaculate, a sharp contrast to Pyro’s bloody clothing. Scout’s were bloodied, too,
though not nearly as badly, and now mostly around the knees, which she imagined was the fault of
the puddle. Dell had a massive patch of red on his front, but no visible holes. “I don’t understand,”
was all she could say.

“We’ll tell you everything,” Dell said, squeezing her shoulder. “But first let’s get out of this
hellhole.”

Pyro fell twice getting back up, despite her own insistence that she was good to go. Her stomach
churned with nausea and a weakness had settled into her bones. The only reason she didn’t fall a
third time was because Dell and Scout put her arms over their shoulders. Faced with this indignity
or the way her wobbly legs promised a repeat performance, she chose the indignity. As they
steadied her she discovered what was wrong with Dell’s hand. It was of course the right one, the
metal one, still exposed and inhuman, but now the metal looked like it had been put into a trash
compactor. It was filthy with blood, much worse than the rest of Dell’s person. When she
questioned the damage, Dell laughed again. It was not a laugh that had any amusement behind it.
“Esau,” he said.

Pyro grunted. “Of course.”

“No, no,” Pauling cut in. She was hovering, clearly looking for something to help with but not
finding it. “Not how you think. He broke down two doors to get to the medigun, both metal. It
ruined the hand.”

“A lot happened real fast,” Dell said. “C’mon. It’s dark in here.”

Back in the cold, soft-lit room where they had found Helen, blood greeted them. Huge swathes and
sprays of it stained the concrete, going brown around the edges as it dried. Pyro had only ever seen
so much at once fighting for BLU, and even that sparingly; something to do with respawn cleaning
up after them. Her shotgun and a knife lay on the ground.

Ahead, Pauling made for the panel of screens and the switchboard that oversaw them. The men
followed, depositing Pyro into the seat that not long ago had held Helen. She grimaced at the
memory, trying not to fixate on Pauling like her instincts told her to. “Tell me what happened,” she
said.

The other three exchanged glances. Dell shook himself out before leaning on the back of her chair
and asking her what she remembered. She had to scrape at her memory for it, still blurry and dizzy:
Helen; a locket; a fight. “And Alice,” she finished, sinking as deep as the chair would take her.
“Alice did something. She said she knew what to do.”

“I guess she did,” Dell said.

The answer rankled her, irritation boiling in her voice. “Then what did she do? Will you quit acting
so weird? What is wrong with you guys?”

“She got Helen,” Scout said, from where he had planted himself at Pauling’s side. “Alice did. She
made her open the locket. Worked just like the bitch said, killed her, at least Pauling says so.”

“I think so,” said Pauling.

“You’d know, if she was still there,” Dell said. “Right?” he added, squeezing Pyro’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” she said absently, picking through this information. She shifted in her chair and winced as
the place where her shirt had ridden up snagged on its side, something pulling at the skin. The
same glow greeted her when she turned her attention to it, tinged red with gore she had not noticed
in the dark.

Dell caught her stare. “Now,” he said, stopping her as she reached for it, “don’t get worked up, it
ain’t permanent—”

“What is that?” Pyro said, trying and failing to pull out of his hold. “Is that—is it in me? What the
hell—”

The immortality machine pulsed quietly in her side, just under her ribs in her left side, where the
shotgun had blown into her. Its light was barely there, much darker than she remembered the light
of the one she had seen in the bear, all that time ago in the woods. “Soldier was right,” Dell said
with a wry smile as Pyro gaped at it. “Complicated little thing, especially that one. But there really
isn’t much to know about making it work.”
For a long time Pyro just sat and looked at it, stunned stupid. “Where?” she asked at last.

Pauling answered. “The Administrator.”

“The Administrator!” Pyro said, leaning on the arm of her chair as much as she could to see
Pauling without falling out of it. She could hear the ice in her voice, and just at present she did not
care that her tone made Pauling shrink into Scout’s side. “What the hell does that mean? Did the
bitch just waltz in here and stick it in me herself?”

“No,” said Pauling, turning. She lifted her chin and fixing Pyro with an iron look. “She’s dead.”

The matter-of-fact way she said it set Pyro’s nerves on edge. “Great,” she said anyway. “Good
news, finally, great. So much for immortality machine, I guess.”

As Pyro had spoken, Pauling stepped around the group and the switchboard, disappearing from
sight as her slight height was encompassed by its sheer size. Pyro cast an uncertain look toward the
other BLUs and received no answer. She opened her mouth to speak only to be struck dumb as
Pauling wheeled something out from behind the switchboard.

The wheelchair was nothing special, of course. The sickly body of the old woman sitting in it
commanded a great deal more attention. It sat limp and slack and with all its front soaked from a
slit throat, and in its lap was a half-spent cigarette. Lidded eyes stared into the middle distance,
glassy in death. One arm lay over the armrest’s edge, hanging down with its sleeve torn open. In
the papery skin of her inner elbow were ugly purple-yellow bruises and among them, a dozen tiny
holes that oozed drying blood.

“She’s dead,” Pauling said, more quietly.

Dell’s slip of a sigh brushed past Pyro’s ear. “Another immortality machine,” he said. “Had me
make it for her as soon as we got here. Had to, she knew where you and your folks were.”

Pyro tore her eyes from the corpse to look down at the thing in her side again. “So—but—now it’s
in me. Dell. Why the hell is it in me?”

“Uh, because you were dead,” Scout said, having drawn Pauling back away from the wheelchair
and its corpse. “You were like, super dead.”

A litany of half-baked responses marched their way through her head, none of them making it to
her mouth. Instead she groped at the bloody machine planted in her side again, letting Dell once
more pull her hand away without resisting. “Respawn?” she said.

“No,” Dell said, and took the kind of drawn-out breath that preceded someone looking for the right
words. “No respawn. You were dead, April, whatever that locket did hit you too. Not as bad, but—
enough. You were gone for ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes?” A bewildered laugh bubbled out of her throat. “What? No way, what—what, can
this thing in me bring people back to life?”

“Ain’t supposed to be able to,” said Dell, and it shook her that he looked just as helpless as she felt.
She could still see the tear tracks on his weary face. “It’s … I don’t know. I was panicking, if you
want to know. Esau busted down the door for that medigun and let go of me as soon as he got it,
and told me I had to save your life one more time. I just grabbed anything I thought could help, and
that thing was on hand, and … I don’t know. I still don’t know. Might be some kinda reaction
between the medigun beam and the machine, but—it shouldn’t have worked.” He laughed. “Ten
minutes. Shouldn’t have worked.”
Pyro bit her lip. She felt her sluggish pulse beating its dutiful measure and the slowly warming chill
in her limbs. “Then how?”

“Don’t know. Doubt I ever will. But I know about you,” he added with a smile. “You promised me
you wouldn’t give up, and you keep your promises. Maybe that’s all it was.”

She was so tired. There was some talk after that, explaining details she’d missed. Pyro had a hard
time concentrating on it, just nodding whenever it seemed appropriate. Somewhere in there her
hand found the dog tags around her neck, and she clutched onto them like a lifeline. The other
searched out her lighter, still safe in her pocket. Behind her, Pauling was directing the other
mercenaries to their location over the switchboard.

When the rest of the BLU team (and Giordano) arrived, it was not exactly a reunion. Everyone was
glad to see Miss Pauling, of course. Dell was regarded with suspicion by everyone except Medic,
who in typical Medic fashion did not seem to care. Pyro only half registered this, still feeling ill
where she sat slouched in the chair. When the story of her brush with death was told, Medic
suddenly became her problem. “Ten minutes!” he crowed, checking her vitals and pupils and
coming obliviously close to groping her breast as he investigated her heart. “A lucky thing you are
already brain damaged, eh? Or that would have done it for sure!”

She was trying to pry him off of her (Scout was no help, fully preoccupied with Pauling, and Dell
had been surrounded by the rest of the mercenaries) when there came a hoarse shout and the rustle
of bodies. She was halfway out of the chair by the time Medic bothered to turn and see Dell
knocked on his ass on the floor, his hand on his face. In front of him, barely restrained by Heavy
and Demo, was Sniper, and it was definitely Sniper: a livid sneer consumed his face as he tried to
yank himself free. When this failed, he spat at Dell’s feet. “You fucking dog,” he snarled.
“You murdering bastard—”

Pyro’s bad leg protested as she cleared the distant between them in a heartbeat. “Leave him alone!”
she said, drawing Sniper’s vicious gaze. She reached for Dell’s hand to pull him up, ignoring how
her weakened body wailed. “It wasn’t him, it was Esau, he’s always been a liar—”

“No,” Dell said, and pushed Pyro’s hand away. She stopped cold. Dell stayed where he was,
sprawled in the middle of one of the blood puddles. The silence was punctuated only by Sniper’s
harsh breathing. Dell lifted his head and met Sniper’s eyes.

“It was me,” he said. “I killed Spy.” He looked next to her, where she stood rigid and staring, and
then at the others. “It was me and no one else.”

A wave of murmuring rustled through the knot of men. Someone—Demo, maybe, though Pyro
was not sure—said, “Why?”

Dell lowered his head. “I didn’t know he was out of respawn range,” he said. “Simple as that. I
didn’t know.”

Sniper ripped himself out of his restrainers’ arms. They let him go. “You’re scum,” he said, his
voice barely level again as he took a step toward Dell. “You’re a turncoat and a coward, Engineer,
and I’ll see you in hell.”

When the balisong got into his hand Pyro never knew, but she saw the flash of it before he lunged.
She leapt between them even as Heavy tried to catch him again, grabbing at the knife. It lay open
her fingers as her hands closed around his, and then she was face to face with him. It was a
laughable attempt, fresh from her own death, and her whole body shook with it. “Sniper,” she said,
pleading. “Sniper, please. It was an accident.”

Sniper opened his mouth and for a hysterical moment she thought he would bite her, but it fell shut
again a moment later. He screwed his eyes shut, head dipping, and then in her grip his arm
slackened. When he shook himself it was with a sigh and a certain ruffled composure. “You may
let go of me, Pyro,” said Spy; and she did, clutching her bleeding hand against her chest. He wiped
the blood from his knife on a handkerchief that appeared as mysteriously as the balisong had and
pocketed it.

When she looked behind her, Dell’s eyes flashed from Spy to her and back again. When she offered
him her hand this time, he took it, blood and all. The two men looked at one another, Dell in
rightful trepidation, Spy in cool regard.

“We will discuss this later, Engineer,” Spy said, arms folding in neat fashion across his chest.
“You, myself, and Sniper.”

“Right,” he said quietly. “Right.”

Where Pauling arrived from Pyro could not have said, but she was suddenly there, as was Scout,
who Pyro suspected would never leave her side again. “Guys?” she said, looking the nine of them
over. “I know this reunion is kind of a big deal and everyone has a lot of feelings to process or
something, but I’m not entirely certain this place isn’t rigged to be flooded with neurotoxin in the
event of the Administrator’s death. I would really like to go.”

It was of course Pauling that led the way, knowing every inch of the facility, with Scout at her
heels. Between her lingering exhaustion and her limp, Pyro drifted to the back of the pack. Dell,
with his short stride and a sudden reluctance to leave Pyro’s side (a development she was still
deciding her opinion about) was right there with her. This was well enough. It removed both of
them from the barrage of questions Pauling was trying to answer with Scout’s help, and Pyro did
not feel particularly talkative.

Had she the feelings to spare, this might have spared them. Her proximity to Dell was turning out
to be a ward against the other BLUs: there was a marked distance between the two of them and the
rest of the mercs. Spy stayed well ahead of them, and Demo kept sneaking back looks and giving
concerned frowns their way. Only once did Pyro glimpse Heavy watching them, or more
accurately watching Dell. The pensive glower in his eyes would have made her blood chill, if she’d
had the strength to muster.

Dell either did not notice, or did not care, and Pyro was grateful either way. “How are you
feeling?” he asked her after they had started down another maze of halls. In the dim light he looked
sickly, and Pyro imagined she looked worse.

She shrugged. She had been examining her hand, where Sniper’s knife had cut her: it was already
almost healed. “I’m alive.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I want to get out of here, then,” she said. “I want to sleep for a week.”

Dell snorted. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“What is Esau doing?”

That silenced him. It was enough to make her look him over again, half-expecting to see Esau
again, with his stiff gait and distant expression. But it was only Dell, though he rubbed at his jaw
with his hand and exhaled hard. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “Just watching, I think. Is Alice
okay?”

Pyro gave a quiet hum, glancing around their surroundings. She didn’t recognize where they were,
in fact, even ignoring the sameness inherent in this place. “We aren’t headed outside,” she said,
voice dropping. Her eyes flitted forward, to where she could barely see Pauling’s purple blouse
through the crowd of men. Dell followed her gaze.

“What’re you thinking?” he said, just as quiet.

Seconds passed. “If she tricked us again,” Pyro said, “if she’s taking us somewhere—”

“That would be a damn fool thing to do,” Dell said. “All nine of us here? Armed?”

“This is her territory,” Pyro hissed, and Dell grimaced.

Her thoughts were too scrambled to even begin to form some kind of plan. Instead she watched
Scout, glued to Pauling’s orbit like a puppy. If anyone would notice Pauling acting off, it would be
him. She was so intent that she did not notice the crowd stopping, and nearly collided with Soldier.

Pauling had come to a halt by a doorway featuring no door. It took Pyro a moment’s study to
realize she had been wrong—she did know where they were, but she had not caught on to it
because they had been coming up the hall the opposite way. The doorway’s missing door was on
the floor. It was the one Scout had shot. “Well,” said Pauling, mouth set in a grim line. “I guess
one of you opened this.” Scout raised his hand with a sheepish kind of grin. “You must know
already, then,” said Pauling as she stepped carefully into the observation deck, “but we’ve got one
more problem.”

The rest of them filed in, though Dell stopped short, looking to see what Pyro would do. This gave
her more credit than she thought she deserved. She followed the group. What else was there to be
done?

When they entered something else had changed: massive flood lights now lit the rocky chamber
the deck overlooked, something Pauling must have done via the panel on the wall she currently
stood by and which Pyro had not noticed before. At the deck’s edge the mercs had already
gathered, muttering among themselves as they looked down at the pit. Pyro did not want to join
them. It took Scout noticing her hesitance and lifting his eyebrows at her to draw her forward.

The army stood in perfect, trembling stasis below them. There were even more than Pyro had
imagined, thousands of them, all the types they had fought before and more. Interspersed among
them were huge machines working in quick silence, fed by long tubes from the walls through
which pieces of scrap zipped along to be reconfigured and molded into further robots.

When she looked up again, everyone was looking at Dell. The only exceptions were Pauling, who
was looking at the army, and Scout, who was looking at Pauling. Dell had noticed his audience, of
course. He said nothing.
“So,” said Giordano, “what is the meaning of this?”

“This was part of the Administrator’s plan,” Pauling said, biting her lip. “Plan for what, I don’t
know. She never told me—I think there were instructions that Helen would have been able to find.
She’s been gathering the robots since they shut down, taking Gray’s army for her own.”

“She offered it to him,” Dell said. “Esau. Command of the army, and another chassis, just like
before.”

“He didn’t take it?” Pyro said.

“No. She had designs on cities, civilians, near as I could tell. Esau didn’t want the blood on his
hands.”

The mercenaries stood looking down at the machines. “So,” said Demo, “can’t be leaving ‘em
here, obviously.”

“That’s our problem,” said Pauling. “On top of, oh, probably sixty other problems that are going to
start happening once word gets out that she’s dead. But this one is the biggest, if someone else got
their hands on it. Probably. I thought maybe, Demo, you could rig the cave to explode, or—?”

“Won’t work,” said Dell. “Would get a good chunk of them, most of the rank-and-files, but the rest
would determine the signal loss as an attack and move into automatic mode.”

Another susurration of talk between the BLUs. “You were involved in their creation,” said
Giordano. “Surely you must know of an override. Is that not what occurred before?”

“Sorta,” Dell said with a grimace. “But the override takes something like forty-five different
simultaneous signals from that control room out in the woods and it’s ruined now. Would take me
months to fix it. Don’t figure we have that kind of time.”

“The one in the woods?” said Soldier. “The top secret underground one? Nonsense! It works fine.”

Every eye turned onto Soldier. When Pauling cleared her throat, they turned to her. “Well,” she
said, “I mean, he’s right.”

“Uh, babe,” said Scout, “we was out there like a month ago and it super wasn’t.”

“After you saw Dr. Kitzis, right?” she replied. “No, it wouldn’t have been by then. The engineering
crew hadn’t arrived, Soldier was still working on clearing the place out.”

“Soldier was working on it,” Dell said, incredulous. “Soldier.”

“Miss Pauling!” Soldier said in an urgent stage whisper. “That’s top secret!”

“The mission’s over, Soldier,” Pauling said. “No more secrets.”

Once more everyone looked to Soldier, who threw her a smart salute. “What in the hell were you
doin’ out there?” Scout asked.

“Teleporting robots!” said Soldier, proudly. “I have done nothing but teleport robots for three
months!”

The hubbub this created hurt Pyro’s ears, even though she joined in: exasperation, disbelief, all
these and more were expressed by the mercs. Soldier stood arms akimbo, grinning, proud as hell of
his part in their new problem. It faded out only when Pauling turned to Dell and said, “So you can
do it, if you have the control room? You can disable them?”

“Well,” Dell said, rubbing at the back of his head, “don’t see why not.”
 40: Lost at Sea

The Chippewa woods in the month of May were different from the woods in the month of April.
Spring burst forth, all the wilder for having been burned away in October. New, green growth was
everywhere, pretty as anything. After the cool dark of TFI’s interior, it hurt Pyro’s eyes.

Under them, the teleporter slowed its low hum and went still, old leaves rambling off its platform.
The change in air pressure was sudden and made her ears hurt, but the cool Minnesotan air was a
welcome shift from the hot, close atmosphere of New Mexico. Rain threatened, but in the vague
sense that suggested it was too lazy to follow through. Pyro looked around her, as though the rest
of her party might have been lost in the transfer, but no: the other four were there. Dell, of course,
and Pauling, and with Pauling was Scout, and Heavy had come along “just in case.” Pyro was not
sure what the “just in case” scenario was, but she thought it probably had to do with Dell. She did
not like this, but there was nothing to be done about it.

She loped off the teleporter and into the cool grass, stretching. Her body was starting to feel okay
again. The air was crisp and smooth and the new leaves swayed in a faint wind. Behind her the
others were sorting themselves out; Pauling wanted to know why they had stopped here instead of
the bunker directly, and Scout was grumbling about being in the stupid woods again. “Something I
need out of that cabin,” Dell said, making for it.

“There might be a bear in there,” Pyro said, her attention directed skyward at where the branches
waved to one another. In the corner of her eye she saw Dell stop, maybe remembering, since Esau
was there when they found the bear. “It wasn’t a very big bear,” she offered, and it was possible
she was being cavalier about the bear. She was having a hard time being afraid of something like a
bear right now, was all.

“A bear is a bear,” Dell said with a kind of bewilderment. “We brought guns, yeah?”

They were mercenaries. Of course they brought guns. Pyro had not, because Pyro did not think she
wanted to handle a weapon again for a long time. But everyone else had one, including Miss
Pauling. It ended up not mattering, because there was no bear in the cabin, just a lot of bear-smell
and overturned furniture. Pyro kind of thought she knew what Dell was going to do before he did it,
and when she was right there was a distant kind of satisfaction there. “What is it with you and
secret panels?” she asked, after he had gone straight to a muddy rug in one corner and peeled it up.

“Well, bear didn’t get at it, did it?” he asked, and she shrugged.

From a loose floorboard Dell produced a series of metal sheets about the size of index cards,
punched with tiny and complicated sets of holes. Someone asked him what they were for and he
said they were an override of some kind. Pyro’s attention drifted.

When she tuned back in again, she had wandered outside. Something scrambled through the
branches, fast and fleet, but she lost it at once. Searching yielded nothing but a bedraggled nest
under the eaves of the cabin, one that looked like it had held life recently but now sat half-torn
from its foundations, hanging limply. It might have been a raccoon’s work, she had seen that
happen at home before. She moved toward it, curious, and a high little sound at her feet made her
freeze.

She had nearly stepped on a tiny bird. It was only half-feathered and sat huddled in the tall grass
that grew by the base of the cabin, and she thought it was larger than it was until she discovered
what she thought was part of its body was another nestling, lying motionless with a broken neck
beside it. Nearby she spotted the dried shells of the eggs the birds had undoubtably hatched from,
cream-colored with brown spotting. House sparrows.

The chick made another pitiful sound, gaping its beak to be fed—it couldn’t be much older than a
week. She dug through her memory, sure that somewhere, at some point, she had read about what
to do with a chick. Was she supposed to pick it up? What if she hurt it? Was its mother around
somewhere? Probably not, if the ruined nest was anything to go by.

She stayed still for a while, chewing her lip. She shouldn’t take it, probably, even if the mother was
gone. She didn’t know how to raise a chick, and nature was red in tooth and claw, and all that. And
she almost turned and left it there, except that the same scrabbling movement she had seen before
caught her eye again. When she turned her head she found herself exchanging stares with the beady
eyes of a raccoon crouched in the bushes.

The chick peeped again, and that was all she could take. As gently as she could she scooped it into
her hand, brushing the dirt from it. “Hey,” she said to it as it flopped on her hand, mouth still wide.
Its eyes were open, and it seemed alert. “What happened to you?”

“What’s that?” came Scout’s voice, sticking his head out of the cabin. His eyebrows shot up as
Pyro tilted her hand enough to show him the bird. “You robbing nests?”

“She needed help,” Pyro said, defensively. “The nest is ruined. And there’s a raccoon over there.”

“Okay, okay,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, but what are you gonna do with it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking down at the whimpering chick, and then at its unlucky nestmate.
“I just don’t want it to die.”

Finding the bird derailed everything. In the back of her head Pyro knew disabling the robots was a
lot more important than helping a sparrow chick, but she was ready to throw a fit over it anyway.
Pauling was confused, and Scout began rambling off a story about a time one of his brothers tried
to raise a baby bird and it got eaten by their cat, which was unhelpful. Dell stroked the chick’s back
and nodded his approval to her with a kind of smile she hadn’t seen on him in a long time before
getting back to his work. But it was Heavy who gently took it from her hands and examined it with
a careful eye. “I have once raised a starling,” he said. “Some years ago, after taking BLU job.
Medic helped then. He will help again now.”

This was how Pyro teleported back to New Mexico alone, nearly a thousand miles from the
Chippewa woods, holding the calling sparrow to her chest. The rest of the team sprang to attention,
instantly on high alert until she explained. Demo thought this was hilarious. Giordano said
something in French and went to take her place, leaving her with Demo, Soldier, Spy (now Sniper
once more), and of course, Medic.

“Heavy said you know about baby birds,” she said, presenting him with the chick. He scoffed.

“I have been raising doves by hand since I was thirteen,” he said, neatly plucking the chick from
her hands. “And a range of parrots, corvids, chickens, to say nothing of softbills. It is a house
sparrow? It would make better hawk food. They are invasive here!”

“Give her back,” Pyro snapped, but Medic waved her off.
“I did not say I would not help,” he said, and that was that.

The absurdity did not end when they emerged from the complex into the hot desert day, piling into
a van that was now much less crowded. Pyro still sat in the very back with the chick in her lap,
hoping it would not overheat as they sped off to the nearest town for supplies. It filled the van with
cheeping, and in short order Demo began to cheep back to it. Soldier’s attempts to translate were
possibly sincere, and Medic went off on lectures about bird care every third minute. Sniper,
driving, was the only one who did not involve himself. She thought at first it was probably because
she was going to be permanently on his shit list for her allegiance to Dell. He surprised her, though.
“What’ll you name it, then?” he asked as they neared the town.

“Uh,” said Pyro.

“That’s a stupid name,” said Demo, and laughed uproariously.

After that it was a bombardment of name suggestions while they got the necessary supplies. Demo
kept coming up with the longest, most Scottish names imaginable. Soldier barked out nouns at
regular intervals. Sniper had his heart set on “Dolly,” and Medic was very stern about the fact that
most orphaned nestlings did not survive, and naming it was unwise and amateurish.

In short order they had acquired things for the chick, and clean clothes for her as well—-she had
forgotten the state she was in and scared an elderly store clerk half to death. Rather than leave the
bird in the car or drive back several hours to the safe house, Pyro opted for the town’s lone, shabby
motel. In the room, safe in its new cardboard box, the chick greedily devoured the wet cat food
presented to it, and immediately fouled its paper towels. Medic said this was a good sign.

She was sitting on the bed and watching it when the other four set up to head back to the
compound. “It is old enough to leave for an hour or two,” Medic observed, but she shook her head.

“I’m staying.”

He shrugged and left. Sniper and Soldier followed. Demo dallied at the threshold. “You alright
then, lass?” he asked, half-shutting the door. “Feel awful leaving you on your own after all that’s
happened today.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, reaching into the box to nudge the bird ever so little. “I’m not alone.”

The chick needed to be fed every forty-five minutes. Pyro found the room’s alarm clock and set it
before going for a shower. Her wounds were closed, but dried blood and sweat were still plastered
to her skin, especially around the spot where the immortality machine clung to her like a tick. It felt
good to be clean again. Tobias’s dog tags were still around her neck, and she tried polishing them.
Nothing would get the charred bits out of the embossed letters, but she did all she could.

The mirror had fogged over when she emerged, and the first thing she did was regard it with
suspicion. Her blurred image watched her. A swipe of her hand cleared away a swath of clean
glass, and she caught sight of herself: uncertain, bedraggled, but still alive.

The alarm blared, and Pyro went to feed the chick.

The next few hours passed in a cycle of setting the alarm and filling the time, waiting for the team
to come and find her. She spent a lot of it staring at nothing. Sometimes she watched the bird.
Once fed it would settle into its towels and drowse or burble to itself. At some point she found her
Zippo and returned to her old, worn habit of snapping it open and shut, open, shut, on, off, letting
her brain fall into the hypnotic rhythm. The chick startled the first time she did it, but after a few
minutes of this it accepted the sound as nonthreatening and went back to sleep.

When the door opened, hours later, she had been trying to sleep herself. Light spilled over her and
the chick’s box, which she had moved to a chair at the bedside. Blinking in the half-dark, she
clicked on the lamp.

It was Dell. He looked tired but in one piece, and beyond him she caught a glimpse of the other
mercenaries in conversation. “Hey,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

She sat up. “Did it work?”

A nod. “Had to get a little creative, but, yeah. Just a hell of a lot of scrap now. Pauling and the
spies are working on how to shut down the rest of the place, but that was the worst of it.” His gaze
wandered to the box, where the sparrow had begun to peep again. “How’s your friend?”

“I think she’s okay,” she said as Dell circled around to take a look at it. He settled down on the bed
beside her and leaned forward enough to watch the bird beg to be fed. Pyro shook herself and
peeled open the cat food container again. “Medic says if she lasts the night, she’ll probably make
it.”

“Good. That’s good.”

She fed the chick, slow and careful, like Medic had shown her. It was so delicate that she wondered
how it had survived the fall from its nest. Stubborn, she thought. Will to live. “He called it an
invasive species,” she said. “Said it wasn’t worth saving.”

“That’s just Medic,” Dell said with a shake of his head. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know.”

“Bothers you though, huh?”

Pyro did not answer. She pulled the plastic straw she used to feed the chick back. The chick settled
in its makeshift nest, content.

“Dell,” Pyro said, “she’s gone.”

In the span of seconds that passed before he spoke, Pyro watched the straw begin to tremble in her
hand. She put it down on the bedside table just before her shoulders started shaking, far out of her
control. An ugly sound crackled through her lungs as she tried to catch her breath, and she pressed
her fists against her eyes. “She’s gone. I’ve been trying to find her for hours. I’ve always been able
to find her if I look long enough. She isn’t there anymore. Alice is gone.”

Dell made a soft, grieved sound. “I thought she might be,” he said. “The way you were acting. I
thought so.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Pyro said, pulling her hands away. “She wanted to protect us,
protect me, and I—it’s not fair. It’s not fair.” Inhaling, her breath stuttered and fought her again.
She bent double under the weight, and at the same time thought she might fly away into nothing.
“It’s not fair.”
Dell sat quietly, a small comfort in his presence. When she began to cry he was kind enough not to
fuss, just stay at her side: a reminder that at least she was not alone. “What do I do?” she said when
she could speak again, when her voice only hitched on every other breath. “What am I supposed to
do now?”

The alarm she had forgotten was still set went off as she said it, drowning out the last few words.
Rattled, she scrambled to silence it, though her frustration when her trembling fingers fumbled with
the switch brought fresh tears to her eyes.

When she turned back to Dell, it was in time to see him gingerly scoop the baby bird up from its
box. He peered down at its fragile body for a moment, and then held it out to her. “I’ll tell you
what you’ll do,” he said. “You’ll take care of this little girl. I think Alice would like that.”

Pyro swallowed. She looked from the chick to Dell and back again, and at his urging she took it in
her cupped hands. It was warm, almost hot, and she could feel the steady thrum of its heart against
her skin. It looked up at her with its wide, dark eyes, an invasive species, an uninvited intruder.

It sneezed, blinked twice, and settled down in her palms with closed eyes.

“Okay,” Pyro said, in a voice that sounded like Alice’s. “Okay,” she said again, and this time it was
her own voice, uncertain, bedraggled—but still alive.
 Epilogue: Fair Winds

I will read ashes for you, if you ask me.

I will look in the fire and tell you from the gray lashes
And out of the red and black tongues and stripes,
I will tell how fire comes
And how fire runs far as the sea.

— Carl Sandberg, “Fire Pages.”

 I. The Administrator

“It doesn’t look any different,” Pyro said, scratching at an insect bite that had manifested on her
neck some time in the last thirty minutes. The bugs were taking advantage of the heat of coming
summer, even in the barrens of the Badlands. She brushed aside another winged thing hovering
around her ear and let her eyes ramble over the early-afternoon shadows that dressed the high
canyon walls. They painted the red rock a purple-brown, and swallowed up most of the vicious
shape of TFI’s protruding front. It was her first time back since she and the others had rushed the
baby sparrow off toward the town, almost a month ago. She did not want to be back. “I mean,
you’re sure it’s shut down, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Miss Pauling. At her side, Giordano nodded. “We made sure of it, and her
failsafes have been neutralized.”

“Does neutralized mean killed?”

In answer, Pauling made a vague wiggle with her hand. “All of the failsafes we could locate, that
is,” said Giordano, rubbing at the permanent five’o’clock shadow that haunted his jaw. “If we are
very lucky, we got the ones that will affect our lives. That leaves only these remains.”

Pyro blew the air out through her mouth. “I don’t see why you can’t ask Demo.”

“I’m going to, but later, after your part,” Pauling said. “Collapsing it is important, but I don’t want
there to be anything left to find.”

“I don’t know if I can do it as well anymore. I’m not even sure I did it that well in the first place. I
was really young when I learned how to do it.”

“Pyro—”

“April.”

Pauling checked herself. She looked younger than April thought she should, somehow, and maybe
it was just the effect of her no longer being someone April feared. Giordano, at her side, was
unchanged, and April wondered what she looked like to the two of them. Different? The same?
Worse, better, nothing at all? “Yes,” Pauling said. “Sorry. April. Look, out of those fires you
started? Four years ago? Only two of them were even determined to be arsons. I know, I checked.
That’s out of sixteen. And thirteen of those places burned down entirely—they just could not put
them out. When you start a fire and you want it to burn, it will burn. Honestly, if you told me you
somehow went back in time and caused the Great Chicago Fire, I’d believe you.”

April tilted her head to one side, mouth quirking in a grin despite herself. “No. Wish I’d seen it,
though. But, uh, I did cause the Bellflower Street fire back in Boston. ‘64. That one was a pretty big
deal.”

“I knew it!” Pauling said, lighting up, and Giordano cleared his throat.

“Ladies, please,” he said. “No matter how adept Kingbird may be at arson, this will take us a great
deal of time. I for one would prefer to start sooner rather than later.”

He was right, as Giordano tended to be. The amount of fuel alone they needed to ensure TFI and
everything in it burned to nothing took the better part of a week to acquire and over two days to
distribute, though to April’s relief she learned that Demo had in fact managed to collapse a large
section of the underground portion so severely that it would not need burning. It was boring work,
mostly, just making sure all the right kindling was in the right places and that there was enough of
it. She had new blisters on her hands before the end of it.

She realized early on there was one area both she and Pauling were avoiding, though it was not
somewhere they could afford to ignore forever: the hallway April and Jeremiah had found their
way to, and one specific door within it. When she finally forced herself to go and drag another set
of wooden pallets out to it, she was surprised to find Pauling already there. She didn’t seem to
notice April, which was out of character to say the least, especially since the echoes of her boots
clattered down the cement halls and the pallet scraped angrily along the cement floor. She was
examining what was a dark stain on the ground outside of that one specific door. April wondered
whose blood it had been as she closed the distance between them. Pauling gave no sign of seeing
her, even when she was practically on top of her. April cleared her throat. “Do you want me to do
this room?”

“Oh, um,” Pauling said, and hurried to her feet. She was in filthy jeans that were too long for her
and a T-shirt April thought belonged to Jeremiah. Her hair was pulled back into a kind of bobbed
ponytail that had been thinking about giving up for the past several hours, and as she stood she
worried at her thumbnail with her teeth. In this state it was difficult for April to come to terms with
the idea she had ever been intimidated by her at all. “I mean. Well. I don’t really …”

“Is she still in there?”

“Yes,” Pauling said in a tiny voice.

“Do you want me to deal with it?”

Pauling shook her head, and her hands tightened into fists. “No. No, I need to see her one last
time.”

The tell-tale stench of a dead body hit April as she opened the door, but with less intensity than
when the bunker’s blast door had opened back in the Chippewa. The drier air here, maybe. It was
comforting in its own surreal way, a confirmation that the Administrator was still, in fact, dead.
The cement floor was still dyed dark in patches from both her and Jeremiah’s blood.

Alice’s blood.

April ran a hand back through her hair and pushed into the room.

The Administrator had not moved from her wheelchair. She just looked more dead. April had
barely reached the switchboard when Pauling caught up with her, putting herself between corpse
and mercenary. When she took the dead woman’s withered hand, April pulled back to give her
room, and after a moment’s thought turned her back. Probably she was an unwelcome third wheel
in whatever strange and secret feelings brewed in Pauling’s head, here with her murdered boss. She
looked at the blood stains instead, until she couldn’t look at them anymore without the tightness in
her chest becoming unbearable.

Pauling said, “Do you want to hear something crazy?”

“Mm.”

“I was jealous of you,” she said, a bewildering enough statement to make April turn. Pauling still
stood with her back to her, looking down at the body. “When Helen asked you to be her assistant, I
mean. That’s—that’s my job. I was her only assistant, ever, she never had another one.” The little
laugh that followed was somehow chiding, self-conscious. “She was going to kill me, and all I
could think about was how unfair it was she wanted anyone else to be her assistant.”

April shifted her weight from foot to foot, her face exploring an array of different and incorrect
expressions as she tried to find a reaction that felt right. “I wanted to ask something,” she said
instead. “Did you know her plan? With you?”

The effort it took Pauling to shake her head could have toppled a mountain as she turned to face
her. “No. Not all of it, not until the very end. I knew she was doing something with looking-glass
syndrome, that’s why you and Dell became so important. I was a guinea pig for the Elysium
compound for a while but I was never told why. But I didn’t know the extent, not even exactly
what she was doing with me. Not until she asked me to kill her.”

“And you did.”

Pauling’s smile spread frail and faint across her face. “Yes.”

“What did—” April stopped, teeth clamping onto her lip. She asked it anyway. “Why? I mean, not
just that. You said your job was to do anything she told you to do. You would have killed Jeremiah
for her. Just—why?”

The silence that stretched between the two of them wound over and into itself, here in this room
where the deaths of three separate women had permeated the very ground. Pauling laughed and it
shuddered. “Why did you do everything you did for Dell?”

The weight of the question physically pushed April back. She leaned away from it, unguarded and
startled. Pauling watched her now from behind her cat’s-eye glasses with that piercing green gaze,
waiting.

“He saved my life,” April said, and Pauling lifted one eyebrow. “What? He did. Over and over.”

“Sure,” Pauling said, “but is that really all? Hasn’t Jeremy saved your life quite a few times too by
this point?”

The worst of Pauling was that she rarely said anything untrue, or at least anything inaccurate. She
was a person of facts, and faced with this one April struggled to recover from it. She was quiet for
so long that Pauling gave that little laugh again. “It’s just that I kind of think you and I are alike in
some ways,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry. It’s none of my business, really. We should get
back to work.”

“Yeah,” said April.

 II. June

The September air in Spokane could not make up its mind. It was too hot in the sun, too cold in the
shadows, even at one in the afternoon. The only compromise was to open a window, except in
Henri Kitzis’s makeshift examination room, the only window was unopenable. Even this could
have been defeated by the right clothes, but as April was down to sweatpants and a sports bra as she
allowed Kitzis to examine her side, she was at the mercy of the atmosphere.

“The discoloration is concerning,” he told her, just like he had at every other examination he had
performed since the immortality machine had been pried from her side a few weeks after TFI had
burned to the ground. Shivering, she glanced down at how his gloved hands gingerly probed the
broad swath of bruise-colored skin where her body had healed around the device. “Can you feel it
when I do this?” he asked, pressing against the spot.

“No, it’s still numb. Does yours do that?”

“It does not,” said Kitzis. As he straightened up, the small bulge beneath his shoulder blades
disappeared from view: the machine they had taken from the forest. The motion was smooth and
untroubled. The immortality machine had done wonders for Kitzis. He looked better now than she
ever remembered seeing him, even on the field, his cane discarded and color in his face. “But I had
the benefit of a slow and careful implantation process, as opposed to outright dying before having it
shoved into me.”

April flapped a hand at him. “Yeah, I’m a zombie, I know.”

“I would use the term ‘medical miracle,” said Kitzis, pulling off his gloves with the same smart
motion she had seen the BLU medic do a hundred times. “Your will to live is remarkable.”

“You told Alice that, too.”

He paused, and the surprise was evident on his face. April watched it for a moment before finding
her shirt and pulling it back on. “Yes,” he said. “I did. I don’t suppose that she has—?”

“No,” said April.

The knock on the door came before he could answer. She sagged back in the folding chair as Kitzis
went to answer it.

It was, of course, Char. In the way of teenagers she already looked different from how April
remembered her back in the spring: taller, maybe a little more filled-out. Her hair was shorter,
anyway. “Hey,” she said, poking her head in. “Phone call. For April,” she added, smiling as she
caught April’s eye. “Can you, like, ask that guy how he always knows where people are? It’s
creepy.”

“How did you know I was here?” April said into the receiver.

“I hid a tracker in your teeth whilst you slept,” came the sardonic reply. April rolled her eyes,
leaning against the cool wall of the tiny telephone room. “You really must see a dentist with all of
that sugar you consume, by the way. It is horrifying in there.”

This could only be answered in the Jeremiah fashion: “Go to hell, Gio.”

Across the line, Giordano chuckled. “Yes, yes. How are you doing, then? Miss Charlotte seemed
unsure if you would be able to come to the phone or not.”

“I’m fine. Not really any different. Numb side, bad leg. I don’t know. How’s J?”

It was not a question she would have normally asked, except she had not seen hide nor hair of
Jeremiah since he found out Alice was gone. April had not been up to much of anything after that,
and even when he had come to see her about it, she had practically ignored him. Talking to anyone
but the sparrow had, at the time, been an impossibility. Even Dell had received silences and cold
shoulders for almost a month.

In the pause that came after her question April could hear snatches of Giordano’s surroundings,
wherever he was: the buzz of distant traffic, and somewhere the soft chatter of television or radio.
When they had spoken the month before he had been in New York, taking care of yet more loose
ends that came with TFI’s demise. “He is keeping busy,” Giordano said. “Very much throwing
himself into establishing his post-war life. I hear things are becoming quite serious between
himself and Pauling.”

“What, they weren’t already? After the near-death thing?”

A gentle laugh. “By the way. I did receive the package,” he said. “Your folder. I am glad you still
had it. Ensuring you continue to stay out of prison would have been a good deal more difficult
without it.”

“Oh,” April said. “I thought TFI dealt with that when I was hired.”

“It did, but Pauling and I continue to find more and more of the old woman’s failsafes. We all quite
narrowly avoided becoming prominent members on several most-wanted lists, among other
things.”

“Fun.”

“Quite.”

“Why the call, then?”

That silence again. April waited, brow creasing further with each passing second. She would have
thought the line had gone dead, save for that soft background noise.

“I made a stop in Pennsylvania after receiving the folder,” he said. “A woman by the name of June
Wagner took you in for a number of years in your youth, I believe.”

April felt her face quirk in confusion. “June? Yeah, why?”

“I am uncertain if this is good or bad news, to you,” said Giordano, “but June is no longer with us.”

Pennsylvania in September was nothing short of handsome. The countryside lounged in a suite of
fall colors, and when April stepped off the bus that had carried her from the airport in Harrisburg to
tiny Pekanoe, her boot sunk into a light dusting of snow.

She knew this stop intimately, and at first after the bus pulled away she could not help but stand
and stare at what it stood beside. The Pekanoe Community Library did not seem to notice her
gawking, its chunky brickwork nestled sleepily in on itself, just how she remembered. The huge,
tarnished statue of Mother Goose, a bonneted bird whose lovingly molded feathers she had touched
so many times on her way inside, gave her a kindly look from her post just outside the doors. It
was muscle memory that brought her up the gentle ramp in front of the statue, and took her fingers
within stroking distance of its beak—at the last moment, she pulled her hand away.

“Brought low by another bird, I see,” called a voice, and April was pulled from her memories by
the bizarre sight of Giordano in her hometown. He had just stepped from the library, dressed finely
as ever. “I thought your name was Kingbird, yet you keep being bowled over by the lesser avians
—first a sparrow and now a goose.” He looked up at the benevolent statue. “Whatever became of
your foundling, anyway? Did it survive?”

“Yeah,” April said. “She’s doing really well. Her name is Nishiime, my grandparents are taking
care of her. Medic said she can’t go back to the wild, but she seems happy.”

“Fitting,” Giordano mused, and did not explain.

April glanced back up at the statue. “Want to hear something stupid?” she said. “I practically lived
in this library as a kid. I always really liked this statue. For a second I got scared she’d know I can’t
read anymore.”

Rather than the laugh she’d expected, Giordano made a contemplative sort of sound somewhere in
his throat. “I am sure many of her fans cannot read for themselves,” he said. “I don’t think she
would begrudge you it. Come. Little sense standing in the cold.”

Giordano had a car, a dull little gray number that April’s eyes tried to slide off of more than once
on their approach out of sheer disinterest. She had no doubt this was an intentional effect, given his
work. The interior was more interesting by virtue of being warm with the mid-morning sun, and
she tugged off her scarf after throwing her luggage in the back.

Out the window, April watched her childhood town display itself to her. Pekanoe had never been a
great proponent of change, too small and poor to bother on the whole. So it was that she looked out
over streets that were almost the same as the ones in her memories, changed only by trees that had
aged the fifteen-odd years she’d been gone, and newer cars in streets and driveways. They even
passed the very building that had drawn her in on her first days here, the one that had caught fire.
There were no signs of damage now, renewed and refurbished into a furniture store.

When they reached the fire station, it too was unchanged. The red-white brick looked as tired as
ever, and even illiterate she could tell the faded words over its garage doors could not have been
read by anyone. A burst of clarity blessed her, though whether it was just memory that let her
firmly pick out the words FIRE DEPARTMENT in stone across the front or not was beyond her.

Two of the garage doors were propped open, and a truck sat halfway out of one. The truck was a
style she had never seen before, shiny red and shaped differently from the way she remembered
them. It was impressive, April thought. Alice would have liked it, even with her opinion on
firefighters.

“They are expecting you,” Giordano said as he put the car into park. “I hope you do not mind.
Given what you told me, it seemed prudent to give some warning.”
“Did … I mean, do they know who I am? I knew some of the guys who worked there, but …”

“There are not many children who are given the run of a fire station,” Giordano said, and that was
all.

It was rare that April thought much of her scars. They were there, they were part of her, there was
nothing to be done about them. As she stepped out onto the crumbling sidewalk the wind started up
again, and she could not help but be aware of the difference in temperature on her face. The scars
were not numb in the same way the spot on her side was, but the burned tissue was deadened in its
own fashion. The mass of twisted skin felt like it was glued to her face, more now than it had since
she’d first gotten it.

A building full of firefighters, some who might remember her—who would probably remember her
only for the fires she started, the arsons that had made June disown her—and her with half of her
face burned off.

“God,” she muttered, pressing her fist against the cheek that could still heat up in response to her
embarrassment.

In time she allowed Giordano to usher her toward the firehouse. On their way she glimpsed a small
gaggle of men inside the garage, doing some kind of drill, and again she was fourteen and raptly
watching the speed with which they donned their gear. June had times with the best of them. She
had always been kind of proud of that, knowing her caretaker was good at what she did.

June was gone.

The thought locked its jaws around her neck in a way it had not yet done, though she had been
waiting for it. It left her frozen to the driveway, picking through the pieces of her that had come
loose with the knowledge of June’s death. Giordano had not known if it would be good news or
bad, to April. April didn’t know either.

“Morning!” Giordano called to the group when they seemed to come to a halt, some of them
looking curiously over the two newcomers. He dropped his usual European affect, instead opting
for something very casual, very American. “Name’s Jeff Russell, I called a while ago? I’m
managing June Wagner’s estate. This is April Kingbird, she’s the executor of Ms. Wagner’s will.”

“Thought Wagner didn’t have a will,” said one of the men, which Giordano immediately began to
smooth over with his brand of double-talk. April ignored him, looking over the faces of each of the
firefighters and wondering if she would even recognize any of them. When one of them came up to
her, it was not from the drill group, but behind. She got a sharp tap on the shoulder and flinched,
turning to see a skinny, red-haired man with glasses and a crooked nose. “April?” he said, looking
her over with a kind of bewilderment. “That’s what he said, right? April Kingbird?”

“Oh my God,” April said, staring. “Mr. Painter?”

“Phil,” he said with a half-cocked grin that she remembered, always quick to bloom and quicker
when April badgered him with questions about engines and mechanics. “Phil’s fine. Look at you,
kid, all grown up. Didn’t ever think I’d see you again. How are ya?”

Of the people she remembered from the firehouse, only Phil and another man by the name of Luke
remained. The others had all quit or retired or moved away, and there was a certain sort of
bittersweetness when she realized June was the only one of them to have died. “We didn’t exactly
keep in touch,” she said as she sank over the bar top in the firehouse kitchen. That was new. The
last time she had been here the kitchen was dominated by a large metal table, riddled with dings
and scratches. There was a beer in her hands that she had accepted when it was presented to her,
though she was not sure if she wanted to drink it. “I didn’t even know she died until a few days
ago. I didn’t know she was sick.”

“Yeah,” Phil said, and Luke nodded too. Luke was a soft-spoken man who reminded her of a timid,
smaller version of Heavy, and who had always had time to entertain her endless questions. “That
was June for you. We didn’t know she had the cancer until she started coughing up blood one
night.”

“She was mad,” Luke said. “She always wanted to go out in a fire, doing something. Boy, she was
mad.”

April nodded, fiddling with the bottlecap from her beer. Phil reached out and knocked his fist
against her arm. “So you know I gotta ask,” he said when she looked up. “Those burns. That
wasn’t the hardware store, was it?”

“No,” she said. “These were a couple years ago.”

“Ahh. Wasn’t sure. Sorry, just, hadta ask.”

“Always thought she handled you wrong about that,” Luke said in his quiet voice. “You needed
help, not kicked out.”

April shrugged. Different responses darted back and forth on her tongue: no, that was for the best;
I don’t know if I could have been helped then; I knew what would happen when I set the fire. But
none of them seemed worth the trouble of saying, so she just drank her beer instead. “Was it bad?”
she said instead. “At the end, I mean?”

Phil and Luke exchanged glances. “Didn’t see her much,” Phil said.

“I did,” said Luke. “I saw her maybe a week before it got her. It wasn’t great.”

“Did she ever …” The aftertaste of beer on her tongue soured. She winced, licking at her lips to try
and clear it away. It did not help, so she sallied for anyway: “Did she ever talk about me?”

Their silence told her everything she needed to hear. She tried for a smile and almost got there.
“Yeah,” she said, “I kind of figured.”

“It’s not that,” said Luke. “She talked about you all the time.”

Halfway through another pull at her drink, April almost choked on it. In the intervening coughing
fit, Phil pushed some napkins in her direction and nodded. “I dunno if we ever went more than a
month or two without hearing your name,” he said. “I mean, you know June. It wasn’t always
flattering—usually wasn’t, actually. But she was just kind of like that. Never let anyone see what
she was really thinking.”

“But she wouldn’t have kept talking about you if she didn’t think about you,” added Luke.

It was more than she had been ready for. A napkin fell prey to her clenching fingers, ragged nails
scoring the cheap fibers. There was a scuff of something green on the bartop and she focused her
attention on it, gathering it all as close to one point as possible to keep it in check.
“I wish I’d come back sooner,” she said once the messy strands of herself managed to knot
themselves into something stable. “Could you tell me about her?”

“Shit,” Phil said with a laugh, “where to start?”

An hour passed, nothing but anecdotes of June Wagner’s strange life. She fought fires for over
twenty years, had developed a taste for chewing tobacco late in life, and had her name carved in
three separate bar stools at the town’s watering hole. Phil related the story of the lengths she had
gone to to ensure the man that had pushed April down the fireman’s pole was fired, and not merely
fired but run out of town entirely, a campaign that had gone on completely under April’s nose.
Luke had tales of June’s younger exploits, having grown up with her: “She was always up to
something weird, always reading some weird book, getting into fights. Worst delinquent in town.”

It was a kind of wake, April realized partway through, story after story of this woman April had
only known for a few years, and she was grateful for the chance to attend. She had finished her
beer and was halfway through another when she finally asked the question that had been hanging
over her. “Where is she buried?”

“Isn’t,” said Phil. “Got cremated.” At April’s incredulous look, he nodded. “Yup. Said she owed
the fire one after all this time.”

And despite herself April barked a laugh, eyebrows jumping. “She—! God. Of course she did.
That’s exactly like her.”

“We got the ashes here, if you wanted to see them,” Phil said. “Funeral home didn’t want to keep
them, wasn’t sure what to do with them since she didn’t have any family left. So we took them.”

April put her head to one side. “So what—”

She was interrupted by Luke’s sudden laugh. Both she and Phil looked at him in startle, and for a
moment he just shook his head, grinning. “Sorry,” he said, “just, June used to do that! The head-tilt
thing you just did. Any time she thought someone said something stupid, exactly like that, the
whole time I knew her.”

Phil’s eyes darted to April and a slow grin spread across his face, too. He bobbed his head in an
affirming nod. “Really?” April said, now very conscious of the angle of her neck. “I guess I got it
from her.”

“You must’ve, I’ve never seen anyone else do that,” said Phil. “Shit, we’re sitting here saying June
didn’t have any family, but you sure as hell were her kid.”

In true June Wagner fashion, there was nothing special about the urn her ashes were stored in. It
was a simple cherrywood box, lacking any kind of flair or finish. The only thing even indicating it
contained remains was her name on the side, hand-carved by one of the firefighters, along with the
dates of her birth and death. She had been fifty-four.

Now the box sat in April’s lap, and she stared at it like it might come to life and tell her off for all
her sins at any moment.

They were at the library again, her and Giordano, awaiting a bus that would take April back to the
airport. The weather had warmed up in the two days they were there, with Giordano ensuring
nothing would come back to bite her in terms of paperwork when Phil and Luke made the
executive decision to entrust June’s ashes with April.

“Once she told me the only reason she took me in was because we both had month names,” April
said, like this was very important. It felt like it was, though for the life of her she did not know
why. She shifted where she sat at the base of the statue, craning her neck over her shoulder to find
Giordano. Mostly she caught the bent form of Mother Goose over her, and complicated, swirly
feelings about the concept of mothers rushed over her.

From where he stood examining a small black notebook, Giordano made a contemplative noise
without lifting his head. “And did you believe her?”

She drew her hands over the wood, feeling the grain and texture. “Yeah. I mean, I was fourteen.”

“I very much doubt that was the only reason,” Giordano said. “Having assumed something of a
parental role myself—one does not take on a child lightly.”

“Jeremiah.”

“And his siblings,” he said. “In whatever small degree one can step into that position, given their
ages.”

April looked back down to the box. In the distance, she could see the bus turn a corner. The box
seemed to grow heavier. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with these,” she said.

“You and Dell managed my ashes quite easily, before your tenure with BLU,” Giordano said, and
she heard the wry smile in his voice. “And I was much less important. I’m sure you will find a
place for them.”
 III. Dell

The sun melted past the horizon, tinted pink with atmosphere. The tall grass that nested throughout
the landscape burned a dry yellow, baked to nothing after the long Texas summer and the start of
an equally long Texas autumn. Shot through the grass, like patches on a khaki jacket, bursts of
stubborn orange flowers and purple thistle waved. The red pickup bucked through another pot
hole, and April turned the air blue with swearing as she narrowly missed banging her head against
the window. “Do they even know how roads are supposed to work in this state?”

“No railing on Texas,” Dell said, though he looked just as rattled as she did even in the driver’s
seat.

“I’ll rail all I want if one of the tires pops again.”

He chuckled. Riding shotgun, April braced her feet up against the glove compartment as defense
against another teeth-slamming jolt in case it came. “This is stupid,” she declared.

“So you’ve said.”

“You have a gravestone out here and everyone thinks I’m the one that put it there.”

“Not everyone. Listen, you just keep your head down and stay in the truck.”

“Wow, I am so glad I came.”

The truck rolled to a gentle halt in one of Bee Cave’s tiny side streets, and Dell put it in park. “So
am I,” he said, making April glower at the easy smile he said it with. “Would be a sight more
nervous coming alone, truth be told. Jensen’s a clever fella, and I didn’t ever fret he’d spill the
secret, but—well. Anyone who’ll help a man fake his death is either going to be your best friend or
someone shady, and he is not the former.”

April huffed out her breath, arms folding over her chest. The engine sighed out a final rumble
before the key was pulled from the ignition. Dell remained where he was, and neither of them said
a word. It was another of those weird silences that had been plaguing them ever since their outset
from her home in Arizona three days ago, when Dell had shown up asking for her company while
he returned to Bee Cave to pick up something he’d left behind. The silences were annoying and
awkward, and a shitty prize after everything they’d gone through. BLU and all of the forces that
had entangled their lives together were gone, and it was like neither one of them now knew what to
say to each other without the impetus of survival.

Months later, Pauling’s question still rang mercilessly in April’s head, echoing without
answer: Why did you do everything you did for Dell?

“I should go with you,” April said.

“No, no. That’s not necessary.”

“You said this guy won’t be happy to see you.”

The way his face changed was like watching someone write out one of those math problems that
described something ineffably complicated: light with water, or the workings of the human eye, or
how it was that after everything that had happened she was still alive. She could not hope to
decipher it.
April focused on the muddy laces of her boots as she tried to parse through yet another silence. Her
head jerked up when he nudged the knuckles of his right hand against her shoulder, bare with her
tank top. A new prosthetic covered the metal beneath, a new hand to replace the damaged one.
“It’ll be fine,” Dell said. “I’m not helpless, y’know?”

The door swung open and closed again before she could concede the point.

Minutes ached by, and April spent them staring at the ceiling. A hot breeze snaked its way in
through the cracked windows.

Her soles scraped the dashboard as she pulled her knees down and opened the glove compartment.
There was a pen in here somewhere, and after some rifling she found a receipt with a blank back
side. She could barely read, but her writing ability was still intact.

When Dell returned some twenty minutes later, exasperated but triumphant with a locked briefcase
beneath his arm, he found the note she left behind:

GONE TO GRAVEYARD. BACK SOON.

The Bee Cave Municipal Cemetery was about fifteen minutes walking from the back alley Dell
had parked at. Twenty, if like April you very meticulously avoided any spots one might easily be
seen. But there weren’t a lot of people to start with, and fewer out by the stout iron bars that
demarcated the graveyard’s boundaries. The entrance was locked, so April hopped the fence and
made a straight line to her destination. There was only one headstone here she cared about. As soon
as the thought itself hit her she found herself again thrust back into the Chippewa forest only a few
months ago, trapped in her body as Alice threw a tantrum.

You don’t care, do you? But now I care and you don’t.

I’d care if I knew them.

She knew none of the people in this cemetery, not even whatever was buried under the marker with
Dell’s name on it, but this time as she made her way past the headstones she tried to find some kind
of compassion for the bodies that lay under her feet.

When she arrived at the stone she sought she did not know what she meant to do once she had
arrived. The flowers on the grave were a surprise, fresh and new. Of course Dell had a life outside
of BLU, before BLU—before her. Of course he would have other people who would miss him,
people who loved him and would bring him flowers. It should not have been the shock that it was.

She had only been there for a minute or two when she heard the slam of the car door, and did not
bother looking up. Either it was Dell and things would be fine, or it was someone who would be
angry with her and she could deal with that when it came to it. There came a rattle of metal and
chain as they found their own way inside the grounds. Then they were a presence and a warmth by
her side, just two people looking down at a grave. “I would’ve been happy to drive you here,” Dell
said, gently chiding. “Scared me ‘til I found your note.”

“Sorry. Did you get your thing?”

“Yeah. No problems.”
“I was wondering,” she said. “What’s really buried in here?”

“Oh, uh. Well, me, technically. An old respawn copy—Gray provided it.” His nose wrinkled. “Was
already dead, I mean.”

“Jesus.”

“You aren’t the one had to look at your own dead body,” he said, but it was far-away. When April
checked to see that he was fine, she found him studying the bouquet. “Wasn’t expecting anyone to
leave me flowers,” he said at last.

She puzzled over this. “Why not?”

He shrugged. “Shoot, beats me. Had some friends, some family nearby I was on alright terms with.
But nobody I’d figure on doing this a year later.” He pressed his knuckles to his mouth, his brow
creased and the lines under his eyes as visible as hers.

She left him with his contemplation. She wasn’t sure if she was welcome in it. Instead she knelt
down and smoothed out some of the more rumpled petals. There was no note or signature on the
thin paper that wrapped the stems, no clue to its origin. Eventually, Dell turned back for the gate.

April followed him back to the truck, heavy with thought. They got back out on the road, and Dell
must have noticed her silence—after all, this time she did not burst into cursing when they hit
another pot hole. “Alright over there?”

“Just,” she said. “Thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you have someone who’ll leave you flowers. I—I didn’t, I didn’t bring anything. When I
came to the funeral, I mean.” She tilted her head up to stare at the roof of the car. “I just sat by the
headstone for hours. Like a creep. So I’m glad you’ve got someone who knows to leave flowers,
somewhere.”

For a long while he drove on, taking them up the path that would send them to Austin and a hotel.
She knew this road, a little frontage road off the highway, because it was the one she had learned
the hockey stadium was situated on. It was another thing to brace herself for, and she watched for
its remains out the window.

Dell said, “I didn’t know you came to the funeral.”

“I thought you were dead. I had to come.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said in a voice she had never heard from him before. It was distant and
bewildered, like he had just found something he was not expecting to find and could not figure out
what to do with it. “You did that. Damn it all, April. You didn’t need to go and do that for my
sake.”

That gobsmacked voice that made her sink into her seat, squelching the strange discomfort it
aroused. “Yes, I did,” she said, still scanning the upcoming road for the stadium. “I couldn’t not. I
don’t … I don’t know what the hell we are. You and me. You keep saving my life and I keep
throwing it away again to help you, and now we don’t have to do it anymore, I guess, so now
everything feels weird. But that’s why I had to, because of whatever it is we are. What are we?”

He looked over at her now, though she did not at first catch it. Instead she was frowning at the
sprawling park coming up on the side of the road, and the pair of oversized metal hockey sticks
rising up out of the ground to criss-cross and act as a gate. She could see a few children playing,
overseen by a pair of adults in conversation. This was where the stadium had been—she recognized
a twisted old tree near to the road. But the hockey stadium’s burned corpse was gone, cleared away
to make a space for something new.

The truck drifted to a halt on the shoulder. April looked back at Dell. His eyes were still fixed on
her, with a face like the one he had worn at the cemetery, but different, lost even further. He gave a
huff of a laugh, a lopsided grin unfurling as he did, and twisted in his seat to better face her—no,
she realized with confusion of her own, to extend his left hand to her. His real hand.

“I don’t know what we are,” he said as she hesitated, watching the proffered hand. “Stuck together,
is my best guess. But if there’s more to it than that—I dunno. Might be. We got the time to find
out, now. If you wanted.”

When she slid her own scarred fingers between his they closed around one another, entwined, stuck
together. His hand was warm, his fingers thick and calloused. April felt her own baffled laugh ebb
out of her, coaxing out a smile that had been a long while in coming.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d like that.”

 IV. Curtis

In the winter they had spent at BLU the year before, Alice’s favorite thing to do was play in the
snow. She liked pretending to be a dragon with the fog that came from her breath, and throwing
snowballs for Shep to go dashing after. Snowballs had been a general favorite, for Alice.

“Do you remember that snowball fight at BLU last year?” April said to Dell from where she was
watching fat, picturesque flakes fall through the vast airport window. “The one Esau got in on?”

The chairs in the waiting area at the airport were a rich, earthy purple, with broad cushions and
geometric shapes, patiently waiting to seat business men and professionals. Dell looked distinctly
out of place among them, wearing the same no-fuss sorts of clothes he always wore. Before she had
spoken he was sitting with his arms behind his head, eyes closed. Now he opened them and
considered the ceiling. “Sort of,” he said. “Pieces.” Another pause, and then, more quietly: “Esau
says he does.”

Even though she had expected a response like this, it still took April a moment to compose herself.
In the end all she got out was a, “Yeah?”

“Did you want to ask him about it?”

She looked back out the window, where a plane was being de-iced. Dell had taken to watching her,
and it made her answer come all the more slowly. “If it’s alright with you,” she said. “I don’t need
to or anything. I was just thinking about it.”

“Your grandparents won’t be here for a while yet, that right?”

“It can wait,” she said, but he was already gone. She could tell, she’d been able to tell the switch
for a while now. Something about the way he held himself.

Esau and April looked at one another, in the same awkward fashion they always seemed to do
when he appeared now. He looked away first, back and down out at the runway where they
awaited the Cadottes’ delayed plane. Here, in North Dakota, winter had come hard and fast,
settling in long before they had arrived in the first week of December. The flight into April’s town
of origin had been met with harsh winds and a sturdy bed of snow. Neither Dell nor April had been
quite prepared for it, acclimated to the southern heat as they were.

“If I remember rightly,” said Esau, “Alice put snow down the back of my shirt. I’m not sure if it
was a fight so much as a decimation.”

The way he said it clearly marked that he meant it as a joke, and April let herself laugh a little.
Laughing around Esau was hard, and finding laughter when thinking of Alice was harder. Easier
now, six months later, but still hard. “Yeah,” she said. “I remember that too.”

“What brought it to mind?”

“Just the snow, I guess.” She nodded at the runway, where men on snow blowers were valiantly
trying to outpace the weather. “I haven’t seen this much since BLU.” And then, hesitantly: “I know
you weren’t around exactly, but … do you remember much about Coldfront? Alaska?”

She snuck another look at him as he contemplated the question, dredging up the few times she had
seen him since TFI. He had all but vanished in the aftermath of the Administrator’s plans
crumbling, reappearing only when summoned. This fact had almost turned into a fight, on her first
visit to Kitzis to have the immortality machine removed. Dell had come along for that, and on top
of the general pain she’d been in afterward (Kitzis refused to use the medigun, after the scare with
Giordano), she’d just been looking for a fight again when she asked him what Esau was doing.
“Not much, really,” he’d said.

Holding her newly-stitched side and generally hating everything, April aimed a sneer at him. It was
hard from the angle, laid out on one of Kitzis’s couches and with Dell carefully sanitizing the
machine at a nearby table. Summer sunlight highlighted every angle of him, but moreover it made
the metal, both of the machine and his hand, glint and beam. It made her think of the chassis.
“Bullshit,” she said. “He’s just playing the good robot now, pretending he isn’t there? What’s he
planning? I bet—”

“Knock it off, April,” Dell said flatly. She had not heard him speak like that since their last fight,
back in Alaska. Her mouth snapped shut, startled into silence even in her pissed-off state. “He’s not
planning anything. I don’t even think he knows what he’s doing.”

“Can’t blame me for being suspicious,” she muttered.

“No,” he said in a sigh. “Suppose I can’t. But he’s—he lost everything. You know? His machines,
his chance at a body—and Alice, too. Now don’t you get your hackles up at me,” he added as April
opened her mouth to interject. “Believe me, I feel crazy myself, taking up for him. But it’s true. He
lost everything, I feel it every day. You’re not the only one who’s hurting.”

“I’m the only one with a chunk out of my side,” she had shot back, but it was toothless, and he did
not dignify it with a response.

Now, back in the Grand Forks airport, where snow pawed haphazardly at the broad windows, Esau
considered his answer. “I suppose it hinges on what you mean by ‘remember,’” he said. “I do
remember some of the same things Dell does, but it’s more as if I were remembering a movie. It
isn’t like how you said Alice felt ownership over some of your memories.”

“Just wondering,” April said. Gradually she pulled back from the window, sinking down into the
cushions of her chair. She made a sound that was not exactly a laugh, but definitely rueful. “I don’t
know how to talk to you anymore.”

“I don’t think I can blame you.”

“I’m surprised you’ll even talk to me.”

“I’ve had,” Esau said, settling back as well, “a lot of time to consider things.”

This was all he would say, though once or twice through the rest of their wait April prodded at him
with varying questions. He did answer one at the end of it, when the flight bearing the Cadottes
was announced as about to touch down. April said, “Do you want to meet them?”

The surprise on his face was as much emotion as she had seen in it since TFI. “They know about
Alice,” she said. “I don’t think you would be too much of a shock for them.”

“Do they know she’s gone?” he asked.

“Yeah. They do.”

“I see,” he said. “I’d be honored.”

The meeting went about as well as could be hoped. There was some confusion about the man that
was now always at April’s side and the fact he was not acting like himself. April did her best to
explain, and to skate around the violence that inevitably surrounded her history, but in the end a lot
of it could still be blamed on “the job.” Esau was nothing but polite.

He excused himself outside as they were waiting on dinner at some fancy place downtown, and
when he returned it was Dell back in front. But he was gone for about five minutes, and she had to
field her grandparents’ questions in the interim. Maude in particular wanted to know if Esau had
anything to do with the fact Dell had vanished, back in the beginning, and April had no idea what
to tell her. In the end she went with the truth, careful to say that things were fine between her and
Esau now.

Fine was a close-enough word for it, anyway.

Where Esau had been polite, Dell was outright cordial, as he always was when seeing the Cadottes.
April had been able to observe this over the last few months, given their frequent proximity. It
wasn’t like the constant company of Alice, but it was a comfort of its own. And with his return he
too was pried at with questions about Esau. These he deigned not to answer, though again with an
artful kind of Southern charm that her grandparents found delightful. This was a side of him she
wasn’t used to seeing, though she thought she could get used to it. She had already gotten used to
the warm glow in her chest she got whenever her grandparents mentioned how much they liked
him.

They ate, and there was dessert and coffee (and everyone made fun of April for the amount of
sugar in hers, which by now she was used to and gave as good as she got). At the lull in the
conversation when everyone was feeling full and sleepy, she finally put voice to the question she
had been putting off asking since their arrival.

“Where are they buried?”

She felt the air change at once. Dell went still and quiet, very aware, April thought, that he was
now an intruder on a private matter. Gus continued to focus on his after-dinner cigarette,
smoldering gently in his gnarled fingers. Maude smoothed out the napkin in her lap and looked
April in the eye. “It’s called Lake Creek Cemetery,” she said, then paused and looked to Gus. “Isn’t
it? It’s been so long.”

“That’s right,” said Gus in his creaky voice.

“How long?” said April.

“Not since they were buried.”

In the corner of her eye, she saw the surprise pass over Dell’s face. She spoke hers. “Really?”

A nod, from both. Maude said, “Well, it was so far from home. And they already went on their
journey. It’s only their bodies there, now, like old shells. There’s nothing sad about old shells.
Their spirits have gone ahead.”

“I have seen them, twice,” Gus said, and April’s attention shot to him in a heartbeat. Dell’s went as
well. “Your mother first, Mary. A month after, in a dream. She came to me and she asked me
where her baby was. You, April.” He shook his head. “She should have been on her way already.
That’s part of a funeral for us, giving their spirit direction on where to go, but she must have
stopped to look for you. I was afraid, because spirits, they can take people with them without
meaning to. Kids are the most vulnerable to it, and you were so little, and we couldn’t find you.”
He put down the cigarette into the ashtray on the table and reached out to April, taking her hand.
She wrapped her fingers around the cool flesh of his. “So I told her we would find you, but she
couldn’t bring you with her. She needed to go and be with Jean, and Curtis and all our family that
was waiting for her over there.”

April tightened her grip around his hand.

He lifted his head and gave her his lopsided smile, yellow-toothed and fond. “And the second,” he
said. “Five years ago. I saw Curtis, in another dream, all grown up. You look so much like him. He
told me you would be coming by in a while. Just that.”

April and Dell were not sharing a hotel room, but she had come over to his after they had all settled
in for the evening anyway. She was sitting in the stiff chair at the tiny desk and watching the rest
of the room through the mirror hung over it. Her sketchbook lay open in front of her, her pen in
hand, not a new line anywhere on the paper. Dell had produced a book from somewhere and sat
calmly ignoring her, comfortable on the bed.

“Tobias died five years ago,” she said. She said it to the mirror, herself, her not-self. “Five and a
half.”

At the name, Dell had sat up, his book in his lap. From the mirror she could tell once more she was
being watched.

“Yeah?” Dell said.

“The same time Gus said he saw Curtis. He didn’t remember the date but he said it was summer.
Tobias died on July fourth, 1967.” She scratched her pen on the paper without looking at it. “I
checked a couple of months ago. To make sure that was right.”

There was a faint thud as the book was left on the bed, and the whine of springs as Dell shifted.
“Quite a coincidence,” he said.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She twisted around in the chair to face him and found herself regarded by
those quiet blue eyes. “Gus says his dreams have always been right.”

“What do you think about that?”

What do you think about that was an Esau phrase, and it was discomfiting to hear it out of Dell’s
mouth. She tripped over it and was slow in righting herself. “I don’t know,” she said again. “They
talk about dreams and spirits and that kind of thing a lot. It’s a really Ojibwe thing, I guess, I don’t
know if I believe it. Death is—they handle death in a way I’m not used to.”

Dell patted the edge of the mattress, and with this summons she took her sketchbook and pen and
joined him, perching on the corner. “Death’s a strange thing,” he said while she settled. “Affects
people differently. And them being of a whole other culture, well, I’m not surprised.”

“What,” she said, and was too surprised by the rest of the question to stop it before it escaped her,
“do you think happens when we die?” His answer was a laugh. A flash of sour temper lanced
through her. “I’m being serious.”

“No, I know, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. Just it’s one of those questions I don’t know if I got an
answer to.” He ran his hand over his scalp, where a true head of hair was beginning to come in. It
was slow growth, and blond, April had learned with a bewilderment she had been unable to place.
He just didn’t seem like he would be blond. Once she had asked why he was growing it out, and he
had said that some things change a person. This was inarguable, but it still didn’t explain the hair.
“What I think’s gone back on itself a lot, and with everything’s happened over the last couple years
especially.”

“I never thought about it,” April said. “I never used to, I mean. Before.”

“What about now?”

She put down her sketchbook, trying and failing to lean it against the bottom of the bed before
allowing it to fall flat on the ground. She almost went right along with it, and Dell had to catch her
arm to keep her from sliding off. She rebalanced herself, rubbing at the spot where he had touched
her. “I didn’t tell you,” she said. “About what happened after Alice opened the locket. What I saw.”

“While you—?”

“While I was dead. Or at least, dying.”

He waited, and with starts and stops she did her damnedest to thread together the muddle of dream
and memory that had visited her. The longer it went the stupider she felt, and the only thing that
kept her going was the intent look on Dell’s face. That, and:

“It’s in my head all the time these days,” she said. “What Tobias said, ‘you think this is a dream?’.
Because, because—if wasn’t a dream, what was it? I see things. I see all kinds of fucked up shit,
but not like that. Not like that. Whatever it was, it was different, and if it wasn’t a dream and it
wasn’t a hallucination … I asked Kitzis about near-death experiences once. He started talking
about, like, lights in tunnels and seeing your own body. That’s not what happened to me, mostly.
And then I just start thinking about what Tobias said again.”

“Do you think,” said Dell, and trailed off. His brow creased, a fact April did her best to ignore.
“Do you think it was him?”

“I don’t know!” she said, throwing her hands up. “I don’t know anything. Gus says my mom and
brother talked to him in dreams, respawn exists, I was dead for ten minutes and came back anyway.
I might as well be haunted on top of it.”

The radiator kicked on. Dell, maddeningly, said nothing. April clawed at her hair, finding a tangle
and fussing with it for lack of anything else to do with her hands. “You didn’t answer my question,
anyway,” she said. “About after death.”

“Don’t think you’re haunted, for what it’s worth,” he said. She was about to needle him about this
being another sidestep when he went on. “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know about what’s after,
just … wouldn’t have said that ten years ago, tell you that much. But—I don’t know. Things like
what your grandfather said. Like what you said. I guess there must be something that goes
somewhere. The scientist in me is not fond of the idea, but I guess you’d call that a soul.”

What happened next may have started in the sketchbook, still lying flat on the thin carpet. It
seemed to ebb out from between its pages, which April could just see in the corner of her eye. It
was the same sketchbook she had packed up in her suitcase the year before, when she’d gotten in a
truck bound for Kansas, and it was beat up around the edges and had a warped cover where April
had knocked coffee onto it more than once. It began in the sketchbook because it had been Alice’s
sketchbook, too, and so April could see the uneven pages and where Alice’s crayons had gone all
the way to the edges of the paper. April watched as the question between the pages ballooned
outward, shaking itself, testing the air, filling the room until it seemed to physically push her
further into the mattress. Even Dell could feel it, she thought: it was the way he sat at her side in
silence, as if he knew what he said would draw that question out.

April said, “Do you think Alice had a soul?”

In a display of something she could not name, he put his hand on her shoulder. He studied the
carpet and she tried to come to terms with the weight of his arm, heavy, and a comfort.

“Without a doubt,” said Dell.

“I had it right here,” said April, her voice riding the line between distressed and angry. “I got in the
taxi with it. Fuck, did I leave it in the taxi? Esau, did you see my bag when I got out?”

“I have it here,” Esau said in his mild voice, which annoyed her further. It was bad enough that he
did, indeed, have the black plastic bag she was looking for; it was bad enough that he’d taken over
for Dell without notice, and apparently without even knowing why he was in front again. And it
was worse that he had appeared today, right before they were going to visit her family’s graves.
But worst of all was the fact that he felt the need to add, “I don’t want to presume on your
relationship with your grandparents, but please don’t let them hear you talk that way.”

“I’ll fucking say whatever the fuck I want,” she said, grabbing the bag out of his hands and
fumbling to hold both it and the three bouquets in her arms. The distaste in his face was obvious.
Her only answer was to square her shoulders and watch him down over the bundles of carnations
and roses, daring him to say anything more about it. In her hand the bag clung warm and tacky to
her skin.

Esau’s breath rolled out of him, gray exhaust in the gray morning. Behind him were the tracks of
the taxi that had brought them here to the Lake Creek Cemetery and then left, churning the snow
up with the dirt and gravel that led to the gate. To their side, past frail, spindly doors that stood
open to them, the staggered rows of graves waited in winter silence. Muddled footprints betrayed
that they were not the only life venturing into this realm. A trio of bright coats hovered on the far
end of the cemetery, visiting their own memories. The Cadottes had yet to arrive, and were not due
for another thirty minutes. April had wanted the extra time.

Esau rubbed at his eye. “You’re right,” he said. “It is not my place to tell you how to talk. I’m
sorry.”

The sincerity of it startled her. It put her on the back foot, and she was slow in recovering. Her
fingers uncurled from their chokehold on the bag. “It’s fine,” she said.

“No,” he said, “it’s not. I am learning that I’m a control freak. I’d like to be better.” This bluntness,
this honest evaluation of his own behavior, left her again silent. “You’re angry with me,” he said.

Her expression slanted, unsure of what it was trying to do. “I’m not—I mean—not with you. Or
Dell.” She lifted the bag and shook it. “I’m just … I don’t want to do this.”
Esau nodded and she dropped her arm. “Maybe so,” he said. “But I’m sure you would have rather
had Dell here.”

“I … yeah.”

He nodded again, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his puffy coat. With nothing else said,
she turned and walked into the graveyard.

It was Esau’s job to read the tombstones, for while April could have managed it would have taken
her a good deal longer. They moved through the snow with muffled, crunching steps, him reading,
her diverting her thoughts. It was a nice graveyard, at least, with a shoveled path and lovingly
pruned trees. She had never given any thought to where her family was buried before. There had
been two funerals, she learned from Gus and Maude the night before, the one she had attended as a
child and barely remembered, and then another when her extended family discovered the burial
had not at all gone according to their tribal beliefs. It was nice, to know someone had made sure
her family got the best care they could give them.

“Here,” said Esau, after about ten minutes.

They stopped, and sure enough here stood two headstones: a double-sized monument and a smaller
one to their side. An untouched comforter of snow overlaid both the plots and the stones, a few
inches of drift clinging to the stones’ sides. Concentrating, she could pick out the words she was
looking for: KINGBIRD. CADOTTE.

“This doesn’t seem real,” she said, and the snow hushed her voice.

Esau said, “Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head, and stepped between the headstones. Her parents’ marker was in good repair,
with only some lichen and pitting of the stone. From what she could tell, there were no words
minced, no epitaph, just their names and dates they had lived. Only an ornate flourish over them
served as décor. The snow was undisturbed, unvisited, and barely moved at all when she lay their
flowers down.

Curtis’s stone was different. It was similarly plain, but instead of a flourish there was a small
carving of a dolphin breaching the waves. She crouched and brushed her fingers against it before
leaving his bouquet as well. “He loved the ocean,” she said to the question Esau had not asked.
“He wanted to study it. I don’t remember that about him, but Alice did.”

From where she was, she could not get a proper look at Esau’s face. Her left side was to him, and
the taut skin of her burned eyelid played poorly with her peripheral vision. She caught motion, a
nod, and chose not to dwell on it. Instead she found the bag and unwrapped its contents.

“I hope they won’t be mad,” she said, soft enough she did not know if Esau heard her, and wasn’t
sure if she wanted him to anyway. “I don’t know where else to do this.”

The bag clung to its cargo, its thin skin catching on the rough and unfinished edges. It tore when
she pulled it away, leaving only the scrap metal umbrella she had brought all the way from her
haphazard little sculpture workshop in Arizona. It gleamed in the white light that reflected from the
snow, tarnished ribs carefully installed at even intervals under its thin silver canopy. Its pole was a
wrought-iron bar, curling around itself until it terminated in a handle of polished bronze. Esau
made a small noise of awe, and then he was at her side, eyes fixed upon it. For a moment April felt
intruded upon, unsure after all if she wanted to share this thing she had made with anyone; but then
he asked in a soft and humbled voice, “May I see it?”
There was a need she recognized there between the syllables. She let him take it.

He turned it over in his hands, even stripping off his left glove to feel the frigid metal. He held it
for so long that April wondered if she would actually get it back. Yet the thing that had come over
his face when he held it stayed her from asking for it, even though the snow began to soak through
her jeans where she was half-knelt between the graves. “Because she tried to protect me,” she said
at last. “From the rain, and everything else. As much as she could. I engraved her name on the
inside of one of the panels. It’s not very good, but …”

“No,” he said, “it’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know.”

“It is,” he said, forceful. “It’s perfect. It’s … do you—when it was her, at the end, she—she asked
me to take care of you, and the others. She said that is what we are, protectors. I don’t know if you
knew that, when you made this. And I … I don’t know how to be like her. But I promised. I
promised her that I’d try.”

April was halfway to a response, but stopped, frozen amid the frost, as she realized Esau was
crying.

When she said his name he shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” he said for the
second time since they had arrived. “I am so sorry. I couldn’t—I wanted to be here, to see her off.
Dell agreed to it, I just could not seem to tell you this morning. I had to say goodbye.”

April was sure there was more, caught there in his throat, but after the way his voice shattered at
the word goodbye it would not emerge. Instead he shook his head and swiped at his face, where the
tears threatened to stick to his skin with the cold. He handed the umbrella back to her, and she took
it. For good measure, she leaned forward and put her arm around his shoulder, which seemed only
to worsen his structural collapse.

Together, they found a place for Alice’s umbrella between the graves, a tiny shelter for a lost little
sister. Esau added to it a handful of penny candy in a velvet bag, its drawstring tied to the handle.
They said goodbye.

The Cadottes would come in time, and there would be talk and more tears and tired smiles, lives
recollected and shared. Esau would depart before then, leaving Dell to be the quiet observer, the
least affected and most sympathetic. But before all this, before even getting to her feet from
between the graves, April would press her hand against the place where Curtis Youngtree
Kingbird’s name was carved into the stone and say what might have been the closest thing to a
prayer she had ever uttered.

“Take care of her for me.”

 V. Tobias
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Art by Payne

April ran.
One foot, the other, again, again. She could run further these days, her ankle still poorly but able to
stand up to a little more than it could a year ago. She was not fast, but she was stubborn, and that
was all she needed.

April ran, a steady, gentle pace that saw her through the blooms of Arizona that littered the sides of
the back road that led to her home from the highway. Ahead and well to the left of her, Shep
circled and darted with his nose to the ground, breaking away from whatever scent he’d found to
catch up with her only when she got too far. Even in early May, even at six in the morning, the sun
burned down on them, and the western breeze that licked at her tied-back hair was a comfort.

She reached the end of the drive, coming to a clumsy halt just before the asphalt reared up at her.
No cars today. She grabbed Shep by the collar before he could run into the road anyway.

A minute’s breathing, and then it was back around and toward the house.

It was not a long stretch of a run, and on good days she would go up and down the gravel path two
or three times. But the morning was hot and her ankle was irritable. One loop was plenty.

She ran.

Coming up on the house, she was greeted by its half-dozen chimneys and the copse of acacia trees
nearby that thought they owned the place. The blue Bronco sat in the drive, along with the red
pickup that now often made its home here, still and quiet. Her ankle snapped at her as she eased
into a walk, passing the garage and its open door, on top of which had nested the wayward seeds
and leaves of the passing spring. It was cool in the garage for now, with the sun not yet overhead.
Between its east-facing windows and the stacks of metal within, it would become an oven by noon.

Shep shoved ahead of her on the front porch, tail thumping her thigh once before she pulled the
screen door open. The front door already hung wide, letting in the breeze, and the rich, tell-tale
scent of coffee pulled at her, along with fried egg and bread. French toast again. You would not
catch her complaining.

The only other thing that had changed between her departure and her return was that the envelope
was no longer on the little table in the entryway. It had been a substantial envelope with substantial
contents, and now she wished she had hidden it instead of hoping it would go unnoticed.

The kitchen stretched out in front of her, simple but spacious (and with a new, third microwave,
obtained after April discovered the hazards of putting silverware inside). The food smells were a
luscious promise, though she diverted first to the sink for water. Sweat clung to the parts of her that
could still sweat, and her breathing still came hard as her body worked overtime to cool her down.

At the table, balanced on the back two legs of his chair with his bare feet on the table, Dell said,
“Short one today?”

“Yeah.” She threw back lukewarm tap water and shook herself before her eyes settled on him:
already dressed for the day, coffee in one hand and yesterday’s paper in the other. She was still not
sure how she had been signed up to get the newspaper—God knew she couldn’t get more than a
few paragraphs through anything without getting frustrated, even with how much her reading had
improved over the winter—but she suspected Dell and his frequent visits to her home were
involved. He got the paper at his new home in El Paso, after all; she did have a habit of stealing the
crossword section whenever she came to see him. “Did you make bacon?”

“Nope. Pan’s still hot if you want to, though. Hey,” he added, just as she was about to head for the
fridge, and the front feet of his chair smacked the ground. Paper rustled on the table. “Were you
plannin’ on doing anything about this, or were you just gonna leave poor Jeremiah out to dry?”

Without looking she knew what he was now holding. She fetched out the bacon and threw strips on
the pan, on the off-chance ignoring him would make the question go away. This did not work, she
discovered when she turned back around. Dell knew her game too well. Sure enough, there he was,
leaned on the table and holding the envelope up for her to see.

“It’s a joke or something,” she said, and went to get coffee.

Dell’s sigh carried notes of light aggrievance and subdued incredulity. “Most people,” he said, “do
not send wedding invitations as practical jokes.”

“J has a stupid sense of humor.”

“That’s true, but this ain’t part of it.” He waved the envelope at her when she finally sat down
across from him, bearing a stacked plate of French toast and bacon and scrambled eggs. “Look, this
is a pretty big deal. You can’t ignore this stuff. Especially,” he added, pulling the card from the
cream packet, “not with it being three weeks away.”

He slid the card across the table to her, and she eyed it doubtfully as she chewed her breakfast. The
honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Miss Florence Sarah Pauling and Mr.
Jeremiah Adam Owens … “I don’t know,” she said.

His face crinkled. “What’s not to know?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t—I thought I’d get another card or a call or something going ‘never mind,
just kidding, wedding’s off.’” She stabbed her toast with a vengeance. “I didn’t really think it
would get serious.”

Dell pressed his fist to his chin, studying her. He did that sometimes, a thing she had troubled and
confusing feelings about. It could make her feel like a science experiment or a malfunctioning
machine, or it could invoke the thought that he watched her because he wanted to figure out some
secret thing about her—a naturalist observing a wild animal, eager to learn. This morning it just
made her aware of the fact she was sweaty, and uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “I
don’t see the point of even bothering with a wedding, anyway. My parents weren’t married. Who
cares?”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing.”

She ate.

“April,” said Dell.

The toast squirmed under her fork when she stabbed it, bleeding syrup. She had to keep her eyes
there and not on the bloodied figure that stood with his hands in the pockets of his torn varsity
jacket, standing just in one corner of the kitchen like he’d been doing since she got back. After her
first bite he was sitting in a chair that wasn’t there, at Dell’s side. Her will buckled, and even
knowing Dell was still watching her her gaze flit up to the ghost. She could see his face through
the gore and flame, where there lived neither judgement nor anger. He watched her like Dell
watched her, and that was somehow worse.

“He’s back,” she said, and hunched over her plate. “He came back when I got the invitation.”
This at last satisfied him. He put the card down and went back to his coffee. They breakfasted in
silence, and at least the food was good. She ate dutifully, trying to wring enjoyment from the
simple act of eating something good her friend had made. She was just gulping through her glass of
milk when Dell put down his mug and said, “I’m going to do an experiment.”

The glass clattered as she set it down, one eyebrow raised. “Okay.”

“Gonna need your attention. Look here, at me—okay.” He drummed the table with his fingers for a
moment. “Firebug.”

April’s expression curled into something resembling roadkill as her stomach did some unpleasant
gymnastics. “Mean,” she muttered, glancing again at the unchanged figure of the ghost.

“I know, Smoky, I’m sorry,” said Dell. “Didn’t try to hit me this time, though. Pretty good reaction
all things considered.” Dell said. He steepled his fingers in front of him. “You wanna tell me what
you’re seeing? What’s he doing?”

“I don’t want to do this.”

“I don’t blame you,” Dell said, “but I think you oughta. C’mon.”

“He’s just … I don’t know, sitting there.” She waved a hand at the spot to Dell’s right, where the
ghost was not even doing her the dignity of looking at her now, instead gazing out the window.
“He hasn’t been doing anything. He doesn’t talk to me. He’s just around. He looks the same as
always, he looks like he did when he died.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dell said, exhaling, and he had that pity-look in his face again like he got
sometimes whenever she said something about her childhood or her mental state or Alice to him.
She didn’t want it. “But he’s been around since you got the invite, huh.”

“I can’t go back to Boston.”

“No. You can. You don’t want to, but you can.”

“I don’t—”

“Listen here,” said Dell, gentle but brooking no argument. “This thing, this wedding. This ain’t just
some, I don’t know, some party—I think we got to talk about Scout. Jeremiah. Miss Pauling, too,
but you and me both know Jeremiah better. I don’t know how much you remember about him
before what happened at Teufort, but I knew him a couple months before you and me met. That kid
was a wreck. Hid it, did a good job of it. Never figured it was my business, but I could tell. Didn’t
know why ‘til later, but I could tell. Working for BLU—” He paused, brow digging itself into deep
trenches. “I can’t speak for the whole team. But I know they preyed on you when they hired you,
BLU did, and I wasn’t in such a good spot myself when they took me to tell the truth. And
knowing what I know now, about Jeremiah and what happened, that boy was just more easy
pickings for them. I half-figured he’d end up getting killed in an alley between missions. I don’t
know that he wanted to die, but he sure didn’t seem like he cared if he lived. Kind of,” he added,
eyes flickering over her face, “how you were, when you found me.

“And I missed the part where that started changing, but Esau saw it. With a lot of thanks to you, by
the way. I don’t reckon there’s anyone else on the planet could have done it, it had to be you. If
I’m right, mark me, he thinks the same. Now—if it weren’t for the fact he still talks a mile a
minute and makes a general ass of himself at the first opportunity, I would not be able to tell you
that was the same man I met those couple years back. He’s okay now, hell, he’s even happy. He
found someone he’s in love with and he’s happy. You helped him get there.”

Every word he had been saying felt like a tiny needle catching at just the top layer of her skin,
catching just enough to notice, rankling her, but causing no pain. But at this she had to interject,
mouth opening—

The sickening smell of burning hair rushed down her throat. She almost gagged.

“So he’s happy,” Dell said, not noticing. “He’s about to have what, God willing, is gonna be one of
the happiest days of his life here in a couple weeks. And you two are thick as thieves, now, so of
course he wants you to be there for that day. That’s what I want you to think about, if you don’t go,
what that’s gonna mean for him if you aren’t there.” He let his breath out in a slow sigh, and as
April watched it turned to smoke that blustered over the ghost. It swallowed him, sinking in
through his scalded, lacerated skin, nestling in his hair.

“If you won’t go I can’t make you,” said Dell. “But it’s one of those things you can’t take back.
He’s gonna know why you won’t come, and it’ll just be a big reminder of how there’s two people
missing that should have been there, instead of just one.”

The smoke cleared.

“When’s the last time you talked to him, anyway?” Dell said.

It left behind a tall, sad young man, so very young, unharmed, and watching her.

The relationship between Shep and flying could be compared to the relationship between pickles
and chocolate: an unfortunate combination that no one found palatable, and in some cases, was
outright nightmarish. “Never took him on a plane before,” Dell said, trying to push the screaming
dog back down to all fours in the middle of the Logan International Airport. Even in the wide
concourse stuffed with people in midday, Shep was inarguably the current center of attention, and
had been ever since April had unlatched his carrier door. “Lord, boy, settle.”

The panicked barking and howling dropped off for only a moment when Dell succeeded in freeing
himself from Shep’s attentions, resuming at once when the dog took his plight to April. “This is
stupid,” she said for the fourth or fifth time since boarding the plane. So far everything in Boston
was stupid: the change in temperature, the humidity, the people looking with curiosity or
annoyance or suspicion at the dark, burned woman and her large screeching animal in the middle of
a busy airport. “I’m going to take him outside, he’ll piss right here if we wait much longer.”

It was a small mercy that Shep’s traumatic reaction to being loaded into the cargo bay finally
began to taper off as she pulled him along toward the closest door. By the time she found an exit
that had grass on the other side instead of tarmac, he was just panting, interspersed with frequent
yawns. Someone had once told her dogs yawned when they were nervous. She might have been a
dog herself, then, because every time Shep did it she found herself compelled to yawn as well.

The early-afternoon light slept in a languid pool over the grassy spot outside, planted with trees she
didn’t know and weeds she didn’t recognize. A little family sat at a picnic table a ways out,
surrounded by luggage and a trio of howling children: Shep tugged toward them at once, his tail
thrashing like he hadn’t just been having an emotional attack to rival April’s best attempts less than
five minutes ago. She clucked at him and eventually coaxed him into losing interest. There was
lots to smell around here.

The only thing April could smell was the ocean. She could see it from here, sliced-off glimpses of
a vast stretch of water through the complicated animal that was the Logan airport. The salt-smell
rested like damp earth in her nose and lungs, wet, wet, wet. A breeze careened past and through
her, heedless of her existence, and she wanted to be home.

When she went back into the terminal, Jeremiah was there with Dell. He did not even notice her
until she slotted herself adjacent to them between the streams of travelers and said hello. The shock
that painted itself over his entire body was neon. “H—hey!” he said, elbowing through it with a
startled smile. “Holy crap, I thought you weren’t coming!”

She shrugged, ducking her head. Shep had already pushed his way past their luggage to shove his
nose squarely in Jeremiah’s crotch, and the indignity of it seemed to pull him out of his surprise.
“Damn!” he said, ruffling Shep’s ears. “Coulda, I mean, coulda called. Uh, okay! Told Engie here
we’d go get something to eat, you hungry?”

The question trotted neatly past her; she’d had one of her own, but it had gotten stuck in her throat.
She had meant to ask who the man next to him was. Her question vanished when she noticed the
smoke curling up off his shoulders, and she lost track of the rest of the conversation. Neither of the
two men that were actually there tried addressing her again, anyway.

The ghost vanished as they left the airport in Jeremiah’s Porsche, though she kept trying to find
him again despite her best judgement. Dell’s, too. “You alright?” he asked her under his breath,
during a rare moment when Jeremiah was too occupied with cussing out another driver to notice.

The ghost might have been in an alley they just passed, but she turned her attention to the now-
calm Shep instead, who was trying to stand entirely in her lap to look out the window. She shoved
his paws off her thigh and rested her cheek against his fur, not meeting Dell’s eyes. “I’m fine.”

“Mmm.”

The smell of diesel that speared through her senses was not real, she reminded herself.

“I’m fine,” she said, and it was almost true.

She had forgotten they were going to eat until her food was in front of them. The point at which
they had entered the restaurant, an obscurely “ethnic” eatery from what she could tell, escaped her.
So had ordering, though the food in front of her looked delicious. Her attention returned to the
conversation in progress as she dug in. “The rest of the team’s comin’ too,” Jeremiah was saying.
“My best man, that’s Sid, my brother, he already did the real bachelor party thing for me, but I
figured, hey, can do another one with just you maniacs, maybe get some of the crazy out before the
service.”

This got a laugh from Dell, and Jeremiah’s eyes darted in her direction when she did not join in.
She had the distinct idea she had missed a different joke, and all she managed was a half-smile
around her food.

The talk continued without her, though Jeremiah kept making overtures to try and include her.
Without fail these came when she had her mouth full or was distracted by some movement in the
corner of her eye that never turned out to be the ghost. She was feeling the jet lag, anyway. She
didn’t mind being left out.

“Hey,” Jeremiah said, flicking a forgotten bottle cap across the table at her when Dell left for the
bathroom. “Uh. How you been?”

“I’m fine,” she said, automatically, for the third time in an hour. It was not quite as true as it had
been before. True or not, though, it put an abrupt end to the line of questioning. Jeremiah slunk
down in his seat and said nothing more until Dell returned.

Before April knew it they were back at the hotel, watching the Porsche drive off. She had missed
the goodbye. Dell wanted to stretch his legs, and invited her, but her lunch wasn’t sitting right;
instead she buried herself in the sheets of one of the beds and did her best to forget where she was.
He was gone for an hour and a half, and when he got back remarked that it was good for him to get
out to a big city like this once in a while: it made him appreciate home. She told him to shut up and
let her sleep. When she finally did fall unconscious, it was in spite of the choking, wet smell of
river water in her nose.

Jeremiah, of course, had a bachelor party. This was a wedding thing, as April understood it. She
did not know much about weddings; surprising no one, she had never been to one. She had also
never been to a bachelor party. The fact she was going was a surprise to both her and the rest of the
BLU mercenaries. “Just never heard of a lady being along on one of these sorts of things,” Dell
told her as she struggled to find a way to get comfortable in the limousine’s overly plush seats, two
nights after their arrival. “I expect that’s why. They can get kinda raunchy.”

April snorted. “What, like, strip clubs, right? I don’t really care.”

“I ain’t going to a strip club with you maniacs,” Jeremiah interjected. “I know exactly what would
happen. Demo would get all the attention, Soldier’d probably decide strippers are communist,
Heavy’d make some poor girl cry, Medic would dissect the cryin’ girl, Engie would—hell, I dunno
what Engie would do, but I bet him and Snipes an’ Spy would just be real friggin’ sticks in the mud
and I ain’t gonna make April go look at tits bigger than hers. We’re doin’ a bar crawl.”

A general sound of approval echoed throughout the limousine the whole BLU team was presently
stuffed into. Demo was the only exception to this. He was wearing an outrageous outfit, something
traditionally Scottish, and noticed April’s curious glance at the declaration of their evening
trajectory. “I’m the babysitter,” he said with a grin. “Nothin’ to ruin a party quicker than you poor
lightweights getting sick.”

“Yeah, he’s gonna make sure nobody starts nothing. Hey,” Jeremiah said, raising his voice to the
rest of the team, “that means no weapons, alright? One of you kills someone at my party, you’re
uninvited to the wedding! And Soldier, I haven't forgot what you did last time we all went out
somewhere. None of that neck stuff. Got it?”

From his seat square in the middle of the limo, Soldier grunted unhappily.

When the limo pulled to the curb of a bar called the Sally Forth and they all piled out into a crowd
of pregamed pre-drunks, the presence of the one or two bars April had experienced in Phoenix
shrunk considerably in her mind. The line almost wrapped around the end of the block, even on a
Thursday evening, and the noise banged around them like hammers in a garbage can. “I’m not
getting drunk,” she said to Demo, who had wound up at her side. “The last time I did that I got a
hangover.”
He guffawed. “More power to y’, lass. Only seen you drunk the one time, up in Coldfront, aye?
You were right miserable the next day.”

“Yeah, that was the time.”

Demo outright cackled, slapping her on the back, and fell to describing the highs and lows of his
own adventures with alcohol. Even if the misery of her experience with the Christmas party punch
had not been so firm in her mind, Demo’s visceral descriptions of how, where, and why he’d gotten
sick off his addiction would have put her off—to say nothing of how frequently the words didn’t
remember it later passed his lips.

Then they were inside. The noise graduated from hammers in a garbage can to jackhammers in a
garbage truck, and there was a distinct scent of sweat mingled with booze thanks to the crowded
dance floor. Thankfully Jeremiah herded them past this and straight up to the bar, and in short
order April had something fluorescently orange in a shot glass in front of her. “One won’t hurt
you,” Dell said, calmer amid all this than she would have thought, and threw back his own. With
some trepidation, she followed suit.

To that one shot was added a beer, and then another, as they made their way through another two
establishments over the course of the next hour. At the third one the heady buzz of intoxication had
her well in its fuzzy embrace, leaving her comfortable and quick to smile, and more than this she
was pretty sure she had not hallucinated anything all day. Demo kept making her take crackers he
would produce from his bag and putting water in front of her, and once a female bar tender slid her
something peach-colored and topped with maraschino cherries. (“Ladies’ night,” she told her with
a wink.) April only found the napkin with a phone number on it after they left.

The most surprising thing about all of it was the fact she really did have fun. Demo’s oversight did
a great deal for this, but so did Heavy, proclaiming at every dartboard he found that he would
demolish all challengers (and did so with aplomb); listening to Medic, after he found a group of
med students, describe with vivid color the various uses and effects of alcohol on different mucus
membranes; and Dell, after his fourth beer or so, who dragged her protesting onto a dance floor.
“I’ve never danced!” she said over the pounding music. “I don’t know how!”

“Best time to start, then,” he laughed.

It was a matter of minutes before a handful of the other mercenaries drifted over. By then she was
already sweaty and had tripped once with help from her complaining ankle, but the laughter came
freely and fast. She lost Dell at some point, to be replaced by Heavy. This had the advantage of
clearing out most of the people crowding them thanks both to his sheer bulk and his music choice
—somehow he had gotten the DJ to play what April recognized at once as something from one of
his Russian tapes. By the time she stumbled back to the bar, exhausted and dizzy from Heavy
enthusiastically spinning her more than a few times, she barely noticed she was about to sit on
Jeremiah until he elbowed her.

“Yo! I ain’t a seat, firebug!”

The name struck her like a shock of cold water. She had to grab onto the bar to keep her footing,
and when she found Jeremiah they both stared at one another, as if uncertain of what he had just
done; even in the dark of the club she could read the startle and unease on his face.

She smelled smoke.

A moment later she was outside, not altogether sure how it had happened. The pavement lurched
and wobbled under her feet and the shock of cool evening air was almost sobering. She jaywalked
through traffic, got screamed at by someone on a motorcycle, and took the first turn she found. The
smoke-smell boiled down from the air around her, sinking into her eyes and pores until it was all
she could think about. The evening crowds thickened and swelled around her until she shouldered
past someone and the crowd bit back. “Hey!” came the baritone voice, and something tangled in
her jacket. Someone’s hand, someone’s angry snarl. “Watch it, ugly!”

She growled something indecipherable but definitely offensive and tore away, the alcohol swirling
inside her jumping at the chance for a fight. Smoke and burning hair and gunpowder burned away
at her nostrils, so strong to make her eyes prickle in irritation. The someone that had grabbed her
was going off, and the anger in her went slow and sticky, molasses. The man swearing at her had
no neck and no reason she could think of to even be alive. The traffic that roared by was an
unending stream, and his back was to the curb. She stepped forward.

She snagged on something and almost fell, her coat taking on a life of her own to drag her
backward. “Hey, sorry, guy, my pal here just she’s kinda drunk, clumsy, yanno, sorry—”

April snarled. “Let go!”

“Nope,” Jeremiah said, hauling her further back from her would-be victim. “Nope, c’mon, Sparky,
we’re going, let’s take a walk.”

He dragged her half a block before she wrenched herself free. The motion sent her swaying and she
staggered, almost falling off the curb and into the road. She caught herself and directed her placid
fury onto Jeremiah, half-poised to grab her again.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, and stalked off down the street.

He followed, of course. He brought the wicked smell of flame and death with him in the form of
the ghost that loped along in the corner of her vision. The alcohol burned in her gut. More than
once she thought about breaking off, running; but it was idiocy to try running from Jeremiah. She’d
learned that lesson already.

This part of the city was disinterested in them. Its buildings caught at the darkened sky that
damned the stars to blindness, and its people thinned away into bus queues and apartment
buildings. If she’d been able to shake him for a moment April could have disappeared down any
number of anonymous back ways and alleys, fleeing the smell, the memories, the girl with the
singed eyebrows and the thing that had never been Tobias.

“I hate it here,” she muttered to the ghost, the only one close enough to hear her. “I hate this city.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“I hate what I was when I lived here. I don’t know what I was except some kind of monster. I think
Alice knew. I think maybe she was that part of me, the part who, who didn’t care if people got
hurt, as long as I didn’t. The part of me that just went off to be alone when I got here the first time
and didn’t care about anything but myself. I was going to push that guy into traffic just now,” she
said, the weight of that reality too much for her to keep hold of. “I didn’t care. I told Dell I couldn’t
come back here, I told him it was a bad idea.”

“Wait,” said the ghost, further behind her than he should have been now. “Is that why you didn’t
answer the card?”

She was in a side street now, and a tiny canal gurgled nearby. It came to her that should she turn,
she would see no ghost, no illusion. The only thing she could smell was water. “Yeah,” she said.
“Jesus,” said Jeremiah, and in the corner of her eye she saw him lean against the guard rail that
separated the street from the water. “That’s why? The city? Not me?”

“What?”

He shook his head, turning to lean over the rail’s edge and stare at the water even as she moved to
face him. “The city,” he said again. “God. April, you woulda cared if you got that guy hit by a
truck, it’s just I called you—y’know—and you’re drunk.”

“I’m not fucking drunk.”

“I watched you actually go dance with Engie and then you nearly sat on me, you’re drunk.”

This was hard to disagree with. She looked for a way to do so from every angle, and only
succeeded in stumbling her intoxicated way to the guard rail. “Fine,” she said after accepting the
idea the water would not rear up and swallow her. “I’m drunk. I’m still right, though, I shouldn’t be
here. This place did something to me, or—I don’t know. All I can think about when I’m here is
what I did. Didn’t do, what I was … God. I figured it out, in the forest, when we went to look for
the immortality machine, I figured out Alice had parts of how I was here. I think I just shut down
when I got to Boston and that’s what I turned into. And then he d—he died. And all that … that
apathy. It started killing me.”

Her rambling spooled itself out, and her face had gotten hot even in the cool New England air. She
had missed something, she thought, she had bowled right past something Jeremiah had said
—“What did you mean?” she said, finding it again. “What did you mean, not you?”

The laugh he gave skipped once over the surface of the canal before sinking. “I mean, just. Figured
you didn’t want to see me.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to see you?”

“Same reason I wouldn’t want to see you around the Fourth of July.”

Whatever path his thoughts had wandered down, April failed to follow. She leaned forward enough
to catch his eye, the bewilderment plain on her face. “You aren’t making sense.”

The canal frolicked under them.

“The last time you and me saw each other,” he said, after a great, uncharacteristic silence, “was that
time I visited after I heard Alice was gone. And you wouldn’t talk to me, and then you didn’t ever
call, and I invited you to my wedding and you didn’t say you were coming. You and me both know
she’d still be around, if I hadn’t asked you to help me. I—what was I supposed to think, April?”

In the long seconds that came after, all April could at first focus on was the water, and how strange
it was that being this close to it made her neither sick nor dizzy. It was a kind of overcoat,
sheltering the undercurrent of memories of the last few days: Jeremiah’s shock at the airport, his
reluctance to speak to her. The booze fogged her thoughts over, putting a foreign veneer over them,
but she tried to find and mark the trail of his meaning anyway. Of course she had agreed to help
him, coming all the way to find her, needing her help. He had helped her when she needed it. For
the life of her she could not figure out what he was talking about, so foregone was the conclusion
that she would help if he asked—

She’d still be around.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” April said. The sickness she had avoided from the water manifested in
force: the guilt that would forever haunt her over Tobias, and the thought that now Jeremiah
carried the same burden. The water seemed toothless by comparison. “Alice isn’t gone because of
you.”

His laugh was a brittle thing. “Right. I mean, look, it’s just cause and effect. You came to help me,
and Alice died.”

“It not your fault. It’s not your fault she’s gone.”

“Yes it is.”

“This isn’t like Tobias.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Tobias was an accident. Alice was murder.”

“Alice was a gift,” April said, grabbing his arm. He cowed, shrinking into his coat. Her grip
tightened. “Alice saved us, you and me wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t done what she did! We
wouldn’t be standing here being drunk idiots before your wedding except that she made the
choice to protect us! You, you don’t get to take that from her, J. You don’t get to.”

She really was drunk. This dawned on her about halfway through her tirade, when the pricking at
her eyes that had been an annoyance earlier returned with a vengeance. She grit her teeth and
scrubbed at her face with her free arm, her hold on Jeremiah slackening but not dropping. “It’s not
like Tobias,” she said again.

Jeremiah’s misery lingered, clinging to both of them like smog. “If it feels half as bad, though,” he
said, and wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t know how you live with it.”

“Because I have to,” she said. “And if I don’t—if I forget again—I’ll turn into something worse.
You don’t, though, you don’t have to live with it because it wasn’t your fault. God, do you know
how upset she’d be if she knew you thought it was your fault? She cared about you. I know that.
You were her big brother.”

Her fingers finally slid free of his sleeve, and she leaned heavy on the railing. At her side
Jeremiah’s fists pushed against his eyes, shoulders hunched up around his ears. The water almost
covered up April’s voice as she gathered the rest of her thoughts. “I miss her every day,” she said.
“I barely knew her, and I know parts of her are still just parts of me, but I miss her every day. I
went up to my family’s graves, in North Dakota, and I left a marker for her there, because I didn’t
know what else to do. I don’t know what I’m doing without her. But it was her choice, and it’s not
your fault. I’m not—I’m not mad at you, I’m sorry you thought I was. It’s not your fault. Okay?”

An untethered sensation rushed around her, like it often did when she spoke of Alice now. Below,
the water leapt up at her unmoored body, and she thought she might float away with the current,
pulled along by the wetness in her eyes and the unsteady wind of her breath.

Jeremiah touched her shoulder, and then put his arm around her, pulling them chest to chest. He
stuttered as he inhaled, a sudden anchor in her drifting. “Okay,” he said against her shoulder, and
leaned against her as she returned his embrace. “Okay. God. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” April said, and meant it.

As weddings went, Dell would tell her later, the wedding of Jeremiah and Florence was pretty
standard. A priest and a white gown, a big crowd. Very Catholic. The other Owens were there, of
course, and at the reception April at last met Jeremiah’s family, like he had wanted. They were all
polite, happy to meet her, and Gladys Owens gave her a hug and invited her to dinner sometime.
The stench of burning hair clung to her nose when she dropped down by Dell again and threw back
her drink.

“Okay there?” he asked amid the hubbub of the growing party. The venue hummed with elegance
and excitement, a rented banquet hall stuffed to bursting with décor and food and well-dressed
guests. Dell was among these, wearing a well-cut dark suit, which ranked among the most absurd
things April had ever seen in her life. It was second only to the fact she was in a dress: green and
simple, the color warm against the ungathered hair that fell over her shoulders.

“I hate this dress,” was all she said at first, pulling at the sleeves again. “I don’t know why I let Gio
talk me into it.”

Dell laughed. It was something about him she had forgotten, that he laughed easily when
everything was not terrible. In a distant, blurry way she knew this about him from when they had
first met, but had only rediscovered it across the past few months. It soothed her jagged nerves,
like it always did. “Oh, he got at the whole team,” he said. “I barely skated by in this thing. Demo
was gonna wear a kilt. Could actually see the veins in Giordano’s head when he found that out.”

“I guess he lost that fight,” April said, searching out Demo and his kilt in the crowd with ease.

“Oh, ‘course he did. Demo said he’d show up in a dress himself otherwise.” He laughed again, this
time to himself. April caught sight of the bowl of pillow mints in the middle of the table and
dragged it to her side. A whole handful was introduced to her mouth in short order. It mixed poorly
with the imagined smell. “Really, though,” he said. “Saw you talking with Scout’s mother.”

“It was fine,” April said. She choked down the candy. “I mean, it sucked, I was terrified. But it was
fine.”

“And the hallucinations front?”

April shrugged. “I hallucinate,” she said. “That’s how it is. It’s okay.”

He nodded, and pressed no further.

The reception started its steady ramp into a full party, music burning up the air and the catered
food swarming with people. April stayed right where she was, decimating the candy bowl and
occasionally stealing sips from Dell’s lemonade when the powdery texture got to be too much.
When the bride and groom’s first dance was called the lights darkened overhead, leaving Jeremiah
and Pauling alone on the broad dance floor. A song April did not recognize crooned over them.
“This is crazy,” she said to Dell below the rhythm, about halfway through. “That any of this is
happening, after everything else. You know?”

“You ain’t gotta convince me,” he said. “I went on the same ride. Can’t hardly believe it myself.”

“Do you think they’re going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” said Dell. “I think so.”

The music faded, and a grinning Jeremiah and red-faced Pauling received their audience’s
applause. A new song saw the rest of the wedding party onto the floor, mostly Jeremiah’s brothers
and some other people April didn’t recognize. She didn’t notice them, for the most part. For the
most part, she followed the laughing enthusiasm of the tall boy with the missing teeth, dancing in
and out between the brothers that did not know he was there.

The master of ceremonies declared the floor was open for all the guests, and April got to her feet.
The only thing she could smell was the food, and the salt-scent of the ocean that seemed to cling to
the air everywhere in this city.

“You know,” Dell said, “the dress really does look nice on you.”

“Yeah?” she said, laughing herself as she took his hand. “I guess it’s okay. Come on. Let’s go
dance.”

“Really?” His surprise had weight to it, even as he let himself be pulled upright. “Thought you
didn’t know how to dance.”

“I don’t,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go anyway.”

The wind twisted its way through the yellow grass that lined the shoulder, where the asphalt gave
way to chipped rock and forgotten litter. The Porsche hummed along the neglected pavement
without complaint, even as it looked more and more out of place in the dilapidated landscape.

“So where exactly are we going?” April said for the third time. “I thought this was another
wedding thing.”

“Kinda,” said Jeremiah, the first real answer he’d given since herding both her and Dell into his car
as the reception waned as dusk drew near. They had been driving for a good twenty minutes now,
getting well clear of inner Boston. “I mean, not really? I guess it’s—aw, I dunno what it is, but me
and Flor are leaving in the morning and I wanted to make sure you saw it before we took off.”

“See what?”

“Just keep your shirt on.”

“I’m wearing a dress.”

“Yeah, I lost a bet about that,” Jeremiah said, and the next five minutes were nothing but a three-
way argument about who on the team had bet that April would show up in the asbestos suit and gas
mask. Dell’s uncharacteristically dramatic insistence that it was Pauling had April in stitches, and
so engaged in the debate that she almost didn’t notice when the car came to a stop. What she did
notice was this: “J? You got quiet.”

“We’re here,” is all he said. His tone had lost its joviality, replaced instead with a seriousness that
put her a little on edge. “Hey, uh, Engie? Would you mind staying here for a second? This is kind
of an us thing.”

“It is?” April said as Dell nodded, but then Jeremiah was getting out of the car.

The Porsche had come to a stop on a road that was more cracks than asphalt, lacking any sidewalk
but rich in untamed plants, exploding in the late spring. New dandelions dotted the landscape like
jewels. In the fading light of the afternoon the sun added its gold to half of what looked like an
empty, overgrown lot, leaving the other half drenched with shadow. April pawed at her dress for
something to do with her hands, trying and failing to see whatever it was Jeremiah had wanted to
show her. Surely it couldn’t be the lot itself. “J?”

He had circled the car and come to a stop beside her. He looked absurd and out of place here on
the outskirts of the city, his suit rumpled from the day. “I was wondering,” he said, a long time
after she’d prompted him. “When it rains this place kinda smells like rotten eggs. I tried fixing it
but I never could figure out what you did to make it do that.”

“What?”

“I guess not rotten eggs. Uh, sulfur? I asked Gio about it once.”

She had opened her mouth to tell him he sounded insane, and it caught in her throat. She almost
choked on it, and fell back a step, leaning on the car. Jeremiah breathed a laugh. “Sorry,” he said.
“I thought if I told you we were coming here you might say no.”

“I didn’t recognize it,” she said, but she did, now. She could see where the patchwork chain link
fence once stood, and the barren spots where a ramshackle house and a crazed shed used to squat.
Most of the places where grass had refused to grow, burned and soiled by chemicals she had spilled
accidentally or on purpose, were rallying. Every other sign that she had once lived here was gone.
“Oh my God. Where did—how—what happened?”

He tugged a hand from his suit pocket, raising it. “Bought it,” he said. “First thing I bought with
the TFI money. Didn’t … I dunno. Didn’t want it getting turned into something else.” The car gave
a faint groan as he joined her against it. “Wasn’t much left after the fire, but I ripped it all out
anyway. I dunno. I don’t like goin’ to the cemetery, doesn’t really feel like that’s where he is. So
I’d come here instead.

“But, like. I think it could be better here,” he went on, even in the face of April’s shock. “I was
talking to Flor about it and she said, maybe it could be a park or something, and that seemed … I
think he’d like that, y’know? So I thought, maybe you’d want to help. Engie—uh, Dell, Dell too,
bet he’d be good at making something like that. I thought … maybe you could do one of those
metal sculpture things, if you wanted. Dell brought some pictures of things you’ve been making.
They’re really good.”

“A park,” April said, and the incredulous laughter roiled up out of her. “A park. That, that’d be
amazing, Jeremiah. I actually saw this park in Texas, last year—well—I’ll tell you later. God. A
park. Yeah.”

Jeremiah nodded, a smile pushing at his face. “Yeah. That, and, like, what we was talking about at
the bachelor party. About Alice, and all. I know you don’t like being in Boston, I don’t blame you,
I don’t blame you even if you change your mind and don’t wanna come back here again because, I
mean, you know. But if it would help any, you can always come here. That’s all.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d … thanks. Thank you.”

“Ain’t nothing,” he said, and loosened his tie. “Glad you like it. Get Dell out here, he’s probably
wondering if you’re trying to cheat on him with me. I know married men is just irresistible.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like that.”

“The hell is it like, then?”

“I don’t know, just not that.”

 “Yeah, right.”

“Whatever,” she said, and knocked on Dell’s window.

They told him where they were, what had happened here, words climbing on the backs of each
other as the sun settled itself into the cradle of the horizon. At the end of it he nodded, and despite
what she had told Jeremiah, when he reached for her hand to hold it she curled their fingers
together. “Some story,” he said, half to himself. “Some story.”

April took a breath. This far out from the city the air had shaken itself free of pollution and people,
snaking through the untended trees and wild grasses. It was a clean smell, a life smell. It could rain
tomorrow, and the sulfur smell might return, or smoke might take its place; the grass that had
grown so patiently might catch fire and burn again. But at least for now, the only flame was the sun
as it slipped down the tree line.

For now, the air was clear.

THE END

Chapter End Notes

Dedicated to:
Prelude, Kiko, Noel, Tea, Jess, and Red, for their unending enthusiasm, clever
suggestions, and general hype;
the writers who have come before me and inspired me so deeply;
Valve Software, for creating something that let me go on this unbelievable journey;
and the unbelievable amount of readers and supporters that have followed TIAS for
nearly a decade.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

There Is A Season is complete, but there's always more to say. My tumblr inbox is
open, and I plan to do a sort of Q&A, if there's interest. I'll also be posting some bonus
art, apocrypha, and playlists over the next few days, and I hope you'll join me.

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