“You are not deformed, Renee.”
“Sure I am. People don’t see
His eyebrows jumped at the Vegas comment, and I could almost see him wondering just what I’d done there. Not that I had any intention of telling him. He could assume anything he wanted. Funny thing was, he never looked away from my face. Not even when I made my breasts the topic of conversation.
“You’re not deformed,” he said again. “You’re beautiful.”
My mind stuttered at the perfunctory way he made that statement, like there was no arguing the matter. I wanted to punch him for saying it, for arguing with me about it. My fingers even curled into a fist. I didn’t swing, though, much as I wanted to. I spun on my heel and stormed up the track to the cabin.
“Hey!” He chased me up the road, then cut me off, the jerk.
“Move.”
“No. Renee—”
“Move.” This time, I did swing at him. More out of frustration than anger, so he deflected the punch like he was swatting a bug away from his face. “You’re a bastard.”
“Why? Because I tell the truth?”
“It isn’t truthful if you think it’s what I want to hear.”
“I’ve never lied to you, not once since our first meeting in the interrogation room. Why would I start lying now?”
“You tell me.”
He made a frustrated noise. “Fine. Apparently I’m not changing your mind.”
“Smart man.”
I stormed away again, and this time he didn’t try to catch me. I wasn’t sure where I was storming off to, since I didn’t really want to be inside that cabin with Bethany. I just wanted away from Thatcher.
The cabin door swung open and Ethan scurried outside like he was being chased. We nearly collided in the yard, and he jumped back with a surprised shout.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he replied.
“You running from Bethany?”
“That obvious?”
“A tad.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the door, which had fallen closed. “She scares me.” He hooked my elbow and tugged me a few yards away from the building. “And not just because she keeps eyeing me like she’s imagining me in fuzzy handcuffs.”
“Sorry we left you alone for so long.”
Ethan looked around, and I realized Thatcher had disappeared. “Where’d you go, anyway?”
“Walked around in town. Talked to some locals.” I told him about our chat with the Bogarts. “It sounds like they’re really working toward being self-sustaining.”
“Which is a good thing, if they want to survive here. I can’t imagine having roots in one place for so long.”
I made a face. “Well, we all had roots in Los Angeles until the mayor had it all flattened.” The two buildings still standing at the old Rangers HQ in Los Angeles had been demolished during the after-earthquake cleanup. Not that they could have stood up much longer on their own, after the combined destruction of the earthquake and our battles with the Recombinant clones.
“You know what I meant, Stretch.”
“I do. They all seem happy here.”
“They seem to have what most of us want.”
“Fresh catfish for dinner?”
He pulled a face. “No. They have a place where they feel safe. A place to raise their families and have a community.”
“You’ve got that sound in your voice again.”
“What sound?”
“The sound of old arguments, Windy, like the one about making Manhattan a place for all of us to live in peace.”
“It could be that.”
“Until it isn’t anymore.”
Ethan opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut. Good. I didn’t feel like having the same old argument again, either. We used to see eye to eye on the issue of the Manhattan Banes. Now we weren’t even looking at the same thing anymore, and it frustrated me to no end. Just like Thatcher and his skewed view of history frustrated me.
“Can we get through this without fighting?” I asked. “Please?”
“But I live for fighting with you, Stretch.”
Oddly, it was the right thing to say.
“Breakfast is ready,” Thatcher said, scaring the life out of me. He stood in the cabin doorway as if he’d been in there the entire time slaving over the meal.
Ethan and I went inside to find Bethany slopping grayish oatmeal into a plastic bowl. She scooped honey out of a jar, then went to sit at the table without a word or gesture in our direction.
The honey had bits of honeycomb and brown things in it, which hinted at being hand-collected by someone. Not quite the breakfast of champions (or superheroes), but it was food and we all gobbled it down.
“What time is it?” I asked once we’d finished eating and had collected the trash.
“Why?” Bethany asked like I was a world-class idiot.
“Uh, because?”
She pulled out her phone and checked the display. “Landon should be back in about an hour.”
Not quite the answer to my question, but at least it gave me a better sense of time.
“I have to go into town to talk to some people,” Bethany said. “Don’t go anywhere, or I zap Red’s collar, understood?”
I bristled at the threat, but she was out the door before I could snap out anything that would piss her off.
The cabin was getting warm under the sun’s rays, so we grabbed some chairs and took them outside under the shade of a towering elm tree. Bethany going off on her own worried me, but it wasn’t as if I could have stopped her. Not with her finger on Ethan’s trigger. So I sat outside with him and Thatcher, listening to various birds sing their songs, and waited for Teresa to arrive and figure out what the hell was our next step.
Because, honestly? I didn’t have a fucking clue.
Twelve
An ancient blue pickup truck ambled up the path, slow enough that we heard it coming long before we saw it. The engine sounded like rocks in a blender, and once it was close enough, the sight of a familiar purple- smudged face sent me scrambling to my feet. Ethan and Thatcher had been playing tic-tac-toe in the dirt, scratching out their marks with twigs, and they ruined their latest tied game as they stood.
Teresa was out of the truck before it came to a complete stop. She walked toward us with measured steps, posture rigid and fingers pointed straight down in a way that betrayed her nerves only to those of us who knew
