“I think I’ll sit here a while. Get my strength back.”
Michael stepped from the hut to find the rest of the crew hovering by the door. “What the hell are you all standing around for?”
“The shift’s over, Chief.”
Michael checked his watch: so it was.
“Not for us it isn’t. Show’s over, everybody. Get your lazy asses back to work.”
It was past midnight when Lore said to him, “Lucky thing, about Ed.”
The two of them were curled in Michael’s berth. Despite Lore’s best efforts, his mind had been unable to move on from the day’s events. All he kept seeing when he closed his eyes was the look on Ed’s face in the hut, like someone being marched to the gallows.
“What do you mean, lucky?”
“That you were there, I mean. That thing you did.”
“It wasn’t anything.”
“Yes, it was. The man could have died. How did you know how to do that?”
The past loomed up inside him, a wave of pain.
“My sister taught me,” said Michael. “She was a nurse.”
30
They arrived behind the rain. First the fields, sodden with moisture, the air rich with the smell of dirt, then, as they ascended out of the valley, the walls of the city, looming eight stories tall against the brown Texas hills. At the gate they found themselves in a line of traffic—transports, heavy mechanicals, DS pickups crowded with men in their thick pads. Peter climbed out, asked the driver to deposit his locker at the barracks, and showed his orders to the guard at the pedestrian tunnel, who waved him through.
“Welcome home, sir.”
After sixteen months in the territories, Peter’s senses were instantly assaulted by the vast, overwhelming humanness of the place. He’d spent little time in the city, not enough to adjust to its claustrophobic density of sounds and smells and overflowing faces. The Colony had never numbered more than a hundred souls; here there were over forty thousand.
Peter made his way to the quartermaster to collect his pay. He’d never really gotten used to the idea of money, either. “Equal share,” the governing economic unit of the Colony, had made sense to him. You had your share, and you used it how you liked, but it was the same as everybody else’s, never less or more. How could these slips of inked paper—Austins they were called, after the man whose image, with its high, domed forehead and beaked nose and perplexing arrangement of clothing, adorned each bill—actually correspond to the value of a person’s labor?
The clerk, a civilian, doled out the scrip from the lockbox, snapping the bills onto the counter, and shoved a clipboard toward him through the grate, all without once meeting his eye.
“Sign here.”
The money, a fat wad, felt odd in Peter’s pocket. As he stepped back into the brightening afternoon, he was already scheming how to be rid of it. Six hours remained until curfew—barely enough time to visit both the orphanage and the stockade before reporting to the barracks. The afternoon was all he had; the transport to the refinery was leaving at 0600.
Greer would come first; that way Peter wouldn’t have to disappoint Caleb by leaving before the horn. The stockade was located in the old jailhouse on the west edge of downtown. He signed in at the desk—in Kerrville you were always signing things, another oddity—and stripped off his blade and sidearm. He was about to proceed when the guard stopped him.
“Have to pat you down, Lieutenant.”
As a member of the Expeditionary, Peter was accustomed to a certain automatic deference—certainly from a junior domestic, not a day over twenty. “Is that really necessary?”
“I don’t make the rules, sir.”
Irritating, but Peter didn’t have time for an argument. “Just be quick about it.”
The guard ran his hands up and down Peter’s arms and legs, then produced a heavy ring of keys and led him back into the holding area, a long hall of heavy steel doors. The air was dense and smelled of men. They came to the cell marked with the number 62.
“Funny,” the guard remarked, “Greer doesn’t see anyone in close to three years, and now he’s had two visitors in just a month.”
“Who else was here?”
“I wasn’t on duty. You’d have to ask him.”
The guard located the correct key, inserted it into the tumbler, and swung the door open to a sound of groaning hinges. Greer, shoeless, clothed only in a pair of rough canvas trousers cinched at his waist, was seated on the edge of his bunk. His broad chest gleamed with perspiration; his hands were serenely folded in his lap. His hair, what remained of it, a silvering white, fanned to his massive shoulders, while a great tangle of beard—the beard of a prophet, a wanderer in the wilderness—straggled halfway up his cheeks. A deep stillness radiated off him; the impression he communicated was one of composure, as if he had reduced his mind and body to their essences. For an unsettling moment, he gave no indication that he was aware of the two figures standing in the doorway, causing Peter to wonder if the isolation had done something to his mind. But then he lifted his eyes, his face brightening.
“Peter. There you are.”
“Major Greer. It’s good to see you.”
Greer laughed ironically, his voice thick with disuse. “Nobody’s called me that in some time. It’s just Lucius now. Or Sixty-two, if you prefer. Most people seem to.” Greer addressed the guard. “Give us a few minutes, will you, Sanders?”
“I’m not supposed to leave anyone alone with a prisoner.”
Peter shot him a cold glare. “I think I can take care of myself, son.”
A moment’s hesitancy; then the guard relented. “Well, seeing as it’s you, sir, I guess ten minutes would be okay. After that my shift ends, though. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
Peter frowned. “Do we know each other?”
“I saw your signature. Everybody knows who you are. You’re the guy from California. It’s, like, a legend.” All pretense of his authority was gone; suddenly he was just a starstruck kid, his face beaming with admiration. “What was it like? Coming all that way, I mean.”
Peter wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “It was a long walk.”
“I don’t know how you did it. I would have been scared shitless.”
“Take my word for it,” Peter assured him, “that was a big part of it.”
Sanders left them alone. Peter took the room’s only chair, straddling it backward across from Greer.
“Looks like you made quite an impression on our boy there. I told you it would be a hard story to keep quiet.”
“It’s still strange to hear it,” Peter said. “How are you doing?”
Greer shrugged. “Oh, I get by. And you? You look well, Peter. The uniform suits you.”
“Lish says hello. She just got bumped to captain.”
Greer nodded equably. “A remarkable girl, our Lish. Destined for big things, I’d say. So how goes the fight? Or do I have to ask?”
“Not so good. We’re oh-for-three. The whole Martinez thing was a catastrophe. Now it looks like Command
