Love, Death, Robots, and Zombies

by Tom O'Donnell

  Chapter 13.

  Following Cabal’s departure, there’s a tense silence at our table. Jarvis is the first to break it. I can’t focus enough to answer his questions. I’m looking at the door, wondering if Cabal will be back, maybe with friends. Should we leave?

  I’m seething with shame and anger. Why was I so afraid? How could I let him talk to us like that? I want to kill him. I’m going to kill him. I should’ve put a bolt through him the moment he came close.

  “Where are you going?” Echo asks, grabbing my arm. I’m poised at the edge of the booth.

  “Huh?” I ask.

  Starbucks is talking too, but all I can think about is Cabal. I’m scared to go after him, to confront him, but it must be done. Where’s he staying? Somewhere in town, surely.

  “–you listening? Tristan? Tristan,” Starbucks says.

  “What?”

  “I can’t have a threat to Jarvis. If we’re to travel together, even in a caravan to Apolis, I need to know what’s happening here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I’m trying to get up again.

  “Tristan,” Echo says, yanking me back. “Let us help you.”

  I look at her. I take a deep breath and try to relax.

  “I don’t want to look over my shoulder my whole life. We can’t let him leave here alive,” I say.

  There’s a moment of silence. I’m essentially suggesting that we find out where he’s staying, go there, and kill him–in his sleep, if need be. Could I do that? Could I kill a man in his sleep? If it’s Cabal, maybe. In my current mood, I’d say yes again and again, but when does life ever follow fantasy? Then I think of Lectric twitching in the desert, of Echo crawling toward New Sea, and I’m ready to do it right now.

  Echo is explaining things to Starbucks and Jarvis. I’m pretty sure she leaves out some of the unfortunate details, like how I shot Ballard when he wasn’t even armed. I thought he had a gun, but that’s not something you can really explain or apologize for, especially to Ballard–oops, sorry about your eye popping out; didn’t mean it, so no biggie, right? Right.

  “Jarvis and I are going to bed–” Starbucks begins.

  “Star, we have to help them!” Jarvis says.

  “No, we don’t. Your mother has entrusted you to my care, and this is not our fight. Tristan, Echo, we’ve come a little ways together, and you seem like good people. But Jarvis and I cannot be involved in this. Handle it any way you want, just leave us out of it. The caravan leaves in two days. We’ll be taking it to Apolis with or without you.”

  Jarvis protests, but Starbucks ushers him out of the booth.

  I take a long look at Echo. Silently, we stand and cut through the crowd to the bar. The two men Cabal was sitting with are gone. I should’ve paid more attention to them. I’m not sure I’d even recognize them now.

  At the bar I order a drink, though what I really want is information. The bartender talks enough when we question him. Echo’s blue eyes help him open up. We learn the blue-coats are hunting down fragments of Foundry’s shattered army. Cove won a decisive victory to the south.

  “Cove’s got some crafty commander,” he tells us. “Way I hear it, they knew Foundry was coming, so they had a few dozen guys in camoshift with night-sights and long-range lasers creeping along in the dark. These guys lay up on some hills in the dark and start sniping at Foundry’s camp. Just put holes in the enemy heads while they slept. No noise, no flash. Invisible in the camo. Way them blue-coats tell it, two hundred were dead before the rest of the army even knew what was happening. The Black Baron’s own son was among them. Cove followed that up with poison gas and long-range artillery. Foundry fired back. Finally, Cove brought in the cavalry. Foundry started a retreat, and some of those blokes broke north–that’s why the blue-coats are crawling around Hapsburg.”

  I hate Cove only a little less than I hate Cabal, so there’s no joy in their victory. When the bartender comes back, I engage him again with a more specific request. I’m looking for someone, I tell him. He recognizes my description, but he’s not interested. I bribe him. He blows out his cheeks and says, “Hold on.” He talks to the robot who handles the rooms. Cabal isn’t staying in this inn, he says, but there’s another one up the road. It’s the only other inn in Hapsburg. I want to leave right away, but Echo stops me.

  “This could be just what he’s expecting,” she says. “He’s not a planner, but he’s clever and cruel when it comes to violence. He might’ve sat down and talked to us just to make sure we’d come after him. He’ll be watching for us. Let’s wait a while. Let him think we’re not coming.”

  I can’t stand the thought of doing nothing, but Echo knows him better–a lot better, by the way he tells it, and that’s not something I want to contemplate. We sit in the room. I pace back and forth. I’m plagued by suspicious sounds, but each time I check the hallway, it’s empty. The more I dwell on it, the more I think Echo is right. Cabal has probably improvised a trap. He’s hoping we’ll come. We have to be careful. We have to be smart.

  We talk about what’s to be done. Doubts creep in. Doing this in town will be different than in the wastes. Hapsburg keeps a small security force. Then again, Cabal might not even be here anymore–would he really want to stay with Cove’s soldiers around? He could’ve hit the road the moment he left the bar.

  I nurse my anger to combat the doubts. Half the anger is toward myself; for my cowardice, for letting him walk all over us. Conan would never let this happen. At some point I notice the handle to the door in our room is brass. That gives me an idea. Brass conducts electricity. I have copper wire in my pack. I could set up a device, wrap it around the handle to Cabal’s room, knock and leave. When he goes to open the door, he’ll be electrocuted.

  Echo makes me realize all the problems with this scenario. It will work–if the other inn’s door-handles make a good conductor, and if I can find a battery to provide enough power, and if Cabal answers the door, and if he’s still in town. Too many conditionals. The plan is untenable, but I try to work it out for a while. Annoyed, Echo snaps at me to forget it. We argue.

  Sometime after midnight, we decide to make a move.

  I have a bad feeling. We’re not well-prepared. Anything could happen. Fear tugs at me. But we can’t just sit here. Something must be done. We put out the lamp and peek out a corner of the window, searching for hidden watchers in the alley below. There aren’t any.

  We’re on the second floor, but it’s low enough to hang-drop from the window. I hit the ground and look for an ambush. Cabal won’t kill us in front of the soldiers, but if he could snipe us in an anonymous street-ambush, I’m sure he would. In my head, it’s already happening. Despite this, we remain among the living.

  Joining me on the ground, Echo grasps my hand. We hurry down the alley, trying to locate the second inn through gaps in the buildings. The streets are empty. There are rainclouds overhead. It’s drizzling, and everything has a reflective sheen.

  “There,” Echo whispers. The other inn is on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare. We stop in the alley behind the corner of another building. Most of the inn’s windows are dark. I check them all with my spyglass.

  “See anything?” Echo asks.

  I shake my head. Even so, we watch for a while. My stomach is in knots. How are we going to do this?

  “Maybe we should we circle around and go in the back,” Echo says.

  “Let’s do it,” I say.

  One step and I freeze.

  Someone else is approaching the inn–a man in a blue coat. A Coven soldier. We draw back into the shadows. The man stops by the inn’s front door, looks around, and gives a signal. Another blue-coat joins him from our side of the street. He was on the other side of the building we’re perched behind, blocked from view. Four more soldiers come up the street. Two wait outside while the other four enter the inn.

  Echo an
d I exchange looks. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe Cove will do our work for us. We watch in silence. Minutes pass.

  A loud bang and a flash erupt from inside the inn, making us jump. Was that a shotgun? Sounded like it. Echo grasps my shoulder. Shouts follow. One of the soldiers standing guard outside rushes into the inn. The other crouches warily and scans the streets with his rifle.

  “Let’s get out here,” Echo says.

  “Not yet.”

  “That bang just woke a lot of people up. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s no good. Those soldiers will be looking for more, whether they’ve got Cabal or not. We don’t want to be lurking in this alley when that happens.”

  I look at her, but I don’t want to leave. I’ve got to know, dammit.

  “Tristan, please,” Echo urges.

  She was attached to Foundry’s army, reluctantly or not. We can’t risk a confrontation with Cove’s soldiers. I whisper a curse.

  “Fine.”

  I follow her back down the alley toward our inn. We move as quietly as we can, sticking to the shadows. I keep looking back for the soldiers. We’ve only gone a short distance when there’s movement behind us. A man drops from the roof of a squat one-story structure. Another is already on the ground. A third comes down behind them. They’re barely discernible in the darkness, but one turns our way…

  Cabal.

  Liquid-blue fire flashes past on my left, leaving a long burn-streak in a building somewhere beyond us. We flinch and duck toward the nearest cover, but I overbalance in my haste and tumble to the wet ground behind a concrete refuse-bin. Echo crouches low, peering over the top of the bin.

  “Come on,” she says, pulling me up.

  “What about–”

  “They’re gone.”

  Just like that, our attackers have fled. Though he was only a shadow, it had to be Cabal. So he has some kind of plasma-hybrid weapon now. We race back to our inn. We can’t be seen. Mercifully, the lobby is empty. We make it to our room and close the door behind us, shaken.

  It’s only now the implications sink in. Cabal wasn’t in the inn. He was watching it. He must’ve lain up on that building with his friends, waiting. If we’d crossed the street, we’d be dead. But what about that bang? Why did the soldiers show up?

  Noon the next day, the answers come. We leave our room reluctantly for food, and I buy some delicious sugary bread from a street-vendor, who gives us the news of the day: Cove’s soldiers are gone.

  “Seems they lookin’ f’r a feller up at the Red Roof,” he says. “Only this feller know’d they was comin’. I hear tell he rigged a shotgun to his door. First man to kick open that door got a blast full in the belly. Didn’t survive but a few hours. Rest of them soldiers go stormin’ out in a rage, looking for them who done it. Now they on the road somewhere. Mmm-hmm. Bible say ‘those who take the gun shall perish by it.’ Guess that feller learnt the hard way.”

  We retreat to our room and hide out until dinner.

  I vomit once. Something dark and empty is left inside. Echo doesn’t say much. That soldier was killed in our place. We don’t know his name, we’ll never see his face–and sure, he was from Cove, but that seems less important suddenly, because he died for us.

  Cabal didn’t leave much to chance. He rigged his room and waited in ambush. If we’d come openly to the inn, he’d have burned us down. If we’d snuck through the back and broke down the door, we’d have triggered the shotgun. We came very close to doing both of those things. I try to imagine what it was like for the soldier: kicking the door in, the flash, the pain. I start to feel sick again. To combat the feeling, I think of Farmington, how it burned. Was the dead soldier there? Maybe he deserved it.

  And now, once again, Cabal is out there somewhere–waiting.

  One day I’m going to kill you both.

  It’s decided, almost as an afterthought, that we’ll take the caravan on the morrow. The rest of the day we spend in our room. Neither of us is hungry. I do make one trip out alone, for distraction. There’s a tech store in town. I load up on all the cheap electronics I can. Normally such a move would be cause for celebration. Today it’s unnaturally subdued. Still, I’m glad to have the parts. I don’t know what I’ll make, but it’ll be something.

  Something better than a shotgun blast to the belly.

  The caravan is due to leave shortly after dawn. With the sun peeking above the horizon, we meet Jarvis and Starbucks on the way to the lobby. Little is said. Jarvis wants to talk. His eyes are slightly wide and he keeps glancing at Echo, but he doesn’t know what to say. A suspicion hits me–but I keep it to myself for now.

  The caravan waits by the gate into town: two big passenger wagons, plus a third filled with supplies. They’re a mixture of old and new, though the old parts are new and the new parts are old. The supply-wagon, for example, is probably the oldest of the three, though it’s built from some indestructible light-weight carbon and pulled by a robotic tug the size of a small bull. The passenger wagons, by contrast, are made from wood and tethered to live horses, despite the fact that they’re of a more recent manufacture.

  The world is going backwards.

  The driver of the lead wagon is a Plastic Person. The caravan originates further south, so I assume either this driver was hired out of Hapsburg or there are more Plastic People in nearby towns. He/she wears a flowery summer dress, with long brown hair sewn into the rubbery scalp. Gaudy makeup is smeared across its face. The effect is truly horrifying. I can’t stop staring as we go to pay.

  The horses are enormous, by the way. They’re Redbacks, or Kentucky Bloods, a genetically modified breed that didn’t exist until a few years before the Fall, when screwing with nature was a fond pastime. Each can do the work of two or three smaller horses, and each passenger-wagon has two up front.

  Paying for our passage takes the rest of the coins from Hapsburg, along with two books and a small mirror Echo found in zombie-land. Even then, we’re supposedly getting a deal. Starbucks is ahead of us. The caravaners allow Jarvis’s smaller wagon (along with one other) to be towed at the rear, forming a small train.

  I’m half-expecting to find Cabal or the soldiers aboard one of the wagons, but neither is present. We climb in behind Jarvis and end up in a compartment with eight other people. I sit across from a stunningly attractive girl with long, wavy blonde hair and green eyes. She’s gorgeous. There’s no other word for it. Her skin is shockingly clean and smooth. It’s impossible not to stare.

  There are some sounds on my right that don’t register. Words. The girl has delicately puffy, cherry-red lips. I’m jolted out of my reverie by Echo shaking my shoulder. I turn to see her staring at me. It’s clear she’s said something, but the words are lost to history.

  “What?” I ask, annoyed.

  She rolls her eyes and turns toward the window in a huff. I glance back at the girl. It’s obvious I’ve been staring at her. She’s suppressing an amused little smile as I meet her eyes. Some magnetic power repels my gaze, forces it away. I swallow. My face burns.

  “Unappreciated beauty is one of the world’s great tragedies.”

  A teenage boy says this. He can’t be much older than me. He’s clean cut, with short brown hair, and he’s sitting across from Echo, looking at her with a secretive smile. Echo frowns at him.

  “But then, what can you expect from your … brother?” he asks, turning the statement into a question.

  Echo’s frown deepens in confusion. She has no idea what he’s talking about … until she does, and then her face lights up.

  “Oh, you mean–no, he’s not my brother,” she says.

  “Cousin?” he says, eyes flicking to mine.

  “God, no,” says Echo.

  “Oh. Forgive me then. I didn’t mean to offend you. Either of you. Sorry.”

  Echo and I frown at each other before we realize what he’s implying.

  �
�Oh, no! We’re not–I mean, we’re just–we’re friends. Travelling together,” Echo says.

  “That so?” the stranger asks, puzzled, looking at me.

  “Yeah. Travelers,” I say, risking a look back at the girl across from me.

  “Oh, good then. No harm done. I’m Byron. Pleased to meet you both.”

  We introduce ourselves. The blonde girl’s proximity pulls her into the conversation.

  “Octavia,” she says.

  I’m smiling dumbly at her by the mere fact that she spoke. Her name is like candy. I immediately want to do everything possible to impress her. I would literally dive through the window of this wagon if she only hinted it was something worthy of praise.

  “This is my brother Ambrose. Ambrose, say ‘hi,’” Octavia adds, elbowing the boy on her other side. Ambrose is what they used to call “special” in Farmington, though it’s not any kind of special you’d want to be. His features are kind of squished together. His eyes are too close and his lower lip juts forth.

  “Hi,” he says loudly, staring open-mouthed at me. I’m a little put-off by the blunt observation. I smile and nod, but he just won’t look away.

  “Ambrose, don’t stare, it’s rude,” Octavia whispers. He stares anyway.

  Byron is pretending to look through his jacket. He comes up empty-handed, scratching his head. Echo is watching him.

  “Now where did I–oh, yes!” he says, as if suddenly remembering, and a purple flower appears in his hand, sprouting out of thin air. Octavia rolls her eyes and looks away. She’s seen the trick once already, it seems. Echo’s eyebrows go up, but it’s Jarvis who’s the most impressed.

  “How’d you do that!” he shouts from my other side.

  “A good secret is worth keeping,” he says, extending the flower toward Echo. “For you, Mon Cheri.”

  “Mon-what?” she asks, hesitantly accepting the gift.

  “It’s French.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “You know what? I haven’t the slightest idea. ‘Beautiful,’ I think.”

  Echo is flattered now, though she tries not to show it, and I feel an unreasonable stab of anger. She likes that cheap trick? It was up his sleeve, for Crom’s sake. I bet he wouldn’t call her “beautiful” if he saw her spattered with zombie guts. If he saw the way her chest heaved in and out after she hit one with the shovel, eyes enlivened, yellow hair askew. If he’d seen the fear in her blue eyes when she’d looked back at me in the alley that night, tiny droplets of rain glistening on her skin. Or even that pouty face she makes when she’s sad and moody in the ruins … when she brushes her hair back behind her ear and tilts her head slightly to one side…

  No, not beautiful at all.

  “We’re going to Apolis,” Ambrose announces, unnecessarily loud.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Us too,” I say, and looking in his direction brings me back to Octavia. I wish I had a flower and a cheap trick for her.

  “Momma’s gonna meet us in Apolis. How come you don’t wear no makeup?”

  Ambrose directs the last question to Starbucks, who’s staring out the window.

  “Excuse me?” the big robot asks.

  “Kitra has a dress and makeup. I’ve seen lots of robots wear makeup. How come you don’t have any? You don’t have no money?”

  Kitra is the lead wagon driver, the Plastic Person at the reigns, and Ambrose is evidently impressed by her appearance. Starbucks’s expression is the robotic equivalent of utmost astonishment and disgust. Jarvis looks as though his birthday has come early. He cracks up laughing.

  “Ambrose, what did Momma tell you about asking strangers questions?” Octavia asks.

  “They don’t like it.”

  “So should you be doing it?”

  “But makeup might make him pretty.”

  There’s no stopping Jarvis after that. Octavia apologizes profusely.

  “Come on Star, where’s your makeup?” Jarvis asks when he can breathe again.

  Starbucks turns back to the window and sighs.

  “Ignorant waterbags,” he mutters.

  The journey from Hapsburg to Apolis is roughly three hundred miles; first west, then north. The caravan drivers vary the route to avoid ambushes, though the caravan is well protected. A high-powered robotic turret is mounted on top of the supply-wagon. I don’t know what it fires, but if the answer is anything at all, it’s bound to be deadly. A mech also walks alongside us. The armored, gun-wielding robotic shell is taller than Starbucks and never absent an operator.

  Any attack strong enough to destroy both the mech and the turret will likely kill us all in the process. That’s better news that it sounds. There are groups out there with enough firepower to annihilate the caravan–but if they have to destroy the wagons to reach the wagons, there’s no point in attacking. Raiders want profit, and you can’t sell a pile of ashes. Our assured destruction thus acts as a deterrent.

  The trip will take almost two weeks. We could almost walk there in that time. Not with a thousand-plus pounds of supplies, however. Even the Redbacks need food and rest. Thirty miles a day is their limit if they’re to be of any use the following morning.

  At first, I’m paranoid about Cabal. He could hide out and snipe us from a distance–but Echo convinces me the idea is unreasonable. There’d be logistical problems from his perspective, and at the moment he’s probably more concerned about hiding from Cove’s soldiers.

  On the way west, we cross big tan grasslands. Heading north, however, we get into greener country. Forests. There’s always a pond or a stream for the horses to drink from, and we take breaks to hunt for game. At night, we arrange the wagons in a triangular perimeter around a campfire. This is my favorite part of the journey. There’s something about campfires that reach into our past as a species. The orange glow, the heat, the sparks curling up into oblivion; a campfire is an island not only of warmth but of time and space as well. It separates us from lesser animals. It connects and mesmerizes those who gaze into its depths. It draws to itself some intangible variety of magic, which adheres like condensation, suspending disbelief, dissipating with the morning sun.

  Not to mention the fact that Octavia is positively enchanting in the flickering light. Her skin seems to glow from the inside. As the days pass, I learn about her. Her mother is a seamstress. They’re moving to Apolis because her father died of an illness a few years back and her mother can no longer support them. Apolis has a bigger marketplace and better prospects.

  Thankfully, she doesn’t think much of the flower-toting Byron either.

  “He just seems so phony,” she says on the third night, confidentially. Byron is on the other side of the fire, charming Echo again. When Echo laughs, I suppress my desire to know the exact source of her humor.

  “And Ambrose doesn’t like him,” Octavia adds.

  “He’s a dustbag,” Ambrose says, a bit too loudly.

  “Ambrose!” she admonishes, laughing.

  “Big old dustbag,” he says, smiling.

  “Well. Ambrose is a good judge of character. He knows with most people right away. Oh, don’t worry, he likes you,” she adds with a shoulder-nudge. Does she notice the relief that crosses my face? I want to high-five Ambrose and thank him for his support. But Echo laughs again, distracting me. They’re getting along a little too well over there.

  “So, how’d you two start travelling together?” Octavia asks.

  “Oh, ah … ”

  I stumble through our origin, staying vague on the whole we-killed-several-people-and-fled-into-the-desert thing. Not a satisfactory answer but it’ll have to do.

  “So she’s really not your … your girl?” Octavia asks, prodding the dirt absently with a stick.

  “Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

  Octavia smiles slightly and glances at me.

  “Good,” she says, throwing the stick into the fire and getting to her feet. She goes off to rummage through h
er supplies, leaving me to ponder the innumerable possible implications of this single word. Did she mean “good” because she likes me or “good” as a general answer or “good” because she doesn’t like Echo or…?

  The fact that I’d interest her at all is baffling. It’s beyond my ability to believe that I possess anything worthy of the attention of so perfect a creature. She must have hidden motivations. Or have I somehow fooled her into thinking that I’m more than I am? In that case, I must not break the illusion. She must not see through to me–to the coward, to the one who wept alone on dark days in the desert, to the one terrified of Cabal, to the weirdo who talks to his dead robotic dog. No, no, that person must be kept hidden.

  “It’s nice to talk to new people, isn’t it?” Echo asks later that night, as we prepare a spot a spot to sleep.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I say, feeling subdued, because Echo does know that hidden person. She knows our joy is only an interlude, like the campfire; a great darkness lies beyond it. There’s something deeply pessimistic in the depths of my mind, whispering eternally: all but sorrow is illusion.

  Echo smiles absentmindedly and something in me needs to make her stop, so I say:

  “You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, glancing at me.

  “Just that you seemed to be enjoying yourself,” I say, shrugging. “You know, laughing with Byron and all that.”

  “He’s funny,” she says, frowning.

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize you could see us at all, with your eyes glued to Octavia.”

  “What? They weren’t–glued…”

  “It’s like she tied a little string to your nose. Wherever she went, it just kind of pulled you along.”

  I’m angry now.

  “At least Octavia isn’t phony,” I say.

  Echo pauses in arranging her pack and gives me a look of mild outrage.

  “Byron’s not phony,” she says.

  “Oh really? ‘Look at this, Mon Cheri. Here’s a flower, Mon Cheri.’ Please. And you, laughing at everything like a silly little girl.”

  She draws back, hurt. She blinks. Slowly, tears come into her eyes. Her neck cranes forward like a cat preparing to pounce.

  “So anyone showing any interest in me must be phony? No one could actually care, is that it? You’re a real joy to have around, you know that, Tristan? A real joy,” she says, yanking up her pack and moving away. “And here, take your damn blanket. I don’t want anything of yours.”

  The blanket lands in the dirt at my feet. When she lies down, she faces the opposite direction. There’s a chill in the air, but I refuse to touch the blanket. In the dark, Echo sniffs. I hold to my indignation; if it slips away, guilt might replace it.

  I’ve gotten used to sleeping next to Echo. It’s hard to sleep alone now. Never had to deal with this nonsense when I lived alone. For a moment I wish I was back in the Library–but the world’s a wheel and it keeps on spinning. Unable to sleep, I get up and find Starbucks on the edge of the camp. He’s volunteered to help the caravaners keep watch. He stares quietly into the darkness.

  “It’s strange how those blue-coats came looking for Cabal the other night,” I comment after we’ve greeted each other.

  “Strange,” he agrees.

  “I mean, how did they know some of Foundry’s soldiers were in that inn?”

  Starbucks says nothing.

  “They must’ve had a name or description at least, because how else could they find out what room Cabal was in? And on the very night we went looking for him.”

  There’s another brief silence, punctuated by Starbucks’ robotic breathing.

  “I thought you weren’t going to get involved,” I say.

  “Jarvis gets easily attached. It would damage him if the girl died, and we did nothing to stop it. Maybe I passed some information to the blue-coats. Doesn’t make us involved.”

  “I just wanted to say thanks,” I say.

  “You’re welcome, though I imagine there’s a dead soldier who’s not so grateful. And that young man from the tavern–the talk is he got away. One day you’re going to have to deal with him.”

  When I return, Echo is asleep, and I lie awake for a different reason. I keep picturing the soldier’s face, despite having never seen it. In the dark, it doesn’t matter so much that he was from Cove. It’s unlikely he was at Farmington when it burned. Probably just some guy who grew up in the city-state. In my mind, I watch him kick in the door. I hear the bang. The impact would’ve knocked him back. He must’ve known he was dead then, even if it took a little while to sink in. Was he afraid then? Who did he think of in his final moments?

  I owe him.

  I don’t even know his name, and I still hate Cove, but I owe this one soldier something–just as I owe Lectric and Echo and myself. Starbucks is right; I can’t run forever. One day I’m going to have to pay a debt, and the only acceptable coin is blood.