Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“Is it something I did?” Cole waited for Penny to meet his gaze. “I screwed things up, didn’t I?”

“How should I know? All I know is a lot of people have died to keep this place together, and now Mortimor’s talking about abandoning it.”

“You’re supposed to tell me this isn’t my fault,” Cole said.

Penny looked to the side. “I don’t know that it’s not.”

Cole pushed her hands away from his wound. “Leave me be,” he said. “In fact, I think you should leave the room.”

Penny slapped his hands in return. She threw the tape in his lap and turned to leave, then whirled on him. Leaning forward, she grasped his shoulders with both hands and brought her face close to his. Cole gasped in pain.

“You leave me be!” Penny hissed. “Get out of my head!”

Cole stared at her with his mouth open, his vision blurred with tears of physical agony.

“You’re hurting me,” he said.

Penny let go. She stood up and looked at her palms, then whispered something to herself.

Cole looked to his real shoulder and saw that the bandage had been torn loose by her grasp; the stitches were leaking blood.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Cole didn’t say anything. He watched as Penny surveyed her hands, turning them over and back, checking all sides of herself. “It’s just—I feel stupid around you. I feel—”

“I’m in love with someone,” Cole said.

Penny nodded. “I know. And it wouldn’t matter, anyway. I just hate myself for feeling out of control.”

“ You hate yourself? How do you think I feel? One minute I’m being called the chosen one by a group of people trying to eradicate us, which makes me wonder what the hell I was chosen for. The next, it sounds like I’m screwing up the plans of a guy I’m doing every damn thing to win the respect of—”

“Mortimor?”

Cole nodded.

“Well, you can stop.”

“Yeah, I’m sensing that.”

“No, I mean the guy already loves you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Trust me. I know what it looks like.”

Cole pressed his bandage back in place and picked up the tape.

“Here, let me,” Penny said. “It’s hard to do stuff like that until your new fingers sort themselves out.”

Cole allowed her to take the tape. He looked down at his fingers and rubbed the pads of them together.

“Do you remember the first time you saw me?” Cole asked.

“Of course.”

“Where was it? Or… when was it?”

“I was in the skimmer that picked you up. Don’t you remember? I performed CPR on you for most of the trip back here. And then there was the surgery. You almost didn’t make it, you know. Pretty bad hypothermia. Your lips—” Penny glanced up at his face, then looked back to her work. “They were completely black.”

“After that, was there any time—were we ever alone together?”

Penny tore a strip of tape in two and affixed it over the gauze and to his flesh. “I don’t get what you’re asking.”

Cole leaned back against his pillow. “So some of it was a dream, then.”

Penny laughed. “Probably. You were rambling a lot.”

“What was I saying?”

“Nonsense. Gibberish. It was all in Spanish.”

It was Cole’s turn to laugh. “Portuguese,” he said.

“Whatever.” Penny finished her work and stood back. She looked him over, the sad expression still on her face. “Get some sleep,” she told him. She turned to go.

“Hey, wait.”

Penny stopped. She turned her head to the side.

“What?” she asked.

“Maybe it’s a good thing, the Seer telling us to all go. Maybe it can be interpreted a different way.”

“The way you want to hear it, right?”

“I’m just saying, the fact that the next fight might be our last…”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” Cole said, “it still leaves open the question of whether or not we’ll win.”

Penny stood still for a moment. She reached up and pulled an elastic band off her bunned-up hair, allowing it to spill down and across her shoulders. Turning, she locked Cole’s gaze with her own, and he saw the barest of smiles flirt with the corners of her mouth.

“Yeah,” she said, “I like that.” Penny nodded. “I like that a lot.”

“Well, I’m sure glad that’s over,” the prisoner said. He watched as the sheriff opened the cell door for Molly and waved her out. “I’ll be gods-awful glad to get free of this joint.”

Sheriff Browne turned to him. “What in hyperspace does a lick of this have to do with you robbing a buggy dealership?”

The prisoner scratched his beard. “I was hoping you could tell me!”

“Not a damn thing, that’s what. Now sit down and shut up. Next time I shoot you, it won’t be with my fingers.”

The prisoner shot a finger of his own up at the ceiling, but backed away as he did so. The sheriff turned and regarded his dead deputy. “Looks like your pet done finished what you started last night.”

“How did you do that?” Molly asked. She looked from the deputy to the Wadi on her shoulder, suddenly fearful to be reminded of what her pet could do. She flashed back to the fight on the Drenard shuttle when she’d last seen its ferocious side and tried to tease out what the two events had in common.

“I’ve always had a way with animals,” Sheriff Browne said. “A way that tends toward trouble.”

“So, am I free to go?” Molly glanced at the office door and thought about dashing out of there, just to get away from the residual tension she could feel coursing through her body. It was hard to believe she’d wanted to come there.

“Way I see it, this is now animal control’s jurisdiction.” The sheriff smiled at her. That smile faded as he looked back to the mess on the office floor. “But who’s gonna clean this up if the Callites keep going missing?”

“The Callites,” Molly said. “That’s why I came to see you. Some of my friends are in trouble.”

“Hardly surprising.” The sheriff looked down at his poor deputy. “Trouble seems to follow you around, don’t it?”

Molly frowned. “I think they might be in big trouble. Like I said before, another shuttle is supposedly going up today, and they might be on it.”

The sheriff stepped around his deputy, casting the body a forlorn look. He threw open one of the shutters and peered outside at the bustle on the busy street. “Never could stand what they were doing there at immigrations, even before the damned things were being shot down. But I had no right to inquire. The law is the law.”

“Just because it’s the law doesn’t make it right,” Molly said. She held the Wadi to her chest and went to the door. She opened it up to let in some light and let out some of the stuffiness created by the dead body.

“Then again,” the sheriff said, “if legals are being shipped off, like Cripple for instance…”

“Will you at least come with me and check? Because I’m going either way.”

The sheriff leaned on the windowsill and peered out through the haze of sunlit dust, his shoulders pressed up around his ears in a frozen shrug.

“Is it hard to think about going outside?” Molly asked.

The sheriff turned to her and laughed. “He meant it as a figure of speech. Whadya think, I sleep in here? I get out twice a day, to and from work. Hell, I arrested you right over yonder.” The sheriff pointed out the window to the sidewalk a dozen paces away.

“So you’ll come with me?”

The sheriff nodded. “I suppose so. As long as you don’t mind riding on the back of my Theryl.” He pulled his hat down snug, patted his holster, took one last look at his dead deputy, then turned to the door.