Sunshine

I nodded. I glanced again at Con. My brain was slowly beginning to function. I realized that the reason Con looked peculiar was because he was passing. Don’t ask me how he was doing it. But SOF thought he was human.

“I can take the cuffs off your friend too, if you say you know him,” Pat said, a little too neutrally. “He was a little—upset, when you, er—”

“Went nuts,” I supplied. “Sorry.”

Pat looked at me. I saw it registering with him that the way I looked, whatever had caused it, I had reason to be a little on edge. He looked away again, and nodded, and someone stepped forward and released Con. He joined Pat and me. The circle of SOFs unobtrusively rearranged itself again to keep us under guard. Pat the lion tamer, in with the lions. Con moved a little stiffly, like a man who’d had a hard night. Or like a vampire trying to look human.

He looked a lot better than he had the afternoon we’d had to walk back from the lake. He didn’t look like any one you’d want to take home to meet the family, but he didn’t look like a mad junkie either. Or a vampire. And I didn’t look like anyone you’d want to take home to meet the family. We were both beat up, ragged, blood-saturated, and filthy, and my nose was as stunned as the rest of me, but I guess we stank. Con’s black shirt stuck to his body in such a way I couldn’t see the wound in his chest. If it was still there. My own breast ached and burned, but if I was still bleeding, it had slowed to an ooze.

I crossed my arms, but with my elbows well in front of my body, so that my hands hung loosely from my wrists out to either side, without touching any of the rest of me. I wasn’t remembering any more of what had happened than I had to, but I knew there was something wrong with my hands.

I wondered where Con had picked up passing for human in the last five months. Was that one of the things I had given him, the night he had given me dark sight? Or was he taking his cue off our jailers somehow? Not that anybody had said they were our jailers. Yet. I didn’t want to say anything like, can we go home now?, in case they did. Besides, I didn’t know that I wanted to go home. I didn’t know that I wanted to do anything. My pulse seemed to throb in my hands.

There was a tinny buzzing from someone’s radiowire: Pat’s. I saw his expression get grimmer, and it had been pretty grim already. “Yeah. Okay. No, my guess is things are going to stay quiet now. Yeah, I’ll leave a few to keep an eye out, and you can send any clean-up crew you can find. Yeah.” He looked at me. “Deputy exec Jain wants to debrief you.”

My heart sank. The goddess of pain. And you don’t debrief civilians.

“You and Mr.—” Pat turned politely to Con.

“Connor,” Con replied.

“Mr. Connor. You and Sunshine can ride back in my car, and Sunshine can tell you a little about our Depex Jain.”

I almost managed to be amused. The intrusive presence of the goddess had just put Pat on our side. I guessed we’d need him there. The effort to be amused faded, leaving cold exhaustion.

Pat did the best he could for us. The goddess wasn’t going to wait for us to have showers, let alone food and sleep. (I would have liked to see Con in one of their fuzzy khaki jammy suits though.) Pat radioed ahead from the car, and Theo and John met us with blankets and tea. (I wondered who got to hose down the inside of the car.) We were also offered the opportunity to have a pee. Such magnanimity. I accepted. Con did not. Don’t vampires pee? It had been one thing on the walk back from the lake, when he’d been on short rations for a long time. Okay, do they have a digestive system? Maybe it all goes straight into…never mind. At least I could wash my hands, although I felt the soap only slide over what I most needed to scour away. I cleaned my face with a paper towel, so my hands never touched anything but paper.