Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Daria paced the room’s dimensions twice (more even than Grendel, who had made a lazy half-circuit of the main area before hopping up on a chair and curling into an orange ball, exhausted from the effort of napping all morning, no doubt) before finally coming to the room’s only bed. She took off her shoes and sat down, then looked at him and lay down. She looked wholly uncomfortable. “Are you just going to stand there?” she asked.

Tagen joined her at the bed and sat beside her, leaning against the cumbersome protrusions of the headboard and stretching out his legs. The mattress managed to be at once lumpy and stone-hard. A noteworthy feat.

Daria produced the printed paper listing the motels of this road and spent several seconds unfolding it and trying to straighten out its creases. “What are you planning to say?” she asked.

Tagen thought about it. “Hello,” he decided at last. “I am looking for my three friends, who may be staying at your motel. One male, very tall, and two females, one of whom has purple hair.”

“One man,” Daria corrected, looking pained. “And two women. And try to sound a little less like a cop. What if they ask you what their names are?”

“I do not know their names. We met at a party. I was drunk.”

Daria’s lips twitched. “And why are you looking for them?”

“The one with the purple hair seems to have accidentally taken my packet of insulin.”

“Not bad.” She handed him the paper. “These are the numbers you press,” she said, running her finger along a short string of symbols. She indicated the telephone and Tagen could see the same symbols arranged on a button-grid, along with several other characters.

“I do not see this one,” he said, indicating the short dash that interrupted the symbols on the paper and frowning at the telephone.

“No, that’s not a number, that just…That’s complicated. Just ignore it. And some of these might be local calls, so if you push all these buttons and you hear a bunch of whistles and a voice telling you that you don’t need to dial a one or an area code, then just hang up and try again, only just push these seven numbers here. And if a voice tells you that the call cannot be completed as dialed, it means that either you pushed the wrong number or the phone’s been disconnected at their end, so just make a mark next to it. Otherwise, if you dialed the right number, the person on the other end of the line should say something like, ‘Riverside Hotel, may I help you?’ If they just say, ‘Hello,’ and nothing else, you might have gotten the wrong number, so just say, ‘Is this the hotel?’ and if they say no, apologize, hang up, and make a mark of some sort on the paper so I can double-check it.”

Tagen nodded once. He had seen how the telephone was used on the tee-vee programs. He was confidant in his ability to use it now. It wasn’t, after all, like a real media station, such as Tagen was accustomed to using back on Jota. The opposing party couldn’t see him, only hear him and speak to him.

Daria was regarding him with open misgivings. “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t let me sleep too long?”

“No.”

“Just a few hours. Here.” She reached over him to the small stand on his side of the bed where the telephone and a glowing timepiece sat. She pulled out a drawer, unerringly finding paper and a writing stylus within, and quickly wrote. “When this—” She tapped the timepiece’s display. “Looks like this—” She indicated the characters written on the paper. “Wake me up.”

Tagen’s hand rose of its own power and drifted through the soft cloud of her hair as she lay tensely draped over his lap. Immediately, some of the nervous energy inhabiting her small frame sapped itself away. She settled there, pillowed on his stomach, her arm encircling his waist. His back was already beginning to ache from pressing on the rigid headboard, but she looked so comfortable and felt so close, he could not bring himself to move her.

“Sleep,” he told her. “I will wake you.”

She sighed and pressed her face against him briefly. “Talk to me,” she said. “Just for a little bit. I need to hear your voice.”

“What would you have me say?”

“Tell me something good. Tell me…what’s the happiest day of your life?”

Tagen thought first of making love with her in the grass before her little garden, the blue sky above them and her lindaria twining through stone behind him. That was happiness, to be freed of Heat at last and in the welcoming arms of beautiful Daria, understanding only then why it was that human sexplay was so slowly carried out. Because it demanded to be savored. It deserved to be.

But he could not tell her this. He was not a man of great intuition, but he sensed that this was not a memory to speed her into sleep. Nor was it a memory he could invoke, and then sit quietly alongside while she lay in his arms and the end of his time on Earth loomed.

He said, “When I received my commission. When I became an officer. I had served some six years as…as a ‘beat cop’, I believe is the term, or as near as I can approximate it. To be made an officer so soon was a point of fiercest pride to me. I knew that it had been an inevitability, due to my father’s name and reputation, but I believed that I had earned it as well.”

“So soon,” Daria echoed. “Six years.”

“How long is one a beat cop on your world before one is expected to see promotion?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it depends more here on whether or not a cop wants to stay on a beat. I know in the army you can go pretty far up the ladder under the right conditions in just a two-year tour of duty, but the rules are different for policemen. I don’t know, really.” She was quiet for a while, long enough that he’d begun to wonder if she’d faded into sleep, when she said, “Did you celebrate? When you received your commission and became an officer?”

“Ha. Yes. I suppose you might say I did celebrate. I purchased a som sommora, a kind of plant, for my new officer’s quarters, solely because the regulations now allowed such things to be kept.” He’d also celebrated with several bottles of ul and a like-minded female, followed by more ul, a meal too expensive for even his new eighth-rank officer’s salary, and another female. He kept this to himself, however.

“Was it a flowering plant?”

“Not in my hands,” he said wryly. “Mine suffered and surrendered swiftly to death. In your care, surely it would someday have flowered.” He paused, and then said, “The som sommora has many long, slender leaves. Very long, like strands of hair. The blooms emerge on broad, curling stems, all along the sides in beads. They can be blue, white, or a deep purple. I no longer recall which mine would have been.”

“It sounds beautiful,” she said sleepily.

“I suppose it was. The things most familiar to us are often unappreciated,” he added. “I have seen little on Jota to compare with the beauty of certain of Earth’s treasures.”

“Like what?”

He stroked her cheek free of stray hairs. “It’s lindaria,” he said.

She smiled, her eyes still shut. “I still think it’s an ugly plant, but you’re entitled to your opinion.”

He said nothing. The plant had not been the only meaning of his words, but he would not emphasize this if she couldn’t hear it on her own. She was weary and sleep was close. There were times appropriate to such conversations and this was not one of them.

Yes, and if he were fortunate, he could continue not having such a conversation until he stood at the airlock of his ship, when all he would have to say was goodbye.

Once again, the thought of leaving swallowed him. Earth, beautiful but despised. A world of hostility and Heat. Farewell to it and good riddance, but Daria…

A snatch of song came to him now and he sang it in his own tongue, in a low and musing tone scarcely above a breath and carrying no more than a tint of melody:

“Many suns I’ve seen

And knocked the dust of tens of worlds from my traveled feet,

But when I am called to home

It is not to the house that my name is carved upon that I return

But to your arms

Wherever you may be.”

Silly, idealistic drivel. He wished he remembered more of it.

Daria murmured something faintly inquiring, but it was not discernable and not repeated. She was asleep at last.

Tagen turned his head, watching the numbers on the timepiece turn. His back ached from its awkward lie against the headboard, his legs were burning and numb, but Daria was warm against his side and her cheek soft against his stomach. He wondered how he could be so contented with that and yet despair so completely whenever her name drifted through his mind.

It was a human thing, he decided. Just one more little thing he’d picked up along with the language and a taste for the food she called ‘ice cream’. Emotions were like any other accent, they had a way of creeping in. He would deal with it when the time came, but this was not the time.

Tagen drew a slow breath and shut his heart away. Then he picked up the earpiece of the telephone and began to dial the first number on his list.

*

“Waken, Daria. The hour has come.”

She had drifted off to the sound of that voice, and she was sure the rise and fall of it had influenced her dreams of him, but now that same voice was a well-oiled knife separating her skillfully from sleep. She stirred languidly, hugging his waist a little tighter, and kept her eyes shut. “You’ve come a long way from ‘Now is not the time to be open,’” she remarked.

“Thank you.”

Daria rolled onto her back, stretching every sore and car-cramped muscle. She knew she could easily sleep out the rest of this day. A three-hour nap did nothing for the bone-deep weariness that had settled into her, but it was all she dared to take. This was no Sunday summer drive they were taking.

Her eye had a way of sliding to him as she lay trying to rub the need for sleep from her brain, and the sight that met her was not a heartening one. He was staring fixedly out the window at the parking lot and his jaw was too tight. It was the same look he’d been wearing since he told her to stay and rest a while. She half-wished she knew what he was thinking, but was afraid she already did. It was the same expression, the same aura of grim stillness that Dan had worn that last day at the hospital, the day he’d brought her flowers and told her he wasn’t coming home.

Well, what did she expect? She’d known from the start that this was temporary. Even after she’d slept with him, she’d known that much. Nothing had changed, except of course, that now it hurt.

She thought she loved him. She really thought she did, and the knowledge didn’t bring her the same giddy amazement she remembered feeling as she fell in love with Dan, but a deep, throbbing ache. How could she let that happen? It wasn’t just the sex, although God knew the sex was a big part of it—his tenderness, his control, his intensity and passion—it was all of him. She loved his patience and his quiet strength; she couldn’t begin to imagine going door to door to all those motels if she hadn’t had his calm to center her afterwards. She loved his forthright manner, even when it was expressed by his near-total lack of diplomacy; he could be careful about how much he said, but she always knew he was telling her the truth. She even loved the strange, archaic way he had of speaking, and the awkwardness of his efforts to modernize his English. Sex had been the breaking point, that was all, the point at which she’d had to admit that there was an attraction there. Once she’d taken that leap, the line between like and love had passed unnoticed.

And now look at them. Alone together in a cheap motel where the seedy manager smugly knew they were stopping in for a quickie and where they had passed the little time allotted to them in pointedly Platonic fashion.

She didn’t know what to say to him. He’d told her already that his kind didn’t get married or even date. Which probably meant that heartfelt discussions of where their relationship was going once he’d found his escapee were completely out of line. She didn’t want to embarrass him with a deluge of emotion, but looking at him now, she could actually feel the space between them stretching out invisibly.

“Any luck?” she asked. Breaking the silence was something of a relief, but the words themselves, so far from what she wanted to say, felt cheap.

“If by that you mean, do I know where he spent the night, yes.” He passed her the printed page of motel names. Many listings had been crossed out and others marked with strange sigils, but only one was circled. The Top Hat Hotel, maybe eight miles up the road. “I know also that he left at nine hours of the o’clock.” He did look at her then, frowning. “I said that wrong.”

“Yeah, but I get your point. So we would have missed him anyway, even if we had kept driving.”

“Yes.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, facing away from her.

Grendel, sensing imminent departure, immediately uncoiled from the stained chair in which he’d been snoring and dropped seismically to the floor. He rubbed at Tagen’s ankle, finally winning a rub to the many folds of his neck for his troubles, and then waddled eagerly to the door. He waited there, making a mountain of himself once seated with his tail wrapping his ample frame, and stared at the doorknob with that creepy feline intensity.

It was a solid cue to leave. Daria rose and put her shoes back on, wishing she could command Tagen’s attention as easily as the cat. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I know it’s a nuisance.”

“What is?”

“Having to bring Grendel along. I’m sure that wasn’t part of your plan.”

“No. But I do not begrudge the necessity. He…He has been good company and I am fond of him.” Spoken utterly without emotion.

She wanted to ask if he would miss the cat when he left Earth, but didn’t. It was too easy to read more into that than just the words. She didn’t mind being transparent, but she didn’t want to be an embarrassment. Instead, she said, “Do you have a pet waiting for you at home?”

“No. Like my som sommora, it would only suffer in my absence. I dislike the thought of abandoning the things in my charge.”

Was that aimed at her? He was too taciturn to be sure and there was no easy way to ask. She went to gather up Grendel’s litterbox and when she turned around, Tagen had the cat stowed ridiculously away in his jacket. They went to the car in the baking midday heat in silence and Daria started up the A/C before running the key in to the office.

The manager, every bit as sleazy as she remembered, gave her a salacious wink as she came in through the door. “Enjoy your…nap?” he drawled.

That hollowness left by Tagen’s withdrawal struck on that question like steel on flint. “You bet,” she said sharply. “We napped the living hell out of that bed. I enjoyed all twelve inches of his throbbing nap and he napped my nap ‘till I napped. Thanks so much.” She bounced the key off the countertop and onto the floor and stalked out, leaving him with his mouth agape.

Tagen was frowning as she slammed herself behind the wheel, an expression that further blackened as he stared into the office and saw the manager craning to look after her. “What was said?” he asked.

“He accused us of taking a nap,” she said crossly, buckling herself in.

Tagen waited, his silence increasingly perplexed. “Is that all?”

“He did it salaciously. Never mind, Tagen, it’s a human thing and I’m not very reasonable right now.”

His face blanked and he turned to face out the windshield. “I regret,” he said quietly, “that I have forced this travel on you.”

“You…? That’s not what I meant, Tagen, I…”

What did she mean?

Silence.

Daria stared at her hands helplessly and then put the car in gear and pulled out onto the road.

*

Regardless of how well one believed one knew oneself, there was always some small new revelation waiting for the right situation in which to be discovered. For Tagen, after a lifetime of exemplary service in space, it was the surprising fact that lengthy rides surrounded by monotonous countryside put him to sleep. The hum of the engine, the whine of passing vehicles, the steady exchange of light and shadow through the trees on his right—all of these combined to heavily sedate him. He had to believe it was the intermittent rise and fall of the road beneath them, because when it came to unchanging scenery and hypnotic sub-sounds, nothing beat a star-cruiser and he had served the better part of fifty years without ever once nodding off on the job.

Although Tagen supposed he could have easily bargained a short nap back at the motel, at the time, he’d felt he could go all day and into the night on the adrenaline of knowing E’Var was finally almost in his grasp. And while he knew academically that the motel wasn’t that far behind them, it seemed the instant it passed out of sight, exhaustion had hammered into him. He didn’t want to give in to it. Daria didn’t seem to mind if he dozed off, but the fact remained, that was damned rude. He was supposed to be representing the Fleet, for the gods’ sakes.

But, ah, it was so easy to fade away. The engines. The flow of trees. The road, always reaching before them, winding and snapping like a great, grey ribbon every time he opened his eyes. Sleep…

A loud bang shattered the lull that had settled on him, but before he could even force his eyes to focus, all residue of sleep was shattered as the groundcar unexpectedly veered onto the gravelly roadside. Daria cursed, gripping the guidance wheel with white hands and stomping at the pedals beneath her feet. The groundcar tipped and Tagen had a flash-recall of tee-vee imagery—groundcars rolling, crashing, exploding—before they came to a painless stop.

“Shit.” Breathing hard, Daria released the guidance wheel. It seemed to take some effort. She leaned back into the captain’s chair and drew a long, shuddery breath. “Shit,” she said again, but she looked much calmer.

“Rowr?” The groundcar halted, Grendel now roused and hooked his front half over the seats between them, tail high and tone expectant. Rest stops for the cat meant a stretch, a bite to eat, a scratch at the true Earth, and perhaps some petting from one or both of them. That Daria was not immediately turning her attention to it seemed bewildering to the animal. It turned its eyes on Tagen as though demanding an explanation.

“What is wrong?” Tagen asked cautiously. He was not a mechanic. He had only the most rudimentary knowledge of engine repair and he doubted any of it would be useful when applied to human groundcars.

“We blew a tire.” His words seemed a kind of catalyst to her; Daria unbuckled her harness. “No biggie. I know how to change a tire. In theory. Shit.”

Feeling superfluous, Tagen pulled the cat onto his lap and occupied it with gentle rubbing as Daria exited the vehicle. He watched her circle the car, her expression one of tight dismay. She knelt at the right front wheel, stared for a while, and cursed. Then her eyes rose to meet his through the fore-window. He had no idea what she expected him to do about their situation but Tagen unharnessed and got out.

“I can do this,” were her first words to him. She looked just at the edge of tears.

The front passenger wheel was gone. Nothing remained except the metal round the rubber tread had wrapped. Looking behind him, Tagen could see wide flaps of black shrapnel that had once belonged to the vehicle. The groundcar, it seemed, could not operate without it.

In his arms, the cat was irritably resisting captivity, so Tagen set it down with a stern admonition to behave itself. Grendel flicked its tail to show what it thought of stern admonitions, and then wandered into the near bushes. Tagen watched it long enough to make certain it was staying close, and then walked to Daria’s side. “You can exchange the wheel?” he prompted.

“I think so.”

“Then you had best make the attempt.” He glanced skyward pointedly. “It is too hot to do nothing for long.”

She looked up at the patch of sky visible between the flanking lances of Earth’s trees, and then stared back at him bleakly. “You’re going to go into Heat anyway,” she told him. “I can do this, but not that fast.”

“I can help.”

She looked doubtful.

“I am a soldier,” he reminded her dryly. “One thing at which I excel is following orders. Tell me what to do.”

She managed a smile that didn’t much touch her eyes and went to open the rear hatch. She pushed Grendel’s traveling necessities to one side, pulled up the carpeting, and revealed an extra wheel sunk into a recess. It took some doing to pull it out, as it was fastened down with metal bars, but when she had it freed, she kept the bars in hand. They folded together into a tool-shape and she brought it to the wounded quarter of the groundcar and knelt down again.

She was struggling to insert the tool underneath the vehicle, but with the tire utterly gone and the metal base sunk into gravel, it would not fit. Tagen watched her efforts as they edged toward panic, and then bent, took hold of the groundcar’s frame, and lifted it.

She looked at him, blinking rapidly.

“Do not ask me to carry it to town,” he said.

Hurriedly, she placed her tool. “Set it down,” she said, fitting a lever to the base she had placed. She pumped her arms furiously and the tool lengthened in short lurches.

A lift. A portable lift. Every so often, it struck Tagen all over again how completely un-primitive the people of this world were.

The front quarter of the groundcar rose slowly but steadily, and although the base of the lift sank into the soft gravel, it seemed secure enough. “Okay,” Daria said, once the metal round was fully freed. “Bring me the spare.”

Tagen went to the cargo hatch. He brought out the new wheel and, as an afterthought, a tin of cat food. He leaned the former against the side of the vehicle, opened the latter and placed it on the ground, and then stood back. Grendel came running, but Daria only continued to sit and look helpless.

“Do I have a…” She shook her head, striking the heel of her hand against her brow. “Christ, I don’t even know what it’s called. It looks like an X?”

“What is an X?”

She looked at him and laughed. It was an unhappy sound. She got up and went to check the hold for herself. He heard her rummaging in the groundcar’s interior, and then her quavering curse. “Damn. Just…just damn!”

Whatever it was she wanted, they did not appear to have one.

She leaned out to look at him, her eyes too bright. “I don’t suppose you can take those bolts off by yourself, can you?” She pointed to the hardware that held the wheel base to the vehicle.

She had a great deal of faith in him.

Tagen took off his jacket and, after a glance at Daria’s blackened hands, his shirt top. He returned them, neatly-folded, to the groundcar’s interior before kneeling to inspect the bolts. There wasn’t much to grip. Nevertheless. Tagen rubbed sand between his hands to roughen them, already knowing this was futile.

“Wait, I found it!”

She came running, a tool of slender bars set at crossing in her upraised hand, and Tagen moved back and left her to it. She fit the end of one of the bars to the angled cap of a recessed bolt, and the rest of the tool instantly became a lever for spinning them off. Daria fought to do just that for several seconds before Tagen took her place. The tightly-fit bolts were no match for a Jotan officer; he removed and held them while Daria exchanged old wheel for new.

“Almost done,” she said, spinning the bolts back on. “Are we in time?”

Meaning him, of course. Meaning Heat.

He felt no more than a faint discomfort, not even a true itching, yet, but he was tempted for an instant to claim more. All this day and all the last, there had been a heaviness between them. He knew it was his fault, his silence and his reserve, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to resolve. He couldn’t speak to her without the looming loss of her crowding at his thoughts, but he longed to hold her. He just wanted things between them to be as they were before the thought of leaving her had ever occurred to him.

But he was no seasoned liar and Daria would see through one even if he were. She might mate with him anyway, but sex without honesty was a dim thing. Even on Jota, where matings frequently had all the intimacy of a handshake, that much was so.

“Yes,” he said simply, and turned to gather Grendel, now basking in full sun beside its empty food tin.

“Oh.” Did he imagine disappointment? Her expression was unreadable when he glanced her way; she carried the ruined wheel to the hatch without meeting his eyes at all.

Tagen set Grendel in the rear of the groundcar and returned to his own seat, keeping his hands curled so as not to leave grime all across his reach. Daria harnessed herself, rubbing the grease that gloved her own fingers off on her pants, and started the engine. The vehicle moved smoothly back onto the road and neither of them spoke.

This was unbearable. Tagen moved his hand from his knee to hers, feeling the fabric of her clothing soft and warm between him and her firm flesh. She released half her grip on the guidance wheel to rest her hand over his, holding him there, and never mind the grease.

“Yours was the first house I came to after I had landed here on Earth,” he said suddenly, and then sat and wondered where to go from there.

“Well, I didn’t think you’d picked my name out of the phone book. I always figured I was just the first human you stumbled on.”

The weight of his plasma gun pulled at him; he could hear the crackle of crisping flesh, smell its phantom smoke. He said, “The first after I resolved to better know your kind, yes.”

“Lucky you.” There was sarcasm in her tone, but no venom.

“Indeed, I am. I anticipated battle—”

“And got it.”

“Ha. No.” He squeezed her knee lightly. “Difficulty, yes, but not battle. I have seen battle. You have been a remarkable host to me, more than ever I could have hoped.”

She returned her hand to the guidance wheel and Tagen shut his eyes to mask an open grimace. Host. A poor word. He flexed his claws on her thigh, thinking.

“I came to admire you,” he said. “Against my better judgment. And then to desire you, although I feared that you should know. Heat…came between us. I suppose I should be grateful. If not for this tar shu-rak weather, I would have never dared to show you my desire. And now…”

There was a reason Tagen had never been asked to give a speech, and this, he thought bitterly, was exactly why. He was stumbling blind in a mire and he refused to get any deeper in. Tagen took his hand from her and stared out the window at the rushing stream of trees that grew beside the road, wishing blackly that his father had, for even one season, allowed his son to be schooled in oration.

“Now?” Daria prompted.

He shook his head, not facing her. “I have made ruin enough of words for now,” he said bitterly. “It is your turn.”

She was silent a long time.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” she said finally. Her voice was very small, and yet still managed to push the air out of the groundcar. “You’ve been very honest with me about everything and…and I understand how things work. I’m not going to make things complicated when you have to leave.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, but there it was, spoken at last, and naturally it had been her to do so. He couldn’t touch her, as much as he wanted to. He couldn’t even look at her as she struggled for composure.

“I’m not as bad as I was,” she was saying. “You don’t have to worry about me, after. I’ll be okay.”

Her promise sounded hollow to his ears, a reminder that he had taken her by force from the security of her self-imposed prison, taken her out into strange lands at his command, and soon meant to abandon her. That she felt she had to reassure him at all was a touching reflection of her essential Daria-ness. She would be ‘okay’, too, whether she truly believed so or not. She was so much stronger than she knew.

But it was not fear of her making her way home alone that darkened his thoughts (although he supposed it should be, were he not so selfish a man), but simply the loss of her in his own life. If there were an easy way to say this…if there were any way to say this…

Daria’s hand rose from the console to swipe at her eyes. “Please don’t do this,” she said, her voice now scarcely above a broken whisper. “Please, don’t make me lose you before I have to. Say something.”

The silence drew out and out while Tagen strove to claw words together from the black chaos of his mind. At last, in pure desperation, he said, “My hands are dirty.”

He wanted to shoot himself.

Daria sighed and reached to switch on the vehicle’s radio. He caught her wrist halfway and only held it. He could feel the pulsing of her life’s blood beneath his thumb.

“I hate this,” he said quietly. “I hate this world and I hate this weather and I hate the prisoner who has necessitated this mission. I hate that I have come to feel hate for the first time in my adult life. The one thing, the one thing in all this Earth, that can make me forget all that I have come to hate is you. And I am leaving you.”

It was her turn to stare fixedly ahead and hold silent.

He looked down at the hand he had captured. Slowly, he brought it towards him and pressed his mouth to the sensitive skin of her inner wrist. Her scent, healthy human sweat faintly perfumed by female pheromones, illuminated his senses and he closed his eyes to breathe it in, to taste it.

“You’re already leaving me,” she said. “I’m riding around with you in the seat beside me and you’re already gone.”

He shook his head, not in dispute of her words, but in simple defeat. “Tell me what to do,” he said helplessly. “Tell me how I am supposed to leave you. Everything I can think of…hurts me.”

She laughed unexpectedly. It was a high, bright sound, and filled with despair. “Welcome to Earth,” she said. She pulled her hand gently from his grip and wiped at her eyes again before returning it to the guidance wheel. “There’s not always a good way to say goodbye, but there’s still plenty of bad ways. Giving me the silent treatment for five hundred miles two days in a row is a bad way, Tagen.”