Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The trees looked stronger. Thicker. Their stems each as wide as a finger, the buds on their limbs bulging up and swelled out, like the leaves inside couldn’t wait to burst free.

I plunged into the hot sludge, scalding myself as I splashed forward. And I felt a jolt when I touched the first sapling—the shock of a memory, because for a second, it was like I was a nipper again and my old man was holding my small hand in his.

I stared down into the pool, and there, floating in the water and all covered in mud, was the last broken bits of Pop’s body. So much smaller now, as if he’d been almost all used up. I could still make out the shape of his sunken belly and a swollen knot of bark where his chest had been. And his head still resembled a man’s skull, though it had become shriveled and tiny, though roots covered his eyes and nose, and a sapling sealed shut the mouth that had once told me stories and laughed at my jokes. The same mouth that had kept secrets from me and spent so many days hungry and never known nearly enough smiles.

As I held the tree, I felt the loss wash over me once more, and I tried to let it sink in. Pop was the one person who’d known me. My one friend, all those years on the road.

“Safe,” the Healer said, her voice at my shoulder. Her eyes staring at the seven trees.

“You did this?” I whispered. “You fixed them?”

She stayed quiet, but I sensed her confusion. I held a sapling in one hand and pointed up with the other, showing how tall it had grown. Then I pointed at the woman. “You,” I said.

“No.” She put her hand on the sapling, just below mine, and she pointed at the gray, muddy water and rumbling heat. “It is the Burning Wheel.”

The soft green something on the rocks was a sort of moss. Algae, the Healer called it. A living thing. Like the trees, and the mammoths. And that meant it was one more miracle, still hanging on.

The algae was soft and slick, and I smeared at it with my fingers as I sat at the edge of the pool and stared at the trees.

“Eat,” the Healer said, scooping up some of the moss with her thumb.

I stared at the strange goo. Didn’t look like something anyone would go eating, not even in an old world story. But I was so damn hungry that I figured I’d give it a shot. I let her stick her thumb in my mouth, and the green moss fizzled on my tongue. It weren’t so much that it tasted good, but it tasted real, if you catch my meaning. It tasted alive, and it sure as shit weren’t corn. As I sucked at it and let it slip down my throat, my whole body got ripe off the sparkle.

“It’s good,” I said, and the woman beamed. Then she tugged off my pink vest and set to working fresh mud into the holes the arrows had left behind.

The mud was warm and foamy in my skin. And I just sat there, letting the Healer work her magic as I scooped up more moss to eat. I’d say it was like something out of a dream, only there weren’t no dream I’d come up with that even came close. Guess the insides of the earth can be even stranger than the inside of your head.

But just like the inside of my head, this place was loaded with questions. And the few answers it had given me just made me want to ask something more.

The Speaker told me the mud bubbled in pits and pools all throughout the Kalliq’s maze of tunnels and caves. It was because of the Burning Wheel, she said, as if it were something sacred, though I reckoned that was just the name they’d given the Rift.

The ground heated the mud and water and helped brew the moss that collected on the sides of the pools. And so the silvery mud had become these people’s medicine, and the moss was their meals. They scraped up enough of that algae to feed the whole tribe, adding meat to their menu when a mammoth stumbled and fell in the mountains, or if one died of old age.

Had been a long time since a mammoth had fallen, and the last dried bits of meat had been chewed off its carcass. But I did wonder what that beast’s flesh might taste like. I mean, this algae stuff filled you up, all right, but before long, I was craving some crunch.

One of those mammoths died, the Speaker said, the people used every bit of it, whittling weapons and tools from its bones.

Tusks, she called their horns—made out of ivory. Stronger than bone and sharper than teeth. And that long snout, the Speaker called that a trunk. Said the mammoths used to be able to pick up a blade of grass with it, or pull apart a whole tree. Back when there’d been blades of grass and trees to go pulling at.

Anyway, if a mammoth died, it was like it kept on living, the way these people didn’t waste none of it but put it all to good use. They made blankets from the tough hide, burned fires and lamps with the oily fat. And they sheared off fur when they needed it, weaving it into clothes. So a mammoth meant more than just a creature to marvel at or something to ride on. And the Kalliq fed those things the biggest portions of algae in return.

That all being said, you can see why it was a shock when I found them drowning one of those beasts in the big gray pit.

The circle of sky at the top of the crater was pitch black with night, and the mammoth had come back from patrolling with a gash on its side and a limp in its leg. The Elder was overseeing things when I got there, which is to say she was chanting softly as the Kalliq prodded the mammoth into the pit with their spears.

I thought the whole thing was sick. The poor animal trying to scrabble free as they forced it deeper, moaning as the mud rose fast against its busted-up legs.

“What the hell?” I yelled out, my voice lost beneath the wail of the drowning mammoth. I’d only been around a couple days. Still a stranger. And hell, maybe I always would be, but I had to say something.

The Speaker grabbed me, stuffing her hand on my mouth and pulling me away from the action. “For the Burning Wheel,” she hissed, sour-looking as ever.

“Are you insane?” I shoved her hands off me. “For the Rift? You’re gonna kill this thing?”

“Sacrifice,” she whispered, turning back to the pit.

The mammoth moaned even louder as the mud surged up its neck. It flailed its head this way and that, until its trunk was the only thing left, poking up out of the mud, twitching about and still breathing.

Until the poor thing was full spent and done.

Each day, I’d check, but each day, there was no news of my friends. No updates about the patrol they were with or when they’d return. No scouts who might have seen them coming back from what the Kalliq called the outer rim.

I’d just have to be patient, the Speaker said, when I pestered her about it. Then she’d scowl at me until I left her alone.

But it was hard to be patient. And the stronger my body got, the more anxious I grew.

I kept picturing Kade with his arms around my sister. I imagined him telling them all that I was dead and they had best forget me, and somehow Kade always seemed to have the right words to say. Something smart, or kind, or something funny. And what was it he’d said to me, about a man having needs? Well, I had needs of my own and didn’t know what to do with them. I yearned for my pirate girl, and it burned me up through the night. I’d fall asleep thinking of her, imagining her body against me, remembering how I’d kissed her when she’d returned to us in the snow. But then I’d wake up from nightmares where it was Kade she was kissing. Her fingers gripping the short red hair on his skull.

Still, it was a break from the nightmares about Hina and my mother and the fields full of locusts. Or the ones where Sal’s head kept exploding in flames.

Don’t know how I slept a damn wink.

And it went on like this. The waiting. The fear. Some days, I’d follow the ledges that spiraled out of the crater, making my way up that chimney that led to the sky. Trying to clear my head as I watched the cold light of the world get bigger, winding my way upwards, until finally I’d reach the top and stare out at the peaks that towered above.

I could see the Rift glowing in the sky beyond the peaks to the south.

I’d spy groups of Kalliq venturing out across the ice or coming home down the side of the mountains. I’d see riders atop mammoths lumbering through the glistening snow.

But I was starting to be a jangled mess of crazy. Hoping each new day that the patrol would return with my girl and my sister and my broken Soljah. Hoping they would be brought down into the crater, so the Elder could give them to me.

Because she’d hand them over, I reckoned. I pretty much had the run of the place, after all. Though the Speaker seemed loath to admit it, the Kalliq had a sweet spot for their skinny new guest.

It was obvious I was to be looked after and looked up to. I was to be kept safe and made healthy. These people had mammoths and moss and their mud, and that was worth more than anything I’d left behind in the dusty world that lay south. But I’d given them something the Kalliq had only heard about in tales told by the Elder. I’d given them something they’d only seen in pictures, faded imprints locked inside the salvage they hunted beneath the ice.

The Chief had given them the mammoths, they said. Before the Darkness descended. Yeah, it was some GenTech science that gave them that miracle.

But it was Banyan that gave them the trees.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I found the Healer knelt in the muddy pool, using copper wire to splint two of the trees together, giving them strength by binding them side by side. They’d grown a little taller since I’d last been down in this cave. They’d gained a good six inches, turned a darker shade of green.

“Looking good,” I said, startling her, but even getting spooked made that woman smile. I sat on the rocks, watching as she checked the roots that ran out of the base of the saplings and plugged into Pop’s shrunken remains. “Those trees were froze up and broken before you came along.”

She could hardly understand a word I was saying, but she got my drift, all right. Someone else would have tried to deny it, or else gobbled up the praise. But not the Healer. She just beamed at me as she tended the saplings, happiness radiating out of her.

And she looked so peaceful and beautiful. Not like Alpha was beautiful. Not in the way that lit a fire in my bones. It was more like I admired her, I reckon. The way she had something to do and gave all her focus to doing it. Because I remembered that feeling, your hands keeping your brain busy, your heart full.

I scavenged up a hammer and chisel, one long strip of wire that was sharp as a razor, a rusty old ladder, and that’s about it. Then I threw a fur cloak over my vest and headed up to the top of the crater, where the ice sparkled blue-white and was near hard as a rock.

With the wire in two hands, I could scrape the ice into blocks if I took my time over it, and that’s how I started. Worked on that for five whole days. Prep work, really. Making the ice into these thick pillars—a whole section of them, about thirty yards wide, right at the base of the chute I’d slid down with the tank, using the last bits of slope to my advantage, creating some elevation to play with later on. I was at it each morning as the sky grew light, and I worked till the sun disappeared.

And at night, I’d crawl into the warm cave they’d given me, down there amid the slumbering Kalliq, and I’d sleep deep and proper. No more nightmares. Too exhausted from one day of working, too excited about the next.

The fifth day, I went up top with the same tools, along with a couple of old knives folk had gathered up for me. The Speaker wanted to know what I was doing up there, but I just told her she’d have to be patient. And then I pushed on up the steps and switchbacks, spiraling up the rock ledges until I busted out into the cold.

I stopped and stared at the peaks, straining to see if any patrols were returning. Hoping for a glimpse of my friends. I quit breathing and stayed quiet, listening for a sound in the distance, the moan of a mammoth or the click-clack chatter of the Kalliq.

Couldn’t see nothing that weren’t snow, stone, and sky

Couldn’t hear a thing but silence.

I thought about what the Speaker had told me—about stars falling, rocks as big as worlds, shattering the earth and leaving it in darkness. Leaving us with the Rift and the Surge, the huge moon and the swarms of locusts. Leaving the ragged tribes of people who’d hung on after the twenty years of night to stake their claim in the rubble.

And then I did what I’d always done when the world seemed callous and too old and empty.

I started building.

At each wide pillar of ice, I worked with my hammer and chisel. Setting up my ladder for the tall stuff and chipping away at the frozen powder, then etching it with knives.

I worked till noon, then past noon. I worked till I was sweating in my furry clothes. Toiling and crafting. Carving at the ice with my tools, as if revealing what had always been there, making something new by taking something away.

Creating a forest from the frozen landscape.

I built trees I hadn’t thought of in ages. Icy leaves like blown glass, shot through with color. Spruce and ash, redwood and oak. I remembered trees me and Pop had come up with. Made the prettiest Pickle Fir you ever did see. And I even made up some new trees before I was finished, naming them for the people I’d lost, and the folk that were missing.

I built one for Alpha. Made one look like Crow. And almost before I knew it, I’d spent nearly a week working, and I’d gone the last day without eating or drinking or even stopping at all. I was hardly even thinking, just feeling my way, lost in my rhythm, up and down the ladder, back and forth with my tools. And when the sun dropped that day, my forest was tall enough you could walk beneath the canopy, wide enough you could wind through the trees.

And it was then people started to appear on the rim of the crater. As the stars began to twinkle and settle in for the night. A crescent moon rose, splitting the dark sky like a smile, as the Kalliq emerged, cloaked and hooded, clambering up from their tunnels and caves. Their voices were hushed, if they even were speaking, and they walked among the trees in huddled groups of three over here and four over there.

I heard the snuffle and snort and stomp of a mammoth, and turned to watch one scramble out of the crater, the Elder high on its back.

The old woman was helped down from her mount and led into the forest. And I just stood there in the middle of the trees, the hammer and chisel at my feet, the knives in my hands.

The Healer and the Speaker appeared at either side of their ancient leader as the rest of the folk made a wide circle in the forest, surrounding the three women and me.

The Elder gazed into my eyes like she might stretch open my soul to stare deeper inside it. And she spoke straight to me, as her breath steamed and shone amid the crystalline trees.

“The Elder wishes to know why you do this.” The Speaker managed to hold onto her usual scowl, but even the ugly way she spoke couldn’t put a hole in the moment.

“Just building,” I said. My belly was empty and my arms ached, but I could have kept on with the carving and sculpting all through the night, I reckon, it felt so damn good.

“The Elder wishes you tell her why.”

“’Cause that’s what I do,” I said, and I remembered what Jawbone had told me, back inside that pirate city on the plains. She’d said that you either are something or you’re not. And it occurred to me that Pop had been right when he’d said I wasn’t a fighter. And maybe I wasn’t meant to be a lover or a brother or a son, either, in the end.

“I’m a tree builder,” I said, and the Speaker translated it for me, but the Elder shook her head, then said something back.

The Speaker made a grim sort of face and stayed silent. But the Healer spoke up. She was a better one for translating it, too.

“Tree King,” she said, and all around me, the Kalliq started to cheer.

And I’ll be damned, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The patrol entered the far side of my forest. We heard them before we could see them—the sound of something huge shattering my work. And the Elder’s beast must have sensed its pal in the distance, because it snorted and wailed, rearing up on its hind legs. And then the Kalliq broke out in voices all around me as we ran through the ice trees.

At the edge of a stand of redwood, we stopped and watched the returning mammoth crush the tall trees beneath it, spraying us with icy shrapnel and slush.

“Alpha?” I called. “Zee?”

I stared at the cloaked figures on either side of the beast. But when words I could understand came back to me, the voices came from up high.

“Where are you?” Alpha called, sounding nearly as stunned as I was. “Banyan?”

“I’m here,” I yelled, running to the mammoth. Bodies rushed around me, the tribe reuniting. And one by one, the riders atop the mammoth tugged down their thick hoods and shook their heads at the stars.

There were six of them up there. Two strangers.

And four that I knew.

“I told you he’d be here,” Kade called to the others. He waved his stump at me. “You can’t get far without your right-hand man.”

Alpha was already swinging herself down from the mammoth’s shoulders. She dropped off the side of the beast, and we each broke through the crowd until we were wrapped up together, holding one another in the sparkling night.

Both mammoths roared, making a sound like a victory blast. And the Kalliq bustled around us as their friends came back from the cold.

“Let me look at you,” I whispered to Alpha, and I took her in. All of her. The golden-white skin, her golden-brown eyes and her busted nose. The beautiful face you’d never be able to draw right but you’d always remember.

“We got word you’d be here,” she said, glancing past me at the ice-sculpted trees. “But I was almost afraid to believe.”

“They healed me,” I told her. “Pop, too.”

“You mean the saplings?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

She quit smiling, then shoved at me like she was supposed to be angry. Only then she busted out grinning again. “Thought you weren’t gonna leave me, bud?”

“Guess you should have come on down the mountain.”

That made her smile even bigger. She stuck her thumb over her shoulder, pointing at the mammoth. “And miss out on all this?”

Crow appeared beside us. Wobbling ten feet in the air. “Good to see you, little man,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders to keep himself steady. Or maybe it was to show that he cared.

“You, too.” I stared up at him, then I stared at his legs. “You been walking?”

“Nah. Too busy riding.” He nodded his head at the mammoth, and I saw Zee make her way through the crowd to join us. Her face wind burned, her long hair a tangled twist.

“You okay?” I said to my sister. It seemed like she’d maybe quit wheezing so bad.

“Barely,” Kade answered for her, because suddenly he was right there beside me. His face had healed from when I’d busted it up for him, and he made that handsome smirk of his as he put his arm around my shoulders. “We’ve been all over these mountains.”

Kade took his other arm and slid it around Alpha’s waist.

I tensed up. Saw Kade’s eyes twinkling.

“You gonna tell him, compadre?” he said to Alpha. “Or shall I?”

“Tell me what?”

Alpha’s face turned grim. She took my hand in hers, squeezed my fingers. “We’ve seen them.”

“Harvest?”

“Oh, plenty of him.” Kade glanced about at my forest. Then he shrugged with the sub gun on his shoulder. “These people were supposed to be hunting for salvage, but we ended up fighting one Harvest after another, while you’ve been building your little trees.”

“Not just Harvest, bud.” Alpha shoved Kade in the gut, but not hard. Just in a way that was friendly. “We went south once this lot figured we seemed to be on the same sort of team, and they could use us in a battle. They showed us the route through the lava. The way through the Rift.”

“Aye,” Crow rumbled. “Channel of black rock, half a mile wide. But what about the trees, man? They all right?”

“Yeah.” I moved away, shrugging Kade’s arm off my back. “They’re here. With me.”

“That’s what we heard,” Zee said. “Though talking to these people hasn’t exactly been easy.”

“Well, you heard right. And the trees are safe. They’re growing.”

“Growing?” Kade laughed. “That’s better news than we bring.”

“The route south is blocked,” Crow said. “The way back be full of agents. Hundreds of them.”

“An army.” Alpha pointed up out of the rocky basin, where the fiery glow of the Rift flickered behind the peaks to the south. “The Army of the Purple Hand.”

“Yeah.” Kade nudged her. “Even this pirate’s not crazy enough to take them on.”

“Don’t tempt me.” She finally pulled his arm off her, grinning at him the whole time. But then she gave her smile back to me and pulled me close, resting her head on my shoulder.

I stared up at the mammoth they’d ridden in on, and its sad old eyes met mine.

“Don’t matter,” I said. “I don’t need a way back, anyway.”

“How’s that?” Kade couldn’t help but sound serious.

“Right here is Zion,” I told them. “And I ain’t leaving for no place at all.”

When both mammoths raised their trunks to the moon and let out a wail, the Kalliq quit chattering and shuffling around, and they all stared up at the sky.

And folk weren’t looking south, where the red globs of the Rift glowed along the tops of the mountains. Instead, they were looking north, where a new set of colors had begun burning the night.

Green waves of light came cresting and spinning out of the heavens, sketching patterns against the blackness and turning blue as the patterns stretched and ebbed.

Looked like clouds of color, swirled quick on invisible winds.

Damn right, this is Zion, I thought. Mammoths and moss. Saplings growing in the mud below, and now a kaleidoscope above. I had my girl, and my sister, and Crow at my side. Place was beautiful.

The Elder’s voice rose as the lights turned pink and white above us. And when she quit speaking, there was silence. Everyone just gazing at the billowy flashes of light.

The Healer found me in the crowd. “Friends?” she whispered, nodding at Alpha. She stared up at Crow, smiled at Zee and at Kade.

“Most of them,” I said, but I pointed to the strange lights that splashed in the heavens. “What is this?”

“The North Lights,” she said, peering upwards, and I watched the glow as it danced in her eyes. “Lamplight of Kalliq.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Elder says for you. Says the Burning Wheel shines for the Tree King.”

Kade had overheard, and he busted out laughing. “Tree King? Well, aren’t you special?”

He laughed so hard, the Kalliq around us joined in with the laughing. I saw Alpha bust a smile, too. “Like your new duds,” she said, smirking as she tugged at my shaggy pink vest.

And I mean, what the hell? Were they even happy to see me? Because I sure weren’t in the mood to be the butt of some joke.

“We need to talk, Banyan.” Crow’s voice boomed above me.

“What about?” I snapped, trying to pull away through the crowd. Alpha grabbed me, though. Kept me beside her.

“About you talking about Zion,” Crow said.

“Oh, right. You gonna say I’m crazy cool?” I made my voice deep as his was, scowling up at him.

“More I’m thinking you just be crazy.”

But I didn’t have to answer him. Because behind us, rising up out of the crater, came the banging of drums.

The Festival of Lights, they called it. And a big old party is what it was. Right inside that big chimney crater, everyone lining up on the ledges and steps, from the mud-pit bottom to the star-filled sky. The North Lights bloomed overhead and lit the insides of the earth, their colors flashing and surging as the Kalliq let loose.

Steel drums chimed and pounded, each beat ringing out all the way to the moon. And it weren’t just drums these people had crafted. Folk banged and clattered on old hubcaps, oven doors, and copper pipes. They blew down glass-bottle flutes, struck mallets on racks of tin cans. And the night came undone as the music untwisted, reverberating into the mountains and making everything sing. It was beautiful. Music like nothing I’d heard. Chants and tunes tumbling from the lips of all the Kalliq around me.

I was stood on the steps with Alpha, midway down the crater, staring up at the luminous sky. The air was thick, and the steam was sour. The whole night seemed to be rolling and sinking, the songs shattering like fireworks.

Alpha grabbed my hand and pulled me to the edge so we could see the bodies moving above and below us. Everyone dancing and jumping. Shaking their butts and waving their hands in the air.

There was a girl on a high ledge spinning a hoop made of fire. Dudes swinging ropes they’d turned into flames. I pointed up at the girl with the hoop, nudging Alpha.

But Alpha had started to bounce herself free.

She moved like she was at the very center of the music, all the light and all of the faces, like it was all part of the same tapestry. And as my pirate girl shook and danced and started to move even faster, it was like nothing bad could ever touch her again. As if she’d slipped out of this world, moving too fast for its dirty fingers and the grip of decay. She moved like a twister on the dustlands. Her arms pulsing with the music and her skin glistening, each drop of sweat vibrating with the thunderous steel drum boom.

And I reckon she wanted me to move with her, but I didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t figure out how to let myself go. And before I knew it, Kade was pushing past me and dancing beside her. He was shirtless, shaking the ugly stump at the end of his arm above his head and grinning at my girl.

I started to slip away through the crowd on the steps, suddenly wanting to find Crow. My old, broken friend. Hell, I knew he wouldn’t be dancing.

I found Zee before I found Crow. She was crouched at the edge of the silver mud pit, staring up at the dancers and the circle of sky.

“Kade was looking for you,” she said when I squatted beside her.

“Don’t reckon it was me he wanted.” I watched the steam swirl about us, tinged by the blue lights of the cosmos. And then I peered up at where Kade and Alpha were still dancing away. “You seen Crow?”

“He was talking with the old woman. Then he went off with one of the twins.”

“The one that looks like this?” I made my face full of misery.

“No.” Zee grinned. “The one who doesn’t speak so good.”

Already had a pretty good idea where I’d find Crow and the Healer, but I had Zee point out which passage they’d taken before I started to go.

“Banyan,” she called, putting a hand on my leg and tugging me back towards her.

“What’s up, sister?”

I tell you, just me saying the word made that lass smile.

“What did you mean?” she asked. “About not wanting to leave here?”

“Look around you. No GenTech. No dust. There’s food growing, and it belongs to everyone. And the mammoths.” I pointed to one, bopping its head out of one of the tunnels as if it was enjoying the tunes. “Hell, this place has it all.”

“But we can’t stay here. We don’t belong with these people.”

“I don’t belong nowhere else.”

She shook her head at me like I was being ridiculous. “You ever even heard of a place like this?”

“Sure. You used to talk all about it. Called it the Promised Land.”

Zee rolled her eyes.

“What? Looks more like it than that island we found.”

“This ain’t the Promised Land, Banyan.”

“Well, stories only get you so far, I reckon.”

“And you think the trees are safe here?”

“That’s the best part of all,” I said. “They’re safe and healthy.”

“So you just want to keep them hidden away.” Zee made this face, like she was all disappointed in me.

“Last I heard, you wanted to give them to GenTech. Or Harvest. Anything to make sure they survive.”

“I never said I wanted to hide them from people.”

“Well, maybe I don’t give a damn what you want.”

“That figures.” She frowned. “We’ve been talking it through, you know.”

“Who?”

“It was something Alpha said. And Kade.”

“What the hell’s he got to do with it?”

“I don’t know why you get like that about him.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “Guy’s a punk.”

“He never did a thing wrong to you.”

“No? And what else did he tell you?”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Used to be hooked on the crystal. He tell you that?”

“Yes. He did.”

“Just like Frost,” I said.

“Not like Frost. Come on, Banyan. Stop.”

“Then quit talking about him.”

“I like him.”

“You can quit liking him, too.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re supposed to be my sister,” I said, letting myself get as pissed as I wanted. I pointed up at Alpha, dancing without me. Kade spinning her around like a fool. “And that’s supposed to be my girl.”

“You can be such an idiot.” Zee stared up the side of the crater, watching Alpha and Kade vibrate with the music. “Why aren’t you dancing with her, anyway?”

I listened as the drums crashed and looped. “Guess I ain’t the dancing type.”

“I would be, if that was my girlfriend.”

“So maybe you should go dance with Stumpy.”

“Who says I won’t dance with him?”

“You say it like I give a damn if you do.”

As I started to leave her, I wondered if she could really be sweet on that punk. And I wondered what else had happened since we’d all been apart.