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The stable faded away, and Phoebe was rolling around in hot sand. Gunfire and explosions erupted around her. She was a soldier in battle, with fallen comrades all around her, and she fought with that fire.
Eventually, the desert was satisfied and receded from her consciousness. She was in the stable again, fighting Lydia Copperman. She realized that she wasn’t getting hit back anymore, and her senses fell into place. She stopped and reared back, scooting out of the field of engagement until her back slammed up against a stall door.
Lydia Copperman lay on the stable floor, unconscious. Her face was a bloody, swollen mess. Phoebe’s gloves were soaked with blood, and she felt warm, viscous drips slipping down her cheeks and neck.
Vin’s phone lay about six feet away. A large black hand reached for it and picked it up; he was awake.
“You okay?” she asked him. Her voice sounded strange in her head.
“Yeah,” he said and set his free hand on the back of his head. “Gonna have a lump like a baseball back here, and my stump fuckin’ hurts getting wrenched like that, but I’m okay. You?”
Phoebe wiped blood from her face. She had some scratches, deep enough to bleed, but otherwise she felt fine. “Yeah, I’m good.”
Vin nodded at the unconscious woman sprawled between them. “What about her?”
Lydia Copperman had not moved. Phoebe considered her still form, sprawled in an awkward twist across the aisle. Something about it seemed wrong.
Though she’d been wounded in Afghanistan before she’d been there a year, she’d been in plenty of engagements with the enemy in the months she was there. She’d seen plenty of bodies, friend and foe, unconscious and unalive.
She’d learned that there was a visible difference between an unconscious body and an unalive one. She couldn’t explain exactly what the difference was—a change in the skin, perhaps, or a difference in the form of the musculature, something—but the difference was there, and they’d all known about it. They’d saved soldiers who were hardly more than torsos because they could see the difference. They’d mourned bodies that seemed unharmed because they’d known it was too late. Probably it was the reason she’d been saved herself, buried under the gruesome detritus of her squadmates.
Before she rolled to her feet, went to Lydia Copperman, and checked for a pulse, Phoebe knew she wouldn’t find one. And she didn’t.
“She’s dead,” she said, the words pushed out on a gust of shock.
“Jesus,” Vin muttered. “Oh sweet Jesus.”
Phoebe’s head began to fill with noise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Okay,” Eight said, leaning back in his chair at the head of the table. “I appreciate everybody getting their asses in their seats on short notice this morning.”
Duncan looked around the table. Half the Bulls wore Sinclair greens under their kuttes, and he was one of them; they were on shift, in the shop or the bays, this morning, so it hadn’t been a particular hardship to set aside what they were doing and walk next door to the clubhouse.
Jay had been last in; for most of the week he’d been out at his folks’ place first thing in the morning, helping his old man with a particularly complicated bike rebuild. He looked irritated at the interruption of his day, but these days he was a lot better about keeping his mouth shut and not complaining about every damn thing he didn’t like.
