"It'll take years."
"I've got years." I watch the fire eat through the stick I threw in. "That's the whole point of what we did up there."
They call church at nine and Finn goes in.
Nobody tells me why.
Nobody tells him either.
Razor comes and finds him at the pit and says Prez wants you in ten and walks off, and Finn looks at me with his whole face gone careful.
"It's fine," I say.
"You don't know that."
"I know that." I get up on my toes and straighten his collar, which does not need straightening. "Go on."
He goes.
I stand in that yard for forty-five minutes with my heart going like a rabbit under a hawk.
Marie comes and stands beside me and takes my hand and neither of us says one word, and the whole club drifts out of the main room in twos and threes until there are thirty people standing around a fire not talking about what's happening behind that door.
Ruby brings me a plate I don't eat.
Lucia comes and stands on my other side.
At ten o'clock the chapel door opens.
They come out in a line with stoic faces on.
Python first, and I can't read one thing off him.
Then Zorro. Boulder on his crutch.
Doom. Brick. Razor.
Every one of them walks past me into the yard and gives me nothing at all, and I want to grab somebody by the vest and shake them.
Then Finn.
He comes out in his prospect cut with his hands empty and his face doing nothing, and he stops on the step, and my lungs quit.
Amara comes out last.
She's carrying a box.
Plain cardboard, the size you'd put a pair of boots in, and she walks it out into the middle of that yard and every conversation in the compound dies at once.
"Rooster." She stops and plants her feet. "Come here."
He goes.
"Six years ago a man rode up to my gate with a fake name and asked for work." Amara's voice carries clear across the yard. "A few weeks ago I found out the name was fake and I found out why, and I found out he'd been sitting on a threat to this club for six years without saying a word."
Nobody moves.
"I put him in front of that table and let every officer I've got take a piece out of him. He didn't defend himself once." She turns the box in her hands. "Then he told us what his silence actually cost, in front of fourteen people, and he cried in front of men he has to look at every day for the rest of his life, and he never once asked a single one of us to feel sorry for him."
