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"You're too . . . too much, David. They were just words, and I was angry."
"I thought it was kind of refreshing. First time we'd been honest with each other since . . . well, your dad's basement."
Molly blushed, but just a little. "We were just about to have macaroni and ration cheese." The tiniest pause after "macaroni" told Valentine all he needed to know about what she thought of Southern Command's "cheese"-an oily yellow concoction that tasted faintly like axle grease. "I can fill another plate."
"Fine."
They ate on the steps of the porch rather than clear off the table. "It occurred to me on the ride back that I didn't know if you could sew," Valentine said. "I recall you were good with leather."
"Not like my mom. But I'm getting better."
One of Molly's civilian neighbors, a tight-faced, tan woman, walked by and took a second look at Valentine. Then she turned her face straight to home with everything but an audible hmpff.
After Edward went to bed they talked. Looking back on it Valentine realized that he talked and Molly listened. Beck and leaving the Wolves, Duvalier and training as a Cat, the Eagle D Brand in Nebraska's sand hills, the wild night of fire in the General's hangar, Jamaica, Haiti, ratbits, finding out that he'd be a father one rainy day in the Texas pinewoods. The deaths of M'Daw and and the Smalls, Hank. He raised his shirt and she touched the burns on his back.
He couldn't feel whether her fingertips probed or caressed. The surface nerves were mostly dead.
It felt so good to talk about it, maybe because Molly was a piece of his life dating back to before so much of it had happened.
"I can't sit anymore. There's a beautiful moon," Molly said. "You want to take a walk?"
Valentine wasn't sure he did. Or he wasn't sure of the part of himself that did, anyway. "What about Edward?"
"Mrs. Colbert can listen for him. She hears everything that goes on in the cabin anyway. It's all of eight feet away."
"Anything to help Southern Command's cheese along," Valentine said. "You'd think something that greasy-"
"What is it about soldiers and their bowels?" Molly asked. "You'd think with a woman and a moon and a warm night you'd just-
Horse hooves clip-clopped through the gravel and turned up the little lane running between the rows of bunkhouses.
Four men on horseback leading a fifth saddled horse appeared. One of Valdez's men walked ahead, and pointed toward Molly's cabin.
Valentine could make out the uniforms even in the dim light. The two in back were Wolves; there was no mistaking the trademark soft buckskins and fringed rifle sheaths. The others wore the plain khaki and the round-brimmed "Smokey" hats of the Rounders, Southern Command's law enforcement branch.
Usually veteran Guards, the Rounders patrolled the roads and bridges of Southern Command keeping the population safe from "bummers"-people in the Ozarks without a stake of one kind or another, who were often conduits of everything from black-market antibiotics to military information-and outright criminals.
The Rounders often brought bad news to the harder-to-reach families as well. Rounder on the doorstep was a phrase that meant misfortune to most people living outside the towns.
"Rounders," Molly said, echoing his thoughts.
The horses stopped in front of her cabin and Edward appeared, seeking the comfort of her hem. She picked her son up.
Valentine went to the screen door of the tiny porch.
"You Major Valentine?" a man with jowls spilling over his frayed collar asked as he approached.
The Wolves stayed on their horses. One looked halfway familiar to Valentine-then it came to him; he'd been a Wolf at his Invocation, though the name escaped him. The Wolves' hands were conspicuously off their weapons.
"Could you step outside, sir?" The jowly man's laminated name tag said Goebbert.
"What's this about?"
"Just step outside, please, sir."
They ignored Molly and her wide-eyed child. As Valentine came out the Wolves got off their horses.
"You're a hard guy to find, Valentine," the other Rounder put in. He had cockeyed ears, like a hound listening to a raccoon on the roof. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Goebbert.
