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Farland and Thrush exchanged looks and shrugged. Roderick sucked soup out of his tin.
"We're getting pushed back again," Farland said. "God, it's like getting a shot when the doctor keeps picking up and putting down the big-bore needle."
Roderick stopped eating and stared. "I had rabies shots. Harpy bite."
"He said all this is more or less of a show. To convince some gulag Quislings that Southern Command won't just shoot them dead if they join us."
"News to me," Thrush said. He returned his pannikin to the slop bin and returned, twitching up his trousers with his deft little hands before he sat. It took Valentine a moment to remember when he'd last seen that gesture-Malia Carrasca's grandfather in Jamaica would go through that same motion when he sat. "You know, they might be firing smoke to get you to plead out."
"They've tried murderers before," Farland said. "My uncle served with Keek's raiders before they hung Dave Keck. But he killed women and children."
"And Lieutenant Luella Parsons," Roderick said. "When was that, fifty-nine?"
"She shot the mayor of Russelville," Farland put in. He wiped raindrops from his glasses and resettled them.
"Yeah, but she claimed he was working for them. Said she saw him talking to a Reaper."
"I heard they tried General Martinez himself for shooting a couple of Grogs," Roderick said.
"That makes sense," Thrush said. "If you ask me, it's a crime not to shoot 'em."
"Actually it was," Valentine said. "I was there. The two Grogs he shot were on our side."
"First I've heard of it. Were the charges dropped?" Farland asked.
Valentine shook his head.
"You made a powerful enemy, Major," Thrush said. "Martinez had a lot of friends in Mountain Home. He had the sort of command you'd send your son or daughter off to if you wanted to keep 'em out of the fight."
"Technically I was under him during Archangel. His charges are why I'm here, or that's what my counsel says."
"Bastard. Heard he didn't do much," Farland said.
"I wouldn't know. I was over in Little Rock."
Roderick grew animated. "Heard that was a hot one. You really threw some sand in their gears. What was her name, Colonel . . ."
"Kessey," Valentine put in. "She was killed early on in the fighting. Bad luck."
"What are you going to plead, Valentine?" Thrush said.
"Five minutes, gentlemen," a guard yelled, standing up from his seat next to the door.
Everyone was wet. Were they all bedraggled sacrificial sheep? "Haven't made up my mind yet."
* * * *
Valentine grew used to the tasteless food, and the boring days of routine bleeding into one another and overlapping like a long hospital stay. He took a job in the prison library, but there was so little work to do they only had him in two days a week. He could see why men sometimes marked the days on the wall in prison; at times he couldn't remember if a week or a month had passed.
The weather warmed and grew hot. Even the guards grew listless in the heat. Young brought in two of the pamphlets produced about the fight in Little Rock and had Valentine sign them.
"Turns out I had a cousin in that camp your Bears took. One's for him and one's for his folks."
Part of his brain considered escape. He tried to memorize the schedule of the guard visits to his hallway, tried to make a guess at when the face would appear in the shatterproof window, but their visits were random.
Also, there was the Escape Law. Any person who broke free while awaiting trial automatically had a guilty verdict rendered in absentia.
He slept more than he was used to, and wrote a long letter to the Miskatonic about the mule list. He labored for hours on the report, knowing all the while that it would be glanced at, a note would be added to another file (maybe!) and then it would be filed away, never to see the light of day again until some archivist went through and decided which documents could be kept and which could be destroyed.
