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"Yes. Checking some roads around Evansville in an old pickup. No sign of that armored Spearhead. But I can't shake the feeling something's going to happen as soon as Bloom marches her people out of camp."
"March out with them," Valentine suggested. "Take a break. You've been going hard for as long as I've known you."
"Can't. Every time I leave you, you do something stupid and I have to claw you out of it."
"I'd do the same for you," Valentine said.
She yawned.
"You'll sleep tonight. Where do you bunk these days?"
Duvalier had a habit of sleeping in strange spots: chicken coops, dog runs, little scraped-out hollows under rusted-out cars quietly going to pieces on the roadside. It was an act of security gained from long habit in the Kurian Zone: to not be where a Reaper might be poking around, looking for a victim.
"That's what death is, right? Just going to sleep forever. Unless a Reaper gets you. I wonder if the Kurians can mess with you, you know, even after death. Like it's hell or whatever."
"That's silly." Actually, it wasn't. Valentine had seen living bodies, suspended in tanks in a death that wasn't death, in one great, skyline-dominating tower in Seattle.
"They almost got me this trip. You think my luck's used up, Val?"
Maybe that was at the heart of her dark mood, drinking, and odd talk. "You're too smart for 'em," Valentine said.
Valentine escorted her up to his room at headquarters. Though the room had his name on a piece of cardboard taped next to the door, he rarely slept there, preferring to be in the little bungalow by the battalion.
"Remember crossing Kansas?" Duvalier said as they went up the wide stairs with big corner landings. "You were always up making breakfast. I woke up and there you'd be, frying eggs in a pan in bacon fat. Then you'd pour in some flour and make breading."
"It was to prevent you from dining out of garbage bins. The food's healthier when you cook it yourself. I suppose that's why I always fried it to hell. Fear of microbes."
"I thought it was delicious," Duvalier said, slipping out of her clothes. Which took a long time-she clothed her slight frame in multiple layers.
"Father Max used to say my cooking was made for Lent," Valentine said. He watched her undress. Not for pulchritudinous reasons; he wanted to make sure there was flesh on her ribs. She was a wanderer afoot, and the long miles left her scarecrow-thin. Valentine admired her knife-cut good looks, but wished she looked a little more like the sleek general's plaything she'd been during Consul Solon's occupation than the bony adolescent raising the sheet next to him.
"Make me breakfast, Val. Make me some breakfast."
"Okay. You stop talking nonsense and get some sleep."
"Next to you. Like the old days."
"Sure."
Valentine climbed into the bed. The queen-size mattress seemed extravagant, but then the estate owner considered anything under king fit only for the hired help.
He'd not lain naked next to a woman since the erotically mobile, lusty Tikka had gathered what was left of the Kentucky Alliance and harried the Moondaggers across Kentucky. Tikka had run through his inventory of sexual tricks, many acquired from an older Ohio doctor of highly specialized obstetrics, in a few marathon sessions that left her energized and Valentine exhausted but both happily relieved of the burdens of the Kentucky retreat during their few hours together.
Last he'd heard she'd returned to the Bulletproof. He hoped she was one of the delegates in Elizabethtown.
He felt some faint stirrings below the waist as Duvalier pressed her slight body against him, sighing contentedly. But the easygoing intimacy he and Duvalier shared wasn't physical, though they took comfort in the body heat and natural comfort of each other's frames when traveling together. Their intimacy might be compared to that of a brother and sister, but outside of black-cover gothic erotic romances, few sisters slept next to their brothers with pubic thatch tickling his thigh.
No, they were more like a veteran married couple, finding reassurance in each other's bodies, knowing that they'd wake up together or not at all-save that they'd skipped the sex that usually led to such complacency and gone right to physical reassurance.
The party went on until dawn and beyond.
The next day he accompanied Lambert across the emptied camp to headquarters. The trampled-down, dead grass where the tents had been set up turned the parkland into something resembling a chessboard.
They passed through to the CO's office. Bloom stood there, her files tied up in three big waterproof binders by her adjutant. She walked a little stiffly but kept the cane as more of an affectation than because she needed it for moving about the office.
They exchanged the necessary salutes.
"Fort Seng is yours. What's left of it, anyway," Bloom said. She turned a bit pensive. "Still wish I knew what they did to me when I got all scared," Bloom said. "I never once the whole time felt my mind was not my own. I was just dark and depressed about everything. Doubtful. That ever happens to you, tell somebody right away."
