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She drinks most of what’s left, but offers me the last swig. I shake my head so she finishes the bottle and tosses it into the fire.
“What happened to your face?” she says. She pulls down my shirt a few inches. Spots more scars. “And the rest of you.”
“Never follow a foul ball into a wood chipper,” I say. “We didn’t even win the game.”
She ignores my stupid joke and says, “Were you a soldier? A boxer?”
“You got me. I fought a bit,” I say, wondering if she ever saw the gladiator pit in Pandemonium.
“You must not have been very good at it.”
“On the contrary. I beat pretty much everyone. Just some were harder to knock down than others.”
I flash on Hellbeasts, the ones that spit fire, the ones with pincers as big as a man, the ones with teeth like buzz saws.
Daja says, “I didn’t have my first fight until after I was damned. Isn’t that funny? I was scared as hell.”
“Did you win?”
“Nope. But I got better.”
“And now look at you. No one here would lift a finger.”
She looks at me.
“Even you?”
“I’m not looking for trouble.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, not sounding entirely convinced. “Did you hear the explosion before?”
“What explosion?” I say, as innocent as a newborn bunny.
“One of the cars. The gas tank went up. It’s been burning all night.”
She points and I follow her finger.
“Oh, that. Yeah. I saw that.”
“And you weren’t interested enough to crawl out of that bucket?”
I pick up another bottle. It’s empty, so I drop it.
“I’m from California. Pretty much everything is on fire these days.”
She gives me a look.
“There’s a drought.”
“Mmm.”
“And we kind of had an apocalypse thing not that long ago.”
“Mmm.”
We stand there for an awkward minute, staring into the fire.
I say, “Why are you over here talking to me like we’re friends? You wanted me dead a couple of days ago.”
