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“Why would she do that?”
I feel the pistol against my back and wish to hell I had some ammo.
“You know how oracles are. Huffing locoweed all day. Makes them unstable. Maybe she has a kind of vision she hasn’t told you about. Maybe she’s on her own side.”
The Magistrate stops for a minute and seems to consider the idea. Eventually he says, “You haven’t seen Megs around, have you? He seems to have gone missing.”
“He unfriended me when I set him on fire.”
“How sad for us all,” he says, then sighs. “The universe has drifted off its axis. It teeters from side to side. There is a chance it will tumble into oblivion.”
“Like a man once said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’”
The Magistrate takes a step closer to me and says, “We live in a time of so much secrecy. Let us play a game. Tell me one of your secrets and I’ll tell you one of mine.”
Daja again. I bet she?
??s been telling him my name isn’t Pitts.
“You first,” I say.
“All right. I know you have a gun. There. Now tell me one of your secrets.”
“It doesn’t have any bullets.”
He laughs another one of those uncomfortable big laughs.
“That’s no secret, my boy,” he says. “Do you think I would have brought you here otherwise?”
“You knew I had a gun but no bullets? How?”
He leans in even closer.
“Souls are so easy to read if you know the trick.”
“That’s a secret I wouldn’t mind knowing.”
“Perhaps I’ll teach you someday.”
We head back to camp.
“When are we pulling out?” I say. “It sounded like the Empress lit a fire under you.”
“We’ll go soon. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“It’ll be quiet tonight. I think everyone is partied out.”
“Still, we must be on our guard.”
“Your enemies. Right.”
“The closer we come to our goal, the more dangerous things will become.”
“I’m sure I’ll be very useful throwing rocks at them.”
“No need for that,” he says.
He takes something from his pocket and presses it into my hand. It’s a box of bullets. They’re even the right caliber. He couldn’t have read that on my face.
