“You wondering about the others, Dad?”
“Yeah. Kind of running over what’s been happening in my mind. Trying not to lose control of any of it. One day someone might want to know all about what went down for us.”
His fingers rested in the tangled fronds of dead lichen and some small-leafed ivy. Jim plucked them up and stared at them, seeing the pallid pink color of the dried plants.
“Fish is nearly done, Dad.”
“Sure thing. Don’t burn your fingers on it.”
Heather glanced at her father with a look of infinite scorn. “Been cooking like this for weeks, Dad. Do you think I’m dumb?”
“No, of course not.”
He was fumbling with the fish, partly charred and partly raw, when Heather asked, “You think Nanci was really a teacher, Dad?”
Heather had finished her trout and licked her fingers, then wiped them on the leg of her jeans. Jim noticed that it had started to snow again, tiny feathers drifting down through the looming branches of the giant trees around them.
“I think she may have been once. What made you think about her?”
The girl grinned. “I knew you were wondering about everyone. She’s the one that seems real odd. You know about her and Jeff Thomas, Dad?”
Yeah, he knew, but he hadn’t known that the girl had known—assuming she was talking about what he thought she was talking about.
“Her and Jeff, love?” he said, stalling for time.
“Sure. You must’ve seen it, Dad.”
“What?” His cheeks were beginning to flush at the line the conversation had taken.
“Weirdly weird.”
“The way she orders him around?”
Heather snorted with laughter. “That what they call it, Dad? Just ordering around? I seen them two or three times. He was like a slave in some porno vids. Doing everything she told him to. Licked her boots and stuff.”
Jim decided that it would be better if he didn’t probe too deeply into what his eleven-year-old daughter understood by “and stuff.” He also wondered when Heather had been watching any porno vids. But also decided to let that lie.
“I guess both of them could have been chilled by now,” he said.
“Won’t cry for shit-for-brains Jeff.”
“Guess nobody really liked him that much.”
“No. Had a teacher in third grade, Miss Leventhal, used to say that everyone had a bit of good in them. Jeff didn’t. I reckoned he was the sort of person who was a bully to people weaker than him and a coward with anyone stronger.”
“Nanci was certainly stronger than Jeff,” agreed Jim. “Fact is, she was probably stronger than most anyone. Can’t really believe she’s bought the farm.”
“Maybe they’ll all turn up first thing tomorrow morning,” Heather said without much confidence.
“Maybe. And Maybe Zelig’ll appear with a chopper to whisk us all to Aurora.”
They fell silent in the face of such uncertainties, until Heather said, “Fire’s going out, Dad.”
“Best get ourselves into the van for the night. Leave the embers to smolder. Won’t do any harm, not with this snow starting again.”
“What about tomorrow?”
He smiled at the girl, her face only a pale blur in the gloom of the forest. “Tomorrow’s another day, Heather,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Poole!” The voice was strident and hard.
Nanci Simms had been dozing after an intensive hour of deep meditation, trying to calm her mind and ready it for what she knew was coming.
“Get off that bed and get yourself to the fucking door.”
“Sure.” Just for a moment, as she reentered the real world, she had forgotten that the guards knew her by the name of Veronica Poole. The decent, gentle, retired schoolteacher from the northern suburbs of Fort Worth. That was the story she’d stuck to when they caught her and that had been her story through a number of interrogations. In her time Nanci had been examined by serious experts, and what had surprised her now was how little interest the inquisitors had shown in her.
Most of them had been callow young men, who seemed merely to be going through the motions with the questions.
How had she lived since Earthblood?
Where had she been?