“Got no reason to. You could be trying to trick me into letting you out of that cell.”
“Then what?” Mildred asked. “I’ll wander around inside the Prince’s fortress? I don’t see that getting out of here really puts me any closer to escape. Do you?”
“No.”
“I’m a stranger to these parts,” Mildred said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t appear too welcome around here. This could be my last night alive. I’ve been thinking about that for hours. Dawn isn’t too far away.”
Clove looked at her eyes then, and there wasn’t really compassion in them. But there was a gleam of sudden understanding of the possibilities.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have picked you under normal circumstances,” Mildred said in a quieter voice. “I don’t usually pick boys when I got men around me. But there’s you here, and dawn coming too soon.”
Still, Clove didn’t react.
Mildred walked back to the cot. “Guess it’s your decision. You’re the one got the key to this bird’s cage.” She stood there, letting him think about it for a couple minutes. Then she walked over to the pot she’d been given to relieve herself in.
Keeping her gaze on the burning eyes of the young guard, Mildred lowered her pants and squatted over the pot. She used her hands and the loose folds of her blouse to maintain her privacy.
“You know how to tell if a woman really wants you?” she asked Clove.
“No,” he repeated, his voice breaking.
“She’ll be wet inside,” Mildred said. “Can’t help herself. A woman gets around a man she wants, her body just naturally starts trying to open itself up to him. She gets wet enough, she can’t hold herself together at all, like a flower reaching for the sun, all covered with dew.” She lowered her voice and spoke slower. “Anything at all gets near that hole in the center of herselfanything, even a fingerit just naturally slides on in.” She closed her eyes and smiled in satisfaction, moving her hand back and forth slightly.
Clove was back at the bars again, staring hard into shadows he couldn’t see through.
Mildred opened her eyes and looked at him. “So what’s it going to be, Clove? You just going to wonder about it? Or are you man enough to come find out?”
“CAWDOR AND HIS PEOPLE are going inside the root.”
Sergeant Conte listened to Whittaker’s report over the radio, hunkered down behind the windbreak he’d found amid the trees. “Any sign of engagement?”
“No. Looks like they’re getting in clean. Got lights visible through the hole they made in the root system, but nobody’s there.”
Conte moved along the trees, getting to a better position to view the strange community below. On first glance it seemed the location in the valley would have been detrimental to the security of the area. But that had been before they’d discovered the plants ringing the valley. Only Whittaker’s killer instinct and fast reflexes had saved him from certain death. Turley and Cruse were rigging flash-bangs they’d taken from the small redoubt they’d jumped to after leaving White Sands.
Thinking about the plants, watching how they’d reacted as the unit had lobbed stones and branches into the area, he’d realized they responded to sound. Then Henderson had managed to get one of the things with a machete, then drag it clear of the others. A brief examination had shown no eyes, nor anything that could pass as them. Visual targeting wasn’t an option.
Conte had it figured that if enough sound got pumped into the area at one time, the noise would “blind” the plants, allowing them to run through. If they had to. That was one thing he still wasn’t certain about.
From the way they were acting, Cawdor and his people had no welcome at the community. Conte had to believe they were there solely to rescue the black woman, since none of his men had seen her in New London, and a rescue attempt was the only explanation for the strangers’ return to the community.
“Damn stupid of them going to all this trouble for that woman if you ask me,” Whittaker said. “Me, I’d leave her. No sense in risking the unit just to get her back. They get inside that structure, there isn’t going to be an easy way of getting back out.”