On the fourth day, several hundred miles northwest of Ben Samuels’ cabin, she asked the question that he had been afraid she would ask all along. “When will you resurrect the others?”
“Others?” But he knew who she meant. He knew.
“Wissa and the prince. The others. They have to be called up sooner or later for the performance, and it might as well be sooner.”
“No . . . show,” he told her.
She thought about that a while, as if she were not really surprised at all. “You could still call them up. They have their rights, you know, as much as you do.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“No.”
“Well, you must have a reason I People just don’t do things without having some reason I ”
“Spiders,” he told her, though he did not know exactly what he meant by that.
“Spiders?”
He said nothing more, just drove and watched the snow and hoped that she would forget about it. He was frightened of the prospect of having several puppets alive at once. Neither he nor Bitty Belina, after all, was living a normal story, the life script that had been intended for them. Each of them had gone against his script. That was confusing enough. If there were a dozen of them about, each doing whatever he pleased instead of what he was supposed to do, it would cease to be confusion and turn swiftly into chaos.
“Will you create them? Please? I would like that.”
He did not reply.
After a long while, she said, “You killed Pertos.”
“You wanted it.”
“But you were the one who did it. How? With a gun? No, I suppose you would have used something more crude than that, like a knife or a club. Was that it? And what did you do with the corpse?”
“Don’t talk.”
“I could report you, you know. I could turn you in and let the police have you”
In his mind was a picture of a small room with cold stone walls and a platform of boards for a bed. He was chained to the wall, and they kept coming in every hour or so to beat him, like they did with stupid boys who had to be put away. “Don’t,” he told her.
“Maybe that’s what I’ll do first chance I get. First time we see someone, I’ll tell them.”
He reached for her. She bit his hand, opening one of the wounds that Wolf had given him. Blood dripped from the tips of his fingers, soiled her white dress.
“Then they’ll lock you away,” she said.
This time, he swatted her with his open hand. She was knocked off her perch and crumpled on the floor in the recess beneath the dashboard. She didn’t move for such a long time that he began to think she might be dead. He stopped the truck and felt over her, blushing and nervous.
Her heart was beating. She breathed. Gently, he lifted her onto the seat and laid her down. And drove on.
When she regained consciousness again, she struggled to sit up. She got onto the stack of blankets and sat watching the snow fall for more than two hours. She did not speak a single word to him, even though he attempted to start a conversation more than once. When she did speak, her voice was fierce, her tiny face lined and reddened. “You ought to be locked up,” she said. “You’re nothing more than a damned animal. They shouldn’t let you run around loose.”
And he felt so awful that he did nothing but agree with her. “Yes,” he said contritely, not able to look at her, ashamed of himself. “Yes.”
On the fifth day, they stopped at a charging station, and Sebastian hooked up the truck’s battery to one of the plugs along the fueling island. They went inside the automat and had some warm food, watching the snow fall through the three glass walls. It was getting quite deep. There were more than ten inches on the ground, though it was all soft and presented little difficulty to the air blades of a vehicle as large as theirs.
It was when they had gone back to the truck and he had disconnected the cable from the battery that the trouble came. He was opening the door on his side of the cab when a long, wide cargo shuttle fluttered in from the highway, heading southeast. There was a large, bearded man behind the wheel, his long hair held out of his face by a headband. He brought his lorry alongside the fueling island and popped open the ten charging portals along the hood by touching some control inside. Sebastian watched him unto he was stepping out of his van before the idiot realized the danger here. He swung inside his own truck and slammed the door, fumbled desperately at the controls, as if he had forgotten how to drive.