As the caravan settled to rest for the remainder of the night, Markos and Sineta once again broached the subject they had raised earlier with Mildred, Doc and J.B.
Having posted sec sentries for the night, the sec boss came over to where the companions had settled with Sharona. Ryan was about to tackle the matter of who this woman was, and why she had seemingly arrived out of nowhere when believed chilled, when the sec boss requested that he and the baron talk with them.
In truth, Ryan was relieved for the distraction. He hadn’t been looking forward to tackling the subject and had had no idea where to begin. Come to that, he still had no idea of where Sharona had been or how she had landed in the same place as the companions—and he had absolutely no idea what her intentions were with regard to her son and to the rest of the traveling party. She had been reticent on the matter during the day’s march, refusing to be drawn on her own life and instead pumping Dean for details of what had occurred to him during the time that they had been parted.
While the rest of the companions were waiting for Ryan to explain, they were stunned when he told Markos that it would be fine to talk to the sec boss and the baron.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Krysty asked angrily. “We’re owed an explanation, aren’t we?”
“And I’m sure we’ll get it—in time,” Ryan said pointedly, staring at Sharona. “But first let’s hear what Sineta and Markos have to say.”
“I think we know some of it,” J.B. ventured.
Ryan frowned. “So we’ve all been keeping secrets. Fireblast, this had better not become a habit.”
Any argument was cut short by the arrival of the baron and the sec boss, who outlined the proposition put to half of the companions earlier in the day.
Ryan whistled. “There’s a lot of your people that could make it rough for us, if we agreed,” he said.
Markos nodded. “That much is true, and I acknowledge that we are not asking you to undertake that which is easy, but I feel that we could learn so much from you. Speaking personally, I know that I have learned much.”
Ryan grinned. “I told you about that. You learn about tactics as you go along, and you’ll learn about the mainland as you go along. Anything that we say or do right now is no substitute for actually living it and learning from experience.”
“This much I have gathered,” Markos said with due consideration. “But that is not the only thing I have learned, and in many ways, it is the least of my concerns.” He continued in a halting tone, stopping to consider every word. “My brother—in the days when I believed him to be a man of honor and integrity, taught me that the black man and the white man were completely separate and that never the twain could meet. That is something that was deeply ingrained in me, perhaps even more than I was fully aware. But I do not feel that way anymore. We are different, but we are equal. That feels so strange, even now, for those words to pass my lips and to be more than just hollow.
“It is strange to consider that just a few short weeks ago, when I first encountered you in the Pilatan woods that I shall see no more in this life, I thought of you as little more than scum who were trying to oppress, if not chill, Mildred. And I did not believe that it was possible for you and she to exist within the same group without a hierarchy of some manner to intrude. But I was wrong. I have learned, more than anything, that it is not your origin—in either a racial or geographic sense—that matters, but rather the manner in which you act and conduct yourself that is important. It is not where you consider yourself to be in terms of origins, but rather how you consider yourself and conduct yourself…how you act toward yourself and others as we all try to survive and make a life in what can be an extremely prejudiced and hostile environment.