Sineta reached out and took Mildred’s hand. “I shall miss you—miss all of you—if you depart. But I shall understand.”
Markos grunted. “I’m not sure that I can say the same. I will abide by any decision, but I feel a little lost.”
Ryan slapped the sec boss on the back. “You know what? I kind of feel the same. Sometimes people use a lot of unnecessary words to explain simple things. At the end of the day, anyone has to live their own way and learn their own lessons. And the problem is, I think ours are just different to yours. We’re looking for something—a place we can call home, a place that seems right for us. What we need isn’t what you need. Pilatu needs a plot of land where it can build a ville, start to farm and start to trade. Somehow, I think that just isn’t for us.”
“Then what is?” Markos asked.
The one-eyed man shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’ll let you know when we find it, because I’m sure we’ll all know when we do.”
Markos and Sineta rose to leave the companions, both seeming to accept that their allies wouldn’t join permanently to them.
“Travel with us a little longer,” Markos said by way of parting. “We would welcome your company until you feel the need to strike out on your own.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Ryan said simply.
The companions sat in silence, watching Markos and Sineta leave them. Then Ryan turned and fixed Sharona with a monocular stare in the flickering firelight.
“And it strikes me that Mildred isn’t the only one around here with a story to tell,” he said softly.
“I DON’T REALLY KNOW where to begin,” Sharona said hesitantly, “because it all seems so strange, and in a lot of ways as though it happened to somebody else, which it kind of did. I’m not the same as I was back when I last saw you,” she added to Dean.
“You look…different,” her son replied. “I knew it was you straight away, though. What happened, Rona? You were buying the farm. It was rad sickness. That’s why you sent me away, because you didn’t have long left. So how come…?”
“I wish I could answer that,” she replied. “I truly wish I could, because then I could begin to understand what I’ve been through in the past few years and I could account for how I ended up here, right now. But I can’t. All I can tell you is that I was deathly ill. I thought it was rad sickness and it wouldn’t be long before I was finally chilled. That was truly why I sent you away,” she said to Dean, “because I didn’t want to see you at the end—didn’t want you to see me. I thought it would be long and painful, and I had to make sure that you were looked after in some way and that you’d be all right when I was gone. And let’s face it, we didn’t have much of a life near the end anyway, with me having to work in a gaudy to earn some jack.”
Dean winced at the memories. Now he had his mother back, he didn’t want to remember those days and what she had been through so that they could survive. “Don’t, please,” he said softly.
Sharona ruffled his hair. “I’ve got to, sweetheart, if I’m going to explain in some way what happened to me. You see, after you’d gone, I started to waste away more and more. I became so thin that even the cheapest gaudy slut had more meat on her bones than I did. I couldn’t even earn a living with my body anymore— sure, I’d pick up the odd trick, but not enough to keep alive. And even though I knew the end was near, there was still a part of me that wanted to keep alive…you know, that spark that won’t let you give up, even when you feel like there’s no hope.
“So there was nothing left for me there—you were gone, and I couldn’t earn a living in any way.
“But there was a convoy coming through, a trader called Nyland. Evil, nasty piece of work, but with some surprising edges. Can’t remember ever seeing a woman trader before, especially one that was so small. She must have just been five feet, if she was that. But I’ve never seen anyone, man or woman, who could take so much jolt or drink so much and still stay on her feet. And that was when her temper got worse. I once saw her take on a man twice her size and beat him in a fight by crushing his balls with her teeth while he tried to break her neck. He let her loose in sheer pain and she chilled him by beating him with a table.