Solstice
21st December in the Old calendar, Winter Solstice
It's hot. It's hot and it's dry outside. And inside this house, this safe house of Blake's, it's also dry. Not a drop of liquor in the place, except soma, and they're keeping that for the sick and the wounded. I'm as sober as a judge, not that I ever knew a sober judge. The ones I saw on the Delta Courts always seemed to need liquid relief when they saw me coming.
I wish I wasn't sober. I'd go looking for the medical unit, and try the thinking-about-dying routine that never worked on Cally, but I don't know anything about this place that they've brought us to, and I don't want to run into him. I don't know where he is now, and I'm not going to ask. I just don't want to see him. Not after what he did. To everyone, really, me and the others, but mostly me... and Blake.
~b7~
"It's a safe house," one of the others, Blake's new people, told me while we were being flown here. I was rather taken with the idea of 'safe', you couldn't call Xenon safe even before we blew it up, what with the people I was stuck with there. "We have twelve of them on Gauda Prime, and a few more on nearby worlds; no, I'm sorry, we can't tell you where it is. Not until Blake gives you the nod." I nodded quickly, maybe too quickly, even though I hadn't been about to ask anything like that. 'Safe' was more than enough direction for me. And it wasn't as important. What was important was -
"Blake's still alive?" That was when I felt something unfreeze inside me. Not all of it, of course - there were odd still bits of ice carved with the words Soolin, Tarrant, and Dayna, and all the older bits with older names - but some of it.
"Well, in stasis. Not - dead," she said with a slight wobble on the last word. She was small and dark and rather mean-looking, what with the miniature bounty hunter's kit she wore and the size of the flame-thrower she had slung over one shoulder. Nice legs, what you can see of them. "Not dead, but our doctors aren't calling it alive either, yet. Not till they've operated." Her eyes were huge and bleak, and for all her toughness, I think she was scared. So was I.
I wish I had enough soma to drown in, drown the misery and the pictures in my head.
I wish it wasn't so hot.
I wish...
I don't know what I wish, but I do wish.
~b7~
Not that I'm complaining, not now, but couldn't they build their safe houses somewhere nice? It's like a fusion drive outside, you can almost see the heat rising off the ground. The air's so still and heavy with it that breathing hurts, and all you can see is dead grass, dead trees, baked earth and baking, empty, blindingly blue sky.
Just another of Blake's garden paradises, we should have known it. Noell says it's the hottest day of the year in this southern corner of Gauda Prime, and the longest. That makes sense, it seems to have lasted forever already.
It's ten hours now since we met up with Blake again - in a manner of speaking - in this brilliant reunion that we didn't get asked about. And bloody brilliant it was too, if I do say so. Now the Scorpio's in pieces all over that forest up north, and Slave's gone the way of Zen. Dayna, pretty, deadly Dayna, is definitely dead. Soolin and Tarrant, we don't know, we don't know, they couldn't find them after it all ended, and anyway I don't know if I want to know. I'm alive, which surprised even me. And he is, of course. Avon. And Blake...
They think he'll live. They want him to live. They just can't promise he'll live. And none of them know - yet - how he got shot in the first place.
"Did you see what happened?" the dark woman - Noell, her name is, I think, mean-looking but really rather nice - asked on the way. That's when I - we - I found it out, that no one knew that Avon was the one who shot Blake. No one except me and him.
"Sort of..." I hedged, looking over at him, sitting on the other side of the flyer. He didn't appear to hear her, he was staring at his hands, as he had been for ages.
Noell handed me a small flask of something sweet and dark brown and foul-tasting, probably good for me. She held another out to him, but he didn't seem to see it. They were fussing a bit over him, and it annoyed me. He didn't looked that much paler than normal, but then they didn't know what normal was for him, did they? Just that he was three shades whiter than white. And that his eyes had gone all dark and cold and shiny, and that he wasn't talking much. And that there was still dried blood on the jacket he wore, and his fingers kept touching the dried patches, lightly, too lightly to rub it off, more like... like... I don't know, and I know I don't want to.
Actually, now I think of it, he wasn't talking at all. I just didn't think of it then.
"We found the one who shot Blake," the other woman - a big, broad-shouldered Gamma type, looked a bit like Gan of all things - said, in a deep voice like a friendly bloodhound.
I promptly choked; Noell thumped me on the back. "You what?"
"The projectile gun was in his hand; he was dead, of course, all of the troopers were," the Gamma lady frowned a little. "Pity, that. But at least you're both all right, and we got Blake out in time."
"Perhaps," Noell added.
"You mean there isn't anyone else - or any tape, or -?"
"No, Deva rigged the security vistape so that Blake was never picked up on it. In case anyone had too long a memory. And Deva -"
"Deva?" A vague memory of a small, gingerbread-coloured man running in and getting shot.
"The insider on the vigilante station," Noell supplied. "Blake's second, a computer genius, really." Ah, I saw that get a slight, flinching movement out of Avon. "And his closest friend."
"And now dead," the Gamma lady added.
So there it is. Avon was found slumped over Blake's body - he'd been hit by half a dozen stun bolts - and some stupid uniformed nobody took the gun and got shot holding it. So they all think that nobody did it. I know better, but hey, I'm not stupid enough to tell anyone, in case they shoot both of us for good measure.
Just our luck, isn't it? I wish I could work out if it's good or bad.
"We do know who you are," the Gamma lady said then, and her voice went all soft and sympathetic, like the same bloodhound trying to comfort a lost wolf-cub. Or something. I shook my head - the picture of him as a lost wolf-cub was something I didn't need even at the end of a good day - and she looked at me. "You're Vila Restal, aren't you?"
I gulped, and shrugged.
"He told us bits about you," Noell said. "Just bits." Not sure if this was a good thing, I tried to look innocent and respectable and harmless.
The Gamma lady was still watching Avon. "You saw it, didn't you?" she said.
A pause, then he gave a quick, sharp nod without lifting his gaze from his hands.
"You are Kerr Avon, aren't you?" she went on, and this time he looked up, briefly, eyes almost as black and twice as cold as the night sky outside the ship. It wasn't only me that shivered - Noell, who looked so hard, did too - but then he looked back down without answering, or not in words.
They left him alone after that, and so did I.
~b7~
I don't think I'll bother with the dying routine, just to get a drink. Not now. Not when Blake might be dead tomorrow.
I remember what Noell said about it being the longest day. Odd that, because on Earth, at least where I was born, it's the other way round, this same day was supposed to be the shortest. Solstice, people called it. Old Mum Chrisemasse, the boss of the thieves' kitchen I grew up in below the Delta domes, she had these strange ideas about solstices. Old traditions, she called them; things like giving presents, though they only were given only to her and she never gave anything back. Things like all going out and begging - or what was it, she called it? asking for alms - the bigger kids singing until someone paid us to shut up, and the little ones picking pockets in the crowds we didn't get. Things like special cakes and meat puddings and sweets, all of which were pretty horrible, but we ate because we were hungry. Things you never heard about in the Domes, or in prison, or with the motley, mostly-Alpha set of freedom fighters I got tangled up with.
I'm sitting by one of the windows, looking out at the heat and stillness of the dying day, and I'm cold.