Sleep was proving hard to recapture.
Andrea curled up in the corner on her bedroll, a thin blanket around her shoulders and her head tipped back against the wall. Every so often her throat would convulse silently, but she was far from crying; in fact, her eyes were so dry they were smarting painfully. The atmosphere in the workshop was tranquil enough, marred only by Daryl's fitful snores from the adjacent corner, but Andrea's physical and emotional pangs were clawing at her by turns.
Something else nagged at her, and her nameless unease was soon so strong that it overrode all other considerations. A few minutes earlier, as she'd watched from the corner, lying as still as she could, she'd seen Mallick slip into the room and crouch down at Sidney's side, shaking her gently but urgently. Even in the gloom she'd been able to see that the man's eyes were wide with what she could only assign to scarcely subdued panic, and when Sidney sat up, he'd leaned in to whisper into her ear. Sidney, for her part, seemed not to react to whatever it was he'd told her, but she'd nevertheless stood up and touched her hand to the hilt of her sword for a second, a nervous gesture that was there and gone in a second but was none the less ominous for its transience. The pair had then left the room together on quick, quiet feet, headed for the cellars, and had yet to return.
Andrea was just starting to think of following them when a small sound jerked her out of focus.
"Hey now, I'm sorry for startlin' you," said Rick, softly, sitting down beside her and looking her over for a second; she could see that despite appearances, it was a far from casual appraisal, and she was immediately aware of the sight she must present, with her hair awry, her eyes raw from crying and traces of Hoffman's blood drying on the collar of her shirt. Andrea covered her face with her palm for a second and then looked back up at Rick, seeing everything she suspected written quite clearly across his steady gaze. Still, for form's sake, she spoke up anyway.
"What's wrong?" she asked him, and now it was his turn to glance away for a moment. When he returned his attention, though, he was more serious still.
"We're partin' ways with those people in the morning," he said, and though his voice was still velvet it was now barely hiding a core of solid ice. "I shoulda trusted my gut from the start, 'cause I knew somethin' didn't fit right. Detective Hoffman may be a fine cop for all I know," he went on, and now his tone was incontrovertibly chilly, "but he's a pretty lousy human being and maybe I oughta've left him chained up. Did he rape you?"
The question struck Andrea so hard that she sagged back a little, her mouth loosening. She couldn't muster so much as one coherent word, but the expression on Rick's face changed at once, and suggested that she'd better say something quickly.
"No!" she said, a little louder than she'd intended, and she glanced around his shoulder to make sure she hadn't woken any of the others with this exclamation. "No, he didn't," she went on, lowering her voice to an emphatic hiss. "He...we just..." She waved a vague hand at Rick and lowered her gaze, her face burning furiously.
"Andrea," he said, patiently, "you don't have to explain anything. Hell, you're a grown woman and it ain't really my business unless he's hurtin' you," he added, "but you gotta understand what it looks like from here." He sighed heavily and hung his head for a second. "Anyway, my decision's made. They're not coming with us. All four of 'em spook me just a little bit too much and I've got a family to think of."
Andrea was still trying to find her equilibrium, but Rick had spoken quite firmly and relentlessly, which had served to keep her off balance. Now that he had wound down, however, she finally managed to compose a coherent sentence.
"Shouldn't we at least talk about it?" she said. "Diana, she's just –" she went on, but Rick shook his head shortly, cutting across her objection.
"If you want the truth, that kid scares me more'n the others put together," he said, and now he sounded more sad than anything else, though the warning undercurrent was still making its presence felt. "There's somethin' badly wrong there, Andrea. Look me in the eye and tell me you don't agree."
She tried. She steeled her gaze, set her shoulders and looked at him, as he'd requested – and then her throat closed around a poorly constructed denial and strangled it unborn. He was right: the girl was spilling over with some kind of bestial, hell-spawned rage for which there was absolutely no accounting, which served only to increase the chance that it could spiral out of control and put them all at risk. Even so...
"What are you goin' to tell them?" she asked, trying to keep her voice from pleading.
Rick shrugged briefly. "The truth," he said. "Look, they can take care of themselves, you can see that. I ain't seen anyone kill walkers as easy as Sidney, and fact is I'll be kinda sorry to lose her," he went on, looking genuinely downcast, "but as I said: it's decided. I don't want to spend any more time worryin' about the next crazy idea that's gonna get itself into Detective Hoffman's head."
Andrea gave in, exhaling half a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding, and then almost smiled at him, thinking better of it at the last moment, knowing it could well be misunderstood. Instead, she unfolded herself from the corner and stood up, trying to disguise the worst of her discomfort by moving slowly and carefully. He subjected her to a quizzical stare for a second, which she fielded and answered by jerking her head in the direction of the sluice room.
"I just need to..." she said quietly, and watched Rick nod.
"I hope you'll forgive me one day," he said. Andrea had been about to turn away, but this odd statement stopped her dead.
"For what?" she asked him, frowning in a very small way.
"Everythin' I've screwed up in the past," he said, gently, "and everythin' I'm gonna screw up from here on out. I can only do what I think's best," he said, and now he was the one who was smiling, although it was faint and inordinately rueful, a Mona Lisa smile with a great deal of suffering both before and behind it.
"I'm tired," Andrea told him, reflecting the expression as best she could. "I'll forgive you in the mornin', how's that?" She didn't wait for a response, but simply dropped her gaze and headed for the sluice room, pulling the blanket around her and closing the door as she passed.
It struck her at once that something was amiss. There was a breeze coming from somewhere, curling down the passage and stirring her hair a little. The sensation prickled both her skin and her heart and her hands uncurled, allowing the blanket to slip from her shoulders unheeded as she moved forward, unthinking. She made it to the end of the corridor and turned the corner, hearing a quiet squeal as she did so, and then halted in her tracks.
The outer door hung ajar and inched to and fro on its hinges, letting in a slice of ghost-white moonlight that waxed and waned as the door moved. By this illumination, all she could see was a rangy silhouette, which swayed gently, head bowed and hands hooked into loose claws.
She was already backing away as her muscles overruled her terror, but the soft scrape of her feet roused the creature from its stupor and it jerked its head up sharply, snarling through a mouthful of thick fluid and stumbling in her direction. As it did so, she saw others moving into the light behind it.
Andrea whimpered, swung around on her heel and fled, a shriek building in her lungs.
"So what's going on?"
Sidney paused long enough to shove open a door and scan the room beyond, and then directed an impatient stare at Hoffman.
"Now is not the time, Detective," she said, sharply, drawing back out of the room and moving off down the passage. She had sent Mallick to scour the far side of the cellars, and they were only now finding out just what a convoluted rabbit warren lay beneath the plant; it appeared to stretch far further afield than the building that lay above it, and they had already backtracked once upon encountering a dead end at a locked door.
"If you're going to kill me," said Hoffman, behind her, "then I'd rather you just get it the fuck over with."
This stopped Sidney in mid-stride, and she rounded on him without moving one step further. He backed a way a little at the speed with which she turned, but her expression was serene and her hands were clasped in front of her, well away from the handle of the sword.
"You live in a simple little world of your own, don't you," she said, and this comment was not pitched as a question. "Kill or be killed, that's all you see. Would you believe me if I told you that it's possible to find a little more meaning than that, even here and now?"
"No," said Hoffman, and his voice was deep and abrupt, but just for a second he'd looked as if he had a lot more to say. There was still something uncertain, something unutterably more complex, lurking behind the soft gleam in his eyes, though it flared and died as Sidney watched it carefully.
"Well," she said, tilting her head at him, "trust me, you will. The game's almost over. You haven't lost yet."
The detective snorted at her.
"I've survived three traps so far," he said, scornfully. "What's your score?"
Sidney didn't move, blink or sigh, but the angle of her head increased a little to the left and her eyes were glowing with a banked fire.
"I only needed one," she said, placidly. "Since it was your work, perhaps you should be proud of yourself, but I don't know; I'm thinking you have more than enough pride to be going on with. It's humility you need to work on, and if you haven't found that after three traps," she said, her tone sliding into the slightest trace of irony and her lips now curving just a little, "then you obviously need a little more coaching than I do. However," she added, "It's interesting you should say 'so far'. Perhaps you're starting to think at last, if not in quite the right direction."
She started to turn away, then seemed to think of something else, and swung back over her shoulder, fixing him with a pointed look.
"There's more to this than survival," she added. "I never doubted you had what it took to survive." She stopped, and looked him up and down. "I want to know if you have what it takes to live," she she said, and then seemed to subside a little, her eyes wandering off to the side for a moment. Hoffman watched her warily, but didn't move or speak.
"There's something I should tell you," she said, her gaze still averted, although she cast one quick, nervous glance back at him as she did so. "This isn't what you think. None of it is. Everything's changed." She paused, inhaling gently but shakily. "The night before last, I decided to –"
"She's not down here," said Mallick, rounding the corner, slightly out of breath. Sidney's head snapped around like a whip and she closed her mouth at once, but she looked almost as if she were grateful for the interruption. Mallick, in turn, regarded this expression with bewilderment, but rubbed a hand across his face and recovered a little ground.
"We'd better check upstairs," said Sidney, firmly. "The state that child's in, there's no telling what she'll take it into her head to do." She shot the detective a look, and then started to speak to him; but whatever it was she had on her mind, it went unsaid.
Hoffman's head jerked up at the hoarse crackle of gunfire from upstairs.