Julia slept where Spike used to sleep. She would lay back, eyes slanted to the ceiling like he used to do, thoughtfully trapped in the stone pose of forgetting her cigarette, then finally come out of it to tap the ashes off and say, "Please, keep reading."
Faye was no good at this, but she read to her from books, the ones that Jet didn't seem to notice missing: foggy idyllic poetry, crime novels that ran through ancient European streets. She didn't think the yellowed grime of books she read in the bathtub was really Julia's speed, if she had any real speed these days. As she read for her it was hard to tell if her attention became deeply fixed or deeply elsewhere, those eyes glassy and transfixed. Sometimes when Faye paused to look at her there would be no sign that her mood moved at all, and it was a kind of relief that she ever asked her to continue, that her eyes might gaze evenly back, that the rueful corner of her mouth just might curl in encouragement.
One night, Julia's body crescent-shaped and her chin nested in the crook of her own arms which she'd loosely crossed over Faye's lap, she fell into the deeper breaths of sleep, and Faye put the book down and felt the tangled electric shimmer of Julia's hair through her fingers. Impulsively she hummed a melody with a drunken twinge in how it clung in her memory, a tune she'd heard on the saxophone in a bar on Ganymede's moon. She thought of all the little veins of roads and highways on Earth, so many blown to toxic ash, as if all these dead promises of escape were reincarnated into so many strands of hair for a woman with eyes that seemed anciently wise yet barely aware.
Of course the tune was off key; Faye felt sharp, like the notes from taut strings, tight bonds sounding like falsehoods.
In all the time Julia had cast herself away with them after limping out of the Swordfish in the hangar with a bullet wound in her shoulder, she had only told her one story about Spike, a story that took a hazy shape in Faye's mind like it had been told out of order. Faye retained mostly the image of him as just a kid with a grudge and a bruise under his eye. Something about a rickety pool table and a lost bet and a fight taken outside through the shortcut of a broken window. Julia told the story through a smokescreen of flat details which only seemed to emphasize the missing pieces, never mentioning herself as more than the observing eye, never the reason he was misty and distracted enough to catch a common punch. Never the way he made her feel.
Julia's far gaze saw trouble up ahead and danger behind. Faye felt at home in that look. She knew some of what it was like to live outside of time. But maybe still not enough.
Jet warned Faye that the woman was marked, dangerous to even touch, but if he always had complaints he also never really figured out how to throw anyone out. So they just counted the cities and stars and planets together, counted the hours. She dreamt about it sometimes, the inevitable: shadows silently crowding outside the windows in some rust-tinted nighttime diner and Julia setting her hand over Faye's as it went for her gun, covering her with that other wrong lullaby: Stay down, this is my fight.
Better to daydream of the two of them flying down the highway in that candy-red slice of a car, Julia's colors coating the drab sights with blurs of her golden beauty, that hair blowing so wild. Space and time couldn't fold for them, but it was a nice dream. She wished she could walk Julia through the back alleys and casinos and cold brick walls all the way to the lace curtains and soft carpets of her own distant past, and hide her there. But that was within, and they were without.
.