Meryl would have been happy to just wander off and find a bed to collapse in (the mansion seemed to be full of empty rooms), but Milly insisted they work off their stay by making dinner for everyone. And Meryl wasn't particularly against the idea.

Of all Meryl's many domestic failings, cooking was not one. (Baking, however, was another matter entirely, so she left dessert up to Milly.) Schezar had a very well-stocked kitchen and it made for an elaborate meal. Meryl wondered how this man could afford to live so well—a mansion, a full pantry—when the town he serviced had largely disappeared. Something just didn't sit right.

But cooking always relaxed her, and she let herself forget everything but the thick soup she stirred and the vegetables steaming nearby. She was amazed to find a rack of spices in one of the taller cupboards and added some crushed basil leaves to the soup.

Once everything was prepared, Meryl didn't really mind declining an invitation to eat with the others. Marianne had asked the two women to join Schezar and the Idiot, though Meryl noticed their host had obviously only set three places. Meryl wasn't particularly hungry anyway, and didn't think she could stand any more of the man in red playing Vash and falling all over himself trying to impress Marianne. She thought she'd rather finish cleaning up in the kitchen and take a long soak in a bath. After all, she and Milly had been stuck in the desert for the better part of a week, and she'd spent a good chunk of that time curled up next to a Thomas (and had the bruises on her elbow to prove it).

While scrubbing out the great copper pot she'd used for the soup, Meryl raised one arm and sniffed almost apprehensively at her armpit.

Eurlgh. It was a wonder Schezar had let them in at all.

"I can finish up here, if you like, Ma'am," Milly said, after Meryl had let out a great sigh. She took the rinsed pot from Meryl's hands and dried it with a ragged old dish-towel.

"It's alright, Milly," Meryl replied, shaking her head. She reached for the next greasy frying pan but Milly grabbed it from the stack of dirty dishes before Meryl's fingers could even touch the handle.

"No, go ahead, Ma'am," said Milly, bumping Meryl's hip with her own to push her out of the way at the sink. It was a gentle gesture from Milly's perspective, but with Meryl's limited mass it almost sent her sprawling. "Oh, sorry!"

"No, it's alright. And thank you," Meryl said, finally, seeing the younger woman wasn't likely to be swayed. "I appreciate it. I'll be upstairs in the bath."

Meryl untied the faded blue apron she wore and pulled it over her head, hanging it on the kitchen door's hinges where she'd found it. She wondered where Schezar's staff was. Surely he couldn't run this whole house by himself...?

Rubbing the back of her neck gingerly as she walked through the empty back hall, Meryl suddenly caught sight of Marianne slipping silently out of a room around the corner. Meryl stepped back into the shadows and Marianne seemed troubled enough not to notice her as she walked by not two yarz away.

Frowning, Meryl hurried to the same door and put her ear to the wood, listening intently. When she heard nothing, she tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, and Meryl took a peek inside. It looked to be Schezar's study; a broad desk along the wall to the left, a plush chair sitting behind it. Meryl could see one of the desk drawers was open just a fraction of an ich and wondered what Marianne had been doing in there.

Meryl heard voices nearby and closed the door hurriedly, walking away as quickly as possible, more certain than ever that something just wasn't right about that woman.

The room Meryl had chosen for herself was almost exactly in the middle of the building, her reasoning being that she would be equidistant from any possible trouble, anywhere in the mansion. She locked the door behind her and ran a bath for herself, amazed at how clean and clear the water was that ran from the tap, filling the porcelain tub in a matter of minutes.

Steam rose from the surface and Meryl walked to the window, pushing open the shutters to let out some of the humid air and try to tempt in a breeze. She put both hands on the window sill and leaned out, breathing in the cool desert air that smelled of sand and heat and loneliness and hard work and exhaustion... Meryl shook her head, trying to clear it of such depressing thoughts.

A towel was sitting on her bed across the room and Meryl stripped off her smelly clothes as quickly as she could, eager to climb into that welcoming heat and let it relax all her aching muscles. She wrapped the towel around her body, and turned toward the bath.

She almost screamed.

Someone was climbing through her window, feet first and backwards. When he turned to face the room, green eyes went wide and terrified.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Meryl howled. The man in red appeared to be too frightened to even speak. Meryl looked him over now and realized he had a rope tied around his waist, the other end trailing surprisingly upward outside the window, rather than down.

He climbed down here from the roof?

"Get out!" she shrieked, too livid to think properly. Only barely in the back of her mind did it register that she was wearing nothing more than a small towel that only barely covered up the important bits.

The man looked still more scared every moment she stared him down.

"I'm sorry!" he was squealing. "I thought this was Miss Marianne's room!"

"Oh, because that makes it better!" Meryl said, furious. "Get out!" She crossed the room in long strides, the towel riding dangerously low across her chest as she moved. She put two small hands on the man's chest and pushed hard, putting all her weight behind it. She was delighted to see a look of total shock and disbelief on his face as he stumbled backward and fell out the window.

Meryl watched him disappear over the edge and waited for that satisfying cry of discomfort that would come once the rope went taut and caught him, hard, around the middle.

She was not disappointed.

Pulling the shutters closed as violently as possible, Meryl tried her best to calm down, feeling her nostrils flaring with each angry breath.

I thought this was Miss Marianne's room!

Actually, that made it considerably worse. Meryl couldn't pretend she hadn't noticed how stunning Marianne was; even more so than Milly, who was easily the most beautiful woman Meryl had ever met (though it always seem downplayed somehow under the girl's perpetual silliness).

Meryl now looked down at her reflection on the bathwater surface. Her strangely triangular face stared back, wide violet eyes taking a moment to look over her body. She was too skinny everywhere; "Hardly there at all!" as Milly would say, whenever she nearly flattened her partner accidentally (which happened fairly frequently, actually).

Goddamn it, what was wrong with her? Why the hell would she care if the Idiot would rather look in on someone else—why would she want him looking at her at all? Meryl gritted her teeth and dashed a hand through the water, the splashing and resulting ripples destroying her mirror image. She let the towel fall to the floor in a heap and climbed into the tub, drowning her troubles in the soothing warmth of the water.

The surface almost immediately skimmed over with that first layer of dust that came loose from her skin, and Meryl rested there only a few minutes before reaching for the sponge. She scrubbed away the all the grit and troubles, her mind blissfully blank for a while as she lay with her neck resting on the edge of the tub. Meryl let her head slide under the water for a moment and then lathered shampoo into her short hair. It was a rather expensive luxury, such nice shampoo, but she used very little at a time so it lasted her a long while, and it was the only indulgence she allowed herself in her travels.

The shampoo had a strong floral scent, or so it claimed. Meryl had never technically smelled a flower herself; the town she came from was so poor that no one could afford such an extravagance. Someday she hoped to live in a real city, with a community garden somewhere, with fresh fruit and vegetables, and maybe even flowers, too.

"Ma'am?"

Meryl was pulled out of her reverie by Milly's knock on the door.

"What is it, Milly?" Meryl called from the bath.

"I made some sandwiches," Milly said, through the door. "I thought you might be hungry by now."

Amazing.

"Milly, you are wonderful," Meryl said, smiling as she imagined Milly's face going pink (as she knew it must be, by now). "I'll be out in a few minutes, why don't you take a bath first and then we can eat them together?"

"Oh, I'm already out of the bath, Ma'am," said Milly cheerfully. "I'll wait downstairs."

Damn. Meryl always forgot how quickly Milly used the facilities; she had grown up with nearly a dozen siblings, it made sense she would have learned to be speedy about it.

With a sigh, Meryl stood up and slicked her hair back, trying to squeeze out as much water as possible before stepping out of the bath and wrapping the towel around herself again. She hadn't laid out clean clothes before she ran the bath, so she chose some now from her suitcase. Really, she only had several variations on the same outfit, so she pulled on clothes almost identical to those she had stripped off earlier; deep indigo leggings and a blouse under a long, fitted white tunic that buttoned down to a tapered point at her waist and then flared out again over her hips.

Toweling her hair as dry as possible, scrubbing at her scalp with the terrycloth, Meryl yawned so broadly her jaw ached. She was getting tired, and it was still early enough that she would rather be out and patrolling the area in case of another break-in. It wasn't as though she could trust the Idiot to actually do the job, after all.

Meryl lay her cloak out flat and open on the bed. Ten narrow Thomas-hide strips ran along the length of the fabric at intervals, each with five small derringer holsters attached. She designed them herself, and had the cloak manufactured at great expense. Three years ago, most of her life savings had gone into paying for the cloak—and the weaponry it hid—but Meryl had never once regretted the decision. It had meant living in a shit-hole of an apartment and eating nothing but noodles and sad stir-fry for months on end, but it was exactly what she needed at the time. And it continued to serve her well.

Now she ran her fingers over each featherweight pistol in her small arsenal, occasionally drawing one to check for wind and sand damage from the storm. Finding everything satisfactory, Meryl finally touched the one derringer that didn't match the rest. It was old, in need of a good polishing, and Meryl hadn't fired it since the day she first put it in the holster that rested nearest her heart.

Meryl gave her pistols one more going-over and threw the cloak around her shoulders. She walked down to the main floor-level, but couldn't find Milly anywhere. Curious, she checked the kitchen and dining room and front room and was starting to get worried when she finally heard Milly calling to her as she passed a window in the back hall.

"I'm out here, Ma'am!"

Meryl could barely see through the dark as Milly was waving from the courtyard, sitting on the edge of an elaborate stone fountain. Even as Meryl found the back door (through the kitchen) to get out to meet her partner, she wondered yet again at how Schezar could afford such a waste of water. She couldn't deny it was beautiful, though, seeing now a tall spray in the middle of a stone dais in the otherwise sandy courtyard.

Meryl took the sandwich Milly offered and sat.

Salmon.

Meryl smiled; it was her favorite.

"Thank you, Milly," Meryl said, taking a bite and sighing contentedly. The younger woman's mouth was too full to respond, but she nodded emphatically by way of response.

Meryl took some time now to look around. She hadn't seen the back of the house before, and as her eyes became more accustomed to the low light she saw that the courtyard overlooked the open desert. The rolling dunes might offer some cover for anyone trying to sneak up from a distance, but at about 50 yarz from the house the terrain leveled out. It would be impossible to sneak across it unnoticed, as long as there was someone around to notice.

For a moment Meryl considered asking the man in red to help them; she and Milly couldn't keep watch by themselves, even taking shifts it would be exhausting to patrol everything. But then she thought better of it. Trusting that man was just inviting disaster.

Now that she was thinking about him, Meryl wondered where the Idiot had wandered off to. Only moments later she heard his exaggerated laugh floating down to her on the desert breeze and she glanced up. She could see him outlined through a window, standing across from Marianne, gesticulating as wildly as he had done earlier when they all sat in the front room of the mansion.

Meryl rolled her eyes and returned her attention to her dinner.

Then the hair on the back of her neck stood up and she sprang to her feet, dropping the sandwich as she spun on her heel, drawing a derringer in the instant it took her to turn, her cloak fanning out around her body in a blur.

It was dark enough that Meryl couldn't see any would-be attacker, and before she even had time to cry out and warn Milly she was slammed down into the dais surrounding the fountain. Her skull met the stone and brightly colored fireworks sparkled in the corners of her vision even in the dark.

Shit.