The sweatshirt hid a lot more than he'd assumed. It, along with the arsonist's jeans, shoes, and shirt, currently sat in a garbage bin by the door, waiting to be taken out and shot. Again. Or burned. She'd enjoy that, Dell guessed.
One way or another, he'd coerced her back to the house, flamethrower in hand and its dented propane tank removed. Given her state she'd reluctantly agreed a change of clothes would not be remiss, and when she disappeared into the bathroom with what he'd scrounged up for her, he'd gone about the business of finding himself a shirt and pants that weren't soaked in someone else's blood.
When she came out almost an hour later in an old pair of his jeans and an oil-stained, overlarge white T-shirt, all he noticed was her exposed arms. They were scalded and scarred, topographical maps of Martian worlds. Patches of untouched olive skin (Chinese? Middle-eastern? Spanish?) interrupted the red swaths like lakes or clouds, strange against their landscape. The bones of her wrists and elbows were sharp outlines of hunger, and two long white lines of scar tissue crisscrossed each of her palms. The mask was back in place; the gauze around her head was not. Dispenser got that too, he supposed.
She had been examining her palms, like she'd forgotten what was under the gloves. Then she caught him staring, her eye sunken and dark through the broken eyepiece, and flipped him off with both hands.
Dell paused where he sat nearby, fingers stiff over the guitar he'd picked up to pass the time. She drifted by him without a word, trailing down the hallway. She tripped over the rug, corrected herself, and staggered around the corner and into the kitchen. Dell followed, guitar in hand, and watched from the doorway as she collected the flamethrower from the kitchen table, where he'd made her leave it. Then, having it safely in hand, she turned, meandered toward the couch—her couch, he'd begun thinking of it as, just straight up "the arsonist's couch." She sank down onto it, cradling the machine the whole time, and pulled a blanket off its back to huddle into. Her razored hair was still damp, shining in the lamplight. He wondered how she managed to keep it short. "How you feelin'?" he said.
"… Tihrredd," she mumbled, her mask half-buried in the blanket. Turning, she pressed deeper into the corners of the couch, the machine like a favorite toy in her arms.
Dell could feel himself drooping. It was round about noon now, and he'd gotten maybe four hours of dozing, all told? It was an effort putting the guitar down to rest in its corner and pulling the blinds to block out the afternoon sun. "All right. Somethin' goes belly-up, just holler. I'm goin' back to sleep. Sleep tight, Smoky."
He got no answer.
Seven o'clock.
Sleep-groggy and with a dull headache, Dell found himself nursing a coffee and watching the sun creep down toward the cotton fields. Man wasn't meant to have his sleep tampered with so.
The arsonist had vanished again when he'd come downstairs. He wondered if he'd seen her for the last time. She'd left no note, no goodbye, but really—either would have been stranger to him than never seeing her again.
When she wandered in from the front door a few minutes later, flamethrower in hand, it took him a moment to get over his surprise. "Thought you'd left," he murmured.
Her shoulders rolled in a shrug. In the light, with clean hair and clothes (it even looked like she'd rubbed down the mask last night), she was a sight less frightening than she had been a few weeks ago.
The table shuddered as she set the flamethrower down on it with a heavy thump. Without its propane tank it looked like nothing so much as a sad skeleton. She pulled up a chair, sat down in it stiffly, and then …
… and then nothing happened. Dell just looked at her for a bit, mystified as she did nothing else. On the whole she looked terse and uncomfortable. Her back was ramrod straight, instead of the animal-wild hunch he'd grown accustomed to, and her hands seemed to be alternating between resting in her lap or on the table, nearer her Shark.
It finally dawned on him that she might be trying to act civilized. "Got somethin' to say?" he ventured, after a long stretch of this.
At his words she flinched, and tried very hard to not let him see that. "…Yes," she said at last, voice slower and clearer than normal. "Let me use your garage." She hesitated. "Please."
There we go. Dell sat back in his chair. He looked from her to the flamethrower, and back again. "So y'can fix that weapon'a yours, I reckon."
"It's not a weapon," she said, before catching herself. "It wasn't—supposed to be a weapon. It just sort of happened."
"Well, now. How d'you figure that?"
"What would you do if two guys with knives had you cornered and this was all you had to fight back?"
He half-raised one hand in a gesture of understanding. "Fair enough. Where'd you get it?"
"I built it."
Right. The blueprints, he remembered now. "Little ol' you?"
She answered him with a deadly serious stare. That was all that came, and a moment later he sighed and put down his coffee. With an outstretched hand, he leaned forward to touch the battered flamethrower, though not without first looking to her for permission. He got a single, jerky nod back, but that was as much as he needed.
It was cool under his fingertips, and still held the same charm he'd felt when he'd first put it away up on the shelf. A grandiose wreck. "You need new tubing," he said, "looks like you took a porcupine to this thing." There was nothing in the way of information printed on the black hose that hung unattached from the handle. It had either never been there at all or had been weathered off long ago. "Can't believe it held together with duct tape this long. You know what kind of—"
"Petroleum hose. Nitrile rubber. Four hundred pounds per square inch," the arsonist rattled off instantly.
Dell stared at the tubing for a long few seconds before he found his tongue. "…This about two-inch diameter?"
"Two and one-fourths-inch."
Slowly, he nodded. And she carried on. "The valve plug is about gone, it's all rust. Pipe's doing okay, I guess. Needs cleaned. And the pilot light's, there, the tube's bent. Just spews gas half the time before it catches … dangerous." A sigh left her as she rested a hand on the fat nozzle. "I shouldn't have even been trying to use it, it was putting so much propane in the air. Would've blown myself up sooner or later."
"Where'd you learn all that?"
The arsonist went still again. Dell waited, as quiet and patient as he might be around a spooked animal. But after a while she seemed to realize he could play the silence game as well as she could, and her shoulders slumped in a sigh. "Just. Somewhere. A long time ago."
"What're you planning on doin' with that thing once it's fixed?" Dell asked. He watched the suds foam and pop on the cement floor as he waited for an answer. Blood was hard as hell to get out of anything. His garage's floor would never be the same, he imagined. When he looked up, both hands still on the mop, he found the arsonist with her back to him, still working busily on the flamethrower. "Still gonna burn all that cotton up?"
Despite himself he'd found he was right quick inclined to let her do what she would with the damn thing. Maybe it was out of pity, or maybe it was the sort-of guilt pulling at him, something still disturbed by the scene she'd made of herself last night and seemed to have forgotten entirely. Maybe it was just because she'd proved herself capable of communicating like a mostly-sane person, and in his experience mostly-sane was about as good as you were ever gonna get from anybody.
And he had more than an idea how important, how vital, the bond between man and machine could be.
So one way or another he'd decided he'd hide just any propane tanks that might be laying around, and let her into the garage, on strict condition he'd best not find her in here without him. She'd stuck to him like a tick on a dog on the way there, and bolted in soon as she was allowed. The flamethrower was lain out and half the tools she needed ripped from shelves before he could say jackrabbit.
For the last three-quarters of an hour she'd worked in intense, concentrated silence on repairing the thing she called Shark. For his part, he'd puttered around fixing the mess had happened while he was sleeping. There were bullet-holes to patch and floors to clean. Questions to ask, maybe.
On the other side of the garage, the arsonist put down the blowtorch she'd been using. "I thought about it," she said after a while.
"And?"
"I don't need it for that. I've got my lighter. Could've done it my first night here."
"What stopped you?"
He could practically feel the air go sour when he asked it, and again he got no answer.
That was the most he got out of her, though to be fair it was a lot, comparatively. The next hour or so was filled mostly with the hum of the electric lights, interrupted only when the arsonist might ask for a certain tool or part. She didn't slow a bit until Dell decided it was about time to try and right his sleep schedule, and damned if she was going stay in his garage alone in the middle of the night.
Not a word of a complaint left her mask when he called her, to his surprise. She just put down the blowtorch she held, slid her hands over the flamethrower (not much yet improved, though getting there), hefted it up, and quietly followed him back to the house, the machine under one arm.
That was the sum of the next two days. Dell watched as the flamethrower slowly returned to its former glory, still a patchwork of parts but efficient, functional. And he learned how to coax conversation out of the arsonist, bit by bit, learned the rules of speaking with her for more than three-word exchanges: don't look her straight in the eye. Don't make any sudden movements. Don't ask questions.
And of course he broke those rules, or at least the last one, as much as he dared, when he wasn't busy with his own contraptions. If he was careful (and Dell Conagher was always careful), he could get her to drop hints, tidbits:
"What brought ya to Texas?"
"It's warm. Doesn't rain much. No snow either. I'm not gonna stick around Minnesota in the middle of winter."
"You all the way from Minnesota?"
"That's just where they kicked me off the train."
And:
"Why 'Shark'?"
"Don't remember."
"Sounds kinda like a sports team, don't it?"
"Do I look like I follow sports?"
Or:
"What's that engraving? Yeah, the lighter."
"Bible verse, I guess."
"Number's scratched over. You do that?"
"I think so."
And when he'd asked what she meant by "think," she shrugged and said, a little elusively, that she meant "think." Couldn't really remember. Maybe it'd been her. Maybe.
'Course, he wasn't really expecting her to ask questions back.
"Why didn't you let me die?"
Dell, wiping grease from his hands with a rag, slowed. The little machine he'd been keeping himself busy with whenever the arsonist was in the garage with him stood inert on the cement, only issuing a soft beep once in a while. And the arsonist was always there these days, it'd been half a week and he'd already gotten used to her constant presence. Couldn't very well get any of Blutarch's work done with her around. "Had the means," he started, eventually. "Didn't seem quite right, lettin' you bleed out on my floor."
"I tried to burn your house down. I would have killed you if the flamethrower hadn't fallen apart."
"If you don't mind me sayin' so, I don't believe you were quite in your right mind that night," he said. "Don't think bein' hungry and maybe scared warrants a death sentence—"
"I wasn't scared of you."
"No? Might shoulda been," Dell said, easy. "Either way. That's bygones. And I'm not in the business of lettin' folk stayin' under my roof die if I got a say in the matter."
She'd stopped working on the flamethrower. Without her huge black sweatshirt, Dell could actually read her body language: tense shoulders, head low. The back of her neck was pockmarked with scars, like fireworks. "All you would have had to do was walk away. Decided I was probably dead already. Or that maybe I deserved it, maybe I walked in front of it myself."
"Missy, what is it that's got you wantin' to kick the bucket so bad?"
"Screw you, is what," she said, twisting to look at him. Her words snapped at the air, sharp and acrid, sulfur and acid. "Fuck, haven't you figured out anything about me?"
Dell raised an eyebrow. "Not that one."
She glared at him, wild-eyed, for a long few seconds. Then she drooped. The sulfur evaporated, the acid drained away. She turned back to her work.
For a while, that was all that happened. Dell watched as she stayed hunched over the workbench, never moving but to fuss with something on the flamethrower, to adjust her mask, to light the Zippo. After a long while, she broke the silence. "I don't," she began. "Want to die, I mean. I don't know why I said that."
"Good to hear."
"So," she said, then stopped again. "So, uh." Start, stop. Like a motor that wouldn't catch. A moment later she looked over her shoulder. He could barely see what little of her face was exposed. "…You saved my life. Thanks."
Huh. Dell managed to offer her a smile. "'Course. Hope anyone'd do the same, really."
"No," she said, turning back to her work. "They wouldn't. They really wouldn't. So, thanks."
Half a week later, the flamethrower looked almost new, and the incident with the sentry—the fact there had been opportunity for an incident with the sentry—still weighed heavy on Dell. It stained his thoughts the way the arsonist's blood still stained the concrete, but he'd found no other reason for suspicion beyond what the arsonist had told him no matter how hard he looked. He changed the warehouse lock from biometrics to an alphanumeric twenty-four-character code, re-alarmed the sentry and added the arsonist to its database, and gone on a few sweeps with the dog, seeking anyone invisible that might be hiding in the corners. But if the interloper had really been there, he was long gone.
(Or well-hidden, Dell thought to himself with frustration.)
The phone call came the next day, shortly after he narrowly avoided a house fire thanks to the arsonist's over-enthusiastic burning of her old clothes. (How did the sparks make it into the living room, he wanted to know. She wanted to see how far she could send them, she told him.) The phone started jangling almost at once when he collapsed into his easy chair with the newspaper, and did nothing to help his nerves. He snapped it up and said, "Dell Conagher."
"Hello, Dell."
Ah. He knew that voice. "Evening, Miss Pauling."
"Good evening yourself," Miss Pauling said pleasantly. Her words were crisp and brisk, just like her. "Things going well, I hope?"
Dell glanced at the new singe marks on his carpet. "Can't complain, I s'pose."
"Wonderful. I'm sure you know why I'm calling?"
"Well, I can only assume. But I'd bet you'll be needin' us again here shortly?"
"Yes, that's right. Teufort, two weeks from tomorrow. Bright and early."
Two weeks. Dell scratched at his head, easing back into the chair. "Alrighty then. You take care now."
He could hear her amused smile over the phone line. "I will, Dell. Goodbye."
The phone settled back into its cradle with a soft clack, and Dell frowned at the ceiling.
Exactly twelve seconds later, something crashed spectacularly in the kitchen. It was followed by a suspiciously muffled yelp. Dell sighed, and got up to go see what trouble the arsonist had gotten herself into this time.
Two weeks. He had two weeks to figure out what to do with the arsonist.