Page 59 of The Brightness Between Us

“Ah,” I say. “Of course you do.”

Irritation flashes in his eyes. Good. I’m irritated, too. “I know some about how Dimokratía training works,” Ambrose says. “You were plucked from the orphanage and made it through an intense gauntlet to be selected for a mission that didn’t happen. It wasn’t just the focus of your school life, it was your whole life, and now you find that its foundations were untrue. It’s not too hard to figure out what got you from there to here, with you in full retreat. I’m in retreat, too. And you’re the only person in the world who can relate to what I’m going through.”

This is all true. But it’s also just so Fédération, to race one another to be the bigger victim. I don’t need someone to wipe away my tears while I wail about my sad, sad feelings. I need to survive, and surviving means being undiscoverable. He’s threatening to take that away.

Ambrose points somewhere behind me. I don’t look, in case this is the diversion moment before he launches some counterattack. Then he speaks. “I like your sheep.”

I let myself look. There’s Sheep, pink and shorn, scabbingfrom her infestation, watching us from the relative safety of the tree line. She’s shivering. A sheep shouldn’t be shorn in these temperatures. I need to knit her a coat. “You were the second being to invade my life today,” I grumble.

Ambrose laughs, with a cough at the end of it. “I hope you enjoyed your solitude while it lasted.”

I run my hands over my hair, thick and a little matted at the ends. Water flicks off, disappearing into the rivulets of rain on the nearby rocks. “Here is what will happen next,” I say. “I will keep you restrained, but I will bring us into my shelter. We can continue to talk there.”

Ambrose seems about to argue, but then he just tenses his lips. His words come out measured. “You could leave me bound outside, but you’re not. Thank you for inviting me in.”

His compliance makes me more suspicious, not less, but not so much that I feel any need to back out of my plan. I stand and Sheep toddles over to me, leaning against my leg. Probably remembering her old farmer and wondering where my barn is and when we’ll go inside it. “You’re first,” I tell her.

I walk her up the steps to the hut entrance, and open the door. I take my old thick wool blanket, raided from the ruins of Le Havre on my way here, and arrange it in the corner. Sheep happily flumps into the middle of it, nibbles experimentally on the fringe. “No. Bad sheep. Wedon’t eat blankets,” I say.

Then I head back outside. For a moment I wonder what I’ll do if Ambrose is gone, or—far worse—if he’s been joined by confederates. But he’s right where I left him, watching the hut doorway with an expression that is worried and also something else. Longing?

I crouch in the mud beside him. It’s hard to look into his lustrous brown eyes for long. “I’m going to bring you inside now. This will only work if you don’t make any sudden movements. If you do, I will take full advantage of your being restrained to eliminate you. Understood?”

“Wow,” Ambrose said, eyebrows arching. “Did you tell yourself to get meaner while you were in the cabin just now?”

I keep my face impassive. He’s right, of course. I did that very thing. Fought against my own weakness. “On your feet,” I say.

He nearly loses his balance with his hands bound, but I easily lift him into the air and place him standing on the ground. I nod to the steps. “You first.”

Once Ambrose is on the floor of my hut, I go back out, put most of my supplies under their tarps, collect and then stash my knife and axe, since they could just as easily be used against me as by me, and head back into the hut. I shut the door and latch it, stare out the window as I stamp my feet to push out the wet cold.

I stand at the door, look at the human and the bovid on my floor. My cabin is full, when this morning it had just me inside it. I’m not at all sure how I feel about that.

Ambrose attempts, as best as he can with bound wrists, to rub some of the rainwater off his shivering leg.

I sigh. “Hold on.”

He watches as I nurse the remaining ember in the woodstove, add kindling and a fresh seasoned log, blow until it catches. The stove will heat the room up eventually, but in the meantime I place my towel, only slightly damp from my morning’s bath in the stream, on the iron surface to heat up. Once it’s warm, I kneel beside Ambrose. “It’s okay?”

He looks at the steaming towel, and at me. “I’d rather do it myself.”

“I’m sure you would. But you’d find that very difficult with your wrists bound.”

“Fine,” he says.

He watches my face with wide eyes as I rub his hair with the hot dry towel, run it down his back and legs. Brisk, respectful movements, like I’m a schoolmaster drying off a kid coming in from recess. Ambrose strangely intimidates me, so I go quickly. I start folding the towel after I finish until, with an impish grin, he lifts his arms. Shaking my head, I dry his armpits. This is not running exactly like the captive situations I trained for.

I resume folding the towel, but then Ambrose speaks up.“Aren’t you going to dry yourself?”

I’m soaking, too, though not shivering. Ambrose watches quietly while I rub down my body, then hang the towel on the back of my single chair to dry near the woodstove.

I sit in that chair and face the bound human on my floor. Sheep has been watching us, chewing on a strip of burlap she ripped from my bedding, like she’s got her snack ready and is waiting for the show to start.

“So, Spacefarer Kodiak Celius, what can I do to convince you I’m telling the truth?” Ambrose asks.

I shrug. “If this area weren’t laced with the EMP dust your country scattered, I’d say we could look information up. But we have to do this all the old-fashioned way. Interrogation.”

“I’m not sure what else I can say to convince you. Devon Mujaba sent you here, didn’t he?” Ambrose offers. “He sent me here, too. To start the resistance. To send out anti-capitalist messages from a place where we’d be difficult to track down. To use our notoriety to change the world.”

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