Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
DUTCH
They sedate me at some point. I don’t agree to it. That’s probably why it works.
When I surface, the room has one door, two monitors, a sleeping engineer who’s going to wake up shaped like a question mark, and no Tom.
I run the count anyway. Habit. The retreat lines, the doors that stick.
Thirteen names in the pod. I do it twice.
It comes up a man short both times, and the short man is behind the bar with a bottle he thinks I don’t know about, and the count won’t close.
Thirty years keeping my voice level inside rooms that wanted to become events, and this room is just quiet, and I can’t.
My hand’s shaking. Tactically useless. I let it.
Later was loud, I told her.
Nobody warns you the loud part doesn’t sound like anything. It just sits on your chest at the bottom of the worst night you’ve had and counts a dead man, a fistful of trilobites, and a job at the bottom of the ocean over and over.