Chapter 8
Sparrow was standing in the same place as before, in the open grass thirty feet out from the south gap, with his coat open and his hands empty.
He had a black eye.
Burner noticed that first, and it told him something, because the black eye was four or five days old at most, and had not come from the night before.
Halloran walked out ahead of everyone. Burner came up on his left. Nobody else was let past the gap, though there were thirty people standing behind it, and Burner could feel them there like heat.
"You've got nerve," Halloran said.
"I've got a job." Sparrow's smile was in place but it was working harder than it had been six days ago. "You killed three of us last night."
"You came into a camp with children in it at three in the morning."
"I didn't come anywhere. I was eleven miles away asleep." He spread his hands. "That's actually relevant, so hold onto it."
"Say what you came to say."
"I said I'd trade. Do you want to know what I've got or do you want to keep being satisfying?"
Halloran's jaw worked.
"Say it."
Sparrow reached very slowly into his coat, two fingers, and drew out something small, and held it up.
It was a knitted square of gray wool. Four inches of it, badly done, the stitches uneven and tight at one edge.
Burner's whole body went cold.
"This was on a chopping block by your woodpile," Sparrow said. "One of ours picked it up on the way out at about four o'clock this morning, which is a thing I'd have told him not to do, because it's sentimental and it slows a man down."
Nobody said anything.
"So no, I haven't got anybody," Sparrow said, and he flipped the knitting over the grass at Halloran's feet.
"I want to be clear about that in the first ten seconds, because otherwise this whole conversation goes somewhere ugly and I'd rather it didn't. I have nothing of yours except a piece of wool and a message."
Burner had not realized he had raised the rifle until he realized he had to lower it.
Halloran bent and picked up the knitting and held it in his fist.
"Then why open that way?"
"Because I needed ninety seconds of your absolute attention and I've got about four minutes in me before somebody behind that gap decides to be a hero." Sparrow's voice had changed. It had lost the pleasant thing. "Halstead doesn't know I'm here."
The wind moved the grass.
"Say that again," Halloran said.
"Halstead does not know I am standing here. He thinks I'm at the fuel cache at the crossing doing a count. I have got, at the outside, five hours before that's a problem and about two before it's a risk."
"Why should I believe that?"
"Because of my face." Sparrow touched his own eye socket, lightly.
"I told him not to come here early. I told him to his face in front of eleven men that moving on a settlement in the dark on four days of planning was going to cost him people for nothing and that the twenty-eighth was the right date and the right date was the whole point."
"And he hit you."
"He hit me and then he took nine men and did it anyway, and this morning he came back with six."
Sparrow's hands were very steady and his voice was not.
"Three dead. Ollie Crane, who was twenty-two, and two men I'd known for two years. And one carried who won't see Thursday. And he came in through that gate at six this morning and he did not say one word about any of it."
Burner spoke for the first time.
"You want us to feel sorry for you."
Sparrow looked at him.
"No," he said. "I want you to understand what's happened to him, because you're all about to find out and you'd be better off knowing in advance."
"Go on."
"For two years that man has run this valley like a book-keeper. Everything he has ever done to anybody out here has been calculated and it has been proportional and it has been boring, and that is exactly why it worked, and why nobody ever stood up to it."
Sparrow's mouth twisted. "You people cost him three men and a truck tire and an entire theory about himself. He has been humiliated, in front of everyone, by a camp of gardeners."
"And now?"
"Now he's coming back," Sparrow said. "On the twenty-sixth. With everything he has. And he is not coming to collect a harvest."
Halloran's face did not change.
"He's got nineteen fighting men," he said.
"He's got seventeen now and he'll bring all of them, plus eight or nine of the hangers-on, because he doesn't care what the hangers-on do anymore, he just wants bodies in the grass."
"And the shed?"
Sparrow's eyes flicked.
"You know about the shed."
"We know about the shed."
"Then you know more than I thought and I'm going to adjust." He took a breath. "Twelve people. They stay. He'll leave four men on them, and that's four men not here on the twenty-sixth, and that's the only good news I have for you."
"Why are you telling us this?"
"Because I've done eleven of these," Sparrow said, "and I have never once had to watch a man who'd been careful for two years decide to stop being careful. And because I have spent two years telling myself that what we do out here is a system and systems can be lived with,
and I sat in that yard this morning and looked at a nine year old with a face like a closed door and understood that the system just died and what's coming next is a man settling a score."
"Nine year old," Halloran said.
Sparrow looked at him.
"There's a nine year old in the shed?"
"There's two," Sparrow said. "Since Tuesday."
Halloran's hand closed around the knitting.
"You said the terms were no children."
"The terms were no children," Sparrow said. "That was true when I said it. It was true six days ago. It stopped being true on Tuesday and nobody told me and I found out yesterday and that is the entire reason I am standing in this grass."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Burner watched him. He had spent eleven months learning to read men at distance and he had been wrong before, and he was aware that a man who talks for a living is the hardest kind to read.
But there was one thing.
Sparrow was standing in the open in front of a camp that had killed three of his people twelve hours ago, and he had not once looked behind him.
A man running a trick looks behind him. He checks his own escape. It is not a thing you can train out.
"What do you want," Burner said.
"Out."
"Out how?"
"When it's done. However it goes." Sparrow's smile was gone entirely now and what was underneath it was a very tired man of about forty.
"If he takes this place on the twenty-sixth then I'm the man who talks in a settlement that murdered fifty people, and I'll be that for the rest of my life. And if you somehow stop him, then I'm a man with no people in a country where everybody knows my face."
"That's not a trade. That's a request."
"I'm getting to the trade."
He reached into his coat again and brought out a folded piece of paper.
He held it up.
"Guard rotation, the twenty-sixth," he said. "Who's on the yard, who's in the shop, who's on the east fence. And the route he'll use, and the hour, and the thing he'll do first."
"Why should we believe a word on that paper?"
"You shouldn't," Sparrow said. "You should believe the woman who's been lying on the hill above our yard for sixteen days, because I assume she came back with him and I assume that's her standing at the gap with the braid."
Burner did not turn around.
"How do you know that?"
"Because we're not idiots and because on day nine one of the roof men reported a glint on the south knob and Halstead said it was a bottle." Sparrow shrugged. "I thought it was a person. I didn't say so. I've been not saying things for about four months now and that's really what's brought me here."
He set the folded paper down in the grass and stepped back three paces.
"Check every line of it against her," he said. "Every single one. If one thing on that paper doesn't match sixteen days of watching, then I'm lying, and you'll know, and you can shoot me when I come back."
"You're coming back?"
"The twenty-fourth. Dusk. Same spot." Sparrow's hands went back into his coat pockets. "I'll want an answer then. Not about the paper. About me."
He turned to go, and stopped, exactly as he had the last time, and looked back over his shoulder.
But it was not at Burner this time.
"Halloran," he said. "The girl from July. Neve."
Halloran went rigid.
"She's alive and she's in the block building and she is not well," Sparrow said. "I'm telling you that because you asked me last week and I wouldn't answer, and I've thought about that every day since, and it was the worst thing I've done in a year, and I've done some things."
He walked off south through the grass.
They spent the rest of the afternoon on the paper.
Halloran and Burner and Sable sat in the second building with the door shut and a lamp lit, and Sable read the sheet line by line while Burner asked her questions he already knew the answers to.
"East fence, three to six, Tully," she read.
"Who's Tully?"
"I don't know the name. There's a man on the east fence at three in the morning who is asleep by half past every single night."
"Does he drink?"
"There's a man who drinks. He's on the west side and he's older and he's got a limp." She ran her finger down. "Here. West, nine to three, Dunbar, with a note. What's that say?"
Halloran turned the paper.
"It says unreliable after midnight," he read.
Sable sat back.
"That's him," she said. "That's the limp."
They went through forty-one lines.
Thirty-four of them Sable could confirm cold. Five she had no opinion on. Two she disagreed with, and on both of them she stopped and thought and then said, slowly, that she might have been wrong, because she had only seen those posts twice.
Nothing on the paper contradicted sixteen days on a hill.
Halloran sat back and rubbed his eyes with both hands.
"That's either the truth," he said, "or it's the most expensive lie I've ever seen a man build."
"It's expensive either way," Burner said.
"Meaning?"