Chapter 19 #2
They were not raiders. That was what Burner could never make anybody understand afterward. There was no plan and no demand and nothing was taken.
The one in front had a cutlass.
That was the detail that stayed with him, that it was an actual cutlass, a heavy curved naval blade with a brass basket hilt that had probably hung on a wall in somebody's den in a town with electricity in it, and that it had been sharpened recently and badly on a wheel.
They came out of the dark shouting.
Burner never worked out what they were shouting. Sable said afterward it was about the fourth agreement. Priest said it was a name. Bosworth, who was closest, said it was not words at all.
The man with the cutlass went straight through the edge of the firelight and across eleven feet of open ground and Neve was standing up off the crate with her cup still in her hand.
He swung once.
It went in under her ribs on the left side and came out and there was not even any noise, no clash, nothing like it is in stories, just a sound like a spade going into wet ground and then Neve sitting down hard on the crate as though she had decided to.
Burner's hand was already across his body.
Six years of carrying it in the same place on the same side, eleven hundred draws in the dark, and the Rhino came out and up before he had made any decision at all.
He fired twice.
At nine feet, both rounds went into the man's chest an inch apart, and the low bore axis meant the muzzle barely lifted between them, and the man went backward off his feet and was dead before anybody else in that camp had understood what was happening.
The other two ran.
Somebody caught one of them four hundred yards out and the third was never found.
Burner did not see any of it. He was already on the ground.
Neve was still holding the cup.
That was the thing. She had it in her right hand and she had not spilled it, and she looked at Burner with an expression of complete puzzlement, and said, "Oh."
He got his hands on her side.
He knew in about two seconds. He had seen Delacroix's and this was not that. This was the other kind and there was nothing in the world to be done about it and he knew it with his hands before he knew it with anything else.
"All right," he said. "All right. I've got you."
"Burner."
"I've got you."
Somebody was screaming for a doctor. There were four hundred and sixty people and eleven of them ran and somebody knocked the fire apart and sparks went up.
Neve's hand came up and found his coat.
"It's bad," she said.
"Yes."
"Don't." Her fingers tightened. "Don't do the thing. Don't tell me it isn't."
"I'm not going to."
"Good," she said. "Good."
He got his arm under her shoulders and got her off the crate and onto the ground and got her head onto his knee, and his hip screamed at him and he did not notice it for two days.
Shyla was there. He did not see her arrive.
"Neve," she said.
"Hello."
Sable came in at a dead run and stopped and Burner looked up at her once and shook his head, and Sable put both hands over her mouth and knelt down.
"Is it fast?" Neve said.
"Fairly."
"How fast."
"Minutes," Burner said.
She closed her eyes for a second.
"All right," she said.
Somebody was trying to get through with a bag and Burner said, without any heat, "Don't," and they stopped.
Neve opened her eyes again.
"The agreements got printed," she said.
"They did. Four hundred of them. They went out this afternoon."
"Five directions."
"Five directions. They're already gone. There's a man from the north camp forty miles out by now with eleven of them in a pack."
"Good," Neve said.
Her hand was still in his coat.
"Tell Halloran," she said.
"I will."
"Tell him I wasn't"
She stopped and her face changed and Burner held on.
"I'm here," he said.
"Tell him it wasn't stupid to come."
"It wasn't stupid to come," Burner said. "It was the best argument anybody made this year and you were right about every part of it and I'll tell him so in front of the whole camp."
"He'll blame himself."
"He will."
"Don't let him."
"I'll do what I can and it won't be enough," Burner said, "because that's how it works and you know it."
Neve almost laughed.
"That's very like you," she said.
Her eyes went to Shyla.
"You," she said.
Shyla came down onto the ground on the other side and took her hand, and her face was completely dry and absolutely steady and Burner recognized it instantly as the face from a spruce clearing six years ago and could not bear it.
"I'm here," Shyla said.
"The school."
"I know."
"There's four copies of everything and they're in four places and Ardith's got one." Neve's voice was going. "That was the whole point of four. So it doesn't matter if one goes."
"I know. You told me eleven times."
"I'm telling you again."
"Okay," Shyla said.
Neve looked up at her.
"You were in that building," she said. "In the back room. You were nine and I was nineteen and I used to hear you through the wall."
Shyla's face did not move.
"I know," she said.
"I couldn't get to you."
"I know."
"I want you to know I tried, for about a month, and then I stopped trying because"
"Neve," Shyla said. "I know. I've always known. It's fine. It was always fine."
Neve's hand tightened on hers.
"All right," she said.
She was quiet for a bit.
"Burner."
"Here."
"The thing you said. With the torch."
"Yes."
"About it being a sheet of paper and a person walking."
"Yes."
"That's right," Neve said. "That's the right one. Make them keep saying it. They'll stop in about eleven years and it'll go back to rifles and somebody's got to keep saying it."
"I will."
"Not you. You'll be dead. Make her."
Burner looked across at Shyla.
"She won't need making," he said.
Neve's eyes came back to him.
"No," she said. "No, she won't."
She was quiet for a while after that and her breathing changed, and the noise of four hundred and sixty people around them had gone almost completely silent, which Burner did not notice until much later when somebody described it to him.
"It's cold," she said.
"I know."
"Is that it?"
"Yes."
"Hm," Neve said.
And then, a bit later, so quietly that only Burner and Shyla heard it and they never agreed afterward on exactly what it was:
"Tell them there were four hundred and sixty."
She died at about twenty past eleven on the seventh of July, in the open, at a rail siding a hundred and ninety miles from home, with her head on Burner's knee.
He held on for a while after.
Then he put his face down against the top of her head and wept, in front of four hundred and sixty people, with his hand still flat against the wound because he had not thought to take it away.
He made no attempt to stop and no attempt to hide it and he did not care that they were watching.
He had not cried for Brill or Corlett or Oates. He had not cried at Teague's funeral or at Marin's little brother's. He had cried for ninety seconds at a fence line for a dog, alone, in the dark, and had told nobody.
He cried for Neve for eleven minutes in front of thirty-one settlements.
Sable had her arms around Shyla. Sparrow was standing four feet away with his burned hand over his mouth. Priest had turned his back and was standing with his hands on his head looking at nothing.
Bosworth, who had known her for four days, sat down on the ground where he was and stayed there.
At some point Burner became aware that people were singing somewhere on the far side of the siding, because word had not reached them yet, and that seemed to him the most terrible thing that had ever happened.
Eventually Sable got him up.
He stood with the stick and his knee would not hold and two people took his weight, and he looked down at Neve on the ground with her cup lying beside her, still mostly full,
and understood that he was going to have to walk a hundred and ninety miles and stand in front of ninety-six people and say it out loud.
Shyla was standing beside him.
"I'll say it," she said.
He looked at her.
"No," Burner said. "That's mine."
They did not let him sit down alone that night, which was the correct decision and which he resented for about two hours and was grateful for afterward for the rest of his life.
Sable got him to a crate by the market wall and stayed on one side of him and Sparrow stayed on the other and neither of them said anything at all.
He shook.
That was the part he had not expected. His hands went and would not stop, and then his shoulders, and it came in waves the way it had come at the woodpile at his own camp six years ago when he had heard voices in the drainage for the first time.
He got about four minutes of quiet and then it came up out of him again.
"I can't process this," he said.
Sable put her hand on his back.
"I can't." His breath was going wrong. "I can't, I can't."
"I know."
"That's not a figure of speech, I'm telling you that I have looked at the thing and there's nowhere to put it."
He had both hands over his face. "I have carried four graves and Brill in the open at forty yards and a boy of four in November and I put all of it somewhere. There's a place. There's always been a place and I go and look at it about once a week and I'm all right. And this won't go in."
"Then don't put it anywhere."
"You don't understand."
"I understand exactly," Sable said. "My brother was in a shed for five weeks and I lay on a hill for sixteen days and I did not have one single place to put any of it, and I sat in the rocks and made maps because it was that or come apart."
Burner sat with his hands over his face.
"She was twenty-five," he said.
"Yes."
"She was in a back room for three months when she was nineteen and then she came out and ran a school and stood up in front of four hundred and sixty people and said the truest thing anybody said all week, and then a man came out of the dark with a sword off somebody's wall."
"Yes."
"There's no shape to it." His voice cracked.