Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [127]
Sergei hoped so. But he wasn’t counting on it.
She still had nightmares. Of Jamie, his face staved in, falling forward into the wet cement prison. Of Frants, groveling for his life as she held him at the chopping block. Or Barbie Doll, eyes vacant and mouth screaming as the spell sucked the life out of her marrow. She woke from every one coated in sweat, Sergei holding her in the darkness. He sat beside her every night as she fell asleep, and was there when she woke. And they never talked about…anything.
We’re so screwed up, she thought ruefully on the fourth day afterward. Before, they’d at least had denial on their side. Well, denial on her side and obliviousness on his. Or was that the other way around? But now…
But did it really matter? She combed out her hair, consciously plaiting it the way she knew Sergei liked. Did it matter if she said anything, or if he did?
Yes, damn it.
She laughed at herself, relieved that it was morning, the sun was shining, and he had finally agreed that she could go for a walk. “A short walk,” he had added. “Around the block, no more.” You couldn’t push Sergei. Well, you could, but you wouldn’t get far. Enough that he knew that she knew and she knew that he knew. They’d work all the details out later. When she had the strength for it.
Her mood sobered suddenly. When other things were dealt with once and for all.
“So?” she said as they walked down to the corner the next afternoon. Strolling, really; all she could manage, although she refused to admit to it. Sergei had matched his pace to hers automatically, wordlessly, so there was no need to pretend.
He had been gone the night before and this morning as well, talking to people, and she had missed him when she woke up. Wren pushed her sunglasses farther up on her nose. The sun was warm, and brighter than she remembered after so many days inside. “We should talk, I guess.” She glanced sideways at him as she spoke, and he nodded.
There was a little coffee shop down the next street that always had the same three old men sitting at the counter, and a young woman reading the newspaper at one corner table. Wren had never been in there before—it was a little out of her usual route—but the windows and table were clean, and the regulars looked well-nourished, so it seemed as good a place as any.
“Coffee,” she said to the waitress, a middle-aged woman who looked as though she had been born in her uniform. “Black, no sugar. Tea for him.” It would be disgusting, the way restaurant tea always was, but he’d drink it anyway.
He had pulled out the cigarette case, and was extracting one of those damned cigarettes from it, rolling the brown paper between his fingers.
“So?”
“I made them your counteroffer,” he said, staring intently at the cigarette.
“And?” She frowned. “Don’t make me pull it out of you, Didier. And I mean that literally.”
He almost smiled at that. The counteroffer was one they had worked out, in the long early-morning hours of her recovery, waiting for the nightmares to recede. She—they—would work for the Silence. But on her own terms. If Wren was on a job already they couldn’t yank her off it, if their job conflicted with her lonejack ethics (“don’t you dare laugh,” she had warned Sergei, her head resting on his shoulder and feeling the laughter shaking his body although he didn’t make a sound) she could refuse it.
“And…they accept. With a few conditions of their own.”
“Of course. Nothing’s ever that easy.” Making this counteroffer hadn’t been easy at all. She was giving up so much. “So? What are they?”
“Information. If you or I hear anything—anything at all—that might be of interest to them, we’re to pass it along immediately.”
“Which you were doing anyway. Without my consent, I remind you. Right, okay, letting that go. So what the hell might the Silence be interested in?”
“More of a question what aren’t they interested in. But we have discretion. Mainly gossip, I’d guess. Cosa gossip.”
Wren sighed.