tents

We spent what I had expected to be a sleepless night on Miklund, camped out and waiting for our contacts to show up. As I said, Miklund does not follow standard time, and we had forgotten this in the excitement of landing in the barren landscape and concealing the Roller from the Feds that were by then looking for us. Caban decided he didn’t want to stay with the ship in case they showed up. He said with the money from the deal, we could buy a new ship. When I reminded him that the Feds would get the cargo, too, he shrugged and asked if I really wanted to sleep in a ship now that smelled like a heaptown bar. I did not.
We set up camp in some brush, squeezed together in a tent. Smaller quarters still, but it was only for a while. Caban took first watch, said he’d wake me in a few hours.
When I awoke it was morning, and he was sleeping, and I had no idea where I was. I was warm, and relaxed, and it wasn’t until Caban mumbled something and turned over in his sleep that I realized what might have gone wrong with this plan. How easily we could have been nabbed by Feds or shot by patrols or cattle ranchers or bootleggers. We might not have woken up at all. I got up and checked around the camp, hiked back and saw that Roller was untouched. When I returned to the tent, the captain was awake and grinning blearily at me and strapping on his holster. Curse the man, he is lucky. I don’t even believe in luck, but no logic can explain the scrapes he gets out of.
“It worked out all right, though.” he said.

I was packing up my blankets when my necklace suddenly dangled free from the folds of my shirt. I felt his eyes on it before he asked me what it was. I shoved it back beneath the cloth and shrugged.
“Was that a bullet? That’s a touch deathly for you, Scout. Thought you didn’t like guns.”
“I don’t.”
He thought a minute. “Well. Then who was it dug out of?”
“Me.” It hurt just to say it.
I knew his eyes were on me but I couldn’t meet them. The bit of metal suddenly felt warm and heavy against my skin, pushing its way back in and through my memory. I tried to mumble an excuse before leaving the tent. That tent, where I had felt so safe and comfortable with Caban, forgetting what I wore against my heart.
I couldn’t tell him the story of that necklace. Too morbid, too…deathly, as he said. What would he say if I told him that it had pounded through Ulysses before burrowing into my back? Would he turn away, or ask me why I still wear it, or would he look at me with sympathetic eyes and understand?

“It worked out all right, though.” It’s something that Ulysses would have said.