“Is he okay?”
“He is. Alive and whole. Walking and talking and dancing around like a real boy.”
Vic gave him a look. Fenn didn’t much like it.
“I’m not his mother, Victoria,” Fenn continued. “Go see him for yourself. Ask how he is.”
She dug her hands into the pockets of her oxblood leathers and stood, blocking Fenn’s path. Fenn felt his lack of armor, his essential nakedness, in the gun sights of her gaze—cool and clear and unwavering. “Never liked me much, have you?” she asked.
“Never had much of an opinion one way or the other,” he said, jinking clear of her, guns-D, and rolling, briefly, out of her field of fire.
“Because I’m taking your boy away from you? Because when I’m around, you’ve got no one to play soldier with?”
“Take him wherever you like. I don’t see as it’s any of my business where the boy chooses to put his dick.”
“The boy,” she said, yo-yoing the word, coming down hard on Fenn, and from a high, blind angle.
“Kevin.”
“And that’s all I am? Someplace for your boy to warm his dick?”
He could taste her on his six, feel the gentle brushes of her viciousness screaming past his undercarriage. “You’d have to ask him that, I think.”
Vic seemed to consider this a moment, to hang back and prime her guns. She never took her eyes off Fenn. There were maneuvers going on in her gaze that Fenn could not understand or predict, a deft, probing wildness. “I’m sorry about Lefty,” she said.
Fenn just shrugged.
“Charlie, too. Ernie. He was your friend, wasn’t he? And George. They took his leg off. Did you hear?”
“It happens,” Fenn said, keeping to his line, giving himself a little lag, and waiting for the moment he’d need to displace and roll. “It’s a war. Anyway, he’s got another.”
“What happened to Jackrabbit, Captain?”
He’d missed his moment. She’d been toying with him, waiting to pounce and, in a panic as he felt her rounds strike true, Fenn went into a hysterical split S, desperate, suddenly, to disengage. “She died on me,” he said, his chin sinking to his chest, eyes finding pebbles and snowflakes and the gray, indistinct horizon suddenly fascinating. “Very sad.”
She was on him still, harrying him to the ground.
“Seems like you’re running out of friends,” she said.
“All of us are.”
The earth rose to eat them both. One last lethal dive.
But then Vic’s eyes softened. Suddenly breaking off the pursuit, she broke clear, closed her eyes a moment, then opened them again to clear blue sky. She bit at her chapped lips, white teeth raking over plum. “He loves you, you know. Kevin. You and that fucking rat of his.”
“But not you?”
She laughed, sharply, explosively, but just once, carrying her over the perihelion of one of those sweet arcs that, to a pilot, seemed like reaching up to stroke the fringes of the sun. “Not what I’ve ever asked him for. I’m there for him for something else. The one thing you can’t give him.”
“I’ll say. Seems to be fond of it, too. At least this week.”
“No, dummy. He’d fuck you, too, I’m sure. If he was wired that way. His brother was. Did you know that? That something you ever talk about, the two of you? Something before… this?”
Fenn said nothing. He lay close to the earth, belly down, and prayed for cloud.
“He just can’t talk to you. You can’t talk to him. That is what I’m there for. And as for the fucking, that’s only what he is to me. Gets cold here, you know? I’m warm when I’m with him.”
“Well,” Fenn said.
Vic watched him. From a great height. There was mercy in her altitude, her god-like view, and in her choosing not to fall.
“Well. There’s a nice fire going at the homestead. Very warm. Kev’s waiting for you, I’m sure.”
Fenn stepped aside and swept a regal arm out to wave her past, the irony of his arrogance a shell around him, thin as a dream. Vic hesitated a moment, still watching him, considering, then shook her head, hunched it down into her shoulders, and rolled past, disengaging, walking on. Fenn went to the longhouse where the survivors of the day were counting bullet holes in the returned planes, making bets on the number. The whole thing had turned into a drinking game. When full dark came on, they put all the lights out from fear. Mostly, by shooting at them until Max reminded everyone about all the aviation fuel, bullets, bombs, acetylene, and other blow-uppable things that were around and how most of them were taking ten or twelve shots to hit an electric light ten feet away.