“Any other words?” Promise asked.
Aubry shook his head. He had nothing to say to the bronze box of Mura’s ashes. She was Warrick’s sister. He had provided for her. In the end he had failed her.
Leslie set the box into its hole at the foot of a towering fir tree, and brushed dirt atop it. He stood, holding a pair of blue steel knitting needles to his chest. “Goodbye, Aunt Mira. I loved you.”
He took his mother’s hand. The four of them walked back toward the road, and the jeep perched there.
“The government men will be here tomorrow,” Jenna said. “You were right. They jumped up and scrambled around like little monkeys.”
Promise’s smile was a small, tired thing. She kissed her sister’s cheek, and sighed. “Thank you for arranging that. Is there any business that I need to take care of?”
“Not just this moment.”
“Then I’d like some time to myself.”
She approached Aubry, her smile tentative. “Want some company?”
He nodded, and she swung into the jeep next to him. Leslie bounced into the backseat, without bothering to ask. He threw his arms around Promise’s neck and pressed his brown cheek against hers. Aubry started the jeep and piloted it up the narrow fire trail into lumber country.
The road wound bumpily past the science center’s ribbed dome. Four years ago, a terrible fire had destroyed it, and much of the surrounding area. It had taken Ephesus’s characteristic stubbornness and dedication, combined with the emerging financial power of the Scavengers, to rebuild so quickly.
There was much to be proud of—the Scavenger/Ephesus/NewMan empire stretched from New Mexico to Seattle to Denver.
His rough hands gripped the wheel, fighting the arrhythmic shocks as the tires slammed against the fire trail’s packed dirt and uneven rock.
“Going to your special place?”
He nodded. The clouds enveloping him were still dark, but the first rays of light were silvering the edges.
The jeep’s headlights splashed against the trees. Oilskin-covered saws and winches and other rigs were stowed neatly at the sides of the road, awaiting the day’s labor. Mazetown was beginning to slip away from him, fading to insubstantiality, shambling back to the ghost closet. Sweet green life was returning to Ephesus, a life that smelled and sounded and tasted realer than the life teeming in Mazetown. There, life milled, and churned, and endured.
Here, it grew.
It would be impossible to count the hours he had slaved in this country, the fires fought, brush hauled, stumps pulled, trees felled, children rescued.
Or, more darkly, men killed.
It was living that concerned him now. And at the moment, life seemed uncomfortably tentative.
An assassin who is me—but a slower, stronger, dumber version of me. An incomparable physique gilded in keloid scars and bizarre tattoos.
What in the hell is going on?
The fire trail wove up the side of a mountain, terminating first in ragged brush, and then in a dead end. If you knew the exact piece of brush to drag aside, a new and narrower road opened up. He felt mildly absurd, knowing that this bit of subterfuge was nine parts self-indulgence to one part security, but it brought him peace of mind.
While Aubry moved the branches, Promise slid over in the seat and drove the jeep up the continuation road. She paused long enough for him to jump in, and then rumbled up a narrow dirt path, up and up the mountain ridge, as dawn’s first powdery blush began to rouge the horizon.
Aubry swung out of the car, creaking the shock absorbers. Leslie bounced out, following him.
A white wooden gazebo sat at the very top of the mountain. Aubry took Leslie’s small hand in his, and together they climbed up the path. Promise hung back, smiling almost dreamily. Somehow, the image of her man and her child, sharing this moment as they had shared so many others over the past three years, was absurdly comforting.
Aubry pulled a heavy, olive-drab weather tarp back from the gazebo floor, revealing polished hardwood. Promise saw his shoulders slump, tension fleeing his body, as if he had been clasped by an old friend. To one side lay a thick-walled wooden box, and from it Leslie removed a heavy woolen mat. Aubry and Leslie spread it out on the gazebo floor, then stood shoulder to hip, hands at their sides, facing the east.
As the sun rose, Aubry began the exercise learned in childhood, and reawakened under Kevin Warrick’s severe tutelage. In time Aubry had not only reconstituted the exercise, but taught it to Leslie.
Promise watched them, her dancer’s eye evaluating.
In some ways the movement pattern resembled a kata, the prearranged formal fighting exercises of Japan, Korea, and China. In other ways it seemed a dance. In still other aspects, it was similar to Hatha Yoga’s sun salutation, the Surya Namaskar, though infinitely more taxing. It combined the long slow limb extension of t’ai chi, the balance and flexibility of gymnastics, and the explosively dynamic tensions of karate. The limbs moved in arcs which, while not blows or kicks, were still frighteningly combative in their implication. In some way that she couldn’t quite comprehend, each motion seemed the embryonic form of a punch or a kick, the essence rather than the reality.
She had tried the exercise for a month and a half. Oddly, its practice troubled her emotionally, as if the physical motions were shaping her perceptions of the world. She remembered completing her last and most intense session, walking about in a daze for the following hour. The first person she encountered was Kregger, who wouldn’t quite seem to come into focus. There was something blurry about her visual field. When she concentrated, for a moment she had the ghastly thought that the crew chief wasn’t a human being: he was an image painted on a sheet of glass, with groin and knees and kidneys marked in splashes of red ink.
She had never performed the exercises again.
Aubry called it the Rubber Band. Why? When pressed, he said only that Rubber Band was what he had always called it.
Aubry and Leslie worked it together, their limbs spiraling through complex changes, twisting and folding and lifting. Now they bore their full weight on the palm of a single extended arm; now the body projected to the side like a gymnast on the long horse. Now each arced through a spine-wrenching slow-motion backward somersault. Once the sequence began it never ended. Now fast, now slow, now soft, now hard, with a strange, sighing breath hissing in the backs of their throats, Aubry and Leslie seemed two animals engaged in a primal ritual of awakening, purging themselves of spiritual toxins, father and child together, welcoming the morning sun.