"They'll get word to us. They always do, one way or another. Right?" Duvalier asked.
The last sounded a bit too much like a plea. Duvalier thought of the Lifeweavers as something akin to God's angels on Earth; the way the Kurians' estranged cousins presented themselves added to the effect. This cool and deadly woman had the eyes of a child left waiting on a street corner for a vanished parent.
"Mystery's their business," Valentine said.
She emptied her mug. "Want to blow this bash?"
The beer worked fast. Valentine already felt like listening to music and discussing the nurses' legs with Post. But he couldn't leave Duvalier tipsy and doubtful.
"Yes," he lied.
Her shoulders went a little further back, and more of the red bra appeared beneath her vest. "Lead on, McGruff," she said.
Valentine was pretty sure it was MacDuff-Father Max made his classes perform two Shakespeare plays a year-but couldn't prick her newly improved mood with something as trivial as, well, trivia.
The men were setting up some sort of chariot race involving wheelchairs, Narcisse, and a Razor with his leg in a cast from ankle to midthigh. By the looks of the clothesline traces and wobbly wheels on the chairs, the soldier's other leg would be in a cast by morning, but Valentine and Duvalier hollered out their hurrahs and stayed to watch. Narcisse's wheelchair overturned at the third turn-she didn't have enough weight to throw leftward to keep both wheels of the chair down in the turn-but she gamely hung on and was dragged through the freshly trimmed parking lot meadow to victory, garlanded by a dandelion leaf in her rag turban.
Duvalier pressed herself up against him as they jumped and cheered her on. As they wandered away from the race, she was on his arm.
"Seems like a staff appointment deserves a special celebration," she slurred as they left the crowd and passed under the Accolade's bunting.
"Careful, now," Valentine said as they made a right turn toward his quarters. "You're evil, teasing me like that."
She looked around and saw that the hall was empty. Then she kissed him, with the same fierce intensity that he remembered from the bloody murder in the Nebraska caboose.
"Let's. Now. Right now." She extracted a half-empty flask from within her vest and took a swig.
Valentine had desired her for years, and they'd come close to making love out of sheer boredom once or twice while serving together in the KZ. But the half joking, half flirting they'd done in the past had always been passed back and forth around a shield of professionalism, like two prisoners swapping notes around a cell wall.
"I wanna see what that little Husker cowgirl thought was so special," she said with a facial spasm that might have been a flirtatious eyebrow lift that suddenly decided to become a wink.
Dumb shit, why did you ever tell her that?
He pulled her into his room and shut the door behind them.
"Not drunk and not with us about to-" he began, fighting off her fingers as they sought his belt.
"Now who's the tease, huh?" she asked, falling back onto the bed as though he'd kicked her there. "You're a lot of talk and fancy words. Ahn-Kha's got bigger balls than you-"
That struck Valentine as a curious-and stipulatable-argument. They'd both seen Ahn-Kha any number of times, and the Golden One had a testicular sack the size of a ripe cantaloupe.
"Ali, I-"
"It's always I with you, Val. Ever notice that? I don't even want us to be a we, I just want one fuck, one goddamn, sweaty fuck with a guy I halfway care about. I spent eight months on my back for those grunting Quislings. Wasn't like blowing some eighteen-year-old sentry to get through a checkpoint 'cause I had a story about how I gotta get medicine to my sick aunt-I had to eat breakfast with those greasy shits and talk about how great they were and just once I'd like-"
And with that it was like all the air had left her lungs. She leaned over with her mouth open for a moment, a surprised look on her face-then she fled to the bathroom.
Valentine pulled his lengthening hair back from his eyes, listened to the mixture of sobs and retching sounds echoing off the tiles in the washroom, and let out a long breath. At the moment he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't rather face another air pirate raid than go into that room.
But he did so.
The mess was about what he expected. A horrible beery-liquor smell wove itself above and around the sharper odor of her bile, and she was crying into the crook of a vomit-smeared arm at the edge of the toilet.
He picked her up. After a quick struggle he set her in bed and took off her shoes and socks, and gave each rough foot one gentle squeeze.
"No, not now," she said. I wasn't.
"I got puke on my good bra."