He just looked at her.
"Who are they?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said.
"Sword?"
"I don't know." His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. He tapped his ear, made a thumb-move at the walls, the ceiling.
Listening?
Someone listening?
Then a slow thunder began in the boat, different than what muttered on the horizon. The deck steadied from its heaving.
"Going to find out," she said, thinking of the little skips out there in the New Harbor, the skips and the neighbors that would have helped them if they could have gotten that far, if a shot had not hit that fuel-tank.
Skips this monster could ride under with no trouble at all.
Take them out to sea.
Upriver.
Maybe it wants my boat so's they can search it. Maybe it just wants to sink it.
Could've done it, easier'n spitting. It's something else. It's searching it wants. Lord, what're they doing with Rahman? And Tommy and Ali? Questioning them, and Rahman already half-dead?
Poor Mary. I'm sorry, Mary Gentry, ain't nothing I ever done but harm with you.
She looked bleakly at Mondragon. He stared bleakly back.
"Jones," he said in a creaky voice. "Why couldn't you let me alone?"
"I dunno." She gave a shrug and her throat hurt. "Stupid, I guess."
His face made a hurt kind of grimace. "Dammit," he said, and put his head down against his hands and slid his hands behind his neck. He rested that way, and she stared at him the while the boat thundered away in that peculiar boil of a big engine backing.
They began to move against that, then, and Mondragon lifted his face as if he could see where they were going. She had a good map of it in her head. They were coming round the end of the Dead Wharf, headed for Rimmon Bridge, which was how this monster had gotten into the harbor anyhow. The center of it was about high enough to let a boat this big pass beneath, storm-tide and all.
"You all right?" she asked finally.
He blinked and shifted his eyes to her. "Sure," he said. He picked the chain up and hung it over his shoulder, half this side and half the other so the weight got off the collar. He fingered the gall-mark on his neck.
"It's bleeding," she said.
"Figured." He looked at his ringers, wiped them on his knee. His eyes looked bruised. His mouth was swollen on one side where they had hit nun. His hair was drying with blood in it. "How the hell did you get there?"
She shrugged. "Up a shed."
"Up a shed."
"Outside." She made a gesture, vaguely up. "I tracked you all over the damn town."
"How'd you find me?"
"Man talked."
He blinked, looking lost.
"It was supposed to work better," she said.
"Hell, we nearly made it."
"Even with the tank gone." For a moment she felt better. Then she became aware of the engine-sound, thumping away with never a falter.
Not stopping for Rimmon, are we?
She got up, wobbled in the doing and saw him tense up and his hands move as if he would catch her. She came and sat down by him, leaned on him for a pillow, and he put an arm around her middle, bowed his head down next to hers. Chain clanked. The metal on his wrist shone in the light where it rested across her stomach, and blurred along with the rest of the glare.
She snuffled, wiped her nose. Leaned where it was warm and he wrapped his other arm around her.
Right under Rimmon bridges. She heard the engine-sound, heard the distant thunder, heard the backpitched sound off the bridges.
Then the engines slowed, and her own heart beat faster, faster.
'Turning to sea." Mondragon said eventually, when the motion made itself felt.
But the engines went slower, slower still, and the boat rolled to the wind. "Rimmon," she breathed, looked up at nothing but beams and rope and a glaring light and twisted over then to glance in panic at Mondragon. "Ain't going to sea, ain't towing no skip with a storm coming. There's Rimmon-slips. That's where this boat come from. This is a Rimmon-yacht."
"Belongs to some family."
"Belongs to white-face and whoever. You got any friends on Rimmon Isle?"
"No," he said.
Which said it plain enough.
The whole boat was busy with shouts and coming and going for a long while after the engines eased her into some Rimmon Isle mooring. Thunder muttered above. The boat made that quiet motion of a vessel at dock, and it was a while after that til steps came and went in the below-decks.
"Those Rimmon Isle bridges," Mondragon asked. "Guarded?"
"Doubt it." she caught a spark of interest. Her pulse picked up. "We be real nice. Maybe they'll get careless."
"Break if we can," Mondragon said. "You know this place?"
"Better'n you."
He looked her straight in the eyes. Someone came down the steps into the corridor. More than one heavy-booted someone. "All right. You cue it."
She felt the aches, felt every bruise and knock. She stood up on legs that ached. Knees wobbled painfully.
You can't run, Jones.
You can't run no more.
"I ain't the one that broke out of no governor's prison," she hissed. "You pick it."
"Who said?" He got to his feet and laid his hands on her arms. "Who told you that?"
"Up in Nev Hettek. Wasn't it?"
"Who've you been talking to?"
The steps came up to the door.
"Boregy-—Vega Boregy," she hissed. "He threw me out when I went there."
"O God."
The lock rattled. Her heart sank at that look of his, like a last hope gone down to bottom. "I done wrong, huh?"
Desperately. Searching his eyes for any hope at all.
He just stared as if she had shot him in the heart.
The door opened. She looked that way, hoping for fewer guns than she saw there.
Four of 'em. Lord, they'd blow us to tatters.
"Word is," one said, a man in dark sweater and rain-spattered leather coat, identical with all the rest, "you've got all kinds of tricks, Hettekker. Sword of God, aren't you?"
"You've got the guns," Mondragon said, and lifted an empty hand.
"Word is," the man said, "you might just run and hope we'd shoot you. So we just blow her legs off. Minute you look like you're making a move. You're valuable. She isn't. So you go over against that wall and spread out."
"I hear you." Mondragon gave her a light touch on the arm, went over against the side and took the attitude they wanted. A man got in her way with a gun aimed at her gut.
Do something? Give 'im a chance? Oh, hell.
She gauged the gun and threw her shoulder into it.
A blow exploded against her skull. She was sprawled backward on the deck with a gunbarrel in her face, and a man was dragging Mondragon back to the wall without a fight. He stood with his head leaned against the wood and let them chain his hands behind him.
Damn.
Staring up at the gun and the man.
They're going to kill me anyhow. I ain't nothing to them. Ain't worth a copper, o Mondragon, they got you, now they're going to make a hole here where my head is.
"Up," the man with the gun said. Her legs and her arms moved, automatic to the chance. She was halfway up when the man grabbed her sweater at the shoulder and flung her at the door.
Another grabbed her arm and jerked her through it.
Down the corridor with its electrics. Up the stairs and out into gray dawn and wind and the spit of rain.
She looked back, blinking at a haze in her vision, flinching from the sting of hair in her eyes. They had Mondragon between two men. His white face and pale hair glowed unnaturally white in the storm-light, and it was a stranger's face, it was that face she had seen in Gallandry's downstairs hall, all dead grim in the lamplight.
It was the Angel's face from the bridge, it was Retribution come to life, all pale and terrible.