“The difference being two loves instead of one.”
“Can you ever not be facetious?”
“If I knew the meaning of the word, I’d know what I wasn’t supposed to be. So if Toby proposes…”
“I’ll say no.”
“And crush him forever.”
“Don’t say that!” Jinny snapped. “Please, don’t.”
“You know it’s true. Guy like Toby, when he gets wrapped up in a girl, there ain’t nothing going to untangle him easily, not without it hurtin’ him plenty. ’Specially a girl like you.”
“But I can’t say yes if he isn’t the man I want to be with for the rest of my life.”
Mal wondered if he might be the man Jinny would want to be with for the rest of her life. He didn’t dare voice the thought, for fear that he would be as crushed as Toby was going to be when Jinny rejected his proposal.
“Whatever happens,” Jinny said firmly, “this thing tonight, you and me, it was a one-off. You hear me, Mal? It was terrific, it was lovely, but it’s not going to be repeated.”
“So, what, this was just my reward for saving your brother?”
“No. No! I need to figure out where I stand with Toby, apart from anything else.”
Mal was crestfallen. He was also quite sure, within himself, that despite what she said, it was not going to be a one-off.
And he was right. He and Jinny kept contriving to be in the same place at the same time, their paths crossing seemingly by accident but not really. These random encounters all had the same outcome. And there would be guilt afterwards, and a vow not to see each other again, invariably broken.
Naturally Toby was appalled when he learned about what Bundy had done, or tried to do, and said he would inform his mother. She would have Bundy out of a job within a week, and sue him for damages, too. Mal and Jamie, however, persuaded him not to tell her. They reckoned Bundy was neutralized, Crump as well. Both lawmen were so far sticking to the story Mal had concocted about a firearms accident. Both were getting ribbed for it by the locals and were taking the mockery stoically. Their feigned chagrin suggested to Mal that they wanted to put the truth of the incident behind them, and involving Marla Finn might just stir up something that appeared settled. If Bundy were plotting any kind of revenge, he was hiding it well. Maybe, for all his pigheadedness, even he realized he had overstepped the mark and needed to pull back.
Then war broke out on Shadow. The Alliance had been pushing its influence further and further out from the Core, sweeping up more and more planets in its barbed-wire embrace. All across the ’verse there had been skirmishes between Alliance troops and opposition forces, ragtag militias that were poorly armed but made up for it with guts and determination. It was war in all but name, until finally the Alliance declared that a state of hostility existed between it and all worlds that resisted its influence. This was simply formalizing what had hitherto been implicit.
By then, Jinny had broken it off with Toby. She had also broken it off with Mal. Toby did not know that they had been seeing each other behind his back, but Jinny felt she could not simply take up with Mal, not so soon after ending things with Toby. She said she needed time out to think about their relationship and figure out what she herself wanted, promising it was just temporary. She was still bruised and fragile from having to jilt Toby. It had not been an easy decision.
Toby came to Mal for consolation, and one of the hardest feats Mal had ever pulled off was offering the kid a shoulder to cry on. He ached to tell Toby about himself and Jinny but knew he never could. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had lost her. Instead, he comforted Toby, got him drunk, was every inch the good friend.
Next day, he found himself on that train to Da Cheng Shi. Jamie was with him. So was Toby.
Once again, as before during the heyday of the Four Amigos, Toby was tagging along. His motives were straightforward. He couldn’t bear to remain in Seven Pines Pass. He couldn’t stay as long as Jinny was there, a constant reminder of what he had once had and could never have again. He hated the Alliance, that was for sure. He detested what they were doing. He wanted to stand up and be counted, to give those bullies a bloody nose, to draw a line in the sand. But whereas for Mal and Jamie that was reason enough to do what they were doing, Toby was driven by a still darker imperative. Misery.
Once more Toby addressed the crowd of Browncoats in the mining cavern.
“Here is how it went down,” he said. “Less than a year after Mal and I enlisted, along with our friend Jamie Adare, the Alliance bombed the hell out of our home planet, Shadow. By then we’d all been through basic training. You all know how that was. Sometimes brutal, sometimes boring, sometimes downright amateurish. But we were all pulling together, all on the same side. It felt good even when we were slogging along knee-deep in mud, trying to keep formation, pretending to fire these broom handles they’d given us instead of guns because they didn’t have any real guns to spare, aiming ’em at an enemy that wasn’t there. Yet. Then came a lull. Our drill sergeants, some of whom seemed to be just making it up as they went, told us to go home. They’d taught us all they could. They would summon us when we were needed.
“The war was drawing closer to Shadow every day, like this big thundercloud on the horizon steadily growing bigger and bigger, more and more ominous. We were told to go be with our loved ones for a spell, and wait for the call. It’d be coming soon enough.
“Mal, Jamie, and I returned to Seven Pines Pass, our hometown. Jamie’s sister Jinny was waiting to meet us off the train, and she wasn’t happy with any of us, no sir, on account of we’d up and left her behind without telling her where we were going and she’d had to find out about it the hard way, through a wave from Jamie. Each of us had our reasons for keeping her in the dark, the details of which needn’t detain us here. However, Jinny and a few of the locals were keen to do their bit, and so they’d begun stockpiling arms, against the likelihood of the Alliance occupying Shadow. They’d put together a sizeable cache — enough to equip a platoon or maybe more — and had stashed it out back of a meadow on the Adare property, in a cowshed.”
Mal remembered that cowshed for various reasons. One was that he and Jinny had met there for a tryst on several occasions. The smell of mingled cow musk and hay never failed to evoke strong feelings in him, even to this day. Sometimes it was almost, in a bizarre way, an aphrodisiac. Other times, it could reduce him to tears.
He also remembered the cowshed for the smoking ruin it had become, all twisted spars of charred wood sticking upwards, with a halo of scorched earth around it.
And for the burned, mutilated corpse lying close by.
“Jinny’s and Jamie’s parents knew what was being kept there,” Toby continued, “but turned a blind eye. Jinny took it upon herself to guard the arms cache round the clock. It was her way of showing support for the Independent cause. And here’s the kicker. She was guarding it that night when the Alliance called in a Zeus missile strike to destroy it. She was there when a space-to-ground projectile fitted with a thousand pounds of explosive sailed in from heaven and obliterated that cowshed and everything in it and everything within a hundred-yard radius around it. Including Jinny.”
Faces stared up at the platform, and Mal stared at nothing. All he saw was Jinny’s dead body, burned into a contorted, skeletal parody of its living version. The face like a blackened skull, jaws opened in a soundless scream. The cindered remains that were barely recognizable as those of the first woman he’d ever truly loved.
All these years, Mal had assumed that rage had burned away the last of his deep grief, but now his heart sank down into another icy pit brimming with sorrow so thick he began to drown. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.