Tate and Gwen hadn't been hard to find, they were still arguing down below.
"The fact remains, you got me here under false pretences! I thought better of you, Reverend." The auburn-haired woman was holding her baby in one arm, and jabbing a free finger in Tate's face.
"I never said anything about you taking more weapons back to Hope."
"New Hope," she reminded him. "We have all the food we need, what else was I expected to think?
"But you know, as well as I, Robert's feelings."
"Screw Robert. He's leaving my people out there defenceless!" snapped the woman, then caught sight of Mary and Jack from the corner of her eye. She stopped her rant, but didn't apologise.
Tate shook his head. "I only did this out of the best of intentions. Robert has gone to tackle this new threat, and I thought you'd be safest here."
"You may have underestimated exactly how safe we are," Mary told the holy man.
Jack explained about the lookouts to the baffled Tate.
"Then we need to break out those weapons right away!" Gwen said. "Start handing them out to your men and-"
"The men are capable of defending themselves regardless" said Mary.
Gwen rounded on her. "I thought you out of all of them had some sense, Mary."
"I do," she replied.
"And what's that tucked away there, a peashooter?" Gwen aimed her finger at Mary's belt, where one gun was stuffed in the front, the other out of sight round the back.
"That's different, it belonged to…" Mary didn't have time for this. "Look, have you seen Mark? We all need to stick together, keep inside the castle.
"And Adele," Jack said. "Have you seen her?"
Mary wasn't actually that bothered where she was.
"Last time I saw Mark, he was with Sophie outside," Tate informed them.
"Right," Mary said, making for the nearest exit and shrugging on her coat.
"Mary, let me-" Jack began, but she was gone before he had time to finish.
Outside, Mary looked for Mark and Sophie. She made her way around the castle, coming up with nothing. As she was about to make another pass, she stopped. Something was amiss. You didn't live somewhere for over a year — especially somewhere they'd originally taken over — without noticing subtle differences in your surroundings. This one, however small, was big in other ways.
The lock had been broken on one of the gates leading to the caves, the gate itself slightly ajar.
"Gwen…" Mary muttered to herself. She'd noticed a real difference in the woman since she'd returned to the castle, since she'd set herself up as a leader in her own right at New Hope. Mary had got to know her a little during the later stages of her pregnancy, during and after the birth, but the woman who'd driven in here late yesterday had been barely recognisable. She made some allowance for the fact that Gwen was being forced to return to the place where she had once been held captive. But it was more than that, Mary could see it in her eyes. They were colder, the determination she'd exhibited when she left had intensified a hundredfold.
Now she'd taken not a blind bit of notice of what Mary had said, gone down to retrieve the weapons anyway in spite of Robert's instructions. At first Mary hadn't really understood this herself, surely it did make sense — as Bill had repeatedly argued — to use the weapons they'd been handed on a plate? But the more she got to know Robert, the more she saw what kind of man he was and the more she loved him for his convictions. This wasn't an obsession with the past, as her own father had, but rather a revolt against the trappings of a world that spawned the virus in the first place. It had taken everything away from Robert, and left people like De Falaise free to use those kinds of weapons (weapons, she justified to herself, from a different era to her Peacekeepers). If they took up the same kind of arms, Robert had maintained, how long before they were back in the position of country vs. country, with the threat of weapons of mass destruction hanging over their heads again?
That was why he'd gone off to face this Tsar character, completely mismatched some might think. But they'd be underestimating him, and Mary knew in her heart that Robert was anything but crazy. He believed it was something worth fighting for, a principle worth dying for. She just missed him and hoped he was okay.
It was also why she had to go down to the caves and have a word with Gwen, stop her from bringing up more of those weapons. They'd fight whatever was coming in the same spirit as Robert, not as the mad Frenchman would have done. Because he'd lost, hadn't he? And they'd won.
Mary began down the narrow, sheer steps that led into the cave system. The stone was slippery and it was dark. As she descended, though, she saw a flickering light. Someone had turned on the jury-rigged lamps which De Falaise had set up down here. For some reason she couldn't quite understand, Mary was as quiet as possible, loathe to give away her presence.
She turned a corner and saw it: the arsenal that had been carried down here not long after their victory, Robert's men disarming the Sheriff's troops and locking their toys away where they couldn't hurt anyone anymore. Until perhaps now…
Because Mary saw the female figure there in the shadows, hunched down, rooting through the weaponry like a dealer at a scrap metal yard. It was time to announce herself.
"And exactly what do you think you're doing, Gwe-" Mary cut short her sentence when she realised her mistake. As the figure righted herself, she saw that this woman had short hair, and it was much darker than Gwen's. Slowly, the woman faced her.
"Hello Mary."
"Adele." For a second or two, Mary's mind couldn't quite process this turn of events. "What are you doing down here?"
Adele just smiled that false smile of hers. "I… I heard about what was happening. And Jack told me about the weapons down here, so…"
"So you just thought you'd come and help yourself?"
"I was scared." But there was something in that voice which told Mary that Adele was anything but scared. This hadn't been a snap decision in the slightest, she knew exactly what she was doing. "Robert's not here and…" Robert again? "I'm glad you and him have patched things up," she tacked on, quickly. "Do you think he'll be all right?"
Mary frowned. What was she doing? Trying to change the subject, attempting to steer it away from why she was down in the caves after these weapons? Mary swept away all the confusion and let her instincts take over.
Don't trust her, Moo-Moo, said her brother's voice, so suddenly it almost made her start. She doesn't care about Robert. Not really. She doesn't care about any of you.
Nodding to herself, Mary then asked the most obvious question of all, the one she should have asked a long time ago. "Who exactly are you, Adele?"
"What are you talking about?" she said, a bit too hastily.
"Who are you? It's a simple enough question."
Now it was her who frowned. "I'm Adele," she confirmed, as if it answered everything. There was no response from Mary, so Adele began with: "I was born in Durham, moved away when I was old enough, travelled around… What more do you need to know?"
She's lying.
When Mary remained silent, Adele continued, like she was reading from a prepared speech. "Okay, I'm an only child, my mother brought me up on her own. It was… hard. My father… well, he left when I was very young. I never really knew him, but I would have liked to."