The girl crouched low in the straw on the far side of the barn, holding her hands up to her face, and rubbing her eyes. He recognized that hair and that dress. And, as she lowered her eyes and whimpered, he recognized the face.
She screamed as Logan grabbed her shoulder, and pressed the pistol against her head. The horse reared up again at the noise, then kicked against the wooden walls of the barn. The planks shook, and dirt fell in through the gaps between them.
She pushed herself up, kicked at him, bit at his arm, and twisted out of his grip. As she turned aside, he grabbed her arm and kicked her legs out from under her. She yelped as she slammed down onto the straw, then rolled over. He straddled her stomach, grabbed her wrists with one hand so she could no longer hit him, and waved his pistol toward her face.
This time, she wasn’t getting away.
“Stop struggling,” he said. “If you run, the solar storms will kill you.”
She stared up into his face, and her eyes blinked as they struggled to recover from the bright flash of the grenade. “Who are you?”
If he hadn’t been sure she was the girl from Gries when he saw her, he was when he heard her voice. He’d heard her speak enough times back in Gries and the Valenciennes tunnels to recognize her accent.
“Logan McCoy. French Foreign Legion. And you’re under arrest as an insurgent.”
She kicked her legs and tried to swing her arms, even though Logan was holding them against the ground. All they did was wiggle.
“Why are the Foreign Legion sneaking around Saint Jean?”
“Probably for the same reason you are.”
“I’m here to visit my aunt. But she’s not here.”
“It’s a little late for that. Your friends have already come to visit her.“
“What do you mean?”
“They threw your aunt off the cliff.”
“They wouldn’t have…”
Logan nodded toward the doors. “Her body’s down there in the river somewhere, if you want to look for it. Along with all the others.”
She relaxed at last, and was silent for a moment. Her eyes and mouth opened wide. Not that he really believed she had an aunt in the village, but she didn’t seem to believe the insurgents would have killed them.
“You can’t mean that.”
He looked into her eyes. Could she be serious about her aunt? She looked distraught, but what man could really tell whether a girl was lying? He’d learned that much in the ZUS. All of Jacques’ girls were expert liars, at least when they wanted to please their customers. Customers who didn’t have much of an incentive to disbelieve them.
“I don’t know whether I saw your aunt down there. But I saw a lot of people. If she was up here…”
Then the girl began to cry. For a second, Logan wanted to release her. Then he remembered Gallo lying in the square after her friend blew him up. And what was left of his body, back in the ruins of his suit.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said, finally.
“You’re the girl who led us into an ambush in Gries, and you’re the girl who was in the tunnels in Valenciennes. You can deny it if you want, but we’ll get the truth out of you in the end. So you might as well admit it now.”
She just stared at him, and pouted. “If you let me go now, I won’t tell anyone what you did.”
He waved the pistol in front of her face. “You can tell my sergeant exactly what I’ve done. He’ll be real glad to hear about it, because he’s been pissed with me ever since you got away the first time.”
She stared at the gun.
“You wouldn’t really shoot me, would you?”
Could he? She’d tried to get him killed. She’d helped to get Gallo killed. He should really want to shoot her for revenge. But she was just a girl, and no older than his sister had been the last time he saw her. What did she know about real life?
“I’ll be in less trouble for taking you back dead than I will for not taking you back alive.”
The urge to fight seemed to leave her face at his words. As though, for the first time, she really believed he might do it.
“Now,” he continued, “Do you think you could do what I tell you, and stop doing things that might make me want to shoot you? We’d all be better that way.”
She nodded. “Just don’t hurt me.”
Hurt was the least that Intel were likely to do if they got their hands on her. But that was a choice she made when she decided to take on the Legion. He thought of Gallo, and all the men wounded and killed so far on this deployment. If she could give them intel that would help them end the insurgency…
“Did you see that burned-out suit back before the bridge?”
She nodded. “That was a friend of mine. Before your friends killed him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Bit late for that. But I’m not exactly worried about hurting insurgents at this moment. Do you understand?”
She nodded. Good. The more scared she was, the less likely she was to do something that might make him do something he’d regret.
His heart had slowed down as his body recovered from the exertion of the last few minutes in the thin air. He’d been up all night and most of the previous day, and now his eyelids were starting to feel heavy. He had to stay out of the sun for the rest of the day, and be ready to head to the mine tonight if the truck didn’t come back.
That meant he needed some sleep.
He yawned at the thought. He’d survived months in Legion training on barely any sleep, but the last few days had been mentally harder than anything the instructors had put him through. No wonder they pushed them so hard in training, so they’d have some chance of surviving combat in the real world.
But that didn’t seem like a good plan when he was sharing the building with a girl who’d previously led him into what was supposed to be a deathtrap. She’d pretended to be an innocent bystander before. Surely she wouldn’t stop at trying to take his pistol or a grenade and kill him while he slept?
“Come on,” he said, and climbed off her. He stepped back and kept the pistol at his hip as she clambered to her feet, and brushed the straw from her dress.
He grabbed her wrist, and she squealed as he twisted her arm behind her. “That hurts.”
“Not half as much as your friends hurt my friend when they fired a rocket through his guts. You got any rope on that horse of yours?”
She shook her head.
“You sure? Because if I can tie your hands up, I won’t have to worry so much about you running away.”
“I haven’t got anything like that.”
The horse snorted as it twisted on the end of the reins in the far corner of the barn.
He’d never ridden a horse before. Never seen one up so close before. Or smelled the stench of hay, crap and sweat. A few of the bosses’ kids back home had horses, mostly the girls. That was about all he knew about them. They couldn’t carry a man in an assault suit, so the Legion had little use for them, only on special missions where a suit would be hindrance.
A couple of small bags hung from the saddle. But who knows what she had in them?
“Where’s your metal suit?” she said.
“It was easier to sneak up on you without it.”
“So how did you know I would come this way?”
“We have our sources.”
“Where are your friends hiding?”
“They’re out there, watching us.”
“Then why do you want to tie me up?”
A wooden ladder led from the floor of the barn to the half-floor above them, stacked with more hay bales and straw. A short rope dangled from the pillar near the top of the steps, with a harness at the end that looked like it would go over a horse’s head. Logan reached up and pulled it from the pillar.