It was very dark and very quiet on the shore; there were no lights to be seen anywhere.
“Now what?” Anne Marie asked, trying to see something other than forbidding swampy forest in the thick gloom of the night.
“We camp as soon as we can find a dry place, of course,” Tony responded. “We still have some matches in a waterproof container, and we might try a fire, if only to scare away anything unwelcome. When we get some light, we’ll see about finding a road.”
“Which way?”
“It really doesn’t matter, does it? I should think, though, if we have any real chance of tracing them, it should be south. At least they’ll have communications, possibly enough to get word to the embassy in Zone. Then we might be able to arrange to get this poor girl home and maybe be out of this and home ourselves. I’ve had quite enough of discomfort and double crosses. We did our duty as best we could. Now we deserve a chance to live our own lives.”
“Duty! Bah!” Anne Marie almost spit. “This poor dear won’t go home willingly. She’ll try to find her husband, even if that’s impossible, because it’s her duty and because she’s in love. You heard what they said about that dreadful culture. She’d be married off to some old bum she didn’t know and die of a broken heart!”
“Anne Marie, this is not a romance novel.”
“Tony Guzman! What in the world has gotten into you? It’s not like we are innocent bystanders in all this! Nor entirely without some responsibility, too, simply because we weren’t all that honest with them, either.”
“We didn’t ask to go along on this adventure!” Tony argued. “We were drafted!”
“Nonsense! That nice young man from the Zone embassy came along and asked us to do it. To go and link up with this Mavra Chang and find out as much as we could. And we found out a great deal, I think! We were also to get off a report to the ambassador if they lost track of the party. Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that. I would have felt just dreadful about it!”
“But it’s over, Anne Marie! We’re the party now. The only satisfaction we might have is rubbing it in that smug drug runner’s face after he discovers we were not fugitives but shadows.”
“Spies, you mean. Spies for our government.”
Tony sighed. “Anne Marie, spies are professionals. Espionage is a highly regarded art. We were rank amateurs dropped into a situation where we might have been hurt or killed by a government that wouldn’t have really cared, and now we got out with our lives and whole skins. I don’t want to be blinded or crippled. Not again. Now we have a second chance. I want to go home before something does happen. We were very nearly killed back there, you know. Anne Marie, we’re sixteen years old again, only this time we’re sexy blond bombshells that had the men of Dillia already making fools of themselves around us. I’ve been on that side. I want to find out if it’s any more fun on this side.”
“Well, then, you go home,” she told the other centauress. “I suppose I should have seen it coming long before this, but I didn’t want to. You’ve had a good life. You were handsome, from a well-to-do and well-connected family, skilled, educated, a pilot and world traveler. I never did any of those things. I couldn’t. I was homely and plain and stuck mostly in a broken body. I made the best of it, but it wasn’t fun, let me tell you! Your coming along, your love, was the one truly wonderful thing that happened to me. I shall always cherish it, and I shall always love that inner part of you, but surely you must have known from the moment we woke up like this that it could never be again. In a sense, this is our afterlife, mortal though we remain, goodness knows. I faced it more and more as we went on this trip. I shall always love that memory of you, and I shall continue to love you, but as a sister. This is after the ‘death do us part’ as surely as if we’d done away with ourselves, and you know it if you’d just face it.”
Tony laughed.
“What’s so amusing? I’m deadly serious.”
“Anne Marie, I’ve rehearsed almost that identical speech a thousand times in my mind, and up to now I never had the nerve to give it. I was afraid of hurting you. And I thought we shared one another’s thoughts to a degree!”
Anne Marie laughed in return, then finally said, “I guess not. I suppose it’s what we thought we would think if the situations were reversed or some such. Or, since we actually were thinking the same, maybe it’s true. Maybe we just didn’t believe we were.” She sighed. “Well, then, I guess this is what we’d call a divorce by mutual consent. Who would have dreamed we two would ever say those words?”
“We’ll always be closer than any other two women of our race,” Tony noted, taking her hand and squeezing it. “But no matter that we see each other in a living mirror, we are two different people who will lead at least slightly different lives.”
“Agreed. And if you want to go back and have all those silly fools swoon over you, be my guest. I suppose, if all else comes out in the end, I’ll wind up doing it, too, but I’m not so eager to start as you.”
“Anne Marie! What can you do? It is like the man said—it is over for us!”
“For you. Go on, I understand completely. But I know how skin-deep those lusting fools are, and they certainly weren’t there when I needed them, going off chasing some—some dumb blond like you. I’m having fun, dear! For the first time in my life I’m living it instead of watching life go by! I very much hope that I’ll come through in one piece, but, in the end it really doesn’t matter to me. Perhaps it was because I was so devoted, to charities, to the unfortunate, to you. Perhaps it’s just divine grace. But God gave me, at the end of my half life, a chance to live a full one, at least for a little bit. I shall probably give up in disgust and go home after a few days, but if there is anything perhaps I can do, if there’s just one little thing I can add, I’ll stick it out.” She looked around at Alowi. “Oh my! The poor dear’s cried herself to sleep!”
“Exhausted, probably. She’s been throwing a tantrum for three days now.”
“We should stop chattering and build that fire, then.”
The next day proved tough going through the thick and ancient trees of Lilblod, but with no sign of who or what was the dominant race there or why they were feared.
Still, before midday they reached a road that, while direct, seemed very well traveled by the depth of the wheel grooves and the marks of all sorts of feet in the clay.
“Runs pretty much straight, northwest to southeast,” Tony noted. “I guess this is the main highway to civilization. He said that place—Clopta or some such—was closest, which would mean we might well make it at a trot before dark.”
Anne Marie raised an eyebrow. “But Agon is where they took the pair of them. If nothing ate us last night except the bugs—goodness! I itch all over!—then I doubt if anything will eat me if I spend one more night by this road. Give me the poor little darling and we’ll head south.”
Tony stared at her. “So this is it? Already?”