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When she looked up into his eyes they were puzzled, little-boyish, as if he was trying to remember something hard. She traced his jaw with her lips, feeling old scars, the thick bristle of his unshaven chin, the heaviness of solid bone under the skin. His familiar smell. He wasn't back yet. But he'd return. If she stayed by him, called him back to himself whenever the strange moods returned, he'd recover. She drew his puzzled face down toward hers.

"Hey, Turner." It was Leo, from above. "We're almost there. Need to get set to move this mother."

She felt his arms, which had begun to tighten around her, loosen and then slip away. He raised his head, and moved back another step. He looked back at her, his face still lost and wondering, and then turned and went quickly up the ladder.

A moan made her turn. It was Quidley. As she watched he moaned again, stirring, though his eyes were still closed. Blue bruises were beginning to appear on his face and on the side of his head. She slid the hatchway closed and then went back to kneel beside him.

She loved Johnny. But she didn't know how she felt about this man. He lay quiet and her eyes sharpened themselves on his face.

For what he'd done to Johnny she should use the long House fingernails to tear out his eyes. For all that the South — and he was one of the rulers, yes, right here — had done to her people, he deserved death.

Yet it wasn't so easy. She remembered his strangeness in her bed, his odd gentleness. He'd cared for her. And saved her, too, saved her from rape and worse at the hands of those Kuklos patrollers. And he'd given her back Johnny. Just because she'd asked him to.

So what did she feel? Kneeling beside him, trying to decide whether to help or destroy him, she had to examine her own heart.

Before she could there was another step on the ladder. She got up hastily. But it was only Willie, puffing with the effort of squeezing through the hatchway. In one fat hand, incongruously, he carried a Tredegar. Looped over his shoulder was a coil of light line.

"Got to tie him up."

"I'll help."

"I can do it. Can you find some cloth? Piece of rag? Got to blindfold whitey here so he don't see where we are, who we are, Leo says."

"Let me look." The compartment offered nothing to a quick search. She unwrapped the red scarf. "Here. Use this."

"That pretty thing? You don't want to use that. Might not get it back."

"He gave it to me," she said. "Now he can have it back."

Willie rolled the unresisting body over, looping the yellow line skillfully around the pale wrists. She saw fine ginger hairs curling around the knots. Suddenly the cabin was too small for her, too stuffy. She needed air. From above came the sound of voices. The hatchway-framed sky was just flushing with the first gray of a rainy dawn, and she breathed the fresh wind gratefully.

FIFTEEN

"Can I come up now?"

"Yeah, Vy, come on up."

She recognized Finnick's voice; and his feet, in the heavy government-worker-issue steel-toed work shoes, were the first things she saw as she poked her head out into the dawn.

They rode were just offshore. The land lay barely a hundred yards away, covered with thick woods. The heavy rain had turned to a slow drizzle, falling endlessly from a thunder-gray sky. She pulled herself the rest of the way up. On the open deck the men were busy around a gray-greenish shape, as big as a small car, but squatter, heavier, egg-pregnant with its own purpose. It lay in its cradle with the men toiling around and under it like a queen ant tolerating its workers.

"Get them timbers under her."

Turner's voice this time: no longer puzzled, nor angry, but resonant with command. He moved purposefully about, in his own element, lending his back and arms to tug a beam into place, flipping a line into a knot with a fluid motion of his wrists. He looked almost like the old Turner. Until he happened to glance toward her, and she saw his eyes, flat, cold, and empty.

Willie came on deck. "All right below?" Finnick asked him.

"Yeah. He tied up good."

"Bo, we're ready, I guess," said Turner. He raked the shrubbed shore with his gaze. "Leo?"

The Railroad man was leaning against the shell, breathing hard. He looked unused to such heavy work. He dragged an arm across that disquietingly pale forehead. "Yeah?"

"Where's your goddamned truck, man?"

The octoroon pointed to a little bay indenting the coastline. "It all looks different from out here, but it should be over there. The estate. The truck's on a dirt road, not far from the water."

"We can't hump this mother far." Turner kicked the shell contemptuously. "And rain makes mud. That truck got four-wheel drive?"

"No. Just a regular commercial Southern Motors delivery truck. But with the best set of tires we could steal."

"We'll run her up on that bank." He pointed to the little bay. As they drifted closer, Vyry made out an edge of green lawn descending to the muddy tide-line. "I don't see no bar, no mud flats. Get the truck right up close's you can to the water, but keep her tires off the mud. Bo, get her nose to, let him off."

The boat shuddered as Finnick nosed her closer. "She shallow draf'," said Turner, looking over the side. "Run her on in, Bo."

When they grounded, Leo swung over the side into ankle-deep, gluey, dark-brown mud. His shoes made sucking sounds as he struggled toward the grassy verge. Then he disappeared into the trees. They waited. Finnick, hands on the wheel, glanced anxiously at the still-empty water behind them. Willie searched the sky. Then, faintly, came the sound of a truck engine starting.

"Let's get her well in, now, Bo. Every foot farther up goin' to save us a gallon of sweat. Run out, get up some speed, get her on in."

"Might not get her off, Johnny."

"Take that chance. Anyway she'll float a lot higher without this thing in her."

Finnick maneuvered free, playing with screws and rudder like an organist, then waited offshore till the truck came into view, backing slowly, jerkily, down the lawn. "Everybody aft," he yelled. Then he aimed the bow and punched the throttles. "Hold tight and bend those knees!" he shouted back.

Vyry crouched as they gathered speed. She expected a crashing impact, but all that happened was that the nose tipped up and the boat seemed to come to rest with a slithery gentleness. As the engines throbbed at last to quiet she leaned out. The bow overhung grass, but the shell, halfway back along the length of the boat, was right at the muddy verge.

"Rollers there, under her. Them timbers braced proper? Bo, you the smallest, I puttin' you on the holdingback rope." Men moved swiftly into position as Turner cracked out orders. "Take a couple turns with that; it gets away, likely to crush somebody."

"How heavy you figure it?" said Wash, cinching tight a broad leather belt around his waist.

"Can't tell. Ton — maybe more."

"Thass too heavy," said someone. They looked at Turner.

"I can't make it no lighter for you," he grunted. He looked at the mud and at the forty yards still separating the back of the truck from the boat's side. "And they ain't nobody to help. And no way to winch her, and no winch if there was. So we sweat it over, that's all. And there ain't a better bunch of men to do it in the South."

The crew shifted and looked at each other and the shell. He gave them no chance to protest. "Free up them straps. Sammy, Ben, lower that carryin'-frame down there into the mud. Good. Now, get behind her — hunh."

A little chorus of grunts came from the men as they leaned into the round heaviness. To get it up over the waist-high gunwale, she saw, Johnny had laid heavy long timbers in a sort of ramp, up which, as the men shoved, the shell now began to roll. The timbers pointed skyward outside of the gunwale, over the mud, and she wondered why — they seemed far too long.