Fear (Gone 5)

“Oh. No. I knew that,” Orc said, feeling as if he’d be blushing if he had more than a few inches of skin left. “That’s not what I was talking about. No.” He forced a laugh. “That kind of stuff, that’s not for me. Not a lot of girls are interested in someone like me.” He didn’t want it to sound like he was feeling sorry for himself, but it probably did.

“Yeah, well, it turns out there aren’t a lot of girls interested in me, either,” Dekka said.

“You mean boys.”

“No. I mean girls.”

Orc missed a step, he was so shocked. “You’re one of those lesbos?”

“I’m a lesbian. And I’m not one of those anything in this place; it looks like I’m the only one of those.”

This was making Orc feel very uncomfortable. Lesbo was just a name to call some ugly girl back when he’d been at school. He hadn’t really thought much about it. And now he had to think about it.

Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, so you’re like me.”

“What?”

“An only. Like me. I’m the only one like me,” Orc said.

He heard a derisive snort from Dekka. It was an annoyed sound, not a happy laugh. But it was the best she’d come up with so far.

“Yeah,” Orc went on. “You and me, we’re onlies is what we are. The only person made out of rocks and the only lesbo.”

“Lesbian,” Dekka corrected. But she didn’t sound that mad.

Something smacked Orc’s head and poked at his eyes. “Careful. There’s a tree. Grab my waist and I’ll go

around it.”

Lana was right. It wasn’t long before trouble started. Quinn stopped a kid who had taken a burning stick from the fire and was heading toward his home.

“I just want to get my stuff.”

“No fire outside the plaza,” Quinn said. “Sorry, man, but we don’t want another Zil thing with the whole town going up in flames.”

“Then give me a flashlight.”

“We don’t have any to—”

“Then mind your own business. You’re just a stupid fisherman.”

Quinn had grabbed the torch. The kid tried to rip it away, but he, unlike Quinn, had not spent months with his hands gripping an oar.

Quinn wrested the torch away easily. “You can go where you want. But not with fire.”

He’d escorted the kid back to the plaza just in time to see two torches heading away on the far side of the plaza.

Quinn cursed and sent some of his people after them. But the fishing crews were exhausted. They’d been chopping wood and dragging it and sawing it and distributing food and organizing a slit trench.

Lana had been right. She was looking at him now, not saying it, but knowing he was coming to the same conclusion.

“Caine,” Quinn said. “Do you have it back?”

Caine had disappeared for a while. Later Quinn realized he’d walked down to the ocean and washed himself up. His clothing was wet but more or less clean. His hair was slicked back, and the scars of the staples Penny had driven into his head had been healed by Lana.

His hands—the backs, at least—were still covered in anywhere from an eighth of an inch to half an inch of cement. He had a hard time articulating his fingers. But his palms were mostly clean.

He looked gray, even by firelight. He looked like a much older person, like he had gone straight from handsome teenager to weary, beaten old man.