Everyone was wet. Were they all bedraggled sacrificial sheep? "Haven't made up my mind yet."
* * * *
Valentine grew used to the tasteless food, and the boring days of routine bleeding into one another and overlapping like a long hospital stay. He took a job in the prison library, but there was so little work to do they only had him in two days a week. He could see why men sometimes marked the days on the wall in prison; at times he couldn't remember if a week or a month had passed.
The weather warmed and grew hot. Even the guards grew listless in the heat. Young brought in two of the pamphlets produced about the fight in Little Rock and had Valentine sign them.
"Turns out I had a cousin in that camp your Bears took. One's for him and one's for his folks."
Part of his brain considered escape. He tried to memorize the schedule of the guard visits to his hallway, tried to make a guess at when the face would appear in the shatterproof window, but their visits were random.
Also, there was the Escape Law. Any person who broke free while awaiting trial automatically had a guilty verdict rendered in absentia.
He slept more than he was used to, and wrote a long letter to the Miskatonic about the mule list. He labored for hours on the report, knowing all the while that it would be glanced at, a note would be added to another file (maybe!) and then it would be filed away, never to see the light of day again until some archivist went through and decided which documents could be kept and which could be destroyed.
He suggested that further investigation into the mule list was warranted. Anything important enough for the Kurians to put this kind of effort into-and apart from feeding and protecting themselves, the Kurians had few pursuits that Valentine was aware of- might prove vital.
Valentine signed it. His last testament to the Cause?
* * * *
Letters arrived in a strung-together mass. Outrage and gratitude from Post, who was on the mend in a convalescent home and had installed Narcisse in the kitchen; wonder from Meadows; a few postcards from his former Razors who had heard about his imprisonment one way or another.
One offered to ". . . come git you Sir. Just send word."
Nothing from Ahn-Kha, which worried Valentine a little. The Golden One could read and write English as well as anyone in his former command, and better than many.
Valentine heard footsteps in the hallway pause, and then a knock at the door.
"Visitor, Major."
This time Corporal Young took him down to a regular visiting room, carrels with glass between allowed for conversation through small holes in the glass-or plastic, Valentine thought when he saw all the scratches. There were fittings for phones but it looked as though the electronics had been taken out.
He waited for a few minutes and then they brought in Moira Styachowski.
She wore good-fitting cammies with her Hunter Staff crossbar on her captain's bars. The only female Bear he'd ever met looked about as healthy as she ever did-just a little pale and exhausted.
"So they got you after all," Valentine said.
"I might say the same about you," Styachowski said in return, then her eyes shifted down. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Dumb thing to joke-"
"Forget about it, Wildcard."
She smiled at the handle issued to her the night he'd been burned in the Kurian Tower of Little Rock. "You know who's behind this, right?"
"Yes, that Sime . . ."
"No, the charges. It's Martinez."
"My counselor told me. Seems like a sharp woman."
Styachowski looked down again.
"What?" Valentine asked.
"I was told, Val, in language that was . . . umm, remarkable for its vigor, to come here and tell you to work with Sime on this. The 'vigor' of the language employed made me ask a few questions of a friend at GHQ. So, for the record, take the deal."
Valentine lowered his voice. "Off the record?"