"Shit, how did someone as ugly as Young end up with you?"
"Kindness," Duvalier said. "He's a very kind man."
"If you ever want to trade him in on a newer model . . ." the young guard said. He sputtered with laughter as he waved casually at Valentine-not taking his eyes off Duvalier-and Duvalier said, "Oh, let me!" She thumped something without waiting for permission and the twin gates hummed as they slid sideways on greasy tracks. Valentine nipped out of sight of the gate and walked quickly down the road.
Valentine heard a thump from behind, a door open, and then quick footsteps as Duvalier caught up.
She pulled him off the road and gave him a brief embrace, nuzzling him under the chin with her nose. "I can never leave you alone, can I?"
"My luck always turns whenever you're not around," Valentine admitted.
"If they arrested everyone who ever quietly shot a Quisling ..." she said.
"Let's not mention arrests or prisons for a while, alright? As of this moment I'm a fugitive from justice subject to the Escape Law."
"It's not so bad. My whole life, I've been a fugitive from just about everything," she said.
"What's the plan?" Valentine asked.
"That's your end. But I've got a start under way. Oh, that Corporal Young's a good man. We need to burn those clothes."
"You've got replacements?"
"They're with Ahn-Kha."
She turned him into the woods and an owl objected, somewhere. Valentine heard the soft flap of bats above, hunting insects in the airspace between branches and ground.
They stopped to listen twice, then found a burned-out house. A transport truck with a camouflaged canvas-covered back sat in front of it. Valentine marveled at it. The ruins of the garage held a small charcoal fire and a very large, faun-colored Grog.
"My David," Ahn-Kha said. "We have escaped again."
"If we're still at liberty in twenty-four hours I'll call it an escape. Where'd you get the truck?"
"Styachowski requisitioned us a transport," Duvalier said.
Valentine stripped out of his uniform, and Duvalier flitted about gathering up the guard's clothing.
Ahn-Kha handed him a too-familiar dun-colored overall.
"Labor Regiment?" Valentine said.
"It goes with the truck," Duvalier said. "The big boy looks like he could do a hard day's work with a shovel."
"And you?"
She covered her fiery red hair with a fatigue cap. "I'm management. You two look like the all-day lunch-break type. Besides Val, you're the suckiest kind of driver."
"Where do we go?" Ahn-Kha asked. "My people will gladly shelter us at Omaha."
"We'd have to cross half of Southern Command. No, let's go east."
Duvalier climbed into her own overall and zipped it up over freckled shoulders. "East? Nothing there but river and then the Kurians. Until the Piedmont."
"I have an old friend in the Yazoo Delta. And I've got a mind to visit Memphis."
"Memphis? The music's to die for, but the Kurians see to it that you do the dyin'." She sprinkled something that smelled like kerosene out of a bottle onto the clothes and tossed them on the charcoal. They began to burn with admirable vigor.
"Ali, I've got my claws into a job. I'm wondering more and more about Post's wife, Gail."