"Sorry to hear that", Valentine said.
"My dad was drinking a lot as he got older. He got scared of going into towns to get work. Thought they'd pick him up, you know? Finally ... I'd just turned fifteen. He tried to sell me. For sex, you know, I was a virgin and all. Some rich guy from Tempe and his manservant came for me. The servant washed me up and combed out my hair and told me how I shouldn't be afraid.
"He got sick of me after about a week or so and sent me back to Pa. But I learned the ins and outs of his house, and knew when the servant door in the wall was unlocked. I got me a couple of mean rattlesnakes and chopped off their rattlers. He had this little toilet room with a phone in it. Always went in there first thing in the morning. I cut the wires, broke the bulb, and put them in there.
"The snakes got him, sure enough, and he started hollering. The servant came and put down this big cut-down shotgun to drag him away from the snakes, I suppose so he could shoot them without blowing his master's leg off. I snuck up and got the gun, shot them both in the face. One barrel each.
"Funny thing is, the guy was nice enough. Really loving and gentle with me, and he gave me some kind of pill when it was over that flushed me out, made sure I got my period. The one I wanted to shoot was my father. Maybe not in the face, in the foot or knee or something. I heard later they hauled off the servants, the ones who worked there during the day, and that seemed the most unfair thing of all. A cook, a gardener, and a housekeeper, who all lived miles away and had to take a broken-down old bus even to get there. Up until then everything about the Order was scary, but in this theoretical sense. When I saw it in practice, it changed me more than getting poked by that old guy.
"I ran for Yuma, wanting to get across to Cali, and made it. But I met a nice kid in Yuma, working part-time at the store while he apprenticed at the airfield in electronics. He got purified, though, my first year there".
Valentine waited until he was sure she'd stopped talking. "What happened to your dad?"
"Dunno. I should have gotten a job in town, kept him somewhere out of the way. He wasn't on any sets of official books, I don't think - no one would have looked for him. Stupid old drunk".
"You are tough", Valentine said.
"Only on the outside. Like a bug".
Valentine nodded. "I know what you mean".
* * *
A thunderstorm rumbled outside when higher authority called for them. Valentine put on a pair of moleskin trousers they'd given him and his only shirt with a collar, a field turtleneck.
They took them down the road to the echoing halls of the high school, where maybe thirty or forty people worked in classrooms in a school built to hold a thousand.
Patched cracks from earthquake damage ran across the floors and up the walls.
It had been a long parade of death since the "turnover" of 2022, when mankind relinquished its throne at the top of the food chain...
Valentine guessed the room they brought them to had been devoted to science. A yellowing periodic table hung on the wall, and all the tables had a thick, black, chemically resistant covering. Cabinets on the wall held binders rather than test tubes and Bunsen burners. A preserved Reaper head sat in a jar on the counter, next to glass-covered trays holding molds of Grog tracks and recovered teeth.
A rather sad-looking elderly man, lost in his green uniform collar, sat on a stool, resting his back against a whiteboard. Another man, bald with a lightning-bolt-like zigzag tattooed on each temple, wore a smart steely gray uniform. Blued-steel collar tabs and matching arrowheads on his epaulets gleamed like a polished piano top as he stood talking to Walker.
The guard halted Gide outside, offered her a chair.
"She's my aspirant, Walker", Valentine protested as the other guard led him into the office/classroom.
The older man pulled at his ear. "Hmm... can't say. Can't really say, maybe around the eyes".
"Major Valentine", the bald man said. "My name's Thunderbird. You know Walker, of course, and this is Colonel Kubishev. Colonel Kubishev is semiretired. He came down as a favor to me".
"Sorry, I'm afraid I bunged things up and delayed you a day", Colonel Kubishev said. He had a faint accent. "They asked me to take a look at you. I worked with your father, briefly, in Montana. Calgary Alliance. They asked me about the name and I wanted to see for myself".
None of that meant much. Valentine vaguely remembered the Calgary Alliance being mentioned in War College; it was a short-lived Freehold that collapsed under the Black Summer Famines of the forties.
"I'm honored, sir", Valentine said.
"How is he?"
"He's dead", Valentine said.
"Oh, I am sorry. I am sorry. My wife and I will remember him".
"Thank you, sir".
"You wouldn't know whatever happened to Helen St. Croix, I don't suppose", Kubishev asked.