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.Calling the shots—literally.The sniper, the murders: It’s all about Samuel.”SerenadeGalen prowled uneasily from window to window, not even aware of what he was doing until Ruby spoke.“You really want to be out there with them, don’t you? With your friends?”“With my team,” he said.“Sorry you’re stuck here watching over me.”“I’m not stuck, Ruby.” He made an effort to soften his voice.“Look, Bailey said you didn’t sleep on the jet, and you haven’t closed your eyes since we got here.Why don’t you go try to rest for a while?”“I’m not sleepy.Bailey said soldiers have to learn to sleep when they can.And I get that.She’s sleeping now so you’ll sleep later.” Ruby studied him with those too-old eyes.“Except I don’t think you will sleep later.”“I will.When there’s time.”“When this is over, you mean.”“If you like.”Ruby was silent for a long moment, then said almost casually, “Are the voices still talking to you?”He stopped prowling and stared at her.His immediate instinct was to deny, but somehow instead he found himself asking, “What do you know about that?”“About your voices? Just that you hear them.Since the church.Since what we did to Father.Since things changed for a lot of us.” She paused.“Are they still talking to you?”“Whispering,” he said finally.“I can’t understand what they’re saying.Can’t quite hear them.”“Maybe because you aren’t listening hard enough.”“What do you mean?”Curled up in the big armchair near a dark fireplace, Ruby returned his stare with an odd serenity.“You’re… shut inside yourself.I expect that’s so you can help your team.So you can guard other people, keep them safe.Keep me safe.But it makes a shell around you.A hard shell.Maybe the voices can’t get through well enough for you to understand what they’re saying.”“Maybe I don’t want them to,” he found himself replying.“Are you afraid of what they might tell you?”Damn.Galen thought it was ridiculous for him to be confiding in a twelve-year-old girl, but he couldn’t seem to stop the conversation.“I don’t know where they’re coming from, Ruby.I don’t hear voices, it’s not my thing.”“It’s your thing now.”“Well, yeah, I suppose.But it wasn’t my thing, so I don’t know how to control it.”“Sometimes we can’t.Sometimes this stuff controls us.”“That’s definitely not my thing,” he told her.“No, I didn’t think so.Your thing is… not dying.Isn’t that right?”“I heal myself.So far, that means not dying.But everybody dies sooner or later.”“Maybe to really kill you they’d have to cut off your head,” she suggested gravely.Galen was startled, but only for a moment.“You like horror movies,” he guessed.She smiled shyly.“We weren’t allowed to watch them inside the Compound.But Maggie says it’s good for us sometimes to be pretend-scared.And John likes horror movies.So we watched some.” I see.“They didn’t scare me, really,” she confessed.“Not after the church.Not after Father.But it was nice to pretend bad and scary things aren’t real.Nice for a while, at least.”He shook his head and heard himself saying, “Ruby, what are you doing here?”Her face changed just a little, going guarded.And there was a secretive expression in her eyes that he’d never seen before.“John’s teaching me how to play chess.You start out with all the pieces on the board.That’s why I’m here.Because I’m one of the pieces.”“Ruby—”“You should try to listen to your voices, Galen.You really should.I think there’s something important they need to tell you.”“Do you?”“Yes.”“How would you know that?” he asked quietly.“Because I hear voices too.And they always—always—tell me things I need to know.”“Like the reason you had to come here? The reason you have to be a chess piece?”“Yes.Like that.” Ruby turned her head, gazed toward one of the windows she was forbidden to approach, and said in the same soft, musing voice, “Right now they’re telling me something bad happened again.Something we couldn’t stop.Poor thing.She was a chess piece too.She was a pawn.She had to be sacrificed.”“We’ve done a complete sweep of the downtown area,” Dean reported to Miranda when she and the others returned to the mobile command center.“Sheriff Duncan pulled in all his people, part-timers included, and even swore in a couple of retired deputies and a few friends he trusts, so we’ve got enough manpower—barely—to keep a fairly close watch on most of the buildings.But we didn’t find the bastard.”“No luck with the dogs?”“Nada, The handlers are as baffled as their dogs seem to be.Do you want to call them off?”Miranda frowned.“No.No, just ask them to patrol.To crisscross the town independently.Randomly.They can decide among themselves when to take breaks, but I want those dogs visible as much as possible.If nothing else, it should at least make it tougher for the sniper to move around.”“Copy that.I’ll go tell them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]