Deadman Switch

"With your permission, sir," I said, avoiding his eyes, "I think I'll stay here a little longer."

For a second he didn't move, and I didn't have to see his face to know he was frowning down at me. "If you'd like," he said, his voice overly casual. "I'll keep you advised of developments."

"Thank you, sir," I said again. "I appreciate all you're doing."

"No problem," he grunted. "All I want is to clear up all the loose ends and get back to Portslava. Preferably without having to leave my Watcher behind."

Nodding, he turned and made his way down the ridge. At the bottom he paused and conferred briefly with Kutzko. A moment later he was walking back across the Butte City toward where he'd left the car, and Kutzko was heading up toward me. "Aren't you derelicting your duty or some such?" I asked as he approached. "Letting him go off by himself that way?"

"Daiv Ifversn's waiting in the car," he said equably, sitting down where his employer had been a minute earlier. "Besides, he ordered me up here—thought I might want to talk to you."

"I had the impression that coming up here was your idea," I told him mildly.

He shrugged, unconcerned at my once again being able to read straight through him. "Well, he concurred with it, anyway," he said easily, glancing around at the sea of thunderheads below. "Nice view. You just waiting around to see if Ninevah gets destroyed?"

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"The story of Jonah," he amplified. "Prophet told to preach doom to Ninevah, ran off and got swallowed by a fish, then did as he'd been told and got mad when the city was let off the hook."

"I remember the story, thank you," I said. "I hardly think it applies here—if you'll recall, I'm the one who was ready to risk his life so that the thunderheads wouldn't be destroyed."

"That wasn't what I was referring to, exactly," he said. "I was thinking more about the part that goes, 'Next, when the sun rose, God ordained that there should be a scorching east wind; the sun beat down so hard on Jonah's head that he was overcome and begged for death, saying, I might as well be dead as go on living.' Sound like anyone you know?"

"I see you've been reacquainting yourself with your personal heritage," I commented sourly.

"A little," he nodded. "So you going to loosen up and tell me why you're sitting out here hoping the thunderheads will decide to blaze you?"

"That's not why I'm here," I growled. "Anyway... whatever they think of me, if they were going to do something like that they would have done it days ago."

"Uh-huh," he said, entirely too knowingly. "So the thought had crossed your mind." His sense softened. "Because of Calandra?"

My stomach tightened into a knot. "Not really," I told him. "I see you know all about it."

"Most of it," he admitted, his own discomfort deepening a little. "I helped Lord Kelsey-Ramos sift through the transcripts of her first trial. Look... it still wasn't murder, you know—once she'd fingered the saboteur and gotten his bomb away from him, tossing it out a window was probably the only way she could think of to get it out of the building. Just because her throw didn't make it all the way across the street doesn't change that."

"She said she was i

Kutzko took a deep breath. "Let me tell you something, Gilead. Two things, really. One: when she told you all that, she thought she'd be dead within two weeks. That would have been the end of it... except that she'd have had a friend for those last few days." He shrugged. "She didn't exactly expect you to jump on a white horse and go charging off into the middle of it like you did."

There was authority in his words; in his words, and in the way he said them. Not speculation, but certain knowledge. "I'm glad to see she was willing to talk to someone before leaving for Outbound."

"You blame her for not wanting to face you?" he asked pointedly. "Especially feeling the way you are right now?"

"Do you blame me for wanting honesty instead of lies?" I countered.

He cocked an eyebrow. "Oh, is that how it goes? All right, then, here's some honesty for you. One, she thought she'd be dead in two weeks; and, two, you wanted to believe she didn't do it."

"If you mean I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—"

"Oh, come off it," he snapped. "I was there, remember? Even I could see how much it bothered you to think that a Watcher could have fallen off the golden ladder—and if I could see it, she sure as blazing could, too. All she did was tell you what you wanted to hear."

I sighed, the flash of anger fading into heartache. What I wanted to hear. After all of Aikman's hatred and paranoia—after all the Patri's suspicions and fears—it turned out that I was just as capable of prejudice and willing self-blindness as anyone else. Somehow, down deep, I suppose I'd wanted to believe that as Watchers she and I were somehow different from the rest of humanity—I'd been raised, in fact, to believe that, and it was one of the few solid handholds I'd always been able to hold onto in Lord Kelsey-Ramos's soul-numbing world.

Only now I knew better. Just one more example of willing self-blindness.

"It's not just Calandra," I told Kutzko, shaking my head. "It's the way that this..." I waved a hand helplessly, trying to find the right words. "Well, the way that nothing has worked out the way it should have."

He gave me an odd look. "We got contact with an alien race, we didn't get into a war, and Calandra's going to get a new trial. How should it have worked out?"

"You don't understand."

"So explain it to me."

I took a deep breath. "I started this whole thing, Mikha. I lied and stole and betrayed people's trust right and left—I shredded half of my ethical standards, first for Calandra and then for the Invaders."

"And, what, you want more of the credit?"

"You're missing the point," I said bitterly. "Lord Kelsey-Ramos and Dr. Eisenstadt are up to their chins in trouble with the Pravilo, the Halo of God has been pretty well destroyed as a religious community, Shepherd Adams died out there, for heaven's sake... and I'm not even going to get a slap on the hand." Tears rose to my eyes; angrily, I blinked them back. "In every case, someone else has had to pay for my actions."

I expected a quick and possibly glib reply. I got, instead, a long silence. "You know," Kutzko said at last, his voice unusually reflective, "my parents used to talk like that. Used to say that we were here in life to suffer. Oh, not in those words—they talked about it as building character and patience and stuff like that. But that's what it all came down to in the end: that suffering was how you proved you were doing what you were supposed to." He nodded toward the thunderheads. "Now, the way I like to look at things is to count up what got accomplished and then compare it to whatever extra it cost. And I'll tell you right now, Gilead, that except for Adams, you accomplished a blazing lot for practically nothing."

I glared at him. "You don't consider Lord Kelsey-Ramos and the Halo of God worth all that much, do you?"

"I said whatever extra it cost," he reminded me with strained patience. "You know full well that Lord Kelsey-Ramos and Eisenstadt are too important for any of this to stick to them; and if you weren't so bent on feeling sorry for yourself, you'd admit you didn't do anything to the Halloas the thunderheads wouldn't have done by themselves in a few months. They had to make contact with us pretty blazing soon if they wanted us to tackle the Invaders for them—they were probably waiting until we'd just have enough time to do the job but not enough to stop and think about it."