A banquet has been laid out in our honor, a party for those who survived the sheriff’s reign. The guests in attendance are my mercenaries, officials who served under the sheriff, and a small number of soldiers who have been judged to be potential allies. It is not a large gathering, but it is an interesting one.

“I thought we were waiting for one of your fifteen clients to come and take over from you here.”

“We’re laying the groundwork,” Silver says. “It doesn’t hurt to have allies in various places.”

Something political is taking place, I don’t understand it, but it seems to me that several of these mercenaries have more than mercenary aspirations. Zen and Keanau and Tore are spending a great deal of time talking to various officials, men who do not seem sad to see the sheriff gone.

The men are very well dressed. Apparently they packed suits along with their mercenary armor. Seven men in three-piece suits from the pre-Event time make for quite a distraction for my wandering eye. Tore made me a woman earlier. Now my body wants more, craves more.

Silver and Alexios stay close to me, guarding me. There are many who wish to speak to me here. Those invited have the self-control to avoid throwing themselves at me, and would not dare to touch me.

I find myself having a conversation for the first time in my adult life that does not revolve around being captured or bred. A man who says he is from the ministry of finance is telling me about something he seems to find fascinating: interest-bearing bonds.

It sounds like something my father would have said only as a curse, but apparently governments would let people give them money in return for pieces of paper called bonds, on which they would get more money.

“For what though?”

“For giving money.”

“But what could the bond be used for? Was it edible?”

“No,” he smirks. “It was a tool by which governments could raise capital from private citizens, in addition to income taxes...”

I draw back, my face flushing. “How dare you speak to me that way!”

Alexios and Silver weren’t listening to the conversation overly closely. They were scanning the room for signs of trouble, but at my outraged gasp, they both pay a great deal more attention.

“What is it?” Alexios growls, his expression fierce as he looks at the hapless gray-haired official.

“He said...” I lower my voice to a whisper, “income taxes...”

“Okay?”

“That’s the worst thing you can say to anyone! Man or woman! My father only said it once when a wolverine broke into our cabin and savaged our winter supplies. I demand an apology!”

“Income taxes aren’t...”

“He said it again!”

“Those aren’t bad words... I mean, they’re bad, but not in that way,” Silver explains patiently.

“They killed my father.”

“Income taxes killed your father?”

“Stop saying that!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Silver says, seeing my distress. Tears are beginning to fill my eyes. I am starting to shake. I try very, very hard not to think about the last day I saw my father, but the memory has been triggered in vivid detail. Silver and Alexios draw me away from the party, to a small quiet room nearby.

“What’s wrong? Tell us.” Alexios rubs my shoulders, while Silver crouches down in front of me, fixing me with that gaze of his that makes me feel funny inside.

“Stop doing your eye tricks!”

“It’s not a trick, I’m just helping you to calm down,” he says soothingly. “Tell us what has you so upset.”

“They chased us. They used to always chase us.”

“Who?”

“The tax men. They came from the city. Said we owed them things. My father dressed me up as a boy most of my life, so they didn’t know I was female, or they would have taken me too. But my father never paid. Said the Event had done one good thing. It had made us free. But we had to move around a lot...”

“Tax evasion,” Alexios murmurs.

I cringe, hearing the war cry in his soft voice.

“That’s what they said when they came... but the last time they came... they saw me. I wasn’t wearing my boy clothes. I had put on a dress... My mother’s dress. They wanted me then. They tried to take me. My father wouldn’t let them. Usually we ran, but this time he fought to give me a chance to get away.” I take a deep, shuddering breath. “They killed him.”

“I’m sorry...” Silver says.

I pluck at the silk of my dress. “These things are dangerous. They get people killed. Every time I have worn one of these, someone has died. First my father, then the sheriff. I should take this off.”

I see a look pass between them. Silver shakes his head at Alexios, who, when I turn my head, I see is wearing a smirk. “Now is not the time,” Silver mutters before turning his attention back to me.

“Dresses aren’t dangerous,” he comforts me. “Nothing bad is going to happen just because you put one on. Your father was a tragedy. The sheriff was a deserved death. But now you are safe. You have us, and...”

Before he can finish, a bloodcurdling scream cuts through our conversation. It is followed by another, and many more, drowned out by the sound of heavy projectile fire.

We rush toward it, all of us drawn by an instinctual call to chaos.

In the banquet hall, death is being dealt indiscriminately. There are multiple men in armored suits, bearing automatic weaponry. They are firing into the crowd, into the food, into the roof and the walls and through the windows. The room is awash in explosions of meat, both food and human flesh.

“Where is the girl? Bring us the girl!” Harsh mechanical voices boom above death screams. “Surrender the prime female!”

They’re here for me. They’re killing for me. There’s a coldness and an almost mechanical approach to it that is sickening to behold. Every target is assessed as being not me, and killed. I see three men drop in the blink of an eye.

I panic. My mercenaries do not.

“We go,” Silver says. “Now.”

Alexios picks me up and slings me over his shoulder and we run. They do not look back, they do not hesitate.

Carried like a sack of potatoes, I see very little aside from the floor and the gleaming of the moon on the paths over which Alexios is running.

“Out this way, the secret passage,” Silver hisses.

I am a passenger in this horrible nightmare. I only saw a few seconds of what was happening inside that hall, but those few seconds play over and over, the sounds and the sights and even the smells reinventing themselves in my mind.

Alexios and Silver are efficient and quick. They avoid the streets and stick to the bushes, just as I once did, but they do it so much better.

The wall that made it impossible for me to leave is no obstacle to them. Alexios puts me down for a moment to bend over and give Silver a base off which to leap. Silver grabs the top of the wall with his fingers and pulls himself up, then leans back over so Alexios can hoist me up and half-throw me into the air. Silver catches my wrists and pulls me the rest of the way, then he climbs back down and hangs by his hands, giving Alexios the chance to grab his leg and climb up himself. In less than a minute, they have me over an unclimbable obstacle. The process repeats itself on the other side. Silver tosses me down to Alexios, who catches me as if I weigh nothing.

They say almost nothing to each other, but they seem to know where they are going, and what they are doing. Silver grabs me up this time and we are off again.

There are soldiers everywhere, citizens in the streets. I worry that they are rioting against me again, but the little snippets of rage I hear are not about me. Whoever is on these streets, inside the sheriff’s residence, shooting down the rich, the powerful, is not from Dallas.

We leave the city entirely, move into the scrubby outland I know so well. The smell of the dirt rushes into my nose and I feel a rush of heady freedom shooting through my veins. It’s wrong to feel that now, with so much chaos and carnage behind me. There is a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach that tells me many are dead. Not my mercenaries though. They can’t die. They are above death. Beyond it. They can keep me safe, no matter what.

Suddenly, we are going down. Alexios pulls an old piece of iron sheeting aside, and we enter a small cave built into the side of a rock. There they settle me on a stretcher. This is a camp of some kind, a hidden one.

“A secret base?”

“A supply stop and safe rendezvous point,” Alexios says.

“The others should join us soon,” Silver agrees. “Let’s have a hot drink.”

They put a little gas stove on and brew up some hot tea. It’s busy work for all of us, both the making and the consuming. I’m more scared than I want them to know. Maybe they feel the same way. I can see the worry written on their faces.

Once or twice, Alexios tries to say something to Silver, but Silver always shakes his head and glances at me. Whatever they want to talk about, they can’t say in front of me, it would seem.

“Who was that? I mean, who is attacking?”

“Hard to know at this point, given we cut and ran,” Silver says.

“It was the right thing to do,” Alexios adds. “None of us were prepared for that kind of onslaught.”

“The guards must have been bought off, or killed,” Silver murmurs. “We didn’t have even the slightest indication...” He closes his mouth, his lips a thin line.

“We got cocky,” Alexios agrees. “And now we have to hope we get lucky.”

The tea isn’t enough to make things better. The warmth of the run for our lives is fading, as is the relief at still existing as we all realize that the others may not.

“We didn’t post a single fucking guard,” Alexios mutters. “Not one lookout.”

“Mattias and Elias were looking out,” Silver says.

“So they either let that happen, or they died first.”

“They wouldn’t let it happen. They wouldn’t let me be hurt!” I interrupt his speculation, growing increasingly upset at the very idea of Mattias or Elias betraying me. They might have worked for the sheriff, but they looked after me.

But, there’s the other option. If they didn’t betray the mercenaries, maybe they died first. I don’t want to think of that being a possibility. I don’t want to imagine any of this being true. I want to shut my eyes and discover that this was all some fucked-up fever dream.

“Try to get some rest,” Silver says, coming over to sit next to me on the stretcher. “It’s been a long day and it will be an even longer night.”

“I don’t want to rest. We should go back for the others.”

“Absolutely not. Nobody leaves the rendezvous point until everyone is here or accounted for,” Alexios says, his voice rough with command.

“Lie down,” Silver soothes, putting a large hand on my shoulder and easing me back onto the bed.

“It’s this dress,” I mutter, my eyes filling with tears. “Dresses are cursed. I want it off!”

“Do we have a change?” Silver asks Alexios.

“Yeah. It will all be too big for her, but...”

“Grab a shirt, a sweater, some underwear, and some socks,” Silver says. “She needs to be in something warmer than this anyway.”

He helps me strip out of my clothing, and then helps me re-dress in an oversized white t-shirt, a big wooly sweater, and long socks that come up over my knees.

“Cute,” he says, pressing a kiss to my nose, the tender touch sending a little blush of warmth through my body. “Now, you’re going to lie down under this blanket, and you’re going to curl up and get some sleep.”

“But...”

He fixes me with that gaze, the one that makes it impossible to look away.

“How are you doing that?” I clap my hands over my eyes.

He chuckles and peels them away. “It’s just something I know how to do to help people.”

“Like you helped me get fucked in front of a million people?”

“Helped you enjoy it,” he says, flickering a wink at me. “Not that you needed much help. Now lie down. Let me tell you a bedtime story.”

Outside the rusty door, there is brutality taking place in the distance. I know that. I know death is being dealt. I know those I have already come to care about are in danger. I know I may have lost them forever.

Knowing all those things makes me eager to escape into Silver’s story.

“There once was a boy named Seraph,” he says.

“Sarah?”

“Seraph,” he repeats, making an fffff sound at the end of the word. “But you’re already ahead of me, because that’s what the other boys called him. They used to tease him, and hit him with sticks. So do you know what that boy did?”

“What?” I begin to settle down against the stretcher bed. It’s not comfortable, but I could curl up to Silver’s voice anywhere.

“He found new ways to beat them, until he could grow big enough and strong enough to physically...”

“Fucking destroy them,” Alexios grunts from across the room.

“Yes, that,” Silver agrees. “And the way he found, was that if he talked to them in a certain way, if he made sure to speak words they needed to hear, if he was calm while they raged with fury, and if he understood the mechanics of their minds, he could not only stop them from bullying him. He could influence them. Control them.”

“You’re talking about yourself, aren’t you.”

“Mhm,” he says, brushing some hair from my forehead with a delicate touch. “I do what I do because it helped me survive. I use it to help others do the same now. The mind is a powerful thing. It decides if you feel pain or not. You can be wounded and not feel a thing, or you can have the smallest bruise and be in agony.”

“Show me... make me sleep.”

He drifts his fingers lightly over my face, closing my eyes.

“Take a deep breath, and remember what it feels like to have the sun on your face. The warmth on your scalp. A soft breeze playing across your skin. You can feel it tickling you a little when it gusts gently. And you’re safe, so safe, in this place where you are protected.”

I can feel the sun. I can sense the wind. Silver’s voice builds a place in my mind outside this dark little survival shack. He lulls me not only toward sleep, but toward a feeling of being so completely cared for that I know I will be safe, no matter what. The dream world rises around me, mixing with Silver’s words until I drift away, held in the arms and the words of the man who saved my life.