Her palms came back to her on stone.
The granite was wet under one hand and dry under the other. Her knees were on the same stone and they took her weight. None of it had been her choice.
The forest hung behind her shoulders. Below her the slope of granite ran down toward a long dragged sound — cars on a road, far off, going somewhere. Whatever ground she had crossed between the open mouth on the path and this ledge, she had crossed it on legs that were not the legs she had walked into the house on the bluff in.
She closed her right hand on the stone. The hand obeyed. Her fingers were her fingers, the nails were her nails, the small cold metal of the ring on her finger was where it had been at seven that morning at the bathroom mirror in Camden. She kept the hand closed for a count she did not run. She pressed the other palm to the granite and pushed herself up to sitting.
The right shoe was in her hand.
She looked at it for one second and probably ten. Pewter calfskin, low heel, the strap she had snapped on the stairs of the service hall. The leather was warm where her palm had held it and cold where the night had reached it. Along the inside of the toe was a dark line that was not from the dye.
She set the shoe on the granite next to her left knee. Then she pushed it off the ledge with the side of her hand. The leather slid into a crack between two stones and stayed there. It caught the moon once before it went.
Her wrists were wet.
She turned the right one over first. The skin on the inside, where the veins ran shallow, had opened in three thin tears — pulled apart by her own arms going up to keep the spruce branches off her face. The bleeding had stopped in two of them. The third was still moving, dark and slow, sliding around the wristbone toward the back of her hand. A coin of it had pooled on the granite by her thumb.
She brought the wrist closer to her face.
The smell that came up from her own blood was not the smell of her own blood.
She knew her blood. She had cut herself with a paring knife last October and watched it on her finger until Howard called from the kitchen. She had bled, monthly, into her own life for twenty-six years. The iron of it had a place on her tongue.
What was on her wrist tonight had the iron her blood had always had, and under the iron something else — something heavier, warmer, faintly mineral, something pulled out of soil and warmed against bone. She drew breath through her mouth. The smell sat on the back of her tongue and would not leave.
She let the hand fall.
The road was to her left.
She walked toward it. Granite went down into spruce and spruce went down into a low cut of asphalt, and on the other side of the road three fluorescent suns stood over a flat lot on poles. A twenty-four-hour station. The sign above the canopy had lost two letters: AMOC SERVI. Through the glass of the low building behind the pumps, a strip light hummed over an empty counter.
She crossed the road on a foot that had stopped negotiating with her in good faith.
She stopped at the white painted line at the edge of the lot.
The lot was empty. Her jacket hung open. Her blouse was the silk one with two stiff brown cuffs. There was a long pull in the wool of her skirt. She held still where she had stopped, hands loose at her sides, while her body decided what work it had left.
The headlights came around the south curve of the road at maybe sixty.
The vehicle was a dark SUV. It came up the entry ramp, swept its headlights across the pumps and across her body and across the front of the building behind her, and stopped at an angle that put its driver's side closer to her than the passenger's. The engine kept running. The lights stayed on.
The man who got out of the driver's side moved like someone whose work was the moving.
He was tall, dark-clothed, one piece of dark hair fallen forward over his forehead. The pistol was in his right hand and it came up without him looking at it. The muzzle settled on her sternum at twelve meters and held.
Behind him the passenger door opened. A woman came out — narrow, with hair cropped close on the sides of her skull, her hand already on her hip where her own weapon rode. The rear door opened a beat after, and two more men stepped out — one broader through the chest, the second a half-head shorter and thicker through the neck, both already armed. The four of them spread on the asphalt in a pattern that had been practiced.
What reached her then was not from the road.
It was a smell. It had been in the cellar of the house on the bluff three hours ago in a thin wrong thread under the cedar of the joists, and here it was the whole rope. Cedar — split, warm, the resin of it. Moss — north-side moss, dense with water. Under both, the iron of a wound that had not yet closed.
The hand on the pistol stayed steady. The line of his shoulders held.
His eyes were dark, and they were on her face.
There was no part of her that had been built for this. She stood on the asphalt with her wrists open and her feet bare and her own blood drying down the side of her ring finger, and the smell of him came up the back of her throat where the smell of her own blood had been a minute earlier, and the two smells did not contend. They lay against each other and there was a heat between them.
He took three steps.
The woman behind him took a step too, and so did the broader man, and the shorter man with the heavy neck, and four pairs of feet went down on the asphalt in a sequence that wanted to look practiced and almost did.
Then the woman's hand opened on the grip of her weapon.
Not lowered. Opened. Her fingers came off the metal and the weapon began to fall, and her other hand caught it under the trigger guard without her looking down. The broader man's pistol was already at his side. The shorter man's mouth had opened on a word that had not yet arrived.
Their hands had moved without them.
She watched it happen. The part of her that had watched her own hand grow into something else in the service hall watched this with the same quiet. She had done it. She had asked her body for nothing.
The man with the dark hair held his weapon one second longer than the other three had held theirs, and then for another second, and the difference between his stance and theirs was no longer a matter of training. The knuckle of his middle finger was white against the grip. He was looking at her, and he was looking at something under her, and the thing under her was winning.
The pistol came down to his thigh.
She felt the slow downward pull of the gesture in her own chest, as if some line she had not known ran from her sternum into his shoulder and was being shortened by a hand she could not see.
He took a breath.
Then he came down — not all at once, as the others' hands had come off their weapons, but in two stages, the way a man goes to one knee when he is choosing the rate of his own loss. The left hand braced flat against the asphalt at the bottom of the descent. The right knee found stone. He held there for the part of a second that was his own to keep, and then he gave that too. His head bent until his throat was open the length of her gaze.
His eyes stayed on the asphalt.
"Your Majesty."
The voice was rough. Nothing in it was performed. He had not used it in some hours, and the two words came out of his mouth in an order he had not chosen.
The asphalt around her was very quiet.
The three behind him had not moved from where their weapons had gone soft.
Across the lot, far off, where the road came down out of the trees from the north — a second set of headlights.
The woman with the cropped hair turned her head before the lights had fully cleared the curve. Her training reached for the weapon her hand had just let fall; she had it back at her hip and her eyes on the road in the same gesture. She said one short word to the man on his knee. Low. Urgent.
He stood.
The standing he did at speed, and by the time he was straight again the pistol was back in his right hand and his head was up. He turned a half step toward her without looking at her face.
"In the truck."
She understood the words. Movement was a separate problem.
He looked at her then, and what was in his face was not a request and not a command and not whatever the kneeling had been. It was a calculation. She was about to be in the middle of an arrival she would not survive, and he had a vehicle, and the head start was less than a minute, and there was nothing else in the lot.
She walked to the SUV.
The foot she could not feel went under her without complaint, because feeling was not a requirement of walking. The woman with the cropped hair had the back door open. The broader man was at the front passenger side. The man with the dark hair waited the half-second it took her to cross in front of him before he got in to drive.
The leather of the back bench was cold against the back of her thighs.
The door closed.
The SUV came around in a tight half-circle that put the other headlights behind them and the dark road ahead. It pulled onto Route 1 going north, and the asphalt under the tires made a sound through the floor of the cabin that she had heard a thousand times in her own car and was hearing for the first time.
The cedar was in the cabin too — fainter than on the asphalt, worked into the leather of the seat and into the fabric on the headrest in front of her, an old wearing-in. The dashboard vent across her knees was running warm air at her bare ankles in a thin steady push.
She put her right hand on her left wrist. The blood had stopped.
A thought arrived in her in the voice she still recognized as her own — the voice that had managed a calendar, a database, the temperature of a room before a closing.
I don't know how to turn it off.