Free Beating Heart Cadavers by Laura Giebfried Page A

and waved a stream of smoke away from his face. It would cling to Mari's curtains and make them reek.
    Fields was sitting in the kitchen reading when he entered.
    “Lad?”
    She looked up at him as he spoke, her eyes traveling over his black uniform before coming to rest on his face. She blinked.
    “You grew a beard,” she said. She cocked her head to the side as she decided what she thought about it. “It covers half your face.”
    “Thank you,” he said, though he was quite certain that it wasn't a compliment. “You look – older.”
    He had known Fields for nearly twenty years now, so he didn't mind telling her that she was far from the nine-year-old girl that he had met in the schoolyard with her braided hair and indefinite scowl, though it was rather surprising that she wasn't the same as the person that he had seen a year ago, either. She was three years younger than him, and yet her face had begun to draw in a way that shouldn't have happened for years to come, with patches of sunken skin and darkness beneath her eyes. At least the scowl was the same, though, Caine thought. Even when she smiled, it seemed, the scowl was the same. He had never minded it before, but now he wished that he could get her features to soften.
    “Could you put that out?” he asked, watching as she took another drag from her cigarette and sent a sprinkling of ash and embers onto the floor. “Mari would be upset if she knew they were in the house.”
    Fields gave him a look.
    “And?”
    “And I'd like you to put it out,” he returned, his voice rather harsher than he had intended.
    For a moment Fields looked as though she would retort, but then she removed the cigarette from her lips and smeared it out against the table, leaving a long mark of black on the wood. When she was done, she tapped her fingers across the surface of the table, not seeming to know what to do with them now that they were empty.
    “The house is quiet,” she said.
    “Well, it's midnight. It ought to be.”
    Fields hummed, though she didn't seem to agree.
    “So you got a new job,” she said. “Congratulations, Ambassador.”
    “You don't have to sound so pleased.”
    “I just never pictured you in politics, is all.”
    “I never pictured you running away to Hasenkamp, but I suppose things happen regardless, don't they?”
    Fields raised an eyebrow.
    “You know why I left,” she said, her tone carefully void of emotion. “I'm not very welcome in Oneris anymore, in case you've forgotten.”
    She gave him a look, but he turned his head away, feigning that it was simply too dark to see her withering glare.
    “But that's nothing,” he said after a moment. He went to the coffee pot and fiddled with it, hoping to make himself a cup, but he still hadn't figured out how to work it. Not wanting to admit that Mari always did it for him, he quickly gave up and pretended that he had changed his mind. “They didn't prove anything, and they haven't arrested you. You're still allowed here. You're still Onerian. You can stay.”
    “Maybe I don't want to, then.”
    “That's ridiculous – don't tell me you prefer the Wastelands to here.”
    “I prefer not being monitored at every moment so that the government can find legitimate enough proof to arrest me,” Fields countered.
    “It's not that bad – and it was ten years ago. They've forgotten it by now.”
    “Have they?” She took a pouch from her pocket and proceeded to roll herself another cigarette as though he hadn't just asked her to put the last one out. She tapped the blend down so that it was sitting evenly over the paper and gently rolled it back and forth until it formed a cylinder. “You think they'd forget if they knew what really happened?”
    “I asked you not to smoke.”
    “Mari won't know.”
    “She –” He paused and took a breath, knowing that he had no argument. “Just put it out, Lad. I don't want to be around you when you're smoking.”
    “No, you don't want to be around me when