Free Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant by Karen Traviss Page B

busy.”
    “You’ve got to spend time with him.” Maria took firm hold of Marcus’s hand. “Promise me.”
    “I’ll see him.” Marcus nodded, looking embarrassed. “I promise.”
    “Come on, sit down, both of you,” Dom said, shepherding them toward the living room. It had to be her medication. She seemed much more spacey today. “Let’s have a drink while the dinner’s cooking.”
    It was good wine. Dom didn’t know much about vintages, but the Fenix family was rich, seriously rich, and this stuff was twenty-six years old—older than him. Whatever it was, it had cost a fortune; the chicken was swimming in something that had probably cost a week’s wages. But with rationing, money was ceasing to mean much. The chicken was a rare treat, not because he couldn’t afford it on a Gear’s pay—shit, they were getting paid on time, even now—but because the Locust had trashed farms and food factories, disrupted freight traffic, all the little invisible things that put food on the table of a big capital city.
    “Animals,” Dom said, holding the glass up to the light while he racked his brains for another neutral topic of conversation. The wine looked more brick-red than ruby. Marcus always said that showed it had bottle age.
    “Animals are smarter than us. We get a power outage or some factory gets blown up, and we fall apart. We need so much stuff . Animals—they just get up in the morning, find food, and carry on. No piped water supply—we drown in our own sewage, but animals just stay clean . If they’ve got white fur, it stays white. Imagine the state we’d be in if we had white fur.”
    Marcus looked as if he was going to say something, but just did a slow blink and nodded. He’d stopped himself at the last moment. Whatever it was he’d been planning to say, it probably had the word death or kill in it, and he never used either in front of Maria. It was one of those little silent clues that told Dom what really went on in Marcus’s head.
    “That’s what shaving’s for,” Marcus said at last.
    “You okay, honey ?” Dom topped up Maria’s glass. She was looking distinctly distant now. “You didn’t get much sleep last night.”
    “I remembered to take my pills.” The doctor had prescribed antidepressants. “I’ve got to go out later. Just a nap, and then I’ll go out. I go out every day when you’re not here. I have to.”
    Dom didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and hoped it was the medication talking. He wasn’t sure if she felt hemmed in by this house and its memories and needed a break from the four walls, or if she just went for a walk to stretch her legs.
    “Yeah, you’re too sleepy to go out now.” He stroked her hair. “Maybe the doc needs to look at your dose again.”
    “Have a nap if you feel like it,” Marcus said. “You don’t have to entertain me. We’ll wake you up when dinner’s ready.”
    Maria leaned back in the chair and fell asleep in minutes. Dom crept over to her to check, listening to her breathing; yes, she was definitely out of it.
    Marcus got up slowly and gestured to the kitchen.
    “It’s just a year,” Dom said, closing the door behind him. “I’m pushing her too fast.”
    “Anything I can do. Just say.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And stop blaming yourself.”
    “She’s the one with the blame problem. She’s still saying that if she hadn’t sent the kids to her folks’ for the day, they’d be alive now. She thinks she let the grubs get them.”
    “Shit, Dom …” It wasn’t as if Marcus hadn’t heard it before. But it always seemed to upset him to be reminded of it, and he looked as if he was about to offer some insight. “Ah, forget it. Explaining to someone why they’re not to blame doesn’t actually help. They have to work it out for themselves.”
    Dom assumed it was all about Marcus’s mother. When she went missing, he was sure that Marcus felt responsible, in that weird way that anxious kids often did.
    “I need you