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"There reed "He said, ’He left us’?"

"Those were his words"

Greer fell silent, stroking his long beard "The question, of course, is where did Martinez go Did Alicia have any ideas about that?"

"Not that she toldthe Twelve is going to beGreer’s face When the major made no reply, he said, "My offer still stands We could really use you"

"You overesti for the ride"

"Not toAll of us would"

"And I accept the co What’s done is done"

"It still doesn’t seeed carelessly "Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t Believe me, I’ve brooded plenty on the subject The Expeditionary was ht in the moment In the end, that’s all a man has to measure his life, and it’s plenty" His eyes narrowed on Peter "Which isn’t so I need to tell you, is it?"

The hts "I suppose not"

"You’re a good soldier, Peter You always have been, and I wasn’t lying about that uniform It does suit you The question is, do you suit it?"

The question wasn’t accusing-if anything, the opposite "Some days I wonder," Peter confessed

"Everybody does The military is what it is You can hardly take a trip to the latrine without filling out a form in triplicate But in your case, I’d say the question runs deeper Theupside down in that spinner-he wasn’t following anybody’s orders but his own I don’t think he would have even kno here you are, five years later, inforive up the hunt Tell ht?"

"Of course not"

"And can you e their oing to listen to ree So there we are"

A silence followed Then Greer said, "Maybe this will help Do you reht in Arizona?"

"There were lots of nights, Lucius A lot of things got said"

"So there were But this one in particular-I’m not sure where ere exactly A couple of days out froe Crazy-looking rocks everywhere I reht hit them at sunset, like they were lit froht I asked you what you intended to do with the vials Lacey gave you"

It was all co back The red rocks, the deep silence of the landscape, the easy flow of conversation as the two of the in Peter’sthe surface until now "I reht And let me just say, when you volunteered to be injected with the virus, that was, hands down, the ballsiest thing I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen so I ever could have done myself I had a lot of respect for you before that, but after " He paused "That night, I said so that’s happened, it feels liketointo words I couldn’t quite figure out, but I’ve given theyou, Lacey, Babcock, everything that happened on thatthem, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or so more? I’ll tell you what I see, Peter A clear path More than that A true path What are the chances these things would have just happened on their own? Each piece falling into place exactly e needed it? There’s a power at work here, so You can call it what you like It doesn’t need a name, because it knows yours, my friend So you wonder what it is I do all day in here, and the answer is very si in God’s plan" He gave Peter an enigmatic smile; the film of sweat that dampened his face and his bare, muscled chest sharpened the air of the roohtened "Probably you’re thinking, That poor guy, all alone in this little box, he must have lost his mind You wouldn’t be the first"

It took Peter ahow much you reminded me of someone"

"Who was that?"

"Her name was Auntie"

Noas Greer’s turn to reot back to the Colony You never toldabout her, and I wondered But I didn’t want to pry"

"You could have You could say ere close, though with Auntie it was hard to tell Half the tio around to check up on her She liked to talk about God, too"

"Is that right?" Greer seee, thought Peter, to find hi of Auntie now Like Greer’s story of their night in Arizona, his ether, eed in his mind as if it were yesterday Her overheated kitchen, and the awful cups of tea; the precise, even reverential arrangement of objects in her cramped house, furniture and books and pictures and narled old feet, always shoeless, and her puckered, toothless le of white hair that seemed to hover in the air around her head, not even really attached to anything As Auntie herself was unattached; alone in her shack at the edge of the glade, the woman seemed to exist in a wholly different realm, a pocket of accumulated human memory, outside of time Now that Peter considered it, probably that hat had drawn hiles of his life always felt lighter

"More or less the same She wasn’t the easiest woman to make sense of" A specific recollection bubbled to the surface "There is one thing It was the saate"

"Oh?"

"She said, ’The God I know about wouldn’t give us no chance’ "

Greer atching him with studious intensity "She said that to you"

He was still a little surprised by the clarity of the ht it was, you know, Auntie"

Greer broke thesmile "Well," he said, "it sounds toor two I’otten on just fine"