" Gideon said she wasn't wrong, but a pause. She could also recognize when someone was trying without a script, without an agenda. Just trying, he held that. I don't know if trying is enough, he said. It's not, Desa said.
Usually a beat, but it's where everything starts. Desa came to stand beside him at the stove the following evening while he was starting supper. Just stood there, which was unusual. She was a woman who was still with purpose or moving with purpose. Rarely still without reason.
Apprentice will come back with more people, she said. Soon the survey disc means he's close to moving. He won't leave loose ends. I know. We need a plan that doesn't require him to be reasonable.
He's not going to be reasonable. No. She looked at the fire. But the letters, if they reach the right hands before he moves, we buy time. We buy more than time.
She turned, looked at him directly. We take away the thing he needs most. No one left who can say what he did to get here. Gideon looked at her at the fire light on her face. at the turquoise beads at her collar, still startling, that specific blue green that looked like summer, kept somehow at the two long braids and the strand at her temple she had never once fixed in 10 days.
He had stopped noticing the strand. He had started thinking of it as just part of what she looked like, which was well, he was not going to examine that right now, Desa. He said, "Yes, when this is over, when it's resolved, you and Amma will have a choice to make. " He paused. "I want you to make it freely.
I don't want you to feel obligated, " she said. "Yes, that she looked at him for a long moment. The last time I made a decision freely, " she said, "was ago. " "Before the pressure got so constant, I stopped being able to feel the difference between choosing and surviving. " He held that.
I think I'm starting to feel the difference again, she said. Here in this place, a beat. I don't know yet what I'll choose, but I know I want to choose it. That's new. She went back to the table.
He turned back to the stove. His hands were doing something he hadn't intended. The slight tremble that had nothing to do with cold. He focused on the pot outside. Wyoming December wind, dark inside, the fire, the lamp, the particular warm weight of a place that had been held exactly still for 7 years and was slowly, carefully, necessarily beginning to move again.
The 11th night was the quietest, which should have been reassuring, which was not. Gideon lay on the floor with his eyes open and listened to the quiet and understood with the instinct of a man who had spent years reading land and weather. That this kind of quiet was not peace. This kind of quiet was preparation. Something was coming.