Dead and Alive

companionship that had developed so quickly between her and the little guy should have been beyond her emotional range. Even as the friendship grew, she recognized that it might signify a pending interruption of function like the one that William, the butler, had experienced.
    She was allowed compassion, humility, and shame, as the others were not—but only so that Victor might be more thrilled by her pain and anguish. Victor didn’t intend that the finer feelings of his Erikas should benefit anyone but himself, or that anyone else shouldhave the opportunity to respond to his wife’s tender attentions with anything other than the contempt and brutality with which he answered them.
    To Glenda, she said, “Go back to the dormitory. I’ll select what I need from these and put the rest away.”
    “And never tell him.”
    “Never tell him,” Erika confirmed.
    Glenda started to turn away, but then she said, “Do you think maybe …”
    “Maybe what, Glenda?”
    “Do you think maybe … the end is coming soon?”
    “Do you mean the end of the Old Race, once and forever, the killing of them all?”
    The provisioner searched Erika’s gaze and then turned her face up to the ceiling as tears welled in her eyes. In a voice thick with fear, she said, “There’s got to be an end, you know, there’s really got to be.”
    “Look at me,” Erika said.
    Obedient as her program required, Glenda met her mistress’s eyes again.
    With her fingers, Erika wiped the tears from the provisioner’s face. “Don’t be afraid.”
    “It’s that or rage. I’m worn out by rage.”
    Erika said, “An end is coming soon.”
    “You
know?”
    “Yes. Very soon.”
    “How? What end?”
    “In most cases, not all ends are desirable, but in this case … any end will do. Don’t you think?”
    The provisioner nodded almost imperceptibly. “May I tell the others?”
    “Will knowing help them?”
    “Oh, yes, ma’am. Life’s always been hard, you know, but lately harder.”
    “Then by all means, tell them.”
    The provisioner seemed to regard Erika with the nearest thing to gratitude that she could feel. After a silence, she said, “I don’t know what to say.”
    “Neither of us does,” said Erika. “That’s how we are.”
    “Good-bye, Mrs. Helios.”
    “Good-bye, Glenda.”
    The provisioner left the storage room, and Erika closed her eyes for a moment, unable to look at the many items of apparel strewn on the floor around her.
    Then she opened her eyes and knelt among the clothes.
    She selected those that might fit her friend.
    The garments of the executed were still garments. And if the universe was not, as Victor said, a meaningless chaos, if it were possible for anything to be sacred, surely these humble items, worn by martyred innocents, were hallowed and might provide her friend not only with a disguise but also with protection of a higher kind.

CHAPTER 55
    DUKE LED THEM across a wide earthen rampart, between vast pits of trash, through the dump, as if he knew the way.
    With the moon and the stars sequestered behind ominous clouds, Crosswoods for the most part lay in darkness, although a few small fires burned out there in the black remoteness.
    Carson and Michael followed the dog, in the company of Nick Frigg and Gunny Alecto, who with flashlights picked out potholes and places where the crumbling brink might be treacherous, as if every detail of this terrain was engraved in the memory of each.
    “I’m a Gamma,” Nick said, “or I was, and Gunny here—she’s an Epsilon.”
    “Or was,” she said. “Now I’m reborn freeborn, and I don’t hate anymore. I’m not afraid anymore.”
    “It’s like we’ve been living with bands of iron around our heads, and now they’re cut away, the pressure gone,” said Nick.
    Carson didn’t know what to make of their strange born-again declarations. She still expected one of them suddenly to come at her with no more goodwill than a buzz saw.
    “Sign, sink, spoon, spade, soup, stone, spinach, sparkler, soda, sand, seed, sex.
Sex!
” Gunny laughed with delight that she had found the word she wanted. “Man, oh, man, I wonder what it’ll be like the next time the whole dump gang gets sexed up together, going at each other every which way, but none of us angry, nobody punching or biting, just doing all the better kind of stuff to each other. It should be interesting.”
    “It should,” Nick said. “Interesting. Okay, folks, right up here, we’re gonna go down a