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chief-of-restless-hearts · 3 months

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Chapter 24: Lapse

. . .

‘An accident’.

Dick had said those words so easily, so distantly, that Wintergreen knew Slade would echo the same excuse. Unevenly chopped hair poorly disguised Dick’s unnaturally shaped ear, bound tightly with tape, or the faint shadows of blood smudged against the lad’s neck and shoulder.

Dick’s frightened-rabbit stare had fixed on anything but Wintergreen ever since the disheveled pair had stepped into the house, and Slade’s gaze evaded Wintergreen’s face with practiced efficiency until the man stalked off to shut himself behind the study door.

The lad stood facing that wooden barrier for far too long, Ace whimpering unattended at his feet. In time he retreated ghostlike up the stairs to his room, the pup trotting after his heels.

‘An accident’.

Wintergreen stood alone in the hall, and wished he was a fool. He wished he was capable of mistaking what he’d seen in that lad’s face for anything aside from fear—which Wintergreen had not seen in him before, not even when the lad had been at his closest to falling apart. Something terrible had happened in that forest.

No—Slade had done something terrible in that forest.

Wintergreen rubbed an icy hand against his jaw, his gaze drawn as though by magnetic force toward the study door. He was wrong. He had to be. Slade had been doing better. Even the lad’s condition had improved.

Slade’s sense of obligation toward the Batman’s ward would run its course, just as had his previous phases of grief—of that Wintergreen was still convinced—but in the meantime...he had options. Ways to expedite the process, get the boy back to his people, and get Slade’s head back on straight. Adeline, if told, would surely intervene—

No sooner had the treacherous thought crossed his mind than icy horror gripped him. Wintergreen let out a shuddering sigh and rubbed at his forehead. No. Whatever had happened in the forest, wherever the blame lay, Slade was guaranteed to blame himself, and Wintergreen would do his friend no favors by jumping to unfounded conclusions.

The lad himself had called it an accident; it was entirely probable that the mistake, in one manner or another, had been his own.

Slade was healing. Wintergreen had seen it, and known better than to rush it.

He’d only hoped Slade would forgive himself by now. Slade had done all he could for Joey and Grant, and every day he failed to recognize that brought him closer to falling apart at the seams. If Slade were to add Dick to his list of perceived failures…

Wintergreen shuddered at the prospect. Some partner he had proved himself, so nearly betraying the one man he owed his life to. That was the problem, wasn’t it? He’d spent too much time apart from his friend. It was compromising his judgment.

So resolved, he pushed through the study door. Slade was standing to the right of the fireplace by an open window that whisked the smoke away from his newly lit cigar. As Wintergreen entered, Slade's shoulders, which were turned toward the window, tensed. Wintergreen’s heart sank at Slade’s apparent anticipation of criticism.

“Smoking without me?” he said lightly as he approached the mantlepiece where he’d secreted his personal stash. “Well, as I’ve been saving these for a special occasion, now is as fitting a time as any.”

He selected a cigar for himself and lit it with the lighter he’d never stopped keeping in his breast pocket. With one more glance at Slade, who had his attention fixed pointedly out the window, Wintergreen stooped to remove the lowest stone from the base of the hearth.

“Brace yourself, Slade,” he began as he pulled the box of documents from its place, “for the product of leaving me with too much time and insufficient action to fill it. Tell me: how would you like to spend your weekend—business?” He drew out a sheaf of paper and offered it to Slade with a raised eyebrow. “Pleasure?”

Finally, Slade stepped away from the window. His attention betrayed only marginal interest in the documents in Wintergreen’s hand, but the hint of relaxation in his posture was satisfying enough. “Business,” he answered.

Wintergreen hadn’t failed to notice Slade’s gaze too-pointedly avoiding the brandy bottle Wintergreen had failed to remove from its usual place on the mantle. Promptly, Wintergreen turned to set out two glasses and poured a generous helping of the amber liquid into both. He offered one to Slade with a grin. “Both it is, then.”

Slade’s gaze rose from the pages, surprise flickering across his features. There could be no mistake: he recognized the extended olive branch that was the glass in Wintergreen’s hand. Following long moments that passed between them with a look on Slade’s face that Wintergreen couldn’t decipher, Slade reached to accept it.

+ - + - + - +

Dick’s backpack waited, still packed, where he’d left it beside his bed the previous morning. He slung it over his shoulder. The frosty glow outside the window that was creeping steadily over the treeline signaled that the night was over—Slade might already be at the door with his own bags.

Slade hadn’t looked at him a single time since. Not a single glance; not a single word.

Dick wheeled toward the door, but balked at the tool-desk mirror. A strange face was staring back at him. He blinked at his reflection’s ghoulish expression only an instant before noticing its asymmetry. His fingers, darting toward his belt on instinct, brushed the hilt of his knife. His entire body recoiled from the contact, the shivering persisting even as he fumbled for the desk drawer.

Somehow among the jumbled collection of miscellaneous bolts and tools, his groping hands found the rubbery finger grip of an old pair of scissors. He ran a tentative finger along the business ends of the twin blades. They were blunt. Trembling hands lifted the scissors above his ear. I can fix this. He fished out uneven locks to cut, exposing a bare patch of scalp in the process. And his ear. I can fix this. He dropped the shears and tugged at the hair, fluffing it out into a black mass that covered his right ear almost completely.

He cropped the other side just slightly to match. A choppy job. He shuddered every time the shears brushed his scalp, but by the time he was finished he could look into the reflection and almost-almost believe nothing was missing.

Good enough.

He stationed himself beside his backpack against the bars of the cherrywood railing, out of the way, but with an unobstructed glimpse of the front door, which would be important if he couldn’t—if Slade moved too quietly. Slade was nowhere in sight.

Crouched tightly at his post, he waited. He waited for a sound, a stir, a call. He waited, ignoring the ringing-throbbing-ringing right side of his head, and Ace, whining beside him, licked unnoticed wetness from his cheeks.

Slade hadn’t looked at him, not even once.

. . .

As the trip to the new contract wore on, Wintergreen’s chatter from the driver’s seat mingled with the static buzz in Dick’s mind whenever the vehicle strayed too close to a sheer sea-cliff or cityscape.

Slade’s face, as impenetrable as any cliff face, never shifted from the windshield.

Eventually night demanded rest, if only for the sun-beaten car. From where Dick had stretched out across the back (with his arm as a pillow under the left side of his head, never, never his right), he stared at Slade’s dark shape in the reclined passenger seat. He stared, waited.

Two nights passed, and Slade never turned.

The contract demanded steady hands to grip the barge railing that was Renegade’s assigned vantage point. It demanded legs poised to spring into action, without bone-deep clamminess locking them at the joints.

The contract demanded that he listen, without twisting his head back and forth until his vision swam.

He shook himself to fend off the strange sluggishness, but the erratic hammering against his ribs wouldn’t ease.

He was afraid.

He wasn’t sure of what, but the reason, a strangled, suffocated thing that filled him from the inside out, was far too familiar—familiar in a way he had never wanted to feel again, and hadn’t expected to. It was supposed to be over. That, at least that, was supposed to be over.

But Slade still hadn’t looked at him.

What he would find in Slade’s face was unanswerable. A desperate wish had turned to dread, to a chill bleeding into his limbs until he shivered.

He had a job to do.

But his head...the shadow slipped across his vision an instant before his eyes cleared again, cutting unsteadily through the pitch black night.

The right side of his head burned, and rang—all silence and sound, unbalanced weights on a scale, on a wire.

The boat had been flushed out of hiding and was coming closer, he needed to time the jump just right…

. . .

Ice water hit his lungs before the crack to his skull had a chance to throb. Needle-sharp, gut deep, the all-encompassing blanket crushed him from every side. His limbs thrashed wildly, panic drowning his mind first.

Idiot, barked a voice in his mind with gravelly disgust. They’ll get away, you’re pathetic, you’re failing, you’re Dying—

His limbs ceased thrashing, years of training kicking in. He opened his eyes, righted himself.

No sooner had he glimpsed a flicker of light than a shadow eclipsed it. A vise, warm and unyielding, clamped around his right forearm, yanked—

The drag threw ice-hot pain between his arm and shoulder, rushing water against his face, doubling pressure against the icy blanket until it ended in a sudden burst. His face struck wind that felt even colder, and his entire body slammed down against splintered wood. He lay staring up at an empty sky, so empty he almost doubted he was gazing upward, gaping like a fish until that same vise grip flipped him onto his chest with enough force to knock the entire river out of his lungs.

He retched until he could suck in a desperately ragged breath, even as he pushed himself up from the dock-wood slats with rubbery limbs.

Pathetic.

The voice, he knew that voice—and the shadow loomed closer, reached for him—

He scrambled backward, a strangled, half-drowned sound jumping from his throat as he stumbled over his own limbs. Slade was a mountain towering over him and he’d be crushed underneath as it fell. It was falling, crumbling, all of it before his eyes, it was all his fault he’d failed and it wasn’t over it had never would never be over—

“Please,” he choked out.

His chest ached, bone-deep, in a way it hadn't for months. It was going to happen again. Aching ribs, darkness, nauseous hunger—fragments flickered in and out of his mind, swift as the howling wind, sharp as fractured bone, harsher than they’d felt since...since when? When had he forgotten? It was going to happen again. It would—Slade’s hand would come down hard, his lenience long since spent, but worst of all by far, Slade’s face would twist into a mask of hatred, and anything else Dick had ever thought he’d seen in it would be proven just a dream.

“Please,” he whispered, the word carried by a sob, “I—I’m sorry, sir, don’t...don’t...”

The shadow stilled. That could be dangerous, deadly dangerous, the slow uncoiling of anger before it struck. But Dick was shuddering, shaking, rendered all but immobile by the sound that tore from his throat, dragging his chest further into the ground with every helpless half-breath. Still, his entire body flinched as Slade reached for him again.

The shadow kneeled, but didn’t touch him.

“Kid,” the murmur drifted to his ear, graveled and low, yet somehow diminished, “...kid...”

Emptiness stretched between them, punctuated only by Dick’s thudding heart and sobs that tore themselves from his throat in rolling waves.

. . .

Dick wrapped his hands more tightly around the steaming paper cup of hot chocolate. Shifting on the slippery leather of the passenger seat, he pulled his knees up closer to his chest. A rough travel blanket covered the dry t-shirt and jeans he distantly remembered fishing out of his bag.

Dawn was creeping along the edges of the horizon, a ghostly glow through dew-beaded windows, but he couldn’t stop shivering.

He could still taste salt-water between his teeth.

He was taking care to avoid looking over at Slade in the driver’s seat. There was no sign of Wintergreen. Slade had parked them behind a small coffee shop, facing a briar-ridden strip of woods. The radio was mumbling a recent pop hit for the fifth time that day. Slade was flipping through the same sheafs of paperwork he’d been studying since they’d first parked.

Dick braved a tiny sip of the scalding liquid in his cup and tried to savor it. It tasted more syrupy sweet than he remembered it being, but he didn’t mind at all. The heat slipped down his throat into his gut, and slowly spread into his limbs.

His fear had spent itself on the dock.

At some point Slade had guided him away from the waterfront, mute and frozen stiff as though his spell had wrung every drop of sensation out of him, body and soul.

It couldn’t have happened—not the way he remembered—but the damp that still clung to his bones removed any trace of doubt: it hadn’t been a dream.

And if the ice was still ebbing from his core, the shame hadn’t even begun to.

He’d left fragments of himself embedded in the dock-wood, hindsight’s proof of the intricate webwork of hairline splinters that he’d been so certain had mended until he shattered under a feather-touch.

Under nothing.

Nothing at all.

But he’d been so terrified of Slade in that moment. And as for his team—his friends? They couldn’t have been further from his mind. In that moment there had been only himself, Slade, and that crushing, crushing shame.

Was that all this was to him, now?

Was he really that selfish?

+ - + - + - +

The boy was sleeping, nocturnal creature that he was, stretched out in the back of the car even as the sun climbed high in the sky. Slade studied it from across the parking lot, where he leaned against the brick rear-side wall of the ramshackle coffee shop. In the hours since they’d first arrived, he’d traded the taste of coffee for tobacco smoke. His exhale mingled with the morning mists that still clung to the damp asphalt beneath his feet.

He rubbed the familiar texture of the cigar between his fingers. An old friend’s vice.

With his free hand he drew the secure line from his coat pocket. Wintergreen would know what to do. Slade lifted the comm to his ear. One press of a button and he would hear his old friend’s voice in his ear, advising him, reassuring him, absolving him—

The last tendrils of mist were dissipating; a cyclical surrender to the day. With his gaze still fixed on the car’s dew-beaded window, Slade let the comm slip back into his pocket.

+ - + - + - +

The old map was nearly frayed through along the quartered folds where someone had folded and refolded it before tacking it against the motel office wall. From where his fingertips had settled on the map’s ‘you are here’ sticker, Dick’s fingers walked two steps north to tap where Slade’s base sat nestled against the bay. Two finger-steps south of the sticker, and he touched Gotham.

Two steps to home.

The door bell jangled, signaling Slade’s return from the payphone outside. “Apologies for the wait,” he said to the man behind the desk. “I needed to call ahead. Our hosts hadn’t expected us so soon.”

“Aw, no trouble, no trouble at all,” the man rattled off genially. “I heard all about your fishin’ trip plans from your grandson here.”

Still facing the map, Dick sensed rather than saw the man gesture toward him, and the irritated look from Slade that followed it. Dick allowed himself a tight-lipped smile.

“Been long years since I last headed off into the boonies with my cousins,” the man rattled on. “Been a while since I got out from behind this desk to be honest—”

“Right,” Slade interrupted. Dick turned his head to see Slade toss a few twenties onto the desk and snatch up the room key. “Me and my son,” Slade said with a pointed look in Dick’s direction, “—who thinks he has a sense of humor—had best get some sleep.”

Dick’s mouth pressed into a grimace that Slade didn’t see.

Already trailing after Slade through the door, Dick tapped the brim of his baseball cap in a final salute to the motel manager. The man’s startled farewell was all but drowned out by the jangling bell and the wind gust that immediately tried its hand at whistling the cap off Dick’s head.

Dick yanked it down further even as the rough denim scraped the sensitive, still-taped portion of his ear. It kept his hair pinned securely against the right side of his head, and with his hand still gripping the brim he hurried after Slade, who was already carrying their baggage through an ajar motel room door.

By the time Dick drew close enough to glimpse the very comfortable-looking beds inside, Slade was shutting the door and turning the key in the lock.

Slade turned on his heel and strode past their car down the road, waving for Dick to follow. With one last, longing glance in the direction of his would-be bed, Dick jogged after him.

Slade’s long, brisk strides might have been taken as an attempt to leave Dick behind if not for the man’s distinctly absent stare that was directed only in the general direction of the road ahead. The silence stretched on until Dick was provoked to ask a few basic questions.

Where were they going? ‘The gas station’, Slade supplied helpfully. Further inquiry prompted the response of ‘dinner’.

The ensuing awkwardness was not in Dicks imagination, he was sure, but not minding the wind-swept silence, he let the night claim his attention. The breeze was warm but stiff, rattling the newly budding branches on either side of the close-hedged road and sweeping the sky clean and bright.

Not yet beneath the smoggy night glow that enshrouded the city, he could just make out a few distinct pinpricks of light.

“Plan on returning to us mere mortals anytime soon?”

Dick dropped his gaze to see an intent expression on Slade’s face, as though he had been watching him for some time.

“Anything interesting up there?” Slade asked, turning away.

So Slade did want to talk. In that case… “What’s with the motel? We’re within like fifty minutes of you-know-where.” The street was empty of cars, the intermittent streetlights camera-free. Still, Dick somehow couldn’t bring himself to use their usual terms when they were out in the open, pretending to be normal people who didn’t have knives hidden in their boots.

“Homesick, are we?”

Rubbing a weary hand over his face, Dick just shook his head. If Slade didn’t want to answer him, then that was that. He’d figure out why soon enough. And that, at least, was reason enough to stay alert.

They rounded a bend in the road, and the fluorescent glare of the two-pump gas station they had passed on the way to the hotel beckoned them closer.

“It doesn’t make a difference,” Slade continued abruptly. “We’ll stop by the place for the necessities before we head out.”

At the flippant half-answer, Dick gave him a sharp look. But Slade wasn’t finished.

“Where would you go next?”

Dick felt his mouth twist skeptically. “You’re asking me?”

“I’m thinking Canada,” Slade mused, as though he hadn’t heard. “How does that sound?”

“Aren’t you wanted up there for espionage?”

“Nothing like an outstanding warrant or two to liven things up.” He looked at Dick for a few long moments, and his grin faded. He looked away. “We’ll figure it out, kid.”

They stepped over the curb, and passed the pumps to approach the station’s tiny shop. Pausing just outside the door, Slade gestured for Dick to wait outside.

He didn’t need to explain. So close to home, Dick’s face was a liability.

Slade disappeared inside, trampling a puddle just outside the swinging glass door in the process. Dick leaned beside the door and watched the shallow pool ripple in Slade’s wake until it again reflected the sky as clearly as a mirror. Dick gazed into it until he could almost mistake it for a pane of glass instead.

Slade reappeared to thrust a plastic bag into Dick’s hands.

“Go on ahead,” Slade said as Dick accepted it. “I need to make another call.”

Dick peeked into the bag, noting the gallon of milk that would do well to reach the motel mini fridge as soon as possible, even if between the two of them they were likely to down it all by morning.

“Business?” he asked, glancing up.

“Always.” Slade flashed a grin, pressed the motel key into Dick’s hand, and strode toward the shadowed face of the station before Dick could ask if he was calling Wintergreen.

Dick hadn’t had a chance to wish Ace goodbye, not even before that contract. His mind had been somewhere far away. But he was back, now. He suddenly wondered whether he’d ever see Ace again. Whether he would ever see Wintergreen. Slade, as far as Dick could tell, had left Wintergreen in the lurch. Something about Slade was changing again, and only time would tell whether it would prove to be for better or for worse.

But Dick would be ready, whatever happened. The wind seemed to curl around his back, carrying him onward as a foreign lightness swelled in his chest. He was still tied to Slade as surely as if by a physical chain, hemmed in by invisible bars as he followed Slade’s orders even while the man was nowhere within sight. But now, finally, he could see those bars again.

He was glad. He was grateful. Because how could he have escaped a cage he’d forgotten existed?

And he had forgotten.

So much. And so many people. So many promises.

I promised I’d wait. I’m sorry.

The shame welled up behind his eyes, filling his throat. He blinked to clear his view of the slick pavement beneath his feet, suddenly unable to raise his eyes to what he couldn’t even pretend was an empty sky anymore. It never had been empty, had it?

I was looking for a reason to keep going, a reason behind all of this, and then I stopped—because I started looking for it in Slade. He scrubbed a rough cotton sleeve over his eyes. I thought I was getting better. Maybe I just forgot.

Safety nets, falling away one by one. Wishing that X were there, until he remembered why he shouldn’t. Wishing it about all of them, until he didn’t, again and again and again until he found he didn’t wish for anything anymore.

He might have gone on forever, forgetting—if not for what had happened in the forest. His hand drifted up to feel the shapeless mass of tape where his ear was supposed to be. His lips twitched faintly. Well, that’s one way to get my attention.

He let his head drop back and took in the glittering field of stars.

Thank you.

“Those weren’t there yesterday,” he mused.

“Oh, yes they were, Dickie.”

His mother’s warm chuckle from so long ago that he could still fit in her arms might have been tickling his ear even now. Its freshly ragged shape throbbed under that phantom breath.

“Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

His mother’s twinkling eyes disappear behind her hands for a startling instant before they part again to fully reveal her smiling face.

Dick giggles, and casts his gaze back up to the sky only to sigh a disappointed ‘oh’.

A fresh wave of smoky black was rolling over the gleaming pinpricks, dousing their tiny lights as surely as it doused the elation in his chest.

“Just be patient, Dickie. You’ll see them again.”

He grimaces. “Don’t like waiting.”

Her arms encircle him, squeezing briefly. “Ooh, tough luck mister. Some things are out of our hands.”

“…and in the end, that’s for the best,” Dick finished, exhaling his mother’s words into the wind.

Crossing an island of grass to the motel parking lot, he used his free hand to dig through his pocket for the key Slade had handed him. His hand was still in his pocket when he noticed them.

Two shapes, silhouetted by the amber streetlight’s glow: a man’s stocky frame barely disguised by his too-bulky coat; a woman’s long dark hair pulled out by the wind. Her flickering mane was the only motion between the shapes that could otherwise have been mistaken for statues.

Dick ducked left. As his back slammed flat against the far wall of the motel, his racing thoughts caught up with his instincts. He had recognized the unnatural stillness in those two shadows in a way that only a fellow hunter could. And he recognized them.

Sportsmaster and Cheshire had traveled a long way for this to be a chance encounter.

Cautiously, he leaned to peek around the corner. They hadn’t moved. Hadn’t noticed him. He could run back, warn Slade, and the two would never even notice. They were still lingering on the far end of the parking lot, talking. And then Cheshire turned to stride toward the office.

Dick’s blood ran cold. They didn’t know which room Slade had taken. And once the manager told her what she needed to know—

Cheshire wasn’t famous for her compassion.

Dick thought quickly. No microphone-rigged suit, no mask camera. He was on his own. His equipment was in the motel—but there was no time. Cheshire was just a few steps away from that office door.

Which left him no choice at all.

Snatching a knife out of his right boot, Dick slipped it under his sleeve, yanked his cap further down over his face, and swung around the corner.

“Hey!” he yelled loud enough to be heard above the wind.

Cheshire halted, a bare step from the door. The two shadows turned, slowly.

“You fellas lost?” Dick drawled, with a lazy tilt of his head. “‘Cause the freeway’s down thataway.”

Silent, with that deadly stillness, they measured him.

Dick shuffled in place idly, the milk bag still hanging from his hand, and waited. It was dark. They had met him only once. And if the two mercs hoped to catch Deathstroke off guard, they were unlikely to risk shooting first, asking questions later. He was betting his life on that.

“You seen an old man ‘round here, boy?” Sportsmaster called. “Silver-haired, built like a truck?”

Dick scrunched his face into a thoughtful expression, lingering for precious moments. “Can’t say for sure, Mister. Lotsa folks come an’ go this way.”

“How’s about a kid? Dark-haired, annoyin’ punk.” Pausing, the man took a single step closer. “‘Bout your age.”

The wind whipped loose strands into Dick’s eyes, fluttered over the plastic bag. He exhaled a breath into the wind, soft and slow as a prayer, and tipped back his head, letting the streetlight illuminate the needle-sharp smile that they would remember well. “You callin’ me a punk, Mister?”

The wind’s distant moan rolled across the space between them, between the moments that passed like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass.

It was his bravado that made them hesitate. They would wonder if Renegade was a distraction, if Deathstroke the Terminator was even now behind them, poised to spring. Uncertainty bought time.

Sand slipped down the hourglass, grain by precious grain.

“He’s stalling!” Cheshire barked, lunging in the same instant that Dick wheeled to bolt for the shrubbery.

A fight in the parking lot would mean a death sentence for the man in the office, whose only hope of surviving the night depended on Dick ensuring that whatever ugliness was about to happen took place far out of his eye and earshot. He couldn’t survive becoming a loose end to all parties involved.

So Dick didn’t hurl the milk in the direction of his pursuers until they were surrounded on all sides by dark tangles of brush and trees. Sportsmaster knocked it aside with the gun in his hand—it looked like a gun—faltering barely a fraction. Cheshire was faster.

Her arm snapped out to throw and Dick dropped into a roll to evade the—

The net?

The gas station suddenly felt miles away.

Claws snatched under his cap into his hair, yanking him off his feet. Dick twisted to bury his knife in Cheshire’s thigh. Her grip slackened with a hiss, and Dick tugged to free the blade.

It held fast.

Teeth bared in a pain-crazed grin, Cheshire clung to the knife with a death-grip. Left with no choice, Dick released his only weapon and lunged toward a denser patch of growth in the direction of the road. Too late to regain that instant of lost ground.

Pain slammed into his shoulder-blade.

Suddenly, strangely breathless, Dick stumbled. Two shuddering half-steps later, he dropped. Mud-soaked leaves prickled against his cheek, and he stayed there, flat against the damp earth, staring wide-eyed at knotted tangles of roots like shadowy snakes. And realizing that it hadn’t hurt the way it should have.

It hadn’t been a bullet. It hadn’t been Cheshire’s poison.

Footsteps crushed twigs and soggy stems on either side of his body. He felt the tremors through the earth only faintly, distantly, even as Sportsmaster’s mud-caked boots stopped a handbreadth from his face. The sinking, dimming sensation of a tranquilizer muted Dick’s hammering heart and spinning mind only slightly. It didn’t dull the sensation of the dart being yanked out, or of a boot’s rough, filthy tread rolling him onto his back.

Dick could stare up into both their faces now, even as dark spots began to blot them out.

They started talking to each other as though he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t. The mumbling words came from miles away, and fear drifted off with them.

He wasn’t what they wanted, not really. He wasn’t even a person. He was a worm. A worm on a fish hook. And as even the dimness faded, all Dick could think of was a boy from long ago, who used to sing.

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