Work Text:
The fire had burned low enough that everyone's faces were half-shadow, half-amber, which was probably for the best because most of them looked deeply uncomfortable. Not because of the plague. Well, yes, also because of the plague. But specifically right now, in this moment, the discomfort was about Karen and Molly.
Mary-Beth sat on her usual log and watched the others the way she always did — quietly, from a slight remove, picking at the fraying edge of her sleeve. The camp had an unnatural stillness to it that it hadn't had before all this started. No one wandered. No one left unless they had to. Josiah Trelawny had in fact vanished the very first night the plague set in, which surprised precisely no one, and everyone agreed he was probably the cleverest man in the outfit. They'd all thought that quietly and separately and not one of them had said it out loud because it stung too much to agree on.
“Someone's gonna have to say something to her,” Javier said finally, quietly. He wasn't looking at anybody in particular. He was staring at the tent. The tent in question was Strauss's old tent — empty of Strauss now, since Strauss had been shot through the temple approximately twelve days ago, and before that it had been empty of all normal human occupation and full of ledgers and ink and the faint smell of pipe smoke and exploitation. Now it held Karen Jones, tied to the central post with enough rope to rig a small schooner, and Molly O'Shea, who had moved in voluntarily and appeared to have no plans to leave.
“Someone has to say something,” Javier said again, looking up now, because the first time hadn't produced any results. It didn't produce any results the second time either, but at least people were looking at each other now.
“I'll do it,” said Bill, with the confidence of a man who had not thought it through.
“You absolutely will not,” said Abigail, without looking up from the mending she was doing. “We all know what'd happen.”
Bill subsided. He stared into the fire. He appeared to want to argue as he usually did whenever someone challenged him in a way, but he had performed a rapid private assessment of his chances and arrived at an accurate conclusion.
“I still think,” he said, reopening a conversation the others were fairly sure they'd buried, which produced a chorus of groans from the others, “that we ought to just—I mean. It'd be the merciful to—”
“No,” said at least four people, with varying volumes and varying degrees of patience. Arthur didn't even look up from sharpening his knife. He just said it to the whetstone, flat and final.
“She's still in there,” Lenny said, frowning hard at the fire. “Maybe.”
“She's really not, Lenny,” Bill grumbled.
“We don't know that.”
“She tried to eat Hosea's arm three days ago.”
“Hosea… provoked her?”
“By walking past the tent?”
Lenny didn't have an answer for that. He went back to staring at the fire.
“The real question,” Javier said, steering the conversation, “is Molly.”
That made everyone look somewhere that was not at anyone else. Abigail set down her mending. Across the fire, Dutch shifted in his chair and exhaled slowly, the way he always did when something in camp directly involved him and he was deciding how not to deal with it. He'd been doing a lot of that lately. Lately being the last several months, if anyone was counting, and Mary-Beth had been counting. She had a running tally somewhere in the back of her head and it was not flattering, though she never really brought it up or acknowledged it because it isn't some ordinary person doing it, it's Dutch.
“She thinks Karen's playing cards with her,” Sean shook his head.
The fire crackled.
“I'm just sayin’ that out loud,” Sean added, helpfully. “Because I feel like we keep dancin’ around it and what's actually happening is that Molly O'Shea is in there right now, sittin’ next to a woman who's tied to a post and tryin’ to eat people, and that somehow-Irish is talkin’ to her about—what was it just yesterday?”
“The weather,” Tilly said flatly.
“The weather! See? She was discussing the bloody weather with a canni—”
“Don't call her that,” Abigail said sharply, looking up.
Sean stopped. “I… I wasn't gonna say anythin’ bad.”
“You were going to say cannibal.”
“I was goin’ to say—she's not—” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the tent. He didn't finish the gesture or the sentence. They all looked at the tent.
The tent sat there. Impassively. The way tents do.
From inside it, faintly, came a sound that was not human. It was brief. Then it was quiet again.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“The weather,” Pearson said eventually, to himself, stirring the soup. The word came out a bit flat, like he'd held it in for a few seconds too long and it had gone stale. He was making soup again. He'd been making soup every night since this started because Pearson was a cook and cooking was the thing he could do, so he was doing it, and the result was that everyone at Horseshoe Overlook had consumed a quantity of soup that would have seemed improbable a fortnight ago.
“Has anyone actually gone to check on her?” Sadie said. She'd been quiet up until now, sitting with her arms folded, staring at nothing in particular. She turned to look around the fire. “Recently. In the last few days.”
Nobody answered immediately. There was a great deal of very deliberate looking at the ground.
“Abigail?” Sadie turned to her, because Abigail usually knew these things.
Abigail exhaled. She set her mending in her lap. “I was checking on her,” she said. “In the beginning, the first week Karen… turned, or whatever you'd call it. Every day. She was—she was a mess, as you'd expect, crying, not eating, all of that, and I was sitting with her, and—” She paused. She seemed to be selecting her words carefully. “And then, about a week in, I came over and she was just. Bright. All of a sudden. Happy, even. And she said good morning very cheerfully and told me Karen had beaten her at dominoes the night before and seemed genuinely put out about it.” Abigail picked up her mending again, shaking her head. “And I thought—I thought she was having some sort of episode. Some kind of—I didn't want to push. So I gave her some space.”
“And nobody's been back since?”
More ground-looking. Javier turned his coin over in his hand. Lenny scratched the back of his neck.
“I went past,” Sean said, a bit defensively. “Yesterday. I could hear her talking so I just—I thought it best not to interrupt their.. whatever they were doing.”
“Arthur?” Sadie turned to him.
Arthur looked up from his whetstone. “I… checked the ropes,” he shrugged, awkwardness packed into his broad shoulders.
Sadie scoffed, throwing up her hands. “That's not—”
“The ropes are the important thing,” Arthur looked back down at his whetstone, clearly already uncomfortable with the main topic of the conversation, seeing he doesn't know Molly well and he didn't like discussing any of those who had turned, like Uncle, Strauss, and Karen. “If the ropes fail, that's a problem for everyone. The ropes are fine.”
“The ropes are fine,” John said, nodding vigorously, in the tone of a half-drunk man endorsing a reasonable contribution to the discussion, and Abigail turned and looked at him in a way that meant he immediately stopped nodding.
“She's clearly gone mad,” Mary-Beth huffed worryingly, and then felt the words arrive outside her mouth before she'd decided to send them, which was a thing that happened sometimes when she'd been sitting quietly watching for long enough. Everyone looked at her. She didn't take it back. “I mean—I'm sorry, but someone has to say it. The poor woman has clearly gone mad, and we've all been sitting out here by this fire for twelve days and not one of us has gone in there and—and actually talked to her. Like a person.”
“Our lovely Miss O'Shea has always been mad,” Dutch grumbled in that deep voice of his, holding his cigar. Ever since Molly left Dutch for a happier relationship with her former adversary Karen, he's been sour about anything and everything to do with the red-headed woman. Not because he actually cared about her, moreso that he cared about having her.
“Dutch.” Hosea chided, sounding displeased with his comment.
Dutch sighed heavily. “She's always been a bit—”
“I suggest you stop now.”
“—high-strung,” he finished, with a careful pivot that communicated he had detected a consequence and adjusted course at the last possible second. He reached for his cigar. “High-strung. That is all I'm saying.”
“She is not ‘high-strung’,” Hosea said, having been surviving this whole ordeal with far too much accumulated patience, and clearly he was running very low on it tonight. “She is a young woman who has experienced something deeply traumatic and is — quite understandably, I would argue — not coping with it in what you might call a conventional manner, and the fact that none of you have—”
“She's always been mad,” Dutch said again with a bit of manchildish stubbornness, quieter this time, with the hope that if he said it at a lower volume it would count as less of a thing he'd said. He exhaled smoke. “Before… Before Karen, of course, I knew the woman best. I'm only pointing out that this—that this behaviour isn't entirely out of character, is all.”
Hosea looked at him. It was a long look. The look of a man who had put up with this kind of behaviour for years, and had long ago come to the conclusion that he wasn't going to change it even if he kept trying.
“Dutch is right,” Micah drawled as he often does, Micah always spoke with a certainty that showed he had decided what he thought and was indifferent to the territory between thinking and saying. “Just ain't nothing sane about a woman who lays with another woman, so this right here,” he gestured at the tent, “is only to be expected, is all I'm saying.”
Miss Grimshaw hit him on the back of the head.
Not gently. With her open palm, and with her full arm behind it. The crack of it carried.
“Ow—what, I'm only—”
“I have told you,” Miss Grimshaw hissed, “to keep that particular variety of opinion locked inside your skull, where it cannot do any damage, because your skull is already a wasteland and one more terrible thought in there won't make any meaningful difference.”
Micah grinned. He rubbed the back of his head, apparently unbothered by the fact that it had just been struck with significant force. “I love it when you talk dirty, old woman.”
Miss Grimshaw sat back down. She looked like a woman who wanted to hit him again but was exercising restraint on the grounds that she'd already used up her one and didn't want to give him.
The Reverend, Swanson, who had been sitting very still on the far side of the fire with his hands folded and his expression clearly engaged in some sort of private spiritual arbitration, cleared his throat. “I've been praying,” he offered, his voice quivering roughly as it usually did, always sounding as if he was vaguely anxious about something or other. “On this matter. At length.”
“Has it helped?” Pearson asked.
Swanson considered the question with genuine seriousness. “Not… noticeably,” he sighed miserably.
Pearson nodded, as if this was perfectly consistent with his broader worldview, and went back to the soup.
“What I think we ought to do,” Charles murmured — and when Charles spoke, people generally listened, not because he was particularly loud but because he was generally right, which was a more effective quality — “is figure out what actually helps Molly. Not what makes the rest of us more comfortable. What actually helps her.”
“That's the thing, isn't it,” Tilly said quietly. She'd been quiet for most of this. “Nobody knows what helps her. Nobody's gone in to find out. None of us really know her all that well, in honesty.”
“I'll go,” Sean announced. Before he could bolt up out of his seat, Lenny yanked him back down.
“You will not,” said pretty much everyone.
“What—I'll be gentle about it!”
“Sean,” John said, lazily pointing at him. “The last time you were gentle about something, you broke a window.”
Sean sneered. “That was one time, scar-face.”
“It was three times, and two of ‘em were on purpose.”
“The point is,” said Kieran, and then he said it slightly louder because the first time it came out too quiet and nobody registered it: “The point—sorry—the point is that maybe leaving her on her own isn't—I–I mean... Maybe she needs somebody to actually—you know.” Kieran began to talk quicker, sensing he was losing them as everyone began to roll their eyes at his stuttering. “Be with her. Someone should be with her. Rather than everyone just—avoiding the tent. Like it'll sort itself out. Which.. it probably won't…?”
He stopped. He'd clearly run out of nerve somewhere around the third clause.
Heads turned.
“Shut up, O'Driscoll,” said Bill.
“Shut up, O'Driscoll,” said Sean.
“Shut uuup, O'Driscoll,” slurred John, which earnt him a hard elbow and a scowl from Abigail.
Kieran looked down at his boots. Mary-Beth saw him exhale through his nose — not surprised, not even really disappointed, just—noting it, the way you note weather.
“No,” she said. She said it before she'd fully decided to say it, the way she sometimes did, when something gathered itself up too quickly for her to stop. “No, he's right.”
Which also made heads turn. At her, this time.
She looked around the fire. At all of them. Arthur with his whetstone. John with a bottle in his hands. Dutch with his cigar and his thoughts which were mostly about Dutch. Hosea, who was watching her with something that might have been approval. Lenny, who looked conflicted. Javier, who looked tired. Bill, who looked like he was already formulating a counter-argument. Charles, who was watching her steadily. Sadie, who had already nodded once, short and sharp, like she'd been waiting for someone to get there.
“She's clearly not well,” Mary-Beth crossed her arms. “And not a single one of us has gone in and sat with her and just—talked to her. Like she's a person. Like she matters. We've all been out here for twelve days deciding whether or not to discuss it and nobody's actually done anything.” She stood up. She didn't quite plan to stand up. Her legs just arrived at the decision. “So I'm going.”
“Mary-Beth—” Dutch started.
“I'll be right back,” she said, which was a sentence she deployed specifically so she didn't have to hear what Dutch was planning to say next.
Abigail caught her wrist, not to stop her. Just to make her pause for a second. “Be patient with her,” she advised. “She gets—if she feels like you're pushing her toward something she's not ready to, she—... just. Be gentle.”
“When am I not gentle?” Mary-Beth tilted her head, brows knitting together.
Abigail gave her a look that was not unkind. It communicated, without words: you are usually gentle, Mary-Beth, but you also have a very specific expression you make when you think someone is being foolish and Molly is going to be able to see it.
Mary-Beth adjusted her expression. She took a breath.
She walked toward the tent.
Behind her, after a moment, she heard Lenny say, “do you think she'll be alright?” and she heard Arthur say, “Mary-Beth's tougher than she looks,” which was the nicest thing Arthur Morgan was probably capable of saying about a person out loud, and she heard Pearson say the soup was nearly ready if anyone wanted some, and she heard John say he'd have some, and she heard Abigail say John would not have some until he apologised for what he'd said earlier, and she heard John say he didn't know what he'd said, and she heard Abigail say that was the problem, and then the fire was far enough behind her that she couldn't make out the words anymore and there was just the dark, and the canvas, and the low sound coming from inside it that she'd been carefully not listening to for twelve days.
She stopped at the entrance.
She went in anyway.
The tent flap was half-open. Not an invitation — it was half-open the way you leave a window open to let in air when you're not thinking about it, automatic, habitual. A light moved inside, warm and low. A lantern.
Mary-Beth stopped at the entrance. Her hand rested against the canvas.
From inside she could hear Molly's voice. Not the words yet, just the cadence — pleasant, conversational, unhurried. The way you'd talk to someone at supper.
She pushed the flap aside and went in.
The first thing she registered — the first thing she always had to get past before anything else — was Karen.
Karen was tied to the main post of the tent, seated with her back against it, wrists behind her and ankles crossed and bound at the front. Someone had been thorough. Arthur, as he said he'd been checking the ropes. The rope had several layers and the knots had knots. Karen was wearing what she'd been wearing when it happened, that long navy coat of hers, and her hair was loose and tangled — not in that limp, greasy way it sometimes got when she'd go through depressed phases of being drunk for weeks, but more scraggly and wild, like an animal's fur after escaping a trap.
Her eyes were the worst part. They'd been a greenish blue — like a clean, free-from-filth lake, warm and often narrowed in some private amusement at something — and now they were wrong. Not in a way you could name precisely. They were still green-blue, technically, if you ignored the red surrounding the colour. But they moved too fast. They tracked and snapped and fixed on things with a kind of hunger that didn't have human reasoning behind it. They'd fixed on Mary-Beth the moment she came in.
Karen made a sound. Low, guttural, somewhere in the throat. Her lips pulled back.
Mary-Beth did not move. She'd learned not to flinch, mostly. It had taken several tries.
“Oh, don't mind her,” Molly said brightly, from two feet away. “She's just telling you off for interrupting.”
Mary-Beth looked at Karen. Karen was not telling anyone off. Karen was producing a low, continuous sound from somewhere in her chest and tracking Mary-Beth's collarbone with the fixed attention of something that had forgotten how to blink.
“Right,” Mary-Beth nodded slowly.
“She says it's rude to walk into someone's tent without knocking,” Molly continued, in the tone of a woman relaying a perfectly reasonable complaint. “I told her you didn't know we were in the middle of something. She's being a bit precious about it.” She cast Karen a fond, exasperated look. “Aren't you.”
Karen's jaw moved. Something between a snap and a grinding. Her head tilted — not toward Molly, just slightly, the way an animal tracks sound.
“She says you can stay,” Molly translated graciously, “but you'll have to wait until we've finished the hand.”
Mary-Beth took a moment to examine the space.
Molly was sitting cross-legged on a bedroll that she'd dragged in and installed as though she were settling in for a very long holiday. She'd made it quite cosy, actually. There was the lantern on a crate, a folded blanket, a tin cup, and — Mary-Beth looked again to make sure — a small arrangement of cards laid out in the space between herself and Karen, fanned and sorted in some configuration that Mary-Beth did not recognise as any particular game. Karen's own hand of cards rested in her lap, propped against her knees. She hadn't touched them. She was very much not looking at them. She was still tracking Mary-Beth with those wrong, fast eyes.
Molly looked well, physically. That was the thing that was disturbing about it. She'd lost the hollow look she'd had the first week. Her hair was brushed. She'd had enough to eat recently, apparently. She was sitting up straight in the way Molly always sat up straight, the ingrained posture of someone who had been told about posture enough times for it to stick.
She looked at Mary-Beth with a warm, pleasant smile, as though Mary-Beth had just wandered over at camp and dropped in for a chat.
“Mary-Beth,” she greeted. “Would you like to sit down? We're in the middle of a game, but Karen won't mind, will you, darling?”
Karen snapped her teeth at the air. Not at Molly specifically. Just. Generally. At everything.
“There she goes,” Molly said, with fond exasperation, and patted Karen's knee.
Mary-Beth sat down. She wasn't entirely sure why. Some combination of her legs making the decision before her brain finished the sentence and not wanting to stand over Molly for this, because standing over people when you were trying to talk to them always felt like the wrong way to begin.
“Er… haha..” Mary-Beth chuckled uncertainly, unsure what to say. “What are you… playing?”
Molly looked at the cards. “Poker,” she said, before casting a wicked look at Karen. “Though Karen's been cheating.”
Mary-Beth looked at Karen, who was staring at Mary-Beth's neck with an intensity that was not about poker.
“Right,” Mary-Beth said.
“She's very cheeky about it,” Molly continued, examining her own hand with great seriousness. She had her two cards, and then the three of the five community cards. They were — Mary-Beth angled slightly to look — a two of clubs and a jack of hearts as her hands, and then a seven of spades, a queen of diamonds, and a card that was facing the wrong way so Mary-Beth couldn't see. None of them matched. It was, objectively, a bad poker hand. Molly seemed deeply satisfied with it. “I've told her three times that if I catch her looking at my cards, the game's forfeit, but.” She gestured vaguely in Karen's direction. A concession. What can you do?
Karen made a sound then. Short and guttural and deeply uninterested in card games.
Molly looked up at Karen when she made the noise. “I know it's taking a while,” she responded to… something, apparently. “But you'd have more fun with it taking so long if you weren't spending half your time trying to look at my hand.” She paused. Tilted her head. Karen's jaw worked silently, her eyes dragging slow and animal across the tent wall. “Because,” Molly said, as if responding to something only she could hear, “it's called strategy, Karen. Not everyone plays like a complete ruffian.” She said it the way you'd say it to someone who'd made a rude remark and deserved to know it.
Karen made the low sound again. She was pulling against the rope, not dramatically, not with any real surge of effort — just a constant, automatic tension. Like a caught animal not quite committed to struggling.
“Molly—” Mary-Beth started.
“How is everyone?” Molly asked. She turned a card over in her fingers. “I heard some carrying on out by the fire earlier. Was that Sean? Sean gets so loud when he's had enough whiskey. Or even not enough whiskey. Actually, Sean is simply loud.”
“Everyone's—they're all right," Mary-Beth nodded, trying to find a way to move the conversation to what she actually wanted to bring up. “They were—we were talking about, uhm.” She paused. She'd had a plan for this and it was not surviving contact with the actual situation. “About you, actually.”
Molly looked up. She looked like someone caught off-guard. “About me?”
“Just—how you were getting on. Everyone's—they miss seeing you at supper. You haven't been—”
“Oh, Karen and I eat in here now,” Molly said easily, looking away again and reverting to that simple, relaxed demeanor. “It's nicer, actually. Quieter. She doesn't like crowds right now, do you, love?”
She was looking at Karen when she said it. Karen was not looking at Molly. Karen was looking at the back of the tent as though calculating the distance through the canvas to whatever was on the other side.
“Molly,” Mary-Beth began again. She tried to say it gently. She thought she managed it. “Karen—Karen can't really eat proper supper. Can she.”
Silence.
Molly turned one of her cards over. Set it face-down on the bedroll. Picked up another.
“She managed some tea today,” Molly said simply, which was not an answer to the question but was clearly the answer Molly had selected to give.
Mary-Beth thought about saying something else and then looked at the tent wall and thought about the fire outside and all the people sitting around it who'd watched her walk over here, and the fact that no one had offered to come with her, and the fact that Jack Marston was asleep in Abigail's tent right now and didn't know any of this was happening because he was four years old and thought everyone in camp was always fine. She thought about that little priest's ceremony he'd conducted in the woods for Molly and Karen's “wedding” once he'd found out about them together, which everyone had heard about second-hand from Karen, who'd told the story three different times in three different configurations all of which were funnier than the last, and she thought — quite suddenly and forcefully — that she really did not want to be doing this.
She did it anyway.
“That's good that she had some tea,” she said, carefully. “How did that go?”
Molly's expression did something complicated that smoothed back out almost immediately. “Well, she spilled a bit. But we managed.”
She reached beside her without looking — it was the movement of someone who had memorised the geography of a space — and picked up the tin cup Mary-Beth had clocked earlier. She held it up, checking how much was left, and turned to Karen.
“Would you like some more, sweetheart?” she asked, conversationally, as though Karen might answer in any of the usual ways. “There's still some in here.”
Karen snapped. Quick and sharp and completely unpredictable, her whole upper body pitching forward against the rope's limit, mouth open, teeth coming nowhere near Molly because she wasn't close enough but going for it with great commitment.
Molly jerked back. Fast, reflexive, the cup sloshing. She sat there for a moment with her eyes wide and her free hand pressed flat against the bedroll, and there was a moment of heavy silence.
Mary-Beth stared at Molly warily, sensing the silence wouldn't last long.
And she was right, because right then, Molly laughed. Actual, real laughter — a short sound, surprised out of her, before she got hold of it. She leaned forward and — very quickly, to avoid Karen's jaws — booped Karen on the nose with one quick, pointed finger.
“Oh, Karen,” she tutted, in a voice that managed to be both fond and reproachful, which was a very specific register that Mary-Beth had not heard from Molly before. “We talked about this, don't you remember?”
Karen blinked. Or something that looked like blinking. Her jaw worked.
“We talked about it just this morning,” Molly continued, settling back with the cup. She was already tilting it toward Karen again, holding it at a distance now, more carefully. “And yesterday. And the day before. If you can't be patient, I can't give you your tea.”
Karen made a sound that was nothing like agreement and everything like deeply unsettling hunger.
“I know, I know,” Molly said, which was addressed to neither Mary-Beth nor Karen specifically, just to the general tent. She angled the cup and tipped it slowly. Most of the tea ran in a warm stream down Karen's chin and jaw and soaked into her collar. A small amount, by pure geometric accident, actually made it past her teeth. Karen did not appear to notice or care either way. She was tracking Molly's hands now.
“There,” Molly breathed, satisfied, and sat back. “See. Good girl.”
Karen strained forward again, slow this time, testing. The rope went taut.
“Yes, I know,” Molly said mildly, settling her cards back into order. “It's too cold. I shouldn’t have let it cool longer, I agree.” She considered her hand. Moved a card to the other side. “Though I'd argue you could say so without lunging at me.” Karen made a grunt noise, and Molly glanced up. “That's not an apology, that's just a noise, sweetheart.”
Mary-Beth had not moved for the last forty-five seconds. She became aware of this and tried to look natural, which she suspected she failed at.
“Molly…” She trailed off.
“Yes?” Molly looked back up, eyes bright.
Mary-Beth opened her mouth. She had perhaps six different things she could say and none of them felt right for this specific tent with this specific woman and the specific way the lantern was throwing light across Molly's face, which was calm and bright and entirely disconnected from the situation it was inhabiting.
What she settled on was: “How are you sleeping?”
Molly considered this with the seriousness she'd brought to the poker hand. “All right,” she said. “Karen's restless. But she's always been restless.”
Mary-Beth looked at Karen. Who was, in fact, pulling steadily and rhythmically against her ropes, tipping forward and back by about two inches, over and over. It was less frantic than it had been the first few days. More like a habit, a rocking, something automatic that her body kept returning to.
“Karen,” Mary-Beth said. She didn't know why she said it. Just to—... she didn't know.
Karen's eyes moved to her. Snapped there. Stayed.
Mary-Beth held her gaze. She'd known Karen Jones for , well… longer than Molly. It didn't matter how long, long enough to know what her laugh sounded like when she was really laughing versus when she was performing it for an audience, long enough to know she stole extra rations sometimes and left some of it for her and Tilly, long enough to know she'd cried once after a mission and been so furious about being caught that she'd looked fit to fight, long enough to know she collected small smooth pebbles and kept them in her coat pocket for no reason she'd ever explained.
The eyes that looked back at her now were not the eyes of someone who remembered any of that.
Mary-Beth looked back at Molly.
Molly was looking at her cards.
“Do you want to join the game?” Molly asked again, pleasantly. “I can deal you in. Karen won't mind losing her advantage.”
“Her advantage,” Mary-Beth echoed.
“She can see my cards from where she's sitting. I've told her it's cheating but she claims she doesn't have a clear line of sight.” Molly looked at Karen with cheerful scepticism. “Which I don't believe for a second, do I, trouble?”
Karen had gone back to watching Mary-Beth's neck.
“She called you that,” Mary-Beth said, without meaning to, the memory coming to her. “Karen. She called you trouble. That one time, where you accidentally pushed her so hard she fell in the river.”
Molly's hands stilled on the cards.
Just for a second. Less than that. Her thumb traced the edge of the jack of hearts and then she set the card down and picked up another one and her face was still pleasant and her posture was still straight and the lantern light was still warm and the tent was still dim and Karen was still rocking against her ropes and the world outside was still full of things that had died and come back wrong, and Molly said: “She still does. Did it just this morning.”
The silence was different this time. Longer, with more going on inside it.
Mary-Beth stayed where she was. She didn't press. She didn't fill it with something kind and helpful and gently steered toward the obvious point she needed Molly to reach. She just sat in it, with the cards between them and the tea stain on Karen's collar and the low sound of Karen rocking and Molly's thumb tracing the edge of that jack of hearts over and over and over.
Molly set the jack of hearts down. She picked up the card that had been facing the wrong way — the one Mary-Beth hadn't been able to read from where she was sitting — and turned it over. A three of clubs. She considered it. Set it down beside the jack. Picked the jack back up.
“She's been trying to teach me a new game, actually,” Molly said. “A different one. Not poker.” She arranged the cards in her lap with great care, the way you'd handle something fragile. “She's been explaining the rules all morning. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I've got it entirely—she explained rather quickly and I didn't want to ask her to repeat herself because she gets impatient when she has to repeat herself.” She said it the same way she'd always said it. Like it was a well-worn complaint, a comfortable one, the kind that comes from knowing someone well enough to have memorised their particular varieties of irritating. “You know how she is, the silly outlaw.”
Mary-Beth did know how she was. Past tense, present tense, she knew how Karen was.
“Though I suspect,” Molly continued, with a side-eye in Karen's direction that was genuinely suspicious, “that she made some of her rules up to lead in her favour. She does that. She thinks I don't notice, but I always notice.” She looked back at her cards. “She's done it to Lenny before. He was very gracious about it. I'm choosing to be less gracious.”
Karen was not looking at either of them. She was looking at the tent flap, pulling in slow, rhythmic increments against the rope, that same two-inch rock, forward and back. The lantern threw a moving shadow up the canvas behind her.
Molly glanced at her. Whatever she saw, or didn't see, she received it with complete equanimity. She reached out and straightened Karen's card hand where it had slipped sideways in her lap, fanning the cards back out with two careful fingers, and Karen did not react to this at all, just kept pulling at the rope, forward and back, forward and back.
“She's terrible at sitting still,” Molly said, with the fond exasperation of someone who has spent a lot of time sitting next to someone who is terrible at sitting still. “Always has been. Even before all…” She made a small gesture, vague and encompassing, that covered the tent, the rope, Karen, and presumably the wider plague situation. “…Even then. She'd tap her foot constantly at supper. You'd be trying to eat and there'd just be this persistent—” Tap. She demonstrated it on her own knee. “All through the meal. Drove me absolutely mad.”
She was smiling when she said it. Looking at her cards, not at Karen, but smiling. The smile of someone remembering a thing they'd complained about enough times that the complaining had become its own kind of affection.
Mary-Beth watched her. She thought about the correct thing to say and couldn't locate it.
“She's being very patient about the whole situation,” Molly added approvingly, with a nod toward Karen. “Considering. She's not a patient person by nature, as I'm sure you know. But she's managing.”
Mary-Beth looked at Karen, who was not managing in any conventional sense of the word. Karen was pulling against rope that was not going to give, with the mechanical, empty persistence of something that had forgotten what it was trying to get to. Her lips were slightly parted. Her breathing was wrong in a way that Mary-Beth had mostly learned not to think about directly.
“She is,” Mary-Beth agreed, carefully.
“I told her it won't be forever,” Molly said. She was still straightening her cards, aligning the edges. “These little fevers pass. I told her that. Doesn't help that the camp's so dull at the moment, I think she's bored more than anything—you know how she gets when she's bored. The tapping. The complaining. The picking fights just to have something to do.” She shook her head, the resigned head-shake of a woman who had long since accepted the fact of Karen Jones into her life and found it, on balance, worth it. “I think you coming round at least helped.”
The last sentence arrived without particular emphasis. Molly turned another card over. Outside, distantly, Sean's voice climbed over something and then Pearson's voice flattened it back down.
Mary-Beth sat with the sentence for a moment.
“Did she say something?” Mary-Beth asked hopefully, before she'd decided to.
“She seemed pleased,” Molly said simply.
Karen rocked. Forward and back. Forward and back. The lantern swayed very faintly on its crate and the shadows went with it.
“She's going to be so cross when all this sorts itself out,” Molly sighed and shook her head. “She hates being restrained, not free to move. She's mentioned it about four hundred times.”
“She's—right.” Mary-Beth swallowed. “She will be.”
“And she'll be furious about the hair,” Molly added, with a tiny laugh. “You know how she is about her hair, usually she likes it all curled and such. I've been trying to sort it but she's not very cooperative.” She looked at Karen with the expression of someone dealing with a difficult patient. “Aren't you? Yes, my beauty. You are very difficult to brush.”
Karen made a sound.
“I know,” Molly said, rubbing her forearm. “I know, my darling girl.”
She said it the same way she'd been saying it all week, probably. Warm, theatrical, absolutely unwavering. Like she was reciting something from memory. Like she'd been saying it so many times that it had worn a groove in her, and she was going to keep saying it until the groove became something structural, something she could hold onto, a fact she'd repeated often enough that the world was going to have to concede it.
Mary-Beth sat in Strauss's old tent and looked at the two of them — Karen rocking against her ropes, Molly turning the jack of hearts over in her fingers — and thought: I have no idea what to do here.
Which was, at least, honest.
“I could come back tomorrow,” she offered, before she was aware she was offering it. “If you'd like. I could—I could bring my own cards. We could have an actual game.”
Molly looked at her. She seemed, for a moment, genuinely pleased. Not the bright, theatrical kind of pleased that Molly's been performing this whole time. Just.. pleased. “That would be nice,” she said. “Karen gets tired of winning all the time.”
“Karen is very good at cards,” Mary-Beth agreed, which was true, actually, and she had no idea if Molly knew she meant it genuinely.
From outside, distant and faintly absurd, she could hear Sean MacGuire's voice rising over something and Bill telling him to keep it down and Pearson saying dinner was ready, which meant soup, because Pearson had been making soup for twelve days straight and showed no signs of stopping.
“Go and eat,” Molly said, with the small, fond authority of someone who had decided to look after people and was going to do it whether they asked or not. She turned back to her cards. “Tell them I said hello.”
“I will,” Mary-Beth nodded, and gave her her best smile.
She stood. She looked at Karen one more time. Karen's eyes tracked her — those wrong, too-fast, bloodshot eyes — and there was nothing in them that was recognisable, but also Mary-Beth could not entirely stop herself from thinking: well. She'd know those eyes anywhere. Under everything else. Still.
She went back out into the night. The fire had come up again — Sean had probably added wood without asking, the way he always did, since he got cold easily — and the camp was loud and warm and Pearson was serving out bowls and Lenny was helping without being asked and Abigail had gotten Jack out of the tent for some reason and he was sitting on the log beside John, listing sideways into John's arm with his eyes already mostly shut. This wasn't exactly a good arrangement considering John was listing sideways himself.
Everyone looked up when she came back.
Everyone looked up when she came back.
“Well?” said Bill.
Mary-Beth sat down on her log. She accepted the bowl of soup Pearson held out to her. She looked at the fire for a moment. Then she looked at Kieran, who hadn't said anything, just watching her with his elbows on his knees.
“She's lost her mind completely,” Mary-Beth muttered.
A silence.
“But—But she's all right,” she added. “I think. In the way that—she seems very settled.”
“Settled,” Abigail repeated.
“She offered me a hand of poker.”
Nobody said anything to that. Pearson ladled out another bowl. The fire crackled. John opened his mouth and Abigail looked at him and he closed it.
“I'm going back tomorrow,” Mary-Beth informed. “I said I would.”
“That's…” Kieran cleared his throat and looked at his shoes, nodding as firmly as a man of his sorts could do. “That's the right thing to do, Mary-Beth.”
And camp went back to normal.
Or as normal as it could be in times like this.