Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Eight: A Merciless March of White

Hawk got Alex and Emile situated with the soil samples and blood—her sample, from the center of the tomato plants, was the only one labeled, and Emile gave Alex a severe look. Her husband pled for rescue, but she left them to it. She had to go back to her house for the ants.

It was not that short of a drive. She made it, knowing that she was going to be in the car all day long. Meanwhile, her husband was left behind, with a lone enby babe who was also one hell of a scientist, and it said a lot about the caliber of friends she kept, that she wasn't worried. Alex wasn't going to start an affair; if he was, it'd be about the thrill of deception and he knew better ways to get that than fucking outside of marriage. Poker, for example. Or else he'd run another "teach your cashiers how not to get scammed" course. He was a magician whose greatest pleasure was ensuring his audience would never be fooled again. Tricking his wife the way he would a mark? That was the sort of thing his father would do.

Funny how the one guy who didn't view women like a starving dog views pork chops—or at least, the one who wasn't willing to make a big deal out of it—was an ex-con-artist who wasn't so much ex as he was contentiously abstaining. Someone who understands deception knows better than to bring out that trite nonsense. Men don't jump supermodels at the catwalk, and women don't jump the lifeguards at a public pool. They're more than capable of self-restraint when the consequences outweigh the possible benefits. Alex liked his life with Hawk, valued her enough to choose not to hurt her, and thus chose not to cheat. He knew how temptation worked, and knew enough about how to build it in someone else to sabotage it in himself.

He'd never cop to it, of course. He'd blush, and mumble something about love, like it's a feeling that happens to you and not a choice you make every day. Alex woke up each morning and chose Hawk, and she felt that through the domestic air currents. She had no fear of Alex looking at a beautiful woman because she'd watched him do it, watched his eyes fill with admiration and desire when a feminine body presented itself, curves of hip like unexplored tributaries, hidden clefts to delve into, deep, and then he would look at her and those embers would smolder into conflagration as he deliberately chose her. He turned "cleave" into a verb of the highest order, made a gift of stray lusts, did pilgrimage past the foreign gates to lay his favor exclusively at Hawk's altar.

It was sexy as fuck.

But as Alex wouldn't understand the ants, Hawk got a nice, long, lonely drive back home while Alex got to play in the dirt with her friend, and she'd have been alone if that friend hadn't also told her she wasn't about to turn into glass.

We aren't going to die! Part of her sang. And the rest went, we might not be dying. Don't count your lifespan until you've gotten to the grave.

She drove on.

***

"Does it really need to be Hawk's ants?" Alex asked. He was sitting in Emile's living room, looking at a tablet with most of a word document on its screen. It was his statement about what the Wests had done the previous night. Emile had asked him to be as clear and impartial as possible, but he'd had to resort to profanity a few times. He didn't have the greatest vocabulary, but when saying "it was blue" doesn't quite convey the appropriateness of shade, saying "it was fucking blue" somehow gets the point across. Great horror, like great beauty, should come with a thesaurus as a memento of the experience. Reality forces us to make due with fucking blue.

"Do you know how honeypots work?" Emile said.

"I live with Hawk," Alex said.

"So when she talked for an hour every day about Honeypots' place in the ecology...did you listen?"