“Sorry I made you stop,” Ellie said to Sameh, as she opened the SUV’s door. “It just seemed better to leave him. To make him lie low on his own, and not to draw any attention to him and why he might have disappeared.”
“I understood. Sorry I got carried away.”
Ellie stopped, thinking, and looked at Sameh. “We didn’t only not kill him because this is here, and not back home,” she said.
Sameh looked over at her, surprised. “What?”
“We didn’t leave him alive just because this is here.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We haven’t left him alive only because…” Ellie stopped. “Because he isn’t a hajji.”
“Oh. Good.”
“Just in case you wondered.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, in case you did, it isn’t just that.”
Sameh looked at her, and seemed confused. “I know.”
Ellie sighed, and gave up. Talking about things like this was just far too complicated sometimes. Her and Sameh and everything they both were and what it meant. She gave up, like she always gave up. Instead, she took a bottle of water out of their supplies in the back, and rolled it along the ground towards Mark. Then another, just in case he needed it, and then she threw over a food bar as well.
Then she walked around to the front passenger door, and got in.
Joe was looking at her.
“What?” Ellie said to him. “Do you want to argue too?”
Joe shrugged.
“So don’t,” Ellie said. “Or I’ll go back and shoot him. If everyone has such a problem with this.”
“No problem,” Joe said.
“So stop looking at me like that,” Ellie said.
“I’m not.”
“Just don’t,” Ellie said. “Head back to town.”
Joe nodded, and started driving.
As they drove away, as Joe turned the SUV in a lazy circle to head back towards the doors they had driven in by, Ellie looked over at Mark. He was still lying where she’d left him. He was probably exhausted and still a bit shocked, and mostly just glad to be alive.
“He saw the kid at the militia building,” Ellie said to Joe. “We should have just gone there first.”
“It’s best to know for sure.”
“I suppose so. Not that it makes much difference now. Do you know where the militia will be?”
Joe shook his head. “Not these ones. Your intel people will, though.”
Ellie nodded, and tapped her comm, and asked the voice that answered to send her coordinates for the nearest militia compound. They did, almost right away, and with driving directions too. An anti-debt militia was probably on some kind of active intel watchlist with the corporate debt-recovery intelligence people, Ellie supposed.
She held out the tablet, and showed Joe, who looked, and then nodded.
Sameh leaned forward, behind Ellie, and said, “Better now?” She said it as if she hoped Ellie would say yes.
Ellie nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Actually.”
She reached back, behind herself, twisting her arm behind her seat to reach for Sameh’s hand. Sameh took hers, and held it, and then leaned forward and kissed Ellie quickly too, kissed her neck, bending around the seat.
“You always get moody after something like this,” Sameh said.
“I know.”
“Well it’s done. So cheer up.”
“I will,” Ellie said, but kept staring out the window for a while anyway.
Joe drove back towards town, quietly, and Sameh was quiet too. Everyone was in an odd mood, Ellie thought, but at least they were getting somewhere about the missing kid.
Sometimes Ellie wondered what she’d become. She wondered whether too much time out the world, in the endless wars with this problem or that problem, hadn’t tainted something inside her. Sometimes she wondered, and then she realized it didn’t matter. Not any more. She was what she was, and the world was the world, and she hadn’t made it become what it had.
And it wasn’t as though anyone cared very much about the people Ellie happened to kill, anyway. Or not kill. Not about people like Mark. The world didn’t care about him or Ellie or Sameh or Joe any more.
Only about people like their corporate heir.