Page 37 of V-Day
“It’s bad enough dragging Chloe into this—” Parris began.
“Chloe can take care of herself. I’m not worried about her,” Cristián said calmly.
“You’rearmed?” Parris said, whirling to face Chloe.
Chloe crossed her arms as Isabela was doing. It was an effective defensive posture. “If I answer that, you’ll take any weapons I might have from me.”
Parris considered her, her eyes narrowed. “Convince me you know how to use it and won’t shoot one of my men in the back accidently, then I might let you keep it.”
Chloe hesitated. “Three years of marksmanship training. Junior champion, two years in a row.” It was vague enough to not give away anything yet had enough detail it might let Parris back off.
Parris considered her. “Whatever,” she said at last. “I don’t have time to frisk you and I don’t think Stretch, there, would let me.”
Cristián grinned. “Nope,” he said softly.
Warmth built in Chloe’s chest.
Parris settled her helmet once more, her gaze on Chloe. “At least, I’ll let himthinkhe couldn’t stop me.” She winked with the eye farthest from Cristián’s view and whirled away. “We’re out of here.” She looked at Isabela and her daughters. “Keep up with us, you hear? A moan, a single complaint, and I’ll tie you to a tree and leave you for the monkeys.”
The rest of her team picked up their packs and threaded their arms into them as she strode toward them.
Chloe shoved her dead phone into her backpack, and shrugged the backpack into place and paused, for Cristián was watching her.
“What?” she demanded.
“You put your pack on the same way the soldiers do,” he said, his voice remote.
“I guess that’s kinda to be expected, huh?”
“You told me the name of the place,” he said. “You told me all about your time there. I didn’t process that you really went through it, until just now.”
“You mean, about the pistol?”
“The pistol, the pack, the way you speak to Graves. It’s pure military speak.”
Chloe shuddered.
“Hurry up, Cristián!” Parris yelled from the end of the gulley.
They jog trotted to catch up with Parris’ men and the three women, who were scrambling to keep up with the unit.
The place. Even in Cristián’s mind, it was “the place”.
She wondered if he felt the same frisson of horror she did whenever The Place was mentioned.
*
CHLOE WAS FOUR YEARS OLDwhen she realized she was different—and not in a good way—from the people around her. With her burgeoning intellect, she intuited that she startled adults far too often when she spoke to them. They had a way of drawing from her as if she was somehow unclean.
It was grown-ups’ odd reactions which made her hide from everyone but her mother, Jessica, that she had taught herself to read. She used the few books sitting on the dusty mantelshelf above the closed-over fireplace. Her wariness did not blossom into full blown caution until later. By then, she had already been labeled a prodigy.
Being called a prodigy made no difference at all to her life. No one told Chloe—although by the time she was eight, she figured it out for herself. There was no money for special schooling and there were few books around for her to read.
The one difference was that Jessica’s mother, EllaJean, came to live with them. Chloe’s special talent was mathematics and science, so it took a few days for her to discover that EllaJean’s gift was for languages and music—she knew twenty-seven distinct languages, which she inhaled like vapor. EllaJean had never owned a single book. She learned by observing and talking to people.
Chloe stopped going to school after that. EllaJean took over her education, and they spent half their time in the public library and the other half walking around Richmond, watching and learning. Everything came to Chloe easily. She didn’t have to work for anything at all, which would be a problem later. When she graduated junior high school at eleven years of age, Jessica was astounded. Chloe figured it was completely natural.
Then her mother died in a traffic accident and Chloe’s education was almost permanently halted.
