Chapter 112: 112 How Ending Starts, Part Two

The next morning Jin felt like his whole body didn't fit right, no matter how much he fussed with the collar of his shirt.

"I miss my old uniform," he said.

Angharad, perfectly polished with her loosely curled hair and old-fashioned dress, gave him a small smile and smacked his hands when he tried to fix his tie again. "You did look good in it but you look good in this suit, too. Really mature, and, uh, appropriately sombre."

He nodded at her and stopped trying to fix what didn't feel right.

"Why did I decide to give a speech?" he asked.

Freya, resplendent in her uniform, grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "Because you're a good man and it's the right thing to do."

Believing that she believed it had to be enough.

*

Jin held himself still when he spoke to the crowd and tried to pretend the cameras weren't there. Seeing the Major in the front row, severe as ever, made that easier.

He squinted against the searing hot sun and took a deep breath to steady himself.

"I didn't always get along with Tabitha," he said. "It was easy to think of her like she was an enemy. But she was just a person, like me. She was as scared as me. She liked the same bad jokes and ate the same food. She was normal. She was..."

He remembered her in that strange purple dress in that bad party they'd thrown in Zapville, the sharp white of her collarbone under the flickering light and the way her shock of red hair looked as it tried to escape her hair style. She'd laughed, he remembered that. He couldn't remember the things she said, only an impressionistic vision of the way she looked when she moved, her hair pins twisting as they pushed away from where they were supposed to be.

Her voice had been sharp and she was very mean. He couldn't say that, that he missed how mean she was. That for a moment, in that terrible camp, before the barrier to the other side came down and he'd been able to talk to Freya and the Major, she'd been the only person who understood the way he felt about their war and being stuck in that place. How could he explain how it felt to have that moment of connection with someone who hated him like that?

He couldn't hate her at all anymore. She'd been scared like him and mean like him.

"I miss her," he said, and looked up from his notes.

*

They only briefly appeared at the wake.

Freya stood, arms crossed, surveying the room. Angharad ran about asking the waitstaff which things at the buffet had no garlic, onion, dairy or oats. Almost as many photographers walked around as at the funeral. Jin had to make an effort not to put his hands in his pockets and let himself slump.

"This is a media circus," he said.

"You knew it would be," Freya said.

"I did." That didn't mean he had to like it.

In the distance he could see Angharad talking to Captain O'Connor. He couldn't imagine what they had to talk about. Major Keating was elsewhere, even if Jin didn't know why. Andrew Nguyen sat on a folding chair in one corner, talking to some guy.

"I'm sorry about last night," Freya said. She didn't unfold her arms.

Jin felt awkward all over again, just remembering the things they said. Only Angharad's return with a half-eaten something smothered in red bean paste saved the conversation.

"Let's go somewhere we can dance," Jin said. "For Tabitha."

*

They dropped by the hotel for Freya to change her clothes first, because she didn't want to walk around late at night in her military uniform.

"It's a shame," Angharad said, leaning in the doorway as Freya looked through her suitcase in her underwear, "because your uniform looks so cool, but I totally get it."

"You need to help me pick an outfit," Freya said, voice high.

Jin slid back through the doorway and into the dark hallway. He leaned against the wall and looked at the ceiling, waiting for them to be ready.

Would Tabitha have taken this long to get ready? Of course she would have. She was always immaculately presented, but for the unruly thickness of her hair in her last weeks of life. If she was there with him in the hallway she would have insulted him for being so impatient and expected him to wait maybe an hour for her grooming and careful outfit picking to be done. On her last days in Zapville she'd always pressed Angharad into helping her choose. And then mocked Angharad's choices while Angharad laughed. Even Freya had gotten into helping Tabitha into her clothes and pinning her hair into those elaborate retro hairstyles. Tabitha would talk about the old and out of copyright movies undergoing revival in her country and Angharad would talk about what her great-grandparents must have been like in Bulgaria and Ukraine.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine Tabitha in the hallway with him, her expression scornful, her hair almost too bright to be real.

But he opened his eyes to an empty hallway, and Tabitha was already in the ground.

*

Once they got outside, he felt a little overdressed in his suit. Tried to loosen his tie a bit just so it was easier to breathe.

"Uh, so I got an address for somewhere that might be a club earlier, but I don't really know how to find it or how to understand these directions, so..." Angharad said, and then handed Freya a piece of paper.

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"Where did you get this?" Freya asked.

Angharad shrugged. "Sometimes strangers just walk up to me on the street and hand me things."

"I don't understand anything about your life," Jin said.

He let Freya look up the address and check that it was moderately safe. Not that it had to be perfectly safe. They were young and strong and he knew Freya was still carrying a weapon under her dress.

The address took them to a mostly abandoned suburb, one of those areas that had collapsed economically early on. The air was mostly quiet around them, other than Angharad complaining about how much her shoes hurt her feet. Not all the street lights worked.

Some of the houses they passed looked empty but some had their front lights lit up yellow and artificial as the day slipped away and the night slowly set on them.

Finally they found the landmark they were looking for. It must have been a suburban shopping centre once. Freya turned on the torch light on her phone to light their way in.

They had to walk up a flight of stairs to the entrance first. There must have been automatic doors into a food court once but the glass had been smashed away. The entrance was empty, cold, dark. Angharad pulled the hood on her jacket up over her head. They walked over the pastel tiled floor deep into the building, looking for a sign that there was something in there worth seeing.

"Are you sure they weren't trying to scam you?" Freya asked.

Angharad shrugged. "If there's nothing here we can still call Maria and get her to drive us somewhere, no big deal. And if there's some mean, nasty criminals wanting to hurt me, I can rely on my big, strong protectors to save me."

Jin huffed out half a laugh and looked away. "You're ridiculous."

Deeper into the maze of the abandoned shopping mall there were more signs of life – the occasional working light, the distant throb of synthetic music, posters on the walls. Jin thought, for a moment, that one of the posters had a picture of Angharad's face rendered in hazy colours, but Freya grabbed him by the hand and dragged him forward before he could focus on it. He blinked, unsettled.

They followed the hint of the music down the stillness of the old escalators and then deeper into the strange turns of the building, until they found the deep throbbing heart of the sound. A man in dark clothing stood by the arch-shaped entry to the club, the rifle by his side occasionally illuminated by the flashing lights spilling out the edges of the room.

"ID," the man said, in a bored voice.

Angharad bit her lip, luminescent in the faint wash of light, and said, "Oh, please, you'll let me in."

"You're right. I will," said the bouncer, and waved them in.

Stepping through the doorway was like stepping through a wall of heat. Jin felt himself starting to sweat underneath his clothes.

The overhead lights flashed blue and pink over clusters of people. People danced and threw their bodies about in the golden light of a large floor lamp next to a working water feature, the splashing sounds nearly drowned under the waves of music from the DJ. The DJ was set up on a table next to a bar that looked hastily assembled.

"This looks like something out of those eighties films my dad loves," Angharad said.

She walked into the crowd, but Freya stood in front of Jin to stop him tracking Angharad's path. Freya pushed her fingers under his jacket and shoved it off his shoulders. It fell to his bent elbows, waiting for him to remove it the rest of the way.

"So you don't overheat," Freya said, and winked.

It looked better in her hands than it did on him, anyway.

Freya hung over him when he got a drink, whispered in his ear, made him remember how she sounded the night before when she'd closed his eyes with a scarf and tied him to the hotel bed. All the body heat in the room seemed to be building up in his corner. He undid the top button of his shirt just as the bartender handed him his beer.

Freya slipped into the crowd with his jacket before Jin even turned around. He watched the crowd move as he sipped his drink, face warm. He caught a glimpse of Angharad spinning with a stranger, her head thrown back in laughter, long dress floating up so high he could see the tops of her old-fashioned stockings. Freya he couldn't find in the crowd. She could disappear completely when she wanted to.

Jin focused on his drink and tried not to worry about it.

When the glass was empty and he was done with it, and feeling no better for it, thinking, Tabitha would never drink beer, Tabitha would never lower herself, he turned again to face the crowd and find the people he came with.

The music droned on and on. He searched and he searched until the crowd parted just enough and he could see them, moving together with the kind of bump and grind that only got to call itself dancing in this kind of club. Angharad's head rolling back against Freya's shoulder, Freya's hand sliding down Angharad's thigh, Freya's eyes intense as she looked at their bodies together. Red and black, and then a blue light from above washed them purple. Angharad moved her hands up, slowly, through her own hair, and then Freya grabbed one of those hands and hooked it around her neck and brought them even closer.

Tabitha would never have danced like this.

Angharad opened her eyes. Jin knew she could see him.

He walked to them, watching her watching him. And when he got close enough to touch, close enough to hear Freya laugh at him, he grabbed Freya's side, and they crushed Angharad between them with their movements. Angharad pushed and pulled, her free hand grabbing Jin's shoulder to bring him right into what was left of their space. He was stuck in their orbit now, unable to get free. They moved too close, washing over each other, as the voice from the speakers said that nothing ends, as Angharad's breath turned into ragged gasps, until she shoved at his chest and said, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I need air," with a wet voice.

He stepped back and turned away to let her free.

"What you need is a glass of water," Freya said.

Angharad nodded, moved toward the bar.

Jin turned back to Freya and stepped into a slow dance. His jacket was secure on her shoulders. Her face, when she leaned against him, was cold with sweat.

He tried to ignore how wet his eyes were and enjoy the things that Tabitha could no longer choose.

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