books

Samantha

She got untied an hour later and limply bolted out the back, lamely slapping against the ground: more blunt force than a scrape. She got winded, pushed herself up, took two steps towards Felkner, then immediately gave up and stumbled back to the immobile wagon. Roe still held that same face she’d already seen from too many other women in her life.

The wagon was full of books. She’d ‘noticed’ this earlier, in the sense that her eyes had seen objects in the wagon, but she hadn’t bothered to follow that stimulus any further, until now. That’s something to do, one could think.

“You’re not dying here,” said something, maybe a horse (talking horses aren’t unheard of), and Roe offered a hand, which Samantha took. She declined to assign any moral valence to the choices being made by either of them, because neither of them were making a choice, they were simply acting out of necessity.

…But Quincy had made the choice to kill himself, killing yourself to escape a bad situation was always an option.

… But Quincy was stupid.