It’s a bad night.
Happens, sometimes. Andi got to bedtime feeling overtired and stretched thin, and then jolted awake on the hour, every hour from uneasy sleep until she gave up and dragged herself past the clock, spurning any knowledge of the dimly illuminated digital numbers in favour of just knowing, bone-deep, that it’s fucking dark and she should be sleeping.
She gets herself a glass of water. Drinks it, looking out the cabin’s kitchen window. The trail up to the main road curves away gently through the trees, a chalky-white ribbon through the night-blackened grass.
The Spinnaker deployment had broken down Andi’s sense of time completely: just an eternal moment of mud and wreckage and incoming fire. She knows why she can’t sleep; it’s because that bright white trail is sitting there undefended, and the Spinnaker defensive forces’ little waist-high bipedal drone walkers could be slithering right down it, right up to her cabin, right up to Church, little explosive-laden fucks loitering silent in whatever cover they can until a manned mech or a person comes walking past. Never mind how long ago, and how many worlds away, all of that was.
She takes a blanket and the shotgun out on the back porch and sit in her rocking chair and stares at the trail, empty, on a whole mountain’s worth of empty, on a planet of mostly empty, which they’d picked special for the empty. She doesn’t load the gun, because saints, what if one of the neighbours from a dozen miles up the main road comes tearing over because someone has appendicitis or fell off a roof? Nobody’s actually coming down the mountain to mine the trail or to kill her or to blow up Church, and she ain’t gonna sleep any better for shooting some damn fool, if some damn fool come a-calling.
That, as it turns out, takes a couple hours to happen.
She cusses out loud when the flashlight starts bobbing down through the trees, all the way from the main road. Only one possible idiot is gonna haul over here on foot; only one possible reason. She casts a dark look over at the barn, where Church is apparently not minding its own business.
She boils the kettle; is back in her porch chair, jaw clenched and two mugs of tea steeped, by the time Vin makes it to the house.
“Aw, don’t be mad,” Vin says, tone cheery, eyes carefully taking her in, and settles into the other rocker. “Church is just lookin’ out for you.”
Andi grunts.
They sit and drink tea, and then Vin stands up. “In you go,” she says, and Andi is tired, too tired to get into it, so she hauls herself up out of the chair and goes inside, and lets Vin herd her into the bedroom, tuck her under a blanket. Kneel by the head of the bed to look her in the eye, lip pursed in a serious look that Andi doesn’t like on her.
“I’ve got this watch,” Vin says, and pats her shoulder. “Get some shut-eye,” and Andi closes her eyes over the bitter bone-deep knowledge that Vin will be out there, unloaded shotgun across her lap, diligently watching the harmless, empty trail, until Andi wakes up.
Andi’s hindbrain unclenches; enough to fall asleep.
