Release me. Now. Or I ..........." Bear-lady stopped because she had put the muzzle against her shoulder and was pressing on it with the heel of her hand. It was not like the muzzle of a gun, being made of wood, but it was still deadly. She pulled the muzzle away and backed off a step. The big man was watching her through the eyeholes in his mask. He spoke, slowly, deliberately, for someone who had almost just not been shot: "Take your hands out where I can see them, and do it slowly." "I don't have any weapons," Bear-lady said. "I gave them all up before I came here." The man said, "You're lying." Bear-lady said nothing, and waited. The man drew his handgun from under his left armpit, and made a gesture with it. "Turn out your hands." "Why?" The man spoke without taking the gun out of its shoulder holster, and without moving: "We'll do this the easy way or the hard way." Bear-lady kept her hands at her sides. The man smiled. He gestured again. "Turn your hands out. And keep them out." Bear-lady did. "All the way," she said. The man cocked his head. "Show me." Bear-lady turned her head slowly, letting her right ear come to rest against her left shoulder and the back of her neck. "Are you looking at my hand?" she said. The man smiled and nodded. Bear-lady's hands, fingers interlaced with fingers, palm facing out, came around in front of her body. She held them with the palms up, so that they could be seen at all times. The man nodded again. "Let me have a look." Bear-lady opened her fingers and held her hands out to the side. The man turned them over, opened the palms, turned them over, opened them again. "You come with me," he said. "Where?" Bear-lady said. The man looked at her. "Show me." The man looked at her a moment longer. Then he turned and walked back through the narrow gap between the pallets and the tenting. She followed him. He was watching her the whole time. She saw him take his mask off and she looked away from his face, and from the muzzle of the sawed-off in his hand, as he searched her through the eyeholes in his mask. Then he opened a flap in the tenting, and the flaps were pulled back. He gestured to her with the muzzle of the sawed-off, and she went in, and closed the flap. She looked at the square of darkness. "Sit down," the man said. She looked around. There was a chair. She dropped into it. "That's it. You don't seem to understand the rules of the game. I said I'd have you, so I'll have you. You're going to sit there and wait until they decide that you're not much use to them." "Okay," she said. "They might decide that you're more of a risk than you're worth, and they might decide to cut you up and put you in a box with a stake through your heart. I don't know what the plan is, and they don't tell me. So, no matter what, there's not much sense in your trying anything. Why give them any more reasons to use you for a cat's-paw, eh? Now, how about getting the hell out of here, and not sticking around for any more stares, or having the muzzle on your shoulder, or—forget it, there's just no reason for you to be doing what they think you're doing. But the rules are there, they're a given, and they're understood. You get them wrong, you get burned." Bear-lady said nothing. "They might get a little testy, if you don't do what you're told. So you'd better pay attention. Let me tell you what you're going to do when the sun's up: you're going to clean up. Then you're going to go out and put some sticks together and make a fire. We have two hours, a little more. Are you following me?" She said, "Okay." "You got any questions?" "No." "That's all." He put his mask back on. She put hers on. He started for the opening. She looked at him as he went by. He stopped, turned his face up to her. "You ever see a dead man?" she said. He nodded. "What happens to them?" "I don't know," he said. "I don't know anything about it. It might be this thing." He opened the tent flap, and nodded. She walked to the end of the tent and turned left, and went along the way to the opening between the tenting and the pallets, and stepped outside, and went to her left, around the end of the pallets, and into the trees. She had almost gotten into a steady rhythm when a man's voice said, "Bear-lady!" Bear-lady was not carrying a bow at the time. She stopped, looked over her shoulder. Three men had come around the rear of the tents and were coming towards her. One was the guy who had found her in the woods, the one with the beard. The other two were with him. The man with the beard was carrying his bow. Bear-lady felt for her knife in her boot, and held her other hand up to indicate that she was not carrying it. The man with the bow was closer to her than the others were, but the other two were coming towards her at a steady walk, with their eyes on the ground. The man with the bow stepped forward, and said, "Where the hell you been?" "How do I know where I'm at?" Bear-lady said. "I just got here." The man with the bow said, "You'll be damn lucky if you aren't dead in the morning, coming here and doing what you did." "Then they didn't do a thing to me." The man with the beard said, "Shut your mouth, girl." The one called Bear-lady said, "What do you want with me?" The man with the bow gave the woman with the slitted eyes a disgusted glance. "Let's get a fire built," he said. "Then we'll see what the hell we're going to do." * * * When she had finished cleaning up, she waited a little while for the man with the beard, and then went back into the enclosure. He was sitting in his chair, by the fire, and she went across to his chair and sat in it. The man with the beard looked at her and said nothing. The other one, the one with the slitted eyes, nodded to the one with the beard, who stood up and walked around to where Bear-lady was sitting. "Who are you?" he said. Bear-lady said nothing. "What's your name?" She said, "Look, just tell me what you want, and how much you want for me to tell you, and then I'll do it." He grinned at her, not his grin, which she had seen, but some other grin that didn't show his teeth, not the best he could do. He looked away from her and around the compound again, as if he were searching for some lost thing that he thought was there. "You didn't hear what I said, did you?" Bear-lady said. "I'm not interested in doing what you think you want me to do, which isn't much, if you want to know what I think." "So how come you're here?" "Tell me, and I'll tell you. Right now, I don't like you, and I don't care for you. I'll tell you what I think. Your leader is a damned fool, and if you don't do something about it, pretty soon you'll have the whole world thinking like he does. I'll tell you what I think." The man with the beard turned his back on her and looked out into the woods for a moment, as if he were looking for some lost thing that was there. He went back to his seat, and sat down. The one called Bear-lady was still leaning forward, her hands on her knees, elbows on her thighs, her back bent at a right angle. The one called Bear-lady was there. Bear-lady was still there. The one called Bear-lady went back into the trees to the first person she had ever encountered who had told her that all she had to do was what she thought was right, no matter what anyone else thought.