“For threatening us.”
“Yes.”
Quinn nodded. She had her blond hair pulled back into a loose diagonal braid that pillowed into a side bun. She oozed the self-assurance of a woman with the upper hand in a salary negotiation. Shane opened her mouth to begin clearing the air, but before she could, Murdock and Kai were at the hostess stand and then on their way to the table.
“Shane, darling,” said Murdock, taking her in his arms. His fat stretched his plain white T-shirt to the point of comedy. She saw he had a new tattoo on his chunky forearm, a patch of crammed script she couldn’t make out. He’d shaved his head clean. But for the eyebrows, he looked a bit like Allen. “Where’s Lali-girl?” he asked. When he sat, Murdock overflowed the chair, his gut pushing against the table.
“She went with her friends’ family to the Ozarks for the week,” said Shane. “Easier that way.”
“Hey,” was all Kai said, and he hugged her as well. He wore a posh blue jacket over a black shirt, which looked too warm. His brow was as smooth as she remembered. He seemed never to age. His eyes were murky and sad. He looked quite beautiful.
She cleared her throat.
“I was telling Quinn how sorry I am for the threat. I just think we’re moving too fast on—”
“You want to get a drink first?” Quinn interrupted.
“A fantastic idea, Quinn,” said Murdock. Shane closed her mouth.
They ordered pints of hazy IPA, cocktails, and a dozen oysters. Shane stuck with water. The restaurant was filling up, like a meeting of the local chamber of commerce had let out, and all of Bay St. Louis’s slickest wheelers and dealers were hungry to support their most endangered restaurant.
ARCHIE Had put Kai in his place. He’d demanded there be accountability for Allen, that someone pay a price for what he’d had to read about online. All Archie wrote was, There will be no price. You take orders from the ladies now. Thx. Even as he hugged Shane, his oldest living friend, he wanted to scream in her face, How could you? First Allen and now this? Who the fuck are you?
“We shouldn’t go through with this,” Shane said abruptly. “Or I guess, you all shouldn’t go through with this. Since I’m no longer in the picture.”
Murdock looked out at the water. Kai cast his gaze at the clean white tablecloth and left it there. Only Quinn looked her in the eye.
“You see it, Shane,” she said. “All the years of talk about the end of the world, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s the beginning. And no one can wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.”
“That’s why we’re trying to build something that will outlast us,” Shane said fiercely. “That will live on no matter how dark it gets.”
Quinn took her fingertips to her eyes, closed and rubbed them. “Will it? With anything we’ve done so far? When all was said and done, Shane, a lot more was said than done.”
“What does that even mean?” she demanded.
“It means you were right in Wisconsin,” said Kai. His gaze did not leave the table. “And I was wrong. We spent all those years thinking we could chip away at their power, and all we did was give them a rationale to stop limiting their own violence. Or did you not see what happened in Washington?”
MURDOCK When Shane had been a young woman, beautiful and strong, she’d sat him down in the Bob Evans in Ohio to walk him through her plan. It sounded far-fetched, yes, but something about her bearing made it also seem realistic, plausible even. She had a weapon inside her—or she was the weapon—and he could feel himself craving the action again, the battle rhythm. And they made it happen. His bombs went off, and they all escaped like bandits in the night. Yet the more years that went by, the more implacable it all felt. The more they seemed like gnats on the heels of a few dark, fucked-up immortals, and the gods, they just swat you and carry on all the same. He wished then, only briefly, that none of this had ever happened. That he’d spent his life after the war drinking down his own beating heart instead.
Shane looked to Murdock. “Kel? Tell me you’re not with them on this.”
Murdock kept right on staring at the sea. He made a soft shrug of his shoulders. “I’ll get home tomorrow and barely remember this. I’ll have a thought or memory, and I can remember having the thought or remembering the thing, but I can’t recall the thing itself. Little like going insane, slow-rolling, for thirty-some years.”
“That’s not an answer,” she hissed.
“Oh, Shane, my love.” He finally looked at her, sadly. “There are no answers no more.”
KAI Ground his fingernails into his palms. It wasn’t just the massacre in D.C. that had rewired his thinking. Across the world, they were finally breaking through. He wanted to tick off on his fingers for Shane: The hundreds of aboriginals and whites in Australia who’d blockaded then stormed the Carmichael Mine, destroying millions of dollars of equipment before being beaten and arrested by police. The Minyun in China leading sabotage campaigns against government, military, and fossil-fuel targets. The two women who’d set themselves on fire outside the school of the Indian prime minister’s daughter so that the whole country had to watch them burn. The twelve-year-old Palestinian girl who was organizing people to walk into Israeli bullets in Gaza, demanding food, water, and release. And right here, Louisiana’s own: the Mossville Raiders monkeywrenching the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries that ruled the acid wetlands. This is what we worked for! Kai wanted to scream at her. Why are you cowering now? We are the fucking Weathermen, and they are finally afraid of us.
The waiter approached, and they went quiet. He babbled about what a nice day it was, how the weather had talked about rain, but here they were serving outside, et cetera. Shane went through the motions of listening, but her heart pounded and her mind spun through every fear and regret.
Kai waited until the waiter was out of earshot. He said, “I’m sure you’ve seen these people self-immolating.”
“So?”
“And the group that drove a boat into the Petrobras platform—”
“Yes, Kai, I have access to the news too.”
“We’ve served as an inspiration, Shane.” He leaned forward and thumped two fingers on the table. “People are pouring gasoline on themselves. They are putting the violence of this system in front of those perpetrating it. Now it’s on us to take the next step. The financial and industrial elite are not ashamed of themselves, and they’re not about to let go of their power. We had no idea how far they would go. We sat around for too long telling ourselves we were a political movement or a social movement. We carried that fairy tale for so long because we didn’t want the alternative to be true. Because the truth is, this is a war.”
“And people have died, Kai.”
“And people have died,” he agreed. The wind gusted again, wetting rich men’s eyes, while the sound of silverware scraping plates and low chatter filled the silence.
Murdock thumped his forearm down on the table, twisting his enormous body to display his new tattoo.
“Look!”
There was a beat. Shane read it anyway: TASTES LIKE CHICKEN AND WE’LL ALL BE WITH GOD SOON.
Quinn said, “I don’t get it, Kel.”
He retracted the arm. “Yeah, neither do I. Barely remember when I had it inked. Just woke up one night with it in my head, then a couple days later there I am applying moisturizer stuff to a crusty new tat. I’m pretty sure it’s something this guy I knew in EOD said. He was like my mentor, my father, my brother, and now I don’t remember his name or what he looked like. But maybe it just means we’ll all pass on and, disappointingly, every fucking thing just tastes like chicken.” He downed the rest of his beer. “Just a theory, though.”