Out

The waiting was the hardest thing she had done. The whole of that second day she had to move through the store being nothing, being a tired beaten girl chewing on Carla's offer, when every nerve in her was strung to the coming dark, when she had to look across the floor at Henry by the fires and not let her face say goodbye to this place, not let it say anything at all. She ate the day's paste and did not taste it. She let a guard walk her up to the office and sat while Carla talked and answered in the flat dead voice and did not hear a word, and Carla watched her with the tired knowing eyes and Laura was sure, twice, that the girl saw straight through her, that it was already over, and each time Carla only went on talking and let her go. She did not know which was worse, that she might be caught, or that she might not, that in a few hours she would be running through gunfire with everything she had staked on a boy she'd known two years telling the far-side gang a lie and a ten-year-old waking cold in the dark. She watched the light go down out of the high plated windows. She made herself ready the only way she knew, which was to go over it and over it until her body knew the moves without her.

The wall lit up a little after full dark, an orange bloom going up in the east where the fuel dump was, and the shout went through the store, and it happened exactly as Wyatt had said it would. Every gun went to the front wall. Every eye turned out.