I made a note to ask around about opium. Made another note to look over my list of Hydo’s known associates.

Finished deliveries.

A suicide bomber on the way home.

I did what I could. Not much. I think I stopped a boy’s bleeding long enough for him to get to the hospital. Who knows what happened to him there. Traffic got messed up for miles. Once the EMTs and paramedics showed up, I spent most of my time passing out water. A lady thanked me when I saw her fainting in her car and got her a bottle. A witness said the bomber was a woman, a New America Jesus insurgent. He said he knew she was a NAJi because she screamed “something about Satan” before she blew herself up. He also said she was staggering like she was drunk. NAJis don’t drink. A Guard told me that looking at the size of the crater she left, she was probably staggering under the weight of the bomb. He said that kind of blast was what they got in Iraq from car bombs. I said something about how at least he wasn’t there anymore, and he asked me if I was “fucking joking.” Almost noon before I got home.

Francine had to leave Rose alone with the baby.

She was in the backyard with her laptop. There was gardening stuff lying around, but she was logged into her Chasm Tide account, playing her elemental mage, Cipher Blue, trying again to get through the Clockwork Labyrinth on her own.

The baby was on a blanket next to her, under an umbrella, crying. As I came up, Blue was being dismembered by a skeleton made of brass gears, wire, and rusting springs. Beenie says no one gets through the Labyrinth on their own. You have to join a campaign, but Rose refuses to try it that way. Which isn’t surprising.

She closed the laptop and grabbed a garden trowel and started stabbing the dry earth, digging at the roots of one of the weeds that’s taken over the garden. I picked up the baby and asked how she had been and Rose told me she had just started crying again right before I came home.