"I love talking to your back, Eric."

"Good, it's been lonely for conversation."

"What are you fussing with back there?"

He didn't answer.

"Need help?" Sarcastic.

"Yeah. I need you to keep your head down."

She crunched her carrot loudly in response.

Eric, still struggling with something heavy in the water, paused, glanced over his shoulder at Tracy. "I mean it, Trace. Head down. Something's not right here."

What little light there was in the night air seemed immediately drawn to Eric's glacial face, flaring along the thin twisting scar that climbed out of his shirt collar, up his long neck, along the curve of his boxy jaw, then exploding in a round patch on his cheek. The pattern resembled the sparking of a fuse.

Tracy had known him for months, since before the disasters and afterward at the survivor's camp where they'd made him Warlord. Before he lost everything he'd loved. She was used to seeing the scar. Mostly she found it sexy, exotic. It gave off an aura of danger that spiced his rawboned good looks. Some days in some lights you couldn't even see it. Yet other times its intensity still startled her, the way it seemed to almost pulse with life like a winding strip of plastic explosive pasted along his face. The threat of violence lurking beneath the smooth surface skin.

Did he know the image he projected-tough, hard-nosed, ruthless-and how at odds that was with the other sides of him she'd come to know? Like last week when he'd recounted the last battle of the War of the Roses-Bosworth- where Henry Tudor finally defeated and killed Richard III in 1485. Describing all this while scraping out the slimy intestines of a rabbit he'd caught bare-handed and was about to cook with plants he'd dug up that looked suspiciously like weeds to her, but were, he claimed, herbs used by the Hopi Indians. This was also the same man who yelled at her to keep up with him, then slowed down so that she could.