shook her head
I
shook her head stubbornly. “But how come you’re doing all this for me? It doesn’t make any sense! You’ve got to have something better to do than—”
“Than spend my day with a teenage hooker?” he interrupted. “If you were any such thing, maybe so. But I don’t believe that any more than you really do. You know you hate it, but you think it’s all you are. We both know better. And, well, yeah, I could be working. I’ve got testing to do, but, hell . . . the machines can wait. You can’t. Not another day. Or else you wouldn’t have shown up at Kevin Barry’s looking for me.”
They were both silent for a moment, watching the huge ship at last move into the channel. It was at least twelve stories high, marked in a language Tania couldn’t identify. It bore a prancing horse atop a globe painted on one stack, above hundreds of multicolored boxes the size of tractor-trailers. Tannim stood up slowly and dusted his jeans off, then raised his arms and waved.
From beside a massive lifeboat a single figure waved back.
Tannim stood, grinning and satisfied,