A roll of plastic sheeting is outside our door. She was right. Seamus was going to kill us, and then wrap our bodies in it.
No other doors lead off the hall. We stand together at the top of the stairs, listening. The house is quiet. The guards might be smoking outside. I follow Marian down the stairs, holding my breath, unable to hear how much noise we’re making over the pounding in my ears.
Marian leans forward to look toward the kitchen, then waves me ahead of her. The front door is maybe ten feet away. We’re almost there, I’m reaching out my hand for the doorknob, when I hear a floorboard creak. The bouncer is standing motionless in the dining room. His eyes widen when he sees us, and the blood splashed on our clothes.
The two of us freeze. We draw together, standing side by side, near enough for me to feel the warmth from her clothes and hair. A taut wire runs between us, pulling with every twitch of movement. The side of my body prickles, the hairs standing on my arm.
“Aidan,” says a man’s voice, and then the other guard rounds the corner into the room. “Oh, fuck.”
“Listen to me,” says Marian softly. “There’s a brick of Semtex in the closet. Unwrap the foil and place it on top of the boiler before you leave. The explosion will look like an accident.”
The air between us hums. I don’t know what she’s doing, why she thinks they’ll obey her. Marian says, “You’re going to say that Seamus and both of us were inside during the explosion. You’re going to say that we died.”
Slowly the bouncer reaches behind his back for his gun. He holds it at his side, looking back and forth between us. There is a row of icicles hanging from the window ledge. I notice them, and a lemon scent in the air.
Nothing she can say will convince him. The waste of it stuns me, when we’ve come this close. Finn. Finn, Finn, Finn. I won’t get to find out what he will be like. He’ll be lovely, I know that. A sound breaks from my throat.
“No one will thank you for killing us,” she says. “When this is over, people like us won’t be rewarded.”
Sunlight slides down the icicles. Aidan steps toward us, and I feel Marian flinch. He says, “Run.”
40
MARIAN IS AHEAD OF me, her hair swinging from side to side, her arms pumping as we race through the trees. She’s fast, even with the snow. Pine trees jerk past us, and it feels less like running than downhill skiing. With every step, the cold stabs through my feet.
The wet soles of Marian’s socks flash up toward me, kicking back as she sprints. I look past her to where the trees thin, and then we’re out of the woods and racing up a slope with the farmhouse behind us in the valley. My lungs burn. If the guards are outside, they will be able to see us, exposed on the hill.
We’re halfway to the ridge when a sound makes me pitch forward. I land on my hands in the snow and look back as a fireball bursts through the farmhouse walls and boils into the sky. Debris and glass rain down on the clearing. The flames keep expanding, mushrooming outward, then they subside and smoke pours from the blackened ruin.
“Come on,” says Marian, and I scramble to my feet. We reach the top of the slope and throw ourselves down the other side, spinning our arms for balance.
At the bottom of the hill, we turn onto the narrow track. No one has plowed it yet. There are tire marks in the snow, but they might be Seamus’s from when he drove to the farmhouse this morning. “There’s a main road ahead,” says Marian.
“How far?”
“Two miles.”
My feet have turned numb. I can’t feel them at all. It’s like running on stumps, like I have two peg legs.
Overhead, the clouds are opaled yellow and purple by a hidden winter sun. Every surface is banked in snow, and the trees are lacy with ice. The temperature is, I would guess, slightly below freezing. We need to worry about frostbite, and hypothermia. We pass a derelict farm building, a concrete shed with a rusted tin roof. I want to crawl inside, out of the cold and the wind, but Marian is pelting down the track.
When she turns around to check for me, her chin and nose are scalded red from the cold. We don’t seem to have covered any ground at all. The track stretches ahead of us, with white hills on either side, and no houses or telephone wires in sight.
“Are you sure this is the right direction?”
“Yes.”
A sound takes shape in the distance, and we both stop. A car is coming toward us. We’re in South Armagh, in an area controlled by the IRA. This person might help us, or drive us straight back to where we came from. We can’t have made it this far only for them to round us up.