Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy
Page 38
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“His heart scalds are his own. You cannot bear them for him.”
“Wise words.”
“I have stumbled upon such now and then.”
“I should, perhaps, take them to heart.”
“You can always endeavor to try.”
“It might be that you should as well.”
Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall
It was, she thought, the secrecy of it all that got to Karen the most. Subtlety was not a part of Karen’s repertoire (she would have been amazed that Will hadn’t noticed that he was being tailed in the first place if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was, after all, Will), and she didn’t really have much of an appreciation for it in others. She would, if pressed, have told you that it all came down to the question of why bother. She didn’t really see what subtlety could get you that a plain old in your face approach couldn’t. She got the impression from the others that she had been introduced to who were sharing with Will on his little pilgrimage to the land of the adventuresome that they didn’t think she really believed what Will had persuaded them to tell her.
That wasn’t the case at all. She was, after all, dealing with Will (even if he had been driving her mad with the unexplained personality shifts), and she knew Will. He wouldn’t be investing himself in this so heavily (or at all really) if he didn’t believe that it was absolutely necessary. What she didn’t believe was that they had all come to some sort of agreement that sneaking around in the background was a better way to deal with things than what her grandfather would have termed a “full frontal assault.” They clearly knew things about Will’s brother and sister-in-law, but they didn’t ever seem to use them. She had heard one of them mutter something about the situation being a chess game once, and Karen felt that explained her feelings on the subject quite nicely.
She never had liked chess. It was too much about what the other person was doing instead of what you wanted to be doing, and she didn’t see the fun of a game that was all about someone else. That’s exactly what they were all doing. They were playing some sort of a game with Will’s family that involved watching and reacting instead of charging ahead and making them play defense for a change. She didn’t get it. She didn’t really want to get it. What she wanted was for them to wrap it up so that she could get her Will back, and they could all move on with their lives.
It seemed reasonable enough to her. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t find herself enjoying being around the others -- she did. They were all so very earnest that it was amusing to watch (and eye roll worthy how often they seemed to miss things despite how very earnest that they were). Anna was particularly fun to prod a little because she always clammed up so quickly and pretended not to hear any of it even when you could see that she was sitting there seething. It would, of course, have been funnier if getting her life with Will back on track hadn’t been dependent on all of them and their snail’s pace way of dealing with things.
Karen did what she could to be helpful (even though she knew good and well that they all considered her to be anything but). They were forever going on and on about Anna’s computer program and the right and wrong way to use it and what Meredyth Walsh might or might not be able to do with it. (How Meredyth Walsh had possession of it in the first place was not a question that anybody ever bothered to answer for her.) If it did what they all claimed it could (and after watching Anna work with computers for a while, Karen was inclined to think that it probably could), then there seemed to Karen to be an awful lot of wasted opportunities for using it that no one else seemed to think of (or to dismiss too quickly for some sort of ethical reason or something like that).
It wasn’t that Karen didn’t have a healthy respect for ethics. She did. It was sort of central to what she did for a living. It was just that she wasn’t quite sure where they should come into play when one was engaged in the situation in which they found themselves. It was her opinion that if the structure of the world as you knew it was at stake (and they genuinely believed that it was), then was it really the moral high ground to make sure you didn’t “end up as what you were fighting against” when balanced against the chance that that meant that you lost?
Karen didn’t have an answer to that question, but it bothered her that the others (minus Will) never even seemed to ask it. She thought she would be rather inclined to err on the side of saving the world, but it wasn’t as if she was included in the decision making process. There were very clear lines drawn in all of this, and her role was clearly delineated as observer (and certain someones weren’t overly happy that she was even around in that capacity).
Karen was, however, still Karen, so it wasn’t as though she was keeping her mouth shut. She asked uncomfortable questions and kept up a running commentary and all in all did everything that she could to try to push the rest of them into stepping up their game a little. This might be the be all and end all of existence for the rest of them, but she and Will had a life to get back to (and she would just as soon that they get around to it sooner over later). She didn’t much care how many feathers she ruffled in order to make that happen. She was in a holding pattern again, but she wasn’t inclined to settle into this one. She wanted it over.
She prodded at Anna because she read the situation for what it was and that was that acknowledged or not (resented or not) Will was following Connor’s lead. The only one that had any chance of getting Connor to try a different track (or even increase the speed of the one that he was on) was the elder McKee. She used liberal doses of sarcasm with Connor because she really, really needed to use sarcasm on someone (it served as a pressure release for her temper), and she ignored the kid. Mostly, that was for self-serving reasons.
She thought he needed a good healthy dose of reality (of the “the girl dropped you and likely used you in the process so move on already and stop with the clinging to illusions” variety), but Anna seemed to be set on coddling him. She was set on getting Anna to do what she wanted, so she was willing to drop the matter (most of the time) to further that particular agenda. (She was learning to prioritize.) She just avoided speaking to Kyle whenever possible because his woe filled, put upon expressions caused her to have an overwhelming urge to open her mouth and start dictating, and she just wasn’t used to having to fight back that impulse. She figured it was best to avoid the temptation, and it wasn’t as though she actually wanted to be spending any time around the teenager that couldn’t adjust himself to the fact that sometimes people just let you down.