Anne got back to work the next day. Prometheus had been hoping she would take a couple days off, but when he saw her come into the garage, he didn’t have the heart to tell her to go home.
Besides, he figured. Where else would she have to go?
She kept herself busy, working furiously while not actually getting much done. Still, she fiddled with stuff. Tinkered with things. Took the longest, dumbest path possible to solve the simplest problems.
It took her a couple days to ask what Prometheus knew about Shade’s death. He figured he wouldn’t tell her until she asked him.
She’d waited until Sharise had gone out to lunch. That meant it was just him and Anne, alone in the garage.
She sat directly under a light, staring at the gauntlet she’d been working on. She didn’t touch it, didn’t even really think about the problem all that much. She merely looked at it, letting the beauty of the gauntlet — a silver thing, with one of the fingers broken off after some super-accident — keep her grounded.
“How’d she go?” Anne had asked.
Prometheus, who’d been looking at the jizz-like substance through the microscope, because it was so strange and unexplained, looked up.
He almost asked what she meant, but he knew better. He knew what she meant.
And so he told her: of the horrible way Shade had died, of the way she’d ended up in the dumpster and the organization who’d done it. The Killer’s Gallery.
He told her everything.
Much to his surprise, she didn’t show much of a reaction. She nodded her head, thanked him for being honest, and went back to work.
MEGAPULP 