Chapter Fifteen

She was running the spine when she saw him.

A figure at the old line, kneeling in the grass. She slowed, and then she stopped, which she had not done at that place in seven years.

Cheta. On his knees in the wet grass with a pair of hand shears, trimming.

The grass was cut in a neat rectangle, maybe three strides by two, high on a wild ridge where nothing else was tended. She had been running past it at speed for five weeks.

This was where they had found him.

“Stop,” she said.

Cheta finished the stroke he was on.

“Stop. Why do you — nobody runs here. He’s not—” She couldn’t finish it. “STOP.”

He sat back on his heels and set the shears down in the grass and looked up at her. He was older than she kept remembering he was.

“Seven years,” she said. Her chest was still going from the climb. “Seven years you rake a dead man’s lanes. You cut his grass. You kept his track — and you couldn’t give me one sentence when it mattered.”

“He asked—”

“He asked you to watch me lose him without knowing I was losing him!”

Cheta didn’t move. His voice didn’t apologize. It never had.

“He knew you would choose him over the race. He could not live with being the reason you stopped.”

“It was my choice,” she said. “He stole it.”

The wind moved in the cut grass. Down the valley a dog was barking at something, and stopped.

Cheta looked at the shears. He looked at the rectangle of tended ground. Then he looked at her, and something behind his face moved — she watched it move and could not tell what it was. It went on for a long time, whatever it was. Longer than she had ever seen him take over anything.

Then he got up, slowly, in stages.

“Come with me,” he said.