I could tell him he doesn't have to. I've been walking myself where I'm told for years now.
I don't tell him. Somebody put him on me, and doing what he's told is the only thing either of us knows how to do this morning.
The chapel door's open.
I've never been through it.
For years, I've stood outside that door more times than I can count, waiting, holding something, delivering something, andI've never once had a reason to be on the other side of it, because prospects don't go in there.
That's the whole point of it.
What happens in there is for men who've earned the right to be in the room, and I haven’t earned it.
I'm about to go in anyway, and every man at that table knows exactly what it means.
They're all there.
Amara at the head, Razor on her right, the patched men down both sides, and the big reaper burned into the middle of the wood.
There's a chair pulled out at the foot of the table, away from everybody, and that one's mine.
I don't sit.
Nobody's told me I can sit and I'm not going to until somebody does.
Python clocks that I'm standing, and his jaw works, and I can't tell if he respects it or if he's deciding it's one more thing I'm doing wrong.
"Sit down, Rooster," Amara says.
I sit. I put my hands on my thighs where I can keep them, and I don't put them anywhere else.
"Tell everyone," Amara says. "All of it. Same as the office. They've heard the gist. Now they hear it from you."
So I tell them everything.
Same as her office, except there's fourteen of them and the door's shut and every face is pointed at me.
My name. Sierra Vista. Where my father worked for nineteen years, how I was a sixteen-year-old on a job site. Everything about Ironwood. What they are, where they came from, and what they did to my mother for a town her grandmother was born in.
I get to the federal building in Tucson and I speak flatly. "My father and I informed. We gave them everything we had on the organization."
Nobody says anything for a second.
Then Python leans forward on his forearms. "You're a rat."
"Python," Amara says.
"No. I want him to say it. In here. At this table." He's looking at me the way you look at a thing you're about to break to see what's inside it. "You sat in a federal building and gave up a whole organization. Yes or no?"
"Yes."
"Say the word."
It’s hard to hold his eyes and I do it anyway, because a man who looks at the table right now is a man who thinks he did wrong, and I don't.
"I informed the Feds on everything Ironwood was doing." My voice comes out level. "Call it what you want. I won't argue the word with you."
"Rat's the word." He says it slowly, testing whether it'll move me.
