The woman with black hair and the two chairs made of darkness. Shadow, who had told him to call her that.
He thought about the way Randy had phrased it. The way he had said she without specifying who she was, and the way his expression had carried something specific when he said it, the kind of specific that did not come from professional familiarity.
"I don't know." Neil said, which was the honest answer about whether she had come through the settlement specifically, because he did not know her movements beyond the single encounter on his path home.
Randy looked at him sideways.
Then he sighed, a short and genuine sound, and looked back at the sky.
"Right." He said. "Of course you don't."
They talked for a few minutes, nothing consequential, the easy back and forth that Randy used to fill space when he was thinking about something he was not going to discuss directly, and Neil participated in it without pushing on the parts that were clearly not open for pushing.
