Gilpatrick looked nervous as Kenzie carefully made her way up onto the truck bed, then motioned for Camisola to go watch her.

Jester walked over to me, and we watched from a bit more of a distance.

“What are the odds that you let me pull the trigger on that thing at some point?” he asked. “After all of this, isolated area, point it at a mountain or something.”

“I’m not even sure if there’s going to be an ‘after’,” I said, without thinking. I self-corrected. “Not like I think we’ll lose, but…”

“Things are going to be messy, whatever happens.”

“Yeah,” I told him.

“I really want to try firing that thing sometime,” he told me. “I’m a bit of a goofball, I know that, but I’m a determined goofball.”

“I know.”

“I set goals, I go for them. Sometimes they’re things nobody else would get. Like trying to get a poster on every square inch of wall in my room, after Gold Morning, when some stuff’s hard to get. But it got me up at five thirty to help my dad at his work for some extra cash before school.”

“Didn’t know you did that,” I said.

“I do it with people, too. Find that weird, dark girl who seems like she’s struggling to deal with the situation she’s in, and find an inoffensive way to be there for her.”

“Swansong appreciated it, I’m sure.”

“I’m talking about you,” the guy said.

I looked at him.

“Geez.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, except, “I appreciated it too.”

“We get through this,” he said, standing a little straighter, “And you’ll let me try firing that thing. Make it up to me for standing out in the cold, guarding this thing until you could take custody of it.”

Jester was a goofball, with a priority system I didn’t and would never really grasp. We didn’t have a lot of common interests, and we’d really only spent time together because we’d spent time together. Not even convenience, but habit, and the fact we didn’t really argue or struggle to get along. If I were uncharitable, I knew he’d sort of liked me and his goal had probably been to win me over, but he’d never pressed, so I could forgive that. To tap that part of me that had once been a judgmental twelve-year-old girl, Jester had bad acne at the corners of his face and around his nose, his hair was a little greasy and too long at the top, his choices in fashion puzzled me more than anything, and he was just the furthest thing from my type overall.

But standing there, at the edge of the world ending, he could talk about tomorrow and wanting something and I could respect that. The guy sounded like a man, juvenile as the ‘want’ was.