Page 14 of Forbidden Protector
Nothing.
"Blackwater. It's flying a grid."
He watches the priest's hands. Not the sky, not me. "I know what it's flying."
"Then say it out loud. Say drone."
"You'd write it down."
"That's the job."
"That's the problem."
It runs the lane east to west, holds, turns. I get fifteen seconds of it, two full lanes and the spacing, enough for somebody in Salt Lake to tell me what I'm looking at without asking a Blackwater anything.
Then it comes off the grid.
It leaves the pattern mid-lane, which nothing has done in ten minutes, and it crosses the open ground between us and the tree line, and it stops.
Over me.
Not over the grave. Not over a hillside of people in black wool.
It holds there and drops maybe thirty feet, close enough that I can hear it now under the wind. A small hard sound like a wasp in a jar. It hangs above my head and does absolutely nothing else.
Two seconds. Three.
Nobody around me looks up. They are burying a man.
Then it lifts, slides back to where it left off, and resumes the grid one lane over, patient as a county clerk, finishing what it started.
My arm is still up. I have all of it.
Holt has not moved his eyes off the tree line the entire time, which is when I understand he was never watching the drone. He has been watching the ground it came from.
"That was for me."
"Left," he says. "Now."
And I go, because this time it isn't him moving me.
His shoulder comes over with me. The hand rises again, that inch of air, with nowhere left to put me.
"Do that a third time and I'll put you on the ground."
"You could put me somewhere," he says, and looks at the sky. "Not the ground."
He's close enough now that his breath comes past me in the cold, and I catch myself standing in it. I stay a full second longer than I need to before I step back.
"You shaved," I say.
That gets me the first cut of his eyes since the church. One second, all the way down and back up.
"So did the priest."
"The priest didn't sit behind me."
"No." He looks at the sky again. "He didn't."
