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There was punctuality, and there was Taym, who was early to the point of being irritating. With kitchen duties and cage cleaning this was something of an advantage for whoever's name ended up on the roster next to his--something Jordan knew from experience--but for a job like this, it did nobody any good, especially Taym. He'd shown up far too early anyway.

Several intersecting interests had led to this: a peek at Moon duties, a desire to help America productively spend her time chasing an unrealistic pipe dream because it was better than the alternatives, a task ideally suited to being paired up with someone offensive-oriented, just in case things went awry (and when didn't they?). "Whoever'll be interested in helping out a new kid," he'd said sardonically, a decision he would come to regret.

He sat on the ground at the foot of a path that led through a narrow swath of jungle and down to the wreck of the old town, and he'd been there long enough for his legs to fall asleep, smoking an unreasonable number of cigarettes and tearing his way through a battered paperback yet again. He heard the approach of what must be the unfortunate a*****e who got invited or forcibly assigned to this work detail, but he didn't look up, holding up a finger in a "let me finish this page" gesture.

He read to the end of the page, and then as he tucked the book away into an inside pocket he glanced up and went very still, the momentary surprise coalescing into an "of course it is" eye roll. It was a very impressive eye roll.

He didn't say anything as he gathered up the handful of cigarette butts and shoved them into his pocket, more out of a concern for future lectures than any genuine urge to keep the Island clean (they were, after all, about to go poking around a falling-down ghost town). Nor did he say anything as he rose to his feet, holding all his angular limbs and distractedly shaking out the bottom of his coat.

"Miller," he said finally, flatly. "Someone up there likes putting us on the same schedule."

"Tentative," he said, still touchy on the subject, still afraid that people would perceive it as him fleeing danger after the Sahara escapade and getting shot by Caelius, rather than the clash of ideals that it was. Or, worse, afraid that anyone who'd shared the New Year's dream and remembered him would imagine him as desperately and pathetically grasping at the straws of being like the man he had been in that other reality.

Without comment he summoned, and he gestured with his elbow down the path before he remembered that this was no longer a training exercise of "Sun handles the violence while Death exercises observational skills," and shot him a nasty look before he set off down the trail instead. He appeared, at the very least, to be taking the work seriously even if he was not handling the situation with the professional aplomb that Jordan was. He felt the need to clarify, as he went: "Caelius and I do not see eye to eye on the role of an intelligence division."

He snorted, and apparently Jordan had done the fortunate (?) thing of stumbling on a topic that channeled Taym's irritation--ever-present, and currently amplified by Jordan's very presence--into a space that was almost productive, or at least less unproductive than aiming it into snipey comments.

"A little? A little." Agitated, he jabbed viciously at thin air, or possibly at some mentally-projected Death lead. "Sit a bunch of people down in a room and yell at them for failing to work as a team, threaten them, accuse them of being unable to fathom either a sense of human compassion or at least a professional sense of protectiveness--all of this totally ******** reasonable, by the way--and then turn around and gouge a kid's eye out. Shoot some mouthy a*****e in front of a crowd of people after you sever him from his weapon and leave him to bleed out on the floor because he has concerns. Great ******** show of consistency, a*****e."

Another violent swipe at nothing. He was not being loud--he almost never was--but he grew quieter and quieter where someone else might have grown louder and louder, in an unsettling demonstration of his reaction to anger: a simmering bottling-up instead of an explosion; a tapering-off that nonetheless grew no less intense.

"And what ******** concerns? Only that the orders you're ******** giving him are ones that are going to turn everyone against each other and cause exactly the kind of suspicion and in-fighting you were screeching at us to abandon. ******** Salem witch trial s**t, demanding results, throwing treason around, and can't even look two feet in front of his goddamned face to find the traitors and the murderers running around in the same ******** office."

And maybe, for an instant, it would seem he was talking about Rep, but he abruptly veered off verbal course, addressing Jordan directly: "Lawrence Weiman. Jan, you know? Tell me why I'm supposed to be running around rooting out communists for McCarthy when there's a walking act of treason sitting in the same goddamned office. A lack of results does not exactly motivate me to go spy on my coworkers day and night. Is it somehow less a traitorous act if you don't sign it with the symbol of some theatrics-prone splinter cell? And what exactly, if I can ask the question without getting my weapon severed and a bullet in my arm, is the point of an intelligence division that gathers intelligence and then uses it to educate no one? I'm going to get 'information is a right, not a privilege' tattooed on my goddamned forehead as often as I've had to say it in the past couple of months. We keep sending out a bunch of--a bunch of ******** kids, they are kids--and we don't even arm with any kind of basic--there is no infrastructure for disseminating--there's--Jesus ******** Christ."

Incoherency had set in.

"Melodramatic, secretive assholes, the entire ******** division. I would bet good ********' money--" with incoherency, the accent too, and he was quiet now, dangerously quiet, the volume one would use in a church if not even remotely the tone "--that every poor b*****d who shows up like that Mikael kid all wide-eyed and basically kidnapped was picked up by a Death recruiter looking for cannon fodder to distract the bad guys long enough for them to cram some shiny new piece of information in their pocket, presumably for the overwhelming joy of later stuffing it into an evidence bag, locking it into a safe, and then throwing the safe to the ******** kraken, then gleefully informing Life division that they've lost a prime research opportunity, because ******** interdivisional cooperation when there's decent rivalries to be had."

He ran out of breath, steam, and lack of awareness all simultaneously, abruptly remembering who he was talking to and where they were, serendipitously saved from the urge to immediately apologize by a rough, violent cough, just one, cut off in the middle and choked back.

Jordan's answer was followed by a long silence that had a vaguely stunned quality. He'd been thrown for an immediate loop--it was obvious--by the fact that he got a civil answer at all, before latching on with keen-eyed interest first, with a snort of obvious agreement, to the idea of civilian cover stories (a problem with which Taym was intimately acquainted); and then to Jordan's outline of what sort of things Suns and Moons ought to be receiving primers on.

It was a lot to process, and not least because he hadn't expected any of it--had expected, even from Jordan, a snipey, cynical, dismissive comment; an insult, maybe, or even a fist, it was hard to say.

He answered, finally, in a voice that was too angry for what he was saying, the tone an odd-fitting skin for the words: "That's a huge ******** shame," he spat, not sarcastic but exhausted, frustrated, enraged at the entire ******** world and especially this little island of it, "because everything you just said is more sensible than anything anyone in Death leadership has said to me in the entire year I've been here. That is exactly the sort of s**t this division ought to be doing. It's what I wanted to do," he finished bitterly. "And then I gave up."

"Knowledge as defense," he agreed, idly kicking a clod of earth down the path in front of them, a boyish little gesture: one of many that occasionally undercut both the nervey tension of him and the scowling attempts to look cool and aloof. "I guess I might have an opportunity to find out, either way. I got more useful conversation out of one sit-down with Edith than I've gotten in a year of trying with Caelius." Even if it had been attended by the world's most horrifying food. "I guess you ought to base your division of choice on more than your favored style of leadership, but I don't know what the point of catering to your skillset is, if you can't do a damned thing with it."