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She drinks most of what’s left, but offers me the last swig. I shake my head so she finishes the bottle and tosses it into the fire.

“What happened to your face?” she says. She pulls down my shirt a few inches. Spots more scars. “And the rest of you.”

“Never follow a foul ball into a wood chipper,” I say. “We didn’t even win the game.”

She ignores my stupid joke and says, “Were you a soldier? A boxer?”

“You got me. I fought a bit,” I say, wondering if she ever saw the gladiator pit in Pandemonium.

“You must not have been very good at it.”

“On the contrary. I beat pretty much everyone. Just some were harder to knock down than others.”

I flash on Hellbeasts, the ones that spit fire, the ones with pincers as big as a man, the ones with teeth like buzz saws.

Daja says, “I didn’t have my first fight until after I was damned. Isn’t that funny? I was scared as hell.”

“Did you win?”

“Nope. But I got better.”

“And now look at you. No one here would lift a finger.”

She looks at me.

“Even you?”

“I’m not looking for trouble.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, not sounding entirely convinced. “Did you hear the explosion before?”

“What explosion?” I say, as innocent as a newborn bunny.

“One of the cars. The gas tank went up. It’s been burning all night.”

She points and I follow her finger.

“Oh, that. Yeah. I saw that.”

“And you weren’t interested enough to crawl out of that bucket?”

I pick up another bottle. It’s empty, so I drop it.

“I’m from California. Pretty much everything is on fire these days.”

She gives me a look.

“There’s a drought.”

“Mmm.”

“And we kind of had an apocalypse thing not that long ago.”

“Mmm.”

We stand there for an awkward minute, staring into the fire.

I say, “Why are you over here talking to me like we’re friends? You wanted me dead a couple of days ago.”