With Big Bad Bart’s brains blasted, I let the rest of Teams A and B geek the other Eighty-Eights and have fun with their grenades while Paco and I slipped outside for a quick discussion. It took all the jam I had to suppress my reaction—the shakes, the nausea, the sense of absolute fragging wrongness —that comes every time I’ve had to kill someone. (Every time? Well, to be honest, priyatel, that’s both times—including Bart.) Anyway, I was sure that showing such a reaction would probably diminish me in Paco’s eyes, something decidedly counterproductive at the moment. So I bit back on everything, shoving it into the old emotional gunnysack where my nightmares go looking for raw material.