What even the heck is going on here

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   The first live round Jon ever heard fired was by Daisy’s hand. It was both louder and quieter than he thought it would be. Daisy shot Mike Crew just once, straight to the point. In through the forehead, out through the back of the neck. He was killed instantly, and Jon Knew it in the moment. The trajectory was such that no dirt or viscera sprayed on Jon, but the experience still left him feeling like he was covered with a corrosive residue a week later. Out, damned spot.

   Afterwards, Daisy had holstered her gun. Calm, perfunctory. Efficient. Jon had noticed at the time that her safety was still off, but he also had a wild thought that her gun would never betray her, so of course she could leave it like that.

   She didn’t outright threaten to shoot him. The possibility pulsed through the air, electric and unignorable. The smell of gunpowder felt like an asterisk deep in his nostrils. When she pressed him to the tree, he felt the handle digging into his own hip. But the gun never again left its place at her thigh. Sharper, more pressing concerns arose, like a knife to his throat. She wanted it to be personal. She wanted him to suffer.

   Sometimes, Jon wished she’d just shot him.

   She only pointed a gun at him once. They were drunk on the floor of Jon’s office, leaning against the desk, when Daisy pulled it out. An uncomfortable feeling curled out of Jon’s esophagus in a belch, and Daisy started giggling. She leaned in close, knuckles pressing into his thigh where they curled around the trigger, and whispered, “I’m not supposed to have this.” The Eye helpfully informed him the moment her thumb slid the safety off, in a deep-worn habit. She brought it up to her eye, shoulders hunched comically with the improper form, squinted down the sight at Jon’s heart, and pantomimed a shot with a soft “Pow!”

   Jon stared for a moment, waiting to panic, but it didn’t happen. The overdue comedic timing on his dramatic collapse could be blamed on inebriation, but the same couldn’t be said for his evident lack of fight or flight. Daisy could have shot me just now echoed through his head, though it was quickly swallowed up by a secondary refrain: she wouldn’t shoot me.

   She swatted his hands away when he tried to pick it up himself, and then explained at length how it was the wrong type of gun to play Russian Roulette. Jon couldn’t remember which one of them suggested it.

   A few days later, Jon saw her hand it to Basira. Casually—just placed it on her desk as she walked past, though she sped up minutely as she left. Basira had given it a complicated look, before putting it in a drawer and going back to her work. Neither woman said anything of the encounter. Jon went about the rest of his day knowing there was a gun in the office.

   Knowing that he was walking around with guns under his feet here in the safehouse was a foreign experience to Jon. It could maybe be compared to the early days after the worm attack, when he had first discovered the tunnels and believed a murderer lived within them. Of course, this still wasn’t a perfect comparison—the guns couldn’t exactly fire without someone to take aim and pull the trigger.