After (62 page)

Through the cemetery, past the church, on for another two miles and into the walnut orchard. Now that Nix was tucked away, out of site again, Gareth hurried out to the road, found the sign post, and turned the diamond-shaped sheet of metal a hundred and eighty degrees so the side painted black faced the orchard, and the side painted white faced the road. Then he dashed back to Nix.

They waited. About a quarter of an hour later, there was a sound. Footsteps. Two solid shadows closed in, then halted. One of them clicked out a series of flashes on the ground with a mechanical torch, powered by rare, precious batteries. Nix hammered out the response with a pair of stones she'd found in the dirt while they waited, then dropped them and rested her hand on her gun. The shadows came to life again, moved nearer. Two men. Men in the uniform of the Guard.

Gareth raised and aimed his gun.

“No,” she whispered.

She touched his arm, coaxed it down.

“You Nix?” one asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who's this?”

“Artel.”

“We weren't expecting him,” the ersatz guard said to Nix as if Gareth weren't even there.

“He's alright. He's killed a lot of men, helping me.”

“Look, we have to be careful. More careful than usual,” the same one said again.

The other shadow stayed silent.

“He had intel, before. Could have undone the orphanage op back in Goodland.

Could have gotten those girls rounded up, and the rest of us chained to the pillory. But he helped them get away. And saved me. He's an asset.”

“This op. There can't be any mistakes.”

Nix said, “In fifteen years, I've never brought a man into the resistance. I know what's at stake. I wouldn't risk him if I had any doubt.”

After a frustrated silence, the man sighed, “All right. Follow me. No lights. No talking.”

He led them through the orchard, away from the road, across the railroad tracks, and into the damp cellar of an ancient mansion. All Nix's skin went taut, all her hair prickled.

“Where are the others?”

“Another site. Nearby.” The man in the guard uniform checked his watch. “They should be here in thirty. Just sit tight.”

Who the fuck did this ass think he was? Telling her to sit tight like she was some virgin rescued on the eve of her first marriage. She'd fucking orchestrated half this goddamned op.

“I'm sorry,” the man said when he'd lit a lantern and saw her face. “It's been a tense day. We've got a lot of very scared, very young women. I've spent the last few hours just trying to keep them from panicking and doing something reckless.” He smiled, mocking himself, she thought, and said, “I'm Miguel. And that's Jason, back there.”

She made herself nod. Smile.

“And your reputation precedes you,” Miguel said. “You've been doing this a long time. Gotten a lot of women over the line. And never come, yourself.”

His smile, the dimples and creases framing it, his brown eyes and his closeness were smothering her, pressing her back, weighing her down. She fished her gun from her pocket, checked for the tenth time that it was fully loaded.

“But you're coming along this time, right? You won't believe it. It's like a different planet.”

She faked another smile. Caught Gareth watching her. All of them watching her.

The three of them. Not in a cave, stone and moss, natural things. Buried alive in another dank basement, under another rotting house.

Gareth was too close. Almost touching. She should have known he wouldn't keep it up, giving her space. Letting her breathe without inhaling his scent. At least Miguel drifted away and turned his focus to a pack he was filling with rags and bottles. The arson kit. But the other one closed in on her. Blond and fair and green-eyed. Just a boy.

“You're wounded.”

Buried alive. The stench of rot, the muck gripping her boots, holding her down, and the heat of them, those men, their breath and sweat seeping into her, filling her throat, choking her.

The blond one reached for her, tried to touch her. She blocked with one arm, snatched up her knife, caught herself. Just.

Noise. Loud and deep and male. Voices.

Gareth. “Nix. He wasn't trying to hurt you. He was just going to check your wound. Put the knife down.”

The blond kid was panting like a hunted rabbit, tears rising up over those green eyes. She lowered her knife, let the kid go. Gareth's voice, syllables and sounds chafed and swirled by her ear, and over there, smile and dimples and creases gone, Miguel had the kid by the arm, brown eyes burning into green, saying, “You know better. You know what she's been through, what they've all been through. Someone needs tending, you ask. You wait. You don't touch until you have permission. Got it?”

The kid with blond hair and tear-veiled green eyes nodded.

“Tell the kid I'm sorry,” Nix said to Gareth. “Tell him about the other night, if you think it'll help.”

Kid. She laughed at herself. He was nearly as old as Gareth, probably. Eighteen, nineteen. But he'd never killed. Never even seen anyone killed, maybe. Or the public gang rapes. Or the brandings. That's why he looked so young. Like a child.

While Gareth talked to Jason, Nix approached Miguel. “It won't happen again.”

“Good.” He sounded stern. Like the commander he was. But then he smiled, wide and white-toothed, and those dimples and creases came back. His brown eyes were the warmest, the kindest-looking eyes she'd ever seen.

There was a strange hiss, and Miguel reached for his belt, put a black rectangle of plastic or metal to his ear. Nix could hear a voice, small and shallow, come out of the device. Miguel said “Check,” pushed a button, and holstered the thing.

So it was true. They had radios or phones or whatever that was.

“They're en route. Five minutes. Four from the resistance, three more of us, and forty-three refugees. We lay low here for less than an hour. Then we're off. It needs to go smooth and fast.”

“I'll consider this a crash course in taking orders,” Nix said, forcing another smile to her lips. Trying to erode some of the anxiety she'd provoked. Fuck if she'd gone on dozens of raids, marched hundreds of miles, done the things, endured the things she had just to see things go sloppy because she'd made a rough situation worse, panicking, waving her knife at that pale kid.

Looking at the pack Miguel was zipping up, Gareth asked, “What's the diversion?”

“The granary,” Miguel told them. “Two miles outside the town. We’ll burn it. It's most of their food for the winter, so almost every soul in town will run over there, and if we do it right, it'll keep them busy much longer than we'll need. And the ones that don't run off to fight the fire will have something pretty to watch. It'll keep their backs to us.

Noisy, too.”

“Who's going?” Nix wanted to know.

“Actually,” he turned to Gareth, “I was hoping to recruit you.”

Gareth looked at Nix. Looked back to Miguel. “I don't think I should.”

Nix said, “I'll go.”

“No. It's too risky. If I send you, anyone sees you just walking, you're in trouble.

And the whole thing falls apart. It's got to be a man. Someone who won't be accosted for just walking through a field. And, unfortunately, I'm short on men. So,” he turned back to Gareth, gave him a teasing smile, “You mind volunteering?”

Gareth looked at her. She gave him a nod. A smile.

“I'll go,” Gareth said, “if you have better uses for your guys. They know your equipment. The people. Know more details of the plan.”

Miguel gave Gareth his wide smile. Handed him the pack. “You've got a gun?”

“Yes.”

“You a good shot?”

“Decent.”

“You may not need to shoot, but it's good to be ready.”

“Yes.”

Miguel walked Gareth through his course in basic arson, featuring the tried and true molotov cocktail. Then he called over to the other, “Jason. Let Artel have your watch, would you?”

The kid slipped the watch off his wrist and passed it to Gareth.

“At ten fifteen, light her up.” The wide, white smile wilted, the dimples disappeared. “Then get your ass back here. We can't risk a delay. There's no waiting.

When we're loaded, we roll. No matter what.”

“No. I understand.”

“And, I know it's obvious, but you can't be followed. If you lead someone to us...”

Miguel trailed off.

“I understand. I won't do anything to get them hurt.”

“Good.” Miguel smiled and gave Gareth a pat on the back. Then he checked his watch and said, “You should go ahead and get going.”

“Yeah.” Gareth caught her eyes, held her gaze. Checking to see.

“I'm going to be pissed if you're late,” she tried to tease. Inside she felt like dough, cold and thick and beige.

“I won't risk getting you mad,” he teased back. “I'll be here.” He moved in close, and she forced herself to stay still, not to back away from him. He whispered, “Sure you're alright here?”

With Miguel and the other. Jason. Men she didn't know.

She nodded. Smiled. She wanted him to go. She wanted him to come back, but for now, there in that basement, until the others came, she wanted Gareth gone.

He went. Ascended from the rot and mush of the basement, into the cool clean air that came rushing in to them for the few seconds the door was open.

Less than ten minutes later, the others came. A pack of women and girls, gray and quiet. Used to being shut in, hidden, hunted, they filed through the door, neat and somber, and sank to the floor along the walls. They looked thin and tired and ragged, like they hadn't had enough food or sleep in days or weeks.

They were well rehearsed in following where they were led. Even though they were so many in such a small space, there was no order to impose or maintain. Just a wretched silence. Not hopeful. They didn't believe. Didn't trust. And why would they?

Nix felt her heart beat, her blood warm and pump with fresh fight. Fresh want. It would happen. They'd make it happen. If men came, if they tried to stop them, she'd shoot, she'd stab. She'd throw herself under their horse's hooves, grab and hold on, let them trample her if it would slow them down.

Over the line. They'd get there. With or without her.

In the corner farthest from the door, there was one woman, grayer, more hollow, more transparent than the others. Eighteen. Maybe twenty. Nix asked Jason, half to make amends, “What's her story?”

“A baby. Taken from her just last week. She's only been off the books three days.

Ran off after they delivered her to her second husband.”

“Here? In this town?”

“Yeah. She's local.”

No wonder. Her baby, just there. One mile, two miles away. Crying for her arms.

Her breast. Her voice and her smile. She'd be borne away to freedom. Away from her baby.

The hot surge, blood in her veins, swelling, compelling her beating heart.

Even when she squatted down right in front of her, the woman's body didn't shift.

Even her eyes were still. Dull and unfocused. Nix leaned in, touched the woman's pale hands, touched her hair, pulled her in, put her arms around her. There was no chill. No burn. It was like that, with people so wounded. That was how she'd endured Gareth, those few days. Those few days he was more hurt than she was.

Back and forth they whispered.

Hard to believe anyone could sneak away from a small rectangle of space with fifty pairs of eyes. But she'd been practicing invisibility for almost fifteen years.

The clouds had slipped off to the west, and a million stars punched through the night sky. Out of that close, humid basement, the world spread out so, so big. With no people around, everything seemed vast and clean. The big black star-pricked sky stretching all the way to that distant cradle of moon and beyond, the earth, just visible under her feet, going on and on and on, offering nests to rivers and lakes, reaching out for the sea on every side. Once, she'd seen the Pacific. With her mom and dad. It had smelled like salt and life and death.

Had Gareth made it to the granary? Was he crouched down next to a tree, or by a low wall, watching the hand on his watch circle toward the three? Or had someone seen him? She listened for gunfire. For shouts. But the night was silent, even as she crept over the highway and squatted down in a thatch of tall grass within sight of the first buildings at the edge of the town. She fixed her eyes on the part of dark earth and dark sky where she thought the granary was, and waited.

She waited until she saw the flames, an explosion of fire lighting the sky and the lone building at the edge of a flat field, then a yellow glow low to the ground, climbing up, up the side of the building, reaching for the black sky as another burst of sparks and flames exploded against the other side of the building. Behind her, doors slammed.

Shouts and cries of the men in town volleyed between buildings, echoed down the streets until horses went galloping, until men with no horses went running.

There were stragglers, men slow to wake, slow to drag their boots over naked feet and calves, men less efficient than others at locking their women into escape-proof rooms, or cuffing them to furniture so they wouldn't run off while the town was practically empty. And some men didn't leave at all. The suspicious ones who would guess that the fire was a diversion for some bigger plot, and even the men who just never trusted anything or anyone enough to leave the woman they'd paid good money for unattended.

A fire like that, everyone running off, that's just the kind of opportunity some loser who can't afford his own woman is waiting for.

So she clung to the shadows where the glow of lanterns and torches couldn't reach, and kept her finger on the trigger of the gun hidden in her pocket. In her hat and jacket and boots, she knew from experience, men saw her as a man; they were so unused to seeing women in anything but the garments they dressed them in, the gowns and shoes that make it hard to run or even walk without effort, but provide easy access.

Past the emptied pub that had just vomited out a horde of panicked men, past the shops selling clothes and shoes and saddles manufactured decades earlier, past the shelves of magazines and books printed by a dead generation, past the park, past the church, then over one, two, three streets, then north, up the road marked by the big brick house with yellow double doors and a swing on the porch.