Strikers (12 page)

I look them both over to see how things are between them, but they seem the same as they did before Maddix left. If there were any hard feelings or any emotional stuff, they’ve worked it out of their systems. They go back to the house for some sleep and we toward our perch. After a few steps, I hear Connor say my name.

When I turn back, a hand shading my eyes against the glare of the sun, he shifts his feet like he’s not sure what he wants to say. Then he jogs the dozen steps between us and surprises me by wrapping me in a hug. Not the one-armed half-hug we like to call a “man hug” but a full-on arms-wrapped-as-tight-as-they-can type of hug.

To say that I’m surprised would be an understatement. Connor is affectionate, but not touchy in that way. He’s not the one to initiate the physical comfort he needs. It’s always Cassi or I that reaches for his hand when we know he needs it. Not today, though. After a beat, I wrap my arms around him as well. He smells of dust and sweat, which is probably what I smell like, too.

“Thank you,” he whispers in my ear.

“Thank
you
,” I whisper back.

It’s all we need to say. We each know what we’re saying to the other. He’s thanking me for going for broke inside the jail and I’m thanking him for giving me the courage to even go inside the jail in the first place. We’re a team.

When we break our embrace he turns and runs to the house without looking back. I can see from the stiff posture that he’s a little embarrassed. I look at Jordan, who is already atop the wall and looking around, but he doesn’t acknowledge my little emotional moment with Connor. At the wall, he reaches down a hand for me and I barely have a chance to touch the wall with my toes before he pulls me up with apparent ease.

There’s nothing to see, for which I’m grateful. No plumes of dust to indicate searching vehicles, no smoke from a patrol’s campfire. The only sounds are the wind through the remains of the houses and the slither of sand rubbing against itself.

Now’s my chance to talk to him, really talk to him. I’ve haven’t had a single moment alone with him and after what he told me in his cell, when he thought he had only a few minutes in this life left to say anything at all to me, I’ve got a lot of questions.

He seems to sense how hard it is for me to get started, because he stops a few paces from me on the wall and asks, “How ya doing, Karas?”

“Well, I’ve lost my home, my mom and any hope of a normal life. I’m also guaranteed a hot shot and a grave if I don’t run for my life fast enough. Other than that, I’m good,” I say, my voice flat with sarcasm.

I have no idea why I answered like that. It’s true, but it isn’t what I wanted to say at all. It’s a curse. When I’m hurt or confused or anything other than asleep, I strike out. It’s my defensive offense, according to Cassi.

His face is calm, no hint of anger to be found in the lines of his face.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I have a mean mouth.”

His sudden laugh surprises me. Apparently, this is my day for surprises. Or rather, another day for surprises.

“What?” I ask, turning my palms up to emphasize my question.

He shakes his head and takes the few steps between us with light, confident footfalls on the narrow wall. But he’s smiling and that’s probably the biggest surprise of all. If I had said that to my mother, I’d be holding my hands over my head to protect it from a blow.

“I missed so much that I can’t get back. You’re a pistol,” he says and his eyes seem to drink in my features, memorizing them all.

I don’t say anything to that. I can tell he has more to say so I just wait and let the sun warm me.

“You’ve turned out so beautiful,” he says. He reaches out to run my ponytail through his fingers, and then drops it against my shoulder. “And you have a whole lot more hair. You were a very bald baby.”

It’s a funny thing to say so I laugh. I tell him about my genius plan to sell it. The big truck that collects it comes a few times a year and they pay well. The sides of the truck are bright with pictures of people with bald heads next to pictures of them with full heads of hair.

I’ve never heard of a disease that makes hair fall out, though there are certainly bald people, but the truck and the nicely dressed people inside it pay good money and they say it will help out the sick. Brown doesn’t fetch the premium of a true blond, but it’s enough to make me want it handy.

He frowns and says, “Karas, they don’t buy it for ill people to have hair. They buy it for rich people to make into wigs so they can have prettier hair.”

“What? No,” I say, thinking of some rich person walking around with my hair on their head. “Really?”

He nods and says, “It’s just another lie.”

I’d like to ask him what he means by another lie but I’ve got more important things I want to know first. He takes one more look around us, searching the horizon, then sits down on the wall, patting it for me to join him.

“Go ahead, Karas. Ask me what you want,” he says.

“Why did you leave?”

He points to the three strikes on his neck and says, “Three strikes. I had no choice.”

“You could have just stopped getting strikes,” I counter. “You know, stop living a life of crime.” There goes my mouth again, so I clamp it shut.

He nods toward the strike on my neck and says, “I suppose you got that living a life of crime.”

I can feel my face redden and I shake my head. “Did Maddix tell you?”

He nods, but says, “I’d like to hear it from you.”

This isn’t a story I want to tell him. It embarrasses me that my mother is like she is and telling this story just reinforces the reality.

“It’s okay. Just tell me,” he urges. His voice is gentle in the quiet that surrounds us.

So I tell him. I tell him about a night not much different from any other, her drunk, me closed up in my room trying to avoid her. Only this time she wasn’t satisfied with just banging on my door a few times and yelling. This time she kept pounding and then she started really working on the door, kicking it with increasing force as her anger spiraled out of control.

I made it out of the window and onto the roof just in time to hear the door crack. It wasn’t until much later, after I got convicted and a strike inked onto my neck, that I came home and saw the heavy garden spade on the floor of my room amongst the shards of wood that remained of my door.

“I heard the crash and knew she was really worked up so I had to clear out. I usually just go to Cassi’s when that happens. Normally, I just hop a few roofs, come down where I know she won’t see me and then hoof it over. No problem.” I pull up my pant leg and show him the long scar on my shin. It’s healed into a shiny pink line. “Only this time, I fell through someone’s roof. Destruction of state property.”

He shakes his head and says, “This isn’t how things were supposed to be.”

“Maybe not, but it’s the way things are,” I say. There’s no point in debating history because it doesn’t change the present. The present is controlled by those who win in this life and we’re not them.

“I don’t have your good excuse, but I did what I did for a good reason. Or what I thought was a good reason,” he says.

“Mom said you rustled cattle,” I offer to get the ball rolling.

He nods and says, “I did. It would be more accurate to say that I rustled
back
some cattle.”

That’s new information to me. Once he was gone, the only version anyone was going to get was the one provided by the Texas Army, though I knew there had to be more to it. Maybe some part of me just wished there was more to it.

He gazes toward the shadows behind the house where the others are still sleeping inside. Then he asks me, “Are you and that boy Jovan an item or something?”

The look on my face must be answer enough because he laughs again and says, “Okay. I guess not. It just seems like there’s something there. There’s the whole “pretty eyes” comment, and the way you two look at each other is very telling.”

“Huh…well, it’s telling you a lie then,” I answer, though that heat is back in my face again and I’m pretty sure I’ve turned as red as a sunset. I hate that I do that.

“It doesn’t matter now, I suppose. He’s in the same boat as the rest of us,” he says, then cocks his head as if he’s just had a thought. “Or maybe not. He’s a Foley. They might be able to fix it.”

He hops back up on the narrow wall and looks around again but keeps talking while he does. “I’d bet, now that I think about it, that those two soldiers have either met with unfortunate accidents, died of wounds we gave them or mysteriously disappeared.” He suddenly squats next to me on the wall and adds, “And that those patrols are now looking for a
captured
Jovan rather than a criminal one.”

My mouth drops open while he speaks and he taps it shut with a forefinger under my chin. All I can say to that is, “But we didn’t hurt those soldiers.”

“So naive, Karas.”

“No,” I insist.

“Yes,” he says.

I don’t want to think something like that could be true, but deep down I feel the ring of truth in his words. All citizens are theoretically equal, but the more land a person possesses, the more equal they seem to become. In Bailar, we have a handful of families who own most of the land and are, without question, living life under very different rules than the rest of us. Jovan is from one of those families.

That’s fine to think this an unjust state of affairs, fine to wish it would change, but it doesn’t answer my question about Jordan’s strikes.

“What does that have to do with what we were talking about? The rustling?”

“Oh, a lot,” he says and sighs again. It’s a heavy sigh full of old burdens. “You know that my family used to own the parcel of land just east of Robin’s waterway?”

I nod. I’ve never been there, but I have an old photo of a small house, a faded barn and the smiling child that was my father. “Your family lost it when I was a baby.”

“No,” he corrects. “My father lost it when Jovan’s father decided he wanted to increase his acreage and the Robin waterway was closed. No water for our cattle.”

That doesn’t make sense. The smaller waterways are closed now and then when the river runs low or the lake isn’t filling well, but no one is left without water. Right of way is never terminated. I shake my head.

“The details don’t matter. What matters is that over time all the viable land came into the hands of just a few families and water was how they did it. Foley did it to my father. My father brought water from the canal using horses. I brought water, too, but it was never enough. We went down to just the breeding stock and tried to wait it out, but you can’t pay your bills off breeding stock that can’t be slaughtered or sent to market. When some of those cattle followed the dry waterway onto their property, they kept the calves. I went and got them back.”

This is a very different story than the one I’ve heard. Not just different, but fundamentally so. It turns the young man who was branded a thief into someone trying to save his family’s legacy. It sounds like a story from the creation of the Texas Republic, a hero’s story. That makes it pretty hard to believe.

“So you say,” I shoot back and even I can hear the challenge in my voice.

He purses his lips and his eyes grow distant. “Believe what you want,” he says and I know there won’t be any argument from him.

“Is that really what happened? Is that why your family left Bailar?”

“You’re my family,” he says, “but that’s why my parents left, yes.”

“And this?” I ask, holding up the pendants around my neck. They’ve been hanging there like hot coals the whole time. Every time they clink together against my skin I’m reminded all over again that he had one made for me. And I’m forced to wonder what that means.

His fingers are warm against mine when he lifts the pendants from them and turns them around to check their condition. He smiles and drops them so that they make a musical tinkling sound against each other.

“I haven’t just been running around in the wild lands for all these years, you know,” he says. “I got a message to your mother and waited, but I never got a response. Truth is, I never expected one.”

He takes one more look around then sits next to me on the wall again. I’ve not looked once since we’ve been on watch, leaving all the real work for him. I’m not being a very good partner.

“At the time, I
thought
you’d be better off in town. I didn’t know anything about what was out there in the world or what was possible beyond Texas. You were just a baby,” he explains. The way he says it, the way his eyes light up when he says the words, makes me think that there’s a lot more out there than the wild lands and wild people I’ve grown up hearing about.

“And when you did know?” I ask.

“By then it was just easier to think of you growing up happy, settled, with a family you loved. I always intended to figure out a way to come for you when you were eighteen and free to do what you wanted with your life. Or at least give you the option to come. I left word at the border that I’d pay for news from any Strikers coming out of Bailar. Over the years I’ve gotten just two bites since not many Strikers make it as far as the border between the Riverlands and the Southeast. One didn’t know you, but you would have been just a little thing then. The other knew of you and told me you were doing well. Happy,” he finishes and looks at me as if he’d like to know if that was ever true.

“Until Maddix came?”

He nods and I can tell it’s a sad nod. I can only imagine what Maddix told him given how long he’s known me. He’s a year and change older than Connor and me, the same age as Cassi, but we all played together and he’s seen marks on me plenty of times. It would be a hard thing for Jordan to hear, especially if he’d built up an idea of a happy daughter growing up safe in Bailar.

“So you came back to get me?” I ask finally. This is what I really want to hear from him. I want to hear that he couldn’t sit still for one moment after knowing what my life was really like, that all he could do was hurry to rescue me.

“Basically, yes. There’s more though,” he says and picks up one of my hands to hold it between his two rough ones. He takes a deep breath and then looks me in the eye. “You have a little brother.”