by C. A. Gray
I wanted to burst into tears, but finally I managed to whisper, “I… I found out about Maggie.”
I saw the naked fear in Alec’s eyes when I said her name. “What do you mean? What about her?”
“She… she popped up in my inbox as a… recently deceased EOS.” I couldn’t bear to look at him. “You said you didn’t know what happened to her after you parted ways. I can tell you. She made it to New Estonia, and she was there for years. I don’t know why she didn’t just stay there, or how they finally captured her.” I glanced at Alec. I could see the muscle in his jaw twitch, and he inhaled sharply. I went on, “Honestly, I’d forgotten she even existed until I saw her face pop up. I couldn’t understand how I’d completely blanked on my entire time in McCormick. On top of that, it didn’t make any sense why the government would have her killed. So I asked my fiancé to help me chase down the story. He—he was a computer hacker.”
Was. I had to use the past tense when referring to Will now.
I wanted to finish the story, but I found I was no longer able to speak. Molly approached my makeshift bed again and stroked my hair. “Poor dear,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.” The two men said nothing.
“Almost everyone here has lost someone,” said Alec at last, coldly. “It’s a common story.”
Suddenly a crunch of leaves and twigs sounded just outside the cave. In the space of a breath, everyone fell silent, on the alert. I was no expert, but it sounded like more than one person—and they didn’t seem to care whether or not we heard them.
“Nick!” said Molly with relief, before we could even see anyone. I didn’t know how she knew it was him, but a man’s voice answered her, comfortable and familiar.
“Plus one,” he called. “We’ve got ourselves a new hunter!”
I glanced at the mouth of the cave, and Molly ran and hugged a broad, well-muscled, forty-something man salt and pepper hair and sharp black eyes. Then she smacked his shoulder good-naturedly and said, “And otherwise empty-handed I see. Where’s our dinner?”
“More interested in your stomach or the safe return of your husband?” he teased her, pulling her in and planting a kiss on her washed out cheek. Then he added, “Jackson here shot and killed a deer, actually. Half of it is in my pack and he’s carrying the rest.” Then Nick turned and appraised me at once; but unlike Uruguay and Alec, his appraisal did not feel unkind. “You found a drifter too, I see?”
“Poor dear,” cooed Molly, glancing back at me, “she was half dead with exposure and dehydration—”
“Wait a minute,” exclaimed the man who had come in with Nick, the one whom he’d called Jackson, “you’re the girl from the broadcast!”
I glanced at the other man now for the first time. He looked about my age, with brown hair and pale skin that was reddish where the sun had touched it, on his cheeks and nose and forehead. He was broad and well-muscled like Nick, and something about the way he stood, with his shoulders thrown back and his chin held high, reminded me of Will. But there was a difference too: Will had emanated self-assurance in a very conscious, intentional sort of way, like he wanted everyone in the room to know he was in charge. This guy’s self-assurance felt more like something he took for granted—like he was so sure of himself that he didn’t bother thinking about himself anymore at all.
How I knew all this at a glance, I wasn’t quite sure… maybe I was making it all up.
At any rate, his eyes scrutinized me in a way that made me uncomfortable. It felt almost indecent, like he could see everything about me at a glance. I wasn’t sure what it was that I didn’t want him to pick up on, but I looked away.
“Yep, that’s her,” Alec confirmed to the newcomer. Then he added disdainfully, “Kate Brandeis, Reporter for the New Order!”
“Not anymore, she isn’t,” Molly retorted on my behalf, her eyes narrowing at Alec. Then she turned back to me and said sweetly, “Are you dear?”
I didn’t reply; the question didn’t seem to require a response.
I looked back at the man with the reddish face, and found him still staring at me, unblinking. His eyes, I realized, were reddish too. He altogether matched. Something about him reminded me of a fox.
“This is Jackson MacNamera,” Nick announced to everyone in the cave, gesturing at the reddish man. “He’s the best hunter I’ve ever met. He’s here from Iceland. And he’s on the run.”
Chapter 14: Jackson
She was beautiful—despite the mud and sweat and tears, Kate Brandeis was still absolutely stunning. The contrast of her blue eyes under those black eyelashes, dark hair, and rosy cheeks—wow. I could see why they’d picked her to be on a national broadcast.
She shrank back from me though, her shoulders retracting, averting her eyes and tucking her chin under the blanket that covered most of her body. She looked like a child playing hide-and-go-seek, like she thought if she couldn’t see me, then I couldn’t see her either.
That’s when I realized I was staring too much. My aunt always told me I did that. “You freak people out, Jackson!” she’d scolded.
“Best hunter you’ve ever seen, huh?” echoed the skinny redheaded boy who had confirmed Kate’s identity to me. I thought I’d heard him called Alec. He was jealous, I could tell. He tried to act like he wasn’t, but he didn’t hide it well. He must be a hunter too.
“Unreal,” Nick nodded, not picking up on it. “It’s like he has a sixth sense. Never seen anything like it. He built a slingshot out of some trash, and managed to fell a buck with it that was a few hundred feet away!”
The redhead’s eyebrows shot up. “Really.” He tried not to sound impressed. Then he glanced back at Nick and said, “I assume he’ll be joining us, then?”
“He’d better be,” Nick shot me a lopsided grin. He’d hinted this at least six more times on our journey back to the caves, but I’d consistently evaded the question. After all, I didn’t know my plans yet.
I avoided Nick’s pointed implication this time not because I didn’t want to answer, but because I was still much more interested in Kate. I wanted to know her story. I turned back to her, cleared my throat, said as lightly as I could, “I just saw your broadcast a few days ago. You’re not a reporter anymore, then?”
Kate looked up at me quickly then, her blue eyes widening. I saw that the whites of them were bloodshot. “How many days ago?”
“Three,” I told her.
Kate closed her eyes and her head sank back onto her pillow weakly. “Three days,” she whispered. “It’s been three days?”
“She hasn’t been conscious for most of that time, poor thing,” clucked Nick’s wife, the woman who introduced herself as Molly.
I wanted to ask Kate more about what had happened to her in those last three days. Did she disappear right after that broadcast? From what I’d seen, she certainly looked like she’d been on the verge of running, but what made her finally do it?
But before I could probe her further, an old woman shuffled in to the mouth of the cave, flanked by two much younger men. She was dressed in rags like everyone else, but she carried her head high and wore an expression of confidence and authority. The others fell silent when they saw her, and stood up straighter.
“I heard there were newcomers,” said the old woman. Her voice was low and gravelly, but it carried. Her steely blue eyes fixed upon me at once, and she shuffled toward me, shoving her crooked nose right up to mine as she scrutinized my face. Folds of flesh nearly obscured both her eyes and her mouth. I knew why; people always picked me out of a room like that, either because they felt drawn to me or considered me a threat. “That is what happens to the one with a clear, calm mind,” Grandfather had told me. “People will sense your power, and they will love you or they will hate you for it. What they will not be is indifferent.”
“What is your name, son?” she asked.
“Jackson MacNamera.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time in the sun,” she observed.
“Doing what, pray?”
“Fishing. I’m an ice fisherman.”
“Not here, you’re not.”
“No. I’m from Iceland.”
“What did you come for?” she demanded. She fired each question at me when I’d barely had time to finish my answer to the previous one.
“I came for my mother’s funeral.”
“And? Did you attend?”
I paused. “No,” I said finally. I was pretty sure I’d missed it by now. Not that that mattered—even if it hadn’t taken place yet, given my current status as a fugitive, it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to get there unnoticed.
“Why not?”
“Because some agents picked me up and tried to scan my brain waves.”
“Tried to?” Her eyes narrowed so much that they almost disappeared beneath the folds of flesh.
“Did,” I corrected.
She nodded, the lines of her mouth contracting together like she was sucking on a lemon. “I see. And then?”
“I ran away.”
“You ran away?” she repeated, her tone incredulous. “How did you escape them?”
I stopped, and chuckled.
“Why are you laughing?” she demanded.
“Because you won’t believe me if I tell you how I got away.”
“Try me.”
I’d had enough of these kinds of conversations with the uninitiated to know how this was going to go over. So I merely told her what I’d told Nick. “I faked my death.”
She actually looked disappointed. “I see.”
“What were you hoping for?”
From the sharp look in her eyes, I could tell she wasn’t used to the impertinence of being questioned in her turn. “Never mind what I was hoping for.”
“You won’t tell me, then?”
“I know nothing about you!” she snapped.
“You know my name, where I am from, and what I do for a living—which is a lot more than I know about you so far,” I pointed out.
She stared at me for a long moment, and something in her prune-like face relented. “They call me the Crone.”
She certainly looked like a crone, but I was surprised she tolerated the title. “Pleased to meet you.” I held out a hand, and she actually gave me a very slight grudging smile as she shook it.
“You may be useful yet,” she pronounced.
The Crone averted her eyes from me abruptly after that. I noticed that some twenty more people had trickled in after her, probably curious—but none of them spoke.
“The Crone is our leader,” Molly whispered to me.
“I guessed that,” I whispered back. Nobody acted the way she did unless they were accustomed to being obeyed.
The Crone shuffled over to Kate next, the two men never leaving her side. What are they, bodyguards? I wondered. Kate looked like she might break down sobbing with the intensity of the Crone’s gaze, and I felt the ridiculous urge to protect her.
“You are Kate Brandeis,” was the Crone’s pronouncement at last. She said it with a frown.
“Oh, but she’s on our side now—” began Molly.
The Crone leaned in towards Kate and hissed, “That remains to be seen.”
Kate pulled the blankets tighter around her shoulders, highlighting the fact that her shoulders were bare. Her cheeks lit up with color at the Crone’s words. I wondered if she was wearing anything beneath those blankets.
Stop it, Jackson.
I cleared my throat. “So when you talk about sides—do you just mean staying hidden versus letting the Potentate know this compound exists? Or are you guys strategizing a stand or something?”
The Crone looked affronted. That was actually what I was going for—at least it took the scrutiny off of Kate.
“How old are you, boy?” she said at last.
“Twenty-six.”
She nodded. “That explains your ignorance, then.” Then the old woman shuffled to a wooden bench and eased herself down to sit on it, facing me. But she extended a gnarled palm to Nick. “Tell the boy about our community,” she commanded him. “How and why we came to exist.”
Something about the way she said it felt like a threat, but I wasn’t yet sure why. Nick seemed to feel it, too, and I saw the little muscle in his jaw twitch before he turned to me to respond.
“All right,” he said slowly. “The first of us were the lucky ones. Some saw the crash coming for months in advance, and started storing up supplies…”
“Saw it coming?” I repeated.
“Like your parents,” said Kate suddenly. She was looking at Alec when she said it.
He looked startled for a minute, and then said quietly, “Yeah, that’s right.”
Kate shrank back beneath her blankets again. I saw her mop the sweat off her brow. That was the first time I realized she was ill. I wondered I hadn’t noticed it before.
“Those who were caught in the middle of the riots mostly didn’t survive,” Nick told me. “Two thirds of them didn’t. So now, we’re the only free community left in the Republic.”
“And everybody else is totally brainwashed?” I asked.
Nick frowned. “There are those in the system who either already know the truth and are on the run, or who are just waking up to the truth… but most of them won’t get out on their own. Not without help.”
“That is not our concern!” cried the Crone, standing. The bodyguards on either side of her stepped forward, flanking her.
“If we don’t go in and help citizens who have no way of surviving on their own, we’ll die off out here!” Nick shot back. He gestured at Kate and said, “She would have died in the wilderness without our help!”
“That is different. You did not go in and get her,” snapped the Crone. “She was already outside the purview of the control centers by the time you found her. Wasn’t she?”
Alec and Nick exchanged a look but said nothing to each other. I took that to mean she was not, but I wasn’t tracking why that was a problem.
Molly, Nick’s wife, put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me away while Nick and the Crone went on bickering.
“The hunters sometimes go back on the grid and attempt to rescue people who are fleeing for their lives, before the agents can eliminate them,” she told me. “But the Crone and the rest of the Council are afraid that their activity will alert the Potentate to our existence out here. So far we’ve managed to survive only because neither the Potentate nor the Tribunal know of our existence.”
So that explained the Crone’s veiled threat earlier. I looked around the cave, at the thirty-some bedraggled, dirty people. “Surely he wouldn’t think such a small group could pose a threat?”
“This is only one of a network of caves,” she told me. “We’re about eight hundred in all.”
“Eight hundred is still hardly an army,” I pointed out.
“But if the Potentate thinks that we are trying to steal citizens and whisk them to safety, he’ll fear a revolution,” Molly whispered. “Or so thinks the Crone.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we can’t leave people to die, and we have to help them if we can.” She wrung her hands on her calico apron. Alec approached behind her, listening to us. Then Molly hedged, “But it’s one thing to rescue people who are fleeing anyway, and are already outside the range of the control centers. It’s something else to do what Nick wants to do: go in with guns blazing and bring back as many people as we can, right under the Potentate’s nose. I think the Crone is right, that if the Potentate finds out about us, he’ll wipe us out. I tell Nick all the time, we’ve got to be discreet!”
“And you’re the reason we don’t do more, Mol,” Alec hissed. “Nick doesn’t care who else he pisses off, but he won’t cross you. You’re one step away from joining the Pacifists!”
“I am not! You take that back!” she retorted.
“What a
re the pacifists?” I asked.
Alec glared at Molly for a second before turning back to me, the shadow still upon his face. “There’s a whole group in the caves that says we shouldn’t even bother trying to rescue anybody, even the ones already running for their lives. They call themselves ‘Pacifists,’ meaning they don’t want to get involved in anybody else’s problems. Bloody cowards, I say.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” Molly snapped.
“Look,” Alec went on to me, ignoring her, “there are people in the caves here who think it’s better to let the rest of the schmucks in this nation continue to believe the lie, because at least they’re happy. Hell, they’d rather go back on the grid themselves if they had that option, if they wouldn’t know they were one step above starvation and there were rats eating at their kitchen tables. They think it’s better to be a slave, as long as you don’t know you are one.”
I appraised Alec, trying to read behind his words. He spoke with condescension, like anyone who didn’t agree with him was not only wrong, but an idiot. It probably didn’t help him win too many arguments, that approach, but he seemed so bitter that he couldn’t help himself. Alec must have one heck of a back story. Aloud, I said carefully, “I agree with you. I am always on the side of truth, however unpleasant it may be. Only then does change become possible.”
Alec clapped me on the back with approval, and informed Molly, “I like this guy!”
Molly frowned at him and moved away from us, to where her husband still debated with the Crone on the very same issue.
“So you and Nick aren’t just hunters, then,” I said. “I mean, you hunt more than just game.”
“Yep, or at least that’s the goal,” Alec scowled in the Crone’s direction. “But so far all the Council will let us do is find fugitives on the outskirts of the grid, or in the forest. Government control centers are stationed about every ten square miles in the main cities, and they scan to detect anyone in the area that’s unregistered. But there are a lot of people to scan, so the process takes about two hours. When we’re in the main cities, that means we only have two hours to do anything before the agents find us and haul us in for questioning.”