I held a grudge against Ma for a long time after that. I thought it must be her fault, even though I wasn’t really sure what “it” was. But surely, if she were on Dad’s wavelength, he’d show her the same kind of real emotion he’d shown Madeline. As to why he’d never shown me anything like that, either…I stumbled over the thought.
I wasn’t old enough, that’s all. Someday he would.
Whenever he was home after that I spent as much time with him as I could. I probably got on his nerves, the way I hung around. I couldn’t help it. There was a whole other Truce Vancour who I didn’t know, and I longed to.
“Dad, why did you become a Peacefighter?”
“What was it like when you were growing up, Dad?”
“How did you and Ma meet?”
“Oh, you know,” he’d say, usually with his face half-hidden as he fixed an engine or mended a fence. “I’ve told you that story a hundred times.”
“Yes, but…” I’d trail off in frustration. Maybe I knew all the words, but there had to be more to it than just words, didn’t there? If he’d only talk to me the way he talked to Madeline, I could maybe figure out the secret to him.
I started thinking about masks a lot. Did everyone wear them? I didn’t think I did. Or Collie. Although I wished I did have one to hide behind sometimes. More than that, I wished my father would take his off around me, just for a few minutes.
The only time he ever did was the day he died.
Hal and I had been messing around in one of the fields when we heard his plane. We’d whooped happily – he was hours earlier than expected – and raced for the long, flat strip where he always landed.
“Beat you there!” I flung over my shoulder at Hal as we ran.
“No fair!” he shouted. “You’ve got a head start!”
I laughed and burst out through a stretch of birch trees. I stopped, the smile melting from my face. The Gauntlet was almost down, a yellow, racing blur with sunshine glinting off its wheels. Fast – he was coming in so fast.
Too fast.
I knew what I was going to see before I saw it. Ice gripped me. I pounded towards the field.
“No!” I shouted. “Get the nose up!”
The plane hit the ground before it reached the runway and did a somersault. A wing crumpled with a loud crunch, like someone taking a bite from an apple. In a blurred tumble, my father was thrown clear. I saw him hit a barbed-wire fence.
“Dad!” I screamed.
I ran faster. The plane skidded and came to a mangled halt. I could hear my heart crashing in my ears, and Hal screaming somewhere in the distance.
My father sprawled motionless with the section of fence collapsed around him. I reached him and dropped to my knees. My breath was short, panicky.
A piece of barbed wire was tangled around his neck. Blood was pulsing – so much blood – I gasped and pressed my hands over the wound. Barbed wire bit at me. I could feel Dad’s artery throbbing, and the blood’s warm slickness as it painted my fingers.
“Dad…” whispered Hal from behind me.
I twisted towards him. “Go!” I screamed at my brother. “Get Ma – anyone – hurry!”
Hal’s face was white, streaked with tears. As he stumbled into a run, he began to sob.
His footsteps faded. There was the sound of the grasshoppers chirping and the wind whispering through the grass. My father was making a terrible gasping, rattling noise, his chest heaving. One of his hands clawed at the ground, white-knuckled.
I was crying, too. “No!” I burst out. “Dad, please!”
I wanted to hold his hand. I couldn’t let go of the wound. I’d keep him alive no matter what, I thought wildly – I’d hold his life force inside his body.
It was already spilling away around my fingers.
Dad’s eyes met mine. I saw him try to form my name and fail. He groped to touch me, still struggling for breath.
“Dad…please…” I choked out.
The tears were damp on my face, yet I could see him so clearly. Time seemed to slow as we gazed at each other.
He died without managing to touch me. I stayed crouching with my hands over his neck, refusing to believe he was gone, even though his eyes had turned blank and his blood was cooling against my skin.
When Ma came running up with a neighbour who’d been visiting, it took both of them to pull me away. “No!” I shouted, struggling. “Let me go! I’ve got to save him!”
My mother gripped my shoulders and shook me. “Amity! He’s gone! You can’t do anything. He’s gone.”
She pulled me into a tight embrace. When she released me I stood trembling. I saw for myself it was true. My father lay with one arm flung out, gazing upwards. His body was still.
“Oh, Truce,” Ma cried. She kneeled beside him and started to sob on his chest. I backed away a few steps, staring. The neighbour woman tried to hug me but I pushed away.
I looked down at my bloody hands. I wished so much that my father had been able to touch me.
And then I realized that he had, even if not physically. When our eyes had met, he’d gazed at me with love…and with something like wonder, as if he’d never really known he had a daughter named Amity before that moment.
Most of all, his brown eyes had held regret.
Chapter Twenty-three
“No…no, please…no!”
The cries awoke me with a start. For a tangled moment I couldn’t think where I was; then I knew. “Collie!” I whispered, shaking his shoulder. “Collie, it’s only a dream!”
He moaned but didn’t awaken. I smoothed his hair from his face. The blinds were slightly open; in the glow from the street lights I could just make out Collie’s full lips, the rugged shape of his nose.
“It’s all right,” I said. His hair slipped softly against my fingers. The motion of my hand was steady, soothing. “Shh…it’s all right…”
Soon his breathing became regular again. I pressed against his solid warmth and he put his arms around me in his sleep. “Amity,” he murmured, not as if he was aware I was there, but as if I were part of his dream. A happy part now, from the sound of it.
I let out a breath. Collie had nightmares once or twice a week. Always the same, with his head lashing back and forth on the pillow and him pleading to someone, though he said he could never remember what they were about. I wasn’t surprised that he’d had another one tonight.
Russ.
I lay staring at the ceiling. When I’d first arrived on base, people had ignored me just like they had Collie. Russ hadn’t. He’d taken me under his wing, shouted at me more than he did anyone else – always pushing me to fly harder, faster. To survive.
How’s my favourite wildcat?
My chest felt leaden. The matchbook still lay on the bedside table. I swallowed and picked it up. Its cardboard cover felt smooth against my fingers. The stylized shamrock looked dark grey now.
Slowly, I opened the cover and closed it again. Something about the way the shamrock looked in this faint light… I frowned at a sudden memory of wailing jazz, and of Harlan putting a shot glass in front of me.
The night of Stan’s send-off, I’d sat playing with a matchbook just like this one.
My eyebrows drew together as I recalled that night in the speak for the second time: Russ sitting with two men, leaning intensely across the small table as if he were arguing. A man with curly hair who’d laughed and wagged a finger. The other man had been bald.
One bald, one with curly hair. The same men I’d seen running from the alley. How had I not made the connection before?
I sat up straight, my scalp electric. It hadn’t been a random robbery. Russ had known his attackers. I fumbled the matchbook open again. Brand new, only one match gone.
Russ had been at that same speak tonight. Had he met those two men there again? Yet they hadn’t seemed like friends the night of Stan’s send-off. More like business associates.
Why would a pilot like Russ need business associates?
&nb
sp; That night in the speak, Russ had quickly tucked something in his jacket as Harlan and I approached. Something those men had given him.
The next fight, my air bottle had seized up.
Well, that was clever of me. I wasn’t sure whether I’d hit you at all. Ingo’s comment on the dance floor suddenly seemed ominous. We were both experienced pilots. He hadn’t been sure he’d hit me, and I hadn’t felt the hit.
A malfunction, I’d thought at the time. And then, with the odd sense that Russ had been celebrating after my lost appeal, I’d fleetingly suspected sabotage.
But I’d been wrong. Hadn’t I?
As Collie slept beside me I pressed my fists to my forehead and willed myself to remember every detail. I’d found my old Dove, its bullet holes scorched by the fire that had forced me down. I’d run my hand over the holes, dug my fingers in them. Then I’d creaked open the panel and shone my flashlight on the damaged air bottle. A bullet hole had been there, too.
It had glinted in the light.
I went stock-still. My plane had caught fire after Ingo shot it. My air bottle had been a melted lump. If the bullet hole had really come from my fight, it should have been as blackened as those on the hood.
Yet its edge had glimmered like diamond dust.
Amity…I shot it.
My breath curdled as the meaning of Russ’s dying words hit me. Russ had shot that section of my plane after it burned, to make it look as if my air bottle had been hit mid-battle like he’d told me…but then he’d been a bit careless about charring up the fresh bullet hole afterwards.
He had never expected me to land that plane.
“No,” I whispered aloud.
Edwards, I thought frantically. He’d know the truth; my fitter had been the one to check out my Firedove after the crash-landing. Except that while I’d been grounded, he’d been reassigned to Tier Threes. Thinking back, my spine chilled: had I seen Edwards on base at all since I got the burning Dove down? If I had, I didn’t remember it.
And Clem, who was T3, hadn’t known who he was.
My blood hammered at my temples. I slipped out of bed and crept through the dark house. In the living room I switched on a lamp beside the phone and flipped hastily through the base directory. It was a new one, out only the week before.
There was no entry for “Edwards, Joshua”.
I dialled “O”, almost too tense to work the dial. A few moments later I slowly hung up the heavy black receiver, the base operator’s words echoing through my brain: “No, I’m sorry, Mr Edwards left months ago. No, I don’t know where he went.”
In a flash I saw again the night I crash-landed: Russ’s muscular form striding off towards the hangar.
Had Edwards left of his own accord? Or had something happened to him?
I stood trembling with shock. I had no idea why those two men had killed Russ tonight…but suddenly I was pretty sure I knew what the three of them had been up to.
No.
I rushed back into Collie’s bedroom, where I kept a change of clothes. Groping in the dark, I yanked them on. Collie’s breathing stayed gentle, rhythmic. I grabbed up his leather jacket and slipped again through the house, pausing only to take the flashlight from the kitchen.
I let myself out and eased shut the front door.
Outside the street lights cast an eerie glow, with dark palm trees arching overhead. I walked briskly down the sidewalk. The direction I took surprised me; I’d planned to return to the scrapyard. But there was no point. I knew what I’d seen.
“You couldn’t have done it,” I muttered, the words keeping a fierce rhythm with my stride. “Russ, please, this has got to be a bad dream.”
Finally I reached his street. He’d lived in one of the single-dwelling houses that Tier Ones get, more spacious than the place I shared with Vera. The screened-in porch made me think of lemonade and Sunday afternoons.
I felt on edge, every nerve singing. I snuck across freshly-mown grass to the backyard. A lot of pilots didn’t bother locking their doors…yet I wasn’t really surprised when Russ’s screen door was latched.
It was my chance to back out. I looked up at the silent house and licked my lips, wavering.
No. If the truth was in there, I had to know.
I went to the side of the house and started trying windows. None opened. The cellar doors lay flat against the ground, padlocked shut. When I tugged at the handle the latch rattled; its screws were loose. I hesitated, then stood on the doors to deaden any sound. I kicked at the latch with my boot until it shivered apart.
I creaked open the cellar door. The smell of earth and concrete wafted out. I started down the steps; once below ground, I pulled the door shut. Blackness encased me.
I snapped on the flashlight.
I was in an ordinary cellar, with a boiler in one corner and a workbench against one wall. Some distant part of me watched in disbelief. Amity, what are you doing? I steeled myself and walked quickly up the stairs that led to the main part of the house.
The cellar door opened into the kitchen. Here, too, everything looked innocent – and at the same time, nothing did, not even the mug on the draining board. I hesitated and cupped my hand over the flashlight, dimming its glow. I had no idea what I was looking for.
Instinct took me down the corridor. I opened doors until I found Russ’s bedroom. The sight of his bed, looking vulnerable and unmade, almost defeated me. I wanted to leave, forget any of this had happened.
Russ’s dog tags lay on his dresser. They stiffened my spine. Hardship was gripping the Western Seaboard because of my lost fight – if Russ had done what I thought, he’d betrayed everything we stood for.
I searched quickly, pulling drawers open, rummaging through them. Socks, underwear, T-shirts. My spirits leaped when I found a slim metal box under the bed, but it held only photos.
I shoved it back. Frustrated, I yanked Russ’s bedside table drawer open so hard that it fell onto the floor. Its contents clattered everywhere. A thermometer, a box of prophs. Nothing that told me anything – nothing!
I sank onto the bed. My breathing sounded too loud in the silent room. Think, Amity! Where would Russ hide something? What was important to him?
A sudden image came: Russ standing in the sunshine offering me a cigar, waggling it seductively as he grinned.
I lunged off the bed and rushed for the study, where I’d seen a wooden cigar box on the desk. If that was where he’d kept his beloved stogies, then he’d spent time in there.
I rifled through the desk. A stack of payslips from the World for Peace. Completely standard, just like the ones I received. I shut the drawer and glanced tensely at the packed bookshelves covering one wall. If Russ had hidden something there, it would take hours – days – to look through everything.
I stiffened.
Footsteps.
My nerves tingled as I listened hard. No, I must have imagined it. I started to move, then froze as it came again: a faint, steady tread.
More than one.
I snapped off the flashlight and stood tautly motionless, straining to hear. People passing by outside, maybe? Pilots came and went at all hours. Or had someone seen my light despite the closed blinds and called security?
Russ’s study was at the front of his house. I sucked in a quick breath as the footsteps passed near the window. I heard the furtive murmur of voices.
And then a key in the front-door lock.
My heart went wild. There was a small alcove between the bookshelves and the adjoining wall; I sprang for it and pressed into its shadows.
The front door opened and closed. Two sets of footsteps approached down the hallway. Male voices floated in: “Think there’ll be anything?”
“If there is, you know what to do. Take the bedroom. I’ll take in here.”
A bright circle of light entered the study. My pulse battered at my throat. I kept my cheek tight against the bookshelves, trying not to breathe.
The man holding the flashlight jerked open the des
k drawer and shone the beam inside. Its reflection gleamed faintly on his bald head as he searched. He slammed the drawer shut and lifted up the blotter. He’d just reached for the cigar box when a shout came:
“Hey! Someone’s already been here!”
The man’s head snapped up. He swore and hurried from the room.
The cigar box. I didn’t stop to think. I stepped out and took it from the desk, then slipped into the hallway, tiptoeing, my brain screaming, Run, get out! When I reached the kitchen I started quietly down the cellar stairs.
“Damn it! They’re here now!”
Forget sneaking. I raced the rest of the way down, then barrelled across the cellar and up the steps to the trapdoor. For a second it stuck and my heart leaped into my throat – then it swung open and I burst out into the star-coated night.
Shouts came from behind. Still clutching the cigar box, I raced for the street, my footsteps thudding with my pulse.
Halfway down the block I heard someone coming after me.
In a frenzied backwards glance I saw a shadowy, running form, not nearly far enough away. With a burst of speed I turned the corner, then ducked away into the shadows.
Panting, I crouched behind a rhododendron bush in someone’s yard. The footsteps slowed, stopped. I huddled tight against the branches. The cigar box jabbed into my ribs.
A second pair of footsteps. Low voices came, hissing with anger as the men began to search. In a sickening flash I saw again Russ’s body, sodden with blood.
I was trembling. Move – now, I ordered myself. I gripped the cigar box and somehow eased away from the bush, keeping close to the house’s blanketing shadows. Step by step, I crept through the darkness. Behind me, I heard the men rustling at the bush’s branches.
I turned another street corner and ran.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Ramirez, Tier Two fight against the European Alliance…Stanford, Tier Three fight against the Central States…”
I sagged against the metal folding chair. Collie didn’t have a fight today. To my relief, Hendrix passed over my name, too.
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