“Who is driving them?”
Valeria stared at the sky. “Angry people.”
“The day the barns burned, Diego said one word. He said hatred.”
“That’s right.”
“Could anything be happening already? Other than drills?” Lou glanced up at the bright blue sky. “It’s not spring yet.”
“No. But it will be Saturday tomorrow. I’ll keep my ears open at the bar and see if there is anything to learn.”
Lou nodded. “Maybe I’ll go with you.”
“Is that a good idea?” Valeria cast a doubtful look at her.
“I’ll bring Shuska.”
Valeria laughed. She had kept up the bar routine. There had been two Saturdays since the attack and the fire, and the only change they’d made was sending Shuska down and back with the family, and posting her near the door as a visible enforcer. There had been no incidents. “Leave it for now. There’s nothing to learn during Christmas breakfast.” Valeria took her arm. “Everyone has been working hard, and the preacher and his little dog are here.”
Another mystery. What was Coryn up to that meant she didn’t have time for Aspen? She kept meaning to capture Pablo and ask, but he was wildly popular with this family. You’d think they’d been starved for religion.
Everyone had been working extra hard to repair the barn and shore up the planting beds and the fences during this last unusually glorious week. It had felt like a late Indian Summer, a strange gift after the freezing rain.
Lou went upstairs to find Shuska.
The big woman was looking out over the fields. “I hate holidays,” she said as Lou came up behind her. “Particularly Christian ones.”
“Would you like a job that will take you away from the table?”
Her broad face brightened.
“Alondra mentioned something creepy her dad said about maybe never seeing her again. It’s probably nothing, except my sixth sense is itching. Will you go wake up the ecobots and make sure they keep watch? Can you keep watch, too?”
Shuska pulled Lou close to her. “Good day to be outside.”
“Grab a plate from Matchiko on the way out. Tell her you’ll be on guard duty.”
Shuska changed her indoor shoes for boots. “I understand what Pablo did out there more than I’ll understand the prayers they’ll say in here.”
“Me too.”
Lou followed Shuska down the steps and resolved to stay cheerful, and even to enjoy Pablo’s indoor prayers. She did find them oddly comforting, even if she had no deep sense of their meaning. Out here, it was easy to understand the pull of religion. Life was hard.
Pablo had the good sense to offer a very short prayer so nothing grew cold. “Dear God, keep us and our families safe on this day.”
Even Shuska wouldn’t have minded that.
The sausages tasted fabulous and the pancakes had emerged warm and fluffy, and smelled of cinnamon. There wasn’t any syrup, but Sofia had revealed a bag of powdered sugar she had been saving for a special occasion in a tin on the top shelf of the pantry. The Silversteins and the other new staff had all been found places, so the table was crowded in a happy way. At one point, Lou noticed Diego looking sad, but he was across the table from her and there was no easy way to ask him about it.
At the end of the meal, all of the new people properly mentioned that this was the best feast they’d had in a year. Astrid and Tembi almost glowed, and all of the household women looked pleased. Most of the women went to the big sitting room, and most of the men spilled outside to exercise the horses.
Since Lou hadn’t helped cook, she stayed in to clean alongside Valeria and Felipe and his small son, Hila, who brought him dishes with a solemn look on his face. Felipe took them one by one, thanking Hila for every plate. Alondra was with them as well, cleaning up the floors and giving Hila directions from time to time like a rather annoying big sister.
Lou hummed as she washed, happy to have a simple thing to do. The kitchen was clean, and they’d started boiling water for Alondra’s holiday tea, when Shuska came in and pulled both Valeria and Lou outside. She walked them a few feet away from the house. “Hear that?”
At first it sounded like a strange wind, except that it was too steady. “Drones?”
Shuska shrugged. “Maybe big ones. Helicopter drones carrying people? I can’t see them, but the ecobots compared the sounds to their databases of machine sounds, and they think they are troop carriers.”
Valeria frowned. “We can’t see them?”
“From the ridge,” Lou said. “But we can’t get there in time.”
They listened until the sound faded away. She needed to know more, and she needed to know now. She stared at her wristlet. If only—
To her utter astonishment, it buzzed her, signaling a call.
“Coryn?”
“Merry Christmas.”
She shook her head, the greeting a little jarring. As far as she was concerned, the holiday was over. “You too. Look, we just heard something—”
“What?”
“We don’t know. The ecobots think they are troop carriers.”
“The ecobots told you what they think?”
“Shuska has a way with them.”
“They’re probably right. We have a sat shot from a few minutes ago that shows six pretty big vehicles against the lake. There are signs that the attacks are going to happen now.”
“Now?” It wasn’t spring yet. It was Christmas Day. Lou stared at the tiny image of Coryn on her wrist and tried to tell what she was feeling. It was as impossible as trying to read Julianna. “We’ll see what we can find out.”
“We don’t think you should go to town. Not today. Not after the barn burning. Let me know if anything happens. I have to go.”
Lou stared at her wrist for a long while. The advice not to go to town today was probably good. Tomorrow she would go in with Valeria and she would be well-armed.
She ignored the hoofbeats on the road at first. After all, the -o boys were exercising the horses. Then Alondra raced past her, and she looked up to see Paulette on Buster’s broad back, her baby slung in a pouch on her back. She had Sugar and Spice on lead, trailing obediently behind her.
Lou felt a chill run though her. She broke into a jog, stopping when she reached the horses.
Buster held his nose out and whickered at her.
“Good boy,” she murmured, looking up at Paulette. She wore a red-and-green Christmas dress and a gold cross, her eyes wide above cheeks streaked with tears.
“What happened?” Alondra asked.
“Diego told me to bring the horses back to you. He and Ignacio and Santino left with the other fighters.”
Diego’s sadness at breakfast made sense. She remembered talking with him in Wenatchee. I want to fight.
Could she have done anything to stop this?
Lou knelt down in front of Alondra. “Can you tell your mom? And Valeria? I’ll help Paulette put the horses back.”
Alondra ran as if she could outrun the information she carried.
Lou and Paulette led the horses into the new barn. She hadn’t told the -o boys the horses were for them. She was going to do it today, as a holiday present. Damn.
Paulette moved easily around the horses, taking off tack and whispering in their ears. The child stayed quiet against her back, occasionally making tiny sounds as they brought the animals fresh water and buckets of grain. Lou kept expecting it to cry or be frightened by the smells of damp horse and the sound of stomping feet, but it didn’t object to any of it, not even when Buster put his head down and sniffed the baby’s head.
After the horses were all settled, she asked, “Can I see your baby?”
“Of course.” Paulette twisted the carrier around so the babe rested in front of her and pulled back a corner of its warm blanket. Dark eyes and a tiny wisp of dark hair above round cheeks and a small mouth. “This is Jude. He’s named after my oldest brother.” She chewed on her bottom lip and looked down. “He wen
t, too. Jude. To war.”
“Do you know that? Do you know where they went?”
A brief bitter pain tightened Paulette’s features. “They don’t tell me anything since I ran away.”
And she’d still named her child after one of them? Jude opened his small, circular mouth and let out a significant screech for such a tiny thing. “How old is he?”
“Four weeks.” Paulette rocked him against her and he snuffled and twisted in her arms. “He came two weeks early, but he weighed seven pounds, so the midwife said he would be fine.” Her voice was soft and still a little full of the wonderment new mothers often had. His soft cries seemed to fade into Paulette’s heart while they crawled up Lou’s spine, making her want to move, to do something. But Paulette simply gazed at him, her eyes soft. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
The baby let out a wail.
“He is. And loud.”
“Can I feed him?”
“Of course. Sit right here. I’ll be right back.”
Lou jogged toward the house. As she neared the front porch she heard angry words and then a woman screamed in anger, frustration, or pain. Lou couldn’t tell if it was Valeria or Sofia. One of them. Alondra must have relayed her news.
Lou wanted to get back to Paulette, so she snuck in and up the stairs without stopping, retrieving the small plastic horse from her rooms.
She ran into Alondra at the bottom of the steps on her way down, and waved the horse at her. “Let’s give this to Paulette.”
Alondra ignored her. She looked quite small and alone at the bottom of the stairs. The other women were probably thinking of everything else. But of course, Mathew must have been in one of those troop carriers as well. He had even told Alondra he was leaving, only she hadn’t known quite what he had meant. Lou should have done something, gone to town instead of having holiday breakfast.
But there was nothing to do now. The carriers were gone, the fight started.
She bent down and whispered in Alondra’s ear. “Do you want to come with me to give this to Paulette?”
“Yes.” He voice sounded small. “Yes, I would.”
Poor baby. “Here, you can carry it.”
“Is she hungry?”
“Of course she is. I should have thought of it myself. Can you bring her a bowl of soup?”
“Can you carry the soup so I can carry the horse?”
So they ended up walking back together through the unseasonably warm night. Owls hooted and a slight wind barely cooled them. In the barn, the baby still nursed hungrily, and Lou held onto the warm bowl until it finished, and after that she gingerly bounced the warm baby until Paulette finished eating.
Only then did Alondra hold out the small horse. “This is a gift from Lou.”
Paulette looked up at her. “Really? For me?”
“Yes.” Lou didn’t really know what to say, so she stayed quiet.
“Thank you.”
“Lou likes to help people,” Alondra said. “She helped me get home, and she let me carry the horse.”
If she said anything she might cry. Lou took three deep breaths, and then asked, “Can I give you a ride home?”
Paulette nodded.
Alondra took the bowl and gave the baby a small, sweet kiss, before heading back toward the house, her head bowed.
Lou and Paulette talked of small things all the way back to town, Paulette behind her on Buster, the baby between them. Buster didn’t seem to mind the triple burden.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Their impromptu Emergency Operations Center was a hive of confusion. Coryn and Imke both started to turn on the same devices. Adam pushed Imke away and muttered something about being better at searching. Imke said, “Fine, but think about what we’re searching for first.”
Coryn had the fleeting thought that all of them, even Adam, were used to taking orders.
Eventually, Adam stared at news screens and data feeds, flipping content so fast it made her dizzy when she glanced at it. Imke used a secure line between them and Chicago to talk to the Chicago EOC, and to two people from Chicago who were in the formal Seacouver EOC.
Coryn called Lou, and together they started writing down everything they thought might be a fact, and when Lou begged off, she sat beside Adam and wrote down the facts he pulled out of news articles, using paper and a purple pen. Half of the “facts” she wrote down seemed contradictory. The paper quickly became a mess, but when she tried to move to the computer it was hard to type, since Adam was using all of the screens.
Namina brought coffee. After she handed it around, she stood staring at the table full of notes, looking perplexed. After a minute, she started taking photos of the notes and ordering them into lists that she sent to the printer and taped onto the wall.
Relief flooded over Coryn when Eloise opened the door.
Eloise had never been talkative. She didn’t bother to offer a greeting, but simply came and leaned over Coryn’s shoulder, looking at her list. She pointed at a statement that troops had been identified on a boat outside of Tacoma. “Cross that one off.”
“Why?”
“It’s a rumor. I don’t have time to explain everything. Add that the Camas Gate has been fortified and the road remains clear, but Portland also has two suspicious tankers.”
“What about city systems?” Coryn asked. “Adam saw a transportation knot up in Lynwood.”
Eloise shook her head. “Those happen without hackers. Remember that nothing is true until it’s verified and even then it probably isn’t. And that’s worse in this case. We know there’s bad information being injected into our systems.”
Coryn swallowed. “How do I tell?”
“Use multiple sources when you can’t find a human to verify.” Eloise offered her a rare smile. “You’re doing well. Keep it up.” Then she went to interrogate Imke, and Coryn gave up on listening as Adam already had a list of three other news sources for her to review.
After Eloise had visited all three stations, she clapped her hands for their attention. “Short briefing,” she announced. “We’re going to keep this center running as a backup center. More people will join us, some from the city, some from our teams. Most of you will end up with assistant jobs. Coryn, when you get relived, I want you to work with Imke and handle communications with Lou.”
“Where are Blessing and Day?” Coryn asked.
“We sent them to bed. They’ll be second shift.”
At least they weren’t out trying to save the world like last time. But then this was far more serious. The last attack had felt bad, but the question had always been how quickly the city would win, not if it would. Before she had time for more questions, three new people came in and reported to Eloise.
Coryn returned to the news reports. It was the only way she could think of to manage both the chaos in the room and the fear and adrenaline that kept spiking through her.
‡ ‡ ‡
A few people trickled in, but the work didn’t slow. Shift change finally came. Coryn had never been so happy to see Blessing in her life. Given that he always made her happy, this seemed significant. It felt like she had been checking and rechecking facts for no more than an hour and no less than a week. Her shoulders were tense and her neck hurt and her forearms ached from so much typing. She felt wrung out of energy, sugarless and pale.
At the end of the briefing, Eloise came by and touched Imke on the shoulder. “We have a cot for you in the room next door.”
Coryn almost protested, but Imke had seen the look on her face and shook their head slightly, smiling a secretive and sweet, if tired, smile. Coryn understood. They were both, after all, envoys of a sort. And Imke held a more formal position than she did, and worked for a mayor, not an ex-mayor.
So Coryn walked home with Namina, and let the robot give her an upper-body massage before she went to bed. Namina’s fingers knew exactly where to poke and prod, which muscles to run long on and which to treat with strength. Best of all, Namina demanded nothing in return, not e
ven polite conversation. This was good since Coryn’s throat was sore from talking for so many hours.
Coryn kept her sleep to seven hours, ran for two, and showered and ate in one. She arrived in the outside corridor fifteen minutes before she was supposed to report back for her next shift.
First, she called Julianna. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need anything? I could send Namina.”
“I’m okay.” The words were flat, and they both knew Julianna wasn’t okay. The etiquette of disaster. Multiple disasters, really.
“Do you need anything?”
Julianna sighed. “You’re helping the city. That’s the best any of us can do. Is your sister okay?”
“As far as I know. She sent a text an hour ago and said the night had been quiet.”
“Good. Give me an update when you can.”
Coryn had learned to recognize a polite dismissal. “I’ll call if I get news.”
She stared at her wrist for a few moments, but she’d have all the news she needed soon, and there was no one else to call.
When she opened the door, she barely recognized the EOC. There were four times as many people, the big table had been pulled apart into four smaller tables that each had four to eight people huddled around them, a coffee service filled one corner, and the room smelled like tired people and fresh bread.
She went to check in with Eloise, but couldn’t find her. She found Blessing and asked him what she should do. He grinned her, of course, but it was an exhausted smile. “Are you okay?” she asked him.
He pulled himself up to his full lanky height and took a deep breath, then gave her a little bow, as if she were a queen. “Of course I’m okay.”
She smiled. “It looks good in here. A lot must have happened.”
“The real cavalry rode in to the rescue.” He pointed across the room at a tall gray-haired woman with an apple-cheeked smile and a red hat. “That’s Lucille Moore. She acted as our Incident Commander, like Eloise did for you. She knows her stuff. She called in all these people and all this food.”
“Did anything important happen?”
“The operation team worked on reporting viruses and hacks. They found a lot. A whole neighborhood water system went down, and another neighborhood’s sprinklers went on full speed and stayed on. The transportation grid stuttered a few times during the morning, and they think some of it is still in trouble.” He shrugged. “But who knows? Since it’s Saturday, there’s no school or anything, so the grid isn’t stretched.”
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