by Alex Wells
“And other things,” Mag whispered. She looked down at their clasped hands.
“And worse things,” Phil agreed. “Will you do this for me, for your mother?”
Mag looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “I’ll do it,” she whispered. “I’ll find work, I’ll get a big house for the three of us.”
Phil’s eyes stung; he should be happy, he knew, but the thought of his only child, his daughter going so far away left him spitless. But the unknown had to be better than this. “That’s my girl.”
Chapter Three
Hob rode like a bat out of hell for Rouse, but even at full throttle with the electric motor half screaming beneath her, it was long gone dark by the time she rolled up to the town. With the sun down, the temperature dropped profoundly; she was grateful for her heavy coat, since her sweat-damp shirt left her feeling chilled. She pulled right up to the massive gates set in the razor wire-topped walls of Rouse, knocked on one in the special pattern that identified the Wolves to the townspeople, hoping someone would be near enough to hear. If it was a Mariposa man, she might end up getting shot for her trouble.
The small inset door opened in the gate; she drifted through on her motorcycle, nodding politely to the man who had opened it for her. In the dark, his face blackened with mine dust, she had no way of knowing if she’d ever met him or not. And even if she had, it wasn’t likely he’d recognize her after three years and enough growth spurts that she was now only a few centimeters shorter than Old Nick himself.
Even at night, the mine works dominated Rouse, washed bright as day with floodlights set up all around it. The mine was a lattice of metal and wood built up the side of the black rock spires that loomed over the town like tombstones. Elevators ran up and down, some taking miners high onto the spires, others deep into the ground. Teams of men and women with hybrid oxen moved enormous carts of ore to a set of conveyer belts, which took the ore to a waiting train car, its metal shine muted by a hefty coating of red dust.
Hob turned away from the mine works and idled down the three little side streets to Uncle Phil’s house, following them like a long-cherished scar in her own skin. In the narrow alleyway between the beat-up walls of his house and the next, she parked her bike and pulled off her helmet, replaited her hair into two smooth tails, fussed with brushing the dust from her jacket.
There was only so much delaying a body could do. Helmet tucked under one arm, she walked up to the door and knocked.
Irina opened it. She looked like she’d aged more than just the three years since Hob had seen her, round face haggard and her normally ruddy brown complexion blanched gray. Her dark hair was shocked with white; surely there hadn’t been more than a few stray strands three years ago. Dark circles shadowed her hazel eyes, red from weeping. Maybe, Hob thought, she already knew. Only how could that be, and Nick not already here like a cat with his tail afire?
Irina stared at her uncomprehendingly, a frown creeping over her thin lips. Then her eyes went wide and she smiled, of all damning, awful things. “Hob? Hob Ravani? You haven’t paid us a visit in ages.”
She didn’t know, couldn’t know, Hob realized. So she’d been crying about something else. “Ma’am, I’m…” She licked her lips, tried again. “Is Mag here?”
Irina shook her head. “No, and not Phil neither. Hob, we… we decided to send Mag away, get her off world so she could start setting up a new place for our family. Maybe we should have… I didn’t know if you’d want to say goodbye, but there just wasn’t time.”
Hob gave her head an abortive little shake, trying to wrap her mind around that. Mag gone, Mag getting sent away. “Why – no, don’t worry about it. I haven’t been ’round in years. When did they leave?” It wasn’t fair, she wanted to scream. That they’d send Mag away and she might have never known. But she’d long since lost her right to complain on that count. And how could she think so selfishly when she had her burden of news to still tell?
“Phil took her on the train to Newcastle the day before yesterday.” She frowned, worry creeping back into her expression, cutting the lines around her mouth deeper. “I expected him home yesterday, but no trains came in, so mayhap the track’s got some emergency repairs or such.” It wasn’t an unusual situation, with the sands constantly shifting and the hardpan settling at seeming random.
Hob’s face felt strange, frozen, her blood cold. Mag had gone with her papa. But they hadn’t found a second body, hadn’t seen the great eagles circling a second meal, and hadn’t seen even signs of more blood. Did that mean she’d made it onto her ship, or…? It was the or that left her stomach sick and chilled. She didn’t know which leg of the trip Phil had been killed on, though if Mag had been with him, wouldn’t she have been killed too?
“Hob? What’s wrong? You look ill…” Irina looked ill herself, and she knew now, she must know, a little worm of horror uncurling in her heart and showing as a shadow in her eyes, in the way she gripped the door frame with knuckles going white.
Hob dug into her pocket, took out the wallet that she’d pulled from Phil’s pants. Irina’s eyes went wide at the sight of it, and she covered her mouth with a shaking hand. Hob shook the wedding band from the wallet, held it out to Irina. “I’m sorry. Truly sorry. We found him today, in the dunes a few hours out of Primero. Been shot in the back at least four times.”
Irina collapsed to her knees, a thin wail coming from her mouth, tears filling her eyes as she shook her head. “But the train… train’s just late, ain’t it?” Her eyes went wider, throat straining as if to scream, but she could only whisper, “What about Mag? Was my… Was my Maggy…?”
“She weren’t with him. We would’ve seen her if she’d been anywhere nearby.” There was nothing more than that she could say.
“She’s– she’s got away then. Away.” Irina sagged, sobs tearing from her throat.
Hob crouched down so her head wasn’t so far above Irina’s; it felt wrong, to be standing over her like that. “I was with Dambala and Coyote, and they went to tell Nick. He’ll be here soon as he can. Won’t be much longer now.” Irina grabbed the collar of Hob’s jacket with her hands, half falling forward to press her face against Hob’s shoulder. Hob sucked in a shaky breath, chest gone tight like she’d never breathe proper again. “And I swear to you, Irina. We’ll figure out who done this, me an’ Nick. And we’ll make ’em bleed.”
Irina only sobbed louder. Feeling wooden, Hob slid one arm around her, rubbing little circles on her back and making noises she hoped were soothing.
* * *
It took nearly an hour to calm Irina enough to get a coherent word from her, but Hob didn’t begrudge her that time in the least. Sallow, still, calm Irina was somehow worse than screaming and crying Irina; she looked like all the blood had been drained from her, all life, all hope. Hob made them each a terrible cup of coffee, like tar, just so they had something to hold and warm their hands, and she asked Irina all the horrible questions that had to be asked. Where had they gone, how much money did they have, had Phil made any of the company men angry, had Mag, had Irina, had anyone been bothering them.
Irina had no answers for any of those questions, not even a reason for wanting to get Mag off world other than Phil had decided it was high time and they had saved enough money for her, if not for themselves. Hob couldn’t comprehend how a woman could know so little about her own life, leave so many decisions in the hands of a man, even a good one like Phil. On that count, she held her tongue.
Last, Hob took the little burlap sample bag from her pocket, showed it to Irina, even poured a few of the little crystals onto the table top, careful not to touch them. To her eyes, they pulsed with threads of flame, beating in time with her heart. “Do you know what these are? Have you seen them before?”
Irina gently stirred the crystals with one finger: no reaction. “Never. Nor the sample bag. That’s not the sort of thing… Phil… it wasn’t his job. Only company men do that, the onsite geologists. They wouldn’t give it to him.”
“Damn.” Hob used her handkerchief to brush the crystals back into the bag; seemed best to not have Irina touch them, just in case.
“Are those somethin’ to do with what– with what happened?”
“Don’t rightly know. But I’ve got a few ideas on who I could ask.” Hob pulled her battered watch from her waistcoat and checked the time. “I hate to ask but… you mind if I catch a few hours of shuteye? I’ll be off early to go huntin’. I suspect Nick’ll be here late tomorrow morning, so you won’t be alone long.”
Irina shook her head. Her eyes were red, but dry now. “I… I’m so glad you’re staying. I don’t want to be in an empty house right now.”
Hob dumped out their untouched coffee and then guided Irina to bed, where she tucked her in like she’d seen Irina and Phil tuck in Mag, back when she and Mag were girls, pulling up the quilt to her ears. The woman curled up around her husband’s pillow, face buried in it. Hob turned out the light and left quickly; she couldn’t eat any more of Irina’s grief. It made her feel too goddamned helpless.
Rather than return to the kitchen and make more undrinkable coffee, Hob headed upstairs to Mag’s room, telling herself that it was just to see if anything was untoward. It was neat as always, but barren, most of Mag’s stuff no doubt packed away for her trip off world. Felt strange, to contemplate Mag hopping onto a rift ship like the one Hob herself had jumped off over a decade before. Would Mag be relegated to the hold too, or to the closet-like cabins that always smelled a bit like vomit, from so many passengers unable to handle the moment the ship fell through a rift to come out in another system?
Hob found a bit of torn flimsy and the stub of a grease pencil in Mag’s desk drawer. She wrote out what little she did know in a note for Nick, and an explanation of what she planned to do on the morrow with the crystals. If they had anything to do with Phil’s death or Mag’s possible disappearance, she didn’t want them near Irina a moment longer than necessary. Herself, she didn’t care about. All the Wolves were already long since damned, most of them corpses who had walked from the desert into a new life.
Hob took off her black tie, shrugged off the black waistcoat she’d lifted from Old Nick’s closet a couple of years ago, and then in her shirt sleeves laid down on Mag’s bed, curling up so her feet didn’t hang over the edge. The sheets smelled of the soap Mag liked, cinnamon and vanilla like her mother’s cookies, and a little bit of sweat and dust. But it also smelled different from all those the times they had shared it as teenagers. There was a grownup smell, a hint of perfume, and something else. Made sense – Mag had been a few years younger than Hob, still in shouting distance of childhood when Hob had been a wild teenager and sowing her oats. After three years, Mag would almost be a woman full grown, and Hob had missed it all. For a stupid argument, because of a stupid boy, and the stupid had spread like blood in water. She’d about drowned in it before she was through.
“I’m sorry, Mag,” Hob murmured to the pillow. “I’ll make it up to you. I pay my debts.”
* * *
Hob woke early, feeling like she hadn’t slept at all. Her back ached, one arm gone numb and tingling. The sky outside the window was starting to lighten up; false dawn was as good a time as any to leave. It was a long journey ahead, and she preferred to get as much distance as possible before the sun really set things boiling.
Hob tucked the note she’d written for Nick under the coffee pot on the kitchen counter, then helped herself to a couple of slices of bread and a wedge of cheese, gobbling the food down as she walked the short distance to where she’d left her motorcycle. She finished the last mashed-up mouthful while she filled up her canteens at the water tank that occupied a place of honor on the street, under its own little roof. The taste of cheese still thick on her tongue, she shoved her helmet on and rolled out of town.
This time it was a man from Mariposa security at the gate, his green uniform ill fitting, shirt tails untucked and poking out from his unbuttoned jacket. When he approached, Hob just shoved a handful of plastic chits at him, everything she had in her pocket. She wasn’t in the mood to answer questions or even pick a fight. There was somewhere she needed to be.
The ruins of Pictou were north, just off due north, a location she’d had to mark on the map herself years ago since the town no longer existed and had been struck from the official maps. She kept an eye on her compass, the steady ticking of the chron as her course plotted on her HUD, and just relaxed into the ride, trying not to think too hard about Phil or Mag as the dunes spooled by. No tracks or way markers existed to keep her on course. The town had been abandoned for a half a century, destroyed in a single night by a crazed witch, according to TransRift. It was story numbers one, two, and three any company man would trot out as an example of why all witchiness should be reported before the contaminated individual grew too strong. Old Nick had never offered her an alternate explanation, something she still found disturbing. Pictou now sat at the middle of an area marked as a toxic disaster site, a circle thirty kilometers in diameter that warned of a deadly miasma of witchiness Hob had never noticed. Perhaps it wasn’t visible to someone already “infected.”
Close to boiling midday she arrived at what was left of Pictou. Anything soft had been stripped from the streets by the wind; there was no synthetic wood left in it, no plastic or scraps of fabric or signs of any life. Tumbledown stone walls sat in the shadow of the black rock spire that the miners of Pictou had once cut their way through. Here and there, rusted bolts were visible, the remnant of a piece of metal, like a flywheel, that was all that remained of the mine works. The only thing that had saved the town from being completely buried by traveling dunes was how far into the hardpan it was, how it was sheltered by the black buttes above from the worst of the winds. As it was, dust and sand had drifted up onto most of the ruined walls, filled in the gaping holes that had once been basements so that they looked soft and safe to walk on.
She parked her motorcycle in the deepest shade, where she’d be safe from the sun until the end of the day, took her helmet and jacket off, and waited. She gave the body of the machine a few desultory thumps to knock the thick caking of dust away, but the scratched and sandblasted paint beneath wasn’t much prettier. Shiny, clean machines were things that happened to people who didn’t ride them daily through an endless dustbowl, she reckoned. The engine was the important part anyway, and Hati the garage master kept it humming at a perfect pitch she knew like the sound of her own breath and heartbeat. She brushed another swath of dust off the battery stack and turned her attention back to the ruins.
The Bone Collector haunted this place like a ghost, Old Nick had said. Well, not so much told her as implied it in that smug bastard way of his, lips all screwed up like he was holding in laughter. She’d dropped messages and packages off here on errands, but she didn’t know how to summon him. Nick just always seemed confident that he’d find the little packages he sent.
She passed the time sharpening her knives; she always carried six with her, distributed over her belt, boots, and wrists. They didn’t really need tending, but she hated having her hands idle. Idle hands did nothing to keep her mind busy, when she’d rather be thinking of anything but what she’d already lost and might still lose. Nick had fished her up off the streets young and thrown her straight into training, but he’d never treated her special, no matter what the other two pups – Francis and George, they’d been called back then – claimed to the contrary. Hob was fair certain he’d been meaner to her, most spiteful, harder on her, if anything. But she’d stood up to him and spit in his eye and worked hard to learn how to fight and ride her motorcycle and do the hundred other things every fullgrown Wolf knew – though never how to use her witchiness. That was a secret Nick had sworn her to once and then left her to figure out on her own.
The reward she’d shared with Francis and George for all their hard work was trips into Rouse where they got dropped off on Phil’s doorstep so he and Irina could give them some veneer of civiliz
ation. Neither of the boys had ever had much use for Mag, and she’d had even less use for them, but she and Hob had taken a liking to each other immediately and been thick as thieves. Felt like sisters, Hob thought, not that she’d ever had one properly, but that had to be what having a family was like in some kind of back-asswards way. It hadn’t been an easy life even so, but she’d been happy and confident that she’d keep moving up in the world, keep being Mag’s friend, keep having a family. Then she met the goddamn preacher’s boy.
Oh, he’d been cute, and no one had thought anything of it at first, other than Nick giving her the stinkeye like he always did. Jeb fussed over her and told her how scared he was every time she went out with the big Wolves to carry their ammo boxes or watch the motorcycles while they did the real work. She’d always been tough as hell, mind, and proud of it, but a little fussing had felt perilously special, when the only special thing she had to her name was the witchiness she never dared talk about. And then they’d started kissing. And then they’d started fucking. And Old Nick pulled her off town detail. In retrospect, she could see it hadn’t even been anything that personal. She’d been due for the next step in her apprenticeship, more responsibility, and that just meant guarding their base while everyone else was away. But she’d been thinking with her cunt instead of her brain, as Nick had accused her of later, and she took it a place beyond personal. She’d argued with Old Nick and got her ass grounded, of all humiliating things. And then she’d gone and done it proper stupid, and left the base while everyone was out on a job to go get her boy, bring him back, and then screw him there like it was the world’s biggest fuck you to Nick Ravani for daring to think he could tell her what to do. The one rule he’d ever given her, and she’d shit all over it at the first opportunity because she was mad.
The night she’d gone to Rouse to get Jeb was the last she’d seen Mag. Her best friend and sometimes sister had tried to talk her out of it, and Hob should have listened. But Hob had never been that good at listening to anyone when she had her back up. Old Nick had told her later that it was Mag who ratted Hob out to him, and that was a tangle she still couldn’t undo in her own brain. It had been the right thing to do, the necessary thing, because Old Nick had been right – because somehow the dried-up sonofabitch always managed to be right – because the preacher’s boy had just been using her to get to the Wolves, and she’d almost brought TransRift down around their ears with her stupidity. All the horror that had happened next and ended with Hob busted back to pup and starting fresh had been necessary too. But she couldn’t divide what she knew intellectually to be true from the sight of blood spraying across a ceiling, and from the absolute hurt of knowing Mag, the person she trusted most in the world because only a damn idiot trusted Nick Ravani, had betrayed her. Even if it had been right and proper and necessary, it still hurt.