Hunger Makes the Wolf

by Alex Wells

  Hob didn’t try to follow. For all she’d called Mag’s papa Uncle Phil, the man hadn’t been blood kin of hers. She headed outside to smoke and try to escape the oppressive atmosphere of grief, only to have Coyote grab her arm as soon as she crossed the threshold. Hob almost slapped his hand away – she didn’t like anyone grabbing at her, least of all from her blind side – but the look on his face stopped her.

  He looked scared, brown eyes wide and earnest above his sharp cheekbones. “The Ravani would kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but I think you ought to know.” Coyote had been shorter than her ever since she’d had her last couple of growth spurts, but he seemed even smaller, somehow, wound in tight on himself with worry.

  “What?”

  “When Dambala and I returned to base to tell Nick what happened to Phil, he had an… episode.” Coyote finally let go of her arm to smooth his hand over the stiff, black hair that bristled out from his head.

  Hob dug her cigarettes out, from habit; it gave her fingers something to do, bought her a moment to think. “What do you mean?”

  “He collapsed. Gave us quite a scare, but he was back up on his feet fairly quickly and made us swear to tell no one. But… he’s been coughing lately, and I think there’s blood.”

  Hob almost crushed the cigarette in her fingers. “Know what it could be?”

  “There are several possibilities that spring to mind, and none of them are good.”

  Hob nodded. “Thanks for tellin’ me. I’ll figure out a way to ‘find out’ on my own.”

  “I trust you to get it done. He’ll listen to you. He won’t listen to any of us.” He gave her a quick salute, which seemed strange since last she checked she was the low wolf of the pack, but Coyote did things she found strange all the damn time.

  Hob shook her head. “Don’t know where you been all this time. Man wouldn’t even listen to me if I was tryin’ to tell him piss ran downhill.” She tucked the cigarette between her lips and lit it. “Fuck, like we didn’t have enough shit pie on our plates.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Is Mama gonna be OK?” Mag asked Uncle Nick, as soon as the door closed.

  “Your ma’s a tough old bitch.” Immediately, he winced, at his own words perhaps. But Mag had always known that Uncle Nick and Mama didn’t get along; she just never figured out why. His hand rested awkwardly on his shoulder, a subtle tug, then a push, then a tug.

  He wants to hug me again, Mag thought. But he didn’t know how, maybe. Uncle Nick had also never really been one for affection like that, not like Papa. And how sad was it, as a man grown and more than old enough to have had children, that he didn’t even know how to hug his own niece proper?

  But did she even want to be hugged? She’d stayed calm, the whole journey. She’d already done her crying, she thought, but she could feel more tears just below the surface. She was so tired of crying. She wanted to be angry; Hob had always said angry was better than sad, and Mag was more than ready to believe her. So where was that anger that Hob always had seething in her like more fire?

  “What am I going to do?” she asked, instead. This, she still had no idea about. She couldn’t leave the planet, she couldn’t go back home.

  “Clarence said you can work here. Town’s big enough and enough folk blow through that the company men won’t notice if you keep your head down.”

  She frowned. “Papa didn’t want me in the mines.” But Papa hadn’t wanted a lot of things to happen.

  “Won’t be down in the mines. Clarence promised that as well. Gonna get you workin’ in the warehouse.” He paused, squeezed her shoulder one more time, and then let go. His hand disappeared into his duster for a moment, and then came back out with a small silver pistol that he offered her.

  Mag stared at the gun. “What’s that for?”

  “Hell, girl, didn’t your papa ever teach you to shoot?”

  She shook her head. It had never come up. And she wondered if that would have made a difference a few days ago. She imagined Mr Franklin, dead on the floor of the kitchen with a hole in his forehead, blood spreading out across the floorboards. There was a sick sort of satisfaction to the image, perhaps. She imagined the man with the black eyes, the guards, them all dead as well, before Hob ever got to them. Shouldn’t that make her happy? She didn’t feel much of anything at all.

  And she also thought about Papa, dead in the desert with a cluster of bullet holes in his back. She should want to find the people that did it and shoot them in return, she was sure. Did it make her a bad daughter that the thought only made her ill? Did it mean she loved her papa any less?

  “Take it,” Uncle Nick said. When she made no move, he grabbed one of her hands, pressed the gun into it. His fingers shook, just slightly. She looked up at him, at his one muddy hazel eye, and saw how red it was. Did Uncle Nick cry? Could he? He couldn’t give her papa back. All he could give her was a gun, heavy and hot from his hand.

  She carefully stuck the gun in her skirt pocket. She didn’t want it, but she didn’t want to tell him no either. And because he couldn’t, she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face against his chest. Uncle Nick was stiff for a moment, and then he just collapsed down onto her, his face on her shoulder. He was shaking; his breath heaved, though he stayed quiet. But Mag felt her shoulder go hot and damp with tears soaking through her borrowed shirt.

  Carefully, she rubbed his back between his shoulder blades, and listened to his heart thumping. She didn’t shed a single tear, as she counted each beat and added them into minutes.

  * * *

  After dinner, Mag asked Hob to cut her hair, take her braids off with a knife in Clarence Vigil’s kitchen. Uncle Nick had long since begged off, making grouchy noises about his age, about needing his goddamn beauty sleep, just look at him. Mag doubted that Hob was any more into fashion than she had been when they were girls – not at all, and plain allergic to skirts – but it didn’t take talent to hack her hair down to something short and no-nonsense that would fit under a hardhat. Mag wanted to look like just another miner, even if she wouldn’t be going underground. Then, Hob watching her keenly like this was some sort of mysterious black magic, she filled a bowl with store-bought dye that stank like a laboratory and looked like it ought to be smeared in the gearbox of an elevator. Grimacing, Mag pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and started slopping the mess into her hair. The box had claimed it would quick-dye to permanent black.

  Hob had a cigarette between her fingers, rolling it back and forth like a nervous tic. But at least she hadn’t lit it yet. Mag couldn’t stand the smell and Clarence wouldn’t take kindly to his kitchen being stunk up with tobacco. “You look like a ghost,” Hob said.

  Mag managed a wan smile, “I feel like one. Been dug up out of the ground enough that it don’t seem so far from the truth.”

  “I could ask the Ravani again, ’bout money. Put the screws on him. You’re his kin. He should provide for you.”

  Mag gave her head an abortive shake, then carefully raised her plastic-gloved hands to make certain her hair hadn’t sprayed. “I wouldn’t be much help on that base of yours. Your motorcycles scare me and I don’t think I ever been mad enough to want to shoot anyone, even now. And I don’t think it’s the life my papa would have wanted for me neither.”

  “Don’t have a lot of choices.”

  “I got plenty of choices.” Mag felt her throat beginning to close up and gritted her teeth. “Just might not be the choices you’d make.”

  Hob stared at her for a long moment, still rolling that cigarette between her fingers. She laughed sharply. “Guess I deserve that.”

  “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” She hadn’t meant it like that at all; she was just thinking about Uncle Nick’s gun, still weighing down her pocket. That was the kind of choice that Hob would make, and Mag wouldn’t.

  “No, I hear ya, Mag. But I promise I won’t disappear again. I’ll come by as much as I can.”

  “I’d like that.” Mag shrug
ged. “But we both know that ain’t all that much.”

  “It’s up to the old man how much time he’ll let me have and where he’ll send me.” Hob had said things like that before, though, and then had started spending more and more of her time with the preacher’s boy, Jeb. Though at the time it hadn’t seemed so bad; Mag had been happy for her, if a little jealous.

  She’d never thought Hob was the sort to turn her back on family for anything. And it had gnawed at her. “Were you working all that time?” she asked quietly. She might never get a chance to ask that again.

  “Think it was all my choice?”

  “Yeah, I do. Uncle Nick said you didn’t want to come ’round.”

  Hob sighed. “Asshole,” she muttered. “No… yes. He was right. Was shamed, Mag. Powerful shamed. Ain’t a thing to be proud of, what I done.” Hob crushed the cigarette between her fingers, like punctuation. “But I was also mad.”

  “Mad about what?”

  “You told the Ravani I’d taken Jeb back to the base.”

  Mag stared at Hob, open-mouthed as she tried to make sense of those words, which had nothing to do with reality. She’d seen Hob that night three years ago when she climbed in her window, tried to tell her not to do anything dumb, and of course she hadn’t listened. But that was it. She’d never breathed a word of it to anyone, because that was what she did. Mag kept secrets. And for three years she’d been left wondering what had happened – something to do with the preacher’s boy; it was obvious when he hadn’t come back, though Father Lee had just claimed he’d run off – and not even able to ask Uncle Nick a question because it would have been too incriminating. And then Hob accused her of kicking the mess off?

  Hob continued on, staring straight through her. “You were right. You were fuckin’ right. I almost got us all hanged ’cause I was thinkin’ with my cunt instead of my brain. But it still… it fuckin’ hurt, Mag.”

  Mag finally found her tongue. “Never. I would never have told on you.” She’d never even ratted out those little assholes – what were they called now, Freki and Geri? – when they’d done something bad. She’d always taken care of things herself, taught her own lessons with pranks.

  Hob drew back as if slapped, but she looked to be listening now, keen and hard. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I didn’t breathe a word to anyone! Not Papa, not Uncle Nick, not anyone! And no one asked. The very idea that I’d snitch on you–”

  “If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” Hob interrupted.

  “How would I know?” Strange, she could be mad about this and still feel numb about her father’s murder. But this was years past gone, and a safer way for all that anger to leak out, maybe. “You ain’t talked to me for three years about it, and no one else did either. You might as well have fallen off the map and stopped existing, for all anyone said!”

  “But–”

  “But nothing! Do you know how much it hurt me, Hob Ravani, to not know if you were alive or dead or – or whatever?” She made herself take a deep breath. “If Jeb… if Jeb got you killed, it would’ve been just as much my fault ’cause I wouldn’t have told. But I still kept that secret. I always keep your secrets.”

  Hob took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  Well, it wasn’t every day someone with the last name of Ravani said those words. It was plain startling, even past all the numbness. “I’m sorry too.” She sighed. “I wanted… Hob, I wanted you to be happy. He made you happy. Even if it felt like you were leaving me behind and didn’t need me no more.”

  Hob covered her face with her hand for a moment. Flakes of unburnt tobacco, shreds of paper fell to the floor. “Don’t fuckin’ say that, Mag. Just don’t.”

  “We can’t… We can’t keep playin’ what if about this, Hob. We just… we gotta let it go. Say we both made mistakes.”

  “I think I made more’n you.”

  Mag snorted, smiling in spite of herself. That was more like the Hob she’d always known. “This ain’t a contest.”

  “Everythin’s a contest, ain’t it?” Hob shook her head, dropped her hands to her sides. “But if you didn’t tell the old man – all this was for even more nothin’ than I thought.” She shut her eye tight for a moment, and then opened it narrowed. “Who the fuck told him, then?”

  It was a question, and even without an answer, an easier one to contemplate than the rest of the ugly mess. “I don’t know. Could ask him?”

  “Might as well ask a crow what color the bottom of a rock is on Tuesday,” Hob said. She bared her teeth in an expression only smile-like. “But I aim to try.”

  “Don’t go doing anything dumb.” Carefully, Mag reached out to take Hob’s hand. “I already lost too much. Don’t you go away again too.”

  Hob looked down at their joined hands, nodded. “It’ll be different this time. I promise. I crawled belly-down through hell for three years just to get back to where I started. I ain’t doing it again.”

  After so many days of unrelenting shadow and evil, was it wrong of her to smile, to feel a little hint of hope? That choked her throat more than sorrow had been able to over the last day. “I’m gonna hold you to it, Hob Ravani. Don’t you make me come after you.”

  “I wouldn’t dare, Mag. You’d eat me alive with no salt.”

  Mag laughed, and then Hob laughed, and that felt good. Not like old times, when they’d been giggling girls. Maybe like new times. “Neither of us want that. You’re too damned stringy to eat.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Vice President Gregson? Sir?” Female voice, fuzzed with static.

  Leeroy grunted, cracked his eyes open into slits that showed him the familiar rippling shadows of his office’s ceiling. Right. He’d sacked out on the couch, not wanting to go home until the current crisis had some kind of resolution. It was out of his hands, but he’d found his presence in the building tended to compel the white coats in the basement to stay at their stations instead of weaseling out.

  “Sir?” More static, a few pops.

  “Status report?” he said. His throat felt like gravel, his mouth tasted worse.

  “They’d like to see you down in the basement, sir.”

  “All right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” He levered his heavy frame to sitting, the faux-leather couch creaking beneath him. “Lights!”

  Nothing.

  Annoyed, he walked to the wall plate and tapped the lights on. Another damn maintenance ticket to put in. But as he headed to the little coffee nook past his desk – he had a whole, upper floor of the TransRift tower to himself, since upper management tended to be a literal thing – something seemed off. Coffee would clear the fuzz out of his mouth and brain and get him ready for dealing with a bunch of scientists and doctors all trying to throw each other on top of a live grenade. They could wait a few more minutes.

  When he had his glass mug in hand filled with black coffee so strong it threatened to eat the skin off his tongue, he finally saw it – the liquid tilting, this way and that, ever so gently. The tower was made to sway in high winds, flexing without danger of breaking – an architectural necessity of skyscrapers that the builders back on Earth had figured out centuries ago. TransRift had commissioned its tower to be able to withstand the full fury of Tanegawa’s World’s desert winds.

  But it hadn’t known the full force of those winds, not since before Leeroy had taken over. And the lights of his office – a glitch, sure, taking out the voice command module – were brightening and dimming ever so subtly in an unknown pattern. And – that’s right, there’d been static on the intercom. There was never static on the intercom. Power fluctuations.

  None of these things were supposed to happen – that was part of the point of having a pet Weatherman, wasn’t it? Sure, the majority of them were built to be pilots, but one of Leeroy’s long-ago predecessors had discovered that they could also affect the stranger phenomena found only on Tanegawa’s World. The damned lab-designed freaks were spooky as hel
l, but they could calm the odd weather and the magnetic anomalies somewhat and, more importantly, they could detect and sometimes remove the planetary contamination the idiot workers were encouraged to call witchiness and view with superstition. And then the current resident Weatherman, Mr Green, had been something of a special project, designed specifically to stay in Newcastle at Leeroy’s request rather than be rotated in and out of piloting – most of the Weathermen did go a little odder if they were planetbound too long, creepily twitchy even for them. But since Mr Green’s arrival, living in Newcastle had almost – almost – been like living on a normal planet, the effect he had was so profound. And now it seemed that effect was already draining away, which didn’t bode well for the smooth running of Leeroy’s division in the near future. Or for Mr Green’s health, he supposed.

  Leeroy set his unfinished cup of coffee down very carefully and headed for the elevator, quick walk. Not a run. Upper management didn’t run. But he walked with purpose.

  A gaggle of white coats waited at the elevator doors in the basement, and they all started talking at once the minute the doors opened.

  “Quiet,” Leeroy snarled. He scanned the anxious faces, sallow, pale, black, brown, and no one seemed to want to meet his eyes. He pointed a finger squarely at a middle-aged woman, her dark brown hair shot through with steel gray, a set of anti-splash glasses still perched on her nose and covering her green-flecked brown eyes. “You. Give me the report.”

  She took half a step back, then seemed to find her resolve. “It’s not good, sir.”

  It had already been not good since this afternoon. “Who are you?”

  “Larsa Kiyoder.” At his raised eyebrow, she hurried to continue on, “Neurosurgeon. There was a lot of damage, sir. Heat, spinal fluid leakage – I stopped the neural disengagement before it could advance further, but…”