by Alex Wells
“They contaminate everything they touch with their sin,” the preacher said.
“If you believed that, it wouldn’t just be them waitin’ to hang. It’d be every person the Weathermen would be takin’ too, every one of their kin and every one of their friends, their coworkers.” She tilted her head slightly. “Or mayhap you believe that, preacher, but I’m thinkin’ these fine folks don’t, cause they ain’t offerin’ themselves up to be the next sacrificial lamb.”
There was a lot of ugly still left in the crowd, even if she had it confused for now. Near her two people were praying, hands folded and heads bowed. Barely daring to breathe, keeping her shoulders square and her chin up, she turned back to the miners that guarded the two men. “If you boys please, we’ll take ’em out of here.” She met the eyes of the man who had shoved her back before. There was uncertainty there. “Preacher man wants to hang ’em, but you don’t want to see that. Them two, they’re your neighbors. You don’t want to have a hand in them dyin’.”
The man licked his lips. “But he said death cleanses the taint.”
“Think about it real hard, logic it out in your head and decide if that makes sense.” She glanced over her shoulder. The crew leader and preacher were having another whispered conversation. She had a feeling the crew leader was on her side, was all for just getting the men the hell out of his town before the trouble started. “Ain’t no reason anyone’s got to die today.”
He nodded and stepped aside.
Ellis and Harding walked haltingly to her, their shoulders hunched as if they expected perdition to rain down on them at any moment. “Slow and easy, boys. Don’t startle anyone.” She put them in front of her, Geri and Coyote helping cut through the crowd as they made their way back toward the street. Now that they had the “tainted” people with her, everyone made it their business to get out of her way.
“Ravani!” the crew leader shouted. “Don’t you ever come back to my town again!”
“Not till the day it’s you beggin’ us to come back and save your asses.” It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to let someone that downright cowardly have the last word.
At the edge of the crowd, she saw someone lunge out of the corner of her eye. She turned, hand snapping up to aim square at a dark-skinned woman throwing herself at the younger man – she still wasn’t sure which was Ellis and which was Harding – with tears in her eyes. Coyote grabbed Hob’s wrist and shoved her arm up even as her finger squeezed the trigger; her shot went wild.
The crowd nearest them hit the deck. Someone screamed. Hob cursed, grabbed the older man by the arm and shoved him ahead of her, shouted at the young guy to run. She jumped up on her motorcycle; the oldster got up behind her without any prompting. Behind them more screams, and there was another gunshot – there were some illegal firearms in the crowd after all, even if no one had been volunteering to play executioner. Geri threw the woman over his battery stack even as she screamed, and Coyote did the same to the young man. They peeled out as quick as they could, the sound of chaos growing behind them. Hob jammed her helmet on her head one-handed, just to cut off the sound of it.
“Goddamn stupid fuckin’ idiots,” she cursed into the channel.
“That could have gone better,” Coyote observed.
“What the fuck happened?” Freki asked. He’d already gone back out the gates with the female prisoner.
“Stupid happened,” Geri growled. “Entire square full of fuckin’ scared and stupid.”
* * *
They stopped a safe distance from Tercio to rearrange everyone more comfortably on the motorcycles. Harding turned out to be the older man, and Ellis the younger. The woman was Ellis’ wife Amanda, who’d been locked in the basement of her parents’ house until she escaped by breaking open the cellar doors. Her dark hands were covered with bleeding gouges, her eyes red and voice gone to nothing from screaming. Coyote bandaged up her hands as best he could, but they couldn’t pause long. As they mounted back up, the dark shape of a great eagle cut across the sun, the bird no doubt smelling out the fresh blood.
The sun had sunk behind the dunes long before they made it to Ludlow, heading straight for Clarence Vigil’s house. He was asleep, but Mag answered the door, listened quietly to Hob’s explanation of the situation. “Ellis, I can set you and Amanda up in the guest room, I think. You can talk to Clarence tomorrow and ask about a job. He’s the day crew leader.”
Ellis stumbled into the house like a man in a daze; it was Amanda that stayed behind on the steps, looking up at Hob. “What do we owe you?” she asked, voice a ragged whisper. “Can’t ever rightly repay you, but I’ve heard of the Wolves. You always got a price.”
They’d been playing hero, but heroes still needed to eat, and she had to think of that ugly truth as well. She hadn’t been doing it for the money today, but she didn’t want people thinking they could just throw their troubles on the Wolves for free. She owed her people better than that, even if part of her did want to swoop up all the witches she could find and carry them off. The woman had a gold chain around her neck, so she pointed at that. “Whatever bit of shiny you got. We’ll take it all.”
Amanda’s hand went to her breast, clutching at the necklace half-hidden there. But she gave her head a sharp shake, pulled it off and held it out. The necklace was nothing fancy, but fine enough jewelry for a miner’s wife. “And this,” Amanda whispered. She dug into her pocket and brought out a wedding band, setting it in Hob’s hand. She tugged the other from her finger. The gold finish was clouded with blood. “They gave me Ellis’ ring when they was fixin’ to hang him. Considerin’ they were blessed by that goddamn preacher, I ain’t feelin’ so attached at the moment.”
Hob closed her hand around the rings, tucked them away into her pocket. She touched the brim of her hat. “Handsome payment indeed, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” Amanda whispered. Her spine bowed and her eyes went shining and soft with tears. Mag led her away, then, to Hob’s immense relief.
The less normal cases were still to be dealt with: Harding, and the woman with no voice. Hob dug around in her pockets and brought out a scrap of flimsy and a grease pencil stub and held them out to the latter of the two. “Now that we ain’t runnin’, how about you write down your name.”
Harding cleared his throat. “What if there was some truth to what we was accused of?”
“So what if there was?” Hob shrugged. She took the scrap back from the young woman. It read: Anabi. “Well, Anabi, my friend Mag’ll take good care of ya. She’s been my best friend since we was kids, I trust her with my life.”
“I mean, Ellis was just on the block ’cause Amanda’s parents didn’t much like him, and… it’s a long story. He ain’t done a damn thing wrong, ’cept bein’ a little careless with his cigarettes. But me…”
Hob held up a finger, and handed the flimsy back to Anabi since she was reaching for it, fingers opening and closing impatiently. “I know there’s people around here that’re different. They’re people just like everyone else.”
“But the witch hunt is gonna come here eventually.”
“If it does, you know what’s comin’ now. Start plannin’.”
“Don’t s’pose you could use an old man like me in your company. I heard about the Ravani, and the Ghost Wolves.”
“Depends, Harding.” Hob took the flimsy scrap back from Anabi. It read, in tiny, cramped handwriting: I didn’t deserve to die for being a stranger in town. Thank you. It made her blood boil, knowing she’d been right about it, folk turning on a girl just because she was a new face and had no voice. “How good a shot are you?”
Chapter Thirty-One
“You got a second, Mag?”
She glanced up from the coffee pot to see Hob leaning in the doorway like a long shadow. Her friend looked and sounded more like Uncle Nick every time she saw her. “Another one?”
Hob snorted. “Got something you oughta know.”
“I’ll be
right back.” Mag handed off cups of weak coffee to the three new problems Hob had dropped in her lap, hoping a warm drink would help them calm their nerves. Then she followed Hob into Clarence’s parlor, shutting the door behind her. “What is it now? You got another stray in your pocket you’re gonna pull out?”
“Didn’t know where else to take ’em.” Hob had the grace to look abashed, at least. She sprawled out on a chair.
Mag sighed. She knew she had a better chance of setting these people up with something than Hob; she knew what crew leaders to talk to, what resources they had in their shallow pool that she could call on to help strays. “I know, Hob. We both got our own skills. What’s the news?”
“Don’t rightly know what it means yet, but you got a better head for such things than me. Had someone tell me that TransRift don’t let no one off the planet, they just pretend to. Because for all that only a few of us are out-and-out witches, every last soul on this fuckin’ planet is contaminated.”
With each word, Mag felt herself go colder, stiller. Her mouth suddenly dry, she said, “Who might this someone be?”
Hob wrinkled her nose. “You know that ain’t how it works, even atween you and me. I don’t know if I trust ’em further than I can throw ’em, but my gut says they weren’t lyin’ even if they weren’t tellin’ the whole truth. And Mag, if it is true…”
In a small, awful way, it made her feel slightly better about what had happened. She hadn’t done anything wrong, to have lost her one chance of escape. But shock and cold fury swept that minor relief aside. If this was true, it had become the biggest lie the company had ever told: a false division between the workers that made them turn on each other, and a false promise of a better future on a kinder world if they only worked hard enough. “But we got no proof.”
“Not yet, though I asked for it,” Hob said grimly. “But you know as well as I do that it is the truth. ’Cause you’re lookin’ like you’re fit to be sick, same as I feel.”
“Fit to eat steel and spit nails.” Already she turned it over in her mind, thinking how best to use this piece of information. She looked solidly at her friend, wondering now why Hob had told her, what she expected to come of it. “What’s your aim on this, Hob?”
“Same as always: surviving. Keeping my people alive.”
“But who are your people?”
The corner of Hob’s lips pulled up into a crooked smile. “Still figurin’ that out.” She stood and put her hat on. “But you know, Mag? You always had better aim than me.”
* * *
Hob and the Wolves headed out while Mag was still trying to settle Amanda and Ellis, leaving mute Anabi huddled in the kitchen, staring into a cup of tea like it might bite her. Mag looked through closets until she found the little piece of slate and bit of chalk Clarence’s children had once used to practice their lessons.
“Sleep first, or a bath?” she asked.
Bath, please.
Mag took Anabi up to her room, hauled up a little copper half tub and filled it for her, then helped Anabi get undressed. The young woman’s body was a maze of bruises and cuts. “Didn’t treat you too nice, did they.”
Anabi shook her head.
“I think your clothes are a loss. You can wear some of mine for now, and then we’ll get you something that fits better in a day or two.” Mag began washing the young woman’s hair. It would have been beautiful, all black, heavy curls, if it’d been washed or brushed in recent memory. “I think you’d do about as well in the mines as me. Can you sew? That’s how I make my money right now.”
I can embroider well. I’ll earn my keep however I can. Hesitation, then she scratched out. You don’t have to do this for me.
“People were kind to me when I needed it most. I’m not so mean I won’t pass that favor along.” She got that sense from the young woman, as if she’d been running for a long, long time. “You can bide a while and be safe here, I promise.”
Underneath all of the cuts and bruises there were scars, lashed across the Anabi’s back. She gently touched one, finger tracing the thin weal. “Where’d you come from?”
Anabi shook her head.
“I come from Rouse. They burnt my house down around my mama there, and shot my papa in the back, out in the desert. I can’t ever go back. ’Cause they’d be lookin’ for me.”
Anabi stared at her for a long time, like she was trying to read the details off Mag’s face. With a dripping hand, she wrote, Harmony. That’s where I came from.
“Not such a nice place, is it.”
They don’t welcome strangeness, or strangers. Anabi wiped the writing away with one thumb. I don’t want to put you in danger.
“I promise, you can’t get me deeper in trouble than I already am. We strangers got to stick together.” Following an impulse that drifted up like a bubble in her throat, Mag took Anabi’s hand and pressed her lips against the back of it, felt the flutter of her pulse. Perhaps it was a strange thing to do, but of all the strangeness in her life, this didn’t feel like a wound about to tear open. “You’ve had a long day. Let’s get you put to bed, and you can tell me everything you want in the morning. But don’t worry about it until then.”
Anabi nodded, her dark eyes wide, looking at Mag as if she might try to swallow her up.
For once, Mag found herself not minding that look. She didn’t know what to do about it, not yet, but she knew she didn’t mind at all.
* * *
With Anabi asleep in her bed, blankets tucked up to her chin, Mag checked the clock and let herself out of the house. The reason she’d been awake late enough to greet Hob was that she was supposed to meet with the nightshift crew leader, Odalia Vigil – no relation to Clarence despite their shared last name. She let herself into the warehouse, the sudden hush like a physical thing as she opened the door on people who realized they had nowhere to hide.
“Sorry that I’m late. The Ravani brought me a few fugitives. So you’ll have a couple of new hands in the mine in the next couple of days.”
Odalia sighed, pursing her lips. Three men stood in the room, one from Rouse and two from Shimera. Mag had never asked their names. It was better not to know. “We seem to get a lot of lostlings these days.”
The man from Rouse said, “Wolves used to bring them all to Rouse for Phil to take in, but they can’t exactly show their faces around any more.” At the mention of her papa’s name, one of the men crossed himself like a nervous tic.
Odalia shook her head. “We’ll figure it out. Mag, I wanted you to tell these men what Tavris Meeks said in Blessid. Better it come in your words.”
Mag sat down, smoothing her skirts over her knees, and told the story. “He didn’t see a reason to throw in his lot with us, because we’ve never done anything to throw our lot in with them. We’re two different worlds.”
“So we need to find some common ground,” Odalia said.
“Don’t see why. Farmers like bein’ under TransRift’s thumb? Fuck ’em,” one of the men from Shimera said.
Mag shook her head. “We need ’em. If we ever get cut off from supplies on the train lines, they’ll be our source of water and food. We can’t keep relying on TransRift for anything, not if it means they can press their boot down harder on our necks. Mayhap we could even hide folk out there, if we can get things worked out.”
“Big if.”
“What about this witch hunt that’s been going around?” the man from Rouse said. “That common enough? Far as I know, they’ll be hitting the farm towns same as the mining towns.”
“Things are gettin’ dicey in Shimera already. Farm towns’ve probably hunted out all their own witches and hanged or burned them already,” the other man from Shimera said. “They always been more thunder and lightning about their religion. That really the place we want to make our stand, for a bunch of sand-addled freaks?”
“If you have witchy people in your town, they been living and working beside you without hurting a soul so far,” Mag said, keeping her words measu
red and patient. She thought, then, about what Hob had told her a few hours before.
“Yeah, but when it turns into us or them, we’re gonna have to go with us.”
Mag shook her head. “And don’t you see? That’s exactly the same thing that’s keepin’ the farmers from helpin’ us out. We always let the company divide us up. The only us and them is us…” she circled a hand wide to indicate the miners, their towns, and the farmers “…and the bosses in Newcastle.”
“I don’t think it’s quite the same thing, Mag,” Odalia said. “If someone’s witchy, they ain’t really human, are they? They’re…” Unbalanced, dangerous, destructive. Mag already knew how those sentences ended.
“You ever know anyone, left the planet?” she asked, pleased to see all of them look a little off-balance at the shift in topic.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Odalia returned with asperity.
“News I got today, from someone I trust.” Even if it had come from someone Hob wasn’t certain she trusted, now seemed the time to put it to use. “Said company don’t let any of us leave, not really. Company takes their money and gives them the same kind of treatment I got. Because we’re all contaminated by this planet.” She raked them with her eyes. “Contaminated sounds like a nice company way of sayin’ witchy, don’t it.”
One of the men from Shimera shook his head. “Now hold on a damn minute. That’s one hell of a wild accusation. You got any proof?”
“Ain’t I proof enough?”
The other man from Shimera looked equally unconvinced. “We’re powerful sorry about what happened to you, but that ain’t ever happened before.”
“You so sure about that?” Mag asked quietly. “Or is it just I’m the first one had a friend paranoid enough in the brain to come lookin’ for her? You tell me. Any of you ever heard of someone who left Tanegawa’s World writing back home to tell us how it is, where they gone?”