by Alex Wells
Mercifully, whatever it was retreated, and it was just the three of them again, the guards gasping and wide-eyed. She felt a tickle start up in her nose, probably a bleed from the continual strain of pushing and pushing. Mag licked her lips, tasted salt and copper, and spoke evenly, “No one’s bothered you all afternoon.” She pressed the words deep in on them. “You ain’t never seen me. And you ain’t gonna see me when I leave, neither. You’re both gonna take a nap for the next twenty minutes.”
Both guards slumped back in their chairs. She pressed their eyes closed with the weight of her words and shoved them under the surface of sleep. Only then did she let up. A wave of dizziness washed over her and left in its wake a pounding headache, but she did her best to shake it off. A few uneven steps took her past the deeply breathing guards and into the office. Thank all that was holy and un- that the door was unlocked. She hadn’t even thought to check. For a moment, she visualized shaking one of the guards awake and demanding the key.
She swallowed an unhealthy little giggle as she shut the door behind her. It had worked. Now she needed to be fast.
Her stomach sank, though, when she looked across the office. It was like a dune sea made of nothing but flimsies and scattered sample bags. She would need days to sort through it all, but who knew how quickly the pit boss would be back. And she didn’t dare disturb any of the piles overmuch, in case there was a method to the madness.
As quick as she could, she scanned the top layers around the room. Her papa had taught her plenty about mining when he was alive, enough that she could make some sense of the mess. It was daily reports, and supply sheets, and ore tallies mostly. Maybe if she dug deep enough into those, she’d be able to find patterns in the minutiae that would be useful to the miners. But what she wanted was any kind of information about the surveys.
She focused on words that might be useful: survey, seismic, results, and things of that nature. She felt the seconds slipping away like grains of sand as she kept reading and reading until she thought she’d be swept away on a torrent of useless words.
Under a pile of fresh mine tallies, she found what she was looking for. Sheet after sheet of flimsies showed closely stacked rows of wavy lines. She didn’t know what any of it meant, but the labeling was clear. She stared in dismay at the thick sheaf of seismic survey lines. Why had she thought this would be something she could just read and understand? What did any of it even mean? She considered taking the whole bunch with her and showing them to Clarence, but that many sheets would surely be missed. She did extract one from the middle of the pile and stuffed it into her pocket. One sheet could be excused as something that got lost in the shuffle.
Then she kept looking. There had to be more than that, some kind of report to go with it, right?
She was so caught up in her frantic search that she didn’t realize just how much time she’d wasted until she heard voices outside the office door. Even muffled, she recognized the voice of Bill Weld, the pit boss. And from his tone, she could tell he was yelling at the guards. The door cracked open, and Mag’s heart almost stopped. Then she heard Bill say, “Well, what do you want? Speak up. What do you – oh for goodness sake, why are you waving that slate at me?”
That had to be Anabi, buying her a few more seconds. Frantically, Mag glanced around for somewhere to hide. The only way out was the front door, and she didn’t want to have to try to lean on Bill if she didn’t have to. The very thought made the ache in her head worse.
She spotted a narrow supply cupboard and jammed herself into it as Bill dismissed Anabi with an annoyed, “Take it to your crew leader. That’s not my concern,” and swung the door fully open. It was a plain miracle that she didn’t make noise knocking things over; the closet was filled to bursting with pens, boxes of blank flimsies, and all sorts of office supplies. Something poked her bruisingly in the back. She held her breath in the darkness and listened to Bill’s footsteps move back and forth across the floor. Then he moved further away and she heard another door open and shut.
With any luck, it meant he’d gone to the bathroom, or into one of the other rooms of the office. Mag cautiously eased the closet door open a crack and listened. No, she couldn’t hear anyone in the room now. And when she tried to reach out, to feel if other people were there, like stretching out an invisible hand, none of them were too close. She stepped out of the closet.
As she was about to close the door, she noticed what had been poking her in the back – it had been the corner of a bin marked “destroy.”
It was a risk, but she pushed the bin open and scrabbled through the flimsies at the top. She found more survey sheets among the disorganized mess and… a sheaf of flimsies marked “report.” A quick glance showed multiple corrections scrawled across them in red grease pencil.
She heard the whir of the compost toilet crank. Mag stuffed the report in her shirt and shut the bin, then the closet. She sprinted out the office door. As her foot crossed the threshold, she felt a thrill of fear, waiting to hear the guards shout after her.
Silence. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw them both standing, alert now, and staring right past her like she wasn’t even there.
With an act of will, Mag made herself slow to a quick, purposeful walk. The flimsies crackled in her shirt as she moved. She just had to hope there’d be something worth reading in them when she got back to Clarence’s house.
Chapter Four
71 Days
“He’s singin’,” Dambala said, his low voice filtered to a hoarse growl with emotion. Sweat stood out on the dark brown of his shaved head, running down his square jaw and the tattoos that wreathed his thick neck. “And he ain’t even awake. Why the fuck’s he singin’? Coyote never sang a day in his life, no matter how fuckin’ drunk he got.”
“Sit your ass down, Bala,” Hob said. Not gentle; she never did gentle. But not unkind, either. She still felt like she’d taken a step off solid rock and found nothing beneath her. She’d kept herself moving when Freki had dragged in the ragged, bloody mess of bones barely contained by skin that used to be Coyote by sheer force of will. There were things that still had to be done at the bandit camp, no matter what other fuckery had fallen into their laps. They had to finish going over the bodies, collect all the salvage, and leave their calling card where it could be seen – in this case, Davey had painted the wolf’s head on one of the canyon walls. He was getting good at that sort of art.
But now, back at their base, with Coyote stowed in the infirmary, she’d made the mistake of sitting down. Of breathing. And the harder she tried to breathe, the less she felt she could. The night outside, moons waxing oval, pressed in against her office window.
To her relief, Dambala sat – collapsed, more like – into a chair, which creaked dangerously under the bulk of his muscle. Then she took out a cigarette and lit it with a snap of her fingers, which were somehow still steady. It was an automatic twitch and a calming ritual that could have passed for prayer in anyone but her. After a moment’s thought, she offered the cigarette case to Dambala. He took one with shaking fingers – Dambala had never smoked a day in his life, as far as she knew, but this didn’t feel like a day that belonged in anyone’s life – and she lit it for him with the same little snap of the fire from her blood.
He sucked a drag of the cigarette like it’d save him from drowning, went into a coughing fit, and then did it again.
Hob waited for the next jag of coughing to pass. “Now what’s this about him singin’?”
“Just that. Singin’… no. More hummin’ in his sleep. If asleep is what he is.” Dambala scrubbed his face in his hands. “But there’s music to it. No music I ever heard, but music.”
“Davey takin’ good care of him?” She’d made her own attempt to hover once they were back at the base, but the infirmary was barely big enough for the wounded, and Davey had told her to fuck off the third time she stepped in his way. Coming from someone normally so mild-mannered, she’d taken the hint and stopped fightin
g Geri when he dragged her out of there and told her she needed to update the bandit maps.
But Dambala wasn’t the sort to get dragged away by anyone, unless they had a tractor and a tow chain. “Yeah, seems so. Got two IVs runnin’ into him. Gave him antibiotics, sewed up his wounds. Let me…” Dambala rubbed his eyes again, “…clean him up a mite. He had blood all over his hands, Hob. His mouth. His teeth.”
“I know. I… know.” She’d never be able to forget as long as she drew breath.
“They swore up and down in Harmony that all they done was shoot him in the shoulder and stick him in a cellar,” Dambala growled. “Swore he was doin’ just fine up until he escaped and got lost in the desert on their fuckin’ tractor. I’m gonna go back there and fuckin’ kill them–”
“Bala.” Hob held up a hand. She understood his urge. She was half ready to punch the next person who came in her office door, just because it felt like that or screaming. “There’s… a lot of shit that can happen to someone in the desert when it don’t kill you.”
She knew from personal experience, and when the words came out of her mouth, she suddenly wondered if Coyote had seen the phoenix like she had. If it had worked some change on him at a price he hadn’t fully understood, for the chance at surviving. She shuddered.
Dambala put his face in his hands. “I thought I was all right,” he said, and she’d never heard such a big man sound so small. Dambala had always been a mountain, first literally when she’d been a scrap of a child, picked up fresh off the rift ship by Old Nick, and then figuratively when he’d always stood steady at her back as she’d grown, fought, and taken charge in the wake of Old Nick’s passing. “I thought I was all right with him bein’ gone. No, not right with it, but used to it, like you get used to a bad ankle always hurtin’. But now…”
This was territory no one in the Wolves was any good at, least of all Hob. They all hid their pain under bravado, pretended to be untouchable. That was a really stupid idea, Hob realized suddenly. Because it meant none of them had a fucking clue how to deal with anything more complex than getting angry and shooting shit. But that revelation didn’t help her do anything but wish Mag was here. Mag had always been so good with people, always knew what to say and how to listen so that when you poured your troubles out to her, they felt like they really had drained away.
“Bala…” She cleared her throat, trying to get out the words stuck there. They wouldn’t move. Finally, she rasped, “Let’s have a look at him. I wanna hear this singin’.”
She followed Dambala to lean in the doorway of the tiny infirmary room that had housed Old Nick in his final days. The infirmary was probably the most comfortable place in the base, where the fans mostly worked and they had some cooling lines set up. That had been Diablo’s pet project, between people getting their bones broken and asses beat; he said people healed better when they were comfortable.
A solar-powered fan in the window sullenly stirred the air. Coyote looked like a brown skeleton surrounded by sheets that had once been white but were now soft gray-brown from washing by disinterested recruits. And he looked even tinier and more scraggly when Dambala sat unsteadily in the chair next to his bed, his splinted leg stretched out at an awkward angle.
In the heavy quiet cut only by the metal fan blades, she heard what Dambala had called singing or humming, and it wasn’t really either of those. Like every time Coyote breathed, there was a note of music he exhaled. The sound of it crawled across her skin and set every hair of her body about on end, because within a few notes, she recognized it. She’d heard it before, louder and sweeter and clearer, with a voice she was losing hope she’d ever hear again.
Hob tucked a cigarette between her lips, barely remembered at the last moment that she shouldn’t light it. Not in a sick room.
“You look like you been gutpunched,” Dambala said.
“Ain’t far from the truth.” Hob made herself breathe. “Let Freki know he’s gonna be in charge for a couple days.” She pushed away from the doorframe.
“Where you goin’?”
“Out.” She didn’t want to say more than that, didn’t want to give Dambala false hope. Hell, she didn’t want to give herself false hope.
But if the Bone Collector hadn’t come when she called, maybe she just needed to go to him. And for once, she knew where he was supposed to be.
“Hob!” Mag said, her hazel eyes wide with surprise. Even after so many months, her short hair, dyed black, still didn’t look right to Hob. Not even with the sunset softening the harsh contrast between that and her miner-pale skin. “What brings you here?”
The little splash of wariness in Mag’s eyes hurt a bit, but Hob couldn’t blame her for it. Most times she stopped off in Ludlow, it was to bring bad news. Having a price on her head had really put a damper on casual visits. “Nothin’ bad. Was in the neighborhood and thought you’d want to hear how your job came out.”
“Job… right! Yes. I would.” Mag waved her inside.
Hob paused at the threshold long enough to pull her half-finished cigarette from her lips. She regarded it, sighed, and the rest vanished in a shower of sparks between her fingers. Mag had never liked her uncle smoking, and that dislike had extended to Hob’s copying his filthy habit. Hell, Mag still seemed to want to blame Old Nick’s lung troubles and eventual death on the cigarettes, no matter how often Hob told her it had to be something else. Smoke and fire couldn’t kill you when you were damn well made of smoke and fire. “Thought you’d be more excited about it,” Hob commented as she followed along to the kitchen.
“So you found them?” Mag asked, as she poured her a glass of lemonade.
“Yeah. Hell of a lot more than you said there’d be, by the way.”
“Was that a problem?”
“’Course not,” Hob snorted. “Mostly ’cause our timing was lucky. I got a passin’ strange story to tell ya after the business is out of the way.” She took her accustomed seat at the kitchen table – it almost felt natural now, to be in Clarence Vigil’s kitchen in Ludlow instead of the one belonging to Mag’s mother, Irina, back in Rouse. It still didn’t smell quite right, burnt coffee and garbage that needed to go out rather than sugar dough or sausage klobasnek. In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t been that long since Mag’s papa Phil had been murdered, and then Irina burned alive in the house they’d shared together. But it felt like another lifetime, and she wished it didn’t. Was wrong, for someone so kind as Irina to be fading away with such ease.
Hob sipped her lemonade and detailed the job to Mag, the number of company spies they’d found, and then the presence of Coyote. Mag started that part of the conversation with her hand over her mouth in plain shock, but finished it leaned forward, elbows on table, intent.
“So you’re goin’ for the Bone Collector.” Statement, not a question. Mag had picked that up quick. Ludlow was the closest town to where he’d buried himself, after all.
“Gonna try, at least.”
“Surprised you stopped here first, then.”
“Like I said, was passin’ through.” And maybe she was playing the delay game, because she didn’t want to break that last sliver of faith she had. Hob regarded Mag over the top of her lemonade glass. “You wanna come along?” The words echoed sour in the pit of her belly the moment she said them. Part of her wanted the Bone Collector all to herself, in a way. Like he was somehow hers. The other part of her didn’t trust that one damn bit.
Mag nibbled on her fingernail. “You know? I think I might. There’s… somethin’ I think I better ask him about.” Mag stood abruptly. “Let me show you.”
Hob made no move to stand as Mag opened one of the kitchen cabinets and wormed half into it. Probably a hidden panel in the back, she figured. A moment later, Mag emerged with a roll of flimsies tied with a scrap of twine. She spread them out in front of Hob.
“What do you think?” Mag asked.
Hob looked at the one on top, a collection of wavy lines. “Think your art could use some wo
rk,” she said dryly.
Mag laughed and slapped her on the arm. “That’s a survey line. One piece of it. I only took one page.”
“Don’t know about no wavy line survey.”
Mag traced the line. “Don’t rightly understand it myself, but they stick these hearin’ devices in the ground, and then set off explosives nearby. That sound from the explosives goes through the ground and them hearin’ devices pick it up and different kinds of rock pass the sound different and… somehow you can read it all off here.”
Hob raised her eyebrows. “Any of y’all know how to do that?”
“Clarence does, a bit. ’Cause he’s old as dirt.” Mag shook her head. “But the point is that they been doin’ a damn lot of surveys. And there’s this.” She slid the top sheet aside to reveal a report, covered with corrections made in grease pencil.
Hob squinted at it, doing her best to read over it quick. She’d never been as strong at reading as Mag – she’d learned late and not well – and bless her adopted sister for forgetting that all the time. She did catch one phrase repeated over and over again: unknown ore type A. She tapped the words with her finger. “This what they’re lookin’ for?”
Mag nodded. “Must be. And there ain’t been a new ore type found in decades. So they’re lookin’ for it hard. In all the towns. And the company men pushing hard, too. Been accidents. The kind with explosives.”
“Always accidents, aren’t there,” Hob said, trying to puzzle out a bit more of the report.
“More’n there should be. But you know what I think that unknown ore type they’re looking for is?”
Hob glanced up at Mag, then sat back. It wasn’t something they’d talked about much, but she remembered the little sample bag that had been in Phil’s pocket when she’d found his body, and she remembered what the blue crystals inside had done when she touched them. She remembered also what the Bone Collector had said about it when she’d shown it to him: …that moment, when the claws of the phoenix sank into your eye? Like that. It still didn’t make sense to her, but her eye throbbed with the memory of it all the same. There was some kind of power in those crystals, and of course TransRift wanted more power if they knew about it. “Shit,” she said.