It was a converted office, boards nailed gracelessly outside the window so the moonlight cut through in silver slats. Both men sat up in their beds. Tristan held the shiv in front of her and stared at Colin's partner.
"You're going to be very quiet," she said.
The man pushed himself against his headboard. "You're leaving, aren't you?"
Tristan advanced on the bed. "You have a choice to make."
The man shuffled his feet in the sheets, as if trying to force himself through the wall. "I won't say a word."
"Convince me."
"I've seen you together. I saw Colin give you the keys. I could have said something."
"Why didn't you?"
He laughed, burbling and off-kilter, then covered his mouth, eyes wide. "You kidding? I saw what you did to the guards the night you came here."
Tristan turned to Colin. "Come on."
"This isn't what we planned," Colin said.
"Shut up and get your shoes."
"We can't risk him—"
"He's smart," Tristan said. "Smart enough to prefer a beatdown to a comb through the heart. Right now, the king is upstairs with one of his brides. In sixty seconds, I'm out this door."
"Break your word the moment you step through my door." Colin fumbled for a shirt, pulled it over his smooth chest. He jammed on his shoes and laced them tight. "Great way to earn my trust."
Colin's partner stared through the moonlight. "You made her promise to kill me?"
"It was nothing personal."
"I'd say that's pretty fucking personal!"
"This is no time for couples counseling," Tristan said. She pointed at the man in the bed. "I'll leave the door unlocked. Wait ten minutes, then you can leave, too."
The man's brow creased. "Why can't I leave with you?"
"Because I'm not friendly." She pocketed her shiv. Yvette's blood lined her nails. "The hard part is over. Wait ten minutes, then run."
Colin pulled on his coat and picked up a small black bag. "Ready to go? Or do you plan to literally shoot us in the foot first?"
She stared at him, then opened the door. The hallway was still empty. The moans upstairs had ceased. She went to the back stairs and leaned over the railing. The kitchen was dark. She descended and moved to the light blinking on the alarm beside the back door. She'd been watching Winslowe reset it every morning. She punched the code. The light went green. She slid open the door, glass rumbling.
Cold air touched her face. She jogged across the dew-soaked lawn Dashing had the peasants mow every Sunday morning. Colin kept pace. She didn't look back until they reached the high fieldstone wall. No extra lights had gone on at the palace.
She climbed straight up the rough stone, flattened herself under the first string of barb wire, and held down a hand to help Colin up.
"Who are you, Spider-Woman?" he whispered once he'd struggled his way up top. "What do you need me for?"
She smiled. "We'll see."
They dropped into the grass beyond the wall. Still no lights or alarms from the clubhouse. It would be another two or three minutes before Colin's shadow made his move. And he would, too. Colin had misjudged him. She understood the urge to keep their conspiracy to a tight two, but it would have been less messy to include the man than to kill him.
Colin's shoes smacked asphalt. She followed him down the road between the dark mansions of Oceanside. Or was it still Oceanside? It was Dashing's land now. The territory of Better San Diego. The kingdom was a joke, but it was real, too. The institutions that had made it Oceanside were all dead. If a stranger were to come and draw a map, an update of what the country had become, Dashing's claim would be the accurate one, the one that should be set down in ink. How many micro-nations bloomed on the blackened corpse of the United States? Even with the aliens gone, there was no hope for restoration, was there? Too many people had died. The few who were left would persist in pockets like Dashing's for years. It could be generations before rulers had the resources to begin conquering and consolidating, pulling these new cities back into proper states. It could be hundreds of years. Progress was not inevitable. It was always easier to burn than to build.
The fog of her breath hung in the night. Colin jogged down a long hill, scanning house numbers, then turned into a driveway and knelt beside an overgrown flower bed. He lifted a stone owl and fished a key from the dirt.
"Just as planned," he grinned. He led her through the dark house to the garage. A black Prius sat in the gloom. He laughed and grabbed her and hugged her to him. "Can you believe it?"
"Maybe." She put her shiv to his neck. "Now where's my brother?"
Colin went very still. "What are you—? I'm on your side!"
"Then you'll be happy to tell me where Alden is."
"Did the squid swap your brain with a crocodile's? If you stab me, you'll never find your brother."
"Unless I start with your extremities and work my way in. If I cut off your balls, how long do you think it would it take you to bleed to death?"
"Cartwheeling Christ," Colin said. "Washington State. A nuclear power plant made it through—it's called Hanford. They got all kinds of slaves there. What's your problem?"
Tristan lowered the knife. "How do you know all this?"
He popped the driver's door and leaned in for the keys. "Same guy who set me up with this car. Old high school friend. He's a coyote now, been driving people up there for weeks."
"A guy like that is your friend?"
"Look, I just know the guy. You got a problem with that? Maybe you can go talk it out with Yvette."
"Just want to know what we're getting into." She pulled the trunk latch. Water. Food. Blankets. She closed it, the click echoing in the three-car garage. "We got out. That was the deal. Why are you helping me now?"
He crossed his arms, rocking on his heels. "I had a little brother, too. He made it through the Panhandler. He wasn't so lucky with what came after."
She met his eyes. They were steady, bright. She went to the garage door and hauled it up with a metallic clatter. "Let's go."
He smiled unhappily and started the car. Brake lights flooded the garage. The engine was far softer than her Vespa. Colin wound through the palm-lined streets and the silent Spanish manors. He reached the highway and headed north. The gas engine kicked in, grumbling through the car's sleek frame.
"What do you think you'll do once you find him?" Colin said.
"Kill whoever's got him."
"I meant after that, Terminatrix."
"I hadn't really thought of it." She gazed out the window at the flat, black Pacific. "Find a place. Stock up. Go from there."
"I want to find a few people. Just a tight little group. No psychos like Lord Dashing."
"You don't want to go it alone?"
"No way," he said. "Who's going to watch your back against the wolves? Anyway, you'd get lonely, don't you think? I mean, my hand makes great company, but it's awfully clingy."
"You could get a mannequin," she said. "Dress her up however you like."
"Just you and your brother." He laughed, gazing across the car at her. "What are you going to do when he wants to find a girl?"
"I told you. Mannequins."
"Well, he is fourteen. He'd probably go for that."
With the aliens gone, they drove straight through Los Angeles, slowing to weave through the wrecks blockading the lanes of the highway. Smoke rose from a handful of chimneys, but entire stretches of the landscape had been burnt to the foundations. Tristan looked out Colin's window, trying to catch a glimpse of the sea and the disc of the ship jutting from the waves, but the highway was too far inland. Another time.
They stopped at a gas station in the cleft of the hills north of the city. Tristan peed in the weeds, then made a pass through the convenience mart, but it had been stripped bare. Colin topped off the tank with one of the two jugs in the trunk. Tristan bashed in the window of an SUV and siphoned the jug back to the top. They continued on.
"You smell
like gasoline," Colin laughed.
"Peril of the age," Tristan said.
"Got some gum if you want it."
"You kidding? I'd kill for gum."
"I don't doubt it," he chuckled. He dug into his pocket and passed her a stick of Orbit. Sharp spearmint. Her mouth watered around it. He grinned. "Good, right?"
She blew a pathetic little bubble, cracked it between her teeth. "Best thing mankind ever did."
They stopped for the night at a motel on the road north of Bakersfield. The eastern mountains grayed as they prepped for bed. Tristan's twin bed smelled musty and the room was cold enough to see her breath, but she piled the covers high, napping in fits and starts until the early afternoon.
Awake, she was eager to hit the road. Colin snored on, shirtless, hair sticking up from his head. She got out some granola bars and Cheese Nips and crunched them as loudly as she could. He woke with a sharp intake of breath, blinking at the unfamiliar white ceiling. He saw her and smiled.
"You chew like a gorilla," he said.
"Shared a lot of dinners with the larger apes?" she said.
"Every Thanksgiving." He rose, twisted his back, grimaced, and stripped down to his jockey shorts. He plopped beside her on the bed and scooped up a handful of salty orange crackers. She passed him a bottle of water. He swigged and scratched his chest. "Eating cheese crackers on the road with a pretty girl. My sixteen-year-old self would be so proud."
"This life has its moments," she said.
She packed up and waited for him to dress. She offered to drive, but he shrugged her off and pulled back onto I-5. The Prius thrummed up the endless valley. Snow rested on the peaks to both sides, but the valley floor looked better than the last time she'd seen it: the winter storms had brought it fresh water, returning hints of green and green-gray to the swaths of brown and yellow. The road climbed into the mountains. Patchy and half-melted snow covered the grass, a worn-out white blanket. She called their first stop a few miles south of Redding so they could use the bathroom and switch seats.
"There's bad people here," she explained. "I know a way around."
Colin squinted up the desolate road. "You're from here?"
"Yeah." She closed her door. "You?"
"San Diego. Loved it. All this white stuff on the ground is kind of freaking me out."
She thought about asking him more, but there didn't seem to be any point. It would be like asking about the life of a stranger. A stranger with nothing but bad memories of lost family and friends. She detoured around the city and rejoined the highway.
Mount Shasta swelled to the east, its white heights painted pink by the sunset. Colin guided her off the junction at Weed. Sunlight disappeared from the road through the forest. The highway swooped and fell, embedded in a mass of primeval pines that blotted out all but a narrow strip of starlight. Up in the pass, snow obliterated the road. Tristan slowed to a crawl, heart thudding at every curve, frustration mounding with every minute they crept through the unkempt roads.
The pass dropped. The snows receded, revealing beautiful black pavement. Wary of black ice, Tristan didn't press past 50 MPH until they reached Bend, Oregon.
"Why don't we call it a day?" Colin said.
"The day stops at midnight."
"Which is what, ten minutes from now? Hanford's another 250 miles from here. Through two-lane highway. It's going to be five o'clock before we get there. I don't know about you, but I get cranky when strangers knock on my door at five in the morning."
Tristan slowed the car and clenched her teeth. "Fine. But we stop early, we start early."
"Good by me. I don't want to get there after dark tomorrow anyway. I don't know what this place is like. It could be just as crazy as Dashing's."
She exited the highway and started looking for a quiet subdivision where they could break into a house. "What do you know about this place?"
He gazed up at the cloud-skeined stars. "Not much. They've still got power, which is cool. And slaves, which is a lot less cool. But I don't think they're totally swinging from the chandelier. I've heard there's a way to buy your way in to citizenship."
"With what? I doubt they care about cash. Unless they've got a shortage of toilet paper."
Colin shrugged. "I didn't get the specifics."
"Is Alden a slave? What will they want for him?"
"I'm as clueless as you are, Tristan. If they're doing business with my friend, I'm sure they'll do business with us."
She pulled into the driveway of a darkened home. The door was locked, but the neighbor's wasn't. She yanked open the empty garage and Colin guided in the Prius. Using a flashlight from the trunk, she scavenged the house, turning up a few cans of green beans and boxes of cereal. No milk, of course, but she'd gotten used to pouring water on her Rice Krispies long ago.
Colin rattled around the den, emerging a minute later with a bottle and a grin. "Look what I found."
She turned the flashlight on him. A brown bottle of Jack Daniels glinted in his hand. She smiled with half her mouth. "How thoughtful of them to leave the liquor cabinet unlocked."
He raised his brows. "Fancy a party?"
"We've got to get up early."
"Come on. We're escaped fugitives. All the best criminals drink bourbon."
She snatched the bottle from his hand and showed him the label. "This is sour mash, not bourbon."
"Sounds even tougher."
She took a swig, eyes burning. He winked and tipped it back. His voice went hoarse. "God, I've missed that. Think the brewmaster survived? Or is the secret of JD lost forever?"
Tristan found candles in the bedroom and brought them to the living room. They passed the bottle back and forth, discussing what to expect in the morning. He wanted to drive right up and talk their way in. She wanted to watch from a distance before exposing themselves.
"You're so cautious," he said from beside her on the couch. "Sometimes you've got to just go for it."
"So cautious," she said. "Like yesterday. When I broke us out of that Fellini-esque kingdom."
"We'll creep up on it, then. But I'm telling you, it'll all be fine." He smiled at her. She could see it coming from a mile away. He let a moment pass, as if waiting for her to absorb his smile, then scooted next to her and took her in his arms. As he leaned in, she placed two fingers at the base of his throat and pushed. He jerked back. "What's the matter?"
"Well, Colin, I'm just not that sort of girl."
"It's the end of the world. Who cares what kind of boys and girls we used to be?"
"My uterus, for one."
He grinned in the darkness. "I've got protection."
She snorted. "That was optimistic."
"There are other things we can do."
"Like?"
"Mouths can't get pregnant."
She smiled, bringing her hands to the front of her chest, where she could strike quickly if needed. "You realize I don't owe you anything, right?"
He cocked his head. "For the ride up? I'm not doing this to put you in my debt."
"I'm talking about me." She gestured at herself. "I'm not here for you."
"You have the wrong idea, Tristan." He met her gaze, his eyes soulful and serious. He shook his head and reached for the bottle. "It's not a demand. It's an offer. If it came off otherwise, I'm sorry."
She mashed her lip between her teeth. "Me too. Look, these days, it's tough."
"What?"
"Letting down your guard."
"I think you just did." He found his grin and handed her the bottle. "To peace."
She drank. "Peace."
They went to bed soon after, she on the couch, he in one of the beds. She stayed awake a while, pleasantly drunk, but he was snoring within minutes. She slept.
He didn't mention it in the morning. They were back on the road by nine. The pines shrunk, grew scrubbier. Hard black rocks jutted from the weedy fields. Within a couple hours, they were back in the desert, where the sagebrush was the tallest plant in sight and tumblew
eeds clustered the barb wire fences of forgotten farms and pastures. A bridge carried them over the wide Columbia into Washington. Colin stopped in the gray and snowless hills to have a snack and hit the bathroom.
Tristan tromped into the dust and picked out a sage to take care of business behind. As she finished up, a muffled crackle drifted on the wind. She went still. It repeated twice more, staticky and brief.
Back at the car, Colin leaned against the trunk, gazing north across the hills. "Ready to roll?"
"Did you hear something a minute ago?" Tristan said.
He shook his head at the hills. "Like what?"
"Nothing. Probably just a coyote." She got into the car.
Not twenty minutes later, they crested a long hill and a city spread out before them. Single houses, strip malls, bands of green along the river. Brown circles of old farms. Two towers of steam rose from the river north of the city. Colin cruised along, slowing as the highway entered town. After several miles of lost civilization, the desert resumed. The towers of steam grew nearer and nearer. Colin watched the road. They curved around a spur of rock, revealing a striated gray building with a square white cap, dozens of industrial outbuildings, and mile on mile of fence. The road led straight to a gate.
"Stop the car," Tristan said.
"What? We're almost there."
"I know. Stop the car."
"What's your problem?" he smiled.
She whipped out her shiv and pressed it to his throat. "Do I need to tell you again? Or is the blade more convincing?"
He blinked, slowed, guided the car to the shoulder. He put it in park, leaving the engine on. "You want to tell me what this is about, you crazy bitch?"
Tristan tightened her grip on her shiv. "Where's the radio?"
"What radio?"
She pushed the point into his neck until a bead of blood bloomed at its end. "The one you used to call ahead."
He cried out, lifting his hand to his neck. She dug in harder and he froze. "Under the seat!"
"Is my brother really here?"
"Yes!"
"Then what aren't you telling me?" She leaned into the shiv, peeling apart the skin of his neck. Blood washed onto his collar.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 62