With the sickening give of a loose tooth uprooting from its gums, the rock slid from beneath him. He cried out and fell toward the bright blue water.
9
"Who is it?" Raina said. "Who were they working with?"
"I'm not telling," Martin said, index finger and thumb pinched together, other fingers splayed. "Not unless you promise not to run after the islanders with a knife in your teeth."
"Do these people mean to fight back?"
"Yeah."
"Then I'll see them."
"Great," Martin said. "Okay, then you have to get cleaned up first. I promise not to look."
"Do you normally?"
"No," he blushed. "But you need it, Raina. No offense, but you look like something coughed up by a dolphin. We'll only have one chance to make a first impression with her."
"Her?" Raina said. "My parents were seeing a man named Bryson."
"I'm talking about Jill at the Dunemarket. She organized the whole thing. Bryson must be working with her."
"How do you know Jill will see you? You're just a boy."
He shrugged, smiling. "I fixed her walkie talkies. She'll do anything for me. Come on, I'll set up the tub and get your clothes. Which ones do you want?"
"What do you think Jill will like?"
He shrugged again, not meeting her eyes, and went to the garage and pulled out the big plastic tub they used for a bath. She grabbed sun-warmed jugs of water from the back porch; he brought her green bar soap and a big black bottle of shampoo and a towel that didn't smell too bad, then headed up the shore toward her house. She stripped while he was still within eyeshot, but he didn't turn around. Out in the breakers, black dolphin fins scythed the water and disappeared. She poured the water into her salt-locked hair, scrubbing the sand from her scalp with her nails. The water was nicely warm, offsetting the cool morning, but she knew better than to waste water or time. Her hair hung down her back like beached kelp. She dried off and went inside, rattling around the kitchen for scissors. Martin got back a few minutes later with a bundle of her clothes, including white tufts of underwear.
She held out the scissors. "Cut my hair."
Martin tucked his chin, staring at the scissors as if they might leap for his tendons. "What?"
"My hair. Cut it."
"I don't know how to cut hair."
"You open the scissors, then close them. Do that until my hair is shorter."
He looked up in horror. "Seriously, Raina, I don't know how. I'd make you look crazy, like one of those little dolls with the—"
"Fine. I'll do it." She twisted a clump of her hair, snugged the scissors against her scalp, and closed them with a crisp clasp. A long black chunk of wet hair tumbled to the tile floor.
He reached for her hand. "That's way too short! You'll look like a boy."
"Then do it how you want."
He mashed up his face, cheeks red, then accepted the scissors. "Let's go outside. The light's awful in here."
He brought a chair to the back porch. She dressed, then sat outside while he trimmed her hair in careful snips. He didn't understand. Now that her wrath had gelled and cooled, she wasn't sure she could kill them all. There were so many. They had guns. Boats. Lived isolated on an island across the waters. She had to become a different Raina, but she knew too firmly what Raina looked like to do that.
But if she looked in the mirror and saw a stranger, that stranger could become anything.
Birds peeped from the trees. Martin snipped and mumbled to himself. Hair coiled around her bare feet. He took a long time. With the sun close to noon, he stepped back, returned for one last cut, then brought her a mirror.
Raina's hair had hung down her back like a cape. The girl in the mirror had visible ears, her shiny black hair stopping short at her chin. She turned her head, examining.
"Well?" Martin said.
"I don't know who I am."
"Did I cut it too short? Didn't you see the stuff on the ground? Why didn't you say something?"
She handed him the mirror. "It's perfect."
She stood. He brushed stray hair from her shoulders, confused. Finished, he put together food for the long walk to the Dunemarket.
"I'm going home," Raina told him. "I'll be right back."
"What for?"
"My knives."
"Why didn't you tell me to grab them when I got your clothes?"
She gave him a look. "Because you don't tell someone where your knives are."
She headed to the house, jogging to work out the stiffness in her legs, but didn't press herself too hard—the trip to the market would take a few hours and she was already bruised and sore. Crows cawed from around back. She approached from the front. The house looked the same as always—the wind-chapped paint, the windows greasy from the constant seaborne mist—but it no longer felt like home.
She kept her three best knives under the particleboard on top of her bookshelf. One of the blades was longer than her hand. The others were finger-length, one double-edged, the other serrated. She put them on and returned to Martin, who had two packs ready and a walkie talkie on his belt.
Raina had gone to the Dunemarket a couple times a year with her parents, but she let him lead. Once they got past the first hill, the sunny day got hot. They drank warm water as they walked. Blind windows watched them, doorsteps sheltered by tall tangles of grass. She knew of a few families who lived in the neighborhoods west of here, but the homes along the main road were all abandoned. Even in the peaceful years before the Catalinans arrived, no one wanted to be obvious to travelers.
They detoured around the makeshift graveyard at the bottom of the long hill. There, sun-mummied bodies and gnawed bones showed the scorches and shatters of a gunfight that had erupted in the middle of the jammed-up cars. Martin hiked up a residential street nestled between two clusters of supermarkets and coffee shops and veterinary offices.
The long, shallow valley between the next two hills had been burnt to the ground. Black timbers leaned from foundations. A crater rested on the far slope, its hundred-yard hole finally healed with vigorous green grass. Houses stood half-collapsed, paint blackened, windows broken. The homes and shops on the other side of Gaffey St. had mostly survived, but half the city had been erased, reduced to rubble, much of it already reclaimed by hungry grass, coastal scrub, and young trees.
But the straight road through it was the best route between the ruins of Long Beach and the whole Palos Verdes Peninsula. A market had been inevitable.
That's what Raina figured, anyway. It already existed in a smaller version of its present form by the time her second parents had brought her to the hills. The market itself had sprung up on the road, where it shifted daily, a fluxing quilt of tents, tarps, and stalls bracketed by a canyon park of tall palms and a shuffle of perpetually brown undergrowth. The permanent merchants lived in these small, undulating hills, but Raina didn't know why people called them dunes. They weren't sandy at all.
They walked in from the south, the road sloping down into the canyon. Travelers and locals mingled among the spreads of lemons and oranges, the fresh fish and bread, the scavenged jeans and seeds and cans of coffee. Martin put his walkie talkie to his mouth, repeated his name and "Over" a few times, but got no response.
"They must not have theirs turned on," he offered.
A man with sunglasses and a crossbow watched from a platform shaded by an umbrella. Martin waved. The man nodded. A couple of the marketeers glanced Martin's way; they must have recognized him, because they didn't bug him to buy or barter. He turned off the paved road to a dirt trail leading up the serpentine hills.
Raina watched his plodding back. It was weird to see evidence he knew people. He usually spent his time alone in the ruins. Even around Raina, he could be shrinkingly shy. Then it came to her: it was the road that brought him here. The information. Wires and outside news were his two great loves.
Palms fluttered overhead. This part of the interior could get blazingly hot in late summ
er and the merchants had dug new homes into the sides of the hills, for protection from sun, fire, and hostile travelers. Martin passed by three wooden shacks that served as foyers to the underground homes, then knocked on the door of a fourth.
It was opened by a heavyset man with a drooping black mustache and arms as tan as Raina's. "What's up?"
"It's Martin Grundheitz," Martin said. "Can I speak to Jill?"
"She's out."
"When will she be back?"
"How should I know? She doesn't tell me nothin'." The man scratched his bristly cheek. "You want, you can wait down at the tent." He gestured to a blue tarp strung between the scraggly trees lining one of the canyon folds. "I'll let her know you're there."
"Thank you," Martin said. The man closed the door, stirring the smell of dust. Martin brought Raina down to the tent. The shade was cool and the trees smelled like pollen and sage. At the very bottom of the fold, dried white mud promised a creek would return when it rained.
"Do you think she'll see us?" Raina said. "You might do work for her. That doesn't mean she'll tell you about the rebellion."
"She thinks I get so wrapped up tinkering with an engine or a solar panel that I can't hear her talking to her people. I know what they're planning. She can't just brush me off."
Raina had her doubts, but after an hour in the shade, feet crunched across the layers of fallen brown palm fronds. A middle-aged woman with a sun-blond ponytail stepped into the shade and offered them a bottle of water, which they accepted, as was polite.
"Hey, Martin," Jill said. "What brings you up from the sea? Got another machine part you want me to watch out for?"
"Not this time." He glanced at Raina, fiddling with his hair. "Can I ask you something?"
"Is that what you walked all this way to do?"
"Yeah."
She grinned. "Then I think you'd better."
"Well, it's just kind of secret. Like, it isn't something where I want you to get mad, or think I've been prying, and maybe I'm not even right, but—"
"We want to join the rebellion," Raina said.
The woman's mouth twitched. "The rebellion?"
"The one against the Catalinans. The islanders. The ones who want to take us over."
"I think they've gone from 'want' to 'did,'" Jill grinned wryly. "Now, Martin."
"What?"
"You're too smart for this," she said, earning a blush from him. "You're our little technowizard. Rebellion? Even if one of those existed, you wouldn't want to get dragged into something like that. What if something happens to you? What do we do next time the radio breaks?"
"They're not that hard to fix," he muttered.
She turned to Raina. "As for you. I don't know you."
"You knew my parents," Raina said. "Kate and Will Ambers. They were working with Bryson and Bryson works with you."
"Were?" The woman shook her head. "Say a fight's brewing. Say people don't want to become the subjects of a bunch of savages. Such a resistance might be considered noble. But what kind of people would they be if they used children to fight rapists and killers?"
"But Jill—" Martin said.
She cut him off. "Keep your heads down. Move inland if you need. Whatever it takes to stay out of trouble. Good seeing you, Martin."
The woman strode uphill. Martin watched her leave, dumb with disbelief.
"You said she'd listen," Raina said.
"It's not fair. I help her all the time."
"Are you going to just let her go?"
"What's the point?" He flapped his hands. "We should go home. She'll never listen."
"Not to words," Raina said. She exited the tarp into the post-noon heat.
Martin hurried after her. "Where are we going?"
She almost didn't tell him—the storage was her place, her secret—but Jill hadn't even let her speak. Martin was her way into the rebel ranks. She needed to trust him, and more importantly, for him to trust her.
"To prove we're useful."
She took him to the dead man's bunker, detouring along the way for trash bags from a hollowed-out grocery store. The walk took most of the afternoon. At the metal steps leading down from the trap door, Martin clicked on the pen light he never left home without. He swept the beam over shelves of food and soap and coats.
"Dude," he breathed, "this place has everything."
"This is where we go if we ever have to hide," Raina said. "It's my most secret place. You have to promise not to tell."
"Promise," Martin said. "Are those vacuum tubes?"
She yanked him away from the glassware. "Stop it. Jill doesn't care about vacuum-tunes. She cares about guns."
Dozens still stood in the rich wooden racks. She took six. Enough to command Jill's interest without quenching it or exhausting her own supply. She took no bullets. Jill would have to earn those. Martin looked longingly at the room with the tubes, then followed her upstairs for the trek back to the Dunemarket.
The late afternoon wind was cool and steady. They had a long way to go, so Raina avoided the winding side roads in favor of the PCH. Blocks on end were jammed with cars, but the sidewalks were clear enough.
The sun dropped and went away. A dark blue dome of light rolled into the ocean, dragging a blanket of star-speckled black behind it. But when they reached the Dunemarket, there were still torches flapping in the wind, like she knew there would be, along with a line of solar-powered garden lights embedded along the road, their pale light just bright enough to place your feet by. Jill was there in the road, arguing casually about the cost of a spear gun with a grouchy old man. Similar dickering played out at a half dozen stalls and blankets.
Raina flung the bag at Jill's feet with a clank. A rifle barrel tore through the black plastic, exposed by the torchlight.
"Got a use for us now?" Raina said.
"Sweet Christ!" the old grouch spouted. "Is that a .30-30?"
Traders and travelers turned, wafting old sweat. Jill stared at the pile of metal.
"What you got there, Jill?" said a man who was less old than her, his grin a V of delight. "A bag of suicide?"
"Contraband," Jill said, snapping out of her shock. "From two kids. Who don't know any better." She grabbed up the bag with a grunt, then took hold of Raina's wrist. "Come on."
The woman dragged her up the hill straight for her underground home. A candle wavered in the foyer-shack. Jill used the candle to light two more, handed one to Martin, and went down a short earthen tunnel propped up by wooden beams. It smelled like moist dirt. Jill brought them through a doorless entry into a semicircular room just tall enough for the woman to stand upright.
She hoisted the bag in front of Raina. "You idiot."
Raina crossed her arms. "You need guns to fight them, don't you?"
"I also need them not to hear that I have them. There were a score of travelers out there. You too short to see they had eyes? If one of them tells the islanders what they saw, how long do you suppose I'll get to keep these guns?"
"That depends on how well you hide them," Raina said. "They only took the others because no one knew they were coming."
The fire in Jill's eyes dampened. "Could be. Or it could be they come here and put out my eye to make me tell them the truth."
"So let them take these ones. I can get you twenty more tomorrow morning."
"From where?"
Raina tipped back her face. "That information is reserved for my superior officer."
"For God's sake," Jill muttered. "Stay right here."
She left the room, footsteps crunching down the gritty floor. Martin cleared his throat. "Was that smart?"
"It got us inside her house," Raina said.
"A dirt house. That's like the best place to bury people in."
Minutes dragged on. Her confidence flagged. A flat black beetle wiggled along the wall. Footsteps scuffed down the hall.
"I have talked," Jill said. "And I have decided to make an exception."
Raina grinned at Martin, who grinned
back. She stepped forward. "So we're in."
"As long as you can keep scrounging up guns? Hell yes you're in. I want you combing the city 24/7."
Raina didn't understand that last part, but she got the rest of it. "I don't want to scavenge. I want to fight."
Jill's smile bent. "We've got trained people for that. It's not all about warriors. What are we going to fight with if we don't have any guns?"
"I don't want to find guns! I want to kill Catalinans!"
The woman gaped, then extended her hand to the south. "Then go and kill them. Nothing's stopping you. But you want to join my group? Then you follow my orders."
Raina clenched her teeth. Martin edged beside her. "I think we should do it. We can help. That's more than we can do on our own."
"This is a waste of what I can do," she said.
"You're what, fourteen?" Jill said. "This won't happen overnight. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. Recruiting. Supplying. Training. They've got a huge head start on us and it could take years to close the gap. If you're ready then, I'll let you on the front lines."
"I can't wait that long. They've got my mom!"
"Come on," Martin said. The pleading in his voice made Raina want to punch him. He moved close enough to feel the heat of his skin. "They're not going to kill her. We'll only have one shot, remember? We need to take our time and do it right."
Raina hated it. She hated the islanders, this woman, Martin's insipid compromises. The Catalinans were wrong. That should be enough. She screamed and struck the wall, dirtying her fist. Jill flinched.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 80