"If it's too early for the market," she said, "it's definitely too early for me."
"Wrong as Raina," Mauser said. "Oh, that's good. I'm making that a thing."
He took her through the market to the inn at the base of the hill where they'd first met. She watched the McDonald's warily. He jogged up to the second story of the motel and knocked on one of the doors. A redheaded man answered. He wasn't much older than Raina. He let them inside and locked the door. Heavy drapes muffled the sun.
"Raina," Mauser said, "this is Luke."
"Good for him."
"He's from Catalina."
She reached for her knife—Carl had told her it was called a tanto—and whipped it from the lacquered sheath.
Luke stumbled back against the bed, shielding his face. "Hey!"
"Stop!" Mauser moved between them, scowling at her. "Must you always stab first and ask questions never? He's seen your mother."
The point of her knife shook. "You have?"
The boy glanced at Mauser. "Are you sure? Was her dad—?"
"She's adopted," Mauser said.
Raina took three tries to put away her tanto, its point scraping the mouth of the sheath. "Where did you see her?"
"Is she kind of short?" Luke said. "Dark hair she wears tied back? With the little strands of it hanging past each ear?"
"Yes."
"Kate?"
"Yes!"
"She's on Catalina." Luke slid off the side of the bed, standing several feet away. "In Karslaw's castle."
"He has a castle?" Mauser said.
"With a drawbridge and everything."
"Has he hurt her?" Raina said.
Luke's eyes went guarded. "I don't know."
"She's alive, Raina," Mauser said. "She's still out there. That's all that matters."
Raina's vision smeared with tears. She pressed her elbows to her chest. The room pulled away from her. She ran to Mauser and bowled into his arms.
"Gracious," he said, patting her hair. "The little wasp has feelings after all."
She only let herself cry for a few moments. Mauser dug into his pocket and handed her a cloth that was almost clean. She wiped her face.
"Thank you," she said to Luke.
"For your troubles," Mauser said. With two fingers, he passed the boy a rolled-up baggie of ovoid green buds. "Don't smoke it all in one place."
Luke flushed, pocketed it, and smiled at Raina. "I hope you find her."
Mauser took her outside into the brilliant sunlight. The asphalt glittered. The mountains stood to the north, feet hidden by the haze, crests suspended in the air like a reachable heaven.
"We have to go get her," she said.
"Have you heard what's going on?" Mauser said. "Or have you been too busy twirling your batons to keep up with local events?"
She carried her bamboo sticks at all times now. She pulled one from her belt and menaced him. "Does this look like a baton?"
"Well, the last time tax day rolled around, the Catalinans demanded twice as much as ever. Mostly in food. And they were very insistent on being informed of any contraband guns that may have showed up in the last couple months. There was a beating or two. Most locals had to hand over more than they'd been taking in. A few went—how do you put this—food-rupt? About to starve. Some of the merchants started up a collection to ensure nobody went hungry. Let's just say the Catalinans didn't go home with a lot of fresh admirers."
"So what?"
"I'm not finished. Meanwhile, in the ongoing Period of the Warring Assholes, the Catalinans have pretty much chased the Osseys out of Long Beach. Some guerrilla fighters rolled around now and then to take a couple potshots at the occupying islanders, but by and large the whole gang skedaddled back to Orange County."
"Did they hurt the Catalinans any?" Raina said. "Or did we do all that for nothing?"
Mauser laughed. "Oh, the Catalinans were hurt. Repeatedly. Not a lot of casualties—the Catalinans torched a few buildings, but they weren't exactly eager to fight house to house; lots of sniping back and forth—but, to paraphrase a guy so smart he got streets named after him, every death counts. More importantly, we drew the focus off the Dunemarket. That gave Jill a lot of time and freedom to organize and train her people. Things really came together while we were out gallivanting after that painting."
"Is she finally ready to stand up?"
"I wouldn't go that far. You know Jill. She moves about as fast as a banana peel."
"What does that mean?"
"Have you ever seen a banana peel move?" he said. She shook her head. He splayed his palm. "Precisely."
He went silent as they reached the Dunemarket. He smiled at three or four different women, touching the tip of his finger to an imaginary cap. He didn't resume talking until they were past the vendors and travelers and halfway up the hill.
"Where was I? Nevermind, I know exactly where I was. About to tell you that three days ago, the Catalinans evacuated Long Beach."
Raina smiled. "The Osseys struck back."
"No," Mauser said. "That's the thing. Nothing about the battlefront had changed. They just left. Pulled everyone out and sailed back to Catalina. Which raises the question: if nothing changed in Long Beach, what changed on the island?"
"Did you ask Luke?"
"How do you think I found out he'd seen your mom?" Mauser shook his head. "He didn't know anything. Was visiting the island as an envoy from a kingdom in San Diego."
Raina glanced downhill to ensure they weren't being watched. The sun poured down between the palms. "What does all this mean for the rebellion?"
"That's the thing. Nobody knows. Are they gone for good? Can we stop busting heads and start busting champagne? Or did they catch wind of what we're up to and fell back to regroup? If so, how long do we have before they return to go all Gallagher on the watermelon of our little society?"
"We need to know more."
"That's exactly where I was going with this longwinded bit of exposition. You fancy a trip back to Long Beach? I'd like to see how the prostitute store is doing."
"How long will it take?"
"Just a day. Think you can tear yourself away from the color guard for that long?"
She didn't like it, but she went to Carl and asked if she could skip the next day of training.
He gave her a long and unreadable look. "Do whatever you want."
"Are you mad?" she said.
"Why would I be mad? I never trained as hard as you have."
"I'll only be gone for a day."
"I heard you." He folded his arms behind his back and turned to face the painting hanging from his wall. The Chagall was so vivid it looked like it was stepping right out of the wall. "Anyway, it will finally give me the chance to appreciate my new art.”
* * *
"The Catalinans just took off and left," the woman said. "Sucks, too. Best business we've done since opening our doors. They made sure we didn't get touched by the fires or fighting, either."
"See?" Mauser said to Raina. "You act like this is such a terrible job, but listen to those fringe benefits. Meanwhile, if they'd fought the war in San Pedro, they'd have probably used the Dunemarket for target practice."
The woman's name was Belle and she had agreed to see them in her room at Pokers. The building looked no different from when they had ambushed the men in their beds. The same couldn't be said for the rest of the waterfront. Bullet holes pockmarked the storefronts. Broken glass carpeted the streets. Several buildings were scorched; one had been burnt to the foundation, with two more beside it reduced to gutted shells. If the fire hadn't been isolated by a curve of the waterfront's quirky streets, half of Long Beach might have burned down.
"So you don't know anything?" Raina said.
"Just one thing." Belle lit a rolled cigarette and geysered smoke from her nostrils. "One of the guys who comes to see me said he won't be back for a while."
"Maybe he doesn't like you anymore."
"Raina!" Mauser said.
> The woman exhaled smoke. "You skinny little bitch."
"You'll have to excuse her," Mauser said. "It's a miracle she's housebroken."
"I don't care what some john thinks of me. But I'm trying to help you, God knows why, and she's insulting me to my face."
Martin raised his hand for peace. "She just meant that doesn't necessarily mean they're leaving." He avoided Raina's gaze. "She sees things different. It's hard to explain."
The woman tapped ash from her cigarette. "That right?"
Raina still didn't see what all the fuss was about. "That's all I meant."
"Whatever. They all left. Either every trooper they had decided to pack up their cocks and find a better place to spend the night, or they got sent home."
"Right." Mauser clapped his thighs and stood. "Thanks, Belle. If you hear anything else, you'll let me know?"
She laughed. "Anything for a friend."
On their way out, Mauser chatted with a couple girls in the lobby. Outside, he shook his head and started back toward the market. "Well, that was a bust. And what the hell was that, Raina? Belle's a friend of mine. Even if she weren't, did you forget the part where we wanted information from her?"
"She was acting superior," Raina said.
"And knocking her off her high horse is more important than discovering what the hell is going on? So what if she gets a kick out of male attention? Don't be so judgmental. It's bad for your cholesterol."
Raina kicked a pebble down the road. This whole thing was stupid. Mauser's woman didn't know anything. The whole trip had been a waste of time. None of that was her fault.
"Well, what now?" Martin said.
"Now?" Mauser dabbed sweat from his forehead. There was a breeze off the bay but it wasn't doing much good. "I report in to Jill. Barring something very stupid, I think we're out of options except to wait and see how things shake out."
Martin started to speak, faltered, then cleared his throat and started over. "We could ask the Osseys."
"That would fall under the heading of 'stupid.' They just got their asses kicked out of Long Beach by hostile barbarians. You show up to ask them how that went and they're likely to regain their pride by beating you to death."
"What do you think, Raina?" Martin tried. "Can you think of a better way?"
"Mauser's right." But she wasn't sure of that at all. She just didn't want to waste any more time chasing answers when Jill wouldn't act on them anyway. Not when she could use that time learning from Carl. Her faith in the rebellion waned with each day it failed to manifest in battle. Like the moon, the slimmer her hopes became, the hungrier she got. She couldn't look to others. No one wanted this as much as she did. If she wanted to take Karslaw's head and free her father's spirit, she would have to hone herself until she was as sharp as her tanto.
It was dusk by the time they got back. Too late to go to Carl. She got up at dawn. To kill time before noon, she went out foraging in the ruins for avocados and corn and strawberries. Their supply of freeze-dried food was getting low and she didn't want to walk all the way back to the bunker.
She went to Carl's as soon as the sun neared the middle of the sky. They worked with the bamboo for a while, playing through combinations, welting each other's arms.
She broke for water. She didn't want to put it off until the end of the day when he could shrug her off. "I want to learn how you use the knife."
"You are," he said. "A hand is a stick is a knife."
"No. A hand is a hand. A knife is a knife."
"And I am the teacher."
She gestured south toward the island. "But it's all useless if I don't learn before it's time to fight."
Carl laughed and pointed across the room. "There's the door."
She picked up her bamboo. If he thought she wasn't ready, then her only choice was to work until she proved him wrong.
She didn't get the chance. Three days into a schedule that involved nothing but training and sleeping, Mauser flung open Carl's front door, breathing hard. Someone had found Martin in Long Beach. He'd gone there by himself. The Osseys had beaten him half to death.
24
Waves came and went, swelling beneath Walt with tidal and terrifying force, lifting him as effortlessly as a flake of skin on a shaken blanket. The moon moved on the water, but couldn't penetrate the shadows of the island-sized vessel three hundred yards ahead. He wore nothing but jockey shorts and every kick of his legs reminded him how naked he was. A few other swimmers kept pace with him, the foam of their strokes gray-silver in the moonlight, but most of the scores of soldiers were strung out in loose lines behind him.
Finally, the fat drone of an engine drifted down from somewhere in the sky. Walt laughed, glancing up between waves, trying to spot it in the darkness.
It had taken an amazingly long time to get the Goodyear Blimp up and running. Just tracking down the airfield in Gardena where they housed the thing had tied up a dozen scouts for nearly a week. That accomplished, Walt had overseen its revival, but while the blimp was in theory not so different from the hot air balloons he'd grown up with, in practice, it was more difficult by an order of magnitude.
First off, it was giant. And rather inconveniently stored in a hangar. They'd had to get the airfield tractor up and running just to drag the thing out into the open. Second, the blimp floated via helium rather than hot air, and while the airfield still had plenty of canned gas, they'd had to lug in a generator to get the pump going, at which point Walt discovered that one of the cables tying the slowly inflating vessel to the mooring mast had come free, causing the whole thing to angle from the scaffold at a potentially destructive angle.
Even after he sussed out the basics of inflation and deflation, he found himself faced with an entirely new concept: steering. While the maneuvering of a hot air balloon was based on the simplest and most passive systems—make air in balloon hot, causing it to rise; climb until you find the air stream blowing in the direction you want to travel in, then stabilize altitude and enjoy the ride—the blimp's steering was active. It had engines. Scoops. Valves. Little balloons inside the main envelope that could be filled with colder, heavier air to help keep the blimp level and maneuver it up and down.
There had been several points in the whole endeavor when he'd contemplated scrapping it in favor of a balloon instead. But delivering all their materiel would require multiple balloons, each with their own rookie, Walt-trained pilots struggling with the balloons' clumsy, passive steering. Coordinating an attack would be a nightmare.
So he learned to fly the blimp. And he not only had to learn it for himself. He had to teach it to a young woman named Lacey, the intended pilot of this semi-suicide mission. No way in hell was he flying the thing when he figured it was 50/50 odds that it would ever make it to the mothership in the first place.
Because quite frankly, the plan was moronic. Lacey and her team had done three or four dry runs to work out timing and coordination, but there was no telling whether the alien ship would allow the blimp to maneuver into position, let alone how it would react to phase two of the aerial operations. Walt didn't even know for sure the amphibious end of things would make it. Bringing the blimp into the mix had let him convince Karslaw to try swimmers instead of boats, but the only thing Walt knew was that the ship hadn't shot at him when he'd swum up to it alone. He had no idea what would happen when they approached it with a hundred soldiers. He might be a father soon. One of these days, he was going to have to start acting responsible.
Walt paddled down the backside of a wave, grinned, and got a mouthful of seawater for his trouble.
He spat it out and paddled on. Swimming out to open ocean in the middle of the night was nothing short of terrifying—given how his bowels were taking the experience, there was more than one advantage to being stripped to his skivvies—but if he took what the currents gave him, easing his pace when the low but steady waves hit him and then picking up speed when the incoming water stopped pushing back, he made steady progress toward the
waiting ship. The summer air was still warm, too. Overhead, the blimp droned on, barely audible over the splash of the tides and the men and women swimming around him.
The ship filled more of his vision with each passing moment. It slanted from the sea at a low angle, its uppermost heights projecting some three hundred feet into the air. Its flat surface was runneled with canyons and studded with short towers. He was having a hard time keeping his breathing steady. Every flicker of the moon or the stars on the waves made him imagine a magnesium-bright missile arcing from the silent enemy and blasting a foamy crater into the ocean. All that was left of the swimmers would be mangled limbs and strung-out guts wheeling down into the deep parts of the sea.
The ship neared. Walt kicked harder. The last moments were the worst. His fingertips brushed an algae-slick surface that felt like the hardest rubber or the softest metal. He pulled himself aboard.
He crouched down to catch his breath and wipe off the worst of the water. He helped a few soldiers clamber up beside him, then jogged up the gently angled ship. In a few minutes, if everything went according to plan, each of the soldiers would receive a map drawn from the best of Walt's memory and copied precisely by Karslaw's personal scribe. But it would do all of them exactly zero good if Walt couldn't find the way inside.
He ran up the inclined hull in a low crouch, feet slapping the hard surface. Sudden chasms delved into the dark surface and he detoured around, keeping one eye on the crevices, as if an alien horde might boil from the shadows at any moment. Bird droppings freckled the matte black ground. Now and then a blunt tower stuck up from the plane like the weary thumb of a hitchhiker a long ways from home.
And then he spotted it, the metal spire that marked the staircase down to the landing bay. He ran to the opening and lay flat. He got his flashlight from the plastic bag dangling from his back and aimed it into the gloom. A couple portions of the spiral stairwell had collapsed. Better hope the supplies made it down from the blimp intact.
He stood and waved his flashlight downslope, passing his hand in front of the beam to make it wink twice, repeating the signal a few seconds later. Down at the base of the ship, a flashlight blinked three times. Walt tipped back his head. Moonlight sliced through the strings of a parachute descending from the unseen blimp. A box dangled beneath the dark fabric of the chute, swinging through a tight circle.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 95