Jill's house stood empty in the side of the hill. Some of the merchants suggested Raina take it, but she didn't like that it was underground. That had been Jill's problem in the first place. When you lived underground, you thought you were safely out of sight, but that was really just a way to ignore what was happening outside. The man who'd built the bunker had died, too.
Instead, she flattened the ground on the hill directly above the Dunemarket, dragged up a set of chairs, rigged up a tarp, and sat where she could see the business in the street below. She discovered she had a lot of correspondence to answer from families and small groups scattered around the city. Requests for passage and trade and alliance. Many of the merchants came to her, too, wishing to discuss the membership rates, or what projects they should pursue next. One of them had just left her on the afternoon Mauser limped up the hill to see her.
He eased himself into the chair beside her. "How goes your reign?"
"Boring," Raina said. "There's nothing to do."
"You mean you ran out of wars to fight? The horror."
"All I do is write letters and listen to people tell me what I should do."
Mauser chuckled. He shifted in his chair until he found a position acceptable to the metal embedded in his body. "Sounds like you need to relax for a while."
"Like how?"
"Specifically? Or are you unfamiliar with the very concept of taking a day off from smiting your foes?"
"What would we do? Go for a swim?"
"We could. Although I'd probably need water wings." He frowned and drummed his fingers on his thigh. He stood. "I'll get back to you on that."
He hobbled back the way he'd come. Raina watched him pick his way between the palms, then returned to her letter. She knew she was misspelling things. She should ask someone to teach her so she wouldn't embarrass the whole Dunemarket, but she didn't want to. People could understand her words well enough.
Mauser reached the road and limped over to Vince's stall of toys. They spoke for a while, much too far away for Raina to hear. She lowered her eyes to her letter.
She didn't see Mauser for several days. The next time he returned, it was in the seat of a two-horse covered wagon. He stopped in the middle of the market and cupped his hands to his mouth.
"Hey Raina!" His voice echoed through the hills. She lifted her hand to wave. He beckoned broadly. "Get down here!"
"Busy," she called back.
"Too busy to go to Disneyland?"
She sighed and set down her pen and walked down to the street. The others were watching her, grinning. She raised her eyebrows at Mauser. "I have too much stuff to do."
"All taken care of." He swept his hand to the side, indicating a smiling Vince. "Vince will look over the administration. Bryson's agreed to assume the role of chief of security, which he should probably be doing anyway."
"What if something happens while I'm gone?"
Carl poked his head from the flaps of the wagon. "Then you'll deal with it when you get back. Now get in here."
"Go on, Raina," Vince said. "Have a good time."
She could feel the invisible pressure of the crowd willing her into the wagon. She did it anyway. She had no interest in seeing statues of a giant mouse, but the trip might be all right.
The wagon rattled along the coastline, detouring wherever wrecked cars snarled the road. Most of what she saw looked just the same as San Pedro and the peninsula: bungalows, strip malls, fancy homes on hills, sun-drenched parking lots. Two days later, the wagon rolled into a vast and largely empty lot. Mauser clopped the wagon up to the grimy turnstiles, hopped down, and offered her his hand.
"Milady," he said. "Welcome to your Magic Kingdom."
Raina rolled her eyes. She ignored his hand and hopped down on her own. Gum spots and rain-battered paper clung to the pavement. Dirt coated the closed-up shops. Most of the windows had been bashed in. Brightly painted rides climbed the sky. Sooner or later, they would rust and fall.
Mauser took her to a ferris wheel, opened its gate, then held open the door of one of the cars. "All aboard."
She snorted. "What are you doing to do, crank it by hand?"
"Shut up and get in."
She shook her head and climbed up. The car rocked front to back under her weight. Mauser lowered a bar across her waist, hopped down from the platform, and hunkered beside a large metal device at the ride's base. He flipped a switch and the generator roared to life, blatting through the silent air.
"Do you have any idea what you're doing?" Raina said.
"It's perfectly safe," he said. "Isn't it, Carl?"
Carl raised an eyebrow in mock affront. "We wouldn't risk dear leader's life in a machine we hadn't tested for ourselves."
Something fluttered in Raina's chest. She couldn't remember if she had been on a ferris wheel before. Mauser fooled with the controls and the car jolted forward, swinging back and forth as the wheel turned. The ground fell away beneath her. Raina whooped. She climbed higher and higher, soaring above the gift shops and all the rides except the looping rollercoasters. At her peak, she lifted the bar, grabbed hold of the side of the car, and stood. She could see for miles. Countless homes and stores and parks spread out before her.
Someday, it would all be hers.
* * *
He would give coastal central California that much: it was fucking gorgeous. Waves battered themselves silly on the rocks. Foam exploded with each crash of surf, lingering on the soft, luscious air. Trees grew wild from the craggy hills. They were the perfect shade of green. He wondered if the aliens had trees on their homeworld, and if so, whether they were green, too.
He took his time. Did plenty of fishing in the sapphire sea, casting right into the waves while he stood on slender little beaches pushed up against the big black cliffs. He wouldn't have argued if you'd claimed it was more beautiful than coastal Mexico. At the very least, it was close, and as an added bonus, it had several trillion less mosquitoes, ants, and jaguars.
Just outside Carmel, a stream ran down from the cliffs to the ocean. He stopped there for the day—it would be awfully handy to have fresh water so close while he caught and dried all the fish he could carry—but he had the feeling he wouldn't be going anywhere for a while.
He built a little shack on the beach. Nothing crazy. A couple of walls with a slanted roof to keep off the rain. Dug a latrine and a fire pit and set up smoke racks. He had no idea what day it was, and the pleasant weather gave him little hint, but he figured it was fall. One day he wandered into town, rooted around until he found a Tupperware of flour and a bag of bug-free sugar, then strolled back to the beach and baked himself the world's worst birthday cake. It was his 31st.
A few months later, with the winds going cold enough that he was thinking about moving to one of the houses on the cliffs, he woke to find a rifle pointed at his face. It was owned by a woman in her late twenties or early thirties.
"Come here often?" he said.
Her bent elbow stuck straight out from the gun, finger on the trigger. "Do you have any food?"
"Don't you know how to fish?"
She stuck out her left hand and beckoned her fingers. "Hand it over. No sudden moves."
"I'm handing." He turned slowly and reached for the cooler of dried fish he'd embedded in the sand by his wall. On his cake run, he'd found some wax paper which he'd been using to wrap the fish. He raised his brows at her and extended one of the bundles. "There's more. Take as much as you want."
She snatched it away, sniffed it, took a small bite, then devoured the rest, keeping her gaze on him all the while. When she finished, the look in her eyes was slightly less crazed.
"You're awful calm for a man at the wrong end of a gun," she said.
"Experience, that's all."
"Can I have another?"
"No problem." He dug into the cooler and handed her another piece. "That one came from a flounder, believe it or not. Caught it right here on the shore. Storm must have pushed it in."
&nb
sp; She ate that, too, then sat on the sand and rested her rifle across her knees. "Sorry about this. A person gets pretty nuts when they're hungry enough."
"Not just for food," he said. Her rifle twitched. He held up his hands. "It's okay. I'm perfectly harmless for the time being."
"Well, if it's all the same, I'll keep my gun right here."
"My name's Walt." He smiled, squinting against the sun on the too-perfect sea. "What's yours?"
She smiled back, but it was a cautious thing. He doubted she'd stay. It was all right. He was in no hurry. Things moved to their own rhythm. If you could find it, move to it, you'd end up okay. All it took was a little time.
* * *
Winter came. The days were cool and the nights were cold. She opened the door one morning to go to the market and found a letter tucked under her front mat. It was as short as letters could be: "Please come."
The writing was her mother's. She ran all the way south to the coast.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Hello everyone! The book may be over, but the Breakers series isn't. Book four, Reapers, can be purchased here. If you'd like to hear when I've got a new book out, the best way is to sign up for my mailing list (http://eepurl.com/oTR6j). The only emails I send are for new releases. No spam, and the list will never be shared. Promise. Or may Raina track me down and cut me up.
MORE BY ME
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Table of Contents
I: PANHANDLER
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
II: CONTACT
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
III: LIFTOFF
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
EPILOGUE
I: PANHANDLER, REDUX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
II: LANDFALL
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
III: PREDATORS
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
EPILOGUE
I: FERAL
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
II: SCOUR
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
III: USURPERS
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
EPILOGUE
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 108