The older woman sets the chip on top of a stack of papers. “Daniel. The councilman’s son who was part of the ceremony hijack.”
I nod.
The door flies open, and Asher almost falls into the room. “There’s a Cardinal address happening right now.”
Whitney pulls an old Noteboard out of a desk drawer, and I fish mine out of my bag. We both fire up the screens. Whatever the Cardinal has to say, I want to hear it. Ethan and Eric crowd closer to me, and I hold the Noteboard out so we each have a view.
I tap the screen to access the news feed, and the Cardinal’s face fills the screen. His salt and pepper hair is slicked back without a single stray hair out of place. His suit is meticulously tailored to accentuate his trim frame without making him look frail. Everything about him screams perfection, except the smile. That kind of sincerity can’t be faked. The full-teeth grin comes off as more rabid dog than friendly dictator. Why can’t everyone else see him as the liar I know he is?
“…announce our new alliance with the leader of the United European Union. This partnership will go a long way in helping our neighbors across the sea benefit from the freedom from crime that we all enjoy today.”
We missed the beginning, but even this much sounds like bad news.
“Over the years, I have done without the most basic of comforts that you all enjoy. I never married or had children. Not because the position of Cardinal demands it, but because I committed myself one hundred percent to improving the lives of my dear citizens. I couldn’t allow myself any distractions in my quest for perfection. Each of you is the most important person in the world, and I’m pleased to be able to say that with this partnership, we can all move one stop closer toward complete freedom from violence and indecency throughout the world.”
The camera pans out to reveal more of the room where the Cardinal is speaking. The whole room is trimmed in dark wood, with golden-yellow walls and deep red carpet. A huge, red laurel wreath covers the entire wall behind where he stands. It’s almost garish, but the Cardinal is crisp, visual perfection in his dark blue suit and red tie. I can’t take my eyes off of him, which is probably the point. I can’t imagine the most evil man I know allows anything to happen by accident.
“Sadly, we’re aren’t completely free from violence yet. Just this week, two of our youth were captured by my guard for conspiring to commit crimes against the Territories and its citizens. There are those who want to destroy the peace I’ve worked so hard to build, but I want to promise you, I won’t let those individuals stunt our progress.
“By law, these criminals should be executed. I had to look up the punishment since it’s been so long since anyone would dare defy the system that has provided peace for so many years. However, I am a merciful leader, and seeing as how they had not yet been screened by the Machine, these two will be sent to the PIT instead.”
Was there ever a time when I bought into this? I can’t imagine sitting back home listening to this address and believing every word. But I did. I soaked up everything, and that’s what all those people in the Territories are doing now. Nausea rolls though my stomach.
“It saddens me that some of our own could allow themselves to be so corrupted. And yet this is exactly why our new expansion is so important. I ask that each of you takes it upon yourselves to be watchful for others who have not yet faced the Machine and would seek to rip apart the very fabric that binds our society into a strong sash of freedom and peace. Rest easy, citizens of the Territories, and know that I am doing everything in my power to keep each of you protected.”
The speech ends with the playing of the national anthem, and the feed cuts to black. In less than a second, the newscasters are back on screen singing the Cardinal’s praises and reminding citizens to be vigilant.
I click off the screen and set the Noteboard on my lap. Whitney tucks hers back into the drawer and pulls out a bottle. “I think after that, we need something stronger than the tea.”
She pours each of us a tiny cup of brown liquid, raises her cup in a little toast, and then drains the contents in one gulp.
Ethan motions for me to copy. I grab my little cup and let the warm liquid trickle down my throat. It burns going down and settles into my stomach, warming me from the inside out.
I set the cup back down and stare Whitney in the eye. “The Cardinal’s reach is getting larger every day. He’s done allowing the Freemen to live untethered, outside his control. Now is the time. Will you join us?”
All the air sucks out of the room as Whitney pours a second cup of brown fire, downing it just as fast as the first. She caps the bottle and slides it back into her desk drawer with the cups.
“I’m sorry that you’ve suffered so much loss at the Cardinal’s hand. And I mourn with you that Allmore had to be deserted, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Wait. What?”
Eric places a steadying hand on my shoulder, and I focus on the warmth of his fingers instead of the erratic beat of my pulse.
“I appreciate what it is you’re trying to do, but I’m afraid it’s misguided. I don’t think there are enough Freemen out there to form an army big enough to take out the Cardinal. Not to mention the tremendous loss of life.” Whitney passes the comm chip back over to my side of the desk. “As the leader, I’m tasked with ensuring the safety of my villagers. Your plan feels like a suicide mission, and I won’t condemn my people to die.”
“But you are condemning them. You won’t be safe here. None of the villages are safe anymore. Eventually the guards will find your village, and then playing it safe will be useless.”
“Those are odds I’m going to have to play.” She holds the comm chip up to me, but I refuse to take it.
“No, the chip is a gift. I don’t use bribery, but I thought you would understand the need for action. Especially after what the Cardinal said.”
“If anything, the Cardinal’s words only reinforced what I already knew. He is too powerful to take out.”
I never believed this plan would work, but a small part of me held out hope that maybe Liam was right. Maybe the Freemen are ready to stop living in the shadows. We were both wrong. “If you change your mind about joining us, just use the chip to comm Daniel Whedon. He’s already included as a contact.”
“I won’t, but thank you for the gift.” Whitney stands and motions to the door, a clear sign this disaster of a meeting is over. “You’re welcome to rest for a bit in the rider house and tend to your horses, but I would ask that you keep the details of our meeting to yourself.”
We each nod our heads and mutter our agreement while plodding out of the room and back past the rows upon rows of well-organized food and supplies.
Eleven
Five more villages and five more no’s. After three weeks of traveling, it’s getting harder every morning not to run back to Liam in defeat. It doesn’t help that all of us are feeling the strain of failure.
“Well, this has been a huge bust.” Ethan turns in his saddle and waves goodbye to one of his friends from Mountain Pass. “At this rate, we won’t have to worry about getting turned down too many more times. Eventually, the Cardinal will destroy all the villages for us.”
“Real nice.” I give him my best glare, but my heart isn’t in it. He’s probably right.
“I’m just calling it how I see. I never really thought this was going to be the raging success Liam hoped for.”
“Watch it, Ethan.” Eric’s face is blank, but his tone lets on to the frustration simmering inside.
“Watch what? This mission go up in flames? It’s getting colder every day, and I’m tired of sleeping in rider houses. We need to face the fact that this isn’t going to work.”
“Just shove it already.” Eric pulls back on the reigns to stop his horse, blocking Ethan and me from going any further. “Rebecca asked you to come because she thought you could help, but all you’ve done is call her a failure and whine like a little baby. You don’t want to be here, fine. We don’t need you. Why don�
�t you run home to mommy and let her take care of everything for you.”
Ethan tosses his reigns to the side and crosses his arms over his chest. “That would be fantastic, except my mom is dead. My dad, too, in case you want to rub any more salt in that wound.”
I had no idea. Really, I don’t know that much about Ethan. He grew up in Allmore, he’s our best rider, and if he gets something stuck in his head, he can talk your ear off until your eyes cross. That’s the grand sum of my knowledge about Ethan. Three weeks on the road and I don’t know anything more about him than when we started. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? You didn’t kill her.” Ethan drops his arms and rolls his head back to face the sky. “It was a long time ago.”
“What happened?”
“She got sick like Ana.” His voice is hoarse and softer than I’ve ever heard from him. “We didn’t even know about the PAM drug then, so there was nothing for us to do but sit and watch her die. It took forever. Months of sitting by her bed watching her get weaker every day. By the end, she refused the pain medicine. We tried to hide it in her food, but she didn’t really eat much. She wasted away until her body just gave out.”
“And your dad?”
“Watching Mom slip away like that drove him to the brink. He stopped sleeping and eating. Five days after Mom, he went to bed and never woke up again. Doc said there wasn’t anything wrong with him. He just lost his will to keep going.”
I pull Salty around until our horses are side by side and I’m close enough to reach out a hand to rest on Ethan’s arm. “No one should have to lose their parents that way.”
“Well, you’re right about that.” Ethan presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “If we lived in the Territories, it wouldn’t have happened. They have every medicine imaginable. Mom would have gotten better, and Dad would have been right there, and I’d be with them now instead of out here on some fool’s errand. The Cardinal needs to go down, but not for the pampered princesses of the Territories. This one’s for my mom.”
Ethan grabs his reigns and steers around me and Eric. “I haven’t done any trips this far south, so I don’t know where the next rest is. I’m going to scout ahead so we don’t get lost.”
I watch Ethan head deeper into the woods and let out a slow breath to calm my pounding heart. Nothing about this trip is going the way I planned.
“He’ll be okay.” Eric urges his horse into a slow walk. “Give him some time and he’ll come back around.”
“Maybe he’s not wrong.”
“Come on, not you, too. Is this why you were so soft with Regina back in Mountain Pass?” Eric stops his horse and lifts his voice up. “Oh, so sorry to bother you, Regina. No, of course, I understand, Regina. We’ll just be on our way, Regina.”
I throw my hands out to the side in surrender, startling Salty and sending us back a few paces. “Because all of my sound arguments did anything to convince the other villages? I’m only out here because Liam asked me to, and I’m incapable of telling him no. Maybe I started out hoping this could work, but let’s face it, no one is going to join us.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that Liam believes I have some kind of magic tongue that can convince other people to do what I want. But I don’t.”
“And I know that Liam believes in you, but you don’t yet.”
“I don’t have a reason to believe.” I grab the leather reigns and squeeze them between both fists. All I want to do is go home, except I don’t know where that is, or what is waiting for me there.
“Would you really give up now and let all those deaths be for nothing? Molly, Frank, Alan, Ana…Patrice.”
“There’s nothing more I can do for them.”
“That’s not true, and we both know it.” Eric bumps his stirrup clad leg against mine. “Do me a favor. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year and a half, it’s that anything is possible.”
“What’s the favor?”
“One more village.” Eric reaches over and places his hand over mine. “One more try and then I’ll concede.”
“One more.”
Ethan trots back through the trees, brittle leaves crunching underneath Vincent’s hooves. “There’s a small river a bit to our east. If we follow it south, there’ll probably be a campsite eventually.”
I nod, already looking forward to stopping for the night, even though it’s barely past midday.
A hoarse voice shouts from somewhere to my right. “There are no less than six arrows pointed at you three, so freeze right where you are.”
My head spins, eyes searching for the source of the voice, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Eric and Ethan ignore the order and maneuver their horses to flank both sides of me until I’m almost smashed between them. Salty rears her head, ready to bolt. I don’t blame her. I lean my head down to rest on her neck, hopeful it can calm both of us.
An older man with long, gray hair and well-worn boots walks out of the trees as if he had been invisible only seconds before. “Let’s everyone stay calm, and no one gets hurt. Get down off the horses and empty out the saddle bags.”
Ethan leans toward me as he swings a leg over his saddle. “Vagrants.”
The whispered word sends chills down my spine. These men will take everything we have of value, including my only connection to Daniel and the chips he worked so hard to make. Any hope of recruiting others will be dead in the water.
“I’m not a rider.” My voice comes out an octave higher than normal. “I need help getting down.” Please don’t come over, please don’t come over.
“You.” The man gestures at Ethan with the tip of his arrow. “Get her down.”
Ethan quirks an eyebrow at me, but says nothing as I lean down over the side of my saddle as if I’ve never been on a horse in my life.
“She’s really a bear to get down.” Eric takes a step in my direction, hands out to his side. “Can I help?”
“Just hurry up and get her down.”
Eric rushes over to me and leans in with one hand up as if to steady me.
“Noteboard and chips, down my shirt.”
Ethan coughs to cover the noise and Eric slides the cold metal down the front of my sweater with one hand while I lean off Salty and let them take my weight. I look ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter if I can save these few items.
The second my feet hit the ground, the man is pulling the three of us apart. “Saddle bags. Empty them here, now.”
I unlatch my bag from Salty’s saddle, but Eric takes it from me. The less I have to move, the less chance old man with the pointy arrow figures out what’s hiding in my sweater. I step back and wrap my arms around my waist, both to hold in my prize and to keep my body from shaking. The boys spread our meager rations out on the leaf-covered ground and step back to flank me.
The man whistles and two other men materialize out of the trees. Their green and brown colored clothing let them blend right in to the forest. They both have weapons, and as promised, they’re aimed right at us. I take a tiny step closer to Eric, and he puts a shaking arm around my shoulders.
Without speaking, the two newcomers sort through everything we own, tossing items into two piles, the larger one clearly filled with the things we aren’t getting back.
One of them holds up Ana’s map, and a tiny whimper leaks out of my pressed lips. He jerks it open, and a small corner of the worn paper tears off. The outdated map can’t possibly be useful to them, but he tosses it into the keep pile anyway. I shouldn’t care. It’s just a map, a piece of paper. But haven’t I lost enough already?
When they’re done, we’re left with my Molly bag and a few apples that are well past their prime.
“Since the lady is such a poor rider, we’ll go ahead and take these horses off your hands as well.” The man in charge nods and the other two grab the reigns.
I give Salty a little pat on the rear as she walks past. They stuff most of our possessions back into th
e bags, mount the horses, and ride off. The three of us stand in silence as they weave between the trees and disappear into the forest. This is my first encounter with the Vagrants that roam between the Freemen villages, scavenging for what they need and stealing the rest. I know well enough that we’ll never see those horses again, and it’s a long walk to the next village.
“Are you okay?” Eric gives my shoulders a squeeze.
I nod, but I’m not.
“No one got hurt, and that’s the important thing.” Eric gives me another squeeze, but it doesn’t help.
I should be grateful. Eric’s right, after all. They took our supplies, but they left us alone. Plus, I was able to save the chips. But after every village turning us down and Ethan pretty much writing this whole mission off as an act of futility, this feels like one more bad omen.
“Better get going if we want to reach a decent camp spot early enough to find dinner.” Ethan piles the apples inside the Molly bag and hands it to me. For once, he doesn’t have a sharp comment about our disaster of a trip.
I pull the Noteboard and bag of communication chips out from under my shirt and add them to the bag. At least we still have these, not that they’ve made much of a difference. But I promised we would try.
“One more.” I swing the strap over my head and follow Ethan deeper into the forest.
* * *
Three days after the vagrant attack, we trudge out of the trees and right into a fence. On the other side, several cows and goats graze on the green grass and lie in the sun, soaking up the last few days of warmth.
“Hail, friends,” a deep voice calls from the other side of the paddock, and Ethan and I raise our bracelet-clad wrists in greeting.
“Hail,” Ethan calls back, walking closer to the voice. “Which village is this?”
A man with the reddest hair I have ever seen steps out from behind a small barn. “Blue River. I’m heading there myself right now if you want to join me.” He joins us at the fence and hops over in a move that indicates he’s done that at least a hundred times before. “Name’s Henry.”
Rite of Redemption (Acceptance Book 3) Page 7