With each bite, he tasted blood from the beating he took. He tried shouting into the corridor, but no one answered. Eventually he gave up and fell asleep again.
A door creaking on rusted hinges woke him. Judging from the footsteps, the people approaching did not wear shoes—this was good. He was not in a human prison.
Mort(e) threaded his arms through the bars and folded his hands. Wawa arrived first, with D’Arc behind her. D’Arc now, not Sheba, wearing a Tranquility-issued vest along with her trusty sword. She was safe. Maybe it was all worth it.
The two dogs waited for him to say something. In the distance, a leaky pipe dripped, sending an echo through the hallway.
“Did they bring you some food and water?” Wawa asked.
“Yes.”
Another awkward silence. “You broke your promise,” she said.
“What promise?”
“That I’d never see you again. Actually, this is the second time you’ve broken it.”
“I’ve been told that I’m a liar.” He refused to acknowledge D’Arc when he said it.
“Captain, you have left a swathe of destruction I cannot even begin to describe. Lodge City burned to the ground. The matriarch handed over to the bats like currency. And now this.”
“Right. How long am I going to be here?”
“It’s your fault we couldn’t process you sooner. The Sons of Adam blamed Tranquility for what you did. So they attacked headquarters. And the temple. You’ve been here for forty-eight hours, and you’ve already triggered a civil war.”
“Sounds like I did you a favor. You can run the city on your own now. You’re the only honest person around here. Might as well be you.”
Wawa gritted her teeth. “You think that’s what I wanted? I was trying to save this city.”
“You wanted to be a loyal dog, protecting her pack.”
“Yes, and I don’t apologize for it!” She stopped for a second to allow the echo to cease. “I try to work with others. To build something. To become something more. You could have tried that, but no. You went and hid in the forest and hoped the world would never find you.”
“I don’t apologize either.”
“I know you think that what you did was an act of mercy. But the clerics and the other humans are calling it murder. We have to follow through on the charges. Especially now. We can’t let people think we’re falling apart.”
Wawa told him that there would be a hearing in a few days. Until then, they would keep him here, away from the main holding cell, for his own protection. When Mort(e) rolled his eyes at that, Wawa explained that the prisoners in general population had placed a bounty on his head. Meanwhile, Tranquility agents arrested his accomplice, Gaunt of Thicktree. They netted him while he slept dangling from an overpass. He would be released within a few days. Mort(e), on the other hand, would stay.
“So it might be goodbye for real this time,” she said.
“Goodbye then.”
“You were always welcome here, Captain. Could have used you. Before all this.”
Wawa stomped away. “Two minutes,” she said to D’Arc. Seconds later, a distant metal door opened and then slammed shut.
D’Arc folded her arms. “Don’t think you’re gonna talk to me like that.”
“No,” he said, suddenly exhausted in her presence, after acting like the tough one for so long.
She reached out and clutched his hands. He managed to hold it together while she wept. He wanted so badly to run his cheek along hers, but he could not fit his head through the bars.
“Old Man,” she said.
He pulled away and got a better look at her. “So what are you now? A member of Tranquility?”
“Unofficially,” she said. “Mort(e), do you know about the expedition? The one that’s sailing into the Atlantic?”
Something hard and heavy and warm sank into his stomach. “Yes,” he finally said. Marquez had mentioned it to him during their sessions together. But he never thought—
“I’m going.” D’Arc said. “They chose me.”
For a few seconds, he listened to her breathing. And then he couldn’t help himself. “Are you going on the expedition to be with him?”
She let go of his hands. “Falkirk isn’t going. I’m doing this by myself.”
He leaned his forehead on the bars.
“I’ll get you out of here first, Old Man. I won’t leave until you’re safe.”
“You don’t have to do anything. I don’t want to stand in the way anymore.”
“I’m trying anyway. Like you would for me.”
Someone knocked on the steel door three times.
“I have to go,” she said.
She gave him two licks on the crown of his head before running off. Once she was gone, and the place fell silent again, the warm patch left behind by her tongue evaporated. He felt nothing at all, and wondered if he had imagined the whole thing.
CHAPTER 20
The Summit
D’Arc returned to the barracks on foot as the broken city shut down for the day. Nearly a week of digging, rowing, and bailing forced her to walk with a stooped gait. Along the way, she heard singing coming from an abandoned building—a human, belting out some mournful gospel song in the waning light. Several blocks later, D’Arc passed a fire flickering in an alley, around which people shared stories of rescues and hardship. At this hour, the flames provided most of the light in the city.
Candles and oil lamps lit the windows of the barracks when she arrived. D’Arc brushed past the cadets who loitered in the main courtyard. There were fewer of them now. At least ten deserted after the Prophet died. With classes canceled indefinitely, they had nothing to do but wait for Tranquility to assign them to different work crews or guard posts. The cadets in the courtyard were filthy, with a layer of grime on their vests, most likely from the construction site near the river.
In the living quarters, Razz rested her head on her desk. The pug’s nose twitched when D’Arc walked by. She looked up with enormous bloodshot eyes.
“You smell too good to be in here,” Razz said.
“I used the hose at headquarters. My reward for helping to carry in the new equipment.”
“I helped put out the fire on 11th Street.”
D’Arc knew what she meant. The strators had set a series of blazes during the melee that followed the Prophet’s death. The latest was at a nearby apartment building. “No survivors,” Razz said. “And no shower afterward.”
Razz asked if the husky would be coming for her in the morning, in the same tone she always used. The pug had already grilled her about mating with Falkirk, something D’Arc denied even after Razz swore she could smell it on her. “You better jump on that soon,” Razz told her. “These wolf dogs can’t help themselves. He’ll be humping some poodle if you don’t act fast.” To illustrate the point, Razz thrusted her pelvis and stuck out her tongue.
This time, D’Arc cut her off before she got going. She had not seen Falkirk since the Prophet died. On the day after, D’Arc waited for him in her usual spot in front of the barracks. He never arrived, so she went to headquarters without him. It took some asking around before she learned that Falkirk was involved in the skirmish near the dam, which drove most of the strators out of Hosanna. No one would tell her anything else.
“Do you want to complain about it?” Razz asked. “I made a new concoction and I need a test subject.” She lifted a canteen from her desk, removed the cap, and held it under D’Arc’s snout. It smelled like cleaning fluid and cherries.
“I don’t think so,” D’Arc said.
“Come on, just a little this time. I call it Razzamatazz.”
“I thought that’s what you called the last one.”
“No, that was Razzle-Dazzle. We’ll drink it on the roof. No one will see us.”
The
last time D’Arc did this, she woke up with a swollen tongue and a headache that pressed against her eyeballs. Still, she relented.
From the rooftop, D’Arc could see that the flooding had spared most of the area. Several of the apartment buildings remained occupied. Farther away, the lights faded, save for the enormous trash fires. From the relative quiet and stillness, D’Arc got the sense that the city had worked itself into a state of exhaustion.
D’Arc leaned on the concrete wall separating the roof from the ledge. Beside her, Razz poured her latest experiment into two cups. “To the Prophet,” she said, raising her drink. D’Arc took a sip. The fluid scorched its way to her belly. She exhaled a fruity scent through her nose.
“What do you think?” Razz said.
“It’s terrible. You’re getting better.”
Laughing, Razz drank some more and wiped her mouth with her paw. “You know, I saw some humans toasting the Prophet by pouring wine onto the ground.”
“Should we do that?”
“No!”
Razz lifted her cup to her lips. She paused. “See how my arm shakes? Three days of manual labor. I wasn’t meant for this.”
“You weren’t meant to have arms at all.”
Razz asked if D’Arc had tried alcohol before the Change. D’Arc didn’t remember. “I think I may have,” Razz said. “I know my master kept the house well stocked.”
Her master was an old woman, a widow named Lois. She refused to leave her home during the evacuation of Baltimore, choosing instead to sit in her parlor and drink herself to death. When Razz entered the room, fully transformed and walking upright, Lois calmly invited her to sit at her table. “If you’re going to kill me, then let’s at least have a drink first,” the woman said. But this human was a good master, kind and fair even as the Colony invaded. Razz could not say that out loud during the war. It was bad enough that she had been someone’s pet—a pug could never claim to have been a stray. So she played along with everyone else, and even made up a story about killing Lois. She assumed that almost everyone told a variation of the same lie until they started to actually believe it.
“What happened to her?” D’Arc asked.
“I helped her commit suicide,” Razz said, her eyes reflecting the distant bonfires. “She had been planning to do it for a while. So I wasn’t totally lying when I bragged about killing her.”
Without going into any detail, D’Arc said that she ran away from home the same day she changed. Her master was long dead by the time she even considered searching for him. When Razz asked about her slave name, D’Arc said she didn’t remember it.
“I’m not telling you mine, either,” Razz said. “A pug has enough problems.”
A chill crept across the rooftop. D’Arc felt impervious to it. The drink warmed her gut and numbed her skin. She held out her cup for a refill. “Not too much,” she said.
They toasted again. Razz’s arm still trembled. “I think God’s trying to tell us something,” she said. “He brings the Messiah here, takes the Prophet away. Maybe he’s telling us that we need to sort this out on our own, without his messengers to tell us what to do.”
“I wish everyone saw it that way.”
D’Arc wondered where Falkirk was. She imagined him warming his hands by a fire, wondering who would hear his prayers now that Michael was gone. If he really did mate with some poodle like Razz said, perhaps he thought of D’Arc. Or he did it to forget her.
Hiccupping, Razz said she was done for the night. D’Arc said she would go downstairs later. After the pug left, D’Arc stayed in the same position, thinking of what she would say to Falkirk and Mort(e) the next time she saw them. When she caught herself nodding off, she sat down and curled into a ball, letting the wall protect her from the wind. She soon fell asleep under the clouds with the artificial cherry flavor coating the inside of her mouth.
The cadets awoke at the usual hour, when the first hints of sunlight crept above the skyline. The alcohol from the night before left D’Arc groggy, though not as hungover as the last time. Without speaking to anyone, she gathered her things and walked past the sleeping area. Razz huddled against a pillar, snoring softly while the other students bustled around her.
D’Arc made it two whole blocks before she started thinking about the Old Man again. While she strolled at her own pace under an open sky, the cat who rescued her wallowed in a jail cell because he had put a dying boy out of his misery. D’Arc imagined sneaking into the prison and helping him escape. When that fantasy ran its course, she settled on being angry at Mort(e) for following her here, and for breaking everything he touched.
A dump truck overloaded with debris rumbled alongside her. Behind it, a motorcycle beeped its horn and tried to squeeze past the truck, only to stop abruptly. The driver—a dog—swung around in his seat and waved at her.
“D’Arc!” he said.
It was Falkirk. She ran to him.
“Get on. Something’s happening at the pier.”
She slid onto the seat behind him. “What is it?”
“They’re back.”
D’Arc wrapped her arms around his waist as the bike accelerated. He was leaner than before, having spent days on the prowl trying to root out the last of the strators. His muscles felt taut and sinewy, but they emanated the same warmth that she remembered.
“Are the strators all gone?” she asked.
“I think so. We followed them to the other side of the river. But they broke camp before we got there. They must be halfway to the Poconos by now.”
He cranked the accelerator, enough for the front wheel to levitate for a second. They overtook the trash truck. D’Arc closed her eyes to keep out the dust.
“Are you doing okay?” she asked. “I mean . . . with all of this.”
“I’m fine. I will be.”
They hit a traffic jam on the street that ran parallel to the river. Tranquility officers tried to redirect the vehicles around a roadblock, using flares and bright orange flags. On the other side, a narrow pier stretched into the river. With a brick walkway and a row of trees, the pier had once been a pedestrian oasis in the middle of a noisy city. But on this day, a row of sandbags sealed the entrance. Wawa and several other agents hid behind the barricade. D’Arc recognized the human Daiyu Fang next to the chief, wearing olive cargo pants and a flak jacket. Her shiny black hair was greased so that it lay stiffly behind her ears. Fang pointed at something in the river, and the officers nodded.
Falkirk parked the motorcycle at the roadblock, where a bearded man asked for ID. Falkirk showed it and asked for an update.
“Two fish-heads have been circling the pier,” the man said. “They have a hostage.”
Falkirk turned to D’Arc. “You’ll have to fall in with the others. I’m going to talk to the chief.”
They split up. D’Arc drew her pistol and took cover behind one of the squad cars. A dog held a shotgun across the hood while D’Arc propped herself on the trunk.
With Falkirk beside her, Wawa ordered the officers to take a position along the railing. D’Arc and the others scurried to the edge of the river. She caught a glimpse of tentacles undulating and then disappearing into the murky water. Another creature surfaced, covered in sopping wet fur. It was a female raccoon, belly up, her pink teats exposed, a tentacle wrapped around her torso. The raccoon gasped for air before the Sarcops pulled her under again.
The soldiers aimed their rifles at the dark shadows under the surface. In response, the intruders moved away from the river’s edge.
Someone shouted. “They’re out of the water!”
At the end of the pier, a tentacle lifted the raccoon over the railing and dropped her on the other side, her wet body slapping the concrete. She shook off the excess and jogged to the barricade.
“Don’t shoot!” she said. “Don’t shoot!” The raccoon stopped when she realized that the s
oldiers were not about to lower their weapons.
The chief aimed her pistol at the raccoon’s head. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dice,” the raccoon said, shivering. “From Kensington.”
The word sent murmurs through the crowd. Kensington was a refugee camp washed away in the flood.
“How did you get here?” Wawa asked.
“I was stranded on a tree branch. Way downriver. The fish-heads rescued me.”
“Rescued?”
Falkirk pointed at the edge of the pier. “Chief!”
One of the monsters climbed the railing and slid over the top, like a sheath of wet leather. The other one followed. They stretched out their claws and tentacles and marched toward the barricade, with the larger of the two in the lead. The creatures made the same odd choking sound that D’Arc remembered, the eyes blinking each time.
Dice held out her hands. “They wanna talk! That’s all!”
Still dripping, the fish-heads put their full arsenal on display. A breastplate made of solid bone covered their torsos. Their clawlike feet gripped the cement as they moved.
D’Arc recognized the larger one. It was Big Boy, the leader.
Dice held her ground. “They told me that they would speak to you at the end of the pier.”
Wawa laughed. “Choke that.”
“Please. The guns make them nervous.”
“That’s the idea.”
The Sarcops came closer, bringing with them the stench of ammonia. Wawa growled. D’Arc could tell that she wanted a simple fight, not this peace offering. The chief snapped her fingers and pointed at Dice. Two soldiers hauled the raccoon away.
“They saved my life!” Dice said. “Please, just talk to them!”
The Sarcops came to a halt about thirty feet from the barricade. A minute went by. Wawa ordered everyone to lower their weapons. Nothing. “Speak!” she said. Still nothing. Finally, she jumped over the barricade, gun drawn.
The officers closed ranks at the foot of the pier. D’Arc positioned herself directly behind Falkirk. Fang whispered something in his ear. He nodded in agreement, and then the two of them mounted the sandbags. D’Arc took their place at the barricade and rested her gun on it.
D'Arc Page 22