Scavenger Alliance

by Janet Edwards

  As I straightened up, Phoenix opened her eyes, and her hand shot out to grab mine. “Wait for me, Livia! I’m coming to Zeus to be with you. Wait for me!”

  There was a dazed look in her eyes, and I knew that she wasn’t seeing me but the woman she loved. “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

  Phoenix smiled, her eyes closed, and her hand relaxed its grip on mine and fell back to her side.

  I turned to Nadira. “I’ll need you to help me give her the fever medicine.”

  She stared at me. “You’ve got medicine? Where from?”

  “From a place between Yonkers and Tarrytown,” I said. “We’ve brought boxes and boxes of it. I’ve got some of the tablets to treat the winter fever here with me.”

  Nadira helped me lift Phoenix into a sitting position. There was a bottle of water and paper cups on a bedside table. I filled a cup with water, and coaxed Phoenix into swallowing her tablets. The two small blue ones went down easily, but the one large white one was a struggle.

  We kept Phoenix sitting up for a couple of minutes, until we were sure she wouldn’t be sick, then laid her down again. I could tell from the conversation going on behind me that Luther and Aaron were stripping Tad’s clothes off and putting him to bed, so I was careful to keep my back to them as I moved from Phoenix to check on Braden. Tad had done his best to respect my privacy when he was working on my arm, so I should do the same for him now.

  Braden’s breathing was still quite normal, and his eyes were open. He turned his head to look at me.

  “Braden,” I said. “You have to take some tablets now to make you well.”

  “Tablets,” he repeated, in a confused voice.

  Nadira and I went through the routine of lifting him up to swallow the tablets. He gulped them down quite easily, but the effort seemed to exhaust him. When we laid him down again, he lost consciousness.

  I heard the door open, and turned to see Donnell and Julien coming in carrying stasis boxes. They stacked them neatly against the wall. I turned cautiously, saw Tad was in bed and covered by a sheet, and went past him to get the small flexiplas box that held his notes on the medicines.

  I handed it to Nadira. “This is the full list of medicines. Some of them are in these boxes, but the rest are still on board the Spirit of New York.”

  Nadira opened the box and started rapidly scanning the pieces of paper. “We’ve got a very sick baby in Room 1, so I’ll need the other medicines here as soon as possible.”

  Donnell nodded and turned to his officers. “Go and fetch the rest of the boxes. Once Nadira has sorted out what she wants for immediate use, you can take the rest up to the top floor of the Resistance wing.”

  “Back out into the cold before we’ve even had a chance to get warm,” said Julien. “I don’t know why people think being an officer is a privilege.”

  “I don’t know why you think you’re still an officer,” Donnell snapped the words at him in an icy voice.

  Julien hastily headed for the door, while Luther and Aaron exchanged graphic glances.

  “And you two can stop pulling faces at each other and do as you’re told,” added Donnell.

  Luther and Aaron sprinted after Julien. Donnell watched them go, and then went across to study each of the off-worlders in turn before facing me.

  “Blaze, we need to talk,” he said. “Upstairs. Now.”

  I glanced at Tad. “I’d prefer to stay …”

  Donnell cut into my sentence, his voice even harsher than when he’d spoken to Julien. “When I say I want to talk to you now, I mean it!”

  He turned and stalked out of the room. I chased after him, my stomach churning. I’d only heard Donnell use that tone of voice to men just before he punched them. Why was he using it on me? What had I done wrong?

  We went straight through Reception, with people taking one look at Donnell’s face and rapidly getting out of his way, and then headed up the Resistance staircase. Donnell didn’t say a word until after we’d reached his apartment on the sixth floor and he’d slammed the door shut behind us.

  “Chaos weeping, Blaze, why didn’t you tell me you’d got a problem with your arm? Why didn’t you warn me that Cage was going to call general justice on you? I thought we were finally talking to each other, and building a proper relationship at last. I was obviously fooling myself.”

  I moistened my lips. “My arm is perfectly fine. I lied to Hannah about having a …”

  “Don’t do it!” Donnell pointed an accusing finger at me. “Don’t you dare look me in the eyes and lie to me! You may have fooled people down there in Reception with your story, but I know things that they don’t. I know you were pleading Hannah’s cause to me only days ago. I know Tad is Thaddeus Wallam-Crane the Eighth, the last man in humanity to be webbed. I know the pair of you spent the last few days in a storage facility packed with medical supplies.”

  I sighed. “All right. I still had some aches and pains after breaking my arm. Nothing significant, but Cage got Hannah to make a big fuss about it in front of the other women so they’d think there was a serious problem. Then Cage ambushed me and Tad as we set off for the trip upriver. Cage attacked me and injured my shoulder, but Tad treated it at the medical facility.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Cage had attacked you?” demanded Donnell. “I admit that carrying on to the medical facility made sense if Tad could treat your injury there, but you could have told me the whole story as we were coming back downriver on the Spirit of New York.”

  “Cage told me he’d call general justice on me for hiding an injured arm for months, and get Hannah to confirm his story so everyone would believe it. His plan was to drag you into defending me, claim you’d been lying about my arm as well, and then challenge your leadership of the alliance. It was much safer for me to deal with him myself. Once Tad had treated my arm, I was in the perfect position to turn Cage’s plan against him.”

  “It was my job to deal with a leadership challenge, not yours,” said Donnell.

  “Yes. No.” I shook my head. “The whole situation was my fault. My mess. My responsibility. I was the one who insisted on you accepting Hannah into the Resistance. I thought she was my best friend, and was fool enough to believe everything she told me. The lies about what happened when she was caught stealing. The hints about how I couldn’t trust you, that you were ignoring me because you didn’t think you were my father, that …”

  “Hannah!” Donnell turned and hammered his fist against the wall.

  “I’m sorry.” I eyed him nervously. “I only found out Hannah had been working for Cage when I was leaving for the medical supply run. But you see that this mess was all my fault for trusting Hannah, so I had to be the one to deal with Cage.”

  “Not your fault,” said Donnell. “Mine. I should have stopped you being friends with that girl years ago. I should have thrown her out of the Resistance the moment I caught her stealing. I should never have let her join the Resistance in the first place.”

  He faced me again, and spoke in a quiet voice that had lost the edge of anger. “Hannah could only convince you of her lies because I was too scared to talk to you myself. I wasted six years of our lives because I was afraid of making a bad situation even worse. Your brother hated me enough to risk his life making a deal with the off-worlders and planting a bomb for them. I thought you hated me just as much. I was terrified that if I tried to force you into a father and daughter relationship, you’d do something equally desperate.”

  His face twisted in pain. “There was no way for you to portal out of New York the way your brother did. I had a recurring nightmare where you sneaked away, tried to make it to America Off-world alone on foot, and got yourself killed. I took the cowardly option of leaving you in peace, not realizing Hannah was dripping poison in your ear.”

  “I was a fool to believe the things she said.”

  Donnell stood there in silence for a moment, before speaking again in a more normal voice. “We have to forget the mistakes of the past and
concentrate on the present situation. You asked me to let you deal with Cage, so I did. By the time I realized you were planning to make this a full scale confrontation with him, it was too late for me to stop you. Do you have the faintest idea how much danger you’re in now?”

  I shook my head. “I knew I was taking a risk, but it worked. We’ve won. People were too scared to speak out against Cage before, but they’re doing it now.”

  “Oh yes,” said Donnell. “You led the way, you defied Cage, and broke his rule of fear. His victims are queuing up to say they want to accuse him at his trial. I had to leave Machico making the list of witness names, or I’d have been stuck in Reception for hours.”

  His bitter tone of voice was worrying me. “But that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s horrendously bad! Cage is going to stand trial. He knows a host of his victims are eager to be witnesses against him, he knows the only way to stop them is to re-establish his rule of fear, and he knows he has exactly seven days to do it.”

  Donnell paused to give a heavy groan. “It’s my fault that Cage has those seven days to save himself. In the early days of the alliance, we held trials immediately, and in some cases the true facts only became known after punishment had been carried out. I finally got the alliance to agree that there should always be a seven day delay between an accusation and a trial.”

  He paused. “Well, Cage has seven days to re-establish his rule of fear, and the only way he can do that is to kill you, Blaze.”

  I blinked. “You really think he’ll try to murder me?”

  “I’m certain he will,” said Donnell. “If you die in the next few days, all the witnesses queuing up to give evidence against Cage will realize they could be next to die. They’ll hastily change their minds about accusing him. Cage will walk free from his trial, and be more powerful than before.”

  “But how could Cage murder me? Wall said that he’d keep him locked up until his trial.”

  “Cage will still have some friends in Manhattan,” said Donnell, “or at least some allies who’ll be scared of being implicated in his crimes. They just have to let him out for a few hours so he can kill you. Once you’re dead, Cage can happily go back to his prison cell, and use his imprisonment to claim total innocence of being involved in your death.”

  I stared down at my hands in silence.

  “Cage has got away with murder before,” added Donnell. “The first time we talked about him, I warned you that I’d seen his enemies die suspiciously convenient deaths. It’s happened at least three times now. A man publicly clashing with Cage, humiliating him, and dying a few days later in what was allegedly an accident.”

  Donnell waved his hands in a despairing gesture. “If you were just going to be in danger for the next seven days, I could stand guard over you myself for every minute of them, but the danger won’t end with Cage’s trial. Unless we can prove one of his murders, Cage is unlikely to get a death sentence. After his victims have spoken out at his trial, he’ll have lost his power base forever, but he’ll endure whatever punishment he’s given and be even more eager to kill you out of revenge.”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t regret what I did. Someone had to challenge Cage.”

  “That someone should have been me,” said Donnell.

  “It couldn’t be you,” I said. “When I called general justice against Cage, the only risk was that I’d be ignored or laughed at. If you’d called general justice against him, and nobody supported you, then you’d have lost control of the alliance.”

  Donnell sighed. “Well, we can’t change what has already happened. We have a decision to make for the future. Let’s sit down.”

  I sank into a chair, remembering at the last minute to check it wasn’t the cursed one.

  Donnell sat in the chair opposite me. “I told you that I’d planned to discuss your future with you on your eighteenth birthday, but I decided to delay part of that discussion, including the bit about you becoming an officer.”

  He hesitated. “I wasn’t entirely honest with you about my reasons for delaying things. It was nothing to do with the unstable situation in the alliance. It was because I’d seen the way Tad was looking at you during the meeting and had a whole new idea about your future. If that boy took you to Adonis with him, you could have a far better life than any I could give you.”

  “What?” I squeaked the word in shock.

  “So I decided to delay my original plan for a while, ask you to make friends with Tad, and see what happened between you.”

  I waved my hands in bewilderment. “You didn’t want me to make friends with Tad to get information out of him? You were really hoping he’d offer to take me to Adonis with him?”

  Donnell nodded.

  I was struggling to make sense of this. “You took one look at Tad and decided to marry me off to him?”

  “I wasn’t necessarily thinking of marriage. Lover, friend, any relationship that got him to take you with him to Adonis would be enough. It wouldn’t have to be a long-lasting relationship either. You’d just have to stay with him long enough for you to reach Adonis, and you’d have a secure, bright future ahead of you.”

  Donnell shrugged. “Unfortunately, Tad’s interest in you didn’t go as far as offering to take you to Adonis.”

  “Actually, Tad offered to take me off-world on the first day we went fishing together. Not to Adonis, but to Zeus. He’s expecting to go there to continue his research.”

  Donnell let his head fall forward into his hands and made a low moaning noise. “Why the chaos didn’t you tell me that right away? I’d have taken you and the off-worlders to Fence myself despite the snow. You could have been safely on Zeus by now.”

  It didn’t seem the best moment to tell him that Tad could use the Earth data net to send messages to people, so we wouldn’t even have needed to go to Fence but could have just taken a boat up to Bear Mountain. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to go with Tad. You should know that I’d never leave Earth.”

  Donnell lifted his head. “Was loyalty to Earth your only problem, or was it Tad himself? I’m still bitterly angry about the people who plundered Earth to found their new worlds, but I accept that Tad, Phoenix and Braden were too young to be guilty of any crime other than being born on those new worlds. When I found out Tad was the heir of Thaddeus Wallam-Crane …”

  Donnell waved both hands. “Well that was a bit much to cope with, so I didn’t react well at the time, but now I’ve had time to calm down again. Tad has caused me a lot of trouble, and he talks far too much, but he’s helped us as well. I’ve a reluctant liking for the boy, and I had the impression you did too.”

  “Whether I care about Tad or not doesn’t matter. I’ve only known him for days. I’m not going to literally give up my whole world and run off with him.”

  “Take a moment to think about the life you could have on Zeus, Blaze,” said Donnell. “It would be safe and luxurious, with plentiful food and medicine.”

  I thought about it. I remembered what Tad had said about Braden only getting a handful of messages from his brother over the years. If I went off-world, there’d be no hope of getting any messages from Donnell at all. I’d be living my luxurious life, aware that I’d left everyone in the alliance struggling to survive. I’d be eating generous meals every day, and picturing them starving to death back on Earth. Every time I saw a flame or even a light, I’d wonder if they’d made it out of New York or died in the coming firestorm. I’d never know if Donnell was alive or dead.

  “It would be utterly unbearable,” I said.

  Donnell shook his head. “You had one chance to go off world with your brother when you were eleven years old, and you refused. Tad is your second chance. If you refuse that too, then you’ll never get a third one.”

  “I’m not going,” I said flatly.

  “If the boy wasn’t so sick with winter fever, I’d order you to go off world with him. Drag you to Fence by force if necessary.”

 
“You want me to leave?”

  “Of course not. After all these years, the wall between us has finally gone. I’d hate to see you go, but not nearly as much as I’d hate to bury you. When I was eighteen, I thought I was immortal. You probably feel immortal too, but eighteen-year-olds can die, especially in a time and a place like this one. You could have died when London burned, from the winter fever, from a falling star attack, or in that accident where you broke your arm. You’ve been lucky so far, but next time your luck may run out.”

  “I know all that,” I said. “I’m still not leaving Earth.”

  Donnell let out a heavy sigh. “If you’re definitely staying on Earth, then we need to have the conversation I’d planned for your eighteenth birthday.”

  I was getting a bit confused by now. “The conversation about me becoming an officer? Isn’t it a bit late to discuss that?”

  “When I told you about my plans for your eighteenth birthday, everything I said to you was perfectly true, but there was an extra factor I didn’t mention. Something that only Kasim, Machico, and I knew existed.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Donnell stood up, went across to his wall safe, opened it, and took out something wrapped in cloth. He came back and put it on the table in front of me, then sat down again. “Open it.”

  I unfolded the heavy cloth, and looked down at an intricately segmented, grey metal object. It was a gun, exactly like the one clinging to Donnell’s arm, but the strands trailing from it were dark and lifeless.

  I gave Donnell a puzzled look. “Why have you kept Kasim’s gun? I thought it self-destructed when he died and was buried with him.”

  “That isn’t Kasim’s gun.”

  I looked from the gun on the table, to the one glowing on Donnell’s right arm, and back again. “Kasim was a Military Security Armed Agent. He already had his own gun, and he stole another one for you before he defected to the Earth Resistance, so where …?”

  “That’s the story we always told people,” said Donnell. “The truth is that Kasim stole two guns. The second one was intended to be for Machico, but Mac wouldn’t accept it.”